Pthigrivi

This is an interesting idea. I mean I still like that experiments also produce science because it gives players an ability to freelance and not just doggedly pursue the missions. It helps round-out the tech tree unlock process. The missions currently are on a crazy learning curve where you orbit the Mun and then are asked to do a precision landing like a minute later rather than teaching players about inclination and letting them practice on Minmus first. But say you fixed that with a bunch of intermediary missions: they're still proscriptive. It's still the game telling you what to do instead of giving you some tools and some goals and letting you figure it out, which is to me what creative gaming is all about. What I like about this idea is emphasizing the value of non-mission, experiment-based science outside the tech tree, that its actually doing the work of uncovering real, actionable information. The value of missions exhausts on a fully linear basis--you do the mission and get the science and its gone. Experiments are a bit different in that you've unlocked this part and it expands a whole range of uses that persist throughout your playthrough, ideally even through interstellar exploration and potentially through completing the tech tree completely. It creates a zone for creative exploitation where you can cleverly string together a series of actions that result in a bigger payout than if you just followed the spelled out instructions. It encourages excursion and free exploration. And if those experiments are also doing SCANsat like things and providing extra information you have even more incentive to deviate from the proscribed path and do things on your own terms. Learn from BG3, folks. Let players play. Just for comparison: Factorio has exactly one mission: launch a rocket. And when you do the game is like great, that doesn't actually matter, it was the spagetti we met along the way. The entire game is just a set of rules that you can creatively exploit to your hearts desire. I really appreciate that KSP's main story has some structure to get players going but especially as we delve into colonies and resources I'd like to see the devs really give themselves over to this process of open-ended play, where you have tools and constraints and resources and you can kind of go to town.

I think the loose answer is you should have and be deliberately introduced to features just before you need them. Many of these will come very, very early hence KSP1 frustration with locked maneuver nodes. You need this the minute you try to go to orbit, potentially your second launch, so there’s no reason to lock this at all. But when do you absolutely need biome maps? When do you need trajectory factoring drag? When do you need resource maps? Soon, but not immediately. These seem ripe for exploration-based reveals.

Haha okay that makes more sense. Line up the escape either directly behind (to inner planets) or in front (to outer planets) of the body you’re leaving (the orbit line) Ive always been more focused on the resulting kerbolar transit orbit to notice. And nobody make fun of me for saying ‘midnight ejection’.

Yo I been manually tweezing this in the dark for years and never knew that. If Im headed outer I generally guess a point between midnight and sunrise and midnight and drag out till the Kerbol Ap intersects the orbit line, then I move the node forward and backward till I find the intercept, then refine, refine, refine reducing the target Pe and dV cost until I get bored. I’ll definitely check out ejection opposite Kerbol as a starting point.

There it is. It definitely should be squared off AND count down and I love the idea of an anititarget for burns as well as encounters. I’ll offer one more: its cool that the countdown dots go from yellow to green but make the green light bigger and turn the yellow lights off on zero/go so its really obvious that it 3-2-1-GO.

Awesome, thanks!

What's impossible to tell is how this diagram is mapped onto Kerbin's atmosphere currently, mainly whether and how much it's been scaled down relative to atmospheric pressure. My guess is that they've basically applied a 70% scaling so the Karman line is at 70km rather than 100km and abruptly cuts off. In reality atmospheric heating begins above the Karman line, closer to 120km up, so you could scale 58% it to deliberately ease-in this initial heating event. What might make for a smoother transition would be instead to scale it so the mesopause is aligned at 70km (82% scale) so you don't have a sudden temperature spike as soon as you enter the atmosphere. All of these solutions are a little artificial of course because kerbin's scaled so much differently than earth. For my money the latter solution would make for the most intuitive gameplay while still incurring a solid dose of reality. Or maybe Im wrong and at these altitudes air temp doesn't matter compared to density and friction?

I find this tool also to be very helpful for finding the best windows, though it doesn't have those nice phase angle diagrams: https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/

Totally. 4km is a darned good landing but an agonizing walk. Im currently sneaking in a science-only Moho mission so I can afford wheels to at least drive the last few km (there's a decent Moho window around day 130) I can't imagine many new players would think to do that or realize just how dV heavy that Moho capture burn is. Absolutely agree there should be a set of intermediary missions to help bridge those gaps, and that the actual monuments should be reordered: Minmus > Mun > Ike > Duna > Dres > Gilly > Moho > Vall > Laythe >Tylo > Eve. They should definitely also be considering what the launch window sequence is and time between launches, in transit etc. Some players are going to do one mission at a time sequentially but I think especially as colonies and resources get started and we have an alarm clock players are going to get used to multiple things happening at once, and those launch and transit times are going to become more and more important. On the broader point about scanning--absolutely. This goes to something Nate said early on about intrinsic vs extrinsic goals. There's value to both, but often just giving players some tools and a broad array of options creates the most dynamic kind of gameplay. If for instance they gave players an orbital scanner that could detect the non-monument, more geological discoverables they could play around with exploring and landing more accurately on Minmus before being asked to land in a specific location on the Mun. Not only would this give some more directions to go and better training for newer players but it creates more story build-up to that reveal. The other thing that would help would be biome maps. I think we definitely need a way to log where we've already been and already done and also have a clearer picture of where we might go next. The old science log in the R+D building in KSP1 was okay but pretty unwieldy. Ideally once you'd done a biome survey you could turn on an overlay in map mode, hover over a biome to know what it is, or right click on it to bring up a list of completed science there. That way you don't need to constantly jump buildings and loading screens. Its all right there in flight and in the tracking station.

