Bej Kerman

That sounds more like a minor misdirection than "poorly conceived and inconsistent". There are examples of poorly conceived UIs, and I certainly don't think KSP 2 is one of them. You don't have to look far from KSP 2 at all for examples of "poorly conceived and inconsistent" interfaces, in fact. Most of the things you said are fair, but I think saying this over something that can be fixed with little adjustment to the overall direction of the UI isn't fair.

Nor am I going to waste time with strawman arguments made because you can't just ignore someone who isn't speaking about your favourite game using the words you would hope they'd use. I'm addressing the people who ignore KSP 1's issues and aren't being constructive with KSP 2's issues, not the people who give it fair criticism. It was a success because A. there was 0 competition, and B. there were no standards for casual space flight sims.

Not any reason for forgiveness given that the modding scene has proven that "a single guy" could also do persistent thrust or a proper parts list with good models, let alone a small team.

Absolutely ridiculous how some people keep "dumping" on KSP1. KSP1 was, and remains, an absolutely brilliant and unique game that has given me and, I know, many other players, many hundreds of hours of joy. Would you care to explain how this is ridiculous, rather than just telling me off for pointing out all the double standards and the issues with a game you liked, all without ever giving me any actual counterarguments to what I said? The game's tutorials sum up to dialog boxes that occasionally do stuff when you satisfy conditions. One tutorial, for a while, couldn't even be completed because of a mistake during its development. KSP 2's tutorials will probably do the job of bringing rocket science to a casual audience with its animated tutorials breaking everything down into everyday analogies while using understandable and fairly common works, but KSP 1 never held up to "teaching them in a brilliantly intuitive way". The rocketry was simplified but don't confuse it for intuitive. Most people I'm finding only learned the game through Scott Manley et al. If you are at all going to call my criticism of a game "low", at least provide me with actual counterarguments. So far I've seen you putting KSP 1 on a pedestal, exaggerating and overstating its qualities, but no counterarguments to anything I've said. I'm severely overstating the severity of a vessel imploding because its part tree got too complicated for the game...? I encountered this twice within a short span, on my Minmus space station and on my probe, which was barely any bigger than a small Mun lander, all because I relied a tiny bit too heavily on tiny cubic struts. Putting too much stress should cause the cubic strut to fall off with sufficient force, not cause the entire vessel to wobble, vibrate and shatter as if every attached part is being thrashed by an engine. Mhm? That's not going to stop me from calling double standards where I see them. I, in no universe, would pay $50 for KSP 1 knowing how barebones it is and how many features, often basic ones, are lacking that are needed. The tutorials are bad, the gameplay suffers from a lack of critical features, the parts list is full of gaps, the bugs tracker has too many bugs in it, and so on. It's not nearly the game people state it to be. People find it easy to complain about a game that's new and has lots of issues, but complaining about a game people have had 10 years to get used to and holds a sentimental value? I don't mind constructive criticism of KSP 2, I've started on reporting bugs myself. But most of the criticism I see of KSP 2 is hardly constructive, and I do see the odd bit of criticism claiming KSP 1 is somehow better on a fundamental level even though you can see from some parts of KSP 2 that the developers are at least thinking, and not just adding stuff on impulse; "We've got ion engines (and later interstellar ones), so we need persistent thrust. People are going to be doing burns in the background and colonies will be told to perform missions on their own, so we need to support resource transfers in the background. The KSP 1 UI was designed by five-eyed aliens who don't understand that humans can't perceive the entire screen at once without bits going into our peripheral vision, so we put altitude and basic orbital info with the other navball readouts. People are going to be building space stations so we'll give them more than a pitifully small selection of girders to play with. The KSP 1 parts list was barely readable so parts are now labelled by size and are divided into subcategories. The VAB and SPH were restrictive so let's make dropped parts act as separate vehicles, integrate mirror symmetry into rocket symmetry and allow players to toggle vertical and horizontal default part orientation within the same workspace -!- wait a minute, with that last bit, we don't need an entirely different scene for aircrafts anymore!" et cetera. There are very few parts of KSP 1 where I can see thought went into planning things. Forgivable when it was still mainly Harvester, sure. Forgivable over 10 years later, absolutely not. TL;DR: People only forgive KSP 1 because they are only attached to it, from what I can tell.

