K^2

You absolutely can describe interactions from coordinate system of interaction particle. In case of electromagnetic interactions, that yields light cone coordinates, and it's a useful tool in particle physics. But again, considering particle nature of interactions is entirely unnecessary. If you were still stuck in late 19th century and only understood electrostatics as an effect of electric potential, if somebody came to you and explained to you special relativity, you'd be able to derive magnetic force from it. And in fact, the full set of Maxwell's equations.

I don't disagree with the problem, but I don't think above would solve it either. By the same token, what sounds like "plain voice" to one person will sound "uninspired and phoned in" to another. To be clear, I don't expect any intelligible VA over a Kerbal talking. Kerbals should continue speaking Kerbish with subtitles if necessary. But a voice behind the screen might be good in tutorials not only as framing, but for accessibility as well. Some people might have hard time focusing on mission and reading text at the same time, and pausing to read text isn't always great. With that in mind, there ought to be some decent compromise on the voice. And hey, maybe you're right that none of the prominent KSP YouTubers would fit the bill, simply because there aren't that may of them. My point was more along the lines that I don't think that'd have anything to do with them being YouTubers.

How about ShadowZone, then? I know, I know, you said high pitch, but does it really have to be? I think ShadowZone's intonations fit with the theme. And then there's his infamous, "Again!" which is a catch phrase far more likely to be followed by typical KSP player than Scott's, "Fly safe."

How is this different from literally any other VA? Or are you just against having voiced narration in KSP2 in general?

That's going too far down the sci-fi route, IMO. KSP2 has some tech planned for it that's speculative at best, but black holes as gateways may as well be magic portals.

The example you quoted immediately after talking about 0.1c is GPS satellites, which, first of all, travel at 0.000014c, and secondly, require a larger correction for Earth's gravity than their orbital speed. Clocks on the GPS satellite actually run faster than on Earth, not slower. The reason I brought up electricity is because it is the most extreme example of relativistic effects at low speeds, and it highlights that using an arbitrary cutoff point, like 0.1c, is absurd. But the GPS example proves exactly the same point. It just has an inconvenience of having to deal with General Relativity, meaning working out the correction is actually far, far beyond the kind of math that has been discussed in this topic. The idea that Newtonian physics starts breaking down at a specific threshold is absurd. Newtonian physics is a model. A way to make an estimate. And whether or not it is going to be good enough depends on the purpose. 4km/s is too fast for Newtonian physics to be good enough for GPS, sure. But also 4m/s is too fast for Newtonian physics to be good enough for a length of wire, so big woop. At the same time, if I use classical Rocket formula, derived from Newton's laws, to estimate quantity of nukes I need to get an Orion-style NPP to 0.4c, I'll still be off by a smaller factor than variance I'm likely to get from detonation to detonation. So Newtonian physics is perfectly good here. To once again repeat the obvious, relativity is relative. There is no specific point at which Newtonian physics stops making sense if it ever did. If you want to show that something's moving too fast for us to do Newtonian computations for, you'll have to do the work with relativity taken into account and then show that the error is too high for particular purpose. If you want to show something for a particular trip between stars, work it out and show that you have to take relativity into account. Don't just quote an absolutely pointless threshold that has nothing to do with anything.

Antimatter will react instantly and destructively with absolutely any matter in its proximity. Even entire star system consisting of antimatter isn't plausible, because interstellar space isn't empty enough.

Oh yeah. A tiny leak in your suit will cause instant frostbite. You want to be extremely well insulated on Titan. In addition, your suit will need to have layers with very different properties. Materials that are suitable for internal layers would freeze and shatter if they are used for external layers, while materials that can still remain flexible on the outside of the suit would turn into putty or liquid on the inside. Which does mean that getting into and out of such a suit is somewhat problematic. The only place other than Earth where you can go outside briefly without a protective suit and survive is upper atmosphere of Venus, about 60km above surface. Depending on exact elevation, both temperature and pressure are comparable to what you'll find on Earth, either a bit above or a bit bellow comfortable. You will want to hold your breath and take a shower immediately after, because you'll get some sulfuric acid on you, but it's still far better than anywhere else in the Solar System. If you wanted to establish a habitat, you'll just need a thin plastic film between you and the environment to keep you safe. If there's a tear, you'll have time to locate it and fix it with some tape. And if you need to go outside to do repairs, a light hazmat suit with a rebreather and oxygen tank can have you set for hours. The only serious problems are lack of firmament to build on and difficulty in obtaining any resources you can't extract from atmosphere. That still leaves it more hospitable than surface of any body except Earth.

