Jacke

I imagined that video having Thunderbirds soundtrack music.

This is also why very stable high explosives (detonated by shock waves) are used and low explosives (ignited by fire or electricity) are restricted to detonators to set off high explosives. Stable high explosives can be burned safely and are crafted not to be a hazard unless a detonators is used. The battery packs for electric cars are verging into being way too dangerous. Something will need to be done about that. Up to a certain size, the atmosphere should provide at least some protection. And atmosphereless bodies should have buried facilities to protect from other radiation sources. No one will want to test this. And starships will always be dangerous and have to be under strict control.

It is a very Kerbal solution to game bugs.

Don't worry. It's 2 out of 3 falls.

Imagine what the Kerbal Afterlife must be like.... Exactly like Kerbal Space Program. ! KSP IS THE KERBAL AFTERLIFE!!!

@R-T-B, you may want to talk to @sarbian and find out how he set up a DEV repository with CKAN. You can add in that via CKAN's Settings > CKAN Settings > Settings window at the top, Metadata Repositories. That way both the current stable release and DEV RELEASE are both available and can be selected in CKAN to either go with stable or with the testing version within CKAN.

It doesn't matter what was imagined about Venus and Mars before there was enough data on what really was going on there. I think Venus was doomed because it was so close to the Sun, just as Mars was doomed by being so small. Venus may also have been doomed by rotating so slowly; this one is more tricky as it's uncertain what the history of its rotation has been, as is known to a large degree for Earth. Venus being closer to the Sun was hotter than Earth. That led to it lacking or losing the things that protect Earth and its atmosphere. Even at a small amount of oxygen in the atmosphere leads to an ozone layer that shields the atmosphere below from most hard UV light. The way the atmosphere becomes structured means that there's a cold trap in the atmosphere that removes virtually all water vapour above about ~11km, well below the ozone layer. Together they protect the water vapour in the atmosphere from being broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, of which the hydrogen is easily lost to space. On Venus, that likely led to it losing most of its water vapour leading to the atmosphere heating up higher, even to plate tectonics if it had been established to stopping as its lithosphere also dried out. The higher temperature also drove carbon dioxide out of the rocks leading to an even thicker atmosphere and even higher temperatures. Venus's slow rotation likely means it never had a very strong magnetic field, even in the past. Mars has a similar problem, but it's due to it being smaller, which led to its core cooling sooner than the Earth's, leading Mars to lose any magnetic field it did have in the past. Without a strong magnetic field, both Venus and Mars's atmospheres are exposed to the Solar wind from the Sun. For the smaller Mars, this means what atmosphere it has was significantly eroded by the impact of the Solar wind. Earth has its stronger magnetic field except during field reversals, about every few 100,000 years. Earth's surface is protected from Solar wind radiation by the thicker atmosphere during reversals. Mars is exposed to this all the time.

Gargamel, MechJeb in KSP v0.23 could fly rockets with that issue's crazy weak joints better than I could by a long shot. Probably because it kept the control forces just enough to do the corrections needed. At the time, I managed to fly a simple rocket without struts to orbit successfully once and was completely exhausted. With MechJeb's Ascent Guidance in control, it did it over and over again. Only in later versions did joints get strong enough--with no visible wobble--that I could easily fly rockets to orbit manually. From what I remember and what I've seen, I'd say KSP2 is more like KSP1 v0.23 in the strength of its joints, if not worse.

A recent video on the Permian-Triassic Extinction. Currently now thought to be a linked triple event. Outside of this video, I've heard that like the drier climate of the Permian, the Large Igneous Province, the Siberian Traps, was spurred on by the forming of the continents into one land mass, Pangaea. Must have been other factors, as previous supercontinents hadn't caused this much vulcanism. At least Large Igneous Provinces don't show up overnight but give lots of warning, as they make even supervolcanoes look like popguns. There's also some information on when plate tectonics started on Earth. It does seem to have been a big driving force in making Earth different. Linked to the presence of surface water which then permeates down to the bottom of the lithosphere, the bottom of the tectonic plates. And in helping drive the carbon cycle, seems to help keep Earth mostly close to the amount of carbon dioxide to counteract the Main Sequence Brightening of the Sun. The slow rotation of Venus seems to have been original. I've not heard it recently but I have heard that Venus's rotation is actually coupled to Earth such that the same side of Venus faces the Earth at its closest approach at inferior conjunction. If there was any plate tectonics on Venus, the heating of the atmosphere, destroying any atmospheric cold trap (which on Earth keeps water vapour well below the ozone layer and relatively protected from solar UV light) and leading to the loss of its surface water likely ended plate movement long ago. Rising temperatures and loss of water drove the carbon dioxide out of the rocks forming a thick atmosphere. It's really really hard to study Venus as the surface conditions destroy any probes in short order. Outside of remote sensing from orbit, there's a lot of R&D going on to develop more rugged components for landers for the future.

