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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.

It is simple. Say anything you want that abides with the forum rules in Zalgo text, and please don't make it too crazy. https://lingojam.com/ZalgoText B̶̳̦́e̸͉̰͠͝g̴̢̘͐i̶͖͉̓͘ṋ̴̯̊!̸̦̏!̶̙̂̋ (Begin!!) You do not need to add regular text of what the zalgo text reads as long as it is mostly readable.

Talk about loaded questions. My biggest gripe with the talk about performance is that 90% of all the "gains" comes from removing elements from screen. Take a look at how low graphics looked in 0.1.0 vs 0.1.4 and it's pretty damning that there's been minimal performance gains, only fidelity losses.

It’s like they picked the worst of both worlds. Talking a lot at times but only about insubstantial stuff (amas with softball questions, dev insights into features that were supposed to come a brief window after launch) And then trying to change to a “under promise over deliver strategy” without acknowledging or wrapping up the loose ends of everything they’ve already discussed (reentry heat video was supposedly supposed to come out 11 days ago, has since then not been even acknowledged) all the while not actually delivering everything. It’s like they keep flip flopping on how much to talk thinking that’s the reason the player base is grumpy when, if the game was making progress, they could talk a lot or not at all and many would be happier. Because the communication style isn’t the reason for the backlash, the state of the game is the reason.

Hardly a deliberate tactic, just passion. Remember that a forum (or any community) is mostly made up of the most passionate people for a project, both positive and negative. Those who don't really care and just play occasionally tend to lurk at best, but usually just don't engage these kinds of spaces at all. The negative speakers are speaking out because they want to be heard - the prospect of driving others away makes that harder, not easier. And its not some effort to tank/punish/etc the developers for it, as again, the majority of people don't interact with communities at this level. They'll see the steam ratings, a few suggested and top reviews, and make a decision there. Folks are upset with the state of things, and they want to talk with other people who are upset with the state of things. Others are ok with the state of things, and they want to talk to people who are ok with the state of things. Both groups want to feel vindicated, justified in how they feel by confirming that no, they're not just crazy or stupid, others feel the same way. Some of those people just take it a bit too personally when they stumble across someone who doesn't feel the same way they do. The community ends up on defense mode, with all members wary that someone's there to tear them down for hate/hope for the project. Which in turn leads most conversations to be snippy and aggressive as everyone takes every quip by assuming the worst. The gap between the groups grows wider, and the outliers become more extreme. Back immediately following launch, the extreme positive side was "Wow this is rough but the bones are so good, they'll sort it out soon" and the extreme negative side was "Wow the games in a terrible state, how'd they think this was ok to release?". Now, six months on, the extreme positive side is more or less saying "Lol why did you expect a full price game to be any good or playable when its got the Early Access label? You're a fool if you expected anything else" and the extreme negative side is "The devs have cut and run, the ones left over can't tie their own shoelaces much less write a line of code, how hard is it to copypaste from a decade old game?". The moderate opinions and positions are still here, but frankly, nobody listens much to them lol, quirk of human nature. So long as these narratives remain so extreme and so divergent, things won't get better in the community. The devs actions will shift the dial one way or another, but from a community perspective its in the worst possible state - Maximum risk of genuine incompetence and failure in the game, and maximum possibility that its all just around the corner. Six months with minimal quality patching is extremely poor. But six months plus change to a major feature release is pretty good. Frankly, until the devs land it, flat on their face or perfectly, its going to continue to diverge. Once they do the narrative will likely unify, either to "Yea it sucks" and "It sucks but recovery narrative NMS guys", or it lands it and goes "It sucked but its turning around" and "I told you guys to stop crying, its great". But all the while, as the passionate community divides and bickers and hopes for some proof one way or another, the real danger is the quiet majority audience. They're not hanging around reading devblogs. They're not digging deep into community discussions and roadmap details and the rocky development cycle the game has. They're seeing a 29% Mostly Negative recent review score on steam, and skipping the game. They're taking a gamble, buying it, having a bad time, and refunding it with a negative review. They're folks who bought the game, tried playing for a bit, left a negative review and put the game down and probably won't come back, alter reviews if it gets good, etc. The easiest representation of this I can see is the mission reports forums for the two games. The first games one is still pretty active, with the entire first page of threads having been posted in this month. KSP2 has six threads that've been active this month, and its first page goes back to April. If the passionate forum goers aren't flying as much, what do you think the casual audience is doing? Nothing much, I'd imagine. Balls in the developers court, but the clocks ticking - This lurch period of uncertainty isn't helping any aspect of the game or the community.

