K^2

I think a good mod SDK will allow people to create APIs like this. So I don't know if Intercept necessarily needs to create an API/SDK for this themselves, but I would very much like them to keep this sort of functionality in mind when working on mod SDK.

Oh, one more thing I haven't noticed immediately for some reason is the trees around the launchpad. Definitely same procedural system as we've seen shown off for grass/bushes earlier. So that definitely syncs well with my comment on distant terrain looking very boring at the moment. I'm now 95% sure that the plan is to hook up the procedural generation into LoD system to make the forests blend between texture, billboards, and mesh trees at different distances giving it all a look of one whole. Can't wait for that terrain show-and-tell!

There's also marketing, including indirect via streamers and YouTubers, so there's a lot of value in making hard-to-reach places purty in particular because they are hard to reach places and will attract a lot of attention because of it. That said, floating colonies would be awesome. If they aren't in the game, I hope the modding system is flexible enough that it can be added.

Yeah, looks very placeholder. Some earlier screenshots have shown procedural vegetation. Intercept might not have LoD baking hooked up yet, and not wasting time on making better terrain textures by hand.

That right there is basically equivalent of yelling for "Freebird" at a concert.

Huh. I barely remember that movie. The quote above is from 1941 where a tank is sunk by Japanese sub under similar circumstance. Maybe, Spielberg stole the idea from Operation Petticoat.

"The Japanese sank both our tank and Ferris wheel, sir."

This is a serious discussion. You should be ashamed. Eh, what the hell. LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!

Technically, you can tune time dilation inside the bubble, but it might require the ship to accelerate, which is exactly the thing you're trying to avoid.

I'll give it an actual read to confirm later, but in general, the biggest problem with pretty much every model, including Alcubierre, is that they don't take mass of the ship into account. Yes, it might seem insignificant compared to energies involved in the bubble, but it's also where the hard requirement for having negative energy involved comes in. The bubble can do all sorts of nifty things, but at an absolute minimum, you have to cancel the mass of the ship to have any hope to go FTL. This is a lot easier to show with Alcubierre due to spherical symmetry, but the gist stays the same. You can't have flat space-time beyond the bubble if the ship inside the bubble has mass and the bubble doesn't contain negative energy to cancel it. This can be derived directly from GR. Now, if space-time outside the bubble isn't flat, then the bubble can't reach the speed of light, much less exceed it, for the same reason an ordinary object can't. Accelerating any object that generates curvature requires extra energy the faster it's already moving, and that energy diverges to infinity as you get closer to light speed. So light speed is the asymptomatic limit unless you cancel out the mass of the ship with negative energy in the bubble. This also ties neatly into some fundamental conservation laws in GR. Again, way easier to show rigorously on Alcubierre, but you can see it in a simple thought experiment. What happens to a ship orbiting the Sun at 1AU (orbit of Earth) if it warps to 5AU (orbit of Jupiter)? It doesn't have enough energy or angular momentum to be up there. It is possible to show in sublight warp with Alcubierre that the bubble will radiate gravitational energy providing propulsion. And in general, any warp bubble that doesn't cancel ship's mass will radiate gravitational energy in such a warp. But this radiation is impossible under FTL. You literally can't have a bubble carry any positive quantity of mass at FTL speeds. The net mass must be zero. Even under all these limitations, practical sublight warp would be absolutely amazing to develop. And Alcubierre, sadly, requires negative mass even for sublight travel. But there is no hard limit preventing a theoretical warp that carries a ship along its geodesic (so, same orbit it was already on) at a much higher, albeit, subluminal speed. In other words, if you burned conventional engines for a transfer, but then instead of waiting for months or even years to complete transfer, you could be there in days or even hours. That's absolutely a solid win, and nothing in GR flat out says it can't be done without exotic matter. Maybe the idea in this paper is adaptable to that sort of warp, in which case, that would be absolutely fantastic. But I have to call BS on any FTL without negative energy for the same reason I can call BS on any perpetual motion machine with magnets without getting into details.

So yeah, it was inspired by the Soundgarden song, of course. But my needless pedantic interpretation of what would qualify as Blackhole Sun was something that produces sunlight. That is, the Hawking radiation matches that produced by Sun's photosphere. I plugged in the numbers for the event horizon acceleration, and I got something on the order of 2x1021 kg. Hence my signature. Though, I don't think I did gravitational red-shift correction back then. If you correct for it properly, the actual answer you get is more like 2x1019 kg, which is substantially lighter and will produce a lot more power. Still not enough to be practical, of course. Don't know if I should make corrections or leave it as is. So far, I've been too lazy to fix it.

