weissel

And now read the Atomic Rockets website and find out that "stealth" again is relative. Yes, you likely can use hydrogen or helium to dump heat and expel the waste (or use it for thrust, too) while being hard to see. And now imagine you were the guy in charge of protecting your planet/asteroid/system from threats like these "stealth ships". Are you going to have lots of small, cheap drones around that look for heat signatures? Sure you would. How about drones scanning everything nearby with Radar or Lidar or similar? Sure you would, even if they are more costly and visible to all due to their higher power use and active radar/lidar use. And if they are attacked, that in itself is an important alert signal. How about extensive surface systems, which can be totally stealthed under ground, both for observation and for counterattacks? As much as the budget can be squeezed and then some! How about organising a 24/7 watch on the brightness of all stars bright enough to be of use? No problem! We routinely do monitor star brightness of stars over months and years, detecting tiny dips of 0.1%, which shows us there's a planet crossing the star far away. All that is needed are some large aperture lenses (apparently the old 200mm f1.8 Canon lenses do great work for a very low price --- compared to specially made optics, at least) and sensitive sensors (current DSLRs have fairly good sensors, enough for that work) and some software for tracking and finding the stars on the photos and measuring the brightness. Which we all have today. I am pretty sure you'll find some other ideas --- even a very sparse, but wide hydrogen stream at 9km/s (and 22K) should be detectable with matching active sensors. I am thinking of something not quite dissimilar to Michelson-Morley (trying to detect the Aether which obviously failed due to non-existent Aether --- but that hydrogen cloud exists ...). All that being given, do you see a role for spy craft of that kind? And if so, will they (at 190m/s per day) be manoeuvrable enough for any kind of battle where they are detected? (I guess no. Once they are detected in any way, any dumb kinetic weapon will take them out, they cannot dodge at all. So yes, you may have some stealth in space --- given very special circumstances --- and now tell me, what can you do with it?

"Better than <questionable design decision>" has become an in-joke for FlowerChild's mods. Better than Wolves, Better than Giant Bees[1], Better than Sentry Turrets (which was the best he could come up with re Rimworld). For a "meaningful, slow progression" starting with valuable and expensive Kerbals is not the right thing. But then KSP's Career Mode is a tutorial for beginners, not a challenge even for veterans. And there I can really see the "better than" being true --- obviously if you have different goals, your mileage will vary a lot. [1] 7 Days to Die, a craft/build/survival game with zombies and zombie hordes coming to kill you. They had Giant Bees as a 'flying enemy' back then, so you'd need some sort of roof, too. The game was too easy for FC. They added a shortness on resources, resource quality by biome (the more dangerous, the more rewards --- instead of "the higher your level and relevant skills, the higher level the rewards), slower progression, reduced the fairly OP crossbow, etc etc etc and you'd avoid zombies --- or lead them away from where you wanted to search for stuff --- because zombies now are dangerous. A few versions later, while not perfect and still having some less than perfect things, settings to hard (zombies ruin always, shortage of everything, no loot respawn, no air drops, ...) FC found the gameplay hard enough for their liking and discontinued the mod. (Note that FC is/was a game designer)