If the devs bring in science trust me most of the discussion will be on science. That’s more interesting for everyone to talk about. I’d like to talk about resources and asynchronous options for multiplayer but it’s hard to have those conversations not even knowing what science will be like. And, to keep this merry go round conversation going, KSP1 was much cheaper than KSP2, was a new idea combining Orbiter like mechanics into a sandbox game without any prior game to get ideas/solutions from, was made by far fewer people, and had more progress down its “roadmap” over any 3 month period than has KSP2 over its lifetime. When your game is less playable with less features than the prior entry in the franchise, is more expensive, and is progressing substantially slower than the first game yeah people are going to get grumpy. If you then apologize and try and start off with a clean slate and return to overpromising and either under delivering or never delivering yeah people will get upset.

Honestly, I think the hard part about trying to stay positive about the future of the game is that many of the things, that would normally be sources of hype, have been proven to be unreliable for people to be putting their hopes in. So of course we can't change that. It's weird feeling like their has to be a dichotomy, between positivity about the game and negativity. I want to be want to complain about the things wrong with the game, but like many others I would also like to see this forum, if not full, at least largely so, of people engaging with the game and enjoying themselves. It's frustrating when the core problem is that people feel that they can't get engaged with the game enough due to all the bugs and whatnot. It's a valid feeling, full stop. I just wish the game was in a state where it was more interesting to talk about what we're able to do in it, than to talk about how difficult it is for us to GET to that point of engagement.

