pincushionman

I can see the benefit of both approaches. if you use large max time steps, you guarantee that calculations can finish in the alotted time, so no nominal slowdown. At the expense of accuracy. The calculations usually don't care what the time step is, they take the same time to complete either way. If you use small max steps, you favor accuracy, at the risk of running in slow motion. This has advantages because mathematical models are only good as long as certain results remain within acceptable bounds. Large time steps risks large displacements, that is situations where the physics is modeled by simple rules but the results leave the system in a configuration where other, more complicated forces would (in reality) come into play to stabilize it. Non-linear response can be especially bad here, if implemented poorly. So you end up in configurations with excessive internal forces, which overreact on the system, so the NEXT frame is also out of bounds, which overreacts (or the opposite, where it doesn't react enough and the next frame is still out of bounds) and… …and it snowballs and the Kraken eats your ship. A small time step causes the next calculation to occur while the results are still in the expected range, hopefully before things get out of control. It'll run more slowly, but hopefully with less world-destroying bad. It's also why you're warned to avoid high physics timewarp - that forces the game to use larger time steps, not just do it when it has to.

If you're in a circular orbit, your vertical (radial) speed is zero, and will stay zero. It is under continuous acceleration, but the result if that acceleration is a constantly-changing direction, but no change in speed. I'm not sure what quanity you're looking at to compare the "falling speeds"; looking at altitude won't help because that won't change for the circular orbit. Comparing the Cartesian coordinates in the falling direction won't be helpful either, because the acceleration vector changes at the same rate as the velocity vector.

No. KSP uses a patched-conics two-body approximation of gravity, and these low-energy transers require the influence of additional massive bodies to affect the gravitational field itself. It's the same phenomenon that creates Lagrange points. Like @regex said, the Principia mod intends to incorporate an "N-body" Newtonian gravitational model to replace the Keplerian one we've got.

Holy necro (kinda)! But I did glance at @Fr8monkey's profile and saw a good bit of activity over the past couple of months, so I think it's safe to assume he made it okay.

I believe what some of the above posters are referring to about Jool "not having a surface" is about Jool and the Sun being different types of object (in game engine terms) than the rocky bodies. Probably much simpler, since it doesn't need to support any kind of surface data at all. The justification is probably that you're not intended to ever get to the surfaces, so why bother? Save some system resources. With the Sun you'll definitely burn up long before you get anywhere close; not so sure about Jool. @Snark, did the probe-dropping experience you speak of happen pre- or post-1.0? As such, it's not as simple as "add a surface" to Jool; it'd either require changing big J to use the rocky-bodies object, or extending the biome code to include this other planet type. That said, I'd sure support adding this.

If you start the plane facing west, you can roll down the ramp and hop the rails onto the grass. It isn't easy, but it can be useful early in Career when you've forgotten to upgrade your facilities in the right order

I like the fact that we even have the "what is missing" discussions the OP pointed out, as silly as that sounds. It shows that we're still excited about the game, and want it to be better, instead of just good. After all, if all these features were really showstoppers by their absence…we'd all be playing something else, right?

I'll be sticking with my 6-year-old AMD Phenom II 955 / GeForce 9800 GTX setup, which wasn't exactly top-of-the-line even when I built it. I haven't had any KSP problems (though I haven't ever built any huge monsters). Or for that matter, any other games I actually play. Thought about upgrading last year, but bought a laptop instead. Don't use it that much, but it was probably the better choice for me. I might do some computer builds with my sons in a couple of years, and I'll just wait for any upgrades until then, unless components (other than fans) start breaking.

As a matter of fact, Unity has full support for Unicode out-of-the-box. So if the U5 UI overhaul isn't including work to make sure this is taken advantage of…tsk tsk.

I thought I remembered seeing in a devnotes there was work going on for localizations, but I can't remember whether it was an official statement or not. Either way, we should be demanding full Unicode support. I suspect it's one of those situations where going whole hog would end up being less work than trying to half-*** it.

Truly aerobatic craft have the neutral center of lift (or whatever it actually is in real life) as far forward as you can get it without losing control (some planes like the F-16 are actually longitudinally unstable for this exact purpose). Ideally, use a single fuel tank centered as close to the center of mass as you can get it so it won't vary through the flight, and nail that CoL marker right on top of it, too. Then give yourself loads of pitch authority. But Snark is right - a picture is worth a thousand words.

The RoveMate is a big pain in the butt when it comes to that. I feel your pain.

