Moach

I'm pretty pleased with how that one turned out. Got kinda carried away there - But hey, it's all part of the game! It's actually a screenshot from the game itself that I took, then I started editing it and stuff, then one thing led to another and next thing I know I'm "Hey it's daylight outside again? When did that happen?" So I had to make myself stop before either my mouse or wrist broke down... I like drawing explosions and such... Fly safe out there!

New build is up, btw

Some bugs to fix, but that's how the next build should look like

That wasn't him. I think I remember that episode too - "Felipe" is just a really common name, that's all (It's just the Latin variant of "Phillip") The furthest north either of us have been is just around Vancouver. That's the only part of Canada where people still find snow a pretty morning sight, rather than refer to it as "that white sh..." I think also that episode was aired some time before he left Squad, I loosely recall seeing it some time between 2014 and 2016. That was one year too soon for that theory in any case. Am I an old man for remembering how historically, the History Channel used to have documentaries about actual History?

New stuff!] see https://www.motorwings.net/updates for details and download link! Also, now the game has its own original soundtrack too! I composed it myself, and found that writing orchestral music isn't really difficult, the problem is just getting them all to fit in your room... (J/K, it's MIDI and samplers alright)

I make this:

Might as well tell the story myself, since I was there when it happened.... In the beginning, there were Kerbals... But before that, there weren't any. They hadn't been invented yet. Instead there were two teenage boys with a rocket model kit. They were twins. There more handsome one and most unbiased storyteller of the two was me. The other was HarvesteR, but he didn't call himself that back then. I probably hadn't even thought of "Moach" either... This was a long, long time ago, in a land far, far away.... The rockets in the kit were soggy with damp. They wouldn't fire. While waiting for them to dry out in the sun, I fiddled with other stuff from the model kit and it's packaging. Lots of cardboard bits, and tape. And there was tin-foil there too for some reason. That tin foil was rolled up by mischievously idle hands into a humanoid shape, I then called up to my brother, who was tinkering with the kit's launch tower and announced: "Hey look, he's gonna be our pilot!" - That he was meant to be an alien is intrinsic to teenage character-building processes everywhere, so I had to name his kind right then. Thus I quickly added: "He's a... Kerbo!" We knew he wouldn't live for long.... What happened afterwards has already been told by another most gallant and totally unbiased narrator, who just happens to also have been me. The tale continues here:

Sounds like you're suffering from "Too Many Options" syndrome. As you said, this started when you got a better PC, and now with so many new possibilities available you become frustrated with the sheer impossibility of playing them all at the same time. Any time you pick one game, you can't help but long for all those other's you're now "missing out" on. It's kinda similar in a way to "Programmer's Block" - A situation in which the choice of what method requires the least effort to implement ends up taking more effort than any of the alternatives. The thing that seems to work the best for that, is to just pick one or two. Don't try to play each and every game in turn, even if you own them all. Instead, just focus on a maximum of two titles at any one time so that you can really get into them. Eventually you'll phase them off with new ones to replace them as they grow old for you, though you might end up cycling back to them in a few months (if they're replay-worthy enough) Any Non-Casual gamer should feel most dissatisfied should he/she attempt to play games in quantity over quality. One can never truly enjoy anything served in casual-sized chunks. The best games are those that you can make into a hobby, rather than merely go over as simple disposable pass-times. And remember that winning is really just one of the possible outcomes that result from having fun in games. Most often, it is not strictly a source of fun by itself.

One can never have too many BoolDogs!* There'll be a bunch of ppl looking for their left arms though, but we can always set the dogs on them... There will be an absurd amount of licking - Ten thousand faces will be covered in slobber! *Not a typo; "BoolDog Games" is the name of my startup game studio. My avatar was the original logo for it. It is based on a real dog, though the arm is purely fictional - 10k of my dog would indeed result in an apocalyptic amount of face licking

Thou meaneth, it can'th? Thou shalt wait a score and ten minutes or it to load! And thinketh it normal!

