Accelerando

That's cool. The way you talk about gender, not so much. Sorry, but: No, please don't. I know many fine people who more than seriously consider themselves agendered or non-binary. I'm transgendered myself. It's just a name and group association, after all; it's not any more or less joking to consider yourself one gender than another, unless you mean it that way to begin with. While I understand that you might not be familiar with the idea, please don't start with the "are the alternate options just jokers?" It's far too common as a first response to the concept, and frankly a little grating.

An ancient statue, bleached by age.

Whether or not to consider buying a game with relation to whether early access-style business models are legal isn't my point; my point is that Rosa is a pompous bag of air to customers who paid hard-earned money to support him, doesn't even pay his own employees, and hides it from the public eye after the fact while excusing himself by fobbing off responsibility to his workers and explaining the faults of his company as "not firing enough people fast enough". There are better people who deserve the funding he's getting, whether or not they finish their games. Anyway, baack on topic.

I completely agree with this, and with the OP in general; I always really liked the KSP title theme, and I feel like the game would benefit greatly from music that enhances the ambience. The music that currently plays in the background while I'm in space feels really sleepy, and it's far too repetitive for me to keep it on. I'd honestly love a system, or at least an option, that enables me to hear different musical "variations" of each Kerbal world's theme that play at different situations within each SOI. Thus we might collectively have a Kerbal "Symphony of the Planets and Muns" that plays each theme for its titular world, and also contains variations of each theme. Think something like this, but with additional variants that cut seamlessly into each other depending on your current craft's situation: These variations would overlay perfectly with each other in terms of tempo, pitch, and so on; and you'd have at least one for when your ship is just exploring, peacefully; and then if it's in danger, such as when you're about to execute an aerocapture maneuver or when you've set a maneuver node and are timewarping to/within 3 minutes of executing a burn, the danger! variation starts to fade in. As an example, I present FTL: Faster Than Light, with its Explore and Battle variants of each theme that cut in seamlessly from each other when you enter or exit combat: Explore Battle I have to say that I've never gotten tired of this soundtrack. Imagine something like that, plus maybe a Surface-Explore and Surface-Danger theme as well, such as if weather factors like sandstorms are implemented on Duna. And perhaps, when a Kerbal world has reached a threshold of enough craft, stations, and/or mass in orbit or on the ground, there might even be an "urban"-styled variant(s) of the theme that plays instead of the Explore versions, to signify that you've developed that world's orbital and/or surface space to a high degree. And there are definitely no shortages of talented musicians around here!

That's true; sorry. I'll turn this over to discussion about Squad proper now. I want people to know about Rosa's scamminess, since it rarely if ever seems to be brought up even among my friends who dislike early access games on principle. Rosa seems to have been able to gloss over and bury his public transgressions from his customers' eyes with enough censorship and aggressive self-promotion, and that's just icky, especially in light of how Medieval Engineers seems to be Keen Software House coming full circle again. But yeah. I'll make a separate thread for it, maybe; or maybe a mod can spin off of this one, while leaving the Squad-related posts here.

Sorry about that. I tried spoilering the major passages I edited in after the fact; is it more readable now? As for your point, I more or less agree, although I think delegating most of the low-down engineering to your computer/Kerbal peons is realistic enough in itself. But yes, definitely - people should be able to make aircraft that work like aircraft. Yes! This needs to be a thing. Some kind of intuitive, active overlay of your craft that shows values and severity of forces/tension/etc changing in real time in flight and/or in the VAB.