Unmanned before manned is the same as BTSM mostly in forcing you to launch probes first. BTSM was a very tightly integrated experience (and therefore, by necessity, incompatible with about all mods --- either technically or by radically altering game play away from what was wanted. (That does not only include MechJeb, but also any kind of dV readout, like Kerbal Engineer. Yes, you were meant to "know" your dV by try and error.) About the only mods that might stand a chance to be compatible with BTSM would be purely visual mods. BTSM started with giving you the small Kestes solid rocket and the Kestes boosters. (Estes is a very successful solid toy/hobby rocket maker, they produce their own solid fuel engines ...) No steering at all, not even winglets. No changing the amount of fuel or the thrust. So you need to stage properly, and be balanced. And have the batteries to send back your science before your crash or burn-up --- no parachutes yet. And, as you might soon find out, there's a thing called "going too fast", and you need to learn to wait the right amount after each booster burnout (and did I mention, side-attached separators come very late in the game, as do fuel lines?) before staging the next one, if you want to go high enough. Soon(ish) you'll be running an experimental bi-propellant liquid engine, the aptly named "Death Wish", and you may have some movable fins. The Death Wish will overheat and explode about 8 seconds after take-off from the pad, and it is only capable of sustained ~50% throttle in space (no air to pass heat to), so you have to play with the thrust. While manually keeping the rocket on the suborbital course you want[1]. Carrying a gravity detector and a dozen or two batteries (which are emphatically not made from potatoes with wires stuck inside. Unfortunately: they would give you more power then. Though you could recharge them ... if there was any way for you to produce power in space. You'll be graduating to long suborbital flights --- you want tundra and pole biomes from low space, because that't the only place the detector works. (Note: there is no science to be had at all below something like 10 or 15km height!) And then try to get an orbit. With only movable winglets for steering. Which only work in lower and middle atmosphere. (All the probe bodies have zero reaction wheels, and the capsules only enough to get to a heatshield forward attitude at reentry time.) You also only get the FT-800. Full. No way to have a half-full tank (unless you burn the fuel off before launch). You may then graduate to vertical staging (Saturn V, not boosters detaching), and you will have fun with no struts. You may gain a small RCS tank and nozzles, finally some attitude control in space. But they do have very limited power in the lower atmosphere. Now you may be ready to do a Mun flyby or even orbit. Unmanned of course. With the probe cores you have you will find that Hohmann transfers are ssslllooowww and that means a much increased weight in batteries ... and you start considering if you can lighten that weight ... and how ... in the meantime, some old cockpit from an old war has been found and you might want to launch some kerbal up there ... only to find out what "not pressure tight" means. You will also be a bit creative when it comes to attaching parachutes (the attachment rules have been worked over, so many attaching methods are not possible. You cannot mate 2 or 3 Kestes rockets side by side, for example ... only the boosters.) Soon you'll have a pressurised cockpit (not vacuum proof) and then the Mercury equivalent. It has about enough life support for one orbit and a bit --- life support is really heavy, and suits and early pods and capsules go through life support in an alarming rate --- and you better make a nice and shallow reentry with the heatshield you have. And do not carry anything but heatshield, parachute and capsule. Not even a single thermometer. If you want to survive, that is. Do not even think about polar or retrograde reentries at all, unless you can do propulsive braking. Struggle after struggle after struggle ... and yet, even choosing the "worst" next node will not paint you in a corner (you just might have to be more creative) and if you are low on money, there are a few grind missions to get you back up from even a totally empty purse. You will want some of those missions to finance your science missions; and the stuff is from "sending up a sounding rocket with a thermometer and a barometer for weather checks" over "deliver this warhead to that point" (from suicide crash to dropping them as bombs on multiple targets (not just on Kerbin) --- the military needs to be prepared against big pale aliens from outer space invading, the public demands it) to "deliver this heavy MacGuffin to this and that orbit" and possibly "and now shift the orbit to there and there much later". Of course, you can combine missions and the more efficient (in Funds) you build, the more is left for you. Most contracts are "must be done on the next flight", so not getting that cool engine for a test sometime later and use it a lot in the meantime. I do not think any other mods have made that much of a challenging game with the rewards that come from overcoming difficulties. Most of them go for some realism (which is fun), but ... a properly designed game with progression is something else than a wonderful sandbox and there is space for both. [1] not even a SAS hold on these early probes, but to balance that they are really heavy and eat electricity like there was no tomorrow. Oh, no hibernation. You can switch them off and on --- if you have a running probe core or a kerbal to do so.. And even 0.1s without electricity is an insta-kill for a running probe core or a kerbal. Also, solar cells come really late and are initially heavy and bulky and inefficient as hell, but fragile like thin glass, so your manned Mun landing will be done on batteries only.

Engines are "frozen"? Do you see your nozzles go white all over with frozen humidity, or are they starting to glow red if you run them? Decouplers having a delay? Decouplers use explosives. Explosives do not care about deep temperatures: guns fire even in the Russian winters and the Antarctic. You want something 'cool' which is fine --- but if it badly clashes with the type of reality the game has, it fails. (This reminds me of Here's To The Heroes (lyrics), mp3.) I think you should go back to the drawing board to find viable effects and explain why waiting a few days, weeks, months for more pleasant weather is not going to happen all the time, rendering all the weather mostly a non-issue or a nuisance at worst.

