Jackissimus

I am pretty sure that the technology necessary to sustain a technological civilization will come from the minds of scientists and engineers, not environmentalists. But I am all for the environment, I just don't like it to become the central issue, and I also don't like malthusianism, which is so often tied to it.

... you made me laugh ... I am from Europe, but my hope lies in Mr. Musk. His attempt at low cost space travel is the best so far.

That's exactly right. I wonder how the charts were generated and if they include the procedural craters on Mun for example. IIRC MapSat has trouble detecting them.

I was saving that point for counter-arguments I guess what peeves me is when I have to listen to 15-year old girls on the bus talking about CO2 being "toxic" and that the evil factories want to poison us all by releasing more of it in the atmosphere. It's starting to resemble propaganda more than science. If it was real science, those girls wouldn't care, lol. I understand that the above example is a bit extreme, but I had a long discussion with a truck driver recently (yeah I meet a lot of different people) and he was saying that burning things is just evil, we should stop burning things. But burning is just a natural process, it's part of the carbon cycle just as well as decomposition is. Some forests cannot even grow without first burning down. Storing all carbon in underground fossil deposits might be even more dangerous to life. Why should all human activity be automatically evil? I for one am very proud of human achievements and nature might even be very grateful to us for spreading life to other planets one day.

Possible, possible. But the counter measures as suggested now are so expensive that they will also cause major political upheaval and massive suffering.

Voice of reason, K^2 and DicheBach. I can't believe how far we have gotten with this climate change thing. When it was just starting out, there was still some open discussion, now there's just name-calling and popularity contests. I can tell you that the 97% metric, so often cited by the alarmists, is completely bogus. I work with scientists every day, they are our customers. None of them simply says "yes" or "no", the discussion there is ambivalent in the same way it is ambivalent in the general public. The data is unreliable or the models are wrong. Heck, the whole idea is based on turbulence, one of the last unsolved problems of classical physics. What I dislike is when people call CO2 a pollutant. That to me is just evil tactics. If anything, it's an elixir of life, you and I wouldn't live without CO2. Plants build 90% of their body mass from CO2 through photosynthesis. We eat plants. CO2 levels used to be much much higher historically and they've been so low in the past couple million years that plants are actually suffocating - they had to evolve a more efficient method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere (C4 photosynthesis). CO2 have been so low because all the carbon has been deposited underground and there is not enough to go around in the biosphere. There used to be rain forests in Antarctica. Barring anthropocentric arguments, rising CO2 levels is actually good for nature. If you double the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, plant size doubles as well. By the way, the Earth has been actually getting colder in the past 10 years. I am not an antienvironmentalist, I think the environment is important. But I think science has been taken hostage by political forces trying to hold people down in this matter.

That thing we would almost certainly see. What worries me more are rocks about 100-300m in size, we won't be able to see those in advance. Here's the same video with commentary:

I see some really dangerous attitudes in this thread. Some people in here could really benefit from visiting some of the Nazi concentration camps in Europe (and I mean this in the nicest possible way, I know I did, it's really eye-opening). Or read some Viktor Frankl. About limits to growth - it's important to understand that Malthus was a criminal, only serving British interests in the colonies. I could write down some arguments here, but I could not put it better than the great Robert Zubrin, author of Mars Direct. What does he think about limits to growth? (read the last two questions of the Q&A) Also by Robert Zubrin - China's one child policy.

I was 12 and we were sitting at a campfire with my family and my mom pointed to the sky and said: Look, that's the Big Dipper. And I was ashamed because I didn't know know any constellations. So I came home and studied until I knew all of them. I even wrote a little software in Visual Foxpro to test my knowledge. Later I read Hawking's Short History of Time and became really interested in cosmology. I read a lot of books about that. I remember I was reading in bed once and I kept scribbling all the subatomic particles' names on my hand to memorize them later. Or another time when I was explaining black holes to this girl and wasn't actually aware of the double meaning and wondered why she kept giggling the whole time. By the end of this time I was teaching astronomy in class instead of our physics teacher. Then later when I was 17 I began attending a class at a local observatory, it was a lot of fun, they let us control this whole telescope cupola with a remote control. It was the first time I saw Jupiter's clouds or the Big Spot. My father was great, he drove me to the class every Thursday (you have to be 18 to drive a car in my country), waited for me to finish and then drove me home. I didn't know much about rocketry or spaceflight until I discovered KSP on youtube though and I am still learning!

Mind providing a link for this? Because I found it's just a couple of hours: Musk told Popular Mechanics, â€ÂMultiple flights per day for first stage and side boosters. At least one flight per day for the upper stage.â€Â

Because of the Oberth effect? Yeah, that's very possible. Yeah I agreed it's the best way to do it on low gravity worlds and high velocities. Unfortunately you cannot do this on high gravity worlds or low velocities. As a test, you can try putting your Pe over the pole when transferring to the Mun. Can't be done, sorry. Why do people keep mantioning this? Do I appear so dumb to not know this? This is called the Duke's Advice in my country. Service engineer: Boss, I tried to fix your computer and it can't be done. I've worked with computers for the past 10 years and I've seen everything. I can tell you, you can throw that PC in the trash. Boss: Have you tried turning it off and on again?

This sounds about right ...... . . . .

Eh ... you meant accelerometer, right? You can't really measure gravity.

