Hanuman

I don’t play with any mods in KSP2 yet. I won’t really even consider it for a long time yet. I don’t want to give the devs the excuse to be lazy and defer to just using mods as an answer, if I’m just going to be up front about it. The game is under development and in construction. I don’t want to end up missing something awesome or important from stock, that should be there. To me, the game isn’t really ready for funsies playing yet. I mean, one of my core takes in this thread is that the tech tree is whack. I don’t accept just going “oh well, mod it” as an answer. It’s lazy. Fix the issues, instead. Even if the intention is to leave a lot to modders after, the base game should still be as made to be as good as can be.

I’ll have to give it to you and concede that funds and Career would work as toggle options if that comes along with the expectation of randomly generated or repeatable mission offerings. You’ll need a non invasive way of generating income. I think your prefab craft works better as you taking control over the flight for Different Space Program 2 who are experiencing Comms issues. Then the next logical step is a followup optional mission to rescue said crew at the landing site of the first. Use Duna and rip off (pay tribute to) The Martian. A clip of a Kerbal farming snacks in vending machines is mandatory. Better than a Jeb dream sequence I think. I do agree with you completely that there should be no wrong way to play this. One of if not THE single most magical thing about the first game is how it manages to do exactly that. No matter the specific parts that people enjoyed it welcomed everyone to jump in at their own ability level and have at it.

They’re not disparate, but they exist at odds with one another. One entire game mode exists as a subset of the other. So for some people Science won’t be enough complexity and challenge, and others will think of Career as too much. Toggle options will be great, but then we’re still looking at a tech tree full of logic problems and looking like the total method for sorting is just size, so you got people “looking for a challenge” calling big fuel tanks overpowered with a straight face because they’re T4, while also ignoring SRBs completely because why not just slap 5 liquid engines on and keep throttle control.

Well, with Multiplayer on the list, I get it for the internet connection, and I try to be hopeful for what that could inspire. A much busier Mission Control interface with their curated missions, plus a community section for forum challenge and community voted missions, and section of random suggestions for missions you can pick up as both a nod to the first game and to keep that added replay value mechanic alive. All of that would be fantastic. Where I can’t help but feel like it wanders astray is in trying to distill two great game modes that exist at odds with one another into a single game mode, you’re just gonna end up with something worse. I don’t just want them to remake the first game with better graphics, please don’t mistake me. I would like to see this game be and do more, and I don’t think that it has to nor should it trade away the ways that made it special in order to become a one shot “You did it, you beat the KSP2 missons, time to uninstall it and play something else.” cash grab.

I thank you guys for your kind replies. I’ve been sitting and trying to think about it for a bit, and I really hope they aren’t doing away with career mode, with funding and losing the game actually possible. Science mode worked as a game mode because it was a non threatening Easy Mode on top of sandbox for players who wanted to do more than build things. It lacked any kind of real stakes in your choices though because that’s where Career mode came in to play. You didn’t just have to explore enough to unlock that giant fuel tank you had to pay cash for each one of them you flung into space along with all the fuel inside. I did a Class E asteroid redirect in my career, and put it into 300k Kerbin orbit to use as a fuel depot. That wasn’t exactly cheap to pull off. But it was awesome. Sandbox was for -building-. I would really enjoy it if people stopped suggesting this to others like they’re in the wrong mode. You could pop into sandbox and build freely using all parts. You could play with how well some parts might help you, or build your awesome pie in the sky design, all gas no brakes. Sure, you could go places. But as far as doing things….. Science Mode became the go to mode for learning how to fly, honestly. I mean that in all ways of exploring, and more of in the convention of walk, run, fly. You couldn’t run experiments in Sandbox, so you had something to do once you got to a place. So, you had to learn how to get places so you could do the thing. That’s also why it worked as a great mode for kids. A very basic push: Explore and you can build more things to explore with. But it didn’t have missions, because missions mostly paid in funding, and Science mode had no use for that. Career is for when you can fly and want a challenge. Because your mission boondoggles just hit different when you gotta pay to try wacky ideas and they don’t work out. I really enjoyed Career mode, and I hope it’s not being dumped. Especially not for this system as it sits. I don’t think this is better than Career was. Missions make it better as a gaming experience than the old Science Mode was, but it simply is not a better challenge than Career. I mean in this mode the hardest part of having deep space fission reactors is their weight. Wanna shoot 20 of em into the sun? Hope you brought enough fuel, but otherwise go nuts. No consequence. Who cares? They’re free now. We took half the scientists off that advanced “cargo ramp” project thingy since we can’t understand it and invented deep space fission reactors instead and can make them endlessly.

