NovaSilisko

Here, for the record, is the paper that the OP's story refers to http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/821/1/L13/meta

"Breaks current physics models" is hyperbolic nonsense. No laws of physics are being violated, we just don't know how the system formed. Big difference. Edit: Hold on, now that Kryten's posted, what are we even referring to? Are we talking about a hypervelocity star or a quasar? Both? I don't see a mention of quasars in the OP's link.

Only a very rough estimate, and it would vary significantly between perihelion and apohelion. Still, you could probably find stuff orbiting at least on a temporary basis out to a few AU.

Science of the Spheres has always, at its heart, been about people. So that is why I have spent dozens of minutes crafting finely detailed personas for the player to adopt when playing the game. Without further ado, I would like to present the first four playable characters: I hope they will help you immerse yourself into the game's rich tapestry of characters and creatures. Incidentally, I hope you're enjoying the first day of this fine month.

And so, it would seem KSP 1.1 is the version that finally killed Muffler. A lifespan of 2 years, 6 months, and 12 days. I'm not sure I feel up for figuring out how to make it work all over again. Anyone else want to eat it and gain its powers?

I've done a hyperbolic flight to Jool before, with a Duna flyby on the way.

If there's ever a physical edition of SotS, I had a brainwave for the cover: Parody the cover art of Fragile, by Yes. Tiny planet + right era for the game. It's perfect!

I vaguely remember this happening as a bug before in earlier versions... a rare bug->feature evolution?

Hmmmm. Neat, but I'm not sure what utility it would serve. Would be nice to be able to view the interiors through windows.

Bad working conditions are the norm, unfortunately. Not just games either, a lot of things of similar disciplines are just as bad - visual effects studios for films, for example.

I worry that the procedural generation will suffer from sameishness, which is a real term that I didn't make up just now, like a lot of games with procedural environments - minecraft (more recently, after revisions to the terrain generator), space engine (really, there isn't very much variety in planet surfaces at all), etc.

Unfortunately no, not yet. I've mostly just been doing what I can (both SotS-related and otherwise) while waiting for things to be able to regroup. R4m0n's had a lot of work that's been swamping him for the past few months, and there are a lot of things that only he can do/things I don't trust myself to do. The plan remains unchanged: Step 1: Public playable demo; single solar system, no money or restrictions to worry about, decent selection of parts. Step 2: The Quest For More Money (crowdfunding or somesuch). Step 3 (cocurrent with step 2): Using the demo as a starting point, build the proper game with infinite solar systems and money and all that good stuff. From there, I guess a private alpha phase and a public beta phase (both handled on steam, due to its ease of rapid iteration and patch deployment [apparently]), followed by multi-source release. ETA: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can't believe I forgot to post these here: Sharp edges aren't doing so good unfortunately, but the terrain generator works good with up to 128 subdivisions (beyond that you're dealing with more vertices than the engine can handle in a single mesh) without much lag. The generator's multithreaded properly, kinda. It takes a long time to actually make the chunks when they first spawn, seemingly capped to one per frame. Need to figure out how to coerce it into doing more than one so it doesn't take so long. Of course, there's no actual stutter from it doing so, which is nice. Lower chunk counts and smaller planets help, too. Among many other niceties, I also need to apply some Math Stuff™ and puff out the "corners" of the basic cubesphere shape, so the vertices don't get as dense there.

...and eliminate all other revenue streams? Absolutely no way. Why does everyone refuse to believe the logistics explanation and instead jump to conspiracy theories?

hi do I count?

With a big enough stage (if you were to, say, go to the fairing's 5.2m diameter), you could potentially make a stage capable of going all the way to GEO and then returning - at least for smaller payloads. Whatever this stage turns out to be, I'd expect it to be reusable in general, at least in some form...

It was implied to be a replacement for the existing second stage, I think.

What's an ultra-high thrust nuclear ion drive? What? Its surface gravity is 0.029g. About 20% of the Moon's. Small, but not low enough to ignore. Why, though, would having low/no surface gravity remove any requirement for artificial gravity anyway?

True, there's not as much pressure. The atmosphere at that altitude is still 26% of that at sea level. The main issue arises from any torque that might be put on the rocket - if it was a uniform force across the entire rocket it would be fine, but nature is never that clean. Differential force on one part of the rocket versus another produces a torque for which the guidance system has to correct, and given these altitudes are very rough on the rocket already, a sharp gust can overwhelm it. And, if you've ever used FAR in KSP, you know what happens when you tip too far out of the windstream... Falcon is a robust vehicle and. perhaps. could take it. But given the choices are "risk screwing up everything" and "sit tight for a few days longer", I'll choose the second. I trust SpaceX knows their vehicle better than we do, and knows its limits. There have been hints (the notion showed up in documents from the Air Force) that Falcon Heavy will be getting a high-energy upper stage, with some flavor of Raptor engine powering it. Hopefully something comes of that.

70 m/s wind shear, by the way, is about the same as suddenly finding yourself in a category 4/5 hurricane on the way up.

Now it's up on SD: http://spacedock.info/mod/262/Audio%20Muffler Should be on CKAN, too.

Pssst. Hey.

Honestly, it really doesn't look very fun to manuever that cursor around with the analog stick... Things like transferring fuel or crew must be super tedious.

The "replace sensor masts with a giant drone" thing seems like a stupefyingly bad idea. It's not something you can quickly and easily retract in an emergency, it needs to touch down carefully and presumably be re-latched to the ship. Also, why's there a ten meter high giant scissor lift on the back of the ship? The aircraft certainly don't look like they need the clearance.