FleshJeb

I'll expand on that with v = at for those who don't know. That would be my solution as well. With the added advantage that we probably have several decimal places more precision on the local mu s due to centuries of observation. For story purposes, the fleet commander also happens to be the solar system's champion billiards player.

Yeah guys! What's the ISP of an (unlit) fart anyway? Surely someone has done the math. Hmm, gold, being a heavier molecule, would surely have a lower ISP... Anyway, back on topic (and it's the same topic I'm going to come back to in every patch thread): Software developers need to have higher standards, especially with respect to their customers' time and energy. Let's pretend KSP2 is a functional piece of software that's fit for purpose, and imagine that tens of thousands of people were affected by the launcher debacle above. That's a lot of man-hours of confusion and searching for workarounds caused by a lack of care and competence. Maybe that takes 15 minutes to resolve. In my industry we bill in 15-minute increments, because you can get a lot done in that time. As it happens, my billing rate over those 15 minutes is THE PRICE OF YOUR GAME. It's a fair chunk of change, and if I don't feel that I've made a significant and valuable contribution in that timespan, I discount that time. Let's take a more important example: A talented kid can launch the game, build a rocket, and get to the Mun (if SOI trajectory changes worked) in 15 minutes. In that time, they may develop a further intuitive understanding of the Oberth Effect by capturing at 8km instead of 20km. They may discover that a pair of overlapping spotlights makes a fine distance gauge for landing. (Redneck engineering on the Mun!) That kid's time is worth more than gold. If you frustrate and burn them out with crappy software, you're losing a piece of the future. Indulgent self-aggrandizement aside, the knowledge that your users' time has tangible worth is maybe a standard that software developers want to calibrate themselves towards, instead of constantly saying, "Ooops sowwwy <cuteface>". What you do MATTERS--Be harder on yourselves or go home. (By way of comparison) To the corporate MBAs at Take Two: You're wasting oxygen that other people could be breathing. Kindly stop.

Showerthought of the day: If being a software engineer required professional licensure like other disciplines, game releases like this wouldn't happen, because people could (rightfully) lose their privilege to practice. Yes, I've seen the counterarguments, but software is so integral to our daily lives, it's well past time to put some responsible constraints on the industry.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90759059/doubt-is-their-product-how-big-tobacco-big-oil-and-the-gun-lobby-market-ignorance https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-industries-used-same-researchers-to-sway-public1/ Provide sources from reputable news or scientific organizations. This is a serious public policy issue, making vague assertions and handwaving are not sufficient. If scientists are liars, why are "your" scientists telling the truth, and "mine" lying? I can just as easily argue on that basis: "No, your scientists are paid off liars and/or idiots." Of course, since 97% of climate scientists agree, and 3% don't, then there might be some merit in my adopting that position. Climate Change is an uncomfortable phenomenon, it demands taking responsibility and thinking and acting like an adult. It's much easier and more comfortable to be dismissive and iconoclastic. Iconoclasm is cool, because one can just say, "LOL, no" to everything and still feel good about it.

On the one hand, we have documentation and testimony proving that oil companies hired the advertising agencies that spread a lot of FUD to say smoking was healthy for you. ...and on the other, we have vague conspiracy theories about nebulous figures trying to control the world. Yep, totally equivalent and equally legitimate. /s

All human activity is geoengineering, whether we like it or not. Fossil fuel power plants ARE geoengineering, as inconvenient a truth as that is. We used to drain/fill wetlands because we thought that we could make better use of these "economically unproductive" areas. As it turns out, they're absolutely amazing and vital water filters. The rise of industrial farming and ranching contributed a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into streams and rivers, causing algal blooms and fish kills all the way out into the nearby bays and oceans, and depleting fishing stocks. This is also geoengineering. (The relevant search term is "non point source pollution" for those seeking to learn more.) So we decided to do more geoengineering, and reconstruct what wetlands we could, to mitigate and reverse the damage. It's expensive and time-consuming, but it's working. Portions of the Central Valley in California have subsided up to 28 feet due to the collapse of groundwater aquifers due to overpumping for agricultural irrigation. That's some serious unintentional geoengineering. So we design groundwater recharge basins and other facilities to try to halt that process, and make agriculture in the region sustainable. (Shall I beat the dead horse and say "geoengineering" again?) All of these mitigation efforts started with identifying the problem, conducting small pilot projects to investigate the impacts of solutions, and then moved to becoming large-scale standards of practice. So, we've established that the problems and the solutions are in the same category and scale of activity--One of which has known unintentional, uncontrolled side effects, and the other involves the deliberate, cautious application of time, effort, and expertise. It follows that doing nothing is the more radical, dangerous option.

QA team, longing for the day when they can be this guy:

I've watched enough Biffa to know that the answer is obviously a roundabout.

Great work Dakota! This seems like a really solid and well-considered system, and it's exactly the kind of thing I'd like to see from all game development companies. With the fluid view, this might be one step better than Wube's system, and they're bug assassins.

