K^2

KSP2 should have much better threading than KSP. Both because Unity itself has improved and because, hopefully, Intercept is taking this into account during development. At the same time, I still suspect that the overall performance will be main-thread-limited. That is, how fast each individual thread runs on particular CPU will matter more than thread count - within reason. If you have 4-thread CPU, maybe don't expect KSP2 to run well on it. That said, as far as what it means for the Gen8 console support, I don't expect anything good. If this was a custom engine, I'd be way more optimistic. Even if we simply had reason to believe that KSP2 will run on Havok. But it sounds like Intercept is sticking with the same basic tech that Squad used for KSP, with improvements to core engine and some physics optimizations, of course, so it sounds like we're still looking at all the components being processed on the main thread and PhysX running single-threaded as well. Not being involved in development I can't say any of this with certainty, but my bet is on KSP2 being released primarily for PC and Gen9 consoles. So PS5 and XBSX/S. If the game is even getting released on Gen8, I don't expect it to support base models of these consoles at all, and I expect the PS4 Pro/XB1X versions to be in some ways reduced in scope. I don't know if that would come as part limits, colony count limits, or something. It's just too easy otherwise to completely overwhelm the system with all that's going to be going on in the game, and unlike KSP, being an indy title that people expect to be rough, KSP2 needs to look professional. Personally, I'm not fundamentally against the game getting back-ported to Gen8, but I do think it needs to be a back-port and possibly not even handled by Intercept internally. There are plenty of studios out there that can do a good job of taking a Gen9 Unity game and striping it down to run on Gen8 hardware, and if Take Two/Private Division really want a Gen8 release, that's a more efficient investment. Edit: Pretty sure it's limited to graphics settings. Graphics aren't a bottleneck. I'm sure you'd have to dial it down a bit to run on Gen8, but that's the easy part. KSP2, just like KSP, is going to be CPU-bound. And Unity can't scale things down for CPU performance. No engine can do that, really. This is something that has to be hand-tunned by somebody, and the sacrifices made will be far more drastic than shorter render distance. Odds are, you'll have to drop features.

I mean, yeah. A scoop also works as a shield. You can divert things around the ship or into a specific part of the ship designed for it. Ram scoops are a bit of a problem, though, as they do convert kinetic energy into heat by design. But a scoop can also be used as a pass-through of a linacc or fed directly into a black hole for power. In the later case, you'll still be getting the drag, but heat isn't a problem you have to deal with. So there are options there. (I actually think I have an even better idea of what to do with it, but I need to run the numbers. Even in the best case scenario, diverting a charged beam produces synchrotron radiation, and I need an estimate on how much that contributes to drag.)

You know, usually, things are never as simple as just using a magnet, but in this case, the solution is literally just using a magnet. Lorentz force on a charge is proportional to velocity, so a magnetic deflection shield that works at 1c will work at 10c and 100c and 1000c. The magnetic field doesn't even have to be that strong, because that just determines the turning radius, and that can be hundreds of meters or even entire kilometers for an interstellar craft. And if you do happen across some neutral atoms, at high enough speeds, magnetic field will rip electrons clean off and your ship will just experience a tiny amount more drag than normal. All of this works in relativistic case as well. The math is a bit more complex, but principle's the same. The higher your Lorentz boost, the more Lorentz force is applied, and the incoming particles are deflected safely around the ship. Problem of interstellar travel at light speed is trivially reduced to having enough propulsion and propellant to keep accelerating. That problem itself is the exact opposite of trivial, but if you have means of getting to near-light speeds, keeping the craft protected is actually the easy part. At hyper-relativistic speeds even small asteroids you might be risking running into will be turned into a cloud of plasma safely deflected around your craft.

That's the bit I missed! Thanks. The rest worked as advertised.

Unfortunate, but makes sense. FYI, it looks like the Steam API returns file ID 0 as a way of telling the program that something went wrong. Might be useful to check for that and give some sort of notification to user. Currently, the game assumes that everything went fine and links you to the non-existing page. As for scenario editor itself, I can definitely feel the "work in progress" of it all, but even in the current state it shows great potential. Again, I don't know if something's broken or I failed to discover the right UI for it, but I ended up having to place checkpoints by editing the SCM file in Notepad. Everything else worked for me, though, including the trigger linking, which I didn't do a deep dive into, but it looks very powerful. Can't wait to see what people will be making with this in the released version.

