K^2

Yeah, I wouldn't want the devs to spend a lot of effort on that for this exact reason, but if it's a community-currated "galaxy" of stars that is managed by a mod you have to install? I don't know, could work out pretty well.

For real satellites in high orbit, where there isn't enough interaction with Earth's atmosphere for their orbits to decay, such as geostationary satellites, there is a concept of a graveyard orbit. Basically, it's a lot cheaper to put defunct satellites into a slightly elevated and slightly inclined orbit than to try and deorbit them. In KSP, there isn't as much of a reason to do this, as it's mostly about UI clutter, but you might be able to use the same principle. If your defunct ship/satellite is located too high to make de-orbiting practical, see if you can collide it with Mun instead. Once you're in high enough orbit around Kerbin, it takes very little fuel to ensure Mun encounter.

Based on the same intersection test, KSP2 was released about a decade ago. But yeah, that's why you don't use regression on raw data. You always need to have a model in mind.

That is completely irrelevant. We aren't talking about watering plants wit sulfuric acid mist. Activity of water in that state doesn't matter. We are talking about collecting sulfuric acid from clouds, heating it up to high temperature, until all sulfuric acid breaks down, and separating H2O vapor from SO3. Then condencing water vapor to clean water. Again, having sulfuric acid is as good as having water, because chemically, it is water with some junk you don't want. Just a few hoops to jump through. And there is enough sulfuric acid to make clouds.

Flu rarely hits population entirely unprepared for it. Only a fraction of population lacks propper immune defense against even a new strain. Given how quickly R0 for influenza drops after an outbreak begins, my guess is that influenza is inherently more infectious if we didn't already have immune training. Which is why I'm cautiously optimistic about vaccine effectiveness in the long run. We get enough people vaccinated, maybe there's a chance to stop COVID for good.

You are still saying "their well being", though. It's not about them. I'll try to talk a person off a bridge, but I won't hold them. Everyone has a right to chose for themselves. Anyone who wants to move to a remote jungle or desert and live there without vaccines is welcome. Problem is, these kinds of people insist they have the right to send their kids to public schools, to shop at public stores, and to otherwise mix with general population. They aren't risking their own health. They are risking other people's health. If you see a person chain-smoking, you let them be. Unlikely they haven't heard it all by now. But if you see a person chain-smoking at a gas station, you don't look for correct solution that balances everyone's freedoms. You call the cops. We have a word for it. It's called criminal negligence.

I don't like the word "impossible," but lets leave it at, "extremely unlikely." Pfizer and Moderna are both using lipid particles, which is the same stuff that your cell membranes are already made from. There's slight risk of allergic reaction to additives keeping the membrane stable, but this is no different than discovering a food allergy. There are other delivery methods, like Russia's Sputnik V that's a bit more intimidating, but even there the risk from adenovirus vector are absolutely minimal. As with pretty much any other vaccine, the main risk comes from immune system responding exactly as it's supposed to to the foreign proteins being introduced, and possibly being a bit too aggressive about it. In most cases, it's going to be no different than potentially getting some flu-like symptoms following an influenza vaccine. There are edge cases and specific vulnerabilities. We still don't know where the autoantibody correlation with COVID is coming from, and there's a chance that a COVID vaccine will trigger the same. But crucially, that's a problem with a new vaccine being new and has absolutely nothing to do with delivery method. The good news is that if there is an autoimmune risk in introducing the CoV-2 S protein, we might be able to do genetic screening for it. And that's already way more than we can hope for with most diseases. New vaccine requires due diligence. Due diligence is given, at least, in US and EU. Going broad with vaccine will give us the missing data, and while there's going to be some risk, it's generally lower than risk of getting sick by orders of magnitude based on data we already have. Crucially, if we'll need to modify the mRNA that goes into vaccine for other strands of the virus, we will not need to re-test the whole thing. We will, by that point, have high confidence in the method. Some people think that having to wear a mask is erasing their personal freedoms. That is the exact reactionary attitude because of which we are in this excrements right now. I don't care what risks people want to take with their own health and well-being. That guy who was building steam rockets and found out the hard way that you should test your parachutes? I salute him. He knew the risks and he made sure that nobody but himself would get hurt. But anybody who can't act responsibly towards other people's health? They shouldn't have a say. Personal freedoms end where you start taking freedom from others, and people have the right to be healthy. Refusing to vaccinate is stripping away that right from others. Freedom to refuse a vaccine is not worth the LIFE it can cost of another person. Quarter of a million deaths from COVID have been reported so far in US alone. These are primarily immuno-compromised and elderly who would not benefit from vaccine directly. Majority of these deaths are preventable with a vaccine, however, if everyone else takes it. The 95% effectiveness we're seeing right now is enough to completely stop the spread of the virus. Freedom to refuse vaccination on personal conviction is not worth quarter of a million lives. You'll have to come up with something better than that. And COVID is pretty mild as far as diseases we have vaccination against. Do you want to throw in numbers for Polio and Small Pox, which have been all but eradicated with vaccination? Tuberculosis and people dying of consumption ring any bells? This is no longer a problem because vaccination against these things was not looked at as an option, but rather a requirement. And we're now living in a world where many people don't need to be vaccinated against these things, because there is no risk of catching the disease. Freedom not to have to worry about a disease is a much more important one than right to object to injection based on ignorant belief.