At first I thought: "I'll just get to the Mun and back. That's it. Then I'll be done." Then it was: "Just plant a flag on Minmus, that's enough." "Just see how mining and refueling works..." "Just rescue my Kerbalnaut stranded in Munar orbit..." "Just plant a flag on Duna..." And for a while, that was enough. I did the rendezvous and docking tutorial. One go at that tedium was more than enough. I was even getting a bit bored babysitting every single burn. Going elsewhere with robots was unexciting, and flags and footprints meant docking. Nope. Crew transfers or rescue missions for me meant either planting both parties on an airless celestial body, or MAYBE a orbital rendezvous. Either way, it involved a LOT of EVA propellant and a long space/moonwalk. Then I heard about MechJeb, and KSP took over my life again. I got misty-eyed as my three, helmets-off, intrepid explores watched Jool phasing overhead like a giant lava lamp / clock (waxing quarter at nightfall, full at midnight, and back to a waning quarter near sunrise) in the Laythian night. So, Hi. Nobody in my life plays KSP and I just can't keep all this wonder to myself any longer! I'm also too impatient to wait for moderator approval. So now I'm going to write a book (feel free to not read): LAYTHE 1 - 2-part launch - Grabbing (not docking) in Kerbin orbit - Flight to Minmus - Grabbing and refueling from a Minmus miner/refinery ship. - Then off to Jool's SOI! Jool Aerocapture My first mission to Laythe blew up 6 times (and ended up sub-orbital once) trying to Aerocapture into Joolian orbit because: - I designed and built it wrong: Fully fueled lander W/asparagus staging being pushed by a single-engine nuclear intrasolar transfer vehicle (that was also pushing a lab module) with insufficient fuel. - I'm too impatient to figure out all the parameters for the online Aerocapture tools, so I just kept trying different periapsis until I found one that was sorta manageable. - I docked the lander to the NERV-powered transfer vehicle using the AGU rather than a proper docking port. My engineer kept having to spacewalk to reconnect broken struts that I installed post-connection. At one point, she had five minutes to get outside, climb down a ladder, repair the broken strut, climb back up and get TF back inside before they hit the atmosphere. - I didn't put enough AIRBRAKES (and RCS thrusters and reaction wheels) on to compensate for the 10M heat shield waaaaaaay up front. The whole stack (more like a train) was pretty unstable and I just barely managed to keep it straight even after pumping as much of the fuel to the forward-positioned lander tanks as they would hold. The tail got pretty cooked and I ended up rolling the entire ship (during my successful-enough Aerobrake altitude) at periapsis to keep everything from going completely sideways. Something exploded, but I guess it wasn't important. (I don't know how to access mission logs to see what broke). But I made it! With a small retro burn right after exiting Jool's atmosphere, and jettisoning a full RCS tank (whoops, ended up needing that later). Laythe Aerocapture I think I only blew the ship up twice during the Laythe Aerocapture. All this time, I was just guesstimating the amount of fuel I needed to get the crew home. - I also don't know how to calculate delta-V for vehicles before I've dumped some of the stages, so I didn't know how much DV I'd need to push my much-diminished stack home. Laythe Landing Turns out that a 10M heat shield is unlikely to make a stable reentry when you undock the 100-meter lab, fuel tank, and NERV engine that kept it sort of stable during aerocaptures. I was doing okay until I ran out of monopropellant. Then my lander went Mary Poppins on me much higher and faster than I had planned. Funny, but terrifying. Good thing engines have a pretty high thermal tolerance. I think it took me 3 tries to actually land in one piece, on land. I wanted coasts, but I ended up on a mountain after mashing the "LAND SOMEWHERE" button in desperation. Laythe Jool is SO PRETTY! I love the noon eclipses and the giant green nightlight! I landed on the rim of the big crater so it was almost directly overhead. All my Kerbalnauts developed neck problems from looking up. Also 90 degrees is not easy to pan to. I wanted them to have a swim, but I didn't have the patience to watch them hike for however many physics-warped hours it would take to get down to the water. I disembarked all 3 crew at the same time. What could go wrong? Ladders. Ladders that don't work the same way after a save on an uncrewed vehicle (or something). I tried everything to get my crew back onboard, including welding a solar panel as a "catch plate" for