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Yes, it could be possible that these assemptions are to maximaze safety, but we don't quite now. Maybe starship can survive with a little number of tiles missing, with internal damages and the need for refurbishement. But it could be possible that SpaceX itself don't know if the ship can survive to that without actual testing in real life, so who nows ? It's also possible that these safety margins for crewed flight to mars will be implemented later down the line, whith block 2 or 3. We will talk more about this subject Tomorrow, when we will have (HOPFULLY) an example to look to

*Raises hand* I will first admit I wasn't right in all the things I said, but I was right in a considerable majority of the things I said. I could probably write an hours-long "I told you" post delineating every single thing I called that became reality, but it's always been wasted effort when people just handwave you away as a "toxic doomposter". During the "delay era", I was worried because the trailers had performance issues. During the "post covid" era, I was worried because they were showing barely asset mounts and no real gameplay of anything but rockets flying (they ended up having to stick a "not real gameplay" label on a lot of videos). During the "it'll come out as early access" era, I was worried because why would you remove everything from your game you already allegedly showed working?. Finally, after release, I knew it was mediocre garbage and looking at the sales numbers and reviews it was obviously gonna need a lot of work to be exceptionally good mediocre garbage. Then the work just never came, they were exceedingly sluggish. Some time after, the AMA series came out and I realized it wasn't even gonna be "maybe fun mediocre garbage". That's when I realize the game was creatively and technologically bankrupt. Every devblog talked about dumbing stuff down, every other devblog was just some dumb deflection instead of showing real work... "here's how we made an algorithm to draw a pretty circle" like dude, really? "here's some ms paint mockups of how we made the heating system less complex which somehow means it's better." They were not putting in the work or creativity. Plus it was around the time people started to discover massive foundational issues like save bloat, performance rot, and so on. They also teased that the solution to wobble was just gonna be autostrut again... Then the buildup for science started, whilst we still had an unreadable UI, heating wasn't still in almost a full year after launch, all they had added along the way were some engines and fins... They just couldn't get anything visible done. The FS! media event kinda looked good, until people here began analyzing it in detail. It was obvious there was no thought applied to the tech tree, and it was much more linear... dumbed down. Science itself was dumbed down to a single blinking light and all in one parts. For Science was probably when the meter changed from "I'm worried it's gonna be a really bad game" to "there'll be no game." The update just completed the vision of how slow, amateur, and incapable they were, and I'm now even vindicated in saying that since it's been revealed that they were indeed just hiring juniors. It also didn't really sell... only about a thousand new reviews popped up on Steam, some of those indicating refunds as well. That's when I became 100% sure the game wasn't making it if they didn't violently 180º. They didn't. They kept dripfeeding us meaningless "sneak peeks" of lazy all in one parts, they refused to talk about anything colonies, and they made a killer devblog about... how their game doesn't even have eclipses.

Last time I got problems on College, I had to drive half the campus to talk to different coordinators - each one on a different building, each building about 5 to 6 KM from the other. Send the emails and stop complaining - trust me on this one, you are good!

It's especially sad because if you have to say those things it usually means you haven't done any of them, so you have to convince people by telling them. That's why people use the phrase "Those who do, do. Those who can't, talk."

Vitriol doesn't make this argument any more sound, not that it had any substance to it to begin with. We can talk about which game you like all day, but if you wanna talk objective stuff like the technical side, there's no place for opinions there. KSP2 is a broken, unplayable, badly designed mess, left incomplete and wincing painfully on the ground after being unable to gather interest, sales, or any sort of trust in whatever might come out of it long term. This is not to say that KSP1 is perfect, far from it, but hey, one is still being played by thousands, with a myriad more playing hyper modded saves, making vessels in the thousands of parts, adding planets to it, clouds, obscene levels of detail, gigabytes worth of parts, mission packs, entire mechanics, and it refuses to break under all of that except for some very specific cases.

Honestly, having built forums multiple times over, this is not an easy thing to do. There's so much to talk about like picking the forum software, any sort of hosting or domain names, rules, moderation guidelines, etc. The kind of community we'd want to build making sure it's a safe enough environment for everyone that loves KSP, as well as worrying about any possible legal takedown action from the IP holders whoever they are. I'd be up for it, and I'd support and offer my hand in building it, but I don't know what sort of hunger there is really for the community. Also, as already stated, there's a lot of history here in this place. Including my first posts as Community Manager that I sometimes look back on to remember the good times. All the mod threads, the WIP mod threads, all the vessel sharing, missions, stories, et all. There's just, way to much here and we don't and will never get access to the database to mirror it or save any of it. As the others have suggested, I think the best course of action is a new dedicated KSP fan ran community discord server. That also, is something I have a great deal of experience in building and running and managing, but it's also a lot of work to really set one up well.

