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Again, not talking about "magic me to orbit" - but I am choosing to be a little evocative in the hopes some will think about their own carte-blanche aversion to any kind of orbit assist. I used to work for an MMO called WWII Online, half-scale map of Europe with realistic guns/tanks/planes/yadda. When it launched, you could spawn at any friendly forward base alone the front line, and drive, ride, or walk, towards the nearest "enemy" town. The dream come true. Do you know how fun it is to talk 15km in a video game with birds tweeting in the distance, only to find an empty, poorly modelled village? Or to crawl thru ditches towards one for 2 hours only to have your screen go black inexplicably, because the bullet reaches you before the sound of the shot. Well, that's one of the reasons not many people have heard of the game (even tho it is *still* running, lol). One of the biggest cluster-fs in the game was finally realizing the melding of the naval aspect of the game and the land aspect: cargo ships. But, not wanting to break the spirit of the simulation, every troop and vehicle that the ship was going to carry had to be loaded onto the ship. That is: 1. Spawn the ship, 2. Convince people they want to ride a freighter to the battle happening _right now_ in Kaalmthout or Antwerp or somewhere, 3. Sail the ship into harbor and line it up against the dock, 4. Raise the crane and turn it out over the side of the ship, 5. Get a tank/atg/truck to drive in under the crane, 6. Lower the crane, find the hitching point, get the vehicle hitched, 7. Raise the crane, carefully, swing it over the hatch, 8. Gently lower the vehicle without damaging it and place it onto the cargo bay, 9. Unhitch the vehicle without dropping it, 10. Have the vehicle find the parking spot and "mount" the ship, 11. Repeat, 12. Sail a WWII freighter vessel across a half-scale English channel, while the players stay connected to their in-game troopers/vehicles, 13. Hope the fight remains at a coastal town you can reach during the *2 hours sailing time*, 14. Try not to get bombed/strafed/sunk by enemy air patrols who have a reasonably good sense of where freighters would be launching from, 15. Try to reach a piece of coastline sufficiently far away from the fight that you won't get shelled/bombed before you can unload, 16. The freighter didn't have a cargo ramp, so ... find a spot where you can use the crane to unload vehicles without dropping them into the water. Use the life boats to lower troopers down and hope you're not too far out... 17. Despawn, because f**k sailing back. 18. Never do this again after all the complaints you get from people who disco'd, sank, drowned, or who didn't get to the target until after it had been captured and the frontline moved away. It absolutely made sense that there be a player-investment in the loading of the vehicle, so that it wasn't just a magic firehose-for-one whereby if one player can get a boat into position X they could spawn an entire army on the enemy; but the vice-like grip of the auto-fear meant that there was no willingness by certain team members to even consider ideas where any part of that process wasn't entirely manual/humanized. My concept was for to add supply trucks/engineers who could execute sorties to the docked ship, the ship would operate its crane to take loads onboard, and then when it reached the opposite end it would be able to provide/deploy an amount of resources corresponding to the amount of effort that went into loading. Because on the rare occasion when people were insane enough to mount actual coastal assaults, almost invariably the outcome was that the reduction in number of combatants *at* the fight ended up killing the fight. You might be willing to spend 2.5 hours boarding a ship and sailing to 50km away from your planned destination, but will the enemy wait there or despawn and go someplace else? What I'm aspiring to here for KSP2 is that it be possible in some game modes to earn additional launch assistance so that you can *feel* you are moving your focus onto the next stage of gameplay. And yes, some people will hit launch and then timewarp. But what of it? How does that affect you? I dunno about you but when I watch Matt Lowne videos I'm always glad he doesn't show the whole thing in real time? I mean: tell me how much of *this* video you actually watch, and how much you think anyone else would watch?

Launch them attached to a manned vessel. Release the first one above KSC so it has connection. The rest can talk through it.

just a small thing dakota has done this week alone, communication requires more people a decent talk today with them on discord (dakota and darrin) they wish to have more CM's to help workload but he would rather have the resources spent elsewhere. and finally, dakota somewhat ratio of workload he has to do until April 1st (then it MIGHT change) hopefully there will be less stuff on dakotas plate when mike is back.. also Just because dakota said he is working on it doesn't mean its coming soon just shows what is needed for a single person in a week, and there is more that is missing from that list. why none of this was in dev tracker... and finally dakota said he will do this once in a while telling what he did that week increased communication

