LameLefty

Welp, this is sad but not unexpected news about the Forums possibly evaporating. I "survived" the Great Forum Derp in 2013 when my then-new account and post history got lost without backups shortly after I joined. I haven't been very active in recent years but still, well over 11 years of my digital history is tied up on these boards and I hate to think of it all just going away. Thanks for nothin', T2.

I don't know what this version means for the future of KSP2, but with a week or so to go until the WARN notice layoffs of the final folks go into effect, SteamDB is still showing 3 different dev branches getting updates daily, most recently 2 hours ago. I expect we'll get one more patch late next week and then it's sayonara, as the lights get turned off and the keycards stop working.

Further, it’s entirely possible for a person to be a fan of both games, for entirely different reasons. KSP lets me remember my engineering degree wasn’t completely worthless, and GTA lets me live through an interactive narrative full of chaos, violence, pathos and absurdist humor. Humans are complicated creatures and a healthy mind is capable of appreciating and enjoying vastly different experiences. (GTA IV had the best story and soundtrack - I will not be taking any questions on this point. So sad when the 10 years rights’ agreement expired and the game had to be patched to remove a bunch of tracks, especially the bangers on Radio Vladivostok. Fortunately, there are online playlists that have all the tracks).

If you’re referring to GTA VI (which will, undoubtedly, end up as one of the most-sold games in history), “about” is not the correct word. With luck, it will be released around November 2025, a solid 17 months from now, assuming that - in true R* tradition - it is not delayed further past then.

LOL, read again. I use Docking Port Alignment Indicator and fly every proximity approach and docking manually. Try again. Also, I learned all the math and theory of orbital mechanics earning my aerospace engineering degree literally 34 years ago. Try a third time. Or don’t. I don’t care - I’ll be disregarding your further efforts to kerbalsplain a topic I mastered before you were likely born yet.

I have over 2,000 hours in KSP 1 going back to March 2013. I run campaigns with dozens of stations, probes, refineries, fuel tugs and transfer stages. I am not "inexperienced" and when I'm trying to manage as many craft at a time as I do, I am not going to fly every one of hundreds of ascents, transfers and rendezvous manually. But hey, you do you.

Mechjeb is great at planning the plane matching and rendezvous maneuvers and in automating the burns (after you've done it all by hand and eyeball a few dozen times, it gets old) but Docking Port Alignment Indicator and flying the prox ops and docking manually is where it's at if you want a sense of accomplishment and if you really want to minimize monoprop usage.

Not gonna lie, when I discovered the fancy Mun Arch with the glowy bits, and the monuments on Minmus and Duna, I was sure that's what they were going for. But even setting the whole mess of math involved with integrating interstellar burns and the resultant trajectory over the scale of lightyears, the fumbling of basic part physics (exhaustively detailed in this thread and others) is just mind-boggling. I still have a save from my first landing at the Duna monument that just falls apart on scene loading, even with the patches.

Then you were very, very lucky or you weren't playing before the 3rd patch fixed this bug.

Note my disclaimer: “without massively over-building for dV.” So yeah. I did it too. But only because I had a huge nuclear transfer stage with over 3,100 m/s to make a return from Jool that was SUPPOSED to take like 1,100 m/s or something. But in addition to the excess dV I happened to have available, I also made liberal use of time-warp to get favorable phasing for the corrections I had to make once leaving Jool SOI. For anyone who plays like a real rocket scientist (and one of my oldest friends does exactly this) and tries to min/max mass and dV requirements, playing a real return mission like a real space agency does was just impossible except by luck.

It wasn't just "not working" as a cohesive game, it was FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN. A game entirely about space travel could not even reliably predict planned orbits, something KSP got right from the beginning. I mean, it was utterly impossible to return from any outer planet body without massively over-building for dV. It's like everyone was so busy scripting frankly-dumb little juvenile "tutorials" and creating unique (illegible) fonts for the UI that no one actually tried to play the actual game. It took three patches to fix that trajectory bug, and I have a save from that period where the legs STILL just fall off my Duna lander as soon as I load into the scene. Again, Nate and crew, if you're lurking - did you or your team actually play the game you pushed out the door and charged $50 for?

Exactly what KER (and MechJeb for that matter) provides: real time numbers during flight.

I never hated him, though I was annoyed AF. I’m an engineer and I conceptualize in terms of numbers. Even though I design with rules of thumb and internalized knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, I want to see dV, relative veloocities, etc. So, within a week of getting KSP (at version 0.19) and learning how the game worked, I discovered KER and used it to make my first orbital rendezvous and docking. 11 years later, I still want/need some numbers when I build in KSP.

July 1968. I was a bit over five months old when Apollo 8 orbited the Moon. Looking back at the earlier posts I’m not the oldest, but I’m certainly older than most.

