p1t1o

Born+raised in the 80's-90's on Spielberg, the child always saves the day.

Rimworld. Picked it up on thursday and over a 4 day weekend racked up 34+hours. Seriously addictive. Im just as much in love with my plucky, uncomplaining combat engineer ("Engie") as I am with Hitomi the one-eyed teenage pyromaniac. Poor old Keunomate is having a hard time after Sheena refused his proposal though. She changed after her left hand was smashed off when that herd of rabid muffalo broke into the compound. Basically "Prison Architect in space". (NB: though the two games have remarkably similar graphical styles (and some gameplay elements) the two projects are unrelated (other than inspiration) and apparently the devs have communicated about the art similarities and are supportive.) Any game that you can mod the Imperial Guard into at the same time as a suite of lovecraftian horrors is worth a go in my book.

Why doesn't everyone think like me? If everyone did, the world would be a perfect technological, meritocratic utopia. Cant people realise this? It seems so obvious. I am trapped on a planet of idiots. I take it everyone thinks this? Which is probably the answer to the first question. If only humanity could change everything about itself we'd be set!

True, except now it is competing for my money with all of the other stuff I want to spend it on! Too true. Buy a new computer and play a few new games at max settings and it is SO. HARD. to go back to anything less!

Wherever you find cyborg assassins, you also find plucky resistance fighters with ungodly amounts of luck. Its a catch-22. And god help you if one of them is a teenager.

Pure marketing. And quite succesful too, 2million EUR raised in a matter of weeks. Now I dont know much about how much it costs to train an astronaut but I can tell you it takes ~ 2million GBP to train an RAF pilot (which takes 2 years). *re-thinks* Oh right, all you win is a seat on a sub-orb flight? So "technically" an astronaut...but not *reallllly*. All power to them, have at it. Its not like they are getting a job at NASA. Pure marketing.

Kinetic energy differences are insignificant, you just throw arbitrarily large nukes. Getting weapons off the surface in either direction will be trivial, given the technological assumptions here. The same probably can be said for radiation environment. The winner depends on who has the best equipment, training and military acumen, as is traditional.

Well one answer is that it would be a war-as-we-know-it-kind-of but on a colossal scale. Large weapons/fleets, long engagement times, huge destructive effects. But war is a societal concept as much as a technological one. Without FTL, a single engagement could take most of a persons career and the war itself is likely to have a lifespan longer than most people, possibly significantly longer. Communication with the enemy would also take a long time, in other words it would take a long time even to realise that you were having a disagreement at all. How do negotiations works when in between question-response each party has time to go off, have kids and have sent them to school before being able to see an answer? How does a war like that even start? (Though Im sure we could manage it if we put our minds to it). *** It also strongly depends on the flavour of "non-FTL" that you choose. Are we talking generation ships where your grandkids have to be the ones to pull the trigger on that mission that you started out on a hundred years ago? Or are we talking 0.99c ships where young people come back from a 10 year mission having only experienced 2 weeks? What effect these factors haves on a population's "will to fight" I cannot say, but it will be significant Im sure. How does this affect communication? In the latter example, your fastest communications only travel slightly faster than your forces. This makes surprise easier to achieve (because a warning could only possibly arrive just before the effect) but also coordination more difficult. This is also true of political communications as well as tactical considerations. I dont think there has been a conflict on this earth where that has been true (comms only slightly faster than forces) since someone trained a bird to carry a message. Is it possible that our truly devastating conflicts only became possible when this happened? Is it possible that with such little difference between communication speed and force projection speed, that large scale conflict is supressed? *** So, IMHO, considering the weapons systems and timescales is like describing the Gulf War by saying "We'd use troops and tanks". In other words, its only a very, very small percentage of the overall picture. *** I dunno. Given the timescales and distances, it could be over in one mission. It could be over before the losing side-to-be even knows it is at war. It could be as one-sided as zero casualties for the winner vs. total loss of the biosphere of their opponents planet.

Probably not really possible, due to the sheer number of combinations that are possible. Two computers might have superficially identical "specs" but due to things like drivers, motherboards, operating system version and update history and probably 100 other things - one might run the game ok and the other might not run it at all. GPU, CPU and RAM capacity are only 3 numbers that are trying to describe the capabilities of really quite complex systems. Alternatively, one might have a modest CPU and RAM but you dropped all your saving on a top line GPU. Great! Now Im substantially above minimum specs! But because I cheaped out on CPU+RAM the GPU is waiting for the rest of the computer to catch up half the time and Im still getting 1-3 fps on Crysis XVII: CRYing over spilt milk. If one doesn't like this, one can buy a console (Fun Fact: I cheaped out on RAM on my current system and boy do I regret it...)

People these days dont know how good they have it. I remember when 20fps seemed like a magical dream and I was playing military flight sims at 5-10fps. Mind, that was back when having a 3d card at all was optional. Nowadays the performance of graphics cards and the processing required for high-detail, high-framerate play are much closer together.

Does "Grackle" sound like something from Rick & Morty to anyone else?

Yes, the dynamic pressure of wind against the vessel, which is dependent on the density of the fluid. Whether the fluid is at 1 atm or 5 atm, makes little difference at constant density. It was the low density of the martian atmosphere that would have prevented the MAV falling over, the [static] pressure could have been 10atm, but if the density was still the same (say if the atmosphere was very hot) the force exerted on the MAV would still be low. Thats a bit better. Force does depend on pressure but is not necessarily proportional to it.

