SolarAdmiral

I was so distracted by the amazing sight of round bays and a hinged nose. That I missed another exciting part of this video. Watching it again. Look at the payload. The nose is the cupola module, so large size. Then the payload gets larger, so probably S3 size. And then there's the bay around that. So definitely S4 size or similar. I'm not 100% sure if it was ever confirmed yet we were getting the Making History S4 size back right off the bat. I'd been watching for it anyway because so far most of the big tanks we'd been seeing were the S3's. I'm excited for that for sure.

In some ways yes. But it's not a pre-order in the way that's meaningful to this conversation though. You get the game when you buy it. Steam gives you 2 hours of play during which you can refund it. You will get to see the graphics in the game as is with your own eyes on your own pc before you decide to keep it.

Yeh. But I'm willing to wait and see what the game actually is before crying that the sky is falling. They aren't even taking pre-orders. So they're putting zero pressure on you to pay up front. Everyone can see what the game looks like with their own eyes before giving them any money. Either on YouTube and twitch as the game releases, or by buying it and trying it out in steam's 2 hour refund window. Keep in mind these aren't even polished trailers. These are just photos and videos the devs are sharing to show off some of their work.

Well, would you agree that what we are currently seeing graphically for KSP2 looks better than what is presented in game by Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program (as two other games that need to provide massive maps). And would you also agree KSP2 doesn't look as good as Satisfactory (as that game has a small hand crafted map). Now that you've brought up Dyson Sphere we can remove Factorio from consideration if you don't want to mix 2d and 3d in the discussion. I think even still it makes the same argument. Let us compare only the games that present the player with the entirety of planets. For a start, we have Dyson Sphere Program, Ksp2, and No Man's Sky. Which I think still illustrates what I was talking about. Dyson Sphere is a great game. I don't think anyone would argue it isn't as visually striking as KSP2, it's graphics are simpler. Not that it needs it and not that it harms it as a game, what it has serves it well. And in the same way, you might argue No Man's Sky looks better in some ways. But it is a bit of a randomly generated mess. Fine for that game, but the same wouldn't really serve KSP2. I'm also not very familiar with No Man's Sky. Does it even do everything KSP2 does, with clouds, scatter seen on ground and in space, planetshine?

This is all I ever could have hoped for! Absolutely thrilled to see we're getting more bays! Desperately needed. Can't wait to see all the new sizes.

Satisfactory is fine for what it is. But it's limited. It's a small handcrafted map. There's a place for games like that. Satisfactory, Subnautica, Outer Wilds. They're fantastic. But they're small enough to be fantastic. Ksp needs huge planets. Ksp can't cheat and make a few square Kilometers surrounded with a skybox. Now with colony building, ksp planets are now more like blank canvasses to build on and roam around looking for resources. Do you complain a Factorio map, or a Cities Skylines map is empty when you start? I think all ksp2 needs to look really good for our purposes, are some good looking clouds, some good looking hills and mountains and cliffs, some good sunsets and sunrises, some good looking planets from orbit. Everything else is just icing on top.

Building a game is a balance. The team has a limited amount of resources. Limited time. Limited money. You have to pick your battles. And planets are big, there's a lot of ground to cover if you want every square meter of them to look fantastic. Looking fantastic isn't always everything. And frankly, always putting so much time and money into having the best graphics is one of the things strangling the life out of the modern gaming industry. Those fantastic graphics are so expensive paying huge crews, so triple A needs to squeeze all the money it can out of you. The big games so often are the same old thing and following trends to be safe as they can't take any risks for fear of failing. It's why Star Citizen is going to languish forever in development hell. And why really good unique and ground breaking games like KSP1 and others now come from small indie teams. Good graphics aren't enough to make a game good alone. Bad graphics aren't enough to make a game bad alone. I'm far more happy with good gameplay than good visuals. I'd take Factorio and KSP1 over No Man's Sky or Anthem any day. Lets not overlook that whats being complained about here is only a small part of the game. The ship parts and the ships built from them look great with the shine and the custom paint. The planets from orbit look fantastic. The shots of Duna, Joel, and Glumo look excellent. The planet shine, the darkness, the rings, and the shadows promise to make space magnificent. So what we're talking about is the somewhat plain look of the planets from the ground. And quite frankly, even the images at the start of this thread being used as examples of how the game doesn't look good, in my opinion still look pretty good. And for the game ksp is, what's there is probably enough to support the gameplay. The planets are a place to land, build bases, and extract resources.

