K^2

Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this?

Most of that's still just literal drag against solar wind, though. Relativistic drag for the Earth-Sun system is absolutely miniscule.

I know there have been incidents before, but the teams I've worked with have been very diligent about that sort of thing. To the point of actually pointing out poor performance of some specific libraries on AMD systems and helping us fix it. I don't know if it's the fear of more law suits, or if there has been a genuine culture shift within the company, but the Intel teams I've worked with have been absolutely amazing at making sure that everyone who plays our games will have a better experience. I am absolutely confident in saying that some of the games I have helped ship would have worse performance on AMD PCs and consoles if we did not have Intel engineers helping us optimize the CPU performance on Intel's dime. Everyone playing these games is having a better time because Intel helped us. Intel did get an advertising deal out of it, I'm sure it wasn't at a loss to them, but if Intel didn't approach us, we would not have had engineering time to get all of these optimizations, and the overall performance of our games would have been worse. As a customer, you can absolutely make your own decisions on how you feel about the company and whose hardware you chose to buy. As a developer, Intel's assistance has been invaluable, and I would absolutely accept it on any future projects without hesitation. And yes, that does mean that these games are likely to have an optimization bias in favor of Intel, but I also know that it will be worse across the board if I do not accept that help.

I'm not sure it's been directly stated, but it has at least been implied that some of the most advanced civilizations have figured out how to make their drives reactionless. At that point, you're not looking at fuel so much as just a general source of energy for the ship. I don't think it was even speculated what the Vorlons, Shadows, and other "old ones" used for that, other than they all could produce absolutely immense amounts of it on demand.

This is becoming less of a problem, since the biggest advantage of Intel was single threaded boost, and KSP2 just can't swim on a single thread. They'll have to have good threading. Consoles are also AMD, so these processors get way more love than they used to. But I won't pretend like it's not a factor. Intel has a huge game support engineering team that they send to work with major studios and engine devs, and they are a joy to work with. They'll never sabotage AMD, and they will help teams get general CPU optimizations, but they live and breathe Intel, so it's not a surprise that benefits of such partnership impact Intel performance more. AMD needs to step up their game in this regard.

Every magnet wants to tear itself apart. The effective pressure of 1000T field is about 400GPa. Theoretical ultimate tensile strength of graphene, the toughest material we know, might be as high as 130GPa. But there are, typically, significantly lower limits that come from statistical mechanics. Magnetism is always related to structure of the material, so it is a factor in phase transitions. Whether a phase is stable depends on whether it is an energy local minimum under given conditions. As in above, stronger field, means higher energy of that state. The best permanent magnets we've learned to make are superconductors. The highest critical field for the best ones we know at pretty much absolute zero are just under 30T. So that's the limit for what we've found. You might be able to go a little higher than that, but not by a lot, as the energy grows as the square of the field intensity.

At the first glance, it might look like the netherite fuel tanks provide the same amount of storage as the diamond fuel tanks, but they're lighter, which gives your rocket a significant advantage in ISP overall.

Preferably, when Mars is close, because that both increases the parallax, and gives you a full moon to work with, making the occultation a bit easier to anticipate. And since both the Mars and the Moon have a significant inclination, this doesn't align nearly as often as you might otherwise think.

Gravitational drag is only a factor once the two objects get very close together. Much closer than the stars normally can get to each other. Until then, for ordinary stars, it's just regular old drag. Very often, if two stars orbit very close together, one of the will be siphoning the atmosphere off the other, converting angular momentum of the binary into intrinsic angular momentum of the star. But yeah, the angular momentum is the key here. Any two random stars that happen to pass each other in the depth of space are just statistically likely to have a high angular momentum when considered as a pair. And for a collision to happen, the angular momentum needs to be very close to zero. So a collision of two stars that weren't spiraling into each other is very unlikely. And if two stars are spiraling into each other, it's going to take a very long time. That time is shorter for particularly large stars, but in that case, you're likely to end up with a pair of neutron stars and/or black holes by the time they collide.

For 4k, definitely. But I do want to point out, for anyone who might be worried, that most of these new fancy visual techniques scale directly with the pixels on the screen, so if you have a somewhat older graphics card, you can bring down the resolution to 1080p and still have a very playable framerate. All of the features KSP uses we've seen running in PS4/XB1 games at 1080p at 30FPS without hick ups. (Well, without GPU-caused hick ups.) So that stuff scales pretty well.

I'm sure there will be mods that clip the tech tree to something a bit more KSP-level tech, and something for an alternative start in a different system. So if you want to explore new star systems in the old KSP style, there will be a way to do this. I wouldn't worry about it.

Wind-induced oscillations are not a good indicator for a telescope mount. So again, closer to mid-point around 19:35:39.5 with separation at 19:36:02.6. And don't ask me to estimate an error, because it was definitely not amazing for what you're trying to do. v_v Kind of made me want to buy a telescope with a tracking mount, though...

