weissel

Well, who's fault is it? Squad, making a bad decision choosing the porting company? Squad, for deciding to port to console at all? Squad, not being able to force FTE to do proper work, be it due to insufficient contract power or FTE not being able to do better? FTE, for miss-representing their capabilities? If someone says "We are going to make a hash of it", who would hire them? So either FTE was deluded or lying (or both) FTE for making a hash out of it? FTE for not saying earlier "Sorry, cannot do ..." and ending the contract? Squad for not testing the port properly? Squad for giving some sort of OK (maybe in the contract) for the result to be uploaded? The console stores for not properly vetting the stability and usability of the game? The console stores for still not flagging these kind of in-dev games as "buggy, may crash often, you may not enjoy it ..."? The buyers who did not read about the port before buying? Squad for not taking the time out and hiring a lot of developers who get to learn how to do things properly on consoles for the first 3 years before porting the game in-house? Blitworks for not having already pulled a miracle? Some Large Publisher for not buying Squad and/or KSP outright, slapping an "always internet, never works" Digital Restriction Management on it, remove all modding ability and let it collect dust in the attic? The console makers for not making the consoles to be "just like PCs", so stuff has to be ported beyond keyboard+mouse to controller UI? something or someone else? Say, the modders for modding or the FPS players for making FPS games to block busters, instead of KSP? Von Neumann for the architecture? Physics/Maths for not having solved the 3 body problem yet? Intel, for not having brought out quantum computers as commodity hardware and in a way that makes KSP be easy to do everything in parallel? So, who's fault is it? And why not anybody else's fault? And how is that easy to see?

This will not be a real problem. With 20 GB you can download the less than 150 MB of the game at least 133 times …

First impression is: - how do I move maneuver nodes timewise - where is the 'closest encounter' marker? - I wish KSP had such an exponential maneuver node drag handle - mm/s can be done, and hughe changed too - the auto-adjust (a symbol pops up at the right place on the orbit in spe) to intercept, fly by and join orbit (where possible - you have to get close to the orbit - and the target has to be there for intercepts and fly-bys) is nice and generates a number of burns to adjust things. I wish there was one for inclination matching. - the "project course onto the inclination plane of the other object" is coo and valuable - apo- and periapsis as well as up and down node respective the enemy are shown, but there's no "click to display their data permanently" - ripping someone's reactor radiators off is a good reason to think of electrical storage and heat sinks … or at least backups. No power means lots of things don't work. - there is the standard design for warships, with 3-6 weapon turrets in a sort of "weapon ring" as broadside. Quite a few also havebow guns. But some crazy designs (armour only one side; a really tough "head" (60+ cm armour, usual is 2-6 cm) and no protection for anything behind the head at all) are "pre-designed" ships. - CoaDE shows the maneuvers in length and direction as orange arrows - how do I tell my drones, who having a tiny target area, outrange the latter's heavier weapons in effective fire, to hang back and keep range, instead of going for a close, very fast encounter, speeding past and having not the fuel to slow down and reengage the target (which is dry)? Calculation do not need much space - just lots of CPU - and the game does not use many textures nor pre-rendered movies or detailed locations. KSP has lovingly textured and modelled Kerbals, VAB interiors, (100+) parts, different surface textures on the different biomes and planets, etc etc. CoaDE does have minimal textures from what I have seen. And I guess many tanks and tank like objects just have a base colour and light from sun and planets etc applied. So why not? But then I remember the time when many a game came on a single 360k floppy and you did not install it, because your computer would not have a hard drive. Or a bit later, when you might install a huge game from 2 or 3 1.4 MB 3 1/4 inch floppy disks[1] on a spacious (and that's not ironic!) 40 MB[2] hard drive. I played a moon lander game (display height, velocity, fuel reserves, you enter the fuel == velocity change to burn, game advances to next second) on a machine that could store 256 commands (not one more), had a 6 digit (0-9A-F] output and a hex keyboard as input, was programmed by hex codes … and let me discover that a) suicide burns were effective, b) the game sucked, because it assumed you could burn as much fuel as you wanted at any point, so it was way too easy to 'cheat' in that way. I could have improved the program (after all, I had to key it in to play), but back then I didn't have the urge. So, while 150MB looks tiny today, game quality and enjoyment do not correlate with download size. [1] which took a minute to read! - unless they were formatted in such a way that the next track started not at the same place, but a bit later, so the head could pick it up without waiting for a full spin, so you could read and write the floppy in about 30 seconds. Today's hard drives can stream data at 100-150 MB/s … and SSDs can be much faster still. [2] Megabytes. Not Gigabytes or Terabytes, children. Megabytes, and you had an extra card in the computer to talk to the disk.

I have not progressed far in RP0, but where I have been, I did not need lots of contracts, even with no revert and no quicksave and part failures and … suboptimal design and pilot errors. I do run simulations (not sandbox), and I had up to now no real cash problems, but then I am aware of what my tech can do and which contracts can make me money. Often that means combining missions. A daily/ weekly/monthly/yearly/decadely stipend will not work with KSP - with XCOM you have aliens interrupting your plan to fast forward a century, swim in money and win the game easily. With KSP, you can and will fast forward with no treat problems at all. if anything, RP0 should cost money monthly or weekly (upkeep, wages, etc) so you will have an incentive to actually go out and do something this decade. Looking at real life, what happens when a state sponsored space agency does not perform as wanted and expected? Do they get money for years twiddling their thumbs or are people fired and/or budgets slashed cruelly? I can imagine a number of forced contacts with serious time limits, of which, say, 80% must be fulfilled or you get fired … but do you really want that extra layer of overhead for a stipend? Wouldn't it be easier to get money from, say, fulfilling contacts?

Well, of course you can choose to not install RSS … … but then everything will be terribly unbalanced, if it works at all. Stock tanks, for example, are very very heavy compared to their real world counterparts, and the stock engines are very heavy for their thrust. Stock needs about 3,400 m/s to orbit, RSS needs ~9,400 m/s. Thanks to the rocket equation, a rocket with ~3 times larger DeltaV is not just 3 times as heavy, it's exponentially more heavy. So in the Kerbin system the RSS engines and tanks are vastly overpowered, similar to racing a bicycle (stock w/stock parts or RSS w/RSS parts) against a Concorde (stock solar system with RSS parts) across the US. Who will arrive first? So yes, for a laugh you can try it --- it's a single player game, so you can at worst "cheat" yourself out of fun, unlike cheating in (especially competitive) multiplayer games to get an advantage over other players --- but I don't think shooting fish in a barrel will turn out to be that much fun, after all … And of course, things may depend on RSS or stuff it pulls, so some things may just not work.

You should try to get off your addiction to KER. You use it as a crutch instead of a tool; you have crippled your legs by using it. That is not good for you.

Since I am using Linux pretty much exclusively (and exclusively for KSP) I wonder what balls are broken. Can you point me to your bug report(s) on http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com?

We are talking about 0.025 - 0.25N (says Wikipedia), so it's 0.00255 - 0.0255 N/g0. Not exactly unhandy. Even if an engine technology is "strictly final stage" stuff does not absolve it from being compared with other technologies that are first stage capable. It's not exactly unheard of to use chemical fuel engines for the final stage. Which has been the usual method. So yes, you will need to have a good way to compare them old chemical engines with these new-fangled, up to no good, oh so magical amber-powered thingies. Isp is one of the ways that help comparing them.

m/s is much more sensible (in my eyes),that's why we are stuck with seconds. Isp is no more or less sensible with ion drives than with chemical rockets, the point is that you can (and want to) compare the efficiency. IHowever, with air breathing turbines (especially high bypass ones) the effective m/s (as used in Isp) and the actual exhaust speed are an order of magnitude away from each other ... so here seconds may be the better unit there. Or not. (Same would be true for rockets if you used some of the fury of chemical recombination to accelerate inert stuff with the spent fuel --- but why would you do that, when you can spend the same mass on stuff that actually carries energy?)

