Pthigrivi

They also didn’t guarantee 100% save continuity through EA. Obviously if you want to experience science mode functionality and progression you’ll want to start a new save. Colonies and resources may also introduce concepts that wouldn’t previously be accounted for. Seems like for folks that wanted to use high radiation drives but already had a fleet of vessels with nuclear reactors right against crew modules you could just toggle off radiation effects in difficulty settings until you started a new save.

And can we get those spherical geodesics in foil too plz?

Exactly. I think the cost/efficiency puzzle could be much more interesting this way actually because you'll have control over how much of each resource you'll have access to through ISRU.

On the discord last friday. They just said big news this coming friday, Im just guessing at the rest.

Yeah they've said there will be news coming this friday, possibly gameplay from the ESA event and more details on the release. Hopefully system requirements find their way in there.

This might sound harsh, but I don’t mean it so. If you are playing in an unrealistic way you might have to accept that there are unrealistic consequences. I, personally, believe KSP is at its heart an expansive, creative, unpunishing game and no particular playstyle should be ruled out by the games mechanics. Some folks say they knew KSP2 was in good hands when Nate said he’d played 2000 hours. I knew it was in good hands when they described how boom events drive population growth, because its an incredibly efficient and elastic mechanic that allows for so many ways of playing. Pace matters in terms of resource collection and maybe reactors burning through fuel and snacks being gobbled but the player has full control over colony growth and how many and how long each mission takes. In this way players are able to set their own pace, and growth is based not on the calendar but on how far you’ve explored. So yeah, if you build a self sufficient colony on Minmus and then you launch a probe to Jool and time warp all the way there your Minmus colony is going to top off all the resources you’re collecting, but nothing bad will happen. Because its self sufficient there’s no harm in underutilizing it. No biters are going to come chew through everything you’ve built. Thats just a choice based on how you’d like to play and there’s nothing wrong with that.

LS isn't really a problem here. If you can gather what you need to keep colonies supported they're just going to top off the tanks and stay stable. If vessels require LS (and I hope so) those aren't really an issue either, because in theory you've packed what you need for your journey. This is the same whether you're doing a dozen missions at once or one. The space race issue is more subtle. You've suggested a system in which players can go back in time and augment and revise missions they've already run, and you'd like both or several players to be able to do this. You probably don't realize this but you've created an inevitable stalemate-grind senario. There is no way to resolve a space race with retroactive causality, because each player or team in a losing position can continue to go back in time and revise or augment until they beat the winning team or player, and then that team goes back and does the same, and so on and so on. The team or player who wins the space race is not the team who executed the best and fastest plan, but the player or team who refuses to quit in an endless chain of recursive edits. Kudos to them for perseverance I guess, but its not really a recipe for good gameplay. (And if this doesn’t sound like a problem watch the movie “Primer” like 3 times.) This is a general problem with Rube Goldberg solutions to problems that have simpler answers: they spawn additional problems that must be solved with yet more overcomplicated solutions, which themselves require fixes and on and on it goes. This is why I don’t particularly like kerbal classes either, because its a bad solution to the problem that creates more and more player busywork the more you try to fix it. So Im not saying parallel sequential missions with recursive casualty is fundamentally impossible, Im saying its a deeply inefficient solution to the problem.

Well it takes the same amount of player time, it's just broken up differently. I personally like to do lots of missions at the same time because it makes missions to Jool feel so epic and I don't mind hopping around. But I don't begrudge players who feel differently. It's just a personal playstyle difference. I think the game really needs to let players play either simultaneously or sequentially depending on their preference, but I don't see why it would be worth it to create a bunch of temporal headaches so that players could do both. I mean if you're going back in time then you're going to wait for the payoff anyway. Boom events are already solving the core issue, because your population grows based on what you've explored rather than the clock. So if you set up a colony on the mun all that matters is that your outputs are in the black and you can timewarp a few days or a 2 years and nothing bad happens. The clock only really matters for vessels en-route, and each player can decide for themselves how much of that they want to manage at a time. If you want to have concurrent missions you do concurrent missions. If you want to do them sequentially do them sequentially. All that changes is the calendar date.

See I misunderstood and thought you meant an easier way to see dV for things like landers attached to the side of a mothership with docking ports. Since they’ve gone to a workspace model I would love a way to see dV for each subassembly even when its not connected to the main vessel.

