Snark

By "performance" do you mean rocketry performance, like Isp and thrust and what-not? Or do you mean PC performance, as in "how many parts can I add before my framerate starts to drop"? If you're asking the former (craft behavior), I think the answer is "probably yes". My impression from talking to them today is that they really don't want to discombobulate or confuse people who are already used to KSP, so for example they're keeping pretty much all the stock parts (though giving them a total cosmetic makeover, they're gorgeous), and the kerbal solar system has all the same planets at the same sizes and locations with the same gravity and so forth. So I'd guess that they'll probably keep pretty much the same stats for the parts. If you're asking the latter (PC performance, framerate, etc.), then that should get a lot better. They're putting tons of effort into optimizing the performance, and they explicitly said they want to support craft with considerably higher part counts. "Get it to run fast" is being baked into it from the ground up, that was a top priority from the beginning. Well, I enjoyed being there. (We decided we should go out for Mexican in honor of Squad, so I took 'em to my favorite Mexican place. Awesome duck burritos. Yes, you heard that right. Mmmmmm.) I think the answer will probably end up being the same as for KSP 1, based on what I've heard thus far. But it may not have occurred to them to address this, so I'll try to ask. Probably not going to get any more numeric specifics than we have now-- they were kinda tight with details about that, I think it's still very much a work in progress. They will not be doing N-body, that's definitive. My impression is that it'll basically be patched conics, with some sort of special allowance for the binary thing. Good one, I'll try to ask.

By the way, folks. We get to have another crack at Star Theory tomorrow-- I myself have a half-hour slot in the early afternoon to interview them. So I'd like to solicit questions folks would like me to ask. If you've got questions you'd like me to ask them, I started a thread over here:

[UPDATE, morning of Friday 8/30: Folks, I've now got 49 questions to ask in 30 minutes, I think I'm about out of space. So I probably won't be able to add any more questions now, gonna call this "closed". Feel free to post your questions if you have them, but I probably won't get to further questions (beyond the ones listed here) in today's interview. Will post more after the interview, with answers.] [UPDATE 2, afternoon of Friday 8/30: OK, all done with the interview, got through all the questions! Answers to be posted Soon™.] [UPDATE 3, evening of Friday 8/30: Answers posted! See bottom of this post for direct link to results.] So, as some of you may have heard, a group of us got to spend a day with Star Theory yesterday, and talk to the devs, designers, producers, etc. Details here. Great day, got to see lots of cool stuff, had a lot of questions answered. However, the time was finite, and there's still plenty left to ask. And... we get to interview them at PAX West tomorrow! So, tomorrow afternoon Seattle time (i.e. a bit over 24 hours from now), I'm going to have 30 minutes, myself, to sit down with Star Theory and ask them anything I want. I view myself as kind of an "ambassador for the forums", so I'd like to represent you guys and, as much as possible, ask the things you'd like to know. So... do you have any questions you'd like to ask Star Theory about KSP2? Let me know! (Before the morning of Friday, August 30, Seattle time.) I'll ask as many of them as I can, and I'll post the results here sometime afterwards, as soon as practical. Here's your chance, folks. Let 'er rip. Some caveats: I make no guarantees that I will actually ask your particular question. I'll do my best, but please bear in mind that I have only 30 minutes, and I do have quite a few questions of my own to ask, and some questions may have detailed answers. And I don't know how many of you may submit questions here. There's no guarantee that a particular question I do ask, will get an answer. There's plenty of stuff that they either don't know yet or are not yet at liberty to discuss, so an answer may come back as "no comment" or something like that. I reserve the right to pick which questions to ask. I'm not making promises, and like I said, I do have my own questions and I'm gonna be asking those. But I'll do my best for you guys. You're kinda like family at this point. My requests / recommendations to you: Best questions are ones with short answers. Remember, time's short, and there are lots of questions. The shorter your question is to ask and answer, the easier it is for me to slip it in with the rest. For example, "Will you do X?" is a much easier question than "Explain how the design for X will work". "No comment" means "no comment". There are some questions that have already been publicly asked, and already answered with "no comment". If they've already said that, then asking them a second time won't change the answer and just wastes time. So no point in asking those. See spoiler below. Questions that have already been asked & answered (See spoiler for full content, but one biggie: no information about multi-player is available yet, so don't bother asking.) Questions that I'll try to ask, time permitting (in some cases I've paraphrased your original question, my apologies) [UPDATE: Answers to the questions! See the post linked below for all the questions and answers from the interview.]