Hey there. Thanks for the wonderful mod, amazing to hear you're still working on it! Just going to talk about a problem I encountered with Parallax version 2.0.6 where I would get crashing/freezing/out of memory issues during load screens, and what someone can do to resolve it. From the sounds of it, the upcoming version of Parallax may not have this problem, but I thought I'd post a little write-up anyway in case it helps anyone else using 2.0.6. My system: Intel i5-13600K / 32GB memory / Radeon RX 6600 XT 8GB / Ubuntu 22.04 I had been playing with a fairly hefty mod load for a while and thought everything was fine because framerates were good and "top" never showed KSP going over about 10GB memory usage. However, after a while of playing on that save, I started getting issues where my whole system would lock up during load screens and I would have to restart the computer. This was very confusing to diagnose, as I could see my system memory disappearing somewhere but it wasn't going to KSP. It also hardly seemed to matter how many mods I removed from my mod list With the help of the "radeontop" utility I finally figured out what was happening. Essentially, with Parallax installed, VRAM usage was spiking massively during load screens. It was maxing out my card's 8GB of VRAM in a few seconds, then maxing out the GTT memory as well. I'm not an expert, but from what I understand GTT is part of system memory and can be used as overflow for VRAM. By default GTT was set to 0.5 x RAM = 16GB. Once that filled up, the system was getting low on total memory and started paging things out. Obviously that's terrible for graphics performance, and resulted in everything locking up. No idea if it's an AMD-only issue or a Linux-only issue or both. All I can say is it happens during load screens. After scene transition is done, VRAM usage drops down to a very sensible 25-50% (Without Parallax installed, VRAM hovers around 70-80% at all times and doesn't change during load screens) So, if you're reading this and have the same problem, what can you do? Here are the options I figured out - Stop using Parallax 2.0.6 and wait patiently for the update... Reduce your system's GTT allocation. I don't know how to do this or if it's a good idea. Didn't try it myself. Close all other apps that may be using a lot of RAM (looking at you Chrome!) Reduce your mod count so KSP uses less memory, leaving more room for GTT. Not a good solution for me, as I wanted to have more than just the stock planets. Set 1/2 resolution textures in your graphics options. This is actually a pretty good solution... cuts VRAM usage by a lot, doesn't look as bad as you would think. Worth trying. Upgrade your graphics card to one that has more VRAM. No guarantees it won't also get completely filled up. Buy more RAM. Personally I was looking for an excuse to upgrade my system to 64GB anyway, so this is what I did. Now the GTT fills up to a whopping 32GB but there's so much room left over, nothing bad happens. I guess that's a win? Worth noting that even if you don't actually run out of memory, this weird VRAM behaviour does seems to slow down load screens by a lot. Anyway, thanks once again @Gameslinx for the awesome mod, and I'm very happy I can keep using it even if I did just end up throwing more RAM at the problem! And on the off chance any of what I wrote above is new information for you, I hope it's useful for your dev work.

At the risk of sounding condescending, accusatory or offensive (I'm not trying to, sorry in advance), and not knowing how much you can talk about... You mentioned Shana was still hired and working when you joined, pointing to you joining prior to September 2022 where she says (on linkedin) that she left Intercept (something we never discussed in this forum as it was never mentioned IIRC). This means you saw the Design Director leave. Who else did you see? Didn't those consistent layoffs and/or people just walking not set off any alarm?

That is an awesome plane! We at Beyond are ecstatic to see this in flight for the first time, and the pilots in the astronaut complex are abuzz with talk of this plane. Many have started arguing over who will fly it first. We have plans to continue flying the Talon as well, and maybe even add some of own modifications to the plane. Thank you to CalSpace for this amazing plane, and thank you to CalSpace for continuing to work with Beyond!

