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sorry i have been a bit busy and haven't finished this yet and i should probably vent about this in the talk about negative things thread. I'll get to it!

Could this provide us a better clue for the release timeline of Colonies / 0.3? We have confirmation of at least a 0.2.2 release. Let's be optimistic and say that update comes in about 2 weeks (May 2nd, 2024). Using Scarecrow's average of 49 days between releases, we could anticipate the next update around June 20th. If that next update was 0.3 (again, being optimistic), then the timeline of milestones would look like this: 0.1 to 0.2 - 9 months, 26 days 0.2 to 0.3 (speculated) - 6 months, 2 days This timeline would match the hopes shared by Nate that the Colonies update would come quicker than For Science! and leaves quite a bit of breathing room. Even if there was a 0.2.3 update that dropped in June instead of 0.3 these timelines would still allow for an August release to follow (which still would meet the proposed timeline goals). Of course, this talk feels quite arbitrary given that each update and milestone is unique, but it helps put things in perspective. Do I want to wait until the end of summer for colonies? Not at all. However, the rate of development seems to show that we are indeed in the thick of it for now and the upcoming months.

@ColdJ i frankly do not care if you cant accept or wont accept King Richard the Lionheart. Its a historically accurate title. And you want to talk glass houses? Ill toss that stone. You started it. Remember this from 22 March: “Rovers rove.“ All of your “examples” are wild accusations and false save 1. Plumbers Plumb. A DIRECT response to your action on Rovers rove. The rest are legitimate sentences. Circling back to King Richard the Lionheart allow me to quote: Per rule 5: Names and proper nouns are added in one post. For example, if you wish to add the name "Robin Hood" you add "Robin Hood" in one post.“ As you see King Richard the Lionheart fits per the rule. Now that we have derailed this far enough I relay the currently active sentence so this game may return to being played. ——RESTORATION TO ACTIVE SENTENCE—— King Richard the Lionheart reigned ———RESTORATION COMPLETE——— 124504172024 new page 124604172024 130804172024 131304172024

Sorry but glass houses. I have put up with premature cut offs on more than just these, and constant manipulations to get the sentence to something you want to talk about. It is one WORD at a time. Even if @Kimera Industries allowed "Maid Marian", "King Richard the Lionheart" is pushing it too far. I would have accepted "King Richard" but 4 words is a no from me. I kept away for awhile to let someone else play it out with you, but nobody did. So I tried to start fresh and you as with other word games we have played decided that you can overrule whenever you want. If you are willing to play fairly and randomly then I will play, but I am not up for being railroaded again.

I feel a number of people do not fully take advantage of the current upvoting system for the Bug Reports. Maybe they lack the technical expertise, comfort level required to post detailed reports, trouble finding archived report.. etc. I appreciate it when others post a bug I have had issues with but may have (temporarily) forgotten. Sometimes I intent to upvote a series of bugs but get distracted by work & the intention moves some where into the Aether. If there are bugs you want upvoted.. link them. Post a Reason why you thinknit deserves significant attention. But please.. let's avoid cross talk or debates. (If this is Stupid or Present Elsewhere Please Remove)

Accurate, but not polished? Clarification please? Also, it would be helpful to know what they can and cannot talk about.

I suspect it isn't that simple. However, that could be one of the topics for "increased communication". Talk about development on a current pain point, without spoiling the colonies, or other new stuff in general... Instead of we can't wait to share what we've been working on

Hope to hear from CMs in the morning, maybe y'all can talk a little about the improvements to communication that y'all have come up with to deal with keeping the community up to date @Nerdy_Mike @Dakota

