JoeSchmuckatelli

I just want to add to this: the mere concentration of the possibility of mutation isn't enough. They have to have some kind of environmental factor that the expressed genes can take advantage of. Specifically, to be advantageous, there almost has to be something unique within the environment that others (previously) were unable to exploit or that the new ones are less subject to. Thus, in the Red Forest... what is likely being coded for is resistance to radiation - not something that might be more advantageous in the wider sphere. Every Red Forest deer that wanders out finds itself in a 'normal' environment and so the expressed genes that made that deer stronger and more capable inside the Red Forest aren't any better in the normal forest. FEV - like mutations would have specific coded changes, thus not environmentally driven... which might give you a few individuals (and possibly a breeding group) that could be externally (artificially) maintained... but I suspect that once released into the broader environment the same thing happens. The mutations are not broadly beneficial and die out fairly quickly (especially if FEV renders the surviving subjects sufficiently different that all offspring that survive are essentially mules). @Spacescifi touched on some of this stuff months ago: should his 'meddlers' find an environment that normal humans could not survive in, a group might be engineered that was tailormade for that planetary environment... but they'd essentially no longer be human (or capable of breeding back in).

Thanks - appreciate that you guys keep up on all this!

Do Ship 24-26 have the updated flaps?

My Gen Z kids also asked me (a few years ago) 'what is a dictionary' and 'what is a phonebook'? (I was trying to explain how much paper would be necessary to stop a bullet) Some things are just lost to history, I suppose. (Like needing a dime to make a pay phone call)

My take-away from the Chernobyl findings is that the hot-spots are really just cooking stuff, not mutating it. I recently posted this (longest running evolution experiment, video below) - which has some interesting findings about mutation. They've been, for all intents and purposes, concentrating evolved members of the species together and 'breeding' successive generations from them. (Lot more complicated, and they don't exactly talk about the details of the reproduction or delineate whether horizontal gene transfer is a factor). But the concentration of evolved individuals and the eventual evolved ability to take advantage of a new food source are informative - as is the number of generations living in the confined environment before change occurs). So - even if being exposed to a higher-than-normal background radiation in the environment does lead to increased mutation; you need those mutations to be both advantageous and concentrated to see them retained and expressed in subsequent generations. (Thus, no giant mutated deer that suddenly evolves and decides to march on Tokyo). So if you have 3 Deer: Deer A lives in a nearby forest, unaffected by Chernobyl Deer B lives in Chernobyl's Red Forest and gains an advantageous mutation Deer C lives in Chernobyl's Red Forest and gains a disadvantageous mutation The breeding of Deer A and C likely results in increased mortality and a reduction of likely subsequent breeding The breeding of Deer A and B could result in advantaged offspring (and some that are merely 'normal') The breeding of Deer B and C could get both; with the disadvantaged offspring likely dying early, so over time the disadvantageous mutation disappears So within the Red Forest you might have a population that has (or will over time) some measure of advantage... but the more often they wander out of the contained space of the Red Forest - the more 'washed out' those advantageous mutations will be in the general deer population.

Given how large and informative the last feature vid was; I wouldn't expect much today... other than: TGIF!

I cannot tell you how disappointed I am to learn this: I figured that (especially with some of the outlandish proposals) that we had some pretty good ideas waiting in the wings. The way 'magnetic nozzle' gets thrown around, I guessed we were getting closer... but according to Princeton: What I was really hoping for was a 'something' between using the fissiles to heat fuel and direct fission; that something like a fission-fragment rocket wasn't just sci-fi at the moment. Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Systems - Glenn Research Center | NASA 718391main_Werka_2011_PhI_FFRE.pdf (nasa.gov) Sadly, I don't have the education to do more than read these kind of things (simply); critical reading to understand the actual probabilities of success/ implementation are beyond me. Thanks for the response!

Of course!

Appreciate that - I was looking for the funny hat on the space ship and just not finding it in the image

It wasn't until I watched 'Hidden Figures' that I even thought about how incremental and fraught the early days were. Those of us who come after never really understand how difficult it was for those who pioneered. (Thus, I agree with you that incrementality would be a good gameplay feature!)

There is some fairly good speculation on that in another thread - along with the implications of 'sticking the landing' etc. I'll look for the link - start reading from here: So I'm looking at the great timeline created by our good colleague @DrCHIVES and I wonder what the initial release schedule for the Feature Videos was. Consider they were spaced apart by 5-6 months from the beginning AND that the team knew starting with video 2 how many features there would be based on the number of sequences it takes to get to the Mun landing. https://time.graphics/line/642556 And also in 2021 there were regular Show & Tells and Developer Insights spaced 2 weeks apart, but starting with the 2022 delay info is very sparse.. 1 month apart maybe more. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/197935-kerbal-space-program-2-to-be-released-in-2022-discussion-thread/&do=findComment&comme nt=4116314

@K^2 and others deep into the physics / material science spheres: NTP looks interesting, but apparently only reduces travel time to Mars by 25%. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/6-things-you-should-know-about-nuclear-thermal-propulsion Are there other papers / info about possible atomic/nuclear rockets that are theoretically practicable but shy of Orion? Not interested in high ISP low thrust like NERVA but rather solutions to getting significant mass moved quicker. (Also looking to leverage your education and experience in cutting through the chaff of crazy but won't work ideas to look at those with potential to succeed in the next 50-70 years or so.) I've skimmed the wiki and some fairly outlandish sites... But what (in this arena) is worth looking at?