At the risk of veering heavily off topic, I'm not sure I'd call it early days if the information I've been reading is correct; Keen Software House has been pulling this kind of move since it got started. Space Engineers was the next big project that would reclaim their good name after they ditched Miner Wars in its unfinished state, and when people complain enough or the project gets too over his head, Rosa runs with the money and shifts focus to another game - Medieval Engineers being the next. I'd love to get a veteran's opinion on the matter, as I've only tangentially played or been involved with Space Engineers myself, but I've seen threads pop up on KSP forums about Rosa's shadiness before and his behavior from what I've seen just stinks of someone who abuses his executive position over his employees and his customers. And on that note, after some digging, I found a journal here (warning: some language that might be NSFW) that quotes a reply on Rosa's Gamasutra blog version of the postmortem, which seems to have been deleted. For those of you who like Space games... One of the comments from Rosa's blog - I read it before myself, although I neglected to save the page - is reiterated on the journal in italics. The original link to the blog on Gamasutra can be found here, although it leads to a blank page. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MarekRosa/20130807/197812/Marek_Rosa__dev_blog_Postmortem_Miner_Wars_2081.php There's also a page on the All Things Now "search engine" that links to that URL and gives the full title for the page, but I'm not sure if ATN is a really legitimate website or not. Nevertheless, all it shows is a blank page, too. With that and Medieval Engineers' reveal in mind, I don't think I would recommend buying Rosa's stuff to anyone, even if KSH seems to be going strong on Space Engineers now.

Keen Software House and their Founder/CEO Marek Rosa seem to have a rather shady history, and Mr. Rosa doesn't seem to be a very even-handed person, to say the least. He's lashed out at commenters on gaming websites before and in his previous game, Miner Wars 2081, and I recall reading a post made by a former employee that he mistreated and fired; I'll have to do more hunting. For now, here's some examples of Marek talking to a guy called Ooktar and getting riled: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/21/miner-wars-2081-source-code-made-available-to-modders/ http://steamcommunity.com/app/223430/discussions/0/810919691092026633/ He also wrote a rather pompous postmortem of Miner Wars 2081, which to my understanding was basically supposed to be Space Engineers before Rosa decided to cut his losses, keep the money, and start a new Early Access title that is now Space Engineers - the below mentioned "ultimate space sandbox" that he claims he still believes he will deliver - after its unfinished "release". He notes: He also takes care to "criticize" himself and lambast his team for, quote: And I feel you - I'm glad that Squad has made it to the point of laying down the foundations of career. I'm not sure what to think exactly, though, yet.

Yes, Scramble, please do not put words in my mouth. I never said anything about having to explicitly deal with every fine minor detail of rocket construction and launch - I have even, multiple times, explicitly supported the "armchair commander" model of flight control and voiced my dissent against simply requiring the player to push every possible button at every second of the mission, give an alternative, and explain why this is neither un-fun nor unrealistic. Even in real life, not every person in mission control has to worry about every other aspect of a rocket's systems or its flight plan in order to be able to do their part, operate the controls, and make it work. Everyone splits off some work somewhere; that's true of any job. There's nothing fundamentally incompatible between making a game realistic and choosing the elements of realism you want to include and in what way to implement them that they'll be fun. Since I don't seem to have gotten through, I'll point out the places where I tried to clarify my opinions, for you: So, yes - please stop trying to strawman my posts and use slippery-slope fallacies. This idea of "all realism advocates are clearly being sticklers for 'perfect hardcore realism of actually putting on astronaut boots and stepping into vacuum' or else they don't know what they're talking about" seems far too common among some people, and I agree with Tater here 100%:

I'm really glad to see that this is going strong. That render is gorgeous! I'm really curious to see how the science aspect of SotS will play out. Will we be encouraged to uncover, say, the physical constants of this new universe? One thing that's always interested me about your game, Nova, for instance, and about small-planets games in general is how the worlds retain an atmosphere. As far as I'm aware, Mars IRL lost its air largely because its escape velocity was too low compared to the average velocity of hot gas particles at the exobase; might this be taken accounted for in the Microverse by some new physics? I'm aware that this isn't meant to be anywhere near a "100% realistic" simulation of "what if there were tiny planets", but I'm not looking for something that perfectly replicates our universe - I understand that the Microverse is meant to be its own unique thing, so might there be some experiments we could perform that would start to shed light on the different physical equations we might use to describe the Microverse? Or it could end up having something more directly to do with the little spheres of hyperdense stuff in the center of each dirtball, of course; perhaps they're holding onto the atmospheres somehow, and that figures into the lore of the game. Either way, I think it'd be endlessly fun to explore for and uncover information like this; and perhaps investigations into the workings of the Microverse could help shed some light for players on how our own universe works by helping to understand the differences between the two physics. On the other hand, if the physical approach would take too much development time, that's also cool. I'm really hankering for a fun science game to teach me science beyond what I've learned about delta-V and orbits from KSP, but just being able to fly through and experience interesting content and/or the multitude of worlds and their backstories will surely be great.

