Bej Kerman

Then it wouldn't exactly be Kerbal, would it? There's literally no point in starting anywhere else when it's supposed to start with the same challenges. Setting it somewhere difficult doesn't exactly make it easier for the new players that KSP 2 is supposed to be helping.

Does the guy ever get around to how massive the planet would need to be for the moon to have such a big orbit and the influence such a massive planet would have on its parent star? Massive doubts on my end.

I'm not sure why bother thinking a lot about the hard-science aspects if we're just gonna resort to soft-scifi gibberish like "antigravity rays". You can only pick one lane, there's no reason whatsoever to overthink the physics of everything if in the end you're gonna throw any realism in the bin.

If you have a technology that allows you to literally manipulate gravity at will, why do you need an Orion? Why do you need any kind of rocket at all? This is again running into the problem in which you try to optimise the Orion design and completely obviate it in the process. That's besides the fact that Orion drives will be older than stone tablets when we figure out how to manipulate gravity.

Must have been about metallic hydrogen? Good ol times, telling people that technology which isn't possible today shouldn't be automatically crossed off for a futuristic setting.

Yep. Wind and weather are important aspects of spaceflight and should be treated as another challenge like structural integrity and heat, but don't need too much detail. I do think that just a single mildly random force may be too simple for aircraft, even if sufficient for rockets.

Except your argument doesn't make sense. Pitch blackness is needless visual realism (key word: visual, distinct from actual gameplay realism) that leads to unrealistic solutions I.E. light spamming. Practice doesn't give you laser vision. Practice does let you fly better in windy conditions which is realistic in terms of gameplay and "I want to do a gravity turn" is no excuse when the obvious solution is to practice with navigating hard conditions, as you did when learning to do gravity turns in the first place. Pilots do need to navigate windy conditions, but don't need things on the exterior of the jet to be lit up to interface with its mechanisms, which is why vessels should just be lit up anyway seeing as Jebediah on the inside should not need a light attached to the exterior in order to activate a thermometer. Ambient lighting is only a reflection in gameplay of the fact that astronauts don't need arbitrary lighting on the exterior of the craft in order to interface with various systems. If Jeb wants to activate a thermometer on the hull, he does so without ever seeing the exterior. The player has ambient lighting to show that Jeb really doesn't care how black it is outside. TL;DR: Turns out "reversing the argument" does not make a good argument in of itself. Again, lighting is completely different from actual gameplay, and the sterile windless plains of Kerbin make for boring flights and landings. Having to deal with wind during booster landing would make things more interesting than just hovering at 50% throttle until the landing legs touch something - a hovering vessel with its thrusters fine tuned to perfect 1TWR should not just hover stationary as if in a vacuum.

There's a great big blinding difference between how realistic the graphics are and how realistic the gameplay is. Wind is a challenge that can be overcome with practice. Pitch blackness between the stars is just a hinderance that makes the player resort to spamming lights (which, let's face it, is hardly a realistic solution). Don't think you were admonishing me for a good reason; you missed the big difference in context between posts.

When?

What if other people do? Would a little wind direction arrow be that bad? No, it's a simulation with a game on top of it and having wind effects would go a long way to making routine rocket trajectories and aircraft physics not feel so sterile. A choice between "Wind and longer loading" and "no wind and faster loading" is a false dichotomy. Did you forget about how well KSP 2 will be optimized from KSP 1? No reason at all to bring KSP 1 up when KSP 2 is going to be built completely different.

It's an alright suggestion, it's just being suggested for the wrong reasons. There should be an actual application for it, not just this...

Space Engineers has an inertia dampener that can match velocities with ships automatically, Outer Wilds has a better balanced version of the system where you have to manually hold the match velocity button if you and your ship change directions, and KSP already has a precise control system in it - just that it only applies to ship thrusters (last time I checked, anyway).

You only have to practice instead of EVA'ing for a total of two seconds and concluding that trying wouldn't make you any better.

@SUS Free parking space here

Did you timewarp and see if it could go higher?

It can lift anything from anywhere if you have as much disregard for the environment as all billionaires. Ideally you wouldn't want to use it anywhere near a planet lest you mess with the electronics on the ground or irradiate nearby satellites.

So, to save weight, you're gonna alter the design of the craft to add much more weight than is taken by removing the shock absorbers? Wouldn't we save weight by replacing millions of tons with a little shock absorber?

Adjust the wings until so Good luck with that. Might help to put fuel at the front and back. If someone can figure out a good way of figuring this out more consistently, @ me. ? If you mean for landing, heighten the friction on the back wheels. I only realise now you were guiding them and not asking how to do all of this. Oops. Some help on balancing fuel better could be nice though.

Maybe when computers run on unicorns and magic, the devs can cater to your unrealistic wishes. But not today.

There's a bit more nuance to the topic, and the presence of a human face is not needed. See for example the demos shown at places like E3 where you have a human holding a controller, performing motions that have nothing to do with the running demo on screen, that's non verifiable, even with a human right there, specially since those demos tend to have a lot of movement and camera smoothing, and sometimes they've been found out to be completely scripted. This ties into scripting having the possibility to show stuff in a way you won't experience, If you show me a hudless static building with a camera turning around it you could definitely write a whole article around the colony building system, but really the only thing we can all unequivocally agree has been actually shown working is the models of buildings. Heck in that specific shot even the terrain is up to question. That's why the concept of verifiable gameplay exists, because companies have, for decades, really tried to play around every angle and setting to pass their bullshots for actual products. That's why the requirement is simple: human input (which can easily be shown under a scripted camera) or human perspective (as opposed to a scripted camera), or a mix of both (best possible case), otherwise it gets the label of "not real gameplay". I still don't really care all that much. It's just a game at the end of the day.

Yep, that's why my suggestion is to keep this functionality using part variants Had I caught that, I would have typed all the same things but prefaced it with "removing stack separators and streamlining stack separators are contradictory ideas so I'll just complain about the worse one". Integrating them as different variants does sound like a good idea, providing that the paint jobs and textures are separated from functions this time round and not mashed into the same thing as KSP 1 did.

Does it matter? It shows new things are being added either way, and frankly I don't care t osee playtester #71's blank face in the corner of an otherwise pretty shot for the sake of verifying that it wasn't a script performing some menial function (set 100% throttle, do nothing else) that a human could have done.

Duna's atmosphere is still essentially a vacuum. When the atmosphere actually begins to act as an atmosphere, vacuum engines stop working and you need atmospheric engines. I am still right. Either way, where's the necessity in labelling all the atmospheric engines as ones that work on Eve, Kerbin, Laythe, etc. and labelling the NERV as the engine that works on Duna, Ike, Mun, Moho, Bop, Pol, etc? I still maintain that the idea of needing to segregate engines by planet has 0 uses whatsoever.

if you optimize an engine for an atmosphere, it will work better in all atmospheres than a vacuum engine would, everywhere, period. What part of that am I not clearly communicating?

I'm saying an atmospheric engine that barely works in the depths of Jool will still work better than a vacuum engine in the same situation.