Westinghouse

Exactly. There's no concrete evidence yet whatsoever. Obviously the communication vacuum must be disconcerting for you on the mod team, but it can probably just be put down to normal corporate bureaucracy and changeover. I did find it interesting how much influence the old CM Dakota had over the forum, illustrated in how he got you to reinstate all those deleted comments in that April 8th eclipse post. That was an absolute mess that the Intercept CM's obviously realized was awfully PR wise. If the forum is indeed shut down, it would probably create a far greater outcry than when Intercept Games was shuttered. Let's be honest, even before the announcement more people were playing the original KSP than the sequel. Any executive at T2 will hesitate over the bad publicity surely.

Out of interest, what evidence is there that the forum will be shut down? Yes, there seems to be plenty of 502 Gateway errors, but that simply might be to do with a switchover of servers. The communication blackout is entirely due to everyone involved with the Kerbal franchise being laid off, including people outside of Intercept Games such as Private Division executives Grant Gertz and Ara Josefsson. Whichever Take2 executive has been passed the decision making role over the forums has probably barely even heard of the game. The note that they've been handed responsibility for KSP is probably still sitting in their In Tray. Game Publishers absolutely do not throw away assets that they can potentially make money from in the future. Yes, they might let Kerbal sit dormant for a while, but will they really damage the franchise by killing the forum that hosts such a resource of information? Take2 is all about their franchises they own, take a note in their shareholder meeting a few months ago how they had a graphic listing the game 'brands' they own; Bully, Red Dead Redemption, Outer Worlds, Kerbal Space Program, L.A. Noire. It would be a very brave T2 executive indeed to kill the official forum to one of their brands, no matter how 'niche' it is. Despite the failure of KSP2, the Kerbal name is very well known and recognisable. Plus, the cost of hosting a forum is a drop in the ocean for a corporation like Take2.

Has there ever been a truly great sequel that was developed by a different team to the original game? Fallout 3 is the one that comes to mind. But Bethesda repurposed their Oblivion engine and basically just did their own thing, even to the displeasure of fans of the originals. Donkey Kong Country was developed by Rare, but it was significantly different to the early Nintendo arcade games. Similar to Fallout, maybe enough time had passed that the new developers felt comfortable doing things their own way. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was produced in a different country to the first, but they went to great effort to bring over as many of the original team as they could, even despite the language barrier. Basically all of the truly great games with '2' in the title have been created by the original developers of the first, or at the very least the same studio: Half Life 2, Red Dead Redemption 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Portal 2, Mass Effect 2, Dishonored 2, Halo 2, Resident Evil 2..... If KSP2 had become a success it would be a very rare case of bucking this trend as it was created by a different team in a different country with none of the original developers to the first game