Yeah, I was about to say. I really like these! Makes it a lot easier to connect parts together than trying to find the right adapter in the list of N to N-1 items. Also! I managed to create a simple checkpoint race. It's not great, but it's functional. Unfortunately, Workshop upload for custom scenarios is either broken or I derped in figuring out how to use it. So here's a file link instead for anyone who wants to try it. (File needs to go into scenarios/missions folder wherever you have BALSA installed, which is probably under your Steam/steamapps/common/BALSA...) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QUl99GbB5qEB9sTKMuTVXKqAsHwUPNBO/view?usp=sharing

It was uploaded in 2019. He explicitly says that it's being recorded in 2015 in that video. Insolation in much of Western and Central US is 4kWh/day/m2. Direct peak solar power is 1kW, so you need 6kW peak per 1kW average. Modern panels have warranty of about 10 years (they can serve 20+, but lets take risks out of it) and degrade at about 1%/year in capacity. So 1kWh average gives you 10 * 0.95 * 365.24 * 1kWh = 3,470kWh over a decade. Lets take your upper end of $3.15 per kW peak. That gives you $18.90 per average kW. Dividing this cost by the 3,470kWh we get from it comes out to 0.5 cents per kWh. If you live in northern parts of New England, that will go up to about 0.75 cents per kWh. There is NOWHERE in US that has electricity costs under 1 cent per kWh. Here in California, I'm paying 25-30 cents per kWh. In fact, I'm pricing out an installation for my home right now. Getting the contractors to come in and install the panels AND a pair of Tesla power wall batteries to average out the day-cycle use and provide backup power just in case, plus the wiring work to install necessary breakers and overall get everything up to code, and doing financing through the bank for the next 10 years, I pay absolutely nothing up front, and what I pay to the bank every month will be less than what I'm paying to the electric company right now. That's how cheap the solar has gotten. Now, I realize not everyone can do full replacement. Battery is the part that costs a lot of money and takes up a lot of extra room, making it completely impractical if you don't have the space for it. In California, electricity prices are high enough that if you own a house, this makes sense. Somewhere out in Mid-West? Not so much. But you can still get solar panels and supplement your day power use and still be saving money. Honestly, if you own a house in US, you should have solar.

This is definitely outdated. Prices have actually dropped significantly, and longevity of panels improved. Insolation, of course, is still a huge factor, but there is no part of US where solar isn't drastically cheaper than grid prices. That is, until you start looking at energy storage. If your power company gives you a good rate on pushing power to the grid, you should get solar. Sell electricity to the power company during the day, buy at night. If you live in a place with very expensive electricity (E.g., parts of California,) definitely get solar - cost of lithium battery installation AND the solar panels with labor is going to be lower than what you are paying for electricity. But in most of US, if you install panels and batteries, you'll be paying more than your electric bill. Now, that might still make sense. You aren't at risk of power outages, you are protected against electricity price hikes if new regulations come in, you might still be getting good use out of the system after you're done paying it off, and you get to feel good about helping the environment. But not everyone's going to be able to afford to think this way. In fact, most people won't. And this gets even worse for renters. I can easily throw a couple of Tessla batteries in my garage, put up solar panels on the roof, and pay the same money I pay to electric company to the bank instead. A few days of construction noise, and I've done my part for the planet. But if you want to provide solar for an apartment complex, well, that's an adventure. Roof to living area ratio is nowhere near that generous, and the power banks not only take up a lot of space but start to present real hazard that you probably aren't allowed to keep on the same property as the apartment complex. But the trend's in the right direction. In 2015, when that video was made, there were very few places where solar made financial sense for anybody. It was a self-imposed green tax. Now we're at a place where it's just a cheaper way to power your home for a lot of people. And a lot of progress has been made on making it work on industrial scale. The main problem being, again, storage, with a number of ambitious projects running all over the place using batteries, flywheels, hydroelectric storage, and even silly things, like compressed air underground. Some of it is promising and even operates as various pilot projects as part of the power grid. So this stuff's happening. Just isn't clear if it's fast enough.

