Wheehaw Kerman

Thank Kraken for that :).

On reading this, and watching some of the early content creator vids, I’m feeling vindicated in my confidence in the devs. It feels like the game has turned a corner. Thanks, IG, and keep up the good work.

Agreed on the last two points, but the rest is conjecture unsupported by even conjectural numbers…

Having a really hard time focusing ATM. Let’s hope this drop far exceeds what the 1.0 drop back in February should have been.

“So hear me out: you get an infinite supply of hundreds of different kinds of explode-y rocket parts, an infinite supply of bug-eyed little green alien dudes called Kerbals that are *this* close to being sued for infringing the Minions’ IP rights, and this little cartoony solar system…”

Do you have any actual, non-conjectural financial data or inside information originating from a credible source (or any source other than yourself) supporting this?

I think you’re right. Even if missions are “just” contracts, which I doubt (I’m betting they haven’t told us everything), I expect they’re going to be a much better implementation of the contract system. One of the things that bugged me about contract mode was that it kept me from exploration. This became less of a problem once I realized that you can fit 9 tourists into command chairs in a 2.5 meter Service Bay, stack a couple of those, and make obscene profits on a single Mün shot, but if the contract/mission system is better thought out, less annoying, somewhat less randomized and more about heroic space exploration and building cool stuff, it’s going to be awesome. Heck, it’s right there in the mode title.

Possibly extremely different, with more depth, playability and nuance, as a result of a bunch of talented devs who love and play the game spending several years listening to player discussion and designing something that addresses KSP1’s issues and improvs on the original considerably. In other words, about as different as stock graphics and music in the EA versions of both games - vastly improved already and only going to get better. The neat thing? We’re going to find out 19 or so hours from now :).

It’ll be interesting to see how buggy it actually is, and if I was a gambling man, I’d suggest we start a betting pool, with the stakes being undying glory on the forums - but odds are the devs wouldn’t name a Kerb after the winner, sadly, and metrics would be hard. I’m cautiously optimistic - more so than I was for EA. When the EA announcement was made and then the first minimum specs dropped, I kerbed my expectations considerably. The development since hasn’t been as fast as I would have liked, but hasn’t taken as long as I feared. But the devs have fixed a lot of the big ugly hairy bugs since, and if I were a gambling man I’d bet “significantly less buggy than EA, many cool unannounced things, very playable, with room for improvement and some need for polish.” Regardless, I promise you all to be less hostile with those of you who disagree with my opinion on the state of the game (we should all do this - pledge to be more kapybara-like or something). The best case, of course, is “Wheehaw says he has COVID and won’t go anywhere for Christmas”.

Too explosive? This is KSP! No such thing. Jebediah wept…

Start the download, spend the rest of the day working, and then sit down and start an Exploration Mode game after dinner.

I’m going to agree with you about all of that. KSP1 was an unplanned, not terribly well integrated kitbash of a game that didn’t get developed so much as it evolved by accident, trial, error and “hey, that sounds cool”… …and yet here we all are, some of us with thousands of hours into the game. There’s just something about the thing that *worked*. I’m almost afraid that by being professionally developed KSP2 will lose some of the brilliance of KSP1. So far, I’m optimistic, but too much focus on theory and planning can ruin things.

Well, that’s a relief :). Seriously, though, I predict that landing ridiculous outsized baroque Kraken lures with lighting like an eighties hair metal concert on top of Devil’s Tower is going to become A Thing(tm). Dude, you’re almost as old as dirt (and me) :).

Am I the only person here old enough to have seen Close Encounters Of The Third Kind in the theatre?

Like the fission pulse engines for large landers in multiplayer.

Roger and thanks. Will give it a shot. Are there any other decent LS mods?

Insofar as the mod may not be exactly what I have in mind for life support in KSP2, I may be reporting as much on the delta between what the mod is and what I think it should be, but I will happily report back after some playtesting. I have limited time over this week and weekend, but I should be able to get a few hours in next week.