Clearly, they're the comical twin investigators of your space program. I'm sorry.

Yes! This touches on something that I've been thinking about, too, and that I've given severely little thought to in the OP of this thread - that one of the great appeals of the game, and one of the ways in which its potential seems, in my opinion, the most severely neglected, is its potential to educate, and the potential fun that that is. When I first started playing in the early, early days of KSP - back in the first releases when it was a free game - I had no idea how orbits were achieved, or that there was anything such as an optimal flight profile that could be achieved by throttling the engines backward or forward; I had no idea that rockets are supposed to fly east to get the greatest speed boost from their planet's rotation, if counterclockwise; I had no idea that a rocket's fuel efficiency could be neatly and easily described by a single number, Isp, and that I could use a simple equation to give me a rough idea of their "range". I had to learn all of this, and it was fun, and the reason I could do any of that and have any of that fun was because the way rockets behaved and behave now in the game is realistic in some way - it wasn't simply a hard game mechanic, like learning to grapple with Dwarf Fortress's arcane control system. I actually -learned- something! Why shouldn't this figure into peoples' considerations of fun? But at the same time, and to address your point - as the game grows in complexity, it helps greatly to increase the amount of feedback, the amount of instrumentation, the amount of data and analysis the game gives to the player, in order to help them understand and make sense of what's going on around them. For example, I remember hearing something from HarvesteR along the lines of refusing to implement a delta-V readout or a set of aerodynamics readouts and instruments because "it's not fun to know everything about your rocket"; but that is not true and not good gameplay. It simply creates an artificial obstruction for players who want to learn the real physics, and makes the game seem more obtuse and arcane to players who are unfamiliar with such concepts. EDIT: As a further example, take the orbital Map view and all the data that it currently provides. The orbital map provides fairly plentiful information on your orbital characteristics, and by doing so, it allows me to set clear goals for myself and understand whether or not my maneuvers have succeeded - and by looking at the ∆V left, at the inclination and dimensions of my orbit with regards to the planet, the ecliptic, other orbits, and suchlike, I can understand why they did or didn't succeed. If the game didn't have these readouts, it would not be more fun - it would be infinitely more frustrating. The fact is, I need to know this data anyway if I am going to advance my understanding of the gameplay; you can't just thrust randomly in space and expect to "hit" Duna without knowledge of phase angles, much less knowledge of the dimensions of your very orbit. Likewise, I think that providing better, clearer, and more insightful instrumentation and data for all other aspects of the game - some kind of ruler in the vehicle assembly building and spaceplane hanger would be muchly welcomed, for instance - will open up far more opportunities for education and creativity than denying them to players. It is infinitely more enlightening to be able to see your orbit grow and shrink, and to be able to watch the numbers go up and down for its periapsis, phase angle, and so on, at the same time, than to simply watch a blue curve move around a planet, or even worse to have no orbital display at all. And it's not as if people don't run out of fuel even though they know their rocket's delta-V, or crash aircraft even though they have all the readouts anyway - people run out fuel all the time in cars IRL that don't deplete their supply in such unintuitive ways, and people crash test aircraft in real life even though they have plenty of computer data. Knowing and being able to keep track of more or less how much range you can expect out of a car or the flight characteristics of an aircraft does not make driving a car or flying a plane less fun! But not being able to know without running the calculations yourself or installing a mod does make it more frustrating for people who want to be able to learn. It certainly helped me a lot when I started using MechJeb in .17 and I could begin turning to its readouts to learn about phase angles and watch my delta-V fall. So yes - it's definitely very helpful, very educational, and fun to play the game with realistic elements for the purposes of learning, and it definitely helps and increases that fun to have bountiful data available on my flights! And if you want a challenge, you can go without the instrumentation - but just because you've played it long enough for that to be a challenge doesn't mean that that's the only challenge there is, or that's worth undertaking. I'll reiterate this in the OP, because it's absolutely exactly something I want to address, but completely forgot to.