Ah, but you have to decide. Fairy tale where the guys with the Imperial Deathstar get pwned by a script-kiddy rebel pilot and have their heads handed to them? Or reality where you can do much better with less investment, and where you actually have the money for all the aircraft carriers and destroyers you'd want to have a proper CAP and screen your Imperial Rod Of Death, before you insert it rectally into that pesky rebellion? PS: The Deathstar was designed by a Rebel sympathizer, not only did it get backdoors en masse --- building and maintaining it prevented the Empire of having a huge number of much simpler and actually effective weapons. So ... use fuel tankers? Probably to be abandoned after sucked dry? Yeah, that is a valid technique. Of course you need lots of mass to stand being slammed into from the front by 40m/s. And it assumes that the other side does not wreck you with any kind of weapon first. Which is sorta obvious. I do note that ramming has sorta disappeared from naval battles as of lately. I wonder why ...

So you'll have no efficiency at all outside LEO? Great Idea(tm). German has the "Pfund" (500g as per 1858 customs union definition), but it's only used in things like shopping (butter, minced meat, ...). It's not an allowed unit in any official or commercial communication (i.e. you'll never find anyone advertising a Pfund of butter for x.xx€). Formerly, the Pfund varied widely from 467.41g (Lippe-Detmold) to 560g (Bavaria) and 560.012g (Austria) and even 1000g (Netherlands). Frankfurt am Main, (i.e. the Frankfurt in Hesse) even had a light Pfund of 467.711g and a heavy Pfund of 505.128g ... I can calculate the CO2 use of aliens from Alpha Centauri, measuring their CO2 use is somewhat more difficult ... Also, what is the LD50 for oxygen in the pressure and concentration as found in the sea level atmosphere of Earth (as of 1950)? Yes, that makes total sense. Wouldn't do to have the USA have 9000 feet/second misunderstood by the USSR's 3000 meter/second during rocket scientist discussion in the cold war. Translating between Russian and English --- or the fact that Russian uses a different alphabet --- is not as big as a problem ... ... and of course German scientists (-> Operation Paperclip) would obviously be used to using feet instead of meters.

Ball shape assumes you assume the need to turtle up, attacked from all sides at the same time. If that is not what you expect, you probably want a cylinder shape. Armor the nose really thickly, the sides thinly, point nose roughly at the enemy. The shallow angle of the sides means the effective armor is much thicker, too. Advantages: smaller cross section (harder to hit), much more effective armor for the same weight (or much less weight for the same effective armor), place for reeeeeaaaaaaly long spinal weapons. Disadvantages: Need to point the spinal weapon at the enemy, even when only they are firing. As to reactor exhaust shafts: try to build less fire prone reactors instead of adding exhaust shafts. Two can play that game. Dual or triple or quadruple shielding layers. Sorta like they have on the ISS. And/or spinning outer shielding layers. Also: point defense against projectiles. But they do not help against gravitation gradient sensors! Look up the "Forward Mass Detector". (Hint: unlike zero point energy thrusters and EM bending shields that thing exists in the real world and works. And I understand there are other gravitation gradient sensors, e.g. for hunting submarines and for submarines navigating in underwater mountain areas.) Yep, dwarf planets. Ceres was found in 1801. The other 4 have a perihelon of 30-40 AU, which is a bit further than Jupiter or Uranus, and likely outside combat range. They are also very very cold (30-50K, in other words, if you want to warm them up, throw liquid air at them and see even the oxygen solidify!) I think you'd agree humans do not function that well in the cold, you want 270-290K, and that's assuming a shut down nuclear reactor! And of course none of them use any propulsion, those that sorta do (comets) are very easy to spot. Asteroids are not that dissimilar, but much (much much) smaller and we have a hard time seeing them against the sun, which happens to be really really hot, you know? Place an IR sensor somewhere around Venus' orbit and we'll get the ones that occasionally cross the orbit pretty soon. (And they are still many many many times farther out than the moon. Would you consider the moon in fighting distance?) Shrouds: Extra mass. Needs active cooling Cooling exhaust gases == reducing exhaust gas speed == reducing ISP. (If you disagree, show us how!) See the problem? F-22 supercruise speed at altitude: 1,220 mph (1,500 mph full afterburner) == 0.34 miles/second (0.42 miles/second AB) Max detection range: (your claim) 50 miles (under ideal circumstances) Time from maximum detection range to zero-range: 147s (119s AB) Typical detection ranges for the F-22 are likely much shorter, with the time between detection and the plane being overhead likely less than 30 seconds under typical circumstances ... For your space vessel, we are talking weeks and likely months between detection and arrival. Sure, you can go faster --- which means you have to start from even more far out to not be detected during burning --- so though you are faster, the coasting time is similar. Most things an F-22 would target do not move fast in 150s, much less in 30 seconds. In the months of your coasting ... well, you connect the points! Even if you know, say, the position of the ISS perfectly, the changing Earth atmosphere is causing varying drag, changing the orbit enough that you as likely pass the wrong side of the Earth after months of drifting. Never mind if they evade some space junk or boost orbit. And of course any enemy will change the orbit every now and them, just because of people like you ... So, how do you correct your course without lighting up the engines and becoming instantly visible? How will you correct your course? One single(!) space shuttle attitude thruster is visible from the asteroid belt. With today's off the shelf technology. Your 0.001g ion drive? Visible from 1 AU away. The Voyager 1 is in interstellar space. The Green Banks telescope (today's technology) latches onto it's 22W transmitter (your fridge light is likely stronger) in one second flat. It's just 18 billion km away. The VLBA can not only see it, but resolve it! So ... how to correct your course? And even while drifting, ignoring all life support, sunlight heating you up, nuclear reactors providing energy, electrical stuff (like computers) producing mostly heat --- each human produces ~100W heat. Which means you either have to trap the heat somewhere (and remember a heat pump/climate control/... also needs power, which means more heat to handle). Directional radiation is nice --- but sensors do care very little if you show them your radiatior's flat face or just a shallow glimpse of it --- they trigger just the same. (In daylight, look down at the street next to your feet? Is it any brighter than the street 500 or 1000 meters away, where you only see a very shallow angle?) And any country that can build space ships can easily build hundreds of small satellites spread all over the place. Looking for people just passing into the shell they protect, and any infrared signal from directional radiators. And trivially looking for stars being shadowed by a vessel, no matter how far it is! Throw in a few hundred or thousand microsats in orbit, using a few solar cells, a gravity gradient and magnetic torquers (even a permanent magnet will do, as long as there is some planetary magnet field) for passive attitude control, a smartphone (GPS, accelerometers, more computing power than needed, communication capability), an additional camera or 3, some apps to do detect "missing" stars, and a conductive tether, if you want them to be able to raise orbit against the magnet field at will. Cheap as dirt, today's mass technology, really hard to stealth against. Have fun having an effective laser from just one light hour away. Let's take a nice violet laser, and if you want a spot size of less than 50 cm diameter --- you know you have only limited power --- you'd better bring a mirror 1 million kilometers across. Aiming will be fun, as you see where the enemy was 2 hours ago. A trivial maneuver every now and then and you will not ever hit. On the other hand, it's kinda hard to shift a 1 million km diameter mirror ... kinda hard to dodge with that thing. Sounds like the Cold War, where, as we know, both sides casually nuked the other one's capital cities and population centers. After all, it's just sports, and nobody (and no third side) would ever care, right?

