Sean Mirrsen

You'd just blow a hole in the atmosphere with a single bomb. But even with thousands/millions/billions of bombs, equally spaced and detonated simultaneously to create the pressure necessary incite fusion inside Jupiter, that fusion would only be sustained for a brief moment - at which point the energy release from the fusion would tear Jupiter (and several neighboring planets) apart.

Clone it about 20 times and pile them together. It might have just enough mass for a brown dwarf.

Surround Jupiter with enough nukes to manifest Kessler syndrome, and trigger them all at once?

Do I really need to quote all the people who said similar things about the world being round, the Earth not being the center of the universe, flight, heavier-than-air flight, personal computers, spaceflight, etc.?Star Trek transporters present a more nontrivial problem (one of essentially killing and replicating the person), but there is, fundamentally, nothing wrong with the principle itself either. It is, granted, a far more advanced technology than even Warp Drive - as demonstrated by the ST series itself, actually - but sooner or later those portable novelty 3D printers might learn to work with molecules instead of plastic pellets, and from there... who knows? Yes, I'm aware of the Heisenberg principle et al that obstruct the creation of a true "transporter", but ultimately it's a technical problem - the principle does only mention "exact" values. There are always margins of error in technology.

The Alcubierre drive is mighty similar to the Warp Drive. Not by far the same thing, but still. We know how it can be done. We don't know how to get there yet, but we're working on it.And it's not about Star Trek, not at all. It's just the most influential of the fictional works. Or, one of the most. Many other fictional writers have described discoveries and devices well ahead of their time, and many things we take for granted today were deemed absolutely inconceivable mere decades ago. Fiction really only really remains fiction until man looks at it and decides "I want one of those". From there, it's a question of time and effort.

If you're flying a rocket full of fuel, disintegrating it into a rain of hellfire over a city isn't the best option. In atmosphere, gratuitous use of parachutes is much more preferable - less mass, less debris, and you might even recover the rocket.

I understand the general principle of relativity and how it relates to causality et al. I am maintaining that the rhetoric that uses it as a weapon against FTL travel is in error. It's all about the points of view. From one both people that see different things are right. From another, all but a few are wrong. Ironically, our stances on the matter are the opposite of the points of view they represent. Like I said, that segment of yours was moot because there were no broken rules. You just mentioned all the different universes. I just happen to be very partial to the Multiverse, so it's rather a favorite subject of mine. It wasn't meant to contribute to the discussion. What I like is a fun and challenging game of starship construction, starship piloting, and exploration. I don't like pointlessly grinding towards goals, and spending time doing nothing important or engaging. The reason we have a compressed universe and ion engines a few hundred (thousand?) times more powerful than they have any right to be is because otherwise the game would be a drawl. The last thing I want to be doing is playing a realistic interstellar mission structure, decades apart between departure and arrival, all intervening time spent amassing resources in order to build just another probe to the nearest star.I don't want it to be ridiculously easy either - Noctis gets old pretty fast, even with the naming. There needs to be a challenge in going to a different star, but not a challenge that would deter all but the most determined players due to the logistics involved in it. Put it differently: It's possible to fly to, land on, and freely explore and do anything, on any body of the Kerbol system, using technology that, in career mode, will be at most midgame-tier. There are almost no more challenges remaining in this system that have not been done stock. By your proposal, the player would be stuck sitting on this level, doing nothing but waiting for tech to improve and for resources to accumulate, until he is able to build an interstellar ship - which will only deliver a probe. By any of the FTL proposals, the player would, after some preparations and obstacle-busting, be using his midgame tech to try and explore a whole different system, finding new things to do and new places to go, with the improving technology aiding him in the task. I don't know what game you want to play, but I'd rather play the latter.

