TROPtastic

I agree with your assessment of their strategy, especially since I've seen a few indie games recently lose sight of the importance of putting your best foot forward. Some have launched paid early access programs with very barebones products, where even the core gameplay isn't at a stage where it could be considered fun. Add in many bugs and instabilities, and their playerbases have dropped significantly from the excitement of launch to a couple of hundred or even a couple dozen daily players. Completely avoidable declines if they had focused on putting out a playable, fun product at the start and then extending it with features. Private Division/Take Two cannot afford this sort of approach to development (releasing something unfun and hoping that players stick around long enough to see improvements), especially for a game that probably won't go through early access, so it's really good that they're taking their time and letting Star Theory make the game the best it can be rather than trying to rush the game towards a more profitable release window, CP2077-style. This won't ensure that KSP2 will be great at launch, but it's certainly a promising approach.

I'd just like to chime in and say: this is a very cool idea! It's great to see all KSP2 content laid out chronologically, and it makes it easy to see how spaced out updates were at different points in the game's development. Thanks for putting this together, and if it's not too much work/too expensive, I hope you can keep it updated until the release of KSP2

The glossiness could probably be toned down, and hopefully the bloom is as well, but the UI doesn't seem to be as problematic. In the site you linked, three determiners of "clickability" are listed as: Traditional, externally consistent signifiers (such as the blue, underlined text or raised buttons) Something reminiscent of a traditional signifier (such as underlined text of any color or boxed text) Contextual clues (such as actionable text or placement at the top of the page) In the UI, we see that the Fuel parts tab has a different highlight to show it is active, and buttons follow UI traditions/contextual clues that are broadly familiar to people who've played KSP or Besieged or other "builders" before. There's also consistency in that everything that looks like a button is a button. It's also important to distinguish KSP2 from websites that might be visited once or twice. Since KSP2 is a game, users will become more familiar with the UI layout as time goes on, reducing some of the effect of a fully flat UI. This doesn't mean that the devs can totally abandon UX principles (if the CoT/CoM/CoL buttons are not highlighted when said indicators are active, that would be needlessly confusing), but it does mean they have a bit more design freedom to work with.

What's the advantage of this system over one that shuts off when a resource runs out? As someone with 0 experience with game design, I don't understand why repeatedly sending request responses that say "0 resource remaining" could be useful.

@LezRowlFortunately, there will be a lot of continued improvements between now and release in a year or two. I don't think we have anything to worry about on the graphics side of KSP2.

This sounds like cynical nonsense given that there are 0 ways to pre-order the game right now. What "illusion" is going on here? We didn't know how exhaust effects were going to work in KSP2 before, and now we do. Just because you don't appreciate technical explanations doesn't mean that they are "technical java" (whatever that means). The dev of Waterfall himself gave that confirmation earlier in this thread. Incorrect. I don't know if you were following KSP2 when it was first announced and its Steam page went up, but some people were complaining that the 2019 pre-alpha visualizations were trash and evidence that KSP2 was going to be a failure. If the games you're playing have 12 minutes of gameplay and cost 60 pounds, you need to find better games. Great advice, and it seems like Take Two agrees with you since, again, there are no ways to pre-order the game right now.

This thread asks a great question, and I hope the answer is "You will have the ability to land first stages in game while the rest of your mission completes." That would be a fun addition to gameplay and to KSP's education aspects as well, since it will help demystify how reusable rockets work. Hopefully because KSP2 is already being designed with multiplayer in mind, it may be easier to have two independent craft carry out actions simultaneously.

I think "built with consoles in mind" could mean several things (in order of decreasing likelihood): 1. They have designed KSP2 to work well with controllers - this is basically guaranteed because KSP1 is available on consoles. Doing this will help the many PC players who play games with controllers too, and will make KSP2 well-suited for the Steam Deck and accessible gaming. 2. They have designed KSP2 to run well on previous gen (PS4/Xbox One) and current gen (PS5/XS) consoles - this is quite likely because KSP1 was available on previous gen consoles, but making use of current gen ones will require more work. Building KSP2 to make use of the NVMe storage on consoles will be great for high-end PCs. ... 100. They have simplified KSP's game mechanics to make it work on consoles - this is extremely unlikely and wouldn't make any sense given that KSP1 is just as in depth on consoles (without mods, of course). But, some people still fear that it might happen.

Seconding my vote for "NERVOUS", but I think the acronym should be "Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicles with Oxygen Utilisation Supercharging". The "S" could stand for something else, but I think that the NERV part has a nice parallel to the existing Nerv engine from KSP1, and it's clear that it's related to the existing engine. Bonus: using a mildly radioactive engine in Kerbin's atmosphere might make some people nervous Alternatively, the engine could be named "Nerv-S" (S for supercharged) if the acronym shouldn't be too on the nose, or it could be named "Transformer" if there are no other engines that have retractable nozzles or some other method of mode switching. LANTERN is cool as an acronym, but I think there are engines that would be better fits for the name (like one of the mentioned torch drives, perhaps).

How many times... All answers you need are there (2 S&T's out of date but that's just me being lazy) The linked repository doesn't seem to have any (labelled) images of Moho, so it doesn't seem particularly relevant to the question of whether the Mohole will be reworked or replaced. On the topic of Gurdamma having a moon that's similar in scaled distance to the Moon ~4 billion years ago, it would be very cool if the tides on the planet could dramatically change the waterline of oceans and large lakes. That would make choosing landing sites and setting up colonies more interesting and challenging, but it certainly could be a feature that comes after release if it's not already planned.

The WIP KSC looks very cool! Hopefully some industrial buildings in the style of the cool models we saw earlier can also be added to the complex. As long as they make sense of course, since there's probably no need for things like on-site xenon production.

This is far outside my area of expertise, but a 2021 peer-reviewed paper claims that, for specially constructed arrangements of spacetime called solitons, the violations of the weak energy condition of general relativity of the Alcubierre drive (thus requiring negative energy) do not happen. There is obviously some debate about the claims, but so far allegations that the concept is unworkable seem to miss the unique aspects of this solution or seem to be non-rigorous. Of course, even the author admits that there is a long way to go from "pre-existing spacetime bubbles using massive amounts of positive energy are theoretically possible" to "here is a practical warp drive design", but the math behind the paper suggests that it is not as "impossible" as previous concepts that required negative energy. I don't think KSP2 should include stock warp drives given that the engineering for this concept has a TRL of 0, but it's still interesting to follow advancements in theoretical math.

Johannes (one of the KSP2 devs) said that they weren't switching entirely to DOTS out of a risk of destabilising the game (I think Unity DOTS is still a preview package and is not production-ready), but they are still picking useful elements from it: On the topic of what these job postings could be for, I agree with that its either a port of KSP2 for consoles (I could see senior talent being valuable for this given the high-profile nature of KSP2), a major expansion that will release some time after KSP2, or something completely different. No idea for sure, but it's interesting!