Lighthuggers, and Bussard Ramscoop-type ships in general.

Props to you for including the alternate options in the poll. I'm a lady, of course, but yeah.

That's true, and with regards to what kind of protection I'm aiming for, it's mostly along the lines of keeping the theme of "travel between parts of an interstellar civilization" without having to venture far immediately into the territory of "exploring the implications of effective 'time travel' and/or being able to access parallel universes for the same cost as running a starship". Basically, I'm interested in knowing how or if I can write a realistic story where FTL works in the way most people think of FTL - as a method for traveling between "places", in the lay person's idea of the concept, rather than between "times". At the same time, I also think the concept of Novikov self-consistency and similar chronology protection concepts are endlessly fascinating in their own right, and time travel muchly deserves a far more deeply written treatment in space SF and SF- and space opera-type works in general. The idea of the hypothetical ball being able to encounter itself at an angle sufficient to set itself on its original trajectory is wonderfully interesting and I'd love to understand how such a situation might work when taking into account the uncertainties in real-life interactions, as well... I've also always been curious if there's perhaps some convoluted way that time travel into, and altering or at least interacting with, "the past" could ever make any kind of sense, perhaps even barring multiverses or outright chronology protection. But yeah - travel between places, rather than between times. While I understand that these are the same in physics terms, I want to be able to write a realistic setting where by the layperson definitions of these terms I can have an FTL system that only moves me between places, and to know why I can, or if not, why not. I'll compose a more detailed reply and wrap my head around N_las's diagram when I wake up again, too.

That is fantastic. I want to believe.

Yes. And on that note: You didn't touch any nerves; I simply disagree very strongly with your point. There's no furor here. And while I can understand that you find from experience that the increments of realism KSP has added put it along a line between more and less fun, I don't agree that that's fundamentally a problem of them being realistic. Certain elements of realism at the very least are fundamental to a good gameplay experience; real-life mission controllers wouldn't want a spacecraft that's impossible to control, for instance, or on the other hand that requires every last ounce of a person's concentration to pilot it by hand on the way up, manually turning valves and levers in the rocket to fine-control every last subsystem to the highest possible degree of micromanagement. Yet this doesn't make realism fundamentally fun, as you know for yourself. But likewise, realism isn't fundamentally un-fun, either. I understand that it's your opinion and your own personal taste in gameplay that massive amounts of realism don't amount to more fun, but I feel it's unfair or at least needlessly limiting to talk about it as a simple sliding scale for general purposes. That, for the most part, is what I want to say with regards to the matter of "realism vs. fun". I feel that, yeah.

That's true, and I edited your second post in to account for that, since it lined up very well with what I was saying to John. I personally consider it more than realistic to simply kick back behind an armchair and direct someone or something else to move their arms to push the controls of a faraway vehicle; real pilots do it with drones today. I've never heard anyone criticize, for instance, Dwarf Fortress for being unrealistic by not forcing players to manually carry out calculations for moving every pint of blood in every artery of every animal in order to advance the wildlife simulation going on around them; it just happens, as is realistic and as is conducive to gameplay. Such players' opinions lie in a different arena of realism, I think, rather than being a matter of simply more realism. Even then, on SQUAD's part, why make aerodynamics out to be a pressing issue when it clearly isn't? Better aerodynamics have been asked for many, many times, and it's been clear for years now that the game is long overdue for an update in this regard; I remember when shortly after absorbing C7 onto the team it was suggested that an aerodynamics overhaul would be coming soon for the benefit of spaceplane builders, and I recall the same sentiment from some time around the releases of .16 and .17. Now that it's been years and FAR, Real Solar System and similar mods have long been established and gained popularity, and it's long been clear that new updates might break saves and old aspects of gameplay that are now obsolete, now there is suddenly a controversy? Why? Over what? It's not just the realism hardliners who've been asking for this, I'm sure; it's one of those features like multiplayer that people just expect. And it's clearly not going to destroy any wells of creativity that weren't already powerful enough to weather changes already. If anything, adding realistic aerodynamics will make it far easier for people to design insane contraptions, simply by lowering the delta-V by a staggering 1K m/s and enabling huge launches to orbit.

