Strawberry

As some of the regulars on the forums might have noticed, I havent been nearly as involved in the community for several months now. I've mostly moved on from ksp2 just because other stuff began catching my focus, and only the whole studio closure debacle has made me pay attention again. Im surprised my "Star theory ksp2 was intended to basically just be a heavily modded ksp1" theory was correct. Honestly I mostly just feel bad for the people who worked for the game, especially the public facing ones, and I wish they all find greener pastures. This whole story is filled with what could have beens, what if the studio was different, what if they didn't do the studio swap, what if intercept had X more months, what if middle management was better. Part of me wants to believe that this game could've been like no mans sky if things were just slightly different. A public facing head with starry eyes overpromises in spite of technical wisdom, wide whiplash when reality hits, then they internally acknowledge their mistakes and eventually more then make up for them. Intercept did in many ways improve, their organization improved, they were no longer working with a skeleton crew, etc. In spite of all of that though, it wasn't enough. At the end of the day as far as I can tell, the mandates that made this project such a mess still for the most part remain. Even if the ksp2 team internally acknowledge/acknowledged their mistakes, whatever higher up's called the shots that made it play out like this very likely won't. They were the ones who answered "it might have been" with "it couldn't have been". Unless if something big comes out, which I doubt, this will likely be one of the last comments I make on these forums. I'll reply to any replies if I feel like it and stuff like that, however in the past 5? 6? months I've only felt it worthwhile to comment on one thing and you're reading that comment right now. At this point there's not much left to be had, even if there's a studio move, which is increasingly unlikely, nothing will fundamentally change. I wish you all hope in finding greener pastures elsewhere. EDIT: Instinctively I went to open up the forums and see if I got a reply, you may notice this particular edit is two minutes after I commented this and to that I reply shush. I've never bookmarked the forums, instead I just press f and click on the first link for the ksp2 forums. This link is for some reason a thread I made nearly 2 years ago speculating about the original scope of ksp2 and I never really put much thought into this because why would I. I guess I got my answer somewhat? I still have no clue on some of the specifics but at this point speculation is as productive as anything else, though honestly that may have always been the case.

Doesnt orbital report fulfill the theoritical niche of doing polar orbits if its current implementation wasnt (admitedly by the devs) lacking? Afterall you need to hit all biomes for it.

I haven't had the chance to play around with science nearly at all due to personal reasons, so I can't speak much to a lot of the specific criticisms in this thread and take what I say with the appropriate grain of salt. My general thoughts on the matter from what I have seen so far is I think on a fundamental level what they have is good, I do wish however that they add some more science experiments to flesh out the craft design limitations (ie stuff like a science part that makes a lot of heat and something like ksp1's breaking ground seismometer). That being said, I think claiming that as a whole (I am not referring to very specific design choices that effect like 2% of science modes gameplay) stock ksp1's science delivered better in realism/purpose is just rose tinted glasses. Keep in mind, in ksp1, you could run seismometers and barometers in space and this generated meaningful amounts of science consistently because ???. While both ksp's science systems are particularly realistic (nor would I argue they should be), I do think that in general from what I have seen ksp2 does a better job at "hey you actually have to monitor the thing that scientists care about." . Thermometers and funky goo canisters, while silly, don't really tell you what scientists actually care about, going hey go do a survey of a planets liquids (you actually have to be in the liquid) does . One thing I think ksp2 could do better in this regard is with it's descriptions, I'm fine with the silly names because it's ksp, but I do think the atmosphere survey parts should've mentioned the use of a spectrometer for example as that's a really important science part. From what I have seen, ksp2's science reports are also better at telling you "here's what's actually going on physically here (ie here's the surface composition), though this is based off of the very little i have seen of it. I will fully admit all of this is subjective however. I do think that ksp2's science system is way way better with giving the player purpose however. The science experiments are much more unique compared to ksp1 having 66% of the parts working everywhere and only minor variation with those parts (ie sometimes you need to micromanage with a scientist!). While I think ksp2's experiments could and should be more purposeful with some of the later ones, it is leagues better then ksp1. Not to mention, you actually have to leave the kerbin system to finish the tech tree which is nice. The only big thing you could argue that ksp1 does better when it comes to purpose is you're not directly interacting with the parts in specific as much. But I dont think the purpose of ksp is to go through uis, it's to fly rockets, and I think all gameplay should ultimately serve that goal. Differing cups of tea and all that, but I think it's a good design choice to assume kerbins work out the finer details of flipping the on switch of a science part, while we do the overall management.

Player counts were decreasing pretty quickly after launch, two hours from launch its only gone down by 200 players. Definitely good signs all around

My hope is that the first two tiers are kinda easy so new players can get through them, and the later tiers are where science starts to kick but we will see. I can't really play science on a decent setup for like two weeks anyways which is sad

You can disable paige in settings now! Under cadet orientation

The last interview for the ESA space event has dropped, the creator is french so the intro is, but the interview starts at 2:20 and is in english. Nothing super gameplay relevant in this one, still is neat

I'm excited and here's to hoping the team can deliver, good luck.

No they were all cut down by ancient kerbals and that's where all the ecology present went and why there's no animals

Im entering so I can combine my two copies to get KSP4

That's a real tree stump, unlike all those fake trees that surround it

Torchships with millions of isp and over 1g tend to be mostly fictional because in order to get that type of performance you need power outputs of hundreds of terrawatts. The entire power output of humanity makes roughly 2 terrawatts. From a physics perspective, its possible to have a spacecraft with this type of power output and have it not melt from its own exhaust, from an engineering perspective though good luck even getting the fusion to react enough in order to get these types of power outputs. Anyways, more realistic interstellar designs tend to involve very low thrusts, for example project Daedalus (which seems to be the inspiration for the interstellar engine we have seen), gets an acceleration of roughly .01 G (assuming fully loaded) and also needed a fission reactor to power the thing (You can have a craft with less acceleration and not a terrible loss in performance (only less then 10% of daedelus's mission had it actually using its thrusters). For comparison, DART (which used the NEXT ion thruster with similar isp to ksp's dawn), would've had an acceleration of .00004 G using just its ion thrusters, and Psyche also gets very similar acceleration. I think the main reason why you wouldn't want to use interstellar craft in system is theyre kind of a pain. They're not as slow to fly as ion spacecraft sure, but they're huge things that are hard to dock, rotate, and individually they're very expensive. If you were to use them, you'd use them only for routes and materials you need to transfer lots of materials, making them more of space trains, with high setup costs but low maintence costs. Overall I think you can have interstellar engines not break the game just due to the reality of them being heavy, large, slow things.

Correction, the "camera" is actually an autonomous sampler which is presumably unlocked under the autonomous sampling node. The animation for this part seen in the For Science video teaser makes this a bit more clear.

The forum has a bug to where linking text can lead to all text further down in the page to wobble, video of it here. I am on windows 10, and this is on google chrome https://discord.com/channels/1039959585949237268/1039965578754007060/1180260492770541668

We dont know much definitively about ksp2 science parts yet, but it does sound like some science parts will have more strict criteria for using them (ie aquatic sciences will likely need water), so it makes sense for them to introduce the more parts gradually, and i think a fine way of doing that is them being in the tech tree. I think having every science part at once at the begining of the game would just be overwhelming.