I think most people don't realise how destructive even the humble NATO 7.62x51mm round is. It's hard to fire even just semi-auto from a rifle (and really demands a better designed round like 7.92x42mm CETME), but it can rip huge chunks off of people or cause very destructive wound cavities. Many other rounds have less energy (still rather destructive though), but a lot have more.

I'm none too happy about the state that KSP2 was released in, especially considering the price. However, I also think even if it didn't have a lot of the bugs that it does, there still would have been a similar drop-off in online active KSP2 users. The number of systems in the game is rather low. Doing the best in sandbox-only requires quite a bit of self-directed play. That alone would lead to a drop-off. I'm sure there will be spikes in activity with each patch too.

One of my distinct memories (though still somewhat vague) is visiting a neighbour who had been home raising her child for a while. I got the distinct impression she was very starved for intelligent conversation. That was before the Internet had become a general tool for the whole populace. The benefit just to stay-at-home parents of online conversations must be immense.

@Superfluous J, do you perhaps mean ResearchBodies?

It seems that Microsoft can't properly handle software downloading and updating. I compare Debian apt+dpkg to MS Windows Update: Debian is amazing at its ability to download, unpack, and install software, all while doing all the extra fiddly bits needed to handle special cases. MS Windows Update is horribly slow, taking far longer to do less. If I could, I'd regulate all download and updating processes by *all* software companies to be forced to use apt+dpkg.

Real rockets do not wobble like that. Sure, they flex. But they're also designed to minimize that flex to the point where in KSP (either one) you wouldn't be able to see it. It comes down to not setting up the joints correctly in Unity. Unity joints can be made much firmer by adjusting parameters. And with measures like what the Kerbal Joint Reinforcement mod does (turns a single joint in a trio of 3 in a ring) or later stock KSP1 (add partless autostruts to connect more parts together to reduce overall flex) things can be made much more realistic.

When you select the other craft, do you get the relative velocity and a target marker on the Navball? In KSP1, rendezvous is all about setting up an initial close pass at low relative velocity (far rendezvous, the rest here being close rendezvous), then at that closest approach, killing the relative velocity, then thrusting towards the target. Then repeating that sequence at the next close pass, and so on until within about a 100m and in roughly the same orbit with no relative velocity. Then docking proceeds with selecting control-from-here on the craft's own docking port and targeting the target's docking port. Helps for alignment to have an indicator where the target's docking port is pointed (usually set up with the mod Navball Docking Alignment Indicator). A craft with properly balanced RCS is almost necessary for this part to cut down on translation-while-turning and turning-while-translating coupling problems.

While there may be a degree of concern about Intercept Games, I think it's Take Two in who people are lacking trust. Sure TT want's an ROI on their costs of purchasing KSP and redeveloping it. But we all know if there isn't enough ROI within some time limit, at some point those at TT will figure KSP is a lost cause, then terminate it and write it off. This has all happened before and this will all happen again. I've already been through this roller coaster with City of Heroes. It was still profitable but not enough to withstand whatever process went on inside NCsoft that lead to its termination being announced in August 2012 and enacted on November 30th, 2012. Only by a supreme act of the power of friendship was that not the last day I played City. Sure, if TT pulls the rug out from KSP2, we'll all still have the KSP versions we've downloaded and there'd still be the 3rd-party infrastructure. But it could happen that KSP1 and these forums would end too. And pressure could bear on that 3rd-party infrastructure. This community is about the size of City's community in 2012. I saw what Shutdown did to that community, did to my gaming guild and my friends. I hope we never see that happen. But as things are now, there is still a risk of that happening.

