Nikolai

He also mentions that the physics improvement allows sub-sampling for higher precision, where "forces change rapidly over short time scales". This has an obvious tie-in to graphics improvements as well, but the mention of "forces" seems to indicate that calculations controlling spacecraft position are different from what they used to be. I'd be surprised if changes under the hood had absolutely nothing to do with aesthetic improvements. Of course, the definitive way to answer that one would be to take different snapshots of code and run the diffs on them. We're both kind of shooting in the dark otherwise.

Not according to the press release linked in the OP. Its physics engine has been almost completely replaced, and the surface collision model has been improved. (I'm especially looking forward to that latter one; I remember running a scenario years ago which involved landing on Phobos, and finding out to my surprise that the "surface" of the moon was a sphere. The press release claims it will help in making different kinds of spacecraft as well.)

Just the opposite, actually, if the planet in question has greenhouse gases. http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~strauss/FRS113/writeup3/

The missing rulebook wouldn't have been an issue; since it's hard to get a hold of, I'm putting a synopsis of the rules up along with my campaign. But if time is a constraint, there's not much I can do about that (especially now that my flux capacitor is on the fritz).

I was working on putting a campaign up on rpol.net when I was interrupted by the death of a family member. I should be able to wrap that up shortly. Moderators, is it all right to invite people here to an RPG on a different server?

Oh, yeah. It was steampunk a good quarter-century before "steampunk" (as a word) was coined. Once the rule books have an in-universe solution to accomplishing interplanetary travel, they seem pretty content with hand-waving details of that travel away completely. There's no sense of what kinds of accelerations or velocities are involved in using an "ether propeller", for example, and vague allusions to the difficulty of navigating the "ether wake" of planets properly (but not what ether wakes do when they're improperly navigated). They bump Mars' surface gravity up to Earth levels to simplify weapons handling. They also seem to think meteor storms are more common than the actual population of asteroids in the Solar System would seem to suggest. I agree with your notion that solar boilers and heliograph communication and solariums for atmospheric recycling seem to work well as things to facilitate steampunk-type space travel, but the source material doesn't give much more than that on its own. I'd happily engage in trying to suss details out with some of the excellent minds here, but that might not go over well... I don't know where the line lies for role-playing on the forums, exactly, and don't want to approach it.

I've been deliberately trying to avoid it, since I didn't know whether or not suggesting things that have been dropped from our ideas about space (like the luminiferous aether) would be well-received. FWIW, I enjoy Space: 1889 immensely. (I recently assisted with a translation of the core rules from German to English in the Ubiquity version of the game.) IMHO, it has basic respect for science as a method (if not necessarily for its findings), but not so much that it gets in the way of fun stories that sometimes have to be woven off-the-cuff. And it appeals to my own personal nostalgia in wonderful ways. But I can easily see how a different individual's feel for where that balance should be would be different and/or wouldn't have or care for that kind of nostalgia, so YMMV.

Yup. A Koch curve, for example, has ln(4)/ln(3) dimensionality, or roughly 1.26 dimensions. Here's a PDF version of the paper which brought the idea to the fore: http://users.math.yale.edu/~bbm3/web_pdfs/howLongIsTheCoastOfBritain.pdf

I'm really kind of old school. A 1957 Chevy Bel Air Sport Sedan, black -- or a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray (and yes, for that model year, it was two words) with a 427 cubic inch Big-Block Tri-Power V8, red.

When you're excited to use the official Asteroid Day mod so that you can create your own Kuiper Belt, park the telescope inside the orbit of Eeloo, and find out that you forgot to pack an antenna to report back to Kerbin. Long flight, I guess, to be technical. Still, somehow, it seemed to fit in with the tone of the thread...

Thanks. I'll give that a try. I've seen those things, but didn't know if they actually did any good. ... And this, too, of course.

Mine's been crashing from the VAB a lot, completely shutting the computer down. I think that's because it tends to make my computer run hot, though, and the computer shuts down if it thinks that things are getting too warm.

Thank you so much, Squad! I used to love parking the telescope inside Eeloo's orbit and pretending that I was mapping out a Kuiper Belt (with missions to go check it out, obviously). I can't wait to try the mod and see if it still works!

