RealKerbal3x

It's inserted into a decaying orbit so that it re-enters over the Pacific safely (similar to what was done with the Shuttle external tank), and the upper stage does a burn at apoapsis to circularise the orbit.

This sort of occurred to me when there was first talk of 'Starbase City', I'm hoping things don't end up that way but I guess we'll have to see.

Starship's ballast is also its landing propellant. If you remove that, there's no way to recover the stage short of completely re-engineering it into some sort of spaceplane. This is already what they do. The flaps aren't just there for decoration, they move to control the vehicle using differential drag, and can be used to trim it for different return payload masses. In fact, Starship probably isn't passively stable at all, so computer control is essential. Now I'm no expert on aerodynamics, but this doesn't seem like it would be much of a benefit to control authority given the high-AoA re-entry profile of Starship. The F-22's all-moving control surfaces contribute decent lift, compared to Starship's which are mostly there to increase drag. Also, seeing as they've already had trouble with thermal protection around the flaps, this also sounds like an absolute nightmare to protect from re-entry.

O boi not that thing again

With a rocket this small, the propellant margin required to propulsively land would absolutely destroy the payload to LEO capability. Having such a small rocket enables the helicopter catch method, too - you certainly wouldn't be able to do this with a Falcon 9-sized first stage.

New video (it's a recruitment ad, but lots of nice new footage):

You can still launch directly from the .exe file and completely bypass the launcher.

Welcome back Falcon Heavy!

If my calculations are correct, this will be my 5,000th post on this forum. I figured that this would be the only appropriate way to mark such an occasion. I've spent a lot of time on this site, and I don't think it's at all an overstatement to say that playing this game and being a member of its community has drastically changed the course of my life. Let's take a trip back in time, to a little over five years ago. The details are fuzzy, but I do distinctly remember scrolling through youtube in early-to-mid 2017 and coming upon a video titled "Kerbal Space Program - 01 - First Flight" by a guy named KurtJMac. Now, I already followed Kurt for his Minecraft Far Lands or Bust series (a journey to the edge of the game's world that still continues to this day), but I had never watched or even paid any attention to his KSP series - I guess judging a book by its cover syndrome had me. That fateful day, however, I clicked on the video and was presented with a little game about building and flying your own rockets - complete with tiny green astronauts. I was instantly hooked - I'm pretty sure I binged the rest of Kurt's KSP series after that - and by the end of the year, I had my very own copy of Kerbal Space Program. I was immediately faced with the game's steep learning curve - while I don't remember experiencing that much adversity getting to orbit or even landing on the Mun (I think the latter took me only two attempts), orbital rendezvous stumped me at first. It didn't help that I chose an Apollo-style munar orbit rendezvous for my first ever Mun mission. After many tutorials, tracking station terminations, and waiting for Jeb, Bill and Bob to respawn, I finally cracked it. Whether it was by skill or dumb luck, I don't know. Regardless, the sense of accomplishment I got from simply docking two spacecraft in orbit was immense - and that was only the beginning. To this day, I still haven't landed everywhere, and only just put my first Kerbal on another planet last year. I had been interested in spaceflight for most of my life thanks to my dad indoctrinating me, but I don't think I could ever truly call myself a space nerd before I found KSP. I've picked up an intuitive sense of how orbital mechanics works, and I certainly wouldn't have been so deeply entrenched in current IRL space news had it not been for the Science and Spaceflight section of this forum. But I think there's one thing that KSP did that stands out. I don't think I would be pursuing a career as an aerospace engineer had it not been for this game. It hasn't been easy, but with the promise of our future as a species waiting at the end of the road, it is by all means a sacrifice I'm willing to make. So, I'll stop rambling. I'm sure many others can join in saying a resounding THANK YOU to the community, and everyone who made this game what it is today. Here's to another 5,000 posts, and many more thousands of hours, whether that's in KSP1 or KSP2.

