Raptor9

@Mr.Gentlespy and @tremonthedgehog, please stop distributing my artwork without my consent. That is my personal artwork that I spent a lot of time creating for my own presentation of the craft files, and exploiting it in such a manner is in very bad taste.

@tremonthedgehog, the images that I used to present my craft is artwork that I personally created. I originally posted my craft files on KerbalX to share with others, but the artwork itself is my work and was part of my personal style of presentation separate from the actual craft files. I chose to remove my downloads from KerbalX and the artwork from my forum thread for my own personal reasons; and I find it very offensive that others are intending to exploit and re-post such artwork without my consent.

I don't think it comes down to an all or nothing choice between the current KSP2 implementation and the KSP1 implementation. It's not a "this or that" choice, it's a feedback thread to try to find solutions that work for as many players as possible. It would be a much greater experience in the long run to take what was proven to work in KSP1 and merge it with the advancements made within KSP2; especially if they were coupled with some potential user-configurable settings. As it stands, the current KSP2 view controls are way too coarse and make it quite cumbersome and difficult to position the camera into very specific orientations and locations to properly judge precise part placement and rotation on a craft. If a player is content with simply snapping parts together, then the camera controls in their current form are sufficient. However, if a player is into building craft with very precise part placements for specific designs or replicas, the current camera controls in KSP2 are too cumbersome and coarse to provide the level of precision and orientation that is needed for such gameplay.

But that doesn't make a difference. That's just saying aim for a different target altogether. The point is that if you move the mouse to the far left side, you'll simply drop the part into the VAB again because of the gap between the edge of the screen and the parts palette. And depending on what parts category you have displayed, in some cases the entire parts palette saturated with parts from top to bottom so now you may inadvertently select a different part, and then you need to delete that one. Are there alternatives? Of course. But the point is to increase efficiency where possible, not workarounds. However, that was just an example to illustrate my point of how a lot of small changes to the UI accumulate to reduce efficiency in several areas of gameplay and UI/UX, it's not a prime issue of the UI that I think needs addressed.

It's not so much the camera controls I have a problem with, I can get used to those. It's the UI elements themselves and how you interact with them. For example, the Parts Action Window in KSP1 was a much more efficient method of presenting and interacting with part-specific data than the monolithic Parts Manager they have now. When I right-click on a part, I want to interact with that part only. Presenting information about all parts on the entire craft is inefficient in that it forces me to concentrate more on interacting with the Parts Manager itself to process all of the data that I don't want at that moment, instead of focusing on just the data I am requesting at that moment in time. This will be especially important when designing large interstellar ships in the future. Another example is how there is now a gap between the parts palette and the edge of the screen. In KSP1, if I didn't like a part or wanted to get rid of several parts quickly, I could simply click on them and jerk my mouse to the left side of the screen. I didn't even have to look at where the mouse was when I left-clicked to throw the part away because I knew my mouse was up against the far left side of my screen, and anywhere along the left side would allow me to left-click again to drop the part to delete it. Now, I have to pause what I am doing and place the unwanted parts in a very narrow target area in the bottom left part of the screen to delete them. This may sound like an inconsequential issue, with a difference of fractions of a second, but its the cumulative time spent needed to hit a smaller target each time I remove a part and the attention constantly being pulled away from my craft to focus specifically on the action of deleting the part. This is quite cumbersome over several hours of gameplay.

The current VAB controls are a significant step back in my opinion. There are certainly some new features that I like that leverage some of the new tools in the VAB, and there are some occasional limitations and bugs in KSP1's VAB/SPH even to this day, but overall this is an instance of why they say "If it isn't broke, don't fix it." Before anyone says this is just people set in their ways and resistant to change or progress, this isn't the case. The VAB experience of the early KSP1 versions in 2011-2014 timeframes was quite raw, just how it is now in KSP2. KSP2 certainly has more tools compared to the early access version of KSP1, but the overall VAB experience in KSP1 was very well tuned after years and years of player feedback into how they felt KSP1's VAB/SPH experiences could be improved. It seems that there was a lot of institutional knowledge as to why the KSP1 VAB experience was the way it was, that was either lost or disregarded in an effort to rebuild the experience from scratch. As a result, we are back to square one and the developers and community are going to have to rediscover why the solutions fielded in KSP1 were implemented in the first place.

I agree. This was my main method of doing fine-tuned adjustments. With individual clicks of the scroll wheel.

I agree with the OP. Having the Parts Manager is definitely a step up if you have a large complex craft with many parts behind fairings, structural pieces, cargo bays, etc. However, the old system was much more efficient for craft building in that it only presented the information that you wanted at that moment, but still allowed you to pin the information to keep it open so you could have several open at once. I think the OPs suggestion of having the Parts Manager as an optional pop-up window via a widget icon at the bottom would be preferable, but the legacy KSP1 system for when you right click directly on a part itself.

@Intercept Games, thank you for your time and efforts. The community appreciates your dedication to KSP, just as we appreciate all the Squad team members that came before.

Thank you for the candid update Nate. Rome wasn't built in a day, so we appreciate the drive toward quality over expediency. Keep up the good work, we're all pulling for you.

Great video; a wonderful summary of the past decade. Thank you to Felipe/HarvestR, all the members of Squad (past and present), and the community. It's been a great decade of Kerbal experiences, and I'm looking forward to another.

Best part of the video: Nate: "That thing's awesome, dude!" Nate's son: "...Crash it." I liked seeing all the dev team as regular people, drinking coffee trying to wake up, not wanting to deal with a commute, etc. A good reminder that the dev's are people like all of us, dealing with the same issues, and not a faceless logo.