Incarnation of Chaos

Yes; it's famously inert (Quasi-Inert? It's not noble, but close enough). Thanks to that triple bonding you mentioned earlier It would be the Oxygen that would react with any fuel, and the extra energy from the reaction of the Oxygen and Fuel would also impart more velocity to the N2 particles. So while the N2 wouldn't react; it would still contribute to increased ISP in this "Afterburning" situation. You're completely correct that if you didn't have any other combustion/reaction and just threw some random gas/liquid into the stream it wouldn't do anything but hurt the performance. Also i wasn't sure if the O would be able to find a partner at these temps, so that's why i didn't say "O2" since this is pretty far from standard pressure and temperature. And if we're Decomposing the NOX using heat, then you could easily make sure the portion of the reactor where it would begin decomposing was hardened against it (There's a select few compounds that won't react with it, even at high temps). And the combustion chamber you might actually be able to keep shielded using the N2 gas, assuming it could be directed after decomposition into a somewhat laminar flow across the bell/chamber walls. All a tall order indeed, but then again so is making a nuclear reactor in space and using it to accelerate your rocket using it's coolant(s) xD

Well yeah, but i was more thinking that in an Nuclear Thermal Engine the NOX would decompose and contribute to much, much higher ISP (Though NH4 is likely far better for this purpose, but i digress). Plus you could introduce a proper fuel into the seething stream of heated N2 and O gas afterwards for a massive boost to raw thrust, afterburner style. You wouldn't "Burn" a mixture of N2 and H2O for propellant, i was thinking IRSU at most tbh. Oh yeah; Hybrid Liquid N2O and Solid Propellant rockets are rather common in "High-Power" hobbyist rocketry and university rocketry settings. But he was responding to the idea of combining N2 and H2O to yield N2O, which assuming it's even possible would be energetically unfavorable. Since he mentioned how Stable Nitrogen was, and Water's reluctance to release it's Hydrogen vassals is a close second on the tier list of "Stubborn chemistry things to keep note of" Arent those Hybrid jobs actually Throttleable also? Since the HTPB only burns in presence of Oxidizer, so by cutting off the supply of NOX or reducing it you can actually get around the issue of traditional solids not being very friendly after ignition.

MM configs I'm alright with, but the B9 portion is where I hit a brick wall. Unfortunately I can't really work much on it, but I'll keep it in mind when I can.

I was more asking him if N2 and H2O could be reacted to make it. I know in KSP there's multiple mods for it, and not any hurdles to defining it xD. And yeah, thanks for the detailed breakdown on fuel switching. I looked into B9 a while back but couldn't find any solid documentation for actually using it to roll my own patched engines.

Oh I've known that there's other options, I was just using that one as an example because I'm familiar with it. From what I've heard making multi-mode engines in KSP is a bit of a pain. Hopefully they can make it easier. Could you possibly create Nitrous Oxide? I feel like there's a much easier reaction path even if that's the case.

.... Again, nobody is disputing metallic hydrogen exists. The dispute is that a metastable state of metallic hydrogen exists.

I'm just excited we finally may have a "Working" example of a Room-Temp Superconductor, even if it turns out that it's not practical for actual use the big hurdle so far is that we've basically been shooting in the dark. We've known certain things undergo a phase transition to Superconductivity at higher temps (Is that the right phrasing?), so the efforts have been mostly focused on combinations of these which sometimes end up duds that only achieve superconductivity at much lower temps than their individual constituents. But the few "High-Temperature" (Which in this context means Liquid Nitrogen, Yikes!) superconductors found have been a result of mixtures, and their success gave us much more insight on the phenomenon as a whole. So now if we do actually have a working example, and we can start absolutely hammering it with our instruments and finding any potential difference between it and our high-temp Superconductors. That feeds back into the process of iteration, guiding it much, much more precisely. This could be enormous, even though it seems like a complete nothing burger right now.

How? You're still going to have Kerolox rockets if they decide to add Hydrolox, you'd just have the option of a "Master of none rocket" that could do everything alright but wasn't extremely well optimized for anything specific or slapping a hydrolox upper stage on the same rocket for increased performance in Vacuum (Or Basically-Vacuum like Duna, i use NERVA there all the time. And they're patched to use LH2, which actually HELPS with their abysmal TWR). Heck they could even implement a fuel switcher like Nertea's NERVA's where you can switch on-the-fly between LH2 and LF, which would also apply the respective ISP, Thrust and Fuel consumption values for the given fuel. If they did this for enough engines it might even quell the desire for procedural engines a bit, since the decision to use an engine in a specific "Mode" would also affect it's suitability for a specific regime and therefore give way more flexibility and customization for every mission. Bonus; you can make every engine default to Kerolox/LF and only allow fuel switching when "Advanced Tweakables" or similar is tripped. Best of both worlds (Or 4 if they have Methalox and Ammonia fuels (I really want some NH4 for my nukes)). Also i don't think this would be a barrier for long gameplay wise, we're getting Project Orion which is the epitome of "Brute forcing your way to space" xD P.S I didn't even realize we had font settings on this forum o.o. And since it's KSP; you could literally launch the replica of the Burj Khalifa you just painstakingly crafted into space afterwards if you wanted. Because M O A R B O O S T E R S.

