K^2

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.

More like Krakencebo, since it's starting to look like it's them who sent Kerbals the message. And I think the second scale is supposed to represent the distance to this other star system, home of the Kraken kind. 22 units away from Kerbol? I wonder what the unit of measurement is. Edit: It could be light years, but measured in Kerbin years. The message does single out Kerbin, so it would make sense as a reference, and light speed is the same for everyone. 22 Kerbin years is about 6.4 Earth years. If we take Intercept literally, that the nearest star is about 4 light years, meaning 4 Earth years (with or without scaling of the speed light, which doesn't matter to this discussion), then another nearby star could easily be closer to 6.4ly away. A bit further out, but still reachable with the similar tech level. There is a star 6.5ly from Earth, which is Luhman 16, but it's a binary brown dwarf. Such a system is unlikely to be of any interest, so unless it's in the game purely as an Easter egg, I doubt Luhman 16 would be a prototype for it. Another option that's not far off is Barnard's Star at about 6ly away. Now, that one is promising. Prominent point of interest in research and sci-fi literature, and it has an icy super-Earth orbiting it. Barnard's Star b would be just outside of the habitable zone for surface life, but it's well positioned to have a sub-surface ocean of liquid water which might be very habitable. And hey, krakens, right? They ought to live in an ocean. That would actually fit pretty well.

Oh, yeah. I don't mean this like part of the main storyline (if there is one) or progression through the game. It's more like these optional quests in some games that give you more lore. And I don't mean that all of them have to be alien-related. There can just be a collection of SETI-themed sort of exploration side-mission of finding these easter eggs. Purely fluff and flavor text. In a similar vein, I would love for exploration of natural artifacts to give you lore about the star system you're exploring. How its planets formed, under what conditions, etc. Again, nothing central to the game or necessary in any shape or form. Just something that instead of just being, "You took a sample from a cool-looking rock," be more along the lines of, "You took a sample from this rock, and here is what you learned about the way it must have formed, which tells us this about the early history of this planet/moon/asteroid." Again, basically fluff, but it would make exploration just that little bit more exciting. Both of these categories can co-exist and not interfere with each other or the main game, and you can ignore either or both if it doesn't mesh well with what you're looking for in the game.

I wouldn't want it to impact the gameplay in any way, but having some sort of a story you can discover through it could be interesting. Looking for other worlds with other sapient minds is one of the big motivations for space exploration for some people, and so that would actually work nicely into the general feel of KSP - not giving you means to go out there, just a reason to go out and search.

In early access, absolutely, and you're welcome to skip it. Early access is never meant to be a complete, finished product that will be right for everyone.

To be fair, breaking the second law is a simple way to satisfy the first. If you can absorb the ambient heat, that's a lot of free energy just sitting around.

I even had my account stolen using voulnerability during migration. Got it back. Changed a number of computers and operating systems. Still only ever payed that 10 to Mojang directly back in infdev (pre-alpha) days.

The math we have for them comes from General Relativity, which is by far the best verified scientific theory we have. If we can't rely on GR, we can rely on absolutely nothing in science, as it builds on the same foundational principles. This includes all of the quantum theory. So while there are a lot of unknowns concerning how to practically achieve a wormhole, and even if we can possibly achieve them, there's a lot we can say with as much certainty as we have about anything scientific in so far as how they would work. How they deal with differences in potential energy is one of these things, as it falls firmly within the well established frameworks. I wouldn't say that either. OP asks about the second law, but the crux is really the first law, which is really just the conservation of energy. And again, within the framework of General Relativity, it is replaced by a much stronger statement: Stress-Energy is the conserved current of the Poincare local symmetry. (See: Noether's Theorem) Which is a roundabout way of saying that you can tie the space-time in a bow and wear it around your neck, and the energy and momentum are still going to be conserved quantities, although, with some caveats that account for it being relative to the coordinate system of choice. Long story short, a wormhole is going to conserve energy whether we like it or not, adding to a long list of things that won't violate laws of thermodynamics. And on a more general note, the second law also has some pretty strong foundation. The only part that's not firmly fixed in theory is the concept of arrow of time, primarily because it's really a whole bunch of related concepts. But in the nutshell, if the direction of flow of time is fixed to the direction of entropy increase, the rest of thermodynamics follows. And we can absolutely take an anthropocentric view of this, since memory formation is reliant on entropy increase, meaning we'll always remember states with lower entropy, considering them the past. I'm skipping over a lot of detail, but as you might imagine, "how time works," is a big topic.

Pure speculation, but the multiplayer, physics LoD and extended physics warp (for long burn maneuvers) might have something to do with it. No reason the robotics can't still work with warp when stowed and locked, and multiplayer is a well understood problem, but it's certainly added complexity that Intercept might not want at launch. Alternatively, this is just a cheap way to add much desired DLC. Breaking Ground seems to have done well. If that's the case, I don't mind too much, but I hope they don't take too long.

Someone certainly has learned the Kzinti Lesson.

So here's the thing, if we actually get access to Lua scripts with components, and there are Lua bindings to the full API, the changes might not impact mod compatibility as much as it has in the past. It might actually make sense to develop some of that fancy stuff in the Early Access. I'm sure there will be some breaking changes along the way, but so long as they don't up and replace the entire mod API on us, I think they'll be easily fixable.

That said, MacLeod tends to be very chill about licensing, so long as people are nice about it, and would likely be happy to provide a mechanical license for a modest fee. Armed with one of these, Intercept would be free to create their own take on the piece for KSP2. Alternatively, I wouldn't mind seeing a few of the pieces used in KSP to come back as little Easter eggs. This can be done for free via attribution, but Incompetech provides a shockingly inexpensive standard license option as well, which tends to be a better option for games. (That way, you don't have to worry about attribution if that music ends up in a trailer, for example.) Either way, though, if this happens at all, I certainly don't expect it to be anything like the main themes. It would be little callback or Easter eggs hidden away somewhere.

It wouldn't surprise me if we see improvements like that as we're moving through Early Access. This isn't one of the things that has to be fully fleshed out in beta.

I don't remember the source either. I just remember the fact that it was stated somewhere, and precisely because it made me so sad to learn it. It should be relatively easy to add them with mods, though. So I hope we'll have some to hold us over until they are added to vanilla either as an update or DLC (which I hope will happen eventually).

It's not just expertise, but also completely different constraints. If you make a mod and it turns out that it can't run on 30% of computers out there, that's generally ok. If you make a mod and nobody but you can figure out how it works to maintain it, that's not a problem at all. If you make a mod and its visual style doesn't match the rest of the game, well, people who are bothered don't have to run this mod. Devs can't make these decisions. Anything they make has to be stable, maintainable, work well with everything else in the game, and be within resource budgets on target platforms. These are a lot of conditions that may require a lot more skill, a lot more time, or just straight up make the task impossible on current generation of hardware. And yeah, sometimes you also get modders with special talents. Especially when it comes to these tight interfaces between the art and science that are the technical art of rendering, and specialization can get really narrow. You just shouldn't assume that the lack of talent is what has been holding back the dev team. There's way more that goes into it.

You can set up wormhole geometry very differently, but the conventional way is for there to be gravity either at the entrance to the wormhole or within the traversable part. Basically, what @RCgothic said. Going through the wormhole is going to require same work as climbing the ladder, but applied over shorter distance. So the force resisting you trying to go through from lower opening to the upper is going to be stronger than gravity.