MKI

I think we should remember that "crew rated" is a NASA/Government rating. AFAIK there is nothing preventing Elon from putting some zealots on the next Starship to Mars. I have no idea how or if NASA would rate Starship safety, since its so vastly different than anything before it. Nor can I see SpaceX doing much with getting it rated anytime soon with the current architecture, which is very much still a grain silo with a buncha engines, heat tiles, and a much larger grain silo with even more engines on it as the booster. Technically the Shuttle "was human rated", and it was a well known death trap so I'm sure there is plenty of leeway.

I feel bad for most of those working at BO. They are seeing their company turn into a villain in the industry before they have been able to do much.

This is all extra risk, that also directly effects other aspects of the Spacecraft making it overall more unsafe when used with its current requirements, under normal circumstances you now suddenly have more rockets that can fail/explode/leak/ignite near/in your crew compartment which will get you killed, you also have less margins due to all the weight you just added, decreasing performance across the board. Currently Starship is running as close to the margins as possible, because again, SpaceX needs to figure out that entire list of requirements first. Adding parts into the process will not only slow things down, and make iteration slower/worse, it will also increase complexity, which increases risk. Shoving in a LES in Starship just doesn't seem to be on the table. The main counterpoint to having one seems to run along the lines that "all other crewed rockets had one (except Shuttle)" yet there aren't many cases where such a system would help even if available, there are cases where such systems would get just kill people however.

The Saturn 5 was also not suppose to be reusable what-so-ever, it was also designed using the method of "trial and error" and over engineered simply due to the fact they didn't really know what they needed to engineer. Hence the completely overpowered design to meet the requirements of getting a man on the moon and back safely. Everything else is thrown out the window. Apollo killed 3 people (Apollo 1), and almost killed 3 more (Apollo 13). Neither of which had anything to do with the LES. Having an LES didn't make the overall system much safer. Better engineering made it safer. I never said Starship wont mitigate other failure modes, I only wanted to point out that the set of requirements are too wide to cover with any dedicated LES, and that the idea "it will never be safe because it doesn't have one" is impractical and misses the other large amounts of risk. I also didn't directly compare Starship to airliner safety because there are a number of differences between the two fields. With airliners you have a vastly larger interconnected fleet, with multiple places human error could screw things up. SpaceX is one company, focusing on 1 launch at a time (or a few) The scale just isn't there, nor does it need to be. If I wanted Starship to get to "airline safety levels of risk" it would take a long time to get anywhere near the scale and percentage of airliners. It also could just keep being perfect in a specific scenario and much more risky in another. Simply put, getting to LEO in Starship 10000 times perfectly is a totally different level of risk as carrying out a full Mars mission and getting back. Its never been done, and the risk is incredible, as the unknowns are vast. What is known however is getting to LEO is just the first part of the entire journey. Dominating that scenario is peanuts for SpaceX, and only a matter of time, but also only the first leg of what Starship is designed for. edit It should be noted that there are a few contingencies already planned around Starship during ascent to deal with possible failure modes. Namely executing a RTL, except more reliably than the Shuttle, where Starship fires all of its engines to escape a potentially failing SH booster. I have no idea where current numbers are on such a concept, but I can't see why it couldn't be done in a pinch even if it requires firing the vacuum raptors. I also don't really have an idea of what sort of scenario you'd have where a SH is failing to the point you need to execute a RTL. Unlike the Shuttle, you can turn off the engines/de-throttle and potentially detach and fly the entire stack back when its safer/possible, or lose the SH and fly just Starship back. On the topic of powered decent, redundancy has already been demonstrated where the 3 gimbled engines all fire to see which is in best shape for landing. I personally think this is important in the previous RTL scenario, where potential damage on multiple engines might be possible. However, if your flying Starship+Super Heavy with quick turnaround, and able to land it on Mars reliably and get it back. Raptor should be pretty reliable during normal operation, especially so if you only need 33% of them to be working.

