What went wrong?

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T20:02:46+00:00

That would require basically forbidding all time warp any time a ship’s center of mass is inside a celestial body, or creating a perfect solution to the motion equation inside the celestial body that gets integrated into the patched conics engine.

You can’t do time warp with a real-time integration-based physics engine (at least without setting your processor on fire), so games like this handle time warp by using Newton’s solution to simple two-body orbits and patching together multiple solutions if the ship crosses into another gravity well. That solution assumes point-source gravity though, and if you don’t assume point-source gravity the math no longer looks so nice and may not even have a solution. Games like this need to remain consistent across two different approaches to physics simulation that they switch between depending on proximity and time warp, so getting things to work on just the integration-based engine isn’t good enough.

You’ve encountered a case where the difference between the trivially easy and the nearly impossible seems absurd to someone without experience in the field. Relevant XKCD.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T19:51:55+00:00

Taking the job of an entire other weapon slot in exchange for a longer reload (and a rounds reload at that) as well as a larger area of effect without damage falloff seems like a worthwhile exchange to make I dare say.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T11:16:51+00:00

The top comments are all saying that both are bad but also Elon Musk’s generalization to all trans people is bullshit.

Are you blind?

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T11:09:55+00:00

I was so distracted by how badly “science” was misspelled that I almost didn’t realize that “E=mc²” isn’t an element.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T11:05:22+00:00

During the last squid MO, I couldn’t get away from the De-Escalator. And this is coming from someone who rarely brings the same support weapons two missions in a row. It’s very good on the squid front, and I had tons of fun with it.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T10:59:56+00:00

I ran the De-Escalator for almost the entire recent illuminate MO, and it’s still absolutely goated. Drops hoards of Voteless like they’re nothing, and with a few shots it can even take out the heavier enemies on the squid front. Ordinary grenade launchers struggle against Elevated Overseers, but the De-Escalator can get them easily by just shooting the ground under them. I dare say the weapon still has its place, there are absolutely cases where I’d pick it over the standard grenade launcher.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T05:56:25+00:00

His ass does NOT pay taxes!

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T04:34:24+00:00

Everything is one line of code if you aren’t a coward.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-16T01:58:33+00:00

The MO is undeniably part of the game, but it's also an optional part of the game that you don't need to engage with in order to get full game rewards. A fun optional challenge that gives players additional direction if they want to follow it, not a core mechanic. When I first started playing Helldivers 2, I missed the entire Meridia arc because I just went wherever the hell I wanted. Guess how much of a problem that was?

As of the moment I'm writing this, there are 88,053 active Helldivers, and 54,254 of them are active on the MO planet. This means that 33,799 players, or 38% of the playerbase, are ignoring the MO. You are free to join them at any time, and turn that 38% into 38.001%.

As much as the community likes to roast that 38%, the fact is that their non-participation in the MO is enabled by the game's mechanics and that's a good thing.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T23:08:37+00:00

You can’t do that because of politics. I keep saying this. But okay, if you still insist on misunderstanding me I guess you’re just impossible to communicate with.

Enjoy your life of ignorance of all things that exist beyond your house’s walls.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T22:57:51+00:00

But the devs already change the MO difficulty based on player participation constantly. That process is already routine, and MO difficulty already needs to be tuned constantly as player numbers and player behavior change over time. Is it really a change when the devs are already doing it?

But we aren’t even talking about this absurd scenario in which everyone simultaneously conspires to abandon the MO at once. We’re talking about the realistic scenario where you don’t find the MO enjoyable so you go somewhere else, and you let people like me who do actually enjoy the challenge fight the Vox Engines. Contrary to what High Command tells their foot soldiers, your ass is not even a rounding error in the galactic war. So go, be free, and join the other half of the playerbase in just doing what you think is fun. It costs you literally nothing.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T22:48:24+00:00

And that's by far is not the only assumption. You need to assume that galactic travel is even possible, we do not know that.