You are.. very hard to follow. Let's try to make sense of this... The bomb either explodes, or it does not. A person either sees the bomb explode when it does, sees it later than it does, or only sees the crater after it's already exploded. If you fly away at superluminal speed away from an exploding bomb, you will see that it unexplodes and sits there (assuming some terrible things about how light works), but stop flying away and sit still long enough, and you'll see it explode again. It's pure propagation of information. This is fairly moot given the above, but eh. The Multiverse may or may not exist until we've been there and went back, but I do believe it exists, and it has nothing to do with flying faster than light.It's also a very, very boring place to live in after a while, though it is exciting for the first few perceived millenia or so. The principle of the thing is that the Multiverse is infinite. There is a universe where you spontaneously combust upon reading this. There is a universe where I am a ceramic-feathered duck that spontaneously ceases to exist at irregular intervals. There are an infinite amount of permutations, or at the very least infinite for all practical purposes, and each and every one of them has a right to being, although they do have wildly varying probability indices, so you could say that there is a whole lot more of the things that make sense than the things that don't. It's a curious place that you'll spend a lot of time exploring, but it will become quite boring after a while, as you will realize that everything already exists, and none of what you do matters, as you can't add anything new. If you choose to go to a universe, you will not actually go there - you will simply see a universe where a person that is an exact copy of you spontaneously materializes out of nothing, and starts doing the exact things you would have done if you went there. But I digress. Choosing the real physics path is no reason to abhor the theoretical and the fictional. Fun must come before realism, especially since KSP was never intended as a simulator.

The first one is a case of light lag - or perhaps more accurately, light warp. An arrow traveling faster than light would strike the target faster than the light reflected off the position of the shooter - to anyone watching the target, the arrow would strike before it was loosed.The second one, as it seems to be the case with all train examples here, is flawed. Instantaneous communication between all points means that all points receive a message at the same time. From the observer at C, A has not yet sent a message when he needs to relay a message from B to D, whom he knows will sent the message instantly - from the PoV of C, A receives the message before he sends it. From the PoV of B, A, and D, A sends the message and immediately receives it, despite D doing nothing from the PoV of B, and C not yet existing in the PoV of A. For people studying in a field where all reference points are said to be equal, they don't seem to accept the curious notion that there exist points of view other than theirs that may be just as correct.

More accurately they'll unfreeze into rapidly dying vegetables, because of cellular damage, as even with measures taken against fluid crystallization it's pretty much impossible to fully remove. Last I checked, anyway.

I'd point out that the navball is your single most important and most-used instrument, and when you see that something is off you better damn well check the speed reading. Also the phrasing would be "I propose that the navball automatically change modes as most appropriate to current ship mission parameters without requiring user input."

The problem is that in order to make a decision, there needs to be a preferred frame of reference. A decision can not be reached without one, but even without a conclusive decision the outcome is still definite, especially with a binary problem - in the existing case, if the system uses FTL communication to poll all existing observers and is unable to come to a conclusion, the balloon will remain unpopped. If the system takes a decision to pop the balloon as more important than to not pop it - i.e. if there is no system, and it just accepts the first kill signal it receives - then the balloon will pop, as at least one observer will see the system fail. Observers don't go into different universes. Everyone observes the outcome of the decision made. To some, it is correct. To others, it is in error. This is the basis of the term "point of view". The "preferred" frame of reference is relative to the event in question. There may as well be no preferred frame of reference for the universe as a whole, I'm not in a position to argue that, as I can't know. But if I see a perfectly valid and logical explanation where our world's mathemagicians are hell-bent to have our universe twist itself into a swiss-cheese pretzel whenever something travels at near-lightspeed, I can't help but point out every hole I see.

I would honestly prefer a more varied, explorable universe, instead of a work-intensive 3D repeat of Civilization with grinding tech and materials for the "ultimate project". Because there needs to still be a goal beyond that. An interstellar probe in and of itself would be an achievement in timewasting. A bragging rights reward, because there is only so many ways you can build and send one, especially if you cling to known physics. Civilization at least had different starting conditions and opponents in your way. And you still have not provided a causality violation case that I could not handily deconstruct.

I take it you've never played online games. Especially from halfway across the globe from the server. Your pathetic "light lag" and causality violations have nothing on the kind of stuff that you can see happen on poorly managed net code with a two-second latency.To elaborate further, where exactly is the third person, and who determines whether or not he survives? If the one who makes the decision is in the "ground" reference frame, he will see the trigger malfunction and will kill the person. The person on the train will return later with logs showing that the trigger did not malfunction, and the ground person will probably be tried for negligence and spend the rest of his days trying to wash away the guilt with gallons of alcohol. If the one who makes the decision is on the train, then the third person will not be killed. If both persons need to make a conclusive decision, then, assuming a form of instantaneous communication between them exists, their opinions will clash - presumably with the opinion of the train person taking priority, as the trigger is in his reference frame, and he is right there and can tell if the bloody thing it malfunctioning or not. I don't need a job as a physics professor. I don't need a degree. I don't need a label telling others that I can think.Other people are quite likely far greater than me. More skilled, more experienced, having more knowledge. But you can't just experience light lag, not truly. We're too far away from making actual experiments with spaceships traveling at significant fractions of c. Until that point, the best one can do is use their imagination, substantiated by logic. There are more uses for the brain than memorizing and running equations. I tend to use my laptop for that crap.

