rodion

i don't mind some of the part contracts, but i flatly refuse to wait half a kerbal year whilst my throwaway part payload sails through interplanetary space so i can do a Run Test in duna orbit. all that for a basic jet engine?

just because the game status has changed doesn't mean that the days of new features is over, it just means that the last of the full deck of minimum core aspects of the game that felipe wanted to implement have arrived. the update focus will probably change a bit but there's no reason Squad won't decide to add more major features down the line, if it fits their vision for the game.

maybe this is too tedious for you but if you want to you can make custom tech trees just by editing plain text part .cfgs (back 'em up). it looks like: ...\KSP\GameData\Squad\Parts\Wheel\roverWheelS2\roverwheelS2.cfg ... [somewhere near the top] TechRequired = yourChosenTech entryCost = 80085 ... for batches of ten to twenty parts it's realistic to do this by hand. edit: seems you already mentioned this possibility in the original post? i don't remember reading that part. sorry, i try to read peoples' entire posts but i'm not always in top form.

so, can we have an option added to the poll that says "hire bac9"? barring that, maybe we could get a community cash pool going towards the same end. i know that i'd put money in it.

i'm devastated that KCT is not 0.90-ready as it has become indispensable to my career games and i can't imagine playing any KSP of substance without it now. i would throw virtually any other mod under the bus before KCT, but despite that, i look forward to seeing what you will come up with for the new version in the coming days.

if anyone is having trouble and wants a stop-gap patch before the official Astronomer update i did this compression of the Clouds folder that reduces the 8Ks to 4K and reduces the total memory burden of AVP by about 70%; it's here.

for months and months after career was first introduced i was totally unenamored with it. i just wanted to build huge, cool things and go everywhere right away, like i had been in the salad days of sandbox since 0.18, and then everything felt slow and frustrating. eventually i warmed to the challenge of doing more with less, and that's when it started to open up for me. in the end game i can still do the jool conquerors and moho returners just like old times, but there's an equal charm in getting those mun samples back intact before you've unlocked landing gear. i agree completely that the balance and variety in career is extremely half-baked, but hey, watch this space - 0.90 is coming (CHOO CHOO), Fine Print integration is coming, DMagic Orbital Science is a huge improvement to career and it's already here. KSP is WIP.

i did work out the kinks on this pint-sized powerhouse lately: it's ~3,400 kg and has a sea level TWR of ~2.5 with the Rapier which means that you can simply point it at any angle above the horizon and it will just keep going straight up at a colossal rate until it launches straight out of the atmosphere, even with no oxidizer on board (its accumulated momentum is easily enough for a 150 km hop). with NEAR it can also exceed mach 2 at sea level (!), but then (unsurprisingly) it becomes excessively responsive to control input. i experimented with a heavier version with oxidizer for orbital use, but its dV performance was mediocre and and you'll also notice that it has no cargo bay, docking ports or seating for more than one kerbal, making it absolutely useless for any sort of practical purpose at all. regardless, it is very, very fun to launch and fly.

i agree that KIDS is the way to go if you want to return the game to stock behaviour, and if you don't want all of the features it offers it supports custom profiles to change the Isp behavior to whatever you think is reasonable for your game.

thanks, i just found the mbm2png suite independently a couple of minutes ago, works great. i mostly just wanted to have more control over file formats and compression than ATM can give me, so i can experiment with what works best. P.S.: who on earth thought bitmaps for textures would be a great idea in a 32-bit program?

does anyone know what software the KW guys use to create and manage their MBM files? i was going to look at some compression options since KW is a fairly big chunk of my mod memory demand but i can't find a good suite to do so with.

thanks for this patch guys, booting 4-2 was the first time running through \boulderco that ATM didn't start spraying milk out of its nose. caching is really fast, and it's awesome. plus, on aggressive my game is running at something around 2.4GB, which is more headroom than i've been used to. SQUAD, integrate this miracle technology now! pause 0.90 experimentals, do whatever, just get it done!

i agree that this is definitely a stupid filter, not just for the ultra-puritanical sÑÂx filter, but as a general concept. i think a wise man once said that the hallmark of a perfect society is not when all bad words are banned but when the idea of banning them is made meaningless because nobody would have any reason to use them in the first place. filtering words is not in accordance with the spirit of a community that has overwhelmingly distinguished itself as a highly welcoming and non-toxic place to be.

yes, clouds, aurorae etc. are loading now (i also disabled ATM on BoulderCo, just to make sure), try it out. the half sized textures look fine.

update: unfortunately i'm also getting the no clouds in EVE/AVP bug too right now. however, to ease the burden of recaching the ludicrous textures, i resized the astronomer's 8K textures to 4K (which is enough for me anyway, personally) and crushed them more aggressively than the originals (at no small cost; my CPU hit 65 C for about an hour, bits of programs' GUIs started breaking and i could faintly smell singed dust wafting from my case, no joke), the result is that my \Clouds\Textures folder is down to 66MB from 208MB (almost two whole B9 installations' worth of difference) which should greatly ease loading. if anyone else is running astronomer's visual pack and could do with the smaller textures you can get them here (7zip). now to see if i can normalize the clouds issue. i might try setting up an exclusion for all of \BoulderCo from ATM if i have to but i'll just recache, mess around and see.

