Terwin

As far as I have seen, the most telling argument against n-body physics is that it is harder to understand for newcomers and has a very real ability to anger or frustrate those who do not expect their satellites to come crashing down for no obvious reason. The bar for entry in this game-space is already much higher than for most other games, so it is in T2I's best interest to keep everything as simple as possible for the purposes of keeping their audience as broad as possible. I expect that if Patched Conics required twice as much work and processing power as n-body, that T2I would still use patched conics so as to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible. As such, I do not expect n-body physics to be the default setting unless and until the average high-school student with a sport letter-jacket can explain what a Lagrange point is. And if it will not be the default setting, I seriously doubt it will be available in the release that needs to be ready before the end of the current fiscal year, unless it was already done before the announcement(it sounds like it was not). The bar for entry is far more important for audience-size(and thus revenue) than any reasonable amount of additional processing power, and as indicated by the effort being put in on context-sensitive help/tutorials, lowering the bar for entry is a primary concern for KSP2. I have no doubt that n-body will be a mod available within months of the release date, but as something that raises the bar for entry(and thus lowers potential revenue), I cannot see it included as the default setting.

What is the most Kerbal thing I will do in KSP2? I will deploy parachutes at launch because I forgot to check staging. I have difficulty imagining anything more iconically kerbal than that. There is a good chance I will also fire only the boosters and not the core stage at launch because I forgot to check staging

What should happen if you have a probe orbiting a class E and then it is grappled and towed away or joined to another class E? Try to put a class E in orbit around another Class E? Then put another one in orbit of those two? Gravity for any movable body will require n-body physics. I am happy to make-do with klaws.

Even if the systems are made up of the same bodies and are the same distance from Kerbol, that does not mean that they need to be in the same place.

Why would the star systems be the same for every game? Even if you kept the systems themselves and the distances from Kerbol the same, you would still have a lot of freedom in where they are by just changing which direction they are, and how far above(or below) the ecliptic they happen to be. Then you get to decide the orientation of the star system, is it mostly parallel(easy mode, giving lots of bodies to use for sling-shots), mostly perpendicular, or somewhere in between? Finding planetary bodies around other stars is hardly something we were doing with Apollo, it requires long observations combined with a certain amount of luck(like planetary occlusions) and a lot of processing power.

When you force them to the same spin, you break entanglement. Entangled bits are great for communicating private keys, as you can know what the other guy has and verify that no one else can know(because if it got intercepted en-route, you would not have received it). But all of the actual communications (outside of the shared secret) still takes place over conventional channels, including the check-sums to verify which q-bits each party has on-hand. But you cannot control what message the other person gets, it will just be a random assortments of ones and zeroes that happens to match the assortment of ones and zeroes(possibly inverted, I forget) as what would be gotten if you measured the other set of entangled bits. You cannot even tell if you were the first to measure, or if they other guy measured first I believe there is actually a mathematical proof that it is impossible to communicate with quantum entanglement.(I vaguely remember the proof showing that communicating over quantum entanglement is the same as time-travel, so if you can do one, you can do the other)

Isn't the main point of using the Lagrange points that they provide a more stable orbit than other possible orbits in that vicinity? Personally I like having stable orbits pretty much wherever I put my craft. I would find it frustrating to try and match the orbit of a pod that is changing it's orbit by several m/s per orbit. It would be even more frustrating if my stations and satellites started crashing to the ground or flying off to who knows where any time I tried to time-warp towards a good launch window or during a long duration flight. This is not the Kerbal Satellite management program where station-keeping is an issue of major importance. Anyone who wants to simulate station-keeping, is welcome to manually deorbit their satellites after sufficient time has passed to account for using up their station-keeping fuel, and anyone who wants N-body physics is welcome to download the mod. Rocket science is already hard enough, there is no need to frustrate new players with an excess of complications. (And experienced players who wish to try test themselves against those complications will have both the access and inclination to use mods already, so what is just one more mod? )

Such as 'Diffuse' or 'Low Density'? Sparse could also work in some cases. The problem is that 'Dense' has several similar yet distinct meanings depending on what it is being applied to, so a single antonym would need to cover quite a bit or ground.

Considering that private companies can go away/under, unless you have a lot of redundancy(probably more than SS+NG), it can still make sense to keep SLS going, even just at a life-support level, to ensure that we do not return to a time when the US cannot put a man in orbit even with both SS and NG making weekly trips to the moon. Considering the size of the US military budget, $1 bln/yr is not a lot to spend on national pride. And that is before you get to any of the political jobs in districts type stuff. As such, I can see SLS lasting well into the 2030's with mandates on military launches making SLS purchases on an ongoing basis. That said, it looks like ~100 min until Elon's address...

Isn't this the new efficiency handling? Two separators produce more than one, but less than twice as much. With the maximum heat rejection for the drill, it does not matter how many MEU-500 you have attached, the drill can only cool at a certain rate, and once you hit that rate, additional cooling does nothing. Have you verified that two or more MEU-500 will let the drills run more separators with less heat? I would not expect that to work, and you can probably have several drills per MEU-500 with no reduction in efficiency.

Well, I suppose that is one way of getting a lot of starships cheaply... what is the gestation period of one of those things?

They have said on multiple occasions that they intend for any computer that meets the minimum specs to be able to build any vessel seen in the trailers(including the one where the ship leaves the space-dock) without any lag. That looks like hundreds of parts to me, so hopefully that will be enough for players with lower-end computers.

Depends on how artificial you want it to be. Solar panels collect energy from the sun in a much more industrially useful form than carbohydrates. Bacteria tanks are generally pretty efficient when it comes to converting solar energy into chemical energy, so most forms of solar bio-harvesting concentrate on breeding bacteria that produce useful forms of chemical energy. I am not aware of any pressing need to convert solar energy to chemical energy without the use of chlorophyll.