Hey, everyone!New build today! Now you can use your joystick(s) to fly your glorious/infamous creations around! It also includes the plane in the picture above, the Hellcaster SovereignAnd I've fixed a bunch of weird bugs that were making the drag model act all weird (basically, induced drag was acting backwards - it's correct now)Get it while it's hot!

"Aah, the sweet couple of seconds before I remember why I'm sleeping on the lawn..." -- H. Simpson. (unrecalled episode) "Build a man a fire and you warm him for a day, set fire to him and he'll be warm for the.rest of his life." -- Terry Pratchett (Jingo; Discworld Series)

New build (Mk.1d) Just Uploaded! Here's the news: Updated Map Generator; Performance improvements, better position tracking for detail. Improved Terrain Texturing and Elevation Generators. Added Tweakable System to Parts. Added Part Selection Highlighting and Preview Effects. Added Part Reshaping Capability, aka: AeroMorphing (a complex, yet very flexible system, meant to be addon-friendly) Wing Sections may now be reshaped via Tweakables Interface when selected. Wing Section shape changes affect their flight characteristics. Wing Sections can now have their control surfaces assigned as Ailerons, Flaps or Disabled. Added Flap Controls. (defaults F: Raise, V: Lower) Drag Model Overhauled, More realistic handling across various airspeeds. Added Crash Camera behavior for much improved crashing experience and explosion appreciation. Crash and Stress Damage (fatigue) tolerances readjusted. Engines May now be turned on and off. (press I key) Wing Sections form into grouped spans, sharing tweakable values across several parts. Span Sections Can be Set to Straight or Break, allowing tweak discontinuities at any selected part. Hold Ctrl while attaching a Wing Section to install it as a separate span group for independent tweaking. Control Surfaces now affect Wing Section Drag according to their angle of deflection. (realistically causes adverse yaw) Open Attachment Points proportionally increase part drag according to each point's drag coverage value. Reworked default controls to a WSAD-and-Mouse friendly configuration Mouse Back thumb button causes main flight controls to operate respective trims. Mouse Forward thumb button prevents main flight controls recentering to trimmed position until released. Made lots of unseen progress on the soon-to-come user addon SDK. Added Ctrl+Z (undo) Functionality to Hangar Added Ctrl+Y (redo) Functionality to Hangar for undoing inadvertent undos Hangar deck (floor) now fades out smoothly as camera crosses underneath. Parts can no longer mode below Hangar Deck while camera is positioned above it. Parts attached to tweakable parts should move in response to aeromorph displacement of their attachment points. Wingtip Vortices and Downwash logic improved. Various other small tweaks and assorted bug fixes. Added Splash Screen Logo and Program Icon. Free undiscovered bugs. (let me know in the forums if you find anything new and weird)

Does it have to be in space? My current project (see banner below) is basically what you describe, minus the actual part about being in space. Also, it'll take a bit of patience as I work alone before any meaningful combat may be had...or perhaps a generous donation to help get the business started? But you can build airplanes - And eventually use them for blasting other things to bit in battles not unlike those of Star Wars. I.e: Where star destroyers clash and their fighters scramble onto furious skirmish in between. Just replace "Star Destroyer" with "Massive Airship" and Space with Sky, the actual mechanics of how things behave end up really being just the same.

