Wheehaw Kerman

Sense of wonder, but pronounced with a cheesy accent :).

You know, I have never bothered much with mods, Parallax included. I might install it this weekend and see what all the fuss is about. But my stock dinosaurism aside, yeah. My saves are littered with plaques labelled “[Kerbname] Lookout/Vista/Mountain” that I had Kerbs climb especially for the view. The game really triggers the old sensawundah.

Medics? I think the case for Pilots and Scientists coming with For Science! practically writes itself. Engineers with Resources would make sense. And I could argue for Colonists, to run colonies when we get those. I’m curious about this Medics idea, though?

Guys, the sunsets and sunrises on Laythe are really nice now…. Kinda pumped. Might check out Duna tonight.

It’s hard to say at this point, but the good news is that we’re going to find out in sixty days at most. Biomes seem to make a lot of sense - I’ll just point at Mars. The devs for Human Space Program did a pretty good job there, with cool ice caps, the northern hemisphere sea bottom, and those honking big volcanoes and canyons. The humans are already yeeting probes at all of those. On the other hand, Squad both over-did and under-did them in KSP1. I was never one of the players who finished the tech tree in Kerbin SOI, but I usually managed it with a couple of labs on and around Duna before heading off to Jool. Using science to incent exploration more seems like a no brainer. As for the procgen wastelands, this is actually a big problem with Starfield for me (and was an even bigger problem with No Man’s Sky). Starfield’s worlds are pretty, diverse, and kinda lacking in interest, probably because of how I got there. Click, click, click, without any dreaming, building, or flying (and crashing, and quoting ShadowZone). No Man’s Sky’s worlds were even more obviously procgenned - infinite diversity in ultimate sameness. In both cases I enjoyed running around on them a lot less than rover traverses of Duna, and I am not sure why. Maybe it’s a question of human-created art versus machine process. And that brings me to your why you like certain games point - for me, it’s first person exploration. I spent most of late 2004 to early 2005 exploring Azeroth - just running around, looking at scenery, climbing mountains, and getting massacred in the high level zones. The game’s lack of a Tourist or Hiker class was what killed it for me. And then there’s KSP - simply flying around Kerbin enjoying the landscape is great, let alone building up a bit of a base somewhere and then going for a drive. KSP2 is great already in this respect - with the exception of the Mün, which is kind of blah, the CBs I’ve been to have been plenty engaging. Especially Laythe in 1.5. Sunsets and sunrises are really pretty, and I’ve only lost one Kerbal to falling through the surface and another one getting mysteriously stuck on terrain.

Are you threatening me with a good time :)?

It’s the difference between the nagging knowledge that your simulated spacecraft’s simulated mission across a simulated star system is glaringly poorly mapped to reality because its simulated little green alien pilot doesn’t have a need for simulated life support and the satisfaction of completing a [“simulated”s taken as read] mission that’s that much more satisfying because it had the added complexity of planning and building in life support.

On a high level, you’re right about the KSP Easter eggs. Too random and in-jokey, no connection, and overall poorly thought out. A missed opportunity - to either do something awesome or fail miserably and develop lore/story that reduced the game to cold designed by committee writing room gruel. Thing is, they were still fun. One save I did revolves around building a base at Vallhenge. That was a lot of hours of fun, and all it took was some geometric objects. We don’t know much about the discoverables system yet. I’m excited, though. Even if they’re just flag-planting spots with pretty views, they’ll still be fun and make for some nice screenshots. I am worried about the possibility of lame lore, though. My biggest aesthetic gripe about the game is the fact that most of the Kerbals look like Arts students from a third rate university that were recruited from barista gigs - there’s none of the Cold War/Space Race buzz cut The Right Stuff vibe that made the first game resonate with history so well. Once we get Kerbal management I am only hiring Kerbs with the right aesthetic stuff… and if IG hires the wrong writers with no sense of history who haven’t read The Expanse or seen For All Mankind, their lore could make noodle rockets look like a good time.

What would you have said if they gave us a game with no discoverables?

You mean you’ve never gone looking for Vallhenge or the whale skeleton or the dead Kraken on Bop? Finding the Easter eggs in KSP was a lot of fun. And if the POIs are as pretty as that Laythe screenshot…

Matches my experience around the Mün - the other day I set up a sub-6K equatorial orbit with an unKerbed probe, and the effect was apparent.

