Kerbart

I'm not sure if it's that easy to dismiss. First of all there's a solid chunk of textures in use for the planets. Now obviously there's only one body you can orbit at the same time (yes, it could be a moon and you'd need a texture for the planet of that moon, but that can be a microtexture again) so that'd leave out a good chunk of textures, especially when people replace the stock textures with their own hi-res ones. Second, yes, theoretically that scenario would arise, but only if you're using practically every part available between the two ships. The memory problems arise because people are using dozens of part mods, each with textures that eat up precious memory. I doubt you'd be using practically every part from every mod. Proper texture management would mitigate a lot of these cases though. Not sure if you would build ships that would cause these problems that often. The current approach is great when you're only using stock parts (I am, thus I have little problems), as there is no stuttering in the game due to loading textures. And it's understandable as the underlying architecture was probably designed when this wasn't an issue. But it is now, for a lot of players, and Squad needs to address it at one point. 64 bit is only a temporary solution as people will now invariably load hundreds of mods and simply run out of real memory (not just addressable memory).

Ah fidonet! Yes, I eventually upgraded to fidonet, since the BBS that I played VGA Planets on was using it One of the advantages was offline email—Imagine that, you didn't need to be logged in to access your inbox, read emails and reply to them. Although to be honest, Bluemail offered that as well—but fido allowed you to send emails to the other side of the world, if you could deal with message delays measured in days, instead of milliseconds. As for young people being rude nowadays? I'm pretty sure the terms “flamewars” and “trolling” existed back then just as much, I doubt it's a generational thing.

You'll need to do some hardcore googling on that, but I remember Raymond Chen of Microsoft explaining in a blog post that there were good reasons for that. As for the “no biggie:” I don't use the joystick. I tried it a couple of times, and maybe I'm just to much used to the WASD/IJKL operations, or maybe it's due to the on/off nature of rocket-driven steering, I just don't like it. With that out of the way, I find it inexcusable that the program would not start if hardware that is easy to unplug is not available. In my teaching days I would always use hardware-related issues as examples for exception handling as it would absolutely quash the student's argument but if you thoroughly check your input exceptions wouldn't happen. After all, how can your software prevent the printer running out of paper halfway in a print job? Depending on your hardware there are some workarounds. My CH Flightstick doesn't work with KSP in the first place, so I have to use the (very flexible) CH Control Manager instead (amazingly KSP can talk with that. Go figure). That delegates the problem of not having a joystick attached to the Control Manager software who, unlike KSP, can handle unattached devices (or being connected to different ports, for that matter) CH Control Manager is downloadable for free; I'm just not sure if if works with non-CH products as well.

But in Stack Exchange the replies are nested; that's a pretty essential caveat.

To be very cynical, you can take a statistical approach. You're weighing the risks of, say, a dozen lives for the rescue operation, against the effectiveness of the entire army (say, a 100,000). Because once word goes out that you're left out to dry, the willingness to go out will decrease significantly.

I assume you missed the part where I said "not some hydro-electric powerplant monstrosity" — the discussion was about an energy storage solution on a house-by-house basis, Not at a powerplant level. I've visited the Dinorwig site. I doubt anyone will have that in their back yard.

Pray tell, how are you getting the water from the bottom to the top. Through the pipes yes. But you're going to need a pump. That pump needs to be powered. And then when it gets back, you'll have to convert the energy of that flowing water somehow in electrical energy. By all means tell me where you find the turbine/generator combo (working with the volumes we're talking about, not some hydro-electric powerplant monstrosity) that has an overall efficiency of over 95%; at that scale I think you can be very happy with 50% in both directions.