Yup, but the part that allows your probes to gather samples for returns is buried at the end of T2 making it a reward for going far enough, rather than a tool to allow guys that like to build probes science gathering parity. So, why? I don’t see the sense of it, and it actually seems to (after a point) discourage people from experimenting with unlocks when they aren’t quite certain whether or not their choice is going to hold much value to them? Which, again seems counter intuitive to what you want to see out of this game mode. It’s the Easy game mode for kids where they can’t lose. Should be pretty easy for them to be unlocking parts to play with.

You sound like you’re already plenty gud to me, scrub. I kinda feel like even performing flyby transits of multiple system bodies should qualify a player as being able to build missions with all the parts they want. What I would like to see is a tech tree that is built with a bit more curation and thought. Spaceplane frames aren’t overpowered, and right now there’s absolutely nothing that differentiates the science cost other than node placement. Maybe price nodes according to what they contain and what they do rather than just size and how far down the tree it is. That way we wouldn’t see things like 2300 science for a shielded docking port and 2900 science for a deep space fission reactor and then 6000 for a cargo ramp. One of these things are not like the other two. I also don’t think it’s super cool to put the rover arm experiment at the end of T2 instead of the beginning. Players can be inspired to go and do bigger without allowing these kinds of roadblocks. Even if the only budging that’s given is allowing biome science to be repeatable so that players CAN farm up the parts they want to build with is preferable to this. It’s still not great, but it would at least stop that dead end from appearing for people. Dead Ends and KSP do not mix. Everything, Everywhere, Blowing Up All at Once means that you’re just getting started. Also it won a couple Oscars I think.

Yeah, I get it. I didn’t want to cheat it in, or just push through though. Instead I started poking around to see just how much Science was gonna be available, and then when I saw it like this I came and started reading posts, wondering if I was the only one who felt this was off from what I was wanting to see. Playing with just regular science returns, I wanted to see the game the way they intended it, and for probe and spaceplane guys, yikes. I’m all for devs wanting to help players explore every inch of the game available to us, and I’m liking the missions so far. I just think there’s some room for improvement and that experimentation and diversity of how people explore and play should be fiercely protected. I think it’s the secret to what made KSP unique. I’d like to see mission improvements too, such as online players logged in with an account (which will likely also occur with multiplayer) also having the weekly forum challenges pop up as mission offerings, and a section for a randomized side mission offering like the first game would be ideal and tick some replay ability and community boxes. Also, very much looking forward to a launch window planner myself. Would be cool to see it as part of a better Trip Planner in the VAB. i’m thinking of a delta v calculator that would work more like a flowchart. Showing the possible translations as clickable options added to a stack, while keeping a running tabulation at the bottom. There could then be the next launch window shown for the first target SOI chosen in the calculator. Also would really like to see rotor craft return and the programmable parts from the KSP1 DLC, as well as more done with aquatic and even airship parts. A functional ballast tank part could get us both airships and submarines. We do have a boat dock after all, now.