As much as I loved the idea of adding robotics. Sometimes they were just as frustrating as they were helpful. When they do get around to adding robotics, I'd love to also get some pre-built props and helicopter rotors probably ducted fans too, so we can just snap them on as completed engines rather than have to assemble them from pieces. And we could really use a much more rigid servo rotor. I'd love to build stuff with an engine on a 90 degree swivel. But the ones in ksp1 are too weak to put any powerful engine on.

I also don't remember where it was said. But I wanted to clarify. It was a hard no to props and robotics in the first release of the game. But it wasn't a total blanket no that they would never be added to the game either in a later update or a dlc. So, no robotics and props at first and probably at least a few years. But I wouldn't discount them being added eventually though maybe as a dlc.

I think for me it still comes down to it would be a really strange gameplay design to have two completely different resource systems. Off world, there's all the resource extraction and transport. On kerbin you have to do contracts for money. The result, you do contracts and earn money for the first little tiny bit of the game until you get a couple colonies set up on the mun and duna to the point they can build themselves out. And then never touch the contract and money system again for the rest of the game. Why spend all that extra time building two systems when you could focus efforts on one system and make it better. They could just use the same resource extraction system on kerbin. Instead of paying someone else unseen to extract the resources with money earned from contracts, you can just extract and refine the resources yourself using the same system built for the rest of the game. I guess my question would be, if I can extract resources off world myself without paying for it, why can't I do the same on kerbin? Not to mention the contracts in ksp1 weren't really all that good. Don't get me wrong I always play career because I like the challenge and the build up. But I'd ignore 90% of all the different contracts because they were a huge waste of time. Trying to get to an exact altitude and speed and carrying some random part. And almost always I'd earn all my early game money to get to the Moon by flying 50 identical take tourists to orbit or rescue kerbal from orbit missions. It was super tedious. I would not miss it.

Again, I'm going to ask, how does ksp1 perform when you mod in all the stuff ksp2 is going to add. Because I'm willing to bet the answer is not well. Sure it will still run well with a couple mods. But add in all the stuff and it won't. And there's all the stuff that mods can't fix, the base core performance of the game, the kraken attacks, stuff only rebuilding the code from scratch could fix. And for me one of the most important things to interest me in ksp2. If the ksp2 team has done a good job, it means less kraken explosions which alone is good enough for me, and at the end of the day I think that alone would be good enough for most ksp players. When it's out and folks start seeing how well it performs, less kraken, much larger part counts, word will get out and the ksp core players will be on board. Especially with the promise of interstellar and colonies soon. I also doubt slightly less than perfect graphics will scare off the casual folks too. For them the selling feature is built in tutorials promising to make the game easier to pick up and play. When ksp2 comes out, a couple main stream streamers will give it a try, everyone watching will see the tutorials and if it is in fact easier to get into. And that will be enough for anyone who was on the fence about the first ksp due to being seen as too hard. The game doesn't need to look the best to get most of the market I think it was going to get anyway. The way ksp1 looked didn't stop it at all from achieving a wide market and great success. And I'm willing to bet very few players bought ksp1 based on the visuals of mods. And again I'll add that ksp2 will also be moddable. Modders will be able to start from the greatly improved baseline of ksp2 instead of ksp1. Give it a couple years and it will have just as many graphics improvements mods. I'd also like to point out that many players don't mod the game. I've seen polls here and on the reddit that generally get to about 50/50 modded to unmodded. And you have to keep in mind that the forums and reddit generally attract the more hard core of the player base. Especially for the casual players, I doubt most of them mod the game, or have even seen what parallax and other mods can do. I've played 2000 hours I haven't even bothered looking into those mods and don't know what they can do. I'd be willing to bet that a large segment of those people outside the ksp community don't know what modded ksp looks like either. So I disagree completely that ksp2 not looking as good as a heavily modded ksp1 will cause a massive negative impact on sales. Already it looks much better to me just adding some clouds and the improved surfaces, and the features promised in the first step of early access are far more than just small improvements on ksp1. I also don't think getting hung up on comparing a game to what can be done by modders willing who work for free for untracked hours is productive. Its basically saying game devs don't deserve to get paid just because others are willing to do the work for free in their spare time. I can point to dozens of games that got major mods, where the game devs got 'outdone' by the community. And still the later installments still sold just as well.

