Pthigrivi

Anyone else googling international law on stealing a rival power's spy satellite?

I’ll also point out, much as I loathe supposition and counterfactual corporate fan-fic, that No Mans Sky sold fewer than a million copies in 2016 despite all the hype. They dug it out though and now they’re up to 10m units. There’s no reason to wring one’s hands about another 12 or 24mo of development if in the end you’re delivering a product with real quality and appeal. There’s been a real cost to forcing KSP2s release too early in that its desperately difficult to make a good second impression. Id hope publishers are seeing the value of a deserved delay now in the Starfield release. Its also got big problems with bugs and balance but its at least solidly performing and fun to play. With another 8 or 12 months Im sure Intercept could have brought KSP2 up to a much more enjoyable out of the gate experience. Still, as in all things quality shines through eventually.

Error post. Im an idiot. Disregard.

The analogy doesn't hold though. That was a somewhat hair-brained pricing scheme and the person at the top fell. Thats a bit different from lobbying that because the CEO overestimated his leverage Unity itself should be shut down and everyone who works on it loses their jobs and all the games that depend on it lose support. That would sound wildly misplaced and crazy counterproductive to me.

But thats not due to fans, thats due to developer backlash. What you're saying is we should convince as many other players as possible to give up hope that KSP can or will improve--despite obvious evidence to the contrary--tank the game, and then... a bunch of people at Intercept get laid off? And players never get to see colonies or interstellar? That seems like a lot of collateral damage to wag your finger at some upper manager at T2 who will just shrug and move on. Wouldn't we much prefer they make good by sticking to it and actually following through?

I don't know given all the progress we've seen in the last 6 months that sounds pretty over the top to me. I think the game really wasn't ready for EA release this spring and I've said before that decision was hugely short sighted. Thats on T2. They really owe it to Intercept and to us to put in the time and money to get things polished so they can march into steady content updates. Cancelling things now would be the absolute worst thing they could do. And this is still an EA release. Different players are going to have a different sense of what's enjoyable and if some folks get in and find they cant get it to perform on their machine or just aren't happy they can refund and wait to see if things improve later. Other players are happy to roll with it. Thats all completely reasonable. I guess unless you're for some reason hoping the game gets cancelled I don't quite understand the utility of mounting a theatrical crusade against the people actually working on the game. That seems weirdly counterproductive.

Wow a whole lot of wild speculation and interpretation goin on here. I understand folks have a different sense of time and patience but I don't understand actively lobbying to get a game cancelled because it didn't meet your expectations. It seemed pretty clear at the time to me they were talking about patches and bug-fixing updates, not milestones. I'd say the average fan-guess around launch was that big content updates would come every 3-4 months. I thought that was a bit too optimistic and it was likely 6-8 months. Obviously none of us knew how raw the game was and that we'd be spending the first 8 months just getting things to where they really aught to have been at release, but I'd say with orbital decay mostly dealt with we're about there now. Wobbly rockets is the last big nut to crack, but Im hoping we can get an interim solution at least before science. IMO all of this could have been solved by delaying a year, but we are where we are. Despite the fact that I've only really been able to play for a few months I think things really are on the right track, if perhaps moving more slowly than many folks hoped. If they can get rocket wobble under control and Science is great I'll be more than happy. But thats me. Im a patient dude.

All this discussion again makes me grateful that they’re really thoroughly considering this problem and its implications and not just diving head first into the most obvious and terrible solutions.

I think this is just a personal sense of expectations and patience for most people, which comes with any EA. I do think its going to be a very long wait before interstellar and multiplayer are released but I thought those things were years out even before the release. I've also had major issues just being able to play, not least because Im playing on Parallels. Still, it sounds like they're making progress on the big items and Im psyched for science and heat. I don't mind the wait if the quality is there in the end. A few years ago I bought Frostpunk hoping it would work on Parallels. It didn't, but they said there would be a Mac port coming 'soon'. Soon turned into 2+ years, but, when it finally did come out it became one of my favorite games. We've been waiting on a Factorio expansion for 4 or 5 years now I think? Starfield was delayed like 18 months. I know its not how everyone sees it but for me all that matters is where we get to in the end.

