Cydonian Monk

It's 60°F here today, or 15°C if you prefer. A bit warm to cool anything down. 'course it'll feel like 60°C come August.... I'd rather have the freezing weather myself. (Edit: Cursed mobile forum posting things before I'm done typing.....)

Or, if you insist on taking night pictures, at least use night-vision (even if it's a totally fake night-vision like this one):

The AI needed lots of work, especially for a game released in the mid-90s. I've always wondered if it was the AI limitations that caused Holistic to pull the other Church and League factions - they had a hard enough time getting the 5 noble factions to behave. This is why the game was so very good when played against real humans. Between EFS and Homeworld I have several backups of the soundtrack. Both on CD and in various digital forms.

Emperor of the Fading Suns. (EFS) The game is 20 years old at this point, but I still break it out on occasion. Hex-based strategy game on a galactic scale. Fallen humanity rising from the ashes. Tech that can be learned and lost and learned again. Aliens, priests, nobles and merchants, all trying to get the advantage. Nowhere near as much fun single player as it was in Play-By-Email. It was the off-board, out-of-game political posturing that made the game great. And the soundtrack. Guess I'll add Darklands and the original X-Com to my list as runners up.

I'm still a bit partial to Venus Wars... though I've always felt the film leaves out too much. Good couple hours of classic anime.

Yep. I didn't have a flight stick back when I started toying with RSS, and promptly learned flying with the keyboard is not an option. I'm still a stubborn pilot though, and refuse to surrender launch control to some accursed robot or kOS script. -- Also: Welcome to the forums! I need to try out ION-powered flight again soon....

Will this facial recognition password stuff work with my beard? Or will we have to have all facial hair removed with lasers? The tyranny of the smooth-skinned.....

Aye. From a certain persoective that's one of the scariest movies ever made. Kid disappears without a trace. Did somebody kidnap him? Did he run off? Is he dead in a ditch somewhere? Family never finds out, has to move on. Good example of time dilation though. The Disney Channel used to play that movie nonstop when I was young. Don't think I've seen in in at least 20 years.

I may eventually just make my own, models and all. It's been 15 years since I did any serious 3D work, so maybe it's time to break out Blender or similar. This game needs more really-tiny parts. AIES was one of the things I downloaded last night, just didn't have the time to filter through all the parts for those I want to use. Guess I'll go back and take a look at FASA and KW, too. Available memory seems to no longer be a major concern, given I can't run full-res on an Intel HD4000 anyway. When I first started setting this up I wasn't sure if it'd work at all. Stock KSP with full-res textures sits around 3GBs on my MBP, so I was pleasantly surprised when RSS and 1/2-sized textures only rang up about 2.2GBs. Got even better when I dropped all the stock parts made irrelevant by the various procedural ones. I'm thinking now I might even be able to work in the Outer Planets Mod for Saturn, maybe some simple EVE cloud layers for Titan and Venus, etc. Nothing too greedy. Thanks.

Today in KSP (well, late last night) I reinstalled RSS/RO on my MacBook (yay stock 1/2 res texture support!) and set up all the related mods (minus RemoteTech, which I'll get to eventually). Built a quick and simple launcher, the GP-0, and dropped two basic satellites into 300km and 500km orbits. With qualification and testing of the launch vehicle complete, I decided it was time to send up Jebediah. And thus the Adventure 1 was born. It's a Mercury-like orbiter with a dedicated reentry package, and used the GP-0 booster with a slightly upgraded second stage. Jeb was launched from Wallops Island with spectacular views of the East Coast, much to the delight of no one as there are no cities in my RSS. He made it to space, but was several hundred m/s short of orbital velocity. Not sure yet if that was due to a poor ascent trajectory or poor calculations. Might also have to do with the improperly-installed launch escape system. Or maybe Jeb ate too many enchiladas the night before launch. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the reentry package failed to ignite. Had Jeb made orbit, he would have died there. Regardless, the EVA was green-lit, so he was happy. Kerbals are easy to please. Sadly Jebediah Kerman did not survive reentry. His parachute system burned up and exploded, and the craft and crew were lost somewhere in the Eastern Atlantic (or maybe the Mediterranean). RealChutes was promptly installed following that debacle. Spaceflight operations have now transitioned to Brownsville, TX, where tonight Bill will be attempting to reach orbit in the Adventure 2 atop a new and barely tested GP-1 booster. As an aside: does anyone have a suggestion for a small orbital engine in the 5-50kN range that is also RO-configured? (Or a configuration for such?) Doesn't need to be hypergolic - even KeroLox or LH2 would suffice. I'm not overly thrilled with the "stock" options, and the only engine pack I'm using at the moment is BobCat's old Soviet one. Thanks.

Ah. That's what I was thinking of. Hadn't realized you'd done that in a separate save. What about that circumnavigation of Duna?

It was news to me and my coworkers too. Wait.... Not really sure I'd count finding coworkers that play KSP as "in the wild" though. I was thinking more of stumbling upon somebody in a coffeeshop in Montrose or The Heights trying to crash the Mün party moreso than finding somebody at work.

Nah, nobody here in Houston is into any of that crazy space stuff.... (Though it's likely folks have seen me playing KSP in public.) I'm still sad the Intrepid chose the one morning I had to spend in NYC last summer to blow up. (Well, not really blow up per se - just some electrical stuff that exploded and sadly hurt a few workers.) Guess maybe I'd seen enough aerospace stuff on that trip anyway, having hit Stennis, Pensacola, Pax River, Udvar Hazy and a few other spots along the way.