I feel there was a balance they failed to hit (talking about direction as in the general sense of the finalized vision for the game). The heavy work on tutorials already tells you they were going for "we take this niche game and make it accessible to even more people, it'll definitely sell more." FS! followed on that by simplifying and linearizing the tech tree and having science be a single magic button, where you can absolutely skip even the timers so long as you hit it every time it flashes. Lastly, they also wanted to tell a semi-linear storyline through missions, discoverables and their lore. That part was really good, the new user onboarding was a magnitude better than KSP1. On the other hand, the game really required a strong technical foundation because by the time the difficulty curve of rocket launches and SSTOs is over, almost every player just goes big. Here is where to me they completely failed, by making a game that doesn't support this second bit. Of course now it'll all be woulds and coulds, but it's not hard to see that even without colonies we were already still finding the limits very easily (another example, another one, another). 8000 parts might sound like a lot on that bug report, but that's about a constellation of satellites, a couple rover missions, and a Jool 5 vessel. Meanwhile the game was supposed to allow you to do that on multiple star systems, whilst supporting trust under timewarp... and just no, the game could never be able to do that with the foundation it has. Also, as a last nail in the coffin, they forever handwaved the explanation of how Rask & Rusk (the binary system) were going to work. So yeah, we have a game built on flimsy foundations that they just outright refuse to talk about (remember the promises of HDRP and the system that'd replace PQS? I do), we have only the most basic stuff (yes, science and a tech tree is very basic, deal with it) implemented and none of the complex problems, and not just that but whatever little we have is already making those foundations quake... That's why you can google me saying "technologically bankrupt" multiple times. The balance they failed to implement in game by only including stuff for new people and nothing for veterans, was the same thing behind the scenes: they were doing only the easy stuff whilst completely neglecting the complex stuff and much less having the stones to talk about it. At this point I doubt they even had a plan past "cut everything down as manageable as possible", which is what net us all in one parts, gimped heating, the horrible coordinate reset on ground vehicles, and so on. I doubt they dropped anything in favor of a feature that probably never existed (yes, I saw the screenshot). I'm closer to believing they used multiplayer as an excuse to drop anything too complex/deep that might've further gimped the game's performance.

I think there's a widespread misunderstanding about this stuff by people who don't manage investments for a living (i.e., most people). The board and the executives are different groups and sometimes at odds with each other. The executives make the day-to-day operating decisions about the company, the board is rarely involved in any active way unless the executives really mess up and get fired. Leaving aside the misunderstandings about the board, let's talk about the executive leadership of a large company. It is commonly the case that executives and even middle managers of large companies care about 3 goals (with the notable exception of founder-led companies, which sometimes have a long-term vision): Their compensation; The metrics by which their future compensation is determined; and Their personal success metrics, usually the size or revenue of the group that they manage. Not the quality of the product, not the customers, not the shareholders, not the employees, none of those things except as to game any related metric for goal 2. So, you'll often see decisions that from the outside seem utterly baffling and self-destructive, but that's only if you think in terms of irrelevancies like reputation or long-term profits. Executives at large companies are generally really good at optimizing for their goals, it's just that those goals are mis-aligned with anything useful to anyone else. Also, this isn't specific to companies - it's the problem with any large, old organization of any kind. IMO, fixing this would be the most important advancement for the future progress of humanity. In the mean time, the best shot at good games are founder-led studios where the founder is still chasing a vision of great games and the publisher isn't ruining everything.

[snip] So let me clarify that for you. The thread is about refunds and if one should go about getting one. Primarily for Steam. But you literally brought up Epic and how if someone bought on Epic you wished them good luck. I was merely pointing out, for anyone who didn't already know, that Epic has the same refund policy Steam does. With the same option to talk to a human being if you get shafted by the automated system. If talking about Epic's policy is pointless, then it's on you for bringing that pointless topic up. Speaking of things that are pointless in this discussion... No, I have not chosen some arbitrary date for no reason. The layoffs and the building closure are effective on June 28. That was set by the company itself as outlined in the WARN notice we are all aware of and have read. I am waiting until that time - or, rather, giving them the extra 2 days to the literal end of June - to see if they release a statement or not before deciding if I'm going to ask for a refund. Why? Because if they do release a statement, I can read it and see if there's anything in there that could potentially be used to help bolster a case for a refund this far out of policy. Will there be a statement? Probably not. If there is, will there be something in there I can use? Again, probably not. Does it hurt to wait to see what happens knowing that the likelihood of a refund at this point is pretty close to zero? No, it doesn't. Which begs the question: Why do you care if I wait or not? It has literally zero impact on you and what happens in your life, so why do you care? Why throw all this anger in my direction over something that means zero to you? You feeling lonely and need attention?

