herbal space program

I think there's still plenty of work for both parts of the operation to stay busy for the foreseeable future, but I totally agree that they need to take the fact that the game is currently in a barely playable state seriously, even if they need to hire new people to do that. This next patch should be very telling in that regard IMO, because they cannot be deaf to the current outcry.

I dunno, depends what kind of EFFICIENCY we're talking about if you ask me. Saving Kerbucks is one thing, and bragging rights about "smallest crewed ship to land on and return from XYZ" is another (e.g. https://i.imgur.com/ABj9F3u.png, https://i.imgur.com/i6EmOvR.png), but my precious time is also an important resource. Those overbuilt boosters and landers may not be required for Duna, but if they can do Tylo as well, then I don't have to build a whole new craft to do those two different missions. If my overpowered Mammoth stack makes it so I don't have to repeat my gravity turn 5 times so I can reach LKO with enough dV to do the rest, and I can moreover do my ejection burn in one high-thrust go rather than 4 tedious increments, then I'm saving a lot of time there as well! Obviously it all depends on what it is you're trying to accomplish, which is why in this ultra-buggy KSP2 EA sandbox Kerbalverse, my current Duna lander is is a Mk2 with a Poodle, the second biggest set of legs, and an excessive number of chutes, and my initial booster is a Rhino with four SRBs attached to it.

Wow, reading through the last couple of pages of this thread is depressing , but at least I guess I understand now why the core physics parts of the game are still so messed up. It sounds like responsibility for all that code has completely changed hands several times while it was still a hot mess. I can hardly fathom how big of a setback it must have been every time that happened, especially if somebody along the line made some bad decisions that will require starting over on major parts and/or didn't leave behind adequate documentation for the next person to really understand everything they did. Meanwhile, it looks like they've got a crack team of artists and marketing people trying to build out all the cosmetic and story elements of the game on top of this deeply flawed, play-killing foundation, with no clear indication how that can be fixed anytime soon. I sure hope that they have found/can quickly find somebody who is equal to the task of getting them out of this pickle, because I think no amount of window dressing is going to get more people to play the game the way it is now.

The title pretty much says it all. Is anybody in the modder community working on this, or is there some other workaround that makes that unnecessary? I would surely love to go back to using my thumbsticks to fly rather than my keyboard!

I guess my response to that would be that if you're not enjoying what you're doing, you're not actually "playing" anymore, but to be fair it's really just a handful of exceptionally bad issues that make the game that way for me. If they can just fix the orbital trajectory bug, the sinking lander bug, and the berserk SAS bug, I'll be happy to noodle around admiring the new planetary skins, looking for Easter eggs, and whatnot else until they get more of the new content developed. Game controller support would also go a long way towards making me less of an angry villager. Flying planes is just not fun for me if I have to do it with a keyboard and mouse.

Everybody should be entitled to express their opinion about the game, whatever that may be, so long as it does not involve profanity, personal attacks on anybody, or violation of any of the other clearly established community guidelines. You are equally entitled to your judgements about those opinions, but you also don't have the right to impose your own rules of what is constructive and what isn't on everybody else in the forum. If you can't stand all the complaining you see in some threads because it is too negative for you, then the part of you that says you just shouldn't read those threads is correct, full stop. The part of you that "wonders why I should have to" on the other hand, kinda sounds to me like the flip side of the very sort of entitlement you seem to be objecting to. As far as I can tell, the moderators are doing a pretty good job of keeping anything really objectionable out of the comments, at a time when IMO a lot of people have pretty good reasons to be unhappy about the state of the product. And while I do agree that some of the complaints that are made are not fair and not constructive, I still respect the right of those forum members to say those things provided they do so in good faith and not just to troll others. The scroll wheel is your friend, and maybe next time you are feeling down about the state of the discussion, you could try to be the change by starting a new thread about something positive instead of just adding your own complaints to the pile!

Fair enough I guess. Hopefully the properly functioning version of the game will precede the tell-all memoir!

