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The issue with what happened to me here over the past couple weeks is that it wasn’t an opinionated matter we argued over, it was- 1. The definition of something 2. History of something The first time, the guy had a weird definition of something that sounded like something else, so I looked up the dictionary definition to see if I was right. It didn’t match up and I pointed that out. Then he continually changed his own definition until he accused me of not discussing in good faith. Second time, I made stupid statements about something in history. I honestly did not know I was wrong. In fact, other people in the discussion later politely pointed out the flaws in my statements and I accepted I was incorrect and retracted my statement. But before then, this guy- the same guy as with the definition talk- simply says I’m “making walls of words” and again speaks of me “lacking good faith.” This isn’t public policy or favorite foods we’re talking about. If we can’t correct each other when we’re wrong and accept that we’ve been wrong when it comes to facts, how are we supposed to learn anything? Isn’t that what the internet is supposed to be about? For All Mankind had a clip of Tim Berners-Lee praising the then potential value of the internet in the 80s and he spoke of a “more informed electorate.” Obviously politics is politics and it can get nasty in its own right, but what about technical discussions? Discussions about the humanities? I think I’m getting back to my point I made in my long post about climate change. Everyone has armies of rhetoric and data on their side to defend their arguments, and criticism and differing data is “politicized” or has an ulterior motive. If I or others can’t or don’t want to correct or be corrected on facts when we’re wrong, what’s the point of even being here? Just hop in, see if we fit in the echo chamber, hop out if we don’t and then post tweets and occasional witty jokes from time to time? Isn’t a forum all about discussion? I’ve never expected people to change their opinions when I’m criticizing them. But if there’s a fact they’re talking about that’s incorrect, I have a hard time sitting by and letting them be wrong. I wouldn’t want someone on this forum to let me continually make inaccurate statements, and when I did that in the history discussion, I’m glad I was corrected. Considering most of the people who regularly post in the main section of the forum I visit- the Science & Spaceflight section- are also the same people who have espoused the climate change denial arguments I listed in my climate change post in this thread, perhaps I just need to recognize the people there are not who I thought they were when I joined this forum and read about the better forum movement and rules intended to make it a more positive place. The Lounge is cool though, so I’d still visit here. But I can get space news on Twitter and don’t really have any more technical questions to ask people over there, so if it’s just a place to report the news and make jokes from time to time- discussion, while legal, will lead to arguments if anything beyond supportive comments are made, even if someone is incorrect about something- what am I even doing there? I’m also now thinking about how I don’t even really follow much spaceflight news beyond what’s going on in China. I might as well just head over to Sino Defence Forum (where I’m much more conscious of what kind of people they are and how it’s important not to start arguments).

I love hearing more about development! It's great to see that the development team is taking the community's bugs into consideration. I also love getting to see at least somewhat technical talk on how yall establish what needs to be worked on and how they are being worked on. I appreciate the idea of unlocking the maneuver planner from Delta-V, I think that is a great call! I do want to say that I hope it stays this way even after the Delta-V calculator is "fixed", I would suggest just adding a warning statement that says "Plan exceeds Delta-V" but still lets the user try. Great work everybody and I appreciate hearing more about the development process!

THAT Where are the technical dev blogs. Where are the REAL AMA where questions about limitation & strategy are discussed. Where are the reddit AMAs & in depth talks about the "Wheel". So nothing regarding planned content? Start publishing the dev diaries from "For Science" Us those notes with a few water cooler questions / emails to generate an in depth dev blog on decisions behind tech tree groupings. The lack of substance is what sucks and lends me to the thought.. many decisions like tech tree ended up being ad hoc or arbitrarily assigned. When you see people talk about the negative aspects of the UI you see specifics.. Maneuver Tool, Camera Eccentricities, GUI elements blocked / hidden beyond other objects, poor click-through priority assignment, inability to maneuver in another SOI When people express a foundness for the new UI.. it's often "I like it" or "it's better than KSP1" The graphics are better. A new coat of paint.. but I dislike the UI intensely. Font Part Manager Staging Window Interaction Maneuver Tool Camera Controls Ship Save (Filters or Options for Structure) Could you please express the parts of the UI that you enjoy more? I like the stock app tray I like tracking station Aside I don't much like the UI

