kicka55

I'm not quite sure how you can asses that from the screenshot? He's just showing off the effect that's probably not properly implemented in the game yet. Just some debug menu toggle to toggle it on/off probably. I also think having nice heating effects like that from an artistic stand point far outweigh any realism aspect. I want my rocket to visibly burn when it's flaming hot.

I love KSP with thousands of hours in it and I hope I will also learn to love KSP2 in the future. I'm sitting at min specs right now and it's rough. 100% GPU usage just looking at the KSC menu screen at 24 fps. What is your benchmark when it comes to performance? What particular fps targets should a spec reach (GPU and CPU) to make the list for minimal or recommended? Do you have particular scenes or craft? How many parts? Would be nice to know, thanks!

I think to fix this SAS has to cost some energy. I think right now it's free unlike in KSP1. That gotta change. So now you have to decide, do I bring more batteries and solar panels or do I bring monopropellant.

All that effort just because you are too lazy to build the same rocket twice. lol First answer the question: Should we do it before you move to: Can we do it

Dude, use ChatGPT to translate stuff. As mentioned using a fake Moon would mean you can get very close and being very close not good when it comes to Newton. Formula for acceleration a = MG/r² r -> 0 => a -> inf When you hit the center of that fake Moon you'd accelerate to infinity. So in order to solve this problem they had to come up with a new formula for gravity for that special case like for example. Or using two formulas. One for being far away that acts normally and one for being very close. a1 = GM/r² r > 10 km a2 = GM*(1-(sin(pi*r/10km)/(pi*r/10km))^2) r <= 10 km Gravity would approach to 0 when near the center while being being a = GM at the boundary condition of 10 km. The next problem is to deal with the difference between a = GM/(10km)² and a=GM when you switch from one formula to the other. I has to change unnoticed! For that you have to simply divide the whole term by 100km or 100,000m. So the final equation is a2 = GM*(1-(sin(pi*r/10)/(pi*r/10))^2)/100 r <= 10 km The gravity from 10km to 0km goes from GM/100 to 0. The gravity from inf to 10km goes from 0 to GM/100 You can further tweak the numbers to enhance smoothness at 10km. There would be a bit of a bump right now. Until a1'(10km) = a2'(10km). Easy optimization problem. I tried some ChatGPT but it calculates nonsense lol Bing Chat not much better. The green function is what you're looking for. Could be a simple Sinus to be honest. That's why you sketch before you think.

Let's be frank here, you just want more updates because you cant wait for patches. So you want them to change their schedule based on your impatience haha. Releasing more updates won't fix the game any faster. It'll likely only make bug fixing take longer when they have to work on patches more frequently. Creating a patch out of fixes is work too. Development branches probably have a maximum of analytics features that track your whole system, which could be blocked by your firewall even.

I'm not saying planes are out of scope. I'm saying adding 100 more detail features to wings are out of scope when these details don't really provide any gameplay benefit. I'd be happy to get boat parts as well. Just keep the same level of abstraction across all the parts.

This all sounds very out of scope for a space oriented game. I would more tend towards a spin off like "Kerbal Planes". Kerbals have colonized Laythe and it's your job to connect the colonies using airborne vehicles. You could build a cargo and passenger air plane business. Start small and work your way up. Death Stranding but with planes you build yourself. How this is not a game yet is beyond me tbh. There is so much potential for the franchise. Harvest Mun, Kerbals & Krakens, Kerbal Soccer...

Aren't failures part of gameplay? I'm sure a huge portion of the thousands of hours I played KSP1 I spent rescuing somebody or making unpanned stops to wait for a tanker refill. Just remember to put docking ports on every craft so that you can refill it if needed.

1. I believe the date was set in stone by the publisher. 2. The publisher sets the price I guess. Overall I think some people will complain it launched too early, others will complain it launched too late. The question that comes to my mind is why does it bother YOU so much? If you expected more and are disappointed simply refund and move on. If it reaches a state you're comfortable playing with you can jump into it. Saves you a lot of grey hair! This is just a game... nobody gets hurt. Some of you ask questions as if this was politics and you're investigating a scandal lol.

When I understand the devs correctly it's not that everyone right now is squashing bugs. Rather there seems to be a group of devs fixing bugs while othesr keep working on the systems they are assigned to. So they work in parallel. As to how many features they work in parallel on no idea but we definitely saw things like colonies and interstellar travel before so there will be separate branches for that.

If the "black" on the lower left is black it's fine. Why should there be multiple blacks? It would be redundant.

