Diche Bach

Thanks for all the suggestions folks! I'm sure I'll be coming back to reference this thread a great deal as I relearn how to play the game and start "shopping" for mods and such.

Oh it hasn't even got going yet . . . A single cell . . . So, if we consider the number of molecules just on Earth it is almost beyond comprehension. Still not as complex as "Chess" though !

At least 100 billion galaxies, updated recently to an estimate of 225 billion but advances in telescopes may result in that estimate going up. Milky Way is, if memory serves, a fairly "average" sized (if not smallish) galaxy. Andromeda contains a trillion stars they guesstimate. so 3 x 10^11 (300 billion in an 'average' galaxy) x 2.25 x 10^11 = 6.75 x 10^22 eh? Hmmm, not too bad . . . my math skills have not totally atrophied! How many stars in the observable universe" I guess the Milky Way is actually "below average" in stellar count.

So browsing through my old posts . . . looks like Fall of 2013 was when I was last playing the game, and I made a few posts in 2014, but that was mostly just because of the great conversations and brilliant minds that frequent this site. So last time I played likely was Fall of 2013.

I already got my "money's worth" out of this game years ago! Everything from here on is just "gravy!" Hopefully they are still having enough fun with it, and still generating enough revenue from it, that they will be keen to keep expanding and perfecting it for many years. Have to say, I'm puzzled though that they have yet to make any "pay-for" DLCs. The base game was dirt cheap if memory serves, and I'd happily contribute $5 or $10 here or there for substantial content/functionality packages . . . course I also am one of those mental defectives that does things like spend $120 for games like "War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition," spend a month learning the basics of the game, get bored with it, set it down and NEVER go back to it for years at a time! Meh, different business models I guess. It's all good! I'd put this game almost in the same category as Minecraft: insanely cheap, and while not as customizable, very much more than your average indie game.

Well I'm hoping that stuff still blows up with great profusity?!

LOL, what was that thread on github recently where the dude deleted his entire hard drive and all his clients servers? That linux command you just listed sort of reminded me of that . . .

Cool. Having read all your responses closely now, sounds pretty exciting! I reckon I've forgotten most of what I had learned about space flight, so just relearning how to get a sputnik beeper into orbit will probably keep me busy for quite sometime. I want to say I was playing the game as recently as 0.9, but most of what Ultimate Steve refers to sounds totally new. They were just talking about career mode "eventually" being in the game when I got distracted by other stuff. So let me ask this: Has no one yet built an interstellar mod? Even just mod model Proxima Centauri? Modeling something like an Orion-pulse interstellar vehicle or a colony ship would be freakin' cool. Of course, even a whole GALAXY would be even more cool, but I'd settle for just one additional solar system that was positioned at an approximately accurate distance

Thank you gentlefolks!

I bet you're right! Much like all Microsoft productivity applications, the layers of functionality are thick and what is under the surface can easily be ignored. I've found the most intimidating thing about programming, is the tremendous number of switches, toggles, bells and whistles in the IDE! But once you figure out how to do some basics, you can always keep adding small additional bits! I even found a user-made package that is a prototype to compile Java in Visual Studio, but I think it is incomplete as yet.

Good to know. When you say "debugger" is this something that goes beyond the "D" part of IDE in say, Visual Studio 2015? I've been on a procrastination binge since end of spring semester, but I need to break the cycle and get back to working on the elementary data structures stuff he is walking me through.

I've missed threads like this in the years I've been away from this forum

My mentor tells me that C++ somehow gets turned into that stuff . . . I think I'll just keep focusing on the C++ and/or Java part(s) for right now

My understanding is, viable models have been known for decades: for example, the largely conceptual O'Neill cylinder; but also the very "real" Centrifuge Accommodation Module. I get the impression, the primary "barrier" is just simply cost.

Amazingly, it seems to have been at least 2, maybe 3 years since I've played this game! I realize it has changed dramatically (campaign mode? interstellar travel?) so I'm just curious: what do guys suggest? I must've bought the Steam version of the game at some point cause I have it in my Steam library and I'm just now updating it. Are there pay-for expansion-packs or DLC I should consider? There must be a lot of great mods. Although I think I'll try vanilla for a while first, what are considered the "go to mods" for KSP these days?

