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I stand corrected. Promise or not, I think it was a bad idea to state that goal. If saves break it’ll look like they failed to meet that goal, and if they have to do extra work or make compromises to stop them from breaking, the game will suffer. Their biggest communication problem is that they talk too much!

it's like 30 minutes into the 0.2 announcement talk iirc.

No need in billions. Thousands of influential adepts; millions of motivated expendables, ready to self-sacrifice, relevant eschatological discourse, secret plan of eternal life and/or reincarnation. Healthy and worthy like never before. Just the low-level crowd formally belongs to all religious and spiritual groups (and in 99% of cases doesn't know the very word "gnosticism"), following the p.1. The first rule of the Fight Club - you do not talk about Fight Club. No need to affect everyone. The elite is enough. Reincarnation, regeneration, thin plane existence, other bonus options for the chosen. Show them a possibility, then have a deal. P.S. Still insisting that SETI should stop sending their silly pictures, and start translating Marx's Das Kapital at the neutral hydrogen frequency. Let's hit'em first!

Oooohohohoho you know you just activated my trap card. Let's start, in no particular order, might mix and repeat things. All of below has been recorded on 23" 1080p monitor. The clutter. The various windows and instruments take a lot of screen space. This is an issue even on nearly 90% of Steam Survey users who have a 1080p screens. Here's why: Can you tell that there are three other windows hidden behind those visible? They all go over each other with no regard to other's positions, and dragging them around to find the one you need is tiresome. Especially since they are sooooo big while also having a lot of unused space inside, with tiny fonts. And while you can resize some of them, it's not what I'd call helpful: This is the maximum horizontal width of parts manager in VAB. See the issue? The thing could hold two columns and keep twice as much data on the same space. All windows should be as flexible as possible. Inconsistency, that may be long. Because for some reason, of four windows visible here, each one has a different style. The sizes, the fonts, the colors... Even the title bars are different. Some are resizeable, some aren't... And it follows throughout the entire game. On this single screenshot here I can spot at least a dozen of different fonts styles, sizes and whatnot, often within a single element. One piece of the navball has four, can you notice? Then just below that.. The fifth. Aaaaand below the navball... 3 different fonts, 3 different sizes, why on Earth is the time smaller than the altitude? The launch button has three as well, and then there's staging, also with at least three: And the flight report... Why exactly is the right half different from the left? And also, I've noticed... What's with the alignment? Two baselines? W H Y ? And even if the font happens to be the same (I like the smooth one) it comes in at least six sizes. All across one interface. That's not a very unified UI if you asked me. Minor thing but needs noting. Some switches are presented as actions, some as status. I think I'd rather also have a On/Off switch for the engine instead of a button. Engine activated: Green. Or dark if deactivated. Now, the thing I hate the most. Form over function. It's something I've dealt with before with another game (https://www.reddit.com/r/Forspoken/comments/zhdr1m/can_we_talk_how_terribly_designed_the_interface/) although this was a demo prior to release. The thing with interface, is that its most important function is being easily readable and clear to the user. Unfortunately, KSP2 isn't that. Get an average person with glasses, make them sit in front of average-sized screen at perfectly reasonable 1080p with 100% UI scale, and show them one of the fullgame screenshots above. Ask them to read the navball or time to PE or fuel consumption of a Dawn engine without leaning forward. I can't do that. And the new additions don't really help. Here's a real size orbital mode navball sphere: Lots and lots of white lines crossing each other with little to no spearation between them. And it's not the worst part. I zoomed in on the screenshot to take this, but it didn't make anything better - can you tell, at a glance, what's in the circle? I can't. I even went for a comparison with KSP1 and huh, who would've guessed... While only slightly larger (it could've been me, it's an old screenshot) and everything is clear and easy to read. Sorry to say, but KSP2 is a regression. And you had such great ideas during development: It's as clean as day and even has hints where other attitude markers are, it's glorious. And it followed on the entire interface, I believe, even with few hiccups (the LCD font in places etc) it was one of your best yet. Same with VAB. Nice, clean modern design, smooth iconography, perfect for a space age game You even had the same or very similar icons in the interface in the last 4 years, but decided to pixelify them. Shame. Please note I'm not talking about layout - it's fine with me. Forgot to mention that the iconography gets even worse in map/tracking station while zooming in or out... Good luck targeting the moon. Of course, Only fixing the scaling would help, but the smoother icons would look so much nicer. All in all, it would be for the better if the retro pixely style was gone and sent to where it belongs - in the museum. Give us the Dragon, not the Starliner (that never went anywhere) Ease of use. Deleting parts in VAB. There are few days around it, Del button, or dropping them into part picker. However, the dropping, which is what I use the most, comes with one problem. It can only be done in few places: Drop them elsewhere, and you either close the part category, or pick another part. Annoying. Better explanation or refinement of saving system. I got that fairly quickly but there are still many people who don't and have a hard time grasping the idea of workspaces. I know that what you save in VAB is a workspace (read as: a document, and it's what you're opening with editor of choice) and below that a vehicle (a page or paragraph) that you choose to launch directly from launchpad/runway. Overriding saving a document under the same name will make you lose the content saved previously, that's obvious - but not clearly explained in the game when it looks like this Save vehicle, then it shows saved vehicles, but they're not actually vehicles but workspaces... You get the idea. It's all over the place. Now onto the other thing.. That orbital info... there isn't enough info to be actually useful. And I'd rather not switch between seeing AP/PE and inclination/whateverelse. Plus relative inclination to target, angle from prograde... All those need their own space together. But I picked this particular screenshot because it has one problem - the timer ends at 6 hours (Kerbin day). If your AP/PE is more than 6 hours away because you're in very high orbit... you won't know it from there. Also, the window titles.. look like some dev variables. But I think that's it for now. More reading in: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/219151-can-we-talk-about-accessibility/ https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/220482-why-has-the-ui-to-be-so-ugly https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/210240-the-new-ui-for-ksp2-improvements-and-regressions-from-previous-concepts/ (this one is even from before release, right after EA announcement)

