KSK

I’m going for 1d8+3 weeks. I’m a dungeon master and the dice never lie.

Given how long it took KSP1 to acquire anything approaching a consistent art direction, I don't feel that this is anything to pillorize Nate about at all. Likewise, for the 'scapegoat' comment later on in this thread, if I were working for Intercept, I would be far more inclined to put in the hours for a boss who's prepared to stand up, take one for the team, and deal with the brickbats from the community. There may be other reasons to criticize Nate but those are not. Mind you, you couldn't pay me enough to deal with anything remotely community-facing in the games industry. Perhaps I'm just jaded by Steam forums and other assorted wastes of time and electrons masquerading as official forums, but it seems to me that developers are almost universally damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Nah - sounds a bit strange to me. It’s been a trying week though so I’m likely up side down and bottom over top.

I can’t speak for anyone else but personally, whilst I really enjoyed learning to play KSP1; once I’d gotten to the point where I could do most things in space (maybe not elegantly or efficiently but I could do them), then the actual game got rather dull. My first successful Mun landing was straight up one of my best gaming experiences ever, but I never really got the itch to go land on any of Jool’s moons. Likewise landing a probe on Duna was fun and satisfying but I never really got the urge to land Kerbals there too. I think a lot of the problem for me is that there never seemed to be much to do once I landed somewhere. Hop out, click buttons to gather science, maybe deploy an ALSEP-a-like once I had Breaking Ground. And then what? Hop back in the lander and go home? Sure I could try building surface bases - I certainly built my share of space stations but, in the vanilla game at least, they were mostly empty ornaments. TL: DR - I just didn’t find a pure sandbox experience as fun as I thought I would. On the other hand I’ve played games where the player base demanded (loudly and at great and tedious length) ‘zero to hero’ style progression which seemed to me to take out all the fun parts of the game and replace it with pointless grind. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

That’s fair too. And, on reflection, depending what other mods you’ve got installed and whether they integrate with life support at all (I’m thinking RoverDude’s colonisation mods in KSP1 here), I can see life support being an obvious one to drop with KSP2 at its current stage of development.

Fair play if you don’t like life support mods but: KSP2 will be apparently be including a mechanism for automated supply runs. I can’t think of an obvious reason why that couldn’t have been used to ship life support supplies around the system. As soon as you get beyond a very basic rocket, then almost every gameplay feature is a part tax in KSP (1 or 2) Need a bigger fuel tank but haven’t unlocked the next size up? Pay that part tax and add another small tank to the stack. Heat management - part tax in the form of radiators and heat shields. Power Management - part tax in the form of batteries, solar panels, fuel cells, etc. Science - part tax in the form of numerous instruments. Communications - part tax in the form of antennas. Again - I have no beef with not liking a particular feature, but using ‘part tax’ as a justification for that dislike seems like a flimsy excuse.

I think concerns about life support being too complex for new players are vastly overstated and, frankly, a bit patronizing. Life support is not a difficult concept: Living crew need resources to stay alive. Resource storage is a part that can be added to rocket. Resources are consumed and turned into waste. Other parts can be added to rocket to recycle waste back into resources. That pretty much sums up any life-support model that I've seen for KSP, although they obviously differ in the numbers of resources and waste products being tracked and the number of optional widgets for converting waste back into resources. Anyone who's ever played any game genre which requires resource management* will have dealt with way more complicated logistic chains than that. And I'd say that some of those genres (crafting and/or survival, for example) are considerably more popular than KSP1 or KSP2, so there's a large pool of potential newbies who wouldn't have any problems with life support at all. Besides, if there is any doubt about life support being too complicated, then surely that's what the much vaunted tutorial system is for. TL: DR. If you can remember to bring along a heat shield to avoid burning up on reentry, a parachute to stop you hitting the ground too hard, batteries and solar panels to keep your spacecraft powered, and whatever propellants you need to make that spacecraft go faster in the right direction, then I fail to see what's so impossibly hard about bringing along a box of supplies and a recyclowidgetron 3000 (or whatever) to make more supplies. * and arguably that would include real time strategy games. Mine ore, extract vespene gas, use different quantities of each to make buildings, then use buildings plus different quantities of ore and gas to make troops. Or start with ore and wood and gold. Whatever. The point is, if you can deal with that, I'm pretty damn sure you can deal with a highly abstracted life-support system in KSP.

People dumped millions into Theranos despite their due diligence folks coming back and telling them to stay the heck away because the technology was never going to work. Fear of missing out is a powerful force for generating stupid decisions.

