Silver_Swift

That is a very difficult question. Yes, in most situations truth has mostly instrumental value and all that matters in the end is if certain belief sets are more useful than others (though note that believing a lie often has unexpected disadvantages), but: 1) If you are making the decision for your self, you can't first investigate both options and then make an informed choice about taking on a false belief, that is just not how human minds work. ("I am now going to believe that this sugar pill is real medicine because then it will help with my symptoms.") 2) If you are making the decision for someone else you are taking away their choice as to whether they value truth more than pain relief. I would not be ok with people making this decision for me and I assume that I am not alone in this sentiment. This is oversimplifying it, of course, and there might indeed be belief sets that are so valuable to believe in (even if they are false) that it is better to not investigate them to carefully, it is just that this is an area where humans are very prone to making dangerous mistakes. As to your example: There is a difference between convincing someone of a falsehood and deliberately pointing out a very painful truth, but yes, if you do not believe in an afterlife I would argue that it is immoral to go around telling terminally-ill people that they are going to be living forever when, in fact, you believe they will literally seize to exist soon.

The problem is that you are still lying to your customers, it doesn't matter that it helps in some cases, you are still maintaining a false picture of the world. And this picture will have negative effects on at least some of these people, because no matter how much you encourage your customers to still pursue traditional medicine (not that I believe alternative medicine producers are encouraging this very hard at the moment, for obvious reasons) there are going to be people that skip actual treatment in favor of alternative medicine because you told them it would help. Actual medical treatments and their side effects are hard enough to understand for a lay person even at the best of times, we don't need people coming in and blurring the picture even further. There is a nice quote by Randall Munroe on the subject: "Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine when you know you’re not, because you want their money, that's not just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong."

In that case: 1) No, that would be stupid. 2) If we really want to spend public money on making medicine that doesn't actually work and telling people it does, we can do better than just water. We could sell medicine that helps against some of the symptoms but not all and tell the patients they are getting the full cure. In cases where that is difficult or not possible we could at the very least use vitamin pills or whatever.

Same for me, the only thing I really have to use mechJeb for is interplanetary transfer, but I still use it for rendezvous occasionally, because it is quite tedious to have to do it yourself. I also often use mechjeb to auto-execute maneuver nodes that I set up manually as it is just much less tedious that way. I really like that in newer versions of KSP all the features that ease flight control (mechJeb modules, maneuver nodes, pilot skills) unlock gradually, so you have to learn to do complex maneuvering yourself first, but the game doesn't force you to do it for the umphteenth time after you've already proven that you can do it.

Ah, crap, you're right. I thought I checked that I had them the correct . Though, to be pedantic, you probably couldn't have a mouse sized elephant either as I believe there are a few mechanisms for which the square cube law works in reverse (heat management is the one that comes to mind, you lose heat based on surface area and gain heat based on volume). I'm having trouble picturing this in my mind, if one rocket can get to space on its own, why can't multiple rockets that are effectively just flying very close together? Of course, you might be able get some aerodynamic advantage out of the fact that you are launching all of them at once by stacking them on top of each other, but that works in favor of one large rocket rather than against it.

I don't think the square cube law applies here. I mean, worst case scenario: you duct-tape a bunch of smaller rockets together and it will be as structurally sound as the individual rockets were (since each rocket is supported by its own thrust). The square cube law only applies when the supportive structures scale with surface area whereas the stuff that needs supporting scales with volume. An animal that is twice as big in every direction weighs eight times as much while bone cross section is only four times as big, but if your rocket has a payload that is twice as big in every direction it will carry eight times as much payload and it will need eight times as much thrust. You can't have a elephant sized mouse, but you could totally have a elephant size pack of mice each supported by their own legs. Edit: swapped mouse and elephant. Thanks smjjames .

The point is that interstellar civilizations are likely to be really bloody obvious. If the technology and capabilities of a civilization keep increasing like ours are, then a species with a couple million years head start will be spreading their influence across the universe at near light speed. The Fermi paradox (as I understood it) is not about single planet civilizations that are hiding out in their own star system somewhere, but about the lack of vast interstellar civilizations that come knocking on our door. The former we would likely not have noticed yet unless we looked at exactly the right time at exactly the right place, but the latter we bloody well would have noticed more or less as soon as our light cones overlapped. Incidentally, I don't think this is pessimism. I wouldn't mind if humanity was the first or even the only technologically advanced species in our part of the universe. There is no telling whether meeting an alien civilization would end well for us and if we get bored of being alone we can always create or uplift our own fellow sentient beings.

Well, twice as hard. If you are accelerating at 1G near earth's surface you are experiencing 2G (1G from the acceleration and 1G from the earth's gravity). Should still be pretty doable I guess.

The way I understood it (that is to say, very badly), is that there are a lot more fundamental problems with the Alcubierre than collateral damaged and potentially non-existing unobtanium. Not least amongst them the fact that FTL travel, regardless of how you do it, allows you to break causality.

Same for me, except I always use (quotes included) "not Africa" and "not Italy". because I think the landmass looks like a sort of weird mirrored Italy (even if it is geographically in completely the wrong place and way to big) and I don't know what Korea looks like.

My first priority is parachutes so I can properly land crafts after use. After that my main priority are fuel lines because I tend to use large radially attached fuel tanks and having to manually move the fuel around is a pain. (Note: I haven't used the stock tech tree in ages, so this might not make sense for stock only games. I'm currently using the T7 tech tree)

Why don't asteroids have gravity? Would it be that CPU intensive to have an object that is both influenced by the gravity of other objects and in turn exerts its own gravity on other objects? If that is the case would it be easier to do with the abstraction that smaller classes of objects don't effect larger classes of objects (ie. planets effects ships and asteroids, asteroids effect only ships and smaller asteroids, ships don't effect anything).

The problem with a game like KSP is that it is very hard to estimate how much you like it before you buy it (yes, I know there is a demo, but that still doesn't really do the game justice). The experience KSP brings is easily worth the €40-60,- that most AAA games charge you, but there is no way for me to tell whether a game has this much depth before putting a whole lot of time in it to get to know how it works. Would I gamble $27,- on a game like this? Evidently yes, (though I don't remember paying that much, maybe I bought it in a steam sale?) but that is near the top of what I am willing to pay for a game that could easily have become a tedious grindfest after the initial "Weee, I am an astronaut" feeling subsided.