K^2

Yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say that at least sandbox will be alright. Even if it ends up having as much Kraken as early KSP, so long as there are interesting planets to explore, it's a game. So the baseline isn't bad, and the fact that there's only up to go from there is encouraging. And IMO, landing just one of the following: solid multiplayer, improved physics for large ships and colonies, or good story progression - would push it into a good game overall territory.

I mean, in terms of visual fidelity, it seemed like this is a pretty safe project. I'm still worried about gameplay systems and physics, and we've seen almost none of that. And this isn't an, "I expect this will be a disaster," type of worry. I see a lot of doomsayers here, and there hasn't really been any serious red flags to warrant that. But there's definitely a lot of room between a passable game with mediocre, uninspired gameplay, and something brilliant that will become an instant classic. We haven't seen anything that would indicate progress towards the later, and while Intercept by no means has to have something to show us in that regard, or even be in any way obliged to show us what they do have, the confidence in the game aspects of KSP2 is on good faith only at this point.

Modern game development is oriented to vertical slices. That means driving subsets of features to polish until you have a full game, rather than gradually improving everything. Intercept has been showing us things selectively that are near their final state, which is why you are getting impression that the game is polished.

In the way particles are usually interpreted in Standard Model, a particle has to be massless to be its own antiparticle. There's also the fact that neutrinos come with predominant handedness, and that strongly suggests that neutrinos and antineutrinos are distinct. (Otherwise, we'd expect equal distributions by CPT.) So there is strong indication that they probably aren't their own antiparticles. If we find an experiment that strongly suggests they are, we'd have some explaining to do. To put it in classical terms, it'd be a bit like discovering that Saturn came from outside the Solar System. We'd have to do a lot of new research to figure out how the heck did that get past us, and come up with entirely new models for early Solar System formation, but it wouldn't change our understanding of gravity and orbital mechanics.

Well, yeah. But that's absolutely obvious to anyone who works in particle physics. I mean, it took me a moment to even figure out what you are finding surprising about this. Think about it this way. Lets suppose that neutrino oscillation frequency actually depended on neutrino energy. That would imply that in neutrino's rest frame its oscillation frequency changes depending on how fast the neutrino's rest frame is moving relative to some reference frame. Id est, you'd be measuring the absolute speed of neutrino. The fact that physical quantities cannot depend on energy of a particle other than by Lorentz factor is fundamental result of Special Relativity and gets knocked into your head when you study particle physics within the first few lectures. This is your basic assumption that you get used to applying without even thinking, because it goes for absolutely everything. Frequencies, decay times, etc. In fact, the reason flavor oscillations were a big deal is precisely because of that. The part people rarely add, because it's obvious to everyone in the trade, is that if the oscillations are being measured at all, some amount of time passes in neutrino proper frame. You can't have oscillations if you don't have proper time. And you can't have proper time if you are moving at light speed. So yes, observing oscillations means neutrinos have mass, and if you could measure that frequency precisely at different energies, you'll know the exact mass of neutrinos. Even if we didn't have all the rest of Standard Model, simply knowing the Lorentz factor gives you energy-to-mass ratio, so you'll know precise mass of neutrinos. This is just goes-without-saying kind of thing in particle physics.

Elite is self-published, so it deserves benefit of the doubt, but I don't know enough about Frontier to really have an opinion on whether they need it or not, and whether this is good-faith early access or a money grab. I don't mean to make it sound like things are always black-and-white. Sometimes, you even see games on Kickstarter that have serious publishers behind them, but a successful Kickstarter could be a condition for publishers backing the project in the first place in some rare cases. It can be a way for publishers to gauge public interest to see if a game is worth financing when it's somewhat of a niche title. But early sales have also been exploited to make money on titles that turn out to be no good. Any copy you sell before the reviews are in is a sale you didn't lose due to game's quality. This is why I'm always very skeptical of any pre-orders, especially ones driven by hype and/or pre-order bonuses. Even as a developer, I really wish that practice would go away. I know marketing is necessary for game's success, sadly, and some amount of development effort will always be diverted to it. But pre-order bonuses, especially pre-order betas, take away a lot of resources that would be better spent on making sure we ship a polished product. Even little things, like pre-order only skins for characters can be a nuisance when the deadlines are tight. I can't tell you how many times I've watched critical engineering resources being spent at the last moment trying to fix a bug related to unlocking specific pre-order content on specific platforms instead of fixing bugs related to gameplay, because we are contractually obliged to ship these pre-order bonuses, and so it ends up higher priority than things that actually break the game. And yes, sometimes this is result of poor planning, but because these things often involve 3rd party APIs, these problems can arise at no fault of developer, because there really was no way to test if it's working until weeks or even days before release. So every case is different, and you might have to do a bit of research. Usually, you can tell if a particular early sale is aimed at helping make the game or just improve investment safety margins for some mega corp. Sometimes, you can't tell, and it's a judgement call. And even in cases where it's clear, and people are just buying into the hype and fear of missing out, I don't think it's fair to hold it against anyone. Been there myself. Sometimes, you really, really have to have that pre-order exclusive. I just wish it happens less, so that publishers don't push it on developers nearly as much.