Exactly. We see parts and screengrabs designed to send some of us on deep dives and drive speculative discussions. We get the odd little hint, but overall no spoilers. Some of the older dev diaries did good deep dives on things like calculating orbits, but we haven’t had that level of peek under the hood in some time. So what would be insightful? A bit more technical depth on what they’ve got planned (remember the talk around metallic hydrogen a few years back?), perhaps. Some more transparency on how the foundational work is driving progress on the milestones, maybe. Info that might stifle some of the wilder-eyed speculation - if we’d had better comms around the roadmap and how they were planning on delivering it this place might have been more liveable. Look at how much better things have become since they announced For Science!.

Did we just basically agree on something again, albeit in different terms? That’s basically what I meant about platitudes - nice as the improved comms are, I don’t think they have much significant content. We have slightly more information on what they’re up to, but like Nate’s comments in Matt’s vid, nothing terribly insightful, and frankly, that might have been part of the plan all along. If nothing else IG does know that the community is obsessed and will lap up anything they tell us. It’d be odd if they had planned to go into complete silence during the roadmap.

“Hey! There’s open water on Vall! We should figure out how to explore it!” “Dangit, if only we’d paid more attention to that really big puddle on the other side of the beach!”

I think we’re largely on the same page in terms of the unknowability issue. On the other hand, thinking that what I’ll charitably call the hostile reaction and tone in the community since launch had much influence on the trajectory of the game beyond comms strategy doesn’t make sense. It presupposes that the team’s plan was not to develop the game to end of roadmap, cleaning up the bugs as it went, but rather that they were going to ruin a niche but valuable property by dropping a half-baked EA and then doing nothing. I think that the game has been developed according to plan, and even if we’d all been kinder than our grandmothers about the state of the EA, we’d have still seen For Science! drop in December. Attributing basic development decisions to the tone on the forum ignores the realities of business and project management. All the forum tone has done has make IG issue some soothing platitudes and carry on as planned (and possibly make Dakota regret some life decisions, but I may be overestimating its effectiveness).

Mild curiosity about said reasons on my part - not enough to make me go full conspiracy theorist vision board with every single dev post or video all tied together with thumbtacks and string conclusively proving that Nate is really a Krakenoid alien in a human suit, though…

This is a great illustration of what I’m talking about - I’ve watched the video a few times, and my earlier post took that knowledge into account. You’re conflating your frame with knowledge - the sourcing isn’t the point, the interpretation is. 1. As I noted, Nate took the fall for the estimation. You can take his words as literal truth, selectively or otherwise, or question whether there might not be a lot left unsaid, glossed over, and so forth. Given how project teams do scheduling and the corporate environment, I suspect the latter, but we can’t really know until somebody breaks NDA - getting worked up about it, or assigning too much value or meaning to it, is pointless. Ditto 2. - as I said, beyond that statement, which tells us nothing beyond the date, whether Nate meant start of development or the initial legal work, what’s happened since 2017 is unknowable, and ultimately irrelevant. We know the current status of the EA - we aren’t going to find out who did what when and why. To your point about TT, well, yes; in the absence of anything concrete, there’s not a heck of a lot of value in demonizing them, either. 3. Much the same - Nate makes a high level statement. We can’t read anything much into it - certainly not much use. 4. Yup, game development sees a lot of turnover. That’s kind of a given, and I’m not sure why it’s worth mentioning. It’s nice to hear that IG is doing better in that respect, and we know there were some layoffs a while back, but again, unless somebody in IG’s HR talks, we don’t know how much better, and it’s not much use in figuring out what’s going on barring info on productivity impacts. Which, of course, we’re unlikely to get. 5. As I noted above, blameshifting to TT is kind of pointless, and Nate’s statement is vague and not worth a lot. Anybody can come up with any number of reasons why that statement might be as misleading as it is vague. And ultimately, I care a lot more about the game’s progress than I do speculating about what happened. Essentially, the For Science! videos are encouraging in many respects - a lot of things in earlier videos have made it into the EA. And we have a timeline for the first roadmap item. And lately IG’s been close enough to their timelines for hand grenades, if not horseshoes. So overall the trends are positive. But I don’t think they give us any hard evidence for the speculative blame shifting exercise, and while I’m vaguely interested in what happened, until we get some hard evidence the exercise is just speculative groupthink.

