t_v

I just want to clarify that that comment was made in jest, and I don’t want to put any pressure on the devs. My real reaction to the possibility of a marketing campaign is “if it is happening, that is great, but if it isn’t, that is still great, we just got a bunch of news at once!”

We’ve seen the grass, which looks just as dense (although a bit lower), and we’ve seen the work on the rock scattering system, which looks more sparse. I don’t think that the density of features will be due to a technical or feature limitation, but rather due to artistic decisions on how the planets should look. However, one thing that Parallax can’t (yet) do that we’ve seen in KSP 2 is the large-scale bumpy terrain visible from much further away. KSP’s terrain is still very smooth with scatters on it, and the jagged bumps that we’ve seen in KSP 2 indicate that planets might be even more interesting to navigate. Also, congrats to Gameslinx on this amazing update to Parallax. If this is the first time you have heard about this mod or this update, download it now, it is very much worth it.

no... don't say it

If atmospheric pressure exceeds chamber pressure, then the engine won’t start, and air can force itself into the reaction chamber while the engine is running, shutting it off. This actually happens in KSP 1 - try bringing a terrier to Eve sea level, it won’t work. Think of it this way: if the ISP of an engine decreases from vacuum to sea level, it decreases even more as the atmosphere gets thicker. I think jets could work at high pressures (with compatible atmospheres) because the intake propellant is already at high pressure. The point is, high pressure atmospheres pose interesting engineering and flying challenges that could affect gameplay in a good way.

My question then becomes: how is Kerbin a watery, grassy planet? It isn’t tidally heated like Laythe, so if minmus was cold enough, then Kerbin would become a frozen ball. Laythe also loses the small percentage of its heating that comes from Kerbol and tidal heating might not be enough for it. Then, the matter arises that minmus still won’t work. The problem isn’t that space is too warm for that ball of ice, even on the sunny side. The problem is that a tiny amount of ice will evaporate from minmus, and it doesn’t have enough gravity to keep it from escaping. Reducing temperature enough might extend the lifespan of minmus into the billions of years, but it will evaporate suprisingly quickly even with a red dwarf.

I'd like people to be able to fly their rockets with limited parts around Kerbin, just to check out the flying aspect too. Maybe limit it to generic plane and rover parts, and one or two sizes of rocket parts, in the early-mid tech range. That way, the exciting content such as the cool future tech or the cool celestial bodies are still reserved for the full version but demo players can try out the flight UI and graphics. Also, limiting parts would make things simpler so that players aren't confused by an overabundance of incompatible resource types in the demo.

Wait, where? I heard that someone was hired to work on Lua scripting, but I didn’t hear anyone say that it would be the new modding language or that there would be a module manager-like system.

What I meant was that the Mammoth engine has multiple colors (primary color, secondary color, highlight color, etc) and on this craft ass of those colors were assigned as “white”. At least I hope that is the case

Remember, things can be painted, and I think these parts got painted all white.

Those are booster recovery pads (because they don’t have the facilities of launch pads but don’t seem to serve any other purpose) which indicates that precise landing and recoverable rockets will probably be a thing in KSP 2.

That music is pretty upbeat - wait is that the new menu music? If it is, I love it- it seems just as upbeat and goofy as the Kerbals!

You can also use the “[“ and “]” keys to swap between vessels at close range.

