K^2

I've seen a number of various approaches to this over the years, from mods either specifically designed to do this or flexible enough to allow for it, like kOS, to really hacky things like simply timing a separatron to tilt the rocket at the right altitude. What I was looking for instead is ability to perform a gradual gravity turn in vanilla KSP, and while I've done some experiments with fins attached to servos, the results have not been very reliable. Recently, I got a thought, what if instead of trying to force the rocket to tilt over, we trick SAS into thinking it already has. So I slapped a probe core onto a servo part, added some curves and activations to a KAL unit, and, well, the results were actually really nice. This can still use a bit of polish, but the entire control unit fits in a single 1.25m service bay and can be tuned for whatever rocket you want to send to orbit. I have found some interesting gremlins while working on this. It looks like the engine gimbals don't want to play nice with SAS if the axis the engine is aligned with differs wildly from the orientation of the control-from point. This isn't causing any issues during the first stage operation, but I had to shut down the gimbal on second stage and rely on reaction wheels only, because if I didn't, the second stage would spin wildly out of control the moment it ignited. There are also problems inherent to SAS use, like the fact that the lock orientation can drift over time, and that is definitely the case here, and you have to compensate for it. However, all that really means is that there is a bit of a trial and error in programming the ascent, which is likely going to be the case for any practical use already. Also, just to see if it can be used for some missions played in first person, I've set this rocket up to have a pilot seat, and when the program finishes, it sets the control-from point back to the command module. So it's entirely possible to use this kind of setup to take you to orbit and let you perform the rest of the mission manually from there. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the result.

Betas can be good for shaking out problems with server load by increasing it incrementally rather than letting everyone in all at once for games where it's relevant. Doesn't always help, but it's one legitimate reason to crowd-source your testing with a beta release. Of course, I don't think that's at all relevant to anything Intercept is doing with KSP2. So yeah, there would be little to no value in beta test as far as getting player feedback goes.

There's still a digital E3, which might have limited turnout itself, but a bunch of big studios are doing their events around the same time. It's an important time point even if mostly by convention at this point. I don't know if T2/PD will have something as part of digital E3, or have their own show, or simply use that time of increased media attention to push a lot of marketing. They'll certainly be doing E3-adjacent marketing of their other properties. So either way, it'd be a good time to kick off KSP2 marketing, whether actually at E3, or just around that time. Not the only option, mind, but it's a high probability one given the release schedule. Only starting marketing push at Gamescom feels a little late, and there isn't really anything else going on that would have sufficient media attention. You'd be wasting free publicity, basically, if you don't start marketing at E3. But yeah, Gamescom and maybe PAX Prime is where I expect it turned to 11 and where we'll see booths, possibly playable demos, certainly some sort of fresh gameplay videos, etc.

Then counterweight is your reaction mass. That still has to be delivered to the centrifuge. If it makes sense to double the payload to centrifuge for this, then that's fine.

This has merit, but there are several things to consider. First, the centripetal acceleration. At 1km/s, to keep it down to 1g of acceleration, the radius of the arm would have to be over 100km long. And if you plan to have this structure be reusable, it will have to be able to absorb the shock of releasing the cargo, which will propagate as a wave through the structure. So it's not trivial to build something like this. It's a major project. Second, conservation of momentum is still a thing. If this arm is orbiting a planet, the recoil from launch is going to alter its orbit. You need to compensate for this somehow. The most practical use case is if something like this both sends and receives cargo. You can also just use it to de-orbit random rocks to absorb that momentum, but basically, if something goes up, equal amounts of something must come down. Finally, corrections will still have to be made, and something with that size and artificial gravity at the tips won't be possible to mill with sunlight. A sail of that size will not be able to withstand the rotation. So you'll have to expend reaction mass for correction and to initially spin up the structure.

It's hard for me to say if that's the correct call, since I don't do marketing, but it looks like PD isn't doing any marketing yet. Intercept is doing normal PR outreach, with a lot of what's being shared being prepared primarily for internal consumption. Clearly some editing work is done and promotion is happening, but just enough to keep us here. Real marketing from PD hasn't started yet. This is typical for a game not scheduled to release until late in the year. Marketing tends to ramp up quickly right before preorders open up, which you obviously can't do until the date is set. The only real conclusion is that we shouldn't expect a release in the summer, but that was everyone's assumption as is. E3 is probably where we'll see marketing kick off, and maybe a booth at Gamescom with a demo. This is assuming PD is marketing this like any other title with similar budget and sales expectations.