With the possible exception of 1., unless there’s any credible inside information backing any of these up, they remain guesses or inferences at best, and extremely subjective and biased ones at that. Nate certainly took the fall in Matt’s video for bad estimation. Maybe that happened, or maybe him saying that was a communications decision and other factors were involved. Again, though, all we can do is speculate. Bad estimations like 1. are practically normal, though, and not just in software land. I’ve seen projects in the energy space that have gone appallingly over schedule too. Things happen. And if you think we’re frustrated, imagine you’re an owner on year seven of what you thought was going to be a simple two year construction project… 2. And how much actual development was done during ST’s tenure, of that, how much went out the window after IG took over, and why, and how long it took for IG to start meaningful development on the current game we can’t know until somebody breaks NDA. Seven years, four years, who knows, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter - what matters is the product. 3.-5. are again just speculation, unless somebody on the inside talks, and pointless speculation at that, unless you’re emotionally invested in assigning blame to a scapegoat in a forum witch hunt. And that matters to me less than the actual state and future progress of the game, which we can actually see and will find out. Right now, the objectively observable state of the game indicates non-trivial and possibly accelerating progress on the EA. The quantity and quality of bugfixes continues to improve, and progress on the roadmap, taking scope into consideration, is much faster than KSP1, as one would expect from a larger, professionally run studio. I’ll be disappointed is For Science! plotzes, but right now, there’s cause for optimism and subjectively, the EA was never that terrible. I’m past the twenty-five cents per hour stage at this point…

Unless certain resources are available only on certain bodies, forcing you to set up colonies to extract them. There have been hints at this from IG.

Agreed - we’re likely never going to find out what happened between the Star Theory trailed and the EA release. It’d be mildly interesting, but unless TT decides to open up it’s basically unknowable. The unknowability is also why we need to treat the timeline-related speculation as uninformed and mostly not credible. Nobody here except the IG folks know the history of the development, the dev planning, resource assignments, etc., etc. Mostly it’s just groupthink.

Maybe a pre-milestone? 0.2 is where things are likely to start taking off - 1.5 is just a pretty good indication that the game is getting into solid enough shape that For Science! is likely to be decent.

I wasn’t talking about the disappointment: I get that. I wasn’t super thrilled with 1.0, even after tempering my expectations over the delays, EA announcement and initial minimum specs. I’m talking about the hilarious overwrought angst-fest the disappointment triggered. I’m talking about not falling for the forum-think, and understanding that the doomsayers haven’t got any inside knowledge and are just venting. Disappointment is one thing, but now that it’s becoming more and more obvious that IG are finding their feet and making progress, in retrospect all the drama and histrionics after the EA are going to look silly, and the game is going to be fine.

I seriously think Joel Kinnaman based his portrayal of Ed Baldwin in For All Mankind at least partly on Jeb Kerman. Even the names have the same number of syllables…

One thing that bugs me is the loss of the early Space Age/Shuttle Era NASA aesthetic vibe that KSP1 had. As a huge spaceflight history nerd that is like catnip to me. I have no objection to P.A.I.G.E. being female, but I think I would have preferred her to come across more like Mae Jemison or Sally Ride and less like a drama major recruited out of a Seattle Starbucks. KSP1 Kerbals looked like like astronauts - they had that The Right Stuff vibe regardless of whether they were male or female. KSP2 Kerbals don’t.

FWIW, one of the only reasons I’m at only slightly over 200 hours since February is that after a decade and 5300+ hours in KSP1, Sandbox is pretty but kind of dull. After figuring out the EA, playing with the new parts and going most places, there’s not much to do that interests me aside from admiring the new scenery. I doubt I’ll really start putting serious time in until Interstellar drops. I wanna explore, not revisit. Well, yes. But it’s currently October, not December, and 1.5 is what dropped this week, not For Science!. I expect that they’re working on regular bugfixes in parallel with any foundational work and bugfixes needed to make For Science! work: they’ve implied as much already.