I don't recall ever seeing that warning before. Also, what do you mean by "navball is polar"? Unfortunately we can't help much unless you post a few pics so we can see what problem you're having. Make sure you include a closeup on the core(s) you're using and a shot of when you go to the launchpad so we can see the navball symptoms. You say you're not using MechJeb, but are you using any other mods? Oh, and welcome to the forums! You'll be glad you came.

Why? Just to admire them? The ability to build and modify your ships is an integral part of the game.

Just throwing this into the ring - it's also on GOG and…Amazon, I think? The real answer might be whether it's on discount any of these places when you intend to buy, if you care about that. It's totally worth full price.

You're not going to be using transfer orbits of any kind in interstellar travel. While the forces underlying the system are the same, the galactic environment is far different from a star system. One is a collection of small discrete point sources of mass dominated by a large central body. The other is a more or less continuous distribution of mass (in the large scale) from the center to far beyond the visible edge. As a result, stars don't "orbit" the galactic center in clearly-defined Keplerian ellipses, and the speeds of individual stars don't vary very much, especially between bodies that are close together. Instead, you end up with families of stars coursing through space at pretty much the same velocity (speed and direction). Plus, any "small" differences wll be dwarfed by the enormous speeds you'd need to attain to make these journeys in any kind of "reasonable" time frame, or even to escape from your first star.

Hedgehogs FTW! …seriously, though, I haven't had one of those, or a rabbit, in years. I've got a dog and a cat.

From what I understand, the temperature reduction (throughout the engine, not just the incoming air) allows increased RPM and works for both piston and jets. But on turbojets and low-bypass-ratio turbofans, you also increase the mass flow rate, which is a key variable in the thrust equation.

Water injection has been used in the past to increase jet engine thrust. A good example is getting early BUFFs off the ground. But there are serious drawbacks in weight and efficiency for doing it.

Threads like this have been locked before...but Vanamonde has obviously seen it and he hasn't locked this one yet ('less somebody spoofin' his account)...so I guess I don't know what to think. However, I certainly can't identify any regular users as male or female. 'Course, I ain't been lookin', neither.

@Slabgizor117, if I insulted your intelligence in my post, I apologize for that. It wasn't my intent to do so. But hear me out on this. I don't know you from Adam. I don't know if you have any experience with firearms, or how much exposure you might have had with them at home. How smart you are doesn't matter; A great many gun injuries are accidents (I'd say most, probably, but I wasn't able to tell from the information I could easily find, so let's just stick with "many"). Accidents aren't caused by dumb people; they're caused by people who make mistakes. Smart people are as prone to this as anybody else. I'm not so naive to believe that if you misuse a firearm, it's a sure sign that somebody is going to be injured or killed. Lots of different things get misused every day and nobody gets hurt because of it. But by not misusing something, you eliminate, as much as you can, any risk of accident-due-to-misuse. In the United States - where I am posting from (I don't know where you are) - there is controversy about guns. Whether your position is for or against, somebody is going to take issue with it. Especially if said position implies, rightly or wrongly, a lack of respect for safety. "Plays with" does this, to the general public. This forum is not dedicated to gun enthusiasts or experts. Now, that last part's the real rub here. We may not be dedicated to guns here, but our pages and threads are viewable by the public. We even show up in Google results. That means anybody and their mother could accidentally stumble on this thread - including kids who may not know better. Vanishlingly unlikely, but I know I would be heartbroken if it turns out some kid stumbled on our conversation here, saw smart people talking about playing with guns like it was no big thing, got the wrong idea, and somebody ended up getting hurt because nobody took the time to stress the seriousness of this. The posts above between Camcha and GoSlash27 is kinda similar - we don't want to be giving out bogus legal advice either. The [dadmode] I inserted isn't entirely a joke - the thought of my sons finding bad information on the internet and then doing something totally stupid because they didn't check up on it first frankly scares the pants off of me. I really am concerned about anyone - you, me, random joe on his web broser - getting the wrong idea about this simply because of how the conversation went. So again, I'm sorry for any insult implied by my post. But I hope you can understand were I'm coming from, and why I posted what I did. We cool now?

It does, very much. All your navball stuff will be 180 degrees out of whack, and you can't point relative to a maneuver marker you can't see.

Hell yes.

Yup. Where do you think we got it from? Hint: a great many of the rather odd terms thrown about here (such as "lawn dart" and "lithobrake") came here because many users brought the jargon from the real-world fields with them.

I personally just window 1600x900 on my 1080p monitor. I actually don't mind that it isn't maximized.