There are people (and companies) in any industry who are dishonest. I'm not passing judgment on anyone outside of yesterday's meeting here, just remember that "different people are different". So I'm not commenting on anyone else, just saying that I was there in the room. I could see the body language. And I've been swimming with corporate sharks in the software biz for a quarter-century. I'm familiar with the types. There are the technical types, who are-- pretty much universally-- direct and straightforward and honest because they literally don't know how to be any other way. And there are corporate types who have to spout a corporate line that may or may not be tied to reality. There are the more open-and-honest type of situations, and then there are the weaselly ones, and I have a reasonable amount of experience of spotting the danger signs and "tells" when there's a certain amount of repurposed bovine excrement flowing. And I'll say that my radar wasn't picking up danger signals yesterday. They were straight shooters. A hallmark of weaseling is excessive surety and having bold definitive answers for everything-- they didn't do that. There were tons of questions that they couldn't or wouldn't answer, and they weren't the least bit shy about that. So based on my experience in the industry and with these types of people, I'm saying I find their statements credible. You can draw your own conclusions about that, of course.

Hi folks, I can comment on this, since I was also attending the event yesterday. Thanks to @GoldForest for posting here; I can confirm the bullet points in the quote above. Regarding this: That was me. I was the one who asked those questions. Among those of us who were invited yesterday, I'm probably the person most familiar with the "pulse" of the forums-- so I figured I ought to try to "represent" you guys and ask them questions that I know have been eating at a lot of you, because I figured you'd appreciate some straight answers. So I asked them, point blank, very explicitly, no wiggle room, about these two points. (I also asked "will there be any requirement for a network connection or 'logging in' when playing single-player", to which the answer was a definite and unequivocal "no".) I stressed how concerned the community is about this, especially in light of what's been done with some other T2 titles. And they were quite definite about these points, and I'm strongly inclined to believe them (my rationale below). I totally understand your concerns (and those of plenty of other forum users who have expressed this same worry). It's a legitimate concern. That's why I made a point of asking it very explicitly, and also of paying close attention to not just what they answered, but also how they answered. And because of the "how", I find their answers credible. Here's my take: These people are professionals. This is not their first rodeo; they're a game studio and have released other titles before and know how to make announcements to the public. They also know that it is much better to refuse to answer a question, than to give an answer that's wrong or misleading. There were nine of us visiting, and as you'd imagine, we came with a ton of questions, and were not even slightly shy about asking them. We asked all kinds of things, including ones that were admittedly "long shots" that I'd be surprised if ST were actually willing to answer. And the folks there were professional about it. There were many questions-- perhaps even more than half-- that they couldn't or wouldn't answer. For example, anything at all about multi-player? Nope, sorry, can't answer that yet. Will there be life support in the game? Mmmmm, well, no comment at this time. So for any area where they weren't sure or hadn't settled the matter, they weren't at all shy about telling us "sorry, can't answer that". There were some other questions where we asked them, where they had only a tentative answer-- i.e. "will there be an early-access program for modders?", the answer was "that sounds like a great idea and we'd like to, but we really don't know yet whether that would be possible" or something along those lines. But for some questions-- the ones where they actually knew the answer and were at liberty to share with us-- they were unequivocal. Immediate answer, firmly stated, no "weasel words" or I'm-not-sure-about-this body language, just a prompt and unequivocal "this is how it'll be" type of answer. So... "Will there be DRM?" No, at least not in single-player. You'll be able to copy the game's