radonek

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Beamed_Power--Solar_Moth

I have similar early lander, sans fairing - I usually stretch outrigger tanks to form a multicolumn booster. It's strutted hell, looks like pig and certainly flies like one, but beats landing a pencil…

Designing a lander is not hard, just put stuff to sides instead of stacking it down. Add asparagus to taste. Real problem is how to push that low, wide lander up to orbit. And that is one part where engineering is well complimented by piloting skills :-) If you really have to land a candle, it helps to turn on RCS for a bit after touchdown. It can smooth out landing gear oscillations and get you into stable attitude. And if it just fires constantly, you know you are not actually stable.

C- for lander design, but A+ for piloting

I was thinking about buying it, but… is it really a space game? Ingame videos look like regular simcity clone with bubbles over houses.

OTOH it kinda fits with all those equaly jarring old mag cover pictures.

You are wildly mixing tech levels (again?). If you can build antimatter torch, you may as well fullfill all your material needs by tapping Jovian atmosphere. Or haul suitable icy body from Oort. As for actual mining, I'd go with hitting selected icebergs with splash of color-adjusting nanomachines. Directed outgassing is a slow way to move, but I don't think you can beat the energy budget. Dunno if it's feasible though, not much sunlight there. Lasers could be used to speed thing up, but note that unlike Nukes idea they would just pump in additional energy. Other way would be to build a big mirror at higher orbit.

War of the Worlds It's totally war, it's definitely scifi and it's absolute classic. Yeah but it pretty much glorifies that excrements (with notable exception of Emperors Text to Speech Device)

This reminds me something. There used to be combination of plastic and metal distance pillars for mounting the board and IIRC most boards used to ground on one of metal ones. So if that particular distancing pillar is removed (it can be unscrewed), whole thing is left ungrounded. Now, back bracket of that ISA card have a screw on one side, close to our magic screw...

The screw probably just closed a loop that involved something else. I have absolutely no idea what could be, but most likely ended in PSU or motherboard because, well, where else? And I can't think of any PSU problem that would only affect a lone ISA card. BTW this reminds me of magic switch.

My guess would be that something touched motherboard outside of mount points. Still, symptoms beats me.

That's a nice story except color was a pink and it happened two years later. Later, it was found that some Party officials were indeed probing army about possible deployment against protesters and were firmly put off on the ground that men would not be willing to fire at their own people (and neither would most of the officers). So Mr. Zubrin actually has a point here.

You can consider human to be a drone engineered by nature to work at certain conditions and it actually performs quite well. It's versatile, independent, easy on maintenance and can be extensively upgraded. Replacing it will take a lot more then finding a few particular cases where it is at disadvantage. Not saying it's not possible, but it it will take a lot of technological edge. I'm thinking grey goo, knife missiles (of Culture fame), this kind of stuff. But take a man out of environment it is designed for and it fails miserably. Seventees tech can beat humans underwater or in space combat. So, I can see "space marines" having a role , but people manning the guns of space battleships... nope. No crew, no space battleships.

I can see that working, especiall in some aquatic creature. I would go for opposing thumb be more, um, opposing. "Paddle" is not gonna be very fexible IMO (evolutionary pressure in that direction would be more likely to produce separate digits) so thumb have to do more. Maybe have more joints, or have thumbs at both sides of paddle. Not sure about suckers though - if they are so useful why are they not seen more often in nature? There must be some disadvantage to select against it quite heavily. And having a thumb to get hold of things is just as good for most things, so parsimonious mother nature will let you off with either one but not both. BUT,if you can have them somehow and can control them individually, that is your controls. Instead of push-sensitive keys, their keyboards have pull-sensitive disks. So instad of flat "keyboard", they use curved "discoid". There.

@Fierce Wolf Combined waiting/transfer orbit is great for small bodies like Mun or Minmus, but I would avoid it near Kerbin unless I happen to be on same orbit and close to target.

I learned game basics (or orbital mechanics 101) from text tutorial with a few images in about a two nights. So much for the degree. That being said, back when I tried scenarios (which was a long time ago!) it was not always clear what you are meant to do. I'd say, read tutorial (there is whole category here on forums) or watch some video on topic of orbital mechanics (Scott Manley be your guide). It's not hard, it's not even particularly complicated. It's just different and need some getting used to.

