Profugo Barbatus

This - There's very little reason or benefit to push to consoles in early access. Deploying patches and updates to consoles is a significantly more involved process than publishing steam updates, involving significant review and testing from the platform controller, and an associated cost. The speed of iteration is just one of many reasons why console early access is so rare. This is starting to slowly change with things like Xbox Game Preview, but that is very much a "Microsoft will pick and choose" process, and not something the devs can just do themselves. What you lose out on, mainly, is console player feedback on game mechanics, but that is generally not a problem so long as your PC launch is large enough - Its unlikely that console players will have input to say, the balancing of Colony resource production that is any different from PC players. Any divergent feedback will almost exclusively be in regards to console input/control schemes, which would be the bottom of the barrel of concerns during the core part of actually adding new gameplay mechanics and content - There's simply more important things to focus on.

That's fair, and I'm mostly in agreement. Science and Technology is a concern point of mine - I found the base KSP science servicable as an exploration incentive, but not particularly interesting, until they started getting deployable science. I'm hopeful that they continue that path of more involved science options. If they had something real interesting to show, I'd imagine it would have made a devlog by now. Or they did show it and I'm just an idiot who forgot.

Even the snippets we've seen indicate at least a handful of fuel and structural resources, and odds are across the kerbol system that will expand to the low tens across the space - Which gives plenty of room for inner/outer system resource scarcity and implications to your production, and by extension lots of reason to invest heavily in exploring, colonizing, and then connecting the solar system. Just the transport system alone will add a lot - not because of ease of movement, but by forcing us to fly the first route. Barring bragging rights in a grand tour, there was little reason to make a trip from Duna out to Jool directly, or vice-versa. Now navigating space will be a lot more interesting than just learning the launch windows and intercepts for Kerbal-to-everything. And I would not be surprised in the slightest if the interstellar drives went a bit sci-fi in their implementation, requiring exotic mixes of ingredients not present solely on one world. They're staying grounded in the technological principles, but a lot of the concepts out there already start from "Well if we had room temperature superconductors" or other such unobtanium material thoughts. Introducing such materials as resources would be in line with KSP, without violating the scientific grounding. Not to mention that we can all but guarantee that there will be mods going absolutely in depth on resources and production. If the base game has us pulling up 'Metallic Ore' and putting them through a refinery to get 'Metals' for ship production, modders will quickly throw in everything from a simple common/rare metals divide, to the full periodic table, with all the colony buildings for complex refining you could imagine.

I'm pretty sure we've seen an official Orion Drive already - And Orion is interstellar capable, even IRL. Plenty of time to accelerate and Decelerate, and enough energy to hit reasonable fractions of C. We've also definitely seen Fusion Torches. But, we may not see all (or any) of the interstellar drives until the Interstellar update, which comes with "Interstellar Scale Parts". So depends how big some of them are, I suppose. I guarantee you that if Orion is in at launch, the first thing every creator will do is attempt a surface launch with one. We will see a lot of memes from that chain of war crimes climbing into orbit.

Content creators will almost certainly get early access for marketing purposes - but we're talking days. The game comes out on a Thursday, creators like streamers will probably get it monday/tuesday, for some sponsored streams/vids to hype it up before release. I wouldn't expect any examinations deep enough to decide if its worth $50. Frankly, the "Is this a KSP upgrade" question won't really be solved until launch. If "KSP Sandbox mode with some new parts" isn't worth $50 to you, that's fine, give it a month and see how the EA release goes, how fast content drops, etc. Constant price hikes are uncommon, so its not likely to climb to full release price until the actual 1.0 drop, whenever and wherever that is.

Honestly, I'm inclined to believe it is neither, and that its just a structural piece they put out there because it looks nice to pretend its a debris shield

Nah, its more likely that some subset of resources is not present in the Kerbol system, that gates some of the latter interstellar techs. So makes more sense to get the parts in before the resources, both so you can balance them, and so you can get feedback on the fancier ones without someone having to build an interstellar empire first.

