Kerbart

It's not a matter of patience; it's a matter of limited time and resources of the people who, without any obligation, are trying to help fellow players who are stuck. They have very little to go by and are forced to make guesses to fill in the blanks you didn't provide. When someone is asking a question to rule out something you didn't mention ("Is the stage locked?") they get a pesky answer ("of course it's not locked") and seemingly have to tease every single detail only to get a "well doh, I did that, why do you even ask" kind of response. To help you a bit: Make a copy of your KSP directory Remove everything from the mod folder except Squad If the problem persists it's not with a mod Start adding mods until the problem reappears

Interesting thread… it dawned on me that the question is more about “when did you grok English” (relatively speaking at least). With two sisters picking up the language seemingly effortlessly, I was the oddball in the family, struggling with it and getting bad grades at school. Then I discovered computer games, which at my age and time (the early 80’s) were mainly text adventures like Zork and the Scott Adams adventures. Night after night I’d drag the English-Dutch (for understanding what was printed on the screen) and Dutch-English (for typing in the commands) dictionaries to our TRS-80 and picked up a significant part of the language. Growing older my interest expanded to applications like Visicalc and Wordstar — and while Dutch manuals where available, the quality was usually abominable, and requiring translating half the words back to English to reverse engineer what the original phrase was, in order to figure out its meaning; reading the English documentation was just easier. By the time I graduated high school I routinely scored 95% on any test for comprehensive reading or listening. I now speak far better English than my sisters and reading novels in English is second nature — for them it’s not a struggle but they still prefer translations. It helps that I live in the US, nowadays, so I have little choice, Getting an Austrian girlfriend when I was younger and repeating the process with German (an easy language for Dutch speakers) I can attest that, at least for languages in a similar family, the academic method of focusing on grammar is a complete waste of time. Commercial courses that focus on conversation are much better; what you need is a vocabulary (the collection of words inside your head; not the book) and practice, practice, practice. You’ll pick up the grammar as you go along, and even if you don’t, people will understand you if you know the words anyway.

I work for what you’d call a fortune 500 company if it were a US company. It’s a global company, and yet I recognize nothing of what you claim about CEO’s. He is exceptionally well connected to the business, and knows exactly who our largest customers are and what their issues are. Perhaps in an industry like banking or insurance which traditionally is build upon layers upon layers with many sub branches this might be the case, but in most business you can’t make decisions without knowing what goes on. The CEO of Pepsico visits supermarkets to see how her brands are doing. Now that I think of it, the C-level executives of a large oil company seemed pretty well connected to what was going on when I worked with them. And Strauss Zelnick having no clue what Candy Crush would be? That’s like Jim Hackett claiming he doesn’t know what Ferrari is. You can’t lead a business without knowing its industry. Finally, games are not “dumbed down,” but a lot of effort is made to make them easier to pick up, as it increases accessibility. A great example is Portal; a painstaking amount of detail went into the first levels of the game to ensure the player was taught everything they need to know to play the game without noticing that they’re actually working their way through a tutorial.

Exactly! This is how decisions are made in large corporations. Usually by a CEO who walks through a hallway, insulting everyone he encounters, and thinking about this company he noticed this morning in an article in Bloomberg. There might be an intern or so who will try to point out some flaws in this plan, but those are laughed away. That’ll probably exactly how it went... in a movie. In reality though, shareholders are not that pleased with willy-nilly takeovers that fail miserably. Aside from screening the company financially (so there are no skeletons in the closet), market research is conducted, as well as an evaluation of doing things in-house would be cheaper. Buying privately owned companies tends to be expensive as a good amount of the price will include “goodwill” instead of tangible assets like property, staff and IP. By the time the deal is inked the CEO and those involved will have a very good idea of the audience of the game, and in what ways they can—and cannot—make money from it. KSP is a great product for T2 because it’s very predictable. They know how many copies they can sell looking at KSP1 and there’s no reason, if the product is good enough, they can’t sell that with KSP2, and with they right marketing probably even more. It’s highly doubtful the game will be a commercial succes if it betrays the character of KSP1. A large part of the audience will not buy it then.

The downside of such a cramped capsule is that the Kerbals have to get in and out in a fixed order. Nobody would design a lunar lander like that in real life... right? (Yes, of course I'm aware that the LM had exactly that issue...)

I use a pirated version of Adobe CS6 at home. Well, a pirated version of the DRM DLL, that is. Why, Kerbart? Didn’t you pay for it? Well, yes I did, and it’s giving me non-stop problems with claiming that I didn’t, especially with Adobe Acrobat Pro; it would silently go into trial mode and then stop working after ninety days. Now, if it simply would ask for my username to check, I’d probably be fine with that, although I’d still be very annoyed. But it simply doesn’t start anymore, without any message. Imagine something similar would happen with KSP. As a paid customer, I am suddenly confronted with exploding ships, ever changing orbital paramaters every time I open a saved game and other “punishing teases.” Would I assume that’d because the DRM failed? Or would I assume it’s bad software? How would I know? And if I did pirate the game, would those teases make me think it was due to piracy? Or would it reinforce me into thinking “good that I didn’t spend money on this #### software?” I agree with others that DRM will do very little to stop piracy and mostly hurts paying customers. The best course of action is what Squad did — foster a community, and continuously develop the game so therefore a reason to promote buying the game (and buying the DLC). Speaking of DLC, my main reason for buying it is to support continued development for the game, not its perceived (lack of) value. Anyone complaining that “there are mods for those parts” (aside from the “mod vs stock” discussion) seems to forget that element — we depend on the DLC to pay for those “free” updates. That’s why I would never pirate them.