By flying 10-25° off retrograde (point the shield end more down towards Kerbin) you can generate lift, thus keeping you in the thinner atmosphere for longer, hitting the dense "we are going to cook you" atmosphere layers slower. By the same token you have a limited steering ability (left and right) by tilting the pod left and right. Unfortunately you are unlikely to have enough electrical energy or monoprop to manage holding that position. There are other options, left as an exercise for the reader, alternatively investigate how the Apollo capsule did it. I do not think you can fix this problem in flight without certain mods and parts you don't have. You could raise your periapsis to above 70 km and launch a rescue mission when you pass Kerbin, collecting the stranded Kerbal --- assuming you can already do EVA in space. If not, be happy that Kerbals need no life support while you go get that ability and rescue him/her, possibly years later.

later

The Sovereign. Sorry, but if you come along the lines "who died and made you king?" I naturally understand that as a "shut up". '"who are you to say what" is right and what is wrong?' does have that ring, doesn't it? Actually, no. Not even the right continent. Let me answer: T2 insists on being able to change the terms at any time. T2's (and tons of other EULAs) are written in dense lawyerese, so people will not be able to read them, and that is on purpose. T2 did not "agree to share their property" --- T2 agreed to "let me use their property (code, assets, IP) until they don't feel like it any more". Like these free and now pay-for SP cars. T2 is not acting in good faith in first place, changing their tune from "as long as it's SP, mod all you want" to "we'll shut down more or less all mods", and if that is not reneging the deal I don't know what is. T2 is trying to shore up their own shoddy work in GTAO and doesn't care about collateral damage --- even to their own product. I have the right to fork over money. And more money. And even more money. I might get some data or virtual goods, but no guarantees. And that is about the only right I can rely on. Now if my money clip was weighing me down with all these $10,000 bills, that may come in useful. Now, if you can say that sounds like a fair deal ... "honest enough to pay"? There is no dishonesty involved in getting the software legally from a place where you don't have to pay over a place where you have to pay. I think you are totally not understanding the basic idea here. But see the links in the last posts. And of course people have the right to commercialize their software! I don't see where on the world they would not have that right --- except maybe in criminal groups, say Daesh. And people do not need to forbid unauthorized redistribution --- go see the copyright laws, it is not allowed, even right now, to distribute without a license.[2] So what the ... is your problem? That the GPL does not allow them to simply ... to say it in your words, "pirate" the GPL'd software and sell it as ARR with no source code? Is that really what upsets you? [2] Excluding Public Domain, which is a licence or stuff that have lost the protection time of copyright. I am sorry but I have to contradict you. Other people cannot use that segment of the code. They can only use --- probably --- from what that segment was forged[1]. Unless the maker of the proprietary software did not change a single bit of the sourcecode, that is. Which is unlikely for anything but fairly trivial projects. [1] There is no need to publish any changes. The code may have gone through many hands until it arrives at the company, who may have paid for getting it. It may never have been available outside a number of companies who were not inclined to publish it. You really need to read up about the GPL. It's not against corporations, nor against the military, nuclear power, Republicans, Democrats, ... You even have permission to pass it, changed or unchanged, on to others, under certain circumstances. Again, please compare that with the GTA EULAs.

I see, we will not be able to find common ground here. We will have to agree to disagree, I guess, with me pointing out that by that logic they could intentionally make GTA V no longer work at all and let everyone buy a patch/new version/GTA VI, and you answering that it's their IP, they get to do whatever they want. But I stand on that Rockstar/TT building GTAO knowingly and wilfully decided not to or not sufficiently to check what the players' PCs told them, like "Here, add $10m to my account", but to believe blindly and add that sum to their account. Checking your input has been considered absolutely needed for at least 20 years now. And now they try to put a band aid over it by not allowing mods --- not that *cheaters* will care. In their idea of a cure for the problem they are. URL for that claim?