I must have looked at an old article. Even better. This is 5M people already familiar with KSP, meaning PD won't have to spend nearly as much marketing KSP2 as it would for an obscure game, and it makes RoI even more reliable here. So the fact that KSP2 is on an expensive side for a brand new studio is entirely justified here. It also doesn't look like they're squandering resources based on the progress the game is making. So again, I don't see a problem.

That's low for Seattle area. The cost of hiring someone also averages about 60% over salary. Something in the ballpark of 120k-150k per year on average is more likely. Though, team composition also changed over time, so taking low figure on this is probably reasonable for estate, giving us something like 20M in costs. There are othet costs too. Rent is going to be a significant one. We are likely talking 30-35M production costs - though, part of it went into Star Theory. Marketing is probably not going to be outrageous, though. So 50-60M total budget seems plausible. That is on the high end for mid size studio, but tiny by AAA standards. And it will make a good profit if it can manage to match 2M sales of KSP. The break-even is in 1.3M-1.5M sales, which seems low risk. Keep in mind that cost of making games has been climbing. So comparing to HL2 is entirely invalid and even Division is a stretch. This is all very reasonable. And dev progress is about what I expect from this.

The limiting factor on NTR thrust is heat exchange and on ISP the operating temperature. Both are primarily material limitations. I don't think you can do drastically better than NERVA. But it's already not terrible for interplanetary, where TWR isn't as important, so getting a bit more TWR out of it would let you cut the transfer time more, but we're still talking multiple months in transfer. You might be able to do something creative like NTR with a chemical afterburner and magnetic nozzle. Theoretically you can get several times more thrust at comparable or even slightly higher ISP, but we're deep in theoretical science territory with that one. Primarily, I'm not aware of a single design for a magnetic nozzle that would have been tested, and making it work with combustion products is problematic.

There are no tests of Bell's Theorem that I'm aware of that disagree with Many Worlds interpretation, and MWI is mathematically equivalent to Copenhagen. There are cases where Copenhagen can look contradictory (see EPR, Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, etc,) but that's really just a side effect of us thinking with classical determinism mentality. Quantum Mechanics, in its standard interpretations, is deterministic, self-consistent, and agrees with experiments to precision matched only by tests of General Relativity. The ad-hoc fixes like hidden variable and superdeterminism only serve to make people feel better about their bad intuition on quantum phenomena. They don't fix any real faults in the theory.

Nothing that I can say in a polite company. As for lower limits on energy for FTL, you need to have at least enough negative energy to compensate for the mass of the ship. The net mass of the ship + warp bubble has to be precisely zero. This is often overlooked, because most simulations simply take mass of the ship is negligible. But in order for a warp ship to go FTL, you have to have the space-time go to flat beyond the bubble, and that requires net energy to be zero within some boundary around the bubble. Even if you only want to use warp for sublight, if this doesn't happen, you'll be generating gravity waves that will be sapping a lot of energy on acceleration, and at that point, you're better off with a photon drive. So you have to have at least enough negative energy to compensate for the ship. The rest depends on how thin you can make the bubble, and there might be limits to that from quantum gravity which, needless to say... nervous laughter. And when you create the bubble, how much energy do you need to make a given quantity of negative energy? Well, we don't know what the mechanism for that would even be, but you're at least leaving the equivalent amount of positive energy behind, so more energy than the mass of the ship, that's for sure. And on arrival, when the bubble collapses, that negative energy has to be compensated with the positive energy, which will require every bit of positive energy you have, including all of your mass energy of the ship. So that is a problem. Unless you have some sacrificial matter at destination, you literally have to annihilate the ship and the crew on arrival. Point is, if you're making an FTL mod, you can basically just make up numbers that work for gameplay purposes. We don't have anything like remotely practical mathematical model that gives numbers you can possibly use in a game.

Seems like a very haphazard attempt for a very questionable gain. [snip] I hope we get good flight recorder data at any rate, since that has been apparently recovered. That will tell us precisely where it was launched from.

The energy ("volume") and frequency ("pitch") remain the same. The only things that change as light passes through medium is the propagation speed and the wavelength. The light still has all of its momentum, but you can think of it as if the medium is delaying the propagation.

That's an interesting idea. The relevant magnetoplasmadynamics is way over my head, though. It is plausible that if the sail works as you describe, modulating the magnetic field in a clever way will allow you to get more impulse out of the same plasma at a cost of a higher energy drain, which is what you're looking for. But I don't have the background to even say if it's possible, let alone analyze the energy efficiency of such setup. If you are really interested, my recommendation would be to see who the main author on the original paper is, find their university e-mail address, and just e-mail them this question. If they don't reply, try one of their graduate research assistants instead. They might have already considered it and possibly even ran simulations of it.

