SolarAdmiral

You know something I just realized. I love that we're getting new bays. And I'm so excited to see all the possibilities of the new parts. But I'm really hoping we eventually get another variant of this nosecone that splits down the middle and hinges open in two halves. To build more symmetrical designed cargo and flight bays. (Or even beaks for giant robot birds.)

I think the reason it was moved was due to the thought 'most of the rockets you launch are vertical, so if there's nothing directly above or below, it frees more screen space to see your rocket'. But I'm also not sure about it, as it is the most important display instrument. However, they have hinted that all the ui can be moved. So maybe move it back to the center once you're in orbit and the vessel is more horizontal than vertical. I'm hoping the game supports multiple monitors, and if so, I'm buying some small monitors to put below and beside my main one to move all the instrument ui onto.

Seriously, everyone complaining about poor framerates, undetailed terrain, and 'lacking' features on release, contrast and compare with KSP1 when it first released (and even as it is still now.) I keep being told how angry I should be about how terrible KSP2 looks, and every time I'm just excited because it looks great. It's like just because TakeTwo is involved, everyone expects KSP2 to be as high budget as GTA 5.

We have already seen these, No word I think if they can also be built on ships or in orbit, or if there's a different one that can be. Speaking of which, now looking at it closer, it looks like the kerbals grow cauliflower, lettuce, and tomatoes.

Or maybe Kerbin just has a lot of natural gas, and very little heavier hydrocarbons.

All the little windows are titled like they're running in some old operating system. I really love the 80s/90s digital style. For the buttons in it, I'm going to guess, fuel/fuel transfer, maintenance/repair, craft dimensions/weight/stats, and the last one your guess is as good as mine.

No you were right the first time. The old Large size is now being called medium. So the medium one is the old Sr docking port. And there are two sizes larger.

Radiators are procedural. Not sure if procedural solar panels were confirmed. The last I saw I think they got a "Maybe"

You can see the power generation tab in the vab in a shot where they are building what looks like this craft. Looks like in addition to this cone generator, there's an even bigger one that looks like a truss, inline, probably also nuclear. Also looks like there might be a solar panel even bigger than the old XL.

I was wondering the same thing. It looks like it's only in front of the lander but not behind it so it might just be some flash added for the trailer. But I'd absolutely love it if the game puffed up dust on landings. Hopefully it will be in the game it seems as doable as the plumes on takeoff. Unbelievably excited to finally get this!

Strawberry was talking about using them specifically to go to inner planets. But yes normally you'd run MPDs on nuclear power.

I expect the plasma engines we're getting will either be MPDs or Vasmir (Also magnetoplasma). So the only thing to be seen is if we will get solar panels large enough to be used to easily power them.

Why couldn't the telescoping ladders just detect pushback from hitting the ground and stop where they are? That seems like something just as doable as reversing like a garage door. That way it would be more forgiving for different gravity bodies and different load weights where gear suspension might be differently compressed.

Not just that. But the skybox looks pretty great. Almost totally black against the light of the sun. I hope it's all dynamic and based on levels of brightness.

To say nothing of the Orion drive. Probably even the old Nerv engine, which to reduce weight probably isnt fully shielded and should be placed a long way from crew compartments.

Again, did you just ignore what I was arguing? My argument was the LQ/OX engines will still be most useful for orbital launch and landers on Moho and smaller bodies, Mun, Minimus, maybe even Duna. Liftoff from Kerbin is kind of a very different scenario I wasn't talking about. (And even for Kerbin, I'd need to see what the atmospheric performance of the new engines is specifically. Because it might also wind up that a Rapier and a good vacuum liquid engine might still edge out the new stuff. I can get three kerbals to orbit with a single Rapier and a 16 ton vehicle. Some of the new big engines might weigh more than 16 tons alone. Unless that hydrogen engine is less than a few tons in weight, and puts out 800 plus sec of ISP, it would struggle to compete ton to ton. So, for example, if I wanted to bring along a small crew lander SSTO for kerbin like planets, unless the new engines allow the craft to be built lighter than 16 tons, then I'd actually save weight on the main ship by using the older 'obsolete' engines, as you call them.) And I still don't know what you're arguing. Are you mad that they're including new engine technologies, or do you want the old engines removed from the game? Are you just against the sense of progression in a video game? Yes, the new engines will have better stats on paper, probably be better all around. But that doesn't mean the old stuff is useless. It doesn't mean they'll be outperformed in every possible condition. It doesn't mean they won't be super useful during the early or mid game. Even if they become complete obsolete, which I highly doubt, is that even a problem? Every RPG starts out by giving you a suit of leather and an iron dagger. Do you demand a full set of dragonbone the moment you boot up Skyrim? Stuff is allowed to get better as you go through a game.

