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A number of comments have been removed regarding a prank. People are already upset enough. Please don't add to it with misinformation, even if intended as humor.

Was Nate always PD or IG before this? Because that alone would already tell quite a lot.

The problem is that correlation between studio doing a good job with the resources they have and the revenue math is negligible. I mean, it's possible to very clearly and unambiguously be bad at things. If you took publisher money and went on a drinking spree and had absolutely nothing to show for it, yeah, sure. But drawing the correlation the other way, from failed projects to the quality of the team overall, is pretty much statistical noise. In practice, a lot more is determined by the conditions of the project and the IP. Did PD trust your project enough to give you a budget to hire the best people in the field? No? You're kind of boned. People the Intercept hired for physics were just out of academia and had very little game dev experience. They were good at physics, but very, very green in games. Networking engineers they had also never had to work with a game like KSP2. I don't think that's because Intercept just didn't know how to find talented people. They didn't have the budget to hire people who could hit the ground running on absolutely everything. Finally, the engine. The only reason it's a Unity game is because heavy reuse of the KSP assets and code was promised by Star Theory, like, seven years ago, and it's been sunk costs ever since. That limits people you can hire to a specific set of skills, because you make certain kinds of games on Unity, and they aren't KSP. It's a big part of why Intercept ended up having to hire modders. They knew how to work with Unity, how to make things for KSP, and they were probably within budget. Clearly PD wanted to make a game cheap. And the ambition they were sold on was not of a cheap game to make. Not a lot of it is on the studio that was created years after the decisions were made. Some of it is on the people who were at Star Theory from the start, but the majority of it has been PD decisions on how much they value the IP. And the game was still happening. It was a buggy mess, it was wildly off schedule, but we were seeing a game being built. Just not fast enough. Not selling enough EA copies. Not getting glowing enough reviews. Given the same constraints, I don't know if it was possible to do better. You can make a strong argument that people who ended up in charge of the Intercept should not have attempted to make KSP2 with these constraints. And, yeah, maybe? But to say they are a studio that deserved closing more than another studio because they decided to try is at a minimum a very cynical thing to claim. And I would argue unfair. And then there are so many factors on top of that. It's not just about money you've earned it's how much you're going to earn soon. Again, Tango Gameworks are a great example. Hi-Fi Rush went above and beyond. Critical success, glowing user reviews, and it recouped its development costs several times over. Studio gets shut down. At the same time, the studio working on Fallout 76, whose beta launch makes KSP2 EA look good and who are running a bill tens of times higher are allowed to keep going. Because they are maintaining a title that continues to make money, and Tango Gameworks would have to start working on another game that will maybe be as successful as Hi-Fi Rush four years from now. So a studio that performed great got shutdown, and a studio that's been making mediocre work, taking years to put 76 back on track and massively over budget is allowed to keep going. It ain't about the the studio's performance. It's about the resources, and IP, and a type of project, and what the higher management thinks it means in terms of revenue over the next couple of quarters tops. There are additional considerations and backroom talk that makes me think that some of the criticism towards Intercept leadership is deserved. But I would not have drawn this conclusion purely from how the development of KSP2 has been going. Knowing everything we've learned about the project over, eh, 2023 or so, they were always going to have to fight uphill. Some of it through more thorns than another studio, perhaps, but I have no reason to believe that any other studio working on the same budget would be able to make KSP2 good enough to not be cut at this point. And that's all that matters here. The rest is fluff and victim-blaming. If I needed to write a satirical sketch about somebody being so far out of their depth it hurts, I couldn't do better. 10/10 standup comedy. No notes.

One of the additional benefits of renewable energy is that it’s viable at multiple scales in ways that nuclear and fossil fuel power are not. (I’m still pro-nuclear, especially the small modular reactors.) A big topic in civil engineering is decentralization of necessary resources like electricity, water, and wastewater. Smaller, more local systems can be controlled by the people that actually use them. You don’t quite get the economies of scale of larger systems, but you get increased accountability and responsiveness. They’re also more resilient in the face of disasters, because fewer people are affected if a community-scale system goes offline, and this makes them easier to help. I have a lot of real-world examples showing the dangers of over-centralization, but the most stark one is from Dune. Paul is able to take control of the galaxy because he controls the single source of the Spice that enables interstellar travel. This is an example of what’s known historically as a Hydraulic Empire.

