Snark

They should name it "Orbital Construction Dock" and then abbreviate it "ODC" everywhere. <evil grin>

Yes. Really. And only about 1/4 of them got as far as the Mun. Here's an oldie-but-goodie thread that was a real eye-opener for me, a few years ago; worth a read: Moral of the story: When you're looking at some aspect of game design that seems "wrong" to you... always bear in mind that other players have very different needs and expectations. Be careful about assuming that one's own experiences are "typical". It's clear that they want to enable very large ships with much larger part counts, so I'm assuming that they'll have some reasonable story around that. Clearly, "structural strength" is still a thing that players have to address in some fashion, but I don't think it'll be too big a problem in general.

They absolutely allow building bases on non-level terrain, and specifically called that out as a feature-- i.e. "you get a spectacular view if you choose to build overhanging the lip of a crater rim, but then you need to account for terrain when building". They want people to be able to build colonies pretty much anywhere, and they know that flat/level ground is scarce on most bodies. Launchpads are definitely a thing, and obviously no one ever wants a launchpad that's not level. So I don't know exactly what their mechanism for allowing the player to build a level base will be... but I think it's safe to assume that there will be a reasonable one. I expect they're addressing this concern; just don't know exactly how, is all.

Absolutely a valid concern, but +1 to this: We specifically asked them about consoles, and it's clear that they're giving console considerably more love this time around. No guarantees about feature set or how it will work or when it will be available or that sort of thing-- there are challenges in hopping platforms. But it's clear that they're paying it attention from the get-go, and it's not being treated as a sort of "afterthought" the way it was in KSP 1. TL;DR: Don't know what the console story will actually be, exactly, but it ought to be considerably better than KSP 1.

It's at least two. "How many new solar systems will there be" was answered "multiple". So at least two, and from the way they said it I'm guessing more, but "at least two" is firm. By the way, "the single-player game is DRM-free, can be played from a copy, and requires no network connection to play" can be added to the list.

It gets a lot prettier in KSP 2, just like everywhere else. They're also aware that Dres tends not to get visited in KSP 1, so they want to give people more reasons to go there.

No worries, this forum is not about "denouncing" people. You've got a problem with the mod, you've come to the mod's thread for help figuring it out, you've posted your log files. Perfectly reasonable, and that's what people do all the time. You're posting the right info, and you've come to the right place. So I expect you'll be fine.

Yah, that's certainly a valid concern, and I share it. However, they made it very clearly explicit that they want to keep the focus of the game on building and flying rockets, and that they don't want to let other aspects distract too much from that. So their hearts appear to be in the right place, as far as I can see, so I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt until we know more about how things will work.

