Pthigrivi

It’s likely many of these efficiency constraints will come in through resources in a later update.

So after a very long week wrapping things at work for the holiday I was able to tinker around getting KSP running on my Mac and IT WORKS!! YEEHOO! First time in months I've actually been able to play. Absolutely psyched. Edit: oh and lest people misinterpret Im running it on windows using Parallels. Im just happy it works on my machine finally

Hmm good question... if you have a pressurized cylinder are the hoop stresses any different along the length? I wouldn't think so but I could be wrong.

I am not. My brother and I watched it on VHS in the 80s like 100 times.

This means something. This is important *If you get this reference you are indeed very old.

Thats the really cool thing about LS, that it really puts the time back in spacetime. Making time a visceral component of gameplay really changes the way you understand speed and orbits and the magnitude of some of these distances. You start to feel the difference between a trip to Minmus and and trip to Jool. You get that same kind of 'click' understanding the relationship between time and space and velocity that you get from understanding dV and orbital mechanics. That seems like a core goal in this game and it be a shame to miss that opportunity.

You would only have this problem if the game didn't tell you how much time you have. Any LS system would need to supply players with that information both in the VAB and in flight. You'll see exactly how long your LS will last and what your time to intercept and flight duration is. Just like dV its just an at a glance 'which number is bigger' question. You'd never get 4 hours into a mission and suddenly and unexpectedly run out. I played USI-LS for years and I never had anyone run out because its right there on the screen, so you know you will have a problem long before anything bad happens. The worst thing that could happen is you might have to revert your burn if you did something odd and ended up with some wildly botched encounter. More likely you could fix it with a small correction burn. You would however need a proper mission planner though to help find launch windows and set alarms so you'd know your total round-trip time on missions that aren't taking advantage of ISRU, but we need those kinds of planning tools with or without LS.

Yeah we're seeing a few subtle changes here that I think are big improvements on the original and should (I hope) reduce grind. One is that data always transmits at 100% and there's a clear distinction between samples that need to be returned and transmittable data. That means players aren't encouraged to go back to the same biome and repeat the same experiment to scrape the barrel. There's also of course the "collect all science button" which is really nice for obvious reasons. The third thing we've heard mentioned but not seen exactly is that they're reducing the number of big, visually indistinct biomes and adding in much smaller discoverable zones. This reduces the amount of repetitive biome hopping over and over to places that look and function exactly the same. What I'd like to hear much more about is how each experiment will differ in its functionality, how discoverables might be detected, and how that affects the actual planning of missions.

It sounds like they’re not strictly gating anything behind specific exploration benchmarks so there wouldn’t really be anything preventing you from dropping that one-way probe as early as you were able so long as you could successfully navigate the aerocapture and landing. I think thats right—let players do what they like and work the numbers… but it makes the reward scale from tier to tier really tricky to manage. Thats why Id love to see that spreadsheet and the implications. Im just curious how they’re thinking about player tradeoffs.

Oh and how have I not said this YES PLEASE CAN WE SEE THAT SPREADSHEET?? I think I attempted that same spreadsheet last time I put a KSP1 tech tree overhaul together and it is not easy.

I would further argue this is a really good reason why kerbals themselves shouldn't just be role-play or set-dressing but a central, fully integrated part of gameplay through building and maintaining colonies straight through interstellar exploration. *cough*life support*cough*cough*

I mean I haven't seen any evidence yet so... probably not...yet. But I think it's a really good opportunity. In the same way Starfield makes landing a cut scene or outright fast-travel whereas in KSP its this harrowing player experience that conjures the real thrill and terror of vacuum landings, KSP can do things and leverage all that incredibly hard work constructing full-3d space that other games cant. In most games you scan a planet by hitting "SCAN" and there it is, where KSP with some injection of reality with polar orbits and scan ranges and energy usage you can make the presentation of actual planetary data more physical and tangible and tied to exactly how you plan and execute your missions. You can plan years out with light-weight, probe-based survey missions to scout landing and colony locations as a matter of strategy. You can build a satellite bundle that shares an interplanetary transfer drive and then splits off into a polar scanner and geo-synch relay network. As things progress I'd like to see science experiments capture those kinds of in-game, physical, navigational, and resource-based mechanics to give players actual, usable information and capabilities.

Man this video was great. Thanks for taking the time. A few thoughts off the bat: 1) It's really good to hear there will be a subtle distinction between physical samples and other forms of data and that the samples themselves need to be returned. I like the way thats being broken out. Im curious if things like liquid + atmospheric samples will have a similar dynamic? Im definitely curious about how each experiment will work but Im guessing we'll hear more on that later. The more in-game mechanical distinction the better. 2) I think there are some really smart decisions being made on the tech tree and I like the way its organized. The whole grind vs gate question has come up a bunch of times on the board so Im excited to see how all these incentives and rewards play out. I do however think this makes getting a real flight planning tool for interplanetary transfers even more important in the near future as giving players a clear visual to understand launch windows and phase and ejection angles will make it much easier for them to go beyond Minmus. 3) This might sound subtle but I think it's also really smart to limit the number of medium sized biomes and focus on visually distinct landscapes and discoverables. Precision landing and over-land (or over sea) exploration are really key parts of gameplay that KSP1 never really took advantage of until BG, and even then not super well. Which leads to: This is a big one for me. I think I remember seeing one of the experiment descriptions hinting that it can help track these down? I fully agree there needs to be a way to search for them and I'd really like to see some mapping tools as things progress. Even just having broad biome maps so you can clearly see where you've been and what you've already explored seems essential, and Im sure even more so when resources are added in down the line. Plus as many have noted that SCANsat orbital survey mechanic is gold as an in-game engineering + navigation puzzle. Thats my take as well. It seems like after a couple of hops players could branch into probes or planes if they wish and progress from there. I know, brotha's gonna make me cry! Edit Sorry I thought you meant Min. 35 and Tom's actually very heartfelt closing thoughts on this, which were honestly quite moving. You can tell how much these folks care.