folder tree, just like KSP 1. (For one thing, they need to allow that to let people have different sets of mods installed. Otherwise they'd have to implement some sort of dynamic mod-switching ability, which it sounds like they don't have planned-- it would be a chunk of extra work for them, and they're super busy.) "Will there be loot boxes or microtransactions or anything at all in the game where you pay real-world currency for stuff?" No, it'll be like KSP 1 in that regard. (Though they didn't rule out the possibility of some sort of DLC in the future.) "Will the single-player game require logging on or a network connection at all?" No, it won't. (The person commented "I've got a buddy in the merchant marine, and KSP is the only thing that keeps him sane at long weeks at sea, and he'd kill me if we did that".) Now, after reading the above, I can imagine you might wonder, "Yes, Snark, we're sure the devs at Star Theory are nice, but we're worried about the publisher." A reasonable concern. However, a few things to bear in mind. First, there were Private Division people in the room there, too. They weren't the primary presenters (that was mostly Star Theory), but they definitely had a presence there and were part of the discussion. So it's pretty safe to say that anything Star Theory said in that room has the publisher's blessing. They wouldn't be saying that stuff if they weren't sure about it-- they'd just say "no comment" or something like that, as they did to quite a few other questions. But these questions, they were quite definite on. "Yes, Snark, but you're kinda one of them, of course you'll think that. You're biased." Well, I'll let you folks come to your own conclusions about that. Bear in mind, though, that I'm just a forum user like you-- I happen to be a moderator, but that's a volunteer position and I don't work for T2, Private Division, or Star Theory. I don't get paid for this and don't have any personal reason to be biased, other than being a self-admitted KSP fanboi. I wasn't financially compensated in any way for any of this stuff-- they paid for my parking yesterday, and they gave us lunch, but that was it. (In the interest of full disclosure, they also got us passes to PAX West, which I'll use tomorrow so that I can go have another shot at "interviewing" them in an afternoon time slot-- more on that after I've done it. But I expect that's about all the time I'll spend at PAX. I don't like conventions or big crowds of people, it's really not my scene.) Of course, nobody has a crystal ball, but I'm pretty confident in my read of the situation. I've been in the software biz for a quarter-century and am very familiar with the various dynamics that go on-- both the weaselly corporate-speak that companies may do, and the direct no-nonsense attitudes that pretty much all technical people have. These folks are for real. And they really love KSP. They're fans. Heck, as excited as we were to be there, they were as least as excited as us. These are KSP fans. "OMG that's Scott Manley!" They were wanting to take selfies with us. (No, I wasn't as big a celebrity as Scott. But I did have a couple of people come up and say how much they enjoy reading what I write on the forums. They're here, they read this stuff.)

The Mun is actually a pretty good place for canyon barnstorming. It has a fairly deep canyon that meets two very important requirements: First, it's right plumb spang on the equator. This is important because all celestial bodies rotate. For any surface feature that's located away from the equator, you have to have an inclined orbit to do a flyover, and the surface feature will quickly rotate out from under your orbital track. Second, the high ramparts on either side of the canyon also happen to be the highest points on the Mun's equator. This means you can set up a low circular orbit that will get you a close pass over the canyon every time, but you won't have to worry about smacking into the surface somewhere else.

Yeah, that's a thing that used to work, and then the KSP 1.7.1 changed something that broke it. But the fix turns out to be pretty simple. Here's the commit where I fixed it in SimpleFuelSwitch: https://github.com/KSPSnark/SimpleFuelSwitch/commit/c34bae3fefd9debc68e6b99869f18dcdbaf8f5cb ...the relevant line of code is in ModuleSimpleFuelSwitch.cs, specifically the method OnResourcesSwitched. Basically, it used to be the case that calling window.displayDirty = true was all you had to do, but now it's necessary to call window.CreatePartList(true) first.