The official explanantion as to why they don't try to pump out ore updates faster makes total sense to me. They don't want to hop from patch to patch until eventually in a couple years they're finished. Instead they have the grand scheme of things in mind. This means they already "see" the finished game and they want / have to get there asap. More updates means more time spent on polish and QA with all the feedback that arises from it. Less time to actually fix bugs and add features. So from their perspective working on fewer bigger updates makes more efficient use of their limited dev time. We should respect that. One bigger update every 2-3 weeks is totally fine with me. Better than one update every 2-3 months. Sure, for the first update maybe they could've sped things up a bit to show the early player "we're here, and we're fixing it", but it won't really matter in the long run. If you're that easily annoyed by a game maybe early access is not the right thing for you. It's really hard to understand why people get so emotional about it. I "understand" the trolls who just want to hurt the company for no particular reason, they're just dumb and bored, but not actual players who want to enjoy the game. If you want to enjoy it now but can't, just wait. It doesn't cost a daim.

How can you say it's not real physics when KSP models physics. It's just that the tanks are not welded together like in real life. They are stacked together with some kind of wobbly glue. That's the Kerbal way. Just leave it at that. The target audience are not grown ups who complain about such things. I'm sure there will be mods to turn it into a grown up boring simulator down the line. Meanwhile just stick to KSP1.

Haha, didn't know the other. Is it better? I know GeoGebra from school lol. We use planets on rails and 2 body physics. Don't have to be too strict about all that. The point here is to prevent players from reaching speeds faster than the speed of light. What would be your solution? Just stop all thrust? Or just let them have it? The 1/7 Kerbal thing would be a super niche case if anyone actually get to 99% the speed of light using cheats. It won't be possible in the normal game I assume. And then you only experience that slow motion effect as long as you EVA in space at that speed. But as I mentioned it could be optional. Now that we have interstellar travel why not make the travel itself interesting as well? Otherwise it's just a loading screen. And the speed that counts would be of course the speed displayed on your Navball. My proposal is not perfect but I wanted to get the idea out there. Maybe they already thought of that before. No idea.

While I agree that excessive wobble is unrealistic and should be avoided, some amount of wobble is a game feature. It provides a sense of power as your engines roar alive. They actually push the rocket up. It's not just an animation while the rocket moves up magically. So a small level of wobble and shake is needed to convince a player that what is happening on screen are real physics at work and not just a cheat. I hope I could make you more comfortable with the idea behind wobble. At least from my perspective. Cheers!

Abstract I hereby propose a system to avoid players breaking physics by traveling faster than the speed of light using futuristic drives. Introducing futuristic engines in KSP is needed to deal with the insane distances between stars in order to avoid mega time warps that would fast forward time by hundreds of years. From this arises a problem. Namely, people abusing said engines to break known physics to travel faster than the speed of light - even if using cheats. As an educational game this should be prevented to not spread misinformation about the cosmos. A simple yet realistic (relativistic haha) system to deal with that is time dilation! A space ship approaching the speed of light experiences time more slowly. Down to a full stop at the theoretical limit of the speed of light. At that point chemistry stops working (no time -> no chemical reactions etc.) and a space ship could not accelerate faster. You'd be trapped actually, hence only a theoretical limit. You can't reach it. Since the player is not part of the ship just an observer from a different dimension, time dilation would only affect the ship. Not the ingame clock. How this could be implemented: Reaching a threshold of lets say 30% of the speed of light every engine would start to lose thrust in tangential-exponential fashion. Optionally also reaction wheels and even Kerbals themselves for the player to notice that something strange is going on and he is not just running into a bug. This could be solved with a local time-warp factor <1 that only affects the craft and everything in physics range. If you'd EVA a Kerbal at 99% the speed of light he would also move 7 times more slowly. The ship would rotate 7 times more slowly and produce 7 times less thrust. Or 0.14x thrust: t = t0 / sqrt(1 - (0.99c)^2/c^2) t = t0 / sqrt(1 - 0.99^2) t = t0 / 0.1414 The bottom figure shows the relation between the time of the player and the time of the Kerbal as our velocity is approaching the speed of light c. The closer to the speed of light the more time it takes for the Kerbal to do anything the player asks it to. Up to about 0.3 or 30% of the speed of light the graph can be simplified as linear. This means time passed for the player and time passed for the Kerbal are equal. Hence no calculation is needed for optimization. f(x) = x/sqrt(1-x^2) Conclusion Adding Time Dilation into KSP is necessary to deal with problems that arise from the educational nature of the game and from players being players trying to break physics. Those who dare would be surprised and left in awe as to how much attention to detail the developers put. There are simply no cons besides a few minutes of development time. Thank you! Sources: Calculation by ChatGPT Graph by GeoGebra Calculator PhD. in Kerbal Astrophysics and Goo Dynamics.