I'm not sure I believe that that's really a great motivating factor for the KSP devs. Not that it can't be, although I'm not sure if it is; but it doesn't seem like a good one. Because from what I've seen the vast majority of active speakers on the forum cry foul when you mention autopilots, for instance, much less realism in general; the consensus seems to be, at least in my experience, that there are elements of real life that are worth putting into a game and make it fun, much as Jofwu iterates in their post. I have no problem with this myself, but I do take issue with the seemingly common notion that there needs to be a balance between realism and fun, juxtaposing those words as if to say that they are immovable polar opposites on a sliding scale. It seems unfair to me, or at least poorly worded, especially if these players you speak of are a significant enough minority to want to reach out to. WRT John's post, I vehemently disagree that there is some kind of "sliding scale"; that's what I was trying to say in my OP. And in general - obviously there are elements of real life that are more or less fun to implement and ways to combine them that are more fun or less than others. But it's the same with unrealism; you could have a space game where pressing any key instanlty moves you 3000 light-years in any direction, but without any coordination of such elements it's going to be hell to play! It's all a matter of game design, which it's great that the devs seem to want to keep in mind, but seems unfair to single out realism as being the cause of trouble on this part, much less on the subject of aerodynamics for not only these reasons but the purely KSP gameplay-related ones I mentioned above. So yeah, @Parkaboy and in general, that's true, it's not the amount that matters; it's what you pick and how you use it. Something along those lines.