Well, the reason I don't like the idea of placing arbitrary boundary on distance is because it might make it difficult for a mod to place something waaay out in the distance. I think a reasonable solution would be to do origin relocation in two jumps. First places coordinate origin at the nearest star. Second places the simulation/rendering origin at the craft. This basically means that distances can get a tiny bit wonky really, really far between stars, but you won't have a point of reference to notice. And you won't get krakeened anyways, since all your physics is relative to craft's center of mass. And once you get closer to another star, you'll switch to that one as your reference and everything's fine again. That would allow modders to place things way, way out there. And yeah, maybe if the craft is far enough from any star and is on trajectory that's taking it away from all of them, then maybe it should be considered lost. I just wouldn't base it exclusively on distance from arbitrary zero point.

That's not the kind of problems you start getting. Coordinates are almost always stored in floating point format. We can separately discuss finer points of single vs double precision arithmetic as well as the use of origin relocation in games to avoid the worst of the problems, but the gist of it is that the further you get from (0, 0, 0), the worse the math precision gets. If handled improperly, you start getting camera and various object jitters and physics grows unstable. Eventually, Kraken would get you. Of course, even KSP is large enough that this had to be addressed early on, most likely via relocation. With relocation in place, it's possible to entirely avoid physics problem. Camera behavior is still subject to implementation. But eventually, you'll get to the point where you simply can't move origin anymore at given velocity, and the craft will freeze in place, still showing the velocity, but unable to actually make progress. You'll have to get mighty far before that happens, though, and by then, how would you even know? You'd be too far out to notice any change in your position relative to anything else. So I think it's in the category of problems that aren't.

Sort of? I mean, we obviously can't know for sure until we figure out the problem. It can always be a case of, "Scientists discovered one more particle. The Standard Model now matches all experimental evidence perfectly." But if I was placing bets, I would definitely put money on things being way more complicated again. That said, the level of fines at which you have to split hairs has definitely gone up a notch. A new theory wouldn't just have to explain the discrepancies. It would have to explain why we're getting such good results in many other experiments. Why is the anomalous magnetic moment of electron so darn close? It's not as simple as the case with Newtonian forces being just, "We never measured them precisely enough." We do have measurements that are precise enough in conditions where the match between experiment and theory is extraordinary. And then we have exceptions, which are few, but oh so annoying. Another thing to highlight is that GR doesn't just invalidate all of classical mechanics. Conservation of energy and momentum are still there. You have to be careful with them in warped space-time, but the concepts are most definitely there. The difference is that we used to think that Newton's Laws are fundamental and conservation laws are a consequence. And now we know the conservation laws to be far more fundamental, being consequences of symmetries of space-time and fields within it. And because of the conservation laws and action, Newton's Laws fall out naturally as a good estimate to average dynamics. It's entirely possible that next major upset in physics will bring with it another paradigm shift, and maybe we'll find that symmetries are just approximate as consequence of something else, or whatever. But the fact that local symmetries are connected to local conservation laws is here to stay, and that means that we can't have something that's just completely new physics, it really has to be something that builds on top of what we have now. Not that this has ever been any different in practice. Just that now we have way more reason to expect this to persist. Finally, there are some principles in physics that never change just because they aren't really physics. Allegedly, Einstein claimed that the one part of physics he'd be most surprised about ever changing would be thermodynamics. And I can't disagree. The basic principles were invented when people thought heat was a fluid. And entropy was just a funny consequence of the equations - a quantity that happened to be convenient to define to do math with. In that sense. But the underlying math is solid. We have substituted new concepts for what all the individual parts mean as our understanding grew, first with classical statistical mechanics, and then with quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics. But the math's just math. That isn't going anywhere. And so thermodynamics still works. We just know that heat is measure of internal energy of a system and entropy is a measure of disorder in that system in a way. All new physics, new understanding, but same thermodynamics. I expect same of Quantum Mechanics. People always say that it's the one that looks the wonkiest, but that's just at the level of interpretation. Most of quantum theory is actually just math. Interpretations might change, we might get new underlying physics, completely new understanding of what a wave function is. But the math is still going to be the same. So we'll still have Quantum Field Theory of whatever's going to be the next big thing. And this is the sort of thing in which I think we're in different place than early 20th century physicists. Everyone back then knew that change was coming. Experiment after experiment crashed against accepted notions. But what nobody had any idea of is how much of physics was about to change and what was to remain the same. We now have a bit of hindsight to work with, and I'm feeling much more comfortable about certain areas of fundamental physics enduring even if we have to throw Standard Model and much of General Relativity into the garbage bin. Fair warning, this is me just being in maximum pedantic mode, but I wouldn't phrase it like that. Special Relativity is a special case of General Relativity, so it certainly has a few things to do with precession of Mercury. But yes, SR is not sufficient to explain precession. General Relativity and Schwarzschild solution of Einstein Field Equations for vacuum are necessary to adequately describe motion of Mercury. And yeah, that came about a bit later. Specifically, Schwarzschild's work was only published in 1916.