Expansions add to what is already there. Without being argumentative, please reconsider your choice of vocabulary. There is no complete gameplay loop to KSP2, not for those of use that play career mode. I feel when it is done, it still will not be an expansion.. but something else entirely. As far as the simplifications: They have said that omitting occlusion from the game was a choice. They may revisit that at a later time, but [it was not implemented from the very beginning because they wanted it to be easier to have communication with far out craft]. One per system is all you should really need to talk to all the cosmos, right? The entire idea of Commnet was abandoned as an unnecessary complication. Perhaps exitc alloys will be relegated to nice shiny scatters [nodes] with collision mechanics. Im sure the pretty visuals will go over well with the kids. You can mine it like all the other survival crafters. Not being able to create maneuver nodes in another SOI is definitely a simplification over a feature already implemented and well established in KSP1 (Whether the wish to change that later due to feedback remains to be seen) The maneuver node itself used to split the burn time in a manner that felt more intuitive. I do not know advance math related to this, but all the math i do daily with circles involves ratios related to the arc. It feels simpler. There is no longer fuel priority assignment No longer mission specialists No longer experiments that require physical interaction during EVA The proposed colony design will be like craftin in Planet Crafter or Subnautica instead of the way people have spent up to 15 years building colonies? [Instead of having to Scan for ores with polar arrays, build complex SSRUs, develop solid engineering designs to connect orbital structures]... Granted some of this was mod function. But it was built around the core mechanics of the base game in such away to enhance. I really want to say something to all the people that keep saying .. "KSP1 didn't have that, that was a mod" The developers may not consider mods when evaluating what they want to replicate from the first. Considering Adderly's history that is asanine. Perhaps he only considers the mods he wrote to have enough significant meritory value to include into KSP2 From a community stance. The mods HAVE to be considered by the developement team... They have kept this game alive long after release. I want to figure out a series of polls to determine the length of time people have played the game, and if they use mods. The question becomes which mod features from KSP1 should be included in the BASE game. This is before the massive roadmap that included features we could only dream of without modded support. [My own deductions lens through perspective]

But Starship isn’t exactly reliable. It fails almost every flight, and frankly I don’t even know why they’re shooting for orbit, considering it could barely go to sub orbit. And Starship is taking so long to fix, yet it’s advertised as the future of space travel. Also, let’s talk about Elon himself. You really want our future to belong to a Reddit bro? He’s openly anti-Semitic, has 10 children among three women, half of whom won’t speak to him. But no, he can run a colony. He can’t even keep his own family together, and somehow you expect to run a city on another planet. People just listen to anyone with money.

This is the only project I've heard of that people feel needs more CMs. They don't even engage in moderation duty nor are they too public other than random tidbits on the Discord. This is just work not being done, not short-handedness. Sadly it seems to be the case for the game too: Bi-weekly KERB failed multiple times. They stopped giving certain dates because they failed multiple times. They stopped upnates because they failed to understand basic interaction rules and what the community wants to hear from them. They announced their new devblog system with videos and what not and we got... 1 deep dive, 2 interviews... and that was it, months ago. We as a community wanting to engage with an EA need to see plans, specs, designs, ideas, a smidge of compromise (as in being invested in the realization of your promises, not as in tradeoff) both with a vision and the steps required for its execution. Instead what we get is the inability to even make a list of 20 bugs every 2 weeks, let alone knowing anything else about the plans for the game. That's not even going, as other users have, into how feedback that's not bugs just goes into a dark hole, if it goes anywhere. Aaaaaand that's not even going into actual stuff relating to the development of the game. It's incredible to me people are still here. Remember when they laid off the whole community team after the paul furio fiasco? oh wait, the community team wasn't affected at all. Plus, it's not really the place to talk about the huge work of the community team when they're just announcing they can't do a single post every two weeks.

To help us understand better. Simply due to the shift heavily going to colonies work instead of smaller bugs (cause large bugs take forever) with NDA's, and just information you cannot talk to the public, it will be shifted to monthly due to "there ain't nothing new in this front" due to the priority shift to colonies. for a TLDR?

You can count me as a hard skeptic on this. I've seen a number of analyses of the 'go-fast', 'gimbal' and 'flir' videos and I remain unconvinced there's any actual hard evidence there. The recent testimony is really bizarre and interesting. Still, without like actual instrument data to back this stuff up I can't help but feel unconvinced. Anyone else been following this? https://thehill.com/homenews/4118340-ufo-hearing-live-updates-lawmakers-former-officials-strange-sightings/

1st rule of ban club is you dont talk about ban club. 2nd rule of ban club is you dont talk about ban club. banned. 230703012024 new page!

I definitely know that feeling Is there anyone that you can talk to about this? Maybe a parent, friend, cousin, therapist, etc.? Oh hey, I know a neat trick. If you've been asked to do something, set a ten minute timer and (more or less) force yourself to do it for just that 10 minutes. See how you feel after that. If you're feeling good, then keep going. If not and you're not done, take a 5 min break and do another 10 mins!

Calling 911 because you want to learn how to hustle at cards. (Operator: "Please hang up and talk to your state or local gambling authority for further advice.")

