herbal space program

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.

I'm not particularly inclined to buy any TT products after what happened, but I'll probably make an exception for Civ VII if that ever comes out. I definitely won't buy even that one right after release though. I will have a wait-and-see attitude, as I should have had with KSP2. TT have shown themselves totally capable of wrecking a great game with mismanagement, so my trust level is zero even for that hallowed franchise. If the reviews are not uniformly glowing, I will take a pass.

We submit to your will, O Great Kraken, and humbly pray that you may spontaneously disassemble the ships of all those incompetent pilots who drove our beloved, precious KSP2 IP into this ignominious ditch. May they never make orbit again! And may you one day receive proper sacrificial offerings from a new generation of Kerbonauts, flying through a bigger, better, and more beautiful Kerbalverse!

To distract myself from the grim exercise of arguing over KSP2's cause of death in other parts of the forum, I decided to take on challenge #8 with a single-stage space plane. I did it before in KSP1, but never tried it in KSP2 until now. It offers a similarly difficult but distinct challenge from doing the same thing for Laythe, as the overall dV requirement is quite a bit less, but the thin atmosphere and lack of oxygen on Duna introduces different, challenging design requirements. In terms of KSP2 vs. KSP1, the very high ISP and relatively high TWR of the SWERV makes it theoretically possible to build a longer-range single-stage spaceplane in KSP2 than in KSP1, but the massive size of the SWERV and the equally massive bulk of the hydrogen tanks means that if you want to do that, you have to go big. So after a few false starts, I arrived at this fairly simple Mk3 design, shown first in the VAB, then on Duna, then touching down again at the KSC runway: It has 6 Rapier engines, 4 on top and 2 on the bottom, and one SWERV. The wings are slightly up-tilted with respect to the fuselage to optimize the overall lift/drag ratio, and the lower 2 Rapier engines are offset downwards to balance the center of thrust vs. the upper four. For its large size, it weighs fairly little (98t) because most of its volume is hydrogen tanks. On Kerbin it has a fully fueled takeoff speed of ~70m/s and a dry stall speed of ~40 m/s, which are good benchmarks for flyability on Duna IMO. It makes LKO with around 3 km/s left on the SWERV, which is plenty to get to Duna and back. In my mission, I left some methalox in the Rapiers after making orbit to assist in taking off from Duna, but it wasn't necessary. The SWERV alone could have sent a significantly bigger plane back to orbit on Duna. It also remained nicely balanced throughout the mission, with only minor shifting of ballast required to maintain aerodynamic trim. It was really fun to fly, and I wish that KSP2 had done more to encourage flying planes with For Science, because I feel like they just left a lot of potential fun on the table there. Anyway, here is a link to a full Imgur album of the mission: https://imgur.com/a/65L7noD In spite of all its problems I really did get quite a bit of fun out of KSP2. It's sadly getting to the point on this forum where it seems like there's little left to do but point fingers and argue about who saw it coming, and I for one don't want to say farewell to it on those terms. So happy voyages, fellow Kerbonauts, and may we all see each other again one day in a new and better Kerbalverse!

Words fail me. Human beings should not treat each other that way, no matter how much money is at stake. And I don't doubt for a second that you and everybody else at IG were all in on making KSP2 the best computer game ever. As far as I can tell, you got dealt an unplayable hand and then got scapegoated when you couldn't win with it.

Without ISRU, I think that landing on every moon in the Kerbol system in a single stage might not be possible, but flying by every moon almost certainly is if you have enough patience. In a single launch, it's not even particularly challenging to do that in my book. Just a lot of building.

Based on their last earnings statement, they already have so many losses on their books that there is no need for any more write offs.

Well if they don't sell it and they don't develop it any further either, they are 100% sure to lose a whole lot of money, so I don't think there's any reason to assume they would never sell it at any kind of a loss. The question is just how big of one.

That seems like a reasonable assessment to me if they really don't mean to do anything else with it. Recovering some of their sunk costs has to be better than just eating the whole loss, and TT can't reasonably expect whoever might buy it from them to pay so much money that the buyer ends up in exactly the same position they are trying to bail out of. But of course where exactly to draw that line is going to be a very complex negotiation, so it doesn't surprise me that they haven't reached a deal with anyone yet. As time wears on and future earnings reports loom, it wouldn't surprise me if their price came down significantly, to the point where somebody will finally bite. Could be quite a while before that happens though, and if it does there's no guarantee we'll end up with a better product. Still, it's a ray of hope that a new and better version of KSP is not a completely forlorn prospect.