I kind of hope not. I can't imagine anything they can put in will be remotely satisfying. Maybe a neutron star, but even that will stretch Unity's physics paper thin.

Sulfuric acid IS water. It's SO3 + H20, and all it takes to separate them out is a bit of heat. Sulfuric acid is unstable at temperatures above 300°C. At 24.8m/s², though? It's survivable short term for sure, and a healthy human will be able to walk around with effort, but I kind of suspect long-term health will be a problem. And launching from that altitude? Even how? You need something like 90km/s to make low orbit from 5bar altitude. I don't think we have a theoretical proposal for a type of engine that can achieve this ascent. Yeah, you can have a high altitude way-station, but that's probably where most of your facilities will end up, then. If you really want to stick around gas giants, you want to stay high in atmosphere, where you still have a chance of reaching orbit, and then there is just no reason to go with Jupiter, as Saturn gives you all the same things at comfortable gravity and much cheaper ascent to orbit. From upper atmosphere it's about 43-ish km/s for Jupiter and 25-ish for Saturn. The later is still excessive, but I can at least picture some ways to achieve it without going total sci-fi.

I wouldn't think so, but then I wouldn't have called them taking so long to get it the first time around. Even looking at Pfizer vs Moderna vaccines, both are using basically the same delivery mechanism, but they have very different manufacturing and storage requirements. Notably, Pfizer's vaccine has to be stored at way lower temperatures, making distribution complicated, but they can apparently make a lot more of it? Point is, it seems to be more complicated than it sounds, and it doesn't sound all that simple, so I don't really know. That's how it usually works, especially with diseases that aren't particularly threatening to children - you catch it a few times in childhood, and then you have a much better immune response to new strands as you grow older. But given that this is a new virus, we don't really know what the long term effect is going to be. Best we can do is handle the immediate emergency, break the pandemic, and then see what other adjustments we have to make in the future. You're not deciding for your body, though. You're deciding for everyone you're coming in contact with. Vaccination doesn't provide full immunity, and even if it did, for most vaccines, there are people with adverse reactions who can't have them. That means a person who refuses vaccination may infect an individual who had no choice in the matter, and at that point, personal freedoms end and social responsibility begins. You wouldn't accept, "It's my car," argument for driving without a license, and you shouldn't accept "my body" argument for refusing vaccination. Precisely because it's not just their body that's at risk.

It's not as much about rate of mutation as what mutates. Immune system targets specific sites on specific proteins of specific viruses. If that portion of a protein happens to be fairly arbitrary to the function of the virus, that site may quickly mutate with subsequent generations of that virus. But if it's critical to the way the virus works, it can be impossible for enough mutations to happen at once to produce something distinct enough for virus to be undetected, but also still allowing virus to function. And all that a vaccine does is give your immune system some target practice, so that it can learn to identify the virus before that virus has been introduced to the system. There are different ways to do that, however. One of the simplest is to take virus, shine some UV on it or even just heat the vial to kill it, and then inject it as is. In that case, you don't really have a lot of say on what the immune system will focus on, but it will be very similar to how the immune system will learn from a real virus. On the exact opposite side of the spectrum are vaccine like what's being developed for coronavirus. Instead of giving you actual virus or any part of it, you are injected with some delivery mechanism for a strand of RNA containing the code for one of the proteins from the virus. In case of COVID vaccines, specifically the S protein that makes up spikes on the virus that coronaviruses get their name from. Your body then produces copies of that protein, which is harmless on its own, but your immune system still learns to identify it as a foreign substance and to create antibodies for it. With this method, we get to chose which protein the immune system learns to recognize, and that can be advantageous. Unfortunately, spike proteins are most definitely a subject to mutation, but with viruses that have a lipid layer, there isn't a whole lot of a choice. Influenza virus is similar in that way. So yeah, CoV-19 is likely to mutate resulting in us having to update the vaccines. Fortunately, once we've sorted out the delivery method, updating the RNA strand that codes for a specific variant of the spike is pretty quick. And it does look like COVID doesn't spread quite as easily as Influenza does, so even if we'll only be able to tackle a fraction of the strands in any given year, similar to influenza, we should be able to avoid such dramatic outbreaks. But just like influenza, COVID isn't going to go completely away with a vaccine.

