Bay 12 Games Forum

Might want to save your iron, stick with clay buckets for a bit - they work perfectly fine unless you're moving lava around often. And on a related note: Shears are an amazing investment. You can compost leaves and get just as much from them as a sapling. One set of shears gets you several stacks.

Heh, I'm pretty sure I can rely on a lack of dickishness anyway. MFFS was actually one idea I had, but in a slightly different way - those force fields can be set to build things as well, making self-repairing bases possible. Also thought about making the age into a sort of 'capture the points' type thing, with a number of MFR laser drills scattered about and powered with Creative energy cells.

Frankly, the real question is, "How do I make it fun for people to blow each other up repeatedly". It's just that limiting the consequences of being blown up is the most obvious answer.

Quote from: Girlinhat on July 21, 2014, 10:49:33 am

At the same time, orbital mechanics and things are WAY beyond a lot of people.

Maybe, but not at the basic level that you need to do things in KSP. Stuff like "Burn prograde/retrograde to raise/lower your orbit" is easy enough to get.
The complicated things like calculating perfect transfer orbits is of course way beyond that, but you don't actually need to know that to play KSP. If you want you can just throw more Δv at the problem and do it less efficiently.

Man, KSP is being used in schools to teach orbital mechanics to kids. Like, lower school kids. Kids who don't even know what the branches of mathematics involved are called! KSP falls into the classification which is best for teaching in fact: Easy to learn, incredibly difficult to master.

The wall that keeps people out is the initial learning period - the point where they realize they don't know how to progress, and the game isn't going to go out of it's way to explain it to them, they need to find something external. ...I really have no idea if that's a good or bad thing though to be frank. It's great for those curious enough to go looking. It encourages and reinforces learning. But it does mean a lot of people get frustrated and drop it entirely instead.

Yeah, yesterday I tried adding probe controls and parachutes to all of my discarded stages. It didn't work since they simply disappear as soon as I look at the map, I'm not sure why. But it saddens me, because I'm losing a lot of money in discarded staging...

Scott Manley did a video explaining this - short version, if something is unloaded (ie, 2.5km away from the active ship) and under a certain altitude in the atmosphere, the game deletes it, regardless of whether or not it should have survived. There's already a mod to fix it though - check out DebRefund, it autorecovers stuff when it would otherwise be scuttled, based on parachutes active on it. (technically based on drag, but close enough)

How on earth Kerbal do you get solid rocket stages big enough to get you up to orbit alt before switching to the liquid rockets?

Ok, that's one problem there already: Solid rocket boosters are horribly inefficient. They provide a lot of thrust in a short period of time so they're decent for getting off the ground, but getting all the way to orbit on nothing but them is going to be a pain unless you really really know all the quirks of the physics engine... Or use like 4 stages of ridiculous numbers of them I guess.

For getting started, here's what I suggest: (Begin: DRAGNAR'S GUIDE TO GETTING A ROCKET TO ORBIT IN LIKE THE SLOPPIEST WAY EVER.)
1. Start with a core of a capsule, some science instruments, and a small fuel tank+engine on the end of that. (The stumpy little one with 390 ISP in vacuum. Can't recall it's name, but there's not many engines to check!)
2. After a decoupler from what you built in step 1, add two of the tallest liquid fuel tanks you have, and stick the most powerful engine you have on the bottom of that.
3. At this point, you've got a tall thin rocket in two stages. Next, slap on some radial decouplers and solid rocket boosters around that second stage. You should be able to get some basic radial ones with just near-kerbin science, but they can probably be done without anyway. This stage won't reach orbit. Heck, an SRB with nothing attached won't reach orbit, so one stage of them can't do it no matter what you do.

That three stage rocket will almost certainly get to orbit. Heck I usually use a somewhat modified version of that basic setup (replacing the SRBs with an asparagus) for early mun/minmus science trips. But you'll need to do it right - you can't just burn straight up, then turn the rocket over once you've reached 70k. Instead, you slowly start tilting the rocket east at 10k - try for being at about a 45 degree angle once you've hit 40k. Once the map says your max height has reached 80k or so, stop burning til you're closer to that height - then point prograde and throttle up til you're in orbit.

The MAIN issue with all this that Sealy was addressing is that you can't have 'premium players', or anything like that. Which, yes, you can easily paint as evil - but they're what run a lot of servers. I know a pretty large number at least have things like limits on how much land you can apply grief-protection plugins to, or how much you can chunk-load at once. You know, things which - in greater amounts - put greater strain on the server. You can play fine without them, but having them is nice for more dedicated players. This isn't "10 bucks to access the nether", it's "10 bucks to use up enough extra memory on our server that we need your 10 bucks".

Most servers will be fine, yeah. But minecraft servers benefit from a large player base. Thus, they benefit from allowing people to play for free, because it enhances the experience of the paying players. This removes their ability to actually encourage paying in any gameplay-significant way, even IF the core experience is left alone. Will this shut down tons of servers and spell the end of minecraft or something like that? No, of course not. But it is banning something that a lot of very good servers need to cover their operating costs at the standard of service they currently provide.

...Ok, so, the argument is mostly over already, but I'm bringing it back up because nobody ever linked any real evidence: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/12/future-spaceships-should-be-bu.html

tl;dr: Orbital construction isn't only realistic, it's extremely practical and people do it all the time in KSP even without orbital launchpads. If you have ever sent anything up in multiple pieces and docked them together, because you just can't lift it all at once/it would collapse otherwise? Yeah, that's the benefit, it's just not quite so easy to join ships together like that in reality.

Ah, the joys of trying to look up something you don't know the name of...

I'm working on a simple(ish) Javascript page for class, and need to set up a pair of, er. Selection boxes? Two side-by-side boxes full of options and a pair of buttons with arrows on them that move the selected option from one side to the other. I can't imagine this is anything too complex or anything, but I have no idea what that sort of interface is even called to look it up.

Also if anyone knows a clean way to load variables from PHP into javascript that would be nice. I've figured out a way to do it, but it's rather inelegant.