JoeSchmuckatelli

Stop with the negative waves, maaan.

Solid, straightforward post in this OP. Appreciate your highlight, here, as well. I've been critical - but this was well done. ...and welcome. GL!

Curse of the Mummy... FAFO.

Weird to see the back side in so much detail. Our shieldmaiden has done her job well!

There is a massive vortex on Uranus The north pole of Uranus has a stormy vortex. We just saw it for 1st time (photo) | Space

We've had clear weather all week, and as soon as I post this... clouds. Tomorrow night is supposed to be clear. What sized scope?

That was awesome.

They probably are / already have. Strong suspicion that FAA simply asked SX what happened (beyond what everyone could see) and SX gave them open access. No need to shut SX down for months for some hyped up Congressional Inquiry like dog-and-pony show. Smart folks from the FAA look at what happened and what SX plans to do about it, write a report... done.

A new supernova is visible in the night sky right now | Space A huge star just exploded, and you can actually see it (msn.com)

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/22/world/saber-tooth-predator-fossil-scn/index.html

I know I answered elsewhere - but remember that Asia, Europe, Africa and everything else connected is part of a super continent. You could walk / wade across rivers from the Horn of Africa to China and back to Portugal. We've evidence of sailing going back 4,000 years BCE. So people on the supercontinent were relatively in contact with each other for the entire history of humanity. Many of the earliest plagues / pandemics that make it into the histories seem to have moved from East to West, meaning that your Alt explorers going East across the Pacific would have had plenty of pathogens that the NA/SA populations did not have experience with. No reason to assume that the disease process would have been different in either scenario. The one thing I wanted to add, however, is that it might have taken longer depending on where your Alt Chinese land. Western NA was always less populated than the East and Midwest. Part of the rapid pathogen spread from the European incursions was due to fairly high population density in MesoAmerica and the East Coast, coupled with the local river trade/contacts along the NA interior. So if the Alt history has people meeting the NA locals in 1400 in the far West - the crash could have been just getting started on the East Coast by the time the Europeans land later in the century, and they'd bring in new stuff. (Meaning it could have been worse). The really sad thing is that sometimes survivors who seem asymptomatic can actually be carriers - and so, your inclination seems correct. Absent modern medicine, the only way to gain immunity is to survive (which some did) and then have your remaining folks undisturbed long enough to regrow your population.

Most everything recent can handle 70. 85 isn't uncommon. I would not recommend keeping it at 85 - but 70 is fine.

Wait until they follow you to the launch site and your entire flight. Fun! (Answer? No. It's part of the bugs of this build. Sometimes closing the client and restarting helps - sometimes starting a whole new campaign is required)

Betelgeuse is acting wonky again. The dying star's regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time of writing, it was sitting at 142 percent of its normal brightness. It's been fluctuating back and forth on a small scale but on a steady upward trend for months and hit a recent peak of 156 percent in April. Currently, Betelgeuse is the 7th brightest star in the sky – up from its normal position as the 10th brightest ... Betelgeuse is an uncommon type of star, even for a red giant. Once upon a time, it was an absolute monster: a blue-white O-type star, the most massive stellar weight class. Stars of this mass range burn through their hydrogen stores more rapidly than lighter-weight stars; Betelgeuse is only about 8 to 8.5 million years old. Compare that to a star like the Sun, which at 4.6 billion years old, is only about halfway through its hydrogen-burning lifetime. Betelgeuse changed its spectral type since it has almost run through its hydrogen reserves. It's now fusing helium into carbon and oxygen and has puffed out to a gargantuan size: about 764 times the size of the Sun and about 16.5 to 19 times its mass. Eventually, it will run out of fuel to burn, go supernova, throw off its outer material, and its core will collapse into a neutron star. The Great Dimming event saw the star decrease in brightness by a considerable amount, almost 25 percent. Astronomers scurried to figure out the cause; it turned out that cooling on Betelgeuse's surface caused a massive cloud of dust to condense on the star. This cloud was subsequently ejected, partially obscuring Betelgeuse, causing it to appear to dim. Fairly normal behavior for a red giant star, scientists say; we just don't usually get such a front-row seat. Before the Great Dimming, Betelgeuse also had brightness fluctuations on regular cycles. The longest of these cycles is around 5.9 years; another is 400 days. But it seems the Great Dimming has caused some changes in these fluctuations. ... A new paper, led by astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, uploaded to preprint server arXiv, found that the 400-day cycle seems to have halved.

I don't understand the hesitancy /resistance to oversight. It's not like this is rocket science, or anything. We should absolutely trust the judgment of a politically appointed administrator to know what is in everyone's best interests.

The KSP analogy is inapt. *Deleted the rest.*

I wrestle with this every day. ...but they make it hard to.

I share some of your concerns - and the NON KSP2 portions of the forums (like my usual hangout, "Science and Spaceflight") are still the way you recall. The emotions people are expressing here go way past disappointment or annoyance with bugs. Folks here feel like they were actively deceived and outright scammed into buying a product that is so clearly not what they were promised. The counter argument to this seems to come in two forms: a pollyannish "the game has potential, it's EA, they can fix it, give them time" or an ad-hominem attack on the complainer for being so emotional about the experience. That is often followed by wall posts about all the failure to meet expectations, explanations supporting the emotional content or responsive ad hominems... resulting in thread closure. Repeat cycle. It's pretty much the same six people in multiple threads barking and snapping at one another, along with maybe another 12 who like to do drivebys on either side of the argument. The point I keep coming back to is that Intercept has a 'good will' problem at the moment and have been prosecuting a failed Comm Strategy. I've recommended to them to hire a Crisis Management consultant - because their in-house solutions are either worrying people at the low end to driving people away in the main, or outright liquiding them off. Most people have left. You can tell this by merely skimming the KSP2 boards. Those who've stuck around seem to me to be people who would actively enjoy playing the KSP2 version we've been led to believe could happen... so I don't resent them their opinions. Even if I am kind of amazed they can hold on to their anger this long. Honestly - I think the only way Intercept is going to resolve this is to fix the game. That's the only thing that will ultimately work. But in the meantime they either should find a better way to communicate with fans - or go completely dark and work their tails off until its fixed.