That isn't good. Unfortunately, until she hits rock bottom and sees the need for help, there's not much those around her can do to help. But there's a little bit of hope. Let me explain: I have PTSD, depression, and high-performing anxiety, and because they are all friends and needed a new playmate, they brought in OCD for giggles and grins. It took me to the point where nothing made sense; I was mad at myself, in the middle of another "life crisis" (I went from one of these to the other), and there was always agitation under the surface. Your sister sounds like she's close to this stage now. I am no expert in psychology, but I can tell you what I went through. Maybe this will help you understand what your sister may be thinking and feeling: The outward anger and hostility were because I felt I should better control things in my life, but I wasn't. Many things I thought were wrong in my life weren't apparent to anyone else but me. And I could not understand how they could feel things were fine when they were not. So, whenever someone would ask me why I was mad, I'd lash out rather than explain what I was going through. Why should I? In my mind, if they could not see it for themselves, what good would it do for me to explain it to them? The outward anger was also driven by seeing other people "happy, happy!" and wondering why I could not be like that. Some folks seem to have the ability to get hit in the face with a shovel (metaphorically speaking), laugh it off, get up, and go about their day, never even bothered by it. Then there was me; I was depressed, and the lack of enjoyment or the joy of a typical day just ate at my very soul. It made me even angrier and more depressed and fed the ill feelings I already had. The outward anger is also driven by being misunderstood by others. A lot of people around me had no idea what I was going through and would often say stuff that I took (because of my depression) wrong. Sure, some of it was dumb statements, such as, "Snap out of it" or "You've got so much going for you." But when you are buried in depression, your perception of those around you and perceptions about yourself -- you do not see it. All you see are those kinds of comments being critical of you. So, you resent the helpful comments and gestures, even those made in good faith. One of the best things you can do is to let her know you're there, but don't push or back so far away you become unapproachable. Buy her favorite snack food, soda, or other trinkets/gifts as an "I care" gift. It will be met with distrust, skepticism, and questions (and probably anger). But keep doing it, make it unpredictable, and be polite. Eventually, she will let you in. It will not be an easy thing to do. Her self-isolation is a part of her pain from the depression. Her acting out towards the rest of the family resembles a hurt animal striking out against its rescuer. For about four years, I volunteered for both the university's and community college's mental first aid team - and I am the faculty member that as soon as there's a report of a student thinking of suicide, I come to talk to the student. So far, there's been three occasions in the last two years to use my training, unfortunately. I'm good at it because I sank to that point in my life in 2004; I was lucky enough that a good friend kept reaching out and didn't back off, regardless of how nasty and mean I got. I am no psychoanalyst, just a guy who has lived that life. Don't hesitate to involve a family therapist, even if she doesn't go. They will give you and your parents powerful tools to deal with the situation.