No light lag. Yes, Kerbol system is smaller, but still. Kerbals can handle pretty much any G-forces I throw at them, regardless of direction. Sometimes with a smile. They can also pop out to space in soft pressure suits without any prebreathing. Real rocket engines are not so easy to throttle as in KSP. For instance, Apollo lander descent engine can only by throttled up to 55%, above that it can only run at full blast due to thermal issues. Also, ablatively cooled engines tend to change their properties as they burn. Some booster engines can't be throttled at all, while other are kinda regulated by changing fuel mixture. And some solids can be throttled down by pressure venting. Fine-grained and perfectly linear throttle of KSP engines is engineering dream. Also, shutting down an engine is not trivial matter (unless you want it blown to pieces) and adds to transients mentioned @Dragon01 . And all of this is probably trivial compared to issues of nuclear propulsion. In KSP it is quite possible to land on an engine bell. In real life, you really, really do not want this to happen. KSP gyros never saturates. No alignment is needed for directional antenas. Not a big thing for simple probes, but major issue for relays. No comms blackout during aerobreaking/reentry. Real life RTG power sources decay. KSP models perfectly spherical gravity field. Real planets are not ideal spheres of uniform density. No space weather whatsoever. No solar storms, radiation belts, light pressure etc. ISRU I harbor doubts about longterm stability of Gilly orbit. Real atmospheric effects are not only way more complicated then in KSP, but sometimes even more complicated then real rocket science, as witnessed by Skylab. KSP does math in finite precision (I think collision physics is only done in floats and celestial mechanics in double, but I may be wrong) so even correct math produce inaccurate results. Timewarp essentialy zeroes any rotation (and probably introduces a lot of other issues). Due to physics simulation in discreet time quantums, objects can actually pass through each other instead of colliding in some situations. Whole "physics bubble" thing. Just for the record, I understand reasons behind most of these and I actually think Squad did a pretty good job designing the game.

@Dragon01 @kerbiloid I hate to derail your derailment, but original point was about fabrication difficulty of curves, not about barrel shapes. Boxy barrel that got you so riled up 1) is molded, which is exactly kind of technology that can make curves en masse as easy as sharp edges and 2) just to drive point home, that "box" is actually full of curves. For exactly kind of reasons already stated here. Village itself close to zero. But people, those are invaluable. And lots of other factors exist. Nothing of this has any relation to modern economy, much less rocketry so I don't see your point.

If you stopped watching movie crap and look for some realistic designs, you'll see this is exactly what they are about. However you are confusing crew quarters pressure vessel for ship outer hull. As for bouncy castle – you will learn limits of this once you start punching holes and mounting in stuff like controls and life support. Bigellow-style baloons hung outside the hull may be a good way to provide some additional breathing space for crew, but for anything important like the bridge, you want a nice, solud pressure vessel. Also, if curves pose a challenge for your engineers, they are unlikely to produce a working car, much less a propelant tank. Asteroids. Icy moons. Comets. Certainly not at bottom of a deep gravity well, that's for sure.

I can't say that Civ VI. is any worse then V., but it's not any better either. I do not like cartoony visuals though. As for X-Com, new series is kinda fun but I prefer original shape. In that regard, Xenonauts are a better successor – true to form and with more mature atmosphere.

Nah, it still had a mad scientist to fill the quota.

If you really want go forward with this analogy, say that wooden shields and spears are obsolete and you are still not even close to level of technological division. COADE is base on sound physical principles, but if you arrive at so called battlefield via warpdrive as OP would have it, those principles are deep down the drain. That is nice and reasonable scenario… if you assume usual "rubberhead chauvinism" - aliens are biologically compatibile, have similar technology and so on. I do not. In my book, if those aliens really wanted to wage unplanned war for the planet (which is itself a dubious proposition), they opt for a few strategically placed nanodetonators to rebuild surface conditions to suit their needs, introduction of incompatibile biosphere designed to drive out native species followed by bioengeneering atmospheric conditions closer to requirements. All they need is a genebank with sythetizers, some modifications to a maintenance swarm and perhaps some well aimed asteroids to add missing elements where applicable. They might not even see it as an aggresion, just some terrain improvements for Roadside Picnic.

Not sure bipedal humanoids are plausible either. Obviously, their twodimensional habitat must hinder their comprehension of space, they lack natural ways to manipulate even simplest of carbon nanostructures, their grasp of world elements is limited to crude oxidative reactions.They can't even tell most simple hydrocarbons apart! How can one even start to use natural resources with such handicpap, much less industrialized civilization? Totally implausible :-p

Now THAT explains why current world is dominated by Aztec empire, Quing dynasty and Zulu kingdom. Nah, such crude RKV's are boooring. Now, imagine very small relativistic mass driver fed with tiny slivers of some dense exotic matter. Something that cuts through stuff, makes nice fireworks on contact with ordinary matter and is unstable enough to be just barely held together during relativistic life time. Bonus points for autocatalytic instead of direct energy effects (yes, I'm still intrigued by idea of strangelet weaponry). As for name, I'm torn between "star-destroyer-destroyer (man portable)" and "cheela toothbrush".

No idea, really. Lots of possibilities. Could be simple charged singularity used to shred stuff at close range. Or tiny, unguided evaporation bombs. I intentionally avoided "black hole" term since that is used for stellar mass objects, and those would probably be difficult to toss around even for kardashev-high civilizations. Although, who knows? None of this is my point though, I could as well go for RKV's for instance, or invent some other fun stuff ("calyx hollow" comes to mind). In the end, it makes as much sense as medieval knight trying to come up with "realistic" use of nuclear weaponry. Does it need many blacksmiths to forge? Will it be delivered by cavalry or siege machinery? Instead of answering silly questions, point here is that sensible answer, whatever it ends to be, is not going to involve sticking pointed objects into people. Not because of this or that particular technology, but simply due to energy involved.