Well the societies where people work together for the betterment of all rather than themselves alone have been dead for four centuries so it would make sense you’ve never seen them. If there’s a certain way we’re “built” psychologically it’s because there was a builder, and it occurred based on how we’re educated in youth. Advances in human history have been built on people thinking beyond what they were taught or what they had seen. No one told Columbus to go sail west, and no one told any settler to move somewhere else. The way they were raised told them to stay put as their fathers and forefathers had, but they ignored what they knew and made a decision of their own. If we can’t grow beyond the behaviors and systems that were set up and indoctrinated a few centuries ago I don’t think we’re going to last long at all, whether on Earth or on Mars. I never said all companies exist to make money. But money would be required to build a Mars colony, thus I assumed SpaceX is the type of company that needs to make it. And there are things they already have to pay for. Support infrastructure, paying their workers, maintaining and refurbishing rockets. Contracts in LEO and on the Moon. What will be left over for Mars? The colony, that is. I don’t know why you’d see what I write as a complaint. He can try, but if he fails, we shouldn’t give up. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not saying he shouldn’t, I’m saying we can’t limit ourselves to simply hoping a billionaire will do it all for us. When I say “we” I mean humanity. Not specifically you or I. I’m skeptical industry will ever be moved to space. It makes no economic sense either, because it’s easier to build factories on Earth. The cost of shipping something across the land or sea is much lower than shipping stuff to and from space. If governments signed off on regulations banning industry on Earth, then they’d do it. But corporations don’t really do massive “save the Earth/environment” type stuff unless they’re forced to. Otherwise they largely prefer the little things that look good for PR but don’t incur too much cost. The issue with automation is that it would leave people with nowhere to go. Eventually robots would be building robots, writing code, and repairing robots, and those robots would replace all jobs except government and management. There would be no need for humans. How are people supposed to pay for Starlink if they have no job? And then companies wouldn’t be making money and it would all collapse. There’s talk of UBI and what not, but at that point people would more or less be receiving necessities for free, obviating the money. Corporations would have the power to do things simply based on whether they have the resources to produce enough robots to do it, gained by cooperation with another corporation, which also just needs to produce enough robots to harvest the resources. If people are getting necessities for free and don’t have any way to work, because robots are doing everything, corporations wouldn’t really be making money off people by selling goods and services, they’d just be providing it with no return. A Mars colony suddenly becomes feasible not “economically” but simply on whether people want to do it or not. At which point it seems you’ve brought us to my point: How can we think beyond our existing economics in support of space colonization? It goes back to my original post when this thread was revived: thinking about profitability and affordability (both in terms of money) as a means of making space colonization feasible is silly.

They've actively, literally, contradicted this by saying work was continued between the restructuring. Plus it's literally the same upper management minus Paul Furio who got fired early on, so it's either them practicing corporate diplomacy (with themselves?) or development really wasn't interrupted. Hope one day we get a proper post mortem and a case for devs and publishers to look at and learn from. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. They work super slowly > they can't show progress because there's none > there's nothing solid to talk about (and they don't want to talk about plans either because they know they'll be held up to their words, the horror). > they need to space posts more > those posts are still empty because (start cycle again here). Basic bug-reporting feedback right there that you should be telling the authors of reports. In github you get your issues properly tagged if they can't be reproduced, or are believed to be hardware related, or whatever. Reports being archived without saying a single word is a big no no, no matter what single excuse you could write for doing it. Even a "not important" provides at least some closure and safety that the thing was at least read. Not only is the faith in QA testing for this project under the ground, but the bug tracker that had to be fought for "happens" to be ignored and users are made to wait ~1 month to see if top voted issues are even being looked at. Because even those barely have developer interaction, only to be met with "can't reproduce lol". The whole bug reporting-to-feedback process (let alone a "hot" fix that's cold by 2 months at the minimum) is laughably bad and should be set as an example to every dev running a bug tracker on how exactly to not do things. Great way of putting it into words. We're 1+ years into the project and these very basic doubts still linger. Even if they work at the pace of a DMV, they should have a vision they want to pursue and a reason for wanting to repeat all the same mistakes KSP1 made. For all the hate KSP1 received in these forums once 2 dropped, from some people, they're really doing a very basic rerun with a fresh coat of paint and a bigger price tag. Doesn't matter, there's still a missing part to close the loop. It's the same issue the old "mail us the bug" reporting system had. You have no idea what they're doing, if they're doing anything at all, with your report. On which everybody complained about readability and what we got in return was "replace font 2 hard" and some color changes on the navball which is still a mess. Great feedback loop, at least that issue had some closure and we know we need mods to fix that. So you get another black hole place where you don't even know where your feedback goes. The K.E.R.B. is so vital and wanted because it's what's missing to close the loop: feedback on feedback. It's the only time we get to hear about what devs are actually working on, without marketeer language, without hypebeasting, and so on.

most of the diagnoses ive had have been of questionable quality. getting an actual psychiatrist to sign off on what you have so you can actually get services is the hard part (they will hand out meds on the spot though, treating symptoms only). you can wait six months for one appointment, and thats not enough time to get an idea for whats going on. how to fit 40 years of failure and trauma into a 30 minute session. and that's even if you are willing to talk about it with a complete stranger. still not comfortable talking about certain things with my therapist who i have been seeing for a couple years now. the word of a therapist also carries very little weight with the bureaucrats.