Is there an echo in here? J/k Looks like an interesting approach and perhaps explains DARPA's recent talk of lunar He3 mining

I guess the list of all mods is the point where anyone working on Kerbalism will bonk my head and say they're not even touching it, but welp, 'ere we go: https://imgur.com/a/MJ5Khqb The exact name of the engine I'm using is CANDLE Travelling Wave Reactor Engine from Interstellar Extended. I completely forgot IE comes with its own set of stand-along nuclear engines, not just nozzles you need to attach to a Thermal Generator... I apologize for confusion here. Since I'm also running KTC, launchpad tests would be a hassle, with all the rollout/editing times... I fully admit I might've borked myself with my modding, but after all those years (and KSP2 being the thing I don't wanna talk about) I really wanted a KSP run that'd give a big system for exploration, realistic mechanics and interstellar lategame... So JNSQ, Kerbalism and KSP Interstellar sounded like a way to go. I do realize the devs explicitly said IS might not be fully compatible with Kerbalism, but I'm not sure if there's another mod that adds such nice beam power system and complex ISRU.

My apologies if I came across that way. I understand my first impression is not always correct. I have a question for you, though. How am I derailing a thread titled: "Is KSP2 going to offer any challenge to experienced KSP1 players?" by offering the opinion of an experienced KSP1 player on the state of KSP2? Also, I'm not accusing you of not dealing with me square. I am saying in general, if someone comes up to me and is open and honest with me, I will listen to whatever they have to say. If I feel they are hiding something, I will tend to not trust them so much. I was not talking about you specifically. Having said that, you came into this thread, presumably read all that I said, did not address any of my points, did not even reply to me until I asked you to specifically, and told me that I am reading too far into something and jumping to conclusions. Ok, tell me how. I will not believe something without proof just because you said it. Give me something to work with here. How am I jumping to conclusions? Maybe if you talk to me you could straighten me out rather than have me derailing threads with misinformation.

talk wike you are thwee ill go first: mommy said i cant eat the wrapper! waaa

also this is extremely flat understanding of what there work flow is like, this is ofc different in some fashion or way Just hope for mike to be back on board soon i know his situation, it should hopefully cause fewer headaches with the community communication, there is to much work for 1 person, and a little to much for 2 people, you need 3 or 4... i have something of an understanding of what's needed for this community: Mike and Dakota is two, which is the bare minimum from what it seems. 3rd should be for more communication to users and platforms that are harder to reach or not as active as discord, doesn't mean this person cannot use discord, just more active, like on the forums for example. 4th should be for more creation of leaks, photos, videos, mini-part/action posts to give perhaps the name, and the flavor text and its size, location leaks, and proper far away to JUST somewhat see what the leak is showing.. The fourth person should be in a lot of contact of the early access parts/features/ giving this user/person the time needed to make the leaks proper such as i stated before. Photo of part/craft/location of the building, either doing a "slow" build adding more and more parts, or start off with a chunk of new parts, and do for parts: Photo of parts or craft/building(s), or adding new part as if you are build a craft (be in space looking cool and fancy) or if a building just add it to the colony (spruce it up once in a while building a new colony to change location). Video of it in motion (if possible to see if its on, spinning, engine plumes, or even just lights turning on). Kerbal for scale (if wanted). If not in a build, see it near other craft/parts as if it was a functional part Mini post of the part, engine, and building, telling us its function, giving us the name, size and flavor text of it (can be kept secret some parts to create hype). Repeat process adding a new part to the craft/location if this way was used.. Even if we got 20 new parts and we got ALL this done besides step 6 (due to it being a repeat statement) each week, we would have 20 weeks of leaks.. 5 months or so of consistent once-a-day leaks of the game... either showing, a video, photo, kerbal for scale (if wanted), the function of the part, building, giving us a random leak of the name, function, size, or flavor text, it wouldn't be bad due to once a week a new part is shown, or added to a larger build. The issue is that the fourth person got a lot of work to be done and is pretty much needs to be consistently working on leaks and wouldn't really have time to be a real CM, just doing the leaks. Hence, its not on the other real CM's plate, even though they are a real CM's just they have a large focus of creating leaks for the community, This person still can talk to the community just like any other CM but his job isn't juggling everything , having a solid one person doing leaks that has a good decent mental plan makes it go along way. @Dakota This is my brain storming idea, the issue is the amount of CM's overall, there isn't a real solid answer to fix everything, but the amount people isn't enough just simply due to amount of users across all platforms. and the last one doesn't need alot of large requirements to create the job, only real passion of the game, a clear mental focus of what and how the leaks need to be created/published, an understanding of communication to users.. etc and not like a full on real CM example:

Well, there seems to be a lot of dev info on Discord that did not make it onto the forums. Not that I've been asking about CommNet for months without getting any answers. Such is life for second hand forum citizens.. you're either on Discord all day or you don't get to talk to the devs. I can only thank providence that Dakota is still engaging with us here. Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:17 AM i hear there are some questions about commnet and im here to answer them if they're here Spork Witch — Yesterday at 2:18 AM yeah! I was asking about whether occlusion and vehicle links were implemented at this time. I was told occlusion / LoS is not, but that if there's a commsat in range, you'll bounce off that back to kerbin. Further, is there a distinction between transmit-only and relays? I notice we have all the old commsats, wasn't sure if they ALL function as relays now, or if there's still the same split of RA=relay, others are Tx only. Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:23 AM Generally All antennas are relays by default, they can bounce signal back (we didn't like this distinction) Line of sight is not a thing, there is only distance as a concern Connectivity between vessels is a simple matter of ensuring that they both have antennas that have ranges that qre equal or greater to the distance between them. So if 2 satellites are 100 km apart, they both most have antennas of rating 100 km or higher to connect Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:26 AM Commnet and occlusion was extremely forgiving by default settings in KSP1 and we didnt feel there was a significant difference between soft occlusion and no occlusion for EA launch. Lots of the depth people would want requires a set of supporting visual and planning tools that are a fair bit of work to design and build Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:32 AM I think there's a thing I wrote in a devblog of everyone playing KSP with different goals in mind - everyone has a thing they prefer, whether it is building vessels, making comm networks, etc. We can always take player feedback into account in driving plans and make changes at that point. Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:33 AM dev hat off, I hate commnet and always turned it off in KSP1 Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:34 AM I mean that goes back to need - a question we always need to answer is that, given all the ways people play the game, should you 'need' to do any particular thing? That could significantly impact what someone else wants to do. It's a fine line Spork Witch — Yesterday at 2:37 AM which is why it was always a toggle, but KSP is also about education. Learning about line of sight communications, and the need to set up satellites in particular orbits is a REAL WORLD learning thing, and also an orbital mechanics one, a core focus of KSP. The easiest way to properly position satellites is to launch them all at once, using resonant orbits. Without this constraint, from occlusion, you remove the one thing in the game that would actually direct someone to learn about these things. Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:39 AM Yep, understood Nertea, Destroyer of Fun — Yesterday at 2:35 AM I think I could say with some confidence that increasing commnet complexity has to come with more viz and planning tools Nate Simpson — Yesterday at 2:39 AM A lot of us like all the detailed line of sight/relay features in Commnet and it's definitely a thing we want to revisit, but as always we're having to balance multiple priorities. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ That being said, here are all the current antennas in the game, for comparison purposes:

You talk about the roadmap as a progression tree for players: "resources show up after we crack interstellar travel". It is not, it is a list of development steps. We won't crack interstellar travel, the devs will. And yes, interstellar is easier to implement than resources, because it consists basically in placing new stars somewhere and new planets around them. The difficulty is more in the design variations than in the game mechanics. In game development it makes sense to first implement a simplified version of the final product you want and then after to refine the game loop. When colonies will be here, we will build them because we will want to. The game is in early access, so the colonies are implemented in order for the players to test the new game mechanics brought with it: new parts, orbital construction, maybe ground-anchoring... Sure it would be nice to have other motivations to build colonies, but it is not the main goal of the update. Besides this point, I agree that KSP2 is (and wants to be) simpler than KSP1, which can be disappointing for seasoned players who seek a challenging experience. Sure the first early versions of KSP1 without maneuver tools were challenging! But the additions of tools in the game to simplify the user experience didn't make it less fun. Maybe you thought of the current state of KSP2 as a wannabe improved version of KSP1 final state. With this perspective, the simplified science gathering game loop can be disappointing. However, I think KSP2 game loop as planned by the devs will be different from KSP1 (launch, collect science, transmit/recover, spend points in the tech tree). They talked about it but I don't remember where. I think it will be a bit closer to an automation game: resource gathering improvement, supply lines improvement, and science gathering will be used to unlock parts but will be less significant than in KSP1. Some people will like it, some people won't, but for now we have to keep in mind the game loop is not complete, hence the lack of motivation for rocket launches