Of course I am not the owner of GTA V. Neither are judges, juries, the supreme court, the constitution or the law of the land. Also, last I looked, I was not under your command in any way and therefore you have not the slightest right to tell me what I may say regarding T2 and their IP --- especially not an implied "Shut The **** Up!" When I buy a game --- or rather, pay for the license to play a game --- I certainly feel entitled to actually play that game to the fullest, and I don't feel warped saying that the publisher removing content only to sell it back to me is not a case of fairness. It's not like I use a time or feature limited demo or not yet registered shareware. GTA V doesn't come cheap. But I agree with you on piracy. You cannot see how that is not piracy? Let me help you: It is not murder/robbery/... on the high seas (or rivers). It is not Copyright infringement or "music piracy"... nothing was taken of code or assets. It is not patent "piracy", nothing to do with patents. It's not a pirate radio, by virtue of not broadcasting anything. It's not a boat or ship, hence not a 1934 designed sailing dinghy type called "Pirate". Nor has it any relation to the steamboat "Pirate", the USS Pirate (SP-229), the civilian motorboat "Pirate" turned patrol vessel for 1917/18, the USS Pirate (AM-275), an WWII minesweeper sunk at Korea in 1950. It has nothing to do with: sex, pimps, etc, where the word "pirate" turns up now and then. aircraft hijacking Space piracy (analogue to high seas piracy) Films, games, toys, literature, ... even though some have "pirate" in their name Sports teams any Pirate Party a butterfly (Catacroptera, aka "pirate") It is not related or involved with a Passive Infra-Red Airborne Track Equipment It has no connection to "Pirate Joe's" which bought/buys at full price and resold some Trader Joe's wares in Canada, where Trader Joe's does not exist at all. This is a special case of Corporate Stupidity: Pirate Joe's spends $4,000-$5,000/week. At full price, mind you! (He clearly is their largest customers.) Of course you need to shut them down, by litigation, banning them from the stores (with photos to other stores), because ... everybody loses that way. Yeah, real real smart. Take heed T2, you need to emulate that. Instead of giving the guy a very good retailer/VIP discount, logistic and other support and a medal, because selling more stuff is apparently a bad idea. And in which way exactly does the Gnu Public License license prohibit that? That is the entire point of the GNU GPL. Any work utilizing GNU GPL-licensed code must be distributed under GNU GPL itself. Therefore, there's no way to include a GPL-licensed software library in your proprietary, closed-source, ARR program. You can do that with something like the MIT or BSD license, where you have to include a copy of the license with your program, but the program itself can be under any license. And I thought you had an argument or facts instead of an (uninformed!) opinion. Stuff like this and that paragraph. Maybe you reread the FAQ and the quick guide to the GPLv3 and the GPLv3: yes, you may sell copies, yes, you may charge a fee for downloading a copy, etc. More on selling free software. You may also read how open source developers make money. The entire point of the GPL is to make sure that it's software stays free. You exactly describe it: with free software, anybody can --- and should --- take it, but with MIT or BSD the result is a proprietary, DRMed, "do not touch, do not look", "mods are forbidden" AAR software and any extensions or bug fixes to the free software parts are buried, and likely never will turn up again, forcing the next guy to reinvent that wheel, again. With the GPL, if you want to propagate or convey the program, you have to give back. And EULAs don't? Forcing conformity of the author's view what you may or may not do with the software, like no mods and so on ... The GPL lets you do whatever you want, unless you want to propagate or convey it --- which is an action that without permission gets you into copyright troubles anyway. Changing the source code, adding mods, turning it upside down ... which EULA does allow you that again?