Well, there is a playstyle called 'Caveman' where you can only play with the parts you can get with No facilities upgraded, no use of Mechjeb, Cheats and other Tools/Mods. So, any Craft is limited to 18 tons, 20 meters in height and 30 Parts. As there is the normal Caveman Challenge (getting all Science unlocked on different hardness levels) I, for myself, took this to another level in trying to Land on Celestial Bodies around the System where its not so easy to get to with this limitations. Landing on Mun ? No issue, landing on Minmus, either. Landing on Duna ? Thats a Task. I did that once and i may have regretted my last words, saying, i was currently building a Caveman Mission to land on Tylo and safely return. Do something, maybe noone has ever done before. Luckily, there is the Clamp-o-Tron Junior Docking Port. As other already Exercised, with this device you can Assemble Big Ships in Space (and even on Ground, you will need it!) to Get to destinations where others haven't gone before while being restricted to the limits of the Available parts, size, weight and number of Parts. As the Words, once they leave the Mouth, couldnt put back there again, i uttered it, so i had to Build it. I had to Fly it. And i did it. The Setup: I will not get into Details, but it can run 4-digit number of parts Craft. At least you need a Rig that can run a 500 Part Craft. The Software: KSP 12.5, both DLC installed, Plain install, no Mods. I have a Savegame here with all Craft Files linked and a ready-to-depart-Vessel, so you can REPLAY the Mission if you want.... Here is The Save File with all Crafts I had to Plan in advance a Long Time, had to design the Crafts, had to take into account to not exceed the Software and Hardware Limits, and had to create this Mission in a way that it stays into the boundaries where tha Risk of getting Krakened is marginal. I had to redesign the Ship several Times because i ran into the 'need too much FLT-400 Tanks' at all etc. So i ended up to get the overall Number of needed FLT-400 tanks down to 100 for the main Mission (really, 100 tanks docked to the Craft, Guess how much Time i wasted on that, Launching and Docking all that stuff ? I didnt took this as a Fulltime-Job but at least, with some creativity breaks where i had to think over the Concept, it took more than a Year. In total, somewhat between 200 and 300 Rocket launches where needed to Assemble everything together, with several complete restarts of the main Project. So in Total i may have had 1000+ Rocket Launches until i Found a suitable way for This Mission. All those failed iterations, we wont Talk About here, but the one Mission that Succeeded--- As there may be others that want to Torture themself, there is also a Savegame here added, so you can Replay the Mission without going thru the slog of Assembling the Craft in Space. The Craft has 500 Parts and is currently in Orbit, ready to Fly to Tylo. Dont forget to decouple the rescue ship after getting to a Higher Orbit for the endless Jool Burn. - i had to retry the Jool Burn 1 Time, the First Transfer was not useful due to Shifted Planes. so i had to wait for a Transfer window where Start and Arrival are on the same axis. But as the difficulty is normal, revert/retry is allowed. - i had to retry the Kerbin Burn 3 Times, the Tools Online for Eyeballing the Transfer from Jool to Kerbin does not take into account that Jool has a Tilted Plane and excentic orbit. - docking ports seem to fail using as decoupler somehow, anyhow. This led to some trouble with the Lander but i evaded it, by manually decoupling it. this led to a very hard ascent on Tylo, i barely made it back to 25km orbit with nearly zero fuel left. I will, nah, maybe may Try to Comment every Picture, that needs a comment, this will take Time... But at least, everything stands on its own. Now here is the Line of 342 Screenshots. Here we start with all the Scienca gathering because the Nodes needed to be unlocked. didnt wasted too much screenshots on them. The first part of the Tylo lander In Orbit Some FLT-400 Launches The Landing Part of The Lander. Too big to Start Alone On Ground Assembling needed Ready for Start Docking to the Main Lander Docking the Fuel tanks for Tylo Descent to the Lander Now the main Structure of the Spaceship to Tylo need to get into Orbit. I created another 2-Stage Rocket that can be docked to existing Rockets on Ground.... The Main Spaceship Structure. Rolling the External Rockets to Dock. second Rocket Docking I try to start the Main Ship with 2 Rockets. Hmm. Better, i misconstructed the External Rockets so i failed to dock them all 4. I Tried... Barely made it to Orbit... Reworking that Set would have taken a few days First, Docking some additional Fuel to the end and trashing the external engines. Adding the Lander to the Top, Facing Backwards Now the adding of the remaining 48 Fuel tanks started for the Main Ship. Asparus Staging, i knew the docking Port issue now, so the decoupling is done by the small decoupler This were 2 additional missions because i need 2 3-Star Pilots. Now the assembling continues Main Ship Ready with 8 sets of 3 FLT-400 in asparagus staging. For the Starting Burn to Jool, i had to add another 2 Stages of 24 FLT-400 each. Now we have 100 FLT-400 Docked Now the Rescue Ship needs to be constructed. It has 2 Purposes: - help to push the Main Ship to Higher Orbit and then stay at kerbal Orbit in case, its needed in Jool SOI for a Rescue I notices i had the 2nd Solar Module docked to the wrong end, so i have to swap it out to the other side. Ship Is completed. Main Ship has 100 Tanks, Secondary Ship (rescue ship for first Push) has 24 tanks. 500 Parts, 293 Tons Caveman Vessel I First lifted the Vessel up to 300Km Orbit Now the Push for a High AP starts. Goal is 5M Succeeded. remaining Weight of Ship is 205 Tons, all 100 Tanks still fully Loaded Starting the Transfer Burn to Jool 36 Tanks Left, Burn Complete That was the Perfect Burn But i had to waste a Bit Fuel because i came in directly hitting Jool. i had to Burn outwards to get 67M PE Planes need to be matched Getting near to Tylo to get a Catch Argl, again a direkt hit I had to get 27KM PE Slowly burning Down to 25 KM Orbit around Tylo Success. Orbit Around Tylo reached. Jeb has to Go. This Lander is Built to work from 25KM around Tylo. Yes, i simulated this. Prior coming all the way along, but This Burn was Real and it Worked. Erm. no small Step. Even some Fuel left, but i can not reuse it for the ascent due to the un-docking issues witch the docking ports. After Ascent you see, due to the issue of having to ditch the 4 Outer tanks on Ground, there is barely fuel left for docking. So i have to come around with the main vessel to pick the lander up. That was really sharp Coming in for Docking. I have to delete alot debris.... Docking to main Vessel Transfering Jeb and Ditching the Lander Now we have to leave Tylo SOI Unfortunately i had Chosen a very High Orbit around JOOL for the transfer. It Took Eons to find a suitable Window This'll Do Many Course corrections needed. Planes and retrograde Burn wasted much Fuel. But i had sme saved from the first Transfer that went Great A Hit. Having To Burn until i have an orbit. No way of trying to Aerobrake this and not Burn off. Now i can Aerobrake a good 1000KM of in several rotations. barely... but it worked around 60KM PE Until i got the PA small enough to stop aerobreaking and getting a stable orbit with the remaining Fuel. Rescue ship is coming for help. Some Tanks for the rescue ship needed. changing planes to match both ships Docking, Transfering all Crew Aand Deorbit Burn Only 2 Meters to Got :-)- Where is the watered screenshot ? Ermon had Orbit Around Tylo. He was the Guy in the Main Ship Jeb has the Landing on Tylo. So he is the One that Went to Tylo, landed and Returned on caveman Level. Hurray Pilots Summary. Facility Summary Science summary. I didnt bothered to take any science from Tylo. Its caveman. what for i need additional science ?