Greetings, forum-goers! I’m Ness, the Art Director here at Intercept, and I’m interrupting your regularly scheduled UpNate to bring you a special broadcast. Let’s talk about KSP2’s User Interface, the most meta of all game art disciplines! UI must surface moment-to-moment information and actions to players in either text or clever visual shorthand. When making a simulation game like KSP, an even greater burden of information is placed on the UI, since we need to supply players with a mountain of information and choices without overwhelming either the player or their screen’s real estate. It’s a fascinating and sometimes frustrating balance to strike and I am consistently impressed by our UI/UX team’s ability to analyze abstract, un-implemented features and translate them into visuals. Jordan and Colton from our UI/UX team at Intercept work tirelessly to make rocket science digestible and slick-looking! Before we dive into future plans for KSP2’s UI, I’d like to first take a quick look at KSP1’s. Its UI went through several distinct stages over the course of KSP1’s history, the most radical changes happening early in development. One thing that I love about videogame UI is that on top of all the information it must convey, it’s visual styling can suggest subtle narrative and worldbuilding—something that KSP1 has absolutely utilized and that we will continue to evolve in KSP2. Some very early unreleased examples of KSP1 0.2’s UI can be found on HarvesteR’s dev blog. We can see a mix of fonts, both handwritten and geometric sans serif, as well as a barebones parts catalogue. The mix of fonts here is the most interesting detail to me; the handwritten altitude and speed readouts suggests a theme of "DIY" that applied to both the Kerbals in the game and the developers making the game. A later iteration of the UI around KSP1 0.3 introduces the familiar grey that stuck around for the rest of development, as well as a precariously-stacked flight heads up display. This cobbled-together “junkyard” readout was an evolution of the Kerbal narrative of a DIY space program using salvaged parts. By the time KSP1 0.7.3’s public release rolled around, the staging stack had moved to the left side of the screen, we had a flight cluster, and Kerbal live-feed portraits all carefully spaced around the edges and wrapped in that grey pseudo-metal that we saw back in 0.3. Gone was the junkyard aesthetic, and the skeuomorphic gauges were carefully lined up. Ty to @Whirligig Girl for the image above And finally, a shot of KSP1’s UI as of 1.0 We’re all familiar with the symbiotic effect that mods had on KSP1, and I believe that by keeping the UI simple and grey, it allowed modders with limited artistic ability to easily match the look of the canonical UI and maintain a level of visual consistency which ultimately cuts down on cognitive load and increases immersion. This is absolutely something we on the art team are aware of in KSP2, and when it comes time to roll out additional modding tools the UI team will also share our internal style guide for modders interested in mimicking KSP2’s UI. Now onto what I think most of you all are here for; what’s in store for the future of KSP2’s UI now that For Science! is out the door. In the weeks since release, we’ve enjoyed following along as new and returning KSP2 players have checked out the missions, discovered points of interest, and put all of our flight systems through their paces. As thrilling and satisfying as it’s been to see all of the impressive feats you’ve achieved since the For Science! update, we’re also been watching and documenting your reactions to the user experience and the user interface in particular. We’re excited to see that many elements of our UI have facilitated a smoother first-time user experience, but with your help we’ve also identified several areas of confusion that we are actively tracking. These improvements include: Fonts can be hard to read for a variety of reasons (size, scaling, color, contrast, etc.) The maneuver gizmo can be difficult to interact with, and precision maneuvers are especially difficult Trajectory tag markers can be difficult to differentiate or identify Trajectory tag stems can get tangled with one another in ways that cause significant visual confusion SOI transit "bullseye" indicators are too bright, too big, and too prominent relative to other map elements (this is a personal bugbear of mine) Rearranging the staging stack order when selecting the bottom-most stage is difficult The Part Manager presents several usability issues including but not limited to; observing many parts at once, using the Resource Manager as a separate app to specifically track fuel on a per-part basis feels awkward, associating a viewed part in the manager with the actual part on the ship We are not adequately communicating that "Revert to VAB" causes a loss of recent progress, and there are situations when reversion should not be accessible at all It is not obviously clear, especially to new players, when a vehicle is recoverable The audio-only countdown on launch presents both accessibility and legibility problems When in any time warp state other than 1x, the UI does not adequately communicate the state change. The tendency to interpret an under-warp failed control input as a bug has caught out quite a few members of our own team, and is likely responsible for quite a few bug reports Visual styling for some UI elements is not completely unified It would be very handy to be able to see mission requirements in the VAB while constructing a vehicle KSP2’s Early Access is delivering exactly the kind of active feedback loop we were hoping to see, and we’ve now got a nice collection of feedback items to help guide our work priorities. We’re excited to continue improving on the UI. In the meantime, we’ve been working away on a few UI improvements of our own! In the upcoming v0.2.1.0 update you’ll not only see us begin to work through the 2024 bug list, but you’ll also see the following changes: We’ve adjusted the iconography and visuals of intersect nodes to make them easier to interpret (and hopefully easier to learn). We’ve also adjusted the colors of the planned trajectory line to further differentiate from your current trajectory, and shifted the colors on intercept nodes to make it more clear what relation your craft has to celestial bodies. Time and space are weird, but through these and future trajectory improvements we’re working on, we hope to make parsing orbital mechanics more approachable! Aaaaaalso as a sneak peek for something that’s coming beyond the v0.2.1.0 update, Jordan has been diligently combing through and adjusting KSP2’s UI in a giant unification pass in order to align some of our disparate visuals. The shot below represents the first wave of style unification on the highest traffic areas of the game: I’m looking forward to sharing more UI improvements with you all in the future! --- Finally, we’ve got an exciting announcement! We’re working on a new promotional video for KSP2, and we want YOU to share your favorite creations with us. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rocket, a plane, a rover, a boat, a giant mechanical turkey, or whatever your heart desires—if you love it and you’re proud of it we want to see it! If we end up using your submission in the video, you’ll be credited and have eternal bragging rights If you’d like to submit, send an image of your creation along with a craft file (.json) to [email protected]. Please also include your preferred name so we can credit you! (can be real name or username). A bit of fine print here: by submitting your creation, you’re agreeing to let us use the craft file in any and all future marketing materials. Thanks! We’ll release more details as the trailer project moves forward. We’re excited to take your vehicles out for a spin! Ness