They just stole my idea. This is from back when I taught physics labs. Yes, phone cameras sucked back then.

Every atmosphere is a little different due to composition, but the general trends are similar, and you can see it on the graph you posted. If anything survivable would produce enough temperature difference to give you habitable climate in atmospheres of gas giants, you'd get cooked on Earth at 1 bar. That said, keeping a large habitat warm isn't that hard, so we can still, theoretically, have cloud stations on Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Jupiter's "surface" gravity is a bit too high, so that one's out, I'm afraid. The main difference with Venus is that as stated earlier, you can briefly survive outside on Venus without protective gear, greatly increasing safety of any colony there, and there are ways of making Venus colony self-sufficient in the long run, because as hellish as surface conditions are, robotic mining isn't completely out of question, and you only need a balloon to lift cargo from surface to the colony. There's also plenty of sulfuric acid at lower altitudes, which can be reprocessed into water. In contrast, gas/ice giants are unlikely to be good for anything other than satisfying our scientific curiosity.

You guys are all wrong. A sim is the collective term for the constraints solver and integrator, as well as prediction miss correction for an on-line game, inside the physics engine of pretty much any game. Or maybe it's just one of these words that changes meaning depending on context. But I prefer to just say you're all wrong, because that makes me feel better about myself.

Yeah, but KSP cockpits seem to be in good shape for that. There are a few controls that aren't represented that you'd probably need, and it'd take a few days of code to make it possible to interact with all the controls in VR. But overall, it's in a very good shape, and I can see someone taking this on as a small side project. It's also why I mentioned doing this as "experimental" feature, as supporting stuff like that usually eats a lot more resources than implementation. Likewise, you need some minimal VR UI to get to the cockpit, but I don't think it needs to be anything fancy. So long as we don't expect it to be convenient and fully playable in all situations, it can be clobbered together with minimal effort. Honestly, I would almost expect modders to pick up most of the slack. We really just need a way to run the game in VR mode.

Yeah... "Shouldn't" would have been a better word there.

There isn't a reason why this can't be allowed; after all, there are struts. But there are some reasons for why it's not done in KSP and why they might not change that in KSP2. With exception of struts and fuel lines, all parts in a craft are arranged into a tree. That is, every part has a unique parent, which has its own parent, and so on until you get to the root part. This creates a unique path from any part to the root. In turn, this allows for a number of simplifications. Resource logic likely started out entirely using this tree structure. Even with fuel lines, the way the tank vs fuel line priority system worked, it effectively worked back along the tree. Modern implementation of fuel consumption is more balanced, so it might not strictly depend on the tree, but I bet it still uses it for optimization. Technically speaking, not a requirement for KSP2, depending on how they chose to manage fuel. Stresses distributed around loops are generally bad for numerical stability. That's at least partially solved, because, again, struts, so might not be a factor for KSP2, but it certainly used to be a big part of the problem. It's very easy to edit the craft. If you pick up a part, everything attached to that part moves. If you have 3 parts attached to each other in a circle and you selected one to move, it's not clear what your intention is - to move one part or all three. Though, that can be worked around with a different UI for assembling parts. Perhaps, most relevant, logic for keeping track of what still constitutes a single craft. This is relevant if a part breaks or if there is staging. In general, if you allow parts to connect any which way, process of figuring out if two parts are still part of the same craft is a bit complicated. So you'd have to do a lot of expensive checks any time there's destruction or stage separation. For reasonable sized craft and with single separation events it's not so bad, but if you think framerates get bad for big rockets during a crash now... Having parts connect in a tree solves this problem. Two parts are on the same craft if they share an ancestor. It's a very quick check. And when staging happens, part to one side of the stage separator becomes a root of a new craft, and everything down that branch is removed from original craft. Simple, clean, easy to maintain.* That last point is the reason I would expect KSP2 to keep this design. In light of that, I propose an alternative solution. Allow us to hide struts. If you simply arrange parts into the shape you want and hold them with struts, then make struts invisible, it gives you the same visuals that you wanted with all the structural strength you wanted, while the game gets to keep the simple logic of tree traversal. * A caveat worth mentioning is docking. When you dock to a station, the docking port of one craft or the other has to become a new root for that craft, so that after the attachment, it makes up a branch of the new, combined tree. Fortunately, trees can always be re-rooted. And you might have noticed that we even have a widget for it in the VAB that does the same thing. I don't actually know what's the logic on picking which craft gets re-routed during docking, and whether the new root persists after you undock, but either way, even here we see trees being cleverly utilized to simplify game logic.