Sooo ... let's see. You insinuated many times CoaDE's damage handling is bad, without ever offering anything that would support your claims. No look at the code, no quote from anyone who played the game, nothing at all. How would you like if I insinuated you did your work shoddily? Especially when it's clear I have no idea at all what you do and how well you do it? See? That is why your constant putting down of CoaDE is grating on me. You assume the worst and then think it is fact. And yes, "a lookup table might be every bit as accurate" ... you are right. You "might" win the national lottery if you buy a single ticket. Once in your life. Might. Likely? No. Not at all. So either you are weasel wording for effect, or ... Have a look at how War Thunder does it's damage model (explained, Youtube). This is a damage model that makes very simple assumptions at each step and follows a particle (projectile) as it passes through the tank. I would like to see your lookup table that will, for any given projectile, hitting any given spot at any given angle on a tank, shows how it proceeds through the tank and damages stuff --- without damaging causality. Note: we are not talking about how likely it is to hit and damage a tank, if a gun with this-and-that qualities shoots at it, that's a statistical question, we do not talk about the "realistic outcome" of a thousand shots (which a table can likely handle just fine, statistically, for a 100 vs 100 tank battle), we talk about one specific shot against one specific tank! So ... where's your 'every bit as accurate' table? Or do you prefer to cede that point? English is not my first language, so I may have misunderstood the word 'particle', but looking in Sir Merriam-Webster's reliable book and in other places like http://dictionary.infoplease.com/particle http://lookwayup.com/lwu.exe/lwu/d?s=f&w=particle#n/10448670 https://1828.mshaffer.com/d/word/particle https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/particle https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/particle http://www.allwords.com/query.php?SearchType=3&Keyword=particle&goquery=Find+it!&Language=ENG http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/particle http://www.dictionary.com/browse/particle http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=particle http://www.freedictionary.org/?Query=particle http://www.mnemonicdictionary.com/word/particle http://www.onelook.com/?other=web1913&w=Particle http://www.rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=particle http://www.thefreedictionary.com/particle http://www.wordsmyth.net/?ent=particle http://www.yourdictionary.com/particle I regretfully come to the conclusion that your claim is false and to me it feels like a real dirty trick of moving goalposts. Also, "anything smaller than masses that matter for solar systems is a "particle."" would imply that you make no difference between a large flour speck, a 1mm ball bearing, a 1cm object, a 10 cm aluminum projectile, a 50cm steel ball, a Mercury capsule, the complete ISS, a fully loaded Saturn V before launch and an asteroid 10km across (which really do not matter for solar systems) trying to smash through a fuel tank. Would you agree that this includes all between "no damage" and "utter destruction"? And that both of these ends do not happen to need fluid dynamics to handle the impact damage? Would you also agree that there's nothing but confusion to gain in using 'particle' instead of, say, 'projectile' or 'thingie'? And that 'particle' is not helpful for "impacts where fluid dynamics will make a difference"? "a non-microscopic particle" (your original term) and "macroscopic" would, in context of a particle, simply indicate the ability to see them with the naked eye. Making them a large particle Your 'significant events' is a better definition, but a) 'significant' has so terribly many meanings (just ask NASA and see the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Chapter 7, page 191 (15th page in this PDF) if they can stick to one meaning) b) we are just trying to find out what these events would be anyway, a Saturn V impacting would be significant, but not for fluid dynamics c) where do we draw the line between non-trivial damage and trivial damage? A single speck punching a small hole in the Whipple Shield? Then what happens after millions of trivial damage specs, once lots of specs have no Whipple shield to slow them? d) where would your lookup table manage to differentiate between them, especially in the light of c)? And I would like you to please stick to the lingo commonly used for space craft, space stations and rocketry. I do not think that talking about if burning hydrogen and metal is better than metal and metal or metal and metal, or metal and metal, for that matter, even though metal can easily be found on the moon,or the use of using metal versus metal or metal for optical lenses, solar cells, or isolators. Of course, I do assume here you want to be understood by other people. Choice a) simulate a very complex system using the known laws of physics, find complex, counter-intuitive interactions (developer says, that's what's happened all the time). Choice b) make something up that seems "right" --- if you are trailing in an orbit, speed up to catch them, for example. Which is just the intuitive thing. Here's my game: Spartan phalanxes battle WWII machine gun nest groups over wide open fields: Spartans: hundreds of people, proper shields, proper weapons. MG nests: 10 or 20 people, no shields, knifes on a stick as best weapons and these "MGs". Intuitively it's clear that 10 or 20 archers cannot kill a phalanx, their arms grow tired, and then they have to run or die. And the phalanx has shields. And these mythical MGs of yours are just like archers --- they shoot something a fair distance, maybe even a couple of lance throws of distance. So, to be "fair", let's have these new-style archers have extra-strong arms, to even out the battle. And maybe reduce the size of the phalanxes shields, as they are totally arrow-proof. And for a piece of entertainment (aka a game that may or may nod make a nod at the real world) that's fine. Choice b) it is! Nobody cares! It's fun, it's fair ... what else could you want? Any simulation might not be more accurate, you know? And anyway, it's a game. As 'realistic' as chess. (Which is actually a good example: simple rules, very complex interactions, studied for many centuries.) However, if your aim was (and the developer's clearly stated aim is) to understand what the conclusions for a given set of rules (say, physics, working technology, ...) are, then that's simply not good enough. You may find to your surprise that a really fast and heavy arrow can pierce armor. Ballista, Scorpio ... now, look at the Polybolos and notice what would happen if that was faster. Quite faster. Much faster --- OK, you'd need some better power source than one man's arms. But a weapon that could fire armor and shield piercing shots really really fast, say 1 per second, would be tearing up a phalanx if it was able to shoot for a time. And you'd notice as the phalanx player that you'd need another technique. Maybe use really heavy shields that are not pierced most of the time (-> tanks). Or split up and run --- which is better without armor --- to zerg rush them (-> modern infantry is not bullet proof). Or maybe have some archers yourself that can make the enemy stop shooting one way or the other (-> combined arms). You'd be able to try all that out in simulation, even when you could not test that mythical "MG weapon" against the real world. So, for the stated goal of learning about space combat, what is better --- even if you surmise (not knowing about gun powder[1]) you'd need a lot of oxen for driving the capstan to power such a machine. Or that you'd have to build some gravity power system (and needed lots of slaves to haul up water or stones to drive it) and that hence it'd only work well in fortifications. It still is vastly closer to reality than "intuitive" damage tables. Even though it's wrong on many things. [1] a problem CoaDE is unlikely to have since it concentrates on technology we know works If the interior is actually modeled, it's still functionally a lookup table. A 3D table encoding what is damaged (and likely, in which way) if something passes through there. Say a steam pipe or a cable tree. And actually ... modeled down to X cm scale when the projectile is X cm? That is definitively not fine grained enough. What happens if the projectile passes through some cable tree? Does it cut all of them? Or does it only clip it and cuts some of them? That can be a huge difference, won't you agree? Especially when the projectile is not 1mm, but 20 cm across ... And look up Renegarde Tech (a fan made damage resolution system for Battle Tech drawing from Renegade Legion): you've got a (2D) grid of boxes for hit points, each weapon does a specific pattern of damage, 'crit damage' is when you reach a grid box containing something important --- no crit rolls, no lookup table for damage (only for which body part is hit). Here you have a causality of hit and damage in form of the grid even if said grid is not really comparable to the physical layout of the mech. (Which is kinda hard with a "roll dice, look at table" damage model.) And you can even have a lookup table without having any areas. Think of D&D and "2D6 +2" damage: it's a table with entries 4 to 14, where each entry says what happens (by coincidence, you lose as many hitpoints as the entry number) --- no area, just one hero/monster/being. I am merely pointing out that it would be strange to bend over backwards to simulate current weapon technology and their scaling (and worry about sloshing and baffles in tanks, too, and N-body simulation) and skimp on damage resolution. Why would they? Whereas you make no positive, but lots of negative claims. With no evidence I can discern. The quality of any simulation is "fit for the purpose" and nothing else! A simulation how a car deforms during a crash, running for days per crash, may be very good for the purpose of studying crashes and making cars safer and utterly terrible for the purpose of entertainment as a game. The stated goal of the simulation is to find out (aka research) how space combat would work, assuming the current knowledge of physics and weapon technology is correct or at least correct enough. The developer says the simulation has surprised zir over and over, giving zir new insights. This is evidence that the simulation is at least good enough for those insights, and the results it delivers are logical, even if non-obvious. (Any developer getting a strange result would check that the reason for said result is not a bug.) I understand you know some astronomy. Has anyone ever held a thermometer into the core of the sun? No? But how do you know the temperature of the core, there is no real data! How long does it take a photon from the center of a star to the surface? How do we know? Anybody ever tagged a photon and sat there with a stop watch? Or maybe that was simulated? What happens when galaxies cross paths? Nobody's ever seen more than a snapshot. And you know how a snapshot can seem to show things that are completely different --- so no real data. But maybe we should just use whatever somebody with little knowledge of the details thinks is 'intuitive'? Cause we'll not know if the simulation is doing it right --- we've observed gravity mostly on our sun system level, not on the level of galaxies. People have been investigating Lagrange points before the 20th century, long before anything went into space (never mind orbit!) All they had was maths and physics. Would it be correct to say they simulated the stuff? Ok, so please set up vessels over every planet of KSP's solar system so that every point of the planert is covered and reachable within at most 5 minutes for your fast, heavy or nuclear stuff. Tell us, how easy that is, how many craft you need ... and consider, that unless you are in control of the planet (by occupation or whatever means) or willing and able to wipe out everything that might be a danger, like launching missiles and drones to spoil your vessels' day (if you can launch motherships, you can launch these with ease) Ground based laser systems w/adaptive optics to transfer power to their own craft --- and to sensitive spots of your craft fighting with drones controlled from the planet's surface, while your vessels must be manned (light speed limitations) If they have any satellites in orbit, these might just contain a surprise rocket or coil gun or laser, if they don't, you are oppressing them and might as well occupy them outright ... Also, you want to rotate crew, refuel, replenish food and movies, ... In short, while you are right, if you can smack it while it launches, you win, I do not see how you can be in a position to do that, yet not be able to simply occupy the planet or bomb it into submission. I do not see CoaDE claiming to be a future history, nor claiming to be accurate as a future history. I may be missing where the developer claimed it was ... can you give me an URL? As I understand it, it's a simulation of space combat to see how that would work and what would not work, not a prediction, nor a simulation, of the political and geographical landscape of the future. Not even one of 'this is one possible, logical path'. Have you recently researched the history of the settlement of the Northern American continent and how part of it became independent from the Kingdom of Great Britain? I understand they were putting up resistance against their entire starting industrial base and supporting population even without said base being f****d and dying, not even weakened! When in history have people not fought wars, even, nay, especially when it made little sense to do so? Do you really, honestly, believe that there will be no Osama, Putin, Erdogan, etc etc etc etc in the future? No people believing their culture/religion/race/hairstyle makes them superior, they need to rule everyone or make them their slaves or that they have the god-given duty to save the souls of the infidels from eternal hell (even if that means torturing their bodies to death, but then what is a couple days, months, years, decades in dreadful, screaming agony against an infinity not spent in hell)? When have there been trading fleets without means of protecting them? And when has there not been trade, when stuff could be bought and sold for a profit? And would a planet with a lesser industrial base not have a need for stuff they cannot produce? So what if a giant 'dinosaur killer/mass extinction event' meteor impacts on Earth and causes the environment to turn to be sorta hostile to life. Is it so out of character for humans to think that, since they cannot get X from Earth any more, they could try your place, and since unlike Earth you don't have that military weight, they might be able to force it? Or the remnants of the military forces (or private armies and their (former?) multi-billionaire) of Earth trying to find a new home and privileges, paying with services ... or trying to subjugate you? That is, if they don't go for plundering since they (think they) have nothing to lose? If Earth is dying, you should make damn sure your space fleet is in good shape! A power vacuum draws in all kind of unsavory characters. And you can guess that whoever settles all these places will tend to separate by ethnicity, history, language, culture, religion and so on and so on --- just look at Pakistan and India! --- so that there will not be animosities between different settlements, especially since too many humans are less than tolerant towards those unlike themselves. Lots of conflict potential, and without a strongman (say Earth) keeping the peace there will be conflict at times. "tater's neat conclusion" is not even touching the history described in CoaDE (whatever that history may be). What tater "concludes" is that, not knowing anything about the actual damage resolution of CoaDE, it must be bad, the code must not include things he thinks are critically important, and (lately) that while the simulation may be vastly better than a made-up lookup table, then again it may not and we "cannot know" how good the simulation is against real life space battles (due to lack of the latter). Of course tater has also admitted that to make a lookup table with realistic results, we'd have to calibrate it against real life space battles ... As to assumptions, I understand that physics-as-we-know-it and real, current weapon technology are hardly objective, just as the universe (and politics, and physics, and technology) displayed Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica or Lord of the Rings.