Re: performance - this improved greatly with the patch and there were no notable regressions that I'm aware of. Polished. Re: wobble - for practical purposes for gameplay, wobble was fixed. While there might be a more optimal under the hood improvement, from a gameplay perspective it is as good as fixed. This was welcomed with a lot of praise for the patch. Polished. How many of these were legitimately new and not reposts of bugs that happened to be found again by new players due to the uptick in purchases after the patch? Honestly not aware of anything squarely on the FS update itself that was notably broken. Besides the science issue noted earlier, heating needing some tweaks is the only other thing I recall getting much attention and they're not gamebreaking. Obviously there's more work to be done, but the point is the specific aspects that were worked on for the patch were very well done. It isn't fair to call the patch bad because there are other aspects of the game that weren't touched in it. The patch was extremely polished. The point is the level of quality of their most recent work has been objectively good despite the earlier failures. They stepped up and that should be respected.

Different EVs might also have different fire risks.

"Say, have you been flaming about lore changes lately?"

Hello, everyone. I've been a bit busy recently, but I haven't forgotten that The Sky is Not the Limit is now a little over one year old! I'm sorry that I haven't been posting chapters often anymore, but I promise there's more coming down the pipeline. Here's to another year.

I don't believe we are born with the right to our investments paying off- and an EA title is an inherently speculative purchase. It's not my fault, nor your fault, nor T2's fault if someone doesn't understand that EA's are supposed to be discounted, in part, because there is a risk the game will never actually be finished. Moreover, introducing regulation could kill speculative projects, which some people want! You don't always know if there's a market for your game, and sometimes, launching an EA is a way of increasing market efficiency. It causes more games people want to be developed, at a cheaper average price for game studios, because they don't have to full commit! The problem here is that there is a discrepancy between what people think they value, and what they actually value. In fact, people are willing to pay for games they rationally know may never get completed. That doesn't stop them from being dissapointed if it doesn't pan out, but it would be wrong to say that people are regularly scammed by an EA game. I think minimal rules like this could be okay. But it would have to be used sparingly. And, to my knowledge, things like this already happen, like in the case of "A Day Before" which was an actual scam. However, the line between people being scammed, and wasting their money (which companies are allowed to profit from), is often thin. If they call KSP 2 finished tommorrow, then I agree, there should be refunds. I agree, I just think the devil is in the details. People regularly make bad purchasing decisions, and it's tempting to extend consumer protections too far. Should we refund everyone who's purchased Balance of Nature because it does nothing? No. In fact, I would argue, that by releasing an early access and getting you hyped, I have provided a service. If the game gets cancelled and this happens over and over, and you keep buying, it would seem that you actually value this service in its own right! I think this is actually what often happens. People enjoy hype trains. There's a business model in that, and the fact that people complain when the train ends doesn't make it illegal to sell it to them. What do people actually value about EA games? It's hard to say. Pricing, for instance, around games is ludicrous. Games are more engaging than movies, and cost a fraction of what movies do on a per-hour basis. Realistically, a lot of games could be $150. The point is, Steam in its current form has only existed for like 15 years, the video game market is changing rapidly, no one knows how to price anything. It's a bad idea to introduce regulations at this stage. We should wait 10 years and see if people still fall for the abandonware trap, at a minimum. I think we agree in general, but perhaps we have different setpoints for when to let time take its course, versus introduce new rules. With respect to KSP 2 specifically, I decided a long time ago that I would buy the game, even though I gave it a 50/50 chance at best of being completed. It was still worth it to me. Other people would not have considered this to be worth it, but they thought (in my view, irrationally) that everything was fine and the game was on-track. Now they're dissapointed, and many want to get bailed out of spending $50 over a year ago. I don't think there's any reason, at this stage, to do that. There was certainly no shortage of information to influence their purchasing decision, and there were many people expressing the view that turned out to be (approximately) correct in the end. This is a perfect example of a situation where no one has been scammed. That is, unless they somehow pretend that the game is finished now. THAT would be a false statement.

