Defcon: Victory via Destruction

Defcon: The game where you will use nukes and lots of 'em.
You get 2 points for every person killed and only -1 points for every person lost.
Overall a fun way to spend an hour with no unpleasant guilty aftertaste.

It takes a while to get used to how to control your units (I'm still not sure I have that figured out) and to figure out what each one does. The game does come with a manual, which is full of handy information and bonus tips on how to "survive" an actual nuclear attack. You know, just in case the computer doesn't think it's a game anymore ;)

While playing a 2-on-2 game, we discovered that Europe can kick some serious butt against Asia. Moscow and Leningrad didn't even know what hit 'em in the first strike. This screenshot shows the total destruction of Russia. Eastern Asia hung on until the end mainly because it takes a long time to get all the way around the top of Russia, and I couldn't get there before the victory timer expired. In this Old World, 2 team match (humans v. AI), Europe was easily most defensible continent with 67.8 million kills and 0 loses. 'Nuff said.

Orbiter 2010 is out!

After 4 years, a new version of Orbiter has been released! Although all of the improvements look really nifty, I'm probably the most excited about the autoscripting functionality. I am also jazzed about the fact that there is a proper Windows installer now, vastly reducing the effort required to start virtually exploring the Solar System. I'm really looking forward to trying it out! Download it here!

Herschel Crater on Mimas of Saturn: Needs Pink Spice Geysers

Check out this Astronomy Photo of the Day:

Herschel Crater on Mimas of Saturn

Q: Why is this giant crater on Mimas oddly colored?
A: Because the outer solar system is a fascinating place! Could use some pink spice geysers though.

Amazing sand dunes on Mars

It's a Mars-filled weekend here at SRV. Check out this amazing HiRISE image of a sand dune inside a crater on Mars.
This image also appeared in a Discover Magazine online article: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/05/are-martian-gullies-formed-by-water-or-not/

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Full Image at: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001440_1255

Martian polygons

This HiRISE image shows polygonal ridges that may have originally been dunes. How they formed is still unknown. Link to full image: http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_017348_1910

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

A Few Small North American Impact Craters (Or: Fun with Google Earth)

Several of our posts in the past here at Space Race Victory have had to do with Google Earth. One of many cool features you can see in Google Earth are impact craters. Here are just 3 of the smaller ones that can be found in North America. I wanted to look at impact craters worldwide, but it turns out that there are a lot of them, around 500 actually, with Google Earth aiding in the discovery of new ones every year. So, these will have to do for  now.


Meteor Crater: One of the best studied and one of the first craters thought to be formed by meteorite impacts is Barringer's Meteor Crater in Arizona, USA. It is a small crater (~1 km in diameter) formed ~50,000 years ago (in the Pleistocene). It's shape is typical for small impactors and is bowl-shaped. The impactor was a metal (iron and nickel) meteorite ~50 m in diameter.

Excerpts from Wikipedia:
"In 1903 a mining engineer and businessman named Daniel Moreau Barringer suggested that the crater had been produced by the impact of a large iron-metallic meteorite.

Barringer's arguments [were] met with skepticism, as there was a general reluctance at the time to consider the role of meteorites in terrestrial geology. He persisted nonetheless and sought to bolster his theory by uncovering the remains of the meteorite. At the time of first discovery by Europeans, the surrounding plains were covered with about 30 tons of large oxidized iron chunks from the meteorite. This led Barringer to believe that the bulk of the impactor could still be found under the crater floor. As impact physics were poorly understood at the time, Barringer was unaware that the meteorite had in fact vaporized on impact. He spent 27 years trying to mine the crater and find metallic iron, drilling to a depth of 419 m (1,376 ft), but no significant deposit was ever found."


Upheaval Dome: located in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, USA. Upheaval dome was originally thought to be a salt upheaval dome but is now known to be the eroded core of a 5-km impact crater. Upheaval Dome was formed in the last 170 million years (Ma). The crater has been subjected to heavy erosion since its formation and is interrupted by stream-eroded canyons. Once 1-2 kilometers of material overlain the now-exposed-but-once-buried impact core.










