Wheehaw Kerman

Really looking forward to the dev chat - it’ll hopefully settle a lot of the speculation we’ve been seeing (and trigger a whole bunch more).

It’s a mental aesthetic thing, really. KSP1’s Jeb, Bill, and Bob all looked exactly like John Glenn would if he was reincarnated as a cartoony little green alien, and that somehow managed to hit me squarely in the spaceflight history aesthetic sensibility. It fit the pioneering rocketry vibe of early KSP perfectly. Squad replicated this well when they brought Val in - she looked like she had the Right Stuff too. For whatever reason inside my head Kerbals that don’t give off the same vibe as Season 1 of For All Mankind or Apollo 13 do not have the Right Stuff and do not belong inside cockpits or on the cover of Life magazine. YMMV, and that’s fine. And in the real world, when making hiring decisions, what the candidate looks like is immaterial to me so long as they have the qualifications and are a good personality fit. But in KSP2 I am going to be basing my hiring decisions on looking properly Space Age/Atomic Age, as well as being high Stupidity high Courage. I’m vaguely curious as to where this whole hibernation thing came from. AFAIK it doesn’t get mentioned anywhere in the game…

I have a similar issue - a lot of the neoKerbs look like they belong at the controls of a Karbucks espresso machine, not a spacecraft. My agency will only be hiring steely-eyed missileKerbs who look the part.

Either would be fine and both would be great, plus the challenge of having to lob craft over the protoplanetary disc, having to figure new launch windows out without Alexmoon’s launch window planner…

Pointless? Interstellar is probably the thing I’m most eager to get into, even more than shenanigans with fission pulse propulsion in multiplayer. I’m so done with the Kerbolar system that I may install OPM just to have something new to poke at.

Frankly, given our reaction it’s amazing they’re still talking to us :).

It’s going to be an improvement to be sure, but as our collective reaction to the EA demonstrated, unrealistic expectations lead to disappointment and the forums turning into a ball pit full of rabid chimpanzees with anger management issues. I’m sure there will be bugs and rough edges and For Science! v2.0 is ultimately going to prove to be a rough draft that’s going to be polished as a result of a whole bunch of screeching and flinging of balls and other stuff. So I’m not letting myself get too hyped. Still can’t wait.

One thing that occurs to me is that the Munarches might not be stargates: they might be ansibles. Magic FTL travel might be a terrible fit for the game, but magic FTL comms might be a better fit for the gameplay>realism folks…

FTUEed is the acronym for FUBARed in Kerbalese in my headcanon now.

Only a Cadet would put the navball on the lower left! *ducks, runs, hides*

I think it’s kind of funny. I can only imagine what the Kerbal Space Cadet uniform looks like. And just think of what it must be like to lead them…

Funnily enough, I have over five thousand hours in KSP and a couple hundred in KSP2 - despite the gaps and issues I love this game with a depraved unholy passion :). I compensate for the lack of life support by building lots of living room into ships - with the exception of orbital skydiving shots anything going to be out for more than a few days gets a higher seat to Kerbal ratio. For Duna I’ll aim for 3 seats per Kerbal, for father than that I’ll go 4-5. The idea is to add more space, weight, and complexity to approximate really good long term life support. I’d love it if the game gave me more to play with in that respect… To your edit, yes, that’d be fine by me. I’d like more realistic permadeath LS, but recognize that others might not, and toggleable options as you describe baked right in would make everyone happy.

It depends on what sort of game you’re into. I lean hard into realistic simulations. Right now, if I have a mission suffer, say, a staging error that strands the crew, I’ll terminate the flight in the Tracking Station because the crew is basically already dead (or would be if the game had life support/should be if Squad had completed the game). I know enough about spaceflight to make the lack of consequences for that sort of thing to really freaking annoy me. If “gameplay” doesn’t make at least a hard nod if not bowing before reality I want no part of it - it isn’t (as) fun for me. The last time life support reared it’s head on the forums, during those bygone nostalgic innocent halcyon days before the EA dropped, I was arguing for something I called “Cartoony Verisimilitude(tm)” - the same level of nodding to reality that the game takes in other areas, while not going into so much detail that it takes a degree in aerospace engineering to understand. IMHO lethal life support has the same level of Cartoony Verisimilitude as the rest of the game. I’d be perfectly happy with it implemented as an option - I get that some people don’t want to get that realistic.

It is, however, completely lacking in verisimilitude and utterly breaking of what immersion the game manages to create. Without the need for life support, The Martian would have been two hours of Matt Damon twiddling his thumbs in a spacesuit while waiting for his lift to arrive.

Don’t forget about asphyxiating when the air runs out, or freezing when the power runs out, or explosive decompression, or… Sign me up for that! Burning up on re-entry or crashing do more than tickle. Life support shouldn’t be any different.

I think we’re doing better than we were back in March, though…

If we’re arguing on how we should force people to play, I think hostages, cattle prods, and airhorns are the way to go.

I love this bar.

Live specimens of the leviathan that left its bones on Laythe!

Something like that would be interesting to try - IIRC that Juno/Simple Rockets does something similar, albeit simplified in the extreme. Regardless, barring a HUD, the correct location for the navball in KSP2 is going to be “not concealing the spacecraft but easily read”. IMHO the KSP2 navball is fine - they basically put it exactly where I wanted it. The burn timer, OTOH, is a great idea that needs more detail.

1) Life support. 2) the Making History Soviet-style parts. 3) Kerbal parachutes. 4) replace Vallhenge with kilometre-high statues of the dev team and relocate it. 5) Recognition and undying glory for the first player to discover Natehenge. 6) more Soviet parts - seriously: they built some really funky spacecraft. 7) real, persistent spacecraft flying the automated supply routes in multiplayer, because space piracy. 8) tank treads for rovers. 9) bring back the Kerbalizer. 10) first person IVAs, up to and including being able to walk around inside your craft and colonies.

Thinking about it, though, if real life planes were piloted in third person view, would they put their navball where it got in the way when landing? I immediately shifted the navball off to the left in KSP1 as soon as Squad made that possible. IMO it’s optimally placed in KSP2.

Well, if you’re of the view that the fan feedback to date has been constructive, what to make of the several hundreds of bugfixes?

We don’t really know that they haven’t taken our feedback and built it into the roadmap items yet…

As I have said, I look forward to landing a Putt-Putt-drive craft (at (other players’) KSC once Multiplayer drops). That big pusher plate will probably allow pretty high speeds at landing…