Incomes are way lower in Russia. There are a lot of ways in which modern Russia is closer to 3rd world than 1st world. You won't see it as much in Moscow and a handful of other major cities, but periphery is rather poor. The country mostly has infrastructure you don't see in 3rd world countries, albeit aging, but that doesn't really help you buy games. Median salary in Russia is about $500/month, which is about a quarter of median salary in US. Other reasons are historical and have to do with piracy. After USSR collapsed, you had a lot of professionals in various industries with not much to do. So games were getting pirated and sold, first on floppies, then on CDs, all over the place. If your option in late 90s was buying a licensed game for $40 (IIRC, back then) or paying something like $3-$5 for a pirated copy that's been fairly well translated, had copy protection stripped, and possibly even some bugs fixed, which one are you going to chose? Eventually, some companies emerged that would make deals with Western publishers to release licensed games cheap. The price range would be in $5-$10, so a little more expensive, but you'd get better translations with professional voice acting and generally better quality overall. Over time, the prices climbed a bit, but still remained much lower than prices for licensed games in US and Europe. This became well established practice, and by the time digital distribution came about, they had to deal with the fact that expectation was for a much lower price. Fun little side story. When Star Craft came out, somebody in US managed to swipe a copy while stocking shelves the night before, had it transmitted over the internet, and it was cracked, replicated, and available for sale in Moscow before the official launch. Similar things have happened to other games and movies over the year. The fact that licensed market is successful in Russia at all is, quite frankly, amazing.

... That's, like, $1 USD. I know prices are adjusted to regions, but that sounds entirely too low. Looking at SteamDB, it looks like typical price for $60 game in US is 1,999 Rubles in Russia, which is closer to $25 USD.

That one isn't too hard to overcome. Plants grow just fine under artificial lighting. But yeah, on a station, you could end up with something like a natural day-light cycle so that you don't have to bother with lights. It might, honestly, come down to the kind of plants you are trying to grow. Some might be more practical to grow in an underground bunker on the surface, others will do just fine in microgravity and harsh radiation of the orbital garden.

I mean, it sort of is. It's part of why you can get far more risky with physics warp on a good CPU. Physics and most game objects will tick once per frame with duration of previous frame passed in as time delta. That means that things will move and interact at the same rate regardless of FPS, but because any given time period is distributed between fewer ticks, precision suffers, and you are that much more likely to get physics bugs.

We don't. The problems might be manageable. But it's hard enough to get adequate exercise on Earth for a lot of people. If walking isn't part of your daily commute, you kind of have to find time to do at least something. At lower gravity in enclosed spaces? There is no way your daily routine will involve enough physical work if you aren't part of the construction crew. This is why I'm saying that at a minimum, physical exercise with dedicated equipment will have to be a significant portion of your daily routine. Sure, it might not kill you, but having an increased risk of early onset cardiovascular problems if you don't is bad enough. And this is best case scenario. Like you said, we only have two data points and we have pushed long duration stays in microgravity pretty far, but everything points to it not being an option for indefinite stay. Certainly, not for most people. Is a third of Earth's gravity enough to push it over into manageable indefinitely with right exercise routine? Possibly. But we don't even know that. And yes, we'll find out long before we try to establish any permanent outposts, but when the best possible outcome is significant inconvenience and worst drastic reduction to life expectancy, it doesn't fill one with optimism.

Valid points, and yeah, you wouldn't capture a personnel shuttle with the same rail you use to send processed ores to orbit. But at least this actually feels like an engineering problem. It doesn't require some super-materials that are yet to be invented or impossible fuels. We have everything we need to build something like this. Also, I just took another look at OP, and I should probably add that I'm of even lower opinion of Mars as valid place for human habitation. For purposes of safety, it's not an ounce better, with an added bonus of Martian soil being toxic on top of getting in everywhere just as well as Lunar regolith. The atmosphere is too thin to provide any sort of protection or even significantly help with landings, but thick enough to have dust storms and to make ascent complicated. Same deal with surface gravity. It's high enough that you have to deal with it when building structures and sending cargo up, but too low for normal human health, meaning at best you'll have to spend a lot of time daily on special equipment keeping yourself in shape, and at worst will put a hard limit on how long you can live on the surface. And building centrifuges is even more of a problem on Mars, because, again, there is atmosphere and dust that gets in everywhere with it. Out of all the places in Sol where we can actually build an outpost, Mars might actually be the worst place to do so. So it's not so much, "Why we are talking about Mars and forgetting about the Moon?" and more about why are we even talking about Mars? Certainly, we should work on getting boots on the ground there, and having a few research station anywhere we can reach is a good idea, but neither is suitable for permanent habitation, and I don't think that will ever change. Every advancement that makes Mars a little more livable will also make all of the alternatives so much better as well.