MISSION_UPDATE - Tour de Minmus - Johndin and Podcal looking on the ancient relic found in the mysterious crater on Minmus. While Poduki relays their findings to KSC FOREWORD: Before we start - I would like to say that this post became a lot longer than I anticipated. I would very much like some honest feedback on weather I should dial it down a notch and be less detailed. Or cut it into more edible pieces. or if its just all good and fun. Before we start - I would like to thank all who indulge in my increasingly longer forum posts. Any way.. Funny story! A mistake was made by my internet provider and I was without internet this weekend! It was an odd experience.. I mean I grew up without internet.. but I realized how much of my home is setup to use internet.. I hear my radio through my Sonos and see TV through my Chromecast. At least when I was a child we had antenna tv and FM radio. It actually made my wife and I talk about getting a low tech FM radio - Just incase the political climate deteriorate even further in Europe.. and we need to be able to get news from the government. But before we go all doom and gloom... let's keep on topic... Without internet, the only game I could play was KSP - the others required internet in varying degree. So I managed to get the rover the last stretch to the mysterious crater in record time. Before being offgrid for an weekend, I was only driving the rover, half attentive, while listening to Audio Books or Podcasts with my wife. This weekend, the journey was done with plenty of whiskey in the glass and vinyls on the record player. You may be thinking, why plenty of whiskey? is Rovers that bad? well no... whiskey is a nice drink of course.. but also yes.. let's talk about Rovers.. and how much I dislike the Rover Game Mechanics. MISSION TASKS: A. Test the Rovers functionality and maneuverability - Success B. Drive an expedition to explore the North of Minmus - Success C. Drive the Rover back to Base Camp One C. Recover Rover via Dropship and return it to base- Success D. Return Dropship to ICV Explorer - Success LESSONS LEARNED; LESSONS IDENTIFIED: Section A: The Rover has left the Sheet Ice of the frozen lake and drive in the Snowdrifts that cover most of the little moon. Let's talk about rovers: I... HATE the way rovers drive in this game. It is not that I expected it to be Snow Runners, with the game simulating every minute physics detail of sand, snow and mud.. But man It would be nice if rovers at least drove like a car... and not a shopping trolley... It would be so nice if the wheels had just an inch of traction.. Speaking of traction.. What does the traction slider even do? It seems very backwards. If I turn traction up, the engines cannot turn the wheels, it feels like the engines are terrible underpowered (are they that weak?). But if you keep the tracktion down, you'll be wheel spinning like mad.. but unlike in our world, were the vehicle would dig it self down.. In the solar system of Kerbol the vehicle will gain momentum... a lot of momentum. I found I could get my rover to ~10 m/s on rough terrain (the only limiting factor being that it's hard to gain speed when the wheels dont have a lot of contact with the ground from all the jumps) and I never reached the limit on the flats of the Sheet Ice lakes.. the rover hit a small bump and tumbled. The science junior on the front broke off. - It was a bloody miracle the antenna didn't break off or the vehicle exploded.. So Johndin had to pick up sample and take readings by hand after that. The rest of the journey was done with the antenna folded down... and then only folded up to send situation reports to Kerbin, or the ICV when it passed by. After realizing this was how it was going to be - the only thing left to do was to strap in hit the speeder and tune the radio in on: And Start drift.. I mean driving. I found that the only reliable way to turn was to create a custom made Action Group for turning the Reaction Wheels ON - do the course correction and then press another custom made Action Group turning OFF all reaction wheels (to avoid the rover doing flips from the torque power when pressing forward). Because of course the "Only online when SAS is on" is bugged. The rest of the lessons learned Lessons identified I've put in spoiler sections for those interested to keep a bloated post more streamlined: 1. Axle configuration and angle of climb: 3. Thrusters: 4. Lights: 5. Power and Recharging: Section B: The rover - stopped in the snowdrifts - to enable Johndin to take samples and readings - While a cresended Kerbin is setting in the horizon. The Expedition to the Northern parts of Minmus was divided into 5 legs: Leg 1: Contained the initial testing of the Rover on the Sheet Ice Flats of (what I have Identified to be?) The Greater Flats that Base Camp One was established on. After that it took a sharp turn North East to get to new terrain that was found to be snowdrifts. This was done in the hopes that the reason the rover drove like a elephant on ice skates was because of the sheet ice - and not game mechanics.. Unfortunately I was to be disappointed. The rest of the leg consisted of the traversal of the Sheet Ice by night - Heading North West. Leg 2 + 3: Would be traversal of the hardest terrain the Rover forced. It was the heavy cratered mountains North of The Greater Flats. Leg 4: Would be the traversal of the less demanding rolling hils on the path North West - Dont let the map fool you - it looks way more smooth than it is. I thought it would be quickly traversed at high speeds. But the low gravity and rolling hills meant that as soon as the rover exceeded 10 m/s - it would spend the same time in the air (between jumps) as it did on ground. Making it impossible to really pick up more momentum. Leg 4 ended shortly before the destination. (My kids wanted to see what was in the crater, and were sleeping at the time) Leg 5: would be the last short stretch to the edge of the crater with the mysterious lightsource. (My daughter was so impressed by the monument that she had to call my wife so she could see it) Bellow a Map showing the approximated route with legs marked: From Right to Left: Leg 1, Leg 2, Leg 3, Leg 4 and Leg 5 Bellow in the spoiler section you can see a detailed walkthrough of the Journey: The Minmus Monument: Here, at the end of the journey I was presented with a choice - Call the mission done and drive home. Or, in the true spirit of the great kerbalnaut Jebidiah, drive down the cliff side and study the monument up close - though with the chance of not being able to get up again... or worse.. crash and burn The Rover had shown itself to be quite tough - It had survived landings with up to 20m/s - And no way in hell I was going to drive the rover all the way back again. No... going down would be a great excuse for a pick up via Dropshop and be flown back to Base Camp One, Johndin argued. So down the slope it was. Geronimo! - the