K^2

And I thought @Pthigrivi was being pessimistic.

Depends on the distance. There are multiple methods you can use to detect planetary bodies, including direct imaging from close enough and under otherwise favorable conditions.

One downside of a radio signal, in terms of determining its origin, is that light-speed messages do not age. So they can't tell how long the message has been in transit. But you ought to be able to make some educated guesses on a range of plausible distances, and so long as you have good fix on direction, that still can't be that many candidate stars. The message we sent out just can't travel all that far. And especially if it is picked up at a bit of an angle to the galactic plane, that would greatly limit the possibilities.

I don't think it's that bad. We have non-mamallian species on this planet that can make sense of pictograms in certain contexts. It's far from certainty that someone would figure it out, but it's also not a guarantee that they won't. In most general terms, at least. If they figure out the DNA chemical composition from that message, though, they're galaxy's champions in solving obscure puzzles, and they deserve the right to decide if we should be sprayed with roundup. I agree with you that that last bit is a likely possibility regardless of whether they understand the intention or not. So I'm with you on the dark forest bit.

I don't think that will matter all that much. There is so much smaller junk that what we call or do not call a planet becomes kind of ambiguous. If they infer that 3/2 pixel ones are gas/ice giants, they might use that. Otherwise, they'd just look at the direction of the signal, and look for anything with a single, stable main sequence star within reasonable distance, and there won't be a lot of options to chose from. The bigger problem is assuming they'll notice and/or decode the message at all. It's pretty anthropocentric in its design, and if the aliens' culture of using visual symbols is wildly different, they might not have enough context clues to even interpret it as a pictogram.

You can actually encode color in audio using SSTV. You do this the same way that you encode color in a regular TV signal. I believe, the Duna signal is an SSTV, though, I don't think they encoded color in that one. The signal used in KSP2 preview videos is different, though. The encoding also seems like a frequency modulation, but it makes use of the stereo channel, so that you always have a "pixel" going to either left or right side. That removes any ambiguity about the number of pulses, but also restricts it to pure on/off states, with left channel representing black pixels, and right channel representing white pixels. I guess, you could introduce a third color by having both left and right signals on, but I haven't seen that used.

I haven't been able to find anything in the signal that can be interpreted as a color. It seems to be just a binary encoding, with each pixel being either on or off.

Yeah. The dots could be separators between the Kerbals' message and the Krakens' reply.

Solved problem. Ok, we can't be strictly sure that this technique will work in KSP2, but I'm sure somebody will figure out some way of punching through to the singularity inside the planets.

The current asset only has the 7 circles, but the 8th circle would have to be further out than the asset cutoff point. I have a feeling we'll need to go look for this arch in KSP2 to find out more.

It's not about posting before the launch. It's a common practice to give major creators in the space access to the game a few days, often up to about a week early, and allow them to prepare the footage, upload it to YouTube in private mode, etc. Everything but release that footage to the public. That way, the moment the game becomes available on Steam and other online stores, there is a wave of digital content that gets people hyped about the product, driving sales. If it weren't for this being early access, I would have zero doubt that PD would be doing something like this, but as it stands, I'm not sure. I think, a lot would depend on how much of the games sales PD is hoping to get during the first days of early access, and whether early footage would improve sales or make them worse. The game might be rough the first weeks, so there might be no reason to give people advance copies, in which case PD will be delaying any public marketing push, including work with influencers and content creators, until much later in the year.

People have been able to clip the camera into the stone and see a bit more of the golden arch, so there was already a solid guess on what these lights are, but I wanted to get a cleaner look, so I removed everything from the scene that was getting in the way, along with some of the texture layers, leaving just the most relevant detail. I don't think this leaves any doubt about what the lights represent. Obviously, a potential spoiler. I was hoping for there to be more, but I guess we'll have to actually wait for KSP2 for the complete picture.