I mean that might be slightly an exaggeration. For places like the Mun or Minimus, you can move just about anything with enough poodles.

Hey this is a great find! I also missed this. Though I got a little more excited at first thinking you meant the huge fuel refineries they showed off were confirmed to be able to be mounted and moved. Hopefully they are, I want to build an absolutely massive mobile base. It will be interesting to see if anything is restricted to colonies or ships. Like, could we build a massive mobile space colony? Can ships be built at other bigger ships, can the orbital construction yard be put on a suitably massive ship? Can we build a version of the Homeworld Mothership or an Eldar Craftworld to explore other systems? What does the line between spaceship, spacestation, and orbital colony look like?

If the bottle rocket does the job and is cheaper, easier, yeh, why not? So, did you just not get the point? Turboprops are "obsolete" but they still have their use. Otherwise all planes would be jets. Internal combustion is "obsolete" but not everyone drives electric yet. Steam power is "obsolete", but I work building brand new power plants and they all still use steam, including nuclear plants. x86 and x64 processors have been obsolete for 10 years, and yet they'll be the only way to play KSP2 day one, until there's support for Mac silicon. There's nothing stopping us from using liquid engines plenty even once new stuff comes along, especially if there's still niches where they work just as well while saving us resources. Just because something is obsolete, doesn't mean it isn't useful. Doesn't even mean it isn't the best solution for certain cases. So like, what are you even arguing anymore? Do you just not want engines to be any better than what is in KSP1 now, or are you just determined to never use liquid engines once new ones become available?

I mean, yes they'll become obsolete if you just insist on always using the best available no matter the cost. But if you have a cheap liquid fueled lander already laying around that works and you've got a bunch of tanks full of liquid fuel ready, why not use it? A Moho lander already needs less fuel than payload for a round trip. It's an even smaller fraction on the Mun or Bop and Pol. I'm going to guess there's more involved with making and storing large quantities of metallic hydrogen than regular old liquid fuel, so it will have a larger material cost for fueling up. You could insist on always using the newest and best if you like. Or you could upgrade where needed and keep using cheaper older established engines where they still work just fine. If it's balanced right, all routes will be possible, but optimizing for resource use will encourage a lot of different paths. The simple fact is they are going to be obsolete, just by definition. We're going into future engine techs, all the old engines will be older, less capable. But just because the jet engine was invented doesn't mean we don't still build turboprop planes. One of the things I'm looking forward to is watching all the engines fall into their niches and watching those niches change as new stuff becomes available. I'm picturing a once state of the art interstellar vessel being replaced with new engines, and being used instead to run slow cargo between planets in system or from orbit to a moon. The spark and the wolfhound are similar. But obviously there are times where one or the other is more appropriate despite the wolfhound being far better on paper for vacuum burns.

I imagine the liquid rockets will remain relevant even in the late game in some places just due to it being good enough and easy to make. For anything smaller than Moho, it doesn't take that much liquid fuel to get to orbit and back. If you're just lifting payloads to orbit or a nearby station or landing stuff brought in by a ship, why waste all your better advanced fuel. When it could be saved for interplanetary/interstellar, or landing on more dv demanding worlds like Tylo and Eve. Asking why use liquid when the fancier fuels are around is like asking why use a spark when you have the wolfhound. Sometimes the new stuff will make sense, sometimes the old stuff will make sense.

I agree I don't want to see a kerbin in every system. But also don't underestimate how habitable the larger universe might be. Every solar system will have a habitable belt at the right distance from the sun. Our sun's extends from almost Venus' orbit to almost Mars' orbit. There's a good chance any main sequence or even red dwarf star with planets has one or two inside it's habitable belt. Also keep in mind that earth's atmosphere wasn't what it is now when life arose. Compositionally it was similar to Mars or Venus. Early life itself turned the CO2 into Oxygen. Life might be possible in conditions very very different than we are used to. Even on earth, life exists in almost every environmental condition. From tropical rainforest, frozen tundra, deep ocean vents, and dry deserts. So life could be possible on worlds much drier, much colder, much hotter, much wetter. What I would be super interested in, is seeing different kinds of life. We still haven't ruled out bacteria living on Mars, we've detected traces of very early organic molecules in the atmosphere of Titan, we suspect life in the subsurface ocean of Europa might be possible. So that's four possible life bearing worlds in this solar system alone. I'd love to see planets with simpler life than here. Maybe a Titan planet that has simple floating organisms in the atmosphere. Maybe a Mars like planet that has some simple lichens on sunny rocks. Maybe some little tiny colonies of organisms living next to deep ocean volcanic vents on an otherwise inhospitable frozen world (maybe Puff fingers crossed)

Yes. The only point I have to bring up to that is how do we get to them? I would not be interested if the only thing we need to do to get to them is fly in a straight line for two hours. If that's the case I'd probably just watch a summary video on YouTube with all the travel time cut out. On the other hand, I'd love it if we can fast travel over the vast open flat ground, get closer, then have a good challenge getting right up to them. Either by following a difficult path made by the dev or finding our own way.