rover going down the slope. While it is true the rover had survived traversing a chasm with the thrusters - and subsequently bounced in the rolling hills for several km going 20 m/s (it's hard to break when your wheels hardly touch the ground). Going down the cliff side quickly accelerated the rover to 40-50 m/s. and worse still, it was aiming directly for the statue. While I was positive that I could survive these speeds on uneven terrain as long as I kept the wheels leveled with the ground.. I was sure the suspension would not "tank" slamming into the statue at the center of the monument. In a last ditch maneuver Johndin, (who had pitched the idea of going down), managed to pull hard on the controls, pitch the rover up and break the rover with the thrusters. - a daring move! Having redeemed himself, he was given the honour of planting the flag.. and take another sample. KSC was still just visible over the ridge.. and the call for a taxi was relayed to ICV Explorer. While waiting for the dropship to arrive. Johndin, Podcal and Poduki had ample time to study the ancient ruin. Who was it depicting? How was it build? By Whom was it build.. answers I will likely only get once I've exhausted the sandbox experience - and try the campaign. Section C: Dropship arriving at The Minmus Monument - ready to pick up the Rover Crew. I had a feeling that by diverting the remaining fuel from the 3 Dropship to 1 - I would be able to complete the taxi mission. I was correct. It was strange to zoom past the terrain I had just spend the better of 4 evening to cross in meer minutes. Playing with audio on for once, I found that the Minmus Orbit Theme is really awesome - it made the tour back to Base Camp One felt like a final victory lap. I was to make one important Lesson Identified though: When correcting inclination - eyeball it - maneuver nodes are unreliable, as seen from the example bellow: The maneuver nodes are weird around extreme inclination burns - If I told the node just to burn Normal it would say that my craft would leave Minmus SOI before reaching the northern hemisphere. I had to adjust by also pulling on the retrograde node for the maneuver to stay in orbit. In the end the maneuver node did not work - and I ended up just burning Normal and eyeballing it. (without leaving the Minmus SOI) The result was this: Notice how much much further apart the two vehicles would be before the burn was complete. As well as the wrong fuel bars from image 1 to 2 (which had a quick load between them) For detailed walkthrough of the pick up - see spoiler section bellow: Plotting the course to Base Camp One: the next leg - getting the rover back to Base Camp One was a simple maneuver that did not require a lot of Δv - since there was no need for a expensive correction inclination burn. And the correct direction could be picked from the start, The maneuver wasn't even required to be orbital and a sub-orbital path was charted: The rest was just a final victory lap, were the achievement could be marveled at. - a few course correction had to be done as I forgot to take the rotation of Minmus into account. The last thing to do was to pluck the rover back into base for a refuel - I was a bit nervous about this since the rover tilted the base when I tested this feature on the runway of KSC - the alignment was slightly off. My fix to this was to give all the base elements landing legs - not only because I anticipated it would be nice on uneven terrain, but also because I thought it would fix the tipping issue spoiler alert - it did: As you can see it worked fine - but for a moment I had real fears that docking the rover to the base would cause it all to do flips in the low gravity. My fears were unjustified - The rover was refueled. Although not to full, as I didn't want to empty the G.P.U - the G.P.U was dropped only half full because of weight synergy between the base modules and the dropships performance window (around ~10t cargo each) - but I expect that I need to either downgrade the rover fuel levels (which is fine) or upgrade the fuel amount for the generator (which is harder to pull off). there are many things to consider for future base missions. In the spoiler section below you will find a detailed walkthrough of the tour. Section D: The dropship tacking off after waiting for ICV - Explorer to get into an optimal position for rendezvous. I thought i was smart and waited for the ICV - Explorer to get around Minmus, so I didn't have to play catch up - I did not wait enough though. After doing the initial sub orbital burn to get the right AP for a intercept orbit set, I realized that I was going to get ahead of the target... New plan had to be made. I had 2 options: A. Make a inclination correction burn and set an orbit 10km higher than target - wait for it to catch up and perform rendezvous maneuver. B. extend the AP and to meet target on the other side of the planet - making use of the approx 30° difference in path and correct inclination and make the path orbital at target. Option A. was the safest - but would use more Δv - something that was a bit on the low side (in hindsight it would not have been an issue) - option B used less fuel - but would need to perform both circulisation and inclination correction at the same time (this would also not be an issue due to the low orbit speeds around Minmus) I decided upon B and in the end the relatively speed to target was only 50 m/s opun arrival- an easy correction. the dropship safely docked back at ICV - Explorer. The Δv between the dropships are all but spend now - which means It will be hard to perform another pick up of the rover in the future. Although that being said - the Crew Shuttles have enough Δv to land and take off on the Mun from a 10km orbit. and the two that landed the crew at Base Camp One only spend 1/3 of their Δv - having 921 left - so Δv could be taken from the Crew Shuttle still docked to the ICV - as it only need enough to perform an emergency landing in case of catastrophic event. Now the only thing left - was to dock the dropship back at the mothership and call it the day.For detailed walkthrough see spoiler section bellow: Moving Forward: Where as I have done the long stretch from a bit south of the Minmus Equator - to the northern hemisphere. I only came across 2 different biomes. And can I truly call the expedition a success when so many more biomes are left to be explored? So much Science can be done? The Δv of the Dropships may be spend - I may have done enough Rover Driving on Minmus for 1 life - But.. there are two perfectly well functioning Crew Shuttles at Base Camp One - with ~920 Δv on them each. Maybe a few further excursions to the other flats - the south pole etc. can be done to gather more science with them? Am I done with Minmus, or should I explore further before closing down the Minmus Base for now and fly the Kerbals home. I need to ponder on this. Stay Tuned for More!

