@austin_walker I urge you to check out the prequels again. If there's one thing they do well, it's complicate the what you state as an absolute truth of the SW universe: That Light side is inherently good and Dark side evil. In fact, I think even the end of ROTJ does this, when Luke rejects what Yoda and Obi-Wan tell him, that he must kill Vader to become a Jedi. The prequels depict a failing Jedi Order which has become complicit in oppression. I suspect/hope that this new trilogy will "destabilize" that false Light/Dark dichotomy further.
It's also more than a little petty to paint everyone who critiques Rey's character as an angry man-child. Yeah, there are a lot of angry nerds out there, but I've also seen plenty of people say "Yeah, she's a Mary Sue, but so what?" Her character works in the mythical framework of the story because we already KNOW who she is, and her unexplained prowess with the Force will surely be explained in the next film.
Last point: rather than destabilize Star Wars' mythic framework, I think this film further cements it. Have you read the Ring reading? I highly recommend it.
+1. Jedi == good and Sith == evil is the mantra of the old order, but at least for me is not the message of the story itself. Sadly it does seem like Lucas kind of forgot about the important thing being the "balance of the force" when writing certain parts (arguably could attribute this to the story largely following "the good guys"), but I agree that overall the theme is present in all the movies that neither monochromatic view is the "correct" one. I would presume that Luke came to this conclusion and that it is the reason for his exile, and hope they delve into it in the next film.
I only hope that Rey is not related to Luke somehow which is a fan theory that gets thrown around a lot. It would beggar belief a little too much. There were tons of Jedi before Skywalker so it's not like every force prodigy has to be related to him.
The new Nintendo will have a higher resolution screen on the gamepad with a detachable headset-mount so that you can just hang the gamepad in front of your face and fuck yeah MaVRio Maker!!!
@quantris: I think the surprise is mainly a "how are they expecting to sell this to the average gamer?" sort of surprise. Anyone that is saying "oh yah $600 for an additional gaming peripheral, sounds about right" are the outliers in this situation. I agree that considering what the tech can do I bet that price is pretty good when you look over manufacturing costs, but in order to sell it to a broad gaming audience? Six hundred dollars on top of a good gaming PC just to play the first wave of experimental VR games? That price is pretty surprising.
I guess I never imagined that that was what they're expecting to do out of the gate (obviously if they could they would, but realistically speaking...). I mean, this is an experimental device that started life on Kickstarter. IOW I don't think this needs to be bought by the average gamer to be considered a successful launch.
That said, I totally understand if prior to this announcement you'd been expecting an "average gamer" kind of price, that you'd be pretty disappointed today. And similarly, comparing to the hypothetical situation where this thing costs ~$300 or wouldn't require me to upgrade my ancient CPU to use, I fully agree that the reality kind of sucks. Someone (Austin on twitter?) made a good point that the PR side of things might have seriously misled some people (IMHO not maliciously, but we are where we are). Personally I'm probably just enough outside the PR-loop to have been majorly affected by that.
I love this feature, and I don't want to be one of those backseat people, but Vinny keeps burning retrograde at his periapsis to degrade his orbit and burning prograde at his apoapsis to extend it and it's tearing me apart. That's the least efficient way to do both of those things!
Am I just missing something, or is this justified?
From a near-circular orbit the efficiency difference is not too important IIRC. And if the goal is to move the apoapsis down, retrograde at periapsis is the right thing (e.g. when circularizing an orbit). Whether that's worth doing in the first place is another question though. Timestamp for what you're talking about?
You probably got to that part already, but the thing that happens before-around 30 minutes-ish, with the monopropellant... is just excruciating if you have any experience or knowledge at all about orbital mechanics...
Yup, just watched it. Certainly that was pretty much the opposite of what should have happened :) Though that whole run was kinda screwed up from the beginning (orbit lopsided in the wrong way for Mun intercept, even a bit tilted if I'm seeing it right). Even ignoring that, he could have at least used up the remaining fuel + OX before jettisoning it and using mono.
I love this feature, and I don't want to be one of those backseat people, but Vinny keeps burning retrograde at his periapsis to degrade his orbit and burning prograde at his apoapsis to extend it and it's tearing me apart. That's the least efficient way to do both of those things!
Am I just missing something, or is this justified?
From a near-circular orbit the efficiency difference is not too important IIRC. And if the goal is to move the apoapsis down, retrograde at periapsis is the right thing (e.g. when circularizing an orbit). Whether that's worth doing in the first place is another question though. Timestamp for what you're talking about?
Guys there is something critical you aren't really understanding. Your ship's weight is MEANINGLESS once you have left the atmosphere. Weight only exists when gravity is acting on your ship. You are using asparagus staging, which allows you to drop weight by getting rid of fuel tanks once they are empty. But you aren't using the asparagus rockets until you have already left kerbin's gravity.
Do asparagus staging on the very first rockets you use when lifting off. You should be able to get into orbit by using less fuel.
Loving this feature though!
They still have mass though. And more mass means it is harder to accelerate. Right?
Yes, this is correct. A less massive craft requires less impulse (less fuel) to achieve the same delta-v (e.g. a given orbital maneuver).
The point in the original comment is somewhat meaningful though; shedding weight while closer to planet has a larger effect because of the more significant gravitational force (noting also that even while in orbit, the craft is very much subject to Kerbin's gravity; it's just not trying to fight it anymore).
Haven't watched this part yet, but so far they've been using solid boosters to reach orbit. You can't asparagus stage those, and it's not like they'd end up with more fuel by getting rid of them. At some point they will probably end up adding larger / more liquid fuel tanks (in order to achieve the goal of flying to Mun *and* back), and eventually the craft could become heavy enough that solid fuel isn't quite enough to break atmosphere (just spitballing -- I'm not experienced enough with Kerbal & what parts are available to know this will definitely happen).
They could probably significantly reduce the fuel usage for the "widening the orbit" part of the flight by 1) angling the craft better during the booster stage, 2) starting the horizontal burn closer to apoapsis (which is where the existing velocity is entirely horizontal), and 3) shedding asparagus-staged tanks ASAP (there should be some way to display the fuel levels of each tank as Vinny has mentioned before). For point #3 theoretically having the same amount of fuel distributed among smaller tanks is more efficient (assuming the overall weight would be the same) but I believe there are probably significantly diminishing returns going past 6 sections.
It's also possible that there are simply more efficient (in terms of weight or fuel) parts available in the editor.
PS I think this series is best if @vinny and friends figure as much as possible out on their own. But I would love for one of the team to deep-dive into the science (e.g. reading stuff like http://www.freemars.org/jeff/speed/) and drop some knowledge bombs during the broadcast. Maybe even a brief "blackboard" segment (maybe even better if the actual gameplay is *not* informed by this knowledge, and it's more like a "what went wrong" kind of thing).
Wow, lots of disagree-ers (which is fine) crossing over into complainers (IMHO not cool, and getting old). Some seem to be ascribing a little too much meaning into what this list is (to be fair, GB leaves it somewhat ill-defined). Literally the only way this list could be wrong is if somehow what's in the article was different from what was agreed upon at the conclusion of the deliberations. It was cool to see Kerbal getting so much support!
But in case you don't know, generally you'll want to heat up the water (kettle) separately before introducing tea (teapot). Not to mention using a microwave makes it hard to get an appropriate temperature for the water. However, I'm guessing you might not care about either of those compared to the time saved by doing everything in one step. For the record, I'm pretty weird about my tea as I prefer to have black tea cooled to room temp (meaning I just leave it out 30-45 mins before drinking it).
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