Sufficiently spaced out network of individual habitats and evacuations of threatened ones. I.e. how we manage predictable disasters here on Earth right now. Hurricane heading towards Florida? Evacuate. Volcano getting ready to erupt under Grindavik? Evacuate. Asteroid on course to hit Hellas City? Evacuate. There has been a lot of talk about potential methods to deflect threatening asteroids. The problem is that all the feasible ones have to be implemented a long time before inevitability of impact becomes apparent. That means sufficient funding is unlikely to be allocated in time to be effective. Improving technology will eventually change that, but there is still a long way to go.

My sister's a nihilistic ass who hates anything to do with anything. And she is perhaps the worst person to be in a car with. And I had to be with her for two hours talking about "how we should all just kill ourselves" and "I'm too stupid to get a job". She's NOT stupid, far from it in fact, she just refused to put in the work to find opportunities and now she's taking it all out on us. Not that I can say anything. She yells at me, locks herself in her room, and then comes out an hour later with a phony apology. And then the cycle repeats. Sorry to rant to a bunch of strangers on the internet, I just feel you all are the only people I can talk about this to.

The Communotron 16 is a direct antenna. Direct antennas will only talk to ground stations or relay antennas, they cannot talk to each other. If you're trying to make a comm network, you need to use relay antennas.

I wouldn't be surprised if they never switch to CBT. I think the current system is good enough for what's needed and it clearly still has room for optimizations, rewriting it would be a big undertaking that might not even bring the expected benefits. Mortoc's essay was interesting but it shows why sometimes it's better to talk less, now everybody's expecting CBT to be delivered any day now and if they decide to drop it, people will be upset.

Why would it have the density of Kerbin? The only reason Kerbin has an absurd density is to give it the same surface gravity as Earth despite its miniscule size. The whole point of a real-sized solar system would be to not have planets made out of unealistic materials or suns that could never sustain fusion. Talk about reality! You're working from the assumption that everything has to be the same as the Kerbol system. Me and others don't—that's the whole point of other systems. In KSP1 you're forced to replace the Kerbol system with a modded version if you want something Earth-sized. For the record, personally I don't care. I see great opportunities for KSP2 for someone to introduce a modded system that has solar-system like properties without replacing what we already have but you're telling me they can't because that would break the rules you have about the Kerbal "universe?"

I already listed some examples earlier. Now you can say “Well that’s just Elon time/talk”, but the fact remains he does say these things, regardless of whether they are realistic or likely or not.

