Wheehaw Kerman

There’s a fun discussion to be had about hope versus expectations - the distinction being around what the consequences of disappointing them are. One has expectations of the people they manage; they hope to live up to those expectations. The only consequences to TT of the game not living up to your hopes is at most $50 in lost sales and the threat of some gamerish badmouthing, which I’m sure keeps nobody awake at night. That kind of thing is more annoying to the rest of us than it is to them, especially after the first few dozen repetitions. So I think that “hopes” is a better term. There’s not much you can do if your hopes are disappointed… But regardless of that, I find it ironic that you are calling me an optimist when you developed the hopes or expectations that you did based on the leadup to the EA launch, which included the roadmap, the specs sheet, the sneak peeks, and the ESA insider footage. I looked at those, and concluded that we were going to get pretty much exactly what we got: a buggy EA package with exactly what the roadmap promised us in terms of content. I think that there’s another term for the belief that the cinematics were accurate representations of EA gameplay - delusion. As for the fifty bucks… well, there’s nothing wrong with being in a position where that’s a lot of money to you. I’m beyond fine with fifty bucks for the game in this state. I’m well past the $2/hr threshold, which makes quibbling about the price tag beyond silly. In fact, in terms of hours of entertainment bang for the buck, quibbling about dollar value in gaming is completely ridiculous… And in addition to the gameplay, which is only going to improve, much like KSP1’s did (the KSP1 EA process was the best gaming experience I ever had), I get several months to a couple of years of gaming before 1.0, which I get for free. That’s a solid deal to anybody with reasonable standards.

I think “solid enough for EA as part of a trend of continuous improvement” will do the trick. Expectations? I think you mean “hopes”. Those are on us to control. Taking cinematics for gameplay is foolish. The state of the EA shouldn’t have surprised anybody - we were give. Plenty of warning.

Again, some disappointment was only to be expected. And people expressing that is actually useful. Endlessly rehashing the same basic unfounded and exaggerated complaints everywhere, in bad faith, only louder and with extra vitriol, is only going to make the forums unliveable. The sort of person that does that basically abandons any entitlement they might have to any degree of civility in excess of forum rules, and the mods have rightly been jerking their leashes hard. This place is getting more tolerable as a result. And I think that the narrative can be easily reversed with a series of successful updates. Things can only get better, and if they do, consistently, the negative anti-narrative will lose traction and fade. As for the fifty bucks is a lot of money the game should have been perfect and complete never mind the EA warning and it should run at 500 fps on a potato stuff, it’s all been said and replied to elsewhere. I don’t suppose you’ve watched S1 of For All Mankind, have you?

Well, if you haven’t been all toxic, hissy, and bitey, then you aren’t one of the people my remarks were directed at. As you’ve surely noticed, not all of the negativity here was disappointment being expressed in good faith. That sort of thing is fine and can be productive, and not even the clear communication we got around the state of the EA can help that - some people confuse their unrealistic hopes with realistic expectations and then vent when they’re predictably disappointed. Happily, a combination of good moderation and the sort of person in question lacking commitment and attention span has led to less of the bad faith toxic negativity for negativity’s sake that we saw over the first week. I don’t understand why people enjoy being hostile, aggressive, whiny, entitled to that degree, nor repeating the same litany of unfounded hyperbolic complaints despite their audience’s clear lack of interest. I blame the internet, personally. Regardless, I am cautiously optimistic about the game, you are somewhat less so. If you feel strongly about this, why don’t you set a reminder and touch base again in a year, and we’ll see who was closer to the mark? We’re actually not that far apart. I think we’re both saying that obvious steady progress is necessary - I’m pointing out that a series of solid roadmap drops over time will change the current temporarily whiny negative narrative. I think you have me confused with Ghostii and Dakota

Now that things have settled down and the venomous reptiles have been relocated to their natural habitats, I’m going to suggest that everything depends on the first three roadmap steps, assuming that things get reasonably debugged and optimized by the time Colonies drop. Science in a semi-debugged state in Q1 is going to give people a playable progression with things to do at destination that’s much prettier, has better and has more parts than KSP1, and is, let’s assume, about as stable. I expect we’re going to suffer a minor infestation of reptiles regardless, but the mods seem to have upped their pest control game. Word on the street will be “It’s improving”. Then, we get Colonies, again assuming on a reasonably timely basis - say right before Christmas. More bugs slain, lots more to do, a whole brand new way to play. And it’ll be very photogenic too. More improvement, more players, buzz starts snowballing in a positive direction. Newbies start buying the game. And then Interstellar drops. An entire new star system drops, with new honking big parts being assembled into honking big starships. It’ll be extremely photogenic. The Kraken will likely devour some interstellar ships, because he’ll have been banished from the Kerbol system and interstellar space and DebDeb will be the only locations not purged with holy fire. The positive snowballing increases, sales go up, some of the less toxic reptiles quietly forget what they said about the EA being worse than ethics in video game journalism and start showing up and being meekly non-venomous. Now imagine what the reaction is going to be to when Multiplayer’s release date is announced. We’ll have had months of buzz about the game heading in the right direction, positive reviews, feedback, optimization, bug fixing, Kraken-purging. People will go nuts. And all this hinges on nothing more than careful progress by the devs following the roadmap steadily.

