p1t1o

Exactly. I fly the ascent (that part is fun), I do my own docking (also fun) and mostly fly my own landings. Things like manouvering my craft to face prograde. Then retrograde. Then prograde again. Then anti-normal. And prograde again. A machine can do that for me please? And honestly, it would actually take some skill to use MJ for a whole mission without taking manual control once, I think that would be a cool way to play.

Your objection....is DENIED

I would love to see a feature which displays some pretty data about whatever craft you are building before you go to the launchpad. In my head the initial concept looks like this: Perhaps it is an option in the VAB/SPH to toggle, but it could be cool if it was its own seperate building (I mean there already IS a wind tunnel at KSC!). Anyhoo, you would load your vessel, as you do, and could toggle on various overlays. A major one would essentially be an extension of the aero overlays we have now, but with some sweet fluid-dynamics-based visualisations. Im not sure exactly how accurate this "fluid dynamics" needs to be, like I say, more like a graphical extension of the overlays we have now, but in a pre-launch phase. Even if the data displayed was quite simplistic, as long as it was illustrative and pretty I think it would be a worthwhile/fun feature. I know that some information is just not available, for example Im fairly sure that KSP does not compute the movement of air as the craft moves through it, just the effects of virtual air on your craft, but you could still probably extract some useful/pretty graphics. A very simple model could simply be a room in the KSC where you can see the usual simple overlays of your craft, but as you manual rotate the craft to expose it to airflow from different directions. This would be prefereable to having to load to launch every time for a round of trial/error. Thoughts?

Some people are naturally good at picking up languages, some people have innate talent for musical instruments, some people are great with numbers and some people "get" how aerodynamics delineates what a plane should look like. So even when KSP "makes it easy", its still naturally that some people will not find it intuitive.

Good question, Im not sure. But to hazard a guess, I'd say that in order to capture a neutron that has sufficient energy to cause a fission, the sail would have to be significantly thicker? Reading the material, a certain amount of attention is given to the thin-foil nature of the uranium layer and the light weight of the system as a whole. This is still going to be a low-thrust/high-Isp solution, so extra mass is a big no-no. Given that they want to use significant amounts of antimatter, I doubt any isotope of Uranium is an issue...

LOL Ok that sucks, but your build sounds unusually "crashy"? Either way, I have been on a KSP hiatus since 1.1 and I wont be happy re-entering until orbits are properly stable. A funky part causing a bug or crash is one thing, but problems with the orbit code seems more fundamental to me.

Some will pay more than that just to keep a single instrument turned on!

Perhaps you have only found it a minor annoyance but can you be *sure* that the bug wont screw you over when you try some other approach in the future? You are still missing the point, you cant just say "Well our physics simulation is inaccurate in places but *we assume* that every player who finds this area will be in the process of screwing things up so *we think* he should just quit and start over at this point, so we're gonna go ahead and leave the bug in." To be clear Im not saying its a hugely significant problem - at this point Im not even sure the problem exists - just that it IS one and that simply "playing around it" is not a solution.

I smell a scam. Ok I am known for being *particularly* cynical, and hope Im wrong because it looks totally sci-fi, but my BS-sense is tingling like I just liquided on an electric fence. *edit* So i took a look at the kickstarter - the key seems to be a big box that "modifies the refractive index" of air within a region of space. Meaning that they can make certain "bits of air" more shiny under the laser light. Obviously they dont go into much detail into how they do this, but the fine spatial control they have over refraction is amazing! If true, of course. I dont understand how it works, how does the heat from the laser not cause convection which screws up which bit of air has what refractive index? How can you "touch" the image without "smearing" it? How exactly is invisibly manipulating the refractive index possible over a distance? For the moment I will switch positions and say "Cool! I hope this works out!" but secretly Im like "Its a scam right? Its gotta be a scam..." simply because 90% of the things that have made me go "Cool!" turned out that way. *edit 2* In 1 video at least you can see some evidence of "smearing" when a hand comes near the image, so its looking legit so far! Some things: Resolution obviously has a long way to go, and colour would be nice. Its going to have problems rendering "solid looking" things, basically we aren't going to be watching TV or movies on these. Rendering dark or secondary colours is going to be problematic. Images containing black area will be weird. The larger the display, the higher power laser you will need. Safety issues etc. Its very cool but does it *really* have paradigm shifting advantage over other hologram technologies? I mean, the image still has to be encapsulated on 2 sides by the equipment.

Ha! Yes! However, I dont know the minutia of how AM is produced, so I was wondering if reducing those horrendous power+machinery requirements was anywhere near as plausible as producing a large amount pre-launch and a method of reliably storing it long-term. Because as it stands, we need to reduce the power and machinery costs significantly anyway, if we ever want to stand a chance of manufacturing any useful amount at all.

