Codraroll

Uhh ... you haven't read the latest news? No fun facts to be found there, I'm afraid. Rather the opposite. EDIT: To put any reader who might only follow this sub-forum up to speed: The studio that developed KSP2 has been disbanded as of April 29, the developers laid off, and the community managers are apparently no longer employed there either. There hasn't been any official announcements yet, but things are not looking good for the future of the game.

One little musing before I give up hope completely: The Kerbals remain marketable. They are adorable little green geniuses who kludge together spare parts found in a scrapyard, to create fully functional (but not necessarily safe) spacecraft, which they happily ride to orbit-or-bust out of the sheer joy of doing science. They embody the sentiment of "if it's stupid but it works, it's not stupid". They are joyful little blobs with a cutesy nonsense language and a love of snacks, but mad engineering skills in more than one sense of the word. They remind us more than a little of Minions, granted, but less chaotic and with a clear penchant for rock-hard science. In spaceflight circles, the word "Kerbal" has a clear and well-understood meaning. Something so nuts it shouldn't be allowed to work because whoever wrote the rules of the universe are supposed to be grown-ups, but somehow it does anyway. Or maybe it fails and causes a horrible explosion, but at least the attempt was made, against all laws of reason. "Kerbal" is hard to define, but you clearly recognize it when you see it. Kerbals shouldn't be put in a drawer. They have potential. The IP would be attractive to potential buyers. I could see them working in other games, other settings. Imagine a build-your-own-kart racer, for instance. Or a build-your-own-plane cargo delivery game. Or Kerbal Architecture. Or, heck, just edutainment games for kids. Either way, I don't see the IP being locked up in a vault and never touched again. There is value in this worldbuilding, it's a known franchise with an established fanbase. Even if KSP goes bust, I don't see the Kerbals doing so. They would be continued, some way or another, or sold to somebody who would. Maybe they'll get a second lease of life somewhere, and somebody will dig the plans for KSP2 out of its box ...

On the other hand, to be unreasonably optimistic for a moment, it could be that the lack of an official statement means they are still negotiating some details. That there is some ongoing effort to hand the franchise and development over to somebody else, and that they hope to have it sorted out quickly enough that they don't need to make an announcement just yet. If this really was "goodbye forever", the people whose job it is to write "goodbye forever" statements would presumably have done so by now, before the community went into a meltdown. Instead, there's deafening silence, and the fans are left free to fill it with their worst suspicions. But it could mean that things are happening frantically behind the scenes. On the other hand, if that were true, it would do them a world of good to write something along the lines of "please wait as we are clarifying a few things", and that isn't happening either. So it could really be that they yanked the plug completely, so quickly that even the communications people don't know what statements to give, or no longer have access to do so. Either way, I find it really strange that they are allowing the rumour mill to grind freely.

The lack of communication is making the trust issue worse every hour. That they hadn't even prepared a statement to release to the fans indicates a rather bleak situation. It seems that those who know can't speak, and those who can speak don't know. That the whole mess wasn't very well planned out and there's little regard for what is supposed to happen next. The books are closed, the devs are sent packing, the requisite amount of money is saved, and as far as the company is concerned the fans can all bugger off. They have already got money from those who paid, and they give up getting any from those who didn't. Any further interaction is probably considered a waste of work hours.

"Working on the game" might just amount to the equivalent of packing it down into boxes and writing a neat little list of what is found in each box, before the boxes are all carted away to storage somewhere. Creating enough documentation that somebody else can pick up the project again, should a buyer ever be found. Then, metaphorically, sweeping the floor, turning the lights off and ensuring that every door is properly shut before leaving the place for the last time.

So, a question I haven't heard anybody make yet: Will this forum remain up? Hosting it is an expense presumably paid for by the now-defunct developer. It seems they will continue "support" for KSP2. That might very well just mean "the game will still be available on Steam." Not that they plan to develop it further, but they'll at least ensure that there remains a way to get paid by future customers, if any show up. Like a street musician who has stopped playing and gone home, but at least left his hat on the sidewalk, in case any passers-by happen to throw money in it anyway. If my own experience with layoffs is anything to go by, the folks at the office are now (well, time zone difference notwithstanding) packing their boxes, sharing some goodbye cake, and handing their laptops to the IT people, before the real estate people will come to inspect the facilities tomorrow, and list it as available for rent next week or so. 60 days' notice doesn't mean you keep working for 60 more days, it means you get paid for 60 more days and sent home without further duties. Some employees may still be "hard at work with KSP2", as implied by the Tweet. That probably just means writing documentation, to make it easier for whomever ends up buying the code base in case they want to continue the project. It doesn't mean continuing development, it means packing stuff neatly into boxes and writing a list of what can be found in each box, before the boxes are carted off to storage somewhere. I hope somebody will buy the IP and continue the project. Maybe it has already happened, maybe it won't ever happen. Either way, I'll continue to watch for news. I just hope the forum will continue to be available as a news channel.

