Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I think all of us here love hacker movies. Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish, etc. :)
I absolutely hated watching Mr. Robot. Gave up after 4 episodes.
Any reasons why?
Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
211–220 of 344 posts
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I think all of us here love hacker movies. Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish, etc. :)
A real hacking movie would be deathly boring. My favorite hacking in movies is either when it's cheesed up to the max (visually interesting) or happens off screen (more realistic).
I love the 10 minute or so montage in wargames where David just goes to libraries to do basic honest research on falken, in order to figure out what his password is. Of course, he should have tried Joshua like a week before he actually did, but you can't have everything.
And that's not counting knowing where the school password post-it note is kept, and getting yourself sent to the principal on a regular basis so you can keep looking it up.
Or just letting your computer run for an entire day to determine which phone numbers in a given set of area codes have modems on the other end.
Wargames does take a few shortcuts for storytelling, and it is a bit silly in the best possible way, but the actual hacking is genuinely good, and not boring.
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#213Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#214KSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them. Side effects of playing KSP include: - getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics - finding yourself reading up on actual math to better u…
I thought the martian was praised for generally being pretty on the money with the science content?
KSP taught me that orbital intercept to rescue Watney was nosense. (The book was slightly more believable here). also the whole swing by Earth and head back at the last minute was wrong. Orbital intercepts between planets requires very precise timing and alignment. A transfer from Mars to Earth is never going to line up with an instant return transfer window back to Mars.
On KSP itself, huge weakness for me in the game is that it is virtually unplayable stock. Absolute minimum you need to install a data providing mod like Kerbal Engineer Redux for both building rockets to quickly assess dVs and TWRs etc and in flight to help with figuring out burns etc. In stock you are reduced to having to use spreadsheets to build rockets and trying to land from visual clues only. The stock game badly needs something like KER. KAC is also helpful to quickly find transfer windows etc.
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
That and the ships having to flip to slow down burn makes the expanse one of the more realistic portrayals of space flight (minus the epstein drive which is basically magic) in modern tv. Also, they show decompression way more realistically. Its not like a bomb goes off when a hole opens up in the side of the ship, which is nice.
Burn-flip-burn is nice. It'd be nice to see them performing realistic burns to alter orbits, but that might be too much to ask for. >minus the epstein drive which is basically magic It's canonically a fusion rocket, isn't it? So beyond today's means, but hardly "magic".
It's a lot better than people think fusion rockets would be in real life. But the writers actually acknowledged that, in the episode that goes into the drive's history. They had fusion rockets before Epstein, they just weren't near as good before the breakthrough.
And most of the story wouldn't even change if it took longer to go places. The only difference would be that they couldn't show normal gravity inside a spaceship and attribute it to acceleration. It's a slight distortion that saves them money on special effects.
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics Meh. I've a degree in Physics and I still enjoy Star Trek. I agree with the rest.
And I think all of us here love hacker movies. Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish, etc. :)
Oh grief, Swordfish is laugh out loud hilarious. I cannot for the life of me think of a movie that tries so hard to be one of the cool kids.
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interstellar had really bad orbital mechanics. You remember when they used the staged rocket to get off earth? Do you remember later, when they landed on that other planet with 1.5 times the mass of earth? Do you remember the machine that they used to leave that planet?
It's unspoken, but I assume the staged rocket was used to conserve the antimatter the ship was carrying for its rocket-less launches. I wouldn't be surprised if that's in the script somewhere but ended up on the cutting room floor.
Except if the antimatter engines were so reliable, why risk blowing up your last hope to conserve the obvious surplus of antimatter you had for the mission anyway?
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#218I sometimes get the feeling that this is the only game HN plays. When people talk about not being able to switch away from Windows due to games, it seems like someone always responds, "Well Kerbal Space Program runs on Linux and that's all I care about." I don't think I've ever seen articles similar to this one about other games gain as much traction. Can't think of very many articles about games getting to the top o…
Well, KSP and Dwarf Fortress.
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the cloud was orbiting at the same speed, but a different axis, wouldn't the collision be as depicted?
It wouldn't come back to collide with the protagonist every 90 minutes then.
Yeah, it'd be every 180 minutes. There'd be two orbits, the circular 90 minute orbit of the ISS and an elliptical, 180 minute debris orbit that has a common perigee with the ISS but a farther out apogee. The debris would thus be moving faster at perigee and would be able to wreak havoc every second orbit of the ISS. Of course the chance of such coincidental orbits happening by accident would be insanely low; you'd need some explanation as to why the object that blew up was in that kind of orbit in the first place.
Actually ... if you imagine two debris fields spaced opposite in the elliptical orbit, or simply a debris ring, then you would have the devastation occurring every 90 minutes. It's even less likely trying to think of how this could happen accidentally, but you could certainly set up a situation like this intentionally.
Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interstellar had really bad orbital mechanics. You remember when they used the staged rocket to get off earth? Do you remember later, when they landed on that other planet with 1.5 times the mass of earth? Do you remember the machine that they used to leave that planet?
It's unspoken, but I assume the staged rocket was used to conserve the antimatter the ship was carrying for its rocket-less launches. I wouldn't be surprised if that's in the script somewhere but ended up on the cutting room floor.
I think you're giving them too much credit. Happy that it didn't "unsuspend disbelief" for you, but it's too easy to make creative excuses for movie fridge logic.