Incarnation of Chaos

You can always pull the timeline back in if things go better than expected, but you can't undo the damage done from a rushed release. This goes for all games, but in KSP2's case it's double so. There are multiple, foundational systems that once implemented cannot be changed. This is part of why KSP couldn't ever just be updated to KSP2's supposed standards, there's too much cruft that goes straight to the core that affects performance in a negative way that changing it is basically making a new game anyway. Those suggesting "Early Access" should also really keep that in mind, because the moment they release a public build for people to buy and play it's a final release for all intents and purposes. The fundamental systems there are frozen, and cannot be changed or updated extensively. They could release new parts, planets or other DLC, but if there was a problem with the "Physics LOD" for instance that absolutely crushed performance it wouldn't be fixable. Could it also be vaporware? Sure, but 2K has shareholders they're accountable to. This isn't a little indy company anymore, nor crowdfunded via "Donations". This is a medium sized team backed by a large publisher who will want a release, otherwise they have to explain the losses to their shareholders. So personally i think the chances of vaporware are smaller than them wanting more time, and weighing the effects of releasing a bad product against a delay. It'll be ready when it's ready, and I'm perfectly fine with that.

Did you ever find out the cause? Or did it just start working at random?

Personally you shouldn't "Trust" any of them, they're not charities. Both are publicly traded companies with shareholders, they'll do whatever they need to for their shareholders to see returns and furfill obligations to them. Buy the best product you can, at the price you can, from whichever company offers it. Intel's roadmap has slipped multiple times though, so I'm not as confident that they'll pull it off. But i wish them the best, last thing we need is for AMD and Intel trade places in this race for years at a time. We need them to fight, bitterly over our money. Otherwise stagnation will result.

I'd imagine they'd scale the debris with a setting, so even if the minimum was low the maximum could actually be pretty high.

But the 1060 has nothing to do with RT, and wouldn't be unable to play KSP2 with or without RT features. I was saying it's a non-point, not that you were trying to force anything on anyone. I'd honestly be blown away if the MINIMUM requirement was even a 1060.

You mean an RTX 2060.... GTX 1060 has no RTX hardware on it, and would be able to play KSP2 regardless.

They're still using rigid-body Physics for craft, so single-threaded performance is still going to matter. It won't be as important due to their "Physics LOD", but still the general advice holds. Get as many cores with as much single-threaded grunt and frequency as you can realistically, so translated into actual SKU's that means Ryzen 2600/3600 and Intel Coffee Lake i5/i7 parts are probably fine. There's other things that will be on other cores, so > 4 cores won't be a bad idea so long as they have the chops to hold their own. And no, the textures they're using are basically DX11 compliant and that means that normal texture loading is fine. RTX is unconfirmed, but RTX is just DXR. So if any rayyyyy tracing gimmicks are implemented, they'll work on AMD or Nividia cards with the hardware as long as the drivers are aware. DLSS is up to Nividia, but again this game is DX11 under the hood. It's not going to be a monster to run graphically, so i'd doubt it would happen on release. Might come later, but who knows. And honestly; single cards still don't saturate PCI 2.0 X 16 bandwidth let alone PCI 3.0 X 16. PCI 4.0 really in all honesty is for Servers using massive arrays of SSD based storage, or multiple GPU number crunching where the traffic CAN saturate the lanes. Don't fall for the marketing and hype, and breathe. If you already have a PCI 3.0 based system, and a GPU that's mid-range (GTX 1060, RX 480, etc.) and no other games are calling out for an upgrade just sit back and save up for a potential upgrade in the meantime. I'm not Intercept Games, but this is all based on either direct statements (Rigid-Body, Physics-LOD, DX11) or slight interpretation of them in the context of the beginning of development (The Unity version they're on doesn't even support DXR for instance, and Direct Storage was literally just announced.) That being said; if Nate Simpson comes in and contradicts literally everything here. Listen to him; he's actual staff

Oh yeah I didn't know if you were on console or not, but it's well known that it has stability issues unrelated to any calculations. Personally I think SQUAD should freely exchange it for the PC version of KSP or offer refunds due to how badly the port is made.

Ever played Mass Effect? You're basically describing a nerfed Mass Relay for all intents and purposes, sure the mechanics are different (Relays make a "Corridor of massless space" which never made sense to me, since the ship still has inertial mass and thus wouldn't benefit. But i guess that's why they use their own ME effect devices to null out their mass, then again what's the relay for at that point....anyway this shouldn't be a spoiler filled breakdown of plot holes in ME's fictional tech). But the gist is that for a ship to use a Relay to get to a planet, it still needs to at least be capable of interplanetary flight (Well above, Earth's relay was out at Charon). And it needs to have it's own propulsion, as the relay itself provides no motive force. It just minimizes the amount of energy needed to get from one destination to another. And the Relay can only go from one destination to another (In the case of "Primary" relays) but these can connect longer distances, while "Minor" relays can connect several hundred destinations. And computers are used to plot the course, because significant amounts of drift from the intended destination on the order of multiples of thousands of LY can be encountered even with the best efforts, so the ship also needs to be able to travel back to it's destination if needed. And the calculations need to account for the drift, making sure the ship won't just smack into a planet or other obstacle. And ofc these things aren't built by their discoverers, they're remnants of some long, long lost civilization. So they can't just make them, they use the ones they find. Oh and are paranoid AF about "Activating" dormant ones they haven't mapped the opposite "Pair" to, another good reason for having standard and FTL capable ships. Really, if you want a fantastic example of how to merge "Conventional" and science fantasy elements/propulsion then I'd highly recommend at least looking into the first and second games. Warning though, there's plenty of technobabble. Don't expect hard sci-fi from it.