I am not going to lose hope either, but the tale stitched together by @ShadowZone paints a pretty bleak picture of both the magnitude of the sunk costs required to get to where we are now and the prospects for pulling the game out of the ditch it's currently in without sinking a bunch more costs. Nonetheless, I still believe that in the long run, a KSP2 that performs adequately and meets all the milestones of Nate's roadmap would make those costs back and more. But perusing TT's current earnings statement makes it pretty clear that they badly need to cut costs, especially on projects that are not going to be in the black anytime soon, so I don't expect they'll devote anything close to the level of effort they've put into it until now for the foreseeable future. Still, I think they are closer to having a truly viable title than many of the biggest pessimists here assert, and that eventually they will pick it up again and try to make another go of it. I just hope I will not have succumbed to senile dementia by then.

Well that video certainly paints a bleak, maddening picture of one dumb management decision after another by PD and then TT. Trying to work with the old code vs. starting over is a legitimately tough decision, but forcing the new developers to work with the old code without the benefit of any input whatsoever from those who wrote it, due to craniorectally inverted secrecy concerns, has to be up there with Napoleon's decision to invade Russia in the annals of bad strategic decision making. And then firing one person after another who actually understood what the game is about because they cost too much. Words fail me in describing the depth of this idiocy. Clearly, the people who should have been fired are those in the highest levels of decision making for their parent companies, and they probably got raises and bonuses instead. Ack Ptui!!! The same markdown or worse applies to doing interesting academic scientific research vs. the boring corporate type. C'mon! If there is one clear message from what @ShadowZone said in that video, it is that all the developers involved did the best they could, but both parent companies made terrible strategic decisions that either hamstrung them or put them way out of their depth.

We can all imagine what that would look like, but if my last few months on this forum have shown me anything, it's that we definitely don't all agree what that would look like. For my part, I thought KSP2 had actually made a lot of progress towards becoming a worthy sequel in the year since the initial EA release. Most of the really bad physics bugs were gone or at least occurred much less frequently, and although performance was still not where it needed to be, it was considerably better than it had been at the outset. And I for one appreciated the new visuals and the new content, such as it was. All it really needed in my book was more of that new content, more improvement in FPS, and the fixing of a number of stupid QOL issues that should never have been allowed to persist as long as they did. The game literally went from hair-rippingly unplayable to fairly decent over the EA period, but it seems like by the time it got there everybody had lost interest already. Basically, I think they shot themselves in the foot by doing a general EA release when it was still in such bad shape, to the point where recovering community trust is going to be very difficult. Whatever their reasons for that were, I think in hindsight it was a terrible mistake from the standpoint of overall revenue potential for the title, and if they truly abandon it now, I shudder to think how much good work will likely have gone down the toilet because of that mistake. Anyway, for me the core essential elements for a good successor would be: 1) No absolutely game-killing bugs in any release, ever. This was by far their worst mistake IMO. 2) A game engine that performs at least as well as that of KSP1, even with improved graphics at the back end. Maybe what they have now can never become that, or maybe they just need to find the right crew to handle that task. 3) Improvements on various UI features vs. KSP1, like the VAB, PAW, and maneuver planning. I think they made some strides in that direction, but other stuff still desperately needed help. The dumb node behavior in map view, the constraints on planning ahead, and the non-existent multi-maneuver planner were all really annoying and probably really easy to fix as well. 4) More content like the vastly improved planet terrain and all the individually rendered set piece mission goals. I really liked that part, and saw lots of potential for fun gameplay if there were just more of it. Especially more planets! 5) Some new mechanic, like resource-dependent colonies, to create a play basis for further exploration and expanding the Kerbal presence on other worlds. Along with this should go more tangible results from doing science, like biome and/or resource distribution maps when you do different types of planetary scans. Successfully meshing this colony management mechanic with what the game was before is a big conceptual challenge on which they may have seriously stumbled, and we may never know to what extent. Meshing interstellar travel with in-system activities that take place on a vastly shorter timescale is a massive conceptual challenge as well, to which we have basically no idea what their solution might have been.

Calling somebody a good coder is like calling somebody a good physician or lawyer. They all need to be good at certain basic skills to deserve that distinction, but beyond that there are so many distinct specialties involved that there is no generic level of proficiency that covers them all. You wouldn't want even the world's greatest orthopedic surgeon operating on your heart!