To do multi quotes, you use the '+ Quote' button at the bottom of the post. For yours I pasted it three times. 1. I have not seen this information. It's on the KSP 2 Modding Society Discord. There were also posts on reddit by people who appear or claim to be former Star Theory devs; u/ElectricRune and u/Rocketman_KSP. One of Squad developers who was claimed to have had meetings with Nate Simpson was @Maxsimal 2. The existence of an outside consultant does not preclude secrecy on other fronts, including towards Squad (and ex-Squad), as well as prominent community (and arguably even media) figures, such as Scott Manley. No, but it shows they were allowed to communicate with certain people. There wasn't any global top down order not to let the news of KSP2's development leave their offices. 3. Possible? Yes. Equally possible? Nate was gagged by the T2 suits except for pre-approved persons, such as consultants, in order to preserve secrecy and not harm sales of the current game. Maybe, but why pre-approve a random astrophysicist with no history with KSP or game development, yet not pre-approve one of the original devs like HarvesteR? Also, people in the game dev world have shown they're capable of staying tight lipped and preserving secrecy. 4. By that logic, would a higher up T2 exec even know what KSP is? Its pretty hard to learn enough about KSP to consider purchasing it to transform it into "the next Minecraft" without also becoming familiar with who Scott Manley is along the way. H*ck, for all we know, the exec who thought it was a good idea to bring up acquiring the IP probably heard about the game in the first place from Scott. Yes this is true. But I'm also basing my assumption on my own observations on how corporate higher ups work. It seems unlikely to me that a T2 exec would be so hands on about communication, especially if the game had already been announced. @ShadowZone is the real one who can answer where the quote originated from, but it's likely he needs to protect his source. 5. Yes, though it still falls on T2 for falling for the sunk cost fallacy, and not authorizing rebuilding the game, especially after it became clear that the 2020 release would not be possible, and after every single person in this community stressed to the devs that we want a delayed but playable game more than we want a new game ASAP that is a hot mess on release. Again, from my knowledge of how higher ups and publishers work, it seems unlikely to me that a publisher would enforce this top down technical decision about how to make the game. They would leave this call to the experts. The T2 execs aren't game developers, most of them come from marketing or corporate management backgrounds. They would leave the game engine decision making to the team at Uber Entertainment. 6. Yeah, and while that's true, its also equally true he was told by PD/T2 that he had to do that. Maybe he was ordered to say that, but by doing so he was putting his reputation on the line to mislead and possibly even lie for the benefit of his corporate bosses. In the long term, it isn't worth sacrificing your own reputation and good word for the sake of a paycheck. 7. If he did "put himself" front and center, it was with T2's tacit approval. If they didn't want him "front and center", they would not have allowed him to be. It was likely in both parties' interests to put Nate front and center; in Take Two's case they needed someone passionate about KSP to go out and market the sequel, in Nate's case he was clearly happy to walk around on camera taking the plaudits. There's an early dev video published long before release, Nate is shown visiting the University of Washington campus. You can tell from his body language that he's as pleased as peach to be congratulated for the original game (he doesn't care to clarify that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the first game). 8. Alternatively, its likely that he's being gagged by some legal mumbo-jumbo and/or the threat of being blacklisted if he speaks out against T2. Both of which could present much worse consequences (significant legal and financial liability on one hand, being unable to work in the industry again for an indefinite period on the other) than being 'cancelled' by the KSP fandom. Plenty of other people involved with Intercept Games have made made brief statements on the end of development, even if to say token things like saying it was a pleasure to work on the game and they're sad to see it end. Paul Furio, Dakota Callahan, Tom Vinita, Ghassen Lahmar (Blackrack) have all mentioned something on social media. As of right now, Nate has said nothing.

Since ShadowZone's video has come out, various people have come forward on places like the mod Discord to say that some Squad employees were actually in contact with the KSP2 developers in 2018, even being in meetings with Nate Simpson. We also know from their earliest dev blog videos that they had outside consultants such as 'Dr. Joel Green' acting as talking heads to give them scientific credibility. Therefore the idea that there was a complete veil of corporate secrecy doesn't ring quite true. If they were able to reach out to astrophysicists for advice, why not reach out to the ex-Squad developers of the original game? It's possible Nate just didn't want anyone with prior history of the KSP world getting in the way of 'his vision' and clouding his authority. He clearly wanted to be in control of developing the sequel. We still don't know where the quote "this stays away from Scott" comes from. It likely comes from some leaked internal message, ShadowZone is not revealing from where in order to protect his source. But would a higher up Take Two executive even know who Scott Manley was? It's more likely this was someone directly involved with developing the game. Obviously it's conjecture, but it would be in Nate Simpson's interest not to have outside experts giving advice that would contradict his own vision of what KSP2 was going to be. This was likely the higher ups at Uber, not T2. It seems they took this decision in order to have any chance of making the mandated 2020 release date. But even if he didn't make that call, Nate was still misleading us for a long while stating the game framework was rebuilt from the ground up, something many of us were skeptical about after seeing so many technical flaws from the first game appear in KSP2. Ultimately, it was Nate who put himself front and center as the 'face' of Kerbal Space Program. If the sequel had been a roaring success, Nate would have been quick to lap up the praise and accolades. Instead the game failed, and therefore Nate needs to take much of the blame as a result. The fact that he's stayed radio silent since then is unfortunately likely a testament to his true character.

Something I would like to know more about, maybe @ShadowZone will cover it in his upcoming multiplayer video, is the lack of playtesting during development. Bang at the 30:00 minute mark in his video, he mentions IT failing to provide the requested machines for testing to ensure the game would be be performant for regular customers on release. .....but every one of those devs had a windows PC at their desk. What was to stop them just opening the latest build and playtesting it themselves? There's plenty of evidence that they simply weren't playing and testing their own game. Not just the painfully sluggish EA release, but things like the maneuver tool being so clunky. Whoever implemented that clearly wasn't testing it to ensure it was performing robustly - it has so many UI issues with camera zoom and graphic position, not to mention the SOI bug. What SZ refers to with Star Theory and Intercept not hiring people with existing knowledge of KSP, leads to the question of whether the Devs even bothered to play the game they were being paid to develop. There's plenty of evidence most of the team weren't players of the original game, many would have been hired never having heard of Kerbal Space Program. The two CM's didn't even play the game which resulted in their attempts to hype and market the game ringing inauthentic ("you should buy this great game that we don't actually play ourselves ..."). Intercept clearly knew about the problem, Nate introduced the 'Rocketry 101' tutorials to help his own team learn to play their own game. It seems ridiculous to me that professional developers had to be encouraged to play the very game they were being paid to develop. Playtesting your own game is an absolute fundamental of game development, there's no way around that. If you're not playtesting your own product, you're basically working blind. I wonder if their inability early on to hire people familiar with KSP caused their downfall more than anything.