port authority handles that by permits. No port authority knows what is in what warehouse. They can hand out permits for certain class goods, so they know where the hazmat stuff is. In general, port authorities don’t decide where the freight goes; that’s up to the owner of the cargo who has a contract with local warehousing or storage. Storage for these kind of things probably has a lot of specific requirements regarding spacing, building strength, etc. That’s probably why the AN ended up where it was stored in the first place, and why the fireworks were stored there as well. Note that this was not the main port of Beirut. Those grain silos? Grain tends to explode as well if it’s not properly handled by an elevator. (“But what if the neighboring warehouse explodes?” “If it reaches us we have other things to worry about”) there was none of it in the silo, that’s why you confused me. It was in the warehouse between the silos and the water. If it were in the silos they wouldn’t be standing there.

You’d have to mix the AN wIth the fertilizer to make it more potent. Warehouses are nit “picked at random,” they are picked for capacity and for ability. In this case, dangerous cargo that is unloaded for a ship and—at the time, was supposed to be loaded onto that ship once the fines were paid and the ship was released. But that never happened. If you’re going to store a large amount of AN with the intention of loading it back into a ship, then it makes sense to store it on the waterfront, and not to truck it back and forth through a densily populated city. Then the owner of the vessel abandons it. So there’s 2700 tons of AN without an owner. What do you do with it? Sell it to the first buyer that shows up? In Lebanon? I have a feeling that finding a safer spot to store it wasn’t the main issue, but transporting it was. Who’s picking up the tab for that? With hindsight that would have been the cheaper option, but for the past six years it obviously wasn’t. The head of the port authority and the head of customs tried multiple times to get it removed, but couldn’t get a court order for it. Which suggests to me that others argued against it (probably grounded in “I don’t want it to be my problem”). And that worked out “well” for six years. Until it didn’t. Finally, “who is so stupid to store fireworks right next to a warehouse full of AN?” Do you know what is stored in each warehouse you pass by? The fireworks owner was probably unaware of the AN.

With very, very little thrust. It probably worked, but if you have a large vessel you won’t notice anything. You’ll need a fairly light ship and even then acceleration will be in the tenths of one g.

There are currently two leading theories: Rask is the larger one Rusk is the larger one Scholars are still debating!

It might be a bug that isn't that simple to fix Or to replicate (the first step in fixing bugs). 10.1 contained a pretty long list of fixes, should Squad have said "we're still waiting to fix this one bug, until then we don't release the patch?" It's an annoying bug, but it can be circumvented (time warp/visit the KSC) and I think we're better off with a patch than with no patch while waiting for this one to be fixed.

When you split uranium into lighter elements you don’t lose protons, neutrons or electrons, but when you add up their atomic masses you’ll see that the end result of the fission process has less mass than what you started with. that difference, almost like a rounding error, so to speak, is what creates the energy that is released when atom bombs explode. what you want to do is going up a couple of magnitudes on that scale. The amounts of energy are staggering. To create one kilogram of mass, using Einstein’s E=mc2 equation, you will need c2 Joules, or (299.8×106)2 Joules, or 8.99×1016 Joules. It would take a very large 1000MW powerplant about 9×107 seconds to produce that, or a little over 10 centuries. And that’s one kilogram; you want 1000 of those.

Because in American culture, no matter how harmless it may seem, volunteering information is like an open invitation for litigation. And that's without any NDA's in place which I'm sure there are. That reminds me of this little gem. Which is on point actually; anything you say will be taken out of context and will be used against you:

Be careful how you express things online. Some might interpret that compliment (half the bugs are fixed) as something negative! That's why I have a script for that.

Wouldn't that just be a matter of "proper ground procedures" so you can prevent needing the LES? You're hammering on "if we checked valve X those suits aren't needed." The problem with that statement, which is why I mentioned the LES, is that you can apply it to any safety measure. And the problem with that is that while we know what went wrong, and check for it, we don't know what else will go wrong in the future. We don't have suits because 'we don't trust comrade Pavel to check the valve." We have suits because "we're not so arrogant that we think we have safeguarded *every* point of failure" That's why the response to the Apollo One hatch wasn't a mere "let's make sure all wires are properly insulated and grounded" -- even though I'm sure the engineers were pretty confident a fire like that couldn't happen again, they still redesigned the hatch. Why? Because you never know what else might come around to bite you. And if a second fire happened and the crew could once again not escape because the hatch opened inward? Would "well, this fire had a different source" be an acceptable excuse? The LES is a glaringly obvious safety measure you wouldn't leave out, despite a "we analyzed the problem last time you needed it. And we assure you, that won't happen again!" The fact that an LES was apparently used three times shows the folly of that statement. Leaving out the suits? We have identified the root cause of that particular problem and eliminated it. So you don't need a pressure suit anymore." Do you really think your highly trained astronauts would be comfortable with that? "Your crew died because of X" - while "there's nothing we could have done about it" is not a very satisfying answer, "we could have avoided it, but we just thought it wouldn't happen" might very well end your manned program.

