Nikolai

Agreed, and thank you for mentioning it. These little "Quality of Life" updates go a long way to increasing the fun and replayability of the game.

If you don't mind learning-by-death, I can't recommend Invisible, Inc. enough. The strategy is so polished you can see your face in it. And the game's complex relationship to failure is nothing short of astounding. Things can always get worse, and you can almost always take a situation that looks unwinnable at first glance and turn it into a narrow escape; the ways you can use old strategies to accomplish new things always makes me feel like the cleverest person alive. ("Hold up. I can hack the security drone, then use it to block the door so that the guard can't get there just long enough for me to run through the room and escape to the elevator on the other side. I might actually be able to pull this off.")

I'll give you three. First, Primes from the Pandora's Star series. They're hive mentalities with two castes: motiles and immotiles. Motiles are like the worker ants of the colonies -- little more than brains and reproductive systems. Immotiles can send instructions to motiles and receive the sensory input directly as perceived by the motiles; at first, this requires physical contact, but technological development allows this to be done remotely as well. The really odd part is that an immotile can add brains to itself at will. Four motiles join together and merge to make an immotile; extraneous biological structures (limbs, muscles, digestive organs, and so forth) are converted into brain matter. An existing immotile can convert four motiles into a new brain for itself and add it to the network whenever it likes (becoming a Prime). Immotiles are also fiercely individualistic, meaning that they'll happily glom as many brains onto themselves as they think they need for a particular problem, but they very reluctantly work with one another. They also know that in the end, there can be only one immotile that has taken over everything else -- everything else, thanks to FTL communications. All lesser species are merely a means to that end. Second, Life Fibers, from Kill La Kill (an anime series). They form all clothing on Earth. And as parasitic sentient alien threads with a lifespan of 10,000 years, they're responsible for the evolution of humanity. Third, I expect that if the Singularity is ever achieved, us. What we will be ten thousand years after the Singularity is utterly incomprehensible to us now, and we squishy biological individuals with extremely brief lifespans will probably be incomprehensible to them.

... which is still off the bottom of the chart.

I'm playing for the first time with a more heavily-modded installation, and I'm willing to bet there's something I've done wrong. The textures on Mun appear to be gone; when I look at Mun in Map View, all I see is a blank black sphere. I've only copied the High Res textures from SVE. Is that right, or is there some kind of merging that needs to happen? Thanks in advance for any insight you can lend.

Yeah... there were a fair number of parts in each of the docked sections that had been auto-strutted to the root part. I think you nailed the problem.

Even that was off. At 30 AU (Neptune's distance) from the Sun, the Sun would be 900 times dimmer than it is here... ... which is still more than five hundred times brighter than the full Moon as seen on Earth's surface. The Sun is deceptively bright.

Interesting. I had a bunch of fuel tanks, clamped end-to-end. That's literally it. No SAS or clipping of any kind. There might have been autostruts, though. I'll have to check that.

As I was putting together a rather enormous ship with a bunch of Docking Port Sr.'s and it wobbled itself apart after settling down nicely, I wondered if anyone had compiled a sort of list of things that seem to make spacecraft self-destruct -- best practices to avoid in ship construction and the like. Is anyone aware of such a list?

OT wrinkle: It's not that we invented the mathematics to understand spacetime -- it's that we were playing with mathematics as its own logically-consistent diversion, and a particular subset of it happened to describe what we think is happening with spacetime rather well. This kind of thing keeps happening, and we're not sure why. It's kind of like having a hobby where you knit sweaters according to certain rules, and then some time later, a bunch of dachshunds happen by, and some of the sweaters fit those new dachshunds perfectly, even though the rules we used were rather seriously limiting and we really had no idea what a dachshund was when we started our work. Unnecessary nitpick, but I personally find it fascinating. As you were.

I would expect not. Predicting just where your spacecraft is going to go in the long term is hard without shortcuts like patched conics. Yeah. That's what I'd see as part of a potential "feeble gravity" simulation. Of course, it's all up to them; there's already so much that we've been definitively told is part of KSP 2 that this would just be gravy.