I think it might be possible, maybe, if instead of being able to go back an arbitrary amount of time and change things you could only go back to after something was last edited by someone else. In any case its likely not feasible and it’s definitely overcomplicated. I think its pretty unlikely that they’ll add stock mechjeb at all, and if things may or may not work players will interpret that as random failures, which the devs have said they’d like to avoid. Its the same reason they probably won’t use a mechjeb solution for supply routes. There’s just a much simpler and more reliable way to accomplish the same goal.

So I finally sat down and read this thread and it kind of confirmed what I suspected when I thought about this problem a couple years ago: its a neat idea but in practice it creates a rat’s nest of issues that kind if negate the benefits. Best solution is to have time move in one direction and just run concurrent missions with alarms and switch from vessel to vessel to execute burns as they come up. There are much less problematic and time consuming solutions to things like stage recovery. And yeah, it has some interesting implications for multiplayer but keeping things simple is the reason I no longer support the green ‘go back’ arrow in this diagram:

Yeah I wonder if this is possible given their new subassembly system?

These are all really good points and I really appreciate Shadowzones approach to all this. Having the game be better optimized and less buggy is important, but so is teaching players how to be more efficient. Both things can be true. Hopefully the tutorials help a bit with this, and down the road the science and resource systems may provide further incentives to make vessels as lean as they can be no matter how ambitious the plan. There is something else though that hasn't been mentioned here and that is KSP2 needs to give players better flight information. And I don't mean clogging up the main interface with lots of numbers, I mean graphical overlays that help players navigate and fly better. Some of this looks already to be in the works with much improved UI around maneuvers and burns, but there are 3 other categories we haven't heard much about yet that would be absolutely critical to helping players get past the interplanetary hump and start doing more complex things like establishing colonies: 1) An easy to use and understand Mission planner that lets players lay out their desired journey and provides them with dV totals and launch windows and lets them set alarms right there. Ideally the planner would be graphically simple and default to the next window, but offer drop down options to refine or alter launch dates using a porkchop plot. Even better would be the ability to save these mission plans to vessels or workspaces in the VAB so a player could look right there and see "Oh it looks like I'll need 430 dV to land on Dres but my lander only has 300... I'd better beef that up." 2) Better visual cues for precise landing much like what is found in Trajectories--visual targets and landing zone prediction, estimated difference between target and predicted landing point, trajectory factoring drag, perhaps even overheat prediction for reentry profiles. I'd also love to see some of the things Better Burn Time included like automatically showing time to impact/rendezvous and estimated burn time, estimated time to enter/exit an atmosphere. Some of this could be integrated into the science system but most should be on by default. 3) Better mapping. I would LOVE to see SCANsat functionality in which the vessel actually collects data as it passes over the surface. It would be so much clearer to players why a polar orbit makes sense and creates a simple in-engine minigame thats actually about real spaceflight. Most important though would be to have those maps shown as direct overlays in map mode and flight mode so players could toggle through resource overlays, biome overlays, height and slope maps so they could pick smart landing zones and colony sites. It would also be helpful in flight mode as you're landing to have a graphical overlay showing you where the ground is flattest so you could more easily guide yourself down to safe LZ.

Has anyone seen a claw yet? Asking for a friend.

No I mean most of the time I still enjoy it, and the mods are trying to keep it under control. It just kind of goes into romper-room hour sometimes. Aw we just want you to be happy, Vl3d!

I figure end of next week before they’ll have real preview/review full gameplay stuff?

BIG NEWS! I know people are having fun but it's just hours on end of inane spam and nobody else can really talk about anything.

Part of my dream I was building a model rocket engine out of clay and lawnmower parts. Do not attempt.

I mean there were some angsty exchanges here and there but it was pretty nice last week. Now it's just kind of a spam dump.

I guess Im just an old fart but I'm sad the discord has become basically unusable in the last few days.

Oh man remind me to tell you all about “the crown game” dream I had last night.

I would still like to see just a bit of it inside the Kerbolar system. Keep kerbin and its moons the same, but if Gilly and Vall had a bit of tilt? Might make a nice introduction to the problem.

And that thing they're showing is just the scanner.

There’ve been some hints that an 8th planet will be added but nothing confirmed. Existing planets will probably be mostly the same.

This is the key component. We're likely going to have time-based elements anyway because of reactor fuel and ISRU, and LS would just be another balancing component of that. Another key is building in a buffer like built-in snacks for all crew modules or a grace-period so players don't have to worry about it until they start building stations and thinking about crewed interplanetary missions.