KSK

I'll see your Barn and raise you a 'getting rid of the Round8 tank.'

It would be difficult to set up and very difficult to maintain. Any real geneticists please feel free to speak up in case I'm talking from under my hat here but, at the least, I think you would need: To ensure that your male clone possesses an identical X chromosome to your female clone and that both X chromosomes in your female clones are identical. To ensure that neither clone possesses any recessive alleles, to avoid double recessives in their offspring. The first isn't too hard, at least in principle. Somatic nuclear transfer (transfer of somatic cell nucleus into an de-nucleated egg cell) is a known technique which was used to clone Dolly the Sheep. I can imagine a more finely grained version which transfers single chromosomes although I don't have a clue about the practicalities. The second is a lot harder (I think) and would likely require extensive, and quite sophisticated, genetic engineering. Possible in principle using CRISPR or something similar but very hard (to put it mildly) in practice. The main problem is that even if you could set up a true-breeding population of clones, they and their offspring will inevitably accumulate mutations so, absent heroic efforts to remove those mutations, they are unlikely to remain true-breeding for many generations. According to Wikipedia: The human germline mutation rate is approximately 0.5×10−9 per base pair per year. That's an astonishingly low rate but even so, each individual in your clone population will be picking up one or two mutations per year and it's vanishingly unlikely that each person will pick up the same mutations.

Some thoughts on this. Biomineralization, i.e. the formation of metal crystals or inorganic materials is well known in a whole range of species. The obvious examples are bone or shells but bacteria do interesting things with other metals. Generating small amounts of power shouldn't be a problem. Mitochondria are effectively tiny biological storage batteries, and provided you didn't go into too much detail, I don't think that using the electron transport proteins in mitochondria to build a battery for your implants would be a crazy hand-wave. I would have any computer circuitry be based on neural tissue - again, making use of structures that DNA can already produce. Making complex circuitry out of metal parts would probably be a whole lot harder. Not necessarily impossible but designing a set of proteins which can a) template metal crystal formation or semiconductor crystal formation, b) deal with multiple inorganic material, and c) self-assemble into the required circuitry pattern, would be a hell of a piece of bioengineering. In general, minimizing the use of metal parts, in favor of remodeling existing bony structures would probably make these implants feel more realistic. Forget about Borg style widgets sprouting from the implanted patient, and think about an unnaturally thickened eye socket. In fact, I'd imagine most of these 'implants' would augment existing biological structures, for example, additional neural tissue modules built onto the brainstem, existing glands engineered to secrete engineered hormones in response to particular stimuli, or bones reinforced with metal nanofilaments. Getting enough exogenous DNA into the right cells to create these implants is going to be a task all by itself. Gene therapy vectors are typically quite payload constrained - i.e., they can only get so much DNA into a cell. Again, best to gloss over the details, but if you want to sound a bit more authentic, you might have your patients treated with a series of vectors, groups of which are targeted to specific cells. Alternatively, the implants could be grown outside the body and then surgically implanted. The classic example of this is probably the Space Marines from Warhammer 40,000.

The best concrete is no concrete?

I’m always a bit wary when folks get all prescriptive about writing, since I doubt that any two writers have exactly the same process. Your way is certainly one way of doing it but it’s not difficult to think of counterexamples. Sometimes a widget that can do x, y, or z is central to the story - and might be the initial idea behind the story. In which case, figuring out some ground rules about how the widget works might be a sensible place to start (for consistency if nothing else) and might be a way of coming up with those interesting complications to add to the story. Likewise (and here I have personal experience), general worldbuilding can be the framework that makes the story and holds it together. It’s not necessarily something that’s just painted on at the end. I do agree that there’s a point at which it’s probably more useful to just present the reader with ‘a widget that does x’ rather than bombarding them with screeds of technobabble to justify it. Where that point is, is harder to define.

A genuine Weegee board would have a bottle of rotgut moving around and pointing to the letters. Most commonly used letters, in no special order are U, F, K, and C. For those that don’t know, a Weegee is one local nickname for a Glaswegian, or somebody hailing from the fair Scottish city of Glasgow. Surprisingly, it’s not a particularly insulting nickname.

I have no interest in multiplayer for all sorts of reasons, none of which I can be bothered to expand on here. Although I've never been traumatized by a multiplayer computer game. These days it's very simple. Computer games are what I play when I want to get the heck away from people for a while, and I don't find that my computer gaming time is any less meaningful as a result. For social gaming, I prefer board games or tabletop RPGs. Currently playing in two D&D campaigns (both played on a virtual tabletop) and DMing a third (played around an actual table with real clicky-clacky math rocks).