Geosynchronous and geostationary orbits are absolutely possible, since the Mun orbits Kerbin exactly once every two Kerbin days. It's just that there are certain Kerbin longitudes where you can't park a synchronous satellite because the Mun will hit it as it sweeps past periapsis. I've never bothered to work out exactly what range of longitude is the "forbidden zone", but you can see it pretty clearly if you just watch the Mun as it passes through periapsis. As long as your satellite isn't too close to that, you should be fine. In particular, the Mun sweeps across KSC's eastern sky at periapsis, so if you park a satellite in KSC's western sky, I expect you'll be okay. As for other "safe" altitudes for satellites: it's pretty simple arithmetic to work out the range of altitudes. Take the Mun's periapsis altitude, subtract its SoI radius, and anything under that will be safe. Similarly, if you add the Mun's SoI radius to its periapsis altitde, anything above that will be safe. You can also pretty easily make a safe orbit that spans the Mun's periapsis altitude, if you make it eccentric. Set it up so that your satellite is orbiting in a plane roughly perpendicular to the Mun's, and with the Pe and Ap located such that the satellite's orbit and the Mun's are like two oval links in a chain (i.e. the satellite's Ap is above the mun's Pe, and vice versa.

+1 for the request for a picture. It's practically impossible to give specific advice without seeing what the ship looks like. The most likely problem is that your center of mass (often referred to as CoM) is too far towards the rear. You need the CoM to be farther towards the front of the plane. If it's close to the back, it's just not going to stay stable no matter what you do. Seriously, though-- post a picture, please? Should help to settle the matter.

Nope, that has nothing to do with it. You either need to have a pilot on board, or else you need to have an SAS-capable probe core or the avionics nosecone. Comms back to KSC does matter if you want to be able to use maneuver nodes. Pilots can always set maneuver nodes, but non-pilots can't unless there's a comms link back to Kerbin. Anyway. All you need to do is put an SAS-capable probe core on the lander, and it'll work fine without needing any pilot anywhere.

Really need to see a picture of your spacecraft to be able to offer any constructive suggestions about why it's taking heat.

Right. That's what people do, when they have a suggestion to make. Well, one of two things will happen: Possibility #1: Your idea is a popular one, and lots of other people want it too, and there's chatter in your thread. In which case it won't get "buried", it'll stay near the top of the forum, which raises the likelihood of getting noticed and potentially implemented at some point. Possibility #2: Nobody but you wants this thing, and so your thread just sits there and doesn't get any attention, so eventually it will get pushed to later and later pages as other, more popular ideas percolate in front of it. Eventually it fades into obscurity. Either way, it's the right thing to happen. Look, I get that you really, really want this. I understand the frustration, and I sympathize. Do bear in mind, though, that there are literally hundreds of thousands of other users in this forum, and they really, really want things, too. There's no way that the devs could possibly implement even 1% of everything that everyone wants; it would be a physical impossibility. There are only just a few devs, and they generally have their hands very full just building the features that Squad has designed into the game. They can and do read the "suggestions" forum, and when there's something that's really popular and in high demand from lots and lots of players, it gets noticed. Maybe even implemented. But there's simply no way they're ever going to have the time to implement some special feature for one person who wants something-- no matter how passionately. And every other player here has just as much right to their wish-list as you have to yours, so there's really no special mechanism to push your idea to the front of the line for special attention. The thing that's frustrating you is "well, if I just do that, my voice will be lost in the crowd." Yes. It will, if you're the only person asking for it. That's absolutely correct. And that's also absolutely unavoidable when there are hundreds of thousands of forum users who all want stuff, and only a small handful of devs. The only way for "user feedback to devs" to work at all is to just make a big bucket where everyone can toss their suggestions, in a place where the devs can see it. Which is exactly what the Suggestions forum is for.

You post a thread about it in the Suggestions forum, like everyone else who has suggestions about how to improve the game. It's what it's for.