them to jump to from the top of the ------ ladder. Didn't work. And that's when and why I "discovered" the gravity hack. Laythe Launch The lander had launched just fine during a practice run on Kerbin. Not so on Laythe. Probably because I used up all my monoprop trying to survive reentry, and none of the ascent engines, I chose, gimballed. Yikes. My engineer pulled off every piece of "unnecessary" equipment she could reach, tried to compensate for a nasty yaw defect by rebalancing the amount of propellant in the various tanks and changing the staging order. It worked well enough that the lander limped to an orbit above Laythe's atmosphere with just one somersault along the way. Needless to say, Mechjeb was useless for the ascent on my catawampus ship, so it was all seat-of-the-pants. The intrasolar transfer vehicle was able to dip down and rescue the MK-3 reentry pod. Yay! Homeward bound! Jool Escape My Kerbalnauts didn't have enough remaining DV to escape Laythe, then Jool, then lower Periapsis to Kerbin's orbit. Not even close. Whoops. MechJeb said I needed 6000 m/s if I waited 300 years. I had maybe 4K. Luckily Tylo happened to be wandering by when I was playing with impossibly-expensive return trajectories. - The first time I got too excited, did a mountaintop-clipping swingby, and later realized I had dropped the ship's periapsis into Kerbol's corona. Whoops. - Second time I got it right-ish and made it back to Kerbins SOI for around 1000m/s. WOOT! And that was that. - I had enough fuel to straight-up decelerate into Kerbin orbit with a 60km periapsis. - Jettisoned the MK3 pod - Had the intrasolar transfer vehicle climb back to a 400km orbit. As a bookend to the crazy mission, the pod bounced off the atmosphere for 3 orbits and ended up running out of battery (I had left the solar panels on Laythe), and coming in totally dead stick with the ablator on its heat shield completely burned up. Still, any landing you walk away from.... especially one with 6K worth of science! ... which I promptly sold out to finance LAYTHE 2: This Time We're Staying! Laythe 2 Design: - Minimize aerocapture. There are sooo many Joolian moons, and sticking a 10M heat shield on every lander just sucks. - Permanent Laythe Base - Miner/Refueling Ship (probably aiming for Bop) built similar to my overpowered Minumus miner and refinery - SSTO dropship with no ablators. It's supposed to go down and land fully fueled, exchange crews, then fly back up and meet with the Miner/Refueler. It will make the transfer to Jool empty and need to be fueled prior to the first drop on Laythe. - Each component gets its own Intrasolar Transfer Vehicle (ITV) with 3 NERV engines and 14K deltaV (when not docked to something) - Docking to be done with REAL docking ports (the large one), except when refueling. The miner/refinery has a couple of AGU's and LOTS of RCS. Launch: - No problems with anything but the ITV's. Those launched fully-fueled from KSP space center and were heavy as sin. Mechjeb couldn't handle it, so I manually pushed them into orbit. The first one took a couple of tries until I got the hang of it. Currently I have all 3 ITV's fully fueled and docked to their respective mission components. I started building this mission with $9,000,000. Now I have $745,000 left. I have full science and am selling 95% of any new research for cash. A lot of the cost came from hiring Kerbalnauts. 3X ITV's each with Pilot and Engineer + Laythe Base: 4 Scientists, 1 Engineer, 1 Pilot + SSTO: 1 Engineer, 1 Pilot + Mining Ship: 1 Engineer (4 stars) , 1 Pilot. So that's 16 crew in total, and I think I hired 12 of them just for this mission. Lots of greenhorns. Current Issues: - MechJeb keeps blowing up mid-burn for long-duration burns. I have good alignment with the Mun to launch the Jool fleet with a nice flyby gravity assist, but I noticed the target drifting on my first attempt and I had to scrap and restart to a pre-departure save point. This isn't the first time this has happened. - I don't think it's possible to do simultaneous burns and keep the fleet together. Even if I could get a mod that let me fly all the ships at the same time, they have different masses and probably won't stay within physics distance during the long nuke accelerations. That means I'll have to space the ships' departures out by 30-40 minutes or so. Not a big deal, but kind of a bummer and a hassle to re-rendezvous outside Kerbins SOI, if I want to for some reason (like . - I am out of money! - Not super confident that I can land the base and the SSTO within a reasonable distance of each other. The SSTO has wheels but I'm not great at building rovers and it's pretty tippy. - KSP has taken over my life!