Do you expect this would happen? Seems unlikely. As for kids born there... they would be outside of law here anyway. Ask the Martian courts I guess <shrug>. I have concerns about this as well. We have no idea if Martian gravity is even safe long term. We have an N of ~78B for humans in 1g, and an N of a few hundred (times whatever the average stay in space is) for microgravity, and an N of a few days times 12 guys in 1/6g. If I were working on Mars as a plan, I'd build a space station with a couple Starships tethered, and spin them up to 0.38g and raise some animals, breed them, etc, and see how it goes. Otherwise send the human exploration teams (adults would would want to go anyway, even if just to visit), and raise animals as part of the research. The early colony dev missions build infrastructure, and raise mammals to test for bone loss, etc. This lasts enough synods to get good data before people talk about having kids on Mars. Under the assumption you are not a parent, I seriously doubt any parents would knowingly put their kids at extreme risk. So I don't see a family moving to early Mars habitats (once it's safe as airliners to get there, and decades of people living there, maybe). Choosing to have kids on Mars? Maybe some will as long as returning to Earth is an option, but if the safety of that is marginal, who would take the risk?

You are correct in that technically, society doesn't have to do anything. It can just be a way for analysts to group humans who live in the vicinity of each other and maybe say hi from time to time, but otherwise leave each other alone. But historically, society does indeed have a responsibility to protect children. This is why the whole concept of adulthood exists, because children below a certain age are not ready to do things on their own and need to be watched over by both the parents and tribe. Parents alone cannot be trusted, which is why things like Child Protective Services exist. No one under 18 can sign a waiver. Sending children to Mars would be unacceptable (see below for more explanation of this belief). As I mentioned earlier in this thread, SpaceX has said they want to skip a Mars research base and start right off the bat with a town on Mars. Given... certain aspects of human nature, this is going to result in pregnancies sooner rather than later. And yes, you can argue there will be a research base and plenty of study on how best to build a Mars city first, but that's only speculation. What we know is that SpaceX wants to build a Mars City as quick as possible to the point of proposing something as ludicrous as people living in the landed ships on the surface right off the bat. They said they wanted to catch Super Heavy with the tower equipped with "chopsticks". And they actually did it. I think I myself and anyone else who thinks SpaceX has the potential to be negligent in how they handle going about building their city are not unjustified in doing so. Why are you blowing this up to include space travel as whole? I said I didn't care if adults on research expeditions get blown up. Yes, that will continue to happen no matter what, and I don't believe there is a point in stopping just because of that. What worries me is colonization, which will entail moving people and their families, in all likelihood including children, to Mars. SpaceX is known for moving fast and breaking things, and that's fine with the lives of adults who sign waivers, but not for children, whether they launch from Earth and journey millions of miles or are born into a situation they had no choice in in a small habitat on Mars. Actually, I will back off on the children who on born on Mars. Just as it is simply nonsensical to use regulation to prevent people from being born into inhumane situations on Earth, that notion that allowing people to have children on Mars would constitute a negligence society needs to intervene in was wrong. However, I don't believe children should be allowed to be colonists insofar as there is a possibility of true negligence (negligence they could be held legally accountable for). I do think any Mars colony would involve sending families to Mars. They aren't going to just pick bachelors or 20 something year olds. They're going to want "millions" as they say, and they are going to need people with various different skills, some of which can only be gained after having lived enough of life to have had a family. I don't believe anyone would dump their family for living on Mars, and therefore would desire to bring them along. Musk doesn't really seem to like ethics, preferring efficiency, and I could see him allowing children to travel there. And then if the Mars hab explodes because of some defect brought about by a lack of care purposefully overlooked, the blood will be on our hands for having failed to prevent this. This would be as irresponsible as allowing children to participate in some exotic tourist attraction that is normally reserved for adults who can understand and sign a waiver. If Musk does indeed limit colonists to bachelors and 20 something year olds, neither without children, my concerns will be addressed. But there is no reason to believe that will be the case. I think he would value skills over demographic questions and just send whoever is willing*. Is there reason to believe Musk will send children to Mars as colonists? No, but as I said, we hold these discussions even if the scenario in question is purely hypothetical, just as we talk about the possibility of AI rising up and turning on humanity. *To illustrate this concern, let's say as part of making the city a backup for humanity, he wants to send five physicists to Mars. Maybe he finds one who is a bachelor, but if there are four others who say yes but want to bring their families, is he really going to say no?

