Leopard

seems the best way is to have funds to buy stuff on Kerbin, but have resources available elsewhere. e.g. you need 100 tons of %WHATEVER% on the Mun, you can buy it on Kerbin, then get it there yourself, or send the kit to source it locally and have something that produces %WHATEVER% at a rate of "x" per day when powered then some stuff thats only available off planet, or is very expensive on planet so its cheaper to go find it ideally with the ability to set up a pre-funded route once you have flown it once (say a monthly lift of %WHATEVER% that takes 100t to the mun, at a cost so as a player you only have to fly the pathfinder missions and go explore. otherwise you are going to have a limited number of resource points of various types, which for all purposes can be considered multiple currencies at which point you may as well call them that

Was going to, saw the hardware specs and while I didn't expect this old machine to run it I'm not likely to replace the whole thing for several years so I may, but in several years so the specs haven't put me off, just delayed things

what "performance will improve with time" usually means is essentially "hardware will improve at a rate slight ahead of us adding bloat to the code" though they are being very clear and have been for some time that early access is a seriously cut down version of the game, makes sense as for now they can focus on getting the UI right and working before adding more "stuff"

what it says is that I said the one in the "recommended" bit was listed as £700 retail but frequently can only be found for more but yes whatever, plus not everyone wants second hand hardware, and also the availability of such is highly variable

but upgrade to what? what specs will cover the game and cover it well? currently no one really knows, what will a modded install need? also "upgrade" is easy to type, but when the graphics card alone is £700 - £1,000 its slightly harder to actually do meah, anyway for me there is no chance of playing this, PC won't be upgraded until about five years from now, so wish the good ship KSP 2 a safe journey, but I won't be aboard maybe come five years hence I'll have actually rescued everyone in my current save

my point on comparing to KSP 1 is that a lot who will want KSP 2 likely are KSP 1 players so "how will this run on the same hardware?" and "will this run on the same hardware?" are reasonable questions for me "high spec" is a gaming PC, "mid spec" is a more general purpose machine, probably 5 years old, or a gaming machine maybe 7 years old, and less is "low spec", its a moving feast as you say

not thinking of it as a "fair" test in that way, more just managing expectations, suspect a lot who are looking to play KSP2 will be KSP1 players - sticking a KSP1 update thats basically a "will this run KSP2?" info box that can score what settings you are likely to want or just a note that "this machine may run KSP2 but we would not recommend the user experience yet" and then update that whenever the early access requirements change so it may well be someone with a decent machine (better than mine, mines not going to work I accept that) should probably hold off now but maybe in six months could get decent performance its about perception management, when it was noted the game was aimed at "mid spec PCs" the comment should really have been expanded with something like "but during early access requirements will be higher" just to manage expectations. I think the only issue here is people have been led to expect that the requirements would be lower than they are, I suspect what has been put out as the "minimum" is the sort of "minimum" that other games etc should use, i.e. "minimum to get a good experience of this" and not a "microsoft minimum" of "yes you can, but for the love of Kraken, don't"

what would be useful is a way to see if a machine that can currently play KSP1 can play KSP2, into a few categories such as no, just no technically yes, but really no yes, as long as you set all the settings to minimum and don't plan on anything more than 20-30 parts and accept a low frame rate yes, but will be laggy with low settings etc

at a guess the way physics is handled has been rethought a bit to lighten the load on larger craft, especially if its a single thread for physics. Just thought out from the ground up could lead to a fair bit of optimisation there from the off

guess a chunk of this is highballing the "minimum" to avoid a lot of day one videos on youturnip showing clunky graphics - i.e. the minimum is set so its good not just "borderline playable, maybe" pity as it utterly rules my GT730 2GB card but then thats not exactly new, nor is the rest of the PC so wasn't overly expecting to play this.. but the jump to recommended is.. quite high especially considering this was said to be playable in mid spec machines I get this is the early version, I get its unoptimised and I get there will be a slew of diagnostic and debug code in there still, yup get all that however what this has just done is label KSP 2 as "eck that needs an expensive computer the play it" and I wonder how many who see that won't bother looking back if it drops?

its there info on system requirements for the early access release?

Managed to kill Val, again, with a mun landing gone wrong. not entirely my fault, SAS is acting weirdly, randomly disengaging doesn't help but its actively fighting user inputs half the time. landed though, just a bit sideways and attempting to correct this lead to a slight explosion during which time there was some slight death.. still, could be worse probably

Set up a new (er) PC, nothing amazing but a lot better than that which came before this needed testing so 1.12.3 installed, and since I now also have a graphics card (again nothing fancy GeForce 730) managed to not have the visuals set to the minimum.. holy sweet mother of Gork Then added EVE, scatterer and a few others *whimpering*

Have had more luck landing there than Duna so far, though I did have to sign an NDA not to talk about what I saw there, that was just weird

first was on the initial eggbox version, was Jeb, alone, in a Mk1 capsule based lander, due to career progress he couldn't actually get out and as such was a touch and go job with science collection. crude lander but was designed without the aid of internet sites just a few manual calculations on dV requirements, was quite pleased actually, a sense of achievement, especially when he came back successfully. second flight was Val to for the XP, also successful, different landing zone actually successful first time landing, after a free return flyby and two orbital flights to test the actual craft (and grab far & near orbit science) before enough was unlocked to add the six little legs and try risking it. designed to have a 50% dV margin for the landing bit and 10% on ascent with 10% on the rest and had a decent amount of fuel left at the end but really enjoyed it