All companies selling a product talk about future plans and future products that may not be realized yet. You have noticed what site you are posting this on I presume. Ironic. Seems strangely obsessive to call it "Elon vaporware" as if this kind of public announcement never happened before he came along. Why not call it "Star Theory vaporware"? We could go through all the only-on-paper rocket plans from the big space industry players over the last half century also I suppose, but we have a siblings forum devoted to that so I won't. As for the pointing, no one has tried to maneuver such a large craft at those temperatures with could gas thrusters before that I'm aware of. The volume of gas emitted was likely unprecedented. They likely froze over. I bet they fix the problem and make public announcements about the next design at the same time as easily as a kid chews gum and rides a bike at the same time. The stated goals of the test flight were met. Anything else would have been gravy. A suborbital trajectory was a precaution taken specifically for a situation like that which occurred with the thrusters; there was no danger of it remaining in orbit as a hazard. They have rockets lined up like kids at a roller coaster. I don't see any problem. It's working.

I'm hoping for interstellar to offer some new worlds with new navigational, piloting, and design challenges. Eve used to be the final boss of KSP, with Eve, Tylo, and Moho perfectly representing the design, piloting, and navigation triad, but after enough times going there and back it kinda doesn't feel that challenging any more. I forget what it was called, but I'm looking forwards to that new super Tylo they have teased, and that binary system. I am a little bit worried that all the sci-fi technology they are going to add may remove a lot of what would have been a challenge, but inevitably I'll fall back into going for the low mass records and it won't be mass optimal to use any of the super heavy advanced engines. The grand tour record in KSP 1 is under 8 tons at this point, and there's been talk of pushing it low enough that we might not even need the Rapier any more. Speaking of which, when KSP 2 gets stable and polished enough for the low mass leaderboards to take off, the meta is going to be interesting. The ion engine was nerfed a LOT in KSP 2, you can't really use it to land on most of the small bodies like you could in KSP 1. Without a high tech lightweight replacement, we're going to see a lot of ultralight liquid fuel craft with opportunities for per body customization (although without EVA construction, this is docking port constrained), which should hopefully lead to a more interesting design than "Use the same ion lander for everything except Duna, Laythe, Tylo, and Eve."

Bolded for emphasis. Consider for a moment that the average KSP1 player never leaves Kerbin's SOI. I read somewhere once that a whopping 70%+ of players have never gone any farther than Minmus, and another 10% or so have only ever sent probes into Kerbol orbit. Those numbers could be wrong, and I could be remembering them incorrectly. But that's 80% of the KSP1 player base (assuming the numbers are right) who have never had a probe, lander, rover, etc., land on a celestial body outside of Kerbin's SOI. Also consider for a moment that there are some KSP1 players who have landed on Duna, or Dres, or Moho...but who have never landed a Kerbal on Eve. Or who have sent probes to Jool, but have never landed on any of its moons. Or who have never even been to Jool. Or Eeloo, due to its distance and inclination. Even with being able to spam science points in KSP1, and being able to unlock the entire tech tree without ever leaving Kerbin's SOI, some experienced KSP1 players have never been to the outer planets (or landed on one of the inner ones). I can accurately state this, because I'm one of them. In KSP1, I have never landed a Kerbal on Eve, I've never even attempted to launch a landed probe from Eve, and I had never been to Jool (although I have been to Eeloo). So you want to talk about a challenge to experienced KSP1 players? For starters, you can't just spam science points in Kerbin's SOI any more, so now you have to go farther than Minmus if you want to unlock the entire tech tree (or even just get better parts). Sure, there's some local missions you can get some science points out of. But you are never going to even sniff Tier IV until you've gone interplanetary and back. And for those KSP1 players who never left the local SOI, that's going to be a challenge. Take myself, for instance. I mentioned above how I've never even been to Jool in KSP1. In KSP2, I've not only been to Jool, but I've gotten a probe in orbit AND I've landed on and returned from Pol. Things I've never done in KSP1. And I can tell you that it was certainly a challenge. I guess that an answer to your question lies in what someone really thinks a challenge is. Are experienced players going to have an easier time of things in KSP2 than new players? You bet your booties. And that's because they already understand builds, launch windows, gravity turns, transfers, and all the good things that come from having played the previous game. They already get the physics part of it, which is a pretty decent learning curve. But that doesn't mean that there aren't challenges for experienced players. It just depends on what they did in KSP1, and what they expect out of KSP2.

