Strawberry

Doesnt orbital report fulfill the theoritical niche of doing polar orbits if its current implementation wasnt (admitedly by the devs) lacking? Afterall you need to hit all biomes for it.

I haven't had the chance to play around with science nearly at all due to personal reasons, so I can't speak much to a lot of the specific criticisms in this thread and take what I say with the appropriate grain of salt. My general thoughts on the matter from what I have seen so far is I think on a fundamental level what they have is good, I do wish however that they add some more science experiments to flesh out the craft design limitations (ie stuff like a science part that makes a lot of heat and something like ksp1's breaking ground seismometer). That being said, I think claiming that as a whole (I am not referring to very specific design choices that effect like 2% of science modes gameplay) stock ksp1's science delivered better in realism/purpose is just rose tinted glasses. Keep in mind, in ksp1, you could run seismometers and barometers in space and this generated meaningful amounts of science consistently because ???. While both ksp's science systems are particularly realistic (nor would I argue they should be), I do think that in general from what I have seen ksp2 does a better job at "hey you actually have to monitor the thing that scientists care about." . Thermometers and funky goo canisters, while silly, don't really tell you what scientists actually care about, going hey go do a survey of a planets liquids (you actually have to be in the liquid) does . One thing I think ksp2 could do better in this regard is with it's descriptions, I'm fine with the silly names because it's ksp, but I do think the atmosphere survey parts should've mentioned the use of a spectrometer for example as that's a really important science part. From what I have seen, ksp2's science reports are also better at telling you "here's what's actually going on physically here (ie here's the surface composition), though this is based off of the very little i have seen of it. I will fully admit all of this is subjective however. I do think that ksp2's science system is way way better with giving the player purpose however. The science experiments are much more unique compared to ksp1 having 66% of the parts working everywhere and only minor variation with those parts (ie sometimes you need to micromanage with a scientist!). While I think ksp2's experiments could and should be more purposeful with some of the later ones, it is leagues better then ksp1. Not to mention, you actually have to leave the kerbin system to finish the tech tree which is nice. The only big thing you could argue that ksp1 does better when it comes to purpose is you're not directly interacting with the parts in specific as much. But I dont think the purpose of ksp is to go through uis, it's to fly rockets, and I think all gameplay should ultimately serve that goal. Differing cups of tea and all that, but I think it's a good design choice to assume kerbins work out the finer details of flipping the on switch of a science part, while we do the overall management.

Player counts were decreasing pretty quickly after launch, two hours from launch its only gone down by 200 players. Definitely good signs all around

My hope is that the first two tiers are kinda easy so new players can get through them, and the later tiers are where science starts to kick but we will see. I can't really play science on a decent setup for like two weeks anyways which is sad

You can disable paige in settings now! Under cadet orientation

The last interview for the ESA space event has dropped, the creator is french so the intro is, but the interview starts at 2:20 and is in english. Nothing super gameplay relevant in this one, still is neat

I'm excited and here's to hoping the team can deliver, good luck.

No they were all cut down by ancient kerbals and that's where all the ecology present went and why there's no animals

Im entering so I can combine my two copies to get KSP4

That's a real tree stump, unlike all those fake trees that surround it

Torchships with millions of isp and over 1g tend to be mostly fictional because in order to get that type of performance you need power outputs of hundreds of terrawatts. The entire power output of humanity makes roughly 2 terrawatts. From a physics perspective, its possible to have a spacecraft with this type of power output and have it not melt from its own exhaust, from an engineering perspective though good luck even getting the fusion to react enough in order to get these types of power outputs. Anyways, more realistic interstellar designs tend to involve very low thrusts, for example project Daedalus (which seems to be the inspiration for the interstellar engine we have seen), gets an acceleration of roughly .01 G (assuming fully loaded) and also needed a fission reactor to power the thing (You can have a craft with less acceleration and not a terrible loss in performance (only less then 10% of daedelus's mission had it actually using its thrusters). For comparison, DART (which used the NEXT ion thruster with similar isp to ksp's dawn), would've had an acceleration of .00004 G using just its ion thrusters, and Psyche also gets very similar acceleration. I think the main reason why you wouldn't want to use interstellar craft in system is theyre kind of a pain. They're not as slow to fly as ion spacecraft sure, but they're huge things that are hard to dock, rotate, and individually they're very expensive. If you were to use them, you'd use them only for routes and materials you need to transfer lots of materials, making them more of space trains, with high setup costs but low maintence costs. Overall I think you can have interstellar engines not break the game just due to the reality of them being heavy, large, slow things.

