K^2

You can have entrance and exit to the wormhole traveling at literally any local velocity you want. But then you get to plug in the numbers for your wormhole geometry and compute the stress-energies required to maintain that wormhole and for anything that doesn't conserve momentum you are likely to end up very unhappy with the results. The compensation will come from somewhere, and if you don't engineer it with some matter to deflect to compensate for recoil, then the compensation will come from gravity waves, and that means you'll be paying photon drive equivalent energy costs. It's going to be a lot cleaner if you require the ship to accelerate to a very specific speed before going through the wormhole. The image is based on Sun's radiation as seen from space, AFAIK. The atmosphere is going to make a complete mess of it even if the Sun is directly overhead. But it's not going to be a sharp cutoff anyways. When you see the Sun near the horizon, there is just a lot less of the blue light getting to you, but you'd still be able to make spectrum measurements based on light that makes it through.

I think I'd use planes in early KSP a lot more if there were fewer of these, "Collect science from 17km altitude" contracts early on, when I only have access to engines that flame out at 10km. There are definitely ways to make airplanes be a part of a more natural progression of the game. Especially, if we get props as starter tech instead of after we already have turbofans.

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but now I need to know what the smallest NPP size is and can I manage to load it onto an air-to-air missile for some epic dogfights?

The links you have to images on a google account aren't working. They seem to be private to your account. You can try to see if there are settings to make them public, or you can re-upload somewhere else. A good way to do a quick check to see if other people can see your posts is open the page in "private browsing mode," which doesn't use your normal cookies, passwords, cache, etc. It's like logging into a browser for the first time, except you still have your bookmarks and settings. In Chrome or Edge the shortcut is Shift+Ctrl+N. In Firefox it's Shift+Ctrl+P. That will open a new window with a private browsing tab, and you can just copy the link to the forum page.

It's always a compromise between loading upfront and possible stalls when you're playing the game. I do suspect, however, that the big part of the problem is that Squad was basically building a resource system on top of resource system. The ship files are not-quite-JSON, which makes me concerned that it might be using custom parsers every time it's loading things, and that just doesn't naturally lead to anything you can stream. In a perfect world, you do all your parsing upfront when you build assets for the game. Unity will do that with any internal assets - it's not going to just store raw models and materials. They get built into easy-to-ingest binary formats. Ideally, you want data on the disk to be byte-for-byte what you want in memory. That way, CPU doesn't even have to spend time with it. It can be streamed from drive to RAM and be used as soon as the process finished. With a KSP ship, the engine doesn't have anything to signal it that it's going to need to load certain parts. There's nothing built into Unity that will have it recognize that you're approaching a station with a certain list of parts and it needs to make sure that models, textures, and materials for these parts are in memory, because none of these things are a part of the Unity scene. I'm sure there's way to trigger that from the game code, but it essentially means building your own streaming system that works a step ahead of Unity's own. So doable, but not trivial. But even then, I wouldn't expect the up-front loading to take quite so long. I'm pretty sure a lot of the time is just spent parsing custom data. If you want to read a part file, you have to first read the text data from disk into memory, then parse it into some sort of a tree representation, and finally walk that tree to find the data you actually need. It's all the work that's normally done at build time done when the game is loading. This is very suboptimal. There are a lot of ways Intercept can avoid all of this. They can find ways to use more native representations of resources, they can have custom build steps, they can cache intermediate data, and they can have some combination of all of these. It's hard to say whether any of this is being done, but there are definitely ways the loading times can be improved - with or without mods.

It looks like it's parsing data from single core as well. There is definitely A LOT of room for optimization.

A lot of your image links are broken. Try imgur or some other hosting site. On topic, antimatter hasn't been properly confirmed, but this to me looks like a beam core antimatter rocket. (From original trailer.)

Things that they are doing for rendering aren't that heavy on GPU and Unity actually has decent rendering optimization. Focus on making sure you have a CPU that can handle the game. As previously discussed, they will probably be targeting gen 9 console performance as benchmark, so you should be aiming for something that at least matches Ryzen 7 3700X. And ideally, something a bit beefier if you are big on mods. That alone will probably be a big dent in your budget, especially with CPU prices being where they are. Waiting a bit might be wise if you can. Either way, probably don't buy a new graphics card right now. Prices for them are outrageous. I haven't seen anything yet that even a GTX 970 couldn't handle. And if you are going with Intel CPU, you might even scrape by on integrated and upgrade later.