Not a gamer, but would this not be what they call a “skill issue”? IMHO, that would just be grounds for saying “AGAIN”, identifying the problem, fixing it, and giving it another shot. In other words, exactly what we do every time a mission fails fatally through any of the other ways to die in KSP and we have to do it over, which frankly is a lot of fun and part of why the game is so successful?

Nope. I only really started playing with mods a few weeks back. Had a few bad experiences with some half-assed ones that didn’t survive version changes back in the early days, played stock the rest of the way. If there’s a good LS mod you can recommend, though, I’ll be happy to give it a go and report back. As to your nope, all I can say is that the absence of LS has bothered me from the start, since I was a n00b playing for the first time. And as I’ve said, every improvement in KSP’s Cartoony Verisimilitude(tm) - reentry heating, somewhat better aero, comms, etc. over the years has only resulted in my upping my game via the loop I described to match the increase in difficulty, and enjoying the game that much more.

Yes. Absolutely. I would have been THRILLED if this and re-entry heating had been part of the game 11 years ago. It would have been one less thing that I had to suspend my disbelief over. Face it - every 10-year-old science nerd knows that you need life support in space, and even if we’re mostly older than that here chronologically, we all know that this is a glaring omission in the simulationy aspect of the game. Most n00bs will see Jeb asphyxiate or starve, nod, savour the drama, say “AGAIN” in an Austrian accent, and figure the system out. Edit: and thinking about this further, the more horrible ways to die in space that I have to protect my Kerbals from, the happier I will be.

Or, you know, a bunch of fanatics going full totalitarian, running the economy into the ground through central planning, failing to meet the Kerbs’ basic needs, disregarding their Kerbal rights, chucking the dissidents into camps and inefficiently redistributing what little surpluses got generated into running nightmarish surveillance states and propping up dictatorial regimes across the developing world… And I’m writing this as a huge Soviet spaceflight history nerd and possibly the biggest fan of the Making History Soviet parts in the community. Nice space program, shame about the political system, 2/10, swipe left. Don’t get me started on the two remaining Kommunist regimes out there, either. If there’s one thing that looking at technological and scientific progress and economic growth across history teach us, it’s that they drive political change (and that the twentieth century’s experiments in utopian authoritarianism were utter failures). What our governance arrangements are going to look like in a couple of centuries I do not know - I expect they’re going to be different, but I am not going to trust anybody who tells me they have this one simple political trick they want to try, especially if mass Kerbal rights violations are involved. I think you’ve put your finger on why I love KSP - it’s a cartoon of a sort of future we could have had, and might still get if we become better.

First off, the flight interface. I like the navball, and I like the placement (but would support all flight UI display elements being moveable). I like the tapes. That being said, it could benefit from 1) being compacted a bit. It does waste some screen real estate - notably in the gaps between the sidebars and the main navball. I’ll second the guys pointing at the white space. Pushing it over to the edge of the screen wouldn’t hurt. With a clearer font it would not lose legibility. 2) integrating the G-force gauge (it was ages before I realized it was up with the crew and for some reason). 3) a clearer font. The docking mode/flight mode controls would benefit from being in their own little panel. There’s plenty of room to squeeze them in somewhere in the vicinity of the navball. The Burn Timer. How I love it, but again, wasted space, and unclear font, bother me a little. Outing myself as a countdown nerd (timers are my fave watch/phone clock feature and I use them a lot IRL), I think the countdown to burn sound and visual cues are fantastic, but I’d love to see more voice time checks in Kerbalese at the 10, 5, and 1 minute marks, with the time remaining feature flashing concurrently. A DeltaV expended/remaining display would also be useful. I have mixed feelings about the parts manager. On the upside, being able to rapidly navigate around parts categories is quite useful. On the other hand, the ability to pull up multiple small panels for different parts and pin them KSP1 style is something I sorely miss.

Yup! Inspired by cracks in certain icy Jovian moons that you may have heard of, I expect…

Entirely possible! But the Vall lake is odd enough (single isolated body of open water on an icy atmosphere-less moon) that it’s practically screaming “there’s something at the bottom of me!”.

Well, I’m happy for the science parts to remain a Christmas surprise. Also, I’m gonna go out on a limb and bet undying glory there’s a discoverable in the lake on Vall.