As happens to be the case, all of them sharing the Kerman surname, is really MY fault... This was waaaaaayy back when, I think sometime in 2001-ish or even earlier than that, me and my brother were playing with model rockets and I made a little tin foil man. I called it a "Kerbo"* - Though mostly it was a random-ish combination of alien sounding syllables. This poor chap was the very first Kerbal, though I don't think he ever knew that in the few moments he existed before his very much unavoidable totally not more-than-half on purpose Grizzly explosion-bound fate.... After this first guy bought his proverbial farm, we started making more of them, and by then "Kerbo" had become the name of their species for some reason. It was then that I figured it would be hilarious if they all inexplicably had the same last name "Kerman" - I still think it's funny, lolz * may possibly have been so half by subconscious association with one "Kerb", who developed a Flash game called MicroLife, where little microbes have to build a ship on the last level Though my memory fails me, and one thing might have been after the other in no particular order, so this may or not have been how it actually happened, I'd say 50/50... Some 15 years later, my brother moved to Mexico and somehow talked his boss into giving him a chance at making this game we both had thought of... Which ends with us being here, and all that goes with that. So yeah, the last name "Kerman" is just a cultural thing. It does not mean to imply close family relations (or the lack thereof) between them. They all just have that last name, regardless of parentage. Why? Well say, Why not? I always thought whenever two Kerbals get the same first name, they'd deal with the confusion by simply, being confused. What else is there to do?

Aircraft design rule of thumb: If it looks like an airplane, it should fly like and airplane. Can also be read as: An aircraft in flight handles just about as good as it looks. There's no mystical reason for there being a direct relationship between an airplane's eye-pleasing appearance and it's general airworthiness. It is all but a simple matter of proportions. It just so happens that the same geometric concordances that make an airplane wondrous to behold, are also those that make it fly properly. So the question of "Will it fly?" can have it's answer pretty reliably approximated by replacing the inquiry with "Does it look like a proper airplane?". You'll find that in almost all cases, these questions will have the same answer. Planes that look weird/ungainly IRL almost all depend on fly-by-wire or some form of artificial stability enhancement; Compare an Airbus A320 to a Boeing 737 (Not MAX) and you may notice, how the very aesthetics of their designs openly tell which of the two really needs to have a computer behind the flight stick to make it a decent ride. So it's mostly not about how much wing a thing needs before it'll fly - But more of a "Where should the wings go" decision. Having more or less lift area will certainly change how your craft flies. A smaller wing implies proportionally faster takeoff and landing speeds, plus a bunch of other consequences; All of these things can be played around with fairly loosely (you'd be amazed what can fly when it's built right) as long as the placement of centers of mass, lift and drag are correctly arranged. Simple formula: For a plane with the tail behind the main wings, place the CoG somewhere between 25% and 33% of the mean wing chord (that's the average distance between the leading and trailing edges over the whole wingspan) This can produce a natural pitch-down tendency, which you then angle the tail fin to correct. (rotate stabilizer until the blue marker lines up with the yellow one) Such a configuration is extremely stable, allowing you to fly even with your hands off for a while. Though you get a bit more drag for having the tail actually pushing DOWN to get the nose back up. (This is why the A320 looks awkward as if its wings were too far forward. They really are, this being more fuel-efficient, and FBW takes care of how it handles anyways....) Note however, if you try this with a Canard type design, it'll probably flip over and crash on its back. "Putting the tail on the nose" is a very effective way to remove the "tail pushing down" extra drag - Yet again, this design is FAR less stable than any one where the tail comes after the plane. A flyable canard can be built, however, and even be relatively stable (though never as much as a conventional tail) if done right. For stable-ish Canards: Put the CoG somewhere between half and one wing chord's worth AHEAD of the leading edge. Yes, a stable canard should have the CoG actually outside the wing chord section. Stability results from having enough wing area on the rear that the center of drag is placed well back, whilst ensuring the center of lift remains aligned with the CoG - That makes the nose pull towards straight if you trim it right and let go of the stick. It's tricky sometimes to get this right, and takes some fiddling, but once you get it stable enough so you can fly it, it's lift/drag ratio gets you the best bang for your buck The key is to find the balance between the front fins generating enough lift (in level flight) to counter the pitch-down force caused by having the wing way behind the CoG The big challenge is to do this in such a way that when you stall, the nose still comes down before the tail does (or it'll tumble backwards all the way to crash site) Now, A pure flying wing design is the trickiest of all to get right - but that is the holy grail of aerodynamic efficiency. In KSP, you'll need to have various different wing bits along the span, and angle them just right so that the tip is swept back far enough to add a bit of downforce behind the centers of lift and mass. It's possible, but make sure you got a nice lineup of pilot volunteers for test flying as you tweak the thing until it eventually becomes controllable. BTW: If you stall out of control on a flying wing aircraft, just eject. There's usually not enough altitude anywhere between space and "splat" for it to safely recover.... Flying is really all about doing it in a controlled way - This is actually the big breakthrough that allowed the Wright Brothers (of Earth, some obscure backwater planet in the less developed parts of the galaxy) to first achieve powered flight. Fact is: Anything going fast enough can achieve flight. It's being able to decide how it comes back down that makes it an aircraft. Furthermore, being able to do it a second time makes it a pretty good aircraft.

