Bej Kerman

Ran out of reactions, so I'll just say, fascinating stuff

Nice straw man. I specifically claimed that some movies I watch as the fluff they are, and enjoy them based on the story/characters. My own take is my own take. Friends who watched it also hated it, so it's not just me. I'd classify "And yes, it needed to be realistic" as gatekeeping, but as you said, YMMV. What I said still holds though, it's the writer's choice how far they go, even if internet people make trenchant complaints and insist it needs to be one way or the other. Realistic black holes don't need to be accompanied by ships that are more radiator than ship if the writer has better things to be doing or if they just don't want to get involved with that side of physics. IMO, compared to orbital mechanics, frame dragging around neutron stars, and all that exciting stuff, figuring out how many radiators a ship needs for what it's got is perhaps one of the more boring things one could be doing when developing a universe. People do that? Suppose it'd be harder to just enjoy something, I guess

Nope. There's no authority that's going to arrest Nolan on the basis of "this piece of fiction didn't cater to my love and passion for realism for every second of its 2h30m runtime" - extra emphasis on fiction. It didn't need to be realistic, and it's the writer's choice if they go full hard, full soft, or go between. You can't just say something's bad because of its level of realism or its genre or its runtime, or something silly like that. Doctor Who did exactly that - it was a Series 7 episode, I believe. That episode had many flaws, and the Doctor surviving a fall from space in a spacesuit engineered to survive re-entry isn't one of them. And yet it went on to come out with an episode where the central premise was time dilation. Sorta proves my point that a piece of sci-fi media doesn't need to be an extremist in regards to realism.

But falling into it and living is a nonstarter. Even with the black hole, he should have gone back via a stargate, anything else just stupid. ...and? I'd say it was a fairly solid ending. Tied the film together. Didn't need to be realistic.

Some people don't want to be told that the man who posts mediocre memes on Twitter doesn't build the rockets I'm like the man who singlehandedly built the rocket and went to the moon. What was his name, Apollo Creed?

Would a wormhole not simply be the same as if the roof of the VAB was right in front of you?

You mean the hinge continues to bend even after being locked?

With all these fancy camera angles and slow pans, I wonder if KSP 2 is giving us tools to capture cinematic shots and/or camera parts to attach to our rockets

The entire premise was garbage from the start IMO. If you have the tech to move a meaningful (or even just sufficient) fraction of the Earth's pop to a new world that requires at bare min the cargo/energy/dv of a round trip to Saturn, the problem is already solved without needing the worlds on the other end of the stargate. I'll never know anything about "early scripts" since—why would I? The point was that by the time the Endurance came back, they'd have figured out the soft sci-fi propulsion method (HERESY!) they were looking for, which they manage in the end because of Cooper and Murph, hence the fact they got such a massive space station to Saturn. So what? It was talked up as being super realistic. I recall reading a bunch about it (avoiding spoilers). As I said, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It doesn't have to only be hard or soft, Children of a Dead Earth or Star Wars. Interstellar clearly went for a bit of both, evident from the ending and the massive exaggeration of time dilation (as IRL you'd barely notice the time difference unless you spent a much longer time on Miller's than Cooper et al spent). Lots of sci-fis go for something in the middle of the hard-soft spectrum and I can imagine they make you uncomfortable in the same way Interstellar does. It's cool and if Interstellar went the boring route then everyone would still think of whirlpools when asked to imagine a black hole. Everyone knowing what a semi-realistic Schwarzschild black hole looks like is a win in my book. Not as cool I hated it lol k

Methalox, not methane.

Well, I guess that's just your opinion. Still, the plot was clear and straight-forward, especially compared to the extremely weird early scripts. In my opinion, Nolan made a fantastic piece from what would have otherwise been a flop. Nothing is specifically soft or hard sci-fi, it's a scale. Interstellar clearly acknowledges many hard sci-fi things, but makes leeway for the story. Not wasting time on neutron star flings so that time could be made to explore the dynamics of Cooper's family and also his fellow crewmembers is one example of that. Just because the black hole rendering was realistic doesn't mean it has to reflect everywhere else, just as the Expanse has stargates, and Epstein drives that work in ways the show refuses to elaborate on, alongside actually plausible things. You could handwave problems like heat and propulsion in your ship designs but still focus on things like orbital mechanics, populating your world with cyclers and considering the stability of the systems you come up with. As I said, it's a scale. Nothing's automatically good or bad just because it leans hard to the left or right, like Star Wars or Children of a Dead Earth, example. Interstellar leans hard hence the focus on just that from reviews et al, but it can't be expected to hold 100% realism all the way through. In my opinion, Planet Express was a less dysfunctional crew. Any self-respecting company with a state-of-the-art spaceship under their name wouldn't have put the crew of the Rocinante in charge of the on-board coffee machine

We're beyond that - let's remember it's a completely different game, one where the ratio between the base FPS and the FPS when flying a 300 part vehicle shouldn't be too big. This depends on how realistic the idea of a 3-in-1 shield is. Protecting your vehicle from being blasted with plasma and keeping it protected from erosion due to kinetic bombardment from tiny flecks of spacedust are two very different challenges.

