Kerbart

Unless you build ant-sized ships, what on earth would be a "precious capacity?" The monoprop tanks in most capsules give me ample MP for the entire mission. How much MP does docking cost at best? 2 units? 3?

It still sounds to me you're trying to speed up your processing by making your code run faster, instead of by running less code. Can't you run some cheap checks on your data? Without knowing values, you could *for instance* do an initial square root calculation based on the integer value and use a lookup instead of a "real" sqrt calculation. That can give you a pass/fail in far less cycles than actually calculating the square root to the level of accuracy that is needed. Or use hashing. There are many options that save you from searching every single data set every single time, and it sounds like that's where the real profit is. Optimizing your code will rarely make it run substantially faster unless you profiled your code and know where it spends 90% of its time crunching. Optimizing your algorithm usually gets you performance increase in the order of magnitudes. It would be totally not shocked if it turns out your project can run faster in a scripting language like Python, because it allows you to discard large chunks of data based on complex algorithms, than in C or even assembler because you're using a brute-force approach.

I agree on your assessment of goto. In addition, my father, who had a weak spot for Basic (and he started his career in machinecode, not that sissy assembler stuff with labels that the 'ung ones now think is hardcore), always told me: “there are no bad languages, just bad programmersâ€Ââ€â€I'm sure that can be extended to statements! Having said that, my first hunch looking at that diagram would be to stop and figure out how to streamline that monster.

The problem is likely that previous versions were so incredibly underwhelming (at least for me), that I never looked back after trying them out. Maybe XP10 is better... but I'm not going through installing x-plane again -- and I'm happy how FSX performs right now.

I did for a while. But FS9/FSX don't offer the most spectacular scenery around NYC... so I ended up using the Seattle area as my "home base," especially with the Orcas Islands add-in. But I would once in a while take a ride around Teterboro... absolutely!

The RealAir Citabria and Decathlon. RealAir's planes are amazing and a very good case why you'd be willing to pay 2× or 3× the price of the game for DLC.

Here's a different approach where you can demonstrate your understanding of orbital mechanics to your teacher. Since we're way off in Lala-land, let's assume you have a magical rocket engine that doesn't need fuel. Or maybe one that somehow does total mass to energy conversion (a nice side project would be to calculate how much mass it'd need per second but I digress) The idea would be that you'd use this magical rocket engine to prevent the moon from crashing into the earth, after stopping it. So the power of the engine is exactly equal to the gravitational pull of the earth. And then you can figure out how long it takes to stop the moon. For more realism you can have the moon slowly rotate so that the thrust of the engine starts to offset gravity as the moon slows (though thinking about the analysis alone gives me a headache. Modelling it should be easy though). And then calculate how long it takes for the moon to slow down to, say, 5 m/s.

At least the 4000 class engine shows that it's economically unfeasible to build a steam engine out of rocket parts.

Programming languages are tools. For certain applications C will be better, for others not. It's hard to hammer nails into wood using a saw. For code that needs to run fast, C or C++ is usually the best choice. But keep in mind that depending on the complexity of your problem you'll gain more "performance" from improving the algorithm than from writing faster code. A high level language that makes it easy to implement such an algorithm might be a better solution. For many problems optimizing the algorithm yields improvements magnitudes better than concentrating on writing "optimized code." That's not saying that your solution should or should not be written in C; merely that when you're looking to improve processing time, looking for a "fast language" might not be the most effective choice.

I thought about that too. But that's not getting them into orbit; they're already there. Semantics, of course...

Most streams are really bad, which is why most people don't like them. But a few out there are really good. When the host interacts with the audience, explains what he's doing and why he's doing it and displays good knowledge about the game so you can learn a thing or two, a live stream is awesome (yes, Das Valdez for instance). But most streamers I see just stare at the monitor, hardly ever say a word, and pick missions that involve a lot of nothing, and display skills that are, even by my low standards, are annoyingly inept. I can see why people don't like streams. But the few good ones out there are really, really good and the interaction with the audience adds something that pre-recorded video cannot offer.

Because excavating costs a lot less energy than melting an entire asteroid. Of course with the projects we're talking about the energy problem might have been solved but the same technology might bring us energy shields...