Ah, yes "I think you're boring so let me talk about a stupid trend that's absorbing the minds of millions of children" Find better friends if that's how they treat you

Well, in a way or another, nobody has the duty to like what you are talking - you have the right to say whatever you want, but no one have the duty to listen to you. That said, annoyed people can just walk from the conversation instead of trying to make you uncomfortable on speaking. If I understood correctly, they drove you mad by mocking you instead of just telling you "I'm not interested, let's talk about something else?". There're many interpretations for this behaviour, but one possible that came to my mind is they think you are there to entertain them, and so you should talk only what they want to listen. So it's up to you to comply or not. Since you choose not to comply, IMHO the best line of action is just say "hey, I need to go to bathroom" and walk away from the group and that's it. You may be entitled to be annoyed by their behaviour, but why bother externalising it? Sincerity is a very expensive gift not be wasted on cheap people!

Ah! My bad! So this will be the "A TOGGLE BUTTON THAT CAN BE OPERATED BY THE PLAYER TO TURN ON AND OFF A FEATURE THAT IS INTENDED FOR PEOPLE WHO FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE PLAYING THE GAME WITH SOME ADDITIONAL HELP AND TRAINING" button then? But we do need to talk about the "A TOGGLE BUTTON THAT CAN BE OPERATED BY THE PLAYER TO TURN ON AND OFF A FEATURE THAT IS INTENDED FOR PEOPLE WHO FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE PLAYING THE GAME WITH SOME ADDITIONAL HELP AND TRAINING" button popup text balloon text in that case...