That sounds similar to what happened with Cities Skylines 2. CS1 had tons upon tons of features after eight years of mods and DLCs, but its engine was fundamentally outdated. Eventually, the maps felt too small to put in everything you'd want to have in a city, the road tools were rather wonky, the graphics weren't up to the standards anymore, the performance wasn't that great, etc. So CS2 was announced to great hype and fanfare. And then CS2 turned out to be a bug-ridden mess, the promised mod support was nowhere to be seen, and players ran out of stuff to do in the game rather too quickly. But thing is ... CS2 did bring some genuine improvements. Huge maps, smooth new road tools, better graphics ... although it wasn't as fun to play, it still had aspects that markedly improved upon CS1. It made CS1 look even more clunky and outdated by comparison. But again, it didn't offer players the experience they had hoped for. What happened to a lot of players was that they got stuck in a sort of limbo. They weren't too keen on playing CS2, but going back to CS1 didn't feel right anymore either. The result was that a lot of fans simply stopped playing both games. The latest word from the studio is that the DLC previously announced for Q4 2023, and later pushed to 2024, may now be expected in Q1 2025. Partial mod support is out, but still without custom graphical assets, which are kind of important to a city-building game. Fans seem to have taken the position of fence-sitting, waiting for CS2 to become a better game before they go back to playing it. Or migrating to other city-building games entirely. That probably isn't a happy situation for the studio. I can imagine something similar being the case for KSP. I personally had a lot of fun with KSP1, but decided to wait to buy KSP2 until it got out of that awkward early access phase. I'd buy it once it got more to offer than KSP1. But in the mean time ... I didn't continue playing KSP1 either. KSP looked a lot better, had a lot of features I'd miss, and I didn't want to get bogged down in another KSP1 playthrough where I lost motivation at some point after reaching Duna. I'd wait for the sequel. Scale that up to enough players, and you get a studio stuck with a game they can't finish, and revenue that won't appear until they finish the game. Moral of the story, I guess: Don't do early access, and don't overpromise. But try getting that into the heads of the suit-and-tie goblins who call the shots ...

There's not much of anything on Tatooine. It has very few inhabitants and seemingly no formal government. Police seems to be out of the picture entirely. The planet might even be too poor to be worth taxing (it's a bad deal for the Empire to keep a tax system running, if everyone who live there are exempt due to low income). Their reason is usually something like "my trigger finger is itching". Those are soldiers, not policemen.

Off-screen. In an event only shown during a Fortnite event. That whole movie was ... indescribably bad. Remember that this is the middle of nowhere, where the Empire does not have any local presence. The whole affair was carried out by the trigger-happy soldiers brought in on Vader's Star Destroyer. Goons of the "shoot first, forget that there were supposed to be questions" type. [snip]

One might also want a ground landing test, just to see what the ground effects of an incoming Superheavy booster are like. It might be overly expensive to build a mock-up tower and mount for the test vehicle to land on too, but possibly cheaper than risking the real hardware.

But also, to continue the metaphor, they are fishing in a pond rather than a lake, and there's a limit to the amount of fish in there (and several other agencies are also fishing in the same waters). That presents a problem to any plans that depend on getting a whale on the hook. In the end, they will have to make do with a bass instead, then complain that it only presents 4% of the whale that was required for the plans to truly work as intended. But instead of drawing up new plans based on the availability of fish in the pond, they keep making plans that require a whale. The absense of whales at the end of the fishing line appears to come as an unpleasant surprise every time. And then somebody decided to trawl the entire pond and spend all the fish on a failed military venture, permanently damaging the pond's ability to sustain an ecosystem. Yet still, more spaceflight plans are drawn up with the assumption that there's a whale to be caught somewhere in there. It doesn't seem like that will go anywhere this time either.

A Falcon equivalent operational within five years, without having any hardware and no budget at the present? I'd call that unlikely at best. Remember that it took five years from the debut of Falcon 9 until they actually landed a first stage. Sure, it might be possible given infinite funding and competent management, but ... what's the saying again? "If a fish had wheels, it would be a bicycle"? Those missing factors are, well, quite far removed from what is actually available in the present situation. And frankly, quite a bit more than Russia can be expected to make available with things being the way they are at the moment.

Of course. Impressive announcements and PowerPoint slides are cheaper than impressive hardware. As the capabilities of the Russian space program dwindle into nothing, expect their announcements to become ever more grandiose. Ars Technica had a recent article on Borisov announcing a rocket able to throw infinite payload to space by running on reusable unicorn farts, starting next week. Or, well, that's not quite what he said, but he might as well, because what he promised will be equally impossible to deliver in the time frame: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/russian-space-chief-says-new-rocket-will-put-falcon-9-reuse-to-shame/ Expect instead Soyuz to fly for a few more years until the budget or political situation will put a stop to manned Russian spaceflight forever.