LEO and later the moon works better, shorter travel time and an luxury hotel both paces would be viable down the line. Multi year trips then you can not talk normally on the phone has issues if you need to be connected. Yes some people will pay for it but it would not bankroll the operation like orbital and moon hotels. You then attach the research to the hotels as its cheaper anyway, And you get to run on water on a pool on the moon.

I wanted to make an amendment to this post, specifically after watching Matt Lowne's most recent KSP2 video: Matt Lowne struggling with rover wheel physics bugs: 35:30 - 43:40 I don't usually build or drive rovers in the game so I guess I was blind sighted to what that experience is like in the current game. seeing him drive a rover and all the bugs from that is very disheartening and I hope these things get fixed soon, hopefully in the next patch. Anyways, if we want to talk about that more we should make our own forum thread for that, in terms of this thread I'd like to make an amendment that small rocks are fine to not have collision, but medium to large rocks definitely should. I'm going to use some screenshots from his video to be more specific: Small (no need for collision because then driving would be no fun): Medium (I'd appreciate collision so that you don't just drive in a straight line all the time, also assuming wheel bugs are fixed by then): Large(obviously collision should be turned on for these): Hopefully these amendments to my original post is well recieved, I really do think this is an important thing to add a bit more immersion in the game. P.S. somebody with more experience driving rovers in the game should make a thread about that

sorry i have been a bit busy and haven't finished this yet and i should probably vent about this in the talk about negative things thread. I'll get to it!