The government notice stated 'office closure', didn't it? That almost certainly means the whole Intercept Studio is gone. No separate tiger team kept over to produce the spin off game. Also, Take Two/Private Division are a game publisher, not a development house. They don't really want all the overheads and hassle involved with owning studios - office rents, salaries, insurance, hardware costs, HR issues. They probably never even wanted Intercept Games in the first place but ended up lumped with it on their books when someone at PD decided to take the game away from Star Theory and bring it in house. That's not to say T2 wouldn't want a 'Kerbal Kart' type game, but they can outsource that to any cheap game studio anywhere in the world to produce. The reason Intercept Games were working on it was it was likely a means to keep all the art team and the music composer occupied while the software team wrestled with KSP2.

That's good advice in general, it's not smart to stick around in a dysfunctional or toxic work environment. But what if you had joined the dev team out of genuine passion and love for the original and were determined to help make a worthy sequel? In that case I imagine you would have stuck it out. But how incredibly frustrating would it be to watch a franchise you love be ruined from awful decision making from above. The topic has been done to death at this point, but I wonder how many people within the dev team ever challenged Nate on his apparent insistence that wobbly rockets are somehow fun? Or other poor design choices he made. It would have been beyond infuriating to have to be overruled by Nate insistent on pushing his own vision of KSP and him being supported by management saying stuff like "because Nate is the creative idea genius....we need to trust his vision!"

Like I said, we are all basing our opinions on conjecture. ShadowZone is doing exactly that with his video - using the best information sources he has available to him. Plus a good dose of common sense. Let's consider this case example: Rask and Rusk. Knowing that KSP2 uses the same patched conic system as the original game, how was the binary system idea ever meant to work? Would the two bodies pull the craft towards each other? Would there be some sort of barymetric center between the two bodies? Would the craft be pulled to and fro between the two planets? My conjecture is this - Nate Simpson drew up the Rask and Rusk idea on Photoshop, not knowing whether it would be possible using the game's framework, but because the concept looked 'cool'. Artwork he created influenced the PD/Take 2 executives to award the KSP2 contract to his company (Uber) over more competent developers. As i said above - "We'll figure it out later" attitude. It's been five years, and we still haven't been told how on earth that binary system would work with patched conics.

Well, I wouldn't say I know I'm right. There's a ton we don't know. I'm just putting the dots together based on available information. And how do you know I don't have industry experience myself? You replied above saying I'm basing it on 'conjecture'. Aren't we all doing that? @ShadowZone in the video he created is basing what he tells on anonymous sources. Isn't that conjecture too? Some of his sources will have an axe to grind against Intercept games and T2. But he's doing a good job investigating with what information he has available to him. Most of what he says tracks with what we've all heard and observed over KSP2 development. One thing I really like about ShadowZone's video is that it's not casting blame or looking for scapegoats. It has more of an Inquiry feeling - investigating the reasons for KSP2's failure and lessons to be learned from it.

Unfortunately, a game like KSP doesn't require "big picture" blue-sky guys like Nate. It requires a lead dev able to understand and get down and dirty with the fundamental code. HarvesteR is the template here; a person who can code and understands simulation games but who could also 3D model and art direct. Didn't he also compose the music? Maybe I misremembered? As ShadowZone alludes to in his excellent video, Nate likely cooked KSP2's goose by promising game features he didn't have the technical skills to know how to implement himself. He was always relying on other people to come in later and solve the problems. "Oh, we'll figure it out later" mentality.