No worries mate, I guess you weren't around back in the day, but we had a whole forum section dedicated to this very kind of play. Alas, it gradually devolved into ppl being very nasty towards each other over assorted petty nonsense bickering items. All of which of course, must have seemed immensely important to them at the time. Eventually the only solution was deem the place "unfit for human habitation", then bring the whole house down and burn whatever was left upon the lot.... Long story short: This is why we can't have nice things around here.... Yet as a positive side effect: The whole trend was actually one of the things that inspired me to start developing MotorWings; That and various other observations had me notice a strong player inclination towards a build-your-own-airplane environment where this kind of "closer to home" experience might arise. I also found myself seriously wanting to play this theoretical would-be game, though I'd have to make it myself first. Long story short: I'm now working on this project that's basically a KSP style game in a post-apocalyptic-like fantasy setting with an open-world 4X mechanic. I call it MotorWings, and sometimes describe it simply as: KSP + Crimson Skies. It's only just been started, but you can already make planes and fly them around; But sooner or later, there shall be a place where a not so outwordly build-your-own experience can be enjoyed without as much need to make up and enforce (then fight over) one's own rules - Though nothing stops that if one really desires it. My best-case-scenario for it would be to somehow integrate the whole flying gameplay (the stuff you can do with the plane you built) into a vast MMO Elite-Like experience. Though that would require far more money than I currently have... Maybe you know some rich person who could be interested? *wink wink, nudge nudge* Oh well, enough tooting my own old horn, anyways: This was just one of the things that resulted from: The Curious Case of the RP Boards and Why We Don't Have Them Anymore.

The Probe! Hail! Aye, All Hail The Probe! https://www.orbiterwiki.org/wiki/Probe It's an Orbiter meme, predating KSP by almost a decade, I think. Anyways, IIRC, long ere the first Kerbal blasted heavenwards, the ancient thusly spake: First, there was nothing, then there was The Probe! And aye! It was hailed! For all shall hail the Almighty Probe! And thus it was, and is, and ever more eternal lasting, there shall forever be The Probe! And forsooth, thence too it must be hailed! For the Mighty Probe needs not have come nor must it one day go. The Probe simply is. Thus by, The Probe we hail for all epochs of it's infallible orbit. Hail The Probe!

Yes, I do believe that especially since the Great 2017 Extinction Event when most of the original crew went their own separate ways, I just might be now the most ancient of all active forum users. My user ID is really 9, as can be seen on the link preview when you hover my avatar. This means there are only 8 people who could possibly have joined before I did, one of these is my brother (HarversteR, you know him, made the game and all...) - He hasn't been around here ever since "That Day" I don't think. Though his account is probably still active, it is safe to consider him a generally inactive forum user for all practical purposes... I wouldn't put it past him to pop up right now just to prove me wrong, then laugh profusely about it when asked... Twin brothers have weird internal jokes like that. As for the remaining seven, I have really not a clue whom they are. Some may have been test accounts from when the forum was put up. Sounds kinda cool, doesn't it? Having a mysterious Seven Elders who may or may not have ever existed or just might be out there still, somewhere... That's some Zelda storyline material right there, eh! Anyways, unless someone even more ancient comes along, I'm gonna assume I'm the old man in the house and (despite being 35) will continue to dispense grumpy old man memes whenever the occasion seems fit. This is one such occasion, I think.

