JoeSchmuckatelli

Certainly solves the landing legs issue Edit - although now that I think about drag... Perfect yard dart shape

I saw one of those in a park in Vienna. Disturbing reminder of darker times.

IIRC - cylindrical would be better.

I accept that - I get 'low res placeholder and first-pass' work from an internal testing sense. But when you are trying to build hype / keep the fan-base excited... maybe give it a pass or two with the goodies? The other renders we've seen have showcased the promise of fantastic lighting and attention to detail. The look of the rockets we've seen, the shadows on the Kerbals, the transparent ship windows, facial expressions, terrain and end-game buildings... all look pretty damn good. This was kind of like, 'oh heck it's Friday - we forgot to put something out on the forums... who's got something?' Edit: (look, I know this may sound ungrateful - but if no one says anything other than 'yaaay, Timmy!' ... is that really helping?)

I have enjoyed WOT for almost a decade (although on a burn-out break, atm). I tried WT - but found their economy to be so much more blatantly 'pay me' than even WOT. Just parasitic. Really turned me off way back when and I could never get back into it.

Am I alone in being underwhelmed? I really appreciate the update, and as a sort of placeholder set of buildings, it's cool to see ...but. Sadly the graphics at this render look very 'early 2000's... without trees' and etc. So - aside from cheering on the team and appreciating any progress updates... what is the 'woo'? Not up to par with something like this (which is 'woot' worthy)

Did he require a reentry burn? Would we say that a hypervelocity vehicle that launches SouthEast from London, stays within the atmosphere for most of the flight, but over New Zealand briefly crosses the Karman line, passes over London again to finally land in Germany had achieved orbit? Or a B1-B that follows the same course with mid-air refueling? Knuckledraggers understand an orbit as a circular path around the earth that is stable and, in the absence of something that slows it down, is effectively eternal (Moon in orbit of Earth, ISS in orbit - and kept there by periodically burning to counter the deceleration caused by atmospheric friction}. Edit - Note: I have no interest in discounting Gagarin's accomplishments, or the general understanding of him as the first man in orbit. However, the above is intended as a 'grin' continuation of the current quibble. Edit the second: I would also say that if SX puts a ship into an orbital flight (consistent with what I've written above) and then does a reentry burn to drop Pe before completing a full orbit, and lands shy of the launch point... it's still an orbital flight. That would be fair and consistent, IMO.

I get what you are saying - but the quibble is in different directions. I agree with you that for SX purposes in the short term - whether SS can survive and how to land it during a full height reentry from orbital altitude and at orbital speeds, whether it completes a full circumnavigation of the globe is immaterial. But for the layperson (myself included) until and unless you have actually circled the globe while in space (and perhaps to the degree that you need a burn to lower Pe to allow reentry) ... You haven't achieved 'orbit'. Saying that you are orbital, when the flight path is best described as semicircular with a terrestrial start and endpoint but with a whole lot of explanation about why you don't actually need to 'go full circle' seems a quibble too far.

I'm not sure about that. KSP is not a game that would appeal to me from a multiplayer standpoint. My pace of play and the warp ability (which makes it nice to not have to wait several days to see my ship reach its destination) gives me real pause as to how effective any MP implementation can be. To be effective - you would pretty much have to have two or more players in perfect harmony with each other, warping at the same times and willing to wait for each other. Or you would have to 'break time' for the various players: to have them in the same universe, have a reasonable sense of game pacing and be able to work independently of one another - they could not share the same 'time'. Sample case - you and a friend simultaneously build ships for a coordinated Minimus mission. You sequentially launch your ships and work together to time your burns to get clean insertions into Minimus orbit. You warp to the moments before the capture burn, and there is a nice bright spot in distance showing your friends' ship, similarly ready to insert. He gets a phone call. Has to leave. Either you are both stuck waiting for him to be able to play again to un-pause time, or his ship has to go into a spacetime bubble (breaking continuity and suspension of disbelief) while you continue to play and he later gets to finish his part of the mission (meanwhile you have gone on...) That doesn't sound like an easy PBKAC issue to solve.