Yes, with caveats. The orbit would be stable, the habitable zone wouldn't be. Giant stars evolve rapidly, and habitability of a particular region can change over hundreds of thousands to tends of millions of years, which is nowhere near enough to establish a stable biosphere. Main sequence stars, like our Sun, evolve over billions of years, in contrast. In addition, blue giants will generate way too much radiation for planet to truly be habitable, despite the fact that it's in habitable zone, and red giants are going to be ejecting a lot of matter, blowing away atmosphere of any terrestrial planet in habitable zone. A planet might be briefly genuinely habitable during a yellow giant phase of a massive star. In short, stable orbit in habitable zone yes, but actually habitable - unlikely, and certainly not capable of life evolving on such a planet, based on everything we know. Edit: Actual extents of habitable zone will depend on spectral type. Habitable zone.

Just so long as it's not Soylent Green.

I'm fairly confident the interstellar distances are going to be shrunk even more so than planets themselves. Sol is in fairly sparse part of the galaxy, so it wouldn't even be all that unrealistic for Kerbol to have closer neighbors. At a guess, we might be looing at 0.1ly as a target, which is reasonable for Orion-style craft, just so long as we can have full acceleration under time warp. But yeah, an antimatter photon drive or a black hole drive would do a lot better, and at least the antimatter drive has been hinted at. I'm just saying that if we have to have an interstellar voyage, perhaps with unmanned probes, to get enough science to unlock that sort of tech, I wouldn't be upset.

I don't think they meant the second image. And on that one it looks like an in-game render, but the sky is just completely unimplemented, using a solid color instead.

Yeah, little blog posts would be nice to have, but you have to keep in mind that this is significantly more effort than Nate grabbing a few screenshots and posting them on the forum. When the game is on sale, especially in Early Access, the (potential) players are the customer. So it makes sense for developers to spend significant effort to keep their customers happy. Right now, Intercept's customer is Private Division, not us. So Intercept's first priority is keeping the project moving, second, keeping Private Division updated, third is their own team, and only somewhere after that keeping the fans updated. That's why I don't think it's fair to expect something more significant than a screenshot every once in a while.

They took the elevator.

They'll probably start entering end-of-life. Right now, there's still an opportunity to release a major update with a DLC for KSP and it will sell. Once KSP2 is out, it will be far more profitable to work on DLC for KSP2, and so they'll probably wind down KSP support. But some small bug fixes might still happen from time to time, especially, since Squad still owns work on KSP.

Not trying to sound antagonistic, but what do you expect them to post? Print outs from unit tests of core systems? They very clearly don't have a working game yet. Even if they are making progress on, say, aerodynamics simulation, I suspect anything complex explodes from acute case of Kraken, based on what we've seen so far. So it's kind of hard to show off exactly what they're doing there unless it's something with pretty pictures. And having each department find something they can work on until they get unblocked on something else is quite common. A designer waiting until rockets are stable to begin work on anything less critical would be just wasting time. There's no reason why they wouldn't be working on UI for something as potentially trivial as kerbal mood. Finally, the latest batch of pretty pictures is actually showing that they are doing significant rendering and material work, which is great to see. That means their rendering engineers and tech art are busy with exactly the sort of things they should be working on right now. There's still a lot of work there to be done, but it's being worked on. So I don't see a reason to suspect that teams working on core are somehow doing worse just because their work doesn't result in things that are easy to tease on a forum.