My folks have a place in the Abacos and they've seen some incredible launches. Im a busy millennial though so Im not sure what this 'vacation' word means. Id thought some of the issues with actual, non-amateur astronomy had been mitigated? Was that propaganda?

Well this thread is gonna be fun.

Im also thinking a tutorial on strutting might be a good idea. I even see really experienced folks like Matt Lowne using them really inefficiently which is why they end up with so many. Its probably because so many players rely on autostrut and so they kind of stop thinking about structure. In fact I see a lot of players who look like they’re trying to mimic autostrut: just putting connections absolutely everywhere, which creates the same performance issues that autostrut has. With a bit of education I think players could make their vessels even sturdier than Autostrut and with much less overhead. Ive never used Autostrut in KSP1 even for great big modded motherships. You just need to think about where these forces are coming from and counteract them in all 3 directions. This isn’t a ‘get gud’ argument though. KSP2 feels spongier than KSP1 did even without autostrut, and I think everyone feels like single diameter stacks should not wobble around the way they do. So maybe treating those as rigid could be an option. If a player goes from 3.75m down to 1.25m that would still flex, but if you could solve that with a shroud. And I do still think radial attachments should still flex, though perhaps not as much as they do now. Nate brought up the robotics parts from KSP1 which famously performed like rubber and made for a really unrealistic and poor experience.

My suspicion is giant parts are only likely to pose problems if you go from a 50m part with a 10m attachment to a 1.25m part and then back to 10m. Having such a weak intermediary would form a hinge in the middle of your vessel. Nate mentioned solutions like making sure stacks of similar diameter all kind of ignore joint deflection. So if you connect a 2.5m part to a 2.5m part to a 2.5m part it would all just act as if welded. It would probably help with performance. Its a little cheaty, because in theory a player could attach 100 1.25m tanks and it would all behave as rigid despite its real-world implausibility. On launch it wouldn't spagetti, but it would still be unflyable. The question for me is what happens at colonies? I'd love to see players get creative with structural ideas under different gravity loads and that process gets a little warped if players are just deliberately connecting like-diameters to like-diameters because it acts like a brick and you can make a 100/1 cantilever and nothing moves. I imagine this gets complicated because you're trying to approximate real behavior when real behavior on the granular, real-time basis is crazy complex. Lets take a look at whats probably actually happening with the falcon heavy booster connectors. In my life doing really basic wind-load calcs for buildings this is actually a pretty simple example: Granted this is a rendering and Im speculating a bit because the structure is embedded in the aeroshell. These aren't just pin connections (well, some, but not all.) The upper brace prior to separation is acting as a lateral truss keeping the lateral forces (labled X+Y here) under control. These forces are induced whenever the rocket maneuvers because the force is coming from thrust vectoring at the base of the vehicle. This creates add-on aerodynamic forces as you deviate from prograde as we've all experienced. Thought experiment: Imagine you want to balance 3 brooms on your fingers. What will happen if you wrap masking tape around them just at the bottom? As soon as you move even a little the 3 brooms are going to come tumbling apart. But if you tape them both at the top and the bottom you might have a chance. This truss at the top of the rocket is that upper-masking tape. It doesn't have to carry the whole weight of the broom, just keep them together. There's another structure you can just see between the boosters and the center that counters forces in-line with thrust (labelled in blue, Z here.) Notice they're also diagonal. For most of flight there's very little differential in this directions because all of these engines are designed to keep everything mostly even, but I bet there's a subtle advantage to burning the side boosters a little hot, tugging the center stage up. There are probably also moments nearing separation when you have differential thrust. Thats what those subtle struts labeled in blue are handling. So, for folks designing KSP's physics and deflection calcs... are they gonna do all that? Should players worry about all that? Probably not. It should probably be simplified. But how exactly that gets simplified and still allows for the basically infinite configuration KSP allows is not a trivial problem.

To this point Nate also mentioned huge interstellar vessels and colony parts. A solution that only makes sense for simple Kerbin ascent vehicles may not be robust or flexible enough to handle what comes later.