Fair 'nuff, if that's what you're interested in, but not much point in pinging me about it-- I'm not a KSP dev, and don't work for Squad (most of the moderators don't, we're just volunteers who help with the forum). Barking up the wrong tree, my friend.

Moving to Add-on Discussions.

The mod adds the pitched control point to all the cockpits by default, as well as to all SAS-capable probe cores. The only reason you'd need to tinker with ModuleManager would be if you wanted to add the functionality to some part that I haven't already, or if you wanted to change the adjustable pitch range to something other than the default 0 to 90 degrees. Nope. The mod does pitch only.

Note that you don't have to be actually focused on the science pod itself, as long as the vessel that you are focused on stays within the atmospheric physics bubble (I forget how big, but I think it's something like 10 km). For example, if you drop a pod-with-parachute from a plane, and then the pod lands before the plane gets too far away (over 10km-or-whatever-it-is), then you're fine. But if you've got a plane going at hypersonic speed and high altitude and it drops a pod, the plane races away so fast that it gets outside the bubble before the pod lands and then it's auto-deleted. Also, please note bewing's and Claw's comments immediately above, about turning on debris display on the map. It's possible you could have something that actually did land safely but you're not seeing it on your map because it's "debris" and you don't have that display turned on.

So, if you've got no comms, then that seems likely to be your problem right there. A few questions: What are your game settings for CommNet? Specifically, do you have extra groundstations enabled or not, and have you checked the "require comms for control" setting? What sort of antenna do you have on the vessel? At the time that you're unable to steer, how far is it from the vessel to the nearest control point (i.e. KSC, or a relay chain connected thereto), and what sort of antenna power is on that control point? i.e. do you have direct LOS to KSC? Are you running any mods that could conceivably affect the controllability of the vessel?

So, "1 m/s" is a velocity, not an acceleration. Did you mean "1 m/s2" acceleration? i.e. if you wait 10 seconds, you gain 10 m/s velocity? (Sorry, I really don't mean to be pedantic-- just want to be sure we're on the same page, here, so we don't end up talking at cross-purposes.) If you've got a phantom acceleration that big, when RCS is turned completely off and you have no throttle, then that sounds like a bug. Moving to Technical Support.

Well, certainly one's design philosophy will enter into it. For me, neither the size of the fairing nor draggy-bits-sticking-out is an issue. The fairing's not an issue because if I need a very different fairing size, I don't use the same size launch vehicle. I size the diameter of the launch vehicle to be an approximate match for the fairing. If I'm launching something that needs a fairing 3 meters wide, I'll use a 2.5m stack for that, not a 1.25m stack. So my fairings are always a fairly consistent size and shape relative to the launch vehicle, and it's just not an issue. I launch exactly the same way all the time, and it always works. Likewise, "draggy bits sticking out" isn't a thing because I make a point of designing vehicles that are very streamlined. They simply don't have significant "draggy bits". If I have draggy bits, I put those in a fairing. (Of course, there's the occasional oddball vehicle that has a really awkward payload that there's no good way to make aerodynamic-- e.g. big miner/refiners. But those are the rare exception, for me.) How is that relevant? I mean, sure, if the COM is so low that the vehicle is actually aerodynamically unstable, then the rocket's gonna flip. Which is why one designs rockets not to do that. But as long as the CoM is high enough that the rocket is stable-- which is a basic design requirement-- then the actual position of the CoM is irrelevant, at least for a ballistic vehicle that simply follows all the way to orbit. (It would matter if one were building a spaceplane, but that's not what we're talking about here.) CoM position's not going to affect the trajectory, because that's purely a function of speed, gravity, and acceleration, not mass distribution. Must be a difference of design technique, then? That never happens to my vehicles, ever. I don't make them excessively tall, relative to their width, so the rockets are always stiff. I don't make excessively draggy payloads, at least not for 90%+ of my launches. If I've got something that's draggy, I put it in a fairing, and the fairing is a pointy-nosed cylinder that's no more than slightly wider than the rocket body. When I do need to get fairly tall, I use construction techniques designed to help with stiffness, especially in the early stages of launch where stresses (both thrust and aero) are large. And of course it's important not to over-provision pitch and yaw authority. I almost always reduce the gimbal authority on the engines to something like 30-40%, and do the same with control authority on steerable fins, if the rocket happens to have those. The taller the rocket, the less gimbal it should have. Having too much pitch/yaw authority isn't necessary (because there's practically no "steering" to do, it's just following all the way and is mainly using aerodynamic stability to maintain that), and it can be actively harmful (because SAS can over-correct and end up making the rocket flex too much). Also, by pitching immediately and then simply staying perfectly all the way, there's remarkably little flexing stress on the rocket. It's compressed longitudinally (drag hitting it from the front, engine thrust hitting it from the back), but there's no torque or lateral force at any time, which is quite gentle on the rocket and doesn't cause problems. That's pretty much how my rockets look. But "stubby" is a relative term, would have to see a screenshot of your vehicle to get an idea of whether it's more or less stubby than my typical ones.