Envelope math time. Let's go worst case scenario here. Starship radiates no heat, reflects no heat, and has 500 square meters of area exposed to the sun. 1380W/m2 hits Starship from the sun, for a total of 690000W. The latent heat of vaporization of oxygen is 214,000J/kg, and Methane is 510,000J/kg. Oxidizer to fuel ratio is roughly 3.5, so average latent heat of vaporization is ~280,000J/kg. In this scenario where zero mitigation is taken and all of the heat hitting Starship goes towards boiling off the propellants, Starship loses about 2.5 kilograms per second. It will spend ~60% of its time in sunlight (probably a bit high, but again, worst case scenario), so a whole 129.6 tons of propellant is lost from Starship per day. Starship would have to launch nearly one refueling flight per day just to keep up with the losses, in the optimistic 150 tons to orbit reusable config (about the higher end of what has been estimated for reusable mode). This is obviously not a realistic scenario, but it highlights how conservative assumptions can lead to large estimates. Stainless steel has something like an albedo of 0.6 (60 percent reflected, 40 percent absorbed), and with the nose facing the sun at all times, the exposed surface area is about 64 square meters. This decreases the incoming power to around 36000W. Starship will also naturally radiate some heat away. LOX is about 54K, CH4 is around 90K, some of the ship isn't up against cryogens at all, but I will assume the ship's skin is at an average of 60K, conservatively low. Stainless steel's emissivity, I'm finding a large range, let's go for something conservatively low at 0.55 (values up to 0.85 are reported). Starship's surface area is about 1500m^2, it should be higher probably, but again, conservatively low. Plugging those into the Stefan-Boltzmann equation gives a radiative flux of, uh, about 600W. Not great. Radiative flux scales with temperature to the fourth power, but we still won't get nearly enough flux even raising the entire skin temperature to 110K, the upper end of methane boiling temperatures. One thing that could be done is to have a double hull for the nose cone, which is pointing towards the sun here, which is moderately well insulated from the rest of the tanks. This could even be done by just having the nose cone empty as with a normal non depot starship. The interior would be coated to reduce interior radiation transfer. This would allow the, worst case scenario, 64 square meter circle to get much hotter than the rest of the ship and radiate more effectively. The nose is conical, but I'm not sure how to do the math on that, so I'm going to take the volume of an equivalent sphere (should be roughly equal to that of a half sphere stretched by a factor of 2, but not exact). This gives a surface area of about 250 square meters. To offset the rest of the flux from solar heating, the nose would have to rise to about 260-270K. Conduction to the rear of the ship over the surface area of the very thin tank walls (let's be extremely generous and assume 5 centimeters thick taking into account internal radiation bypassing the nose shield and stringers and such) (surface area ~1.4 square meters) (90K CH4 tank immediately behind 270K nose cone) will be calculated also. The section between the tank and the nose is, what, 10 meters long on an unmodified non depot starship? The depot one may be different but the extra length helps us here. Heat getting to the fuel is now 369W, and as we found earlier, Starship radiates about 600W by itself. Even assuming it doesn't, we have reduced the boiloff, in theory, to 114kg/day. Even if I'm off by a factor of 10, just by pointing Starship in the right direction, with not that much modification, that's like a ton of fuel per day, which is well manageable. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple because the Earth is reflecting and radiating heat as well. This ends up totaling roughly 345W/m2 averaged over night and day at the surface, as the Earth is (mostly) in equilibrium, and has four times as much surface area as it does cross sectional area. If Starship is 400km up, this decreases slightly to about 305W/m2, although the atmosphere is further out than the surface so it will be a bit higher than that. Now we get into the wonderful world of materials having different reflectivities and emissivities for different wavelengths, and I'm going to handwave this and say everything is the same as it is coming from the sun. Starship is pointing at the sun, so can't really control its Earthwise orientation. Averaged over the orbit, I'm going to assume an average Earth facing cross sectional area of 300 square meters (450 is the max, 64 is the minimum, approximately at least, this whole post is filled with approximations). With the same albedo of 0.6, Starship will receive an average of 36,600W from the Earth. Due to our solar mitigations, assuming they actually work, the Earth radiation now dominates and is much more difficult to protect against. It is possible the heat shield has better radiative characteristics and could be oriented towards Earth for maximum effect, but the depot probably won't have a heat shield... It could have some other thermal protection in its place, though. This is beyond the scope of my analysis. Total power reaching the fuel is roughly 36,600-600+370 = 36,370W. This is about 0.13kg/s, or 11.2 tons per day. Not great. If we conservatively estimate 100 tons of propellant per trip, and a full load of 1300 tons required, that is 13 trips for the principal, and then 1 more trip for every 9 days it takes. If we assume two ships per week, or one ship every two weeks from each of the four pads, that is a total of 22 refueling launches over the course of 77 days if I did the math right. Keep in mind that this is all an extremely rough approximation, but it shows how upper teens could be a realistic number. High ones could also be realistic if the assumptions on capacity, flight rate, load needed, and thermal protection were changed. We simply don't know enough. If my calculations are correct, and Earth heating is the driving force, deep space boiloff should be incredibly minor. Unfortunately this means pointing the crew compartment at the sun, which is explicitly what they talk about not doing for Mars.

What I mean when I say “propaganda” is that it is only words. There is no “Mars fund”, and no deep engineering work is going forwards right now. Can Starship get to Mars? Yes. But it’s not it’s main purpose right now. In a practical context, IFT-2 brings Starship no closer to Mars than Artemis I brings SLS closer to Mars. The only difference between the two is Starship actually has the launch cadence to do a Mars mission. But the two are quite similar, with Orion CM-001 being a test vehicle in a similar manner to Ship 16 or whatever number this one is. Lucrative may be the wrong word, but the way I see it is this: satellite launches make money, sending stuff to Mars doesn’t. Unless you have another company doing the Mars research and building, but none exist right now. If there isn’t a space launch market taking advantage of Starship rapid reuse, I really have to wonder how Musk plans to fund his city. The City is the only thing I question. With Starship ready, it would be much easier to get a NASA-run Mars “research” mission (normal expedition) funded by the government. The low cost created by something like a “Commercial Mars Crew” or “Commercial Mars Surface Services” program might make a program palatable to Congress, whereas a Mars program in the style of how SLS is being done would be too expensive. To put it another way, I don’t doubt SpaceX will be capable of sending scientific payloads to Mars one day, and maybe crew on a government sponsored expedition, I just think Musk’s city plans are mainly talk at this point. It’s more of a “I’ll believe it when I see it” thing, compared to how I am more inclined to believe in uncrewed Martian surface delivery services. I’m a big Venus colonization fan. I’m highly skeptical of the ability of humans to give birth in 1/3 G or lunar gravity, so if there are going to be colonies on a planet instead of in orbit, Venus is the place to be.