As I said to the last person making this claim in spite of the fact that the game being on Steam is prima facie proof that he was talking through his hat, why don’t you go complain to Steam about this and let us know how that works out for you?

This evening I faffed around with procedural wings trying to make lifting body spaceplanes, with very limited success. Had a funny moment when the wings simply fell off one.

Also, something I just remembered: the red out-of-fuel aircraft sneak peek we got had a second set of control surfaces on the wingtips. This might have been a one-axis-per-set of control surfaces workaround for the SASflappies.

There seem to be a couple of camps here. The first one, insofar as I can translate, seem to be saying [my PC is a potato and I am upset], [$50 is a lot of money to me and I am upset], [I did not read the roadmap and watch the ESA insider vids and I am upset that the game has bugs and is not feature complete], and [I cared deeply about ethics in video game journalism and am happy I have found KSP2’s development to be upset about]. A lot of this camp is also saying, for a combination of the foregoing reasons [I’m not good enough at the game to design stable craft or fly anything], [I am the sort of person who has no patience and ragequits at the first setback], [I refuse to acknowledge any reality where people are enjoying playing the game and substitute my own], and [based on a week’s partial and cherry-picked data and a complete lack of insight into TT’s balance sheet and strategic plan, I predict the imminent cancellation of the project]. It’s so repetitive and predictable that the mods could set up a ticky-box form post and little to nothing of value would be lost. Also, anybody feel like designing a bingo card for the rest of us? The next camp seem to be saying “wow that’s a lot of bugs”, and “here’s a workaround”. Or “I am disappointed but understand how Early Access works/trust the devs”. Or “the code has already got a huge chunk of the roadmap built in, much of what is here is a huge improvement over the first game and I have a modicum of patience”. And some are even saying “the bugs are a great simulation of the early days of human spaceflight where we had no clue and things just failed for no good reason, making the engineers and scientists have the high point of their careers solving those issues”. Well, on that last one, it’s just me that’s saying it, so far, but anyhow, I know which camp I want to be in. Have a great second week of EA, everyone, and Intercept peeps, hammer onwards!

I think you’re confusing commercial reasonability with morality. Either way, that’s not what’s happening with the EA pricing. We’re getting the EA at a discount. And we got full disclosure as to the roadmap and condition of the game at EA. That’d be sad if they did it that way. It makes space piracy in multiplayer impossible.

I agree. I’ve been using advanced controls and setting ailerons to roll only, elevators to pitch only, and rudder to yaw only, and getting zero flap. Then I built a very 1950s single engine delta winged design, with ailerons set to roll and pitch, and got flap.

I wouldn’t call it a disaster yet: “very rough first draft” would be more accurate. Things can only get better. Add verbal countdowns to burn start and stop, time of burn, amount of fuel burnt, and percentage of fuel remaining to be burnt, and the new burn timer would be phenomenal.

You are making an awful lot of very upset-sounding noise for somebody who claims to not care about the game… Clearly, the game meets the Steam requirements if it’s been selling on Steam for eight days. If you feel this strongly about it, you could try complaining to Steam. In the meantime, though, I think I’m going to play some more KSP2, since, notwithstanding your opinion, it’s fun in mine. Not sure whether to go for Dres or Duna. Have a nice evening! I wasn’t going to mention that, but now that you have, yes, that had occurred to me too.

You just made me think of something. That Mün landing I mentioned a few posts ago followed much the same profile, but I was staging with the space bar. I rode the second stage down to about 100m, it ran dry, I dropped it, fired up my lander engine, and was enveloped in a much larger than expected explosion. I’m wondering whether the decoupler fuel drain bug didn’t suck a bunch of fuel out of the lander’s tank, and that’s what made the big explosion?

