Delay

The date of the image Cassini took is known. From that you can calculate where Saturn was in its orbit. Based on the position of Saturn's rings relative to the planet you can estimate where Cassini was. Based on that you can reconstruct the sky at the time. Exactly! It does not affect gameplay in any way, shape or form. So why do you, or anyone by extension, care so much that the developers should decide for everyone? Either make it a highly customizable option or leave it to the modders. There is no correct side here. You can make a case for realism, you can make a case for artistic license, or both or none.

You can quote all you want, dismissing it as an excuse is not an argument. Fact is that the general public has an idea of what space travel looks like. KSP already broke many of these expectations, leading to severe frustration in players who don't necessarily know a lot about space travel. I can imagine this ended some people's interest in the game as being "too hard" (I know we don't have these problems, but that does not imply the complement is empty!). The goal should be to strike a balance between meeting expectations and teaching real-world physics. And again: I'm supporting the middle-ground options of either allowing full control of every visual aspect or have mods do this in case people like to. I don't want to repeat myself too much, but I play with DOE by choice, because I want realism over artistic license. But said artistic license is absolutely fine to have and I would accept, play and love the game just as much without it. Just because I like bloom and slight overexposure doesn't mean you do either. Doesn't mean I should get to decide how your planets look. Or your skybox. Or your rockets. Or your anything.

I find your low FOV images a bit disingenuous, as the skybox is very clearly blurred behind sharply defined objects. The field of view also makes stars appear much larger than they would be (zoom + proper focus on a real camera still produces point-like stars). I otherwise do understand your point, I play with DOE myself. Nonetheless, deciding whether the majority of the game environment should be black or filled with stars by a sample size as small as this thread - this means both opponents and proponents - is absurd and non-representative of the (space interested, but not obsessed) audience that KSP 2 attempts to reach, even more than KSP 1. I, for one, would welcome the idea of a DOE-like mod for KSP 2 instead of being a (not) feature implemented by the devs. Mods like DOE and TUFX give you way more options to customize the looks of the game to exactly your liking than any game developer could universally decide. Either that or literally every single PP setting is made available in the options menu, I'd gladly try all the settings out to see what fits me more (I personally like slightly overexposed planets when they are not exactly in view).

MESSAGE. RECEIVED.

You identified the moon from that tiny triangle? I'd consider that a bit... "fantastic", maybe? Who knows, perhaps even laughable! I thought so. However, I'm not willing to invest 20€. Unless the Moon's orbit was changed to accurately reflect the real Moon (such that solar eclipses become predictable), it's too inaccurate to be worth that much. I'd stick to Celestia if SE didn't have better graphics and a more intuitive movement system. However, the main point I was attempting to make was that stars can indeed be identified without Earth in sight. It was, apparently, subject to debate "that someone would be quickly able to recognize a couple stars on a place that is not Earth, from a single, almost reference-less picture" (you getting the moon right surely counts just as much additionally).

You mean that you couldn't? By the way, in case you're wondering how I got this shot of Jupiter with stars in the background... I enabled "Real planet brightness".

It does not, as I have quoted the defintions for alien (adjective) above. Wiktionary's "See also" and "Synonym" sections (as well as the thesaurus) do not differentiate between nouns, adjectives and verbs. Regardless of who's correct, let's get back to the topic of why a pitch black sky is a must for a space game... with planets of unrealistic masses and eyeball-shaped terrain.

That's the noun...

You want to argue with definitions now? A sign of desperation in my book. Anyways, let's play your game. You described the sky as "alien", not as "extraterrestrial". Here are all definitions of "alien" offered by Wiktionary: Notice any similarities? Because I don't.

...but not because the sky is vastly different. The stars have merely been misidentified, which can even happen on Earth. Just how many straws do you want to grasp at?

Hey, those 0.02 arcmilliseconds of parallax mean all the difference!

More TUFX fun! The vignette is a bit too sharp, I might have to turn that down a bit.

@ShadowmageNot sure if you're aware of this already, but I noticed this while playing around with black-and-white filters. Re-entry effects are not affected by TUFX and remain red, which looks a bit weird.

Had some fun with TUFX. I've overdone the "black and white has terrible exposure/dynamic range" thing. Ironically, I enabled HDR.

@Kerbas_ad_astra Hi. I just want to inform you that, for whatever reason, models you edited (even by just changing names) somehow have their meshes broken. An example of this is the newest Bollard. Other parts with this are the Swivel, Reliant, Swivel and Poodle, and sure enough all of them were modified at some point, mostly in their fairing positions. Now, if the game is otherwise stock, there are no problems apart from unintentionally bright highlights on the affected meshes. But with TU patches applied, these parts become pitch black, which is a real shame because the mod otherwise works very well with PBR. I do understand there's probably not much you could do, I imagine there's more to this than a few mesh export settings.

That is correct. Apsidal precession is not modelled. However, at some 40 arcseconds per century, does it really matter for RSS timescales?

Huh, that's interesting. My atmosphere doesn't seem as large as yours in LKO.

Are you using Scatterer's default?

@Columbiais that the hotfixed version? Because the ground is not supposed to be this overexposed anymore.

Oh, sorry.

@blackrackThis might not be all that important to you, but given that AA seems to cause problems for some, this might actually offer some insight? I disabled the game's native AA in the KSC scene, went back to the main menu and got greeted by this cursed mess: So at least the game's AA needs to be enabled for any antialiasing to take place.

The brightness should have been addressed in the hotfix. It worked for me, at least. Are you using configs other than Scatterer's basic ones? They may need to be updated first, different atmosphere model and all that. As for the IVAs, I tried those before I made my bug report. Granted, it wasn't extensive testing, but I had no problems whatsoever with them. For the record: This is what the atmosphere is supposed to look like: ...and here's what IVAs look like: However, @blackrack, I can confirm that TU shaders flicker a bit. I noticed that on the planetshine while taking the screenshots.

And docking complete!

Docking confirmed!

How long until expected docking?