This is a bit "pop" ized, but I really enjoyed it. For me as a mostly biological scientist, it seemed to do a pretty good job "weaving" it all together: the Milky Way, star life cycles, the great mysteries of dark matter, the evolution of the universe, etc. Maybe some of you guys will enjoy it, if you haven't already seen it.

Well . . . "eventually" Sol will balloon into a red giant and make life on Earth untenable . . . but 2 or 3 billion years is a pretty reasonable "foreseeable future" during which we can get out act together before we go on the road!

Ah right. Someone up above said "100 billion" and my understanding was, the best estimates were "at least 200 billion, but possibly as many as 400 billion." My understanding is, they do not know for certain, and it may not be possible to know for certain without faster than light travel and/or a more firm understanding of what dark matter is.

Well said. And this is to say nothing of the psychological effects. It is the final frontier after all. Coping with it will be the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced.

What language is that most like? Assembly?

Isn't it more like 200 to 400 billion stars (est) in Milky Way?

Fascinating thread. So basically, "we" have unintentionally polluted the near space around Earth with trash, and as yet there aren't even cohesive international agreements that prevent it from getting worse over time, and maybe even eventually culminating in the dreaded Kessler Syndrome. Typical human behavior . . . While I agreed with the spirit of the OP, now that I've read a bit more about how troublesome this space debris is, and how satellites that have just been left up there derelict are a big source of the problem (even ones launched as recently as 2002, by parties as "responsible" and stringent as the ESA --> Envisat) I think someone needs to take responsibility and start cleaning up this mess, and enforcing international law that prevents the problem from getting worse. In a world of warring factions, much easier to say than do, but I guess that explains the whole thing. If ISS is not decommissioned responsibly, then the largest players in the satellite game are showing their hypocrisy if they expect other up-and-coming players to adhere to stringent rules about decommissioning. Even once the ISS has burnt up, I reckon they will still have plenty of diagrams, models and such that can serve as "monuments" to the achievement, and a model in a museum, or for that matter a documentary, are much better these days at making an important historical event/object a permanent monument. We are on the verge of being able to represent some of humanities most famous historical monuments as "virtual realities" that anyone with the tech can "visit" right from the comfort of their own home.

Yeah! I did eventually find that one by the UK university folks. The GUI version restricts you to like 72km/sec but the text version (you have to click around a bit to find it) allows speeds up to around light speed! 299,000km/s if memory serves! This was all "in service" to a thread in the Stellaris forums over at Paradox, where there was a discussion about why "bombarding planets is too fast." I noted that, really there should be special weapons to bombard planets from orbit because the weapons designed to engage spacecraft probably wouldn't work too well (missiles would burn up on entry, lasers/phasers diffuse in the atmosphere, shells would also burn out), and someone else pointed out that "The most sensible way to 'bombard' a planet would be to take one of your spare corvette or destroyer ships, have the whole crew evacuate, deactivate the emergency faster-than-light restrictions for being near celestial bodies, point it straight at the planet, set a timer to cause it to go to full warp speed, and get the last crewman off . . ." Of course, I immediately appreciated (at an intuitive level) what he was getting at: even a fairly small object of some density would cause a tremendous impact it was going that fast. But there were some who were skeptical so I wanted to find one of these pages that would model it. I tried a 40m object, density 1000kg/m^3 or less and nearly light speed (200,000 I believe) and it was an impressive impact. Couple of those would put any planet into complete upheaval to say the least!

Hey Kerbalnauts! Been quite sometime since I've visited these forums, and the look has changed a lot. I used to be pretty active right after the game was released. I can recall (I think it was on this forum) someone posting a link to a page that allowed for "simulating" bolide impact events on Earth. It even allowed you to plug in values or mass, velocity and maybe even composition (if memory serves). Anyone recall this?

I've rented a 64-player, "Life is Feudal: Your Own (LIFYO)" server for one year. Be delighted if any of ya'll wish to join it! "Margelian Sunbeam" 24/7 Blackbox server