Pthigrivi

Right on. It may have just been a product of my setup at the time. I've been a bit AFK on this forum mainly because I've been delving into other games and thinking a lot about automation and base-building dynamics while I wait for more substantial updates but I did enjoy FS quite a bit and I found performance and stability much improved. As you say about modded KSP1 there are some tools I find I really do need--flight planning, transfers, alarm clock chief among them. I also really want life support and trajectory prediction factoring drag but we'll see how all that goes. Im an architect by trade so it'll be fun in the interim to play with planetary static physics and base building when colonies arrive. I just don't see any utility in griping at the devs about pace. If they take till next year to release colonies I'll take my precious gaming moments Factorio megabasing. All games are an indulgent gift.

I think it depends a great deal on when you first interacted with it. I was an early adopter both of Factorio and of DSP, and frankly both were nearly unplayable on first release. I left them alone for a year or two and when I went back they were brilliant. Frostpunk was also utter frustration when I first played but is now one of my favorite games. Good things take time. I think KSP2 is on a great path. Honestly it won't even be a real game for me until resources come into it. Im very happy to wait a few years if that means the end product got the love it deserved. Like, also keep in mind Starfield despite its rollercoaster reputation is the only new franchise single-player game of last year to crack the top 10 of MAU last year. All of the actual money is in brainless live-service, V-buck microtransaction shooters like fortnite. People can complain all they like but all studios care about is how folks vote with their wallets. If you care about thoughtful games that are for folks who like to think about science and problem solving take some time and give a little love. Show a little patience. In large part thats because cars involve the actual health and safety of those who interact with them. Phones are a fundamental necessity of communication and most peoples economic life. Games are a pleasant luxury. If I design a house and it falls down on someone I'll expect to be sued. If I design a sofa and the folks saw and signed the proposal but then a week later just don't like the fabric very much thats on them.

This may be too general a discussion for this thread, but the topic is communication, timing, and expectations. I feel as though there we're in a weird zone in gaming fan relationships where the nature of creating high-quality, novel gaming experiences requires a truly stupendous amount of labor on the part of creators. Im in design, my friends and family are in engineering, finance, software, fashion, journalism, etc. Those industries have little in common but one thing: On time, On budget, On quality. Pick two. Thats the nature of the world. I don't say this lightly but the current status quo of game criticism is actually unreasonable because it has no recognition of this fundamental reality. Further, we live in a "client is always right" world and so no one actually involved in the production will tell you literally everything you want to know minute to minute. They'll be nice and agree with you even if your expectations don't make any material sense. Thats the world you live in. Learn to live with it. Some boomer I work with loves to spend hours loudly and obnoxiously haranguing lower-level service techs about software issues that the actual human being on the other end of the phone has no means of solving. Don't be that dude. Be reasonable. Have a little self and mutual awareness and think about what material benefit your time and their time is actually worth. As far as I can tell the only games that have released in the last few years with minimal bugs and high-polish were kept well in-secret for most of their development existence. We were happy and surprised in large part because there was exactly zero transparency until the product was at 99%. When it released Cyberpunk was mess, Dysonsphere was a mess, Factorio was a mess, Starfield is still kind of a mess. When ambitious games are released they are gonna kind of be a mess. Thats the nature of the biz. Thats the world you live in. If you don't have patience, if you're not willing to accept reality and wait 3 years for Cyberpunk to go from being kind of a release disaster to one of the best gaming experiences out there then you aren't being reasonable or realistic about what producing great modern games requires. Its a huge amount of cloistered incubtion followed by years of passionate fan feedback and developer follow-through. It's absolutely fine to have and voice criticisms. You absolutely need to make those criticism known. Just don't be a jerk about it. All of these artists and engineers and creative people are giving their time and their lives to make a nice little experience for you to take you away from your grueling existence for a few hours. By all means point out areas ripe for improvement, but have a little respect for the actual people on the other side of your post. Be passionate, be persistent, and be polite.

Sir people can have their opinions but that eclipse was awesome. *Note this post is in a joking tone

Man I've been away a while but things seemed pretty good after science released. Folks getting antsy again? I'm psyched for colonies and I think it'll breathe a lot more life into gameplay. Personally Im happy to wait.

What are we optimizing for? Fastest possible human extinction or? Can we pick a Chinese, Mesomerican or Egyptian leader?

Made it home! But the traffic is wild.

Google says "just beneath the moon".. maybe? Edit: no, thats where it will be on April 10th. Today it should be 6 degrees west of Jupiter and 24 degrees north east of the sun, if you've got one of those star-chart apps on your phone.

Man what a great day for it. Totality goes right over our house in VT, just hoping it takes less than 2h to get home from work with the highways clogged.

I mean I know all us oldheads want to see a mars mission on the TV before we die but we probably should use a reusable NSW transfer stage to LMO.

Id love to hear more on thruster and maneuverability updates as that seemed the the central hurdle on IFT3. Still sticking with gas thrusters or augmenting with a separate system?