Starship will be nothing like any existing launch platform, providing a 1% example failure rate out of thin air to push the idea 1% of those people that get on Starship are going to die is a fallacy. Its also true the best launch vehicles have a 0% failure rate, but you might argue sample size, which is where I'm making my point. The idea Starship could have 100+ perfectly executed launches within a few years is actually feasible. Scale that up to potentially hundreds of successful launches continuously, limited to payloads and integration. This is the whole damn point of the rocket, which is why Elon is moving so fast for this 1 goal. If Starship can sustain rapid reusability I don't see how it can't out fly every single launch platform ever created within a few years of getting fully operational. 10 years is where I'd assume it could out perform every single launch platform ever made combined, assuming there's that much to actually do with the system. Obviously this sort of scale is unprecedented, incredible and plainly insane. Which is why its so hard to actually believe it will work. Hell even Elon believes stuffs gonna blow up on their way, which is why they are moving so fast, which is also why I don't see them "slowing down". I actually see them speeding up as things get more stable. The question is more of how fast can you iterate and how quickly you can fail. Right now SpaceX is flying while also learning a lot. But they are still in the early stages, if they can make a system that can reliably deliver payloads to LEO with full reusability (that is semi-rapid) they will already bypass Falcon 9 capabilities, and all other capabilities with an insane price point. The issue with Shuttle isn't so much its "lack of abort modes", but rather the fragileness of the entire system. Mind you 50% of all destroyed Shuttles wouldn't of been saved by "gods hand" abort modes, as Columbia broke apart during descent* (yes I'm abusing small sample sizes again). Focusing only on abort modes during ascent misses all the other insane stuff Starship will have to accomplish. Here's a rough list of what it needs to accomplish to get to Mars and back: - Ascent (abort mode could go here) - Re-fuel in orbit (using technology never tried before) - Trans-Mars ejection burn - Trans-Mars coasting for 6 months - Mars injection burn/entry - Mars atmospheric entry/glide/landing (victory for mankind) - Stay on Mars for years - Re-fuel on Mars (somehow) - Trans-Earth ejection burn (I assume no orbital re-fueling??) - Trans-Earth coasting for another few months (is it 6?) - Earth atmospheric entry/glide/landing (welcome heroes home) So the idea "it needs an abort mode to work" ignores the rest of the completely insane requirements, to the point the first ascent should be the least of your worries since that's the part that should be tested the most, forward backwards upside down, and inside out. The thing with abort modes are they only cover specific situations, outside of those situations they are useless, or potentially even dangerous (see Gemini ejection seats). For example, "planes can glide" only covers the situation when you have enough airspeed, altitude, and control surfaces available, if your missing any one of your those your just as dead with or without engines. Passengers don't have ejection seats for when a pilot loses control of the aircraft, nor can a plane activate its launch tower to get out of a flat spin, or does a plane magically gain the ability to defy gravity when in a stall, nor do passengers have much chance of surviving if there is a high altitude structural breakup of the aircraft. All these scenarios could result in complete loss of the aircraft with no hope of survival and we are totally fine with it. Suddenly we sprinkle in the idea of "propulsion powered descent" and "no escape tower" and suddenly its a death trap. I see no reason why investigating incidents over thousands of aircrafts over millions of flights isn't possible with Starship. That's the whole point of rapid reusability right now. To get the flight time, experience, and push the limits to see where they break.

The issue with focusing that far in "the future", for things like crewed capabilities, and overall safety of the current design all goes back to the base requirement being insane. Full re-usability has never been achieved, and instant turnaround time is also something never achieved. Those two by themselves are hard enough requirements. Hence why the production pipeline is the focus, as you need that capacity to achieve those 2 first requirements as the are so gosh darn hard you'll be bound to blow stuff up in the mean time, along with changing the design over time very quickly to address issues you've found. If Starship itself is keeping Musk at night, he goes to sleep knowing he spent all his time building out a system that is capable of pounding out the problem IE, building Starships+Super heavies as quickly as possible so they can test designs quickly and improve on them. Its less about getting it right, and more about supporting development through mistakes. Every iteration is a step closer to a better system. 1 Shuttle exploding due to a design flaw was a massive disaster that killed people that destroyed a large percentage of the fleets capabilities. 1 Falcon 9 first stage exploding on landing was a learning experience with no risk to the base mission 1 Starship/Super heavy failure will also just be a learning experience for the foreseeable future Again, the biggest weakness is if something happens to the launch tower+pad, as those are not easily fixed which would be a massive hindrance to the entire process. However, if the rest of the system "at least clears the tower" and doesn't ram into it on landing, it would be a success. edit At some point Starship and Super heavy will fly people. By that time, the primary goals of rapid re-usability should be achieved. If that is the case I see no reason for them to be nothing but the most flown space-flight hardware ever made, which should make for a system that is as safe as a commercial jet.