Correction, the "camera" is actually an autonomous sampler which is presumably unlocked under the autonomous sampling node. The animation for this part seen in the For Science video teaser makes this a bit more clear.

The forum has a bug to where linking text can lead to all text further down in the page to wobble, video of it here. I am on windows 10, and this is on google chrome https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1180260492770541668

We dont know much definitively about ksp2 science parts yet, but it does sound like some science parts will have more strict criteria for using them (ie aquatic sciences will likely need water), so it makes sense for them to introduce the more parts gradually, and i think a fine way of doing that is them being in the tech tree. I think having every science part at once at the begining of the game would just be overwhelming.

This is from like, old info that i cant trace down besides the fact it was in the pre ea ksp2 knowledge repository (probably some obscure interview with less then two thousand views), but apparently colonies will 1. Need to be started by delivering colony “seeds” to a location and 2. Early on be inflatable based things. I think introducing the small inflatables by late tier 3 and by tier 4 the bigger suff would be fitting

Important to note nothing suggests we will get ballasts and the like come .2 (nor any non science parts for that matter), the foundation will probably be in place but there will probably not be any parts that utlize that system initially. That being said, its definitely something the team is interested in

The original roadmap on reddit back when ea happened said that we should get telescopes as well, Im hoping that we get some colony sized science parts as well

This is straight from the speculation pits so take this with a grain of salt. The big lab thing will probably be unlocked in the orbital report node on the tech tree. The name orbital report may imply that that lab serves as a sort of scansat esc thing maybe?

(heating image thats way too large for some reason) For literally a second at 17:53 we saw some during ascent, according to darrin the fact that the heat showed is not a bug, but heats been tuned since then (presumably to not make it so jank).

I'd like to point out, it was shown that surface sample collection took time to complete. I doubt that surface sample collection is exclusive in this regard, I think its safe to say that at the very least, some science parts taking time to complete is confirmed because we've literally seen one. Also we already saw this through code, but the video confirms crew requirements for science as well (happened when reentering command capsule, I assume the experiment being interrupted is the crew observations? The final potiental science requirement we saw in code was for resources being needed to run the thing, maybe thatll be the radiation survey parts gimmick?

The tech tree improvements seem nice, nothing too radical but just nice. I do wish we heard more about the science parts though, hoping we get a dev diary about them or something in between now and release. It doesnt seem like there will be new non science parts which sucks, heres to hoping we will get some come .2.1 Oh also diving bell looking thing is confirmed to be in the aquatic sciences tab and the desc is to explore the depths sooo, diving bell gaming

Apparently we'll be getting big news tomorrow according to dakotas discord status, and also we know that there was supposed to be a dev chat coming around this time as of a month ago. There's like a 70% chance we will get a science dev chat tommorow, and like a 35% chance that dev chat will contain a release date or something like that.

Some more from the twitter For my personal thoughts on em, I think they look good, I think theyre a good foundation, however I think they look too static. The overall structure doesnt change much but it does flicker, since these flickers are near instant it looks glitchy more then anything. Also as others have suggested, sparks from ablative things would be cool. Since science is like, 3ish weeks away, I wouldnt expect significant changes when .2 comes out from what we have seen.

The spherical hydrogen tank was missing a desc for a while (interestingly enough iirc desc was in code since day 1 even though name and desc was TBD) it has one now. There were also like, four different bugs that prevented you from reading the entirety of part descriptions but those are also fixed now.

I think theres a lot of potiental for science parts that tie into colonies/heating and i hope we get more when those systems begin coming more online.