JoeSchmuckatelli

Side question: does Ankh-Morpok humor translate well into Russian, or must it be read in the original to be appreciated?

Well, and that's animals. Volcanic activity, including continental drift? At least the heavy hitters are mentioned - but the timing and phrasing in the article reflect an annoying trend

Here's one of those fun, science adjacent articles that are humorously wrong. Not full on 'Ancient Aliens' wrong - but the presumptions underlying the stories are incorrect (in the main, or only corrected paragraphs later) Earth was a hot place to live. Very hot. During this Mesozoic Era — from about 250 to 66 million years ago — the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere were around 16 times higher than now, creating a "greenhouse climate” with temperatures on average six to nine degrees warmer than today. Scientists assume that methane from dinosaurs burping and farting — similar to cows today — contributed to global warming at the time. https://www.dw.com/en/dinosaurs-lived-on-a-scorching-planet-why-cant-humans/a-65494282

Or even a little blinking 'message waiting' icon in the lower left corner. By making it so big, placing it prominently in the screen - and making it instantaneous they're taking the kerbal out of Kerbal

I used to be a regular of 'Years Best' and other collections... And while similar to some I've read, nothing has quite all those pieces. - this seems later than 'golden age' especially since it's got the VR aspect. Brain jacking was the rage in the 70s. IIRC. When I get a chance I'll follow the links and see if it shakes anything loose OK. This is disturbing. Google 'Brain Jacking' - and let yourself fall into the rabbit hole a bit.

I'm going to quibble with you - because I'm in a quibbling mood. A FULL SENTENCE IN ALL CAPS IS SHOUTING!!!!111 However when I bold something - it's because I want to highlight that particular point. It's NOT shouting - neither is a single all caps word. Both are for emphasis. Thanks. This would have been a great post to make during the first week of the EA release. The Comm Strategy at the time seemed to be to handwave stuff, minimize acknowledgement of the problems we all unexpectedly encountered - and run Challenges and show Tik-toks. That said, I do appreciate the time you took to write this up and publish it to the community. Can you comment on how the telemetry gathering process is helping compared to player published reports?

Somebody here isn't 25 any more.

I am usually very forgiving of Alpha/Beta / EA. I've lost that with these guys. The price alone communicates something. Something they did not live up to. Had the game been in what I would call an EA state - I could have forgiven it. Had the game progressed rapidly to a largely bug-free state even if it had to remain in Sandbox while they awaited other development along the Roadmap I could have forgiven it. Had their communication strategy not been Soviet in style, I could have forgiven it. So... I've dropped it for now. Cannot recommend it. But - directly to your point; if I had someone totally interested in the game and patient with Alpha/Beta/EA - and I could give them a free key to help the devs at this point in the cycle? Sure - without qualms. But to recommend someone pay for this experience? Nah.

Anyone who buys KSP2 in the near, foreseeable future - and knowing what we know now - is wasting their money. I would not recommend this to even friends who enjoy EA / Alpha testing. It's just not fun. I'm wishing at this point that Steam would take a page out of Sony's playbook - and make T2 delist the game and refund. Calling it EA is horsepuckey. It's a tech demo at best.

Totally unknown to me - but apparently stars contain water vapor. If asked I'd have guessed that to be impossible - and been boldly wrong. Webb detects water vapor while staring at a tidally locked super-earth transiting its host Red Dwarf. The question is whether the water vapor signal is evidence of an atmosphere surrounding the tidally locked planet, or a background signal from the star itself https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-finds-water-vapor-but-from-a-rocky-planet-or-its-star

I don't think that is accurate. The 25,000 peak player number comes from the very early days before mods were available - and a larger proportion of people who bought from Steam, but would normally initialize from the exe to bypass Steam & use mods probably just used the Steamapp. I suspect that the number of people who bought it from a source other than Steam is closer to 1/4 of Steam purchasers... Simply based off of forum chatter dating to the release

Based on my incredibly scientific poll... You can count the number of Steam players and multiply by 1.75 to get the actual number of players.

OK, HR Geiger.

I agree - and would almost think it's a general consensus. I think the thing some would like to see come back is a few places with somewhat improbable terrain transitions to make atmospheric flight fun (the old 'towers' west of KSC were always a great place to test spaceplanes).

KSP2 promised big booms. Unfortunately I have to watch SX for that.

This was in relation to slowing down production = they have plenty on hand for the next few flights of testing. You know... I'm actually with you. It was amazing to see that much tonnage fly. The boom was a good boom - for a boom. That said - there were so many little things that went wrong, and the cascade of how they went wrong meant we did not get to see what I had hoped for: a clean separation and some kind of boost-back hover attempt in the Gulf & some kind of splash or (hopefully hover attempt) in the Pacific. The main thing I did not expect was all the damage at Stage 0. Kerbiloid's comment above struck my funny bone! Yeah - on that... This is all KSP2 lets me see:

How are you getting things to rotate around an axle? Or just rotate at all?

Yeah, that surprised me as well. Whole Lotta ways that could have gone bad.

When you start with the baseline expectation that it likely will blow up on the pad... This is more in the direction of success than failure. Still... Wasn't pretty.

I think it's endemic to empire, period. People are difficult. Resources are rarely equitably distributed - and even when they are, we are wired to want more. You look at the 200 years of Pax Romana and see it is defined as "relative peace and prosperity" - so the 'relative to what?' question forms the background baseline of what is normal for humans. Analogously, Pax Americana hasn't been conflict free in the slightest... But relative to the baseline? It's been pretty damn good for most people.

Where does Gobekli Tepe fit in?

Story told.

No kidding! Great info: thanks! Musk: Starship sliding laterally off the launchpad was "because of the engine failures." Musk: "There were 3 engines that we chose not to start," so that's why Super Heavy booster lifted off with 30 engines, "which is the minimum number of engines." The 3 engines "didn't explode," but just were not "healthy enough to bring them to full thrust so they were shut down" Musk: For the next flight, "we're going to start the engines faster and get off the pad faster." From engine start to moving Starship "was around 5 seconds, which is a really long time to be blasting the pad." Going to try to cut that time in half.

Pssst... I don't think he owns a copy.

Load up a rover and go check it out - could just be the angle of the camera