I've been thinking about starting a thread about how we all would design a set of lunar missions and the long term infrastructure. I'm just not well-versed enough in the specifics of current tech to feel like I could do a good job with a starting post. Perhaps you or someone else would like to take that on? I bet it would be really interesting.

I'll give the dev team credit for being incredibly brave, and I hope you all have an excellent and relaxing weekend.

NASA high-speed film footage of Artemis launch. Combined into an absolutely magnificent edit with a banger tune:

This is one of the rare instances where I like the cover even better: And my favorite Metallica song, for unprintable reasons:

That's because you're from an engineering discipline with low risk tolerance and a robust culture. I'm from the small consulting Civil Engineering side. This had all the hallmarks of, "enthusiastic junior engineers with inadequate mentoring and supervision." A lot of firms coast on this because we have well-developed standards and regulations, high safety factors, and mostly low-stakes. Plus contractors with a lot of experience who are perfectly willing to call us idiots and fix it with a change order. I have a hunch Leuders was brought on to stop this kind of embarrassing catastrophe from happening again. She has an excellent skillset for it.

Maybe they can finally clean the giant butthole that owns the place.

From a former SpaceX engineer: https://thenext30trips.com/p/scrappy-special-edition "Honestly, if this was any company other than SpaceX I would declare them toast." Another good look at SpaceX company culture: https://thenext30trips.com/p/team-friendship Several years ago I wrote about working as a subcontractor for Tesla--The experience lines up pretty well, and its a worrying one. What I predict happening with SpaceX is that the chaos will catch up with them. Sure, you can push really hard and ride the edge of catastrophe and keep squeaking out wins. However, that causes a lot of burnout and the company gets a reputation. Your really talented people either start quitting earlier and earlier, or they run out of energy and focus, or they just cease applying for the jobs at all. Eventually you run out of luck and talent and the mistakes get bigger and harder to recover from because there just aren't enough human resources to keep things from falling off the edge. You don't want the lines of talent_needed and talent_available to converge. Coincidentally, I just left a job at this kind of engineering company after 15 years. There's no reality in the spin, "We just wanted to clear the tower, 50/50 chance." My evidence being, there's a picture of some ATV/golf cart things at Starbase that got a bit munched in the launch. Sure that's a small budget item for SpaceX, but if they really thought there was a good chance the rocket was going to blow up on the pad, don't you think that someone would have taken 5 minutes to move them well out of the way? Or did SpaceX get "valuable data" from destroying some of their site transports. /s I'll close with a joke an elderly client told me 20-something years ago. I had been hustling around his property trying to get him the absolute best result I could, and we had a brief moment to pause. Fair warning, it's incredibly sexist and heteronormative, but the framing helped a dumb young man internalize the message: I won't be upset if the mods choose to scrub that, but it's an important lesson.

LOL, occasionally. My favorite character is actually DEATH, because he's very, very fair. If there's an afterlife (highly doubtful), he is exactly who I would hope handles the transition. Apologies for my post, I lost my temper. It was unfair. A friend of mine who is passionate about Russian literature made me read A Cloud In Trousers. Mayakovsky translates perfectly.

Well I had ChatGPT translate it, and it made Vetinari the protagonist and CMOT Dibbler the audience surrogate. Curious...

This should help you. It really helped me:

I assumed that this was descriptive rather than literal. Virtual worlds were posited earlier than the 70s. Thanks. I dug for a couple hours on TVTropes and wikipedia (because I have a strange idea of fun), and couldn't nail it down. Oh no, what's this going to do to my search history?!? Heheh. Yeah, I won't even get into a "self-driving" car, much less put a brain implant in. Have a good one.

I'm a big fan of compendiums myself. The trouble being that a lot of stuff tends to blend together in the mind, especially the relatively narrow-scope thought-experiments. It definitely sounds familiar, but it could have been done by any number of the transitional Golden Age to New wave authors. Although https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheMachineStops was written in 1909, but it's kind of the inverse of the story you're thinking of. Under the Literature folder on all of these: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LotusEaterMachine https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GettingSmiliesPaintedOnYourSoul https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TerminallyDependentSociety https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GhostPlanet @JoeSchmuckatelli, a quest for you, because this is our kind of party.

Led Zeppelin has been releasing all their albums for free for some time, and they keep adding new remasters. It's good for a binge: https://www.youtube.com/@ledzeppelin

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/amazons-snowmobile-actually-truck-hauling-huge-hard-drive/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers?useskin=vector

Some of the most fun I had in KSP 1 was zipping around in a VTOL and hunting anomalies and sightseeing. I'm glad to see the tradition continues. I can highly recommend: Designing for in-game aerodynamics because it's a much, much more efficient use of fuel and gives you loads of time to have fun. Design for ease of piloting (add those two SAS if it helps!). Design for evenly-balanced COM at all fuel states. Add strategically-angled spotlights on multiple axes and color code the lights so that you intuitively know your clearances to obstacles. Two overlapping spots is a fantastic way to gauge distance without focusing on instruments or your craft. It really helps the zen experience of zooming through terrain at night. Enjoy!