Kerbart

Where does one get the tickets? Or does one has to Photoshop said tickets themselves and imgur them here?

I did not know that! Then again, it's the navy George Bush (the elder) once joked to a uboat-man that, when he was a USN fighter pilot in WW2, they used to refer to submarines as “tin cans”. “That's funny, we had a nickname for aircraft carriers too,” replied the sailor, and after inquiring he smiled and said: “targets.”

For starters you could apply a simple heuristic along the lines of "if a part has no subnodes and a mass of less than x% of its parent than merge it with the parent for physics calculations" or something along those lines. With some refinements you could come up with a good reduction of the parts involved in Physics calculations without significantly altering the accuracy.

Actually it's not. In shipping, a "boat" is a vessel that is small enough* to fit on another vessel. Think lifeboats, dingies, etc. If it's bigger than that it's a SHIP. This is why it was interesting when the launch this week was cancelled that they specifically said "It's not a boat, it's a ship" indicating that it was something that was large enough to have a crew that should have known better. * within reason. Just because larger ships sometimes get transported by other ships doesn't automatically make them a boat; Wheaton's law applies in this case.

I fully agree. It makes the Elcano Kerbol challenge take waaaay too long!

In this day and age I wouldn't build a new PC with only* 8GB of memory. Unless the mobo has four memory slots so you can expand later. * "only." Har har har.

An image to scale that shows the earth and the orbit of ISS. I always find it a good illustration that "in orbit" has everything to do with orbital velocity and not with "lack of gravity due to being high up in space" as you're pretty much still on top of the surface of the earth.

“The community has closed this channel due to terms of service violations”

I know that a low post count doesn't mean you're brand new to the game. It doesn't have to assume that at all. However, it's easy to assume that, especially when writing a sitting-high-on-the-horse article titled “what will become of the game?” when the obvious answer is “nobody knows but it's steadily progressing” So I'm happy to take a stab at the issues listed: 1) Patched Conics: n-body is not realistic to expect. If you mean the representation in game... Yes, there's room for improvement. But a nightmare? 2) Rocket stability / part attachment node strength: the great Raymond Chen once said: whenever you are asking a question like this, try to see what happened if they did it the way you suggested? Think of it; the game is fun because it's challenging. It's not fun if you can blindly send anything up without any problem. There has to be some middle ground. Yes. And we're right there. “it is the only thing that enables construction of all those awesome huge ships everybody loves.” Again: Challenge. Those huge ships would be a lot less fun to build if there wasn't any achievement in getting them into orbit. Do, by the way, keep that term “awesome huge ships” in mind. We’re going to need it later. 3) Mission and timewarp management : yes, KAC would be nice in stock. But would you need it? The only reason I'd like it to be stock is to minimize the chances the mod developer pulls a kerbalstuffy on it, aside from that I don't mind the mod status. Keep the basic game basic, so to say. The nauseating effect when warping at high speed... Well... if you're going through multiple day-night cycles per second, how would you prevent it? You could switch to one screen refresh per day/night beyond a certain warp speed. And then you'll get complaints from people saying they didn't realize they were warping so fast. 4) Planetary exploration : it's particularly interesting to see this in combination with (2). "I can reach anything with traditional chemical rockets" obviously requiring some big-s ships. I don't think you can have your cake and eat it here. Either you admit that there's a good application for these high tech parts, as you can build smaller and lighter and bypass the issues of launching mammoth ships. Or you say “I prefer old fashioned chemical rockets (if only there was a coal-fed rocket engine!) and I'm willing to pay the price that comes with launching large contraptions.” But don't say that you don’t need lightweight long-mission parts after complaining that your ships are too large to launch. 5) Contracts and rewards - “This part is really done much better than anything mentioned above.” To be honest, that’s an insult to the rest of the game. Well, let me rephrase that carefully. I think the contracts are done very well and they have greatly improved since their introduction, thanks to the people who worked so hard on them. Career mode itself needs fixing though. Although: “Eve and Moho should give a ton more science/money because they are far more difficult to complete than anything else” — wait. Didn’t you say earlier “everything within the stock Kerbol system is far inside the reach of conventional chemical rockets and solar panels, so there is no real need for high tech parts like those. Regular engines + asparagus will get you anywhere you can go in stock system?” So which one is it? All planets are easy to reach even with conventional chemical rockets? Or Eve and Moho are too difficult even when using those special rockets you have no need for?

What a nice story, but it seems inaccurate. At no point in time did Squad mention in advance, let alone promise, a pre-release versions and then backtracked and said "Steam only." Well yes, during the course of the announcement, but if that was "all along" then I think you have problem with being impatient. Squad made a clear case: we want to extend testing, we've never done that before, the process involves certain logistics, right now Steam can provide those, banana banana banana. I can see how an approach of starting this release with the bad news: “pre-release on steam only, and here's why:” won’t achieve a single thing either, as those who will cry foul will stop reading after that anyway. So here's an updated version: One time I was finishing a long hike on a hot day with two friends, Bob and Bill. The hike took longer than expected. Guys, I have some beer in the refrigerator. I'd love to give it to the both of you when we get home, but circumstances (Bill was not yet at the legal drinking age) only enable me to offer a beer to Bob. Bill completely understand that, smiled and said, "Hey, two weeks from now I'll be [drinking age], I get to get a beer too then, right? I'd be silly to deny Bob his beer just because I can't have it." “But of course Bill! It's not that I don't *want* to give you a beer, it's that I *can't* but as soon as I can, I will.” I was amazed that such a young lad was able to display such maturity. Good for him! Morals-a-plenty: if you're coming up with some story, make sure to use an analogy that is not blatantly unprecise. And Squad should see to it that the pre-release is downloadable through curseforge. That should put an end to the complaints.

