herbal space program

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!

It's an incredibly demanding physics simulation, that only gets harder the more demanding you make the rendering pipeline behind it. It may very well be true that the world of consumer-class PCs is just not ready for it yet.

Based on sales estimates, the KSP2 IP still has the potential to create about ten times more revenue than it already has, even if nobody new adopts it. They just need to get it right, and some of the elements required for that are there IMO, but others are still very much lacking. And the fact that you think HarvesteR could somehow save the day shows you don't really consider it a lost cause yourself.

The bottom line is that he was pretty clear he had no interest in such a project in his most recent interview, so I don't know what the point of even discussing this is. And what he actually did that was amazing is come up with a great game concept and get it (mostly) working, in a very admirable but ultimately kind of slapdash sort of way. Porting that concept to the world of high-end, highly produced, multi-title franchise games was never going to be an easy task, and it's pretty clear he's neither particularly well-suited to that role nor particularly interested in it. What he wants to do, and is good at, is coming up with solid basic game concepts and developing them to an advanced prototype stage. What the KSP2 team was tasked with is a very different kind of challenge.

In a recent interview, HarvesteR basically admitted that the entire KSP1 code base was not really in a state that could readily be ported to a new version, so no, it appears that they did not try to use it as a starting point. As to it having some of the same bugs, based upon what I have gathered from various sources here I think those are inherent to trying to do an iterative simulation of an utterly unsolvable set of differential equations using single precision floats rather than double.

Well, there could be some disgruntled modders in the mix here, but in general absolutely. As a player, I certainly don't feel like KSP owes me anything.

Personally, I have picked KSP up and put it down on multiple occasions, generally picking it up again after a long hiatus whenever some significant new thing like robotics came out, and then playing it until I ran out of fun new things to do. I hadn't played KSP1 in several years when KSP2 finally dropped, and although it could be so much more, it still gave me a few hundred more hours of (mostly) fun before I got bored with it again. If there is ever a colonies update, I'll probably play that for a similar amount of time as well, but in between there are endless new things to try. Currently, I'm leaning into Factorio, and I don't expect I'll get bored with that for quite a few more hours.

If that turns out to be true, they'll have destroyed both of my two favorite computer games, and I will never, ever buy anything from them again. But in the case of Civ, I have to say I'm willing to bet my $60 to find out.

I believe we'll get news some time between this June and when the last black hole evaporates, probably later in the year when they've actually decided what to do with the KSP IP. As to what that news will be, I don't think they actually mean to abandon it, but putting my finger into the wind I suspect we will be waiting a good while before there is any update that contains new content and not just bug fixes. Still, I think they will eventually go on to create a game that has significant new content before they walk away. I agree in general terms, but it's going to be hard for me to turn my nose up at Civ VII!

I'm not measuring anybody's worth as a human being by their post count, just the value of their opinion of me in a weeks-long debate in which they have not ostensibly participated. That and my suspicion that they are in fact a ten year-old sock puppet that has been dusted off to be used by somebody who feels they need a little virtual backup. As to outranking me, I only lay claim to leadership of the Chimpanzee division! I would never challenge your clearly higher rank among the Kerbals.

Immediately jumping to conclusions? I have been reading the endless doom propaganda getting posted [snip], replete with belittlement and ridicule of any who disagree, for weeks upon weeks now, and I am tired of it. Anybody who makes utterly false statements like the one I called out above in bold allcaps with multiple exclamation points is peddling disinformation, not just misinformed, period. And I am in fact a scientist, and do care very much about the truth, although I don't really give a hoot what 95-posts-in-ten-years you thinks of me.

So you don't know what confidence intervals are? Do you know what a normal distribution is, or a T-test? [snip] ridiculing my statistical reasoning is all I can say! They arrived at that confidence interval by imputing a normal distribution on those data, including the major low outlier you guys cherry-picked, which is why it is so broad. If they had eliminated it, as they should have on methodological grounds, the distribution would have been a whole lot tighter. Again, please stop promulgating disinformation!

I understand his basic reasoning, and I think you could perhaps have marketed that as a separate title with some vague future promises of integrating it with the original, but I also think that approach (if called "KSP2") would have had just as many detractors as the current one, due to a failure to incorporate the physics simulation that made KSP1 so fun in the first place. It's actually a very tough kind of judgment call to make IMO. Now that I can totally agree on! I would have loved it if some expansion of the KSP universe had included an option to start your tech tree at the dawn of aviation rather than at the beginning of the space age.

What we have is an egregious outlier, with a reasonable hypothesis to support why it is that and so might legitimately be excluded. But even setting that aside, as you so superciliously pointed out, those numbers in the parentheses are the 95% confidence intervals, even with the distorted distribution caused by the outlier, and what PDC Wolf claimed was outside of even those. Riddle me that. They just apologized and called it a rounding error, LOL. How about you just stop promulgating disinformation?