Kerbart

And why would he? That's, unless you got decent physics classes at school (and running into new hires with an MBA who don't know how to calculate percentages, my hopes are not high) not really the "world model" people grow up with, especially when he's a big time EVE player. What I do see is somebody who's pretty amazing in figuring out how things work, with no prior experience, no tutorials and only a few cues from him webcast audience when he asks for it. I had a great time watching it, I thought it was pretty entertaining. If he sticks to it I can see him have a great KSP channel on youtube.

See, it's this narrowmindedness that keeps us at Earth. Why launch it from your own country? There are plenty of countries that need freedom & a space program; today as well in the 1950s.

They make my rockets look better. That increases the pleasure I have in playing the game. For a game, that is extremely useful. I don't see how anybody can call nose cones "useless."

Apparently what you want is a real-to-life space simulator that takes into accounts all laws of physics including aerodynamics. You're in luck! There is such a program that allows you to do that, and model everything the way you want it modelled. What's more, that program is available on practically any platform of choice, and it allows you to run your simulation with stunning 60fps graphics. It's called "C++" The rest of us like to play the game of KSP and enjoy it. Yes, there are some shortcomings that tie in with the way the game is designed, and there are some features missing because it's in development. I did get a chuckle out of your request for things to be more realistic. "But there should be the option to just have the engine power that is convenient for me." That's not how real-life engineering works, son. Engines are incredibly complex to design and a few standard designs are available, and that's what you work with. You won't see Space-X design an engine from scratch for every mission. They have a few models and work with that, and figure out a configuration that works with the mission profile. Engineering is about finding a compromise between your objectives and what the real world offers your. In this case, "the real world" is KSP. Deal with it, others are showing that the missions you want are perfectly possible. If it's not KSP that is limiting you to achieve those goals you will have to wonder what is. Rest assured, you're not the only one who only want realism where they think it is interesting (I didn't hear you about life support, wrecking atmospheric reentry if you're only 2° or 3° outside the re-entry window, parachutes getting ripped off when released at mach .75, etc) and demand unrealism where they think the game "is limiting" them. But keep it coming, I need the occasional chuckle.

How do we get information back? Radio signals diminish with the square of the distance. Given how weak the signal is that we receive from the Voyagers, how would we get it from our Alpha Centauri probe?

Great! By all means: DON'T BUY ANY GEAR! Unless not until you've gotten some more experience. 1. Take a class. A real one, with people in a room, not online. Half of what you learn is from interacting with your class mates. Photography classes for 6-8 weeks should be offered by continueing education in your area. Sign up; it's worth it (even if you already think you know everything) 2. If you (intend) to take a lot of pictures, get Adobe Lightroom. Or any other software that allows to keyword and organize your images and start tagging them from day 1. Once the size of your image collection starts hitting five digits you'll be grateful for that. 3. Accessories to be bought: (1) Flash, (2) Tripod (but you seem to have one already), (3) "normal" f/1.8 lens. Forcing yourself to shoot with a prime lens is the quickest way to get better as a photographer in my opinion (first of all the optics are better, second of all it will get you into the habit of moving around to get the right viewpoint) Most of all: enjoy!

Don't forget, gingercookie, that what seems a small change for somebody not familiar with the codebase might, for some arcane reason, actually be a complete headache to implement. I'm sure you're familiar with that effect.

I have no experience with the multi-player mod but I'm under the impression that griefing was a problem. People would dock with a space station, take control and put it in a suborbital trajectory. To the extend that features as "locking" and "bubbles" are needed to prevent griefers from ruining it for other people. What people tend to forget is that what makes multi-player hard in a sandbox game is not the technical aspect of synchronizing. That can be dealt with by technology. It's the social high wire-trick of letting people who are essentially anonymous interact with each other in a civil way. You won't have that when you're playing with three or four friends but invariably there will be "public" servers that will attract griefers like a light bulb attracts moths.

Technically yes. More accurate would be "if the work was created before Walt Disney Studios existed." Any work created afterwards, at least in the USA, will have copyright protection for an infinite amount of time.

