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Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

kerbalspaceprogram.com

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Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#241

Post by kbenson »

waiseristy wrote: post #156
ouid wrote: post #145

Earlier 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?

Remember when he let go of the spacecraft and fell into the black hole?

I don't recall the exact scene, but wouldn't the different relative centers of mass, and the corresponding difference in distance from the black hole cause some drift. I assume it would be slow. Possibly VERY slow, so it likely wouldn't look like falling, but I think they would separate, right?

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#242

Post by j9461701 »

kbenson wrote: post #117
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game also has a horrible habit of turning people into arrogant know-it-all armchair rocket scientists. > no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics Oh boy, this again. Are you not able to watch movies with guns because Rainbow Six taught you how guns work and now you're just too woke to suspend disbelief? Something about this game…

There is a line to be walked. Having a gun that never runs out of bullets doesn't fly in most movies, even if they'll fudge exactly how many are fired before a reload. This is due to the general public's level of knowledge on the topic. It used to be very annoying to watch certain parts of movies when I was younger. Computers and the internet were treated so haphazardly, it was cause for celebration whenever a contem…

With guns, it has already been shifted in a harmful direction.

Suppressors are safety equipment, not badass silencers that let assassins shoot in near total quiet. But because the public only knows the movies, if you want to get a suppressor for your gun you need to pay 200 dollars. Imagine if we made it so you had to pay money to buy a muffler for your car, because Hollywood kept having cars with mufflers running dead quiet.

Or another one is bullet lethality. Handgun bullets make tiny holes in things without a lot of punch, so there is virtually no chance a single bullet from a pistol is going to knock a bad guy down. Maybe if you get very lucky and nail him in the precise right spot in the spine or brain, but otherwise he's still going to be alive and fighting for minutes or even hours. The police aren't putting 15 rounds into a suspect because they're dicks (well, they might be dicks I dunno) but because handgun bullets aren't very good at stopping people. You can only rely on volume of fire and hope you get a good shot to the central nervous system. Heck, even if you annihilate someone's heart the guy's still got about 10 seconds (called the 'dead man's ten') of useful oxygenated blood to work with before he's incapacitated - more then enough time for him to raise his gun and take you with him.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#243

Post by labster »

CydeWeys wrote: post #224
geekpowa wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ga…

> A transfer from Mars to Earth is never going to line up with an instant return transfer window back to Mars. The whole point of the Hermes spacecraft as used in The Martian, though, is that it has a high specific impulse, low thrust ion drive, that runs continually during the entire orbit (using power from a reactor to do so). Andy Weir, the author, is a programmer, and he actually wrote a physics simulator to calc…

Well, if you read his webcomic Casey and Andy, Andy Weir is also a soft science fiction nerd. The box of antimatter never blows up until a solid object goes in, cause that's totes how matter annihilation works.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#244

Post by j9461701 »

mdavidn wrote: post #209
Orangeair wrote: post #206

I 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…

Agreed. I'm surprised Factorio hasn't surfaced more frequently on HN. The game's automation play is just as addictive and creative, and it runs on Mac and Linux.

The people who have found Factorio have yet to come back from playing Factorio. Their children miss them.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#245

Post by TeMPOraL »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #108
TeMPOraL wrote: post #52

KSP 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…

> 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.

I enjoy Star Trek too, but mostly thanks to growing up with it. It's what got me interested in science and technology in the first place. I also very much enjoy the story and the message of TNG and later Trek series. It's the future I'd love to happen.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#246

Post by TeMPOraL »

aqme28 wrote: post #195
bigdubs wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the martian was praised for generally being pretty on the money with the science content?

It has a couple problems. Like a windstorm that can tip their spacecraft and knocks a radar dish into the protagonist. But later, the atmosphere is so thin he doesn't need a nose on his rocket. Also there's no way you can grow that many potatoes on mars with a solar array that size.

> Like a windstorm that can tip their spacecraft and knocks a radar dish into the protagonist.

This is literally one of the two cases in which Andy explicitly said he used artistic license and departed from realism. The other one being super-efficient radiation shielding on Hermes which he didn't in any way explain in the book.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#247

Post by celticninja »

philsnow wrote: post #164
J5892 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I think all of us here love hacker movies. Sneakers, Hackers, Swordfish, etc. :)

In what way was swordfish like Sneakers/Hackers? The latter are cyberpunk-ish, a bit ideological. Swordfish is more of a "caper" movie with a cheap tacked-on hacking bit. Bad guy wants money, uses hacker and LOTS OF CRIME to get it.

Yeah those three movies are not the same when it comes to the hacking.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#248

Post by TeMPOraL »

sjburt wrote: post #198
bigdubs wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the martian was praised for generally being pretty on the money with the science content?

The Martian atmosphere is so thin that you'd be barely be able to feel hurricane-speed winds.

That was one of the two things the author used artistic license on, the other one being unrealistically good radiation shielding on Hermes. The movie took at least one other liberty with science - they explicitly decided to ignore lower martian gravity, as they would make shots much more difficult/expensive, for (in their opinion) little added value.

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#249

Post by TeMPOraL »

DennisP wrote: post #215
redthrowaway wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spa…

They especially don't show long travel times, but in the books travel is usually counted in weeks or months. Also, in the books they usually travel at ~0.3g for the sake of Martians and the Belters, who are mostly not comfortable with Earth's 1G.

(This is not merely a detail, it's one of the core plot points of The Expanse, as tolerance to gravity is what makes Martians and Belters almost a different species from Earthers; the former can not live on Earth, and so they don't care much about it.)

Re: Kerbal Space Program Acquired by Take-Two Interactive

#250

Post by palunon »

sliken wrote: post #199
ouid wrote: post #145

Earlier 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?

Mass has little do escape velocity, it's density. Consider that any planet/sun could be shrunk until it's a black hole, with effectively infinite escape velocity.

A black hole has the same escape velocity as a star of the same mass, as long as you are well outside the swarzchild radius. Inside or near it, the effect of general relativity makes things very weird.

In case of mostly anything else, Newtonian physics apply correctly, and the relevant thing is mass (and distance from the center). The escape velocity from a body is sqrt(2GM/d) where d is the distance from the center of mass, M is the mass of the object, and G is the universal gravitational constant.

Note that if the sun was replaced with a black hole of the same mass, the orbit of the earth wouldn't change.

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