You can count me as a hard skeptic on this. I've seen a number of analyses of the 'go-fast', 'gimbal' and 'flir' videos and I remain unconvinced there's any actual hard evidence there. The recent testimony is really bizarre and interesting. Still, without like actual instrument data to back this stuff up I can't help but feel unconvinced. Anyone else been following this? https://thehill.com/homenews/4118340-ufo-hearing-live-updates-lawmakers-former-officials-strange-sightings/

Could this provide us a better clue for the release timeline of Colonies / 0.3? We have confirmation of at least a 0.2.2 release. Let's be optimistic and say that update comes in about 2 weeks (May 2nd, 2024). Using Scarecrow's average of 49 days between releases, we could anticipate the next update around June 20th. If that next update was 0.3 (again, being optimistic), then the timeline of milestones would look like this: 0.1 to 0.2 - 9 months, 26 days 0.2 to 0.3 (speculated) - 6 months, 2 days This timeline would match the hopes shared by Nate that the Colonies update would come quicker than For Science! and leaves quite a bit of breathing room. Even if there was a 0.2.3 update that dropped in June instead of 0.3 these timelines would still allow for an August release to follow (which still would meet the proposed timeline goals). Of course, this talk feels quite arbitrary given that each update and milestone is unique, but it helps put things in perspective. Do I want to wait until the end of summer for colonies? Not at all. However, the rate of development seems to show that we are indeed in the thick of it for now and the upcoming months.

@ColdJ i frankly do not care if you cant accept or wont accept King Richard the Lionheart. Its a historically accurate title. And you want to talk glass houses? Ill toss that stone. You started it. Remember this from 22 March: “Rovers rove.“ All of your “examples” are wild accusations and false save 1. Plumbers Plumb. A DIRECT response to your action on Rovers rove. The rest are legitimate sentences. Circling back to King Richard the Lionheart allow me to quote: Per rule 5: Names and proper nouns are added in one post. For example, if you wish to add the name "Robin Hood" you add "Robin Hood" in one post.“ As you see King Richard the Lionheart fits per the rule. Now that we have derailed this far enough I relay the currently active sentence so this game may return to being played. ——RESTORATION TO ACTIVE SENTENCE—— King Richard the Lionheart reigned ———RESTORATION COMPLETE——— 124504172024 new page 124604172024 130804172024 131304172024

I feel a number of people do not fully take advantage of the current upvoting system for the Bug Reports. Maybe they lack the technical expertise, comfort level required to post detailed reports, trouble finding archived report.. etc. I appreciate it when others post a bug I have had issues with but may have (temporarily) forgotten. Sometimes I intent to upvote a series of bugs but get distracted by work & the intention moves some where into the Aether. If there are bugs you want upvoted.. link them. Post a Reason why you thinknit deserves significant attention. But please.. let's avoid cross talk or debates. (If this is Stupid or Present Elsewhere Please Remove)

Sorry but glass houses. I have put up with premature cut offs on more than just these, and constant manipulations to get the sentence to something you want to talk about. It is one WORD at a time. Even if @Kimera Industries allowed "Maid Marian", "King Richard the Lionheart" is pushing it too far. I would have accepted "King Richard" but 4 words is a no from me. I kept away for awhile to let someone else play it out with you, but nobody did. So I tried to start fresh and you as with other word games we have played decided that you can overrule whenever you want. If you are willing to play fairly and randomly then I will play, but I am not up for being railroaded again.

Accurate, but not polished? Clarification please? Also, it would be helpful to know what they can and cannot talk about.

I suspect it isn't that simple. However, that could be one of the topics for "increased communication". Talk about development on a current pain point, without spoiling the colonies, or other new stuff in general... Instead of we can't wait to share what we've been working on

Hope to hear from CMs in the morning, maybe y'all can talk a little about the improvements to communication that y'all have come up with to deal with keeping the community up to date @Nerdy_Mike @Dakota

The MIT article is interesting - they talk about how... difficult... it is to get funding/be taken seriously when trying to explore that theory, then point out that it's not so loopy after all. The concrete, if true, would be poured with a jello like consistency that for *reasons* cures in a way that avoids shrinkage common to other concretes. It's an interesting theory. Back to moving logs with mechanical advantage - this one is interesting. The use of the bipod is totally different. With the rope at the top of the bipod and the fulcrum forward of the log, they just pull it up and over. Side note - I got the funding to try this with my students. So later next week I'll report back on how it went. Using 2x4x10s, making some beams from 2x6x12s and a few other things. Should be fun!