The instability of the data is proportional to the size of the numbers, and while different data types will have different precisions, an instability of 1mm every single time the game updates can cause some serious perturbations. But the reasoning and implementation of this is discussed in a dev diary, I thought so! In this diary, there are these statements: So, what does this mean? first, it means that 1mm precision is actually meaningful for the game. If you think about a kerbal moving at 1 m/s (not sure of their actual speed), 1 mm precision allows them to stop at 1000 points along that mater, which is helpful to not have stutters of 1 cm at a time (which would be noticeable both space-wise and time-wise as the kerbal would stutter like Mario between frames of movement). you might also want to position parts with a 1mm level of precision to gain even greater control. And parts colliding should only dip millimeters into each other, not centimeters. There are tons of reasons why 1mm can be useful as a highest precision, but let's talk about the other end: the maximum signed distance being just under a light-year means the maximum playable area is a box of just under 2 light-years on a side. After that, even if there is nothing out there, leaving that box would require implementing a new coordinate system and managing the transition between the two. Not to mention that you still have to deal with the crazy bugs that happen with large floating-point numbers. Instead, why not accept the fact that multiple coordinate systems will be involved and make it so that the physics works near flawlessly by keeping numbers small and not using floating-point? so, here's how the spatial scene graph works, at least from what I understand of it: you start with your imprecise coordinate system that only measures in increments of 100,000 m. but you don't want your ship doing 100,000 m jumps, you want it moving as smoothly as possible through space. So you take the area where your ship is and you simulate that to a precision of 1 m. This area either stays stationary or moves with the ship (we're really looking at how the origin moves) and its position and velocity is kept track of. So your ship is moving in increments of 1m in a bubble of space that is at a set position (but that position is in an increment of 100,000m). Once your ship reaches the edge of that bubble, it moves 100,000 m and your ship keeps going. But 1 m precision also isn't good because all the parts would be clipped to that 1 m scale, and any kerbals on EVA or any moving parts would jump one meter with respect to the ship. So, you now take a smaller, fully precise bubble of space just around the ship. this bubble jumps 1m at a time inside the bigger bubble that jumps 100,000m at a time, while on the very inside, you can do your micro maneuvers to your heart's content. you have full precision while storing relatively small values in data, and you avoid any of the kraken-inducing bugs that floating point errors produce. It's a win-win-win! I wonder if it is now being implemented everywhere in the game instead of just interstellar space, since the devs are 'slaying the kraken' Sorry for the long explanation, I just wanted to make sure that there were little to no misunderstandings for this particular thing.

Honestly, me too. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a concrete story, or a specific type of setting, or that the lore and mysteries have to be conveyed in traditional ways. Large stories and text logs are two separate things. I agree with your statements about KSP 1 and the way its lore is done, but there is a big point to be made for stark emptiness. Lifeless worlds can tell just as much of a story as one’s full of life, and cresting a hill and seeing a thousand kilometers of unending basalt flats can create just as strong of an emotion as cresting it and seeing ancient crashed ships scattered around. Just because it isn’t a positive emotion doesn’t mean it isn’t a good story. And, worlds and words are also two different things. Anyone who loves to read knows the value of when a book doesn’t hand-hold its audience and does worldbuilding by revealing details and allowing the audience to fill the rest in. Finally, big stories and cohesive stories are also separate things. Minecraft is undoubtedly a giant exploration and adventure game, and it has lots of lore hidden in almost every feature. However, it is unclear whether this lore is cohesive, or if it is, what the story is. Despite this, it is still a great game with a strong, if open-ended, story.

I think the smallest scale of precision was described using the world “millimeter.” But I can’t remember what piece of media it was from, and I’m not sure it was this one. They were talking about spatial subdivisions in a dev diary or something.

As in you want one added? It is in KSP 1 but is folded behind the UI at the top, so you have to hover over it. I hope that the UI gets un-cluttered enough to have a permanent abort button.

The idea is that the pushed plate takes the full impulse of the bomb and spreads it out over a much longer time period. Maybe at the extreme, the pusher plate would still be receiving force while it is extending back, but more likely the bomb stops exerting force before the pusher plate makes it even halfway to the main craft. If the plate was just a simple spring, it would exert more force when it was more compressed and less force while it was less compressed, making the acceleration... unpleasant. But it can be engineered to exert a pretty constant amount of force at any point in its compression, although this might require some motors or something. However, you are right that the bombs need to happen pretty frequently, as the next bomb needs to hit the pusher plate before it reaches maximum extension, or the entire ship will lurch and probably have a bad time structurally.

You technically need active control when storing antimatter magnetically. The reason is that, even though antimatter doesn’t decay at a meaningful rate, stray atoms of it will inevitably hit the walls despite magnetic containment. If the antimatter were perfectly stabilized this wouldn’t be a problem, but if the antimatter is oscillating even a tiny bit, as it gets closer to a wall, the interactions with that wall will increase and impact the antimatter more, pushing it in the other direction at a higher speed than it came in. As the antimatter starts seriously oscillating and accelerating, it flings off larger clumps of atoms into the walls, amplifying the amount of force it generates by orders of magnitude. Think of it like someone pushing off of walls as they near it, building up more and more speed until their reaction time fails and they hit one of the walls. It is kind of cool that antimatter stores so much energy that it will literally give itself kinetic energy just by the minuscule amount of interaction it has with anything around it.

