Akadion

There are three things that come immediately to mind, or at least that I'm able to share without legal advice. The first was when I was a tech at a big box store, in the early 90s. This was when computers were starting to get popular, but a year or two before the Internet started to get popular (I was getting online through a creative loophole involving the university's gopher portal.. Turns out you could just suspend the process and get to a command shell.). We would sometimes have bits that would always test fine but were returned repeatedly because they would fail at the customer's house. Early in my time there we could just send them back as defective, but then we got a new manager who insisted that if I got it to work we had to try and sell it. Usually I could figure out a way to creatively fail an item if it was returned twice. There was one item, a soundcard (Turtle Beach as I recall) that was particularly vexatious. Every time I plugged it in, it tested fine, but it was bought and returned a bunch of times. Finally, enough was enough and I turned on the bench power supply after hooking up some leads and cranking the power to max. I touched two random contact. There was a brief buzz before parts of the microchip that exploded bounced off my glasses and cheek. There was a rather large crater in one the main chip and a funky smell that lingered for hours. Number two was a 3D printer I was trying to build out of an old piece of lab equipment. I cobbled together controllers for the motor, machined new mounts for the print head, and got it largely working before plugging the heater line into the stepper controller. When I tried heating the print head, the motor controller found itself trying to handle 12 volts and a crap ton of amps instead of the nice little 5 volts it was expecting. It quite literally burst into flames. Disconnecting the power slowed, but did not stop the destruction. The third? When my kids and I go skating, they'll sometimes yell "Oberth effect" as they skate up behind me. I'll reach back, take their hand, and slingshot them in front of me as hard as I (safely) can. Not engineering related, but entirely because of KSP.

There *is* a very small window where SAS can keep you on track for almost no energy expenditure (<10 for the Mk1 with just a heatshield and Mk16 chute, on a mun-return trajectory with periapsis ~21km). But then I turned physics on for the heat shield and the landing was so much nicer. It may not be entirely realistic to completely dead-stick a landing - I did a test with the physicsless heatshield and rotated at a constant rate through the landing, like Apollo did, and it worked fine. Nothing blew up, nothing even got terribly warm and the capsule remained pointed in roughly the right way. But I had to use my joystick, couldn't get the right rate of spin with my keyboard, and it ate up a *lot* more power than using SAS.

I'm trying to configure my joystick so I can use different axes for rockets and spaceplanes - for instance, I like to use the twist axis for rotation for rockets but have that control yaw in spaceplanes, and use left-right for yaw in rockets but roll in spaceplaces. I thought that I could use primary/secondary for this, but there's no way to swtich between the two modes. If I try to set the axes to be different for docking vs staging (and just plan on using docking for spaceplanes) it doesn't save the setting, meaning I have to quit back to the main menu and reconfigure my joystick if I'm switching from rockets to planes (or use software that will remap for me) just as before.