Businesses are in business of making money. They'll pivot to anything that makes money. Fossil fuel companies are some of the biggest investors in renewables and other energy types. Some of it is PR, sure. But a lot of it isdiversifying portfolio., future-proofing, and making use of complementary technologies. If a natural gas power plant stopped buying your natural gas because right now it doesn't make financial sense to burn natural gas, sure, you can try to sink an abysmal amount of money in destroying whatever innovation is happening and try to reverse that trend. Or you can just position yourself to be the one who will be selling that power plant hydrogen instead. You already have the pipelines and the relationships with power companies, why not keep making money off of that? Sure, businesses often do stupid or near-sighted things, but these businesses don't stay in business for long. Because, again, the purpose of business is continuing to make money. And if the tech changes, adapting to it is the way to go. Saying that the reason we don't run the world on renewables is some oil company conspiracy is tin foil hat level of nonsense. They are part of the reason why environmental regs aren't as up-to-date as they should be, and that puts us a little behind, but it's not the main chunk of the problem. The main chunk is that this kind of conversion costs a lot of money. And no business is going to invest into it without a promise of return. As the technologies mature and risks go down, investments go up. And this simply takes time. We are hitting the acceleration part of the S-curve, but we're still decades out from it taking full effect. What should be happening to speed it along is a lot more investment and pressure from governments, which might include taxing fossil fuel companies to finance said investments. And sure, businesses lobby against any such regulation, but that only works because the public is indifferent. The truth is, an average person doesn't give a rat's behind that they are being slowly boiled alive. And that ain't going to change. The only reason this isn't necessarily a doomsday scenario is because it is economically self-limiting. As more fossil fuels are extracted, the costs will go up. We didn't invent off-shore drilling and fracking out of boredom. Impending environmental catastrophes will only make it more expensive. Renewable infrastructure will be cheaper in the long run and can even survive collapse of global trade, unlike the fossil fuel infrastructure. So eventually we'll be switching to renewables. It's just a question of whether it happens before environmental change leads to global economic collapse and subsequent loss of countless lives or as a consequence of it.

There is an open beta/playtest on Steam right now. I don't know if there are limits on entries, but I clicked "Request Access" and was granted it immediately. BALSA on Steam Haven't heard of BALSA? It's a model airplane building game from HarvesteR, original creator of KSP. (Old thread with some more info.) And here's a video from Shadow Zone talking about the game based on previous play-test. I'm off to try it out for myself! Edit: Ok, there's working multiplayer and guns you can install on planes. I'm back from participating in several dogfights, and this game is already looking very fun.

It is an absolutely fascinating story. The awards alone paint a picture. She was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, which was in Physics, and she followed it up by getting a second one in Chemistry, becoming the first person to get two, and remains one of two people to have Nobel Prizes in two different fields. Her husband, Pier, also has a Nobel Prize, which he got jointly with Marie, and one of their daughters, Irene, won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And that's just Nobel Prizes.

They seem to be severely limited in scope of what they can do with available resources. They will likely have to focus on a very specific kind of multiplayer experience, and pure co-op hosted by one of the players is the most achievable. It's also entirely possible that the state multiplayer ships in is not representative of what they want to shoot for eventually, and we'll get some good options for dedicated servers and versus modes some time after release. At any rate, I wouldn't expect too much from multiplayer early on. I think some of the grander visions will have to take a while, whether because Intercept will need time to work on them, or because it will have to be turned into reality by modders.

I think one of the job reqs implied that the game is either space related or specifically Kerbal IP. In either case, yeah, a spin-off sounds most plausible.

The only clues we have for design, from interviews, jobs postings, etc, suggest heavy lean into cooperation and building together. I think the KSC will be shared. It's very likely that you'll be able to discover/purchase additional launch sites or build them like you would colonies. In either case, you ought to be able to spread out to your own launch facilities, but I would wager on all players sharing the starting one. But if the game is modable, I don't see why someone couldn't come up with a more of a competitive setup mod, where you have players building out their own launch sites from scratch, competing for contracts, etc.

The SEII/III positions seem to be for main KSP2 team. That lines up with observation that they are kind of light on engineering right now. And it makes sense that they are taking their time with engineering/design leads for unannounced project, since these are critical positions for pre-production, and at this point, there isn't a timeline for release yet, so you might as well wait until you find the right people. Good leads that can work independently on a new project are hard to find. I don't think this should be on Intercept, but if TakeTwo contracts a dev team to make Kerbal Kart Racing, I'm going to play it, not going to lie. Especially, if they have some customization mechanics borrowed from KSP.