Operating the flaperons in the hypersonic regime is completely untested. There was some early talk of putting a subscale demonstrator on Falcon 9 just to make sure the flaps operate properly...who knows how that will go. Looks like we have a good SES-2? Wait, no, that was just a cold-gas flip.

T - 4:30 minutes! It's awesome to hear them talk about Starship production lines. It also sounds like they'll make flight 4 prep more quickly after this launch.

The KSP forum moderator's team presents the Threads of the Month March 2024 Edition March is finally here - well, at least we are already in the middle of March! Before I get too far into this TOTM, I want to take a little bit of your time to discuss a growing trend in the United States and Canada - the growing suicide rate. It is not just young people or old people - it is among all age groups. I work at a local community college and am one of the trained mental health first aid caregivers. I am also a combat veteran and am a trained veteran's crisis mental health first aid responder (22 U.S. veterans commit suicide each day). Before our spring break last week (our spring break began on March 4th), I had the opportunity to assist a student in crisis. He is okay, got the professional care needed, and is now in professional outpatient counseling. This is a small victory in the battle for life. I've seen too much death in my life. Yesterday, I lost a thirty-year Army buddy to suicide. I say this to encourage and empower. If you live in the United States or Canada and feel as if life is getting the best of you, call 9-8-8, and you will be connected with local or regional people (free of charge) who can assist you. Reach out; you're not alone. Some people care enough to volunteer their time and efforts to help you through whatever crisis you're in. Find a friend or family member, a teacher, a professor, someone - and talk. Whatever it is, there are people who want to help you. You do matter. And you matter to this forum community. Now, without further blathering by this bald old man, let's get into the threads selected by you, the community members, as noteworthy for March! Instructions on using the TOTM images: If your thread has been selected as a TOTM, you can copy the image's link above, go to the area of the forum where you want to place it, and then paste the link. Press the <CONTROL> button when the image appears and right-click on your mouse. A menu will drop down and allow you to edit the picture. You can resize it - the first number can be changed as large or small as you want. Eventually, I will add these images to the thread I've created as a repository. For those out there who like the nerdy parts of the TOTM: To continue what I started in May 2021, I have kept some forum statistics to respond to those claiming the forum was dying, or interest in the Kerbal Space Program was declining. 326 new forum accounts were created in February (an increase of 47, or up 16.84% from January). Out of the new forum members who joined last month, there were 20 who transitioned from new accounts to being active and participating in the forum. This conversion means 6.13% of the new users who registered their accounts last month are now contributing members of our community! (This is a decrease from January; 12.18% of the new members became active and contributing members). If you're interested in meeting the new members of our forum, click here! Now, without further delay, I present to you the threads of the month for March: Cinematic-based Fan-fiction, Mission Reports, and Kerbal Space Program-inspired Creative Works: This category features a video or other cinematic form of a Kerbal mission report using in-game video-recorded gameplay. Note: This has changed. Instead of awarding this to a thread, this is a *post of the month* since most new cinematic works are posted in a single thread. We have a lot of great content creators, but because they've been posting their mission reports as videos in a single thread, most of their work goes unnoticed by the general forum audience. Hopefully, this change in the category to a Post of the Month (POTM) will highlight the great work done by these deserving content creators. Other threads containing cinematic posts will also be featured in this category. Many great content creators deserve this recognition since we were aware of the thread by @Halban: Post Your Cinematics Here! (Cinematic Enthusiasts) that serves as a repository for cinematic threads. The thread received the TOTM previously, but it was felt that it wasn't enough for those who shared your fabulous creations featuring our favorite Kerbalnauts. Instead of being a TOTM, I've changed it into a CPOTM - a Cinematic Post of the Month. This month, we had a few nominees in this category. It's not often that we have two nominations featuring the work of one content creator, but this month, we do. So, it came down to choosing the most unique concept by @kurgut. And this cinematic is sure to please. In the cinematic "Journey to the center of a black hole | KSP RSS | Interstellar," @kurgut pushes the hardware of their PC and the limits of the game to produce a high-quality work of visual art. You can find the link here: Sometimes, the forum software will get glitchy, and an exact post may be a little hard to find, especially when it is buried in a long thread. In case this happens, here's @kurgut's cinematic presentation, "Journey to the center of a black hole | KSP RSS | Interstellar": If you encounter other cinematics you feel are worthy of being recognized as this category's post of the month; please nominate them! You can use the exact instructions to nominate a post containing a video as