I didn't realize that being a home owner qualifies me as an expert in absolutely every product out there. I'm going to ask for a raise! Seriously, though. That's the problem with consumerism. People start to think that just because they buy things, they somehow have any sort of valuable experience in evaluating anything but the finished product. To know how things are made and to be able to evaluate a process of making things you need to have experience in actually making things. Shocking concept, I know. And it helps to have experience making the very thing being discussed. I'm going to have a lot better understanding of how cars are manufactured than any random person with extensive experience of ordering various cars, but I would still defer to somebody from that industry if their advice is available. Again, being weary of promises is one thing. That's good sense. But if you aren't prepared to take advice from people who actually work in the field and aren't financially motivated in selling you something, then you aren't even being a good consumer.

Side note, I'm a little upset that this is state of the art for grass. Not a dig against Intercept, anyone else using SpeedTree grass, or even SpeedTree themselves. It's actually pretty impressive what they do with the technique. I'm just upset there isn't a better technique. Rasterized grass always looks bad up close, and the transition to lower LOD is very noticeable, so you only get a great looking grass somewhere in the middle.

No argument there. Even against static targets, say a bunker, it's hard to score a direct hit with something like this. China has tested sub-orbital KKVs that they claim can hit an aircraft carrier with a double digit percentage chance. But that's a much, much larger target, and I'm not sure there is nearly as much plasma interference on ballistic trajectories they are using. Even then, they need a volley of 3-5 to score a hit reliably enough to use in combat, so hitting a tank from orbit seems... yeah. But it's hard for me to say if there are any real limits on precision that aren't just more engineering problems. It wouldn't shock me if that gets solved eventually.

In terms of gameplay, colonies as integral element of exploration, multiple star systems, rather than just the two, physics overhaul for the rockets, a more coherent replacement for career mode, and I'm pretty sure multiplayer was just an idea and only became a feature post E3 hype the game got. In terms of visuals, dense biome-specific procedural placements (vegetations, rocks, etc.), PBR, atmospherics, reflections, and based on this trajectory I expect virtual texturing and dynamic tessellation for terrain or something similar. To be clear, some of these things would happen regardless, but based on changes in schedule and reqs, they are pushing across the board. Some of these things were already promised very early on following the reveal, but given some mixed messaging, it's pretty clear these were new goals, and not yet reflected in the planned release date. I'll give you the second part. I do hope Intercept leadership cares about this game as much as fans do, and there is every indication that they do. All of the interviews with creative director show passion for what they are making. It's hard to fake. But ultimately, these are human beings, and I do simply hope it's true. But your claim that I'm taking anything on faith is entirely without merit. I've contributed to several modding projects before I actually switched career tracks from academia to industry. Since then, I've shipped two major titles and contributed to numerous others. I have worked with teams that make mobile games, contributed to a well-established long running MMO, and even worked on a title that got canceled several years into development. And then there are friends and colleagues who've worked on a myriad of other titles. Game industry tends to be pretty secretive with the outsiders, but devs talk amongst each other very openly. You quickly learn to recognize projects that are a dumpster fire from these that can do alright. Earlier in the year, there have been a lot of red flags with team transition. I consider these mostly resolved. Nobody can anticipate a hit in this business, but I'm not seeing the signs of project heading for disaster in this case, and that tends to be a good indicator. So how about yourself? What sort of wealth of experience and facts unknown to the rest of us are you basing your claims on?

If it was traveling at mach 10? Not very well.