If the pusher plate is well designed, the craft should actually experience a continuous acceleration. If you were sitting in the pusher plate… I don’t think a kid could kick that hard. Maybe a horse.

Just an FYI, the altimeter has a toggle to display from sea level or ground level. My biggest UI thing that I would like changed is actually the precision maneuver editor. I would like to drag the precision editor in the same way as I do for normal maneuver nodes, because right now my only (stock) options are maneuvering the camera weirdly or clicking a lot of times to get increments of change.

I'd like the reason for exploration to be more positive than something missing, and much more vague and in the background like the lore in KSP 1. The relics and monoliths are an example of a system that communicates lore effectively and in-world, and they would be pretty cool if they created a fully cohesive system. so, here's what I think: Similar to the monolith in KSP 1, there is a sculpted rock made out of a strange material that emits some sort of signal by the site of the KSC. Lore-wise, this rock is a remnant of a planetary collision in another star system which scattered pieces across the universe, as well as a few other anomalies. The destroyed planet almost certainly had alien life, but its nature is unknown as everything from a stereotypical UFO to several anatomically incompatible alien skeletons can be found scattered around. Whoever these aliens were, they seem to have no rhyme or reason to their influence on the universe, and the search for answers that don't exist is what drives kerbals to go interstellar. At the end of the game, the signals point to a stripped planetary core floating in interstellar space made out of the same strange material and with huge asteroid fields all around. No answers are given, and the search is concluded. Maybe there is a cryptic Kerbal statue or a monolith made of regular stone with a kerbal on it (like the Squad logo was) but nothing concretely explaining what the story is.

I think that is comes down to balance and play testing -there are a lot of surface level details that have been shown off, such as how things are going to look, or maybe some of the systems that the team is fairly certain will be in the final game or are flexible enough that balance changes won't change the system. But nothing so far about how many intermediary resources there will be in ISRU processing, how punishing life support will be (if it exists at all), or other things that impact the gameplay experience. I kind of get that strategy, if I was releasing a platformer and showed off how the character moved around with all their abilities and stuff to a community, I'd probably get a lot of feedback on it as if those are the final choices for the game. Some fraction of this might be helpful, but that's what the play testers are for and the rest of the feedback is just people misunderstanding that everything is changing. If I don't release anything, some people might assume that I don't have the jumping mechanics implemented, but the truth is I'm trying to figure out if I want it to look more like Mario or Celeste jumping. If you want some reassurance that systems have been developed (and are being balanced instead of being conceptualized, look at the interview with Shadowzone (I think?) There is mention that the code had to be designed from the ground up with Multiplayer in mind, and that was back in 2019. If the codebase was already being overhauled in 2019, then it has almost certainly been developed by now and is going through iterations to see what should stay or not.

Completely agree that RPGs (generally) benefit from this, and I think it also reveals one of the reasons why co-op is so good at improving games. Any automated systems implemented in a game won't be as good as another human sitting there (even theoretically), and while I don't think NPC algorithms should be discarded for an only-multiplayer system, multiplayer would certainly allow some people to have a better experience than single player. For example, in KSP, there's been suggestions to automate booster recovery with some systems that work various ways (abstracting, recording flights and editing them, etc.) or allowing people to go back and recover the booster themselves, but those systems will never be designed better than how someone else could recover the booster. I actually think that co-op city builders could be great, as managing a city is a task that inherently requires a lot of attention divided among multiple systems, and being able to dive really deep into, say, the plumbing while someone else makes sure the tourism industry doesn't die out would be fun. However, I was mainly saying that generalizing things to "all games" won't work, and as Bej said, it is highly personal. I don't want to be landing boosters for shared missions, but for another group of people, that gameplay might be a massive improvement over the single player option.

Very debatable, but that doesn't matter. As someone who has done co-op missions several different ways, I can definitely say that KSP and KSP 2 do benefit from multiplayer.

My internet is slow, what does it say? (But seriously, we know it is exists, is doesn't particularly matter when it is released)