I personally don't think the economics of a P2P focused Starship will work out for these reasons. However, unlike Concorde, Starship will be used beyond just P2P, and trying out P2P wont cost nearly as much as a dedicated program like Concorde. If you have multiple "starbases" setup for orbital launches to LEO/Moon/Mars, you already have the infrastructure for P2P. I just don't think the economics work out well enough per-launch to make it mainstream. However, I could see there being a scenario where you go on a vacation to LEO and go to other parts of the world using Starship by just landing at different "starbases". Still no cheap at all though haha. I'm also not sure if the advantages of using a Starship based "rescue" or "fast response" program makes much sense compared to existing means. A helicopter/plane might be slower, but its cheaper, resilient and more flexible. I think some US agency already reviewed the capabilities of a "space-based transportation/response system" for these means and found similar findings. There are just too few scenarios where a few hours difference in response is important enough to have a dedicated platform for it. Leveraging easier access to space opens up much more avenues though. (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers anyone???)

How far can Starship go without the booster anyways? Has anyone ran the numbers on Starship alone for P2P?

Plus, who doesn't want to do greenfield projects ;D

Concorde didn't need new infrastructure to land/take off, but it couldn't be used beyond a single use-case of a passenger based trans-Atlantic supersonic flight path. It had limited cargo capacity, passenger capacity, range, massive fuel consumption, and the sonic boom problem forced it to only fly only over water. Combined this means the Concorde was forced to essentially fly trans Atlantic. Yes it could take off/land from any traditional airport, but it never could leverage almost any existing infrastructure. At the end of the day the Concorde is just a really bad comparison, so it isn't saying much to say "Starship should be more flexible than Concorde". Almost everything is more flexible than the Concorde hahaha.

Yes, when I said"everyday people" I more meant non-government/large organizations. Like most things, if you don't care you don't have to use it. However, if you stuff a starship with as much stuff as you can, and the numbers work out exactly as planned, where its 2 million per launch. A cube sat could launch for under 100$. The numbers get worse if you can't "fill all the seats", or if the economics don't work out so well, but it is a price range that even if it gets worse, its within the realm of possibility for a good majority of people who have money to burn. Hell at those prices your starting to get into first class international flights for a single person. Idk the feasibility of P2P economics but its already clear Starship should be more flexible than Concorde. This still is in the realm of richer folk, however. Assuming something like a Lunar probe, you could launch multiple iterations with the main goal of building a lot cheaply. Starlink satellites already take this approach of a "quick and cheap built" approach to meeting requirements, expanding this to other use-cases and you can build your own market for whatever use-case you can imagine. Lots of people talk about "space mining", being expensive but potentially incredibly lucrative. It becomes much less expensive if you only need to pay a few million per launch to build out your own deep space network of probes and infrastructure. There has never been a reason to mass produce space infrastructure, because there was no way to get it into space that easily. If Starship offers that capabilities, I see no reason the probe/satellite market wont catch up as its just traditional mass production, and much easier than actually doing the "rocket" part haha. If Starship actually works, I can see space infrastructure following a very similar path as something like the internet. Initially there isn't much reason for investment beyond a few niche reasons. (like academia) Due to increased prevalence, a few ideas will catch on, which might ignite a massive influx of investment which results in a bubble. After said bubble bursts, the end result will probably still be significant, as a few of the best ideas will stick around. There are just way to many possibilities out in space to say "naw, there is no market". If we could build cyber space out in 30+ years from scratch, and create some of the largest concentrations of wealth, imagine what actual space has to provide (!!!) The crazy thing is, I think Elon already knows this, as the end result is ultimately humans do end up multiplanetary after all is said and done, and that's just insane. However, this again is only if Starship works as promised.