Unless you re-orient your magnetic sail as you orbit around the planet, the average effect is just drag, slowly de-orbiting the craft. But the situation is exactly the same with a light sail. If you don't re-orient it, the average light pressure is just drag. If you do adjust the sail orientation, you can use Van Allen belts for propulsion, but there is still more impulse in light pressure than charged particles, so you're still better off with a solar sail than a magnetic one.

Yeah, there are certainly a lot of caveats here, but that's basically the main point. Calling that vehicle APC might be a stretch on my part. I certainly expect it to be well armed and have at least one turret with respectable caliber - I just expect that to be an autocannon rather than artillery.

Enemy having MBTs you can't destroy isn't just "contested". It means they're winning the air war, and you're barely holding on. If that's the case, your decision to also produce MBTs would have led you to losing the air war outright, because a country can only produce so much military hardware. And why were you even considering sending in ground forces in an area where you can't provide air support? That seems rather irresponsible. You need a much better control of the airspace to properly protect your own troops than you need to clear the area of enemy MBTs.

I would argue that if you're a military capable of producing APCs with active defense systems in mass quantities, and you come across a peer adversary's MBTs that you have not neutralized with drone and air strikes yet, you are doing modern warfare very, very wrong. Counterpoint of chaos: I don't think anyone so far has been confused about that. I certainly didn't read @JoeSchmuckatelli as implying they are the same, and I'm also confident he's well aware of the difference. But, I suppose, it does no harm to reiterate for casual reader. That's definitely a good point, and you'd have to build tactics around that. But a) that problem already existed with reactive armor, and b) a heat round going off next to you might not be as bad as anti-personnel fragmentation grenade, but it's still bad news. So infantry moving with armor has to respect the distance regardless. You have to move a little further from a tank with reactive armor, and a little further yet if it's an active defense. Besides, if your armored units are built more around light APCs than heavy artillery units, and you rely on air support for strikes, you can probably get away with your infantry spending more time inside, where they are protected by the active defense, rather than outside, where they are threatened by it. That, of course, is all highly situational.

But then do you really need a tank? Or do you want a light APC with active defense and just enough armor to withstand kinetic rounds from anything light enough to be carried? I'm sure that would lead to a bit of a resurgence of recoilless rifles with purely kinetic rounds, but these weapons are inherently unguided, and so the effectiveness won't be nearly as high as that of modern anti-tank missiles. I don't think Russians have active defenses on anything but few prototypes. Reactive armor, yes, but only on the sides. It was designed against RPG fire, not things like Lances and NLAWs. So a bunch of tanks missing turrets is exactly what I'd expect to see.

I saw the asterisk, but I just find it ironic that weapons like NLAWs are specifically designed to "miss".

There are a bunch of different kinds, but if we're talking about IR-guided ones, they generally don't care about any other objects in the vicinity and just look for the hottest thing in a cone in front of them. That's why they are generally so easy to distract with flares. So if the engine is running or has been running very recently, the missile shouldn't have any trouble locking on. Some guidance types, especially with older systems, would cause significant wobble in missile's trajectory, so there is a chance that the missile strikes the ground before reaching the target. But this is rather situational. Get a bit of an elevation above the target, and you're basically sorted.

No, because you get cut off from the Universe by a Schwarzschild bubble. The event horizon is only a symmetric sphere from perspective of someone far away from the black hole and relatively at rest. If you are moving really fast towards the event horizon, it partially retreats, and eventually envelopes you. From the perspective of someone falling in, you never cross the threshold. You always remain "above" the event horizon, but the horizon now surrounds you from every direction. Hence the bubble. This bubble only fully collapses on you as you reach the physical singularity at the center of the black hole, where no observations of any kind are possible. It might be possible to create a surface with some custom shaders to make it actually look correct, but the math is somewhat intimidating, and you'll have to come up with clever caching strategies to keep up with the computations. There are also tidal forces that will destroy any ship heading in before it reaches the singularity. For a stellar mas black hole, that will happen before you even get close to event horizon, but for supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of our galaxy, the tidal forces start out a lot gentler, so you'll be well "inside" the black hole by the time they destroy the ship.

Whenever they make a documentary, that's the tagline for the whole thing.

Define "album". Technically, this is the oldest known recording of singing. This was recorded on a medium not meant for playback, but only for visual recording of the sound using phonautograph, but has since been reconstructed into its audio form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune-05-09.ogg

I mean, these particular factors are no longer with us, but it's safe to say that there are more pressing concerns regardless. I don't think there is much point discussing how, when, and at whose expense Mrija or some new plane will be (re)built until the military situation is fully resolved.