Doesn't generally work this way. You don't have gameplay engineers write your MP. There's an overlap, of course, and there are some common resources in production and QA regardless, but by the time it gets to the studio scale and over duration of the project, it really comes down to cost of the project. And it's not an either-or proposition. Developers budget out what the core is going to require and what any add-on features would require in terms of costs. The core game has to be built either way, and it will be budgeted for either way. Then the decision is made on any additional feature. Somebody upstairs decided that having multiplayer in KSP2 would generate enough additional sales to be worth the investment, and so additional resources have been allocated by publisher specifically to make this happen. So if multiplayer wasn't happening, it doesn't mean the rest of the game would be getting more resources. The budget of the whole game would be smaller, because they'd take out the cost of multiplayer from the total. And once the game is underway, because working on multiplayer is such a distinct task, you won't have resources transferred over one way or another outside of any all-hands-on-deck bug fixing sprints. And in terms of QA and bug fixes, I'm pretty sure if it comes to it, Intercept will prioritize core. In fact, I somewhat expect multiplayer to be buggy, limited, or completely disabled on release and fixed with patches. I'll be pleasantly surprised if it's not, but you're right that it's technically an optional feature, and the first to take the fall for the team if there will be significant time pressure.

This is just speculation, but it's based on my experience in the industry. Original plan for KSP2 was basically a remake of KSP with a graphics update and a few new features, like having interstellar built in and adding colonies. That was a very reasonable project for the original schedule that was given to us during the 2019 E3. Based on everything we've heard from the creative director since, I'm guessing he and some other people within Star Theory were already pushing for a larger vision for the game. Success of KSP2 presentation at E3 gave them leverage to start negotiations about expanding the scope. This is where things get hazy. I don't know whether Private Division just got greedy, or Star Theory leadership was unreasonable, but negotiations broke down, PD pulled KSP license from Star Theory and started Intercept. I don't know enough to even guess at whether that was the right decision, but it was certainly handled very poorly, both in terms of how it was communicated to Star Theory and to the community. Either way, transition of development from Star Theory to Intercept was going to result in guaranteed delays, but it looks like Intercept was still trying to salvage the original schedule with expanded scope. That was a bad idea and clearly didn't work. They needed to step back, completely rescope the game to the new vision and available resources, and build a new schedule with a more realistic timeline. Looking at the current schedule, I think that was finally done. Things Intercept are saying they're planning to do and the timeline finally match up. The progress they are showing is consistent with where they should be on this new schedule, which is early production. Does it mean that we're done with delays? Unlikely. But they've just said 2022 for now, and they're probably aiming for late summer early fall, and it's probably going to slip to late fall or holiday season. That's quite normal for the scope and the fact that they're effectively in early production now. Intercept is owned by Take Two, so I don't expect more politics to get in the way, and the project they're working on isn't exactly revolutionary, so I don't anticipate great technical difficulties to sabotage the production. Short of disaster, I think the game's more or less on track now. And yes, more transparency on all of this would be great, but talking about this delay in more detail and explaining why they're rescoping would require talking about what happened between Star Theory and Private Division, and I strongly suspect that Private Division doesn't want this talked about. But again, it sounds like all of that is out of the way now, so I see no reason why this would be a problem going forward.

I am a game developer, and Intercept's on the right track. There's a lot they're doing that you either can't do in mods, or it would be inefficient and/or inconsistent. Lighting model is getting an update it needs, they've switched to a procedural generation model that's consistent with modern expectations, and so on. There's a reason why things float with parallax mod, and it's because you'd have to go through and change a huge chunk of code that modders simply have no access to to fix that. Intercept hasn't done a high-rez pass on terrain yet, so it's hard to tell if they're aiming for that sort of fidelity, but looking at everything else, I'd guess it's on their road map. KSP is a relic at this point. Modders can keep adding features, which will inevitably be inconsistent and clash with each other, increasing overall instability, not to mention being horrible for performance. You have to rebuild the core. If any of the modders have real intention of making KSP3, as you've said, they should be making a new game. Except, I've already pointed out why being a good modder doesn't automatically make you a good developer, and even if they all happen to be good developers, you are still missing a huge chunk of project management in the mix. If you just take a bunch of modders and give them time to work on making a new game, you will not get anything good on the other side. Not without them expanding the team to include other talents, and by that point, you are talking about making a new development team with all of the problems that entails.

There's nothing quantum about magnetism. It's all Coulomb's laws + relativity. Magnets, on the other hand, they're deeply quantum, but that's another story. We're just talking about magnetic fields of current-carrying wires here.