SPS is a possibility, as its similar to Starlink. In general I think almost any space infrastructure project of almost any scale could be executed with Starship. We already pay for larger more expensive infrastructure projects than what a handful of Starship launches cost. I also realized, I was wrong about the capabilities of Starship affected the lives of everyday people. If Starship is so cheap, launch cadences so high, and payload capacity large enough, rideshare missions could get incredible cheap. To the point it it might become too cheap. If my cubesat launch costs a few million, except there are hundreds of cubesats with my mission all ridesharing together, your looking at costs that are completely sane for the average person. Obviously you'd probably need some one to manage all those missions together (new business opportunity anyone?) or could create new enterprises to support those kinds of missions. This could mean your local school could send something into space (!!!) for the cost of a science fair. Hell why stop at LEO ride shares? Why not create deep space ride share missions using Starship to get to LEO that dispatches out multiple deep space rideshare missions using a separate isolated transfer stage? I wonder how many humans you can stuff into 1 Starship launch with minimal payload (carry-ons only? ;D)

The words "primitive" and "offworld spaceships" shouldn't go together. We should be talking about all the dumb lame metals we use right now. Since ya know... we just started going to space and are still "primitive" in terms of galactic timescales.

This is a "startup fallacy", where you take an idea and are just suppose to "just do it" and your suppose to succeed. Except all successful startups don't focus on just the idea, they focus on the execution so they can stay ahead. Any good idea will just get re-worked by competitors that try to catch up. The idea just gives you a "time investment head start", bigger/better the idea, more time you might have, but ultimately it turns into an endless marathon race, rather than a sprint to market with a good idea. This is where the idea that "everything is a remix" comes from. Don't get me wrong, you need a good idea, but to be successful long term, you need to build out capabilities to stay relevant over time, and stay ahead of the competition. On the topic of "what large markets are possible" is an interesting one, because SpaceX by itself will essentially be the only market vendor in town for the foreseeable future. Its hard to gauge how many people will show up to this market, because its the first of its kind. I'd compare it to trying to guess how much Google would be worth when it was still hosted in a garage. Or on the flip size, how big the VR market would end up being (its not big and might never be big). Assuming Starship sticks around in only LEO, there are at least a few big names that come to mind who would love to leverage its capabilities. Governments always have money, and will happily put more money into getting bigger/more-awesome stuff to orbit more often, even if its just to "keep up". What about private enterprise that want their own space hotels for the ultra rich? Scientists could leverage access to space a whole bunch of ways that weren't possible before. Imagine paying for a CubeSat launch to send up a larger Hubble? Or sending out simple "budget" probes into deep space, like New Horizons to every planet every month. Maybe build an orbital construction facility and build out even larger deep space transportation if Starship doesn't cut it? Or build out the entire star shot project in orbit overtime and send multiple groups of probes to multiple targets? I think the one area that wont easily benefit is the average person. As even though Starship should be crazy cheap, its still crazy expensive for the average person. However, that doesn't mean its capabilities wont find their use. Its possible more Starlink-type infrastructure projects leverage easier access to space. There are potentially multiple markets that could benefit, all because of 1 new capability.

I've been watching Everyday Astronaut's tour of Starbase with Elon. Elon mentions that all early launches of Starship+Super-Heavy will probably be used/worked until their destruction. The primary reason for this is they don't have the space to store these versions. So more explosions confirmed Also Elon confirms he is aware of is "optimistic schedules", and the fact "he is often wrong" when addressing some aspects he apparently isn't clear on. This also brings up the fact he is very aware of a lot of the process, which is honestly incredible.

I think large scale energy storage is one area that can use a break through and really improve. We will always need more energy, but can we can more or less eliminate blackouts due to the grid requiring too much by simply increasing storage.

I think Starship could still have the awesome James-Bond level capability of hijacking a Satellite in orbit right? Actually if propulsive landing was a thing that was "figured out" and used for a Shuttle system, I wonder what the shuttle would look like today . Not saying it would be Starship, but maybe it would of been more re-usable and successful (and safer)

