Skorj

For those worried about the radiation damage from beamed power: there's a heck of a lot of radiation in space. It's that giant unshielded fusion reactor at the center of things. And of course the faster you go, the worse it gets, at least at interstellar speeds. The beamed power to a ship designed to receive it is just not much danger compared to the general environment.

Pretty sure this was a thing in the interstellar mod at some point. Obviously, if there's a laser + solar sail system for propulsion, then the question about tracking has been answered. Otherwise, if there's no speed of light delay, there's really no difficulty in tracking.

"Exit to Desktop" is the usual wording. Should update the persistent save and exit, vs Alt-F4 which should exit cleanly but not save.

I am very disapointed that the official name for liquid fuel isn't "explodium". You will always be explodium to me. "To sail on explodium seas ..."

I wish it were coming to GOG, always my favorite place to buy games as I can be sure anything I buy there will work properly offline. Meanwhile I have it wishlisted on Steam. Steam cloud saves are really handy. The downside is Steam loves to auto-update to the latest patch, which isn't desirable when playing with mods. Hopefully we'll get old version support through the Beta tab like we used to have with KSP1.

I couldn't disagree more. Back during the dawn of MMOs, it was very common in EverQuest for high level players to offer gold to low level players for specific items (stuff you'd accumulate at low level and had no use for yet). It was a lot of fun. In addition to being a real time-saver for both parties, it was a great excuse to break the ice with strangers and start talking. Yes, some players were effectively paying other to work for them, and it was fun for everyone. Players effectively became quest-givers. Heck, there were people who would wander newb zones and explicitly roleplay quest givers, offering out-sized rewards for doing arbitrary stuff in game, and it was a lot more fun than the same "kill X of Y" quests given by NPCs in WoW, because it was human-to-human in-character socialization. We're not talking about Eve Online where the exploitative play was deliberately designed in, and is really hard to avoid if you want to play that game at all. We're talking about an entirely opt-in experience to play with a particular group of people, or just play with a different group ore solo.

95% of players never landed on the Mun. That's what the game is trying to fix (and an attitude of "git gud" isn't helpful). But you asked "what makes it harder?" - surely you see that a precise, powered landing on Eve is vastly harder than the Mun? On the Mun you can see where you're going ballistically without mods, you can guess "a bit shorter" and with perhaps a bit of hovering land within sight of a Kerbal you're trying to rescue. That's a reasonable mid-game mission. Eve? Mid-air? Not at all. A parachute landing on Eve isn't bad - not the easiest thing because of the re-entry heating, but fine for mid-game. But you're not going to hit a small target with a parachute landing on purpose. I've landed close enough on Eve to drive a rover over to a previous landing spot (or walk with a lot of patience), but that's not going to cut it for landing on a pad on a floating colony. Of course, there are plenty of ways to make it practical with parts I don't expect any time soon, such as a helicopter. Or they could give you some "aim assist" / MechJeb that could pop the chutes in just the right place, or otherwise do the landing for you. The point is, if they want to have floating colonies, which I would love, they're going to have to add some sort of landing assistance (or other big change) if they don't want it to be some achievement that only a handful of players get.

I can land anywhere on Kerbin and be recovered. Landing close is worth more on recovery, sure, but Kerbin's a big target. I've landed on or quite near to the KSC hundreds of times, but I've never landed on the launch pad, and I rarely land within the KSC on my first landing with any rocket, because I land with parachutes. Even with common mods, you can't see where you'll land in atmosphere ballistically. Trying to judge where parachutes will bring you down is pretty much trial and error. So how will even an experienced player land on a pad on a flying colony in a high-g, atmosphere setting? KSP1 has no tools to make a parachute landing on a target, and no tools to land SpaceX-style. Sure, with unlimited delta-V and thrust you can hover over to a pad, and that's common for low-g vacuum landings to be sure (where the cost is low), but it would be a real challenge on Eve.

Cloud cities on Eve would be amazing, but would also be a whole set of new parts and mechanics. I'd love to see it, even as an expansion. Landing on a floating platform would be an interesting challenge to be sure, though that too would probably require some kind of new parts to assist, something that let you target a powered landing to a specific spot. Cloud "mining" would also be fun (mostly getting organics for farms and such, but there are a remarkable number of elements available in trace amounts in Venus's atmosphere from all the acidic erosion.

The best fix for career mode, the one I use all the time, is just to set the penalty for refusing a contract to 0. There are fun contract missions, though many of them are tutorials such as rendezvous and docking. I do like building a tow truck to rescue stranded capsules and bring them back to Kerbin safely. Taking tourists to the Mun is fun when you're still learning. Mostly there's stuff you're doing anyway, exploring planets, but its nice to be challenged with the missions to visit 5 arbitrary planets/moons.