So, I'm reading two assumptions into this statement (and into a lot of the other debate in this thread). Those are: That they're doing this because they don't understand or don't care or are lazy or something. That they're making the wrong choice because their priorities are clearly "wrong" in some objective sense. I believe that neither of those are the case. Based on what I've seen, assumption #1 is simply flat-out wrong. It's pretty clear to me that they understand perfectly well what they're doing, and are going after it diligently and carefully. (I can totally see why #1 might look that way to folks, it's just that I've had the chance to visit Star Theory's studio and get a demo from the devs in person, and what I'm saying here is that based on the stuff I've seen, I believe it not to be the case.) As for assumption #2... that's a subjective matter, of course, so there's no one "right answer". Just, let's be careful not to conflate "someone who doesn't agree with me" with "someone who doesn't understand things as well as I do." They have their priorities, and they have good reasons for those priorities. They can't please everyone, so there are going to have to be compromises in places. And whatever any individual player's priorities might be... it's perfectly reasonable for you to have those, but you're in no position to say that yours are "better" or more "right" than someone else's. The following is going to be one of my Walls of Text™, which I understand not everyone wants to slog through, so I can summarize it thus: They really put a lot of effort into the little technical details of the stuff they're building, and the scientific underpinnings. What you're seeing is the result of deliberate choices, often for gameplay reasons. It's not due to ignorance or apathy. There are good gameplay reasons to want to have interstellar travel and other solar systems. And given the difficulties of interstellar travel in real life, it's not surprising that something somewhere has gotta give to make things more accessible and fun for players. That means they need some sort of MacGuffin, and personally I much prefer "some unrealistically high-Isp engine tech" to other choices they could have made, like wormholes or hyperspace or what-have-you. Regarding "they don't understand science" or "they're lazy" or the like From what I've seen, this is simply not the case. There are plenty of space nerds there, and they care a lot about wanting to make things as "sciencey" as they can. They take the trouble to go to places like NASA and consult with real-life space scientists. (And those scientists appear to be happy to make time to talk to them, since the scientists tend to be big KSP fans.) From chatting with them in person and seeing the stuff they were demoing to us at their studio, it's clear to me that Star Theory is really putting a lot of effort into this. I mean, way above and beyond what went into KSP 1. For example, celestial bodies: they're trying hard to make all the celestial bodies have some sort of plausible "backstory", i.e. an astronomical / geological history that explains how they got this way. Toy 1:10 scale solar system notwithstanding, they want it to make sense. To pick just one example, let's take a single celestial body-- Minmus-- and compare what I might call the "KSP 1 attitude" with the "KSP 2 attitude". KSP 1: "Ha ha it looks like it's made of mint ice cream." KSP 2: "Okay, it's got all these flats. Why? How could that happen? Well, it makes sense if they're frozen lakes, say of water. But that would sublime over time! How would you explain it not having long since been lost to space? Well, okay, suppose that it's actually geologically very young. Hey, perhaps Minmus is a captured comet and hasn't actually been around Kerbin all that long, in astronomical terms!" And so on and so forth. And then when they're doing the artwork for it, they incorporate that thinking: the flats on KSP 2's Minmus actually look like ice. Shiny, slightly-rippled-looking, clear ice. They gave us a similar "backstory" for Pol: how did it get to looking that way? The engines are the same way. They didn't just Google "futuristic propulsion", see "metallic hydrogen", get distracted by a shiny object, then arbitrarily throw together a bunch of greebles and ductwork to make something "futuristic looking". They've put time and research into it. They really, really want to know what would such an engine actually look like and behave? Yes, you can argue about whether the basic premise (metastable metallic hydrogen at normal pressures) can even happen. Maybe it can't. But even if it can't... they can use it as a MacGuffin to start from, and take it from there. And they've really spent time and effort talking to scientists and such to get a feel for "how would this thing actually look and work, if it were real". They showed us their metallic-hydrogen model "up close", and pointed to the various bits of it and what the different parts do, and clearly they had put a lot of homework into it. They weren't just making stuff up. They also showed us the engine in action... and it had a funky, weird plume. And they anticipated our reaction. "Yeah, it looks weird. But according to the people we talked to, that's actually how it would work, so that's what we modeled." I gotta say, I have a lot of respect for that. I mean, they could have just plunked down some fairly vanilla plume on the thing and be done with it... but they're actually making an effort to keep it as "real" as they can. (And no, they weren't just trying to Hollywood it up. The odd plume for that engine isn't particularly more "spectacular" than a normal plume, there's no eye-candy reason why they had to do it that way. It's just... different, is all.) So if you don't like their choice of using a "magical" propulsion system like metastable metallic hydrogen, that's fine-- of course everyone's entitled to their personal likes and dislikes (more about that in the next section, below). But please don't just assume