KSP is missing a boat load of essential, borderline required features (see: persistent thrust, different fuel types bc the old liquid fuel NERVs are completely broken in regards to balance, ways to access parts that are inaccessible due to camera controls, a basic reactor, part classifications inside categories, etc) and £30 is asked for all that. I don't think the indie development really holds valid seeing as you had individual modders like Nertea coordinating the development of part assets and parts themselves far better than Squad was. I don't think it's a stretch to say that what's to be said about KSP 2 applies far more to KSP 1 than 2, especially seeing as <s> KSP 1's developers were so good at priorities </s> that they spent a good chunk of developer time remaking the part assets to be just as mediocre and even more bland than the old part assets. Yes, I'm bringing KSP 1 up for the 50th time. But I'm not a big fan of double standards and seeing people take kind stances about KSP 1 when it had many issues much worse than the, as Vl3d would say, mostly "cosmetic" bugs that I encounter playing KSP 2. On my first few weeks of coming back to KSP 1 towards late 2022, I had even small probes suffering from phantom forces and shaking themselves apart on successive rails warp > physics > rails warp cycles, all because I built a tiny bit of stuff around a tiny small cubic strut. You know, using a part built for part attachment to attach parts to places they otherwise can't be attached to. Again, this game in its entirety costs £30 and that's not a kind price point for an insanely cheap and broken game - the game's look, even with all the eye candy mods you can find, is stuck in 2011 and the bugs and lack of critical features make it feel like an early access game. Even seven years after its early access ended. Sure, KSP 1's tenuous list of planned features being checked makes it "feature complete", but that's a frankly useless metric given that many features you should need for e.g. ion engines were seemingly never planned. Yes, KSP 2's parts list takes a second to load and things are a bit slow, but it's certainly better than KSP 1 directing all of its resources to getting the parts loaded, which becomes a massive problem when using mods. I notice my tangent is getting longer so I will stop there. I just wanted to address how insanely pricey KSP 1 is for how broken it is, and that people seem to forget, ignore or get apologetic about KSP 1's Knock-Nevis full of problems when it gets brought up in discussions about KSP 2. So far, KSP 2 costs 15 quid more than KSP 1 (and is just about the same price as the full KSP 1 experience), and it's already dealt some serious blows in my eyes. I can't now go back to single-craft construction, a separate SPH, impulse maneuver editing and a navball that's afraid to be anywhere near the altitude readout, can I?

lol My bad for going off there, didn't realise that was your case. Either way, it's EA, it's going to be fixed

For me it simply does not work... nothing at all. Alright, that's news to me. Did you report the bug?

That would be valid if the persistent thrust was working in KSP2. And it is working. It's slightly bugged, exactly as I expected for an Early Access title, but it's there. The devs didn't just add ion engines and leave it at that without thinking about the critical features needed for them to be practical. Resource flow is obviously bugged but it beats 4x max warp. You can do beelines through the Kerbol system in stock now, unlike in KSP 1 where it was extremely impractical to do so. I guess this is the bias I was talking about; X was completely gone from KSP 1 and its absence hurt the experience, but because it's somewhat bugged in KSP 2 it's not a valid comparison.

In regards to the bugs now that I reread and properly parse your message, so far the worst I've had is that occasionally the GO button stops working and sometimes the vessel loader only loads half my vessel, and when this happens, I have to repeatedly click "ok" when asking the game to delete the half-vessel it made - this deletes the vessel chunk by chunk, as well. That's the worst I've had so far, and it was fixed with a very quick game restart, where if it had happened in KSP 1 the wait times probably would have led to a rage quit from me. A common minor bug that happens sometimes is that nearby debris accelerates with me when I timewarp under thrust. I'll be doing a Mun transfer burn, and as I see my own orbit rise I see the orbit of some debris 50km away accelerate from a suborbit to an escape trajectory from Kerbin. But this really is minor and hardly affects whatever I care about. Really, it isn't souring my experience much. I'm still having fun pushing the limits of the maneuver creator - with enough ion engines, you could probably get close to doing a brachistochrone Jool intercept. A modestly sized ion vessel can already spend a fair chunk of a Kerbol orbit on the acceleration phase. When I do perform these kinds of intercepts, high time warp levels seem to cause my resources to fluctuate somewhat, and approaching 100,000x acceleration the craft repeatedly runs out of electricity. Not that it seems to impact the average acceleration much, I was still able to capture into a Jool orbit, just with the "out of resources" sound effect blasting my headphones LMAO #1 Hot Take of all time. That's not what Early Access means. Early Access means they're polishing it and getting it ready for launch. Early Access means precisely what it says on the tin.

