Geckos aren't mammals!

It appears that Eddie, my gecko, has grown himself a moustache. He's been shedding, so today we looked, and he suddenly has a very nice shed-skin moustache.

Is that a... geckos aren't mammals... they don't have hair!

The Destroyer Turret Mk I

A few days ago I was working on my first big turret in Space Engineers. My intent was that maybe it could be used as a primary weapon on heavy space destroyers, and maybe as a secondary weapon on cruisers.

Here's a screenshot of it in the late development stage with a yellow respawn ship for scale.

Since this picture I have changed part of the barrel extension to blast door blocks so that I could fit bulletproof glass to the sides and between them. The heavy armor on the top is completely optional. I had put it there when paper sensitivity at the controls would easily smash the barrels through the roof.

Here is a more exact readout of it's capabilities and features:

Firepower: Two large ship rocket launchers, quite devastating when firing rapidly.
Rotational Characteristics: Full 360 degree horizontal turning, 0 - 45 degrees of vertical angle.
Power Requirements: A tiny fraction of a small reactor's output.
Gyroscopes: 7 total, 6 of which control horizontal rotation (may change).
Tips: Use arrow pad to rotate accurately, with a bonus of looking both realistic and cool!
Potential Modifications: Could replace side windows with armor for added protection but would have to add another pilot to call out targets from third person view.

Cockpit view. I couldn't finish the center and left glass strips because the rotor displacement stubbornly wouldn't change.

If you have any suggestions to fix it please leave them in the comments, Thank You.

Damage Test on 5x5x3 block of light armor. Further examination revealed that many of the first layer blocks had been destroyed and that the second layer had been heavily damaged.

I like Ike

Going through some files of Kerbal Space Program, probably my favorite game, I found a few screenshots of my landing on Duna's moon Ike. This had been in version 0.23.5, but nonetheless, I decided to make a post about it.

I had just gotten my Kerbals back from a flyby of Dres, and I decided that it was time to do a landing. The ship design itself was fairly simple, a more recent screenshot is below.

The SRBs (Solid Rocket Boosters) would send it up for a while then they would detach and the liquid fueled rockets would take over. They are hooked up in asparagus staging so the outer ones feed into the central tank, allowing more mass to be jettisoned sooner and increasing efficiency. I only added the RT-10 Solid Fuel Booster just below the LV-N for fun, it is completely unnecessary, it wouldn't be smart in 0.24. Up at the top is the lander with droppable fuel tanks below the side tanks. These aren't hooked up with fuel lines so I had to transfer it all manually. The lander itself, I think, is self explanatory.

The launch went perfectly. Orbit was no problem. The LV-N cowls and RT-10 separating looked super awesome. I followed my standard interplanetary handbook (the only copy is in my head) and matched apoapsis with Duna's orbit and waited to adjust when I got a close approach. I think this is the launch where I was over-aggressive with time warp and zipped through Duna's gravity in half a second, got mad, and readjusted back in. I had come in at horrible inclination and was in a polar orbit but, for once, timing was on my side. I encountered Ike on my first orbit around. My manual transfer tanks had been jettisoned when I had been fine tuning the orbit. I just had to slow myself down to land, wait with time acceleration till I was ~5000 meters above sea level, then decelerated more. I guess instead of sea level I should say something like average ground height, since Kerbin, Eve, and Laythe are the only planetary bodies that have standing liquid. Anyway, I landed at a nice 2 meters per second after nearly freaking out because the speedometer hadn't automatically changed to surface speed. Bob got out, did science, and planted a flag with a heroic plaque he copied off of an email we sent him. (Standard Kerbal thing to do.)

I took off and quickly got myself into an orbit. When Ike was aligned properly with Duna's orbit I achieved escape from Ike, and shortly Duna. Once again I used my interplanetary handbook to return to Kerbin. This time to land I used a maneuver to simply redirect my momentum towards the planet. When I was getting close I saw that I still had a lot of fuel left, much more than I had intended. I had to ditch the external fuel tanks and watch them crash. I was still thinking about where I could have cut down the parts of the rocket to increase the efficiency when I had to thrust to cushion the touchdown... Well... I kind of did, but the LV-N still exploded, and then the fuel tank just above it followed suit, another bad thing for 0.24.

The only thing Bob had to say when he was found and brought back to the space center, a few seconds later was, "I like Ike."

An exciting day in Minecraft

Earlier today I was playing survival Minecraft with my sister and a friend, and quite a few interesting things happened.

First off, we had an encounter with a witch very early in the game. We had only two bows, four arrows, and stone swords. All of us had low health and two people were freaking out... well, I kinda joined in when the witch detected me and chased my sister and me across a small field. From the safety of the hidey hole my friend and I split the arrows between us (we were the only ones with bows), and launched the attack. It would have been a perfect victory if my sister hadn't stepped in front of me just as I released the arrow and promptly died. My second arrow fared better. We charged in, and finished it off as it was trying to drink healing potions. Sorry, I didn't get any screenshots.

Afterwards, my friend and I went off exploring a vast plains biome. My sister got blown up several times by naughty creepers. When we were pretty far away night fell and we got involved in some fun mob fights. After a fight with two skeletons, the arrow teleporting bug (which puts arrows on the wrong part of you when you are hit) did something very funny. An arrow that hit around the front, found it's way to my friend's backside and stuck up... forming a perfect tail. (Screenshot!)

After finding it impossible to edit the brightness via paint, I did a little photo editing.

 

The next battle took place near the beach in the background. A couple of creepers took the chance to blow my friend up, scattering his inventory everywhere. I took his iron sword to finish off a skeleton that was dominating me from the high ground. I took what my inventory would allow me, his iron stuff, and swam for my life from the army of monsters coming at me. Because I was lost, I had to go to my sister's computer to get the coordinates for home. When I got home, I returned the iron to it's excited owner.

Just a little bit later, my friend and I were in a huge ravine with no escape route (my sister was farming). As we were going along the ridge my friend was educating a confused me on the subject of Y.O.L.O. You Only Live Once. I think my confusion was understandable because, after all, we weren't on hard core mode. After some strip mining and getting terrified out of our minds by silverfish stone, we decided to leave. With him at one heart, and me at three hearts, we spiral mined up... without help from the two skeletons across from us. At about 50 y height I noticed that I had no chicken legs, "This is a horrible way to die. trapped under ground," I told my friend. Finally, at over 100 y height we heard sheep, and at 126 we got out, finally! After that we split up, desperately searching for food. We met up at the hidey hole, and started smelting the ores.

That concluded our first couple hours of the new game.