I see so many complaints about ksp2 not looking as good as ksp1 with mods, not having any features that can't be added with mods. But let's give it a month and see how ksp2 performs next to a heavily modded ksp1. And then keep in mind, that mods will come for ksp2 also. With any extra performance headroom, with the new rebuilt base code, let's see what modders can produce with ksp2. It isn't fair to compare unmodded ksp2 with a heavily modded ksp1. Thats adding a whole bunch of unpaid modder hours to the base game dev time. Of course if someone is willing to make something for free with no restraints on time they'll be able to produce something cheaper. Either compare unmodded to unmodded or wait for some mods to come out for ksp2 and compare modded to modded. Even between modded ksp1 to ksp2, I doubt the comparison is all that glowing. Mod ksp1 to allow for improved terrain, part graphics, clouds, new much bigger ksc, time acceleration while burning, procedural wing parts, improved fairings and interstage, custom painting parts, new building system and ui, non-impulsive maneuvers, rings for dres with colliders, and let me know how it performs. Sure those all exist. What fps do you get and how much ram does it take. Mod ksp1 to remove the kraken attacks that destroy anything with a large number of small parts, suddenly wiggling themselves to death. Mod ksp1 to keep heavy aircraft from exploding randomly in atmosphere. Sounds like ksp2 is even attempting to improve the performance of landing gear and wheels, can we add a Mod to ksp1 for that too. Or wait for a few more early access steps and add in interstellar, orbital construction, and colonies too. Even before interstellar and colonies, there's a lot of additions and improvements to the game. Much more than I think you can achieve with a stable set of mods. Let's not discount all the work the dev team has put in so far. And then there's complaints about having to buy an incomplete game. Everyone seems to forget what ksp1 was like when it first came out. When I bought ksp1 there wasn't a map view. Ksp2 is releasing leagues more finished and complete than ksp1. I paid $27 for ksp1 and put in over 2000 hours. That's a pretty good return on investment. And enough for me to be happy to put in another $50 for a greatly improved base game expecting another 2000 hours. If you're happy with ksp1 stay with ksp1 until you see ksp2 surpasses it.

See I was thinking kerbin could almost serve as the tutorial for resources. Like hey, we only get this many resources per day. If you want more, you could drive a rover over a few dozen km west and set up a mining route. Or send a cargo ship a few dozen km north up the coast. It wouldn't be necessary to fly rockets. But it would give the option for players to get introduced to the resource system before even going off world. So then they know what to expect by the time they get to the Moon and have a better idea where they want to establish their colonies. And it would be a shame if there was no reason to go out driving flying and sailing around the home planet.

Agreed. But we don't know how much time and resources it will take to set up the moon bases to the point they're also mining. And maybe there's some stuff on kerbin you can't easily get on the moons. Or maybe there's some advanced products like electronics that can't be built off world until the colonies grow to a larger size. I'm personally hoping there's a higher teir of manufactured materials that have to be brought from kerbin for a bit until the colonies grow larger and get factories. But yes I wouldn't expect the game to require you to set up more than a couple of mines on kerbin before moving out to the moons. The ksp devs seem to be wanting to balance a bit of challenge but not introduce a bunch of repetitive grind.

For sure. And that is a choice I'd expect the player to have. Make do with the little trickle of resources your get off the bat and skip right to moon mining. Or set up a few routes on kerbin to give you an early game boost so you can build out stuff even faster. Imagine if the resources the ksc gives you at the start are roughly equivalent to the funding nasa had at its peak. Say you could build one saturn v apollo mission per one year or six months. Then you could choose to leave it at that level and play a budget restricted nasa. Or head out and strip mine all of kerbin to fuel a massive species wide drive to the stars.

I agree with this. The devs are already building a whole resource system. Why make a whole second resource system using money when the same mining and transport system could be used on kerbin too? What if the ksc creates a slow trickle of resources. Which can be bolstered by driving the same resource transport rovers and planes and ships you'd use on any other planet. This would also give us a reason to drive fly and sail all around kerbin. There could be basic metals all up and down the mountains to the west, oil across the sea, rarer resources in the distant desert or at the frozen poles. And that way, a tank costs 50 iron to build anywhere. Rather than 50 iron anywhere but kerbin and 100 funds on kerbin. I think the point of using resources instead of funds is the kerbals have arrived at the point where they've devoted all their time and effort to exploring and expanding into space. Based on comments by the devs int he videos, going to other star systems will require the marshaling of all the resources of the species. You get to a point where money doesn't make sense anymore. Maybe with a setting to have all kerbin resources tapped from the start for when you want to skip setting up those early routes.