you would use to nominate a thread. Fan-fiction, Mission Reports, and Kerbal Space Program-inspired Creative Works: This category features threads (or threads) that, while not directly related to the Kerbal Space Program, may be creative, fan fiction, or other presentations related to the game. One of the fantastic things about the TOTM's history is the threads you think would have been nominated earlier in the forum's history. Surprisingly, this thread is one of the earliest and most popular fan-fics, but as far as I can tell from the history of the TOTM we keep, it has never been nominated before. So, thanks to you, the long-time readers of the thread and forum community, this oversight has been corrected. The thread, "Kerbfleet: A Jook Odyssey" by @Mister Dilsby (formerly known as Kuzzter), has been revived, and new chapters are being added now with their return to the forum! Here's where you'll find this thread: So, if you're interested in seeing a mission report done in the style of a graphic novel, this is the thread for you. Forum Member Created Challenges and Missions: This category contains missions and challenges created by you, the members of our gaming community. Many excellent missions and challenges threads are created that expand our fun with the game and press our skills, creativity, and sometimes, luck beyond what we get accustomed to. Let's face it: we all have our go-to design basics and our go-to vehicles we like to use. Sometimes, a good challenge can cause us to think of another way to achieve our goals. There was no submission for this category this month. Game Support/Game Mod of the Month: This category features either help with the game (stock or modded) or mods that improve the Kerbal Space Program's quality-of-life gameplay. When I first began playing KSP1, one of my favorite mods was Final Frontier. That mod gave me a way to have the brave Kermen who still crew my various crafts have meaning and stories behind them. I am sure many of you were hoping that someone would develop something similar for KSP2 - well, those hopes have become a reality! @leonardfactory has done just that! From the ground up, and with all new artwork, they have created one of the mods many of us have been waiting for. @leonardfactory introduces the mod in the OP: You can find the mod here: As always, we want to thank our family of mod contributors who continue to develop new and exciting mods that support our KSP2 community! General community threads of the month: This category features a thread that adds to the community and doesn't fit the game support/game mod categories. This month, we have a nomination that's neither a mod nor a mission report. It's more of a "show and tell" by @Tony Swallow. In the thread, "Setting wings to a Precise angle by using an Inclinometer," without any mods, the thread is introduced: In this thread, you can see how construction tools can be made using stock parts to aid you in the construction of your craft: General space flight and space science threads of the month: This category features a thread that adds to our forum community's STEM knowledge (science, space flight, and related fields) and doesn't fit the game support/game mod categories. Honorable Mentions: Sometimes, choosing which threads will be selected as the Thread of the Month for our five categories is challenging. We get many good nominations each month but limit it to one for each type. Threads nominated but not selected as a thread of the month become honorable mentions. The honorable mentions for this month are: How Chuck Yeager broke the Sound Barrier - The Complete Mission - KSP RSS/RO by @kurgut Maritime Rescue and Salvage by @Mostly Harmless The honorable mention for this month may not have made the Thread of The Month, but if you think it might be worth another opportunity, please renominate it! Congratulations to all the winners of the Thread of the Month! We want to thank our forum members @AlamoVampire, @Royalswissarmyknife, @woeller, @Zhetaan, the moderation team members, and the staff who nominated this month's contenders. Thank you so much for helping us identify noteworthy threads and bringing their awareness to our forum community. We'd appreciate your continued help in the future. Odds and ends: TO NOMINATE A THREAD FOR CONSIDERATION: If you find a thread you feel should be considered for next month's thread of the month, use the "Report a comment" feature (the three dots on the upper right corner of the comment box) to report the thread. Please put in the text field of the port post "Nomination for the thread of the month," and we will do the rest! You can always nominate more than one thread, too. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT GOES INTO THE DECISION WHEN CONSIDERING THE TOTM: Wonder no more! This helpful guide is to help you understand what we use to help determine what makes a thread a really good thread and one that becomes a thread of the month/cinematic post of the month. It's everything you did or didn't want to know and includes helpful tips. And the last word for this month's post: I'd like to thank a few people who trust me enough to continue supporting and allowing me to contribute to the forum. I want to thank the Lead Moderator, @Vanamonde, for bringing me on as a moderator. It was a decision I'm sure he has had moments where he often wonders why he did it. I'd also like to thank @PD_Dakota, our community manager, and @Nerdy_Mike, the KSP Franchise Community Lead, for tolerating me and allowing me to continue to serve our Kerbal Space Program forum community through the monthly Threads of the Month post. In case you missed last month's threads of the month, you can click here.