that the KSP 2 devs are being lazy or ignorant. They're not. They're making very deliberate and carefully researched design choices. It's just that their choices may not be the same as yours, due to having different priorities. Regarding design priorities, and what's "right" or "wrong" Bear in mind that the developers of KSP 2 have to juggle a lot of different priorities, many of which may conflict with each other. There's accuracy about rocket mechanics, then there's accuracy about underlying propulsion science, then there's playability, then there's avoiding-too-much-dissonance-from-KSP1, and so on and so forth. No matter who you are (I'm speaking to the broader audience here, not specifically you, chaos_forge) and what your priorities are... other folks won't have all the same ones. For example, I come from a science background and care a lot about scientific accuracy, myself. I'd love it if they could avoid "magic" technologies. However... I care about playability even more. For example, they're going to introduce other solar systems as a feature, and I love that, because that means lots more worlds to explore and lots more design challenges to figure out. But actual real-life interstellar travel is HARD, I mean ridiculously hard, to the point that if they stuck with easily-extrapolatable "real" science, they'd either have to just eliminate interstellar travel as a thing, or else it would have deleterious effects on gameplay. There are excellent gameplay reasons for them to want to enable having multiple solar systems, and to make it so that accessing those solar systems doesn't require compromises that most players would be unwilling to make (such as taking excessively long to make the journey, or requiring excessively large ships, or other such things). So if they want interstellar travel that's fun and playable and meshes reasonably with the more "interplanetary" mechanics of KSP... something's gotta give. They need a MacGuffin if this is going to be playable. They could have put in wormholes or hyperspace or something like that, i.e. some mechanism that basically teleports you from one solar system to another. Instead, looks like they decided to go with good ol' Newtonian "accelerate towards the place you want to go, then decelerate to arrive", and then have made some engine designs that will allow that to happen. So, for example, KSP has a toy-sized solar system that's at around 1:10 scale. Squad did that to make it more playable and fun. And that may be "unrealistic"... but at least the really important things (principles of orbital mechanics and the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation) are still captured. Oberth effect is still Oberth effect, even when you're at 1:10 scale. Tsiolkovsky is still Tsiolkovsky, even if the Isp or fuel tank mass ratio is different from IRL. The actual numbers are unrealistic, but the principles (the equations behind everything, the physical laws) are modeled. And the principles are the important thing. KSP's a toy... but it's an educational toy. So, I think interstellar propulsion technologies are much the same way. If they're not going to use magical sci-fi hyperspace or wormholes or something... then to make interstellar travel playable and fun, they need something that can supply very high Isp at decent thrust levels. Something has to fill that slot. And as long as they continue to model the physical laws appropriately... I don't think the actual numbers are the really important thing. It's sort of like ion drives. KSP ion drives are at least a thousand times more powerful (in terms of thrust) than IRL ones... but they kinda had to do that, because if they actually modeled real ones, they'd take so long to work that players would lose patience and almost nobody would use them. So they made a design choice to put in something that has high enough thrust to be playable... but still is much, much less TWR than most engines in exchange for a much higher Isp. That way, it helps to educate players about the tradeoff, even if it's a "toy" one with numbers that are easier than IRL. "This is the sort of thing you have to think about when you have a whole lot of dV but very tiny thrust". Squad didn't make ion drives 1000x too powerful because they don't know how ion drives work. They did it because they wanted something like ion drives, and needed to make compromises for playability. And frankly, I think they made a pretty reasonable decision in that regard. I think metallic hydrogen is in a similar boat. They needed some futuristic propulsion technologies to bridge the gap for interstellar travel, and they wanted a variety of them, and they've chosen to put gameplay first. So the metallic hydrogen is a handy way to do that, among other things that they haven't shown us yet. Personally, as long as it's still governed by Isp and needing to make engineering decisions about tradeoffs, I'm fine with that. For myself? I like KSP as a tool for teaching "how does space travel basically work". This XKCD strip pretty much sums up what's important to me about KSP (and incidentally, is the strip that finally got me past the tipping point and convinced me to try out the game in the first place): For me personally... that's what KSP is about, right there. I love that KSP conveys the tyranny of the rocket equation and the fact that dV is hard and why multi-stage rockets are a thing and the importance of TWR and aerodynamics and what a gravity curve is and how Isp works and Oberth effect and Hohmann transfer geometry and gravitational assists and the tradeoff between TWR-versus-Isp and angular momentum and suicide burns and ballistic coefficient and all the rest. And the joy of exploration. And it'll continue conveying those things, even if it puts the label "metallic hydrogen" on something, which is why I'm fine with that. (And I don't mean to downplay the legitimate concerns of people who aren't fine with that. Just... please don't assume that your way is the "right" way. Other players have other needs.)

