Lord Aurelius

The Dev's responses on this topic and focus on the silliness and intentionally keeping bugs like wobbly rockets leave me really concerned that they don't really understand the KSP player base. This is not goat simulator or world of goo. Casual players which might mess around in KSP and are NOT the core player base might have fun with this for a few minutes and move on. The core players who are the evangelists for this game and are speaking up here don't really appreciate this physics wonkiness and want to build realisic-ish rockets which don't wobble.

I don't really care if KSP2 gets multiplayer or not personally, but if it does the only way I see it working without drastically changing what KSP is is to have it be locally hosted with drop in/drop out co-op where one player is the host who owns the save. This would allow friends to fly together and help each other on complex missions which seems to be what most people think of for KSP multiplayer without needing to drastically change the game to support competitive play or add a bunch of overly complex server infrastructure.

Overall looks like a pretty good final update, definitely glad to see the focus on bugfixes and quality of life improvements, which is exactly what a final update should be doing. Kind of disappointed that the devs never quite finished rounding out the parts catalog to fill in some of the missing parts in certain rocket sizes, fixed career mode or implemented some kind of life support system to balance kerballed missions against probes. Still, very thankful for the amount of free support KSP has received for the past several years and really happy overall with how the new devs have handled the game. Now that the game is basically stable, I can't wait to see the amazing mods the community will put together and we won't have to worry about future updates breaking them.

The tech tree in KSP1 definitely has some major problems that should be fixed in KSP2, but the bigger issue I want to see addressed is making the game progression about something more than just filling out the tech tree. The tech tree should enable game progression, not be the vast majority of it. Sandbox has its place, but I would like to see career expanded to provide more goals along the lines of what the anomaly explorer contract pack does, giving the player a concrete long term objective (get to a specific location on a planet and return data from the site, to unlock a logical next contract to maybe build a colony for example) with the tech tree facilitating those goals. While we're on the topic of the tech tree, I think that funds, not science points should be used for unlocking nodes (similar to how KCT does it). At most, maybe returning sufficient science data from a specific location could unlock specific advanced nodes (i.e. gathering thermal data close to the sun unlocks some advanced heat shielding, landing on certain planets and gathering surface samples helps to develop landing legs/rover wheels), but in general it's a choice between spending funds to fly more missions with what you've got, or spending funds to develop new tech to enable new types of missions. In terms of fixing the tech tree itself, I like the idea of being able to choose basically from the start whether to focus on manned vs unmanned (along with the appropriate supporting features like life support to make it a real choice, unlike in KSP where manned is superior in pretty much every way), and have a more logical progression to the tree and not lock super basic items like ladders and batteries several nodes in. It would also be neat to finally see the upgradeable parts system put to use and be able to develop more powerful and efficient variants of existing engines.

From reading the posts in here, I seem to be in the minority hoping that KSP2 does have a more story driven game mode. In KSP1, some of the early devs stated they intended to do something like that with the anomalies, and I've really enjoyed the anomaly explorer contract packs. I don't see a story driven mode as a replacement for the current sandbox/science modes, but rather as a complement for players who enjoy a more story driven challenge, and as a stepping stone for players just coming off the tutorial to apply their skills and get mission ideas with entertaining cutscenes between challenges (the devs came up with some pretty amusing ones for announcing updates, seems like wasted opportunity to not put some in-game.

If I'm wanting a really unusual planetary system, maybe have one full of alien constructs like Halo style ring worlds, hollow spherical planets that are giant metal lattices with deep shafts going down to the core and huge void spaces, rotating O'Neill cylinders scattered throughout the system, and a Dyson swarm of dead satellites around the star.

I totally agree, it would be awesome for each planet to have its own theme music. There's a mod for KSP1 that allows for this, and it really improves the feel of the game.