Good logic! Go get yourself fired and not rehired until you are slim to the point of anorexia, because you obviously slack off on the job all the time --- just see your waistline! Next up: "Smoking does not cause health problems, I am smoking and one of the very few lucky ones to get old without health problems. QED." and "I once heard of an immigrant/dark-skinned person/someone following that-and-that religion who was a small time crook. Therefore all non-native/differently looking/religious people are --- at least --- mass murderers."

Force (N) == Force (kg * m/s²) = ISP (m/s) * mass flow (kg/s) The proper, correct, right, sane, ... measurement for the specific impulse is the exit velocity.[1] Meters per second. What comes out. Very intuitive, very simple. 3000 m/s / 9.81 m/s² ~= 305.8s If you use seconds, you are using propellant weight (i.e. mass / g0) as the basis, which is "funny", since the weight is zero in free fall and 4 times the mass at 4 gravities ... whereas the inert mass always stays the same. Using g0 ~= 9.81 m/s² (the standard gravity on Earth at sea level), even when you are on the moon, on Eve's surface or wherever else. Regularly confuses people terribly, just search the forums here. "Wait, but the gravity (and gravity on surface) is completely different here, why is the gravity 9.81 m/s²??" Of course that means we are stuck with seconds as the unit ... [1] Effective exit velocity when you are in an atmosphere. A high bypass turbojet engine will have a much much slower real exit velocity, as the engine will, instead of just pushing it's exhaust really fast, instead use much of the power to accelerate tons of cold air to a (in turn) much lower exit velocity (which is more effective for usual plane travel speeds).