You are in the used market most likely. Covid plus Chinese cyber boom convinced the chip giants they were leaving money on the table - so everything is expensive now. Even then, the resale market is overpriced, IMO because of these lingering effects. Second factor is that chips are being produced these days for the 1440p and 4k monitor crowd. Plus RT - but that's more aspirational than required. Games benefiting from RT implementation just aren't there yet. (Some love them and newer titles are offering RT - but it all looks overdone to me rn - the true artistic implementation? Just not there, yet) So as long as you are sticking with 1080p, a 580 isn't a bad card. I ran my 970 happily until I bought a 4k monitor. 32 GB of RAM may be overkill or not depending on what you do. I'm still running 16. So if you really want a newer card? Probably anything from the previous 2 generations are fine, and 3 if you only look at the one-time enthusiast / high end cards. ... Conceptually you should keep in mind that game developers are starting to leverage higher vRAM availability in certain cards - so much so that I will be hard pressed to buy any card with 8GB even as a value proposition. I'm already feeling the limitations of my 3070s 8gb vRAM at 4k. So if you are torn between two similar Gen cards with similar price, but one has more vRAM? Get that one.

That's my point. You are expecting to hear progress made on fixing the product as shipped. They want to dangle new shineys.

Point... Missed. Jim tried to explain it. Think about a car. Someone builds engines. Someone builds windshields. Someone builds tires. You don't take the guy who knows glass off the windshield line just because the lady who builds tires keeps putting out triangles. You either get a better tire maker or teach her why the circular shape was chosen back in the stone age. So even if the car won't be ready for a while due to engine and tire issues - if you tell the window guy to go home without pay, by the time the tires and engine are resolved you won't have a windshield... And still won't have a car that works. Edit - that said, I don't disagree that Nate's post was crafted in a way to almost guarantee annoying people. They really need to talk to a Crisis Communication consultant. Comm strategy since release has been really poorly done.

From what I read, the average person can see celestial objects as dim as +6.5. Trained astronomers / people with really good eyesight in ideal terrestrial conditions (high, dry, clear and dark) have seen galaxies as dim as +7.2. Centaurus A, M81 and NGC 253 have all been seen naked eye and are between 12 and 13.7 Mly away. They have AMs of +6.8 to +7.2. So what is going to matter is the combination of both distance and brightness such that the apparent magnitude is above +7.2 from the location of the observer - as a floor. I've read that the 'average' distance between galaxies is about 9.9 Mly. Average is in quotes because galaxies are not uniformly distributed - clusters, suoerclusters, sheets, filaments, etc. The opposite of a cluster is a void. The largest void I could find a definition of is the Bootes. It's apparently 300Mly in diameter. So, yeah, drive out there and you will see a whole Lotta Nuthin with the Mark 1 Eyeball. Hubble and Webb would see just fine and you probably could use IR goggles... Which isn't the point of this exercise. Place the observer in any region of intergalactic space that isn't a void - and because of the way 'averages' work, the organization of cluster, supercluster, sheet, filament, etc means that most likely you will have a relatively higher density than normal... Meaning the observer should have several galaxies inside a sphere less than 10 Mly in diameter. So if these galaxies aren't tiny, or obscured by dust etc - they should have an apparent magnitude above 7, and your intrepid explorer should be able to see them without enhancement. cc: @farmerben

Deleted repetitive post.

I'm guessing this lander still has the engines on the bottom? Why do we not see designs with (*) some kind of landing engine up higher on the rocket and pointed down at an angle to allow some offset between the rocket and the regolith? *there has to be a name for what I'm describing... I just don't know it. The SS/SH launch plume makes me now think that landing anything with some tonnage to it would need to have the landing rockets elevated - and maybe angled away from the craft itself.

Perhaps. Some are "ZOMG that's amazing" like they're seeing a kindergartener draw a hand with fingers for the first time; it's not a great hand - but you want to encourage them to keep going. Some are 'Oh jeez, why do you keep peeing in my wheaties?' Neither are particularly helpful when dealing with adults. For those who think they're peeing in your wheaties - the old saw of "_____ me once, shame on you, _____ me twice, shame on me' comes to mind. ... The amusement I'm getting is all the people trying to still read leaves from these infrequent remarks. Nate said 'They're making improvements. Period. They created some new parts. Period. They improved lens flare. Period. Based on history with this team, the simple fact that all of those statements were in a post about the next patch, EXPRESSLY DOES NOT mean that they will all be in the next or even the same patch. We want to believe that. We'd like to believe that. But experience should tell us that what we believe and what we receive are very, very different things. We could see all or none of those things in the next patch. We could see all or none of those things by the time they declare the game 1.0. ... The only prognostication I can derive is that they're trying to move to a new paradigm; under promise and over perform. Does not seem like they're very good at it. Oh look - a challenge! Let's build bunnies on Moho! Shrug.