Scattering can create smooth attenuation in spectrum. To a human eye, yes, this can cause the light color to change, but when we measure the red shift, we aren't looking at spectrum overall. We are looking at spectral lines, which are rather narrow gaps in spectrum due to absorption by various atoms in the star's atmosphere. Since it's a sharp gap, even if the overall spectrum is distorted, the gaps will still be quite identifiable, and their position cannot change due to scattering or absorption in interstellar medium.

Does look that way. I was expecting something precise based on the fact that everyone's pretty confident that collision will happen, and that parallax methods have garbage precision at intergalactic distances, even for close neighbors, and indeed, best figure I found is 80km/s ± 40km/s from this ref. And with the outside result of 120km/s transverse, -300km/s radial, it's a lot less "straight on collision" than I was picturing, but I guess, it's close enough for gravity to do the rest. I'm disappointed, though. I was hoping for something like second-order red shift measurements, based on periodic changes as Earth moves around its orbit for some very precise numbers... Measuring proper motion from parallax was exciting two centuries ago.

Not directly, but we have measurements of Andromeda's movement relative to us that are fairly precise. It's moving towards us at about 300km/s, and this we can measure very precisely using red shift. Well, actually, it's one of the rare cases where it's actually blue shift, since it's moving towards us. I'm not sure what methods are used to estimate tangential velocity, but while they are definitely less precise in general, it's known that Andromeda is heading for us pretty much straight on. We can use our measurements of our own velocity relative to CMB and use this information to get Andromeda's velocity relative to CMB. Naturally, with cumulative errors. I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. It's just heat photons that were emitted very long time ago, shortly after big bang, and are still "in flight," because universe has been expanding so rapidly. 14by might seem like a very long time, but since universe managed to expand to 90bly in that time, it's clear that some of the light simply has not had the time to cross from one end to another. And, well, most of that light never will make it all the way across now. These are fairly low energy photons with fairly long wavelength, so they pass through atomic hydrogen and helium in open space pretty much without effect. Sure, some of them will get absorbed by matter, but universe is mostly a very empty place.

Yeah, the trailer was all an externally rendered animation, but we have had some good quality shots from in-game. My only complaint about these has been the frame rate, and I hope it's just them running dev build with a lot of debug code, because otherwise, yikes. These two videos have some good examples. They show improvements to planet rendering, PBR and materials on ships and colonies, and some in-progress works on terrain, atmospherics, rings, etc. It's not state of the art, or anything, but it's solid work. If the whole game ends up looking as good as best-polished bits of it, I'll have zero complaints.

Which part? Here's one for velocity and direction of motion relative to CMB as measured via Doppler shift observed by Planck Satellite. Planck 2013 results. XXVII. Doppler boosting of the CMB

If you have a consistent current in one direction, possibly. Even then, you have way more problems with things floating in the water, so you rarely see just a bare turbine. But in a lot of cases, you really do get things like waves or tides that constantly change direction, and converting that motion into rotational motion for generators tend to be more convoluted. So purely from perspective of visual appearance, wave or tide power generators tend to look very different from wind turbines, and be significantly more complex geometrically and mechanically if you want the representation in the game to be somewhat realistic. From perspective of the game design, there's also a question of where and how you build these. We'll have surface colonies. If you have one on a planet with an atmosphere, you can basically plop a mast for wind turbine anywhere. But if you want wave power, you need to build pretty far from shore. It can still be in the shallows, so construction on stilts isn't out of the question, but it's still something the game needs to support. So it's a lot of additional work just to make it possible for you to build these kinds of generators where they make sense. Edit: MinuteEarth actually did a pretty decent video on wave power that might help put some things into perspective.

Yeah, but also cost of adding a wind turbine is basically cost of making the model and textures, which are exceptionally straight forward for a wind turbine. Sometimes, decision for adding something to the game is basically, does it sound interesting and fits the theme? Yes. Is it really quick and easy to add? Yes. Is it going to break balance? No. Add it. The fact that it's going to be a niche tech for small colonies on worlds with sufficiently thick atmosphere is kind of secondary then. It's a bit of variety at almost no cost. Wave/tidal power, though, I completely agree on. If Intercept actually ends up adding aquatic bases, then it might move up into the same low-effort tier as wind power and be worth it. But I kind of feel that we're probably in mod territory here.

