herbal space program

That sounds like a sensible compromise between fully implemented resource extraction and OP colony bases that can magically make anything out of nothing besides EC, but in my book that would still involve resources on some level, i.e. some base resource has to be present on the body you're occupying to enable production of specific things. Even better in my book would be if the game requires you to set up your colony within some distance of said resource, e.g. near water deposits in some permanently shadowed Munar crater, which doesn't seem like it would require a whole lot of new stuff to implement, but I guess we'll see.

If they have decided that any capability for resource extraction and ISRU will require a full-on colony/factory setup rather than just the the handful of parts used for that purpose in KSP1, then I agree there is no point to implementing any resource extraction before they have the colony parts. But OTOH building factories and resource extraction systems without any actual resources to use them on also seems kind of pointless to me in terms of gameplay, and just setting up Kerbal Kamps that sit around requiring maintenance and doing nothing else doesn't really sound very fun to me either. So I suppose the reality in my mind is more like resources and colonies are kind of intimately tied together, rather than one requiring full implementation before the other makes sense, and thus the best path for gameplay might actually be to incrementally build both systems together rather than categorically placing one before the other. I have no idea if that's a nonstarter for development reasons, but I can sure think of a snappy name for the first update if that what they were to do -- "Kerbal Kolonies: Just Add Water! " ...And finally, after reading through the more recent interview segments more closely, I'm thinking that there will actually be some kind of basic, almost certainly water-based ISRU system coming along with the first tranche of colony parts, while any more complex and diverse utilization of resources is still on the back burner. Time will tell!

I guess I understand the bugs argument, but the rest of what you said I'm not so sure about. Just being able to make hydrogen fuel and oxidizer in-situ by utilizing water (the obvious first resource) would actually be pretty cool! Hydrogen is obviously a fuel in itself, and oxidizer is so much heavier than methane per impulse generated that being able to just take just the methane with you and generate the oxidizer in situ would give new life to methalox as a propellant later in the game. And wouldn't it be nifty if your orbital survey experiments earlier in the game actually yielded a map that shows water deposits? As to all that requiring colony parts, I don't really see it that way. All you'd really need is a resource scanner part, a water extraction part, a water tank, and a hydrolyzer part, which are things that (in principle) already existed in KSP1. And of course once there is some kind of colony habitation module, oxygen would be its most obvious continual need if there's going to be anything like life support in the game, and again you get that from water. Anyway, I'm not complaining about it, but it does seem to me that you could get a whole lot of gameplay mileage relative to where we are now just by adding water to the game with a handful of parts. A fair point, but apropos of that I feel compelled to point out that keeping us interested in finding and reporting those bugs requires that the game be fun to play, and what I outlined above seems like a pretty easy-to-implement way to maximize that element. But we'll see I guess.

Thank you for that @The Space Peacock! There's a great deal of food for thought here. One thing that does kind of have me scratching my helmet over all this is why they're choosing to implement colonies before they put any kind of resource system in place. To me, the most natural game progression would seem to be the other way around. That is, you start by exploring the other bodies in the Kerbolar system in general terms, then as your science capabilities advance you start doing orbital surveys to find deposits of key resources required for fuel generation, life support, etc., and then you start building outposts where those resources are found. Ultimately, as science progresses further this system leads to colonies focused on extracting/producing various types of unobtainium that are required to make/power an interstellar vessel that must be built in some big orbital factory. Having colony outposts before that progression is laid down therefore seems kind of backwards to me, but I guess time will tell why they're doing it this way instead.

I want to say thank you @Dakota for restoring the deleted content from the other thread. I understand the discussion was off topic, and for my part I promise that in the spirit of good community membership I will be more judicious in the future about where I post comments like that. Still, it felt quite harsh to just see it all yanked out of existence, as I did put a significant amount of thought into what I said, and for that reason seeing it restored makes me feel a whole lot better about my participation here. I hope others who were affected will see this significant and important gesture in the same way.

It's hard for me to believe that Dakota really wanted all that content deleted , considering he said in that very thread that it was important for us to keep telling them what we want, which is what I feel I was doing, without being rude or disrespectful, even though it was not on-topic for that thread. I've spent over 400 hours playing KSP2 now, in spite of all the frustrating problems, and I was really just trying to explain what the truly pressing issues are that cause innocent but fluffy posts like the Dev blog in question to get met with groans rather than cheers. I even stood up for the blog post's author, because this is clearly not their fault. Anyway, if they don't want my insights because these issues have been "talked to death", then I will spend my precious free time doing something that feels less pointless. Hopefully when I come back after taking a break for a few months, it will be to a different kind of party.

