asmi

As long as there are enough reasons to travel to those 2-3 planets, it won't be boring.

I doubt they know this upfront, usually you only find out these kinds of things with any certainty once you actually implement them - at least in the form of prototype. But let't be realistic - KSP2 isn't likely to ever run well on potatos, at least until it's 1.0 feature-complete because ugly low quality screenshots don't sell the game - for that you want the maximum amount of eye-candy, and so I have reasons to believe that their focus will be on a midspec and higher configurations. That's not to say that performance won't improve on lower-spec configs at all, but it will likely be a side effect of overall improvements.

It's not that I don't trust him, I'm just more interesting in technical aspects of the game, rather than listening to the same marketing bullet points for umteenth time. As for this interview, I liked that interviewer did not get in the way of a person he's interviewing and let him speak freely without interrupting. Way too many of interviews with bigger interviews look like a single phrase of the interviewee following by minutes of interviewer's "smart thoughts" (or so they think) which nobody cares about because people listening to the interview want to hear what intervewee has to say, not smartass notes and grandstanding of interviewers. But like I said above, some of those interviewers are so full of themselves that they can't handle not being in the focus of a video - and the bigger those interviewers are, the more ugly and pathetic this tend to look. In that sense this was a great one, all too rare nowadays unfortunately.

ADDED: I wish they would make somebody more technical available for the interview with perhaps some of current or ex-modders to go a bit deeper over technical aspects of the game. I remember for KSP1 there was like an hour long presentation "decomposing" KSP into subsystems and explaining how they work, it would be of immense interest to both current and aspiring modders in the current environment of total lack of documentation, and since engineers are known to hate writing documents, such interviews/presentations would be the next best thing.

I disagree. A lot of those millioneers are too full of themselves to let someone else (namely, the person they interview) to be the primary focus, which is kind of the point of an interview.

I agree. They probably used the same Squad logic "dV is too complex for newbros", "TWR is too complex too". I can't speak for everyone, but I for one was actually surprised that there was NO life support once I got into KSP1. And, being a long-time space enthusiast, I knew everything there is to know about dV, TWR and orbital mechanics, before I started playing KSP. And I'm sure there is quite a number of people like me, and therefore statements like "X is too complex for me" are frankly condescending. There is a BIG difference between a random game mechanics - which you can expect newbros to not be familiar with as it is game-specific by definition, and universal laws of physics, which can be known in advance because they are not game-specific.

Do you actually think developers do any of that? I can all but guarantee that developers have no idea about refunds, complaints and rants, unless they checked that cesspool on their own volition. Which I gather they didn't as they knew all too well the state of the game on EA start, so it doesn't take a lot of imagination to imagine what it would be like.

This is the world we live in - who cares about facts when there are emotions?

My question didn't make it in Oh well, I guess eventually we'll find out ourselves.

You have no idea what are you talking about. I, on the other hand, did quite a few experiments with extending physics range in KSP1 back in the day.

Nate, a question for you - did you include an ability for celestials to have rotation axis that is not perpendicular to the orbital plane? It was a major pain in the behind in KSP1 because engine simply didn't support such concept, so for real solar system we had to "fake" this by artificially tilting ecliptic plane. I really hope we won't have to do the same in KSP2.

KSP1 can be made to support almost arbitrarily large physics range, however it comes with it's own problems.

This is what operating ion engine (specifically, Hall Effect Thruster) looks like in real life in space (from 0:54 if timecode won't work):

It seems rather logical - right as exhaust leaves the nozzle, it's pressure is maximal and so initially it rapidly expands, but as pressure drops with distance from the nozzle exit, the expansion slows down. Hence paraboloid.

Good. We don't need weapons in KSP, we have enough of that crap in the real life.

The reason there won't ever be one is because it will be buggy too, and the publisher will quickly go kaput over payouts

You obviously don't have any knowledge to speak of on this matter. As an (ex-)modder myself I'm familiar with the way many mods work, and almost all of them had their developers reverse-engineer parts of KSP over the course of development of said mods. Now, it was mostly done to either work around some stock bugs/limitations or just to figure out how exactly things work (as we have NO documentation worthy of mentioning whatsoever), which is why Squad turned a blind eye to that by adopting a policy of "don't tell, don't ask" (which is why a lot of regular players are completely unaware of this). And I'm not talking about some obscure mods that nobody knows about - these are mods which top the list of most-often-used mods.Now, this practice did not in any way affect a business of Squad, which is why they were lenient on this, but lawyers are a different breed of people who care only about winning legal battles to make money on them (in order to justify their own existence and their big paycheques), and legally they will be in the right. THIS is why a lot of modders are worried now - many of them invested thousands of hours of their free time into their creations out of their own affection to make the game better for everyone, and none of them want all this work to be in vain.

@sal_vager There are fewer and fewer of the "old band" so to speak here. I wish you well and hope you will come back!

There was a study done by ESA at some point, and GSE has been designed such that it would not preclude such upgrades in the future. I seem to recall that GSE was not the only issue - processing facilities would need to be expanded to support Progress/Soyuz campaigns (loading propellants/gases, pre-launch testing, crew quarters/training facilities and so on). Also the Soyuz capsule itself would need to be modified so that it would be more buoyant as in case of launch abort it would land into the ocean.

Sorry, but I could not resist:

You can do it with MJ + RO. It handles asymmetric thrust pretty well in most cases.

I've learned the game in zero time as I was space enthusiast before that and so knew all math behind spaceflight. And there was no career mode at the time. Oh - and no docking either (I've started in 0.17). So there was nothing to learn really except to slap things together and see them explode (if you think in 1.x craft are wobbly, I wonder what you'd say about 0.17/0.18 ) Lastly, my total playtime in KSP is significantly over 1k hours. And there are quite a bit of people like me. 0.1% maybe is a bit of overstatement, but surely devs count on players spending 100's of hours in-game, so a couple of hours-long tutorial is maybe 1%. If people spend 50% of their game time in tutorial, it means they are either incredibly stupid, or game design is very very bad, or just don't care for the game (this is often a consequence of previous point). Oh, and my numbers are pulled from the same "source" yours did.

Also on the subject of "Career as tutorial" - this game is a sandbox which implies replayability is the name of the game (many of us here play it an-and-off for several years already!), so average KSP player is noob only for 0.1% of total game time at best. If career is indeed intended to be just a tutorial for new players (I don't believe it is, but some here do seem to think that way), they've invested one heck of development resources into feature most players don't need after their first few hours at most. Bottom line - KSP needs a real career mode if existing one is a tutorial.

It's not that I disagree in general, but sometimes it does help with spacecraft design. For example check out Soviet Venera series of probes - first landers in series didn't even reach surface because there was no information about the kind of conditions they will encounter, and their "best guesses" (quite pessimistic at the time - they were built to withstand pressure up to 2.5 MPa - about 25 times normal atmospheric pressure) turned out to be totally wrong, and so subsequent probes were massively overbuilt to withstand ridiculous pressure only so they would be able to tell the story so to speak and transmit they read figures, after that following landers were built to be just tough enough to survive what at that point were known conditions for a little while. Same goes for other aspects - first landers had "sugar locks" for water landing as it was not known at the time that there is no liquid water on a surface of Venus, this feature was removed after first landers confirmed that conditions on a surface makes presence of liquid water impossible. Of course none of this is present in KSP, but I thougth I'd mention it anyway as it's a rare RL example when planetary science findings did actually affect spacecraft design. The only thing of that nature that IS present in KSP is presence of atmosphere and its' parameters (assuming you don't know about them in advance and use ingame atmospheric pressure to get data).

You never flew on, say, Boeing-767?