Is there a way to set the margins? Having edge-to-edge text on a 21" monitor is starting to get old Oh wait, I found it: .ipsLayout_container { /* max-width: 98%; */ max-width: 1200px; }

As Chakat mentioned, it's already done in places with elevated terrain; I suspect that you'll need a large scale project for this to marginalize the inevitable losses due to friction, etc. Let's do some math. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the average US home uses about 10,932 kWh per year. Divide that by 365×24 and you get an average power useage of about 1.25 kW which doesn't sound outlandish. For an 8 hour night (you can expand this number according to your wishes) you'd need a storage capacity then of around 10 MJ. Now that's an easy number to work with! Storing one cubic meter of water (1000 kg) at a height of 1 m will take about 9.8 kJ. Let's say for argument's sake that you store your upper tank about 10 m above the lower tank. That's between 3 and 4 floors (depending on how tall your house is), and especially if the lower tank is buried under ground not unreasonable. So your one cubic meter will now store (theoretically!) about 98 kJ; you'll need about 10 of those. If you take a spheroid tank (we love those after all!) it would take a tank with a diameter of a little bit less than 2.8m. Of course, that assumes that there are no losses in pumping the water up, and no losses in turning the water flowing back in the lower tank into energy. Let's be optimistic (because I think your losses will be far higher than that) and assume 50% loss in both directions; so in total 50%×50% is 75% loss. So your tank will need to be 40 m3 or about 2.24 m in diameter (or about 7'4" if you're into those units). While this doesn't sound too outrageous, the main questions are: Do you need more or less than 8 hours of reserve (adjust accordingly) How much energy storage does 40 m3 in batteries (even fairly simple lead-acid ones) get you? I think it works for a utility company that creates an artificial lake because of the sheer size they can operate on. At home, a battery oriented solution seems the better way to go.

Yes. VB6 wasn't the most charming language but it had some things going for it (mainly due to its interchangeability with VBA). VB.NET is, as far as I'm concerned, "C# without the curly braces" (I'm sure someone will take offense to this but I haven't had a warning from the mods in a while, so I can take it). In the end, learning VB.NET is pretty much the same as learning C# which is why most people don't bother with it, I think; Microsoft did a good job in killing off one of their most popular languages. And since C# is a managed language it doesn't have the challenges that learning C or C++ brings along.

I thought the experience levels only increase when a kerbal is returned to the astronaut center (by recovery)? Aside from that, there's very little incentive to got to 5 stars. A pilot maxes out at 3 stars. A scientist doesn't but by the time you get them to 5 you have already unlocked the entire tree and there's little use for scientists after that (at least from a career perspective).

I do most of my programming in Python but I don' have IronPython experience. Some googling revealed that it is unlikely. You can create a .exe and even create (iron)python assemblies but you wouldn't be able to have them interact with C# code (mainly because types in Python are fluid, and in C# are not). It seems that IronPython is really about "running Python code in a .NET environment, and not "writing .NET assemblies in the Python language" as you correctly pointed out. As per StackOverflow:

...but so is Python. Don't get me wrong, I like Python, but what would make it different from Lua in that respect (aside from the fact that there are apparently two .NET implementations of Python now)? Or do you mean "standalone Lua" as opposed to .netted version of Python?

There are a couple of things in the beginning of The Martian that are hard to swallow, even with the suspension of disbelief. The storm is one of them. Not the storm itself. Yes, it's unrealistic but I can roll with that. What bothers me is that apparently these storms exist and they are powerful enough to topple over the launch vehicle, but somehow the MAV for ARES IV never got hit by it in the years (? at least by the time Watney gets there it has to be years) it spent on the Martian surface. The crew immediately going back after reaching Hermes is another one. The entire story-arch and various sub-plots hinge on orbital mechanics. To paraphrase: “you can't just fire the engine and go to another planet. There's a small launch window and you require a precisely calculated trajectory.” And yet the book and the movie suggest that they basically take off leaving Mark behind, reach Hermes, punch the "Ignite" button and went home.