Some civilized countries (and some very civilized steam employees) do not allow developers to just charge money to say they're going to make a game and then abandoning it. Everyone has the right to ask for a refund, and thanks to Steam, they've got the right to ask many times for a refund, making different or the same case. Which is not the point since most people are way past that, in which case Epic support is definitely one of the worst places, if they even bother replying to you. Steam allows you to talk to a human for refunds after the automatic system fails you. Some people have been waiting since 2013 for an official statement on 2K Marin's situation. You've arbitrarily chosen a date as an ultimatum with almost zero reason, hoping they've chosen the same, or any date, to spend resources responding to the ~120 people still waiting to hear whatever. They've merely respected the law by giving their employees paid heads up time before firing them and have no further obligation with the project or the employees, much less their customers.

Bigger issue is still the heat shield, IMO. For all the talk about the "right way" to test all the things, SLS/Orion people seem awful quiet about testing arguably the most critical component for crew safety with a crewed flight test.

Calling 911 to talk about your dogmas and invite them to your commune.

The CMs certainly are not at fault. They only acted within the scope of their abilities at any given time. Thay must have been a pretty excrementsty burden to bear... wanting to talk about really cool stuff thay was almost ready .. just need to figure this out or that.. and not getting to talk about it at all. I feel like the CMs kinda got the crappiest deal of all. The industry has exploded since early 00's. A vote based system to enter EA is longer relevant. And I know nothing is perfect.. a large group of angry incels could still slam whatever feature and initiate unfair action. But with people behind the oversight, this would be obvious. This sentiment has been fermenting for a bit over a couple (one) other titles I wanted to be excited about but feel developers employed less than genuine approach to EA. It may shape up to be alright in the end.. the massive breach of trust doesn't occur in the community over singular incidents. It's not like we freaked out over price, or routine delays in communication, then postponed delays of communication, lack of technical dev blogs, incinere AMAs... it was a culmination effect. @chefsbrian obviously titles with awesome customer relations and positive review rating would not be one brought to question. im not asking anyone to adopt a unilateral set of qualifiers for EA. Merely adhere to the standard each puts forth on their own EA store page. Each one answers certain questions about what EA means to them & how they intend to approach various benchmarks for the guidelines. There isn't even a scope set forth in the guidleines with a set of minimum acceptance criteria.. beyond game must be playable & not provide blatantly inaccurate info. There is no minimum required engagement for the community feedback nor a set bar for how frequent we should get announcements of any kind. But the development staff sets that expectation when they fill out the little questionnaire & it enters into writing. That is the first step of a relationship where trust Is a factor. That trust is based on what we read on that page. (Very few read anything outside the Steam page)