I am going to start my comment with a question for the CMs and then I will go into my further suggestions My question to the CM comes from the conversations that @Nerdy_Mike was having in the discord, he was talking about the roadmap and how development will follow it and all milestones will be fulfilled. This is obviously great news long term as we will get all that was promised on that front. I also remember many instances where CMs have talked about the ideas of polls and wanting to them but not knowing how to go about doing them correctly. I think some polls that will work are ones about which things should come first, meaning that the "losing" side of the poll will still know they will get the content they voted for. Anyways, my question is would KSP2 ever consider making a poll for if Recourses should come before Interstellar? I ask this because there has been a good amount of people talk about their concerns about not having resources when colonies drop and then having to wait until after interstellar for this feature. @Dakota and @Nerdy_Mike, I would love an answer to this question so I know whether to keep voicing my concerns about this subject or if I should use my time more wisely on commenting on other aspects of the game. I understand that there are reasons that would make these decisions out of your control or if this just plain is impossible with the current development process. I would love clarification on this. Alrighty, now that that is out of the way, I'll give my ideas towards communications: (Note) I think the major thing that is frustrating the community is that we just don't know what is going at all, this both goes for colonies and the next patch. I understand there are powers that be that keep you from giving information about colonies very often, so I'm going to focus on communications patch-to-patch 1. I think a good idea could be a "next patch bugs squashed counter" (the name needs some work ) somewhere on the forums that updates each week. You wouldn't even need to put in a bunch of details about the bugs, just a range based on the current "dev-version" of the game that is being focused on to give an idea of progress in development to the community. You could put a disclaimer that the number can fluctuate upwards and downwards because of different "dev-versions" of the game being considered the focused version, or because some changes broke something and now you are fixing those things while keeping what the original change fixed (this is what I imagine is happening right now and why its taken a while longer for this patch). Anyways I think this would be good because then the community would have a constant feeling of progress as the weeks go on. 2. I think more engagement in the individual forums would be nice, not just when we ask but kinda closer to how the interactions on discord are. It would be nice to see everyday at least one thought given on a thread somewhere about something. It wouldn't always have to be serious stuff either, right now I am realizing a lot of the community gets a bit upset at the "joking" and more "fun-oriented" posts being made right now but that is more because they don't have much communications and want quality/qualitative posts when they happen. After getting over the hump, and when seeing CM posts are much more common, then the forums will feel more like a conversation with CMs than complaints to them constantly. Really just like once a day would be enough, even if half are joke/fun posts. 3. I think that suggestions or things that CMs cant talk about should not be met with radio silence, but instead with a "heard*" or a "there is no information we are able to give right now*". This would give us more communication and make it feel like we aren't just talking into the void hoping that something sticks. (the * would be to indicate that these communications are not a direct "this will be in the game" or a "this will not be in the game"). Anyways these are my thoughts on improvements to the current communications (as far as patch to patch goes). All of these suggestions/criticisms come from a place of respect and excitement for what is to come next both in the game and in the community.

So, I've got a few questions as it relates to communication and development. Can you share with us where you are at with updating your internal calendar as it relates to when we can expect the next KERB? I know you just got back and all, but we are jonesing for info here. As far as the KERB goes, are there any plans to be more verbose in the status of the bugs being worked on? For example, "Researching" doesn't tell us what you are doing with a bug, especially when some bugs have been around and in this status for months. What is being researched, and what about it is so complicated? Same thing for "Need Additional Information". What info do you need? Something from the community? The original reporter? Who and what? It has now been 3 months since the last patch, and there has been zero talk about the next one. Nor has there been any talk about colonies other than to show the same station orbiting Jool a few times. Can you give us any information on where the team is at with the next patch, or with colonies, or when 0.3 might drop? And why the complete silence on all of this? It is early access, but we put our faith in you guys and we haven't had that faith rewarded much (if at all). Can we talk about procedural parts again? We have been told that procedural tanks are too complex, but Juno has them. And ill have to look again to make sure, but I think HarvesteR's latest project Kit Hack has them. What is so complex about them as it relates to KSP2? Finally, we need to discuss maneuver nodes and dV calculation. Has the development team shared anything with you that you can share with us as to how these are being worked on, and what potential solutions we may see? Both of these are critical to the game.

The MIT article is interesting - they talk about how... difficult... it is to get funding/be taken seriously when trying to explore that theory, then point out that it's not so loopy after all. The concrete, if true, would be poured with a jello like consistency that for *reasons* cures in a way that avoids shrinkage common to other concretes. It's an interesting theory. Back to moving logs with mechanical advantage - this one is interesting. The use of the bipod is totally different. With the rope at the top of the bipod and the fulcrum forward of the log, they just pull it up and over. Side note - I got the funding to try this with my students. So later next week I'll report back on how it went. Using 2x4x10s, making some beams from 2x6x12s and a few other things. Should be fun!