Man its good to see Tom again

Yeeeeeeuuuh! Cant wait to hear details.

Eh it sounds hokey to me. It's not a 30% difference, its 22.7%. Let's say for fun we believe Elon and Starship can deliver 150t to orbit for 1m dollars. Thats just $6.6k/t, so you could conservatively put 10kw of generation into orbit for 6k. In low orbit you're only generating half the day so that's about 43kwh/yr. That's not bad, about 4 US households worth for 6k! So you can get the power generation up there, but trying to transmit that energy over 2000km to the ground I don't think you're going to be able to beat 22.7% in losses especially considering battery, radiator, and structural mass. But that's not even the real problem. The problem is throughput. Say you were to move computation up there. Data centers currently use about 200 twh per year, about 1% of total global energy consumption. Let's say we could move 1% of that--.01% of the total--into space, or 2twh worth. Heat dissipation is a factor but its way less transmission loss because you're dumping directly into the processors. That would require 4.6 million starship launches just for the solar panels. Thats about 1% of 1% every 6,300 years. I think we can see why that's not realistic or feasible even before considering battery, processor, structural and radiator mass. You can try beating the energy density math by putting nuclear plants up there but the reality is rockets fail. I know no one wants to deal with this, no one wants to think about Chernobyl or Fukushima but my brothers in science those risks are real. What does China care if industrial standards aren't up to snuff and a reactor leaks into the groundwater or melts down in Uganda? They don't. Thats why it's cheap there, because no one actually cares what happens to anyone who lives there. But toss out the non-zero chance that a low-orbit nuclear reactor could land in the US or Europe? You might run into a few more regulatory hurdles. These solutions are, Im sorry to say, at best nft-esque marketing gimmicks for extracting money from unwise investors, and at worst fantasmograms designed to paint technocratic authoritarianism as salvation. It makes a lot of sense if you don’t think about it too much. Surely a society that could force a community with no democratic recourse to accept a half-baked nuclear reactor developed and build by a limited liability start-up could also force that same community to accept the consequences for their children and grandchildren if and when that ill-designed and half-maintained reactor were to fail, with zero accountability to the original investors. Real solutions tend to be much less dramatic, often utterly mundane, sadly, and don’t imagine wild-eyed investor returns. It's basic stuff like housing density and zoning reform, heat pumps, grid updates, and better transportation management. But who’s going to become a pog-faced overnight billionaire on that? Keep dumping your money into the Techy-tech scratch-off billionaire doohicky of the hour! This is a free market and you're freely encouraged to hand over everything you've made to people who know better than you do how stupid this all is.

The funny thing about all this is the solar/wind folks assume we'll be building a smart grid capable of managing dynamic energy loads, and the nuclear folks assume we'll be spending oodles more money and convincing the masses that its no biggie to have a nuclear plant next door. Neither of which will happen because it's cheaper and easier to just let the planet boil.

I don’t know I think the effects look great. I don’t know why folks want KSP to be photo-real. As to science obviously the changes from KSP1 aren’t radical, but there’s a lot of nuance possible and opportunities that could be taken up that KSP1 missed. The science system itself never incentivized some basic skills like precision landing or real time scanning. These discoverables seem to imply the former and Im hoping the latter gets added over time.

Well there is supposed to be a little more to it this time. Id just love a little more detail? Probably closer to update-eve. The proof is in the pudding of course but being a bit of a game-maker nerd Ive loved hearing Nate and Chris and Shana talking about their thinking on the subject.

Im kind of more interested in the mechanics and gameplay though?

I would love to see a bit more preview info on how experiments will work, what the devs’ thinking is on pacing and balance, using experiments to push mission diversity, etc.

Funny to see all the news stories calling this a big failure for Elon. I have made no secret here that Im not an Elon fan but this was a pretty solid 2nd launch. Really glad to see hot-staging work, deluge appears to be doing its job, even SS progressing nicely toward orbital velocity. Still some obvious concerns about Raptor reliability and heat tiles but for this stage of the game it's good progress. I still hope Elon gets the help he needs but SS as a project seems on track.

Watching Scott's breakdown though you see one engine fail to relight post-separation and it seems like others start to go out in proximity. It may be that an issue with this one engine then spread to those around it.

I would think just one? After that it's just 4mm of stainless separating plasma from propellant. I could be wrong about that and the stainless can take more than I realize. After all there are still gaps in the heat shield between the tiles to allow for expansion. Last I heard they were planning on SS28 for the next run so they're still trying to get data on the reentry system.

Im talking about game depth here, not game breadth—adding and strengthening layers to gameplay. And absolutely! play fast, don't think or worry too much, do whatever you want whenever you want is a really fun way to play KSP and many other games and I wouldn't tell anyone they shouldn't have fun however they wish to have fun. Thats a layer. But play-fast-don't-think isn't strictly compatible with min/maxing in any game I've ever played. Usually you have to pay attention to the basic structure of whats going on and the more and deeper you understand its dynamics and synergies the better you do. Thats kind of the whole point of games. Time IS a layer of this game. Though it need not be mandatory there should be rewards for considering it. Think about Skyrim and spells. As a player you don't need to use spells. There are lots of cool builds that rely little or not at all on them. But it's an option, and that option creates a dynamic field of choice which increases the kind of gameplay possible within the world. Time could be similar in KSP. You don't have to use it. But the game would be much, much less without the option.