These thoughts are related to the poll on aerodynamics and backwards compatibility, but I feel like they warrant their own thread because I don't see them reiterated too often, or at least I lose them in the tides of ranting about how cheaty autopilots are and subjects along those lines, and I'd like to organize them here for others to see. I don't really see the need that Squad feels to fixate on maintaining a "balance" between realistic and unrealistic aerodynamics in the update(s) to come. The idea of throwing out at least FAR-level realistic aerodynamics in favor of a limited definition of "fun" seems silly to me. For one, you can make crazy-looking contraptions fly in FAR, too, albeit not as overtly brick-shaped; but there are other reasons. EDIT: I failed to address this reason the first time around, so I'll include it here as well for posterity. Yes! This touches on something that I've been thinking about, too, and that I've given severely little thought to in the OP of this thread - that one of the great appeals of the game, and one of the ways in which its potential seems, in my opinion, the most severely neglected, is its potential to educate, and the potential fun that that is. When I first started playing in the early, early days of KSP - back in the first releases when it was a free game - I had no idea how orbits were achieved, or that there was anything such as an optimal flight profile that could be achieved by throttling the engines backward or forward; I had no idea that rockets are supposed to fly east to get the greatest speed boost from their planet's rotation, if counterclockwise; I had no idea that a rocket's fuel efficiency could be neatly and easily described by a single number, Isp, and that I could use a simple equation to give me a rough idea of their "range". I had to learn all of this, and it was fun, and the reason I could do any of that and have any of that fun was because the way rockets behaved and behave now in the game is realistic in some way - it wasn't simply a hard game mechanic, like learning to grapple with Dwarf Fortress's arcane control system. I actually -learned- something! Why shouldn't this figure into peoples' considerations of fun? But at the same time, and to address your point - as the game grows in complexity, it helps greatly to increase the amount of feedback, the amount of instrumentation, the amount of data and analysis the game gives to the player, in order to help them understand and make sense of what's going on around them. For example, I remember hearing something from HarvesteR along the lines of refusing to implement a delta-V readout or a set of aerodynamics readouts and instruments because "it's not fun to know everything about your rocket"; but that is not true and not good gameplay. It simply creates an artificial obstruction for players who want to learn the real physics, and makes the game seem more obtuse and arcane to players who are unfamiliar with such concepts. EDIT 2: As a further example, take the orbital Map view and all the data that it currently provides. The orbital map provides fairly plentiful information on your orbital characteristics, and by doing so, it allows me to set clear goals for myself and understand whether or not my maneuvers have succeeded - and by looking at the ∆V left, at the inclination and dimensions of my orbit with regards to the planet, the ecliptic, other orbits, and suchlike, I can understand why they did or didn't succeed. If the game didn't have these readouts, it would not be more fun - it would be infinitely more frustrating. The fact is, I need to know this data anyway if I am going to advance my understanding of the gameplay; you can't just thrust randomly in space and expect to "hit" Duna without knowledge of phase angles, much less knowledge of the dimensions of your very orbit. Likewise, I think that providing better, clearer, and more insightful instrumentation and data for all other aspects of the game - some kind of ruler in the vehicle assembly building and spaceplane hanger would be muchly welcomed, for instance - will open up far more opportunities for education and creativity than denying them to players. It is infinitely more enlightening to be able to see your orbit grow and shrink, and to be able to watch the numbers go up and down for its periapsis, phase angle, and so on, at the same time, than to simply watch a blue curve move around a planet, or even worse to have no orbital display at all. And it's not as if people don't run out of fuel even though they know their rocket's delta-V, or crash aircraft even though they have all the readouts anyway - people run out fuel all the time in cars IRL that don't deplete their supply in such unintuitive ways, and people crash test aircraft in real life even though they have plenty of computer data. Knowing and being able to keep track of more or less how much range you can expect out of a car or the flight characteristics of an aircraft does not make driving a car or flying a plane less fun! But not being able to know without running the calculations yourself or installing a mod does make it more frustrating for people who want to be able to learn. It certainly helped me a lot when I started using MechJeb in .17 and I could begin turning to its readouts to learn about phase angles and watch my delta-V fall. So yes - it's definitely very helpful, very educational, and fun to play the game with realistic elements for the purposes of learning, and it definitely helps and increases that fun to have bountiful data available on my flights! And if you want a challenge, you can go without the instrumentation - but just because you've played it long enough for that to be a challenge doesn't mean that that's the only challenge there is, or that's worth undertaking. Career mode as-is currently doesn't allow a huge amount of room for creativity in terms of the overall shape of a rocket; generally, the most favorable shape you can build a launcher for a low mass and 18 parts in is the shape of a fairly believable pole(s) of varying dimensions, and this seems to be what most people end up building anyway - the kind of shapes you might expect from a real rocket, barring things like lack of nose cones. The main reason people don't include nosecones is, to my knowledge, that they simply don't have any use other than aesthetics yet. Aside from that, none of this changes if new aerodynamics are introduced. Outside of Youtube videos, certain challenges, and the creations of Whackjob and his imitators and people like him, flying bricks if anything have seemed more of a rarity to me than a common feature of Kerbal design among players; KSP's part-tree construction mechanics and limited stock construction tools and unclear indicators don't lend themselves very easily to extremely unorthodox contraptions for casual players, and anyway many people seem to prefer sleek or otherwise Believable™ aerodynamic shapes for vehicles that are meant to operate in, you know, the air. The undying popularity of the spaceplane SSTO and the space shuttle-esque design, as well as endless Saturn V and Soyuz replicas and generally rod-shaped lifters that litter the Spacecraft Exchange and the add-ons sections attest to this. And if you really want to build that rocket of Whackjobian ambition, what's to say you can't? Rockets made in Real Solar System demonstrate that it's perfectly possible to build insane, hulking contraptions even under realistic aerodynamics; just look at this monster: Or this one: And there's no shortage of strange-looking IRL designs that could inspire wacky contraptions under new aerodynamics. The VVA-14 even resembles some of Cupcake's machines. Or just build them in, y'know, space, where there is no air to stop you. I'm sure any Whackjobians among us would be more than up to the task of designing the lifters that can take the craziest huge monsters up into LKO; half of Whackjob's own repertoire was monstrously huge launchers of various shapes and sizes anyway. So again, why is this even considered an issue? Does it have something to do with the devs' somewhat down-putting statements on realism, in the idea that it fundamentally isn't fun but has to be tamed, as opposed to un-realism? It seems to color their announcements with regards to game mechanics, at least. I remember that thing HarvesteR said a while back along the lines of how if you wanted to play a perfectly realistic game, you'd go outside. But how many of us can actually reasonably expect to go out and be able to fly a spaceship tomorrow? Very few if any; much as most FIFA players can't expect to go outside and start a career in pro football tomorrow, or how most Tycoon players can't expect to go outside and start growing a business to massive proportions; you get the idea. I think it is neither un-fun nor unrealistic to gloss over certain grating parts of the challenge or leave it up to someone else or a background mechanic to take care of; leaders and executives in real life do this all the time, for one. There's clearly elements of real life that are fun and people want to do, and ways to present them so as to skip over the parts people don't want to do. I don't deny that there are ways to design a game with certain elements that work better or worse than others, but why continually talk about realism (or believability, if you prefer) as if it's an elephant in the room? Sure, there are things you might implement that aren't very fun for many people, but there's plenty of opportunity for pitfalls if you're designing a game without a mind to believability, too. I don't think we should say that, for instance, if I wanted to play a perfectly unrealistic game, I should quit KSP and try lucid dreaming. On a final note, I'll reiterate what I think is a pretty great post by Jofwu in the "Should Squad drop backwards compatibility" thread, which summarizes pretty well what I'm aiming to convey in terms of the relationship between "realism" and fun: You can read the rest of their post here. EDIT 3: And since I seem to be getting some confusion about whether or not I believe SQUAD should focus on implementing "realism" in the sense of "you have to model and manually take care of every blast of wind, every fart and every ounce of fuel moving in the tanks," I will reiterate here something I posted later in the thread: I never said anything about having to explicitly deal with every fine minor detail of rocket construction and launch - I have even, multiple times, explicitly supported the "armchair commander" model of flight control and voiced my dissent against simply requiring the player to push every possible button at every second of the mission, give an alternative, and explain why this is neither un-fun nor unrealistic. Even in real life, not every person in mission control has to worry about every other aspect of a rocket's systems or its flight plan in order to be able to do their part, operate the controls, and make it work. Everyone splits off some work somewhere; that's true of any job. There's nothing fundamentally incompatible between making a game realistic and choosing the elements of realism you want to include and in what way to implement them that they'll be fun. Tater demonstrates my own view of the use of this strawman of "realism players" against others very well: Please discuss.