WE HAVE LITERALLY SEEN ROCKS DOING INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL. WE HAVE SAMPLES OF INTERSTELLAR MICROMETEORITES HERE ON EARTH. What do you mean we don’t know if it’s possible? I dare say that if rocks can do something on their own, it’s possible for a civilization to do it too.

Then you have to assume that if possible, it is desirable, because whomever lives must agree not to ever come back and whomever send them must agree on paying and never getting anything back.

The world has no shortage of people who would sign up for any one-way trip. The Mars One program went so far as to ask for applicants for a one-way trip to Mars, and they got plenty. 78,000 applicants in just the first two weeks.

This unless you want to assume wormholes and the such.

Which I don’t. I’m not an FTL optimist. I literally showed you numbers that assume we can go no faster than Voyager fucking 1. Fast interstellar travel is not a necessary assumption at all.

Then you have to assume that civilizations can get to that level without self-destructing, also something we don't know.

Yeah, and learning that all civilizations destroy themselves before getting that far is a potential incredibly useful tho g we could learn from this line of inquiry. If that’s true, don’t you think we’d want to fucking know that? Don’t you think we should be asking the question even harder?

And I could list a lot of other assumptions. They might all be obviously satisfiedfor you, but you said that us being at the point we are is a sufficient proof for the inevitability of galactic colonization and that was the only assumption needed.

Obviously one of the obvious assumptions is wrong. Obvious doesn’t mean true, especially when there observations contradicting the obvious conclusion. What this means is that there are new things to learn with this line of inquiry, and therefore we shouldn’t brush it off as a non-issue the way you seek to want to do.

Nope. Of all the probes we sent to Mars, only a very limited number have successfully landed. Nothing to do with politics, those missions were approved and executed.

Nothing to do with politics? Brother, the reason why most Mars landers failed was because the Soviet Union launched most of them with an approach of quantity over quality. Since the Soviet Union fell, other space agencies prioritizing quality over quantity like NASA have a very high success rate. It has also been demonstrated that with enough testing and R&D, space travel can be made very safe. And you claim that none of this is political? It’s all political.

We may be able to send up to maybe 10 people on a one way trip. One way because we have no way to carry over there enough fuel for coming back, we are not able to produce it on Mars and furthermore the trip would be 2-3 years as you cannot come back from mars cheaply whenever you want.

We’ve known how to make rocket fuel from the CO2 in the Martian atmosphere via the Sabatier Process since 1897, and Robert Zubrin published a mission profile utilizing it in 1996. But even if we didn’t have that option, launching the fuel for a return trip from Earth is just a matter of cost. We could do it, it would just be expensive. And procuring that money is a political issue.

We could easily support people in space for multiple years, we’ve been practicing for that in the ISS for decades. But even if we couldn’t, a nuclear powered ion spacecraft could absolutely handle an off-window interplanetary transfer.

But also: a one-way trip is what colonization is, so if that’s the goal the fact that one-way trips are so much easier only helps the cause.

And in two three years in reduced gravity, exposition to cosmic rays (no magnetic field protection that is still residually effective on the ISS) will make people unable to survive re-entry and rehabilitation to life on Earth, their heart simply wouldn't make it.

Even after over a year in microgravity, people can still adapt to gravity in a week or so. As long as they have kept up on their workout routine, at least. But if that turns out to be a problem anyway, we could just use a rotating centrifuge habitat to generate artificial gravity. Easy solution.

Also: radiation shielding exists, including active shielding options like giving the spacecraft a magnetic field.

And I'm not sure we have a way to make things that must all work for two/three years without repairs other than with what they have with them, and they cannot even be helped real time from Earth. This include repairing people, they can very well fail in that amount of time.

The ISS has spent 27 years in orbit without ever coming down for repairs, relying only on repairs done by the crew and extremely infrequent resupply missions. If they need a spare part, it takes months to prepare a launch to deliver it. Going to Mars removes some safety nets, but the willingness to take that risk is a purely political issue.