Yup. It seems like from going through the colony mega thread it won’t approach in a meaningful way a culmination of career and science until the exploration update, after colonies and after interstellar. I like science points. And I like the expansion and better quality of the hand crafted missions in KSP2 over test x part in y situation of KSP1. But it’s not career mode at all until there is a gameplay reason to build efficient rockets. They say rockets won’t be “free” but only really talk about resources in regards to fuel and late tech tree parts. If there’s never a reason to use a SRB over a liquid fuel stack with an engine this game may not be for me. So until they communicate clearly about what resources will be needed for, and how the player will be credited them (ie please have some incentive to not timewarp for maximum resources) the best I can do is *hope* that “rockets won’t be free” includes some player incentives to build cheap and efficient. Thats three major updates down the road. For Science! was a big step forward but didn’t nudge me at all to play more after trying it for a few hours, or to update my negative review to a positive one. The CMs hyped that they have some good communication in the pipeline, so here I check the forums at lunch for a week or so to see if it’s worth me staying around. No news or bad news and I’ll be away from the forums and Reddit for months again.

Of course. If we only "overreacted" when a hungry lion is in the immediate vicinity, I don't think we would come a long way as a society. A car is just a car, after all. So is money. Music. Computers. Biology.. Whatever tickles you... But it tickles, and that's a good thing. I'm fully aware that I have a first world problem. But if there was no such thing at this point, that would mean that all of us here would be in a nuclear wasteland, fighting over remaining canned food. So I'm happy to battle over opinions @Dakota Maybe this exists, and has slipped my attention... Is there a chance to at least get an overview of how news/updates are done? If you have a feature X, when do you post it as a sneakpeek? How decisions are made to share it at all? What's allowed and not allowed to talk about? I'm having troubles to form a proper question here.

I am going to ask that you stop acting like the majority of this commentary is somehow without merit. When the points you attempt to make are so eloquently rebutted, you shift the goal post to "its just game" I do not think that "its just an X,Y,Z" is as acceptable excuse for the very last point that @PCDWolf made. It is not about patience. The majority of the rebuttal addressed that very issue and the last year we have been actively attempting to gain insight on the direction this game plans to take. They have been tight lipped because the community was promised for years that this game would have a certain goal. KSP PLUS. It was immediately apparent that a different direction was chosen and we clamored for something of substance regarding this. The stuff that does come out is pure PR content and nothing of merit with regard to game direction. The only thing worth a dang at all on the future of this game was completely compiled by @The Space Peacock... with much of it dated. How much of these old conversations and ideas are going to stay? You are not understanding how long it took for took to get them to even consider certain important things seriously... Like Wobble Font UI TimeWarp Constraints Things that are not "official' bugs are often ignored when we question specifics or insight in decisions. Official Bugs (Up Until Recently) has been difficult to navigate with key word searches not always resulting in success. This compounds with many redundant postings and ignored issues NO ONE can say that this game was playtesting in an organic manner. EA is not for Alpha State drops.. not traditionally. This leaves us guessing as to why and what.. with the track record our imaginations see "the best prediction for the future is the past" WE want this game to succeed. But we also want that success to be within some realm of what we enjoyed about the first game... People would talk about other things than how crappy "radio silence is" if we were given something to talk about.

I mean really love this team and I think things are coming along nicely but I believe even they see it as getting on base after a tough at bat. Unfortunately we're living in a really toxic gaming culture and its got to be hard for passionate developers and designers to gauge real reactions and actionable feedback in a clear and honest way. The atmosphere from a vocal player standpoint is to take all of these things really personally, or pretend to take them really personally, and then engage in an over-the-top Kabuki dance of feigned rage demanding groveling supplication from the corporate entities they've been wronged by because they think thats the only way games improve. But it's kind of like Cable news outlets constantly running BREAKING NEWS banners. If you're always turning everything up to 11 then people who might listen might as well just tune you out. If players believe rage-bombing every title that doesn't meet their expectations is the only way to convince developers to improve their products then eventually developers are just going to take those flame-campaigns less seriously. I would guess they already are. They'll look to more balanced and genuinely informative heuristics to identify the worst problems and work their way up from there. As test case lets talk about Cyberpunk--widely dragged and laughed at when it first released and probably deservedly so. It probably should have incubated for a couple more years. And now all of the initial hard work of good writing and good VA and story can be capitalized on because they fixed most of the bugs and redesigned the core mechanics into something incredible. Which is great! I genuinely hope as colonies and interstellar and resources are phased in the folks at Intercept remain open to making big internal changes to game mechanics depending on how things play out. What matters in the end is how the 1.0 product actually plays. Is it fun? Is it deep? Are the actual mechanics well tuned? is QOL up to snuff? Thats what matters. In my experience most people in this world are doing their best to be good at what they do. They're already incentivized to do that. Heaping shame and vitriol on them usually makes things worse, not better. The changes Cyberpunk made weren't just because players dragged CDPR through the mud. In fact the more substantive changes outside of bug-fixes--police system, fixing drops and the tech tree, etc. only come from very specific and clear feedback on whats not working and then having the time and creative process to create new and better systems. I personally would argue if you as a gamer are dissatisfied you produce more specific and actionable feedback on whats wrong--and passionately so!--rather than focus on grievances.