Please do, bring us back to the days when we had feature updates and content releases to talk about

So, I've got a few questions as it relates to communication and development. Can you share with us where you are at with updating your internal calendar as it relates to when we can expect the next KERB? I know you just got back and all, but we are jonesing for info here. As far as the KERB goes, are there any plans to be more verbose in the status of the bugs being worked on? For example, "Researching" doesn't tell us what you are doing with a bug, especially when some bugs have been around and in this status for months. What is being researched, and what about it is so complicated? Same thing for "Need Additional Information". What info do you need? Something from the community? The original reporter? Who and what? It has now been 3 months since the last patch, and there has been zero talk about the next one. Nor has there been any talk about colonies other than to show the same station orbiting Jool a few times. Can you give us any information on where the team is at with the next patch, or with colonies, or when 0.3 might drop? And why the complete silence on all of this? It is early access, but we put our faith in you guys and we haven't had that faith rewarded much (if at all). Can we talk about procedural parts again? We have been told that procedural tanks are too complex, but Juno has them. And ill have to look again to make sure, but I think HarvesteR's latest project Kit Hack has them. What is so complex about them as it relates to KSP2? Finally, we need to discuss maneuver nodes and dV calculation. Has the development team shared anything with you that you can share with us as to how these are being worked on, and what potential solutions we may see? Both of these are critical to the game.

I've been working on a CubeSat for the past 2 years, mostly software and testing, and we uploaded the final code onto it yesterday, it is flying to Texas for integration in a few hours, and will be launching into space on Cygnus NG-21 probably sometime in August, and ejected from the International Space Station probably in Fall or early Winter. (picture was very zoomed out, that's why it is a bit fuzzy, I zoomed in) This is CySat-1, a mission to prove the viability of measuring Earth's soil moisture levels using a software defined radiometer (and also to prove that an undergraduate led satellite program at our university is viable). There's many subsytems involved: Endurosat OBC, tells everything else what to do Endurosat UHF antenna and transceiver, how we talk to the satellite, has the worst documentation of any of the modules and took us a long time to figure out how to use. CubeSpace ADCS, has magneto-torquers, star trackers, Earth sensors, a magnetometer, GPS, and a reaction wheel to figure out where the satellite is and point it in the right direction. Endurosat EPS, manages power collection, the batteries, and power distribution throughout the satellite A breakout board with numerous electronic components soldered onto it for toggling power and converting voltages PumpkinSpace solar panels, we bought them (really expensive) after failing to build our own Analog Devices AD9361-Z7035 FPGA/SDR/SOM/whatever you want to call it. Power hungry computer that is only on sometimes, and runs our scientific program using GNU Radio and Python on an Analog Devices Linux Distro Analog Devices ADRV1CRR-BOB Carrier Board, holds the other Analog Devices board and distributes power and data to and from it Mini-Circuits Low Noise Amplifiers and Bandpass Filters to amplify the signals from the radiometer antenna A custom antenna for the radiometer And on the ground: An Ubuntu desktop computer running a GNU Radio flowgraph to talk to the satellite A software defined radio and antenna (we will get a bigger antenna in the next few months, the one we have is temporary) A Windows laptop running a python program (the ground station front end/GUI) to communicate with the Linux server I have been a programmer for CySat-1 for the past four semesters, programming lead for the past three semesters, and the only programmer for the last semester. My job has been to get these 7 computers made by 4 different manufacturers running 3.5 different operating systems in 2 separate programming languages talking with each other seamlessly. For the most part, we have succeeded, and the satellite has worked during short term ground testing. Unfortunately, we ran out of time for long term testing due to an issue with charging the batteries. This project has been one relentless string of failures and setbacks and frustrations, so long I'll probably make a video essay about it at some point. It felt like bashing my head up against a wall repeatedly only to find another wall on the other side, over and over and over again. I'm not very optimistic about our chances for successfully completing the mission, we have at least one possibly unresolved critical bug with no leads (and no time to fix), and given that we were discovering bugs literally up to and including the very last day, there's probably more we don't know about. But I learned a lot, enough that success is one of the possible outcomes. While it is supposed to do a lot more than beeping, I will be happy if it beeps. I'll be even happier if it will beep on command. Anything after that is purely bonus in my mind, especially given that half of university CubeSats don't even get a beep back, so I'm told. I'm proud of how much we managed to overcome, and that this thing finally got shipped off after years of delays, the satellite having been originally conceived sometime between 2002 and 2017 depending on what you take as the start date. That picture is an expression of equal parts "We finally finished it!" "Oh boy, what if I forgot something? What if it fails because I forgot to change a line of code, and I won't know for another six months!" and "What now? This has been my big thing for 2 years, where do I go from here?" In a really roundabout way, KSP is one of the reasons I found myself on this project. Part of that was just because it awakened my love for space, but another part of it was that the organization that manages CySat has a bunch of other project teams, one of which was a KSP simpit. I was on that project for one semester because a friend told me about it. When the KSP simpit project shut down, that same friend invited me to join CySat. It has certainly been an adventure that took me far outside my comfort zone. When I started, I didn't know a lick of C, and barely knew two licks of Python. I came in wanting to do structures/CAD stuff, as I felt that would be what I would suck the least at. But through a quirk of fate, got put on programming instead, something I did not at all feel confident doing. After a lot of pain and a lot of learning , the inter-computer links fell one by one, and we got it to a point where everything (discounting the single use stuff we weren't able to test) works in short term ground testing. While obviously we would have preferred to do more extensive testing, at this point, for a variety of reasons, we've just got to send it. About eleven years and about two weeks ago, I launched my first Kerbal into the sky, and now, a spacecraft I worked on is getting launched for real. Hopefully, when it gets up there, it shows up as a probe and not as debris!