The reactions of the community are interesting. It's like an earthquake, as the days go by the hopes of finding people alive diminish and mourning begins.

I don't just say it. I have personal experience stemming from my own poor performance in the very first job I ever got. 16 years old, got hired at McDonald's, thought it would be a cakewalk and they'd just hand me a check. Boy, did I ever find out differently 2 months in. Walked in for a shift, got called into the office before I clocked in, was handed my final paycheck and told, in no uncertain terms, that "...your performance doesn't meet the McDonald's standard..." and was told I was no longer a part of the McDonald's family. Poor performance in ANY industry can cause employees to get fired, or businesses to close. But we are talking about game dev so...just because you haven't seen it means it hasn't happened? Your personal experience does not mean others haven't had other experiences or seen/heard other things. Your narrow view of what can happen is simply that - your own narrow view. I have been in the same industry my entire career, and I've seen the company I work for gobble up multiple smaller insurance firms. Promises are made, nobody is getting the axe...and then the smaller company ends up just getting gutted, employees laid off, and systems integrated. It happens. Poor performance can, and almost always does, lead to revenue hits.

-=MISSION EXECUTION=- The transfer stage bleeding off energy before deploying near the polar cap of Duna. <<<<<<<<<<FOREWORD>>>>>>>>>> I have decided that, even in the event that this is the end of KSP2(we dont know yet). I'll still continue to grind the content I can out of this game. I am at least aware of the most prolific bugs now, and know how to design around them... and I have only just left Kerbin.. There is so much more to get out of this sandbox still... The KSP2 engagement seem to be on the low end though.. and while I do enjoy making these long detailed blog posts about my progress. Not knowing if any one reads them, is killing my motivation to write them. I will be finishing the Duna Mastery Challenge though! But I had planned to do the same rundown on Eve next.. But we'll see if that will be something I'll write about. I think that depends on what level the engagement with the game is like, at that point. Any way.. This challenge went alright.. I must admit though that I was surprised with how thin Duna's atmosphere actually is (even though I knew it was). More on that bellow: <<<<<<<<<<MISSION_TASKS>>>>>>>>>> A. Launch probe into LKO and return 1st stage and SDG to KSC - Success B. Perform Transfer Maneuver to Duna - Success C. Land the Lander near the Polar Regions - Success. <<<<<<<<<<Lessons Learned; Lessons Identified>>>>>>>>>> Goal Post A: The SDG launching the Probe into LKO. This leg was pretty much business as usual - Although I did learn that the SF-125 will be burned up by the exhaust from the 3x Lv-909 "terrier's" - That did not bother me too much. It looks a lot better to see the exhaust plumes to "clip" through an part that is open, rather than clip through a closed cylinder. where as it feel redundant to wish for something to be added to the game in these times... I still wish we could hot stage rings in the game. The launch went without incident and the probe was successfully deployed (being a lot shorter made it very easy, it flew out of the cargo bay on its own RCS power. For detailed walkthrough of the launch See spoler section bellow: Goal Post B: Duna Lander Probe - making transfer burn to Duna. Because I had the CommNet around Duna now, I decided to just put on a small antenna on the vehicle - with a range of 200 Mm. I figured the vehicle would only need trajectory when leaving Kerbin and approaching Duna... How ever I was surprised of how "short" 200Mm was in reality - not extending that far away from the Kerbin SOI. It meant I had to do a little quick load.. you see I had decided to do the approach of burning out of the Kerbin SOI, then make the maneuver for Duna at a optimal point. However - The optimal point was way outside CommNet range. So I decided to do a more expensive burn and then just make sure that the Duna PE would be a few KM above the surface. I would not have Δv enough to circularize around Duna.. but I didn't need to since I could just be Aerobraking. the maneuver that got the Lander Probe to Duna. The most important thing for me would be to bring the probe over the North Pole - Final adjustment would be made once in the Duna SOI. - The probe was allowed to coast all the way to the Duna SOI without any signal - a bit harrowing... For a sec I thought that the CommNet wasn't able to relay signal.. but it was just because the signal was only required after the timewarp stopped. The probe had successfully arrived at Duna SOI Goal Post C: Lander safely on the ground, taking its first sample. Once inside the Duna SOI it showed that my my path would take me directly through Ike's SOI - which made aiming quite difficult actually - since Ike naturally gave me a high ark to Duna. The probe zipping past Ike on its way to Duna. Fortunately there were plenty Δv left to push the PE down once I was through Ike's SOI. For RPG reasons I was interested in testing the soil near the poles of Duna - Seeing the canyons between the poles I figured that would be a cool landing site - so I aimed for this place: After finding a point to aim at I, then raised the PE to 4km above surface - to make sure that the vehicle didn't pancake into the ground, if the atmosphere wouldn't break me as much as I hoped it would... The last Δv was spend aiming the trajectory for the canyon - or general area. The transfer stage being ditched - and the landing stage burning through the atmosphere. once the atmosphere started to heat up, the transfer stage was dropped and the lander stage just flew through the atmosphere like a bullet. It bled of the energy.. albeit much slower than I anticipated - the lander would drift quite far before the speeds were dropped to a level were I felt comfortable the lander would not have been torn apart (at least in our world - In the world of Kerbals they have the alloy Kerbalium . And that is most sturdy) the fairing was dropped, and the scute deployed soon after. lander drops fairing - creating a lot more drag. After that it was just a question of dropping the heat shield - I dont know if its a bug? or if Duna's atmosphere is just so light it does not need heatshields... At least it had not spend any of its ablative propperties . The scute was deployed and the 4 engines put it gentle down to the ground. The lander breaking for a gentle touch down. The lander would touch down a generally flat place, on the other side of the ice sheet I was aiming fore.. but at least in one piece. We are still taking a sample of the Duna Polar Soil, which can lay the foundation to find the ideal place for future manned Duna Missions. The probes final resting place. The battery power is a bit light - the lander goes all the way down to EC 70U before sunrise. If all unnecessary power usage has been eliminated. Of course the lander could go into hibernation mode in the night.. but I dont know if that is considered "cheating" in relation to the goal post stating that the vehicle should "have means to generate electricity" - I guess it has the means in the daylight.. but If we go by the Martian Landers and Rovers of our world.. power is spend in the cold nights, making sure mission critical hardware is not killed by the cold. I guess that is of OJT to judge.. where ever he is now days. For picture slide show - see bellow: <<<<<<<<<< MOVING FORWARD >>>>>>>>>> with that being a - Challenge Success! - it is time to move forward. Since the parameters of the next challenge is pretty much the same - at least if I just put wheels on the lander. I have decided to compile the R&D post for Challenge 5 and 6. Otherwise the R&D post for challenge 5 will be very short. Since I will mostly be able to use the same vehicles. See you in the next one!