Force is dependant on density, not pressure. 5 atm of Hydrogen blowing at 1km/s will exert less force than 5 atm of Earth-air blowing at 1km/s. (I know its not necessarily hydrogen, just an example) But anyway, the dirigible at this depth would be closer to a submarine than a blimp, with associated tolerances to force. There is a lot of mention of large forces, but things have been made to withstand large forces before. We ARE talking about a station on another planet, are we sure this isn't technologically feasible? Im not saying we could build it *today*. In terms of KSP, we also dont have the technology to send giant, pre-built space station to the edge of the system to be hard-landed, already fully manned AND with attached SSTO spaceplane! I suppose the main weakness here is lack of fine-grained knowledge about gas giant atmospheres. I recognise that this would be a great engineering challenge but have yet to hear a hard and fast reason why it would be impossible, at least compared to the many impossible things we already have in KSP. "The winds are too fast" doesn't quite rule it out (although of course, they are the major challenge). "Due to the physical strength of materials and the limits of fluid bouyancy, there are no materials strong enough to resist predicted wind forces, that are light enough to be made to float with any known mechanism, even taking into account the many different combinations of Indicated Airspeed, density and pressure that are found in gas giants." Would be a great reason to rule it out, but Im guessing that figuring out whether or not that statement was true would be non-trivial. *** Just to head off any confusion on the topic, there are 2 questions: Is a bouyant station possible on a gas giant? and: Is a bouyant station possible enough to have in KSP?

Because SDSs are my job, this one irks me. There is no SDS for astatine because it is the rarest element in the earths crust, and has a half life of 8 hours, so its pretty difficult to sell to anyone. If you aint selling it, you dont need an SDS, you just need a risk assessment for whatever you are doing like any other laboratory/industrial process/procedure. You could, of course, write the RA in charred blood if you so desired, but I think there might be more red tape associated with writing a professional document in charred blood than there is for working with astatine... **** Anyhoo, a quote: "Surely no child, and few adults, have ever watched a bird in flight without envy." - Isaac Asimov

Interesting stuff. What if, and Im just spitballin, you chose a denser altitude (say, 5-10 atmospheres depth) where your dirigible could be more robustly built. The whole thing could be rigid and aerodynamic and made to survive being blown about in 200m/s winds. Being in a dense layer means your buoyancyenvelope doesn't have to be nearly as large, thus it can be more durable. Clearly Im at my limits of knowledge of Jovian-type atmosphere but if I imagine a buoyant station that is a rigid sphere, its hard to imagine a wind environment (in the 1-200m/s range) that could cause much damage. Obviously landing a capsule in such winds IRL would be difficult/impossibe, but I wouldn't mind being able to try in KSP. The other alternative idea, which sounds harder to me though, is having the station at an ultra-high altitude where the density is such that even very fast winds dont carry much energy.

No? Wind speed is only a problem if you suddenly encounter winds going another direction. Are storms really that close together in all regions? Anyhoo, perhaps IRL its not so possible, but I dont see it being out of place in a kerbal universe. Plus interesting challenge yadda yadda...

@Northstar1989 Question: why do you *think* that none of your proposed design principles made it to final production?

If you're not going to accept any answers, why ask?

Mesas? I'd just be happy with two textures per planet!

“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.” “Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.” "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.” - Valentines Day 2017, London, UK.

Valentines day, London, UK.

Imagine an airstrip and landing pad, suspended in Jool atmosphere by balloons (the balloons could be underneath). This would give a small target for the landing of various craft, making for an interesting challenge. For extra points - make the altitude adjustable for increased/decreased challenge. Floaty balloons already have precedent in a mod, and a floating gas-giant station is within the bounds of known science.

Ants, termites. Bombardier Beetle, Archer Fish **** Apparently stamina is our big thing. A lot of animals have eyesight, or smell or hearing or whatever that is tens or hundred of times more acute than human senses (strength? forget about it!), but apparently we can out-distance almost any other creature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting I cant remember who said it, but it was, paraphrased, something like "Evolution works on long timescales. Evolution has made us intelligent, but it is yet to be seen whether or not it will be condusive to survival." Which given what we are doing, makes a certain kind of sense, even though we (currently) think of ourselves as the "rulers" of this planet. Whcih can already be argued as highly subjective, for example, if you define "success" as total biomass (and there is no reason why that is a less appropriate measure than say, technological development) then we are losing to tons of other species already. Of all the damage we do to the environment and other things, we might put a few species in danger, but mostly just ourselves. Oh? We killed a million elephants? A million humans are killed just by traffic accidents every year, globally. (Obvs a million dead elephants is a supreme tragedy (and we didnt kill nearly that many) Im just showing that in evolutionary terms, we are putting far more efforts into species-suicide than we are into harming other species. And Im not talking about war either, war deaths actually are far less than traffic accident deaths!) **** They also taste what they touch (ew!) I have mixed feelings about octopuses, on the one hand they are super interesting, intelligent, weird creatures. On the other, they can be seen as super-advanced slugs. And I HATE slugs.

Fun Fact: Octopuses (yup, thats right) do not have full conscious control over their arms. They lack the sense of "proprioception" - that is, the "sense" of where parts of your body are. Octopus arms are partially autonomous - it can control them but it only knows what they are doing by looking at them.

Rotating water generates all sorts of forces that distort the surface of the water away from perfect flatness. Curved surface of water acts as lens, concentrating light on parts of the inner mug surface, and directing light away from other parts, hence, "shadows".