SpaceX/Starship is the go-to option to talk about I think, but I don't think they'll make a proposal, at least on their own (though, that is probably what a lot of people thought before HLS, so what do I know). Relativity/Impulse have a Mars landing mission on the horizon, and could form the backbone to a project to pursue a return mission, as Tom Mueller is leading Impulse, and has a lot of experience with methalox (that he's applying to Helios), while also having looked into ISRU for Starship. They might even pull in SpaceX for this reason - giving them real data on making methalox on the Martain surface. Just based on having a slated Mars mission Blue Origin/RocketLab are another potential team, set to launch this summer (EscaPADE), but it's a pair of satellites, not a lander. So probably not. NASA needs a firmer deadline for sample return, NET 2040 is too far, and runs the risk of eventual cancellation. When NASA makes their selections, they need a closer date, preferably in the early/mid 2030s, about a decade from now.

RocketStar has made discussion on this forum a couple of times, but with some of their older projects. This one's spicier. I just randomly came across an article effectively repeating RocketStar's press release, and I kind of wanted to take this one apart a little bit. To get the tl;dr out of the way, the claim is that they are boosting their 1U pulsed plasma drive with fusion to give it an extra kick "for free". How much of a kick isn't really specified. There is no point of going over an article, so lets just go to the source with RocketStar's Press Release. Note that they are referencing real experiments that have confirmed the reaction and talk about the upcoming flights of their current FireStar drive, but don't say much about the fusion results beyond detection of gamma and alpha radiation. Which is cool in itself, but doesn't say much for the practical side of things. They do specifically clarify in the press release that the "fusion boosted" really means "fusion-triggered-fission-boosted," which is something that needs to be taken apart a bit. Specifically, the claim is that by introducing boron to the water, which is used as main propellant, they are getting boron-proton fusion, which results in an unstable state of carbon, which decays to alpha particles. The release does not specify the isotopes used, but boron does come in 10B and 11B, with the latter being more abundant and more interesting of the two. The process 11B + p -> 12C is of interest here. As we all, know, 12C is stable, however, there is a rather well known Hoyle State of carbon which isn't. The natural way in which Hoyle State comes up is when stars burn helium in their cores. The process involves two 4He nuclei coming together to form a highly unstable 8Be nucleus, which has just enough time to collide with a third 4He nucleus to form the Hoyle State of 12C. The latter is highly unstable, and is almost like the 3 alpha particles bouncing around in a common strong force potential than a real nucleus. Consequently, most of the time it decays back to three alpha particles, and the star has to try again. Occasionally, however, the 12C** state emits a gamma, decays to a lower energy 12C* state and finally to ground state 12C. The Hoyle State has 7.7MeV above carbon's ground state, which is a lot. The full proton-proton cycle is about 24MeV. So we're talking a good fraction of typical nuclear energies. On paper, this works. The total binding energy of 11B is 76.21MeV and ground state 12C is 92.15MeV. That gives 11B + p plenty of energy to form Hoyle State, so long as protons are hot enough to overcome the repulsion barrier. It is much lower for proton-proton or even D-T fusion, since 11B has the charge much more distributed through the larger nucleus, but I don't really have any numbers to attach to it at this time. I'll try to find either something from the cited SBIR experiments or other publications at a later point to try and get a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how much fusion/fission we are actually expecting in a chamber of a plasma drive. What we have that's probably pretty reliable are the specs of the current generation FireStar M 1.4, which does not involve any fusion/fission processes. Just a conventional pulsed plasma propulsion unit, utilizing water, ionizing arc, and an accelerator cavity. Since this is a commercial product, and validation experiments are apparently available under the NDA, I have no reason to suspect them from being far off. Cited directly from RocketStar's website. The ISP cited is consistent with the total impulse with 250g of propellant and implies mean exhaust velocity of about 71km/s. If the protons are accelerated by the field of the same strength, they can be potentially traveling about twice as fast, resulting in effective plasma temperatures of up to low mega-Kelvins on collisions. That feels like ballpark reasonable for what it'd take for 11B + p fusion to take place. But again, I don't have good estimates for that at this time. On the net, interesting. I want to see the numbers attached to the claimed efficiency boost. Also, the fact that they're calling it a fusion rocket when it's really more of a fission rocket feels a little scummy, but maybe they were trying to not scare people with neutron radiation associated with fission? This is, if real, an aneutronic process, so it would be reasonably safe for the applications for which this is meant. Either way, a real nuclear-boosted drive that's commercially available is really exciting, even if the performance benefits are going to be marginal. Finally, even the base model, without fusion/fission is a really nifty example of how far the commercial plasma propulsion has gone. A 1U propulsion unit that can provide a 3U sat with 4.6km/s of delta-V? Yeah, that's not bad. With the right planning, you can take your 3U from LEO all the way to Mars utilizing a boost from Luna. Neat.