Making it harder. That would make the game more attractive to some, and less so to others. Not everyone wants the same thing. Case in point. At PAX West, I went into the KSP2 presentation room, and got to sit and watch while ~20 people (for whom all this stuff was new) sat through and watched it. At the beginning of the presentation, the guy with the mic asked everyone for a show of hands: "Who here has played KSP?" -> everyone "Who here has gotten to orbit?" -> about 90% of everyone "Who's landed on the Mun?" -> about 25% of everyone "Who's gone beyond the Mun to visit other planets?" -> one single hand out of ~20 people So let's remember that different people want very different things-- and best not to be dismissive of what other folks want just because it's not the same as oneself.

@DasValdez will be doing a streaming session at PAX West today, at 3PM PDT (i.e. about two hours from now).

Yes, exactly. Major makeover. But in broad outline, still looks approximately the same type of place.

It's the forum UI, it can be a little confusing. You need to click the small-font "Snark replied to a topic" displayed up top, not the big "I get to interview Star Theory" title link (which does indeed go to the OP).

I asked them point-blank "will there be life support". They hemmed and hawed a little, then said "no comment". I read this to mean that there may be something that's some kind of nod to the idea "you need to take care of your kerbals" (maybe in the colony mechanics, somewhere?), but that it maybe wouldn't be "classic" life support such as you've described here. And that would fit in with the philosophy they've been very explicit about: they don't want to alienate people who would otherwise enjoy the game, and don't want the core gameplay to be too different from KSP 1. So I'd guess that you probably don't have to worry about this one. Not a thing. We asked, and they were quite definite, they are not doing N-body physics. Based on their saying that the aero model is not too dissimilar with KSP 1, plus the philosophy thing noted above, my guess would be that you won't have to worry about this, either. This may very well be a thing. I suspect they'll have different fuel types. However, also bear in mind that they strongly want good playability, so I assume that if they go with "multiple kinds of fuel", they'll have some sort of mechanism so it's not too much of a hassle. Just my guess. I specifically asked at the interview about Mac and Linux support. The response was a carefully worded one, to the effect that "we want as many people as possible to be able to play the game, but beyond that it's no comment for now". So it was encouraging but slightly noncommittal. My read of that is that they likely strongly want Mac support but maybe they might have to delay that in some way depending on how their schedule works out, something like that. TL;DR: A valid area of concern, my guess is you'll be okay. They did confirm, definitely, that it will be DRM-free (at least for single-player), and that the game's folder tree is freely copyable and will be playable from the copy. So you should be good to go. Yep, a very valid concern. As you mention, they've made it clear that performance optimization is a major priority for them. Not only do they want to improve the perf woes that KSP players have borne for years, but also they want to enable much larger ships with much higher part counts. So we won't know for sure how good a job they've done until we get the game in our hands, but at least we know they're aiming high and working hard on it. Then you'll likely love what they're doing. They're putting a lot of effort into making planetary surfaces not just prettier, but also more procedurally varied so that no two spots on the surface look alike. They want players to want to explore, and find favorite features and spots in specific places they like. And they're designing the game to reward exploration-- you get rewarded for finding stuff. I think you should be fine there, too. They made it clear that they want the player's focus to be on designing and flying rockets, not worrying overmuch about logistics or babysitting or stuff. For example, an important new feature is that ships can accelerate when under time warp or not being flown. You can set up your ship's hour-long burn, start it, then switch to another ship to do stuff and the one you switched away from will continue to burn. That's a huge and important feature, representing a lot of development work, and it's done to save you from having to babysit those really long burns. So if they're putting that effort in, my guess is that they probably will be careful about excessive babysitting requirements elsewhere in the game, too. I suspect you're fine.

Yep. Jump to about 4:43 for the story he shared with us, runs up to about 7:40.

I especially enjoyed his short lecture, when we were standing around looking at the Apollo 11 command capsule (!!!), about the finer details of poo management that Neil Armstrong & co. had to go through. Highly diverting. I could go into details if you're curious, but the executive summary is "gosh, I'm really glad I wasn't an astronaut in the Apollo program"

None of us happened to ask them, so no, they didn't mention it.