Hey, Im not sure if this is the right place for this question. Im currently playing on a mid-spec macbook using Parallels. Is it helpful for me to submit bug reports or might that not be useful because Im on Mac? For instance I've noticed re-setting keybinds for throttle delta doesn't stick when I reboot the game but I can't tell if thats a mac/parallels specific issue? Other bugs seem very to be clearly not mac related and a lot of folks are echoing the same behaviors but again I know my machine isn't officially being supported.

Well, upon reflection I think my observation that started this thread is kind of silly and bound to turn to arguments. Id be happy if the mods closed the thread.

Haha well thats true.

I don’t mean against the folks there. Its the nature of the format, basically just a chatroom. And Im sure the devs do get a lot of data from watching folks interact and comment on the game in real time. I just think an over reliance on it might miss a lot finer points and more thoughtful feedback. And also a lot of what happens here is just semantic squabbling and circular arguments that go on page after page. But I think even in the case of the atmo thread there’s disagreement there and that in itself is interesting. I feel like I learned something even if Im not sure exactly what the right answer is beyond fixing some actual bugs.

Yeah that’s important too. Its not just generational. Its also a structural question.

I mean, we'll bury that same information within a day or two with slightly less inane chatter. Im not too stressed about where new information is dropped. I just think these conversations we're all having here are probably valuable even if we're off our rockers and come to the wrong conclusions. Folks are looking pretty deep at UI and bugs and more fundamental structural improvements for FS and I just hope that doesn't all get overlooked purely on the basis of daily viewership.

This is gonna be controversial. I know. This forum is on the archaic 'internet' and understandably is populated by 40+ grumps and honestly only like 30-50 people on a regular basis. We are not representative of the current or future player base. Thats all 100% true. But from time to time I do check in to the much more popular discord server and I can honestly say I've seen almost no substantive conversations happen there for over a year. Yeah, they're kids. They're having fun and chatting about what they're doing in the moment and digressing into pretty apparent observations about game bugs, things that are cool, whatever. But the conversation is generally millimeter shallow and never really approaches centimeter depth. I understand you have to take in broad based data, but if this data has no depth or insight on actual game mechanics or broader strategy it might not have much actionable value. Just a tossing in a grain of salt. And also, don't just listen to us either! Definitely balance your view. We're nearly to a person 'fogies' and we have all the wrong built-in biases about change and old-school expectations. To our credit though the discourse that happens on this board is at least interesting because it's a kind of alchemy of ideas among folks who have played this game for a LONG time and understand its deeper mysteries, the mod-space history, and what the opportunities and pitfalls are. We might be old but I hope at least some of this in-depth discussion on the philosophy and fundamentals of this kind of game has some value.

And I would argue while flavor text is nice adding text that has no gameplay purpose will, unsurprisingly, have no actual effect on gameplay. This is the problem with this entire ill-named thread. These are atmospherics, not actual mechanics. And I hear what folks are saying about science points being an abstraction but... duh? Even if you split science into a bunch of different flavors it's still an abstraction because KSP is still a game. I always find it a bit funny when folks complain about being reminded that they're playing a game while they're attaching rocket legos and sticking little cartoon frogs in them. Yes. You are playing a game. This is not real life. Most all games have abstract currencies so this shouldn't really be so shocking. "Money" is an abstract currency. "Ore" is an abstract currency. Abstract currencies are not the problem and making KSP a better game will require more than flavor text. It should be unveiling information that does have a gameplay purpose. If we're playing Battleship and I call out "B7" and you tell me "the USS Indianapolis was sunk in 1945 by a Japanese submarine en route from Guam to the Philippines after delivering Little Boy to Tinian" that might be interesting knowledge that's somewhat related to the genre of game we're playing, but I'd probably rather you just told me whether I hit your submarine or not. After getting a bit deeper into the progression "skeletal" is exactly the word I'd use for it. And you're absolutely right at this stage I don't mean this disparagingly. I think what we have is a very solid foundation for science to operate. Look at all the complaints we aren't seeing. We are are seeing very few complains about grind. We're not right-clicking half a dozen parts hundreds of times. We're not seeing players easily exploit and clear the tech tree in 10h before they're incentivized to go interplanetary. Players are successfully combining science-for-science-sake and explicit mission goals and the general result is solid pacing, new environments, and steady progress. Thats huge progress over KSP1. In architecture they tell you the best stairs are the stairs no one comments on exactly because they feel comfortable and natural. Folks put a lot of work into building stairs so that you won't even notice them. Thats the real success of this structure, that it all flows pretty seamlessly and without grind or confounding distractions. The hard part going forward will be putting more and more flesh on those bones without throwing the balance off. All that said there's a lot of room for flesh on those bones. Folks who have dug in will know there are a series of plot-driven missions that move very aggressively from one precision landing to another without ever really supplying players with the experience and tools they need to learn how to do plane changes or vacuum landings let alone precision landings. We don't have trajectories or landing markers visible in flight mode. We don't have an in-game transfer window calculator. We don't have trajectories factoring drag when we get to Duna so we can land right where we need to without a dozen reverts. We can't look at a body in map mode and see what biomes are available or where we've already been. These are all solvable problems with some clever UI, it's just not there yet. My only real argument in this thread is that this kind of valuable flight information should be integrated with the science system itself so exploration is the process by which it is revealed. The difference between a fuzzy red ball and the full-res Duna we see isn't actually any different from a gameplay standpoint. There is zero actual gameplay value in visualizing this this distinction. Again, without actual gameplay information like "where are the biomes" or "where are the nice flat places to land" or "where are the POI" the distinction is cosmetic and not actually important to the game.