evolving some kind of sexual reproduction is highly beneficial to any species of organism wherever it is because it greatly increases the amount of diversity in the gene pool (from semi-random mixing of the parent DNA, increasing the rate at which natural selection can hit on something beneficial) and because it helps get clean up flaws at a much higher efficiency (if a self-cloning organism has a detrimental mutation, it can replicate and its descendants will preserve it, whereas in an obligately sexual organism, if the flaw reduces sexual fitness it will quickly die out of the gene pool). on that basis it's likely that any alien life of greater than primitive unicellular complexity will probably develop some sort of sexual biology, on the basis of convergent evolution.

after much procrastination finally got around to drawing up an original flag (freehand, in photoshop, no less). game size (pixelly; wait, edit: less pixelly): has a kind of jolly roger feel to it, but i also decided beforehand that the main face would be trajan for a bit of the imperious SPQR war standard air.

enthusiastically agree. honestly i don't even know why Squad doesn't offer you a job. a long time ago when Squad polled forum users on what they'd most like to see in future updates i chose greater optimization and extended capabilities over everything else, and several versions later i am still wishing for the same thing. in a sandbox game of KSP's scale the player should feel like space, time and imagination are the limiting factors one has to contend with, not game software.

hooray! something to add to my over-extended reading list. rocket science gets pushed to the front of the queue, of course.

i think what you would basically get in that situation is the equivalent of a short-lived omnidirectional particle collider beam, with a gamma ray burst followed immediately by any matter around the impact site being packed with enough energy to ignite a whole chain of exotic particle interactions. you wouldn't just get radioactive events, you'd get a whole zoo of particle and nuclear physics events, many of which humanity would likely have never been able to observe before (or ever again). what it would do to ground zero in the medium or long term i can hardly imagine but i think it's fair to assume there would be unstable radioactive species amongst the debris.

speaking of \BoulderCo\Clouds, caching the latest version of Astronomer's Visual Pack with its 10 or so 8K textures is truly a herculean effort unto itself. i can practically hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth coming from within my GameData folder, but the libsquish algorithm seems to be slowly and painfully getting along with it. that aside, i'd just like to extend my thanks to you for developing ATM all this time. i feel like you essentially saved the majority of the KSP community twice in a row now; first when the proliferation of good mods resulted in everyone running into severe memory limitations, and then when those people installed so many mods that loading the game was getting to be a ridiculously drawn-out process (especially when troubleshooting; i will not miss the days when i would make a 30-second emendation to GameData, load the game for 6-10 minutes, see that the same problem was still there, and then repeating the same process for a whole evening).

Zeenobit's breathing SFX patch/alternative is good but in case anyone wants even more choice i also made this one from the characteristic suit breathing sound from 2001:ASO (reprocessed and pitched up a little to account for the fact that Kerbals have smaller chest walls than the alien race known as "humans"). also if anyone wants an EVA sound that is less long and dramatic than the full airlock effect bundled i made this one which is just a "squeaky metal hatch" effect (so it triggers as the kerbal spawns outside the vessel). keep up the good work developing the mod.

but wait, that's not true. there's no good experimental or theoretical reason to suggest that gravity would affect antimatter any differently than matter. probably they would interact gravitationally in exactly the same way as any two earth-sized lumps of matter would. otherwise though, your calculations seem to be correct. the only flaw in the practical application is that you're assuming that every single gram of both bodies would be consumed in the interaction, which is highly unlikely as a large fraction of the mass would probably be propelled away at very high velocity by the ensuing cataclysm and thus not converted directly into energy, but i'm not in a position to say exactly how much would survive.

oh, for...of all possible things, this is what scrubs my launch? now I have to spend 3 weeks in KCT putting the whole thing back together. good thing i'm not on a tight launch schedule.

in a past game my abortive mun base construction phase ran into problems when i broke my cardinal rule and flew with what i thought was a minor design revision that i didn't explicitly test beforehand (NEVER do this), as such my skycrane 24-77s didn't have enough exhaust clearance from the payload (mostly just a hitchhiker carrying 2 kerbals) and generated zero net thrust. i didn't learn this until i was on final descent and staging over the mun at about +5,000m. i had KAS installed and hope is never damped by the trivialities of reality, so whilst in freefall i had some brave soul whose name i sadly forget get out and VERY quickly KAS the boosters to the sides of the container with seconds to spare. of course, my only fuel tanks were split on the craft by a decoupler so i didn't get fuel flow and everyone died regardless, but what other game can even put you into situations as ridiculous as that in the first place?