qeveren

But can you hum a few bars...?

I'm pretty sure that, when you have a pair of particles that are entangled in some property, measuring that property will give you a random result of its state. Obviously, being correlated, the particle at the other end will show the opposite state when measured. I'm not sure how one is supposed to send a message using correlated random results...

FTL signaling is a problem not because messages arrive out of order, but rather that one can use it to trivially send signals into one's own past light cone... which, when the message is "don't send this message", is the Grandfather Paradox in simplified form. As for time, observers in different frames of reference won't necessarily agree on the wheres and whens of the same events. The order of causally connected events is preserved for all reference frames... right up until FTL gets introduced.

Time travel as a result of FTL is used as a fairly straightforward argument for why we're pretty sure (local) FTL isn't a thing in real life. It basically works out to be "Relativity, Causality, FTL; you only get to pick two." Also, light isn't the fastest reference frame; it isn't a valid reference frame at all.

It's kind of silly, because I imagine the LHC creates strange matter quite frequently, just never stable strange matter. A "vacuum bubble" is a kind of vague way of saying "vacuum metastability event". In such a scenario our spacetime isn't actually the lowest vacuum energy state, it's sitting in a little "energy valley" somewhere above the lowest energy level. Some event kicks off that nudges the local vacuum out of that valley and it falls to the actual lowest state, and-very much like the early moments of the Big Bang where the various forces separated from each other-the laws of physics in the new vacuum change. This new, "true vacuum" then expands at the speed of light, annihilating the current universe.

Well... I guess I might have to, now that I know it's a thing.

For anyone wondering what Earth plants would look like under a red dwarf's light, the spectrum is basically that of a conventional incandescent light bulb. Atmospheric scattering would shift the lighting a little bit more red, but I daresay they'd still look green to our eyes. As for native plants, their apparent colour would depend on whatever pigments they end up evolving. Remember, evolution is lazy and likes to half-ass things, and developing an "absorb all the light!" chemical complex is probably more effort that it's willing to put into things.

Is there a way to set (or disable) the mousewheel acceleration when fine-tuning maneuver nodes? It feels like the acceleration curve is way too steep: one tick, hardly any change; two ticks, still hardly any change; three in rapid sequence, huge glob of delta-v.

I would imagine that Homo sapiens would be long-extinct by 1My AD, with the Solar System colonized by our technological descendants; assuming that nothing untoward happens to us in the meantime, of course. That's not to say that biological humans (and whatever variations and offshoots we cook up) couldn't still exist. Maybe Earth will be relegated to a weird fantasy theme-park full of elves and dwarves and furries. Interstellar colonization might happen, but I doubt it will be made a serious goal. It's terrifically expensive and difficult, and really we have everything we need right here, for the next several Gy at least.

Well that's hardly Lunar combat, now is it?

I dunno; it's pretty rare for two opposing sides to go 'total annihilation' on each other. Sure, you want to eliminate the opposing side's warfighting capability, but exterminating civilian populations tends to get you frowned at by folks. It also obviously depends on what's being fought over and why; building infrastructure on the Moon is probably expensive, resources, equipment, and specialists are valuable assets to capture. A total war, us-or-them scenario? Smash away, I guess. A steerable mass driver doesn't have any real advantage over conventional Lunar artillery, and has the huge downside that you can't move it out of the way of incoming fire. How the heck are you firing something at the surface of the Moon at 11kps? You're certainly not doing it with something that's on the Moon. It's a good point, actually. The surface is going to be a death zone until at least one side's surface capability is reduced to rubble. Once that's done I imagine troops would be ferried by suborbital transports of some kind... and they'll be spending the ride praying that the artillery guys didn't miss anything.

I wouldn't go that far. You can't exactly capture things with artillery and ortillery; you'll always need boots on the ground. Or robots, I suppose. Things in orbit are sitting ducks to ground fire, unless they've got a lot of delta-v to burn. The reverse is also true, for anything out in the open on the surface. Active defenses are probably going to be critical if one is going to move around where an opponent can see you. I'm not sure what would serve for the 'aircraft' role up there... maybe really-expendable jump-up drones? Stealth is going to be problematic at best for anything mobile. Everything is going to be lit up like a beacon in the infrared. A combat-rated spacesuit would be an interesting challenge to design. On the downside, you need to maintain a sealed environment when the other guy is determined to unseal your environment in the worst possible way. On the upside, you've got about six times more carry-weight for armor. I'd suspect they'd want to design something around a mechanical-pressure spacesuit-if they ever work the kinks out of that idea-since they'd be a lot less bulky. Man-portable weapons don't change much. Someone's going to need to come up with a thing to replace flashbangs, though.

I've always been fond of Project Valkyrie myself...

A Kugelblitz. I don't think this version actually works. The energy of a photon depends on the reference frame of the observer, so you'd end up with a scenario where one observer sees a photon while another sees a black hole.

Ground-effect vehicles are too fragile, unmaneuverable, and terrain-limited to be useful in urban combat. Any damage to the plenum and it will lose all drive.

A purely cosmetic suggestion, but would it be possible to see the name of the agency offering the contract in the Contracts Window? It makes it easier to name satellites etc. appropriately.

I'm sorry, the title of "silliest name for a game" was already taken by "Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance".

... fair enough. XD

Okay so when does 10-11=1?

Nice to see the Gunbuster and Honorverse ships on there.

Someone on another forum brought up the idea, so I figured I'd toss it in here and see what I can find out. So... can there theoretically exist an analogue to a laser, involving the boson one of the other fundamental interactions (strong, weak, gravitational)? What sort of properties would it have? Will a layperson like myself even understand the answer (or ask a question that isn't nonsensical)? (I'm guessing the answer is 'no' for the strong and weak interactions, what with the charge-carrying bosons and all the weirdness that leads to...)

Huh, okay, I see what was happening. The data was actually in a capsule docked with the lab; apparently it can process data stored in any connected part. Mischief managed, I guess?

I have a small MPL-equipped station in orbit around Minimus, and brought some delicious science data up in there. Decided I didn't like the massive transmission losses and would rather remove the data and place it in a return capsule instead. But... that's not an option?

Yeah, it's just the disconnect between the orientation of the ship and camera that's the problem here; the starting view, ship orientation, and control orientation should all align, otherwise it's just creating a confusion situation particularly for new players. It'd be like having the ship and view 90 degrees off on the launchpad. XD Also, the asteroid glider? Brilliant. The devs have always had a good ear for the players here. I just think this wasn't a good implementation of the fix for this; the camera, ship, and controls should all start aligned.

There's no good reason for it to have changed, however. And I still think that requiring the player to rotate the camera from its starting position by default, just to make the controls behave as expected, is a poor design choice. Oh, no argument from me there; though I'm not sure how to go about fixing those, since stacking rotations on rotations is always going to end up a bit strange. Nah, it's still facing out the VAB main doors toward the launchpad. Honestly all this could be made to go away as an issue if the camera is also moved 90 degrees. Then the camera and the rocket are aligned the same way both in the VAB and the launchpad. You just lose the nice default view out the VAB doors.