Hey there! Question for the space veterans here - I was wondering, we do just about all the attitude control with reaction wheels in KSP. Everyone likes them, RCS is just there to help if the wheels are not enough, or for translation. How close is this to real life? I understand that satellites such as Kepler or Hubble use reaction wheels, so do stations, such as ISS. As far as I understand it these things don't use RCS, because that would mean carrying a lot of propelant with it and they have plenty of power for the SAS ... oops, reaction wheels ... anyway. But do other spacecraft have reaction wheels? For example I know that Apollo didn't have it, not in the CM, not in the LM. So if not, why?

I love this forum.

Unfortunately there is no such thing as a deteorating orbit in KSP. Well almost ... your orbit has to have Pe under 22km on Kerbin otherwise it will never deteriorate.

Wow, just wow.

I am talking to myself a bit here, but this is especially useful because the current time estimate is so flaky in KSP. There is basically no way to know the burn time precisely until you start the burn. And mechjeb often isn't much better. For example when you have several rocket engines in your stage, but you deactivated a couple of them, mechjeb will start the burn at the wrong time. The simplest way to use the information presented here is to just click this link, and then just substitutes these variables in the textfield there: m0 = Mass of spacecraft before burn (in metric tons). I think there's a reading in map view? dv = Change in velocity that the maneuver node gives you (m/s). Isp = Our engines' specific impulse (s) -- we'll assume a single type of engine. So 800 for LV-N for example. T = Total thrust of all firing engines (kN) - add them up. Then press enter and you get a result in seconds! This is the result for my craft and my maneuver. Of course you can just use google, I just like Wolfram a bit more.

I am very aware of this bug, although I don't know it's ever been put into a bug report. I've just learned to live with it. Everytime you detach some parts and reattach them again, you have to go over your action groups in that part of your craft and set them again ... otherwise hitting the action button will activate only one of the symmetrical parts as pebble points out in his no. 5.

Seems like a nice approach. It made me think that maybe I could do it even simpler and for non-atmospheric bodies just assume that I am going basically just horizontally (if the station is in very low orbit) and I am basically trying to accelerate from 175m/s to 2256m/s with a fixed acceleration (MJ tells me the max acceleration of my rocket) and then calculate how long it will take me. It could roughly work. I don't have much experience with eyeballing it, but I was expecting some surprises when launching from different moons and different gravities. I don't very much enjoy surprises Anyway, thanks for replies! How do I mark the thread as answered?

Hi! How do you launch for rendezvous on some other planet than Kerbin? I know that on Kerbin you should aim for about 400km distance from your target and then launch. Is there some general method how to calculate such distance on other bodies/different orbits? I even tried it with mechjeb and I often end up tens of kilometers away from my target. And now that I think of it ... since these are nonatmospheric bodies, it really depends on the acceleration of my rocket doesn't it? On Kerbin the speed is more or less fixed, but not so on moons etc., right? Anyway, this question might not have an answer, I think.

This game is incredibly great! I would buy this game over any mainstream game without a blink of an eye. 20 years ago developers actually put some thought into making new game concepts. Games like Dune 2, Civilization, Daggerfall were completely new concepts, you could spend months playing them. Yes, they were buggy. In Dune 2 you couldn't even select multiple units with a mouse drag, you had to point and click every one of them. Civilization had such horrible graphics you couldn't tell a mountain from a forest. You couldn't even finish the main story of Daggerfall because of bugs. But I was playing them nonetheless, because I had no option, they were just so addictive. That's what a new game concept tends to do to you. What do I get now? Civilization 5, brings nothing new, but is a finished product and good to look at, yeah great. 10000th derivative of Command&Conquer, it makes me vomit. Skyrim, which I got bored with after 3 hours of playing. Alibism has made its way into game development - people don't want to make mistakes, so they just rehash the old concepts. They make them seem perfect, but the reality is bland, because there is no novelty. People tend to forget how difficult it is to come up it with new games and the amount of thought that went into this game to make it fun - amazing. Being the developers I would concentrate on finishing this game (it's closer than you think) and then maybe start working on KSP2. All the others do it, why can't you. People tend to forget that the reason we have games like Skyrim is because there were buggy games like Daggerfall to test some of the new ideas. To me the tragedy is that people stopped making Daggerfalls and only make "perfect" games. NOTE TO DEVELOPERS: and other readers of this forum may hate me for it, but - hey devs, you don't actually have to listen to these forum posts that much. They already bought the game and they are mostly hardcore players if they read all the posts on this forum. You should concentrate on the untapped markets more, the casual players that have life outside of the game. People like this guy, who is complaining that he doesn't have the time to learn docking as it is presented in the game. Make docking more fun, that's what you are good at! And don't worry about performance too much - these guys are not going to make 400 part ships. They are going to follow the missions in career mode and then finish the game. This game isn't a simulation of Star Trek anyway, it's a simulation of a real life space program. And I am not saying this just because I wish you well and want you to have more gamers and earn more money. I am saying this because I honestly want more people to learn about space. The more people the game draws, the better. I am already interested in space, I have been since the age of 7, I don't need to be drawn in, the casual players do. And the way to start liking something is to feel accomplished in it. Let them feel accomplished in space. Just make the game more fun. Please don't get drowned in the noise this forum sometimes generates.

Thread subscribed, can't wait!

Yeah, so I just installed KAS. I feel a bit defeated, I wanted to use as few mods as possible. After all, I started this thread: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/39980-Oldtimers-help-me-enjoy-the-game-more! I was labelled a purist for that thread, so I hope none of the original readers read this now ... But the stock game just becomes boring after a while. I even started using Mechjeb autopilot sometimes

Aaaand you got a reputation boost. Two posts only? Welcome to the forums!