Unless your day job is simulation or designing and writing computer programs, you probably don't know what the statistical coincidences are between "current held job" and "likelihood to 'simulate' [as per your definition of 'simulate']. You of course need to do statistics as your day job to understand statistical coincidences. Or maybe that "job -> likelihood to do/not do things" relation is just prejudice. Also: Does a "simulation" in your meaning of the word only simulate atoms, are individual electrons, neutrons and protons needed or do you insist on every single quark to be in the simulation? Also: every simulation makes assumptions. That's called the "model" of the thing you want to simulate. Also: unless you are one of those SDI people, you would not even know if and how they armor their satellites. Merriam-Webster's reliable book defines "macroscopic" as "1 : observable by the naked eye". So do other dictionaries. So, yes, Mir was hit by a lot of macroscopic objects, be they debris or (faster!) micrometeoroids. Whipple Shields are similar, but not identical to spaced armor, see stuffed Whipple Shields. What happens with a 1, 10, 100kg object hits spaced armor depends on the speed difference, the armor itself, the angle of impact, the form of the projectile, etc. If the armor is designed to cope with that specific set of parameters, nothing much will happen. Please do research the shielding of the ISS, the data is public and available, before speculating wildly! (Design criteria was a 1 cm aluminum sphere at 70 km/s (that being the top speed of micrometeorids)). Yes, a shielding designed to cope with tungsten bearing balls (or the ISS shields) will make them harmless. Small hole in the bumper(s), some scorch on the catcher, that's all. Worst for Whipple Shields: slow impacts. Note also that in sea warfare the guns and armor of a WWI or WWII destroyer would have had little impact on a battleship or even cruiser, but the same would not have been true in the reverse. According to your theory all destroyers would have been upgraded to guns able to pass through battleship armor. Same with land combat: fortified positions and forts do care little about the weapons of an infantry man or even many tanks, yet infantry does rely on rifles and MGs. And again the same in air combat, say between armed transport helicopters, bombers and fighters. Any game, by definition, will have a game's damage model. Any simulation --- be it some sort of "physics" in some jump&run game, KSP, flight simulators (for training real life pilots), weather forecast --- is using a model to approximate a real or fictitious system. For example weather simulation on a national scale will ignore the fact that urban canyons can funnel wind and affect weather in the canyons a lot. Since weather forcatsing do not model everything, I guess they are not using a simulation but a game, according to you. But that is beside the point. The point is that you seem to be either 'roll a D10 on a damage table for realistic outcomes" (the developer has said that the way things turn out in his simulation are surprising him again and again, so, without simulation, how would you know what table offered that?) or a simulation to the last molecule, if not to the last quark! Any damage model that is in between (i.e. while not perfect it will not cause the engine to be shot off with a shot scratching the bow) is not good enough for you. "What happens when a non-microscopic particle hits a LH tank at a closing velocity of 10 km/s? Do you know, because I don't know. To know as best we can, we'd simulate it. That means code that is likely not in this game, including the CFD code to model the projectile through the tank." So ... you call it simulating even if you cannot check it against "real data" (because if we have that, we'd simply use that!) nor verify it against "real data". Could you please at least be consistent in your own use of terminology? Really? How would you know? Did you run a 'simulation', ah, a 'game' in your head? (It could not be a 'real' simulation by your standards, or could it? --- no real data!) Or did you just have some made up assumptions how the world should work, AKA a model for a simulation? Fact is: In history there have always been more and less armored variants. There's heavy and light infantry, heavy and light cavalry, there's the wood&sail navy with all their different ship classes, from dispatch boats over frigates to ships of the line, there's the WWI / WWII navy, with both destroyers and battleships, there's the Japanese Zeke/Zero and the Buffalo Brewster ... Now, obviously, it would be of a distinct advantage to have, say, destroyers regularly withstand attacks from cruisers and battleships. Now, tell me, why did they not build destroyers that way in the late 19xx to mid 20xx? And in the light of that: would it be advantageous to have all space warships armored up the same amount? And why not? So would you agree that "a world where all the enemy warships are so armored" is pretty unlikely, unless the enemy just has one light class of vessel? We were talking about "What happens when a non-microscopic particle hits a LH tank at a closing velocity of 10 km/s? Do you know, because I don't know. To know as best we can, we'd simulate it. That means code that is likely not in this game, including the CFD code to model the projectile through the tank." Technically, yes, 10 kg blobs are 'non-microscopic', but at least in my world, you'd not call them "particle". So please stop moving goal posts by astronomical units after being shown that, no, for particles you don't need CFD modelling as they never reach the tank. And remember: "It's important to remember what the spaced armor NASA looks at is designed to deal with" (which would be said particles) "vs people intentionally trying to defeat it." So why do you use particle Whipple Shields versus 10 kg blobs? You may notice, if you reread what you wrote, a very heavy reliance of "RL %" and "calibrated their % tables based upon RL data" and "They knew how often their battleship gunners hit targets at different speeds and ranges, for example, and they knew that certain events (critical hits) could occur with some % (RN Battlecruisers hit in the magazines, for example)." Now, if you could point me to a reasonable number of space battles so we can get reasonably accurate RL data to calibrate such a look up table ... especially considering that people are going to build their own ships, unlike most naval table top games, we'd need lots and lots of accurate RL data ... ... and come to think of it, Taffy 3. Can these naval table top games cope with that bit of RL data and repeat it? A realistic outcome for this example (surviving 1000+ meter falls, sometimes almost unhurt, with no parachute), using the technology of military war games and assuming 1:10,000 chances, would have a table of: Fall damage, 1000+ meters. Roll 1D100: 0 - 99 you die! 100 Roll again on Table "Fall damage, 1000+ meters - B" Fall damage, 1000+ meters - B. Roll 1D100: 0 - 99 you die! 100 You live! Roll on Table "random damage" to find out how much you hurt. and of course a damage table ... Now, can you name me naval table top games that model a chance of non-explosion of a direct, critical magazine hit & shell explosion? And if so, is the chance of non-explosion of no more than 1:10,000 modeled, or is it just a case of "the magazine explodes, let's see if this tears the ship apart or not"? If no, could it be that they want 'realistic' examples, not examples that mirror the whole range of possible (and sometimes really happened in the real world) outcomes? Ah, yes, your "if you don't have real world outcomes, you cannot simulate". As you put it: "What happens when a non-microscopic particle hits a LH tank at a closing velocity of 10 km/s? Do you know, because I don't know. To know as best we can, we'd simulate it." And actually we have quite a good idea how real spacecraft systems fare when clobbered by hypervelocity objects --- it's not as if there were not thousands of satellites up there and there is a certain ISS up there, never mind all the space stations that have been up and have come down again. You may have a point regarding huge hypervelocity objects, so ... are you up to shooting some targets into space and get RL examples? Or would a simulation suffice? Some of the statements you made in this thread: "The accuracy with respect to damage isgoing to depend a great deal on the damage model. Many games screw up at that point, and it's important to remember that in terms of "realistic" outcomes (the desired simulation should be to have realistic outcomes, right?) the game is only as realistic as the least realistic bit. In may cases a game would do better to have a board-game style damage table than "simulation" if the simulation is done wrong, honestly (think of a old board/tabletop/paper game like Harpoon as an example)." "Simulation is only as accurate as the least accurate part. It doesn't do any good to track a 1 cm cross section projectile unless the fidelity of the damage model is at the same scale size. If every part internal to the ship is not modeled to 1 cm accuracy, you cannot measure the damage of a 1 cm projectile (or a 1 cm cross section laser). The "simulation" fails at that point, and you'd be better to characterize it otherwise if you want realistic outcomes. If you want to claim simulation, then you need to have ship models with the fidelity of the smallest particle that might hit them." "Look at the context. I suggested they would be better to use lookup tables for damage" "He's saying it's a simulation, but it's just lookup tables anyway, without actually understanding what would happen in a given volume area via simulation. I'm arguing it is in fact a game WRT damage unless they actually simulate damage to relevant scale sizes of structures within targets. (good luck with that)" "If you want to claim simulation, then you need to simulate. [...] That means code that is likely not in this game, including the CFD code to model the projectile through the tank. If we both admit that this has not been done, then any claims of "simulation" regarding damage are just a different kind of lookup table based on what "seems reasonable," we'd just hope the real world is not counter to our intuition." But you say now "I'm fine with arbitrarily fine-grained damage models". That must be the reason why you are so insistent on "a board-game style damage table" being better, that an arbitrarily fine grained damage model is not good, it must be really fine grained: "It doesn't do any good to track a 1 cm cross section projectile unless the fidelity of the damage model is at the same scale size". And CoaDE uses "just lookup tables anyway", implying it is no better than your "board-game style damage table". And you admit that even your "board-game style damage table" would be pure guesswork "[...] then any claims of "simulation" regarding damage are just a different kind of lookup table based on what "seems reasonable,"" based on "our intuition", which we "just hope the real world is not counter to". Quoting the developer (who likely has seen the code he produced and likely knows where tables are used and at which granularity stuff happens): [emphasis not in original] Since a damage table is based on assumptions, even when real-life data is available --- how likely is what happened to the Hood? If you rerun the scenario over and over, what would be the most common outcomes? --- how do you think it'd work when your assumptions are overturned at every corner? You can properly calibrate to real life only if you have a large enough sample size. And wet navy ships' capabilities are harder to collect, since between classes of even the same type there are important differences. Shells that hit an enemy given these guns and that crew quality --- sure, shells are fired in hundreds. Shells that hit are a bit more rare, but still ... The chance that a shell is on a path that will lead it to the magazine, actually breach the same (or for British WWI ships, penetrate turret or barbette of the main guns and cause a cordite explosion) and destroy the ship ... how often did that happen?

