Strawberry

You know that nate is like, the creative director right? He's very much not qualified to work on physics because thats not his job.

Im hoping itll be patch 3 more bugs + heating patch 4 science but I dont feel like thatll be the case. Eitherway more bug fixes + tweaks are lovely and Im always happy to see them.

The fact that 2/3s of them left makes me feel like this wasn't the case for most of them. I highly doubt that the decision to let them go was the star theory teams (aka Nate and the crew) call, afterall they've been working with them on the floor of ages and presumably bonded. Id blame the decision on take two, I dont know what criteria they made the decision off of (my best bet is they viewed the star theory engineering team as underqualified). From what we know Id blame this letgo as the biggest reason why KSP2 is like this, needing to make a new engineering team essentially from scratch in a highly technically involved game is going to lead to massive setbacks.

The main hurdle for ksp2 seems to be on the technical side. Everything we've seen on the artistic side has been great, and everything we've seen has been finished and polished. Considering the fact that during the star theory merger, most of the engineers were fired (we know only 4 remained from star theory), while most of the artistic team was left in tact it makes sense. Judging by the patch we got the current engineering team seems competent (though we'll know more with next patch which will come out next week), but while I think they got a phase 1 stage working for a lot of the main concepts, for more of the technically involved concepts like resources and colonies theyre in a weak state. Personally Im not worried about planets at all because as previously mentioned the art side of ksp2 is pretty good and planets with the exception of things like Rask and Rusk tend to be mostly art heavy.

I dont think the game will be close to "fully" optimized before science, but I do think most of the bugs will be fixed before science. A lot of people have forgotten about ksp2 and I feel like science will be the thing that draws many peoples eyes back, so theyll want to make sure they get the second showing well off. Not many people are pushing for science to be released urgently so they have time on there hands right now.

Surprised someone did it! Congrats to MinerBat!

You can easily do fission or fusion, especially fusion considering your fuel is the air. Orbital colonies are definitely possible, you can make a hot air balloon in a gas giant as previously mentioned. NASA looked into using solar powered hot air balloons for Jupiter previously and found out you need 112 kg of balloons for 10 kg with this design. I assume you can get better figures switching to nuclear as you can get to higher tempatures. The main uses I can see for floating colonies is 1. Atmospheric harvesting from gas giants, for things like helium-3. and 2. Support colonies for surface bases, stuff like having most of your crew on Eve while only your miners are on the surface. This would be used for when the surface has a reason why you wouldn't want to be there, such as low access to power on the surface but good access to solar above clouds, or when floating is more habitable then the surface.

Requiring to equip this specific suit if you want to do a specific mission seems micromanagey for no benefit. Not to mention, you add an additional science tax to planets because now not only do you need to unlock good enough parts to get there, you need to unlock this specific suit to even consider a manned mission which seems blegh. I do think the idea of unlocking new suits has merits, but Id rather it be focused on providing upgrades instead of downsides. Stuff like a suit that has much more delta v, or a high thrust spacesuit for high g enviroments.

So glad you guys fixed the VAB bug that one was painful

Also KSP2 has engineers whose specialty is to work on multiplayer so itd be a waste to put them towards other projects such as bug fixing as that isnt there specialty

Just finished watching it, this is way better then the previous interview. Nates mic is bad but its clear that the interviewer actually knows about ksp2. There's a lot of interesting things in here and Id recommend watching it, theres not too many new big things but theres a lot of neat stuff in there. The things I found interesting were 1. For some features threes diverse thoughts on implementation. The example listed was radiation, there's many diverse thoughts on the team against and for things for it, so in the short term radiation isnt planned but not ruled out for the far future, but as we gain access to parts that justify radiation more (such as Orion drives or ICF drives), then the chance of radiation becomes more likely. Its important to note here that Nate also specifically said in the AMA that there was no short term plans for life support, so I assume that life support is in a similar case here. Right now it sounds like theyre very much prioritizing core features and not paying as much head to side mechanics such as radiation. 2. Asked about why they used unity, answer was basically we knew that KSP1 could do it and they decided to play it safe. 3. Apparently Chris Adderley has an actual background in aerospace?? Which is just cool

KSP2 has a lot of interviews with very small creators throughout its history (I still think the interview with that college kid was the best interview we've seen yet). I dont know what criteria they use to decide who to interview with but it definitely is very interesting.