No. I love exploration. What I don't like is hours long travel with no difficulty. What I don't like is getting only a slightly interesting item to look at for all that effort. I mean, if they want to quickly plop down a bunch of copy paste pyramids and monoliths around kerbin, I don't mind. But that doesn't interest me in driving or flying for hours to go see them. If that's what they do with the game that's fine, but I'd just ignore it and I suspect that most people would ignore it too. What started the discussion was the map shared in the first post of this thread. Look at all those points and tell me how long it would take to visit even a handful of them. And almost all of that time would be spent driving over grassy fields or flying level with no challenge. You could set the game to play itself and walk away, as I did this morning for three hours to cross only a tiny distance of the map. What I'm advocating for, is if there's going to be sites of interest for exploring, make them worthwhile and challenging rather than just a waste of time and test of patience like ksp1. If there are going to be lots of anomalies, I'd prefer them to be widely varied, each made interesting or challenging to get to. But this would however mean a lot of dev time put into them. So, to justify that time and resource devoted to developing them, they need to be something lots of players will partake in. Take a look at some good exploration games. Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Snowrunner even. Love those games. But there's a challenge to apply that kind of exploring to ksp. Ksps planets are huge, so much larger than those games little maps. So my suggestion. What if the sites of interest were hand made by the devs. Each one having something neat to see. And each one with a bit of a challenge to get to. Something similar to those games listed above. There could be a tight underwater canyon to maneuver a submarine through. There could be a narrow rocky pass to drive a rover through. There could be a narrow ledge to land a plane on. There could be a snaky winding switchback up a mountainside. But the key is, to limit the amount of the players time wasted getting to those challenges and points of interest. Which is why I suggest a means of fast traveling over the wide open land where you'd only be watching as you hold down the w key. Or watching a plane fly level needing no adjustment. Then we could have interesting things to do and see. Something with more challenge than just waiting to get there. And by making it not take hours many more players could go do it, justifying the extra time and effort that would be required making these areas. That would be interesting to me. To me there's a difference between exploring and getting a plane in the air and flying it level on SAS for hours. Exploring is venturing though the caverns of Ember Twin as they fill with sand. Exploring is diving your Cyclops down into the dark void and maneuvering around pillars of rock or tight passages. Exploring is getting a truck stuck in the swamp or trying to squeeze a twinsteer through some trees. I don't really consider flying a plane level for hours, something that could be achieved by an autopilot, all that much exploration. KSP1 did have some good "exploring" content, but that was in space with the rockets, getting to and returning from all the planets and moons. I'd love there to be exploration and lots of sites to go visit in KSP2 to match that feeling of exploration in space between the planets with some interesting and challenging exploration on the planets. I just don't agree that what KSP1 had on kerbin was really "exploring". All it was was taking off a plane and flying it straight for a while, sometimes a long time. There's only so much time in the day between work and chores and everything else. If you can set aside a few hours a night to play a game, why not make those hours count. Rather than requiring nothing more than the player flying straight and level for all those few precious free hours.

I mean that's not really the point. So instead build some jet thing to parachute a rover down, exchange 3 hours of driving for maybe 1 hour of flying and 1 hour of driving. And this was a tiny distance, a small fraction of the size of the planet. And now add in the idea you'll be doing this again and again to go in dozens of directions on dozens of planets. It would take tens to hundreds of hours to visit all those spots you marked on kerbin. Multiply by 15 for all the bodies in just the kerbol system. And again by 3 or 4 or 5 for all the systems we will get. I'd still argue that's more than enough to bore most players. If most players won't bother going to the sites, then the devs don't have a reason to devote much time to making them. We'll wind up with nothing more interesting than the pyramids from ksp1, just in more locations. Just a bunch of static model easter eggs for only the most dedicated completionists look at once and forget. All that gives us is a whole bunch of places it isn't worth bothering to go to. All I'm saying is if the game wants us to cover larger distances like this, they should look into adding some system to let us cross the wide expanses of nothing faster, to get to the challenging bits, to get to the interesting bits. If they can reliably say lots of players will go to the sites of interest, now they could devote more time into making them unique and interesting. Maybe giving us more to do at them. Now we have a whole bunch of sites lots of players will go to, more interesting things to see and do at them, and not a whole lot of time wasted getting to them. All I'm asking the game to do is respect the player's time. Not frivolously waste it. KSP2 is already on a great track, aiming to reduce the time spent waiting for long burns being able to warp while burning. It would be silly to improve the gameplay experience in space so much with that while leaving the experience on planets to be still just as boring and tedious as driving an open field for hours or flying level for hours.