I like the procedural wings too but there is a balance between giving people freedom and constraints. I know most people will say more freedom = better but that's just not ideal game design. KSP2 wants to be recognizable. If you see a craft on a screenshot you want to be able to tell, hey this is KSP2 right there. Nice what you did with the tools you had! If you give people all the freedom in the world you will not recognize the game at all anymore. It could be KSP2 but it could also be any other space game or maybe even a render. And then there is a part of creativity. If you get an assignment in arts in school for example, your teacher will always give you some kind of constraint. Be it time, tools, topic, etc. That's not coincidence.! Creativity requires constraints to get to work efficiently. It's like sitting infront of a blank piece of paper and you shall paint something. Anything! It's soooo hard! But now let me give you some prompts: Paint a toy car made out of Lego. Sooo much easier! The key to becoming a good artist is to constrain yourself. I hope you get what I mean. Constraints are also very important to make the player feel comfortable while playing the game. Not too many, but enough! And that's a tough one to figure out for sure! Lastly I want to mention ingame progress. At some point they will want to add a mode where you progress from early rockets to fancy near and far future rockets. Starting out with small and few parts is just perfect especially for new players. You just have 1-2 tanks to stack and that's it. Even with this little freedom you can already build a whole bunch of different designs. I would bet most people enjoy the KSP1 career in the early stages much more than later on. Because they have fewer parts and more constraints.. (no proof for that though, so it's just my own experience). I hope I got my point across though. Some level of procedural is alright, but the devs / designers have to make tough decisions on how much is too much. Maybe they will experiment with it, I don't know. I think procedural prop engines would be great. Vary blade number, length and thickness to adapt them to the planet you want to use them on. The KSP1 system was fiddly to say the least. Keep thinking about what you'd like in the game though, always great to have a good read! Cheers!

Are we playing the same game? The graphics are nice but they do not justify a 3080 lol. The 3080 is needed to deal with the unoptimized early access release. The specs have to come wwaaay down for the final release and Nate himself said that will be the case. It would be nice to add some screenshots to your post so we know what you are talking about. I personally like the UI. I just hope they will add a couple customization options when it comes to size and color. I also want to be able to toggle individual parts on and off. But that's something for when we actually have some performance.

I like the idea but they all seem to hit performance. Maybe KSP3 when they really develop the game from scratch using a different engine, preferably their own engine written in C++. By adding such features or any features you always have to keep one thing in mind: Multiplayer. How does that feature work when two people share one world but have separate time warp. Aka, one player could be fast forwarding while the other remains in real time. So how does the environment change now? It's a bit of a conflict. So my guess is they will refrain from adding any gameplay relevant environmental change in order to make that happen. It would be cool to transform planets with resource extraction and what not. I just don't see that being in the scope of KSP2. Maybe said future KSP3 that is built from the ground up with a dedicated engine for such space games. It has to be written on a low level language like C++ in order to get some performance out of it.

Yooo Kerbals! I'm not sure how final or telling of the final product the current plant life of on Kerbin is. So this post could be obsolete. However, I still wanted to give some input about how I imagine plant life on Kerbin could look like. It's early access after all and I personally don't "feel" the current one as much. Some pseudo scientific derivation Being a planet with high density air means plants could evolve to grow bigger using buoyancy (The physical rule where light stuff floats up, heavy stuff sinks down). Trees on Kerbin are therefore not limited by what their molecules can structurally support. Gases like methane that can be created biochemically are lighter than air so plants could make use of bacteria to create this stuff and trap it in leaf bubbles that rise up and provide additional support. These methane plants / trees could also be used by Kerbals to harness their beloved propellant. As in: Recent development made it possible switching from fossil fuel to "renewable" methane. I picture methane farms that have needles sticking into those bubbles or Harvesters harvesting them. Old leaf bubbles could become floaters that pose dangers threats to low flying air craft. From that a problem arises: Where do those trees get all the nutrients from the bacteria can digest? They would quickly drain all their surroundings and die. (Could be a reason to not have much grass surrounding trees btw.) It takes an underground form of life that digests food and thereby fertilizes the ground efficiently to provide nutrients to said trees. A form of life that famously lives in symbioses with trees are mushrooms / fungi! Kerbin could have a huge form of fungus that spreads its mycelium as thick roots through ground which occasionally stick out of the ground. The bottom of each connected tree to this nutrient highway would have some kind of visible feature. Some trees would not be connected and smaller while others would be bigger to have some diversity. And these mega fungi of course would also produce mega mushrooms the size of small trees here on Earth. So to sum it up, one of Kerbin's biomes could be populated by such gigantic trees and mushrooms and the occasional mega mycelium sticking out. I drew a sketch of how I imagine Kerbin could look like. I'm not a great artist but I hope you get the idea!

Yooo Kerbals! So in order to avoid using hacks like "autostruts" to beef up connections how about adding a new tool: the Weld Beefer™! It would give us engineering control over how beefy a connection between parts has to be based on where exactly the connection is. Part connections with lots of weight on top need more beef, than connections with little weight higher up on the rocket. This simple tool would beef individual welds up while maintaining game balance with adding mass to the rocket. This tool would only work on weldable parts of course like tanks and other structural components. At max. weld strength it could optionally weld two parts into one reducing the part count in game. I know this sounds a bit complex for a game but if you think about it it's a much more intuitive solution than autostruts. The devil is in the details though in terms of implementation. Good luck with that, I'm just an armchair dev! Any thoughts?