FleshJeb

Octopus Lady covers deep sea hydrothermal vents, including a little tangent on exobiology. I love her work, and this one is even better than her average. To describe her as "perky" would be a gross understatement, but you will never have so much information shotgunned into your poor little brain in such a short period of time. https://youtu.be/6R8hdRiEWkY Weird, the regular video embed isn't working, no matter which style of link.

If I had to go back to the root causes? Well, let me relay that in as politically neutral and factual a manner as I can muster: Some very ugly events happened in 2001, and the U.S. got busy invading at least one country that had absolutely nothing to do with it. Several trillion dollars and approximately a million innocent lives were wasted as a result. Then some comically stupid and greedy bankers caused a recession that just barely avoided turning into a second Great Depression, burning up even more trillions of dollars. Now imagine that was written with 50% of the words not making it past the forum filter and my NSA/FBI file becoming actionable.

If Benjamin Franklin time-traveled to the present day, he'd be wrecking fools on Twitter within two weeks. (Also, all his purchases would be made with hundred-dollar bills.)

I thought everyone just turned the percent thrust slider down on the engines...

I want to see a benefit to all science instruments having persistence. Drop a temperature probe on a planet, open up its properties and hit timewarp. You see a graph with a diurnal sine wave. Let that run for a day, and you get some science points. Let it run (and automatically transmit back in the background) for a local year, and you get a lot more. (The calc in KSP1 is deterministic, so this is extremely low overhead.) Determining position on other planets is hard, so that data also has a quality rating. Over time, your relay satellite / ScanSAT bird can refine the position of your probe, perhaps using radio-ranging. Over time, and depending on the strength of the antennas, the quality metric goes up, acting as a multiplier to the basic science points you're getting from that instrument. (The calcs for this can be simplified a lot, and they depend on existing signal strength calculations, so it's also low overhead.) Zoom out to map view and hit a theoretical Thermal View button, and it displays the running average temperature from that probe as a red radius around that probe. Drop probes all over the planet and watch all this data shift and blend together as you timewarp. (Some observant players will notice that it's latitude-dependent, and they may learn something.) If you've got enough coverage, and you've run it long enough, the planet's info panel will show you the minimum and maximum temperatures for that planet.

You're absolutely right, and I recognized that as a flaw in my argument. Perhaps a better example would be Star Trek making up the "particle of the week", such as the oft-used tachyons: https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/particles4.htm#t It's considered somewhat lazy writing / technobabble, but having magical particles is perfectly fine as long as that matches your story tonally or thematically. Or you just have more important things to get to, and don't want to belabor the mechanics of them. The issue is that your readers might spot the OBVIOUS LITERARY DEVICE , and it could break their immersion. So, you might want to bury the magic in something more subtle. What if it's just a heretofore unknown attribute of particles and quantum mechanics, and doesn't require anything new? I was doing a little reading, because I hate walking into a conversation unarmed, and found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann–Wigner_interpretation It contains this fun bit of text: So which of the multiple observers governs which way it collapses? The most powerful psychic, of course. Who most strongly wants Schrodinger's Cat alive or dead? If I remember the plot of The Stars My Destination correctly, the main character is able to unlock his teleporting ability by being desperately angry and afraid. As it happens, he's the most angry and afraid person in the solar system, so he's really good at it. Just giving you food for thought. Have fun. See also: Moving Mars, or Blood Music by Greg Bear

I'll just point out that George Lucas ruined the entirety of Star Wars by introducing Midi-Chlorians as a concept. I remember watching Episode 1 in the theater and thinking, "I'm gonna slap the beard off this man." If you're going to explore the Anthropic Principle, there may be more elegant ways to go about it.

Works for me. Temporary error, probably. Joe's gonna die if he can't post in S&S.

Great news! Congratulations Anth, you're a credit to the community. There's another highly-technical game I play that just released a DLC and major update that busted the whole game down to the fundamentals. Dev communications about it have been abysmal. They even went so far as to publish a dev note whining about the negative Steam review-bombing from people with thousands of hours in the game. I'll say one thing for Intercept: You guys do a fantastic job understanding and engaging with the community, and hiring Anth is a clear sign of that.

I'm guessing we don't have enough information yet to compare to ULA's canceled ACES project? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage https://www.ulalaunch.com/docs/default-source/exploration/evolving-to-a-depot-based-space-transportation-architecture.pdf

If the asteroid made a faux pas, I hope it's at least a little chon-drite. (Under no circumstances should I be allowed to make puns.)

I just googled "DART Mission" The results were amusing.

I've never bought that explanation. Surely you can hold your breath in vacuum just/nearly as well as you can on Earth. A couple of minutes with prep time is no issue. And your tissue should be easily strong enough to handle a one atm differential. So it must be another mechanism. Could it be rapid, whole-body vasodilation causing loss of blood pressure and consciousness? I don't know how strong the physiology is behind vasoconstriction, but we know it regularly handles swings on the order of 100mmHg (1 atm = 760mmHg). It stands to reason that one could get absolutely ripped on stimulants or other vasoconstricting drugs, and extend vacuum consciousness for a lot longer. Al Pacino in spaaaaaaccceee.

That's interSTOOLer, sir.

I've never read Shattered Sword, but Jon Parshall is a frequent guest on this podcast. it's a fun ride: https://www.youtube.com/@UnauthorizedHistoryPacificWar/videos

Oh yeah, I'm saving the idea for a future build. That said, a coal-powered airliner that looks like a goose may indicate that I'm not deeply attached to realism:

Just not finished, but that's a neat idea if I can get it to float. I've changed the bow shape radically since then anyway. I'm roughly basing it on this: https://www.maritime.dot.gov/multimedia/ocean-going-tug

Some @Cupcake... grade funk: and some hard rock: Music was good before Ronald Reagan destroyed America.

Was playing with various bow shapes, copied and pasted a chunk, and realized I accidentally made a Pixar character:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_platform_station#Solar_powered

Xyla Foxlin builds and flies a carbon fiber model rocket. Best line, "Hot glue rhymes with Mach 2."

If it makes you feel any better, large hospitals/trauma centers are explicitly designed to survive natural disasters and keep functioning. One of the running jokes in my industry when we get a little sloppier than we want is, "Hey, we're not building a hospital here!" ("Sloppy" being defined as 1/4-inch tolerance instead of 1/8th)

I've always thought this was one of the definitive texts on living a cyborg life (or spending a lot of time clinically dissociated): https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithcordwainer-scannersliveinvain/smithcordwainer-scannersliveinvain-00-h.html