These bits I understood. The rest... ...eh? One of the scenes is literally Kerbals in front of a diagram of a hypothetical planet, one that if implemented, would be an analogue to a real case for a hypothetical 9th planet.

This is a joke, right? I've been seeing KSP 2 discussions for three, four years now and it surprises me how riled up people get over delays and "going without seeing cool marketing stuff every day". The solution is simple, just don't spend every day of your life waiting for KSP 2. I can't force you, I'm just a text box, but it works. You can wonder why I haven't been driven insane by several year-long delays... It's because I only spend a bit of my time waiting for KSP 2. The rest of my time I'm doing something else. Just don't dedicate all of your life to watching individual sand grains fall down and you'll find you won't get as bored waiting for the hourglass to drain. Being able to shrug off, for example, a delay to 2024, is a skill I think many people could do with. I can't imagine what it'd be like to be someone who feels tortured just because each day doesn't bring new novelty things.

I've been patiently awaiting KSP 2 for years through several delays, and with each delay I was happy to know another No Man's Sky wouldn't happen. A week isn't long to wait for a game

I'd imagine such would be a weight on performance. Could be done, but I imagine there are more fun challenges to be focusing on that are also easier to implement, like radiation. Especially temperature - you never have to put radiators on KSP 1 crafts unless you're doing ISRU or grazing the sun.

I had a far worse issue - on two different crafts On both of them, I used a cubic octagonal strut to place stuff inside - on one, this was to put a MkI passenger module on a node already occupied by another bunch of stuff, and on another, the same thing but for an engine plate. Timewarping them too much caused the strut to wobble until it wobbled so much it shook the craft apart. Not an alternative to KSP 2 EA to me. Even small crafts can barely be flown in KSP 1 because it's so buggy.

I think I know a film you might like Jokes aside, getting outright irritated because something didn't align with reality was something I grew out of, and something I regret. I hope you, one day, can enjoy media and not end up spilling paragraphs just because the writers took advantage of the fact that it's fiction and would rather spend time making a good story to build off of than waste time making everything perfect (assuming you can base the quality e.g. 'perfect' off of something on its scientific accuracy, which you can't) - a writer only has so much time to focus on pointless details like how many gravity assists a lander has to make before it can meet a planet Exactly this - it's one thing to say "in my opinion, this could have been done differently". It's another to tell other people "this movie is bad because this rocket did something using dV it had" - it's the scientific accuracy equivalent of someone who works on continuity getting riled up because of something inconsequential like a character's necklace disappearing between scenes. Also worth noting that scientific accuracy doesn't have to be taken to the extreme. Obviously Interstellar demonstrated that you can have scientific accuracy to make the world feel richer, but not take it all the way because at a point the accuracy begins to mess with the story being told. On that note, The Expanse (TV) is bad and no-one can convince me otherwise - shoulda spent the time and money budgets fleshing out the characters instead of trying to shoehorn scientific accuracy in a show that got stargates anyway

Playing this mess for another year = a good alternative to KSP 2 EA, they said. It'll be fun, they said.

As you can tell from the fact that the planets are arranged linearly and their gaps don't become bigger the further you go, that is not a scale Jool is 68Gm (not Mm) from Kerbol - so we could take this to mean that the pixels represent 5Gm each and the planet is 2610Gm away. Or we could use Moho as a reference and say each pixel is 1.5Gm and the new planet is 780Gm away. It just doesn't work as a scale unless we start handpicking, and maybe that's what the devs wanted.

Doesn't matter, it's still fun

So just round it up or down. Never did Squad have to manually add 76,825x warp (et al) for the transition between 100,000x and 50,000x warp.

I mean, I don't see the point in letting someone choose to go 5.52x speed. Why allow decimals? I don't get your point. If you could explain why this is at all a bad thing, please do

Why do steps need to be involved?

Er, no. Normal physics for physwarp, your vessel's orbit is a result of experiencing a gravitational force. For rails warp, the game calculates a fixed orbit from your current speed and position and places you on a rail according to that orbit. Why? Did the US devs have to implement every step from 1.001x, 1.002x, etc.? Nope, they just didn't use steps in the first place. KSP 1 already had smooth warp to smoothly transition between steps, it just didn't let you manually choose how fast your game goes.