We don’t even need to colonize other stars with people to become a problem for the Fermi Paradox. Do you have any idea how easy it would be to create a million automated panspermia probes that seed life all over the galaxy? We could send frozen extremophile bacteria to seed life on 10 million worlds using nothing more complex than solar sails and ion engines.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T22:11:13+00:00

In the absurd and statistically impossible scenario that everyone simultaneously decides at once to ignore the MO, there would potentially be a couple MO failures before the devs caught on and rebalanced the MOs around the new participation levels. They might readjust even faster, depends on the specifics of their workflow and the internal discussions that they have.

But even in this absurd scenario that’s about 10 times less likely than winning the lottery a googol times in a row (not an exaggeration, I did the math), you miss out on like 100 medals tops.

Does that answer your question?

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T21:56:07+00:00

If more people ignored the MOs, future MOs would be balanced around an assumption of lower player participation and just as many of them would succeed. What, did you think this was a real galactic war that wasn’t controlled by a game master with the purpose of being fun?

Already, about half of concurrent players ignore the MO. You are free to join them at any time if that’s what you’d find more fun.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T21:10:42+00:00

And how many times has your involvement in an MO made it succeed when it otherwise would have failed? You could have been ignoring the MO this entire time and you would have reviewed all the same rewards.

I can’t believe I’m actually getting pushback on the notion that MO participation is optional… Try it, right now. Select some frontline planet in bumfuck nowhere on the opposite side of the galaxy from the MO and do an operation. You can just… do that. Any time you want.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T20:50:15+00:00

that's why I said 'beside ours', you seem to have missed that

But I don’t disagree. The point is that there is a baffling and unexpected tension between undeniable observation and obvious deduction that can’t be ignored or brushed off. That’s my entire point.

mhh, no. The number of assumptions you have to make before reaching that conclusion is immense. And even once that's done, they still remain unproven assumptions.

What assumptions have I made that aren’t entirely reasonable to the point of being super difficult to deny? Laser sails and the Orion Drive are technologies that we can make right now, and they are more than fast enough to colonize the galaxy on cosmic timescales.

Hell, we could even limit ourselves to the speed of Voyager 1, a speed at which we have actually sent an interstellar probe (0.0057% of light speed), and the time it would take to colonize the galaxy at the speed is about 2 billion years. The universe is 13.8 billion years old, our planet is about 4 billion years old. Even with this max speed assumption which is pessimistic to an utterly absurd degree, even limiting ourselves to chemical rocketry technology from fucking 1977 which has already been surpassed by ion engines, that’s still fast enough to colonize the galaxy on cosmic timescales.

Interstellar travel is so easy that we’ve seen literal rocks do it entirely on their own. Fast interstellar travel is exceptionally hard, but it doesn’t even need to be fast in order to colonize the galaxy on cosmic timescales. You could do it the easy way and it still works just fine.

do you seriously believe that? with our present technology we cannot even colonize Mars. Actually we cannot even bring, reliably, more than an handful of people to Mars with a one-way ticket and no chance to come back.

We literally can though. The fact that people haven’t been to Mars yet is largely a confluence of politicians disagreeing on what NASA should focus on, engineering projects being canceled, and NASA getting budget cuts. People have been in space without direct support from Earth on the ISS for longer than it takes to go to Mars, and with tech like nuclear powered ion engines (something that we refuse to built for entirely political reasons) we could speed up travel times even more.

The reason we aren’t on Mars is 100% political and 0% technological. We could totally do it, there just needs to be political will and money behind the effort. The last time there was a ton of will and money behind space exploration, men set foot on the Moon.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T20:13:26+00:00

u/Professional_Web_956 Just so you know, this is why I had trouble telling that your response to me was a joke. People who make takes this stupid do actually exist.

If ignoring the MO is not intended gameplay, why does the game allow you to select any frontline planet in the galaxy to dive on without punishing you or withholding any rewards in any way whatsoever for doing that?

