GluttonyReaper

As others have echoed already, we likely wouldn't have found much out about what the fate of KSP2 is to be... but it is a shame we haven't had the chance to hear the story of how it ended up like it did straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Thanks to him anyway for at least trying - as he put far more eloquently, the real shame here is that other developers/studios/publishers won't get the chance to learn from what went wrong here in the way that they would have hopefully done otherwise. I'd hate to see other projects fail in a similar way just because someone's covering their backs / someone in legal got spooked.

I'm aware there's been some pretty baseless accusations thrown around recently with regards to moderators, but I'm pretty sure that this in particular is referring to the OP of the Reddit AMA original thread, which has indeed been taken down (by the unrelated Reddit moderators, not the KSP forum moderators)

I seem to be able to see them just fine? Very cool btw @anis - I've never managed to get a shuttle working in KSP, it's definitely up there as one of the hardest things you can do! (especially if you're like me and suck at landing...)

Alternatively, use the power of rebranding - it's not a "failed lander", it's an "unprecedented leap forward on the path to Duna colonisation"...

A bit off-topic, but I believe the inefficiency that is usually being referred to here is immediate land-use and water consumption - i.e. short-term efficiencies of limited resources. As mentioned, this is specifically a problem with industrial meat farming, which needs high-nutrient plant inputs and vitamin supplements to maintain quality (e.g. soya from South America, which is mostly used as livestock feed), which would be more efficiently directly consumed by humans. The numbers I've seen thrown around (alas, unsourceable...) suggest a 5-10% transference of energy between trophic levels, so skipping one is always going to help in these cases. Admittedly I'm not sure how much of that lost energy/mass is recoverable (and if social norms were different, we could do the same with human manure I suppose...), but it doesn't change the more immediate inefficiency of producing less usable calories per unit land used. And again, this only applies to mass industrial farming - I'm sure there's very reasonable ways of using livestock to produce nutrition from less farmable land, same as fishing.

Negative colours implies the existence of imaginary colours......

Welcome to the forums! Which button are you talking about? If you're talking about unmodded KSP1, there's no way to get your kerbals to automatically pilot craft - you unlock the ability to have them point the craft in various useful directions (see here) but they won't be able to fly anything into orbit for you. The basic "Flight Assist" SAS option causes your craft to try and (loosely) hold whichever you're pointing in, as the name suggests it's more to assist you when you're flying things yourself. There are user-made mods available that add the ability for your craft to fly themselves, but if you're new to the game you probably don't want to dig too deep into all that just yet

Just had a check, and yep: it's there, this is a stock tool. I had no idea this existed until now, apparently it was added in the final major version (1.12)! Unfortunately, after a little messing around and a quick google, it looks like that's just how it works, unfortunately. It seems it's capable of producing some transfer to other bodies, but not necessarily a particularly fast one... I'm not sure if it's optimising for dV or what? It even seems to struggle with the Mun and Minmus - I gave it a go from a pretty simple circular orbit, and in both cases it wanted me to wait multiple days for a transfer, which definitely doesn't seem right, and there's no real way to tweak it... You're better off with the Transfer Window Planner mod, which is presumably what the stock version was watered down from (the modder who created it was working for Squad around that time), or I think MechJeb has its own tool for automatically doing transfers? EDIT: Now that I think about it, TWP doesn't actually auto-create manoeuvres for you... but it would at least give you the right times.

Every Worm knows the quickest way to the Mün is via ninja rope...

The difference is that by the time KSP1 stopped development, KSP2 had already started - this time, as far as we know there's no development being done at all, and the companies involved have been effectively closed down. There's no particular reason to think the forums are going be explicitly shut down, but there's no particular reason to think they'll stay up either. No-one's super clear who within Take Two is actually responsible for the forums now, if anyone, and even the moderators haven't been able to get in contact: The forums could be around for many more years... or they might just vanish without warning. It's impossible to say at this point.

