Ah. Well the KSP wiki made them sound quite a little bit like a JATO.
This part in particular:
Rocket-assisted take-offs: by mounting Sepratrons on the body of a plane, they can be used for shorter takeoffs.
http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Sepratron_I
eta - sorry for the ninja edits!
Theyāre the same form-factor, generally, but JATOs are for adding a little extra thrust for takeoff. Separatrons are for making sure your empty boosters donāt ram into your second stage when you jettison them.
Sure, that works as one use for them. But if the plane canāt get off the runway (which is about a kilometer long) a little squirt of thrust isnāt going to make much of a difference.
Another use for separatrons is as ullage motors in mods like Realism Overhaul. In zero-g your fuel likes to turn into blobs and just float around in the tank. you can use a small solid fuel ullage motor (separatron) to accelerate you for a little while, causing the fuel to pool in the bottom of the tank next to the turbopump intakes, and then youāre able to ignite the main engines.
Well, the beauty about Kerbal is that they can be both. But they are typically used in space travel to get a little distance from stuff you want to retrograde and decay into the atmosphere. But Iāve totally seen them as JATO. But if youāre going that route, commit to the A:
God, this sounds like so much work. I just want to land stuff on other planets and then use a racecar to jump a giant canyon.
Iāve just started The Deadly Tower of Monsters, but am really liking the MST3k vibe so far.
Wow that looks like great fun and themed right for my happy place. It will at the least be on my wishlist.
Tell us more. Over here, though, if you will.
Darkest Dungeon by Red Hook Studios was a game that nailed crowd funding through kickstarter and a very popular early access release on Steam to finish its development. The kickstarter finished in Feb 2014, and after constant updates and tweaks (including a dark period where the game was probably too unfair) it made it to a full release including an ending and New Game+ options.
The setting is on the ancestral home of some old money nobles where the last descendant (the player) returns with a Knight and Highwayman to meet the only remaining staff - a groundskeeper. You then must recruit more heroes and plunge them into several dungeon locations around the estate filled with madmen, cultists, the undead, swine-like abominations, slimes, feral beasts, etc. The heroes are the only free resource in the game, and you will burn through a lot of them. Why? Because they are the underdogs in these dungeons relying on luck and resource management to get through the dungeon crawls and return with relics and heirlooms.
Not only are there many physical perils in the dungeon in the form of traps and armed monsters, but there is the risk for disease, and worst of all the risk of losing their minds. When reaching 100 stress (which some enemies target directly instead of health), a hero either become inflicted with a terrible personality trait (abusive, fearful, selfish, etc.) their stats change and they become a bit of a burden for the party. There is a rare chance that the stress will result in a virtue instead (courageous, etc) and they become the paragon of the party. If they reach 200 stress their mental states causes their body to give out and they die of a heart attack. To add another layer of madness to the heroes, they pick up positive and negative personality quirks that affect their abilities in the game (some are stat boosts, but sometimes a kleptomaniac may steal loot from a chest or something). It gives a very dreadful feel to the game, and you end up retreating many times to cut your loses and make a little cash - only to fire all the heroes and pick up new ones to replace them.
The art style also adds to the chaotic horror feeling in a unique way. The 2D animations are crude, but the character style is done with heavy lines and the torchlight impacts the coloration of the characters and dungeon. Heavy shadowing makes the eyes of heroes dark and their features partially obscured, and it turns some generic monsters into something a bit dramatic. Not that there are many generic models, there is a lot of creepy horrifying things to come across.
The sound is also amazing. The music is not the highlight though, itās the narration. The narrator is the previous head of the house that calls you to the mansion, and is the only voice during cut scenes and describing the battles and events. And they really nailed it both in the language used and the choice of narrator.
Itās a bit grindy at points, and when you get hit hard by the RNG going against you it can take a while to recover fully. All in all an amazing RPG.
I also mentioned why I would recommend it to feminists. Itās not because the game has characterization (the story is about the setting, not the people), itās because it has great representation. Gendered heroes or enemies are mixed genders, and there is even some attempt at different ethnicities. Even gendered enemies have a split men an women, and none of the art is titillating for any gender (unless you are the hardest core anti-boob-plate HEMA addicts). There are 14 classes, 5 women, most white but 1 is black and a few have their entire bodies completely hidden by masks and equipment.
I would have jumped on @codinghorrorās offer if I thought I would get a chance to play the game in the next 6 months, but I already have a backlog of games Iām crawling through slowly. I think the lines have been drawn in the sand on those reviews, so Iām not going there again but hopefully there is some better discussion with people playing the game this time around.
All this preamble was to point out a game I would recommend to any feminist that like Lovecraftian horror and Rouge-Lites: Darkest Dungeon was finally given its full release this month! Thatās what I will be playing for the near future after putting 30 hours in during early release, and I am excited to see how it goes now that there is an ending to this madness.
EDIT
The gif was super busy as much as a I love it, so hereās the trailer instead:
I read RPS review of Darkest Dungeon and I thought, you know what, I got enough fucked up frustration in my life already without adding more.
Long answer: corpses and heart attacks are but a symptom of a game which has clearly struggled to reconcile its dual nature, increasingly coming down on the side of obstacle and aggravation for obstacle and aggravationās sake, and Iām not at all surprised people are getting fed up.
Sooā¦ yeahhhhhā¦ Iām gonna need to not be playing that.
Considering the same site calls it āthe best RPG of all timeā itās sort of left to individual opinion. I will say both of those are options you can turn off at any time, because the difficulty is very customizable.
Wow, this sounds tempting. Thanks for the detailed explaination.
Like @codinghorror, Iāve read some of RPSās stuff on this. It sounds interesting but as an unrepentant save scummer, I really struggle with roguelikes. Anything beyond FTL is probably too much for me.
See, itās not really scumming unless itās a roguelike. Games that have a āloadā button are giving you permission. But the location of the folder your save game is saved in is just a Google search away. Scum away. I wonāt tell.
Itās a bit more forgiving than most. Your entire party can wipe and it doesnāt matter that much since you get a new wagon of recruits the next week. If you end up low on resources, try your luck by sending them in with zero supplies.
I had a lot more fun with it once I realized that you should never get attached to party members since they will go batty at the worst times.
A.K.A.: Badass Dragons of the Wasteland Syndrome.
#your welcome
I have a steam key for American Truck Simulator, if anyone wants it, PM me.
