Truebadour

I went to see Dres rings! They are non collidable yet (read on the Discord that it will be added during EA) and they look a bit weird (with zero inclination and a perfectly circular orbit the particles still move really fast compared to my ship, while they shouldn't) but they exist and aren't just a flat texture!

In my opinion, 16 players is more than enough. Imagine the strain on the game if 16 players collaborating meet at the same place and burn together towards DebDeb with interstellar class Daedalus ships.

Watching the video, it just looks like a glitch to me. We can expect some. Matt Lowne's SSTO video shows a glitchy texture on his vessel a few seconds before touching down.

It's less about hoping/wanting and more about what is to be expected, and I personally don't expect stuff that wasn't shown on the roadmap or talked about in dev diaries and official videos/interviews... I expect a more ambitious scale and more gameplay loops because that's what was announced. I also expect better visuals than stock KSP1, nothing more. If enough people ask for weather effects, maybe they'll consider it, but I don't think this is really high on the list of stuff they want to add.

I think you can choose to limit autoplay in your browser's preferences. Alternative method: post enough messages to get to a new page!

I don't really expect anything. I remember when there was no telecommunications and we still had antennas that only served as some cosmetic parts. I hope we'll have a system similar to KSP1, but I've not seen anything in the footage that hinted at the presence of such gameplay. Might have missed it though. Hadn't thought about this. I sure hope the saving system has been improved.

That's quite the vague answer. What kind of features? What "big questions?" The only thing I've not seen talked about is the presence or absence of telecommunications in the sequel. Most of the other stuff is on the roadmap. My personal theory about the sneak peek we have almost daily is content taken from recent builds of the game (we can see some features present on some screenshots that are absent the next, and vice-versa). If you think the content you see on Discord is the dev sandbagging us, then I think you are about to be disappointed on the 24th. I personaly expect less features than in KSP1 in the launch version, because that's what was announced.

How are screenshots from a beta build trolling us?

Yeah, it's not really a secret when the community managers post a screenshot/gif/video every working day. As for knowing if the content shown is recent or from months ago, there is no real way to know. There are still 18 days to go before the release. I guess we'll get a trailer and videos from youtubers during the last week before launch. Being bombarded with info now won't make the game come out earlier.

Yeah I'm a bit disappointed, visiting the new Dres rings was the first thing on my to-do list.

Like building a rocket with not enough fuel, forgiving solar panels or a heatshield is a design flaw on the vessel most basic functions. I understand the rest of your points and as a player with thousands of hours behind me I'll be happy either way if the devs decide to implement life support or not. I even play like you just described, by using big ships with a small number of kerbals to "simulate" a living space. However I still think it would be a risky move for a game that wants to attract new players. In the end it's just a matter of personal opinion and where we draw the line of how many fuel we want: rocket fuel, monoprop fuel, electric fuel, snack fuel, oxygen fuel, living space fuel. I just think it would be a missed opportunity to just have LS as another type of expandable resource that can end a 3 hours mission. Again, from a beginner's perspective.

Lacking fuel results from a direct action: bad planning, throttle using, overcorrecting, bad design, etc..., while punitive life support is and will always be just a ticking time bomb. I understand the appeal of having another layer of difficulty as an experienced player myself, but we've got to remember two things : 1- There will be newcomers, and imagine having to learn the game from scratch with a timer based difficulty on top of that. Most people will give up. 2- We will have other layers of difficulty added to the game: interstellar travel, colonies, resources extraction and transport. Adding a time based difficulty on top of that seems a bit much. In my opinion, forcing punitive life support on players is just not a good way to do things. I've said it before, but for me the only option to integrate a form of life support is to have passive bonuses associated with it. Make it a positive gameplay element, not the final nail in the coffin that ends a new player's mission to the Mun because they forgot one part.

I think they will be in the base game, it seems to me the footage we've seen of vessels falling in Jool's and Eve's atmosphere were just spawned here from the editor, so there is no deceleration from reentry. Could also explain why the heatshield looks brand new (I personally hope we'll get to see them getting crispy).

There is even one rock that looks like it's floating above ground. I guess it's not final! I really like the parachute animation, and the fact that Eve is covered in a thick cloud layer.