Then I guess Google should be bankrupt because here's all the products they iterated into death: https://killedbygoogle.com/ Also losing money now means nothing if you can gain more of it back later. That's why its called an investment rather than gambling (even if they can both feel the same haha). Sure if SpaceX was a publicly traded company, and SN20 exploded on re-entry the stocks would dip. But SpaceX wont go out of business because any smart investor would invest into it ASAP, so the stocks would keep growing right after such a failure. Plus SpaceX is a very diverse company still growing into a stable and growing market. Hell I wasn't sure what the future held for Tesla, and the fact Elon signed on to only get paid if he made the company the #1 car manufacture in the world. Multiple sources said Tesla would run out of cash and be done and over, Elon was sleeping under desks and basically working himself to death. And yet here we are where Tesla is no longer on the death brink, is still an industry leader, expanding into multiple markets and Elon did eventually get paid. I personally still cant believe it, but it already happened. I'm not an Elon fan boy, I'm a realistic skeptic. SpaceX and Starship is the real freaken deal, and yes its freaken insane, but so is the fact we went to the Moon 50+ years. Which we did on the backs of pure trial and error within 10 years. So yes, Starship can work and will eventually work, we already did this when we went to the moon. (Unless of course you ask one of those conspiracy theorist haha) Even if SpaceX doesn't get to Mars, they are still industry leaders and will be for some time. Idk what the next semi-reusable launch vehicle even looks like. So at a bare minimum its a near monopoly. Its also possible Starlink is another near global infrastructure monopoly. 1 company with control of 2 entire markets is incredible by itself, never mind the mission statement of trying to get humanity to be multi species. XD

I believe the current "shape of terrain" is more or less generated from a random seed of data, so there isn't actually anything stored in the scale of the entire planets surface. This is true now, and would be true with deformation. I can see voxel deformation information being compressible to a similar degree, as each "hit" could be calculated base upon a set list of deformations. Obviously this information is saved somewhere, but I don't see it piling up to terabytes of data even if you did something as drastic as bombard all of Kerbin's surface. There's plenty of ways to "hack it" to make the data even more compressible, such as limiting the types of deformations to only a few types of impact shapes, and preventing new shapes from further deforming the terrain. I think its also worth mentioning that this sort of feature would be cool, but also a lot of work to do something you really shouldn't be doing in the first place. Stop hitting the ground, and learn how to fly! There's a lot out there to explore hahaha

The key to SpaceX successes now and in the future is the focus not on the design, but the process. Simply put, any fault you or anyone finds in a given system will be quickly mitigated, and improved. This is how leading companies stay ahead of the game. The prime examples here are Toyota, and leading tech companies. Its also the exact design philosophy Elon is taking to SpaceX, and the same one he applies to all of his companies. Sure you can find a fault with Starship, but the question is how quickly/easily is it fixed/changed? That process of iteration is the product. Or to put it in more crude terms, the factory is the product. The problem is hard, incredible hard, but if the process can adapt a solution quickly, and easily no problem is "too hard". This also means if a competitor shows up, you can iterate and out maneuver around said competitor. There's a reason why there are only a handful of tech companies in control of basically of everything, to the point they are doing things that are almost useless. (see google-graveyard) You can compare this design process with all other competitors and your left with SpaceX, and small-time rocket companies taking similar approaches at smaller scales. Governments can't work like this, traditional rocket companies don't work like this either. I don't see this situation changing anytime soon as its basically impossible to change a companies philosophy to design, and governments can't work like this. Its obviously more risky to work like this, where each failed iteration sets you back. Except at this point SpaceX has made failure cheap. Incredibly cheap. Failed Starship launches are to expected, as are multiple iterations in quick succession. SpaceX also has solid investment and financial backing to support any iteration setbacks. However, its worth noting there is 1 area where SpaceX can't iterate quickly, its the launch pad. If the launch pad gets destroyed, it will take significantly more time to fix than any number of failed rocket tests. However, if such a failure would occur it would be a large setback, but not a permanent one. I personally don't care much about "right now". I like to focus on what's next, as that's much more interesting. Right now it looks like SpaceX's Starship will dominate for decades, simply because there is no competition anywhere close to it. Even if it fails to get anywhere near its original design capabilities (like being able to get to Mars), its fully reusable capabilities look completely sane. You thus end up with a fully reusable, heavy payload lifter, who's nearest competitor is a freaken Falcon Heavy. Even if that ultimately fails... Starlink is more or less operational to give the global broadband a competitor, and meanwhile Falcon 9 is still an industry leader by a giant margin. Together this means more Starship failures and iterations can be supported, which ultimately means the process will build what is required in time. If it was possible to publicly invest in SpaceX, I'd consider it an excellent investment you could make right now. Its hands down one of the most obvious monopolies in the process of gaining increased capabilities. The only real question is if market demand will sustain it for its future ambitions, and if bad financial decisions tank its future far down the line. But at this current time, the best has yet to be seen.

