MarcAbaddon

I agree that KSP 1 is still worth talking and playing, and that modding it has picked up some steam again. At the same time it is hard to overestimate the damage caused by the KSP 2 fiasco - IMO the primary damage is that the stop of development for KSP 1 is almost certainly linked to the plans to release KSP 2. There could very well have been more DLC and content patches otherwise.

Just could not resist pointing out that this is exactly what happened.

IG no, but Private Division does and that is likely getting shut down too.

Not yet. Could still be coming. The only reason they did it in KSP 2 at the exact moment they did was because they also released a bugfix.

I don't think removing the launcher has much to do with making it more attractive to a buyer. It simply seems like part of turning all the lights off. They do not need to support their end of the launcher now.

This feels a bit silly. I am not going to pass on Civ 7 if it looks good, just because 2K is a subsidiary of Take Two. It's obviously your choice to do so, but I'd recommend at least asking yourself if you apply the same level of scrutiny to your other hobbies and purchases. Because probably 90% of the stuff you buy, ultimately is linked to companies that did much shadier stuff than what happened with Take Two and KSP 2, where at least it seems like a sound business decision to cancel. You could e.g., start with Nestle.

The loading times are great compared to modded KSP 1, but I wonder if they would really scale. The issue with KSP 1 was that once you added mods and parts it takes a lot longer. Unmodded KSP loads up quite fast for me as well.

I think the music is really well done - not just the score itself, but how it changes depending on your situation. If there's a feature I wish would be backported to KSP 1 it's that. Other than that I think there are things it does well, but those are features already in KSP 1.

I wasn't surprised. You are always fully funded until you aren't, and it seemed pretty clear that there would have be serious discussions behind the scenes about pulling the plug after the delays and the bad EA launch. If anything I would have expected it a bit earlier and as part of a more specific cut, not as part of the larger restructuring.

Sure - working in Europe that is my experience too. I was more referring to the decision coming to shut down with little prior warning. Not people getting locked out or the entire building shut down without a warning. What I have seen happen is this process: announcement of shutting down without prior warning leading to a shut down process that takes a few month and includes negotiations about some people getting new jobs in other parts of the company and about the settlements for those who have no choice but to leave. But for a software company the shut down seems adequate. What would be different here would be people getting laid off so quickly, though you would see a rapid drop as people already find new jobs before their termination notice period runs out.

Have to disagree here - I think this blindsiding is pretty usual at any larger companies which has subsidiaries. If you tell people their entire department is potentially on the copping block the best people leave and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So usually there are some rumors and a feeling that projects are not doing well but nothing official, and then the decision comes down from the top. This being said, it is really hard to imagine that no one at Intercept was worried about this happening. The game was delayed a lot, in a consequence almost certainly over budget and rather poorly received. That should have rung some warning bells. Even the fan base was speculating openly about the plug getting pulled since early release.

I think the Unity vs Unreal engine discussion is somewhat pointless. None of the engines is natively set-up to handle things like: Conservation of energy/stable orbits when multiple physics parts loaded, that interact with each other but should exert net zero force Gracefully handle the many coordinate system changes required to cover interstellar distances Orbital mechanics Floppy rockets are mostly an issue with the joint model. There'd be better way to handle that in Unity, too. I don't really believe the Unreal Engine would have averted the issues with KSP 2 in any way, and besides the game likely to look prettier in the end I think there is little real advantage to use Unreal instead. With Unity generally being easier to mod, I don't mind sticking with it.

I am a bit confused in that in your initial proposal you just suggest accounting for the Lorentz-factor, but when someone brings up the issue with the relativity of the frames you instead mention Lorentz-transforming to correct. This would make your proposal much less simple than you originally seem to suggest. When do you do the Lorentz-transformation? It's also worth noticing that you only want to apply when speed exceeds 0.1c - so if I first travel away from Kerbin at 0.9 c (triggering your mechanics) but then return to Kerbin at 0.099c (using normal physics) what happens? When do you do the correction? In either way I don't think proposal would be good since by forcing the camera to the star's frame of reference you leave out extremely important items, like the fact that from the point of the ship the length contraction indicates that you can reach arbitrarily distant objects in short subjective time, or expressing this differently: from the ship's perspective the engines don't really get less efficient. With the player camera operating in the stationary frame of reference you also get very weird things happening since it actually moves with the ship, such as a relative velocity of another vessel than the one you are focusing on exceeding c as seen fromt he camera. tldr; I think it gives the player a very wrong understanding and intuition for special relativity and I don't see any gameplay advantages offsetting this. The sphere of influence model is also a simplification but one that is much better than preserving the essential features.

I am also critical of KSP 2 (but also the KSP 1) implementation of Science, and I agree that you do not need to produce a solution in order to be allowed to criticize as some seem to suggest. Generally, I think criticism of KSP 2 science falls into two areas for me: Theme I don't get a strong feeling that I am doing actual science, it feels like pressing buttons. With surface samples you at least get a nice animation. Generally, I would argue that this is just slightly better in KSP 1 since you at least confronted you with some flavor texts, though that lost it's appeal without mods quite fast once you went biome hopping on your first moon. Things I could see that help here is: More descriptions Make science generate reports about other bodies you can look at, that can be informative. Extra points for graphs Have a feeling of time passing for some of the experiments Give a better impression of what kind of experiments is actually performed Gameplay Science is a new gameplay mechanics, and those should be judged on how well they integrate and interact with the existing mechanics. For example, just adding pieces to chess wouldn't improve the game, unless their moves mesh well with the existing ones. Interactions are also especially rewarding if in the long run they have positive feedbacks loops. Consider Civ where you build cities, cities allow you to build things, which allows you to acquire more cities (either by settling or conquest). So what kind of interactions does science have? The good thing is that the most essential interaction is already there and works: Science allows you to get to new places and getting to new places allows you to get more science. But the problem I think here is that the interaction is a bit weak in one regard: you really just need to go to a place. There's no setup or any interactions with other game mechanics involved in actually conducting the experiment. To give an initial example of an experiment that requires some effort: how if you have to run an experiment on the Mun in the same place for 3 months and the experiment require a constant supply of electricity? That would require you to account for being on the dark side for some of the time, and not being able to simply slap two solar panels on. One example of science done right While KSP 1 was also quite weak here in my opinion, I think a good example was the SCANSAT mod. You needed to construct vessel with the required experiments (some bulky, requiring fairings), you needed power and you needed to get in a polar orbit for which otherwise there was little incentive in the base game. It also took time and there was an incentive to use probes instead of Kerbals since that meant you did not have to return to Kerbal and you didn't have a busy Kerbal for a long time (given the supply was limited) if you managed the reward both looked scientific (different maps of the body) and was useful, e.g. to locate anomalies or resources. That felt like meaningful science to me.

The biggest issue with a torch drive right now would be that the maneuver planner does not support constant burn and flip trajectories well. But while it would remove a lot of the planning and delta-v conservation aspects, I think working with those kinds of trajectories would be an interesting change of pace. So I don't think it completely takes the challenge away, if you have to learn about new kinds of trajectories. Other than that with high ISP/high thrust engines you really have heat management issues to take care of as well... I remember that in the Far Future Mod my vessels all had radiatiors extending out at all points to somehow manage to get rid of all that heat.