Youtube link, if you don't like horrible compression (it's in 4k):

Given how close you were, I wouldn't be surprised if the hex colour of that folder was actually ffdd24, but lighting conditions in the video caused the slight error.

I don't think anyone has yet mentioned that this estimate was only two days from being correct. @whatsEJstandfor I believe this was you, in which case, fantastic job!

Very surprised this hasn't been posted here yet:

A small bit of attention to detail I noticed in the MET/UT readout was that the years section has three digits: In KSP1 this usually wouldn't matter as 'normal' mission lengths often don't even make use of two digits, but now that we're going to be going interstellar, it's entirely possible that mission lengths could be measured in hundreds of years.

There's an orbital version of the VAB that doesn't have any walls, it comes into play once you've got a sufficiently large and well-developed colony to support ship construction.

Technically there shouldn't be anything to prevent you from just firing a probe out there with a giant booster, but any significant interstellar exploration is going to require a big ship, which means orbital construction, and necessarily colonies. As far as I know this just means that colonies will be built in a similar method to regular ships (using an editor) and that they'll be subject to physics when you hit whatever the equivalent of the 'launch' button is. Hopefully noodle physics doesn't follow us from KSP1 given that these structures are going to be really large. There's a lot of different interviews and dev diaries that I'm not going to trawl through right now, but I do remember it being specifically being said (can't remember if it was Nate or someone else) that they want the focus to be on flying spacecraft and exploring new worlds rather than micromanagement of colonies. Unfortunately we don't really know very much about how involved the colony system is actually going to be, so 'micromanagement' may end up being a relative term here.

In the end, it all comes down to how you value the game personally. I paid £17 (~$19) for KSP1, and if you consider that my play time is probably north of 1500 hours by this point, that's a little under 2 pence per hour - making it without a doubt the best value purchase I've ever made. If KSP2 was originally announced as nothing more than a more optimised, better looking version of the original game (which seems to be what we're getting with the first early access release anyway), I would probably still have paid full price for it, because if the replayability factor is anything like KSP1, chances are I would have gotten at least 1500 hours out of it, too. Being more expensive, the value for money wouldn't technically be quite as good, but I've played and enjoyed games with far worse value. The prospect of colonies, interstellar travel and multiplayer is just a bonus - a pretty big one to be fair, one that would probably elevate KSP2 to best value purchase ever - but if we don't get them, it won't be a huge deal. Agree to disagree, I suppose, in any case I'm interested to see what the next year or two holds.

Then don't. Really, it's that simple. If the early access stage goes as planned, then you can always buy it later when it's reached a full release state. If it flops and gets cancelled, you've literally lost nothing, and KSP1 hasn't gone anywhere. The roadmap is more or less bridging the gap between KSP1's feature set and KSP2's - everything on there has pretty much been the selling point of the game since it was announced in 2019. Every major element of that roadmap has been talked about or at least displayed in a show and tell or feature video, so unless they've been blatantly lying to everyone and all the gameplay footage is just 3D animations, a significant amount of the work on those systems has already been done. It's not like they're going to be throwing away all of that work and then bolting new stuff on as they figure out how to do it (as we saw with KSP1).

I have to agree. It doesn't look like this is going to be the sort of 'early access' that we saw with KSP1, where new features were more or less implemented as they were figured out. Judging from what they've been showing since the initial announcement in 2019, everything they have planned on the roadmap has actually got somewhere from a technical standpoint. Heck, looking back at what Nate said in some of those early interviews, they might even have had multiplayer prototypes back then. Hence why I'm cautiously optimistic that the early access period isn't going to be another four-year debacle. If nothing else, it'll give us time to transition nicely from KSP1 to KSP2, while still giving us a chance to get to grips with the new game in the meantime.

Check the FAQs here:

I wouldn't be surprised if we see more star systems added even after the game is fully released, either through free updates or DLC.

Not at first, but it'll be available on mac at some point.