Good afternoon, Kerbonauts. This past week has been a learning experience. My last post here received a lot of comments, many of which expressed doubt, frustration, and in some cases even anger about either the seeming lack of progress on KSP2 or the perception that I am concealing some dark reality about the state of the game. Our team has been reading your comments and asking one another if there’s some way we can do better. In the past, every item in these forum posts has had to cross a threshold of certainty - I don’t want to announce some new feature or target date, only to experience a trust-eroding failure to follow through. I feel this burden especially keenly because in the past I have personally announced dates that turned out to be incorrect. For that reason, I have avoided talking about features in progress, bugs under investigation, or internal delivery deadlines. With a game this complex, nothing is ever assured until it has been thoroughly tested by QA. When you combine this "stay quiet until you’re absolutely sure" ethos with a more dispersed update cadence, what you get is long periods of silence. Now, of course I haven’t gone literally silent. I still post here every week. Before each post goes out, I meet with the production and community teams to review the past week’s progress, and a great many exciting developments are discussed. They often take the form of "we’ve made great progress on x category of super annoying bug" or "this feature looks good but we haven’t had time to fully validate it yet." By my standard of "don’t talk about it until it’s truly done," neither of those scenarios yields anything that’s safe to post about. What is safe, then? Well, for the most part, content updates (new art, new parts, new graphics improvements) come along in nice, neat little parcels that are not only visually pleasing, but also unlikely to generate an unmet expectation. They’re fun and they’re safe, and artists are always creating new content. So you see lots of that. But the other thing you see lots of is some variation on "improved stability and performance." That’s my catch-all term for that very meaningful category of progress that, because of my reluctance to write bad checks, can’t yet be talked about in detail. When I hold back on such items, I comfort myself that the less I reveal now, the more surprising the patch notes will be when we finally release them. Still, I’m questioning my choice to withhold information about systems in progress. Yes, there’s always the chance that when we talk about a feature in development, that we’re also creating an expectation that the feature will be present in the next update. Similarly daunting is the possibility that we’ll announce that we’re working on something that the community perceives as "easy" (an especially common situation when we’re working on a feature that is already functional in the original KSP), and then take such a long time delivering that feature that people may decide we don’t know what we’re doing. In such cases, we then need to take the time to explain in technical detail why the implementation of such and such a feature is non-trivial in KSP2. Increased transparency carries costs, and those costs always have to be balanced against other feature-facing work we could be doing. So what I’m going to try to do right now is to extend some trust to you. I’m going to talk about a few things that are not yet complete so that you can at least see some of the ropes we’re hauling on every day - some of which may prove to be long. This list is not exhaustive (there are dozens of people working on dozens of items simultaneously, and there are some features that we really do want to be surprises), but it will hopefully give you some visibility into the breadth of issues we’re tackling. Please do not assume that if a bug didn’t get mentioned in this list that it is unknown to us or not being worked on — this is a top-ten list. Our bug prioritization is broadly guided by the following logic: Category A: any bug that causes loss of a vehicle in flight (physics issues, trajectory instability, decoupling instability, loss of camera focus, unexpected part breakage/RUD) Category B: any bug that affects the fidelity or continuity of a saved game (rigidbody degradation, save file inflation, loss of vehicle or Kerbal during instantiation or focus switching) Category C: any bug that negatively affects the expected performance of a vehicle (drag occlusion, staging issues, thrust asymmetry, joint wobbliness, landing leg bounciness) Category D: any VAB bug that prevents the player from creating the vehicle they want to make (symmetry bugs, fairing/wing editor bugs, strut instability, inconsistent root part behavior) While there are many bugs that live outside these four categories (and in some cases, such bugs end up getting sorted out during normal feature development), the four categories above are the biggest fun killers. Until a player can envision a vehicle, create it without being impeded by VAB issues, fly it with a reasonable expectation that physical forces will be consistently applied, and save their progress at any point without worrying about the fidelity of that save, the KSP2 experience will be compromised. Obviously, now that we are layering in progression mechanics (Science gathering and transmission, missions, and R&D tech tree) in preparation for downstream Roadmap updates, the importance of addressing these issues only increases. Therefore, here are a few of the biggest issues we’re wrangling with right now: Vehicles in stable coasting orbits sometimes experience orbit instability/decay - Status: possible fix in progress Trajectories change when vehicles cross SOI boundaries - Status: fix in progress (see below) Certain inline parts cause aerodynamic drag numbers to spike - Status: under investigation Returning to craft from VAB causes craft to go underground (possibly related to Kerbals and landed vehicles dropping through terrain while being approached) - Status: possible fix being tested Decoupling events result in various issues including loss of control, incorrect controllability of decoupled subassemblies, loss of camera focus, and other issues - Status: may have many causes, but some fixes in progress (see below) Save files get bigger over time (TravelLog experiencing "landed" status spam) - Status: fix being tested Opening part manager causes major frame lag - Status: experiments ongoing Major post-liftoff frame rate lag immediately above launchpad (associated with engine exhaust lighting) - Status: fix being tested Root parts placed below decouplers cause issues with stage separation - Status: under investigation Vehicle joints unusually wobbly, some part connections unusually weak - Status: under investigation We’re tracking down some strange vehicle behaviors associated with spurious autostrut errors. As we’ve discussed here before, some radially-attached parts are reinforced by additional invisible autostruts to improve their stability. It turns out that these autostruts don’t always break cleanly during decoupling events, and may be the cause of some of our more frustrating decoupling issues (including those where detached vehicle elements appear to still affect one another’s behavior). We’re still investigating this one, but we have high hopes that its correction will result in a reduction of mission-killing errors. Finally, we have zeroed in on the cause of some of the trajectory errors we’ve been seeing - especially the situation in which a trajectory changes spontaneously when crossing an SOI boundary. This one is deep in the code and its correction may end up fixing a few other downstream issues. This is a complicated problem, however, and we may not solve it in time for the June update. We should know more about this one soon. I’ve provided the list above as a stopgap. We have been discussing internally how best to improve bug status visibility so that you have a better idea of what we’re working on. We’re looking at a lot of options right now, and I’ll update you when we’ve settled on something. We recognize the need for this transparency and we’ll come to a solution soon. ANYWAY... we have some nice content news! Update v0.1.3.0 will be the first KSP2 update to contain not only bug fixes, but a few new parts. Right now, we can confirm the arrival of the following: A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E Clamp-O-Tron shielded docking port Clamp-O-Tron Inline Docking Port MK2 Clamp-O-Tron Docking Port Cornet Methalox Engine (new small extensible-nozzle orbital engine) Trumpet Methalox Engine (new medium extensible-nozzle orbital engine) Tuba Methalox Engine (new large extensible-nozzle orbital engine) S3-28800 Large Inline Methalox tank (longer version of large methalox tanks) Here’s some video of those new engines in action. The Tuba has individually-swiveling mini-nozzles that might be one of part designer Chris Adderley’s coolest ideas yet (final parts built by Pablo Ollervides, Jonathan Cooper, and Alexander Martin): new_engine_testing.mp4 We are still testing the new grid fins. Because these parts require some special part module support, engineering work is ongoing. Due to the complexity of this work, we don’t believe grid fins will make it into the v0.1.3.0 update. Last week’s challenge produced a few spiffy designs. Check out this rocket, with which user Well braved the Kraken and managed to deposit a lander at the bottom of the Mohole: Gotta respect the ingenuity of using antennae for landing legs: Thanks to those who participated! Next up, at the suggestion of @RyanHamer42 on Twitter, we’re building space stations! Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Primary goal: build a station by docking at least two Wayfarer habitat modules together in orbit above Kerbin Secondary goal: add a deployable solar panel truss and a fuel depot tank to your station Jeb-level goal: dock a transfer tug to your station and place the station in orbit above another planet Val-level goal: send a lander to your station that can be reused for down-and-up flights to the surface of the planet below Thanks for the suggestion, Ryan! Good luck, everyone!