Game doesn't take ages to load and so far the VAB has been kinder in regards to performance with very large vessels. Not yet built my planned high part-count mission but I'll report in when that's done and flying.

When you buy a game that is early access, you waive any reasonable right to be surprised that things are broken To be honest, I think "early access" has become way too synonymous with "games that are 150% complete with things that the devs didn't even anticipate would be in release but the lead isn't feeling 100% confident on a release", but you know, this game though is a proper early access. Whatever reality-breaking bugs you come across, that's just the game not being complete

As the Howard Jones Song says in the Launch Trailer.. "Things can only Get better " (just like KSP 1 did.) Yeah. Let's not forget how barebones KSP 1 was (and still is). I'd honestly say there's a lot of bias around here in favour of KSP 1 despite it missing some very important things like persistent thrust, which let's face it, is required for a good handful of thrusters - I'd say I'm rather baffled Squad added ion engines for 0.18 and over the course of a decade never looked at fixing KSP 1's stinginess with timewarp and acceleration.

A laptop RTX 3070 Ti -- WHICH IS NOT THE SAME AS A DESKTOP 3070 -- and a Ryzen 9 6900HX. Thing is, when you said "not playable at all", I imagined a bug that severely disrupts whatever it is you're doing rather than just bad performance. It'd help to know your specs as well when figuring out why yours lags.

The game's working just fine on my end save for a couple mildly irritating hiccups. If you report whatever's breaking your game, maybe you'll see it fixed some day.

What were your specs?

It's only been three and a half years since KSP 2 was announced.

There's also the comparisons to KSP 1 modded, which aren't really fair because KSP 2 isn't going to need you to download an outdated and possibly broken mod if you want to have thrust capabilities when using timewarp, as was the case with KSP 1.

The VAB scene follows the same day/night cycle as the outside world, apparently. Probably important for multiplayer syncing. It is a bit dingy sometimes, perhaps lighting options would be nice. You're just used to looking for specific things. Most of the parts look very similar to their KSP 1 counterparts and the new labels make it much less difficult to find parts of the same size regime. You'll get used to it No aircraft hangar in KSP 2! There's a button in the bottom left corner that turns the VAB workspace horizontal so you can work on planes and you get mirror symmetry by cycling through the normal symmetry modes. In other words, the VAB and SPH were merged to make it easier to navigate - mirror and rocket symmetry aren't hidden from each other and planes can be worked on at the same time as your motherships

KSP has been cartoonish since 0.7.3 They're not too much different from KSP 1. If you can be more specific with your issues we can help you with them. Not constructive criticism

Spoiler alert...

The physics calculations are working all the time. They don't stop for a moment. Floppiness shouldn't decrease performance. That's what confused me about the idea of floppier parts causing more lag than ones that aren't floppy. However, when I said Juno runs well because it doesn't do joint physics, I really mean it doesn't do joint physics. It's not rigid parts running better than floppier runs like Frog said, rather the game just isn't doing the calculations at all. No matter how reckless you are, your rocket won't bend and parts do not do anything separately until the destruction of a part forces them apart.

I'm honestly not sure what you're talking about. Yeah, you've got clearly feminine and masculine styles, but we've also seen androgynous ones, at least they look androgynous to me. Indeed I've said it a million times before (even in this thread IIRC) but I've not seen gender labels like in KSP 1, from the footage I've seen so far. I won't mind kerbals having no gender

Don't forget about the Mohole, which is supposedly making a comeback! I assume this'll be one of the bespoke, more finely mapped features of the Kerbol system along with the peak on Eve. Source: Matt's interview

Probably important, I assume the winners get to pick the platform they recieve the game on, right?

The problem with women who have jawlines being............? I've not seen gender labels so far yet, and quite a few of the kerbals we've seen have been androgynous.