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Then play Simple Rockets. It's far better, if that's all you care about. Kerbal Space Program is a game about a "Space Program." None of this is to say that rockets should be made intentionally boring, which seems to be the bizarre insinuation. Only that the "Space Program" part is what makes the rockets interesting, and thus is where the emphasis should be placed. Is this really so hard to grasp?

Semantic differences. They also say "Defining and achieving unique goals." My point is that one serves the other, otherwise the experience is hollow. Simple Rockets has a far superior creative interface for rocket design, but I'd argue it's not as popular (and not as good) because the purpose behind the rockets isn't well-defined.

I've probably gotten too sucked into this debate about realism, but I'm on quarantine so it's not like I have anything better to do. I first discovered this game back in college and it ended up shaping my real-life career path, so I'm really passionate about KSP as an educational tool. I think the debate can be reduced to this. Engineering decisions should be driven by practicality. Too many people seem to have it backwards. KSP is a game about solving engineering problems, not designing cool rockets. Designing cool rockets is just a way to solve cool engineering problems. Adding a centrifuge on an interstellar ship shouldn't be because it looks cool, it should be a practical necessity to ensure your kerbonauts arrive safely. Setting up a base at an ice deposit doesn't just mean having water to live, it means having to design rockets which take advantage of water for fuel. Every choice should have a practical consideration behind it, and the sum total of these decisions should be rockets, spaceships, and colonies that look and behave a lot like their real-life and theoretical counterparts. KSP shouldn't just be about learning how KSP works. One should be able to open up Atomic Rockets, learn about some new concept, then fire up KSP2 and make something work using real-world knowledge. That feedback is a beautiful thing.

I don't mean for this to be harsher than it is, but this is fundamentally a disagreement between those who recognize that a solar system becomes a lot less interesting when you eliminate its inherent diversity of resources, and those that are apparently overwhelmed by 6th grade chemistry concepts. On an absolute scale, KSP is not a complicated game. Saying the word "methane" is not going to break anyone's brain. The engineering considerations of different fuels make for inherently good gameplay, and I'm excited about the educational possibilities KSP2 opens up. Ultimately this is a moot point anyway. From the dev diaries, we've seen they're going in the direction of things like "cesium doped metallic hydrogen," which is further than even I would argue is necessary.

No argument here. I think it just comes down to having a very powerful set of mission planning tools that keeps the simulation honest.

Automation and powerful mission planning tools I think are essential to allowing the game to be more complex without overwhelming players. Not having to consider life support in building a colony would far oversimplify that aspect of the game, but having to manually fly periodic resupply missions is the "game ruining" kind of tedium. Instead, once a player demonstrates they've mastered skills, these could be added to an autopilot/mission planner functionality that grows more powerful over time. These could work like challenges. For instance: Reach orbit ten times - Unlock ascent autopilot Orbit Mun - Unlock Mun intercept trajectory calculator Land on Mun three times - Unlock descent calculator Land on Mun within 1km of target coordinates - Unlock descent autopilot Rendezvous with another ship on orbit - Unlock Hohmann transfer calculator Dock with another ship on orbit - Unlock docking autopilot Orbit Duna - Unlock Duna intercept trajectory calculator (...) And so on. Over time, the player can fly entire missions entirely within the confines of the mission planner, provided they've already "explored" the systems. Automation could even follow rhythms, such as "fly 'Shuttle X" carrying Z resources between 'Duna Base 1' and 'Duna space station' every 7 days." More complicated transfers, such as between the moons of Jool could be calculated based on windows from a porkchop plot and available delta-V. The math is fairly intense, but the player needn't be bothered with it. A decent tutorial and a good interface and you could get middle schoolers designing space logistics networks. I'm excited for the possibilities.

Except that it does make the game deeper. There are real and interesting trade-offs between engine types that translate into design considerations, particularly with how one approaches colonizing different bodies. Kerosene is a cheap, dense, high-thrust fuel that is essentially impossible to manufacture off Earth. Liquid hydrogen is relatively easy to manufacture off-planet, you just need water, but doesn't have great thrust and requires massive tanks due to its low density. Methane is a decent trade-off, but requires CO2 or some other carbon source, which is abundant on Mars/Duna, but not on the Moon/Mun. These directly reflect how a player would approach engineering a spacecraft and what bodies the player would choose to colonize, and solving engineering problems is the whole fun of the game. I think the primary problem is that the community in this forum is old and from the days when KSP was just a whimsical simple rocket simulator (myself among them). It has grown considerably since then, but there's a small, vocal group that seems to want nothing to change.

Why? What's wrong with deepening some of the mechanics? Oversimplifying things ends removing any reason to build colonies. If you can turn ore into literally anything, what's the point of setting up bases on different planets/moons? Is it really so difficult to figure out that ice can be cracked into hydrolox and water and CO2 can be converted into methalox? This community seems to have an allergic reaction to anything that might accidentally teach them something about space exploration. The average player should be more than capable of learning about even the more nuanced things with a better UI and some decent tutorials. If all you want is a KSP1 with better graphics, I kind of don't see the point.

Respectfully, I don't think I could possibly disagree more. For a sequel about building outposts in space, what's the point if you strip away all the engineering challenge? Without life support, flying to Jool is only marginally harder than flying to the Mun. What's the point of colonizing different planets and moons if you can get "ore" from any of them and turn it into whatever you want? I get it you want something simple and casual, but there's still KSP1 and quite a few of us would rather something new and challenging rather than the same with prettier graphics and a handful of new engines.