This is the reason we absolutely should be building infrastructure on the Moon. It's also why there is zero reason to put any permanent habs on the surface. An orbital station can supply standard gravity and you can even organize a miniature magnetosphere around habitable sections to give you as much protection as anything in LEO. This is all far more problematic on the surface. And a rail/coil launcher can also work for capture, which means you have "free" way to go back and forward. Do a work shift on the surface, then come back to the orbital habitat. All the colonies we should be building would be orbiting the Moon, not on the Moon.

I actually kind of want something almost like a very simple version of Mii editor. Give me a few hair options, beards, and a few accessories. Then randomize these by defaults with fresh recruits. That'd be grand. Edit: Yeah, I know it adds almost nothing to the game, but it won't impact runtime in any meaningful way, and if it's outside the main budget, I'm prepared to buy that as DLC.

Don't need it until work on kerborg DLC begins.

Not enough subsurface scattering. Where are the wax kerbals and gelatin kerbals?

Yeah, there are good ways to handle massive forests without too much cost, but I'm not sure how much of it is viable with Unity. What we've seen of procedural generation looks like it's loosely based on Horizon Zero Dawn approach, and that is the correct way to set up forests in large open world game, but I don't know how well that would scale to full on forests in Unity. It seems like it should be possible, but it might be a significant tech challenge that Intercept might or might not have the right people and time for. Definitely can hope, though.

Many years of experience developing games, shipping games, creating development plans for the game, and working with every tier of production including engineers, artists, creatives, management, brand, marketing, legal... Because it's a quick cash grab. You don't buy a niche IP with internal problems and then try to build a big game. You hand the IP over to a small studio that has shown itself with some ports and contract them to make a game for you. If they fail, you lose nothing. If the game is a rare success, you make a boat ton of money with very little investment. That's all that KSP purchase was to T2. That and some merch sales. Contract re-negotiation. Star Theory was not in a good place to negotiate initial contract. Just like with many ports, their royalties options would have sucked, if not completely non-existent. When the game looked like a big risk, nobody cared. When it became clear that KSP2 actually can become a high profile game, one that's basically guaranteed to break even, question of royalties becomes an important one. With expanded scope, PD would have to renegotiate milestones with ST, that can allow ST to renegotiate royalties. Best guess, both companies got greedy. Happens often enough. Trailer was approved by publisher. That's not the issue. The issue is that this was supposed to be just an artistic cinematic for hype. It wasn't meant to represent the game as is. Couldn't and certainly didn't. But it set up expectations, which in vacuum, don't mean anything. What actually changed is the publisher's gauge for how wide the game can go. A niche little game suddenly became potentially a major release. And that changes the math drastically. Cheap games ship entirely on their marketing budget. They get jack all in dev budget, and developers usually just get enough cash to pay the bills. Mid-range game budget is still dominated by marketing, but they are actually invested into, because there are enough reviews, influencer plays, etc. that are based on game's quality. You just don't make a cheap port or sequel for a niche audience the same way you make a proper game for broad audience. Again, the key is money. ST is an external studio. If they take the standard royalties cut, which is like 70%-90% of revenue, T2 losses on a game that's position to sell several million copies are well over $100M. At this point both Star Theory and Private Division want to make a bigger game. Private Division just wants to keep all the sales. You seriously don't think $100M is a good reason to dump the development team and start from scratch with an internal studio? Your turn. What's your basis for any of this? Ha, ha, ha. Yeah. Because bean-counters in marketing would ever approve an ambitious game based on a niche fandom. Look, here's how it works in game dev. The dev studios know games, they know how to make content that delivers enjoyable experience and build tech to drive it. Some better than others, but this is the actual objective that developers are solving. Marketing, especially in a major publishing house, don't consider quality of the game as a factor unless it impacts sales. Their actual primary considerations are IP and how it can be sold. For something like KSP as it was in 2017, the idea of making a quality game, let alone an ambitious one, just wouldn't exist. You have number of impressions of the IP and how many users can be reached with a marketing strategy based on existing fan sites and influencers. None of it depends on making a good game. Or a big game. And given that they went with a cinematic teaser, they don't even care about making a good-looking game at that point. It's the same kind of money grab as your typical moive-tie in mobile game. The only way this can change is if the game is shown to have much bigger reach than initially estimated. PD was basing their estimate on active community of KSP circa 2017. The actual community that was reached by the teaser trailer turned out to be orders of magnitude larger. And that's the only reason why a quick money grab turned into an ambitious project. Yes. That's how it works. Publishers give developers a wad of cash and not check back on them for two years. Setting aside weekly reports, money is only released from publisher to developer upon reaching milestone goals. Milestones are typically 3-4 months long, and each milestone is a major presentation on which artwork, content, and, most critically, actual gameplay is shown to a review panel, and unless the presented material doesn't clear the review, the developer doesn't get payed. If things developed the way you present it, Star Theory would lose their pay check in early 2018. Based on the fact that ST relied on KSP2 contract as their primary meal ticket, they would have gone bankrupt long before the 2019 E3 presentation. This scenario can only be imagined by somebody who has no idea how games are made. Yes. These people have failed for 2 years, so lets give them even more money! Especially, the creative director, who in your scenario has been lying about progress all this time! And yes, creative director is one of the people actually presenting milestone goals to the publisher. So again, setting aside the fact that this scenario couldn't have happened in the first place, if somehow ST really was going off and failing for 2 years without oversight, creative director would be the very first person fired from the project. The fact that creative director is the one around whom Intercept was built is the clearest indication you can possibly have that the only disagreement on development between Private Division and Star Theory was MONEY. Because it's the only thing that's completely outside the creative's control. Unity editor is using the game's runtime. There is literally no difference between showing something running in the game and running in the editor. Most of testing of how the game is running is done from within the editor. But also yes. This is what restarting production means. That you scrap most of what you've done and start almost from scratch. Except, you are somehow insisting that they've taken a lot of the same people that according to you completely failed to make a game and gave them even more money to make the same game. You are basing your story on several glaring misunderstandings of how publishing of the game works. As for the whole deal being a lot more complex than poor devs, evil publisher, sure. Problem is, we don't know exactly how the negotiations broke down and who was the truly unreasonable party. The way PD poached ST devs for Intercept before even announcing termination of contract is extremely poor taste. They have gutted Star Theory by using their financial backing as leverage. What we don't know is whether PD has given Star Theory a reasonable out or just went for scorched earth. That'd make a pretty big difference between evil profiteering and publisher just doing what it has to to protect its investment. And we don't know the details of negotiation necessary to differentiate. Not that it really matters to anything that has happened as far as development of the game is concerned.