From that last post it kinda sounds like you were playing the first game in Science mode but not much time in Career. The difference between the two? Missions. In your own narrative, you played the game how you enjoyed it, and had no reason at all to go interplanetary. That sounds like you didn’t have missions enabled to have any suggested, and thus weren’t playing in Career mode. Is that what happened? If you were playing in Career and had missions pointing you towards interplanetary objectives that you wholly ignored, then weren’t you simply playing the way you wanted? In one of the other tech tree threads there’s a guy talking about having soft locked himself in the tech tree in the first game, and having done so again in this one. As you wrote, it IS possible in the first game to unlock practically the entire tech tree in the first game before going interplanetary. What you left out is that you cannot do that by accident. You have to purposely farm those biomes in order to do it. And still, people are talking about having soft locked themselves. Here in KSP2 though we actually have missons in Science mode, which I feel like is a positive inclusion for the exact reason that you’re stating. I have a lingering doubt that you would have never have left Kerbin SOI in the first game if there were a mission sitting there waiting and blinking saying “Go to Duna.”. I think you would have gone to check the mission off your list and to see why. Now, since you seem to keep trying to imagine my motive, please allow me to help. I’m trying to think to include as many players that I can. To include people with different playstyles all finding their own legs. To not make this a game for thousand hour players or hundred hour players or zero hour players, but as many people as can be hooked by the imagination of flight and space flight and exploration as we can get. I’m trying my best to think about just logical consequences of what I am seeing. And what I am seeing is that they think that MK3 airframe parts are more overpowered than SWERV engines. So for the guys that want to build shuttles, well buckle up and run all over the Kerbol system so you too can access this 40 year old design. That there is no way for a player that soft locks themself on this tree to easily dig themselves free and continue their progress at their pace. Lastly, and I’m just gonna say it, we still have career mode to look forward to, where we can still see game difficulties get really tuned. This is still just Science mode, and if anything it should be pretty easy to unlock the tech tree in this game mode because the largest probable audience for this particular game mode will be children.

Man, no offense and I’m not trying to claim to be the oldest or the greatest at anything, but I’ve been playing KSP since the 0.18 demo before there was science to gather, and I’ve got about a thousand hours or so in the first game. I understand the game modes perfectly well. I’m only telling you this because you’re jumping to the conclusion in that I must be playing in the wrong game mode or having some skill deficit because I’m not having the same experience as you. Further, that bad conclusion is seeming to color the rest of your reply as well. It is perhaps most telling, that in a game mode you can’t lose, can save games, and revert flights you’re thinking that tech unlocks are the challenge portion of the game instead of the actual science and maneuvering skill needed to simply do things. It would seem that would again, be best served by their mission system down to and including using part restrictions in order to complete said missions, and later on with using funding and Career. Using your own argument that later tier parts change the fundamental gameplay to be trivial to function outside of Kerbin SOI how exactly is it that you also argue that access to those parts in KSP1 make it so players don’t leave Kerbin SOI? It’s too easy so they don’t do it? Again, I’m glad you had a positive experience, but for every you that sees encouragement to leave, how many players are just discouraged instead? Why accept that?