If that's really the explanation, they should just level with us about it. They might even get help from this exceptional modder community! Couldn't agree more with this. It could still end up being the totally great game we imagined, but they are making no friends among either noobs or experienced KSP1 players by letting these awful bugs fester.

If I thought that is what I had actually gotten, then I wouldn't feel as disappointed as I do now. I can totally wait for various features to be implemented, but at least the basic game engine mechanics should have been pretty solid when they made their first release, and they weren't. I would really like some kind of explanation for that.

OK, it may have been slightly overstated, but not by much. "Able to reach nearly every body in the Kerbolar system" is really not a very high bar, as that amounts to nothing more than being able to set up a couple of orbital transfers without using enough live physics time for all your orbital parameters to get corrupted. For my part, I tried a simple Munar orbit rendezvous landing mission, which is something I've done at least 100 times in KSP1 and could basically do in my sleep, and in the process I encountered 1) Such rapid corruption of my Munar orbital parameters that I had to use up all of my transfer stage's fuel just to stay in bleepin' orbit, 2) Crazy phantom forces on both lander and orbiter upon activating physics, such that my previously stationary lander was break dancing upside down repeatedly after I reloaded it using F9, and my orbiter spinning crazily as it went on a collision course with the ground based on no actual impulse, 3) My lander vanishing into the ground whenever I tried to switch back and forth between it and my orbiter to set up my orbital rendezvous, 4) My fairings breaking my ship every single time I tried to jettison them, to the point where I just gave up on them entirely, and 5) One thing after another just ceasing to work properly as I did repeated saves and reloads of craft that were in flight. This is really not OK for a game that has supposedly been in development for 4 years now with a pre-existing code base that did not behave nearly so badly. YMMV, but as somebody who played KSP1 since 0.2x, I am really quite disappointed.

OK, so why don't you start by telling us what your priority list is, so we can at least know we are all on the same page? What you said here about progress on bugs vs. other stuff may be true, and I do believe your team is trying to fix things ASAP, but Invoking your "top ten" bugs and comparing them to other people's lists of complaints is really making light of the problem IMO. It makes it sound like we are talking about a bunch of minor annoyances here, over which people might differ on the priority, when the problem is in fact a relative handful of totally in-your-face, completely game-breaking issues that stop any experienced KSP1 player in their tracks the minute they try to do anything more ambitious than orbiting Kerbin once. Everybody knows what those bugs are, and no amount of spin or shiny objects on display is going to make them less of an elephant in the room. There may be good reasons why they are so hard to fix and why you even released the game in this unplayable state after all this time, but I haven't seen those communicated clearly anywhere. Leveling with us and doing so might do a lot to quell suspicions that not everything here is above board.

I didn't mean to suggest it was based on nothing. I wasn't exactly hanging on every word from the KSP2 devs back then, but I did look at some of those boffo videos and develop some fairly high expectations based on those myself. I'm just saying that based on that content, people (including me) were getting really excited about possibilities that were probably never realistic. Nonetheless, what we actually got in this EA release, which is basically unplayable, was a disappointment even to those who did not get carried away by the hype train. Clearly something happened that they are not telling us about, or else there is no way the core game engine, let alone all those whiz-bang features, would be in such a shoddy state two years hence. Even so, so long as they don't just take our money and run, I am willing to continue waiting for something that begins to live up to the promises.

...And the answer turns out to be that even if the vessel you switch to is on the ground, you start falling when you switch back. But on the plus side, I seem to have discovered a new form of Kraken drive! If you just let your vessel keep falling, it actually doesn't oscillate around the CoM of the parent body like you'd expect. Instead, it comes shooting out the other side at absurd velocity! I think I was going about 34km/sec when I came out the other side of Mun. Going to see what amusing things I can do with this!

