K^2

For a shape, easy. For rough outline of continents, not too bad. But by the time you're starting to work on detailed coastline and mountains, you're going to be hating you ever started the project. You really need some user-guided procedural tools that can handle different models for weathering simulation. I know that tools for designing open world maps like this exist, but I don't know how much work it'd be to try and do something like this on a scale of a planet. Ideally, you want specialized procedural tools for this sort of work.

Yeah, that thing's going to be basically invisible. And before you ask about Hawking radiation, take a look at my sig. Moon's about 30 times heavier, so the light emitted is going to be infrared and power output is going to be in nanowatts. The only way you'd be able to tell that the Moon...hole(?) is still there is by its gravitational effects on tides, near-Earth asteroids, etc.

I hope they make adding star systems as mods relatively straight forward. Then most of the wilder ideas people have for planets can simply be fan-made mods. Making planets is a lot of work, though, if you want to end up with something that looks nice in the end.

Sulfuric acid can be turned into water with application of heat and distillation, as it decomposes at moderately high temperatures, but using biochemistry might be more practical, yeah. And being able to produce methane on the side is always great. It can be used for fuels and as starting point of making various polymers for construction.

I wonder if it'd be more practical to have resupply remain air born after entry as a rotorcraft or a blimp. Either way, you definitely have options that don't require runways or anything like that. Bonus points if you can cannibalize parts of the resupply ship before letting it... sink? Drop? That's true, but if there's a good place to use hydrogen as a lifting gas anywhere in Sol, it's Venus. It's completely inert in Venusian atmosphere. So long as your habs are suspended bellow lifting cells, rather than enclosed within, you have no risk of fire, as there is nothing for hydrogen to combust with. Hydrogen is also much better at preventing materials from degrading, unlike oxygen-rich mixtures, and will require less than half of the lifting cell volume, once you account for all the additional structures for larger cells. Finally, if you are going to be replenishing oxygen from water catalysis, you'll have free source of hydrogen to help replenish lifting gas, and if you are going to be shipping in the lifting gas, it's still a lot less mass to bring hydrogen than any other gas mixture you might use. I would definitely try to optimize buoyancy of habitat itself, as that will make the project a lot easier, but for any additional lift you need, hydrogen is the way to go on Venus.

Usually, for something like Piano, mechanical resonances of walls, especially the soundboard, are more important than resonances of air inside the box, which is what the formula in OPs post refers to. So I don't know if any of this is going to be helpful. I'm not aware of any shorthands. Historically it's been trial and error. Still mostly is, but these days, you can build an FEM simulation, and then, if you're looking for specific combination of acoustic and mechanical characteristics, you can run something like a genetic algorithm to select for the optimal shape. It's a lot of work on top of building an accurate model of the instrument, though. Not sure if it's worth it. For something practical, my recommendation would be to find dimensions and materials of existing instrument of high quality and copy it. It's very difficult to do better than that.

Depending on environment, surface might even be worse. I'll take harsh UV and slightly toxic atmosphere of Venus, but at room temperature and pressure at which I can comfortably hold my breath, over a deadly cold, near vacuum, space-harsh radiation, and toxic soils of Mars. If you got a sizeable leak in a dome on Mars, you need to evacuate immediately. If you got a leak on Venus, you can casually stroll to the nearest office, get some tape, and go back and cover it up, then alert the maintenance. If a large section blew out on Mars, you're dead. No second chances. If your habitat got compromised on Venus, you hold your breath, walk over to the next one, and take a shower. Fact that Venus has gravity very similar to Earth's is a bonus. There is just no contest over which one is more suitable for habitation. There are additional challenges for a Venusian colony, of course, but I wouldn't even list structural challenges in top five. Water's the biggest one for a mostly self-sustained colony, honestly. The best source for it is sulfuric acid haze, which requires refining to turn it into water, and even that is scarce at altitudes that are comfortable for living. If you need water for anything beyond drinking, your best bet is probably detachable zeppelins that descend to lower altitude, collect sulfuric acid, and bring it back up to be refined into pure water. Next one is minerals, which you aren't getting any from the atmosphere, so recycling better be top notch. And no matter how well you manage, for growth, you'll have to rely on shipments of metals and minerals. Surface mining is, technically, an option, but asteroid mining seems like a more realistic path to real growth at scale on Venus. Still, a permanent outpost is viable with infrastructure we have now, similar to how we run polar stations here on Earth. You can get enough water for day-to-day operations of colony from the atmosphere and simply import food and any materials needed for expanding the colony. Personally, I like that a lot better than building underground bunkers on Mars to protect you from cold, vacuum, and radiation with no guarantees that the water situation will actually be better, given the toxicity of soil and scarcity of ice. Edit: Oh, another nice thing is that we don't really have to launch anything to space to do proof-of-concept. We can build a prototype research station in Earth's atmo to see how well it would function. Earth's weather is actually more harsh at comparable pressure-altitudes, but we have a lot of advanced warning with our forecasts, so I think it can be turned into a fair test.