They’re locked because they cost thousands and thousands of points of science and thanks to the scaling that they’re using to differentiate tiers there doesn’t exist enough science to be able to pick and choose and experiment with different pathways through this tech tree. They have inadvertently created a “right” way to play (send kerbals not probes + bring back data + further is more) and if that’s the intention I neither think that is a good idea nor in keeping with the spirit of the game. I myself like using a fair amount of mk2 and mk3 spaceplane parts. But that’s only a single facet of the issue, because as I have written this system penalizes experimenting with unlocking things without it being necessary to complete your next mission until you’re far enough on their breadcrumb trail to pay for it. There looks to be roughly 8-9,000 total science spread across Kerbin, the Mun, and Minmus. A player will be able to invest and experiment in only so many ways before they hit a wall. Roughly 1/4 of your total science available will be used just on getting access to T3 parts. So as it is, here’s a couple of interesting road markers going down this tech tree: For spaceplane parts: 1,860 science for the Mk1 spaceplane airframe and parts 2260 if you include Mk0. 8,760 science for Mk2 in T2 and 3 38,100 science for Mk3 in T3 and 4. but more generally: 760 science before the second possible experiment unlock. 2,380 science in required unlocks to access T3 4600 science before a second experiment unlock that doesn’t require a specific biome 10,600 science in required unlocks to access T4 28,980 science before you get an aquatic experiment unlocked. Again, there’s not enough science spread across all of Kerbin, the Mun, and Minmus to get anything in T4, including the science experiment for testing the largest biome on the planet, or to learn to build a space truck. Missons already exist as a means to push a player to go to a specific place or to push bigger and further. That isn’t the job of the tech tree. As it stands there are no early less productive or efficient versions of late game experiments, Science returns on a revisit go to zero. Multiple experiments that could have been used to overlap and revisit biomes with new experiments were removed in favor of the one click box tick arcade game solution. Cost scaling introduces logical problems like needing to go to Duna before you can build a jumbo jet. That isn’t a skill test. It’s an oversight. I’m glad that it provoked a positive response from you, but you are not everyone and experimentation and the narrative creation that comes from those successes and failures are a key component to what makes KSP so personalized and special to players. Penalizing experimentation with part unlocks is a mistake. I do realize that if I would simply give in and play the game the way the devs wanted me to, it would all magically work. But that’s not the point of a beta test and feedback, and whether or not some people want to admit it, this IS a non-release beta. I’ll even go so far as to say that’s also not the kind of quality I want to see out of KSP science, so I came and gave my two cents. Judging from the amount of posting I’m seeing on the subject I don’t think I’m the only one that feels this system is off target from what’s desired.

I didn’t say that it was too hard. I said that the parts I enjoy using to build craft for interplanetary missions are locked until I complete interplanetary missions, and that was not fun, which led me to being bored and finding other things to do with my time instead. That isn’t an issue with difficulty or complexity. There are no loss conditions and players can revert mission flights. It’s a systemic issue that they’ve created, whether it’s through the streamlining and removal of early experiments, the lack of repeatable visits to ‘mine’ for more, or the escalating tier costs or the confluence of all of it. The missions already exist to walk the player along a path that creates a story that the devs want to tell. It does not need to be reflected in unlocking tech parts as well, and I’m arguing that it actually shouldn’t be. My argument is that the science and R&D system should allow a progression of part unlocks that have more tolerance for varied playstyles. As I’ve written before, a hundred hours creating missions and craft exploring all parts of Kerbin is currently worth a fraction of a 30 minute transit and return from Duna, and that is just goofy. It just seems like that is against the spirit of the game to me. Like it’s going from “What did you do in KSP today?” to “What boxes did you tick off today?” or “How did you complete the mission we gave you?”. By pairing their story path with their technology path they’re going to make dead ends for players who wander off. And not penalizing that behavior is one of the things that has always made KSP special, at least to me.

I think trying to balance and game-ify science is actual core of the entire problem. Even in KSP1 Science wasn’t intended as anything that required much of any kind of “balance”. Because it was never intended to be a game mode at all. It was added to sandbox to show it off on the way to career mode and making a full game with an actual loss of game possible. There were multiple avenues to unlocking parts because there were simply so many different things to explore, and how you got there having fun doing stuff you wanted to do became part of just your own gameplay experience. Now they want a science progression enforcing bigger and further missions just to unlock parts and quite frankly that’s a mistake. Science mode should be barely a step above sandbox in that there is no wrong way to play, you can’t lose, and you shouldn’t be able to pigeonhole yourself into there not being enough science to gather to unlock parts that you actually want to play and build with. Yes, there should be part progression and unlocking, and I haven’t any issue with Science being measured by points. But it should be actually really easy to unlock things by the amount of choices of exploration possible. I unlocked all of T1, almost all of T2, and just starting on T3 and now there’s a chunk of parts that I like to use when building interplanetary missions that are locked… until I do interplanetary missions. So I just quit playing. There’s nowhere near enough science doing the stuff I enjoy doing to unlock the parts I want to use to do the stuff the developers feel like I should be doing with my time instead. So I don’t play it and spend time elsewhere rather than be told by some dev I’m playing KSP wrong. Science mode was a happy accidental discovery of a game mode and basically just sandbox with extra steps. Trying to inject difficulty and introducing the scaling technology costs to enforce bigger and bigger mission scopes to further and further biomes, both misses the point of science mode and the forest for the trees. All of that and without even touching on any of the awesome ideas for how science could be used instead.