My stand sucks and I had too much wobble, so I missed the initial contact point. Mars was about half-way at 18:34:54.3 PST and fully set right around 18:35:18.4. I'm going to try and catch the rising time to provide additional data. Hopefully, I'll have it a bit more steady for that. (And I'll DM you the location, since I had no chance of sighting 98 k Tauri anyways, and Mars was visible from my front yard.)

Perfect! That's the one I have installed, too. It's a neat app. Didn't know about this feature, though. Thanks. Weather update: Haze up to about 30° in the East. The moon came over the horizon now and is clearly visible, but I can't see anything else. Of course, there's still quite a bit of sunlight making things a lot worse. So I'll check again in another 30 minutes or so to make a final go-no-go for trying to gain occlusion data. It should be better on the flip side, but I'm very likely to miss k Tauri showing up on the other side. I'll try to get a better estimate for when exactly I should expect that, and this might help me time it, but I might be very limited in ability to provide helpful data points.

There are some NTP-based clock apps on the Android store. I plan to just take screenshots with that app open, since that's probably the easiest way to time it for me.

Yeah, I'll need to check the weather a bit closer to the time of. Last night, I could see the Mars, but not k Tauri, and this method only works with both reference points, I think? Precision's going to be tight. Proximity of the Moon means that the occlusion of k Tauri is going to happen at different moments in time, and for me, the Moon is still going to be low on the horizon, so we're not getting anywhere near the 2,500km separation. And you'll need to take into account how the Earth rotates between the two occlusions. I'm not sure you'll get the correct order of magnitude with ±1s... But I'm willing to give it a try, weather permitting. I also need to find a suitable observation site. I'm not sure I'll have a clean enough view of the East from the place I had in mind. Edit: Right now it looks like it will be a bit cloudy, which is likely to make things near horizon completely unobservable. Emergence might be more viable, since that should happen higher up in the sky. I'll keep you updated.

California coast. We are likely to get haze at that time, and I'm not sure if I even have a working telescope anymore. But if I can, I'll give it a try.

Figured I'd ask, since we keep seeing pictures being shared all the time from what should be secured sites. Opsec is a skill and most people don't have it. I haven't seen anything yet, but a photo of some shrapnel from one of the locations hit would be far more reliable than a news article, especially if geotagged. (Because, no, really, opsec is that bad.)

Happens all the time, actually. Intercept is showing us a lot more than most other studios do during development, so I can see why it doesn't look this way from the outside on most games, but so much content gets cut already at alpha-quality. Some times these things make into future patches or DLC. But a lot just gets discarded. If some play test this year revealed that players are finding many different fuel types awkward and confusing, the standard response would be, "Lets try consolidating some of these into something more generic, and test it again," and if that tests better with the focus group, that's what the studio will usually run with. And to be clear, there is no reason that I'm aware of to think that this actually happened. I just want to highlight the fact that the assets for something existing a year ago is absolutely not a proof that the feature is still in the game.

That honestly only confirms that this was a serious plan at a specific point in time, but not necessarily guarantees that all variations survived the development iteration process.

Ok, I was picturing something in a few Gs limit. But I guess, that's why the canards/fins. This is impressive if they can deliver on quantity, reliability, and price. I was still picturing this as some sort of flack. But yeah, if they're pure kinetic kill, probably naval use only.

I'm sure there are material science reasons for why this is a hard and/or expensive problem to solve, but the modern AA shells travel at speeds where you don't need much of a lifting surface to adjust trajectory. If you can modify the shape of the projectile, you can generate enough body lift to steer the projectile into the collision. There would definitely be a limit, and if target starts pulling high-G turns for avoidance, even small wings on cruise missile or a dart will be able to outmaneuver a shell using body lift only, but you typically want to surprise an air target with AA anyways. And yeah, I don't imagine the shell can have its own guidance outside of terminal, so it would have to rely on a ground station, which also requires communication that doesn't make for a juicy anti-radiation target. Perhaps a THz range narrow beam that guides the projectile, then shuts off as the projectile switches to terminal? These can be made virtually indistinguishable from background outside of the very narrow beam.

Do we have any sort of confirmation for this that doesn't come from the government channels? I don't know what else might have been used, and I don't know why this would be a fabrication, but recent experience has shown that you can't trust the official information even when there is absolutely no reason to lie about it.

Not actually impossible. If Intercept ends up going with Lua scripts for modding as an option, these mods should be safe enough to share. It's just a question of whether Intercept will want to spend time and resources to run, manage, and moderate a mod upload server. MS and Sony have also gotten a lot softer on cross-play lately, so if you can connect to a multiplayer server running on someone's PC from a console, and the game is already set up to download the necessary mods from the server, that might be a way for console players to acquire mods. Not an ideal situation, but it'd be something and is zero additional cost for Intercept to implement this. But yeah, that's a lot of assumptions about how modding and multiplayer works that have not been confirmed yet.

Yeah, but that's less than two months on 100k warp! Start a server, join in ever few days to check in and make course corrections. Piece of cake. P.S. Yes, I do really enjoy the sci-fi trope of the FTL civilization catching up to a cryosleep vessel that's been coasting for centuries, why do you ask?