Changing a game's engine part-way through development is a good way to derail that development and cause other issues. Noted examples that show this is bad are Daikatana and Star Citizen. That and much of the rest of this comment are from reading commentary and talking with people I've come to trust and seeing the nature of the base issues. Many space games have issues that isn't common in any other game type and thus no common game engine deals with well: having both a range of physics and a large range of scales. It's more the large range of scales. If you can pan smoothly from the ground to orbit or even beyond, or vice versa, then the game has been customised to handle the radical range of scales at least partly in this visual way. Just because a game doesn't allow that doesn't mean the issue has been ignored. Just because it does handle that visualisation doesn't mean the issue has been handled properly. There are many many issues that come from this and spaces games with it need to address it early in development. It's a realm where the Kraken lurks and is often encountered. The key thing when picking any engine for a space game is often making sure the physics is right at all scales, with solutions being different at different scales. This is the biggest problem with Unity that it does share with other engines. Then dealing with physics and the large range of scales needs to be tackled at the start with 3rd-party and custom additions to the base engine. Anyhoo, these issues make changing the engine of a space game even more fateful than other games, where it is bad enough. If there are issues with the physics or large range of scales are still causing issues, it's usually better to fix those than change the game engine. Fixing them will be hard enough. Changing the game engine is almost guaranteed to make things much worse.

No it is not. In both cases you mention, given appropriate support, change is possible and likely. In the case of the leadership of Star Theory/Intercept Game and Private Division, as @MarcAbaddon said, we can expect their future behaviour to be similar to their past behaviour in similar conditions. Because there would have to be reasons why it would be different.

@Lord Squonk and @Jahnus, if you want issues resolved, you have to do more. You should provide the logs of your game session that you experienced the loss of "BG textures" Breaking Ground features. Follow the link in my signature on how to find the logs. You should also provide screenshots of both the textures being present and missing. As well, what are "BG textures"? I couldn't find anything in a search of the forums? Where did you get them from? EDIT: Whoops! Misread. That was "BG features" as in Breaking Ground features.

Another thing hard to see is the difference in the notifications dropdown between old and new notifications. Again, just two close shades of grey right now.

As I remember, Millikan's oil drop experiment is damn tricky to get right, fiddling with the electric field to suspend a drop and getting a number of runs to have the data to plot so you can calculate the charges and see the quantization of the charges, then see what the charge on 1 electron is. It's a long time ago, but I think some of the others I had to do were worse, if not running the experiment, then in reducing and analysing the data. The one I remember the most is doing stellar photometry with a cooled detector and setting up the 40cm scope so that when the secondary switched between 4 positions, it was on the target star, the reference star, and 2 sky spots near to each of the stars. Had to confirm the data was coming out cleanly for all 4. Still vaguely remember how to reduce the raw data.

As an aside, I personally have actually done both the e/m experiment and Millikan's oil drop experiment, which is how the mass of an electron is computed.

Life is filled with conjecture. Most of history too. Vital to have primary sources and other supporting information. Also vital to learn enough of the authors of primary sources to gauge their tilt. It's tough to do quality history just because of this. It's the reason why journalists and intelligence analysts want at least 2 independent sources to be sure of something. Even statements, evidence, and data can be misleading. It's why experience is needed in a particular field to get good at gauging what is likely going on from what is available. @K^2 --and others--from my long experience on the forums is knowledgeable and experienced with game development because they've satisfied my threshold that they are the real deal. Doesn't mean everything they say is of equal certainty or completely free of issues. But what @K^2 says about KSP2 is their best estimate of what went on, what is going on, and what is likely to happen. Doesn't mean they're perfect, any more than I am, especially about the future. You just don't dispose of their shared thoughts with a one-liner.

How? For a 3rd party app that tries to do what Debian apt does without the game backing the standards needed (see Debian for how it should be done), I think CKAN does things very well. I say this as someone who used to manually mod everything using another 3rd party mod tool. I find things much easier now I've shifted to mostly using CKAN and manually modding only when I have to. Someone like @linuxgurugamer would find it hard to do what he does--which is vital to KSP--without CKAN. The CKAN main post and the devs like @HebaruSan are on the KSP forums, so you can comment in the post or PM them if you have an issue. I vaguely remember the Overwolf App from a long time ago. I didn't strike me as right back then. I didn't even know it supported mods. If I wasn't using CKAN, I have at least 2 other tools I'd use in its place.