Yes that would, in theory at least, mean that the takeoff and landing thrust would be simply equal to g. If it will behave exactly that way, I'm not sure.

no, like, genuinely really really profitable. Too profitable for it to just be shutdown. OlliOlli made a LOT of money

Respectfully, you say this, and then anecdotes are exactly what you offered. Here’s a statistic: EV fires are ten, eighty, even a hundred times less likely to occur in the first place. Even if they are more likely to be “catastrophic” (however you’re defining that), that catastrophe is still less likely to occur. By your own statement (brine solution, etc) it’s already a solved problem, it just requires different tactics and equipment. Such is the evolution of fire response from the beginning (fighting a massive fuel spill/fire also requires special tactics and equipment).

14 days...You did well then with Earth-Moon L2... also, if you come up with Principia saves that have an orbit which you find particularly interesting, to help others tinker & explore, you are welcome to share such save files over at the forum thread I mentioned in this earlier post: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/162200-wip181-191-1101-1110–2-1122–5-principia—version-‎‎کاشانی-released-2024-05-08—n-body-and-extended-body-gravitation/?do=findComment&comment=4301119

KSP2 is still completely unplayable for me with how buggy, unoptimized and just awkward the VAB builder is, plus the lack of part variants and 1.825m parts. It will probably never get fixed or added to either. No reason to play it instead of just modding KSP1.