I hope there will be asteroid belts and Kuiper belts, with more interesting variation between small bodies than size alone. It would also be nice if small bodies put out their own (very, very feeble) gravity; I'd like to toy with making a gravitational tractor.

Yeah, but they didn't know that there had been a foam strike until much later. (They didn't realize it until they reviewed higher-resolution video of the launch the following day. Even then, exactly where the foam had struck was unclear; that wasn't known for several months.)

Many thanks!

I note that the Making History DLC is still at version 1.7.1. It's okay to use that version of that DLC with the new base version (1.7.2) and the new Breaking Ground DLC (1.1.0), right?

Of course. But better that than making ignorant mistakes, even if it's functionally the same as simply choosing badly from a strictly pragmatic point of view. I'd rather have the option of doing the right thing because I know what the right thing is than being required to stumble into it blindly; virtue is more noble than luck. Sure; even though "Self-control" isn't listed, I can see its virtue. I should also note that learning Empathy or Compassion (my addition to the list) would also go a long way towards bestowing self-control (since learning it deeply enough would cause you to want to act in a way that others would want you to act).

Truth will tell you when and how to apply all of the others. So of their choices, I'd go with that one. That said, if I could pick my own quality, I'd go with "Empathy" or "Compassion" or some such thing. Teaching humans how to acquire and use that quality would go a long, long way.

I think so, but I also think that it's possible that it will create more difficulties than it solves; neither Snoopy nor the retrieval craft can be considered a fixed platform. I'd love to see a real in-depth analysis of what it would take to make this work, though.

I'm eager to make "hoppers" for low-gravity moons. And some spiderbots to clamber and scramble over all sorts of terrain.

For a long time, I named my spacecraft after famous sidekicks: Watson, Chewbacca, Donkey, Spock, Weasley, Inigo, Robin, Gromit, Garth, Barf, Olsen, Smee, Sallah, Piglet, Igor, Barney, Squiggy, Falstaff, Garfunkel, Goose, Willow, Smithers, Sancho, Dwight, Norton, Wazowski, Pinky, Arthur, Gabrielle, Tink, 99, Tonto, Kato, Tails, Harley, Dory, Rizzo, Rosco, Passepartout, Pedro, Boo Boo, Baldrick, whatever.

It seems to me that if we can discover what sorts of problems tend to make humans stupid in the aggregate (mob mentality) and what sorts of problems tend to make them really clever in the aggregate (if you ask a crowd the height of a random object in front of them, the average answer will actually be quite accurate), we can leverage that to propel things forward in much the same way that we use government as an arm of the people to make sure that known market failures don't destroy our economic system.

Ya gotta give people more than a few hours to respond, man. I haven't touched Oolite in years. It looks much improved. I might be able to get back to it once my kids get past their benchmark testing.

Didn't that Sean Connery movie Outlaw also take place on Io?

Of course; especially when scientific studies are rare, difficult, and costly, they don't often focus on just one result. I didn't mean to imply that Deep Impact's studies were done primarily to study the diversion created by the impact itself. And I'm still in favor of this test. My statement was about existence, not variety. But if we're going to get into the nitty-gritty of comparison... Deep Impact's impactor and DART are of the same order of magnitude (372 kg vs. ~500 kg). Deep Impact's impactor hit with a lot more velocity (10.2 km/s vs. ~6 km/s), and thus imparted more momentum to its target (though that, too, is of the same order of magnitude). Depending on which estimates you go with, though, Tempel-1 is somewhere around 10,000 to 100,000 times as massive as "Didymoon", and 100 billion to 1 trillion times as much as the impactor (whereas "Didymoon" masses "only" somewhere around 10 million times as much as the impactor). A more apt comparison would be, perhaps, chucking a tennis ball at an An-255 during takeoff versus chucking that ball at the Great Pyramid of Giza. But these are trifles. I'm eager to see the results.

Well, it's not the first time we've done it. Not that we've done it a whole lot -- we're still a long way away from assessing kinetic deflection in general, and I'm in favor of this test. But it's not our first time. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=3910