Since you do not have the slightest idea of the damage handling in the program, you simply made up, with no data, some imaginary problems. For all we know the ship's interior is modeled to sub-millimeter precision! (Everything seems to be created procedurally.) Satellites and their builders have been coping with space debris (11 km/s average impact speed) and micrometeorites (20 km/s average, but up to 70 km/s possible), people have thought long and hard about space combat, flew guns into space and had them fire and hit satellites. Why should the developer --- with the clearly stated goal to find out about real space combat --- work so hard on modelling real weapons and basically ignore their main function, dealing damage? "If you want to claim simulation, then you need to simulate." Well, your damage table is nothing but a (very bad) simulation of what damage occurs. Google would tell you in a minute: nothing happens as that particle disintegrates harmlessly in the Whipple shield, or failing that on the ship's armor or skin or, failing all that, on the tank skin.[1] See above for debris and micrometeorite speeds. Mir in her 15 years in space was hit quite a lot, especially her large, fragile solar panels, which cannot be armored (unlike radiators). Yet all that did not impair the function of Mir. Would it be accurate to say you simply made up that damage simulation was needed here with no data being consulted? I'll hazard a guess: a damage table made by you for such an impact would have the particle rip through the tank and another and maybe a third one, rupturing them instantly and causing a huge explosion as the LH contacts warmer parts of the craft and boils off to gas, at the same time the affected spacecraft parts get deep-frozen and brittle, causing them to crack under the sudden pressure rise and the vessel breaks into 2 parts. [1] a 100µm flour particle (they go from 1 - 100µm, you can see from ~ 40µm, 100µm has more than 15 times the volume, so it is very much non-microscopic) weights below 50µg and has less than 0.0025 Joule of kinetic energy at 10km/s. You could boil (w/o temperature increase) less than 5.4µg hydrogen with that energy. Here's a 6.4mm aluminum sphere impacting on aluminum at 7km/s (3600 times as much energy), which also demonstrates a simple Whipple shield. Whoa! How do you get from a non-event you deem near-catastrophic to what is "likely not" in the code of the simulation and asking me to "admit" that that code absolutely is not there? And how comes you think applying maths and physics and knowledge is identical to making up a damage table from whole cloth 'based on what "seems reasonable"'? Realistic outcomes do not depend on anyone's knowledge. People falling from planes without a working parachute from 1000, 3000, 5000 or more metres height --- you'd probably say that the "realistic outcome" is "100% dead" --- but people have survived that, no matter what your knowledge or gut feelings are. Not only that, quite a number of them made a full recovery, and some had no more than a sprained leg, or some gashes and a few broken bones to begin with. That happened more than once. And it is a realistic outcome, because it's a real outcome, even if it does not happen every time. We do not know (that's why we simulate damage to a greater accuracy instead of rolling 1D10), and we cannot know: What constitutes a mission kill is the inability to perform the mission. History teaches us that there are very many possible missions, not all of them require fighting, or fighting capabilities, some don't even require anything except the enemy believing such capability is there. I point you to the merchant submarine Deutschland, which --- crewed by civilians and totally unarmed --- transported critical materiel through the English blockade twice. Or the "Milchkühe" (Typ XIV) submarines, unarmed (except for AA defense), refueling and reprovisioning other submarines in 1941/42/early 43. I also point you to the concept of a "Fleet In Being". Nothing stops you throwing massive projectiles, as far as I can tell.[5] But what your guts tell you is not necessarily valid --- your guts would tell you to increase speed to overtake that vessel in front of you in the orbit! The RL difference is likely that you'll overpenetrate badly with the 400 kg projectile, which --- depending a lot on armor and angle and impact points etc. might make the 10 g projectiles much better damage dealers. (And that is all assuming you hit with your single shot. And so on.) [5] you may be limited by stuff like railgun mass and aiming speed, capacitor mass, and so on, and it may turn out to have distinct drawbacks in combat ... but that is physics, not the simulation. So ... not having any however formed hit boxes (and not having a care for computing speed), how would you simulate a complex ship? How do you find if a projectile's path passes through something? And if so, through what it passes? And what the damage is? I am all ears ... Yes, slightly stubbing your toe, having your hand smashed and having your head removed are all damage, and we must track exactly where your head flew and if it is further damaged by impact with walls or ground --- and exactly how much your toe will bother you in 4 weeks time. "If the ship has crew, they do jobs"? Are you 100% sure this is true in every circumstance? What again was the job of Gagarin during his space flight, except being a Guinea pig? The controls were locked away behind a combination lock and everything was automated. Alas, you cannot win a battle with the loss of all hands. (You can sink each other, but then both lose. Which may or may not be a good thing for one side strategically, e.g. in WWI and WWII the UK, with it's much larger fleet, would have gladly lost a ship for a ship of the same type from the German Navy. The German Navy obviously would not have.) Finally: You are pointing out that "Damage is damage, and the same fidelity is required." is crap: it is enough to track if there are enough able bodies to do the jobs needed, and if not, how much the capability degrades. You are "FINE" with abstraction when the abstraction is extremely abstract and a pure invention made up from whole cloth. You seem to have terrible problems when the abstraction is more fine grained. I do not understand why. Why is a totally fake (and necessarily unrealistic) damage table fine, but a clearly more realistic approach wrong? And how would you know how damage is simulated or how accurate the simulation is? Have you studied the code? Tried the program? Asked the developer? I believe the domain is very specific because there are so few other contenders, not because of something inherent in the domain.

Tater, could you tell me: What is a "realistic outcome" for space combat? Space combat is not an age-of-sail combat. We know what a "realistic outcome" could be in an age-of-sail combat. Or car crashes. Or Dreadnaught-class combat. Or air combat in from WWI to today. Could be. There have been many cases where atypical, even "unbelievable" results have been documented. Results that are not what you'd call a "realistic outcome", certainly not a common outcome. Yet they happened, in the real world. They were real outcomes. So how do you know what is a "realistic outcome" for space combat? Historic space battles? Gut feelings or a "vision" how things should be? Simulations (like this one) with all the many variations of components and their variations in placement? Then you claim you need a layout accuracy of at least the same resolution as the projectile cross section for "realistic outcomes", or you need something like board-game damage tables for "realistic outcomes". Why? Your claim "The "simulation" fails at that point". What exactly does fail? Why does it fail? Why would 0.5³m³ or 2³m³ voxels, which know what is inside them and thus what can (and cannot) be damaged by passing through it, be not enough for "realistic outcomes", not even 0.02³m³ voxels, but 0.01³m³ would? (Ignoring secondary damage, which would need to be handled separately anyway.) Why do you think a simulation needs to be simulating stuff that is irrelevant to the accuracy of the simulation? Do car crash simulations have to include 3 m/s winds and turbulences caused by butterfly wings nearby? Do grand strategy simulations handling units of corps size and above need to simulate the view of every point man of each squad and not only of the number of rounds on each soldier and magazibe, but of each single round, including all it's imperfections and the effects of each imperfection when used? Do Boing 767 simulators (those used to train pilots for emergencies, not your computer games) need to simulate every blade in each turbine? Does it simulate what parts of a bird striking the engine will come out well roasted and which will be raw minced meat? Does it simulate which part of which turbine blade passes through the outer engine shell and pierces fuel tanks, fuel lines, wires and/or the passenger cabin? Does it have a resolution of a couple cm cubed --- the size of a turbine fragment? Since it does not do all that --- it must not be a simulation, calling is a simulation is (according to you) a "silly claim", right? Maybe you should tell them that that all their expensive stuff is just a game ... "If every single pipe is not modeled, how do you know what actually happened?" you say --- but how do you know what actually happened with a made-up damage table? Even 2³m³ voxels will be way more accurate --- your hit table will have a projectile which passes through where there are only remass tanks, but kill a reactor, knock out life support and pierce the engine bell without scratching any remass tanks! Maybe not every time. But every now and then. So much for a "realistic outcome" .... Re your 'classic example': It does very obviously matter if a mast is hit and damaged or even broken or (important) rigging is parted --- or if the projectile misses slightly and only makes a hole in a sail or into thin air. It does not matter when guy on the gun deck is incapacitated during a battle if that was by a wood splinter, a metal shrapnel, an upturned gun or by the projectile itself. It does not matter during the battle where the guy is hit: hand, foot, arm, leg, torso, head, it does not matter if he dies immediately or later, becomes a cripple or returns to duty after the battle, the only question is: will the guy be able to perform his duty or not. It does not matter who the guy is unless his replacement is significantly less efficient. At some point the reduced man power will reduce combat ability (less people to handle sails, fire guns, repel boarders or swarm the enemy deck), but again --- it does not matter why exactly they cannot perform their duty, only that they cannot. (And for a campaign it only matters if and roughly when they can perform their duty again. And maybe for food and water how many die and thus need none any more.) So please explain what a 'each single splinter, each single shrapnel, every single limb, each single finger' accuracy gives an age-of-sail simulation over a more abstract simulation. What relevant differences does it cause to an age-of-sail battle, to an age-of-sail campaign?

