Bej Kerman

"The food was rushed and undercooked! The food took too long to get to us!" is the vibe I am currently getting from this fandom, which only seems to care about development flamingo-ups so long as the developers aren't squad.

I am talking about fundamental problems that are well in the control of the developers, not unintended problems. Squad's work was pathetic, ridiculous, and honestly I'm flabbergasted anyone with any kind of standards would be willing to do anything but berate it. KSP 1 getting onto Steam was a failure of its quality control and at this point the least I would ask of a sequel has already been addressed by KSP 2. KSP 1 could have been developed by literally anyone else and it'd have been better off. No, KSP 1 being developed in 2011 by a small indie group is not an excuse given that many far better games had been developed by people, singular, no more than one developer, in the past before - Frontier: Elite II and SpaceEngine spring to mind, and even barring the work SpaceEngine had done to it after 2011, these games amounted to far more than KSP 1 did over the decade Squad was supposed to be doing more to it than piling on superficial junk and features that provide 0 benefit to the core experience, to provide fans the illusion of the game getting better, as opposed to focusing on such critical things as the haphazard, horrible, ugly UI which provides 0 readability thanks to the space Harvester thought to put between the altimeter and speed - two critical readouts - and basic necessities like persistent thrust, resource utilization in the background, procedural wings, a parts menu that doesn't throw everything in a haphazard list with little sorting, and so on. If you were happy with KSP 1's useless parts added solely to pad the space between updates that provided any real value to the game, you can be happy with KSP 2 adding basic necessities we've sorely needed for over a decade, that Squad could not be in the least bothered adding. I thought maneuver nodes were even worse in 2 so far, not even showing burn time until you start burning Oh, right, you can do inclination changes properly with ion engines now and do your circularization and capture burns in one go, but oh no, a little UI element that appears when you begin your burn is absent prior to your burn beginning. Whatever. That does not constitute "even worse", and I'd wager claiming it's "even worse" over such minor issues would constitute melodramatic. Have they though? All I know is that you can time warp during burns. Oh, they added persistent thrust? Are you sure about that? Because all I know is that they added persistent thrust. Yes, they added persistent thrust, and stating the purpose of persistent thrust to me just proves my point that they added persistent thrust.

Note how those lines are replying to two completely different parts of the reply.

Real nukes have ISP 900. And less if use anything but pure hydrogen. Exactly!! Squad's borked NERVs shouldn't exceed 400. Oh, right, juggling all that stuff is going to have no impact on development?

One could argue the exact same thing about KSP2, just with the references switched. Not. Having information readouts placed in a layout that doesn't trust my eyes to decouple like those of a chameleon, persistent thrust, on-demand loading of assets, maneuvers that aren't disgustingly inaccurate for anything but high TWR rockets, KSP 2 has already addressed tons of stuff Squad kept under the rug. But KSP2's many game breaking bugs and foundational issues are not? No. There's lots of bugs but there's less issues with the foundation and it's much more forgivable than Squad whom didn't bother changing anything for over a decade, not even bothering to implement blatantly obvious QOL features modders proved can be done. A good way to break a game even further, and make it look even more patchwork. If you need mods to enjoy a game, it's not a good game. So long as the nuclear engines have an ISP of 700, it's a bug. Then why did Squad make this supposed hydrogen so dense and unbalanced? It's a blatant mistake they either kept under the rug or somehow never noticed. It's a simple change that would have cost Squad little to no effort, and yet they never did anything. Just another artefact of having a dev team who trusts complete newbies with hand-calculating dV and relied on mods for so long to provide basic necessities like persistent thrust and dV readouts because they couldn't make a complete game themselves. Thank heavens for Intercept. They had over 4 years to optimize it, that is the main problem A. There are a lot of disabled background features that are being developed in parallel. B. They've still accomplished a lot of stuff Squad never bothered to do. Making the planets 10x smaller is forgivable given that the engines' specific impulses were adjusted to match. Sort of. But letting players do something as stupid as run nuclear engines off the same fuel jets run on and get several km/s of dV out of something that should barely make it to the Mun is unforgivable. Minecraft is a bad game, because real grass is not cubic. Nice strawman. Dismissed.

I'm not gonna listen to one review. I am gonna listen to all the reviews in aggregate. Much much moreso than one guy screaming in all caps on forum who's proven themselves to be completely illogical. As you say, Mr. Spock. KSP 1 couldn't possibly be broken, after all, a bunch of people who have no idea that nuclear engines don't run on the same fuel as jets are the people you should trust when evaluating how good a rocket simulation with a game on top is. Evermore logical and unbiased. That is a funny way to spell "Private Division". Making the planets 10x smaller is forgivable given that the engines' specific impulses were adjusted to match. Sort of. But letting players do something as stupid as run nuclear engines off the same fuel jets run on and get several km/s of dV out of something that should barely make it to the Mun is unforgivable. If the thought of creators like Matt Lowne not being able to resort to the age old cliche of running NERVs and RAPIERs off the same fuel and carrying many tons more fuel than they should be able to doesn't make you excited... Alright. I still maintain that KSP 1 is broken on a fundamental level, ignoring bugs. Broken on such a deep level that it's ridiculous it got the following it has - forget how many fans are ready to defend it if someone dare do something like point out that nuclear spacecrafts don't run on the same fuel as jets. After all, a small, little humble indie dev team can't possibly do wrong...