Thanks for the response. I'm aware that some time-dickery happens no matter how you use your FTL drive, but I'm aiming to limit the "grandfather paradox"-esque scenarios (even if they don't technically violate local causality by virtue of sending the traveler into a parallel universe or something of that nature) or at least complicate the creation of such to something requiring more thought than moving a wormhole or two into a general configuration. Is there a way, in that sense, to make chronology protection, or something like it for practical purposes, make sense? OA mentions that their wormholes require some sort of active stabilization in order to stay open; does this make sense, and could something similar - i.e. some physical phenomena creating the need for active stabilization - also complicate attempts to carry out grandfather paradox-style scenarios? Might it be something else? Why? Or if not, why not?

Thank you for the diagram. I might not have a lot of time to read it and post at the moment, but I'll definitely read through it soon, EDIT and I'll formulate a reply to your answer WRT my wormhole light-cone question soon. I do want chronology protection, and I'm curious about how Visser can be broken by two sets. Orion's Arm canon does mention this, in the form of a "Roman" loop, in the Wormholes Layman's Guide: The page on Wormhole Termini might have more illuminating information, but I'm not sure.

That's what I was hoping to hear. Although I'm also interested in knowing the details of how and why, so that I can better visualize it to develop a system for myself, and for other SF writers to reference. In Orion's Arm, for instance, I don't really understand how you can conceivably build and connect wormholes together so as to create a system that prevents time travel. There's a page on their website which I interpreted as indicating that by having a wormhole's second mouth situated outside of the light cone of the two mouths' shared origin point H, the mouths can be connected without causing backwards time travel. However, when I tried to draw a space-time diagram myself of two relativistic spacecraft that "move" the wormhole mouths apart from the origin H, I didn't understand if there was a way to get either of the mouths to be "outside" H's light cone and thus prevent backwards time travel. For any light you all could shed on the matter, I'd be infinitely grateful. EDIT: I'm not here to argue the philosophy; I'm only interested in whether or not it's possible to in some way prevent time travel. I understand that the FTL methods in question are always potential time machines in the sense that you can always think of a way they can be used/travel in spacetime so as to send them into the past. My question is whether or not an FTL drive will force you, in all circumstances, to send information back in time; and if so or if not, then why? The first question has been answered, but not the second. If you say there might be a workaround, then there isn't "no possible exception" for the purposes of effectively preventing time travel in a realistic-ish universe. Orion's Arm does assume chronology protection, which is why I brought it up. Although I must say I am also curious about whether or not a chronology protection system that prevents multiversal travel in this way for, say, wormholes, would also still allow for some method of traveling between universes.