Yup. It seems like from going through the colony mega thread it won’t approach in a meaningful way a culmination of career and science until the exploration update, after colonies and after interstellar. I like science points. And I like the expansion and better quality of the hand crafted missions in KSP2 over test x part in y situation of KSP1. But it’s not career mode at all until there is a gameplay reason to build efficient rockets. They say rockets won’t be “free” but only really talk about resources in regards to fuel and late tech tree parts. If there’s never a reason to use a SRB over a liquid fuel stack with an engine this game may not be for me. So until they communicate clearly about what resources will be needed for, and how the player will be credited them (ie please have some incentive to not timewarp for maximum resources) the best I can do is *hope* that “rockets won’t be free” includes some player incentives to build cheap and efficient. Thats three major updates down the road. For Science! was a big step forward but didn’t nudge me at all to play more after trying it for a few hours, or to update my negative review to a positive one. The CMs hyped that they have some good communication in the pipeline, so here I check the forums at lunch for a week or so to see if it’s worth me staying around. No news or bad news and I’ll be away from the forums and Reddit for months again.

Of course. If we only "overreacted" when a hungry lion is in the immediate vicinity, I don't think we would come a long way as a society. A car is just a car, after all. So is money. Music. Computers. Biology.. Whatever tickles you... But it tickles, and that's a good thing. I'm fully aware that I have a first world problem. But if there was no such thing at this point, that would mean that all of us here would be in a nuclear wasteland, fighting over remaining canned food. So I'm happy to battle over opinions @Dakota Maybe this exists, and has slipped my attention... Is there a chance to at least get an overview of how news/updates are done? If you have a feature X, when do you post it as a sneakpeek? How decisions are made to share it at all? What's allowed and not allowed to talk about? I'm having troubles to form a proper question here.

I mean really love this team and I think things are coming along nicely but I believe even they see it as getting on base after a tough at bat. Unfortunately we're living in a really toxic gaming culture and its got to be hard for passionate developers and designers to gauge real reactions and actionable feedback in a clear and honest way. The atmosphere from a vocal player standpoint is to take all of these things really personally, or pretend to take them really personally, and then engage in an over-the-top Kabuki dance of feigned rage demanding groveling supplication from the corporate entities they've been wronged by because they think thats the only way games improve. But it's kind of like Cable news outlets constantly running BREAKING NEWS banners. If you're always turning everything up to 11 then people who might listen might as well just tune you out. If players believe rage-bombing every title that doesn't meet their expectations is the only way to convince developers to improve their products then eventually developers are just going to take those flame-campaigns less seriously. I would guess they already are. They'll look to more balanced and genuinely informative heuristics to identify the worst problems and work their way up from there. As test case lets talk about Cyberpunk--widely dragged and laughed at when it first released and probably deservedly so. It probably should have incubated for a couple more years. And now all of the initial hard work of good writing and good VA and story can be capitalized on because they fixed most of the bugs and redesigned the core mechanics into something incredible. Which is great! I genuinely hope as colonies and interstellar and resources are phased in the folks at Intercept remain open to making big internal changes to game mechanics depending on how things play out. What matters in the end is how the 1.0 product actually plays. Is it fun? Is it deep? Are the actual mechanics well tuned? is QOL up to snuff? Thats what matters. In my experience most people in this world are doing their best to be good at what they do. They're already incentivized to do that. Heaping shame and vitriol on them usually makes things worse, not better. The changes Cyberpunk made weren't just because players dragged CDPR through the mud. In fact the more substantive changes outside of bug-fixes--police system, fixing drops and the tech tree, etc. only come from very specific and clear feedback on whats not working and then having the time and creative process to create new and better systems. I personally would argue if you as a gamer are dissatisfied you produce more specific and actionable feedback on whats wrong--and passionately so!--rather than focus on grievances.

talk wike you are thwee ill go first: mommy said i cant eat the wrapper! waaa

SpaceX/Starship is the go-to option to talk about I think, but I don't think they'll make a proposal, at least on their own (though, that is probably what a lot of people thought before HLS, so what do I know). Relativity/Impulse have a Mars landing mission on the horizon, and could form the backbone to a project to pursue a return mission, as Tom Mueller is leading Impulse, and has a lot of experience with methalox (that he's applying to Helios), while also having looked into ISRU for Starship. They might even pull in SpaceX for this reason - giving them real data on making methalox on the Martain surface. Just based on having a slated Mars mission Blue Origin/RocketLab are another potential team, set to launch this summer (EscaPADE), but it's a pair of satellites, not a lander. So probably not. NASA needs a firmer deadline for sample return, NET 2040 is too far, and runs the risk of eventual cancellation. When NASA makes their selections, they need a closer date, preferably in the early/mid 2030s, about a decade from now.