I feel you. That heavy-handed bloodbath by the moderators on the Dev blog thread has pretty much taken all the wind out of my sails, and I won't be seen here again for quite a while.

They each have their own specialties, so they can't really all work on these problems at the same time, but your point about the small things is very well-taken. The current behavior of the UI in map mode is a perfect example of that. How hard could it possibly be for them to fix the way that various informational pop-up windows always obscure the info you really want to see in such a manner that you can't close them, rearrange them, or rotate the view to get them out of the way? How does a simple but incredibly annoying bug like that survive even a few hours of play testing? It's hard not to get the idea sometimes that they actually hate us and are deliberately taunting us with things like this.

What I was talking about with my Eve 10 stack was definitely this and not any inherent lack of rigidity causing my rockets to self-disassemble on the launchpad. With a few struts placed in the obvious places, I haven't had any problems at launch with any of my craft since the most recent update. What I was talking about happens when the craft is in orbit, with no non-uniform forces acting on it, and although having SAS on seems to make it happen more often, it happens sometimes with SAS off as well. It also only seems to happen when I have a craft made from two or more assemblies that were docked together in orbit. And it always starts very small and gets steadily more violent until the craft flies apart, which very much supports your model of incorrectly implemented dampening of small motions causing feedback loops in certain cases. FWIW, it also seems to happen a whole lot less now than it did before, so they seemed to have fixed it in most cases, but it still does happen occasionally.

Indeed, if you're going to land 300 bleepin' tons of something on Duna, it should actually be something that will ultimately be useful in some way! Nothing we have in our current parts inventory looks very likely to me in that regard. Even my Eve 10 lander, which at least serves the purpose of getting ten Kerbals to the surface and back, only weighs ~175t with its landing legs and brakes/chutes still attached, so 300 tons of what?

For Eve I consider it an interesting challenge, especially since I don't have the magic inflatable heat shield yet. Landing a 300t ship on Duna however just seems like a boring, pointless grind to me: easy, but also very time-consuming without proving anything.

I dunno, the game does seem to be pushing us in that direction with FS missions like Eve 10 and Big n' Husky, which to me portends even bigger stuff on the horizon. Still, I'm up to around 450 parts on my most complex launches now and I'm not having any wobble problems yet using only a KSP1-typical number of struts, so I'm not too worried about it. The framerate at that part count however is another matter.

I've built some pretty big stuff recently, and although it still requires the judicious placement of some struts manually, it's way, way better than it was before. My docked together Eve 10 stack on LKO must be like 200 meters long, and although the framerate on it is terrible and it occasionally develops phantom motions and shakes itself to bits apropos of nothing, it doesn't exhibit any wet noodle behavior that I've seen. As to the solution being "duct tape", i.e. autostruts, are you sure there is actually a better solution than that using this physics engine? If you call those "tack welds" rather than autostruts, it seems like a llegit solution to me. There are definitely much worse problems currently they should be focusing on before they try to improve their wobbly rockets solution, unless of course that solution is in fact what is tanking the frame rate.

In the heyday of KSP1, I'm not sure if there was any computer game-based forum anywhere on this planet that had more really smart people participating in it. It was inspirational.

Hey, at least they're making an effort to show us something. I do feel bad for the dev team member who posted this, because he's just showing us what he's working on in his own lane and almost certainly has no involvement in or control over the issues that are causing all these rotten tomatoes to be lobbed in response to his post. Like you said, there's nothing at all wrong with what he posted, even if it's of no great consequence, and clearly it took some work to do and it's not his fault that other aspects of dev team communication about the much less sexy subjects of performance and bugs are lacking. To that end, I think they need some kind of a pinned "What did you do to make KSP2 more playable today" thread for the dev team, in which they skip all the window dressing and just give us fairly frequent but succinct little tidbits about what they're doing to deal with all the nuts and bolts issues, day in, day out. Maybe they shouldn't even allow comments from the peanut gallery in that thread, only upvotes. That way, they'll have an organic way of knowing which identified bugs/performance issues have the highest community priority and we'll have more frequent reassurance that they're actually taking these issues seriously. Moving K.E.R.B. to monthly was definitely a step in the wrong direction in that regard. Instead, they should have made their updates on these matters less comprehensive but much more frequent.