I wonder if an Orion style antimatter engine would be more feasible, using antimatter bombs instead of nuclear explosives. Nuclear bombs are technically just super inefficient antimatter bombs since the energy comes from e=mc^2 matter to energy conversion, same as antimatter, with only a tiny % of the bomb's mass undergoing conversion. An antimatter explosive would greatly reduce the mass of the fuel, and the same shielding techniques proposed for Orion would likely address the heat and radiation concerns.

Agreed. Also consider that when Take 2 originally made its statement regarding console support KSP2 was still scheduled to launch in early 2020, prior to the current console generation. At that point it would have been a no-brainer to attempt to support that console generation, but with all the delays it makes less and less sense IMHO, especially given how slow the CPUs in those systems are. I really don't want to see KSP2 gameplay limited to what the CPU in an OG Xbox One/PS4 can handle.

Now I'm tempted to repurpose my old gaming laptop as a dedicated Linux machine just to show support for games on Linux, its more or less the same Clevo model that System76 used for one of their machines so all the hardware should be supported.

For KSP2, I want to see both easter eggs (random funnies like the toilet in a destroyed astronaut complex, crashed UFOs and other amusing hidden things that have zero effect on gameplay) and also hidden anomalies that tie into the exploration gameplay like the newish green monoliths. Basically something like the anomaly explorer contract pack that functions as the lightweight story mode for career KSP1 never officially got with some reward for finding each anomaly, unlocking the ability to find more anomalies.

I play a lot of games and have a Windows gaming PC so that Linux availability doesn't affect me personally, but given the demographics of the KSP playerbase I'm saddened that KSP2 doesn't look like it will have Linux support at launch. It probably comes down to finances unfortunately, they have telemetry from the game that tells among other things which platform the game is being played on, and its very possible that the number of Linux users (who are probably also adept at disabling telemetry further reducing the number) is small enough that they came to the logical conclusion that there simply aren't enough players on Linux to justify the effort to support the platform at launch. From a development standpoint Linux has a lot of advantages, but not necessarily for KSP mod development itself. I'm kind of in the opposite situation of a lot of people in here in that I do most of my coding work in a Linux VM on my company-provided machine, but use Windows on my gaming PC since games generally work without too much fiddling around but I can still use and tweak mods without hassle.

Totally agree with the OP, and I also want to add that seeing the KSP1 launch made me feel the same way. Really hope the management above the KSP2 devs doesn't push them to release a broken KSP2 by a specific date, although given how KSP1 and The Witcher 3 survived their initial launch states I can't say there's really strong incentive to get it right at launch provided they're willing to continue to support the game and eventually make it better since that usually makes gamers more willing to accept a rocky launch.

Given how well KSP1 currently "works" on last gen consoles AFTER all the bugfixes and how the release of KSP1 and CP2077 on last gen consoles went, I hope the devs quietly scrub mention of PS4 and Xbox One from the page and don't waste any time trying to get it working on those systems. KSP 1 is CPU bound more than anything else and I don't want to see KSP2 hobbled by a misguided notion that they need to somehow make it work on such underpowered hardware (see https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-an-xbox-one-s-apu-the-chuwi-aerobox-review). In all honesty, I hope they don't focus on consoles at all until KSP2 is done on PC. KSP1 was hurt pretty badly (we're still recovering from it years later) by the rush to 1.0 due to needing to have a "released" version for consoles, and I really don't want to see a repeat of anything like that for KSP2.

Totally agree with the OP, the part prices make zero sense for the most part (along with a lot of other part values like mass, storage capacity, thrust, etc and the tech tree in general). There's been a few halfhearted attempts by the devs to balance the parts, but given their reluctance to break people's craft files (even prior to 1.0) the game never got the deep balance pass it needed and we're probably forever stuck with these bad placeholder values. At least the values are easy to change using modulemanager.