Consider the audience. While technically possible to "win" the game like that, how many will? If one is that desparate to "win" the game why not use the debug menu instead? I figure most of us play Career because it offers some fun challenges. Artificial restrictions to force the player to play it in a certain way doesn't make it more fun. Yes, Career needs some work, but in much more creative ways than "lets limit the science you can gather"

Thank you for making a positive, improvement–oriented post about this subject.

He was a bit awkward... As the question was obviously lighthearted, a laugh and how do you think we plan these missions? would not have gone bad, I'd think.

One second is 1/86,000 of the length of a day in Universal Standard Time. I assume they are familiar with Universal standard time after all. Right?

The only thing I truly hate about the current forum is that text runs all the way from the left side of the screen to the right side of the screen. It means that I have to resize my browser window to a smaller part of the screen to keep things readable. Do I give in to my OCD and maximize the browser? Or do I give in to my headaches and resize the browser? Choices, choices… Then there's the color combination which is so godawful bland and Microsoft and... yuk. Can't we have something greenish? We're a forum about a game of little green men going into space. Where does the blue come from? But in the end, if the forum software runs well? I'd rather have a forum with some visual issues that works, than one that doesn't. However, I will vote yes on a petition to have Comic Sans removed from the font options.

That was actually really restrained. I just noticed that the forum is now well readable on the iPhone. Et tu, Tim Cook? Et tu? So, aside from deleting the game, thrashing my hard disk, burning my math books I will now cancel my phone service as well, to remove all the traces of KSP taint out of my life.

This can work wonderfully well if people consistently vote up what they think is the best answer. There are a few caveats: Responses to answers get placed out of order. No problem when you keep this in mind when writing an answer: use quotes, etc. Of course, given the attention 95% of the posters paid to formatting on the previous forum makes me weary that this is going to happen. A good answer providing radical new insights will have zero likes, is unlikely to be read and will thus not float to the top. Of course, if everyone always takes the time to read all the answers, not a problem. But what's the point in reading all answers when the “best” one is already at the top?

The main argument (aside from the fact that these game mechanics have been implemented through an extended and rigorous beta program with many adjustment steps to get where we are) against this would be that the player would simply spam the timewarp button to get a lot of funds, but I assume that funding would dry up pretty quickly if month after month no results are shown. I like the idea as career mode is currently the mindless spamming of mission after mission just to get funding (and trying to combine that with science). While the current career mode system has improved a lot over the various 1.0 iterations and provides fun challenges (cunning planning results in getting funded and gathering science at the same time, not in the least through four very lucrative tourist contracts, but I digress) it comes down to running a lot of missions for the sake of gathering funds and scraping science together. This new system could be used for both funds and science: Completing contracts earns reputation. Reputation is the currency that gets you funds at the end of the month (following Tater's suggestion, 6 day months seem an excellent choice) Doing science earns... well, science. Science in turn is the currency that gets you research points at the end of the month which are used to unlock the science tree. Funding and Research could be fed by some rolling average of your net gains over the last six months or so, so running into a dry spell won't kill your career instantiously. In addition, maybe, you could have the ability to buy parts, maybe only from the science boxes that can be unlocked (e.g. if you've unlocked the tier 2 boxes you can buy tier 3 technology, but not tier 5 technology), for an exorbitant price. Twenty days into career and you really want to have that gravioly detector for that Duna probe while the fly-by window is closing rapidly? Get one for 10× the price (but get a sweet pay-off when the science rolls in).

It sounds like Squad decided that, having a True Master like Maxmaps demoing the game, is a bit demotivating for us mere mortals. Dr. Turkey will take the game to new levels! (using a shovel to reach those levels, it sounds like)

I thought the target to get things up and running was Monday. It's still Sunday. I don't expect it to work fully yet. I'm happy it's already up! I'm sure it'll be reliable by the end of the week. If you expect server changes to be happening flawlessly in less than a day at any organization where it's not the core business... Well, the world will hold some nasty surprises for you!

Maybe because everyone is accessing and posting on the forum at the same time?