I'd say the answer is basically "yes"... but bear in mind that I'm not a "looks like real NASA engine" purist and am the sort of person who's just happy if it "looks rockety". There's definitely a lot more detail and greebles and things-- it's not the "big plastic box" look of a lot of the stock KSP 1 engines. And they're not just arbitrarily throwing pipes and ductwork together, they're putting thought into it. They were showing us a close-up of one of the new metallic-hydrogen engines, and pointing out all the various bits on it and what those parts do. "well, it generates a ton of heat so it's got all these radiators here, and this is the primary magnetic coil for focusing the plasma stream there," etc. I may be misquoting them so please don't jump all over them if I've got this example wrong, I'm just trying to give a feel for the general level of thoughtfulness that they're putting into it. Yeah, me too, friend. This is basically what happens when you put a total KSP fanboi in charge of the design for KSP2. Nate Simpson is our kinda people. From this article: And he's still like that. It's totally obvious if you spend even five minutes talking with him face to face. He adores this game and is super excited to be working on the sequel. And he really cares about the players because he is one.

Oh, they're definitely doing this. Improving and optimizing performance is a high priority item for them, and they're putting tons of work into it. Quite aside from wanting to address the performance complaints of the original, they also want to enable people to build much bigger ships with much higher part counts.

Oh, they definitely have customizable colors. That's real. As LGG said, the cinematic was put together by an artist and isn't actual gameplay... but everything in the cinematic is using actual game art assets. That's really what things look like (at least so far), and yes, they can have those colors. My understanding is that pretty much every part will allow you to pick a primary and secondary color, so you can really go to town on your color schemes.

Not much. It was incredibly busy and crowded, which is seriously not my scene. I'm an extreme introvert and am uncomfortable in crowded / noisy situations, so just being in the building was "burning through my mana bar" at a fair clip. I mean, I liked it, but it was exhausting (glad I have the long weekend to recuperate). So I wandered around a bit and glanced briefly at this and that, but that was about it. I headed home just a couple hours after finishing the interview. One thing I did do was go to a panel discussion hosted by Das Valdez, which included Scott Manley on the panel, talking about use of real science in video games. That was interesting, and also in a nice big quiet room so it was a blessed respite from the hurly-burly of the convention center.

Let's be very clear here, "old models and just new textures" is very definitely not what they're doing. These are new models. Everything's being re-done from scratch. That said, they want players who are familiar with KSP 1 to still be able to recognize the parts-- the stock parts are mostly all still there, and Star Theory doesn't want people to get too disoriented with newness-for-the-sake-of-newness. So for the stock parts that they're carrying forward to KSP2, they've deliberately made the models recognizably similar to the KSP 1 versions... just a whole lot prettier and with a new style, is all. They showed us pics of their redone LV-N, and Swivel, and Reliant, and Terrier, and Poodle. They were all recognizably themselves... but they were just as clearly brand-new models with plenty of additional physical detail. Here's a funny story about the "old Poodle" (they were a bit sheepish about that): They've been working on this game for a long time. No word on exactly how long, but one guy when he was introducing himself to us said "I haven't been on the project long, only about a year", which means it's been secretly under development for considerably more than a year now-- i.e. since long before the 1.6 update that changed the Poodle's design in KSP 1. So apparently what happened with the Poodle was, somehow the fact that Squad was planning to re-do the Poodle for KSP 1.6 got lost in the shuffle and didn't get communicated to them. So when they were re-doing all these models from scratch, and designing them to somewhat follow the general lines of their predecessors... they based their re-done, fancy, pretty Poodle on the original Poodle model before the 1.6 update. So that's what's going on there. No word on what the Poodle will actually look like by the time they ship, but that's the story of the images you've seen thus far.

I asked them this, point blank, at the session at Star Theory the other day. The answer was kinda noncommittal and mostly "no comment". They didn't say "yes"... but they didn't exactly say "no", either. So my read on that is that there's a good chance there may be something related to that, but that it's likely to be limited and/or they haven't fully made up their minds yet. My take on it, based on what I've seen and heard, is that they're very probably not going to make something like MKS. They're very explicit that they want the game to be about designing and flying rockets. They'll add a bit of depth with colonies, but they're very clearly focused on their priorities and they don't want to take the players focus away from that. "We're not building Kerbal Cities: Skylines" was one relevant quote. I've played MKS before, and it's an impressive tour de force, and I can see why some folks would like it a lot. But it wasn't my personal cup of tea because it took much of the game's focus away from designing and flying rockets and made it much more about logistics. And that's exactly what Star Theory has said they don't want to do. So although they haven't actually provided much detail about how colony mechanics will work, my expectation is that it will deliberately not be super "deep" that way.