@K^2, you've got ooddles of industry experience and I'm only an outsider with some IT background looking in. I think you've pointed out a very relevant situation here. Because this isn't what happened with Intercept Games. It's something different. I think it's more what happens in other conditions, when the leadership of a corporation has decided (rightly, wrongly, or uncertainly) to contract. Thus the announcement of 5% job reductions. And even before that announcement, when they knew they were going to make it, they were looking to see where to cut. And in that cold calculus, performance does come in as a factor. Not just whether it's good or bad, but how much net revenue is going to come how fast with what certainty from an operation, from a studio. What they're going to say in that upcoming earnings call to justify this decision. In that case, I think they saw Intercept Games, they saw Kerbal Space Program 2, as poor, uncertain, low to negative net return, long running performers. In other words, the test that was failed was not enough good in the answer to "What good have you done recently?" Once the decision was made of where and what to cut, they then got into some of the details. Who amongst the staff to keep (by moving them to Private Divison) and for what reasons. What they're going to say about it on the upcoming earnings call. Maybe a likely idea of what to do with KSP going forward. Maybe they've ordered a detail review of what's there, what condition, what possibilities. And they decided the best thing to do (for them) was minimize communication after the initial required announcements until the earnings call is done.

Pretty much the point I was making in response to Sure it was an improvement and there was some actual content finally after a year of development; but it is far from what I would refer to as "extremely polished".

Edge of Eternity is now on version 0.23! Ensure you download the new dependencies when you update. Changelog available on the github

I think Take-Two is definitely being silent due to the near date for that earnings call. That may be the first time we hear anything new. Although it may be very low-content corporate-speak. I really don't know about Take-Two backing a restart of KSP 2. And any independent studio entering into a contract with Take-Two to do so better read and negotiate very very carefully. I am almost certain that Take-Two will never sell KSP, even if KSP 2 is shut down. That bears the grave risk of someone doing a better job with KSP than Take-Two's minions did, making Take-Two and its execs look incompetent. If they figure there's no future, they will take the loss and wind things down, one way or another.

You know, the idea is not bad - but I would do some calculations the same just for it, and I think I found a dirty trick to get it for free. I don't have the time to try it in the short term (things are somewhat hairy on DayJob©), so I'm reticent to open my big mouth without proper grounds (I had to eat my words recently on MM/L on something about :HAS, I think it's a good idea to try to avoid doing it again! )

But then why not just deinvest the Studio and recoup the money? Like... I'm a taxi driver, and the costs of the car are eating badly the incoming and I want to quit this taxi business. In this situation, how I would recoup most of the money? By selling the car to someone willing to be in this business or by putting it down into a recycler for the money from the recycled materials? It's the reason I think we are missing something important - the only situation in which the second option on my example above would be the best outcome is if the price of the recycled materials after writing the car off outweigh the money you would earn by selling the car to someone. What's only true if the car is really a rotten tomato... Or you had stripped the car of anything valuable and then are going to deduct the price you paid for it from the taxes as losses. I have (had, switched industries) more than 25 years on development on embedded systems, and I had seen THREE Corporate take overs (one of then, absolutely hostile). And I agree, no one shuts down a whole division for poor performance. They do it for money. Once, I saw a division being shutdown after a merge (that hostile one) because there was already another division doing exactly the same job (bought on a previous merge), and this division were performing poorly when compared to that one, so they scrapped this division and kept the other. In other situation, the buyer literally paid 1USD for the whole Company (the seller was desperate to get rid of the expenses and cut the losses). The buyer stripped the dead body from anything of value, and then terminated it, because this would be more profitable in the short run than sanitizing the Company and make it profitable again (and they could do it, but they had no interest on the Brand, that market was collapsing). And there's that Nokia stunt, with Stephen Elop in the helm - Microsoft bought Nokia pretty cheap and literally wrote it off after some time, deducting the money invested from their taxes as losses.

What's more, as would be said in the Intelligence World, his Legend has been burned. Who in their right mind will ever believe anything he says in the future?

It's a major change, the increase in observation and combat drones. This has actually been going on over the last few decades. It's just not been put out in public that much before the Russo-Ukraine War. There's been similar factors for decades, like overhead satellite and aircraft observation. Thus the need for Air Sentries and appropriate reaction drills. Also the need for survivable surveillance radars and a warning system, because without them, if fast air (a threat decades old) attacks, you don't know it until they're leaving, having dropped their ordnance.