There's also a tiny lamp on the other side of Kerbol for Moho. It doesn't have an associated flare, but it has a circle on the glow texture and is clearly visible on the AO texture. Unfortunately, the 3D asset for the golden arch cuts off not far from where the broken rocks end, so the part that would have had Kerbin is missing entirely. I guess, Squad and Intercept know their audience and were expecting people to dig.

Both. But the part that goes up is going against the wind, as it's obviously lighter than air.

No, that would cause all sorts of gravitational nastiness near the sharp "edges". You want smooth transitions, so the most simple and natural shape is a sphere. Scott Manley made a video with a good simulation, linked below. The sphere would have to be large enough for its surface to be mostly flat on a scale of the object going in, so we'd be talking potentially tens of meters to be safe for a person. Not a problem for ships in space, but not convenient at all for use on Earth. You can make it more gateway-like by squshing that sphere into a thick pancake, making the main interface into a flat disk that transitions to rounded edges. Then you can set up a gangway to walk through it. Picture something like Stargate, but you can see through the face to the other side. But as you're walking trough, there is still depth to a transition, like a tunnel, much like in Scott Manley's video. And it's in that "tunnel" section that you'd have to go "uphill" or "downhill" to compensate for potential energy difference.

There's no such thing as "bulletproof" when the impacting bodies average ~10km/s relative. A hard metal plate will just generate more shrapnel. You want the micro-asteroids to punch through-and-through, leaving a small puncture hole that's as easy to patch up as possible.

The Twitter post specifically talks about the seat assignment in case of emergency between now and MS-23 arrival. There was an option on the table to assign the two Russian cosmonauts to the Dragon Crew-5, as it can handle additional seats for an emergency landing. Crew Dragon is specifically rated up to 7 occupants. But Roscosmos opted instead to keep their cosmonauts assigned to MS-22. Meaning, if there is a catastrophic event in the next few weeks, and there is no time to communicate for the new orders, everyone but the two Russian cosmonauts will get into the nominally safe Crew-5, and the two Russians will head to the MS-22 and attempt to land on that. Is this likely to come up? Not at all. Does it make that an even sadder example of posturing by Roscosmos? Absolutely.

Don't the Progress cargo ships use the same docking port, meaning there's always room for a second Soyuz if needed?

Plausible. The diagram can then be of a planetary system rather than a stellar one. A rogue or distant capture with four moons. That possibility meshes well with the teaser/Easter egg we got earlier, where a map of the Kerbol system has a sticky note with a question mark attached way out beyond Eeloo.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well! This is a fun little topic in itself. 4-body choreographies exist, including some interesting 3-dimensional (non-planar) cases. Their stability is somewhat conditional, and I have no idea how well they work with another body added as a central star. I am not aware of any choreographies existing naturally, but given that they can be long-term stable, they ought to occur by chance somewhere. They would have to be exceptionally rare, however, due to the strict requirement on all masses being equal. (See: N-body Choreography, 4-body Example) There are rosette orbits with a central body, but they are known not to be stable, so they would definitely require station keeping. These have less strict requirements on masses, simply requiring a periodic pattern of masses), but due to the station-keeping requirement, these would certainly have to be artificial structures. (See: Fleet of Worlds, Klemperer Rosette) Finally, there are some naturally occurring cases of two bodies sharing an orbit that might be extendable to 4. The best example is the orbits of Janus and Epimetheus, moons of Saturn. These require a central body that is far heavier than the orbiting objects, but the masses of the orbiting objects can then be in a pretty wide naturally occurring range. The way these work is that the energy and angular momentum is transferred between the two in a fly-by of sorts, resulting in the two objects trading places as being the ones in slightly higher or slightly lower orbit, causing a game of tag around the central body. The two body case is stable, but I don't know if a 4-body case can be. No natural examples of more than two bodies sharing an orbit this way are known to me. (See: Simulation of Janus/Epimetheus Orbit) So in summary, there are some interesting possibilities for 4 planetary bodies or moons sharing an orbit around a central body, but all of them seem a little too outlandish for KSP2. That is, however, somewhat subjective and we'll probably just have to wait for more clues.