Well, the Timewarp Rotation Fix did some of this, namely station keeping and eating through RCS/Monoprop over time. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/67821-Timewarp-Rotation-Fix Trouble is the new SAS system seems to have busted the method used for that, the plugin's not been updated for 0.90, and I've not had time to wrap my head around the new SAS to fix it myself. Might be a good place to start looking.

Never a moment's rest for the old gang, eh? Send them off on a ski trip to the South Pole for vacation or something. "Team-building exercise." Based on my rudimentary understanding of the Kerbal Experience system, most of them should now be 5-star, top-level kerbals. (Were this not a sandbox save.) Skilled enough to tie their shoes and open the hatch. Too bad they can't pass that knowledge on through osmosis - you could use them to train raw recruits. Duna should prove interesting. You still had a small base crew there, right?

It's something that exists in stock KSP (or Unity?) and is triggered by certain mods, or certain libraries (possibly) being built with various Debug options. I've seen this as well, and have never used kOS or B9. Seem to recall certain versions of Blizzy's toolbar triggered this. I've also bumped into it back in the day when I was building plugins for OS-X... Never reliably. Always made me wonder how dependable Mono/Xamarin's output was. I never got it to spit out any info though. I guess that means all the unit tests passed (no news is good news)? I'd love to know if there's a way to actually use this for mod testing.

Looks like my office today. Heck, with that haircut that dude in the lower left could even be me. (Though at the moment I look more like the dude in the lower right.) All things considered I'd rather have their money than their looks.... Say what you want about the movie THX-1138, but George Lucas nailed this point exactly. "Always on" things bug me. Windows 10 looks bad, but not really much worse than Windows 8 (which is already tied to a Live account). OS-X and Ubuntu are no better about it either. Even the iPad, arguably the most mobile computer I've used, has some basic features that just refuse to work if it isn't connected to the internet. (Oh, you want to edit a documemt from a fileserver on the local network? Sorry, I have to report that back to Cupertino first.) I kinda gave up caring about absolute privacy long ago, and largely because I saw the value of the Web. It's a trade-off that'll probably bite us all in the backside, but it's essential to my job and my way of life. And yet there's still a part of me that wants to run off to Montana or Alaska and disappear.....

See, now, I love Real Genius becauae it's a documentary of my time in college. They got a few things wrong, took a few liberties here and there, but for the most part that was my dorm and that was my Engineering school. No, we never hit buildings in downtown ~8 miles away from the Engineering campus with our giant potato artillery - the potatoes usually disintigrated a few feet after leaving the barrel. (Probably why they left it out of the movie.) Yes, we did have a guy snap while studying and run screaming and laughing maniacally from the library. Yet I know some people that despise that movie and would prefer scour the Earth with lasers and turn it all to glass just so nobody could ever watch it again. (These people might have had their VW moved into their dorm room....) Not sure I'd call it either SciFi or a Classic. It's more a slightly fictionalized drama involving engineers, much like, say, a movie about the Trinity bomb test.

Hollywood was "good" in the 80s and 90s? O.o (Ok, I'll grant the early 80s, what with The Empire Strikes Back and Blade Runner in there.) You've already got my favorite "Classic" SciFi film on your list (Outland).... And Alien, too. Hmm. I'd also add Silent Running, Logan's Run, and _maybe_ Westworld. If you're a Lem fan definitely include Tarkovsky's Solaris.

Just wanted to say thank you again for these little rockets. I may be done with them for the moment, but I've had a great deal of fun collecting flight data and look forward to using them (unchanged) when KSP 1.0 comes out to compare the performance.

Another attempt, link from right-clicking on image displayed full-size in the Photos app and copying the Image URL: So that works, at least for me while logged into Google+. I'm not sure I'd trust that link to work for everyone, though, or even for another couple minutes. It appears to be a link directly to the CDN that's hosting the image (here in Houston from the looks of it). It's also not the full image, but the "thumbnail" (well, downsample) provided by G+. It at least answers the question of whether it can be done: Yes. Maybe. At this point I'd suggest imgur.

Good question, and it'd make my life easier if it was possible. It was tough to get the link to the photo in the first place (seems the Google+ walled garden doesn't like outsiders), but here's a test (using IMG tags): And a test using the same image, but through the PicasaWeb "Share Photo" email-generated link: So at first glance, no. The site is set up more to share posts than individual pictures. And all of the share links generated by Google for single photos seem to be links to the Photos "web app". Maybe there's another way to get hard-links to images? Not sure. Maybe there's another image embed tag specific to or better suited for G+?

A small comment / suggestion - the new Stock Mk3 Shuttle parts are using a "placeholder" IVA that might come in handy for the ones you've yet to complete / rework. That at least give the player the crew portrait down on the lower right, though they seem to be living in a darkened, window-less box.

I have it on good authority that my shuttle flys a bit _too_ well in FAR.... So well that it can barely reenter if one is also using Deadly Reentry. The more I think about it and the more I hear about the new aero, the more I realize there may not be too many issues. It'll be the part rebalancing that kills things if anything.

The dark purpose of the Monoliths revealed at long last: They're for Kerbal Taxidermy. Pay no mind to the creepy non-shadows in the visor reflections....