I need to talk to the config's owner and ask for permission

It's pretty hard to manage expectations after a huge hype campaign followed by... hummm... a somewhat less than expected initial release. There's a lot of promises (as well tons of plain statements taken as promises) made in the last years that are probably going to be broken, and without a viable release to use as a trade-off (ok, A is not going to happen, but look! B & C were implemented instead!), at least in my book, the less technical details (or any details that can be used by technicians to infer the state of the game) you publish, less work you will have on managing a new loot of fallen short expectations. It's kinda of a catch-22 situation: you talk about, you get screwed. You don't talk about, you get screwed. Finding the less bitter spot in which you get less screwed is the trick. (don't look at me for answers - I'm on the "talk too much" spectrum)

Oh heavens to Betsy, we forgot all about the thread where they joked about putting imperial units in KSP. Quick everyone, we must finish that riveting debate! Seriously though, the thread isn't derailed so much as the topic is now something YOU do not wan't to talk about. No, they are telling you that you think something is fixed because you have not seen the cracks yet. They have been very patient trying to explain it to people in this thread. It is not a difficult concept to grasp. Why do people think the burden of proof is on the poster who went and did reserach on the topic, and not the poster who reads the post and goes "I don't believe you. I haven't looked, but you sound wrong." What about imperial tons? Back to topic and all that. (I know it wasn't you who mentioned getting back to topic, I'm just making a bad joke)

Exactly... currently. When you set out to do something more bigger and ambitious, than KSP 1 in this context, you have to plan ahead. I won't pretend that I know anything about that physics engine. But, I do have a little knowledge about programming, and as stated above, I'm very much curious how they plan to execute many things. Rocket wobble is just one of them. Continuous long burns, heat transfer, battery draining, etc... computations on all vessels during time warp... those are the meat mechanics of the (new) game. Thus far, as @PDCWolf pointed out, there was a talk about a short term and long term solution for rocket wobble. They went with middle term solution, involving autostruts. Why? I'm not dissing devs. If you asked me how to implement these things efficiently, I'd say wait for home quantum computers. The point I'm trying to make is that, we haven't got any indication on how these crucial things will be resolved. After so many years of development apparently,(judging by autostruts, they don't have any indication either. If they do, I'd be very curious to read an update on that. I don't care if I don't get any new parts, or parachute bug resolved within the next few months. I care whether the team is capable of developing the core mechanics needed for this game. Falling back to autostruts doesn't inspire much confidence, and I pray to be proven, oh so very wrong.