I'm still not seeing a problem anywhere. All you're caught up on is the navball switching to a different frame of reference when you don't tell it to, instead wishing you could manually switch modes without the computer interfering.I don't know what kind of mind it takes to think like that, but the computer is simply there to switch modes so you don't have to, because, all situations taken into account, you have to do less switching with the computer, than you have to do without. If you're capable of directing your attention and switching frames of reference manually, then you are just as capable of paying attention and switching frames of reference manually. It's called a "piloting error" when an automated system performs everything as designed, and the pilot misinterprets its output or fails to act appropriately. It's only an "instrument error" when the automation fails, causing the pilot to act on incorrect data. You seem to be putting yourself on the latter type, when it really is the former - you are perfectly aware of how the navigation computer works, and you are perfectly capable of correcting its output, as the computer gives you all information necessary to act. Failing to act is pilot error. If you want to continue the car analogy, this is your GPS suddenly telling you to "turn right" onto a gravel road because there's a major jam ahead, and you ignoring that because "this can't possibly be the right way" - assuming an error when the computer is correct, and not paying attention to surroundings. The difference is the the nav-computer doesn't tell you to re-plot your course. (or, I guess, the GPS telling you to go straight and you choosing to try the gravel road is a closer approximation - because there's a major vector difference between target and orbit modes... eh, it wasn't all that good of simile either way )

Well, that I can agree with. They're not flights, and they're not "active" per se, so yeah.

You can always filter them out yourself, y'know.

The 4K battery weighs 0.2. If you really need that much power, you should really switch to an RTG - saves both mass and size.

Correction: known FTL methods require that. As I said before, FTL - and I mean the concept of instantaneous FTL here, solely - is a highly unconventional principle. Using negative energy and whatnot is just brute-forcing your way through it. The universe may be working in ways we do not understand - therefore those requirements may not be needed. And as clarification, I believe there is nothing wrong with Newtonian FTL. The whole thing with relativity is that it's a little like an absentminded Ouroboros. You hear everywhere about how it is impossible to move faster than light, and everybody forgets to mention from whose perspective it is impossible - the snake is forgetting to eat its own tail. True, propelling an object so that it appears to move faster than light to a stationary observer may as well be impossible. But from the ship's perspective, problems like the universe turning into a massive laser notwithstanding, accelerating past lightspeed is nothing special. The crew will see space warp and distort, it will probably cease seeing a whole lot as it goes past lightspeed, and it is quite likely to be absolutely annihilated by interstellar particulates and even something as trivial as radiant heat and ambient light, but this will be an effect of the lightspeed barrier, not anything specific to relativity.

Er, the Lunokhod series did nothing during the Lunar night. They were basically put into sleep mode, conserving as much energy as possible until the next sunrise. So, not quite the same.

Nuclear reactors would be needed for MPD thrusters and any potential future high-energy systems like that. The current RTGs are pretty much fine as they are, though a bigger and a smaller variant to make the designs more variable would be a good idea.

"A full night on the Mun" is also known as fifteen days. This kind of thing is what RTGs were made for.

Your example is flawed. The observer on the ground is not the one determining whether or not the bomb explodes. The world does not change due to changing the point of perception - only the view of the world does. So the observer on the ground merely sees the bomb somehow not explode despite beams of light apparently hitting the detector at different times. His mighty nanosecond-timed observation skills do not make him the cause of an explosion - he is simply not in position to cause it. Even if he were, you have merely a classic case of light lag compensation - or lack thereof. I personally find the problems people have with violating causality hilarious. Even putting aside the notion that quantum entanglement is a thing that sort of exists (you can never tell with those quantum things), there are no problems that I see with perceived violation of causality. Like many things relativistic, it just takes a particular point of view. Just because you can't describe it in math, does not mean it does not happen. The universe can be more complex than any math can hope to be - just ask the people trying to solve the n-body problem.

Last post was two days ago. Did you really need to bring it up again, when the discussion had pretty much already ended?

Disagree with OP's tone, but agree with the idea. Most of the time you're rearranging whole groups - thus it would make sense if the groups would select whole on a single click, and only expanded on a double-click or a right-click.