Inspired by @K^2’s molten copper example, I thought it would be entertaining to look up a more extreme real-world example - the Large Hadron Collider beam dump system. Aka, how do you safely absorb 350 MJ of energy packed into a few nanograms of protons travelling at relativistic speeds? Like this. “Each beam dump absorber consists of a 7m long segmented carbon cylinder of 700mm diameter, contained in a steel cylinder, comprising the dump core (TDE). This is water cooled, and surrounded by about 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump is housed in a dedicated cavern (UD) at the end of the transfer tunnels (TD).“ Edit. Whilst 350 MJ is certainly a non-trivial amount of energy, it’s pretty small beer compared to the amounts of energy that get bandied around these threads. As soon as antimatter annihilation enters the discussion you can basically (at least for a rough comparison) square that number and multiply by the mass of antimatter annihilated. Then double the result for good measure.

With sufficient time, energy, and patience - new planets. Smush asteroids together, head out to Oort Cloud and round up a few stray icy bodies, aim icy bodies at smushed together asteroids.

Bit of a change of subject but I figured some folks around here might find this interesting. We finally have proof of active volcanoes on Venus | Ars Technica

You haven’t found it yet? You’re making me nerv-ous… And on a more serious note, I think @silent_prtoagonist and possibly others further upthread, had it spot on. Discussing relative part balance in Sandbox seems a bit premature.

Ohhh - go do a search for threads started by Whackjob in the KSP1 forum, for a masterclass in utterly insane designs. There are implausibly large rockets. There are rockets that are so large that Jeb would think twice about strapping himself to them… Then there are Whackjob rockets. For when lift-off is too hard and it’s easier to just push that inconvenient planet out of the way.

I agree that it was a lost opportunity and, like yourself, I'm not sure why they did it. Newcomers to the game wouldn't have known any better and judging by the number of Gas Giant II threads I've seen over the years, I think there was an appetite for an expanded Kerbol system from the current player base. Personally, I would have preferred Intercept to ditch interstellar travel and massively expand the Kerbol system to provide new places to visit. You only have to look at the real life solar system to see the diversity of celestial bodies that a single star system can contain. But that ship has sailed.

It's that red Lego analogy you made earlier, I think. Sure, you can deliberately avoid cheesing your way around a game mechanic using timewarp but then you're back to applying internal constraints rather than playing the game.

Well I suppose that's one way of looking at it but let me offer you a personal counterexample from playing KSP1. This was a good few years ago now, so I can't remember what I did or didn't try and I'm not looking for a troubleshooting session here. I was trying to build a very early tier plane, probably to knock over a few contracts. Long story short, I could not get that thing to fly for love or money. However I set up the centre of lift / centre of mass, whatever I did with the undercarriage, that plane would veer off to one side, sooner or later a wing would hit tarmac, and that would be all she wrote. I never did figure out whether the problem was my design, a build problem (parts not quite symmetrical or undercarriage not quite vertical, maybe?), or a bug. I do remember giving up, not with a pleasant sense of motivation to keep iterating through the 10,000 ways that weren't going to work (to paraphrase Mr. Edison) until I found an answer, but with a sense of 'well that's three hours of my life I'm not getting back.' TL: DR. I found the whole design, build, fly, fail, iterate, thing to be really damn annoying when I couldn't tell if I was actually failing or just being defeated by a bug.

If you’re getting in a knot about the realism of putting jet fuel through an NTR in KSP1 then boy have I got bad news for you about KSP2. Anyhow, back on topic. I haven’t bought KSP2 yet because a) I’m not much interested in more sandbox play, even in a prettier sandbox and b) likely performance (or lack of) on my current computer. From what I’ve read about the plans for KSP2 , Colonies are probably going to be the make or break feature for me. I don’t care about multiplayer full stop and I’m not excited about interstellar travel - quite the opposite in fact. So, if setting up and running colonies in the Kerbol system looks like being fun in its own right then I’m probably in - assuming that performance gets a boost. If colonies are just skimped over as a stepping stone to the ‘real gameplay’ of interstellar travel, then that’s going to be a harder sell for me. I’m really not fussed about ‘building cool rockets’ just for the sake of it.

I haven't done a thing for KSP2 except keep an open mind about following its development and maybe purchasing it at some point. For KSP1, I was most involved with the Fanworks forum where I tried to do my bit to encourage, and maybe even help, other writers. At least I hope it was helpful! I started and maintained the Fanworks Library thread which was basically a forum index of fanfic and other written work. It's a little out of date now though. I also wrote and posted my own fanfic, with a lot of community encouragement along the way especially when life outside the forum was getting stressful. Thanks and acknowledgements page is here, but if you want the rough numbers, it's a 450,000 word story, written over seven years, and picking up just short of half a million thread views along the way. That was my contribution to the community anyway, although I don't think I contributed much to the game directly.