Neat thing about Unity is that standing up VR support is a snap. I really wouldn't expect the entire game to be playable in VR, but a mode that lets you fly ships you've already built in first person in VR would be really easy to put in. I'll happily take it as experimental feature without official support.

Imagine that there are two rubble pile asteroids orbiting out of plane. They collide and produce a bunch of shrapnel. All that new shrapnel has alignment closer to the average of the two. Eventually that shrapnel becomes part of new rubble pile asteroids. Over enough collisions, everything converges to the plane of predominant angular momentum. A billion years is a lot of time.

Temperature isn't related to energy, but rather changes in energy. Consequently, just knowing that object A has more energy than object B doesn't tell you anything about their relative temperatures. Temperature is a bit of an abstract quantity in physics. The fact that it's measurable is almost absurd. Fundamentally, the idea of temperature comes from the fact that if you bring two objects in contact, one of them might start taking energy from the other, and that will continue until some sort of equilibrium is achieved. We say that the object that gives up energy is hotter than the object that receives energy. And that's sort of it. This might sound extremely underwhelming, and it would be entirely so, except that there are two more observations you can make. First, this relationship is well ordered. If A is hotter than B and B is hotter than C then A is always hotter than C. If you just think about objects exchanging heat through random interaction at whatever interface, this isn't an obvious quality at all. But it holds, and is absolutely crucial for all of thermodynamics to work. The second is that energy that is being exchanged, which we call heat energy, is related to the measure of disorder in the system, which is entropy. I'm skipping centuries of physicists literally going insane, but what it really comes down to is that the change in heat energy is proportional to the change in entropy, and the proportionality constant is monotonic with the above relation ordering of temperatures. That is, without loss of generality, we can say that this proportionality constant is the temperature, write down dQ = T * dS, and this T is the thing we're measuring when we measure temperature. Which should immediately lead you to asking how the *bleep* a thermometer measures THAT? And that's a bit of a lengthy lecture and just small part of the reason why thermodynamics and statistical mechanics are the most underappreciated fields of physics. Add to that the fact that we learned how to measure temperature long before we learned to measure atmospheric pressure, despite the later being such an obvious concept in comparison, and that the relationship between heat and entropy was derived back when people thought that heat was a kind of invisible fluid, and the question pile up a lot faster than they can be answered. Unfortunately, the math requirement to properly appreciate thermodynamics is at least at partial differential equations level, but if that doesn't scare you away, and especially if you're still in school learning that stuff, I do encourage you to pursue it. It's just way more than can be covered in a forum reply or even an entire thread.

This isn't exactly wrong, just not a great way of saying it, IMO. It makes it sound like the disk got stretched out by centrifugal forces or something like that. But it's more about things averaging out due to interactions and collisions. You start out with everything orbiting at arbitrary inclinations and that results in a lot of near misses or direct collisions. Because interactions aren't generally elastic, the difference in orbital energies and angular momentum is decreased by every interaction. Most of the matter ends up with zero angular momentum and becomes part of the sun. But because, statistically, there's going to be a predominant spin, the average isn't exactly zero. So whatever matter ends up left orbiting the star is going to have the same orientation of angular momentum, id est, form a disk. So yeah, the disk is there because of the spin, but it's more that things remained as part of the disk because of the spin, rather than original shape getting flattened into the disk because of it. The flattening itself still happens primarily due to collisions.

Would you have preferred UX designers helped write the physics simulation? Or do you prefer not hiring any until the core is finished, and have development literally take decades?

Such is the life of UI/UX designers. Almost all of their work is done in mockups, because there is nothing for the artists/engineers to implement until there is a mockup, and once it's implemented, there might be some tweaks here and there, but it's mostly a finished product. So we'll probably only see mockups in development updates, and then, somewhere down the line, the finished UI will be just there in a future screenshot on some entirely unrelated topic.

UI/UX is hard. Glad to see the Intercept has people who specialize in it working on making UI better. Best of luck to them.

A while ago somebody suggested possibility of rogue planets, and I've put forward idea of having to discover their location through gameplay. I think that would fit the theme a little better, as it's hard not to notice a star that's sufficiently close by to visit. But a rogue planet is pretty hard to spot even if it's relatively nearby. And it can certainly have a moon system to make it a bit more interesting.