One feature I'd really love is for ships to have both an individual name and a class name. Like I can build and save an Excelsior Class Cruiser, and launch one named the Enterprise. Especially by the time we get multiplayer. So me and other players can see both names on it in the map. "Enterprise - Excelsior Class"

Yes this is part of my point. Outside of earth's magnetosphere there's lots of radiation from the sun. Outside the sun's heliosphere there's cosmic radiation. All the new fusion and fission engines (even the old nerv) should be kicking out some pretty intense radiation. Beaming power via uv should be 100% safe to any kerbals because if your spacecraft can't block out uv then your crew will quickly be cooked. Whatever you're using to shield from other radiation should be more than enough to protect them from whatever you're using to beam power too.

That's a daedalus style fusion engine. Looks like ksp2 is calling it "the crucible". And funny enough I don't think it will fall into the "too useful" section of that chart. It's meant to be super high isp. But because it's so massive and heavy, I don't expect it to have spectacular twr. It will be super useful for interstellar, just in a way that's off that particular chart. And yes they've confirmed you can time warp while engines are burning. So low twr engines can burn for days or even years and you don't have to sit and watch it in real time.

Just finished my new cockpit setup (so excited for KSP2)' If anyone is interested in knowing how it came together, it was actually super easy and pretty cheap. The most important parts funny enough are the cheapest. A couple of old usb Atari joysticks, and a usb numb pad with printed stickers on it. Mounted to a left over Ikea shelf with a little usb hub (hidden). A square piece of metal tube for cable management. Probably only about $60 all together. I got the Atari sticks years ago and it looks like they're hard to find now. If you're looking to build your own, (and as I've already bough myself for a possible version 2) I recommend getting some arcade cabinet joysticks. I feel these style of joysticks work better for KSP than flight sim joysticks (Ask me why). They can be called 4 way / 8 way joysticks, fighting game joysticks, or arcade cabinet joysticks. If you're looking for a no fuss plug and play option, I recommend getting a two player arcade game controller (comes with two sticks and buttons ready to go). If you're looking to be fancy, you can get a pair of these style joysticks from arcade parts suppliers for like $80. The num pad is a cheap $10 one from any computer store. Printed out the buttons on a sheet of vinyl sticker from a local UPS/print shop. Everything is screwed down to the Ikea shelf, except the keyboard, which is part of my normal set up and sits on the board. The expensive and not so necessary piece is the Stream Deck. But it's super neat. The buttons are screens, so it can be programmed to change. Comes with really good macro software that can do stuff like click the mouse at a specific part of the screen in addition to normal button presses.

Also, the crew areas would have to have some sort of shielding built in. I'm not sure what sort of shielding microwave power would require, but whatever is keeping the kerbals safe from years or decades of solar and cosmic radiation surely would at least help. But yes I'd mostly envisioned it used for unmanned probes. Maybe even cargo delivery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam-powered_propulsion I mean systems have been proposed. None of the challenges are more difficult to overcome than say all the potential fusion power systems in the game. And the microwaves from beamed power are no more dangerous than the atomic bombs and fusion particle beams were currently looking at for ksp2 propulsion. There's already going to be a system for radioactivity and I assume crew safety, it could just use that. Power recievers could simply be placed a long way from creating quarters. Or crew could be hidden behind some shielding discs. Also, I don't think they said no to the laser and solar sail systems, they said they weren't currently working on them. But I'd be surprised if they didn't eventually add them if it is possible in the game engine without too much work. As it's a propulsion system that is currently being considered.

This would be a fun feature. And not just for beaming power down to a planet but also going the other way. Using a huge ground fusion plant to beam power up to tiny super light ion probes and stuff. A similar vein, I'd love to see solar sails eventually added as a propulsion method, with an added possibility of constructing massive laser stations either on the ground or in orbit which can be used to boost the craft with sails.

When you do it, at the very least, you have to scream, "For Science!"

So, in the excitement for KSP2, I've been putting together a quick budget simulator setup. Now, as long as we can get the first two from my above list, multiple controller support and some more action groups, getting input into the game from controllers and stuff is easy. And in the process, I found out about stuff like this, its supported by various flight sims like Microsoft Flight, X plane, ext. https://www.logitechg.com/en-ca/products/flight/flight-simulator-instrument-panel.945-000027.html Do you think there's any chance we could get KSP to output Flight Telemetry Data in the same format as these flight sims so instruments like this could be used? Or, maybe even better, think we could get a companion app, like Fallout 4's pipboy? I'm sure we all have some old tablets or phones laying around that are no longer used. What if there was an app we could download, and bring up an assortment of flight instruments on them, like the NavBall, or altitudes and speeds.