Which still contains the possibility of it ending up precariously phased into the terrain at some portion, just waiting for the unsuspecting user to unleash the kraken. Anything that would move the object, causes the code to loop through the array if I'm not mistaken. But the performance of that isn't degraded by "Wobbling" as it's just an artifact of having many Rigid-Body parts connected; each with their own joints and each with the ability to flex along them. More parts introduces the possibility to wobble, and more parts causes the looping to become exponentially more taxing on the CPU regardless. That's why KSP2 is looking at a "PhysicsLOD/Dynamic Welding" solution; as reducing the # of array elements would exponentially reduce the number of calculations needed, exponentially decreasing the number of CPU cycles taken, etc. Now where i could very much be wrong here, is if those "Wobbling" joints have to have their own calculations done. If that's the case, then you could be looking at another increase of the time complexity by likely the square of those joints. Which if the time complexity of the original calculations were linear (Looping thru an array takes about the same amount of time as # of elements), then you'd be looking at going from O(N) to O(N)^2 or even worse. But that's a big assumption, since i don't know the exact time complexity of KSP's physics code. And from my previous discussions with K^2 and others it seems it's hardly Linear due to lack of optimization, so take all of this with a grain of salt. But while welding is a way to get around this; i was trying to say that in this specific case it's more of a workaround for the fact that with a single layer for terrain it's very difficult to get anything still at all. But you're correct that it is a source of performance improvement, as it's the entire rationale behind their Physics LOD which can accomplish the same if the structure is on stilts without risking it being partially phased in the ground. You're correct, but the most important part is that you need to ensure that no matter what they aren't below terrain. That's the big, big point of using stilts and why they're likely going to use PhysicsLOD to reduce the # of calculations needed instead of just assuming it can be still after a certain threshold. It accomplishes the same, and no Colonists have to take an unexpected FTL jump after being tributed to the almighty point singularity in the center of every Celestial. And if anyone else wishes to chime in and tell me about any errors, then feel free to do so.

Awesome, did you pin down the culprit?

KSP doesn't, but mods for it try. Which is what I was referring to. And that could open up a entire new can of worms actually. Do you know why the wheels and landing legs sometimes fling you back up into space on load? It's because the game thinks they're underneath the surface, but then on load is rudely told it's supposed to be a leg on the ground. The resulting correction occasionally becomes enough of a jolt to send you hyperbolic. So if you just stopped something moving when it should be rolling down a gentle hill....well in the best case you snapped the former structure in half. Worst? Potentially game breaking/save breaking bugs. That's why stilts work, they keep the structure at a positive height at all times even if the stilts don't quite manage to remain firmly grounded. For spacecraft though, none of that applies. And I won't be too surprised if the dynamic welding done by the physics LOD system also has the side effects of basically eliminating vibration. Keeping track of 22 massive "parts" is much, much easier than trying to figure out what the entire 10000 would do to each other. But personally I would think that wobble isn't that much of a performance impact by itself, I've flown asparagus spaghetti stacks into orbit and had rock solid FPS. But when part counts get into the several hundreds you get more wobble and less performance. I wouldn't mind many, many more options for keeping stuff still though in general.

If it's on rails the launch would always have to be at the same time if I'm not mistaken, that's why he mentions that the player would have to fly additional missions to "Create" different routes. And yeah, they have to have rigid body to interact with the buildings or ground. Otherwise they'd just have no collision and phase thru the ground. We have parts in KSP that don't have collision (All parts attached to the same ship), but still interact with other objects. So it's possible they might be going for something that would become part of the structure when engage (Welded), but still interact with the ground in a more simplified and durable way (Similar to modded harpoons, which still aren't perfect). That way if the kraken did rear it's head, the entire building and it's stilts would move instead of the stilts becoming projectiles and causing failures in unexpected ways. This would also distribute the "Load" over the entire area, and scale much, much better for larger structures. Just me guessing though; KSP2 using a single layer for terrain makes nailing the interaction between structures and the ground extremely difficult. But they're already aware of this, which is why everything is on stilts. It's literally the only way to do it, even KSP1 colonization mods resort to propping their structures up eventually (Or rather,giving the player the means to do so).