That's a KAS problem, not Pathfinder. The following (old) post and the one after it talk about some work arounds for when this happens - to my knowledge no complete fix was ever made (at least there's nothing in the releases changelog that looks like it addresses this issue):

Hey! I’m Jon Cioletti, the Senior Technical Artist focused on lighting and VFX here at Intercept Games! In celebration of the upcoming total solar eclipse, today we are looking at some of the lighting tech around eclipses in KSP2 - but first we have to talk about eclipses in REAL life! To help with that, we reached out to one of our friends over at NASA: Senior Visualization Designer AJ Christensen. AJ works at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS), where he develops visualization techniques and designs data-driven imagery for scientific analysis and public outreach. AJ was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to answer a few questions to kick this Dev Diary off right: Can you very basically describe an eclipse and why it is a special event? There are a lot of objects in space that pass between the Earth and the Sun at various times. We usually call it a “transit” when something that appears much smaller than the disk of the Sun passes in front of it, like an asteroid, or the International Space Station, or Venus. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky But through a crazy coincidence of physical size and distance from Earth, the apparent size of the disk of the Moon in the sky is almost exactly the same as the apparent size of the disk of the Sun in the sky, and so when the Moon transits in front of the Sun, we call it an eclipse because it blocks out a significant part of the Sun’s light. The Moon actually orbits around Earth approximately every 27 days, so you might think we would see an eclipse every 27 days, but because of the tilt of that orbit, the Moon is usually not lined up with the Earth and Sun. For this reason, a lot of orbits result in no eclipse, or only a partial eclipse. The total eclipse happening on April 8th is a rare event where the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun are all in a straight line, and the United States will be on the “day side” of the planet, meaning we get to experience the Sun being completely blocked out by the Moon for a few minutes in any given location along the path of totality. eclipseElements60fps_4-11-2023a_total_diagram.mp4 Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio What should people expect to see when viewing the eclipse? Anyone within the contiguous United States will be able to see the eclipse in some way on April 8th. If you are outside the path of totality, you will have several hours to witness a partial eclipse in the middle of the day. This means that the Sun will have a bit of a crescent shape, but it will not completely block the Sun. This is a fun time to put on approved solar eclipse viewing protective glasses and look at the shape of the sun, and to make pinhole projectors out of colanders or crisscrossed fingers to see lots of little crescent shadows on the ground. If you are inside the path of totality, which is about 100 miles wide and travels from Texas to Maine, you will see that partial eclipse for several hours, but right in the middle will be 3-4 minutes of totality when the bright disk of the Sun called the “photosphere” is completely blocked. During totality, the temperature will drop, crickets may start chirping, and you will see sunset colors in the sky in 360-degrees all around you. totalGlow_4k_60fps_4-14-2023a_2160p60_2 (1).mp4 Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio If you are able, it is definitely worth trying to get inside the path of totality. One place of many that you can find more information to plan a trip is this visualization my colleagues made: Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio What happens to the Sun’s light during an eclipse? In the words of “Mr. Eclipse” Fred Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist, “there are no special eclipse rays.” The Sun continues to be what it always is – an extremely bright object in the sky that hurts to look at. This is why NASA insists that anyone viewing the eclipse should wear approved eclipse-viewing lenses, because even during a partial eclipse, you are still looking directly at the Sun. (Note, cameras can also be damaged if they look directly at the sun without a solar filter.) However, in the last seconds before totality, there are some dazzling effects we can see. The first to occur is called the “Diamond Ring Effect”. This is where some of the sun’s light wraps around the horizon of the moon like a ring, and a sliver of light still at the edge creates a huge amount of glare like a diamond. Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas The next effect we call “Baily’s Beads” which are visible for only a moment – these are a line of bright spots of light that poke through the valleys on the edge of the Moon. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani And finally, once the Sun is completely covered by the moon, we get to see magic of the Solar corona, long tendrils of illuminated plasma in the Sun’s atmosphere. The corona is always there in the sky, but it is usually completely covered up by glare from the disk of the Sun, which is about 1 million times brighter than the corona. For these 3 or 4 minutes of totality, we recommend taking off your eclipse glasses and soaking in the corona with your bare eyes. Credit: Miloslav Druckmüller, Peter Aniol, Shadia Habbal/NASA Goddard, Joy Ng Once totality ends, Baily’s Beads and the Diamond Ring will appear again and we recommend putting your eclipse glasses back on to enjoy the rest of the partial eclipse. How does that inform your work with the Visualizations team at NASA? My team is called the Scientific Visualization Studio, and we use both observed and computed data to make images and videos that explain science research. We have been working closely