In American slang it's refered to as “Monday Morning Coaches†because, with 20/20 hindsight, they can pinpoint so accurately how, given the outcome, the game should have been coached. Trolling is when you're just yelling “things can be better†without saying how they can be better. Until you give a detailed resource analysis, and how coding hours should have been spent to come quicker to the same results, or get better results in the same timeslot, it is not unlikely that such unproven “I can do better†claims are considered trolling. And my mother taught me not to tell others “you can do better than that†unless you have the proven authority (for instance, but not limited to, by showing it yourself) to do so. I’ve seen people with MBA’s who cannot calculate with percentages. I’ve seen people with a marketing degree who know nothing about “knowing your customer.†Similarly, I've seen some bad-ass coding (elegant, concise, clear, well documented) by people who didn’t go to college at all. Basically “I have a degree in x†doesn’t really mean that much unless backed up by some experience. What would impress me is “I've lead a team of game developers and we’ve consistently delivering products on time, within budget, and meeting all requested requirements.†Now that I would consider as “I know what I’m talking about,†and if that applies I will apologize. Although I’ll wonder why you didn’t bring that up in the first place. Alpha, Beta, RC and Gold apply to classic software development and that's not what KSP is. I bet you’d be the first to protest if 0.23 was a "stabilization release" with no new features at all, just bug fixes and nothing else. Here's my suggestion: if you want to stick to classic development routines, why not simply wait until the game comes out of alpha stage? That way you have nothing to complain about. Granted, that might take a year or two or longer, but in the mean time you don’t have to agonize over the inability of a small team to deliver something that will rival much larger companies who routinely take three years or more to bring their 1.0 product to market. Sure, you'll miss out on the ability to provide feedback to the developers and see how the game is developing, but it will be much more like the classic software development you expect them to do. Is Squad development perfect? Of course not. But they have many things to manage, and many requests to fulfill. Experienced users don't want "ease into learning the game" science, new players don't understand what the charm of "n-body physics that will require daily station keeping (in game time)" is. Whatever the new version will bring, players will complain that there's not enough new features, that there is too many new features (fix bug) or the wrong new features. Obviously you cannot please everyone. And it seems you're one of them. Good luck with agonizing; I'll go back to simply enjoying the game.

Probably because somebody insists on using the word "cured" when it obviously wasn't? Mitigated? Maybe. But if your car starts shaking uncontrollable over 40mph and $2000 the garage calls you to tell you that they "fixed" it and it turns out that the "fix" is post-it note that says "do not exceed 40 mph" I doubt you're happily going to pay that bill and tell them "thanks for fixing it!" Shutting down the engine before it rips apart the entire rocket N1 style is mitigation. It's not curing. Curing is preventing the problem from happening again. And obviously, it did happen again. Semantics? Maybe. But most engineers are semantic hecklers because it makes the difference between a design that meets requirements and one that does not. (Well it did return the astronauts back to earth, didn't it? "Yes, but we meant ALIVE" Well you didn't say that anywhere!)

"NASA simply managed to not get much publicity." Of course not. An organization that is always the first on the chopping block when budget cuts come along will keep something like this on the down low. God forbid it sparks interest in space exploration. [/sarcasm] A case like this will either not be published at all* or get a Kennedy-Assassination-kind of attention. Anything in between, like this, is simply unthinkable. * read The Cassiopeia Affair by Chloe Zerwick and Harrison Brown, in which an excellent exercise is done on how such a message would be constructed and decipheredâ€â€a message for other civilizations would be nature be deciphered in weeks at most, as it is meant to be deciphered by alien civilizations)

That applies to pretty much everything, not just video games. Crusaders against [XYZ] will consider [XYZ] evil because of some preconceptions. Since [XYZ] is such an evil they will not touch it or look at it. Talking to subject matter experts about [XYZ] is like talking to Satan's henchmen, so that is not done either. Once you start looking for it you will realize that this does not just apply to video games but to any subject where there's a strong vocal lobby against it. To gain acceptance, the polarizing element has to be neutralized (in general from both sides). That usually takes an extreme amount of time. After that, public opinion swings quickly from getting an hour time on PBS to "meh, there's them again." In this case the polarizing element is young children in a very influential phase in their life playing cynical games with no respect for human life. We've had the same discussion about comics. There's just certain material you don't want to give to 6 year olds, even when it's extremely high quality (Art Spielelmann's Maus comes to mind). The discussion right now is "video games are bad for little children. Look at GTA" and the response should be "WTF lets their grammar school kids play GTA?"

I wouldn't classify is as a "miniscule" detail, but you are right in the fact that it's a movie, not a documentary and that it doesn't matter as long as the movie is enjoyable to watch. Most movies have their facts wrong. Sometimes out of ignorance of the movie makers (directors, script writers, producers), sometimes because... well, it makes a better movie. Even within the frame of reference you'll find inaccuracies everywhere. Consider Terminator Two, where at one point the friendly T800 is repairing a car and asking for a torque wrench. He's a friggin' robot. He knows what force he's extorting! Why would he be asking for a torque wrench? See? Movies are full of BS. Even when you're not looking for it. But what counts is that they're entertainable.

That has sometimes unwanted side-effects like the crew getting roasted by discarded boasters that are still fully powered.

Yeah that's kinda how I do it. I think it's only common decency towards your Kerbals to have an escape. Unless the design has proven so reliable that nothing ever goes wrong. But in most cases I'll have a small tank underneath the capsule with those tiny radials attached for when things go boom. Or go wobble wobble wobble wew that was close WOBBLE COLLIDE OH **** boom. Or my favorite: when a lower stage start moving through the stage above it. Good times! Experience has taught me to abort right then and there because things are not going to be any better.