No. But I think that many times games publishers have been exceedingly stupid and trying to make a money grab. Often at the behest of some well meaning sales guy or some executive. T2 just did that, so ... Thank you for the compliment. Now you know the wet dreams of business executives who are in it for the money. I agree. But that has never stopped anybody with enough greed and not enough smarts in a position of power. (Psychopaths are overrepresented in high management, BTW.) From what I understand, the content was free, just lately they tried to lock it up for a cash grab and/or to drive people to the online version where microtransactions rule. T2 has a lot to lose. Reputation, sales, ... The question is if the deciders at T2 can grasp that truth. Somebody used a machete to attack and hurt people. Let's not go after him. Let's outlaw all knifes and knife-like objects instead ... steak knifes, butter knifes, chef's knifes ... That (probably) works. OpenIV was (AFAIK) so deep into the game code that it accessed unencrypted data for cars that had been freely available in single player. T2 then decided to make their GTA V no longer read the files until some condition indicated a microtransaction had happened. Morally that sucks. It is also as effective as locking the door behind you ... while you have no walls, so walking around the door is trivial. You are right, that is piracy. Perpetrated by T2, though: taking away what they had given to their SP players and asking for money to get it back. Let's say you are a preacher for religion X and you offer your holy book(s) for free for anyone who pays for and visits your convention. Later, you decide that everybody has to either return the holy book(s) or pay a fee for them. Now, who is the thief? "making content available for all" and "proprietary ARR-licensed software" are clearly the opposite of each other. "making content available for all" and changing a 'share-alike' license to a 'do what you want' license means that the former 'available for all' becomes a 'some things available for some people', which obviously is contrary to making content available for all. For many proprietary libraries you have to pay money, for the GPL you have to share knowledge if you distribute it. And in which way exactly does the Gnu Public License license prohibit that? Are you talking "look and feel" or are you talking "patents"? Corporate Stupidity. Short-sighted money grab. Just look around, read the news ... it's everywhere. I am pretty sure that, unless that interface is well and completely documented, you still need to reverse engineer and therefore see the code ... and I can see lawyers trying to make up a case out of hot air. It's good to have something making them reconsider such an attack. I don't know about you, but a court battle against a company with 3.700 employees, $1.7 billion revenue and $3.1 billion in assets sounds expensive and taking over your life for however long it takes. The gain, if they win? Zero. They are not modding for the money. Yes, OpenIV damaged their "turn already handed out freebies into micropay stuff" plan. And of course the "force people to go online and spend money by making SP way less attractive". Yes, the lawyers always play ball, as long as they get paid, no matter if it's the own side or the other side. However, if you are small fry, losing the case will ruin you. "... the study found that in recent years only about one in three hate crimes are ever reported to law enforcement officials." By your logic 2/3rds of hate crime are no crime at all, because they would be reported if they were. And that is when >90% of the hate crimes are violent, versus 13% of all crime. Sort of like Gutenberg telling the world how the printing press can and cannot be used. Or your favourite band declaring that their music may only be heard while bathing (and you only having a shower) ... it's not like the band are the IP owners or anything ... Yes, that is "commercial quality code". It's not like Open Source where everyone can see how shoddy your code is!

CKAN does not auto-update. It asks you for everything. Also I see no legal way at all for T2 to exert force on CKAN. It does not run KSP, it does not touch it files ... all it does is move some files in and out of a directory. If they could, they could also force any other random program and every game could force Microsoft to do whatever.

Well, if you do The Music Industry, then everyone who "pirated"[1] a copy would certainly have bought one. Because everyone has $50 or $100 to spend on games every week. They just do this because they don't want to "squander" their millions. If you ask the real world ... some. Maybe some. But you have more costs due to supporting a DRM, and the more intrusive it is, the worse. After all, only your paying, legitimate customers are forced to endure your DRM, they are basically punished for not "pirating" your software! [1] Especially when they clench their teeth to hold the cutlass while they climb up the rope to the ship transporting the digital data and, using superior weapons, force the crew to make a non-DRM-encumbered copy of the game ... before they remember they are pirates, "neutralize" the crew, make off with anything valuable (including sailors or passengers which can fetch a price at a slave auction and the chest of jewellery from under the captain's bed) and leave the ship behind, sinking, so there'll be no witnesses. Let us all remember that computers, too, enable malicious mods ... in fact, you could not run your malicious mods without a computer, but you clearly can run your malicious mods without OpenIV --- OpenVI does not even work with GTAO. Do they have the right? I don't know, I am not a lawyer. Copyright may or may not work here --- reverse engineering to archive interoperability seems to be allowed in many jurisdictions. As to EULAs ... some have really questionable terms, but I am not a lawyer, never mind one for Russian Copyright and Contract laws. OpenIV and GTA IV ... Oh, just pointing out that OpenIV was first made for GTA IV, not for GTA V or GTAO.