with scientists and communicators across NASA to create computer graphics imagery to help explain what the April 8th eclipse will look like on the Earth’s surface and in the sky, the surprising geometry of the Earth-Moon-Sun system, and more. We even recently published a game aimed toward younger audiences on NASA’s SpacePlace website called “Snap It!” that gets into what transits are and how eclipses are a special kind of transit. You can find it at this link: https://go.nasa.gov/SnapIt. And, of course, you can view thousands of visualizations about the eclipse and other science topics at our website: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov. ---- So now that we have a good idea of what happens during eclipses in real life, let's jump into the game! Directional Lighting To try and simulate the lighting we see in our solar system we use a variety of systems, but for the eclipse we’ll be focusing on our direct lighting solution with the star of the solar system: Kerbol. While a star technically emits light in all directions, in our game we only really need to care about the star’s light that reaches our player. To handle this, we use a Directional Light which, by definition, is located infinitely far away and emits in one direction only. This works great for lighting our worlds with an intense light from a single distant source like a star. This directional light is also responsible for the direction that all shadows are cast in game. To make this directional light behave more like an actual star, we attenuate its intensity based on distance and occlusion. Distance is the easier of the two. If the player flies their Kerbals way out towards Eeloo they’ll noticed their vessel gets much dimmer. Looking back at Kerbol they can see it shrinking in the skybox as well. To manage this, in the lighting code we attenuate the light’s intensity based on the Inverse Square Law which states that “the intensity of the radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance”. The formula looks a little something like this: 1 /x ² . Things like artist adjustable overrides and camera auto-exposure play into the lighting too, but in general throughout the solar system, the further you get from the star, the dimmer it gets. For smaller objects like terrain, buildings, and parts, we use shadows to show light being occluded. But for something as huge as a celestial body we track how much they block our Kerbals from the star itself to attenuate the light intensity appropriately. As an example, we’ll use a solar eclipse with Kerbol and the Mun. Simulated eclipse Intersection of Circles When you think about it in a flat 2D space, this is just two circles intersecting each other. If that’s the case then we can solve for the area of overlap to determine how occluded Kerbol is. The diagrams and formulas below show more of the math being done behind the scenes: Our lighting system holds a reference to the current SOI celestial body, that body’s star and any neighboring bodies. All of these bodies are projected into a normalized sphere around the player where the system checks if any bodies are going to intersect. We can quickly verify this by checking if the sum of the body’s radii are greater than or equal to the distance between them. Once we pass this check, the intersection code starts and we begin solving for the amount of overlap to determine the percentage a body is blocked. First step is to solve for the distance each circle is from the center of the intersection. To do this we use the equation of a circle and populate it with the values we know. C₁: x ² + y ² = r ₁² C₂: ( x - d )² + y ² = r ₂² Then, isolate y ² in each equation and combine both equations like so: y ²= r ₁² - d ₁² y ²= r ₂² - ( d₁ - d )² r ₁² - d ₁² = r ₂² - ( d ₁ - d )² Finally, we can solve for d ₁ and d ₂ : d ₁ = ( r ₁² - r ₂² + d ²) / 2d d ₂ = d - d ₁ After that we can begin solving for the angle of the sector formed when tracing the radii of our celestial body to the intersection points: With our new θ₁ and θ₂ in radians, we can solve for the area of each body’s overlapping segment A₁ and A₂. The following formula is derived by subtracting the area of the triangle from the area of the sector formed by this angle: Area of a triangle = ( 1 / 2 ) r² sin⁡θ Area of a sector = ( 1 / 2 ) r² θ Area of segment = ( ( 1 / 2 ) r² θ ) - ( ( 1 / 2 ) r² sin⁡θ ) = ( r² / 2 ) * ( θ - sin⁡θ ) A1 = ( ( r₁² ) / 2 ) * ( θ₁ - sin⁡θ₁ ) A2 = ( ( r₂² ) / 2 ) * ( θ₂ - sin⁡θ₂ ) Total Area = A1 + A2 And there you have it, the area of overlap for the celestial body. This can then be used to determine the percentage of visibility the further body has by subtracting the occluded area from the total projected circle area and with that number we can scale the intensity of the light emitted by that source body. In our case for the eclipse that will dim the Kerbol’s intensity as the Mun passes over EclipseAtKSC_Attenuation.mp4 Simulated eclipse over the KSC Lens Flare Occlusion The final piece of the puzzle here is the lens flare of the star changing to show that it has been occluded by the Mun. The same visible percentage value is passed through to the lens flare system where it attenuates the scale of the flare to match the reduction of directional lighting in the environment. Unfortunately, this doesn’t capture the details of a total solar eclipse though. EclipseAtKSC_LensFlareAndAttenuation.mp4 Simulated eclipse over the KSC from the ground We have plans to improve the look of eclipses and celestial body occlusion beyond attenuation and add more noticeable “flair” to a total eclipse like Kerbol’s corona peeking out from behind the Mun! We’ll be keeping a close eye on the next total solar eclipse as reference and inspiration! And, if you're nearby and able to, we hope that you join us on April 8th in safely viewing this awesome event right above our heads. Thanks to AJ and everyone over at NASA for contributing to this Dev Diary - and thanks to you for reading! Cioletti .ipsEmbeddedVideo { width: 700px; }