Open betas, generally, don't really give you any data you won't get with just launching the game, and the hit on your servers, if relevant, is going to be about as bad. So it really doesn't help. Sure, it might sound like it's better to have game-breaking bugs in beta, but the impact is the same - you're airing out your dirty laundry. Except, with open beta, you're doing it in front of people who haven't bought the game yet. So as long as you are planning to fix the bugs anyways, it makes more sense to just release the game. If it's ready to go - release it early. Or more realistically, do take the time you would have been running beta to actually fix the bugs you already know about and get the best release you possibly can. The only time open betas are even done anymore are as a hook for pre-orders, and anyone who cares about games shouldn't be pre-ordering. Yes, it can be tempting, but if all you care about is beta, just wait for the game. It's better for everyone. (Note, we're talking about major releases here. If you see an Early Access from an indy dev or a Kickstarter you actually believe in, by all means, help the devs make that game by giving them your money early. Large publishers don't need to be fed like that. It's their job to invest into future earnings.) Closed betas are a different matter. It's still not always beneficial to run one, but it often enough is. What usually differs from game to game is how exclusive the testing group is. I've seen cases where it's just devs' friends and families that get invited, and you get enough coverage this way; and I've seen cases with open sign-ups in published ads, because devs wanted to throw a lot of bodies at the servers for a couple of days. Either way, the critical part is developer deciding how many people they actually need. If you need to stress-test your servers, it's a good way to do so in a controlled manner. You are also getting people who, presumably, jumped through some hoops or have some other attachment to the game, and are therefore more likely to actually submit crash reports, which can be great for finding these hard-to-reproduce bugs. Finally, with limited exposure, even if your beta turns out to be a buggy mess, your impact on sales is likely to be minimal. Even if somebody starts leaking info and it gets picked up by gaming news, it's still far more likely that people will brush it off as par for a closed beta. In summary, open beta - definitely no. Closed beta - probably yes, but kind of depends on the needs of the dev team as things get closer to release.

Stock KSP has aerodynamic shells, so it's not like we've never had stock procedural parts. But yeah, there are definitely more opportunities there. Wings and tanks are high on the list for me. And with tanks, I don't even want much. Just give us ability to resize them vertically in the increments of the smallest tank up to the largest, for example. Having, like, 8 different parts for these is not helpful for UI clutter. And even then, if I want to create a tank that's 3/4 of maximum size, I have to stack two tanks on top of each other. That's a needless addition to part count and simulated joints, which starts to matter when these are part of your asparagus cluster. Procedural wings would definitely be a more advanced feature, but it's another case of having to either deal with very limited selection or building out of a lot of pieces. Keeping part count low is in everyone's interest, so I think it'd be worth the time spent designing a good UI interface for building the wings.