The collision physics are pretty impressive for a voxel builder with block damage and destruction and terrain deformation, but the actual simulation isn't great. Things like tensile strength aren't simulated at all so its entirely possible to build enormous constructs supported by tiny beams. Orbital mechanics aren't simulated at all either. Planets have gravity wells that will gently pull you in towards them in a straight line, but there's no circular orbits at all. As soon as you cross the magic threshold to get out of a gravity well, you can completely shut off your engines and your ship will be completely stationary. Space Engineers is more of a sci-fi PVP playground where players can test their ship designs against each other than anything else.

Kerbals are great comic relief and definitely add to the overall appeal of the game for me, but they're still ultimately just a nice side touch and should not distract from the core game mechanics of building rockets and flying missions. I've spent far more time in KSP building and flying rockets/aircraft that were either unmanned or had the kerbals permanently in their capsules such that it wouldn't matter if they're kerbals or not than actually using them directly. That said, I would like to see them integrated a bit better into the core game mechanics with a better implementation of kerbal skills and experience for example (not the current magic XP they can get from just being passengers on an interplanetary mission) so that highly skilled kerbals are actually a valuable resource.

One feature I've wanted for a long time in KSP is the ability to add action-group style actions to staging in the VAB/SPH. The primary use case for this is to automatically enable/disable specific RCS thrusters so that I can use Vernier thrusters on my lower stages without burning up RCS monoprop, and switch to RCS on my upper stage more easily without needing to take up an action group slot for a one time action. This could also be used to do things like automatically deploying solar panels and antennas once fairings have been jettisoned, and a million other creative things I haven't even thought of. Things are somewhat better than they used to be now that action groups are editable during flight, but it would still be nice to be able to put actions into the staging order.

Is anyone else getting frequent Unity crashes? I've been attempting to play the update on my ultrabook with an Intel 8550U, 16GB RAM, SSD and Nvidia MX150 and after a certain amount of time (half hour or so) the game abruptly crashes like there's a memory leak. This is happening in a completely vanilla game with no mods. Haven't tried it on a more powerful system yet to see if the issue is also present there, but I've played a significant amount of KSP on this ultrabook without issue and this is the first time I've seen this kind of behavior. Whenever it crashes Unity appears to automatically upload a crash report, so hopefully they can get to the bottom of this soon.

I'm not in game dev but currently work in hardware/software testing and absolutely agree that there's deep systemic issues. Like with many things it seems to be upper management wanting fast and cheap most of the time and not considering that it won't be good, and often design best practices (requirements, documentation) that are required for good testing, along with time and resources to actually do the testing are popular places to try to cut costs and make up schedule time.

Definitely, I would consider any career overhaul as also including the tech tree, part stats, etc.

It's awesome to see feature updates still coming to the game and the holes from the premature 1.0 launch being slowly fixed. Now we just need life support and a career overhaul...

KSP absolutely is a game. Simulators are a well established genre of games, and KSP's simulation is actually quite light compared to games like MS Flight Simulator which can be used for some RL flight credits. There's a lot of game systems in KSP that have been intentionally simplified and behave quite differently than RL for gameplay, fun and accessibility reasons.

Glad to hear the devs are taking their time to do things right. KSP1 was a brilliant game concept hobbled by a severe lack of game cohesion or polish (and is still being cleaned up to this day to address holes and shortcomings in the game), and I'm very happy to hear that the new devs have taken this to heart and are working to build a much more solid product out of the gate. Building quality software takes time, glad to hear you're committed to doing it right instead of being yet another game rushed to release (although be careful with scope creep, better to release even if it isn't perfect, but still good, than not to release at all).

It's been awhile since I've played around with superheavy launchers (most of the time they're a solution looking for a problem), but I intentionally built a 1000t payload out of large fuel tanks and docking ports and launched it to see if I could. The problem with stock parts and this size of vehicle is that the decouplers start to become weak links. Sure, it's possible to strut around them, but you're still at the limits of the physics engine and putting a huge amount of force on a rather small point that's not really strong enough for it.