Mostly, you just need to pick a target with reasonably calm and predictable atmosphere. Something like Venus makes a good target, because at altitudes you'd want to place colonies, there is not that much turbulence and shear. Keeping a structure like that "anchored" is a fool's task, but if it gets carried around the planet at a consistent latitude not too far from equator, that's good enough. There's going to be a size limit, but we have skyscrapers nearly a kilometer tall that withstand much greater wind shears than you'd expect over similar distance in Venusian atmosphere at 50+ km. So a colony a few kilometers across is very doable with modern materials. And a structure of that size would have enough redundancy in case some of the lifting cells fail. With the right approach to construction, it can be no more risk than being on a top floor of a modern skyscraper.

That's why you need good insulation. A good dewar can slow the heat getting in from environment to the trickle, so you only have to worry about the opening where you let the light through. There are aerogel structures that are very translucent in thermal IR and are as good at insulation as space shuttle tiles. If you want, you can also add a thin metal layer deposit on top to reflect visible light while letting IR through. Something like that ought to work outside, sitting on the sand during the day. That's a neat trick, right? But we're talking space-age technologies at that point. What I don't know is where the limits are for simple materials discussed in the original post. It's clear that you can get some amount of cooling with insulation on the sides and an open hole at the top, and there are simple ways to improve on that a bit, but beyond that, I have neither knowledge nor experience.

Oh yeah. The drag model might be primitive, but at least it makes some consideration for occlusion now.

Swept wing only makes an impact if the airflow gets close to speed of sound. Since KSP doesn't simulate anything relating to speed of sound, swept wings make no difference. Making a simulation that faithfully simulates impact of swept wings is actually pretty hard, as it has to simulate the way air flows around the wing, but like most things, so long as you don't need it to be precise enough for engineering work, it can be faked rather convincingly. But it is a packaged deal. If you want swept wings to be meaningful at transonic speeds, you'll have to deal with a whole host of problems if you plan to actually go supersonic. Wave drag, shock cones, loss of control due to separation... Personally, I'd welcome the added challenge, but I can see how it can be intimidating to a lot of people and why Intercept might be hesitant to go that route.

Nah, the principles are solid, but I've never seen it work as described. The correct setup involves some tricky materials that provide good insulation while being perfectly clear in thermal IR. These materials exist, but that makes the contraption a lot more complicated than simply a box with a hole and some mirrors. Nonetheless, on a clear night, you have fairly low amount of IR coming in from above - a lot less than you can radiate out even at sub-zero temperatures. So if you have good insulation, you get sub-zero temperatures with fairly warm ambient.

It's not an either-or, regardless. It takes very different people to work on these tasks. It looks like Intercept got a good amount of art and tech art people from Star Theory, so they're running with what they have. I can't quite tell what the situation was at Star Theory, but as of formation of Intercept, they needed a physics engineer, and it took them a while to find one. And it's still not clear if they got somebody senior enough to make anything like the LoD system they've talked about. Naturally, it's all limitation of budget. You can sink enough money into the search to guarantee you'll find people who will handle the work that needs to be done, but if it costs you as much as hiring five engineers, you're not going to ship on budget.

