herbal space program

Agree with this for the most part. There are so many elements of potential game progression around the interplay between missions, resources, and increasing remote capabilities that were never explored. Like maybe in the early game, other bodies are all blurry, and you don't get better views/maps of them until you do stuff like build space telescopes or run flyby missions with different sensors. I think planetary biomes should be revealed somewhere in that progression as well, as should deposits of maybe a half dozen different resources. And then later in the game, exploiting those resources effectively should be essential to building colonies and your ultimate interstellar craft. And of course I think that idea should be blended with some rich network of discoverable sites, all of which are cool to look at but only some of which yield clues to the progression towards some bottleneck technology for interstellar. I feel like they had a lot of the elements for that in place between KSP1 and KSP2, but it never all got meshed together in a way that turned it into a satisfying game narrative. Yeah, there were many things about the tech tree and facility upgrade system that were super stupid, like how long you have to wait to get a frickin' ladder. There has to be a better way than making that into a bottleneck! And to address your other point, I think there needs to be some kind of self-paced aspect to it, so that at various spots you can choose between less rewarding, intermediate missions that will help you gain needed skills and just cutting to the chase of a harder one that will advance you in some more substantive way. And yeah, some of the marquee missions in KSP2 were way too hard for beginners. That bullseye Tylo landing at the end still makes me shudder from how many times I had to F9, and that wasn't the only crazy hard thing in there. And I mean for me, that was all fun enough, but for a truly new player, it had to be alienating. Myeh. I agree having the ability to have the map window as an inset in the flight window would be great, but overlays...not so sure. Myeeeh. How are you going to actually learn a precision landing if you have so many crutches? And calculating trajectory factoring drag is a tall order, and also not that useful due to the massive influence of attitude. I mean, I agree it's a bit of an elephant in the room, but it has to be handled intelligently or it could really mess up gameplay. Yeah, I agree that real-time interaction between players does not seem like a good fit for this type of game. You would have to design a whole new system and interface for something that has very few natural reasons to occur. I could however see multiplayer as a non-interactive competition, where you race to meet certain milestones, identify resources, and exploit them. Oops! we went to the Mohole and our opponent's flag was already there! That sort of thing doesn't seem so hard to implement.

KSP2's performance issues had precious little to do with graphics AFAICT, at least on my machine. I could max all the settings out or tank them, and still I'd get exactly the same pokey frame rate with high part counts. There were fundamental flaws in the physics engine that made it calculate the state of the craft way too slowly on each tick of the state machine. Also there were weird non-local effects, where having multiple craft flying in the same SOI, even if they were on rails, would bog down the focused vessel.

...So I just went and looked at @ShadowZone's videos/interviews about KSA, and now I really think the only thing KSP's new owners should do is sell the KSP IP to Rocketwerkz. Dean Hall came right out of the gate in the first interview explaining how their top priority from day 1 is producing a stable and performant game engine, and all the art parts will take a back seat to that goal. For me, that's like they had me at hello. Then on top of that he talked about how they want to make their source as transparent as possible to support modders. And they hired HarvesteR too! The KSP brand couldn't possibly have a better steward than that IMO.

Can't really agree on this one. Nate and his team had seven years to put this game together and failed, producing a game that was still not fully stable and also far from sufficiently performant to implement the next suite of planned features. Moreover, it's not at all clear if the existing code base for the basic game engine can even be brought to that standard, which is my hunch as to why TT unceremoniously pulled the plug despite all the sunk costs. So no matter what else is true, it's pretty clear that whatever Nate's team brought to the table was not enough to get the project over the finish line, and if the game is indeed to be salvaged somebody else needs to be brought in to do that job.

I think it would be equally valid to say that KSP2 didn't work because the people developing it lacked the skills and/or resources required to implement a stable and efficient core game engine for it, even though they loved the game too. If the new outfit can assemble a team competent to tackle that problem, then my guess is that there are a whole lot of artistic assets already in place that they can salvage from the old game and transfer into a new, improved substrate.

We can only hope that the new outfit makes some kind of announcement about what it intends to do soon. Still, any kind of news is better than no news at all at this point!

I'd love to see one that's not produced by clipping ridiculous numbers of things into each other. I'd bet it's even possible!