If it's "just a question of ground tests" we can simplify the design of spacecraft considerably, with all the benefits (weight, cost, reliability) that come with it: No more Launch Escape System needed No outward opening hatches needed (a lot simpler - pressure will keep them shut tight) Cut down on reserves for oxygen, food and water The point of safety measures is not that we can be sloppy on other fronts; it's that if everything else failed, we still have a chance on saving lives. Just because an emergency requiring pressure suits (almost) never happened doesn't mean you shouldn't carry them, especially if it potentially can result in "totally avoidable casualties" Commercial air flight doesn't supply pressure suits or parachutes. And once spaceflight has similar safety records (millions of passengers per day, years without accidents) those pressure suits will be deemed just as unnecessary; we're just not there yet.

Without seeing the actual game that’s impossible to judge. Restraints are an essential element of game design, and surely the game will have something in place to make progression a challenge. The problem with career is that accumulating money easily becomes a grind, and the designers have been very clear they wanted to avoid that. That doesn’t mean building a colony on Eeloo is going to be trivial; you just have to work for it in a different way.

Larry Niven solved that problem by following a course above the ecliptic. Granted, the Long Shot was flying to the core of the galaxy, but similar concept.

But then, it’s two light years across, not away. So the distace to travel is much smaller. And while relativistic effects do make it harder to get closer to c, they also dilate time, so in ship time it wouldn’t take nearly that long, I assume. Although a round trip to the edge of the Oort Cloud may leave you finding a long-dead Earth on return, with the last traces of civilization having vanished eons ago.

My bad Kris! And I apologize for that. This is not the first time this has come around, hence the, perhaps somewhat aggressive response. The redshell software did collect some metrics (but that was stopped, I think) and an overly cautious interpretation of the EULA did the rest. It's easy to panic if you realize information is collected, but it's also good to realize that: Some information is necessary to do business with you as a customer. For instance, payment information* Some information is required to serve you better as a customer. Your email address for instance - how else can Squad contact you? Some metrics are indeed for marketing purposes, but that doesn't mean they're traded with third parties. What's the age composition of customers? Gender? How often do they play? Not only is this often collected on an anonymous basis (maybe an IP address to crossref 'age" vs "gender" for instance), it's not uncommon to store it anonymized - if only to reduce the problems that arise if that information is leaked While there are cases where companies sell their customer data to third party, it's really bad business that generates a lot of negative publicity. Especially for smaller vendors (as KSP still is) with relative small data sets, it's simply not worth it to sell the data. * A classic case is the backlash Flickr received when their EULA revealed some language around copyrights. How dare Flickr claim the copyright of my pictures! What it really said was that you gave Flickr the right to reproduce images of which you owned the copyright on their site - without it, they wouldn't be able to show your photos online (which is the whole point of uploading pictures to it). In short: much of the information on that webpage is not correct. Some of the references are, giving credit to the other claims, but on the whole: KSP is not spyware (spyware being software that under false pretences harvests your computer for data and "phones home"). The only malicious part is the number of hours we waste playing it! Some information is gathered, but not nearly as much as is listed Most of the "marketing gathering" was done by redshell and I think that's no longer used

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If this were a renowned news site (and I will go light here, even “PC Gamer” or “Gizmodo” would qualify in this context), I’d take it a bit more serious, but some cheapo webpage that anyone can hide behind? It claims malicious spyware, not just “regular” spyware. What’s the malicious part? Why is it not mentioned what malicious evil things it does on top of allegedly being spyware? KSP collects payment information. Oh my goodness! Yes, when you pay for it, they want some information to actually get paid. Are you suggesting we should pirate the game instead? Facebook integration? Really? You mean there’s a facebook page? As for motivation: you’d be shocked to see what people do for attention. Or maybe retribution for conceived wrongdoing. Nothing better than not being able to land on Mun and not getting your money back than slandering them. Speaking of which, @Squad might want to take a look at that page. Call me a fanboy but until I see something more substantial than some wild empty claims I’m not too worried. We had Redshell, and that has been resolved (even though it was a stotm in a glass of water), and this would pale to that in comparison. It would be shocking to see all of this is true, but right now those claims look as meaningful as “the earth is flat.” Yes, shocking, but unlikely.

In a way that's highly original.

Only if you're gullible enough to believe that kind of disinformation.

Does it need to house crew? If it’s just for show you could use a fairing and paint windows on it.

I'm surprised nobody jumped on this. Maybe it's an incidental but to me it seems that Squad is at least remotely involved in KSP2 development, which I think is good.