I ... disagree. A "vision of how things should be" is starting with the 'this is how things should be' and fixing the universe to allow that, if necessary. The WWII plane and sub games had a vision of sorta-realistic simulators with many/lots tweaks towards playability. They know the end goal fairly well from the start. CoaDE is more of an experiment, or like maths: we start with a (fairly) small number of axioms (which at least seem to make sense), and see where they lead us. I also challenge you to show a spacecraft shape that has equal or better properties in interior size, mass of armor and thickness of armor at any given spot (say, frontal, 45°, 90°, 135°, 180°). Axiom, not assumption. If the developer wanted to explore strategy and tactics of "infantry in space" or "WWII submarines in space" or "Star Trek", he'd have done that. Which engines would you like to have added? What is their use case? Are they either able to produce so high thrust that they are usable in combat (as a total replacement) or their additional mass is in the end a mass win and their transfer speeds are at least as good? That ground weapons will not be there (or even are not there already) is an assumption on your part! Weapons loadout and vessel size: your choice! Want an all-laser small gunboat? Go for it. But do not complain if you find that your lasers (or projectiles) are not ruling the battlefield. That is not a "more balanced game" decision (this is not a game!), that is simply how the numbers turned out to be, at least for the developer's vessel designs. And you may find that a fleet of small gunboats is not optimal: Start by cutting out all the stuff to enable humans to live and command the ship. Add some computers instead and a remote-control system. Reduce the remass down to keep the same dV. Reduce the size and thrust of the engine to keep the same acceleration. Reduce the size and mass of the vessel and tanks and internal structures, so all that there's little empty space again. Note that you also reduced the armor mass without thinning the armor Oh, now we probably have a lot of extra dV again, if so jump to 2. and do the whole cutting again Now, this thing is much smaller. Maybe we can carry it in a "capital ship". Which means we can remove all the dV needed for travelling, pre-combat maneuvering and getting back on course and home after combat. Let's jump to 2. again with the new, lower dV. Maybe we don't even need the drone to 'come to rest' after combat --- either we discard it or we collect it with the mothership. Needs thinking. Maybe we don't need that amount of armor, either ... less mass again. Or maybe we use an engine with more thrust again. Humans squish easy at 10 or 30 gee, computers can be made resilient. But it is clear we have a harder to hit target that is much cheaper, lighter, smaller (also harder to hit) and as well armored as your gunboat. And we can have a larger number of them. There is only a 'human crew on board can try damage control' feature loss, and it'd be doubtful said crew could patch much at all during a combat. There are several problems with your assumptions: There must be quite a cargo fleet. Only when you want to genoicide your enemy and do nothing else you need no ships to carry home loot or transport occupation troops or settlers. You likely want to mine asteroids, too, instead of sending everything from the bottom of the gravity well. You do not want most cargos to be slower than Hohmann transfers. Some (like passengers) you want to be significantly faster. Which means engines capable of that are going to be in much need. Low thrust engines will not be able to reach Hohmann speeds on most distances, no matter what their ISP is. There is a limit on combining low thrust engines for higher thrust (they do have mass, and their support system tends to be weight intensive). You assume war vessels make economic sense[1]. They only do if you are out on a massive plundering and extortion campaign. Otherwise they are a cost factor. History has shown many times that effective weapons (or those believed to be) are produced. In war, money is not much of an objection. Even though strategic material may be rare in a war and will be replaced with more available materials where possible, that does not stop stuff being built. You assume "that large heavily armed and armored capital ships make economic sense to build over any other type". I have not seen any place where it is stated you cannot build lightly armed and armor-free small vessels, if you so desire. I am sure you will be able to build your nearly unarmed eggshell tin cans and see how they fare. It seems however that the tests done by the developer indicate that big motherships and small drones make most sense. Lasers and PD outclassing kinetics? Again that seems to be the results of experiments done by the developer, not a "this is how it's going to be" executive decision. I am sure you will be able to run these kinds of experiments yourself. [1] putting all the money spent for development, building and maintenance of war vessels and the training and keeping of their personell into something which actually provides some return of investment without a war of conquering might be more economic ... They have run tests and concluded that the inability to choose your battleground, match speeds or evade kinetics is a very bad trait for combat ships. And being slower than a Hohmann transfer is also not a good trait. Thus this is not an "assumption", but the outcome of experiments. However you assume, it seems, they did that on an untested gut feeling or something. And don't pull the "they are cheaper, lower-maintenance, and safer than slow-burning engines" bull. War vessels of the wet navy have always have expensive, high power and occasionally less than safe engines, which certainly are not low maintenance, because they need the ability of high speed. Same with the air force. Just look at the Me 163 (where the ... 'temperamental' rocket engine and the highly corrosive and explosive fuel killed more Germans than Allies) or the Me 262 (where the jet engines loved to burn if you throttled up faster than slowly and where they had a life time of 25 hours before a total strip down (100 hours when not eschewing rare materials)). But from what I read you surely will be able to buy these engines and see how you fare. Claim: The heavier, the faster things fall. (Thought) Experiment: 1 large cube and 1 small cube of the same solid material. The large cube falls faster than the small cube (as per claim), so if you combine the large cube and the small cube, it will fall a) even faster, as the combined weight is higher and b) will fall slower, since the slower-falling small cube slows the large cube. Result: The claim is false. Which design does that experiment have, and where is the subjective decision? Where was the experiment pruned down to a chosen range of test data? I think your claim of "Broadly speaking ..." is, broadly speaking, quite wrong. And the question asked here is, "given we use only that kind of technology, what could space combat look like?", and the "pruning" done here would be that technology that does not work/help --- like, say, truck wheels, aeroplane wings, jet engines, sails, cutlasses, catapults, photon torpedoes, handwavium engines, ... The viability of any war vessel design would be: "Does the vessel perform it's function well enough in combat for it's TCO?", and nothing else! (Yes, that depends on strategies and tactics employed. Finding our which work is the point of that simulation.) There is an objective way to decide: If increasing the complexity change the result in meaningful ways, you need to keep the more complex approach, if not, you don't. Which is what happened to rail guns: they do not scale up and down easily, so a complex calculation is needed. So basically what you are saying is that since we can not really experiment in space war, we cannot know. But many many people have been doing experiments there. Rail guns, rocketry, nuclear power, life support, etc etc etc. Experiments. And math. And math to plan experiments. And math to plan 'normal' work, like planning a space mission and designing the satellite. Or designing a nuclear reactor. And this simulation is an experiment using maths --- backed by experiments from lots of different sources, solid experiments, many experiments. Some of them using the whole history of electricity, which is quite objective by your standards. And that may be one more reason to use only the technology we know that works and how it works, instead of mythical photon torpedoes. But we have tons of knowledge on satellite building, mission planning, rocket launching, life support, gee force tolerances. We have extensive knowledge of armor and penetration of the same. We have extensive knowledge of aiming. Knowing the speeds on which converging or passing ships will meet and what speed retrograde vs. prograde orbits meet. We have knowledge of lasers and some of weaponized lasers, we have some knowledge of rail guns and so on. We have destroyed satellites with ground launched rockets, we have destroyed satellites with guns on manned space stations. And space does not have slippery roads, high winds, drunken drivers zig-zagging, hills and mountains, tunnels and passes and so on and so on --- space is a very simple and steady environment. Lasers are possible (up to 1 meter aperture, says the developer), though the developer says that they have not found much use above 10cm --- so you can prove them wrong if you want and my guess is that in that case larger apertures will be offered. You can build kinetics platforms: just remove all other weapons and add no or a tiny engine. There is much more that you can build to test out if your ideas work than you seem to think you are able to --- you seem to be thinking that the game is only allowing you very narrow range of vessels. And if you like to see space combat models evolve from now to then, you may have to mod the simulator or build one on your own --- it's (as fas as I know) not what the designer is interested in right now. You may need to build your own simulation or mod this one. This is not a shortcoming of the simulation. Yes: you make 'assumptions' about the tech --- like assuming they behave as the experts say they do --- and then you see what happens. What is the advantage of few fairly large shrapnel/ball bearing bombs? The bombs mean your munitions are explosive and will cause additional internal damage if hit. The bombs' explosive charge is likely to explode prematurely when touched by a laser, which means the ball bearings will spread much wider, causing many more of them to miss than usual, thus lessening the work load of PD (many more ball bearings are not going to hit than normally and can be ignored by PD) You accelerate not only the warhead (the ball bearings) but also the explosive and trigger, so you need more energy for the same damage at the target. A larger number of small ball bearing guns instead of a small number of larger ball bearing bomb guns means more redundancy. Taking damage or technical difficulties will knock out one or a few small guns, reducing the "broadside weight" only slightly. If you loose even one larger bomb gun, the amount of damage you deal is reduced much more Since you have a large(r) number of guns, you can decide where to concentrate your fire, splitting it between several targets (say incoming kinetics and enemy vessels) is much more flexible Bombs do create a cone of ball bearings/shrapnel with a random distribution, guns can direct each shot, so you can pattern the shooting so that there is a clear pattern of ball bearings, i.e. your chance for one hit can be done with less ball bearings. smaller guns can fire faster likely more smaller guns are also lighter overall The only advantage I can see is that you need less computing and tracking power since you have many fewer projectiles you fire off. But then that should not be any problem with even today's computing power. Huh? The simulation tries to be as accurate as it can. A "damage table" can only be as realistic as a damage table, and a damage table will always be more abstract than a bullet-passing-through-things simulation. Not for nothing you say "board-game style damage table". Game. This is a simulation, not a game. It's a tool to find out tactics and strategies --- and people like many of us here enjoy such simulations. I guess you can simply choose what sort of KE weapons you like. I have seen 1g (0.001kg) projectiles at high speed in screen shots for guns. And of course remass tanks will be compartmentalized, unless a designer wants the first shot to (mission) kill their vessel. Yes, it's quite a bit of extra mass. But the alternative is a one-hit-and-dead vessel, which tends to cause much more mass to hang around with no value than a few more tanks would. Unless it's a small throw-away drone that would likely die from most hits anyway and thus the the extra mass would not help survivability enough for the cost. Yes, for some things more massive penetrators may be better. You can design your vessel and their weapons as you like and see what works. The amount of energy if you stop a round ... is exactly as much as accelerating the round to that speed. If you use a gun-like contraption, you need to put in even more energy, as conversion is not perfect and you get quite a lot of heat in your gun, too. And the gun will heat with every shot, not only with every hit.

