Periple

Absolutely! Having an SRB as your first engine was a really bad idea, it started you off wrong when building rockets — it gives you the idea that SRBs are supposed to be used as main engines when they’re almost always boosters!

I think colonies should be here sooner than 6 months. Interstellar might not take too long either. Resources and multiplayer seem complicated, I think they might take longer. But only guessing!

It has no copy protection, you can launch it directly, and there’s no difference between the Steam and Epic versions. Modding is still in its early stages, but I believe CKAN is actually already being used for KSP2 as well (somebody please correct me if I’m wrong about that).

I’m wrong so often that I rarely get to say “I told you so,” so I’m going to do it now! I’ve been saying from the start that sentiment will turn around when the game gets better. And here we are! It must feel amazing to be able to hit the holidays on such a high note. Thanks for everything IG and especially @Dakota and the other CMs who have been doing a grueling and thankless job for almost a year. I have a very good feeling about things going forward and I trust 2024 will be a lot more fun for everybody! I can’t wait to play FOR SCIENCE! when I get home and am SO looking forward to the upcoming milestones too!

I’m pretty sure they’ve said that transfers to other star systems will be fully simulated. They will have to find ways to increase time warp by a lot though!

Senior management aren’t usually idiots. It just looks that way because the idiots are always on the news! They know full well that the reason KSP2 is underperforming is quality. They won’t force a deadline because that risks another 0.1.0 debacle. If they wanted to cancel the game, they would just do so rather than intentionally shooting themselves in the foot first.

They seem pretty confident about it! I'm going to be an optimist and believe that they have dealt with the technical debt they obviously had at 0.1.0 as well as the process/practices problems that created that technical debt in the first place, and expect 0.2.0 to be about as stable as 0.1.5 but with slightly improved performance and loads more features. Sadly I'll only get to play it in January!

No!

They do if you make spaceplanes!

I like this! It would need careful tuning so it’s fun though!

Wow, impressive! That would work as an interstellar probe! You can fit a lot of science payload in 1 ton. You'd have to have an autonomous probe core though. I wonder how much dV you could squeeze out of ion drives powered by a nuclear reactor? How long would the fuel in the reactor last? Edit: LOL I had an order of magnitude error when I read your post, I somehow thought you meant 37,000 km/s, not 37,000 m/s. So 37 km/s isn't anywhere near enough for interstellar travel. If it's still scaled down to 1:10 scale I think you'd need maybe 100 times more dV than that to get anywhere and even then it would be really slow! Like, 0.05c would be 15,000 km/s, so with 30,000,000 m/s of dV you'd be able to get to that speed and slow down again. If the universe is 1:10 scale, it would take you only a few decades to get to the nearest star!

I just hope the tech tree will be balanced strictly enough that it won't be unlocked too soon!

That should be enough for a (slow) interstellar trip! Which engines were these by the way? If they're ion engines, did you allow for power generation without sunlight? I think that could pretty seriously cut into the mass ratio!

I think it stops being fun if the challenge goes completely away, and Epstein drives would do that. I did this a lot with KSP1 -- for example, I would play without MPLs, without RAPIERs, or various other limitations. I would like it if KSP2 was better balanced so that I didn't feel like I had to do it to keep it fun!

I don’t think the game would be much fun with torch drives. It seems to me that they would remove most of the challenge.

A citation would be nice! I don't really know anything about this but most of the stuff I've looked at that seems relatively well grounded in science seems to put the theoretical top speed at around 10% of c, give or take a few %, if you also need to decelerate. Even an antimatter drive would only get you to maybe 40% of c, and that if you're able to somehow deal with the gamma radiation it produces. But maybe I've missed something big!

I think it most likely will! I do remember them saying that an interstellar campaign could last a thousand years! Also nuclear salt-water rockets would have Isp below 7,000 which is still an order of magnitude or so below what’s needed for interstellar propulsion. I think! I’m not an expert though!

As far as I know, most somewhat-plausible engines that could work for interstellar travel would only give you accelerations of a few thousandth of a G, and could reach about 0.1c in ~30 years. We'll see how sci-fi KSP2 goes, but I'm kind of hoping there won't be magic Epstein drives!

I expect that interstellar engines will have ridiculously high Isp but very low thrust. They would also be very, very big and very, very expensive (in resource cost). So I imagine that you totally could use them in-system, but I'm not sure you'd want to, any more than you'd want to take a nuclear aircraft carrier to go bass fishing!

I also would like hydrogen tanks that look like regular tanks!

Very cool! I’m glad they’ve rebalanced the engines so it’s harder.

It would be a somewhat complex simulation that adds no gameplay value, only flavor. There are much better ways to use that time.

How do you figure it’s not correct if they’ve changed the orbit?

I'm sure that could all be precomputed but I don't know if it's even necessary. I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is with the rigid-body physics.

It would be some work but I don't think it would be HARD hard. I would assign affinities between different parts, iterate through the tree to weld each part to the highest-affinity neighbor, and recurse until I hit the target number of physics parts. So for example two parts with the same diameter attached through a node would have a high affinity, two parts with different diameters attached through a node would have medium affinity, a part attached to another part via a surface attachment would have low affinity, and certain parts like docking ports and decouplers would have zero affinity so they're never welded. Then you'd need to decide whether to recompute the welds when docking in space and handle any issues that might cause, it sounds like the kind of thing that could summon the kraken if not handled carefully. There would have to be a halt condition if an iteration resulted in no new welds -- that would mean that some lunatic built a craft entirely out of decouplers and docking ports. That would still result in an abnormal part count but I think it would be quite unlikely except as an experiment so anyone so inclined would just have to take the performance hit.