Did anyone else notice the rather heartfelt story in the video about the meeting where Jeremy Ables and Paul Furio were told they were being let go? Jeremy Ables was given the dignity of having a few weeks to get his work wrapped up, spend time thanking his team, leisurely getting his affairs in order and maybe have a nice farewell drinks party on his last day. Meanwhile Paul Furio was instead escorted out on the spot by security. Assuming this is true, it really is an insight into the corporate culture at Take Two. The executive class look after their own. Jeremy Ables was one of them. While the software engineer Technical Director was turfed out and effectively scapegoated for the Early Access release, Jeremy Ables the clueless management goob, one of the people most responsible for the project management mess of KSP2, gets treated differently by his corporate pals. It probably explains why the likes of Jeremy Ables have remained shtum about all this while Paul is on here probably slightly enjoying the schadenfreude (I don't blame him, I would be). @WatchClarkBand, not trying to imply you don't have feelings for your old colleagues who've lost their jobs. But at least I hope it's brought you some closure now that KSP2 is done and dusted and you were somewhat vindicated.

I don't know about the FAANG companies specifically, but they definitely brought onboard people from outside the game development world. A quick check of LinkedIn confirms this. They also recruited a PhD from academia. I'm not saying recruiting these kinds of people is wrong, it's absolutely not. In fact, bringing onboard people from different industries and fields can bring fresh perspective. But if you couple this however with these recruits not having any prior interest with KSP it can lead to the kinds of people who are going to flunk away to a cushy high paying job at Microsoft when the going gets tough. For anyone with an interest in aerospace, rocketry and gamedev, working on KSP2 should have been a once in a lifetime opportunity. Yet they had key people leaving the project throughout, either enticed away by higher FAANG salaries or simply sick of working for a prat like Nate Simpson, we don't know.

Sorry, I simply just don't buy the idea that not paying the software developers $200-250k was an issue. The original game and other successful indie games are proof that great games can be created by driven, self motivated people working on something they're passionate about. I think it was a mistake to hire lots of people from places like Amazon and Microsoft. These folks probably thought working on a game would be a fun jape for a while until it dawned on them how tough the task would be. They were also placing a lot of trust in people for whom the project was more of a 9-5 job. Nertea strikes me as an example of the kind of person they should have been hiring right from the start - someone with the necessary skills who was a fan of the original and was invested in creating a worthy sequel. They've often cited Covid in the past as being an issue, but the pandemic did show how effectively people could work remotely, especially in software/game development. When Star Theory started crewing up in 2018, it seems they wrongly assumed they had to recruit people exclusively from the Seattle area who could work locally in the studio. That's a very small pool of people to select from if you assume they have to A) have played the original game, B) understand how simulation games work and C) are actually good at their jobs. This probably led to them hiring a lot of people who weren’t familiar with KSP as @ShadowZone alludes to. It appears they later rectified the problem, learning to bring on board people like David Tregoning who I believe lives in Australia. I won't lie, I remember listening to the lead designer’s interview and wondering if she even played the very game she was being paid to work on. Too many of the team were just not the right fit for KSP.

CommNet: Removed the line-of-sight feature from the first game and taking away the ability of celestial bodies to occlude the radio signal, reducing the immersion. They seem to have decided to make all antennas work as relays, effectively removing the need for the big satellite dish parts. Navball: The main tool for flying a rocket, they moved it over to the left for aesthetic reasons but by pushing it over to the peripheral vision made it less readable at a glance. They changed the color scheme from the very readable blue and brown to the more darker tones, making it far less clear, plus the tough to read font numbers. Kerbal Specializations: I was always hoping to see what they'd do with individual Kerbals, whether they'd build on 'Pilot', 'Engineer', 'Scientist' skill levels from the first game. Instead they seemed to have removed them all together, the Kerbals are basically homogeneous. Maybe this was due to something they had planned for Colony 'boom events', maybe we'll never know. Right now it seems like a regression. Science Collection: Collecting all the temperature, pressure, seismic, mystery goo readings etc. could be tedious, but simply adding in a 'Do Science' button instead was just dumbing down. Docking: Always buggy since release, they never seem to have bothered including a docking interface or IVA view to aid the process. They also never included any tutorial for docking whatsoever. Was this just an oversight, or did they never plan for rendezvous and docking to be a part of the new-user experience? Maneuver Tool: Always seemed clunkier than in KSP 1, and lacked a way to precisely adjust the dV. It also had problems to be placed in a second SOI, making gravity assists hard to plan. Whether this was a bug or was indeed "Working as Intended", perhaps we'll never know. Music: I kind of like the new music for each planet, but couldn't they have included the title theme from the first game? Simply as a nod to the original? There's bucket loads more of these. They changed a whole bunch of things that really didn't need changing. Why fix what aint broke?