Introversion's "DEFCON" (2006) did the same, except for 6 players ... ... and of course you learned to do things quickly, at 5x speed (the lowest acceleration beyond real time, the fastest being 20x) because dropping everyone in real time was a hint that you were up to something ... In addition it was possible to set the maximum amount of 1x "time" a player was allowed, i.e. you got 300 seconds (5 minutes) of 1x, and if that was up, you could not slow down below 5x (IIRC), so that no player could slow the game too long for everybody. (A typical game would use 30-45 minutes wall clock time, multiple hours in-game time, up to 8 hours.) Of course there was an "Office" mode that was locked in 1x, which you could then play over the day (say, in the office :-) Someone writes a simulator to understand how cars deform in a crash and what such a crash would mean to occupants. They use all the knowledge about crashes, the physics and materials science behind that, and use knowledge of simulation and computer science[1] to create that thing --- what exactly is their vision? Do they even have a vision how a car is 'supposed' to crumble? Or are they rather building a research tool, with no "vision" what the outcome should be, except that it should be as realistic as it can be, no matter where that takes them and no matter if they like the results? If CoaDE was drawing it's vision from the sources as you say, then CoaDE would have a given idea how things will work. Example: if someone draws their vision of space travel and space combat from Star Trek, then they would build a world, a game, a system where reversing the polarity solves 50% of all problems, stealth is extremely good, combat distances are closer than the typical distances between the opponents in WWI trench warfare, you can warp (except when you cannot) and laser beams do glow in space. They would start out with these ideas in mind --- and an idea if this was to be more of a multiplayer bridge simulator or more of a singleplayer action game --- and build that. They may change some things, they may abandon the game (or divert into a quite new direction) if they see the results and think it does not work. But they start with a vision, with a 'foregone conclusion' what the result should be. CoaDE seems to not have much preconception ("vision") how ships are to be build (well, except tapered cylinder --- to which I do not really agree it's the only or main right way[2]), armed, engined, mass ratio'ed, etc. Which means you can build the ship that best matches the tactics you want to try, no matter how crazy. You are not restricted to the tactics that fit to a certain type of ship (say, photon torpedoes, 2D, shields, warp and impulse drives, very close engagement ranges). [1] "Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art, but we'll actually see that computer so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic, and we'll see that in this course. So it's not a science. It's also not really very much about computers. And it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. And it's not about computers in the same sense that geometry is not really about using surveying instruments. In fact, there's a lot of commonality between computer science and geometry. Geometry, first of all, is another subject with a lousy name. The name comes from Gaia, meaning the Earth, and metron, meaning to measure. Geometry originally meant measuring the Earth or surveying. And the reason for that was that, thousands of years ago, the Egyptian priesthood developed the rudiments of geometry in order to figure out how to restore the boundaries of fields that were destroyed in the annual flooding of the Nile. And to the Egyptians who did that, geometry really was the use of surveying instruments. Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. And indeed, on some absolute scale of things, we probably know less about the essence of computer science than the ancient Egyptians really knew about geometry." (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-001-structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs-spring-2005/video-lectures/1a-overview-and-introduction-to-lisp/) [2] Cylinder types roll quickly, and if shot from the side a shot will likely go in, through and out instead of having lots of things to smash. They also have the space for really long spinal weapons. But they turn slowly (which is ... ah, unfortunate for spinal weapons). It may be that maneuverability is more important than armor for some tactics --- and maneuverability may be important to some tactics. It may be that in the end tapered cylinders are the better choice ... but we do not know.

A very promising mod. I can see the fun! However, of course I shall have a wish or two: The static seems static. I would expect it to look more like random noise. Hullcam VDS' nav cam static looks better in this regard. (I'd use a random function to add poisson or distributed values (centered around zero), and vary the width of that distribution as parameter. Or record a number of tiles of random noise and build the "noise image" from these tiles, chosen at random every time.) One might even imagine that the higher the data rate versus antennae size/range, the worse noise becomes ... so while mün might work well, you'd only get low-res TV images from Jool, at ... a ... very ... slow ... frame ... rate ... and quite noisy images. Dunno if that's in the scope of the mod. But it would be nice to be able to set several such presets. Make the film scratches not always appear at the same place. Make the film have grain. Try a gaussian distribution of noise, blurred. (Film grain is usually larger than "one pixel".) The darker the light, the faster a film you need and the more grainy it becomes. Also highlights tend to grain least, and midtones the most. Might need to pre-render tiles or whole images.

Adjusting mental model from "Magic variable that pre-exists, but must be written to with 'define' instead of 'set!'" to "If a top level AGC.Status variable is made to exist at the end of the pass (once per tick) through the program, the content is also shown in the output field --- this is the only magic. The variable does not exist if you don't create it." Cool! Thank you! Now I only need to manage to wrangle monodevelop into submission ... and my next mission under computer control can start.

For e.g. calculating atmospheric density[1] at height raising Euler's Number to (/ -12502 5000) is needed. Also important is the natural logarithm. [1] for finding terminal velocity. For intelligent speed control on the lower part of ascent, for example. It would be good to be able to use the common trigonometric functions.

(begin (define AGC.Status (list 1 88)) ) works. (begin ((lambda () (define AGC.Status (list 1 88)) )) ) does not work. It behaves as if AGC.Status was never defined, though introducing errors in the define line are detected and seem to indicate that the line is executed. Changing to some other command (e.g. a let with an if and an action group) also shows that the code is executes. Since AGC.Status is about the only flexible output possibility (outside defining variables and dumping them by pressing "Debug") this does hamper code testing.

bassgojoe, what's the correct syntax for defining a function that does NOT take a parameter? (In this case I'm trying for a function that returns #t once and #f ever after, for example for the initial launch staging.) (define (func junk) ...) works, but needs a junk value in the call. (define (func) ...) complains that I need to add an argument. (define func ...) does not work, from all I see it thinks 'func' is going to be a variable. Common Lisp sidesteps that issue by having a 'defun' and 'defvar' (and 'defmacro', 'defconstant', 'defclass', 'defmethod', 'defparameter' and so on).