Finally got a chance to mess around with some of those beautiful volumetric clouds with JNSQ (thanks @blackrack & @rbeap!) now that I have some (slightly) more powerful hardware... and wow does it deliver (ignore the giant fireballs, I think I have something wrong set up with my Waterfall SRBs) Alas no Parallax as of yet (darned MacOS), but wow this game can look incredible when you pile the right mods in. I've been doing a Kerbalism play through this weekend with JNSQ, which has turned out to be a pretty brutal combination... still, it's nice to feel a little challenged again after so long. I haven't even managed to get an unmanned landing on the Mun yet, and putting any kind of half-lengthy mission up seems risky until I have docking.

Now that I think about it, it might be time to transfer my KSP1 to Steam, in case the PD website vanishes at some point in the near future...

On a related note, probes also need a Comnet connection to have full throttle control. This is especially true when trying to land for the first time on the Mun - as tempting as it is to get try and hit that sweet spot where Kerbin is right above the horizon as you touch down on the Munar surface, your probe is almost definitely going to plough into the ground at full speed if your overshoot slightly and the planet drops out of sight. Unless you're smart enough to set up a relay first, I guess...

it's alive.........

Right, in truth the bar was pretty low - all they really had to do was make a game that felt like a substantial improvement over KSP1, which given how ramshackle the first game was could have been entirely achievable. I do genuinely think that "KSP1 but better-looking and more coherent" with a few new toys to play with genuinely could have been pretty successful: one thing that I don't think anyone was really criticising was how more accessible KSP2 was, through tutorials and such, which I imagine would have been quite attractive to people who struggled to get into the very sandbox-y first game. In truth the alarm bells for me only really went off when Early Access hit... going from a projected 2020 full release to a 2023 (very) Early Accesss release clearly meant something had gone wrong. But it was actually Nertea's blog post that really pushed me to "oh, this is in real bad shape", although not for the reasons some did (I actually really liked what he was talking about there!). What was specifically concerning was that they were still doing lots of 'big picture' planning, and that clearly no-one knew how big features like colonies or even heating were actually going to work practically for the longest time. I still don't know much about game development, so I don't know how typical that it is at that stage of development, but even then it felt like a full 1.0 release was still multiple years out.

The obvious problem here is how you convert your electrical energy into something an organic body can use - I definitely don't have the biological knowledge to speculate as to what exactly is needed for full functioning, but ATP seems to be a major part of how the body releases energy. The only reference I could find to electric-to-ATP conversion was here: https://phys.org/news/2023-08-scientists-artificial-metabolic-pathway-electricity.html# ...but that's extremely new stuff, and I think still requires organics to break down (so you still need some kind of artificial photosynthesis). If you could do that though, you might be able to avoid some atrophy, as then you're effectively "feeding" the muscles and such. Unfortunately there's just so many processing going on in the human body which don't have an "off" switch - even if you are artificially thermoregulating, I don't think your body will just stop respiring, and you still need to breathe and keep your heart pumping. Equilibrium processes are kinda a pain like that. As a side note, you'd also have to suppress your hunger artificially no matter what: the feeling is hunger is based on whether or not you have solids in your digestive tract, rather than what your blood sugar level is.

Well I certainly won't be now, given the, uh... situation Right, which is exactly my point - most of the bugs that plagued the game had to do with stuff that pre-dated the science system and was showing very little sign of ever getting properly fixed, which is what turned me away. The science system itself seemed to be pretty robust, with most of the complaints being about deliberate design decisions than things not working properly (aside from relatively small complaints like Eve giving weird science returns), which is what I think that quote was more referring to: the "science update" was reasonably refined even as the rest of the game was falling to bits. I think that matches up with how this video explains how development was managed: pre-EA everything was being developed in parallel with different people working on different features, but post-EA release it seemed to be mostly all-guns on individual features, even at the expense of core stuff.

Just my interpretation, but I read that quote as being more about the update being "polished and bug-free" rather than "feature-heavy and full of content". I never played, but from what I saw of KSP2's science system, it all looked reasonably well thought-out and working as intended, even if it was way more shallow than I would have liked - the existence of the mission system alone at least suggests that someone was thinking about how the game was going to play as a whole, and at least a reasonable effort to get things 'right' the first time around given the repeated responses from the dev team that the core mission structure wasn't going to change (even if, again, it was a bit of a shallow experience for my tastes). The actual bugs in the game mostly still seemed to be present entirely in the core game systems, which we now know was a result of a huge range of factors, one of which being pushed into an EA release that the team almost certainly didn't want.