I would say the overall scientific project of learning and understanding our universe is at least as old and absolutely as robust as any religion. Astronomers in China, Egypt, and Mesoamerica may not have used the word 'science' but the motivation to understand and predict physical phenomena was there. You don't need 100% institutional stability over hundreds of years, just trust that in the future just as in the past people will be motivated to understand the universe around them. I think thats a safe-enough bet. As to SpaceX going interstellar... I mean we know Elon. He loves big claims. They marketed Dragon as a Mars lander. By the time they actually do start colonizing mars I doubt Starship itself will be the leading proposal. I think it's a great design for mass to orbit and that form factor will be useful for decades if it's successful. It's obviously silly to compare it to anything like a working interstellar vehicle.

Agreed. Again--unconfirmed, but I see 3 likely reasons for booster RUD: A) the engine relight should have worked but was delayed/asymmetric and threw off the suicide burn, or B1) gridfins were miscalibrated / B2) the grid fins were deliberately testing control authority range. Granted this is a MUCH larger vehicle than falcon 9 and fuel mass slosh, descent speed etc. are very different but aerodynamic control is something SX has a lot of experience with. I'll be curious to hear more info on this. Starship is different. I've heard some vehicles deliberately roll in orbit to manage heat... but...? given the sound of crowd reaction in the room, the plan for a fuel transfer and relight test I think this roll was not in-program. You can see the vehicle is basically continuously venting through most of the suborbital journey and if those ports are exactly oppositional to keep tank pressure constant that shouldn't be a problem. If there is a bias at all--even slight--it could induce rotation and tumbling over time. Once they reentred with the atmosphere so thin it didn't look like the fins could reasert roll stability, but worse Starship pitched aft-down. Someone could correct me but I thought I heard the fuel transfer was supposed to move propellant to the header tank at the nose of the vehicle, which would have helped keep the nose down and forward as air pressure built up rather than tilting engines-down.

Im also wondering if without completing the prop transfer if the mass was actually distributed properly for reentry?

Ice or heat tiles? I feel like heat elements around hot gas ports could be mass-cheaper than a full hypergolic RCS system, if thats even the actual issue. After reaching pre-orbital altitude you've got a few minutes to melt or prevent frozen LOX that would impact thruster vectors and retain attitude control above atmosphere. It looked from the video that they were venting almost throughout the coast phase which *should* cancel out if the ports are oppositional. All of the weird roll and tumble action seemed to induce in coast phase.

Nice to have confirmation on the pez door. It wasn't really clear from the video that was working. It says they initiated but didn't complete the fuel transfer which makes sense with lack of control. Tim Dodd speculated the thruster ports might have been affected by ice build up. It'll be interesting to hear more about that.

My wife and I were gchatting during launch and she was like "wait... Pez dispenser? Chopsticks landing? Plasma blanket? Is this a Wes Anderson movie?"

Yeah the flaps seemed to be helping but it never really looked like they had control authority. Most of what we saw before blackout it seemed to be coming in tail first. The roll in orbit was odd too. Still a pretty spectacular launch.

How long do we think before reentry?

Damn thats exciting I havent heard much about the thermal system lately. They managing to keep more tiles attached?

Yeah Im psyched. My wife and I will be taking the afternoon off. We're in VT so it's running straight over us. Fingers crossed on weather!

I mean I've got my over the top art critic voice on. The NFT thing is just icing. Even in the world of contemporary art this kind of stands out as vain and cynical, kind of like Damien Hirst's 'For the Love of God' but without the self-awareness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God

Like imagine if art and its commentary on how money corrupts free expression folded back on itself, like a person sticking their head into their own digestive system. This is the art-world version of that. But launched into space so that humans for all eternity could appreciate what self-absorbed, morally vacuous morons we all were in this moment on earth.

Not as an engineer but as a lifelong student of art and art history this particular collaboration with Jeff Koons may well go down as the worst art piece of the 21st century. I can’t think of two people who could have more obviously outstripped their usefulness and exposed their profound lack of self-apprehension in a more illustrative way. Not sure if that’s something they were deliberately going for. Either way truly an embarrassment for the history books. Like image if Salvador Dali glued a urinal to the side of the Spruce Goose. This is basically that. https://www.apollo-magazine.com/jeff-koons-moon-rakewell/?amp=1

Love all this. I have made a number of UI notes but I want to speak to a very specific important function that I think neither KSP1 nor KSP2 has really captured: Snapping maneuver nodes to Ap, Pe, An, and Dn. 90% of the time when traversing space you're really trying to align your burn vector with one of these 4 points and it would be absolutely amazing if we could right-click and have the option to snap a maneuver node precisely on them. This is a little tricky now because of the way KSP2 handles burn start/stop times vs KSP1's centered nodes, but it would be SO valuable to have this capability for accurate and efficient maneuver planning and execution. I think this is one of those little tools that if implemented folks would wonder how they ever got by without it.