I do think it's a schematic representation of their system. I don't know if it's so symmetrical, though. Maybe that's the best the artists were able to do with a 5x5 pixel area? Looking at Arecibo again, the Sol system is represented below the "human for scale" portion. The kerbal-meets-kraken might not be the final frame. Since, again, this is starting to look like a message sent by the Krakens to the Kerbals, the final frame would be where the diagram of their home system would appear. So I'm eagerly awaiting one more frame that should tell us with some sort of certainty what the Kraken home system looks like. At least as far as star(s) and major planets are concerned.

I mean, "better" is a relative term. Fancier FX, art, physics, and less janky (marginally)? Sure. More fun to play? I can quote a number of prominent game critics and probably a few of the team members, if I promise anonymity, who would disagree. (Seriously, you think you're ready for Zero Punctuation review of the game you've worked on, but you're so not ready. ) But my point is that with big projects, the problems are also big. If a small, feature light game isn't quite ready, it can be made ready in a couple of weeks. If a big game isn't ready, it's going to miss the mark by a much greater margin. A game with a lot more effort going in can look a lot more broken and unfinished simply because there are so many features that are all not quite ready in their own unique way. Again, to be absolutely clear, I think we'll be playing a nice stable version of KSP2 well before the console release happens. But I don't think it's going to be February 23rd. And I'm not saying this to be mean to Intercept. Just the opposite, I want people to cool the expectations a bit, and appreciate the hard work Intercept put into this game by enjoying the parts that work even if we have to take some ugliness with it.

Last major game I shipped was made by a team of ~500 people on a nine figure budget. Some of the people who made it worked for the company for 20 years. Most of the senior people had one to two decades of game development experience. A large chunk of the team was very familiar with the in-house engine and tools, because they shipped other games on it to critical success. We still shipped a buggy mess that was barely playable on day one and took weeks to get to a good shape. It's not just about the team and the budget. It's about how big the scope of the game is in relation to that team and how tight the release schedule is for that scope. Intercept is working with a small team. Their experience looks solid, but there still aren't a lot of them, and KSP2 is a very big game. The original KSP that Squad made available on their website was the kind of game one makes over a weekend for a game jam - obviously with more polish than you can squeeze out in a jam, but only just enough to make it commercially viable. It has grown from there, but still remained fairly barebones. Intercept is meant to make a game that's ten times larger in one third of the time. Yes, intercept's team is larger, but it's not 30 times larger than Squad. This is a very tight schedule for a sizable game. Early access is going to come in with a lot of the features unfinished and unpolished. You should expect bugs, you should expect performance problems, and you should expect things that are broken or look ugly. They'll get fixed, but there's a reason we're getting an early access instead of the full release. And, honestly, that's a good thing. It means the game is getting the work it definitely needs instead of getting rushed out. You don't always get the time to finish a game that needs more time, and I'm always happy to see it when developers get the time to make things ready. And we still get to see a peek at what they've been working on and ask for corrections with the early access.

Yeah, but that's kind of my expectation for day 1 of early access, too. It'd be nice if I'm being too pessimistic about it, but there's clearly still work to be done. To be clear, I fully expect that to be resolved by the time KSP2 fully releases, and by that point any comparison with KSP would be entirely pointless. But early on it might play like KSP with mods.

That can still technically be a mod. Probably is somewhere out there. And in the early access, enough of the things are unfinished, unpolished, or even just not implemented yet, where you can get to the same state by modding up KSP. The difference is in how all of these features come together in the full release, because while yeah, individually, pretty much every feature can be a mod, you're not generally going to get all of these mods working together as a coherent whole. This is what's really going to set KSP2 apart from just modded KSP. And it's hard to say where we'll get past that qualitative difference, but I suspect it won't be day one of early release.