All the talk on here of Mars colonies begs pointing out that Venus is in a lot of ways more habitable than Mars... The 60 km altitude level in Venus' atmosphere has comparable pressure and temperature to Earth and an oxygen-nitrogen mix of gas would work as a lifting gas in a balloon there. It also has very Earth like gravity and much better protection from cosmic radiation than Mars. Access to resources like metals would be a challenge, but every off-world colony faces serious challenges of one form or another. Maybe SpaceX's propulsive landing technology could be put to eventual use flying to/from cloud cities on Bespin Venus? Living in floating bubbles there would almost certainly be preferable to moisture farming on Tatooine Mars.

An intuition is not really good enough. Also why did you ignore my sentence where I literally say that I would replace "Cadet" by "Beginner"? Isn't it a good proposition? At least I find it better than "First Time User Experience". The message I'm replying to only talk about the "orientation" part. And to answer you, in my language you won't use first time in there, it would be a bit weird. That's why they translated it to something a bit different. Also cadet is a french word (my language), so I have maybe learned "cadet" before "first time" in english lol (I was pretty bad at it when I was young).

We are not going to talk about it because it is off topic. If we can avoid talking about a certain conflict in the Russian thread, and politics in the Chinese thread, we can do it here. I haven’t seen anyone wish for Soyuz and Shenzhou to explode just because of the politics in those two countries.

I guess we’re also not gonna talk about it here but boy this would be a whole lot easier to get exited about if it wasn’t entangled with the Elons increasingly impossible to ignore moral and emotional implosion. Hard not to root for this thing blowing up on the pad at this point.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1110329210332053504?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A Musk has literally said the city will be complete by 2050. https://www.inverse.com/science/51291-spacex-here-s-the-timeline-for-getting-to-mars-and-starting-a-colony And SpaceX’s chief Mars development engineer has said they won’t start off with a base, but with a town. Musk has said it will only be 10 years before the town would be established after the first crewed Mars landing. Note that he began these proposals in 2019, before Artemis was planned. Musk had no plans for research on the Moon, and certainly not enough on Mars to determine if people can live there. Musk has also said he wants to die on Mars. If he has Starship working after a few development flights, an uncrewed Mars development mission has flown, and rapid reuse is perfected, there is nothing to stop him from his “1,000 ships in each transfer window” plan. He expects a million people to be sent to the planet over the course of roughly 20 years. I still don’t understand this “human nature” argument. The ISS isn’t being used to study specific systems for Mars missions because none are in development. It would be pointless to develop without a Mars program in place. The reason we haven’t gotten a Mars program so far is because we have more pressing problems on Earth. That’s human nature, but only insofar as we take care of each other instead of abandoning the majority of people in the name of “survival of the species”. Speculation is not a replacement for excitement. We have to talk about these things to see if they are viable. No one, whether it be a government or a company board, is going to fund experiments for something that might not even work. Would you fund parapsychology experiments without speculating whether they are even worthwhile first?

In an attempt to talk about anything other than the navball, have you seen the new pictures posted? I'm sure people will still complain about how game xyz is so much better and KSP sux and bla bla bla but I think these are BEAUTIFUL.

NSF coverage is hot garbage. Would be fine minus the yammering... but the yammering persists. Ditto Tim Dodd. Utterly uninterested in hearing them talk.