Nobody, and I mean nobody is going to want to try that. Maybe you should try it yourself if you don't believe me? That is after all the posted etiquette of the challenge forum: you don't post challenges without providing an example of doing them yourself.

If what you want to see is fancy gravity assists, I think you're really better off specifying the amount of vacuum deltaV you're allowed to expend beyond whatever high-AP Kerbin orbit you start at, as this parameter is independent of vessel design. Even with just 2 tons of fuel, a Nerv with a probe core, some reaction wheels, some batteries and an antenna could probably make the Jool SOI from LKO in a single burn. I'm too lazy to fire up the game and check right now, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. I know that back in the day, some people were able to marginally improve on the ~1050 m/s from LKO Munar-assisted K-E-K-K-J route by using a Munar assist to eject into a Kerbin resonant orbit, from which they could set up a second Munar assist to get to the required, very specific Eve encounter. 1050 m/s is just 100 m/s more than the most eccentric possible Kerbin orbit, so the benchmark for that route would be 100 m/s, to which you could add maybe another 50 m/s in correction burns. But that's still an extremely hard challenge, and I know because this sort of thing used to be my bag in the earlier days of KSP. One thing that might make this more interesting however is the fact that you're not measuring from LKO, but rather from some eccentric Kerbin orbit. That could include one with a PE somewhere between Mun and Kerbin ad an AP just inside the Kerbin SOI. Such an orbit has more energy than the typical Oberth-maximizing highly eccentric orbit, and although it's not optimal for ejecting from LKO, it could likely make it possible to get more juice out of your Munar assist than you would boosting from there. Anyway, good luck getting takers. This sort of thing is far from trivial!

That mission is basically not possible. I won't say it's entirely impossible, but it would require at least half a dozen perfectly timed sequential gravity assists, probably more like eight, and setting all those up so you don't have to do a single correction burn to stay on course is next to impossible.

What part of TT lost a massive amount of money on the failed KSP2 don't you understand?

I sure can't say I was happy with the game from day one. The number and severity of the bugs made it pretty much unplayable for anything but the simplest missions. But by the time they pulled the plug, I feel like that aspect had really improved a lot, and the game was actually quite playable. Performance of course was still pretty kruffty, but for me that was mitigated by the fairly beefy rig I was playing it on. All that was really missing for me was some kind of fun new content to keep it interesting. Perhaps that was never going to happen due to fundamental flaws in the game engine tanking performance to the point where colonies, etc. could never be playable. But if that was not the case, then it really seems to me like they were 90% of the way to the finish line when they gave up, which is a real shame.

Well, after listening to that I'm just shaking my head at anybody who can truly respond to it with nothing but contempt towards Nate. Personally I pity him, because he clearly really wanted to get the job done but was also clearly way out of his depth, and now it looks like the experience has left him pretty much broken, both personally and professionally. Not one person in this community had anything remotely resembling that kind of skin in this game, and the fact is most of us are really just out 50 bucks and the actual sequel we were dreaming about. Such a petty grievance is no justification whatsoever for kicking somebody who is so obviously full of remorse and about as down as they could possibly be, and comments like some of those above just make me feel this hopeless disgust, like the Internet has destroyed all vestige of our humanity. We really need to be better to each other, both here and in the world at large, or IMO we are all doomed.

Well, I'll just throw in my 2 cents and say this is definitely a ray of hope, but I'm not holding my breath either. Time will tell if the new owner of KSP does anything with it.

Whatever HarvesteR ends up making might be a great game, but I doubt it's going to be anything like a better version of KSP2.

Still there for me too.

Re Nate, you may have agreed with his vision or not, but I think it's fair to say in his defense that he may not have actually known that some of the things he told us were falsehoods at the time he said them.

Well Nate getting dumped makes it pretty clear that TT has no interest in pursuing his concept of KSP2 any further, outside of maybe having a skeleton crew slap together a few things that were already more or less ready to go. Now I just hope they don't sit on the IP forever, but rather sell it off at a reasonable price to somebody who can do something better with it.