The issue that I am seeing is that with these “tiers” of science, it gets goofy and in a hurry. Are there enough biomes on the Mun and Minmus to support the purchase anything in tier 3? Or even just fully fill in Tier 2? Is it possible using every available biome on Kerbin itself to even make it to unlock a Tier 3 science experiment, so you can at least revisit biomes? Why? What about players that enjoy making atmospheric craft more than rockets? Science should not work that way. Science is not a dang quest reward, and thinking of and implementing it like that is a mistake. You gather science by exploring the universe around you, not by completing your curated mission string. Use your missions to push and test player abilities and skills sure, but science should not be following the same progression. A player that has spent hundreds of hours in game charting and exploring every inch of Kerbin and the Mun shouldn’t be that far behind a different player that went to Duna in a tin can in 5 hours science wise. Mission wise? Sure, of course. Tell your game story there, but not in R&D. Otherwise you get something silly, like there not being enough science on your entire home planet to learn to build a truck.

I disagree vehemently. I prefer the procedural contracts, myself. Yes, tourist contracts are massively exploitable. But not because of error. But because this isn't exactly a hard game in that fashion. In the way that you're looking for, it's only as hard as you make it on yourself which is kind of the entire point. The procedural contracts would come up with situations that no handwritten contracts ever will, with lots of them being kinda dumb and we can get annoyed at wading through the bad ones. That doesn't make the idea bad. I'd prefer the random than having my replay variability stripped out by using 100% handcrafted missions. Imagine how boring THAT would be the 80th time through the exact same thing in the exact same order. I hope that they do a version of the classic career mode, with funds and science, and I don't feel like that's too much to ask for. These were to me, the boring parts distilled down into two numbers of relative ease to conceptualize. I never used resource mods, I never wanted to micromanage and deal with any of that stuff. If KSP1 required resources and life support, I probably would've had 20 hours in it, instead of a thousand. So distilling that stuff all down into two numbers leaving me free to spend hours and hours on the stuff I liked, was a large part of the appeal for me. I'm not saying they shouldn't do whatever they're doing, only that I can hope that there's a way to play that I personally enjoy, rather than "just play in sandbox" as an answer. I suppose time will tell.

Your break in logic is that you are trying to apply it in all directions at once, and not thinking about the context. All you have to do to fix it is allow for more context, like adding in the phrase "the things they want." Watching the films they want, streaming what they want, playing whatever games the person wants. In your exact examples, it would mean the game with the most grinding and addictive mechanics would be the one with the most value for the people that wanted to play that kind of game. If I want to play a different kind of game, obviously your grinding mechanics don't work to make it the best for me for any value. But if you're playing a game you want to play, then the whole calculation starts to make more sense. It's all Entertainment time spent, but you get to be the one still to rate whether it was wisely or unwisely spent. A two hour movie that cost $10, is like 8 cents per minute. Is the movie good or not? You decide. 10 hours spent inside a $50 game, is the exact same amount of money, 8 cents per minute of those 10 hours. And yes, if you spend 500 hours in some goofy mobile game that you paid $2.99 for, then you got a pretty fair bargain to keep you entertained during those otherwise boring 500 hours. It would stand king amongst the goofy mobile games, and then not be relevant at all when I'm talking about entertainment in a different context, like a full PC game, or even other kinds of entertainment.

Oh hey.... Is the best launch profile still straight up until 30k, then tip over 90 degrees? And if 3 intakes are good what happens if I make one with 873 of them?? Is it 870 gooder? These landing legs look nothing like the ones on the title screen! What happened to them?!? I think I'll show basically any patience at all, and at least see how they react to the first real full day of playtesting. Heck, I might even give them TWO days before I make any kind of end of the road proclamations. I'm feeling sassy.