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?"

This topic is used to talk about flags created by everyday people and the largest modders in KSP alike! We welcome any flags, as long as they are Safe For Work. I guess that's it, keep sharing your flags! (eventually I will make a picture of a vessel with all the flags on the topic, to participate you must include a link to your flag in the description as well as the pictr) Posting NSFW flags on this topic will be reported to the moderators.

Sorry, this jumped out to me as being surprisingly hilarious. I was reading through this dumpster fire and reached your comment - most of the stuff you said just uses different starting assumptions and places different importance on different pieces of information but I can get behind the logic (while disagreeing with most of them), but this one... an acrobatic masterpiece. Okay, an example: Object A has trait B. Type of object C has trait B. (implication...). This doesn't logically imply that the object is in that type - I have eyes. Yeah, flamingoes have eyes. The thing that makes this really funny is that you can in fact talk about things that don't exist - you can find lots of examples of very specific statements about multiplayer that aren't true. The devs could just lie - I'm reasonably certain you are aware of that fact. So, reading backwards, coming across this statement right after reading this is hilarious. Wait... They can talk about it. Yeah, you can talk about things that don't exist. (implication: They don't have multiplayer). One thing that your statement serves for is to rule out its own category; that is logically consistent. For example, if I say that I can't demonstrate something that doesn't exist and then I go on to demonstrate it, then I can't be in the category of non-existence: if p then q -> !q = !p (this doesn't work the other way btw). So, assuming that that Patch 1 was communicated truthfully (which could always be an incorrect assumption), this statement: doesn't work: You can't talk about (I'd say demonstrate) things that don't exist, the devs have talked about (and more importantly demonstrated) their QA through Patch 1, ergo the QA does not not exist. As I said at the start, I respect your opinions and logic, even the QA statement. You noticed I made different assumptions to start with (that the Patch 1 communications are true, at least the relevant part), and perhaps interpreted information differently (that the bug fixes in Patch 1 are an adequate demonstration of bugs that have been fixed without outside input), leading me to a different conclusion. However, changing those factors, I could come to your conclusion logically. I don't want this to be a serious insult, just a jab at something I found funny. Everyone slips up, I caught two obvious logical fallacies in this message (and there's probably still more if you want to find them), but this was a slip with a wonderful flourish.

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

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.

Yes, but forward to...what? I totally agree a lot of you are tired of seeing or having the same discussion over and over again (I'm hardly posting anymore, just reading the same 6 people fight), but...you know...what is there to talk about? (A lot of people think) the game sucks isn't good (yet?), so what else is there to talk about?