Mickel

I suspect it's one of those things that an in-game tutorial would be good for. I get the why/what. Not dug into the 'how' yet. The reason they've done it makes perfect sense.

Nuclear engines are way too early in the tree. We should be able to build a reasonable Saturn booster equivalent before getting anywhere near a nuclear powerplant. Ay least in my little rocket building head...

I have to admit I am rather partial to the KSP1 VAB tune. I never seem to tire of it, which is pretty uncommon for me (the only other I tolerate being W&R).

But isn't that on you? I see people get all upset because of what doesn't limit them. If lock to target dumbs it down in someone's opinion, don't select it. Is there anything stopping you from just not strapping a crap-ton of rockets on? Play with the science and mission reward sliders so they're not as high. The other thing we need to perhaps bear in mind is that they need all this stuff accessible for the majority so people will go dig and do things that leads to feedback. I'd like to think by version 0.8, the screws getting tightened a bit.

Landed a probe in Eve for the first time. It is upside down and now too far from Kerbin to send science with the poxy antenna I gave it. But it's there.

A mixed bag for me, but generally positive. Racked up almost a third of my total KSP2 hours today. I have a potato, but it runs well enough for my eyes (I'm old enough to remember seconds per frame, so I don't dummy spit under 30fps...). Without any AA it looked terrible, but I can now have some. So this is good. Chipped through a bunch of missions. Entertaining enough, I suppose. Science seemed to come too quickly through the first tier. Seemingly high tech parts are in before 'big' parts, which seems odd. But ok - I can route around them. It signed me off on a Munar orbit when I didn't meet the mission criteria. My PE was under the 60k specified. It also mentioned Jool, rather than Mun when discussing comms. But they warned we'd find things like that. I managed a round trip to the Munar surface for the first time. So that's progress. Orbital decay still present under 20k around Mun. Can't plan low level passes and landing sites too much. On the second trip (to the strange signal), I couldn't get an orbital path to register on departure from Mun so couldn't get home. A save/reload left me at 25k with zero velocity. Didn't get going again from that. Revert to VAB and will try again in a couple of days. Dv calcs in the VAB need a tweak. My TLAR method of rocket design worked better than the calc numbers for Mun and back, and I was still way over a safe number. Reentry effects were better than I expected. I suspect they will be tweaked over time. I've been quietly optimistic that this will come right, and I've not got any reason to doubt that.

The challenge as I see it is that we're not a 'space program'. We're sort of running one and managing other stuff on the side and being a pilot, scientist and engineer. The human race has, what, one permanently crewed space vessel in orbit of this planet? If we were (as I'm sure many KSP players have or had) maintaining a Kerballed platform around Kerbin, one around Mun, another around Minmus, then going to Duna becomes really tedious if you have to constantly take your Duna flight out of time warp to launch and dock a resupply mission to an occupied station. In a hypothetical 'real world', you'd delegate that to your likely eventual replacement, or subcontract it to a private space company (multiplayer options, but who'd want to be driving the food truck on a schedule?). As Boss of the space program, you simply could not manage all that. You're going to focus on the thing that carries the greatest risk to your prized little green assets or open up the next big opportunity. So while the concept of LS is attractive to me (and there are elegant models and outcomes proposed here), the logistics of maintaining a presence in space are painful without some level of automation running in the background.

My take on this FWIW: the player should have to be able to fly a pod to orbit and back before being able to lock to pro/retrograde. But then the player shouldn't need to do it with every pilot. They debrief, they talk among themselves. They build a better simulator. A player should have to be able to dock to prove they can do it - just like Gemini did. A player should be able to land on Mun. Perhaps don't make the process as long-winded as KSP1. But the player shouldn't get all the aids at the initial stages. The Soviet and American space programs didn't. They had to go work it out for themselves.

Sadly... upon returning from the saved game, my station was a spinning mass of the major components. Undeterred, I decided it was time to head to another planet (something I have not yet done in KSP...). So I strapped together a booster to take a Stayputnik to Eve. Current established in a 100km orbit. I should have enough dv left to get to Gilly while I'm here. Running on a 6700k with a 1070 card, so well below min spec. So far, I've not had any dramas with performance, though graphics setting are low. 0.1.3 certainly helped the load times.

Decided the glass is 1/3 full, rather than 2/3 empty and had a decent go. Managed to dock two sections of something resembling a space station. It was something of a shame to have an enormous message pop up instantly cover my triumph. Hopefully people will see fit to remove that.