Strawberry

The colony image mentions using water as a heat sink here, and it lists contact with surface should conduct heat. There's a few more examples of stuff like this throughout the diary, however its definitely confirmed that there will be conductivity for colonies (though they probably shouldve showcased why thats important more). Not to mention, there is code in game since release for thermal conductivity with colonies. It is definitely good to clarify where context is missing, however assuming malice just leads to people trying to defend themselves from malice instead of actually discussing the thing relevant here.

I don't think that moeggz is trying to be bad faith here, there is a good chance all of this started by just something being misread, god knows I misread it the first time I saw it. Let's not make this a bigger deal then this needs to be

I think a lot of this stuff is designed more towards colonies then spacecraft itself. For spacecraft, honestly, even with a more simulated approach, heat management will oftentimes just become "add more radiators". While I think there's potential for interesting design space regarding thermodynamics for spacecraft, a lot of that stuff is impractical to implement I think. For an example here, liquid metal droplets are very effective, but they have a high minimum operating tempature, so you'd want to use those for your engines, but use traditional radiators for your crew areas. This could lead to some interesting vehicle design, but not only would this system be much more difficult to implement and optimize, it would also be harder to teach, there's definitely be advantages to this approach, but I dont think the downsides outweigh it at least in the short term. So for spacecraft, heating is basically just a mass tax, it means that if you want to use your super engines, you need to sacrifice a bit of performance. Its not the most complex thing, but it helps with engine design as it means super engines benefit more from economies of scale. Colonies is where stuff gets interesting. For craft, you can't realistically design around all three forms of heat, your primary thing dictating how much touches the ground isn't thermal in nature, its getting this thing to stay straight up in a variety of conditions. For colonies, you can much more easily design around the methods of thermodynamic transfer. For example, let's say you have a very hot planet close to the sun. You will want to minimize heat transfer as much as possible. So you may make something like this to minimize thermal conduct. If you have high gravity, you'd probably need closer to a pyramid shape so your thing doesnt fold over, but yeah. There also could be some fun stuff when it comes to minimizing heat transfer from the sun too, for example if youre in a tidally locked planet, all you really care about is one face of your colony, meaning your colony may end up being basically a straight line to minimize transfer from the heat. I could go on and on with examples, but colonies to me is the much more promising place for thermodynamics.

There's definitely still development ongoing (otherwise we'd have it in our hands already), the question is on what. This is speculation with not a lot to go off of, but its safe to say the reentry side of things is more done then the radiator side of them, I assume the reentry side of things is in the debugging/optimization side of things, its playable but could be better, and the radiator side of things is more rudimentary. There's definitely a lot we dont know though, so yeah some clarification here would be nice, usually these dev diaries tend to come with responses later on and I hope we get some here. Ah I misread 1/2 years as 1 or 2 years instead of .5 years (honestly its possible darrin did the same here as well).

What tells you this? Just because we're seeing this for the first time does not mean this is the first time stuff like this was created or discussed. For example, from code that was available at release, we've seen references to ground and fluids acting as heat fluids/sink. While its possible certain aspects of heating are partially in the conceptual phase (ie stuff like how do we deal with timewarp), they've put down coding work since before release. Why four weeks, 3/4ths of a year is a far gap from 6/4ths of a year. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/212081-kerbal-space-program-2-pre-release-notes/#comment-4233618 I believe basically every youtuber from the ESA event mentioned it as well pre launch as well.

Also mildly unrelated, but we already know at least a good chunk of radiator models are done, would it be possible we see (non functional) radiators before colonies, I love how they make your spacecraft look and Id love to design craft with em.

We will see heating V1 with or before science, as mentioned previously vfx may come before this. The dev diary does imply that SWERV wont make heat, which is dissapointing, That being said, colonies having to deal with heat from the sun and ground is something I was very interested in and glad that it will be a thing.

Also the current ksp2 team is definitely pretty volatile and slower then normal currently. We know the team is split upon what theyre working on, a lot of people are going on vacations right now, and a lot of new people are being brought on on top of that, all of this slows down production a lot and makes it harder to predict when stuff will be done as theres a lot more variables (new people will help in the long term, but when you can get past the expensive onboarding phase is an unknown). I feel like itd be pretty hard to predict timelines right now, but the plus side is in the next few months when people are back and theres more people then ever development should be a lot faster and more consistent.

You’ll only need to include reproduction compartments if your mission takes more time then the time it takes kerbals to die, and your average mission is less then ten years so with the exception of interstellar missions, unless kerbal lifespans are comedically short then this feature can be ignored for 98% of missions so then its like whats even the point? If you want to make taking longer have a cost, making kerbals consume food would apply to 100% of missions and seems like a saner way of doing it This is a game where you play as green spacemen to where canonically in the first game many of the parts literally came from the trash, if this is what makes it feel goofy for you i feel like the only reason for this is because youre used to the former stuff. You could just get more materials to build more buildings by once again timewarping, the reason why i like the boom event idea is it makes building colonies not just a game of sit in timewarp and tweak your colony occasionally, but instead actually engaging with the core of the game (flying rockets to explore places)

You don't need them to die of old age for them to need to consume food, honestly consuming food sounds like a way better incentive for going faster then dying of old age, as all the latter does is a constant penalty if your mission takes longer then x years while the former actually scales.

What's wrong with that idea? Assumedly, kerbals are needed to perform labor (hence you needing to make colonies), so this would restrain expanding your economy to performing the core of the game (instead of just sitting in timewarp for 4 minutes), thus encouraging you to actually explore so you can get to building more colonies.