There are many disadvantages to having products like this managed by soulless, bean-counting bureaucrats, but if there are any advantages, one of them is that "spite" will not figure into their calculations. Besides, it's a pretty well-established fact that they were trying to sell the IP already.

Well I can't say I'm exactly excited, but I'm not in total despair mode yet either. Until they actually call what we have now (or some trivial final update thereto) 1.0, I will continue to hold out hope that development will be resumed at some point by a new and/or smaller group, be it under the TT umbrella or not. That's because I think a KSP2 implemented according to the stated roadmap still has real sales potential, and therefore won't just be set aside forever. Either it will be taken up by TT again on some less rainy day for their balance sheet, or it will be sold off to some other publisher to recoup as much of the associated operating loss as possible. Do I expect any of that to happen anytime soon? Not really, but I do expect to live to see it.

My appeal to TT on behalf of the community and the devs, and my hope that somebody will take this game up again (and besides, somebody had to post it):

First and foremost, KSP2 gave me a reason to play KSP again after I felt I had exhausted all the possibilities of its predecessor. And even though what we have now is just a shadow of what I think the game could (or could have) become, there were already some features that were clear improvements in my book: Everything about the planets was better, but most importantly for me they had much more complex and realistic terrain that was actually interesting to explore. Spending a bunch of hours driving rovers around Duna and Kerbin to tag their mission goal easter eggs was more fun than I ever had driving a rover anywhere in KSP1, and the beautiful rendering of those easter eggs made me excited about the promise of more such gratifying gameplay experiences ahead. The building interface in the VAB worked considerably better (after they fixed some of its worst bugs) than the one in KSP1. There were countless occasions on which I'd spend ridiculous amounts of time tearing my hair out trying to place a part in KSP1 because it refused to snap to the target exposed node, and that didn't happen in KSP2. The procedural wings and control surfaces also made building planes that are both fit for purpose and nice-looking much easier. Lots of little things about the flight UI were significant improvements for me. Fuel transfers were finally something that could be done in a logical, efficient, and symmetrical way! And although there were clearly some diehard fans of the right-click PAW model, having a static part management window that doesn't move with your spacecraft was a major improvement in my book. There were so many times in KSP1 where I would find myself frantically chasing after some part on a moving or spinning vessel with my mouse pointer to right-click on it, and in KSP2 I never have to worry about that. Having an altitude indicator that actually tells you how far from the ground you are is pretty nice also! Wheels and landing legs in the later updates of KSP2 were also much better than their KSP1 counterparts in most versions of that game. No more gliding uncontrollably across 1-degree slopes, no more landing gear Krakening out just sitting on the runway. Maybe they patched some of those bugs in KSP1 after I quite playing it, but in all the versions I played they were still there. Lastly, the mission tree structure in FS was way more logical and fun to play through than anything that was ever in stock KSP1. The idea of having a trail of Easter eggs leading you to some ultimate goal that enables interstellar tech is something I wanted to see in KSP1 for years, and it looked to me like that's where they were going with it. It still needed some work and some filling out, but I thought they were definitely on the right track with it. All in all, I feel like KSP2 really did hold out the promise of a new and significantly better gameplay experience for novices and veterans alike, and I would still dearly like to see somebody take up the challenge of trying to realize some of that potential. Maybe there are foundational issues in the physics engine that make that an impossible goal without a complete rewrite, but if that's not the case then I think T2 is making a big mistake if they just spike it for eternity, especially if there is already a lot of artistic content developed that is just waiting for a viable substrate.

Whatever you do, I hope you'll still allow KSP2 submissions, because I've built a shuttle in KSP2 now that I'm really happy about and I don't actually have KSP1 anymore, due to a recent father-son Steam account separation (he's gone off to college). Reading through, I'm not sure which missions you actually consider impossible in KSP2, although I can see how some of them might be significantly harder. At any rate, I'll be dropping my KSP2 STS1-2 mission here soon.

Sounds like a great idea to me! Having it be full of relics from an ancient civilization would of course also provide a great pretext for having the building of a colony there to excavate such artifacts be the last step before getting whatever advanced drive ultimately enables interstellar travel. And of course such a platform, orbiting at a creepingly slow pace right at the edge of Kerbol's SOI, would probably be the ideal base for launching an interstellar expedition.