I'm local. Enjoyed the visit anyway, had never been to PAX before, and of course it was awesome meeting the Star Theory folks. Holy smokes, that's a whole lotta nerds. Thanks, and yes. Yes it was. Yesterday @5thHorseman observed that I was posting when it wasn't even 3AM here yet, and I was thinking "dude, suppose they told you that you get to have a whole half hour, all to yourself, to quiz the creative director for KSP2 with anything you want... and then you ask the community for input and they basically hug you to death... would you be able to sleep?!"' I would guess almost certainly not. They've made it pretty clear that they really don't want to discombobulate new users and people who are used to KSP 1, so they want the overall control feeling of ships to feel pretty much the same. Saturating reaction wheels (or making them more realistic and not so overpowered) would be a pretty major change to controlling rockets (not to mention making them significantly harder). Yah, me too. It means they're seriously re-thinking and re-designing "career", but their lips are completely sealed for the time being about the details. From the various hints they've dropped, though, it's clear that whatever it is, in broad outlines it's gonna be "you explore more to get more rewards so you can explore more", so in that regard it will be not unlike KSP 1. Well, yes, there's still a reason to pump fuel (or whatever) around. I just like that the "connecting things together on the surface" problem is finally being addressed in stock. That always felt like a "hole" to me. Even in the pre-alpha state it's at now, it's frickin' gorgeous. Lots more detail, really nice scatters (that are denser and collidable, so "Neil Armstrong hunting around for a safe spot to land" is a thing), enough procedural variety so that landing in two different spots feels different. We weren't allowed to take pictures or record videos while we were at their studio, but they showed us a lot of this and it's really impressive. Be careful not to read too much into this. Remember, I wasn't interviewing the whole company, nor was I interviewing someone who had tons of time to prepare for it. I was interviewing one guy, who's undoubtedly frazzled out of his mind right now because they're taking the frantically busy schedule of a game-company-in-dev-mode and adding on the turbulent maelstrom that is PAX, who's been in back-to-back interviews and things for days-- since they finally just announced KSP 2 so recently, and all the media has been hammering on his door, and yesterday he had back-to-back interviews not just with me but with other streamers like Das Valdez and such. (Try googling "nate simpson kerbal" and see how many hits come up with interviews and things, bearing in mind that this is all just in the last couple of weeks.) Just because he didn't have something right off the top of his head doesn't say (to me) "this is concerning that 'they' don't know X". I'm inclined to cut him just a little bit of slack, there. He did indeed. But look, guys, they've got a lot on their plate, and they're human. It's easy to miss a spot here and there. For myself, I don't worry about the fact that not everyone is a walking encyclopedia-- I mean, heck, I learned quite a bit just hanging around Scott, and I'm not exactly uninformed myself. Rather, I'm stoked that they're clearly highly motivated to get it right, and when told something they didn't know, they don't blow it off: they eagerly ask questions and write stuff down. They're receptive and motivated. These are the right sort of folks to be working on this project, as far as I'm concerned.

Kerbals in general get a lot more fun and "relevant" when they're in IVA. They're more "engaged" with the actual situation they're in. Three specific ways I've seen Star Theory improving on this: Cockpit control interaction. When you throttle up, Jeb grabs the throttle lever and adjusts it, that sort of thing. They look a lot more like they're actually flying the ship, now. G-force interactions. When you make hard lateral turns, the kerbals get thrown sideways in their seats. When the G forces pile on, they get kinda squashed. More depth to emotes. More emotes, and the emotes feel more relevant to the situation. For example, when things are going badly, they've got like three levels of escalating panic (from a dismayed "uh oh" face, to a frantic "okay okay I can still fix this" while they desperately start mashing buttons, to full-fledged freak-out (eyes bug out, arms flailing around, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"). When they pass out, they don't just cut-to-static, you actually see them "relate" (eyes roll up, cheeks bulge out momentarily like they're gonna barf, then they conk out and head keels over). It's adorable without being annoying (to me, anyway). They really put a lot of love into this.