RocketStar has made discussion on this forum a couple of times, but with some of their older projects. This one's spicier. I just randomly came across an article effectively repeating RocketStar's press release, and I kind of wanted to take this one apart a little bit. To get the tl;dr out of the way, the claim is that they are boosting their 1U pulsed plasma drive with fusion to give it an extra kick "for free". How much of a kick isn't really specified. There is no point of going over an article, so lets just go to the source with RocketStar's Press Release. Note that they are referencing real experiments that have confirmed the reaction and talk about the upcoming flights of their current FireStar drive, but don't say much about the fusion results beyond detection of gamma and alpha radiation. Which is cool in itself, but doesn't say much for the practical side of things. They do specifically clarify in the press release that the "fusion boosted" really means "fusion-triggered-fission-boosted," which is something that needs to be taken apart a bit. Specifically, the claim is that by introducing boron to the water, which is used as main propellant, they are getting boron-proton fusion, which results in an unstable state of carbon, which decays to alpha particles. The release does not specify the isotopes used, but boron does come in 10B and 11B, with the latter being more abundant and more interesting of the two. The process 11B + p -> 12C is of interest here. As we all, know, 12C is stable, however, there is a rather well known Hoyle State of carbon which isn't. The natural way in which Hoyle State comes up is when stars burn helium in their cores. The process involves two 4He nuclei coming together to form a highly unstable 8Be nucleus, which has just enough time to collide with a third 4He nucleus to form the Hoyle State of 12C. The latter is highly unstable, and is almost like the 3 alpha particles bouncing around in a common strong force potential than a real nucleus. Consequently, most of the time it decays back to three alpha particles, and the star has to try again. Occasionally, however, the 12C** state emits a gamma, decays to a lower energy 12C* state and finally to ground state 12C. The Hoyle State has 7.7MeV above carbon's ground state, which is a lot. The full proton-proton cycle is about 24MeV. So we're talking a good fraction of typical nuclear energies. On paper, this works. The total binding energy of 11B is 76.21MeV and ground state 12C is 92.15MeV. That gives 11B + p plenty of energy to form Hoyle State, so long as protons are hot enough to overcome the repulsion barrier. It is much lower for proton-proton or even D-T fusion, since 11B has the charge much more distributed through the larger nucleus, but I don't really have any numbers to attach to it at this time. I'll try to find either something from the cited SBIR experiments or other publications at a later point to try and get a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how much fusion/fission we are actually expecting in a chamber of a plasma drive. What we have that's probably pretty reliable are the specs of the current generation FireStar M 1.4, which does not involve any fusion/fission processes. Just a conventional pulsed plasma propulsion unit, utilizing water, ionizing arc, and an accelerator cavity. Since this is a commercial product, and validation experiments are apparently available under the NDA, I have no reason to suspect them from being far off. Cited directly from RocketStar's website. The ISP cited is consistent with the total impulse with 250g of propellant and implies mean exhaust velocity of about 71km/s. If the protons are accelerated by the field of the same strength, they can be potentially traveling about twice as fast, resulting in effective plasma temperatures of up to low mega-Kelvins on collisions. That feels like ballpark reasonable for what it'd take for 11B + p fusion to take place. But again, I don't have good estimates for that at this time. On the net, interesting. I want to see the numbers attached to the claimed efficiency boost. Also, the fact that they're calling it a fusion rocket when it's really more of a fission rocket feels a little scummy, but maybe they were trying to not scare people with neutron radiation associated with fission? This is, if real, an aneutronic process, so it would be reasonably safe for the applications for which this is meant. Either way, a real nuclear-boosted drive that's commercially available is really exciting, even if the performance benefits are going to be marginal. Finally, even the base model, without fusion/fission is a really nifty example of how far the commercial plasma propulsion has gone. A 1U propulsion unit that can provide a 3U sat with 4.6km/s of delta-V? Yeah, that's not bad. With the right planning, you can take your 3U from LEO all the way to Mars utilizing a boost from Luna. Neat.