People keep raising time warp as if it is the biggest problem with multiplayer, but on a technical side its really not much of one at all. Its a design problem of what you want to allow. The real problem with multiplayer is physics, latency compensation, and simulation ownership and sync. Things fall apart really quickly when two people go to dock their ships, one player sees a successful dock and the game starts the 'merge' process, but the other player gunned the engines and broke the port in the last 300ms of latency, and now you gotta resolve this mess. Same for moving objects, worse for fast moving objects, exponentially worse for fast moving player controlled objects. And thats why multiplayer takes a bundle to hash out, and causes so many seemingly unrelated bugs they'd want to avoid.

Speaking as an indie dev - While I can't literally show you, multiplayer is one of those critical foundational things, and likely why the whole thing took so long to get to just this state. To put it simply, if multiplayer foundations were not already implemented, then they would never be implemented. Its not the sort of thing you can just hammer down in at the end of development. Either its in there, or they're blatantly lying to our face through their teeth. As for why its not on day one, multiplayer is also one of those things that tends to generate its own wealth of novel bugs that tend to look like something else is broken. Keeping it out of our hands while the major features come into play helps ensure the bugs they're fixing are actually for the major features.

While I'm excited to see an actual launch date and a start to the game, I'm disappointed to see that not only are all but one of the new features (Paint) not being included in the launch, but we're actually seeing a functional regression with the loss of science and a tech tree. I really hope that what does launch runs at a mirror shine, or I imagine its not going to land so well in its public reception outside the hardcore fanbase. Being shinier only gets you so far.

With the limits of information on both games, all I can confidently say is that Base Building on an assembly mechanic looks comparable - Otherwise any similarities are skin deep. You can already see the starfield ship builder is abstracting the realities of the ship design decisions one might make in KSP (Aerodynamics, CoG, etc) into a few generalized mobility stats. IVA is probably superior, but this is just by virtue of being a FPS set in space, of course it'll let you get closer and more detailed internally where you fight. Exploration is fundamentally different, with Bethesda design almost universally focused on deliberate Points of Interest; a design choice I don't see changing, whereas we haven't seen much of what drives KSP 2 exploration past the joys of adventure itself, we've just inferred from the prior game. The one I can say to completely discount at this time is graphical comparisons - Both games are yet unreleased, KSP 2's final visual fidelity is very likely still in flux as timelines and hardware shift, and Bethesda is well known for pushing the graphics to max during reveals only to scale back to what's realistic at launch - This isn't a malicious action, they just tend to be more optimistic than reality allows regarding what they can finally deliver.

They don't have to walk back on anything. They could easily put a "don't show X/Y/Z in your coverage" condition for those review copies. Its pretty common, and a lot of games have soft "don't go past X or Y" in their policies these days for streaming and content creation. Most people have some handful of trusted creators they follow, and if someone like Scott Manly or Quill18 said "I can't show you how colonies work until the release date but I've got one on the mun and its amazing" that would be enough for me to be confident in the product, and a lot of people would be the same. This is not an all or nothing field, they can keep secrets about gameplay systems while still allowing content creators to confirm the state and quality of the game.

I would propose a third option, actually. KSP likes to think of itself as a game of discovery and exploration. Much like the other aspects in the sequel, my guess is they want to keep as much of the mystery as possible on as many things as possible. Revealing substantive things in the marketing (mechanical elements) starts to open questions about how they work, what the systems are, progression, etc. Players will naturally start to metagame their way around a lot of the systems in advance. Keeping systems such as Colony Operations under wraps with just peeks into it in other videos about simpler mechanical things keeps that mystique, prevents players from trying to precompute things instead of figuring them out when they first land a colony module on the Mun. The less new parts, the less new planets, the less new systems and mechanics they show off, the more there is to be surprised by and discover at the end. That leaves mostly showing off technical art, or small aspects of pieces of the game. Its a terrible conflict for me because I do love the discovery and figuring out systems aspect, but I also really want to know whats coming down the pipe. I don't believe this offers much excuse to not talk at all about multiplayer before release though - That is very much a technical system, and not a gameplay one in the sense that you don't really discover what the limits are, you probably want to know "Can two of my friends play with me or only one" well before release for reasons outside the actual gameplay.

Always sucks to hear a delay - but I think what I'd like to see more then is just a more consistent schedule for any of the dev team reveals/communications/etc. I don't think its the total release date that has me on edge, but the complete question of "When will I know more" just being big old question marks. The community has identified trends, but trends are not "come back on the third friday of every month for something small or large".