Studying the behavior of this bug on Mun, I'm finding that I don't actually start sinking If I just go back to the KSC, save the game, quit, reload it, and go back to my lander from the tracking station. Going to the VAB or training center before reloading the lander doesn't seem to cause it either, even if I launch a training mission. Neither does it happen if I load a new vessel in the VAB, put it on the launch pad, and then recover it without launching. BUT, if I actually launch that vessel into orbit and then switch over to my lander through the map interface, then whoops! Where did the ground go? Same if I switch control from my lander to the Munar orbiter part of my mission and then go back, but interestingly in that case it only happens if I actually load the flight view for the orbiter before I switch back to the lander, and not if I stay only in the map view while controlling the other vessel. So the conclusion there seems to be that loading the flight interface for another vessel that is actually in flight and outside of the physics range of the lander is what is actually required to make it sink when you return to it. On a code level, that suggests to me that somehow the fact that the new current vessel is sitting on the ground is not among the parameters that is getting updated when you switch vessels. Perhaps that is the "rigid body" physics mode part. This in turn suggests to me that maybe if I launch another vessel and land it on the ground somewhere before switching back to my lander, it will no longer sink. Off to go do that experiment now...

Another thing that has worked for me and is a little less annoying than that workaround is to put a stack separator or back-to-back pair of one-way decouplers in between the strutted docking ports. Decoupling those has successfully broken the struts for me, although I have seen some bizarre behavior in a couple of cases.

Whatever happened, the idea that this is the product of several years of dedicated work by an effective team of game developers is pretty hard to swallow. But maybe there's a whole lot of good stuff that's been done but is still not ready to roll out precisely because it was left 80% finished by people who are now gone. If that's indeed the case, then we could get some pretty major improvements in the upcoming updates. I could optimistically imagine that's why they're holding off on the next one, so that they can get us back by effectively implementing at least one boffo new feature. Even just showing us one surface-level landscape that lives up to the hype of the teaser videos could win back a lot of trust.

I'd be perfectly fine with a barely implemented placeholder for the first update that rolls out science, so long as they tackle some of the really egregious bugs in the process. Support for a bleepin' game controller and/or joystick would be nice too! Having to fly/drive/EVA with just the keyboard takes a lot of the fun out of it for me, and I'm kind of shocked that they would release anything that didn't include that kind of basic functionality right off the bat.

After my first 8 hours or so playing the game, I must say I'm having some misgivings myself. I mean, some of the high-flown expectations that were bandied about in years-ago discussions around here were no doubt unrealistic, but what we have now after all this time really makes me wonder how long, if ever, it will take for us to get to something that really improves upon the original version. So much of the core functionality of KSP1 is still ether broken or missing in this long-awaited release that it's a little hard to maintain the faith that they are really going to keep up the commitment required to produce a worthy successor here. Still, I don't begrudge them my 50 bucks. It just seems now like it was a riskier investment than I ever imagined it would be before I actually played the game.

Bought the game yesterday. I'm currently doing a Munar orbit rendezvous crewed landing as my second mission, and I had the exact same thing happen to my lander when I switched away to my orbiter and then switched back to the lander a few seconds later. It was nowhere to be seen, and based on the altimeter it was falling through the ground as if the surface weren't there, steadily accelerating downwards. I was actually able to reverse the descent with my engines, but it was costing me so much dV to get back to the surface that I gave up and hit f9. I kind of wish I had waited to see if the craft would come back up through the ground unscathed, but I suspect it would have. Kruffty!

Interesting for me to learn that they are trying to preserve so much of the way different parts performed in KSP1. I was not really expecting to be able to build the same ship I built in KSP1 and have it work the same in the new game. That seems to constrain a lot of the parameters of the new Kerbalverse significantly.

Works for me if it means I won't have to deal with all kinds of pain-in-the-butt life support!