None; because that wasn't the context that those calculations were brought up in. If the game is crashing with no mods installed and for no apperent reason in the VAB, then by all means that's a problem they need to fix. If you have mods, then you can ask someone in the forums for help troubleshooting. VAB crashes can easily be the result of conflicting mods/missing dependencies. We were trying to reel in the OPs expectations of what their console could do, not justify all problems with KSP as a result of it. There's plenty of longstanding issues i'd be more than happy to bash SQUAD on, double so for the Console version. And if you want a refund and can get it, by all means go for it.

Couldn't you just grab the previous textures from a previous version and overwrite the ones you dislike? It would still have to be a version that supported the features of the current KSP, but that wouldn't be too hard considering this was fairly recent. Otherwise they'd have to make a texture, quality and scatter selection available for every single body, and mods likely would also. This would mean so, so much pain for both the users and back-end programmers that I'm actually going to say this shouldn't be done at all. An external Utility would be a better option, but it couldn't use SQUAD's assets directly. And then you're back to manual configuration in this specific case.

Oh I'm not arguing that a fictional fuel is needed, just saying that a high-g vacuum environment isn't impossible. Heck; due to Kepler only being able to reliably detect transits that lie on our inclination and the lack of survey atmospheric tools (Or rather limited scope of the ones we have available) i'd say there's a lot more room to speculate about how common certain combinations of planetary environments are than metastable metallic hydrogen. We used to think earth-like planets (Mass wise, not anything else) in the habitable zones were extremely rare, and even with the limited dataset from Kepler we managed to completely overturn that within a few years. Personally as i mentioned before; I'll be using either brute-force clustering or remote Orion to overcome these in any potential KSP2 play sessions i have instead of Metastable Metallic Hydrogen. It's about as real as infinite fuel, so I'll consider it a cheat for my own sake.

Unless it got blown off, think the cores remaining from hot jupiters or super-earths around red dwarfs that couldn't generate enough of a magnetic field to hang on to it during their flaring. It's not absolutely impossible to have a planet without atmosphere, and high gravity. Unlike metastable metallic hydrogen But yeah, air augmented rockets are the birds. I had a couple of janky heavy lifters that used "Flashfire" or something similar as their booster segments (They were MK3 parts in style, from a mod ofc), and the sheer amount of payload they could haul for the fuel efficiencies they had was basically unbeatable until i got to either far heavier payloads (>Kt) or nuclear Aerospikes.

Lower mass or push the TWR into insane ranges, might also be able to use something like Orion and have it land well downrange of a colony and use rovers/other rockets to shuttle crew to the main colony. KSP2 is going to have clustering plates by default, so brute-force will always be an option when all else fails.

Personally i think it's due to a misunderstanding of what a "Backup" is, or can be. Sure; full system backups are the norm in a production/business environment where every second down is thousands in lost income. But for your average home user who has a decently fast internet connection? Do you really need all 1.5TB of games rolled into your ISO? Or just a snapshot of your preferred OS with your absolutely needed applications ( 7zip, Blender, Programming utilities etc.) and your documents? That in my experience is normally fine, and comes in closer to <200GB for Windows 10. With a fast SSD and USB 3.0 flashdrive; i can be back up and working in a few minutes. And since if i need to get back up that urgently usually the last thing on my mind is games, those are normally fine downloading in the background. And yeah, it is convoluted. But it gets them what they both want, and storage is pretty cheap.

And mind you; once you're in memory it doesn't matter if you're Userland or Admin (I'm talking Windows here). There's numerous well-known and documented exploits that allow a malicious program to bootstrap a chain of privilege escalations until it can read and write wherever it wants. UAC is a bandaid, and while i love Windows for Compatibility....unix achieves it with being open source in a much safer and controlled manner. At the end of the day, the same solution applies. If you know a program, understand what it does, and accept the risks then use whatever narly hacks you want to get it running. But if you're ever in doubt about a program, well it's 2020... you have the sum total of human understanding at your fingertips and plenty of RAM. If the google machine doesn't provide a conclusive answer, then you can always test it in a VM. And have backups of your OS on hand; just in case. I've done things to get legacy software running that would probably horrify most people, but i did it with the understanding that the program wasn't malicious. Though now that i think about it....couldn't he just throw another drive in the machine and make him an admin account, and password protect the other drives (Using bitlocker potentially) ? I've seen that done in enterprise/school settings where the "Guests" need Admin access to install/write/modify stuff but they don't want a bunch of script kiddies blowing up their backend.