A lot of the work that HarvesteR did would fall under the responsibilities of physics programmer, so I would argue that Squad did, in fact, have these kind of resources. Availability of said resources to focus on physics tasks is a separate matter, however. KSP physics performance was abysmal. Part of it was certainly due to Squad having to work with limited resources, and part due to just the state of physics on Unity being in a really bad place, especially, at the time. KSP2 is in a better starting place just from having a more up-to-date version of Unity. So we should have better physics performance right away. However, Squad also spent a lot of time tuning joints to get stability, and the only footage I've seen of KSP2 where you can see physics shows they haven't replicated that at that point. It's been a few months, and hopefully, they're further along, but it does point to the fact that they haven't even began core physics improvements. And that doesn't leave a lot of time to actually work on such features. So I'm concerned about how much optimization will actually get done. Does it have to be done to ship the game? Not really. So long as they at least do the same stability pass that was done on KSP to reduce cases of Kraken, it'll be fine on PC and next gen. PS4/XB1 performance is where it's really going to hurt. It's also going to put some limits on how big we could build on any given hardware. But since I don't expect KSP2 to be that much heavier on physics, maybe that's good enough?

Yeah, especially, if you have some striping across disks to increase read speeds, I don't think it'll make that much difference until we do start getting the same kind of in-line decompression and DMA that we see on PS5/XBSX. So a few years, at least, and even longer until enough games really make use of it. Even then, it'll probably only make sense for games. Personally, I use a SATA SSD for OS, because it's not that much space and it does improve boot times, an M.2 for the Steam library to get the games spinning up fast, and everything else goes on conventional mechanical disks. At work we have similar setups. All of the raw assets and code syncs go to mechanical HDDs, since they're still better for working in volume, but then the game gets built to an SSD to speed up deployment to consoles or to run PC version directly.

Sorry, I'm replying out of order here a bit, but the optimization is read-speed vs processing speed, generally. For example, it makes sense to leave more resources uncompressed if you are going to be reading them from SSD rather than HDD. At a slower read speed of HDD, you often get an asset in memory faster if you are reading a compressed stream and decoding it as blocks are read. On the other hand, with NVMe M.2 SSD, it can take longer to decode compressed data than to read uncompressed data in directly if the CPU is busy doing other loading tasks at the same time. Of course, this also impacts disk size, so compression still has its place, but optimal balance between compressed and uncompressed assets is different for fast SSD vs HDD. (Note, this doesn't apply to next consoles, as they have dedicated decompression hardware that's fast enough to decode things as they are being read, so you get both benefits.) Another good example is animation data. There are a whole bunch of compression tricks used to reduce the size of animation tracks on disk, and it's mostly done to improve streaming performance rather than for the sake of disk space. Leaving animation tracks uncompressed on disk would make streaming and loading way more efficient on a fast SSD. There are also examples of optimization that are done for sake of seek time on HDD that hurt other performance and can actually increase size of the game on disk. For example, it's not uncommon to pack some smaller textures along with a model so that when you need to load model and textures, you are more likely to read a continuous set of blocks on the disk reducing read time. Unfortunately, it means that if a texture is re-used it's stored in several places on the disk. On modern SSDs, there is absolutely no difference if you are reading blocks that are continuous or not because of how SSD memory management works. (There's usually a dedicated chip that's there to map disk address to physical location on memory chips, kind of like virtual addressing in RAM.) So when optimizing for SSD, you would usually avoid this technique and always store textures as separate files to reduce duplication. Long story short, there are definitely optimizations we put into games that address certain features of storage, and while for consoles we just target whatever's in the box, for PCs we usually target whatever hardware is more common. With next gen of console games being built around the SSD storage and with more and more gaming PCs having either a SATA or NVMe SSD, a lot of games are likely to start treating that as default on PCs.