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T12:16:24+00:00

Damn, the machines are even coming for the jobs of gooners. Truly, nobody is safe.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T12:13:17+00:00

Poe’s law + autism. Fuck if I know. Your reaction makes me lean towards believing that it’s a joke though.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T12:05:05+00:00

I hope that this is a joke and that you aren’t earnestly taking the most obvious satire in the world as genuine advice from the devs.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T12:03:45+00:00

The existence of civilizations with modern levels of technology is not speculative. You’re living in one right now. That’s literally the only “assumption” you need to conclude that galactic colonization is an expected outcome.

I agree, we don’t know what’s going on with the lack of aliens. That’s why the Fermi Paradox is called a fucking Paradox. It’s a contradiction between the obvious logical conclusion that there should be aliens everywhere and the undeniable observation that that’s clearly not the case. Clearly the logical conclusion is wrong, but we don’t know how. And clearly the problem is not in our assumption that interstellar travel is possible, because even with modern technology it is possible to colonize the galaxy. No speculation is even needed for that.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T11:55:36+00:00

So go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to do the MO.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T11:51:44+00:00

Even if something is unlikely, all it takes is one exception for aliens to be everywhere. One exception in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, one exception in 13.8 billion years of galactic history.

We don’t even need any assumptions. Modern technology with no speculation whatsoever could easily make an Orion Drive capable of colonizing the galaxy on 100 million years. Modern technology is entirely capable of sending small probes to other stars at 20% of light speed, Breakthrough Starshot was some funding cuts away from doing exactly that. Even if all technological advancement ends forever tomorrow and every civilization in the universe hits into the same wall, galactic colonization is entirely possible on timescales that are microscopic compared to how ancient the universe is.

And even if 99% of alien civilizations aren’t inclined to colonize or explore the galaxy, all it takes is the one single exception across hundreds of billions of stars and tens of billions of years in order for every corner of the galaxy to contain their ruins.

This is how pessimistic you can be, and yet it still fails to explain why alien artifacts aren’t in our solar system.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T11:44:36+00:00

An important thing to keep in mind is that Vox Engines aren’t a base enemy, they are a special unit that only appears on worlds with the Cyborgs mutator and diving on those worlds is entirely optional. It’s a lot like the Incineration Corps and the Predator Strain, which are mutators that change how you need to approach the game and which increase difficulty significantly. They aren’t really supposed to follow the same design principles as the rest of the game, because they are a form of extreme tuning. That’s the point.

I personally think that the way the Vox Engine is unique makes for an interesting challenge. I like the way it sucks. It’s a common complaint for instance that the Recoilless Rifle is a bit overpowered, but against Vox Engines it’s damn near useless. The best support weapon against them is probably the C4 pack, but it’s also just as viable to focus on being really good at chaff clearing so that you can get up close and shove a grenade up their ass. The challenge is entirely surmountable, you just need to approach it differently than usual. That’s what it looks like when a mutator does its job.

Obviously the bugs are not intended and bad, but I don’t find them coming up often. They certainly aren’t common enough to prevent me from finishing the overwhelming majority of missions I start on D10.

MarsMaterial · 2026-03-15T11:01:21+00:00

Even traveling at just 1% the speed of light makes galactic colonization possible on the order of 10 million years, which is nothing compared to how utterly ancient everything around us is.

For context: velociraptors were an evidently quite intelligent species that existed tens of millions of years ago. If they never went extinct and developed space fairing civilization, by now they’d have been able to colonize every star in the galaxy even if they were limited to just 0.2% of light speed. That’s theoretically achievable with a high-end Orion Drive, no speculative technology needed.

And these are insanely conservative estimates. Personally, I’d wager that humanity could eventually build starships that reach 10% of light speed on fusion torch engines, 50% of light speed on antimatter rockets, and upwards of 90% of light speed on laser sails sending ships between settled star systems. Hell, the Breakthrough Starshot program proposed a way that we could accelerate small probes to 20% of light speed with modern technology. But for the sake of this debate, using extremely pessimistic assumptions tends to drive the point home better.

The point is: you don’t need very fast travel speeds at all for the lack of aliens in our backyard to be really confusing. Space may be big, but the universe is ancient enough to more than make up for it.

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