Adding maneuver nodes while paused is also a common request. This may be intended behavior but it seems like there's lots of utility and very little potential harm?

What do you mean by notional?

I suppose if you were trying to do a rover-based sample return you could also design it to dock with an ascent/return vehicle using clamp-o-tron jr's. Again part of my problem is without biome maps in stock you can't pick an LZ thats in close proximity to 2 or 3 biomes so this kind of mission doesn't have much utility.

There is also some bugginess happening which will hopefully get resolved in the not-to-distant future. So far it's seemed that when things are functioning properly (heat shields and fairings occluding as they should) soft equipment stays protected and things don't explode. In KSP1 I used to jettison the fairing on launch in the mid 50's and you can't really get away with that anymore. Since IRL launches don't drop the fairing until 130km I think KSP2 is probably closer to the mark.

Great list. I agree with almost all of this.

First off big congrats and huge thanks to eveyrone at intercept who has shepherded this through. I'd been unable to play for several months due to a specific bug but coming back the base improvement is really phenomenal. Im so thankful and proud of you all for grinding this out and taking care of business. Still work to be done for sure, but Im happy to say the game is much more enjoyable with some of those big bugs squashed. Im also really enjoying FS! content and its nice to 'be back' with that feeling of growing a new program and re-learning to do big things with a small number of parts. There are also a number of subtle but much appreciated changes from KSP's science mechanics and mission structure. Notice how folks are still making steady progress and there isn't a giant outry of "ARGH THE GRIND!" Thats a HUGE improvement over KSP1 and an accomplishment all by itself. Whoever made that secret spreadsheet did a great job. Im not through the entire progression yet and Im sure I'll give more detailed feedback in the future, but out of the gate the overall tone, atmosphere, music, pacing, and general structure is really phenomenal. I do think obviously there's also room for growth and improvement. A couple of key items I'd love to see: - Interplanetary transfer window planner + alarm clock so players aren't hunting in the dark for windows and have a more tailored way of estimating dV budgets for their vessels. - Biome and topography maps - Lots of folks have voiced a love for SCANsat and science feels a little lacking without something similar. Certainly as we approach the Colonies update we'll want a way to scout out landing zones and potential colony sites in a more rigorous way, but even now biomes and discoverables feel really opaque and having a way to locate and clearly visualize them from orbit would go a long way to understanding where you've been and where you might go next. - More gameplay branches both in the mission tree and in the way parts are organized in the tech tree. Right now science and missions are performing decently as a basic process for progressing, but its tough to really invest intelligently in a probe-heavy or plane-and-rover-heavy playstyle. Its understandable that the game focuses on crewed exploration but its tough to make alternate strategies work so the process feels a bit weighted and linear. I think with some minor reshuffling in the tech tree alternate playstyles would be much more viable. I also think there are some key choke-points and missed opportunities in the mission structure. Right now there's a spoilery mission to land at a very precise location VERY early in the mission tree, much earlier than most players will have developed that skill. Players should really be given the option to explore and land on Minmus first as its a much easier training-ground for new players to learn soft landings in hard vacuum. With a few more optional landings under their belt taking on precision landing on the Mun will be much more approachable. Im sure much of this will come in time and obviously lots more with colonies and resources. I think you guys are great and thanks so much for persevering and making this game all it can be.

Thanks, @Nate Simpson! Im out of likes! Too many good convos lately.

Multiplayer at the end sounds fine to me. Everything else really has to be working before they do that. If I had any critique it might be that they should move resources before interstellar.