The concept of "boom events" to where completing milestones causes your kerbals to reproduce has been repeated pretty consistently across the years, if kerbals reproduce seperate from time, I dont think theyd go with the design choice of making them die over time as well, that just seems like a cruel and unusual punishment which violates the US constitution, a country in which intercept games is based in.

In specific, the low resolutions are referring to "far out" views, CBT does wonderfully when zoomed in. We likely won't see much of an improvement in resolution when far from a planet (which honestly is fine as it already tends to look quite good there), but you can definitely get much higher resolutions when close up. As mentioned in the link, CBT isn't the most performant system in the world for this type of stuff, however assuming its well implemented, it should be way better then what we have now. You've probably seen this thread, but for those who hasn't, it does a wonderful job of breaking down what ksp2 uses its gpu on, and on a pretty uninteresting and simple area of the mun, around 80% of the render time just goes to the surface. Even a 50% improvement in rendering times for planet surfaces would mean a reduction of total render times by 40%. https://twitter.com/NicholasTimmons/status/1629522839777705984 KSP2 does appear to use a different rendering pipeline instead of the default unity one, HDRP as an alternative, isn't the most performant alternative, but considering how bad the current one is, it will likely be a far more performant alternative. HDRP and CBT are just the systems used for rendering, which the last we heard about this stuff was when the dev diary on them was released. It's possible that plans have changed since then, but it sounded like it was planned to continue using a height map system for the physics mesh, which is what both ksp's use already.

I think you can have a war over resources/territory and it still make sense in an interstellar setting. The more crowded space is, the cheaper interstellar travel is, and the lower technology your average civilization possesses, the easier it gets to provide such justification. The key thing is to provide some sort of relatively rare resource that every civilization heavily benefits by. This does not need to be heavily consistent with what would likely be the case in real life, it just needs to be consistent with the rest of the story. For territory, you could have an active setting to where not all of the active players aren't to the level of technology to where they can't fully terraform planets, and semi habitable planets (ie has volatiles on it, and good gravity) are super valuable as you can toss one trillion people on them and have the economic output of such. This has a few implications, that being that lives are very valuable. This implies that AI is either not sufficient enough or not safe enough to replace all of labor. This also implies that living in space/on non habitable planets is more expensive then living on a hiveworld, this would mean that most of the people in space are either there for specific jobs that need to be done there, or are rich enough to afford it. It's hard to imagine an interstellar civilization fighting over elements that support life, light elements are pretty common, and are relatively easy to generate with fusion in a worst case scenario. Not to mention, you'd likely lose more light elements just transporting the stuff interstellar. Heavy metals are really the only thing that makes sense here, as they're rare enough to where they could be worthwhile to transport, and with stars having different metallicity (plus some of those possessing especially lucrative metallic chthonian planets), some stars would be much better at mining heavy metals then others. This would very likely be more energy intensive then mining the trace amounts in whatever solar system you live in, so throughput would likely be the priority here. You'd need to have something that drives up the demand for these metals, be it exponentially expanding fleets of ships or a massive race to make matrioshka brains. I'd err against making every faction heavily expansionist, but having a few that are can definitely drive some conflict.

Its an update for steam only, it's technically not a 1.3.2 update because the changes are only steam side, no lines of code of the game were changed.

It is, we just got a hotfix for it

For clarification, the different plasma thing was for after the basics of heating was established, it is very unlikely we will see it with the first iteration of heating.

The answer is very likely take two mandate

I mean when it comes to effectiveness of short term notifications, yes we are not as important. People spend hours staring at twitter and discord per day and get notifications for it on there phones, where as people are actively on forums for much less of there day. Forums is definitely useful for many things, suggestions here don't get pushed back in a tide of comments and you have dedicated spaces for specific topics, however when it comes to short term notifications, you can't really @everyone and have a notification pop up overhead on their phones.

I mean is it a mistake that should be learned from the future, yes, however I don't think it's a major error. The first minor mistake was not including the link in the initial announcement, while the initial announcement for all platforms said it'd be on ksptv on twitch, they didnt specifically link it. Definitely something they should do in the future, but it's a pretty understandable oversight. The second mistake was not posting a "AMA starts in fifteen minutes" on forums. I don't think he forgot the forum exists, most likely the reason why he didn't do it was because unlike twitter and discord people tend to be on it much less of there day thus its not as important when it comes to short notice notifications. Should he have done it anyways as it doesnt hurt, yeah probably, is it an understandable thing to do? Yeah.

It was pretty clear with the context of the ama it was mostly a “we are running low on time, I generally like this suggestion but dont have the time to elaborate” thing. I feel like the explanation of dakota made a mistake is much more reasonable then its a conspiracy to kill off the forums because reasons. I do think cms have a tendency towards discord interaction as its generally much easier to be casual there (its off topic a lot more + it encourages short form quick stuff), however I dont think the devs hate the forums. Its pretty clear they consider it a useful part of their infrastructure considering things like them shifting bug reports to here, (and also doing tweaks to it like dakota working on rolling out a new release notes format).

I think there's still definitely ways cms can improve with communication to the forums (like unifying #dev_tracker), however I don't think the question representation is an issue here. CM's should listen to everywhere for questions, however their top priority should be to grab the best questions instead of grabbing questions to fulfill the ideal social media platform ratio. Personally I don't feel like the forums was really underrepresented considering the last 20 minutes was "Hey this is a good idea please post it on the forums"

So glad to see yall doing hotfixes! Here's to hoping we get one for soi changes

There is a lot of overlap between the job as art director, and the job as design and creative director. How would you describe how you, Nate, and Shana work together/seperately to direct tasks and guide the game.

The poles used to serve as this and readding a flat area to one of them would be cool