The difference between a flat plane and cambered wing is primarily the critical AoA and sharpness of stall onset. In that aspect, the KSP wings are already simulated as cambered, albeit, as if the camber is symmetric. The asymmetric camber is almost entirely equivalent to increasing effective AoA while keeping the same chord and aircraft pitch. You can get that in KSP by simply angling the wings. It looks a little ugly, and getting parts that have built-in asymmetric camber for a bit of extra lift at zero AoA would be great, but it's honestly a component/design fix, rather than any change in aerodynamics. The only bit of real physics that's lost on an autogyro blade is the fact that camber/AoA change throughout the blade, so you end up with a driving and driven region. You should be able to achieve this by building your blades in sections. Again, it's not really something you can fix with better aerodynamics. Games that focus on helicopter/autogyro physics simply simulate their blade in multiple sections. And maybe having stock blades that can be simulated in sections would be nice, but it's not really an aerodynamics change.

Fast SSD is a big feature of next gen consoles. I suspect, a lot of optimization will go into loading speed both on the Unity end and at intercept. I don't know if that will make a huge impact on NVMe speeds, but it should help.

Well, nobody actually really does physics on GPU anyways. Yes, I know that was supposed to be one of the big selling points of PhysX, but nobody wants to use GPU resources for it, and most of the stuff you'd want to do massively in parallel for physics, GPUs weren't terribly good at. With RTX, that can actually change quite a bit, because BVH accelerators for RT can be used for collision checks as well. But if your options are to have ray tracing or GPU physics, which one are you going to chose? Pretty much every game out there goes with more graphics and does all the physics on CPU as that's usually enough anyways. Even KSP isn't bound so much by the amount of physics that needs to be done as by how bad Unity is at physics. Newer versions of Unity are better at utilizing CPU resources, so we should see improvements in physics even just from that. And yes, there are a lot of optimizations that can be taken. I am a bit concerned about how these optimizations were talked about early on, because that was happening at the same time Intercept had an opening for a senior physics engineer, and we haven't heard anything about it since that position got filled, but even replicating what KSP did with some Unity improvements they get "for free" should be a good start. If they can combine some modules into larger rigid bodies, that will help a lot, and shouldn't be too difficult to do, so fingers crossed. Just please, remember to use parallel axis theorem correctly. If I had a nickel for every time I have to go into a physics engine and fix how the moment of inertia tensor is built, I'd have a few nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird that this keeps happening.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Something that fits KSP2 and is written especially for it. Kevin Macleod works in a huge variety of musical styles and I have no doubt he can write something that would fit. You do know that the works in the free library are quickly slapped together just to have a good variety of tracks, right? Have you heard any of his more serious works? He is a very capable composer.

I'm going to be really upset if they don't hire Kevin Macleod to write at least one track exclusively for KSP2. I don't care if it's a small Easter egg track somewhere, just something.

CPU PhysX only, but we might get some of the multithreading optimizations from recent Unity versions. Havok's unlikely, as that requires ECS/DOTS setup, and it sounds like Intercept is building KSP2 on GameObjects, same as original KSP. It would be amazing for both stability and performance, but seems unlikely.

Haven't we already had confirmed planets in the Alpha Centauri system? Which is technically a ternary with Proxima being loosely bound to the AB binary.

Think of it as a, "No, stop asking," face.

I mean, it's cultural, but it is an almost inescapable consequence of its properties. Because gold was used in jewelry-making, it had some intrinsic value. It's also very easy to split and relatively easy to combine. More importantly, it will never spoil. So you have something that you know will always have some value, even as just a piece of shiny, and it will never, ever lose that value so long as there are people in the world. That in itself has a lot of additional value. Add to that the fact that it's hard to find, so nobody's going to devalue gold by just coming up with an enormous quantity of it, and you suddenly have something that's perfect for storing value. It can be a currency or backing for one. The only aspect of this that's historical is that we now have far more candidates for such a material, but gold is still the go-to due to being time-tested. The idea that another metal can be more appealing to aliens on another world, and it would make that metal the currency metal isn't completely invalid. It's just that you need to take other properties into account. Specifically, gold being rare, but reasonably easy to find in small quantities by a developing civilization, while also being the sort of metal that never rusts away. There aren't that many candidates. We also do have backup currencies. Silver and copper were always valuable, for example, and even used as coin. But they were also metals that were in a lot of demand for practical uses, not just jewelry. But even then, they never quite reached the status of gold.