I don't think anyone seriously expected antiparticles to have negative gravitational mass. We don't have a practical Quantum Gravity, but we've had parts of one ever since General Relativity was shown to be a mean field gauge theory in the late 50s. So we know things like what the Lagrangian for Quantum Gravity has to be, and we can do quantum physics in curved space-times, like particle physics inside of neutron stars (which is wild, by the way). Negative gravitational mass for antiparticles just isn't lining up with all of that. Not that it wasn't worth checking, because finding otherwise would be a good indicator that something else is going on in QG world, but the expectation has been for positive gravitational mass. We do know that something that behaves like it has negative gravitational mass absolutely permeates this universe, so it's definitely something worth looking for. A particle with negative gravitational mass would be a great candidate for the dark energy, but there can be entirely different explanations as well. And yeah, thinking that negative gravitational mass somehow creates paradoxes is as silly as thinking that negative charges create paradoxes. Charge radius of electron is the same as charge radius of positron. It's not something that has ever been a problem. Existence of negative gravitational mass would require that the equivalence principle is slightly corrected in that the inertial mass is equivalent to the absolute value of gravitational, but, I mean, it's already sort of understood that the way inertial mass is derived from field equations is an absolute value sort of quantity. So it's not really a problem. The sticking point is that nothing in existing theory predicts anything having such properties, and yet the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. So we'll need to sort it out. Whether the solution will be found to involve negative gravitational mass or just something that acts a lot like it at such global scale - we'll just have to see.

Well, ok, I mean, it sort of does? But not in a way that makes it useful. Antiparticles behave in every way as negative mass particles traveling backwards in time, which still gives them positive inertial mass and positive energy density. So as far as things like exotic energy for warp drives, stable wormholes, and closed time loops go, it's absolutely no help. It's almost more of a mathematical quirk. One of the problems in physics, as far as making it easy to understand to people who didn't spend years or even decades studying it, is that a lot of terms have multiple meanings depending on the exact context. And while you can be precise and reference rest mass, inertial mass, gravitational mass, etc., very often we just say "mass", and people in the field know which one you mean. Usually. It gets even worse when notations change over time. Everyone knows E=mc2, and back when Einstein wrote it, that was a valid expression because m meant relativistic mass. Except in modern day physics, m usually means rest mass - Einstein would have denoted it as m0. But because notation changed, E=mc2 is no longer correct, not because of anything new in physics, we just mean a different thing by symbol m. So the correct expression would either be E=γmc2, where γ is the Lorentz boost due to not being in the rest frame where m is relevant, or you would explicitly include momentum: E2=m2c4 + p2c2. And you can see that if you flip signs of both E and m in these two equations, absolutely nothing changes. There is a more convoluted and precise explanation for why negative mass actually makes sense for antiparticles, but it involves Green's functions and functions of complex variable. Point is, mathematically, it makes sense to think of antiparticles as having a negative mass, but practically it doesn't make a difference. And the kind of mass we'd measure in an experiment, which is usually inertial mass, would still be a positive value.

In one of the videos, you can see what looks like a chart of Kerbol system with this little addition. It's never been clarified if this meant to imply a new planet on Kerbol, something beyond Kerbol system entirely, or just a silly Easter egg.

It's a bit more complex than that. Cable has to vary in thickness for anything practical and the counterweight is quite a bit more massive than the cable. You'll also want to absorb as much angular momentum as possible into the counterweight, so cable release will be done at an angle. The net effect is that initial orbit will differ from GEO quite significantly, and I couldn't tell you off the top of my head if it's higher or lower. I'd need to do a math for a specific example.

Commercial aviation "ditched" radio for INS because flying over oceans made using radio towers for navigation a little difficult. It took decades of improvements before INS was good enough to get you to a specific location, rather than just a vague area, because it's actually a very hard problem. Typical off-the-shelf accelerometers aren't remotely good enough for such work. And even with commercial INS systems, your terminal approach is still by-radio. The INS is still only meant to get you to a radio system that's going to guide you to the landing strip. Not to mention that GPS has become the primary system now, with INS being effectively a backup in case GPS goes down. If you shop for high precision accelerometers for UAVs etc, you'll see VRW on the order of 0.05mg/√Hz. This adds up to about 3cm/s per root hour. After a 9 hour flight, your position error is going to be about 1.6km. Which is actually quite amazing, but you don't want to be a mile off course if you are trying to find an airport in low visibility. You will have to rely on radio navigation. And this is with top shelf component that you have to sample and integrate at nearly 1kHz to get that level of precision, and we haven't even talked about orientation of the INS. Because if your axes are misaligned even the tiniest bit, the component of the gravity onto your XY plane will put you way, way off course. Not to mention the fact that gravity itself isn't uniform around the world, so you are going to get a drift in the Z direction as well. You can improve on that by combining input from several accelerometers and optical gyros and running output through an optimal filter. That's effectively what a modern INS does. But if you are anywhere over land, it's far easier and far cheaper to use existing radio stations for precise positioning. Or better yet, just buy a cheap GPS chip and read from it using an Arduino or something. Unless you are explicitly building something for safety and redundancy as a backup, GPS is by far your best option. Edit: Only marginally related, but I it's just too awesome not to mention: Pulsar-based Navigation. It still only puts you within a few km, but it will work anywhere on Earth, and on a flight to the Moon, and on a voyage to any other part of the Solar System, and on an interstellar trip to basically any star you can see in the sky with an unaided eye... And it will still be good to within a few km after you've traveled lightyears, because you're just counting the pulses and comparing it to frequencies observed from reference location.