It seems there is a feeling that the pre-release is a privilege. I see it as a way to help Squad to make the game better. Sure, it will give you a warm and fuzzy feeling if you can do that. But if you can't, it shouldn't make you have your panties in a bunch. You're not being left out of anything grandiose. The purpose of the pre-release is not to give you the opportunity to show off to your friends that you have 1.1 and they don't. The purpose of the pre-release is to improve the game. So, what to do if you don't have Steam and you're upset of missing out on the pre-release? I'll get flamed when I say “grow up” so I'm not saying that. Instead, I'll leave it to your own introspection.

You can use Kerbal Engineer. It will show you your inclination, and the angle to the equatorial ascending and descending node. Burn towards the normal on the DN, and burn towards the anti-normal on the AN. After doing it a couple of times it shouldn't take more than two burns to be within 0.001° of an equatorial orbit.

Oh god I completely missed that. ROFLMAO

Nooo, that's not it. I was under the impression that there was a search for an "universal base". Aside from the insanity of picking a ordinal system based on irrational numbers, pi would not be a good choice because there are multiple choices based on circle geometry; pi and tau; so it wouldn't be immediately evident which one was chosen. But e doesn't leave such choices. There's no way you can come up with a similar number that has the same properties (unlike the pi/tau couple). I didn't like the rest of the book, but the first part of The Cassiopeia Affair was wonderful in how it was shown how an alien civilization would communicate a message in such a way that the receivers would not have a tremendous hard time deciphering it.

It is the NY Daily. Lol. So now we have at least two errors. Who finds the next one?!

It pretends the Hayabusa mission never existed?

Has anybody mentioned how this post was absolutely unreadable on a cell phone? Why was that?

At launch, your TWR (Thrust to weight ratio) can be close to 1. That means that your rocket will spend a relative large amount of time not gaining speed. SRB's can help you over that "first bump" and basically give you literally a little kick that gets you going. But once those SRB's burn out, and they do burn out pretty quickly, I'm back at square one! Ah! Not quite! First of all, you've already burnt off some fuel, so that alone will have improved your TWR compared to the launch pad. Second of all, even if your TWR is still close to 1, you're at least moving which will get you closer where you want to be (although you really need the speed at one point, of course). And #2 does get you, eventually, out of the lower atmosphere with the high air resistance, meaning that you'll get more bang for your thrust-buck. Finally (although not advisable with low TWR ratios) it allows you to have transitioned to a flatter trajectory -- the horizontal thrust component doesn't get eaten by gravity, like the vertical thrust component (although it helps to go "fast enough to miss the ground" at that point)

But the value that is approximately 3.14 would not be a universally chosen one. Unlike e.

Aside from the incredible difficulties base-pi would impose on day-to-day arithmetic, as a "universal" base it would fail as pi is not a very universal number. I think that e is a more logical choice in that case, as there's only one e. “But Kerbart,” you protest, “surely there’s only one pi either?” Well, not exactly. Pi is defined as the ratio between the diameter of a circle and it's circumference. But that in itself is open for discussion? Why not define it as the ration between the radius (which is how mathematically a circle is defined in the first place) and the circumference? Proponents of tau instead of pi (one tau equals two pi) do just that. With e, such a discussion is impossible. But if we ever encounter aliens from outer space (bug-eyes, green, et al) the most likely way to exchange numbers would seem to be binary.

All joking aside, I have two copies of KSP; my steam copy which is "unmodded" (I think I have chatterer, KER and DPAI in there but that's it). And then my modded 'play' version. The unmodded version satisfies my "I want to know what's new" curiosity. The modded one doesn't get updated until I've seen that at least *most* of the mods I use have been updated. A little bit of patience with that goes a long way!

Well, not immediately. First I will have to insult every mod maker under the sun for the fact that, despite making mods in their spare time and free of charge, they are lazy dogs because they haven't made their mod 1.1 compatible within 20 microseconds of Squad announcing 1.1 Then I'll start a new career.

What I got from Wolfram is that it's pretty much open for discussion and that the simplest explanation (for 1 not being a prime) is basically “cuz we say so.” I get the impression that general concensus is that 1 is not defined a prime as it makes a couple of other definitions (that include phrases like "all primes") a lot simpler.

Sarcasm tag still missing!

That's the passage I re-read I guess the statement that humanity was not able to construct an artifact to such precision is where your enthusiasm kicked in and equaled “perfect construction” (in measurements) with “perfect construction” (in mechanical properties). To be honest, I do think Clarke went a bit overboard with the whole thing, as if any mathematical correlations between the dimensions of TMA-1 were needed to convince others that this was made by intelligent beings. Look! We know math! Yeah, we kinda expected that... The fact that it was artificial, and there, should be enough. A monolith with dimensions 1-2-3 or 1-2-4 would have been equally convincing.