herbal space program

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.

You could add those and also have a whole Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud beyond that, with objects containing resources to make propellant and perhaps even some easter eggs indicating places to seek out in the other star systems. Establishing colonies in such places, with the need to go back and forth between those and the inner Kerbolar System rapidly, would also be a good test bed for potential interstellar designs, as well as practice for the whole enterprise of navigating with direct, high velocity burns rather than Hohman transfers. The SWERV puts a lot of that in reach, but the current KSP2 version doesn't give you much reason to use it that way.

For my part, I would vote for much shorter interstellar distances, since that wouldn't require you to egregiously violate physics with your propulsion systems, and there are in fact places in real galaxies where the stars are much closer together than they are in our immediate neighborhood. If transit times could be 20-50 Kerbin years with a propulsion system that is only moderately impossible, then I think it would be feasible to get the intra- and inter-system timescales to mesh in a playable way.

I personally think the vast distances involved were going to be problematic for gameplay reasons even if there were no technical issues about it. Even at the ~0.1X scale of the Kerbalverse, just one light year equivalent is still about 1015m, or 10,000X the maximum Kerbol-Eeloo distance. of ~1011m. Based on my experience building a pseudo-interstellar ship with available parts, with the 1400 ISP SWERV you could make the trip to Eeloo in maybe 100 days with any kind of reasonable payload if you account for the need to decelerate. And that's if you build a verrry big ship. That would be 29,000 years to go 1 light year-equivalent, and if you increase the hypothetical ISP of your interstellar engine to 15 times that, which is about the theoretical maximum for a fusion-powered reaction engine, it's still taking you about 2,000 years to reach your destination even if it's only one scaled-down light year away. What are you going to do with all the stuff you had going on in the Kerbolar system while you wait for all that time to pass? You'd basically have to just forget all about it, which seems pretty at odds with their whole colony maintenance model for the next phase of the roadmap that leads to interstellar. So their choices basically would have been to make interstellar a completely disjoint game phase from everything else if they keep any kind of realistic propulsion system, implement some kind of totally unrealistic propulsion system, or scale down the interstellar distances at least one more, probably closer to two orders of magnitude. I wonder if they ever even got to the stage where they seriously decided how they meant to resolve that significant gameplay conundrum.

@OJT, are you still maintaining this challenge? If so, I'd like to make some submissions based on the idea of creating a single orbiter/lifter design that is capable of doing as many of the most difficult missions above as possible without changing anything other than what's inside the cargo bay and how full the various fuel tanks are at launch. In that vein, I have a question about this statement at the top of all the interplanetary missions: Does that mean all of STS1-8, or even all of those plus the Kerbin bonus series, or does it refer to some subset of all the Kerbin missions posted that are the "original" series from some former version of the challenge? I looked at the first version from your history, and those challenges are obviously quite different from what's posted here, so that didn't really help. Grinding through all of those Kerbin-based missions just looks like it might get a bit ho-hum for me, so I want to know exactly how much of that is required before I can get on to the juicier interplanetary missions. Thanks!

No Problem! I don't know how fancy you might want to get with gravity assists, but in terms of calculating the dV required to go from place to place with regular Hohman transfers, this is a very useful tool: https://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/.

In its current version, it is far from a barely working corpse. And unless you have some really specific under-the-hood knowledge of the state of the code base, I don't see how you can possibly make that judgment in terms of what it might be going forward. Some serious bugs persist, but having played it for about 600 hours (vs. ~4,000 hrs. of KSP1), I can confidently say that what we have now is not much worse than most of the KSP1 versions I played. And it looks way better, and the assembly interface (except for camera behavior) works better, and the planets have much more complex terrain height maps than their predecessors, to go along with their much better visual detail/rendering. It truly did start off as a total goat rodeo, but it is no longer that IMO, and as I have actually played it more than about 90% of the self-styled authorities posting here, I feel very confident in that assessment.

I'm more inclined to believe that they issued this update now rather than at the end of the month so that if there were some disastrous problem with it, they'd still have a little time to patch it before everybody is laid off. That said, I'm still not convinced the KSP IP is dead forever. I think the only things that have been decided for sure is that they don't want to stay the course with the IG team under Nate, and that if they could sell the whole thing to somebody else on some target terms they would do so. What happens beyond that is likely still being debated IMO, because I believe they recognize that there is more long-term earnings potential in this title than some of the biggest naysayers on this forum have asserted.

That's pretty amazing. I was having constant problems with it until the update preceding FS, but after that it was gone for me.

Seriously? I haven't encountered that problem now in many hours of gameplay. Are you sure it's not be intrinsic to some old save file you're using?

I'm really happy that cargo bays, shielded docking ports, and fairings actually (mostly) do their jobs now. The procedural wings in KSP2 and the SWERV engine are a game-changer for the whole SSTO space plane game, but without those aerodynamic parts in working order, there are pretty onerous limitations on what you can do. Since @OJT took all the trouble to repost the whole STS challenge series in the KSP2 forum, I was planning to give it a little love before everybody leaves the building, but those parts being bunk was really making it hard for me to build what I wanted to.

Does this mean the fairings and cargo bays actually work now? Because in my current game the Mk3 cargo bay is a horrible drag monster even when closed unless I attach a large nosecone to the back wall. ...So I just checked, and yes! My Mk3 cargo bay now actually shields the stuff inside it from drag. What a relief! My current Mk3 SSTO couldn't even break the sound barrier before unless I stuck a nosecone on the back wall of the cargo bay, and now it accelerates smoothly right through Mach1 without resorting to that workaround. It would have been really sad to have that egregious failure to perform as expected make it through to possibly the final update. In other news, I found that the shielded docking port still heats up ridiculously fast, but ironically only when it is closed. When on a whim I opened it just as it was about to blow up, the overheating gauge suddenly disappeared and it then made orbit just fine! Seems like they've just got its aerodynamic/heating behavior bass ackwards with respect to the open/closed state of the shield. How hard could that possibly be to fix? I hope somebody there finds it in themselves to set that right before its all over for real.

Well, if that's the last update we get I sure hope they fix the fact that cargo bays and fairings don't do what they're supposed to do at all. A shielded docking port that doesn't blow up even sooner than the naked one would be nice too!

When it first came out, I was pretty taken aback, but by the end I felt like they were actually fairly close to having a solid foundation upon which to build a new and better Kerbalverse. Maybe the performance issue was ultimately insurmountable, but outside of that it seemed to me like they were on the right track in a lot of ways. It's really sad we'll probably never know what they might have been able to make of it after another year or two. especially since there's probably quite a bit of artistic content that was just waiting for a more tenable substrate.