They've actively, literally, contradicted this by saying work was continued between the restructuring. Plus it's literally the same upper management minus Paul Furio who got fired early on, so it's either them practicing corporate diplomacy (with themselves?) or development really wasn't interrupted. Hope one day we get a proper post mortem and a case for devs and publishers to look at and learn from. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. They work super slowly > they can't show progress because there's none > there's nothing solid to talk about (and they don't want to talk about plans either because they know they'll be held up to their words, the horror). > they need to space posts more > those posts are still empty because (start cycle again here). Basic bug-reporting feedback right there that you should be telling the authors of reports. In github you get your issues properly tagged if they can't be reproduced, or are believed to be hardware related, or whatever. Reports being archived without saying a single word is a big no no, no matter what single excuse you could write for doing it. Even a "not important" provides at least some closure and safety that the thing was at least read. Not only is the faith in QA testing for this project under the ground, but the bug tracker that had to be fought for "happens" to be ignored and users are made to wait ~1 month to see if top voted issues are even being looked at. Because even those barely have developer interaction, only to be met with "can't reproduce lol". The whole bug reporting-to-feedback process (let alone a "hot" fix that's cold by 2 months at the minimum) is laughably bad and should be set as an example to every dev running a bug tracker on how exactly to not do things. Great way of putting it into words. We're 1+ years into the project and these very basic doubts still linger. Even if they work at the pace of a DMV, they should have a vision they want to pursue and a reason for wanting to repeat all the same mistakes KSP1 made. For all the hate KSP1 received in these forums once 2 dropped, from some people, they're really doing a very basic rerun with a fresh coat of paint and a bigger price tag. Doesn't matter, there's still a missing part to close the loop. It's the same issue the old "mail us the bug" reporting system had. You have no idea what they're doing, if they're doing anything at all, with your report. On which everybody complained about readability and what we got in return was "replace font 2 hard" and some color changes on the navball which is still a mess. Great feedback loop, at least that issue had some closure and we know we need mods to fix that. So you get another black hole place where you don't even know where your feedback goes. The K.E.R.B. is so vital and wanted because it's what's missing to close the loop: feedback on feedback. It's the only time we get to hear about what devs are actually working on, without marketeer language, without hypebeasting, and so on.

Ah yes, love the hyperbole. Also, you can clearly check that I'm a man of my word: i said that if FS! failed to deliver, I'd no longer have any hope or playtime for this game, and that's exactly what happened. I booted FS! a couple times to see what it was about, the game is still bad, and broken, science is a bad streamlined copy of KSP1 and now I post here with weeks or months inbetween right as I said I would. That you still have to strawman my posts as some sort of angry, rabid hater wanting change is funny, specially when I didn't ask for anything to change since before For Science! because that update showed me this project is hopeless. They're clearly not obvious for the devs, given how many remain unaddressed (can't address anything if you don't communicate), that's exactly why the community feels unheard. Very little people posts here anymore thinking the devs are gonna read their feedback unless it's a bug. That's as evident as checking the suggestions subforum and seeing the only people suggesting stuff is new users. Expectations remain unaddressed and unmanaged past the roadmap and some handwavy answers at the AMAs and will remain so until the devs decide to man up and come out with serious talk about the final shape of KSP2, so the people wanting something different can move on if they haven't yet.