This is cool: Using sound waves to levitate beads and simulate clumping interactions and spin dissolution in free-falling aggregated asteroids https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rubble-asteroid-space-rock-levitate-sound-waves

Not very Kerbal of you. Phbbbt... That's after National Churro Day; if true I lose the office pool.

You win one imternet

You are not alone there. (For the longest time when I first got KSP I resisted even zooming in on the SOI's of the other planets, wanting to see them on screen for the first time when my ship arrived) Frankly, a feature I'd like (but don't expect) is one that only renders the planet in all its glory once you DO have a ship / telescope able to resolve it... otherwise all you get is a colorful sphere. From Hubble:

That has proven such a valuable tool for so many players, I can't see them not including it as a core feature of vanilla KSP2 I mean - from its humble beginnings, KSP benefitted from the wonderful efforts of some truly talented modders. Further the core development team has added so many features & fixes since the inception that KSP 2 will hopefully start with all of that and run with it.

Grin - you just very succinctly described the point at where my brain begins to say 'whut?' I can keep multiple missions to the two moons going in my head and plan out rendezvous, docking, separation, landing, reorbit, docking and returns for them with some fairly crazy crafts. I'll have kerbonauts scattered about doing things and have a virtual timeline running for when/where/what I need them to do or what I need to do to keep those 'missions' progressing. But once I start trying to figure out anything interplanetary - I have to drop everything I've had going on and literally try to do nothing but that one thing. My few successes are where I basically abandon whatever ongoing 'campaign/science' world I successfully built to the point where I'm ready to begin interplanetary exploration - and shift to sandbox mode to just work on the one thing; one ship, one mission to Duna (or etc). That cognitive break almost invariably works to ruin the fun I had been having in pursuing science advancements and unlocking the tech tree within a cohesive 'narrative' of my space program... and heralds the point where I start to play other games. In other words; daunting. ... I've been long familiar with the link you provided (and its in-game analogs) - and while they should help me to switch from struggle to intuitive mode: for whatever reason, they haven't. Especially where I have multiple missions running where the timelines are in days or months and the efficient transfer window provided by that link/mod is measured in several months to a year or more from gamedate... (and even with timers/clocks set) the cognitive break between doing intuitive stuff to struggle to figure this out mode sets me on my heels. It's similar to my basic inability to understand ISP vs TWR and the interplay between them. Every single rocket I build, rather than being a model of efficiency literally just turns out to be "MOAR POWER" any time I discover I can't do what I want them to do. (I WAAAAAY overbuild my orbital rockets just to get off Kerbin and then use whatever inefficiently large rocket's left-over fuel to start my exit burn, doing a suicide separation in the middle of it and finishing the burn with the intended 'work' rocket (the ship designed originally to carry me from orbit to whatever moon) to get me to where I'm going. The crutch of being able to slap on a pair of SRBs to the huge liquid fueled rocket I built that I thought should be sufficient (but wasn't) makes neanderthaling orbit my modus operandi

Welcome to PC Nation! I don't know for sure - but I suspect KSP on PC is easier or at least better. That said - I'm kind of like you; after being able to reliably get to the Mun and Minmus - my adventures outside the immediate vicinity of Kerbin are few. For whatever reason, I found getting to and from the moons to be fairly intuitive; but trying to figure out interplanetary travel just never clicked for me. I have reached a few of the other planetary systems and landed on their moons - but for some reason I just could not get interplanetary to shift from 'I can do it' to 'I have an intuitive understanding of how it works'. I am really hoping that the writing team and the tutorial team help folks like me to cross that boundary. Otherwise - I'll be blowing up the forums asking lengthy, awkward questions I don't have the vocabulary to ask succinctly.

How could you have a coherent message like that we've seen and have it also contain another message?

I thought that too when I first looked. Still inclined that way; but when I went back to look, I see definitive rings around the planet (with a gap for the moon), then as the scene pulls back, what I interpret as SOI rings pop up; the moon gets one separate from the planet and later another SOI ring pops up a considerable distance from the planet/moon system. The only problem (I see) is that the rendered color of the SOI rings was the same as the planetary rings - which could be confusing. So is that a second moon of the planet or a different planet? Also interesting: at about 0:35, after the later SOI ring appears, there's a 'sphere-like' region as the user continues to pan out. IDK if that indicates the boundary of the planetary SOI (thus indicating the later SOI ring is a moon of the planet) or if it might be something like an asteroid belt or dust cloud remnant. But then as the image continues to pan out - you get multiple disk-rings. And that is interesting; because three new SOI rings appear within those rings (along with a central SOI) ring around a red/orange object. So is that the star in an pretty tremendous proto-planetary disk? I think that to be the likeliest interpretation. Which would make the sphere-like image I mentioned how they visually define the boundary of the planetary SOI - although whether players see that vs it is rendered in the developer build, only time will tell). ... SO. Freaking. COOL! Edit: man I am slow this morning: you guys already agreed on what I blathered about!

Sounds like an intentional feature - exactly for that reason. Thing is; I wonder how they'll implement it. Making the rings full of actual objects might be prohibitive from a polygon perspective. If implemented - would be a neat Dev Diary about how they did it

56 days if they're gonna hook me up with National Churro Day.