Obviously, being sane, Squad (read, however the company developing KSP is called now) has absolutely zero interest in slaying the goose that lays golden eggs. They might ask to not provide EVA parachutes to people not buying a DLC that offers those --- which is understandable --- but they know how much mods have given them ideas, showed what could be done and how much people would (or would not) pick up on that, just by keeping an eye on the mods. And apart from hiring some of the modders, they have implemented quite a few of the ideas explored by modding, in their own take of the thing. Unfortunately, they might be overruled by T2; we don't know their agreements, and I certainly do not know the loopholes in all the relevant laws. Maybe replace the board and the CEXses for ones that are ... more malleable? Also, I am not so sure that all the T2 suits and execs are grounded to reality instead of freely drifting with the wind. And that is what is worrying --- they might want to squeeze the goose hard, harder, harder, much harder ... to get more golden eggs as the goose suffocates. Suffocates without them noticing. From what I understand (pure hear-say, though), the "online-only" content was free to use offline until recently (it was distributed as part of the game). I believe that for using it online you'd have to go through a microtransaction, and I understand that they extended that handling to offline as well. They could easily *not* have distributed the objects until you paid for them ... they opted not to. So, hmmm, ... OpenIV took great pains to not be able to interact with GTA Online (GTAO) in any way, exactly because in any MP game that's going to be used for cheating. So what T2 did is make the offline game less enjoyable, trying to force people to use GTAO. However, without GTAO being detoxed, foamed, washed, dried and waxed --- i.e. getting rid of most the spoilers and cheaters there as well as making the tools they use (which do not use OpenIV in first place) non-functional or even toxic to use (loss of money and equipment, account blocked, etc) --- they are not going to get what they want, but they will get some bad rep. Which may not be good for the bottom line, only time will tell. Yes, the creator of OpenIV admits to clean room reverse engineering -- which basically means that you have one team go, decompile, root through, etc. the internals of the object (often binary code) and properly document the behaviour, but not the implementation, of the object. A second team --- with no contact or connection of the first team --- takes just the produced documentation, and is given the task: build something that acts just like that described behaviour. Since the team does not know anything about the internals of the object described, they cannot copy or derive any code. The new 'something' that works according to the documentation was created in a 'clean room' with no contact with the copyrighted implementation. As to the EULA, they basically are designed to prohibit everything, even if some of that is not legally possible in first place. But I am not a lawyer, so ... T2 has shut down a tool that took great pains not to work in GTAO. And there are already tools that hack GTAO today. It's sort of ordering the removal of a few cardboard boxes (which happen to be in a fireproof safe) in the cellar as a fire risk --- even though not even the safe is accessible to anyone but the owner --- while above the whole building is enveloped in flames. The interest of the (honest, non-griefing) players of GTAO is to quench the fire that is burning sky high ... There are very many cases where business decisions harmed the business. Even when anybody sane could see that coming. Sure. Here we go: "Our DLC has Gas Giant Nr 2. C&D distributing 'Kopernicus'." "The entry costs for many of the more advanced parts in the game have been changed from Funds to USD. C&D any mods changing the tech tree, or items therein or changing prices or science costs for the items." "Out new model is somewhat Kerbal Construction Time based. (And BTW: C&D for Kerbal Construction Time.) All items need to be manufactured. As we are a F2P game now, this will take hours (real time!) for a simple FL-T200, and obviously much longer for more complex parts. Kerballses (in game real money, which you are totally free not to buy if you don't mind waiting for months) can, obviously, speed that up. (Also, no reverting!) BTW: 100 Balls for only $1.99, 300 Balls only for $2.99, only while the promotion lasts. And obviously, all parts that are similar in function in any way to any in game part are C&D." "100 FL-T200 now for only $1. If you want to go anywhere, you need this. And lots of it. Because you can only reuse them, if you can land them (at less than 2m/s)." "New: Tanks: Fuel and Oxidiser not included. Buy a van full of LiquidFuel barrels for only $1.35. (Careful, explosive*)" * Will explode if you take any bump at more than crawling speed. You have to drive it from it's spawn point, somewhere in the mountains to your base. No, you cannot use a plane or rocket. No, the claw does not work either. (C&D on anything that makes it easier/cheaper/...) "New Feature: Driver for hire! It turns out that exploding fuel vans are not quite as well liked, as they take up too much time. Just hire a Kerbal Driver (only $3.99 for a limited period!) who will drive that van home to you*. No more driving and exploding, just waiting. Of course you can speed that up with some Kerballses ..." * the driver has initially a 1% chance of failing, in which case van and driver are lost. Each drive doubles the chance for a slight mishap. (C&D on anything that makes it cheaper/less crash prone) "New feature: We lowered the cost of many items by 2.5%, but to build a rocket you now need bolts to rivet parts together. 1 Bolt: only $0.01." * between 4 and 25 bolts needed for each joining of parts. Bolts are heavy, too. Luckily, they rarely break. "New feature: save weight and use welding instead of riveting. One weld costs now only $0.30 - $0.90, depending on the items to join. Welds are lighter than bolts, but tend to take much longer to be finished. Why not stock up on Kerballses? They are 50% in the next 4 hours!" ... See? From buying an occasional DLC to paying for every part, connection, Kerbal, ... and then extra to not wait real-time days. It's just like printing money! I most certainly have the right to disagree! Or are we already in a world where having any opinion against businesses is a crime? Also, notice the IV in "OpenIV"? Like GTA IV? Rather large changes? "Crash when you find a file or folder in GameData that is not named 'Squad' (or a few others)" ? "Crash when you find a file anywhere in your game folder that does not give the same answer to the cryptographic hash as recorded in 'hashsums.hs'"? "Crash if hashsums.hs is not signed with the matching private key to my public key in the .exe"? Trivial. Will freeze out modding just fine. Well, if a DLC basically copies a mod and then C&D's the mod instead of paying & naming the mod maker as (one of) the author(s) ... Yes, but that very much appears not to be what they are doing ... Let's just say that certain elected leaders sing a completely different tune after the election ... and they have to answer to the people in the next election, while suits only have to answer to the board. Make a backup folder for the KSP folder? You are making regular backups, too, right? He's about making money. He doesn't care about gamers, games or anything unless it helps or impedes his way to make more money. He may also not see that certain things will come home to roost, or misjudge them. Money ... and a rubber hose. And members of your family. And your race-horse's head on your pillow. It's so nice to have integrity I'll tell you why If you really have integrity It means your price is very high You're right there. OpenIV, if done "right" --- and the servers are done cheap, not checking what the clients (player computers) tell them, just inviting something like that ... --- then yes, OpenIV could do that. Yes, they removed the lower jaw, because a single tooth was rotten --- in the upper jaw.