I’m down for: Critical bugs gone, Performance, and Other, but please bear in mind that I’m going off what I’ve read about performance. I haven’t bought the game yet so have no idea how it actually runs on my computer. As for Other: More than Sandbox is my main requirement. I had plenty of sandbox time in KSP1 and whilst a prettier sandbox is always nice, I’m unlikely to plunk down my money just for that. Next requirement (and this might sound trite) is for the good bits of the game to outweigh the meh bits or plain bad bits. I haven’t been following KSP2 development with bated breath but I’ve read enough about it that there are planned gameplay elements that I think I’ll like and planned gameplay elements that *as written*, leave me cold. Time will tell but I’m not expecting to love everything about KSP2. (Incidentally, I’m not fussed about all promised features being included. Promises change, can be harder to implement than expected, and can get quietly dropped.) Finally - a well thought out interface that works well with whatever new features get added. As KSP1 acquired expansions, I often felt that the UI didn’t really grow to accommodate the more elaborate features very well, especially stuff like robotics and rotorcraft, which felt kinda wedged into UI paradigms that didn’t really work very well for them. Some of that is no doubt down to me but on the other hand, I do only have finite time and patience for figuring out UI quirks. I have plenty of other things to be doing and hobbies to be enjoying rather than beating my head against the wall of any one computer game. That’s a general observation - I’m not singling out KSP2 here.

Sure, but not to the extent of ‘unleashing a dung storm the likes of which the world has never seen’, over a computer game. In this case, if I was going into this cold, I would have expected something more akin to Dyson Sphere Program for a £45 Early Access. That is, missing some quality of life stuff that fans of the genre have learned to expect but otherwise playable and more or less fully featured to the point where more features are a bonus. So yeah - I get the disappointment but I still think the hyperbole is dumb. I would also argue that in an age where an internet connection is practically mandatory to play computer games anyway, that there’s really no excuse to ‘go cold’ into an Early Access purchase, as opposed to a crowd funded game where you’re always going to be taking a risk. But that’s a whole other discussion. Edit: For context, I don’t yet own KSP 2, had no intention of buying a Sandbox only EA at any price and have mixed feelings about what I know about the rest of the game. Bits of it I like the sound of, bits of it I don’t, so I’ll almost certainly be depending on reviews to try and figure out whether the good bits outweigh the meh.

Yes it's just a game for me because objectively, that's what KSP 2 is - a game. The fact that it's also a product with investment behind it is irrelevant to me because I'm not involved in making it or investing in it. Would I feel sorry for people losing their jobs if KSP2 turned out to be a flop? Yes I would, but no more so than I'd feel sorry for anyone losing their jobs under any other circumstances. Would I feel sorry for the investors? Unsure without more information, but I will say that 'the value of your investments can go down as well as up' is a well-worn (but seemingly oft-forgotten) mantra. Anyway, none of this is relevant to the post which MarcAbaddon (and then I) was replying to: "Big suprise, but lets give them 1 more chance to fix stuff with the coming patch if they dont at least make the game playable, people will unleash a dung storm the likes of which has never been seen on the face of this planet, and we can consider ksp2 dead for good." Which, with respect, sounds like typical exaggeration from a disappointed game fan.

I think we’ve been around this block before. My own view (for whatever that’s worth) on weather-as-gameplay-feature is that it’s mostly pointless at best and un-fun at worst. Mostly pointless because, as in real life, the answer to any weather problem is likely to be ‘scrub the launch and wait a few days’ or ‘change the reentry path to avoid the bad weather.’ Neither of those is a particularly interesting gameplay mechanic. Un-fun in the edge case where bad weather blows up just as you’re launching or (especially) landing. Losing a mission because Random Weather Roll says ‘no’ is not my idea of fun. YMMV of course.

All of the above. At the end of the day we’re talking about a computer game here so let’s try and keep some perspective. Also ‘gamers losing their dung about something’ is hardly newsworthy these days.

I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this. I agree that a scripted story wouldn’t be a good fit - and I say this as someone who’s spent a lot of time writing KSP fiction. I don’t know The Outer Wilds (although this thread is selling me on it!) but that kind of optional mystery story telling might work better. What I’m not sure about is how optional I’d find it and whether I could actually ignore it or not. I suppose the obvious answer is to make it a separate game mode or to have a setting to toggle it on or off, but that doesn’t seem very satisfactory either. I’m not a fan of the Easter eggs - I find them out of place, especially the more pop-culture ones like the KSP1 monoliths. I’d much prefer geologic or geographic places of interest to go and find.

Thanks! And you should totally write about that if you have the time and inclination! Sounds like an interesting idea that you could take in many different ways, right up to full on Giger horror if you felt like it.