I only have two complaints. They tend not to do well when rolled up and, "Why don't you come with me, little girl, on a personal transport drone ride," doesn't have the same ring. (Context)

I'd like to say that I'm going to be responsible about it, wait for reviews, then play it over the weekend. But realistically, I'm probably going to take vacation time for the day KSP2 comes out.

Notably, if you don't mind occasional object clipping, which can be entirely obscured in a coral riff-like environment, boids can be done entirely in GPU, which is a big bonus for a game like KSP.

CMB isn't coming from any particular source. It's not like a boundary or a medium we're seeing. It's literally leftover heat from the universe itself. Which, yeah, you can think of as every particle in existence having contributed to it, so it has a certain kind of foggy quality to it, but it also comes from the time that the universe was a lot denser, so right now it passes through without much scattering. In terms of whether we see all of the universe this way? Well... Everything we can observe, including CMB, appears to have come from what's as close to a single point in space as physically possible. We can't say for sure if that's all there is, or if the universe is actually even bigger. What's even more concerning, if you are the sort of person who is uncomfortable with things staying unknowable, is that there is nothing that says that this one point in space was all there was to the universe. If there was more of the universe, then there is infinitely more universe out there now beyond our ability to detect in any way shape or form. On the positive side, nothing from out there can ever influence us for much the same reason, so whether or not it exists is an entirely a philosophical discussion. And does it even matter at that point? One thing about CMB, though, is that it's not quite perfectly uniform. Besides some variation that's believed to be purely statistical, one side is ever so slightly warmer than the other. Because we're moving relative to CMB. The fact that you can't select the correct frame of reference is a pretty big deal in physics, but that's theory. In practice, CMB comes as close as possible to the rest-frame of the universe. If you want to measure how fast you are moving with respect to all of the observable cosmos, you just need to measure your velocity with respect to CMB. And we've done so and we have shockingly precise measurements, to within just a few km/s. Our Sun is moving at about 370km/s w.r.t CMB. So all that talk about, "No, Earth isn't moving in a circle around the Sun, but rather a helix as Sun is moving along through the Milky Way," is all kind of silly. We're all whizzing with such speeds relative to CMB that Earth's trajectory might as well be a straight line.

It looks like they're kicking it up a notch with procedural generation. Even adding procedural rocks would add to the looks. On habitable planets, some vegetation and corals in the shallows should be easy enough to add for some interesting environments at reasonably low effort. And all of that would run on the same tech they're already measuring for Kerbin vegetation and, hopefully, vegetation on some other habitable planets.

If the game will ship on PS4/XB1, these versions will definitely have some cuts. Other than that, I don't know if any of the versions need to be different. PC will have mods and opportunity for better performance, so it can be made to play differently, but out of the box, it will probably be the same as PS5/XBSX versions. Odds are, even UI will be the same, since the game is now built from start to be cross-platform, and if you'll want to play with controller on PC, you shouldn't see any difference at all.

(Kin-dza-dza)

It's still going to turn into a miniature sun inside the shell, but having nowhere to expand, would linger much longer as hot plasma. Depending on how much radiation and heat escapes, it might still evaporate significant chunk of surroundings, but if that impossible material is also a good radiation blocker and poor heat conductor, which it might have to be, come to think of it, then it's just going to be a very hot sphere that will take a very long time to cool down.

There is a doctrine in U.S. called Fair Use. Of particular importance are the "fair use factors," and I would especially point out, "purpose and character of use," and "amount and substantiality." I can't advise you on whether what you're planning constitutes fair use, but you can read the article yourself to see if you think it applies in your case. That said, you will always have better chances of avoiding a conflict if you get permission in advance. I don't see any sort of PR contact, but you can always just at them on Twitter.

Honestly, a weather balloon is probably your best bet, but a turboprop might work pretty well for the first stage too. Either way, by the time you're ready to light the boosters, you're in much, much thinner atmosphere. In that case, the only concern is having these survive the heat without damage, which is still a challenge, certainly, but a far more manageable one. And with this, you can do all the testing on Earth. You can put the boosters into a heated pressure chamber with the right gas composition to "weather" them and then see if they still fire under normal atmospheric conditions, which is about where you'd be switching to rockets.