This is a good point actually. Sound effects and music are a nice thing to have, but they're by no means essential. Instead of worrying about cosmetic stuff like this, they really needed to have been focusing their efforts on the gameplay. It was a huge red flag in the lead up to release that they were showing behind the scenes videos of all their art, graphics and sound, but next to no actual gameplay footage whatsoever. This is correct. Nevermind what his official job title was, Nate was leading the project. There's plenty of evidence of this from all the interviews by him or others that all decision making flowed through Nate ("what Nate thinks...."). Bizarrely, it seems he was actually one of the few members of the team who had actually played the original game, meaning everyone seems to have been looking to him for guidance on how to create the sequel, even the higher ups at PD. There's a podcast somewhere of Paul Furio clearly deferring to Nate on all decision making, even technical. Yet it was him who got the can and pretty much scapegoated for the game not being hardware performant on release. He hints about it in his posts on LinkedIn. Funny how Nate escaped blame for that one. Was he not playtesting his own game? Nate Robinson and Jeremy Ables, no idea what happened to them, they were either fired at some point or eventually slunked away. Either way, they appear to have brought over the same toxic work culture of dishonesty and poor game development practices from Uber Entertainment.

No-one outside of Take Two can prove anything at this point, but most of us can put 2 plus 2 together, notice the government warning about the office closure, also notice multiple members of the Intercept staff have announced they're looking for work on twitter, and come to the conclusion that Intercept Games has been shuttered. Of course, there's the possibility they've kept on a skeleton crew of software engineers to somehow push out a viable 1.0 release. But is that worth Take Two's time and money? Never mind whether it's even possible. As @Yakuzi mentions above, there's just too many things wrong with their underlying engine framework even fourteen months after release. Docking still being broken, terrain glitches and vessel glitching apart, orbits still having problems (currently the orbit line disappearing, pretty damning IMO that they never managed to get orbits working robustly in a space simulation game!), plus all the little things such as that silly bug with ghost Kerbals appearing inside empty crew capsules. All this points to a bloated and broken game engine they just don't have a handle on. Again, putting 2+2 together here, but all the evidence points to Take2 finally cutting their losses and killing the game. It's probably what I would have done faced with the same mess.

Maybe I am kicking him while he's down, but if anyone deserves it at this time it's Nate Simpson. He's the prime person responsible for the IP of one of my all time favorite games being in the dust. I've actually met people like Nate in my travels - smarmy smooth talkers, good at PR and can be useful if utilized in client facing roles. But they're an absolute disaster to have in any leadership position. They're the kinds of confident salesmen with no actual discernable skills who are somehow able to sell your boss or client on their big ideas and the possibility that they can deliver things better and faster than others with a more grounded understanding of the system. They always insist on the fact that they have to be in charge, which inevitably results in hiring a large bloated team of staff, including many of their useless friends and cronies who always seem to end up on the payroll (notice how many of Nate's pals from Uber crossed over to Intercept as 'Game Designers' yet were unable to contribute anything of note to the game in four years). And when the project inevitably fails, they're always quick to disappear and turn up at another company the next town over to sell more snake oil. Always moving on to that next grift. Nate was the one who sold Private Division on his vision for the sequel, in particular the idea of incorporating multiplayer and interstellar travel, despite Nate not having the technical skills or knowledge to implement those things. It was a classic case of 'oh, we'll figure it out later' that backfired spectacularly when he was unable to build and lead a team to deliver on his promises. Maybe the situation is hard on him, but he made his own bed here. I worry he's going to wind up somehow doing the whole ruse again, taking someone else's franchise and ruining the legacy of better, more talented developers (seriously, could you imagine him in charge of Outer Wilds 2? That's exactly the kind of franchise Private Division will have their eye on next).

Why feel sorry for him? His reputation is sky-high right now. It's been proven beyond doubt that he could successfully build something that an entire studio of professional game developers couldn't match. He also has his own new game, something that is set to make him financially very wealthy (there's no way he will have made the same ownership and licensing mistakes he made with Squad)