… nobody would have gone to the moon. Too expensive, too risky, let probes do it, if at all. Only the need to out-macho each other made them go these lengths, money no objection …

You could reduce the fuel in the LR89 for a 2 minute burn time and add the weight of the removed fuel as ballast. Should be easy enough to swap them out via sub assemblies. Or calculate what percentage is shown but is not there due to you dropping the LR89 early. Or simply calculate what the highest load is your Atlas can get into LKO, ... and see the upper stage as part of the payload, if you need something better than LKO or a 250 km Ap @ 2500 m/s or whatever the benchmark for your rocket is.

See, now telling him how to get one step further towards his goal (so he gets that grin) is unlike "watch YouTube tutorials". I'll be posting a "how to design" (using the demo to go to the Mun as material) later today.

Orbital mechanics are counterintuitive. You slow down to catch up with a vessel in front of you!? Madness! But this is KSP. You can try it out. (And yes, speeding up to be able to slow come to a stop for less dV overall is just as crazy as slowing down to catch up.) Just place a manoeuvre node at AP and see how much dV you need to reverse the orbit. Note that down. Then do the same for a "raise Ap to border of SOI", "reverse direction" and "lower Ap again" (same as raising it). Add the numbers (you might need a mod to read out the node values, or simply check your speed at Ap and multiply it by to to get the numbers). You can save the game and cheat infinite fuel to try it out, then reverse to the save game (and turn the cheat back off). Or use a different game - a sandbox, likely.

I see. A walkthrough for an adventure or puzzle game cannot spoil anything if you just don't mention the story. And yes, KSP has a puzzle aspect. A large one …

And they may spoiler a lot of things. Often it's more fun to find out yourself than just aping someone. And maybe a pointer in the right direction is all that is needed. As an example, in Children of a Dead Earth, a space combat sim much closer to reality than KSP, you can design and edit ship modules. Like the reactor that gives you power. So one guy opened a (copy of a) stock reactor template for editing … and pretty soon decided he really needed to know (roughly, I guess) how a real reactor works (since that is what is modelled) to be effective with tweaking everything. It's noted in his review.

But you should try to go the correct way, not the sinister one. :-P My appropriate place: last place to look == first place to look.

