whatsEJstandfor

I'm super confused about what you're saying

I'm curious what you define as "finish". I felt like I had finished after completing the tech tree in career mode, but that's pretty arbitrary

Assuming the design hasn't changed since 2019, Nate confirmed in an interview with ShadowZone that there won't be n-body dynamics; it's still patched conics with certain exceptions in which there's a bespoke solution (like for Rask and Russ).

My understanding based on Nate's response was that if you, say, do a very efficient round-trip mission to the Mun, all your future automated trips will more-or-less be identical to that amount of efficiency.

It's not that the other instantly settles into the opposite spin; it's that, once you know the spin of one (let's call it particle A), you, in-principle, know the spin of the other (let's call it B), and you can continue to calculate the evolution of the wavefunction as if you had measured B's spin. It's not really right to say that B knows it's been measured, because it doesn't; it's just that, as far as the observer of A is concerned, they've also just measured B with the same precision, even if it was extraordinarily far away.

It helps to remember that quantum entanglement isn't as spooky as pop-sci might lead you to think. It's ultimately just about a correlation between two (or more) particles. You can think of it this way: imagine you have a box that you know contains one spoon and one fork. You blindfold yourself and randomly put one of those into another box. The two boxes can now be thought of as an entangled system. You don't know what's in either box, but, if you were to look in one, you'd immediately know what's in the other. Looking at it like this, it's easy to see why it can't be used for communication. Suppose you mailed one box to your friend across the world. If they open the box, they would instantly know which utensil you have, and vice versa. However, no information has actually been transmitted between you faster than light. The wrinkle that makes quantum entanglement counterintuitive, and I think why a lot of scientists don't usually explain it this way, is because of the wavelike nature of quantum mechanical systems leading to what seem to be contradictions (see: Bell's theorem), but are kind of more just a failing of our monkey brains trying to intuit what a wavefunction actually represents

This is what I took from it, too. Not sure how others got the impression that every star would be reachable. Dr. Dodd says that you're gonna see a speck of light in the distance, and that it's a star you can go to.

I don't really mess with mods so I didn't use Alarm Clock until it was incorporated into vanilla KSP, but I went from doing one or two missions at a time to doing 4 or 5 because of it. I can only imagine KSP 2 will have even more sophisticated mission tracking, so I'd anticipate that to go up

I'm not sure if the mentality I have is old-fashioned and if digital downloads these days are different, but Back in My Day, there would be a delta of at least a couple weeks between a game going gold and it hitting the shelves (because the discs had to be manufactured in enough quantities to cover first-run sales). If that kind of publishing model is still true, I don't think it'd matter that the devs would need a Christmas/NY break; in either case, if the game is being released at the end of December or beginning of January, development would have finished in early December at the latest, I think.

I'm also still not clear on what makes a suicide burn different from other powered descents. Is there a distinction?

Oh, I see. The computer was having problems but it didn't hinder the navigation. Neil did manually touch down but all the other missions did as well. The computer had a program specifically for automatic landings but none of the LM commanders trusted it, lol, so they all freehanded it

I don't think that's right; how are you defining a suicide burn? Neil's landing was pretty similar to the rest of the Apollo landings, though I think he touched down the softest.

I just can't imagine anyone at a AAA publisher like Private Division going for something like that. The hype you get to build and take advantage of after announcing a release date is too big of an asset to squander by limiting it to a few weeks. I'd guess they'd want at least 3 or 4 months between announce and launch, especially given how much hype had died down due to the delays and whatnot.

It'd be cute if tools like that were even part of the progression. Like, we don't get porkchop plots until the Kerbals gain an understanding of orbital mechanics. And they get more and more precise as the game progresses because the Kerbals develop better methods of computation, going from hand-calculations to analog computers to mainframes, etc.

@Minmus Taster got a screenshot in another thread: When I Enhance™ and investigate the pixels, it looks like Gop to me

November 1, 2022, and you can take that to the bank* *Source: dude trust me

Yeah, but it's still fun to speculate until they give us some concrete deets

I think 3 to 5 makes the most sense; I'd probably guess 4 if I had to. Figure the end game contains one system to introduce you to the idea of interstellar travel, then another to let you apply the stuff you learned from the first, then a final one that might be considered the big boss.

Oof, I hope not. I think something adversarial like that is very much against the spirit of the game.

I didn't see a prediction come from the pitch drop; what about it suggested a date?

Something I haven't seen pointed out often here, if at all, is that game development is extremely hectic and fluid; features can be in one day and out the other. To avoid giving the audience false expectations, it makes total sense that they'd want to only show stuff that's well-established and months or years old, rather than showing something that could potentially just cease to exist at some point between now and launch

Why would they put it in if it didn't mean anything?