It’s totally unlike KSP but is, in fact, a REAL SPACE sim, but I give you RE-ENTRY: https://store.steampowered.com/app/882140/Reentry__An_Orbital_Simulator/ If instead you want a quirky SF-themed exploration/science’y sort of game (and it’s even coded with a full dose of Unity-jank!) I high, highly recommend THE PLANET CRAFTER (and it’s got an amazingly evocative soundtrack to boot): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1284190/The_Planet_Crafter/ And if you want to see what a skeleton crew of developers can build if they refuse to sell out to a big name publisher, stick to what they’re REALLY good at, and adhere to their vision like glue, I give you FACTORIO. If you’re the slightest bit OCD you will love it, or hate it, and quite possibly both. https://store.steampowered.com/app/427520/Factorio/

Someday, after the NDAs have expired and/or no one cares enough to enforce them anymore, I really hope the crew from NoClip gives us an hour-long deep-dive into this mess: how it started, what really happened with Star Theory, how we got from Nate telling us just a couple weeks ago that everything was fine and showing us some WIP stuff like the new clouds, etc. to T2 just sacking the whole crew essentially overnight. In the meantime, 11 years after I started playing KSP in the first place, I’m seriously considering just wiping my installations of both games and forgetting about it all until around Labor Day (first weekend of September for non-USAians) and seeing what’s going on then. This has just been too painful. I know it’s dumb to say that about a game, but KSP and everything associated with it has always been more than just a game to me.

[Snip] Fact check from someone with tight ties to the space industry: SpaceX’s success is not due to Musk. He made TWO incredibly important hires early on. First, Tom Mueller, who developed the Merlin engine family from the groundwork established out of NASA’s Fastrac program. Second, he hired Gwynne Shotwell, an experienced engineer with strong managerial skills and potential and put her in charge of increasingly important parts of the business until she became Chief Operating Office. SHE is the reason SpaceX is a commercial success. Elon is not even the majority shareholder of SpaceX anymore either, kids, though he controls a majority of voting stock through family shares ostensibly owned by others for financial reasons, but giving him voting control over those shares. Shotwell is the reason SpaceX succeeds, and it succeeeds despite Musk not because of him. Everyone who actually follows the space industry realized this about 5 years ago. Pop culture has not yet caught up. The last thing KSP2 needs to grow and thrive is for some intellectually and emotionally bankrupt pseudo-liberatarian-when-it-suits-him techbro to take over.

Just so you all know, LinkedIn now has all kinds of tiers and nuances to its memberships. Not all profile information is necessarily available by default to free members, or members who don’t pay for the right tier of membership. So just because you and I don’t see anything about Dakota being open to work doesn’t mean he isn’t listing that availability to professional recruiter accounts.

I killed Jeb on a suborbital hop, like the early Mercury-Redstone flight - only about 7G's, too, so not even THAT hardcore. RIP. https://imgur.com/a/lNfWqcR

Must be glitchy, then. I created two new saves - the first time, I ensured I had that setting disabled and P.A.I.G.E. showed up anyway. Then I created a second new save, again disabling that setting, and this time it stayed gone. Anyway, first impressions are that it's good to have a reason to do stuff now, although the Mission Control status reports are kind of juvenile/kid-centric in tone. I don't expect experienced KSP people will find that that amusing but if it helps new players, I guess they're fine. I'm also somewhat concerned that the tech tree needs more nodes/depth to it. I've made exactly three launches so far and unlocked all but one node in the first two tiers. I expect there will need to be some rebalancing and fleshing out here, but my comment/observation may be obviated once colonization and IRSU parts become part of the game. Performance seems great so far though I have yet to try to build anything very complex. I'm a little bit concerned that some of the physics glitches inherent in the release version through the first couple patches don't seem to be working completely, at least when loading up an old save. I've got a ship landed on Duna in one of those saves, and as soon as I load up that save, one of the large landing gear just falls off and the ship falls over. Lolverykerbal and all that, but I had hoped the part-attach physics had been ironed out by now. Oh well.

Lordy, I can't remember how to disable P.A.I.G.E. ... (sigh)

10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (US). Do the math for your own time zone conversion.

Yay! I’ve landed on almost every body in the Kerbol system, found all the anomalies, etc. so I’m excited to see some progress towards the game I want KSP2 to become. Thanks for not giving up, team. Bring it!

Thank you for the transparency. I am someone who loved the initial release and had super high hopes(96 hours in-game, most of that within the first 6 weeks), but had become disillusioned with the slow pace of updates. I haven't played in weeks and won't, until the trajectory bug is corrected. But having said that, I appreciate your demonstrated ability to be a bit introspective with this week's post, and share the thought processes that go into your planning for future bug-fixes and feature updates.

Next month? That's disappointing. A fix for the broken-since-launch SOI trajectory displays/calculations would have been much appreciated.