EP-50 engine plate appears to have some broken physics from most recent patch. It somehow fixes the rocket in place, as if it has infinite inertia. It broke my Saturn V design. Edit: Wait, sorry, this isn't one of your parts. Hmm, need to do more digging.

There seems to be an old bug with the nitrogen pressurization system with EVAs. I've dealt with this problem multiple times in earlier versions and it keeps coming back periodically. It has something to do with the SSPX airlock module, I believe. Basically it'll get locked into a state that just continuously dumps nitrogen as it tries to pressurize, even if you disable the habitat or air pump. It's very intermittent. I'll do missions with the same design several times, then on one of them the bug will strike and it will break that save, even if I restore all of the nitrogen by editing the save file. Edit: After playing with the save file a bit more, there appears to be a math error in how it is converting nitrogen into atmosphere. Manually restoring the atmosphere seems to fix the state, but it's a very persistent and very annoying bug.

Hi, first off thanks for all the work you do on this mod. I'm unfortunately having a bit of an issue. My Mun appears to have disappeared partway through my campaign due to an apparent conflict with Scatterer or Eve. It's just a menacing black hole in the place where the Mun used to be. Loading an earlier save resolves this issue, but it reoccurs at random intervals and appears to persist with the affected save. Is this a known issue, and if not, which logs would you like me to provide? Thanks again for your support for the community. Edit: It appears to occur during lunar eclipses, which is too big of a coincidence. I'm not entirely sure why I thought to come here before asking the Scatterer dev.

I mean, he's kind of right that the 1.25 parts are a bit underpowered, but honestly that only matters for the first flight. A 5m Saturn V can be designed very realistically for moon missions. This mod has been the single thing drawing me back to KSP after all these years. The challenge, along with Kerbalism, is exactly what I've been looking for in KSP. Anyone saying it's too hard ought to look elsewhere. You're probably not the target audience.

Since we're all giving Santa our wish lists, here's mine: I'm a big fan of the realism mods like Kerbalism and kind of hope to see KSP2 involve similar kinds of engineering challenges. I'd appreciate having to design around life support, accurate fuel types (eg. 'liquid hydrogen' instead of 'liquid fuel'), realistic resource trees (eg. methane out of carbon dioxide and water / plastic out of methane), an upscaled Kerbol system etc. I also realize that KSP1 is plenty hard enough for the average player and that throwing all these extra features is liable to make the game too daunting to a first time player. Ideally I'd like to see hardcore players given a truly hardcore experience to opt into as part of the native game without overwhelming the new ones. I'd hope that KSP2 is being designed around a depth of customization options that won't alienate either player base, and also provide a ladder for the casual players to become hardcore rocket scientists. Just my thoughts.

Most of the blanket ones aren't meant to be closed after being deployed. That's intentional.

Hope it's not rude to post a few pictures of a new Duna lander project. Great mods, couldn't imagine playing this game without them. A few things I've noticed: 1) The storage space in the back of the Biconic command module doesn't register as thermally protected, so things tend to explode in there on re-entry. 2) The 5m faring looks weirdly black in the upper atmosphere. Possible weird shader interaction with scatterer or planetshine? 3) Biconic command module could really use a heat shielded fairing for constellation type missions. I'd happily send you some coffee money if that ever got put in.

The issue isn't the difficulty, I actually think it's pretty solid balance. The issue is that a Mun or Minmus base is on the far end of what you can engineer for without the instability issues becoming extreme. I've done two crewed Duna missions with the mod and I spent so much time debugging weird behavior that I put the game down for months afterwards. I personally love the engineering challenges of Kerbalism, even if the balance can get kind of wonky (power and science, mainly). I don't even bother with stock anymore, I just wish I could actually fly my missions without my computer catching on fire.

If this is the case, then I think there are serious balance issues with the mod. I already have to cover every square inch of my probes with batteries, and even the late game antennas can't handle the data volume of a single scan. Powering a manned science base through a night on Minmus required such a complicated power arrangement that it slows the game to a crawl. Nuclear power would be mandatory if it wasn't for the fact that it has broken compatibility with Near Future electrical. This is a great mod, but it needs some work on balance and optimization.

Are there some compatibility issues with Kerbalism? Reactors don't seem to show in either the electrical or thermal tabs of this mod, nor do they seem to do anything when activated.

Is anyone else really struggling to complete large data-file surveys, like radioplasma or gravity scans? I can't get past about 5-10 percent a year. I think something is wrong with how it calculates comm blackout periods during fast time progression.

Alright, there's definitely something broken with the the radial airlock parts from SSPX. That's the common factor with all my ships that seem to have their pressurization system completely break. Each time I get caught in a pressurization cycle where the nitrogen just completely depletes within the span of a few hours as all the pressurized parts get caught in an infinite loop. At real time the pressurization value slowly ticks up, but the moment you accelerate time they all depressurize.

That did the trick, thanks! Can't believe I didn't think of that. I was in the process of writing a script to delete the failure state from my save file...

So turns out you can't disable reliability in the settings menu. Even when you turn the chance down to zero, parts still break at an annoying frequency. To each their own, but I don't find it enjoyable to have my missions killed by a random number generator.

That may have something to do with it. I only seem to have issues when I undock my lander and take it to the Mun's surface. The lander has an airlock part, which I assumed would minimize the amount of nitrogen wasted, but I guess not.

Is there some aspect of the pressurization system I don't understand? The amount of nitrogen my station uses is so extreme that I generally just edit the config files to fix it. Parts will randomly seem to depressurize and no amount of nitrogen will ever be enough repressurize them. I'm not even using inflatable parts.