Python doesn't count - that stuff with the tabs and no braces is really just, weird.... Maybe I'm old-school, but I can't do away with being able to freely indent my code - I like to have my identifiers line up vertically so I can do the "alt+select, then type in multiple lines at the same time" trick whenever possible... My favourite language is C++, I really like how it never sacrifices flexibility in exchange for features designed to allow programmers to do their jobs poorly *cough* Java *cough* But, these days, it is kinda on the aged side of the hill, lacking several beloved convenience features found in newer languages like C# (despite it's exceedingly verbose roundabout awkwardness in comparison with C++) Anyways, Unity uses C#, so that's what I use now. It's pretty decent to work with, although I sometimes miss being able to typedef myself a function pointer here and there...

Actually, once you learn your first programming language, most others come on quite easily... Quite enough so that learning another programming language in a single day is really not that uncommon. Some languages however are indeed alien enough that they require a lot more effort to wrap one's brains around... C++ is one that makes sense only after one has become familiar with C. Anyways - learning programming is really not a finite event as much as it is a way of life. One does not ever "finish" learning that kinda stuff - Even with decades of experience, every now and then you see something that makes you go "what da?..." and then you look it up, thus learning another new thing that you hadn't thought of trying or perhaps never needed to until just then... One does not ever really "learn how to program" - I always say. One can only "learn how to learn to program"

Can SuperMan even catch such bugs? I mean, he's technically not really "human". Also, he's an illegal immigrant, as far as those things go.... I mean, dogs for instance can't catch most human diseases. And that's simply for them being dogs, not even super or anything... I reckon a far superior creature from another planet who just so happens to look exactly like a human being (albeit one who wears his underpants atop his trousers) wouldn't be subject to puny human maladies. In any case, SuperMan is totally not helping out with the pandemic - Like, what the hell, Kent, It's not like it's Kryptonite or anything...

Curiously enough, none of our resident sci-fi geeks has so far mentioned the book by George R. R. Martin that shares a title with this thread. Oh wait, exactly this has now just happened... This post thus invalidates its own original observation - Good thing the Arrow of Time™ points only in the way where cause has to come before effect, or this post could self-annihilate in an infinitely looping puff of retro-recursive logical anti-vomit. That would most likely cause the universe to stop and throw an exception out the window (possibly hitting one of the other universes mentioned in the video) Anyways, GRRMs "Dying of the light" does feature a bunch of folks coping with a planet that's rapidly losing sunlight and will soon no longer support life During which time his main character deals with some unresolved girlfriend issues that he manages to have escalate to a death-chase type situation on heavily armed flying cars.... It's really quite a nice read. I do recommend! It very much predates the author's best known work, you know: The one with the dragons chick, where various main characters get casually slaughtered by sadistically random plot twists... Anyways - As to the OP, the main lesson here clearly is: be careful when you take the sole copy of the summed knowledge for all mankind with you on a boating trip. An unknown number of future civilizations can be saved thus, by simply observing safe stowage of personal objects while aboard.

The most Kerbal thing to do in such a case: Scatter a bunch of M&M's in the cabin and watch where they drift; There's your hole! Then find a bottle that looks not too important, and plug the hole with the cork. There! I fixed it! Who said rocket science was hard? *munch munch* ...do we have any more M&M's? *munch*

So, that's where Alec Trevelian went "splat" after our little showdown up there Couldn't see the ground with all that 64-bit fog... And I was in a bit of a hurry too, gotta get him in 2:30 mins for the Gold PP7 Since it's a radio telescope, the hole in the dish by itself shouldn't really be too much trouble to repair (it's not like an optical's super-fine mirror) -- though that gash on the dome thingy looks like it's gonna be a pain in the ass to put back in order....