This rocket ain’t gonna suck so it’s no good as a hoover. It does make the world’s most epic leaf blower though.

I’m going for 1d8+3 weeks. I’m a dungeon master and the dice never lie.

Given how long it took KSP1 to acquire anything approaching a consistent art direction, I don't feel that this is anything to pillorize Nate about at all. Likewise, for the 'scapegoat' comment later on in this thread, if I were working for Intercept, I would be far more inclined to put in the hours for a boss who's prepared to stand up, take one for the team, and deal with the brickbats from the community. There may be other reasons to criticize Nate but those are not. Mind you, you couldn't pay me enough to deal with anything remotely community-facing in the games industry. Perhaps I'm just jaded by Steam forums and other assorted wastes of time and electrons masquerading as official forums, but it seems to me that developers are almost universally damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Nah - sounds a bit strange to me. It’s been a trying week though so I’m likely up side down and bottom over top.

I can’t speak for anyone else but personally, whilst I really enjoyed learning to play KSP1; once I’d gotten to the point where I could do most things in space (maybe not elegantly or efficiently but I could do them), then the actual game got rather dull. My first successful Mun landing was straight up one of my best gaming experiences ever, but I never really got the itch to go land on any of Jool’s moons. Likewise landing a probe on Duna was fun and satisfying but I never really got the urge to land Kerbals there too. I think a lot of the problem for me is that there never seemed to be much to do once I landed somewhere. Hop out, click buttons to gather science, maybe deploy an ALSEP-a-like once I had Breaking Ground. And then what? Hop back in the lander and go home? Sure I could try building surface bases - I certainly built my share of space stations but, in the vanilla game at least, they were mostly empty ornaments. TL: DR - I just didn’t find a pure sandbox experience as fun as I thought I would. On the other hand I’ve played games where the player base demanded (loudly and at great and tedious length) ‘zero to hero’ style progression which seemed to me to take out all the fun parts of the game and replace it with pointless grind. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

That’s fair too. And, on reflection, depending what other mods you’ve got installed and whether they integrate with life support at all (I’m thinking RoverDude’s colonisation mods in KSP1 here), I can see life support being an obvious one to drop with KSP2 at its current stage of development.

Fair play if you don’t like life support mods but: KSP2 will be apparently be including a mechanism for automated supply runs. I can’t think of an obvious reason why that couldn’t have been used to ship life support supplies around the system. As soon as you get beyond a very basic rocket, then almost every gameplay feature is a part tax in KSP (1 or 2) Need a bigger fuel tank but haven’t unlocked the next size up? Pay that part tax and add another small tank to the stack. Heat management - part tax in the form of radiators and heat shields. Power Management - part tax in the form of batteries, solar panels, fuel cells, etc. Science - part tax in the form of numerous instruments. Communications - part tax in the form of antennas. Again - I have no beef with not liking a particular feature, but using ‘part tax’ as a justification for that dislike seems like a flimsy excuse.

I think concerns about life support being too complex for new players are vastly overstated and, frankly, a bit patronizing. Life support is not a difficult concept: Living crew need resources to stay alive. Resource storage is a part that can be added to rocket. Resources are consumed and turned into waste. Other parts can be added to rocket to recycle waste back into resources. That pretty much sums up any life-support model that I've seen for KSP, although they obviously differ in the numbers of resources and waste products being tracked and the number of optional widgets for converting waste back into resources. Anyone who's ever played any game genre which requires resource management* will have dealt with way more complicated logistic chains than that. And I'd say that some of those genres (crafting and/or survival, for example) are considerably more popular than KSP1 or KSP2, so there's a large pool of potential newbies who wouldn't have any problems with life support at all. Besides, if there is any doubt about life support being too complicated, then surely that's what the much vaunted tutorial system is for. TL: DR. If you can remember to bring along a heat shield to avoid burning up on reentry, a parachute to stop you hitting the ground too hard, batteries and solar panels to keep your spacecraft powered, and whatever propellants you need to make that spacecraft go faster in the right direction, then I fail to see what's so impossibly hard about bringing along a box of supplies and a recyclowidgetron 3000 (or whatever) to make more supplies. * and arguably that would include real time strategy games. Mine ore, extract vespene gas, use different quantities of each to make buildings, then use buildings plus different quantities of ore and gas to make troops. Or start with ore and wood and gold. Whatever. The point is, if you can deal with that, I'm pretty damn sure you can deal with a highly abstracted life-support system in KSP.

