Bej Kerman

For a simple 50m long nuclear mothership, you're already looking at this. Squad bothering to implement fuel switching so you can have bigger liquid only tanks could have already saved a lot of fps and sliced the part count by 4. But then again, when the bug tracker calls out and extremely simple suggestions are made that could save a lot of headache, Squad just plugs their collective fingers and yells "lalalala!". That's on a good day! If you're unlucky, the planet will disappear entirely, and maybe the infamous Hell Kraken will pay a visit

Preach! I don't get the stigma around the EA structure. All these QOL improvements from day one will make the experience a million times less painful, in addition to having a dev team that's much less likely to outright ignore game-breaking bugs like Squad did. I don't anticipate that Intercept will ever end up in a position where even Shadowzone, coinnoseur of big Krakenbait rockets, has to beg them to pay attention to the bug tracker. You know, having actual developers on the team and all

That's literally impossible. It's an entirely different game.

They said most star systems are binary. They never said all star systems are binary

Sonic 2006 was a better game than KSP 1, especially modded KSP 1. Intercept doesn't have a high bar to clear. To be explicit about my position, mods don't do any good (definitely not as much good as you think) and I've never found a set of mods that didn't add 10x more jank to the game than the amount of features they added.

The product you shipped is still better than if the same game was built off a base best suited for barely a mobile game and patched together into a half-playable mess using mods that are janky in their own right

KSP 1 was made by a company that virtually didn't exist and didn't dabble in software before Harvester showed up, and modding turns it from a buggy game with no features into a borderline unplayable game with moar bugs. KSP 2 is being made by developers, so I expect it's going to run better than KSP 1 could ever hope to run.

That can still technically be a mod. Probably is somewhere out there. And in the early access, enough of the things are unfinished, unpolished, or even just not implemented yet, where you can get to the same state by modding up KSP. The difference is in how all of these features come together in the full release, because while yeah, individually, pretty much every feature can be a mod, you're not generally going to get all of these mods working together as a coherent whole. This is what's really going to set KSP2 apart from just modded KSP. And it's hard to say where we'll get past that qualitative difference, but I suspect it won't be day one of early release. I think you're overselling mods a lot a bit. With KSP 1, you either have a barebones game lacking many critical features, or if you go down the route of using mods, you have a patchy, even buggier mess that also runs badly. The thing that sets KSP 2 apart from KSP 1 is the fact its bug tracker probably won't take up more space in physical form than every edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and that all these critical features KSP 1 didn't have will be made by a cohesive team and not dozens of different people who can't account for each other's ideas on how to structure a feature; you've heard the quip "this game looks like each dev was put in a different room and had no way to communicate with the others" before, well that's the only way to describe modded KSP 1. That's all besides the fact that by the time you've modded KSP 1 to not suck (as much), you're inevitably going to run into a bug that either breaks the game, or looks worrying enough to seed in the back of your head the idea of ditching your current save.

Trying to seriously get into this game always results in disappointment. Buggyness and terrible performance in general always leads to me scaling back my ambitions until I am left thinking "why am I still playing this?". Kudos to the people who can play this game for more than a month and not think "wow, this is worthless". I mean, the frequent sales selling it for next to nothing is rather telling to me.

In early access, absolutely, and you're welcome to skip it. Early access is never meant to be a complete, finished product that will be right for everyone. And we're just going to ignore the immense optimization and tools Squad would have never given us, like non-impulsive maneuver planners?

If you crash into the metallic part, it doesn't say anything special in the mission report window, does it?

I just don't share the same urge to be the first in whatever I'm doing. I don't let the thought of (absent from the game, but no doubt canonical) animals walking around Mount K2 diminish the achievement of managing to drop a Kerbal on it and plant a flag there, all while making sure the aircraft they jumped from doesn't leave the Kerbal's physics range until they've landed and can safely be left. There's undoubtedly a fine line to be drawn. KSP 2 shouldn't overstep whatever stories the player comes up with, but at the same time there's still room for some storytelling. The story could just be an elaborate easter egg, as long as it's something that can be ignored easily.

The anomalies in KSP1 have always had sci-fi or supernatural elements to them. From the face on Duna to the dead Kraken. Yeah... it's funny how only now, of all the possible times people could have started complaining about alien anomalies, we see this now. They draw the line at a funny star system map and not a literal dead alien or SSTV broadcasts.

"A dinosaur probably once defecated on the island we've made landfall on, Larry, but don't let it soil the feeling of discovery!"

I don't get why that should limit KSP 2's capacity for storytelling?

It's so similar to America's history. If you want hotstage adapters and decouplers a la Soviet rockets, pff. 1.875m adapter, take it or leave it. What? You wanted variety in a game that, for a time, was only managed by two overworked (and likely underpaid) devs because Squad couldn't think of anything better to do?? (The message is serious, KSP had an awfully sparse, patchy, and americacentric parts list, but the delivery is hyperbolic; don't take it too seriously!) ...and? And the blue one could only be Moho

They already stated there would be nothing like that.

Alien tech concealed in the Mun arch, a planet 9 analog hinted in an earlier animation, an aborted KSP 1 storyline involving a planet that nearly left the Kerbol system by accident and deployed the monoliths in a last ditch attempt to spread life... Extremely unlikely, but I hope the abandoned jumpdrive planet from KSP 1 makes it into KSP 2

Mechjeb does everything for you, but I hope the player is encouraged to plan things themselves. 2 is a different game, anyway. Vessels are on rails so there's no real acceleration, it should just follow the set plan unless torque is too low to align with one burn after completing a prior burn, or propellant runs out.

On that note, it'd be nice if we could plot burns and have our ships carry them out without having to leave time acceleration. You plot a maneuver, engage timewarp and watch your ship do what you just told it to do without having to leave timewarp to see your ship do exactly what you planned. You plan the acceleration, turnaround, deceleration and orbital insertion burns, go to 10,000,000x warp, and only have to leave timewarp to start carrying out whatever plans you had in mind for when you got there. Leaves more time for the interesting stuff

Because no-one is performing a year-long interstellar burn with only 4x time warp

Granted. The interactive novel is an SCP itself. I wish for one oxygen atom to be added to the atmosphere.

R

In order to use it as fuel, you have to capture it first, and at some point the exhaust velocity isn't fast enough to make up for the velocity of incoming particles.

The mistake there was thinking that "heat shield" could be used as a synonym for "debris shield" despite them being two very different things - the ISS is covered in Whipple shielding, but it's not surviving re-entry, even if the crew is very careful about how they re-enter The ship isn't ploughing through hot compressed air, the problem it's dealing with is the kinetic energy of these particles. With a re-entry, a capsule is slow enough that individual molecules don't act like tiny micrometeoroids, but all that air is being compressed against the heat shield, making it very hot. For interstellar travel, rather than dealing with temperature, the purpose of these shields is to make sure the payload and the bits holding the ship together aren't eroded over time by the medium, because at these speeds, individual molecules do act like tiny micrometeoroids.