The deorbit burn is the only one I know of where you are thrusting against your orbital velocity, so with an exhaust velocity of 3700m/s, you can have up to 300m/s of exhaust with the velocity to potentially escape earth if your deorbit burn is that long. A shorter deorbit burn will of course mean less carbon-dioxide that leaves the gravitational influence of earth. Also, the deorbit burn is usually after almost all mass has left the vessel(either burned fuel or released satellites), so this would probably represent a relatively trivial amount of co2.

Highest Raptor ISP I have seen: 380s calculated exhaust velocity = 380s * 9.8m/s^2 = 3,724 m/s Earth escape velocity: 11.2 km/s Low Earth Orbit: 7.8km/s So unless I have the wrong formula for converting ISP to exhaust velocity, only the first ~300 m/s of the deorbit burn will have exhaust that is going fast enough to escape.

Then take the items out of your kerbal's inventory so that you can transfer them. This is a warning from KIS that you will lose items if you move the kerbal as indicated.(inflatable parts cannot have internal inventory, so this warning was added to keep you from losing important bits of inventory) GC only counts engineers inside of a GC workshop part for contributing to a construction project, so no engineers means no progress on constructing kits. MKS will count the most experienced engineering kerbal on the vessel, but you can only gain a benefit from that single engineer, whereas GC lets you use as many engineers as you can fit into the workshop parts.

In a molten salt reactor, the active elements are molten. Of course you don't have the same issues as NSWR as only a small amount of your fuel has been bred into U233, and so you just filter it out of the thorium and dump it into the core to breed more. But even a vat of U233 solution is safe, as it needs the moderators to slow down the neutrons so they can interact efficiently.(the fail-safe is a plug of salt that is kept solid through active cooling, and should it melt, all the working fluid drains into an underground vat, where, with no moderators, it will slowly lose U233 to radioactive decay, but otherwise be just fine to pump out and start up the reactor again unless you leave it there long enough to 'freeze') We actually had one working from 1965-1969 (even if they skipped the thorium breeding blanket in preference of taking measurements, they did use thorium bred to U233 as a fuel in later stages) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment Not quite as easy as a solid-core NERVA, but then again, you might be able to stack the 'frozen' fuel salts along the corridors of the hab if you were really pressed for space. (probably want to wrap it in plastic-wrap to reduce floride leaking into the air, but external stacks held down with cargo-netting would work too)

To be Honest Sounds like if you want to make Duna And Tundra MPLs RD would be happy to take your pull request.

To be fair, the 2.5m science lab is already more than capable of finishing off the tech tree in short order from just the Kerbin system, so what would be the point of a lab with 3x the efficiency if 3 labs is already over-kill for the tech-tree? Also, with those (relativly) new science storage modules, it is pretty easy to collect science for several labs to process in parallel if you want a huge collected science total after finishing the tech tree...

I am pretty sure that mods* will not and can not come to consoles. The console manufacturers have requirements, and as far as I know, none of them allow running any sort of code that has not been validated by them. As such, any mod that needs or uses any sort of code(even module manager scripts, which includes just about every mod out there), will require expensive validation by the console manufacturer for each version of the mod, and some core mods(like Module Manager), will be flat-out forbidden. So don't blame SQUAD and don't hold your breath when it comes to mods on consoles, as consoles are not at all mod friendly. * freely available community created mods

Don't be silly, Phlogiston is between the crystal spheres, not near stars. Just be careful about letting it mix with oxidizer and any sort of heat/spark as it is pretty explosive. (on the plus side, a high-bypass jet engine piped for oxidizer instead of fuel would have great ISP for interstellar(inter-crystal) voyages, you just need some way to get to the edge of your crystal sphere and open a portal in it(unless you have some way to divine when and where a natural opening will occur))

The ideal hull shape is largely defined by your intended purpose: A fully reusable bulk carrier with a low-thrust engine like an ion drive would be most efficient as a skeleton with attachment points for each container, having barely enough strength to keep them from blowing away in a strong wind for the take-off/landing portions. For transporting a large bulk of habitable volume, you will probably want a spherical area for habitation, providing the most space per weight of the air shell. For high-speed ships like interceptors or private transports, you will want a classical rocket shape, possibly a rocket-jet with an air-breathing first stage/tug boat. (Gravity negation greatly aids in recovering spent boosters as they can soft-land(or hover) with a much lower mass-penalty)

Just use some of the MKS parts as structural/foundation pieces for your base. Unless you are using life support or the resource processes, you can just use the MKS parts as aesthetic pieces that just happen to help with stability(through tethering)

As far as I am aware, the science lab will provide 50% life-support recycling(aka reduces used supplies by 50%) for up to 4 kerbals. Are you referring to the Material Processing Units? Those allow you to refine raw materials into refined materials(minerals -> chemicals for example). They perform at a faster rate than an unattended refinery, but do not benefit from having an engineer on-board(good for automated resource collection bases). https://github.com/UmbraSpaceIndustries/MKS/wiki/Functions-(Manufacturing)

For a connected base, I try to have at least one of each of the big three jobs, then add as many colonists as I can support. MKS has colonization bonuses based on how many kerbals of each type you have(Kolonists count as all three, but only for this bonus). If I remember correctly, the Engineer related bonus increases resource harvesting from drills(and possibly mks converters), the pilot related bonus multiplies hab-time(and I think at 500% the 'unlimited habitability' threshold drops from 50 years to 5, like with a pilot), I think the scientist related bonus affects science(or possibly farm productivity), but I forget how exactly. So sure, a 3 kerbal base will be perfectly functional(unless you have disconnected bits to minimize on-load destruction), but it will not do a lot as far as colonizing the planetary body it is on.