The one propulsion that would even have Jeb scream in agony!

Exactly! Whatever the "mystery" is, it's probably something a group of less than half a dozen scientists vaguely are aware off. Creating hype is easy... living up to it not so much. I'm not going to tune in on a live NASA broadcast on Monday, only to be disappointed by some minor research result.

Been there, done that. And again. And again. I've made that design mistake enough times to get into the habit of testing my lander on the launch pad. Testing procedure is simple: Get out for EVA (great way to discover that your hatch is blocked by a solar panel, as opposed to discovering after landing on Dres) Descend down the ladder (yes, jumping is an option... but it's so unprofessional) Walk around the lander Return to ladder (can you get there?) Board craft It takes maybe two minutes but it saves a ton of agony downstream.

Ampere seconds? (Or "Coulomb" if I remember high school physics correctly) - - - Updated - - - A fuel unit is 5L if I remember correctly, with all fuels having the density of water.

If you’re using a Mac I can’t help you, but a neater (and quicker) way of entering degree symbols (instead of a superscripted lowercase o) is to hold down the alt key and enter 0176 on the numeric keypad. You'll get something like this: 76° instead of this: 76o. And while you’re at it; Alt+0215 is the magic entry for multiplication; × instead of x. Don't get me wrong; I'm not criticizing your efforts to write something that looks aesthetically pleasing; I've seen to many 3.1415E17's on this forum (instead of 3.1415×1017) to complain about that; just trying to make what you write even more awesome.

I think for the -180°â€â€+180° range you want ((x + 180) % 360) - 180 But I'm too lazy to test in code. And pre-emptively if you're using any atan calculations in your code, check out atan2.

Well they add up to 360 (with a one degree difference due to rounding errors, one would assume). Unless I'm missing something -75 and +285 are the same position, just different ways of expressing it. EDIT: Ninja'd!

I'll leave it to the pundits to comment on the impact of multiple cores to memory limits. But... assuming the new Unity gets rid of the 3 GB memory limit imposed by 32 bits, that doesn't mean there are no more crashes due to memory limits. Given enough memory hogging mods, you can still run out of memory. Especially if you only have 4GB of RAM If memory leaks aren't fixed you'll still run out of memory and crash; it will simply take a bit longer (how much longer? depends on how much memory you have) I'm clueless how windows deals with this, but if this gives KSP the ability to utilize all memory, it might simply be Windows that will do the crashing in that case, instead of KSP

Whoever wins the elections will find this an easy way to find a couple of billions of dollars on their budget. Note that these plans always get launched at the end of a presidency. It looks good, and yet you don't have the burden of paying for it during your term.

We didn't do it. Prove it! It was them, not us. That was “scientific research†That was an action by rogue rebels that are out of our control Actually, those were rogue Russian|Chinese|North Korean|Syrian rebels, trying to frame us We have the proof that Saddam Hussein was behind all this. We can't show you but trust us, we have 100% intel on this. Veto! The possibilities are endless. Whenever these kind of treaties come out you know that the janitorial staff of the UN Building in New York simply forgot to buy toilet paper, so they're making these treaties instead.

Legislation only has a point if you can enforce the law, and if you are willing to do so. Without derailing this thread into a political discussion, I think we can all agree on the fact that there are many examples of companies, either with or without national support, who'll go ahead against international treaties and get away with it, because we do not have the means to stop them, or we're not willing to face the economic consequences of doing so. It would show of realpolitik to say “really, do whatever you want, we cannot stop you anyway†but “politicians are level headed, sane and full of common sense†has no one said EVER.

Let's not forget that if you work really hard you need a lot less computing power than we have today. A 1980s micro loaded with visicalc could already go a long way, and those computer had less power on board than the average wireless mouse these days (yes that's an unfounded claim I pulled out of where the sun don't shine but you get the drift).

Previous to 1.0 I'd say yes. But with the software out of beta one would expect features to be robust and bug free, and the modelling of things like aero and heat to be stable. That's what the extensive range of beta versions was for, after all. So honestly I don't expect my saves to break. That's the implicit promise Squad gave me when they rushed progressed to version 1.0