Huh? Why is that? From my perspective, from what I've read, 'we're all star-stuff'. I find it fairly likely that with all the organic compounds floating around in literally everywhere we've looked - that all that life needs to get a start is 'moderately hospitable conditions'. https://www.space.com/pluto-blue-haze-organic-compounds If we accept the current models that our solar system started out in a star forming region that was effectively the remnants of probably multiple SNs... our sister stars and their systems likely have the same 'seed mix' and that any planets in those star's goldilocks zones started off with a similar mix of organics and thus are likely infested with life. Extend to the galaxy. = lots of wet rocks with squishy bits doing their own thing.

This ...is the best theory. Venus also has more than twice the gravity of Mars and close to the Earth's own, which helps. Lots of speculation that the magnetic field is important to reduce losses - but volcanism is probably more critical in keeping gasses available for the atmosphere to exist at all

Guys - the test was last Tuesday...

@Spacescifi - Panspermia most likely scenario. Given the sheer number of stars and presumably worlds, once we start tripping through the cosmos, we're likely to just find places that are 'close enough' and merely have to adapt rather than terraform. Tell folks 'there's gold in them thar hills' and they'll pay their own way. Also: Hints of Hidden Volcanoes Deep Inside Europa Boost Its Chances of Hosting Alien Life (msn.com) (If panspermia is correct - the galaxy can't help but host life in literally every nook and cranny possible. Origin Of Life: The Panspermia Theory | Helix Magazine (northwestern.edu))

I thought the plan was to murder the innocent creatures living in the depths until the great Cthulu arises https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1T00EK ... found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. https://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/page/2/ Of course this may be the true reason for the US and China to race each other to the best mineral spots 'out there'

is supposed to be able to hover. Excited to see them try it.

...and people wonder why I became a lawyer.

There are certainly a lot of layers to this particular onion. (I live in a place where if you wear the wrong hue of blue during the interminable RoundBall Season you get heckled, so I get it).

The stunning thing is that it hasn't been a part of our 'every day' these past decades. I remember there being a ton of criticism over abandoning Shuttle and allowing commercial space to move into the vacuum created. I'm just frustrated that there is only one 'Space X' (read: company doing crazy ahem stuff to get its concepts into orbit with plans of 'beyond') - whereas the others seem to be comfortable with the complacent pace dictated by the old government run programs. We need more wildcatters.

Not a mistake... the plan. How else do you expect them to unload the corpsicles at Mars? Sheesh.

From this fluff/info piece: Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost (microsoftnewskids.com) the links: Introducing physical warp drives - IOPscience Breaking the warp barrier: hyper-fast solitons in Einstein–Maxwell-plasma theory - IOPscience Cool sounding stuff. That aside, this knuckledragger would appreciate any thoughts by those of you with the maths and inclination to delve into the papers.

Shhhhh. I'm trying to stare at the goats.

Heh ~ tic tac This frustrates the 'water' out of me. I welcome competition - nothing else quite spurs inventiveness... But I hate this idea that competitors are enemies. Totally unnecessary. Of course, I live in the place where UK fans will turn on anyone who likes the Cards (until someone shows up in the wrong blue with the hint 'Duke' written anywhere). .

Problem is, all they will find is cheese. China's odd secretiveness can be used against them as well - for purely selfish reasons. Their choices are resulting in becoming a bogeyman of their own creation that Americans can use to scare themselves into action. (Remember - Congress does not get the best and brightest, just the popular) A dumb guy with a knee jerk reaction is at least predictable. We got to the moon as much because we wanted to beat the Rooskies as for any scientific purpose.

Far more likely for us to find a planet with a 'close enough' atmosphere and then for the colonists to adapt to it. Finding a planet in the right place with the wrong stuff and trying to change that basically requires asteroid and comet bombardment - and any civilization with those resources won't need to do it in the first place. (The 'plant a big machine on the planet to terraform' trope beggars suspension of belief). Even the successful bombardment technique requires an unreasonable cool down period with no guarantee that you'll get the right mix. Just go with what Pournelle et.al. did: fly your ships to enough stars and gobble up the good planets

You win the internet today. ;D