Raptor is assumed to have reliability issues. It is assumed that there exists evidence to support this. It is also assumed that the previously debunked evidence/arguments still hold true despite aforesaid debunking. The conclusion is assumed to stand firm regardless of the amount of evidence presented against it, the weakness of evidence/arguments presented in favour, and the lack of any solid evidence. The basic assumption may be questioned, but no answer will be provided. Such is the way.

Looks slightly smaller than the type of lens paparazzi use to take pictures of various royal families on vacation from mountaintops ten kilometers away.

Depends on the coinage. If I were in a boat and a pallet with $60M in pennies was falling towards me, I'd try to get the heck out of there.

Artillery shells and tank shells are kind of different beasts, though. For an artillery shell, you'd use measures like this to extend the range of the shell, since its job is to hit targets as far away as possible. A tank shell, meanwhile, fires in a near-straight line at relatively close ranges, and needs to pack as much kinetic energy as possible when it impacts the target, preferably as quickly as possible after firing. Although the reasons why it doesn't work tends to be the same for either: fitting a ramjet into the relatively tiny package of the shell takes away space for explosives and fragmentation material, so the ramjet shell will have a rather puny effect wherever it's hitting compared to a conventional shell. It might have its use against time-sensitive high-value targets, though, for instance, a high-ranking officer who visists the troops to deliver a rousing speech to motivate his men to drive golf carts into the minefields for the glory of the mad czar, or a helicopter that lands to drop off troops or restock ammunition. Those are usually key targets that present themselves for a very short duration, and need to be hit right after they are spotted before they are gone to have another drink again. However, I don't think it'd be ideal to make such ammunition for the 155 mm guns. Guided rocket artillery already have the range, higher effect on target, and the mission profile fits better into its part of the organization chart: you don't need to give the long-range "surgical strike" missions to the battalion-level artillery with the 155mm guns, whose job it is to spew out shells at the enemy forces in the battalion's rather limited operation area. Better give the job to the more specialized brigade artillery, with heavier rocket artillery and a purpose that's more along the lines of "strike where needed in a very large area". They also say ATACMS, a rather heavier missile system, is great for "assassinations" like this. They have a short flight time, a long range, and need little time to prepare a fire mission (unlike, say, cruise missiles, which need a whole trajectory to be plotted). And they come in at very high speed, making it hard for the target to prepare for their arrival. They're ideally suited to fire at stuff like, say, a train loaded with fuel or ammunition just as it passes a key bridge.

I suppose it could also have its use for naval guns, where you have a bigger calibre to work with and longer ranges to be covered by the projectile. Then again, at those ranges, you would probably want a rocket booster to get the hypersonic penetrator up to speed anyway, and just launch it as a missile instead of bothering with those huge and cumbersome guns.

I must say I preferred Artemis, but I can see how it would be much harder to adapt. And Project Hail Mary wasn't a bad book either. I really hope they will be as rigorous with the physics as the book was, though.

Same old bunk as always. What does it come from, this obsession to defend a bogus conclusion using whatever bogus straws you can grasp, often submitted multiple times even after thorough debunkings as if repeating them would make them any truer? Put simply: your conclusion is wrong and the arguments don't hold up. They never have. You've been told many times. Yet you still harp on the same indefensible story and refuse to accept it as bunk. Why is that? This behaviour comes across as borderline obsessive and highly irrational.

[snip] lying down on a gimballed couch, like in The Expanse, is something that vaguely resembles what you're looking for. That way, the pilot always gets the G forces front-to-back. It probably is no good arrangement for a fighter craft, though, as it requires a lot of space.

Ah, yes, I was wondering whether this pathological fixation on concluding against all evidence that Starship doesn't have any lift capacity was separate from or a part of the already-demonstrated pathological fixation on concluding against all evidence that the Raptor engine is unreliable. Thanks for providing the missing link.

On the other hand, we are talking about Starlink satellites, which are approximately as expendable as non-expendable payloads get. They've launched almost six thousand of the little fellas by now, about a thousand per year. They reported building six Starlink satellites per day back in 2020. It would not be a bank-breaking gamble to put a few on the next Starship flight, if only to test how well Starship can carry and dispense them. If it works, hey, bonus Starlinks in orbit! And if not, well, they can probably afford to lose a few.

I was watching the liftoff in awe, and re-entry quite slack-jawed. That footage of the hypersonic air stream and re-entry plasma in real time was gorgeous. Quite mind-boggling that they were able to broadcast the footage even as the spacecraft was tumbling through the atmosphere in a stream of plasma so bright that the Earth itself wasn't visible next to it. That struck me as well. Quite aside from the whole re-entry thing, what Starship just did was to bring more mass to orbit than SLS ever could, at a vastly lower cost than even the side boosters of SLS, and there's a mass production line of these already up and running. It wouldn't take much adaptation of the already proven concepts of Starship to far outperform everything SLS dreams of doing. Even when treated as an expendable two-stage rocket, with all the waste it implies, Starship still does more than SLS does, for less. I will definitely keep this excellently consise summation of Exoscientist's whole posting history for future use.

Doing a half-decent job of imitating a Beatles cover while they are at it.