That's what I mean, too, yeah - I want to know if traveling back and forth between points with an FTL drive, and/or creating a "link" between two points using a wormhole, explicitly forces you to send information to the past, alternate or otherwise. Not just allows, but forces. To be clear, I'm not entirely concerned about causality in and of itself; it's whether or not using an FTL drive doesn't, for example under the multiverse interpretation, send you to a parallel universe, that I'm interested in. Mainly because I'm not sure if people would want to use a device that irrevocably sends you to an alternate universe instead of your own, without exception, every time you use it to travel somewhere and "back". Even if it's functionally the same, I feel like it would suck to maybe have to leave behind the people in your original universe... If the FTL method in question doesn't cause backwards time travel in all FTL situations involving travel back and forth between two points, then for science fictional purposes I can handwave a mechanism that prevents FTL when the drive or wormhole would become a time machine. In Orion's Arm, this happens via the "Visser Effect", by which a wormhole collapses when it is arranged so as to permit time travel. Although I'm curious about the realism of such a thing, too...

In short: Do wormholes and/or warp drives allow FTL travel that doesn't also cause time travel into the past? This is a reply to one of K^2's posts from the Control of the Higgs Field thread, but it's open to anyone who's interested in replying. My post wasn't completely on-topic, and it seemed like an interesting line of thought in and of itself so I decided to give it its own thread. I understand that my understanding of relativity and physics in general is not great, so please correct me. With partial regards to locality vs global-ness of causality in SR vs. GR, I've been meaning to ask you something. As a hard-SF worldbuilder, I've been searching around for information to make sense of an FTL system that doesn't cause time travel, as opposed to simply not violating causality, but I've only been able to find scattered information and the best lead I've had so far has been the Orion's Arm universe with its interpretation of wormholes. From what I understood through Orion's Arm, wormholes are the only realistic FTL method that can prevent time travel when traveling back and forth between two points in space, to an extent; because the wormhole creates sort of a single link/tunnel between two points in space and time that stays open - if that makes sense - while an FTL "drive" system such as Alcubierre would need to "tunnel" both ways, once by activating the drive to get to the destination, and once by activating the drive to return to the spacecraft's origin. The wormhole's advantage here is limited by the possibility of moving one or more mouths so as to create a tunnel into the past, but this is prevented in the OA universe by the wormhole immediately destroying itself by self-detonation if it becomes a time machine. While I understand from a reply you wrote last year that using an Alcubierre drive to travel faster than light technically doesn't violate causality, you seemed to indicate that using it could still send its user into the past, albeit an alternate one. I've read it suggested that a hyperadvanced system might be put into place so as to specifically target, "grab", and prevent FTL vessels from traveling in a way that would cause time travel; the author Charles Stross uses it in his Singularity Sky universe, in the form of the "Eschaton", a superintelligent computer and FTL traffic controller. But barring handwaves like this, is there any way that an FTL drive could be built or operated - other than, perhaps, traveling only "outward" from one's origin - so as to prevent backwards time travel? And would a wormhole actually permit travel between two points without also causing time travel? EDIT: And if possible, could you explain why? I have a lot of difficulty visualizing these concepts in my mind and I'd love to be able to create a realistic-FTL resource for myself and for other interested people and SF writers to refer to. Thank you. Further reading: Orion's Arm Wormholes FAQ A Layman's Guide to Wormholes, Orion's Arm Encyclopedia Galactica EDIT: Oops, I wrote the title wrong. Changed that!