Why do we need to hear from him? Everyone who has been following KSP2 development for the past five years should be wise to Nate by now. His credibility is in the toilet. If he does eventually come out and make a statement, it will probably be excuses along the lines of "...we did a good job, but unfortunately game development is hard..." Yes, game development is hard. But a team of over 50 professional game designers should have been able to improve on what a marketing company created as a side project a decade ago. It's damning that these people were paid salaries for 7 years and were unable to add anything new that the original game didn't have apart from improved sound and music, those godawful cartoon tutorials and the childish PAIGE voice. I personally am interested in finding out what kind of narrative story they had planned for the game, but I'm confident this will leak out eventually. Based on what has been hinted at already, it was going to be a 'follow the breadcrumbs to the alien precursor race' kind of thing we've seen many times before. If that was all it was going to be, it's beyond disappointing that people who sold themselves as professional writers and designers were unable to come up with anything better. All the 'Keri Kerman' dialogue we saw was pretty cringeworthy. Its almost as if aiming for the children's game market was just about the right level for the abilities of this team. I really wouldn't be surprised if Nate ends up at Private Division in some sort of executive role. Corporate types look after their own. The PD marketing executives who worked to falsely sell the 'Early Access' release would have seen a lot to admire in a silver-tongued repurposed bovine waste merchant like Nate Simpson.

I'm also curious to know how they planned Rask and Ruas to work. Other things I'd like to know: How would collisions work with planetary rings of Glumo and the other planets with rings showcased? What was the list of resources they planned to introduce and their corresponding rocket fuel types? Would colony buildings be rigid bodies that could collapse like seen in the trailer? What was the planned narrative? What was the story behind all those monuments?

I really wasn't being patronising, I was pointing out that no lives have been destroyed here. Thousands of game developers have lost their jobs over the last twelve months, many of whom would have been working on far more viable projects than KSP2 yet were still laid off due to the industry downturn. As @Skorj says, the laid off devs will be in for a rough few months, but they will all regroup and survive. Many of them are way too skilled to remain unemployed for too long, even if that might mean taking job offers outside the game industry. As for Dakota and the role of a Community Manager, I really think the job title is a cozy word for PR - 'Public Relations'. Their job is to sell the game and defend the game's development, and all importantly defend the corporate interests of Private Division and Take Two. Whether you like it or not, railing against the corporate monolith of the publisher is just damning Dakota the same, they are agents of the corporate overlord. (obviously things were probably different with you at Squad back in the day, but that's a different indie world back there).

Steady on. No one's dying. They haven't destroyed anyone's lives. The folks who are losing their jobs will move on to other things. The fact that they funded development for 6-7 years and even went to all the effort of bringing development in-house indicates they respected the Kerbal IP and the brilliant work on the original game. They clearly wanted to replicate the first game's success, but despite chucking millions of dollars at the problem they were unable to. And they couldn't go on funding a failing dev team forever; what happened to Intercept Games is far more on Nate Simpson and the team around him than the publisher. Yeah, I'm completely with you here. But at the end of the day, they're probably just going through the standard corporate steps for shuttering a division. Radio silence for a while probably, just bland corporate statements. Like I said, no-one is dying. It's not the end of the world. They'll all bounce back, either finding new jobs inside the game industry or elsewhere. See, why does Dakota and the other CM get a pass? They've been right little corporate lapdogs the past few months, assuring us everything is fine and going smoothly, yet now cowardly say nothing in the hope this will earn them sort of pat on the back from their corporate overlords, maybe a token PR job at Private Division Marketing once this all blows over and they help organise the dissolution of Intercept Games. Personally, I have far more ill feeling towards some of the individual devs than I do the corporate executives who simply thought KSP2 would earn the company money. The game failed because of poor game development by Intercept Games, not the publisher who plowed tons of money and resources into the project.

There's no way that KSP2 was ever planned as a 'cash-grab' apart from in the normal sense that the publisher planned for it sell well and make them plenty of money. Releasing it at full price in a broken state and marketing it as 'Early Access'...... yeah, that comes off as a cash grab to me, even if it was probably Private Division's way of lighting a fire under the Intercept team to get their act together and release something. It didn't work of course. The mysterious second Kerbal themed game Intercept were working on? That was probably put into development more to give the Intercept staff something to justify their existence to corporate. While bug fixing and colonies milestones were being worked on by the engineering team, they would have been an awful lot of artists, designers, UX people, the composer and sound designer etc. sitting around with nothing to do, so that Kerbal spinoff game was put into production. Again, it didn't work. Eventually the PD accountants were going to stick their noses in ask uncomfortable questions about why they, a publisher, had dozens of game developers on payroll and all the overheads that come along with them. And so that resulted in the end of Intercept Games.

The Part Manager was some really bad UI design, something that was a major regression from the clickable pop-up windows from the first game. A perfect example of something they tried to improve on and failed miserably. It was almost certainly designed around being accessible using a game controller, ironic as KSP2 was never destined to make it to a console release.