Sierra Madre Crater: lies in western Texas, USA. Sierra Madre is a 13-km crater formed in the last 100 million years. It can be recognized as a circular mound of hills (dark green in the Google picture at the left) surrounded by a stream that follows the arch of the crater rim.












Some nice impact crater kml files for playing with can be found here: http://www.thinklemon.com/pages/ge/

How-to: Get Knights of the Old Republic Working in Windows 7

In my opinion, Windows 7 is really the greatest, most intuitive, most responsive, and most fun to use operating system on the planet today. However, as great as Windows 7 is, the downside to upgrading to this superlative computing experience is that some older, legacy software titles do not function as expected. One of those titles is BioWare's 2003 epic Knights of the Old Republic. Recently, we here at SRV wanted to take a nostalgic tour through Knights of the Old Republic, but were stymied by the fact that it would only run for about 5 minutes of gameplay, then crash to the desktop. After much googling, we determined a set of steps that seems to get the software working under Windows 7 - or, at least we haven't had a problem yet, anyway*.
*(generic disclaimer: As with any "How-to's" on this blog, this info is provided as a general public service, and we aren't responsible for anything you do to your own computer. We do not endorse anything on websites linked from this blog, and anything you download from those sites, you do at your own risk. Also please note that this fix isn't guaranteed to work on all systems, and we're not experts on this sort of thing to begin with, so don't blame us if your computer goes **poof** because you followed any of the procedures you see here.)

We eventually found what we needed to know at this excellent comprehensive post over at the LucasArts forums. Here are the steps that we followed to get it working on our own systems:

Step 1: Apparently Windows 7 allows fractional screen refresh rates (i.e., 59.35 Hz) where previous versions of Windows forced those numbers to be integers (i.e., 59 or 60). So, you have to set your monitor refresh rate to be 60 Hz, the only setting that KOTOR recognizes. I know my monitor is rated to 70 Hz, so this isn't a problem for me, but your mileage may vary. Find the display properties tab and override so that the refresh rate is manually set to 60 Hz.

Step 2: Install KOTOR from the original installation disks. Note that I did not run the setup as administrator and I haven't had any problems. Some of the advice I saw on the internet suggested that you run the installation as administrator.

Step 3: Patch the game to 1.03, which adds new higher resolution display options as choices.

Step 4: Download the unofficial Vista/7 KOTOR fix and replace the mss32.dll file in the KOTOR directory with this unofficial!!! fix file.

Step 5: [Optional] Supposedly, installing a no-CD crack can help to keep the game from locking up. I didn't do that and it works fine, but I bring it up here out of completeness.

Step 6: In the main KOTOR directory, edit the swkotor.ini file. In the [graphics options] section, add a line:

Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1

Step 7: We currently have NVIDIA graphics systems here at SRV, so this step will obviously not help those with ATI graphics. You Radeon users are on your own at this point. However, NVIDIA users should open the NVIDIA control panel, select the 3D settings tab and click "add program". Select swkotor.exe. Set "Vertex Sync" to "Force on".

Step 8: Right click on SWKOTOR.exe. Select "Properties." On the compability tab, for the compatibility mode, select "Windows XP SP 3" Also check the following items on the compatibility tab: "Disable visual themes", "Disable desktop composition", and "Disable display scaling on High DPI systems".

Step 9: Make new shortcut to SWKOTOR.exe and use this new shortcut to start the game.

That should do it! We followed these steps and the game has been agreeably stable in Windows 7 64-bit.

On my soapbox: I do feel constrained to point out that KOTOR is still being sold as part of the "Star Wars: Greatest PC Hits" compilation in brick-and-mortar stores as well as a direct download from Steam, so I would humbly suggest to LucasArts that they might want to invest some resources in coming up with a Windows 7 patch for the game. If KOTOR had been "abandoned" and was no longer commercially available, then I would completely understand that people play it at their own risk on modern systems. However, I feel strongly that if something is available in the marketplace, vendors have a responsibility to the end-users to make things as easy as possible. This is especially true for PC Gaming, which, after all, is supposed to be, y'know, fun and whatnot. Generally, complicated 8-step procedures that involve twiddling with important system settings culled off the webbytubes isn't as fun as playing the game that you were looking forward to. Still, it's worth it to be able to play KOTOR again!