Have you tried cutting throttle before staging? You can crank it back up again after staging; all you need to do is zero the throttle, stage, then add throttle again. If the throttle is non-zero when you stage, then the staged-away boosters are going to keep firing (assuming there's some fuel left), which will accelerate them up into your ship; it's a collision hazard. And with all those Mainsails, and if the fuel tanks of the lower stage are mostly empty (thus low mass for the stage), it may actually have a hefty acceleration once it's not trying to lug the mass of your heavy, fuel-laden lander.

That's weird. I've never observed that myself, nor have I ever heard of anyone else experiencing the same problem. A few questions: What platform are you playing on? And what KSP version? When you say "accelerating", how big an acceleration are we talking about, here? Do you mean "it gains 0.1 m/s over the course of a minute"? Or "it's pulling a full gee of acceleration"? Something in between? Can you estimate how much dV per second (or per minute, if it's small)? Do you notice this when everything is turned off (no throttle, and RCS is deactivated)? Or does it only happen when you have RCS turned on?

That's correct. There's no way to reset them without a crew member present, by design. Sure, that makes sense. Correct. Not really! Three Science Jr. plus three goo canisters is under a ton. And if you're on a one way trip down to the surface, that's super easy and takes very little dV. You just arrive on your trajectory from Kerbin, aerobrake with a heat shield, and then pop a parachute-- very small, because Eve's atmosphere is so thick that a little bit of parachute goes a long way. So, launching a one-ton payload on a one-way trip from Kerbin to Eve's surface doesn't take much dV at all, should be pretty straightforward to build. It's only about 1 km/s of dV from LKO, i.e. less dV than it takes to land on the Mun. Is there some special reason why that much of a payload is a problem for you? [EDIT] Whoops, had it open in the editor for a while and missed seeing your response above before I posted. Never mind, and good luck!

So, point it up more, then. If you don't want it to nose-dive, then just pitch up, right? Is the problem that you can't point it up? i.e. you're holding down the S key to try to pitch up, and it just won't pitch up enough? If that's the case, then it likely means you've designed your craft without enough pitch authority on its control surfaces, which in turn indicates a design issue (with their size, placement, and settings). Could you post a screenshot of your craft while it's re-entering?

Things to check: Is your bottom stage still under thrust (i.e. still has fuel in it, throttle set > 0)? Which part on your craft is the root part? Specifically, is the root part on the lander, or on the bottom stage? Also, a side note in passing, unrelated to your question. Any particular reason you've got a Mainsail on your lander stage? That seems like massive overkill for the Mun, unless your lander is well over 300 tons or something, which it doesn't look like in your screenshot. Looks more like you're in the 40-50 ton range, in which case a Poodle would be plenty for the Mun. The combination of saving several tons of engine weight and getting a significantly higher Isp would mean the lander would pack a fair bit more dV, which in turn would mean that the bottom stage wouldn't have to be as hefty.