WOW.... Talk about a Game Changing experience with this Mod Installed!! Haven't seen anything but Kerbin so far... but I Love what you did... Even the Ocean seems to sprout vegetation!!! Great Work!

Well, with all the exposition and koffee talk dialogue it's actually been a while since I tried to fly anything legit. I guess I've still got it? Though I did lose the starboard small monopropellant tank [ETA: and the docking port] on the Gumdrop in the crash. Ah well. You know what they say in the Air Service. The crash itself was a lot of fun, since I had Infinite Fuel hack running (cheaty-cheat cheat!) and I forgot to turn off the Kerbulan fighter's engine before the ship broke apart. So the tail end splashed around for a really, really long time. I was a bit worried it would slam into Dilsby before he could get the Gumdrop out of physics range. Good times! And RE: that infinite fuel--yeah, the plan was always (like, 8+ years always) to drop Evil Jeb in the ocean somewhere and get Dilsby on an island as far away as possible. I'm pretty sure I could have done that legit, e.g. by dropping Jeb really high up, orbiting, and then making a precisely targeted re-entry so that Dilsby could make his crash landing before running out of gas. But seeing as I want to finish this book sometime soon and in the limited time I have to spend on it, I just flew Dilsby here after the drop-off.

Yeah, but YouTube is where a lot of people will be looking. That makes them prime targets for scammers. I'm gonna bet that the stream Gargamel watched included a lot of talk about cryptocurrency investment and not a whole lot about rockets.

I think my main concern that causes me to question definitions of harm is people being overbearing. I think people (above the age of consent/legality or whatever) should be allowed to make their own decisions, but given a good education of the pluses and minuses of the possible choices at hand. Unfortunately I feel people (at least my age, early 20s) don’t really get taught the skills necessary to properly weigh pros and cons and end up going more with their emotions. It’s hard to find the balance between a warning and an order. I am terribly sorry but I must now correct myself. I was using the wrong term. Some families in Nepal practice polyandry, not polygamy, although polygamy can be found in Nepal too, it is not what I studied about. The way it works is one wife usually marries an entire family’s brothers. The husbands are not drawn from different families. Tension is mainly around personal issues. It’s been several months since the anthropology class and I don’t seem to have taken notes on the subject, but I recall that having two males helps raise lots of farm hands and keep the population stable. I’ve found the TED Talk I watched during my studies. I don’t know if it’s okay to post it, so just Google “Are five husbands better than one TED Talk” and you can find it if you’re interested.