People dumped millions into Theranos despite their due diligence folks coming back and telling them to stay the heck away because the technology was never going to work. Fear of missing out is a powerful force for generating stupid decisions.

Inspired by @K^2’s molten copper example, I thought it would be entertaining to look up a more extreme real-world example - the Large Hadron Collider beam dump system. Aka, how do you safely absorb 350 MJ of energy packed into a few nanograms of protons travelling at relativistic speeds? Like this. “Each beam dump absorber consists of a 7m long segmented carbon cylinder of 700mm diameter, contained in a steel cylinder, comprising the dump core (TDE). This is water cooled, and surrounded by about 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump is housed in a dedicated cavern (UD) at the end of the transfer tunnels (TD).“ Edit. Whilst 350 MJ is certainly a non-trivial amount of energy, it’s pretty small beer compared to the amounts of energy that get bandied around these threads. As soon as antimatter annihilation enters the discussion you can basically (at least for a rough comparison) square that number and multiply by the mass of antimatter annihilated. Then double the result for good measure.

With sufficient time, energy, and patience - new planets. Smush asteroids together, head out to Oort Cloud and round up a few stray icy bodies, aim icy bodies at smushed together asteroids.

Bit of a change of subject but I figured some folks around here might find this interesting. We finally have proof of active volcanoes on Venus | Ars Technica

You haven’t found it yet? You’re making me nerv-ous… And on a more serious note, I think @silent_prtoagonist and possibly others further upthread, had it spot on. Discussing relative part balance in Sandbox seems a bit premature.

Ohhh - go do a search for threads started by Whackjob in the KSP1 forum, for a masterclass in utterly insane designs. There are implausibly large rockets. There are rockets that are so large that Jeb would think twice about strapping himself to them… Then there are Whackjob rockets. For when lift-off is too hard and it’s easier to just push that inconvenient planet out of the way.

I agree that it was a lost opportunity and, like yourself, I'm not sure why they did it. Newcomers to the game wouldn't have known any better and judging by the number of Gas Giant II threads I've seen over the years, I think there was an appetite for an expanded Kerbol system from the current player base. Personally, I would have preferred Intercept to ditch interstellar travel and massively expand the Kerbol system to provide new places to visit. You only have to look at the real life solar system to see the diversity of celestial bodies that a single star system can contain. But that ship has sailed.

It's that red Lego analogy you made earlier, I think. Sure, you can deliberately avoid cheesing your way around a game mechanic using timewarp but then you're back to applying internal constraints rather than playing the game.

Well I suppose that's one way of looking at it but let me offer you a personal counterexample from playing KSP1. This was a good few years ago now, so I can't remember what I did or didn't try and I'm not looking for a troubleshooting session here. I was trying to build a very early tier plane, probably to knock over a few contracts. Long story short, I could not get that thing to fly for love or money. However I set up the centre of lift / centre of mass, whatever I did with the undercarriage, that plane would veer off to one side, sooner or later a wing would hit tarmac, and that would be all she wrote. I never did figure out whether the problem was my design, a build problem (parts not quite symmetrical or undercarriage not quite vertical, maybe?), or a bug. I do remember giving up, not with a pleasant sense of motivation to keep iterating through the 10,000 ways that weren't going to work (to paraphrase Mr. Edison) until I found an answer, but with a sense of 'well that's three hours of my life I'm not getting back.' TL: DR. I found the whole design, build, fly, fail, iterate, thing to be really damn annoying when I couldn't tell if I was actually failing or just being defeated by a bug.

If you’re getting in a knot about the realism of putting jet fuel through an NTR in KSP1 then boy have I got bad news for you about KSP2. Anyhow, back on topic. I haven’t bought KSP2 yet because a) I’m not much interested in more sandbox play, even in a prettier sandbox and b) likely performance (or lack of) on my current computer. From what I’ve read about the plans for KSP2 , Colonies are probably going to be the make or break feature for me. I don’t care about multiplayer full stop and I’m not excited about interstellar travel - quite the opposite in fact. So, if setting up and running colonies in the Kerbol system looks like being fun in its own right then I’m probably in - assuming that performance gets a boost. If colonies are just skimped over as a stepping stone to the ‘real gameplay’ of interstellar travel, then that’s going to be a harder sell for me. I’m really not fussed about ‘building cool rockets’ just for the sake of it.