Got bitten by either the decoupler fuel drain bug or my own stupid assumption that things the worked in KSP1 will work in KSP2. My lunar lander ran out of fuel very early on ascent. So I EVA’ed Tim C. and started burning retrograde. I realized in a couple of seconds he didn’t have enough jet pack fuel for a survivable landing, so I burned for orbit and barely made it. Periapsis is 8,623 meters. Tim’s headed over the terminator into night now. Hope any new mountains are below 8,620 meters… ETA: it would appear that there’s a point on the Mün that high, and Tim hit it in the darkness. Or the map view had his periapsis wrong.

I’ve had no trouble with radially mounted 1.25m boosters with the nosecones mounted on the radial decoupler, tank then attached to the nosecone, engine to tank, and two struts per booster; 1 from the tip of the nosecone and one from the base of the tank. Stick a separatron pointed upwards on the nosecone staged with the radial decoupler. Run your fuel lines to the center tank. Works fine. And on a 2.5m direct ascent Mün craft, those two struts per booster are all I’ve needed. KSP2 isn’t KSP1, and we can’t assume that everything we learned in the first game is going to work in this one. The current version seems to reward simple, conservative minimalist designs and punish large complicated ones. Starting small and progressing incrementally and carefully, with attention paid to flight reports on crashes, as opposed to building giant Kraken lures, is a play style that’s very much playable. And things can only get better…

You’ve reminded me of that wonderful quote about the Code of the Pirate Brotherhood from Pirates of the Caribbean… I’ll just point to the EA having been selling on Steam for over a week now as being proof that the EA is in acceptable condition by the Steam EA requirements you cite. Welcome to the Black Pearl, Mr. tstein. You better start believing in Early Access, because you’re in one . Seriously though, the forums and discord and so forth are like a cross between a ball pit filled with an infinite number of poorly socialized monkeys and a massive homeless person brawl in a dumpster that’s on fire because a lot of people seem to need to yell at passerby about how immeasurably disappointed they are and how completely their lives are ruined because the first version of EA didn’t live up to their wildly unreasonable expectations. That can’t be fun, and it’s certainly neither useful nor productive. I’d much rather acknowledge reality, and work with it. How many bug reports have you filed via official channels?

The first half of the second paragraph sets out a checklist for EA games, and then the second half just ticks all of those boxes but with really angry language and caps and a personal opinion on what an EA should be. I get that you’re upset and disappointed, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game is in the state that it is, that it’s still quite playable as is, and that things can only get better. Nate posted this yesterday. Have you read it?

Zombie shooter, right? There you go.

Dunno whether you’re tracking this, but most of the useful, articulate and civil people on the discord are here. And this place is better suited to having long form conversations and has relatively fewer toxic stereotypical gamers. Substantive comms here with links posted on the discord might be a a workable approach.

There’s a joke in here about the dumpster fire being full of angry entitled gamers screaming and tearing and rending each other with their hair on fire, but that’s not very Kerbal - it’s straight out of the Inferno. [sidebar about what hell Dante Aligheri would have put gamers into had he written it today redacted] Dakota doesn’t answer to the denizens of the dumpster fire. He owes them nothing and attempting to interact with them will just enrage them further. He answers to his bosses and is professionally following a communications plan.

W all need to relax. It’s less than two weeks into EA. I fully expect version 1.0 be as improved over this as KSP1 1.12 does relative to 2013 KSP.

If the arches turn out to be stargates that unlock when you find the opposite end in another system, I fully intend to ignore them completely. I’m not thrilled with the vibe we get from the artifacts at all; they kinda wreck the Space Race/heyday of Apollo/Carl Sagan feel the first game always gave me. if the devs have decided to cater to the supermarket tabloid reader segment of the community and make interacting with the artifacts necessary for progression it will make me very sad. The heroic themes in human space exploration are plenty enough by themselves for great drama in games that mimic it.

Decouplers work most of the time. If you’ve read much Soviet spaceflight history, this is actually an extremely realistic feature :). My high expectations for the game have not changed. If it’s this buggy and feature-poor when version 1 launches I will be disappointed. Given that we’re a week and a day into the very first Early Access version, I am not disappointed. The game currently meets the temporary lower set of expectations I formed based on the communication from the devs - the EA announcement, road map, spec sheet, ESA event videos, etc. There is a fix for the issues a lot of people are having. Settings > Expectations > EA > “Realistic”.

I think at this point that Saturn-alike designs that are this faithful are basically Kraken lures, and it looks like you caught a few big ones. I may get to the point of a Mün landing tonight - I’m going to be going as simple, minimalist and low count as possible. I’ll report back.