I guess I kind of overstated what I meant there. It's really just stuff like clipping together 15 fuel tanks under a 1.25m fairing to nullify all their drag that I think should be disallowed somehow, at least in normal career/campaign modes. Extreme part-clipping and offsetting can can of course also abuse the aero model by allowing you to build ridiculously long and thin ships that are far more aerodynamically stable than they ought to be, and I'm not a big fan of that either. OTOH I totally get the aesthetic problems of not allowing any clipping at all. I mean, with the sorry assortment of wing parts we have, it's more or less impossible to build a decent-looking or even ideally functional plane without it. Perhaps this could be addressed by having a limit of 10%-15% of the volume of any non-hollow part that can be occupied by any other non-hollow parts. Hollow parts OTOH could have up to 90% of their volume occupied by other parts, and for design purposes these would include dry wings. Wet wings could also have a higher clipping limit, but at some point you'd have to pay a penalty in terms of their fuel capacity. I think something like that would represent a reasonable compromise between aesthetics and realism, especially since we seem to be getting at least procedural wings/control surfaces, and I hope maybe some other procedural airplane parts as well. And of course I really don't care if it's included in some kind of cheat menu or as an option in sandbox mode. It only really matters to me wrt vanilla career modes, because I don't think it's good game design for a physics simulator to have these exploits available by default. In the context of sandbox challenges, as you say it can be policed by the participants just fine.

I thought I made it pretty plain already, but here goes again: Just try to walk yourself mentally through what a KSP2 campaign-mode game is going to be like, with the goal being not to explore just one, but rather multiple star systems in the end. They are apparently keeping pretty much all the old parts, so that sure makes it seem like they mean to have you start where you started in KSP1 in terms of tech, if not at an even more primitive level. So you play up through all those KSP1 exercises and build all this infrastructure in the Kerbolar system, the main point of which is going to be to enable you to travel to the stars. What happens to all of that after you launch your first interstellar mission if the time it will take to get there is 50 or more times longer than the time it takes to do a Jool return mission at home? Are you just going to put all that on hold while you timewarp at 1,000,000X for 150 years? What if you first need to learn something about the remote system with a probe before it makes any sense to send a larger mission there? How long in terms of the time scale of in-system play are you willing to have that turnaround take? If there are multiple systems to explore, how are you going to manage the development of your resources in the first exoplanetary system you reach while other missions are in flight? If the timescales aren't too far apart, it's a manageable issue, but at some point it will become truly onerous. That is the gameplay problem I am talking about, and it already kind of exists along the lines of "what do I do in the Kerbin SOI to fill up the three or more years it takes for all my interplanetary missions get where they are going there and back?". Except this would represent that issue writ much larger. The only way to mitigate against that massive discontinuity in time scales if you are going to stick to interstellar distances typical of the Solar neighborhood is to make your interstellar ships go more than half the speed of light, which will require pure fantasy propulsion technologies representing a stark four-orders-of-magnitude discontinuity with everything that came before them. OTOH, every order of magnitude you bring your neighboring star systems closer represents an order of magnitude less ridiculously OP your interstellar propulsion tech needs to be to keep the relative time scales in some reasonable balance. That is, if you bring the other stars 100 times closer than that, then you are talking about only a 100-fold power-up, translating to ISPs on the order of 100,000 to build usable ships rather than some absurd number like 10,000,000 so that there can be some kind of plausible 2-way aspect to interstellar travel. I don't think I can make it any plainer than that.

I believe that's only true so long as you don't then enclose all those clipped-together parts in a fairing or cargo bay. I seem to recall some craft that did otherwise totally impossible things that way, so for that reason I hope that KSP2 cracks down on part-clipping in general Obviously this is just silly, so they need to totally rethink that. They totally need to rethink this too. Lifting bodies ought to generate lift, not disproportionate amounts of drag! I generally find this much more annoying than helpful. Between that and the soft stall behavior, when I do what seems like a proper flare, I often end up sailing right back into the air and then gliding along on what feels like some kind of exaggerated ground effect.

Yes, I understand that, and it does not address the point I was trying to make, which I have tried to explain now at such tiresome length that I am not gonna try again. I guess we will just have to see what they do, but if they really end up putting different star systems 2-5 ly apart I will be quite surprised and not particularly happy, because of the other things that will necessarily imply.