Well you asked for it. I just bought this beautiful font called Verb:

It's important to distinguish global warming from what causes it. Is it getting warmer? With practically every year breaking heat records and the last 10 years all being in the top 15 of what is on record (or something along the lines) I think it's pretty hard to deny that. A lot of people don't realize that history was written twice this year: vessels crossed on their own power, without an icebreaker escort, both the northwest passage (from Asia to the American east coast, north of Canada) and the northeast passage (from Asia to Europe, north or Russia). Those are long routes, and both were ice-free, making it hard to write it up to a fluke of local weather conditions (unless you consider the entire friggin' arctic circle one "local" area). That was a first for both. You don't need a bit of climate warming for that. You need a lot of climate warming for that. The second question is what causes it. And that's important because depending on the cause Opinions, obviously, vary, and that's where the fun starts. To be honest, both camps are at a disadvantage. Those who claim human actions as a cause do have to deal with the fact that for years facts were "massaged" and that "correlation means causality" seemed to be the unscientific mantra for climate scientists for a long time as they had nothing else to go by. But the "mankind has nothing to do with it" camp is not that much better off; for years they've been denying that the climate is warming up in the first place and proven wrong once makes it a lot harder to be taken serious the second time. Proceed with caution? Both camps look at it like that. Should we take deep-cutting steps to reduce CO2 emissions while we're not even sure it will help? Then again, do we want to say 50 years from now as the world is ravaged by wars over water and food, "why didn't we take steps to prevent this 50 years ago? Because we were only 98% sure, instead of 100% sure?" (yes I'm biased) The biggest mistake in any case is saying "there's no evidence, so we don't need to research it;" it's important enough at any rate so say "there's no convincing evidence either way, so we really need to research this". The one thing we can all agree on is that right now the climate is warming up, and closing your eyes for that and pretending it doesn't happen to the extend of putting that in law (like some US state governments do) is very unfortunate. Weather systems largely depend on energy flowing in (it gets warmer) and out (it gets colder). The sun is an obvious source of energy but not the only one. There are both in the ocean (gulfstream) and in the atmosphere (jetstream) large powerful global "conveyor belts" that push air and water around in a continuous loop. Global climate change can influence those systems and accelerate or stop them. To give you an idea, the winters at the US north-east coast are generally pretty cold with lots of snow. But at the same lattitude, in Europe (southern France and Spain/Italy/Greece) winters are mild and warm. Go a couple of hundred miles north and you have blistering cold winters on the American continent, while northwestern Europe (United Kingdom, Germany, the low countries) have mild winters with temperatures usually not going a lot below freezing level for a long time. Relatively warm water (coming all the way from the Caribean sea) that warms up the air above the Atlantic ocean causes that. Stop the gulfstream, and NW Europe will be plunged in blistering cold winters, is the expectation -- and all climate models point to just that when temperature goes up. So there's an example of localized weather (in the winter) getting colder as a result of global warming. If that sounds unlikely, keep in mind how messed up the weather in the USA is an "El Nino" year, when oceanic currents along the south american coast reverse direction; a good example of the influence oceanic currents have on weather thousands of miles away.

That has more to do with being very close to an object of very dense matter than the pecularities of the Neutron star itself. The advice I'd give to the OP is this: think very carefully about the environment. Why all the complications? As Arthur Clarke once put it: good science fiction is when you take everyday life but change one aspect, and then write a story on how different life is due to that aspect. The story seems to be ship is stranded, bad things happen due to internal struggles with the crew. To what extend do you need a complex system for that? What is it that a meteor shower cannot accomplish? Remember the rule of Chekhov's gun: don't introduce details that are not needed in the story.

A skipper with 6 radial Mk 55 engines doesn't give you that much less thrust for a little bit more weight but all in all it puts you in the same ballpark.

They enhance the pleasure I have in the game. For a game, that's a pretty big deal. Useless? Far from it. If we want to leave out the useless part why not leave out the whole 3D thing and just run it as a play-by-the-numbers game? Far more accurate, better "frame rates" and it doesn't change the experience significantly (only leaving out a useless part, "how it looks").

I used too. Then again I'm nailing it too much these days to get any wobble in the first place. Docking goes more like this: “Distance 1.5... 1.4... 1.3... 1.2... 1.1... SSSCHWOP aaaaand we're docked†But turning off SAS is a great trick if you're struggling to line up the ports, that's for sure!

Well yeah if you have it moving that smoothly docking is easy...

Wow. ALL Human spaceflight? The US Congress has control over the Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Indian and European space programs? I never knew that.

The reason we ended up with all that CO2 was because the process of making it released a lot of (useful) energy. Obviously, undoing that will take a lot of energy.