Are you disappointed, or are you jumping the gun, or both? Been in Early Access for 5.5 hours. A grand total of 5.5 hours. Not even a single work day, and people are acting like it's been a month. Calm down, they haven't even made it to LUNCH. My take is those same people probably shouldn't have been here this early. For "loving" something so much, people sure seem to be ready to claim the sky is falling, and everything is a sign of the worst. I'll be lucky if nothing ever "loves" me that much.

I mean, this is a little silly, and you understand that right? You don't have 900 hours playing this game. You have 0 hours. We all do. This is an optional Early Access release program. Optional. You are not required to playtest Early Access, nor is anything at all final. Oddly enough, I'm playing on a 1050 Ti, with my resolution turned down, and while I have encountered a few bugs, nothing like you described and was in orbit in no time. It took you five minutes to look at the lower right corner of your screen? This entire sentence is VERY telling, because of course the interface isn't the same as KSP 1, it's a different piece of software. Took me all of 40 seconds to mouse over and figure out the layout. Yes, it is very plain as daylight that the game isn't close to release. That is literally why the EARLY ACCESS branding and program even exists. No, it is not a skipped beta test, it is an open and obvious beta test, with invitations to join in for sale. Stating the obvious while intending for it to be an insult may not be feedback that you think it is.

I'm excited to enjoy every minute, to see what's changed and what's the same, but better. To find out what's new, and see it all for myself. I'm excited to do what this game has been about since inception, and the greatest strength of our species. I'm excited to explore.

The way they added the older card, but specified a card that also has 6 GB of VRAM makes me wonder if that's the actual requirement. I mean, I would hope that it's not going to require 6 GB of GPU to start up, but the thought won't go away.

You and I have the same GPU, though I've had it for almost 3 years now. I was going to upgrade, and was waiting for GPU prices to return to sanity.... still waiting... maybe if crypto gets regulated. I'm going to at least try it at release to see what happens, as I have to know. The first good news I have for you, is that if a new card ends up requiring the extra power it's really only your power supply you're changing in addition. The bad news is... except maybe in some cases where Dell especially, but others use a proprietary case with their own power supplies so it may not be a simple swap. Don't know what you have. If I get it, and it won't even start up because of my 1050Ti, then that makes this a $400 game. That's what the real worry is, I think. If I get it, and it runs like crap, I'll live with it.

Great, make the old monkey reset his forum password again. This is slightly distressing to me, only because it seems that people aren't seeing the forest for the trees. I think all it takes to fix this for everyone involved is probably nothing more than a couple very honest, very down to earth sentences. I think all it takes is one official person to say: The actual answer for system requirements for this game is that we don't know what they are yet. It's too early for that honestly, all we really know is what we have here on hand that will run the thing right now. So here's those specs. We'll do all we can to make sure this plays on as many machines as possible, and how this game runs on as many different machines as possible is some of the first really valuable information we get from Early Access. So then it becomes not just does it run, but how well can we fix it to MAKE it run too. But anyway, as quick as we can get the info from all the new machines and how well they run it, we'll get the System Requirements updated. In short, this is simply the very first task everyone is helping us find the answer for by joining Early Access. It's almost certainly, the plain and simple truth.

Let's assume that is the case. Then it'd be incumbent on them to provide a replacement later on at that size that can handle re-entry temps to keep build possibilities open, as that is the sole size 0 intake that exists in the game. That's the real point of the "why". If it's not just an "oopsie, we'll revert that" then it's actually exposing a greater flaw in logic than this basic temperature problem. That being in a game that the core gameplay is to explore possibility, those are being arbitrarily removed. That has never been the spirit of the game I've known these many years. Which is basically why I came out of the woodwork after years and years and had to reset my forum password.

Might I ask why the temperature limit of the Small Circular Intake was lowered to 1200? That puts it in the same category as science experiments and without any size 0 replacement later in the tech tree. Was this in error? If so, can it be corrected? It has broken several of my designs that used this intake that can no longer survive re-entry even when closed. I'm aware that I can edit the part myself, but I'm as much interested in the "why" as I am in the number itself.