Really no one should be using struts that are parallel to thrust, as even in KSP that doesn’t help with wobble. Struts are there both in KSP and in real life to resist lateral forces. They can be angled (mine usually are to form trusses) but if they’re straight up and down they’re not resisting the right forces. Instances where you might see struts within the center stack would be like the Soyus hotstage ring or maybe securing a heavy payload with a small base attachment. In both cases you’re looking to strut diagonally to form a truss. Side boosters absolutely need to be attached in at least 3 places. For smaller boosters I often put the decoupler near the top and two diagonal struts near the base. The decoupler force is enough to kick them out and away from the center stack. For larger boosters I’ll use the doupler near the base and struts at the top with sepratrons around 3/4 the way up the booster. This usually creates a nice balanced kick-out so the base of the booster doesn’t over-rotate inward and clip the center engines. Again attaching in three places is what gives you your structural triangle for resisting lateral loads.

Dude they’re still holding the side boosters in place prior to separation. Do you have any idea the moment that you’d see if it was only attached at the bottom?

Have you seen the Aviator? I can't post it because of swearing but there's an incredible scene between DiCaprio and Alda that feels like this.

I don’t think thats what he meant. I think he meant the devs would need to eat their vegetables aka digging into a more robust and sustainable solution. The central problem is that neither spaghetti nor a flying brick are good solutions. I think Nates comment that these parts should behave close to our intuition is exactly right, but even that is a spectrum. Being an architect I absolutely expect things to bend and flex because thats what real materials do. People don’t normally see that because if a bridge or building is visibly flexing something has gone horribly wrong. You also wouldn’t expect a plane’s fuselage to flex, but it does slightly under lateral loads. You can also see wings flexing if you look out the window under turbulence. So Im happy to see the commitment to really solving this problem long term. Obviously what we’re currently seeing isn’t right. And if autostrut puts a finger in the dyke until the real solution is ready thats fine too.

True this is dangerously close to the ‘p’ word. Just curious about the administrative consequences.

You also have to wonder if some of the not-so-well-timed decisions regarding starlink access in Ukraine has made the feds less inclined to offer blank checks of late. Things take less time when pressure comes down from above. If that pressure is absent though... Being a big defense contractor can be a double edged sword.

Nice. I think a lot of folks have wildly oversimplified this problem so it'll be interesting to hear the thinking going forward.

Hey and best wishes for your growing fam! Thats a lot of diapers all at once

The title is a joke. This thread is actually a bit of shadenfreude seeing non-factorio games dealing with factorio problems. As soon as KSP introduces supply lines it incurs a huge number of these same networking problems. The good news is managing these kinds of complex supply lines is actually a really interesting engineering puzzle. The bad news is the devs really need to study successes and failures across genres in this field to give players robust and intuitive UI tools to manage them.

I have this coworker who has a few roles because we're a small firm and part of it is IT and and he really seems to relish in loudly berating tech support folks who are trying to help him, to little effect. Everyone else in the office has to have real conversations about actual business while rolling our eyes at the stream of expletives from the other room. Sidebar: One time I had a Macbook that was 3 years and 2 weeks old, but Apple had (possibly deliberately) failed to notify older owners that laptops have a humidity problem that in the end compromises monitors and the motherboard. It took a couple of weeks of calling, but eventually I was able--with determined, polite conversations with tech support, to have the recall covered under Applecare. Im sure there's a macro-strategy of waging a social media campaign against a particular company which might raise the heat enough to make its way into an actual upper-management meeting. Maybe Im more cynical than some imagine but I don't think they much care. At that level your [complaints] about bugs and communication is weighed against investor demands and you will absolutely lose. There's a famous scene in the life-lesson that is The Wire wherein Bunny Colvin declares: “Middle management means that you got just enough responsibility to listen when people talk, but not so much you can't tell anybody to go [snip] themselves.” For those of you using fellow forum members as a prop in a theatrical pressure campaign against a subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation this is who you actually want to direct your attention to. Please don't waste your time bickering with hopeful fans. We have our own campaign: to as best we can accurately and conceptually convey to the actual makers of this game what real meaning, quality, and value translates to in concrete deliverable terms in the context of KSP.