Honestly, I can see this point of view making sense. Rewriting all of KSP from scratch in a new engine, and focusing on just getting the same core mechanics in place, and expanding it later. The problem, of course, is that an enourmous amount of the new content you're going to be adding after the inital release would be way quicker and cheeper to impliment if it was developed in parallel rather than haphazardly duct-taped on top after the fact. Sorry! I've editied it now, so that should be fixed. That's not possible though? You can't reuse Unity scrips and settings in Unreal. You can resuse 3d meshes and some animations, but those are often some of the easiest parts of a development project like this to make anyway from how I understand it. Anything else has to be recoded from scratch. Of course, that's not to say you can't look at KSP 1/2 code to get insperation and for use as a guidebook, especially if you're able to talk to the actual KSP 1/2 devs, but a lot of the systems KSP 1 and 2 used aren't optimal anyway and we'd want to rework them when starting fresh in any case. I mention all of the budget related stuff later. But yeah, I basically agree with this assessment. Reusing code is literally impossible (you could maybe put some of it though converters? But you'd still end up spending more time doing that and patching the result into a workable state than it would take to redo it from scratch). Yeah, I think releasing stuff in smaller batches would be a better idea. I mostly just didn't want to type out a couple dozen update lists to be honest. Again, I agree, a higher number of smaller updates is better. Life support, yeah, okay I can see the arguments against it. I guess the modding community would have that covered anyway. I'm glad you like the idea with the tethers though! Other launch sites would be included earlier, I was talking about cites and things. I'm not sure if the demand for that is high enough though - it probably isn't, on second thought. Interstellar is basically non-negotiable in some form or another though, given how popular it is even in the buggy state that KSP 1 mods have it in. Yeah, I thought I might have made a mistake with the placement of that. I guess putting career mode closer to or on the inital release might not be that hard upon second thought. I'm not talking about mods here, so I don't really understand what you're asking? The real-life stuff is part of a DLC because it's a too much content for mods to make, but too niche for it to be in the base game. It would completly overwhelm like 70-80% of players and make them stop playing. When I say every real spacecraft, either flown or even just designed, would be in it, I wasn't kidding. Even just the command pods section of the parts list would have well over a thousand parts in it. I'm also super skeptical if this would ever actually happen, I mostly just included it as a whish-list item. It would be a lot of effort to make a DLC that not many people would buy. What? The second DLC package I proposed was the one with RO in it, the first didn't. I think it would be pretty cool if we had not just RSS, but also real-scale kerbal systems and various other real and fictional star systems as well. And I didn't get rid of kerbals in favor of humans, I explicity said it was a toggleable option, probably one that would be off by default. Again though, this would be a lot of development work for a niche product, so it's mostly a wish-list item. I guess given the modding support here will be much better than in KSP 1, we could just rely on community mods to do all of this for us anyway. Yeah, okay, that might be optemistic. I figured that the 4 year figure for KSP 1 could be improved with a larger team size and a clearly defined roadmap to start off with, and the 3-4 year timeframe for KSP 2 was while dealing with massive problems and inefficencies that we wouldn't have. But, yeah, it is possible if things go suboptimally that we could be looking at 4 years to 1.0 rather than 3. Keep in mind though, you say we would have to redo all the code from scratch as if that would make it harder this time around... but the KSP 1 devs had to do that as well. Obviously. Because they were making the game for the first time. So we know coding KSP from scratch takes 3 years with a team of 12, and the features I'm talking about adding to it here aren't substantial enugh that it would massively increase that time, especially given we'd have a team of like 70 people. And doing it in Unreal shouldn't make it automatically take longer than Unity. So it should be fine, but hey, I don't have much actual software engineering experiance (or any really) so I'm probably wrong. All of this makes a lot of sense, and I more or less agree. The one thing I really disagree on is procedural tanks - I think there should be an enormous amounts of varients avalable on every part, but I don't like true procedural tanks in the stock game because when you have too much free choice, it ironically feels very limiting. If we limit it so you can chose between the standard stock dimaters and a couple dozen length varients, then maybe I guess I could get behind it, but in general, while I like procedural wings (or more accurately, I can tolorate them in stockalike games), and stuff like radiators would probably be fine, I think the tanks should still be lego-like. That's just my opinion though, if the community disagrees as a whole then obviously their thoughts are more important than mine. That's fair! But given that any future KSP sequel that doesn't go to EA is guaranteed to fail, I guess that means you're just going to have to wait a few years longer than some others before getting it. Which is fine, EA isn't for everyone by definiton, it's for a small number of people who can act as playtesters while the rest of us wait to find out if it's any good.