And you're going to ignore basically everything I said because you'd rather listen to reviews consisting of "Green men go into space. Spectacular" and "fun" (Real reviews, by the way. What eloquent critics.) than common sense; NUCLEAR ENGINES DO NOT CONSUME JET FUEL, SQUAD. FIX YOUR GAME. Obviously people as professional as steam reviewers won't account for such basic balancing errors as those Squad makes. Things like Harvester doing something as absent minded as aiming a game at total newbies and simultaneously expecting them to hand-calculate dV - like, come on now. Hence, stop using "but X got 90% good reviews and Y got 50%!" as a crutch in your arguments when you're getting proper criticism of KSP 1 delivered on a silver platter.

Then don't. Buy a 1070 instead. Or if you're running a BBC Micro and can't run anything released past 2016 (or really don't care about Early Access titles), then keep playing KSP 1. KSP 2's an early access game, obviously it won't run well on an ENIAC until the devs get a chance to optimise it.

So, to be clear, you believe that a game that is built by a small team of devs and currently has a 94% positive on Steam, and is beloved by a large community, is the product of negligence. Fine then. How would you describe adding nuclear engines without implementing persistent thrust - which is well within Squad's capabilities - nor adding a suitable fuel type to curb the misbalance you get when a 700isp engine can consume a dense liquid fuel as if it were hydrogen? What about the many bugs that Squad left unfixed until Shadowzone addressed their negligence and technical debt issues? The many bugs people selectively forget because they don't want to tarnish their precious indie home-made game? Squad just kept adding nothing more than novelty features even when modders demonstrate it's possible to make the core of KSP 1 better than it is now, that's nothing but negligence. KSP 1's positive ratings are little more than the result of rose-tinted glasses, and just about everything I hear people say about KSP 2, KSP 1 is guilty of as well. Even more inexcusable on Squad's side because they're over a decade in and have put ZERO EFFORT into revamping critical parts of the game, instead leaving KSP 2 to mop up the mess Squad made. KSP 2 has dropped with many adjustments to the very foundation of the engine that I've been waiting on Squad to do for years. Not to mention the fact Squad asks money for what is, for many intents and purposes, an incomplete product, given the lack of (just to make it an example again because it's so critical to low TWR missions) persistent thrust, among other things. Take the ratings and throw them out, they're irrelevant and subject to lots of bias. The fact you rely on the ratings to make a point for KSP 1 rather than the game is a point in of itself. History repeats itself and KSP 2 is not an exception. We've seen a lot of games drop in a rough state and bounce back, give the game some time.

"some pet peeve bug" is putting it lightly.

Wobble that puts any gaps between a parts' connections should cause them to break as well.

You're complaining that they released early - and yet, at the same time, as you conveniently demonstrate for me, you're complaining that they don't release updates early...

The universe in which the devs unlocked interstellar content immediately is the Universe where you complain that they didn't hold off such features until they were ready for access.

Considering what kind of game fans have received, this narrative is quite plausible Because publishers totally haven't ever screwed well-meaning developers over before...

They clearly forgot the parachutes, and have revert to VAB off.

Yes, one NAME, anyway. As of right now there doesn't seem to be a way to give separate assemblies separate names. Yes, that's weird that vehicle names are tied to workspaces and not the vehicles in a workspace, but workspaces were introduced to let you put multiple vehicles in your space and save them together.

I always kind of scratched my head why the original team chose to keep gravity at ~9.8m/s2, but then scaled down the size of everything. Was it a time warp thing at that point in development? Was it just too ... tedious to sit through an orbital burn up to 8km/s, or maybe the jaunt to Jool was just too much to sit through? Less tedious and less floating point error. Don't forget that Kerbal engines are also terribly inefficient so it's not very far off from how it works in real scale - real scale only introduces tedium for most. There were plenty of arguments about it but Intercept never said anything about it themselves.

"you can only have one vehicle in a workspace"?

Because it conflicts with the "developers = evil scammers" narrative?

Three years? I've heard that development began in 2017, it's much more than 3 years. 3 years ago was when the aggressive takeover happened and development likely restarted.

The balancing on the nuclear engines is very nice to see, compare to KSP 1 where one single extra fuel type to keep things balanced was too much to ask for

Entering the VAB isn't very fast, but launching, entering the tracking station, and entering the game itself are all faster than in KSP 1, not to mention the in-game menu lets you enter these facilities instantly, while KSP 1 had you going through redundant loading screens. Really, this is more a point against 1 than it is 2. Their negligence says otherwise.

Aside from the challenge of something greatly diminishing if you rely on someone else's creation, the very prompt of the challenge is to "create an Air Launch to Orbit Rocket — that is, a rocket that’s launched from an aircraft!". The most advice I can give is to experiment with designs. Remember to strut parts together and remember to add vertical stabilizers

Waitwaitwait, is the challenge not to build your own craft capable of doing that?

AppData\LocalLow\Intercept Games\Kerbal Space Program 2\Saves\SinglePlayer\[SAVE HERE]\Workspaces