That pales in comparison to an episode of TNG ("Genesis") in which different crew members "devolved" into species that were supposedly ancestral to their lineage. One human became a spider, and Data's cat Spot became an iguana!

I'm not sure that it does; you can't get something for nothing. If you supply the energy needed to create an electron with a given kinetic energy, it should always sum to be more than the amount of energy you need to accelerate an electron you happen to have handy to that level of kinetic energy, because you don't need to worry in the latter case about supplying the energy to convert into mass in the first place. What? I'm not sure we were even discussing "pinnacle species" here... just a way to get things to move fast. ("Pinnacle species" came up from other posters, as if there were such a thing, but I don't think this particular idea had anything to do with that.)

Well, part of the problem is that darned equals sign. You know how a little bit of mass releases a whole lot of energy? Since the equals sign works both ways, this also means that in order to make a little bit of mass, you need to gather a whole lot of energy. So let's say you do gather a whole lot of energy, and then dump it into photons, and then you use the photons to create matter. Fine. But why wouldn't you just use that energy to, you know, accelerate existing matter?

Fantastic. It's hard not to be excited for this game's eventual release. (Would you consider selling to GOG as well? I prefer their DRM-free policies to Steam.) Just out of curiosity, which music did you use for this video?

Invisible, Inc. I love this game to pieces, but that's probably because of the way I'm wired. I prefer TBS (I'd rather out-think my opponent than out-twitch him), especially when the stakes are high; and the complex relationship this game has to failure, and the way short-term plan-making and long-term plan-making are intermeshed, and the way unconventional strategies can still lead to amazing success, and the sheer number of different strengths and weaknesses introduced by different character combinations, and and and and, all contribute to an electrifying experience from my point of view. (The storyline is sparse, but as with KSP, I tend to fill in the blanks with my own imagination.) Its strategy model is so polished that it's like chess, except that you get to conk enemies over the head. Plus, you know, cyberpunk spies don't hurt one little bit.

Do you have a title for this book? I'd love to give it a look. For impressions of what the Moon might be like just barely before we went there, check out Chesley Bonestell. His jagged lunar peaks are iconic. There's also a book titled (IIRC) Views of the Solar System that has a decent amount of artwork attempting to depict worlds we know very little about -- asteroid 624 Hektor, for example, or the view from the surface of a comet.

For a while there, I was naming various probes after famous sidekicks. Gromit, Watson, Silent Bob, Donkey, Ron Weasley, Samwise, Thing, Garth, Mini-Me, Trinity, Hit-Girl, Goose, Boo-Boo, Tinker Bell, Garfunkel, Igor, Al Gore, and many others all got to explore the far reaches of the Kerbal System.

Okay. Most of the replies so far, if I'm understanding correctly, have been to posit accurate deliberate foretelling of the future and/or flat statements that "It's not possible". Let me see if I can shift the gears a little and make this a little more thought-provoking. The time traveler is trying not to expose the secret that she can travel into the past at will, so she's not going to be dropping artifacts and/or predictions around. You are not personally acquainted with her in any way. What kind of evidence would lead you to believe that, in spite of any prejudices you had had or evidences you thought you had properly understood to the contrary, time travel into the past is possible, and that this person in particular is probably doing it? It's a pretty extraordinary thing, and would require extraordinary evidence; what might that evidence be? Part of the interesting nature of the question to me is not merely the difficulty of the subject matter itself, but in considering what it is that might cause people to re-think their ideas about how the universe works.

I like Blender (for 3D) and Synfig (for 2D -- you'll need to get a dev build for sound integration). Good to hear about OpenToonz, though -- I'll have to check that out.

Assuming that for some reason you were not able to observe the appearance or disappearance of a time machine and were not able to force a meeting with a time traveler, what secondary evidence would convince you that time travel into the past is possible?

Peregrine falcons. They do everything on the wing, don't mind building nests in cities, possess amazing eyesight and intelligence, and have the fastest diving speed known. (If you get a chance to see one in person, do. There are few other sights I've seen in nature that looks so heart-stoppingly inevitable as a peregrine falcon in stoop.)

The Devonian. Hands down. It was home to some of the weirdest organisms I've ever seen. (Dunkleosteus? Helicoprion?) Plus, vertebrates were just beginning to invade the land, and the planet was populated with vast coral reefs.