The first game was "influential" and did not have clouds. I assume a lot of people didn't install mods and enjoyed it anyway. Saying that the clouds are "not good enough" in a peremptory way does not mean anything. They are not a central gameplay element, they were not presented as a major feature of the game like a flying simulation à la MFS2020, they are just eye candy. When you say that the standards most players expect are not good enough, does that mean I'm not a true KSP fan if I like the style they are going for? Not everyone wants to have a photorealistic looking game. Simplified does not mean it's bad. What you expect from a dream game won't always align with what the developer is going for, and it's not always feasible. If you are this disappointed and vocal about such a minor feature, you are setting yourself up for disappointment in the coming months.

The image on the right looks realistic, but that does not really fit the aesthetics of the game imo. Moreover, a really thick layer of clouds hide the ground and I don't think it's good for a game like KSP. It looks good but I would find it annoying really quickly.

I think they look really good considering the cartoony art style of the game. The water shines likes it's made of metal, but otherwise everything looks really good to me!

I know, but even a very basic mining and fuel converting part would greatly augment the range of our crafts. But even if there is no basic mining in the first stages of EA, we can still send fuel depots like pre 1.0 KSP.

I wish IG add a basic ISRU option for refueling during EA, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

I tried to play with life support mods and I think it makes the game tedious : constantly monitoring two space station saround Mun while waiting for a probe to arrive at another planet was boring. Plus launching crafts regularly for crew rotations which took forever, hoping the kraken wouldn't destroy my complex surface bases, etc... I spent at least 50% of my playtime babysitting kerbals. In short, I'm personaly against life support systems that punish the player. However, I'm all for having a life support system that grants a boost to bases. Something like : every life support module on your base gives a bonus to population growth, to resource extraction, to fuel refining, to vehicle construction speed, to research speed, etc...

And the developpers confirmed that players could interact with each other, by exchanging resources for example (what a strange way to describe a collision!). I played a lot of MFS in multiplayer with friends. And while it's fun, there was no interaction between us: no collision, our relative position wasn't precise at all, I kept seeing my friends disappear in invisible clouds (they are client sided), the model of the plane was sometimes a generic 3D model. Other players in MFS are an afterimage, nothing else. While it's fun to follow a propeller plane going 120 knots, I cannot imagine doing the same in KSP with crafts moving up to thousands of m/s in relative velocity. To be perfectly honest, I don't think a massive multiplayer aspect to the game is coming out at all apart from getting an ingame community library where people share their creations (like Spore did for example). And even then, I don't think this kind of feature is necessary.

Yeah, I'm imagining something like Snowrunner where you can open up your solo save for people to join you. Now what I'd like is the possibility to "lock" some structures in place. I think I'll mostly play with friends, but if I feel like playing with random players, I'd want my bases and space stations to be protected from grief. Something along the lines of : can dock and transfer resources but cannot damage or change the orbital parameters.

There is in theory almost no limit to how big a station could get. The limit will be set by availability of resources, time and of course by your computer struggling to keep with your constructions. But if I had to guess, I'd say that building something bigger than 500 meters long would be overkill. Will people do it? Sure (I know I will). Will it be useful in terms of game progression? I'm not sure about that. We've already seen concepts of space stations with interstellar ships docked to them : Keep in mind this screenshot comes from a 2020 video, things have changed since then.

What I would love to see is the inclusion of resources in unlocking the tech. Something like just using science points is fine in the early game but get rather boring in the late game in my opinion.

Well @Nate Simpson already hinted at an open progression in this post : So I guess the first colony location will be driven by what the players need resource wise, which in turn would be decided by what "progression path" players chose. For example (and this is pure speculation from here), if you choose to develop nuclear engines, you need need nuclear fuel. And if you're "unlucky", the only place where uranium might be found is on Mun's south pole. Then you'd have to build a tier 2 colony on quite the awkward spot, but in return you would gain the possibility to build very compact nuclear reactors for electricity generation, which would allow your interplanetary cargo ships to be more compact and lighter compared to having solar panels. On the other hand, you could go with a less complicated scenario and choose resources that are easier to obtain (located for example on the equatorial plane), but would give less of an advantage later on. Man, I'm thinking about several hyper hypothetical scenarios, and I'm just thinking that being a game designer must be tough. Taking into account several paths of progression while avoiding the possibility for players to get soft-locked, that's some migraine inducing stuff. But back to the debate on Mun VS Minmus, I think Minmus is easier to build on, while the Mun is easier to get to.