(SmartAss->on) If you go the left way at start and then reverse your orbit you could have gone the right way and not need to reverse your orbit. Which is obviously less effort! (SmartAss->off) But that falls squarely into the category "Why do you not start searching where you found $ITEM, instead of looking there last?".

Well, half of the fun is to try yourself. But in the interest of not carrying needless coal to Newcastle: What have you managed to do already? Have you managed to launch, fly and recover any rocket, even if you only got a couple 100m up? Have you managed leaving the atmosphere? Have you managed to orbit Kerbin? And to return? Safely? Do you struggle getting enough dV to get to Mun? Do you struggle to arrive at the moon, even though you have the dV? Have you managed Munar flybys? Have you managed Munar orbits? Have you managed crashing into the Mun (unkerballed, obviously)? Have you managed a soft landing? Have you managed to return to Kerbin's surface from a Munar flyby or orbit? Have you found a free return trajectory? Have you managed intercepting and docking 2 spacecrafts or spacecraft-station to each other? And now --- can you ask more specific questions, focussing on the bit you have problems with right now, detailing what your overall goal is (e.g. getting to orbit), how you try to get there (I strap lots and lots boosters onto my vessel), what happens (My boosters go all twisting every way and all goes BOOM) and *not* just asking "My boosters go ever which way and BOOM, how can I make my boosters to be stable" --- "fewer boosters" may be the correct answer, not "make them stable", because of even if you get them stable, other problems will rear their heads (like overspeeding). So ... where did you get stuck, trying what, resulting in ... ? Pics can be really helpful, too.

(SmartAssMode->on) The best way of reversing ones' orbit is to go the right way the first time. (SmartAssMode->off)

[in short]: Squad not vetting FTE properly (repeated a lot), FTE lying, Squad doing bad QA, Console Stores. You don't know how Squad vetted FTE ... you don't know if their vetting was proper or not, you don't know if FTE was truthful or lying, you don't know if anything changed on, say, FTE's side, like top developers quitting suddenly, ... You can surely say that Squad made a bad mistake. But I would be very careful to blame Squad for doing insufficient due diligence and vetting. It looks like they are at fault --- given the information we have --- but we certainly are missing large amounts and critical bits of the whole thing. Yep, I blame EA. After all, EA should have properly vetted DICE. They did not, so it's their fault. Easy-peasy. Apart from that, the problem is likely linked to EA's Digital Restriction Management and Play Protection and always online (and --- of course --- totally overloaded servers at game launches), a thing EA is better known for in general than Kerbals here are known to be green and using crazy/explody rockets. But you probably want me to blame DICE --- well, I certainly blame FTE, who actually develop the console version of the game. It's not a simple translation, if it was, Squad would have hired a Translator for a month or 3 and all would be fine. Next? It's easy to plug in a controller into a PC, so you can have it. PCs are open, consoles are walled gardens. PCs easily allow modders to live, and ask little of the game to accommodate them. Consoles? Nope. PCs can bring you into modding, becoming creative outside the walls of the game, allow you to scratch an itch ... Consoles? Nope. How many customers would that be? And ... FTE screwed up. They are/were the developers for the console port. They kept you in the dark and therefore you demand compensation? Can you point to any part of a treaty between you and Squad that says you need to be informed? Yes, it is not particularly nice to get no status updates, but if the status has not changed in a relevant matter, what could status updates do for you? Sure thing. http://squad.com.mx/ info@blitworks.com So you say I should not have bought the alpha back when, because it wasn't having everything? And the same with quite a number of other alpha games? Do you all think that Squad could have done this on purpose? Bring out a game with serious bugs to rip you off or to destroy their name? Why should they do that?

If you want to move from a 3D world to a 2D one, you would - I guess - have to change gravity to a 2D variant as well, and my intuition says it would likely fall off linearly (not squared!) with distance, in which case the same mathematical proof would turn out that in this 2D world gravity between an object inside the ring and the ring would always be a net zero. Now, this is my intuition, not a proof of any kind, and therefore is likely wrong. It depends a lot on how gravitation works in detail, especially if the number of spatial dimensions play a role in how gravitation crosses distances. For all I know the thingies that transmit gravity could be like soap bubbles growing into every dimension, but expire like radioactive decay, causing a distance squared effective strength, no matter how many dimensions there are.