I loathe using a touch screen for doing basic tasks that are infinitely simpler with a K/M, and the idea of having yet another obstacle between me and building a rocket just makes me gag. Make it optional, and add it after all other major things have been done and i have no issues. I think our perspectives on this are skewed too far either way.

Still don't even understand what the actual point of it would be. KSP2 isn't a flight sim where having VR for IVA activity would be a legitimate game changer, KSP2 won't have weather and the terrain system prevents much for jazzed up topside activity. Everything VR could potentially do would be accomplished by strapping a small, high resolution panel to your face. (I'm specifically talking in the context of KSP 2, not VR as a whole) If they decide to waste the time and resources on VR, then it should only be after KSP2 has seen several DLC and the number of unresolved bugs could be counted on my fingers. I'd literally say that things like relativity would be higher on the priority list....

Yeah they won't let anyone with different mods loaded enter the lobby, at least on public servers. The reason is pretty simple, that a mod is indistinguishable from a cheat/hack/trainer loaded. So if you don't enforce parity checking, then you open the gates to cheating. Plus the other issue is that if you don't have a mod, and one person does. Then how is your client supposed to interpret a space station they've constructed completely out of those parts? It can't, and the game crashes the moment you come within physics range. That being said, they could have a Standalone Server Client. And on your own Server, you could disable parity checking for playing with people you trust. There's also a possibility that the Server itself could have mods applied to it, so that the mods are set and loaded at time of creating the server. This would allow anyone with bone-stock KSP2 to join a modded game, and use the respective mods without too much issue. If you could make disk images of these servers, it would also be exceptionally useful for archival/debugging/development purposes. You could have an entire catalog of curated KSP2 games, with different selections of mods, on different versions and each one could be loaded up at your leisure on the client. But I'd be shocked if KSP2 actually had something that robust. Me personally; I'm hoping for more of a Borderlands type experience. Local multiplayer/Co-op with the host serving as the server, limited to 4 or so people and options to lock the slots to invite/friends only so i don't have to deal with randos. And then a Standalone Server Client for KSP2 a couple months later for the people who want a more "MMORPG/Persistant world" type of experience. It would also allow anyone to play completely single player, by just locking the "Slots" entirely and not allowing anyone to join.

To be completely fair I've taken college chemistry coursework and i still occasionally get aspects of it wrong. And when you're dealing with anything Nuclear it's even trickier, since Uranium, Neptunium, Plutonium are all just Transition Metals, and thus there's not a single easy rule to remember how they'll interact. They can take on multiple oxidation states, Uranium especially (IRL we exploit this by making it into Hexafluoride for gaseous diffusion and separation of the U-238 isotope from the actually fissile (The stuff that goes bang at a critical mass) U-235 isotope). And as this thread shows; sometimes it's not even being wrong; just not specific enough (Which is just being wrong by omission i guess). Basically, don't sweat it. Clouds, and the LOD settings are making them look like fog due to the lowered quality.... Holy ***** excrements, if that's the case this facility is absolutely massive.

And the amount of energy...

Unfortunately not, but it's one thing I've wanted to pick up eventually. I loved reading about the forging techniques used in the iron age and medieval europe as a kid. And then history channel aired Forged in Fire and I was basically in heaven. And I'm actually pretty surprised that there's a number of designs for rotating engine bells.

Hmmmmm HMMMMM HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM It's almost like.... KSP2 announced multiplayer support for a reason!

Oh i know It's the entire mechanism behind an Oxyacetylene torch, which doesn't cut it's way through metal so much as BURN a path through it. But i was really just thinking about a potential application, even if it was out there. And that's the important bit i seem to have forgotten from my chemistry courses, we always treated any Oxygen products from H2O as O2 even if it meant balancing the equation differently. So fair enough, take your damn like. (Also now you have me thinking of a rotating engine bell for the lulz).

It could be, but I'd imagine they'd go a bit of a different route. They already have biomes, or something similar more than likely. And certain resources can be tied to certain biomes, some biomes can only exist on a certain "Kind" of planet (Kerbin-like, Eve-like, Barren etc.) And once you have that, then it wouldn't be too far of a jump to tie extraction to a logarithmic function and a resource "Seed". This "Seed" would basically be similar to KSP's "Ore Concentration", and would reflect how pure the biome's resource-bearing ores are. It could be procedurally generated, and rolled pseudo-randomly for each game with weights assigned to make certain biomes on certain worlds much, much more valuable. And what it would also do is once you began extracting, then this "Concentration" would determine the quantity of "Work" needed to get the same amount of material. As you continue working the ore, the concentrated ores get exhausted fairly quickly, with the more moderate ones sticking around longer, and eventually you're basically left with a concentration similar to normal rock. So you'd see your extraction rates gradually taper and approach 0, but always be able to get something. You could also boost the extraction rate with upgraded colonies, skilled colonist engineering staff, or perhaps even better technologies and even events that give a permanent buff to these things. This would make growing an existing colony vs hopping to another planet an actual decision, encouraging the usage of survey probes and scouting missions equipped with scanning technologies. Something that unfortunately is sadly lacking in KSP.