Yeah, I have horror stories about how under-powered the CPU is on XB1 and PS4. One of my first jobs in Games was optimizing a game recently ported from PC to run at a reasonable framerate on XB1 and sacrifices had to be made. That was soon after the XB1 and PS4 released. The 1X/Pro versions have better CPUs, of course, but they are still garbage by modern standards. In terms of rendering, the terrain tech we've seen demonstrated might strain the GPUs on XB1/PS4, but it should be runnable. So the only real concern is the CPU performance. Yes, KSP2 is reportedly much better optimized, but it's also doing so much more. Additional computations for continuous collision detection, larger structures - even if things like space stations won't be simulated, that's still a lot of additional collision geometry to process, all of the resource and route logic, better physics warp - because you have to for interstellar, and so on. And Intercept isn't a very big team. It's not like Rockstar throwing bodies to get GTA V to run on PS3/360. Intercpet just has enough people to make the game. So I have serious concerns about the game being able to run smoothly on Gen8 consoles. Given that KSP2 is only expected to come out later in '22, and by that point we'll be coming up on 2 years into Gen9, Intercept and PD might chose not to bother with getting the game to run on the older consoles. tl;dr I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see KSP2 on PS4/XB1 or if it's a cropped down port, possibly, managed by a 3rd party developer on behalf of Intercept and Private Division.

In case you or anybody else reading this is serious about looking into careers in games, here's what you need to know. If you go to almost any studio's site, you can find list of openings they are advertising. Like @KSPStar posted above, Jobs at Intercept Games. Currently, the openings at Intercept all require engineering, art, or design skills. But in general, there's a pretty wide range of qualifications that game studios look for. Click on a job title, and it should send you to a page with a description. The two sections you are most interested in are Responsibilities and Requirements. Together, they give you a pretty good idea of what you need to know in order to qualify for the job. If you want to work in game development in the future and plan to train for it, these are good targets to set for yourself. Note that education and prior experience requirements can sometimes be waved if you have a strong background otherwise. I've worked with people who got hired into software engineering position in games straight out of high school. But in any case, you have to have skills that the studio is looking for. For some more examples, Private Division has a jobs page as well, and besides the jobs at Intercept, they are also advertising a few positions in main offices and at Roll 7 studios. These include management, production, and QA jobs. Take a look around, see what studios are hiring for what. It's exceptionally unlikely that you'll be able to be picky about which studio you work for when you start out, but you can definitely use this to set future goals. Game development is a big hard to get into from the ground, but once you are in and build up a bit of experience, especially if you are good at what you do, it becomes a lot easier to look for jobs at studios you specifically want to work at. And if you're really good, you can often just ping the studio HR and see if they'll hire you even if they don't have an advertised opening for your skill set. Studios are always looking for good talent.

If you tried to build it out of normal protons and neutrons, it'd turn into a chunk of neutron matter, absorbing most of the electrons. A few electrons that remain would most likely act as if they are inside a (super?)conductor. That is to say, they'd still be waves, and actually way less localized than they are in an ordinary atom.

Because it's a wave, like all particles. And orbitals are just a kind of standing wave you get in central potential. It's like if you grab a string, you can make a wave that's just a single arch going back and forward, or two arches with a node in the middle, or three arches with two nodes, etc. These are the harmonics or standing waves. Orbitals are the equivalent for electron waves near an atomic nucleus.

It's hard to get a moddable game past console reviews. Sony in particular tends to be very restrictive about content they will allow on their platforms. This means you couldn't get new models for components or any plugins into a console version without rooting the console. What could happen, if there is in-game scripting, is something similar to how Workshop works in Steam, letting you download craft, game mode scripts, and possibly game saves. That would still be very limited compared to PC modding, but it could help fill in the gap a little bit.