Im not sure if this bug still exists, or if it is a different bug, conceptually, from the one mentioned in my previous post but... You are entirely missing the point. For starters, I can think of at least 1 (actually pretty common) situation when you would want this orbital configuration (and would want the non-atmospheric part to still be very much predictable), and if I can think of 1 then guaranteed there are others. Then there are many situations where you might enter this configuration transiently. And that is discounting situations where you might end up in that situation by accident. Secondly, this game is entirely built around the simulation of physics! Yes, concessions have to be made for the sake of CPU cycles and practicality of programming, so we don't have n-body gravitational simulation, we have floating-point errors and all sorts of other things. But here we have a situation where our spacecraft is *visibly* moving through space in a manner incongruous to physical reality. It is not an approximation of real movement.

The idea that I could play stock KSP without any of the stresses caused by mods has entered my head a few times, but then I think "I'll just keep that one mod with that cool part I like" then I think "And that other mod that adds that interesting mechanic" then "Oh and theres no reason to go without lifesupport", rinse, repeat, conclusion: I could *never* go modless. I think I ran the game once when I first downloaded it (this was back with v.0.20 IIRC), to check it ran at all, and the first mod was installed minutes later, never looked back. Sometimes I wish I could, but that is just a pipe dream

Just spitballing - would research into "in-situ" generation of antimatter be a worthwhile alternative to storage solutions? I gather that today it requires monstrous amounts of machinery and energy, but then our best containment methods hold amounts measured in individual particles and containment times measured in minutes... I could be wrong/innaccurate/behind the times, but it would have to be improved by many, many orders of magnitude to enable use as propulsion. Conversely, if we improve manufacture by many, many orders of magnitude, it may solve the storage problem. It depends which one is more challenging I guess. Make any sense? NB: some material on the storage of anti-hydrogen: http://alpha.web.cern.ch/penningtrap

In the Greg Bear Forge of God/Anvil of Stars duology (duology?) there is quite a good treatise on motives on planet killing. It is limited to the case of self-replicating planet killers due to their indiscriminate nature, but could be extrapolated to any planet killing tech. It boiled down to something like: The mere creation of these weapons is a civilisation-level capital offence and any civilisation building these weapons must be annihilated before they can deploy anything, or more usually, tracked down after the fact - even millenia after the fact. Not doing so, or issuing a less severe-than-total-obliteration punishment, risks being too late/too little to stop offensive action. I feel like i have explained that badly, but they are great books. Spoilers: Oblivion ran smack-into the old "If you are significantly space-faring, conquering an inhabited planet is by far the hardest way to obtain *any* resource. Especially water!" (Even now we are investigating the prospect of acquiring resources from off-world, and we already *have* a planet!) But I respect the movie for "owning" it and being generally quite imaginative.

Are you seriously messing up a discussion of using black holes as weapons with talk about why?! Come on, this is villainy 101, you should know better...

Sweet Carry on.

A kickstarter....that includes the manufacture of useful amounts of antimatter... As far as serious attempts at furthering space travel go, this seems like running-before-your-eyes-finish-developing-properly (forget "walking") or more pessimistically, a scam. Things like this seem quite popular/fashionable lately, what gives? On slightly closer inspection, it seems like an enthusiastic physicist wants to privately further what initial research has been done so far. $200,000 isn't going to get very far but I dont think they are proposing to get to another star just on that. However, I cant see any milestones or goals. The originator, Garald Jackson, appears to have some sort of tech company and antimatter is "close to their heart" or some such. I wouldn't rule out a scam, but if it isn't I suppose I dont begrudge people the right to fund their own/other people's private research, it is a worthy topic after all, if a bit "reachy". But then I suppose, "a kickstarter to fund research into advanced antimatter containment techniques" (or some other enabling technology) sounds a lot less sexy than "Interstellar travel". http://www.hbartech.com/ <Link removed by moderator>

@The Jeb. Uhm...I have heard that this file in particular does NOT re-generate properly when you do it this way, can anyone confirm? Not sure if this has been changed in any update. Use the steam "verify cache" or acquire from other download materials if in doubt. As a last resort, just copy your GameData folder somewhere safe and do a complete re-install.

This one: http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/11738 Has been squashed and closed, how is 9619 any different? Is it still occurring?

In my downtime I sometimes like to kill a half hour or so checking out some websites that are regularly updated with short, easily digestible things. These may be news articles, lists of interesting stuff, you know the like. Listverse is good. Gizmodo isn't exactly high on the "quality" list but updates often and usually has at least a couple interesting pictures/gifs. This forum, naturally. Snopes is excellent. Anyone know any others worthy of note? Any diamonds in the rough?

I make use of every available automation and data display device, if I could reliably program an autopilot to fly the whole mission, I would and I would enjoy watching it unfold.

To be clear, a 1 ton singularity may emit at a very high power, it will still only liberate 1ton of mass-energy (about 9e19J, equivalent to about 21.5 Gigatons TNT) and thus will not blow up the Earth either (Assuming a cloud of rubble is the desired definition of "blown up"). Definitely enough to glass one hemisphere though.

Hmm? Work like what? All the math is laid out there for you. What were you expecting? Ok I plugged in 1 ton. Everything seems in order. Now what?

Now I have the strong desire to build a rocket in the SPH and launch it horizontally with a trolley or something from the runway.

LoL are you new?! I jest - you're right its quite positive, nothing good can come of a dislike button. Plenty of ways to disagree, or even issue sick burns, already.