@sevenperforce I'm pretty sure you're looking at bounds on neutrino oscillation frequency based on bounds on neutrino mass. If we knew the exact oscillation frequencies, we'd know masses of all the neutrinos, which would be big news. As for the topic at hand, Higgs boson was basically the final nail into the coffin of any hopes that standard model is "nice and simple." Having just the U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) symmetries with a boson field for each would be a sort of thing that I can look at and think this might be all there is, with just some oddities like the neutrino handedness and broken electroweak symmetry to be explained. With Higgs being confirmed to be the cause of the electroweak symmetry breaking, it's clear that there is no simple pattern to this representation, and if tomorrow they announce that they've found another field that interacts with SU(2)xSU(3) part, or a new SU(4) symmetry, or even one that doesn't fit the unitary group pattern, I'm not going to be surprised. The fact that we're finding out about it indirectly via anomalous magnetic moment measurements is just par for the course. Wake me up when there's a good candidate correction to standard model that fits new observations or if anybody comes up with something better.

I love space. Absolutely nothing happened, but there is enough tension and buildup for a novel in this thread alone.

My argument is that countries that aren't signatories to OST don't recognize space as being beyond their territorial limits, nor the fact that they cannot lay territorial claims on anything in space. Such nations can easily claim the debris as the extension of their territory. Declare it a consulate or a vessel in international waters if it helps. It's paper thin, sure, but if there is no reason for any other nation to specifically challenge it, then maybe it's good enough.

I'm going to liberally interpret this as you having some reliable information about impending collapse of all civilization in the next seven years and commence panicking over it.

Very unlikely. Our productivity, speaking of game dev in general, wasn't hit all that bad. Burnout's worse, but I don't think that was factored into schedules. So all we're getting is that there won't be additional delays due to teams burning out a lot faster than they used to. Initial hit of having to figure out how to work from home has impacted some studios pretty badly, but even that's not across the board. Most of us kept working pretty much the same way we used to before. Just a lot of meetings that, "we couldn't possibly have over Zoom," we are now having over Zoom. A lot of the delays that got blamed on COVID were going to happen anyways, and even in cases where it was a contributing factor, it rarely was the sole contributing factor.

Iron and Nickel are pretty close in abundance in Sol system as elements, but I have no idea about asteroids. They might not have the same relative distribution throughout the system, which can easily lead to one being flung at Earth more commonly than another. I have no idea if one is actually more common than another, however - just speculating on possibilities.

I would really like to see an update on procedural vegetation, forests of Kerbin, and maybe a sneak peak at some alien flora. Also, it's pretty clear Intercept is shy about showing their physics progress, but it'd be nice to see at least some demonstration that it's happening. Surely, they can have a rocket or plane with smaller part count in action by now.

As much as NorCal has changed with tech, I live a stone's throw away from surfer country, and I can hear that last line.

I really appreciate that you clearly did research on this. This almost reads like a legal opinion. So this one might be sticky, but my (admittedly limited) understanding is that space is only outside your nation's borders if you are a signatory to Outer Space Treaty. Quick lookup shows that there are nations that are signatories to NPT, but not OST. These nations can claim that launching a manhole cover vertically up doesn't cause it to leave their borders, while at the same time have the right to request a nuclear detonation on their territory subject to NPT. Notable candidates would include Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. I'm guessing because they haven't bothered to sign OST following collapse of USSR. Of course, any nation that could provide a nuclear device under NPT is also a signatory to OST. So I don't know if they would apply their definition of nation's borders and it would then be considered a violation of NPT from their perspective? Or is it only the laws and treaties of the nation where the test would be conducted that apply? Thoughts? Mining companies tend to use slow explosives, though. These are usually tertiary explosives that are a bit easier to work with in large quantities. So yeah, finding anyone but military that can conduct such an explosion might be problematic.

New? That was a done deal with the first "Again!" I only wish other people would understand when I quote it instead of giving me odd looks. v_v

Not all the same, but there aren't that many elements that are abundant in asteroids. And the ones that tend to make it deeper into atmosphere before exploding tend to be metallic, AFAIK, which limits it even further to primarily iron, cobalt, and nickel, all of which impart color to the explosion. Iron tends towards orange red, cobalt is yellowish white, and nickel is greenish.

If that 300T yield thing is correct, you can do this with HE. Just set up detonator at the bottom, so the shock accelerates through secondary as it goes up the shaft. The shaft is tall enough that by the time the shock arrives at the top, there shouldn't be any substantial difference between conventional and nuclear explosion at that yield. That's still a lot of explosives, and I don't know if a demo company would be allowed to handle that much, but it still ought to be easier to get than a nuke, right? Right? Please, please be right.

They forgot to check staging, didn't they?

Because it's clearly working.