I assume that if youre going at a relative speed to where it cant calculate itll just use rock density to calculate the chance of you "colliding", and use that chance to dictate if your ship explodes or not

The direct transcript doesnt include that Nate Simpson would really like to see weather be a thing, I feel like the team is mostly focused on 1.0 right now and all the cool weather stuff may come afterwards. Honestly it wont add that much to the game compared to things like interstellar so I wont fault them for putting it aside.

Personally I dont really care if they dont introduce life support for ships, id like to see it but I wouldnt cry about it. I do however, very much hope they implement it for colonies (in specific when resources arrive), as itd lead to much more interesting trade routes and make planetary colonization much more interesting.

I agree with the opinion that long rockets should wobble, very much disagree with the claim that multi stacked parts should wobble. For many parts the only options you have are short parts, for example the oscar fuel tank. You shouldnt have to deal with wobble just because the game doesnt have the right part. Not to mention there are definitely asthetic reasons why youd want to use lots of stacked small parts. I like constructing rockets with lots of truss adapters, and I dont think I should deal with lots more wobble because I wasnt lazy and used a large fuel tank instead. While you could introduce new parts for this, this feels bloaty especially on top of an already long tank list. Personally I think itd be good if joint strength adjusted to length of a part.

The transcription of the ama understandably lacks a good bit of text that gives more nuance and detail compared to the audio recording (it was done live afterall). Answer starts roughly here, I honestly recommend watching the whole thing in general as it has info that was left out.. Nate describes science similar in broad strokes as in you get science and bring it back to a r&d center (this implies colonies can have R&D bases which sounds neat). He also mentions how the team is playing around with having localized areas within biomes to play around with. I read the would include in the answer as "this is not an extensive list", and instead the main broader changes he thought of. Personally while I dont expect the changes to be as extensive as kerbalism, I dont expect these to be the only changes. Also one thing that has been mentioned extensively by Nate is that youll have specific resources for specific "vehicle architecture", this is more speculative but it seems weird for you to be able to research things when you havent visited the planet you need to get the materials to craft it, maybe surface samples are needed to unlock specific branches of the tech tree?

While the terrain is definitely a big step down in terms of performance, I think its undeniable that the terrain system is a big step up look wise from KSP1 (If you want to see it from orbit look at duna, if you want to see what the terrain system can do look at the geography of Pol). Im guessing the talk will go basically "We started with PQS because ksp1 did it and it was easy, heres all the little knick knacks we've added to PQS, here's when we ultimately realized that we couldnt get PQS as performant as we'd like with the graphics we like, here's what we're doing with CBT".

Currently if you make something like this, the engine will connect to only one of the decouplers on the other side. This means that setups like this are impractical as they increase the wobble of your spacecraft a lot. What I propose is if when attaching parts, if multiple joints line up at the same time while construction, all the joints will snap together instead of just one. This will allow construction of things like this without it breaking apart massively

This seems to work better while zoomed in. While in flight, you can hold down right click and mouse 3 and this will remove your camera away from the spaceship. I dont believe theres a way to recenter your camera back on the spaceship (see below, rocket is on the launchpad yet the camera is centered on not that)

KSP2 should probably have a seperate area from KSP1 (can be on the same wiki) as things like planets in kerbol will have different info for them and having each page be twice as long seems bad.

Its great that youre doing this! Just two three questions from me 1. What is your favorite soup that the intercept office has served? 2. I remember in the past (in that podcast you did with that student iirc), you mentioned radiation was planned and it would have various effects on kerbals. Is radiation still planned to be implemented in one form or another or has the team lost interest in implementing that? If its still planned how late in the roadmap do you currently plan on implementing it, or if you lost interest what were the reasons for doing so? 3. Will we see the introduction of radiators at the same time we get reentry heating or will that be later?

Honestly this is what kerbals deserve for using car based infrastructure. It should be demolished entirely and replaced with more sensible forms of transport like a monorail

Upon further testing it appears that for all engines the thrust is always shown as 0 kn

I feel like there has to be a way to get the flash cooling required for glass in large quantities in nature naturally. Only thing I can think of is either small bodies having enough surface area to get the speed of radiative cooling required for glass formation, or silicate being cooled down upon contact with a cold metallic core?