This is the proposed timeline. In May 2017 Take Two acquired rights to KSP. Immediately following that, Private Division starts looking for a studio to make KSP2. At this point, it is imagined to be an engine update of KSP with a couple of DLCs worth of new content. Namely, a new star system along with a few engines to get you there and ability to build simple colonies. Game enters pre-production at Star Theory Games the same year and is in full production no later than early 2018. A year and a half later, the teaser trailer is presented at E3. It oversells the visual fidelity, colony feature, and we also get mentions of multiplayer and a few other improvements which were probably still speculative at that point. The trailer and speculation get phenomenal reception, which gives creatives at Star Theory leverage to push for expanding the scope. The multiplayer is now a core feature, colonies and orbital construction are critical part of progression, along with greatly expanded resource system and supply lines, overhauls to science and career, and far more graphical fidelity than was likely originally planed. Talks between Private Division and Star Theory stall and we get first indications of delays. By 2020, talks break down completely and Take Two pulls the plug. A new studio, Intercept Games, is created around creatives who left Star Theory, and Intercept attempts to recover production after hiring about a third of former Star Theory staff. Pandemic, lockdown, more delays announced, all of that with scope of the game still being in flux and several key positions unfilled. By mid 2020 things at Intercept stabilize, new hires are in place, and it becomes clear that original production is not salvageable. New plan is developed, greenlit, and KSP2 finally enters its current production phase by late 2020 with a new release schedule. The critical part you seem to fail to understand is that you can only expand the scope of the game so far before you can no longer just bolt additional features on. At some point, you have to scrap what you were making and make a bigger game. That effectively resets your development. Sure, you can salvage some art, some assets, and occasionally even some code. But no more than you would making a sequel. It's a completely new production. Star Theory probably could have shipped the game under original scope by some time in 2020. Likely, with a few months of delay, but still that year. That, however, doesn't mean that Intercept game had some working version of KSP2 in 2020. They scrapped the development and were building a completely new version of KSP2. And in 2020 it was at the very beginning of its production stage, with absolutely everything that has been shown completely matching what you expect from a game in early production. Now, if you want to refute this timeline, take your best shot. Otherwise, your entire argument is a strawman.

There will probably be platforms and possibly some other structures that you can build on top of. So it's not just plopping things on a terrain grid. I think a good reference would be something like Satisfactory minus the conveyor belts. But yeah, it doesn't look like we'll get complete free-form building similar to how the rockets are constructed. I've actually raised concerns about stability of the physics simulation if they go the ship-building route for colonies, and I kind of wonder if that's the reason the structures we've seen all look like they are meant to be free-standing, rather than attached as modules. Personally, I'm ok with either if it's a design choice, but it'd be a little sad if they were forced into a particular way of constructing colonies by the engine.