I would expect interstellar distances to scale as follows: however many Earth years an IRL journey to a star x LY away would take at 0.12 c, it will take that many Kerbal years to cross x KLY at 0.12 c. Seems the obvious approach. Also, it's worth considering the unknown acceleration. IRL, it takes 1 year at 0.1 g to reach 0.1c (give or take). If Daedalus is much lower thrust, the acceleration could end up being the bottleneck. Also also, for those planning to asparagus stage the rocket to get there faster, that won't help if it takes 100 years (for some reason) to build and fuel 1 of them, which I think would be a cool mechanic.

Indeed. The people who read this forum are well-suited to reverse-engineering the game to figure things out. Modders do a heroic job of reverse engineering KSP. But we forum-go-ers don't represent the average player, and the world of "new release breaks all the mods" is hardly ideal. I guess it shows how helpful the forum community is, that people are responding to a post in the "KSP2 Suggestions" forum as if it were in the "Technical Support" forum.

I'm not sure what precisely the devs have in mind for in-game mod management, beyond Nate saying that mods are a valued part of KSP. I'd like to see modern, integrated mod management, basically what CKAN does with a bit more integration: A mod search/install screen, where every mod registered by a modder can be found, with a modder-provided summary page for each (just a summary, the mod website can be linked from it). Show the list of dependent mods and install the whole "tree" from there. A mod update screen, where you can see what mods are compatible with the current game version and pull down mod updates. A mod management screen where you can select mods to activate/deactivate without uninstalling them (just a game restart). Saved games keeping track of what mods they need, so you can practically have different ongoing games with different mixes of mods in a single install. The UI can tell you what mods are associated with a particular save slot, so you can remember what you need to toggle. Saved ships with modded parts keeping track of what mods those parts came from, so that the file we share (to share a ship) includes a mod manifest. That way the game tells you what mods you need to use someone else's ship (or your own that you saved off from some long-deleted game, as I do all the time).

Yes, I do understand that there are mods for this in KSP1. Frankly, it shouldn't need a mod. I'm suggesting that KSP2 support this officially (whether by mod hooks or its own UI), with appropriate docs and change control. It shouldn't take much, just something official that says "this is how the game knows what the save games are", and if a UI is left to modders, a promise not to change the technical details without warning said modders.

You can also get into this situation from misbehaving mods, where some mod loses its mind and the GUI becomes non-responsive. Of course, quicksaving in this situation could easily result in an unrecoverable quicksave, so it would need to be a distinct save file from the normal quicksave.

In KSP1 many players (to judge by the forums) use a sandbox save as a "mission simulator" for missions. Run a mission in the sandbox to see if the planning was right before running it in the career save, tweaking and cheating as needed to get a reasonable design, or see if a part is worth unlocking, or whatnot. This is straightforward (if a bit tedious) as you just need to run the clock forward in the Sandbox save to run the mission. For KSP2 it seems like there would be too much to recreate on planets and perhaps in orbit for this to be practical. So, could we get a documented way to clone a saved game into sandbox mode? As a similar problem, it would be nice to be able to move saved games between installs in some supported way. I'm currently running 3 different installs of KSP1 from Steam and GOG to play with different mixes of mods and KSP versions safely, but that's awkward and it's nice to merge back into a single install once all the mods catch up. Other use cases are to archive a save game and come back to it much later, or to "fork" a multiplayer game into diverging single-player games. I'm not sure we'd need UI support for this, just some supported recipe for what to do after copying the folders around. Maybe a "scan for new save games" button, at most, and some supported way to change a career game to sandbox?

Mass and size limits do that. Part count is just a bad way to do that in a game with a real game engine.

Hasn't it been clear from the earliest stuff we heard about KSP2 that the goal is to make the game accessible to more people without dumbing it down? I don't understand how one could take that to mean "we're going to make the base game harder". No, I don't expect comms delays, realistic life support, realistic re-entry heat, liquid fuel engines with limited starts, or any other sort of realism that would make the base game harder, because that's the opposite of their stated goal. (I could see a very simple snacks-based LS, that's about it.) Heck, I'll be pleasantly surprised if comms is even in the game at launch, and if so I'd expect it to be off by default. In one of the early interviews Nate mentioned that only 5% of players ever landed on the Mun. That's just the second boss! KSP is already much harder than Dark Souls, statistically speaking. Does anyone really see any commercial prospect in raising the difficulty? Mods or DLC, on the other hand, can do all of this for the sort of hardcore KSP fanatics that typically post on these forums (so many of us with over 1000 hours gameplay, it's unreal). I'd love me some realism DLC, especially RSS with scaled stock parts, but I just don't see it in the base game.