Hard disagree. Not only do lead designers do a heck of a lot more than that as described by others above, arguably one of the biggest-impact issues KSP1 had pre-1.0 was that there wasn't anyone with a cohesive vision of what the final game should look like. You could almost feel the tension between different ideas of what the game should be in those earlier versions as it transitioned away from "silly space frog game", and I do wonder now if that's why career mode ended up feeling like a bunch of disconnected features in a trench coat rather than a complete way of playing the game.

Did some digging, and surprisingly it does seem to still exist on the forums! This is all pre-1.0, obviously (the 86x memory limit was a heck of problem for early modded installs) - I don't have the technical knowledge to tell how it works, but to a totally untrained eye it looks like it was replacing only the textures in the game with low-res versions, then switching them out as needed. Like you said though, it's noted on that page even that it was a bit of a crash-happy mess... and I have dim memories of the loader often failing and leaving you stuck with the blurry low-res textures for half your parts. More interestingly though, apparently someone did set up something that worked post 1.0... ...but that was also apparently broken by the update to Unity 5 in 1.1. Evidently it wasn't really worth the hassle after that, given since 64x became officially supported, no-one's released anything similar since.

This is probably the one thing that genuinely would have gotten me to finally pick up KSP2 had it ever become reasonably stable and reached feature-parity (or close enough) to KSP1. Even the most well-designed mod planets for KSP1 never quite got away from the polygonal look that the stock planets had. Like many things in KSP1, it's definitely one of those things that seemed like a reasonable thing to do when the game was a fun little project that was just thrown together and had only a handful of parts to load each time... but alas, evidently they never got around to rebuilding that system (and perhaps it was too ingrained even when they had the time post 1.1?). I seem to recall there was a mod that actually did add load-on-demand, but I have no idea if it survived to the final versions of the game.

I think the bigger point is that I doubt he would want to work on KSP again, let alone KSP2. In hindsight it's pretty obvious that KSP1 very much got away from his initial "slap rockets together and see how far you can get" idea once it started to gain momentum, and it definitely felt like it was growing faster than they could plan features out by the end. And he's mentioned already that he would be more interested in a prequel to KSP than a sequel, which again makes sense when you consider that that would be much closer to what he was thinking of in those initial KSP versions. I'm not saying he wouldn't be capable of creating a KSP2, but I'm sure he's perfectly happy working on Kitbash instead.

The balance with EA games has always been a bit dicey... on one hand, it's obviously not ideal for early donators to run the risk of effectively not getting what they hoped they would, especially in the face of actively disingenuous teams (see: Ant Simulator). On the other though, EA game do exist for a reason: to get games developed that would otherwise be too niche, or too experimental. It would be a massive shame I think to see it regulated into the ground - it would be a massive shame if small indie developers/studios felt it was never worth the risk of potentially bankrupting themselves or going into massive debt by issuing refunds, in the event the project actually just happened to fail through lack of funding or other unforeseen issues down the road. This seems especially hostile to the "one guy in his garage" model that made EA so popular to begin with. Obviously, the idea of massive publishers/studios doing EA is frankly absurd. Really, it only benefits them - they get a certainly number of guaranteed sales before the game ever releases (like a kind of turbo pre-order...), if it releases at all, with likely no more risk than they would encounter going through a more traditional development. If player input is something they're really concerned about, surely they could just go down the route of having a open beta in months leading up to release, no? Right - I feel if optional donations were enough to keep games funded, EA as a concept never would've sprung up. It's a nice ideal, but ultimately it just means less people actually able to make games, which means less cool games for everyone. It's a lose-lose, really.

Great list, definitely going to use this when I set everything back up! I was going to make some suggestions, but this pretty much is my mod list, as far as I can tell... the only (very optional) mention I can make is: Engine Lighting Relit - adds a minor lighting effect to engines which I think looks nice! Personally, I've also used Kerbalism and JNSQ as an alternative to TAC and Outer Planets, but that's definitely for a bit of a different play style. I would also recommend SCANsat and DMagic's Orbital Science... but I have no idea if they even work on the final KSP1 versions.

I, for one, think they should just leave the bugs in. Even better, they should add more new, exciting bugs in - keep us all on our toes, y'know?