~1:14:00 - ~1:17:30 In KSP1 if your ship has 1000 parts; your computer no matter what isn't having a good time. "That's one of the big boulders we've decided to tackle. And in [KSP2] there's so many more systems, and elements being processed in the background that we need to be sure what you're seeing on screen is behaving in a physically accurate way, but all of these things in the background aren't going straight off the rails as you're progressing. " It seems they've committed wholesale to getting the basic foundation built, and solidly at that. That above everything else excites me.

I'm literally listening to the podcast now as I'm working on some Java code, so I'll get back to you once I'm more than 20 minutes in xD

Same way they're going to have 10,000 part interstellar ships. Physics LOD, should be especially effective on bases since the only time you'd need to calculate physics between the elements once setup is if some catastrophic event occurred.

Well that's a shame then, looks like I'll be resorting to patching the things out whenever I get around to playing KSP2.

Was this made before or after the community raked him over the coals for it? I've seen the stuff before, and to put it politely it doesn't address any of the points me or others have brought. Also it's a separate podcast....which means it can be effectively dismissed as "not official" or "the opinions of the respective employee" if anything in there is inconvenient. Which is why I wanted a separate official statement.

*Mustache Twirling intensifies*

Just make sure to be holding a sphere of U-235 when you do.

It's not running if you renamed the folder.... Next time you launch the game, watch the loading bar on the bottom. If it doesn't show the directory loading then your "Scatterer+" is placebo. Beyond home has better textures and effects than stock that work with stock. So what you're seeing is likely BHs default settings without Scatterer installed.

It's also ARR. I took the question as pertaining to the current version of KSP, I've known about this particular mod for a while. I think there was one other, but it's visual only.

Ah, that's what I get for replying while running errands.

That's only for the non-physics warp, physics warp which is limited to 4X and always available is a linear stepping from 1 to 4 as they describe.

Modern consoles run in a sandbox held pretty tight with a Hypervisor; while i wouldn't doubt there's some exploit that would blow it wide open (PS4's ethernet controller had a vulnerability that allowed defeating the Hypervisor). Such a exploit wouldn't be only possible via DLLs, as it's a flaw in the Hardware or Hypervisor software itself that would allow the DLL to break out of the Hypervisor and begin corrupting memory in the first place. So there's no reason except stubbornness on the part of the Console Manufacturers that they can't have mods, along with the fact that the limited memory and CPU on the Xbox One and PS4 would get absolutely creamed by even a light batch of mods. PS5 and Xbox Series X wouldn't have this same issue, but the PS5 is E-waste after 3 years because the OS drive is soldered (There's a separate space for an "Expansion drive", but it won't boot without the original OS drive), and the Xbox Sex is using 230 USD 1TB flash carts for storage....so i doubt they want anyone to be able to flash Linux on these things and actually get around their planned obsolescence, which allowing people to mod would eventually lead to. Also Skyrim mods are loaded into local memory (RAM) before hitting the Papyrus compiler, so they have plenty of access to resources outside the game if someone wanted to code it. There's just way easier ways to get Malware on someone's machine, and if you go the "Malicious M0DZ" route nobody will ever take you or your work seriously again. Where as using a Javascript attack, or just plain "Social Engineering" (Trickery) is anonymous and can often be done without the user even realizing what's happening. But your overall point is correct; it's up to Sony and Micro$oft in the end. Just wanted to expand on some specifics.

You don't "Replace" it at all; you rework the models to resemble NSWR's using Liquid Hydrogen, Methane or Ammonia. And then you drop them into the same places in the progression and crafting that their Purple Space Magic parents would've occupied. At the most you end up trashing a few models; which wouldn't take "Months" to remake in any world where people are doing this 8 hours a day as part of an entire team. The rest (Fuel, Tankage, Radiation cones, Thermal properties) can be automated via configs if KSP2 is even slightly like KSP with Module Manager included stock. It's been in doubt ever since 2016, and especially after the lowest pressures thought to create Normal Metallic Hydrogen turned out to be inconclusive. Leading to the needed Pressures for Metallic Hydrogen being higher, and breaking the assumptions that the model that predicted Metastable Metallic Hydrogen worked with. 4 is less than several centuries, but the point is valid. Bunk is Bunk, and all evidence we currently have points towards Metastable Metallic Hydrogen not existing at the predicted pressures and temps.