I'm not sure we can know the motivations of the original dev team for the 12.5%, probably you're right, but we do know the in-game explanation: the "stops at 10%" is what we're told by the parts descriptions in the game. The 10% is canon. In context Elon was talking about an engineering challenge - the fuel that can't be pumped out of the tank, distinct from the re-entry and landing burns. The fuel pumps can't tolerate cavitation, so you can't have any bubbles in the fuel/oxidizer coming into the pump. For example, you can't have a vortex deep enough that "air" is introduced into the flow, as happens when a sink drains. Of course there's lots of engineering around this, as with every part. I'd love to know what the real world %s are, but I can't find them. I've looked through the F-1 technical manual and operating instructions books, but it doesn't seem to be there (no surprise, since it's a property of the fuel tank not the engine). I can't find a searchable PDF of either, though.

Pardon my pedantry, but that's not strictly true, though you have to read part descriptions closely to see why. At first glance it would seem that the "empty can" to hold 8 tons of fuel masses 1 ton - after all, that's the part mass, right? But the can is not a ridiculous 12.5% of the fuel it carries, not even Kerbal engineering is that bad; it's a much more reasonable 2.5%. The other 10% is residual fuel. Every rocket engine (IIRC) has the same note in its "propellant" stats: stops at 10% fuel. This is one of the coolest bits of realism in KSP, and one that is just ... hidden. Hidden to the point that I wonder if the KSP2 devs are even aware of its purpose. I'm not sure how that 10% value compares to real rockets, because I can't find anything published anywhere about it. But in one of his recent interviews with Tim Dodd, Elon Musk mentioned that residual fuel was the biggest chunk of mass that Falcon 9 lands with, so it's not small. Given that 10% is likely a number from the early KSP days, I suspect it's probably in the right ballpark for Mercury to Apollo era rockets and tank design. I'd love to hear from an expert on this aspect of rockets. I just find it very interesting that this is apparently the biggest target for efficiency improvements in modern rockets, but no one seems to be talking about it (at least in public).

I have over 2000 hours in KSP, which is far less than a lot of people on these forums. I'd pay for Paradox levels of DLC and still consider it a bargain. Things cost more than they used to, that's every generations' complaint, and DLC is just the modern way. I don't like it either, but I'd far prefer a wonderful game with an unpleasant billing model than a wonderful price for a game I don't like.

Can I agree with both viewpoints? I think the most important thing for KSP2 at launch is to have the core gameplay mechanics well-optimized and bug-free. That will set it well above KSP1 and be worth a AAA game price. However, I also agree that base building, interstellar travel, and some sort of questline or storyline for career mode are as much core gameplay as the KSP1 stuff. However, what I don't think is very important is anything that can be done as a "parts pack", whether DLC or mod. Better solid, fast physics than hundreds of rocket parts. Better a base building mechanic that makes for fun progress in a career than dozens of building parts. Better interstellar travel, and a reason to do so beyond a "you win" screen, than a bunch of alien systems. Everything that's a rich set of choices/parts on top of a solid foundation is secondary, because one way or another it can come later (happy to pay for DLC, gotta support the studio somehow, but mods will fill in any gaps).

Came here with the same problem, and this solved it. Thanks! Works both in the tracking center and from a craft plotting a maneuver.

For interstellar travel, a remarkably large laser to push the solar sail just sounds so very Kerbal, especially if there's a way for it to end in fiery death. And it's the fastest mode of interstellar travel of the near future techs, by far, as you're freed from the tyranny of the rocket equation. Real world, they're limited by drag and the ability to focus a laser at extreme distance, but ignoring that stuff would be fine by me for KSP2.

I'm not sure how you do interstellar travel without wormholes or warp drives, even if it's 1/10th scale, but if the devs find a way then I'd love to see fictional drive and power technologies as a DLC. Normally I don't like "parts DLCs", because they fragment the player base. I hate that I can't share a craft than needs a DLC part without caveats and warnings. However, "post-endgame" tech, just fun stuff to play around with in sandbox or a completed campaign seems OK. And, just in general, content that some players would love and others don't want in the game: perfect DLC. Solar sails have aren't "near future" any more: they've been used. A giant laser to push a craft up to interstellar speed might be "near future". But the problem with that is it's continuous thrust, and so can't be "on rails". I really hope the new physics engine would support something like that, because then it could also support multi-hour ion drive burns in the background while you flew other craft.