This assumes you save all the terrain as-is. If you only save terrain data that has been changed from the default seed you end up with much much much less. Unless of course you plan on exploding rockets over the entire surface of the planet, and KSP doesn't optimize anything ;D

I had a feeling you'd end up talking about all the experience you have, how you know what your talking about. You may as well be right, and KSP multiplayer is all false promises and will crash and burn at launch because they don't know what they are doing. Its possible you know how the game engine will be worked to work with multiplayer and how it wont work, its possible with all your experience you know the risks involved and know Intercept has made a mistake and multiplayer is totally different than what I (and a lot of other people) imagine it to be. Its possible I'm completely clueless about game development and am also totally wrong about how KSP is managing risk, and they are managing it all wrong and won't have the feature ready, or its totally different than what most people expect, or its a combination of both. All these things are possible, you seem to think its not only possible, but highly likely all of this will occur due to said experience. Hence your amazing prediction a core advertised feature wont be ready at launch because the team isn't qualified enough according to your experience and background. However, I think all that experience might be creating unforeseen bias on the engineering risk, as who doesn't want to leverage their experience on a project? Its the sensible thing to do right? Well it might be, if we have enough information on the actual requirements of the project to make a determinable estimate and if more information to go off of. Because right now we don't (or at least I don't), so making assumptions on previous biased experiences on the short amount of information available means the end results are just biased guesses that are stanchly defended because "experience". Something as simple as "how does multiplayer fundamentally work" isn't even known and here we are all making this dead set predictions about the team not being qualified, its frankly somewhat ridiculous. The small amount of information we do have available, might of even ended up "ignored" for one reason or another because it doesn't match with the original viewpoint which again is staunchly defended, since again "experience tells otherwise". Which only just goes back to the fact one is built from their own experiences which can easily clout new information. This is more of a human nature thing than anything, because who likes committing a bunch of resources/energy to something believe in something only to flip/change later? (no one) More experience = more energy = more commitment, its a natural psychological process . Even though, again, those original assumptions are primarily built on experience rather than much hard evidence. "Nate already has played multiplayer? He probably made that up, or obviously wasn't using the full load testing, because my experience says it can't be ready by launch." Of course maybe you got the source-code for the new game downloaded and already reviewed it and are making your comments on that. Then sure! Please tell me more, because I'd be curious and would like to set my expectations accordingly. Otherwise my expectations are more just wishes based on nothing besides a few tidbits of data, like most people, rather than based on some personal experiences. I give the team the benefit of a doubt, primarily because I want a specific version of multiplayer, and have enough software engineering sense to see a path on how I'd make it work with limited experience, time, man-power and available technologies and infrastructure. I don't know enough to make my own determination of what's going on beyond that it will probably make it to launch, simply because Nate has already freaken played the mode. Maybe the multiplayer mode sucks, and is some form of basic save sharing, or a simple observer mode. I have no clue, but to go from Nate playing it to = not available at launch doesn't make much business sense, let alone a technical one. How much polish you need before shipping a feature? Just patch the thing after launch. Telling an engineer "its not possible" is probably the quickest way to make it possible, unless of course you "lead" your engineers so they are more mindless drones smashing keyboards to fulfilling their duties rather than a person with a brain with their own ideas and experiences. Who needs "agile" when you have experience? (this is sarcasm btw) Finally, "all great engineers can be wrong". I'm no great engineer, I'm just a scrappy one with too much work, to many ideas, to many projects on my plate, and not enough time in the day to execute them. I realize I might be completely wrong about my assumptions for the game, but I also realize my assumptions are based on almost no information, let alone any hard information. I also know that experience builds bias, and that questioning biases and previous experience is a difficult but necessary thing to get closer to the objective truth. Just in this situation we don't eve know what that is yet. Obviously I'd hope your completely wrong about multiplayer getting released by launch, or being such low priority that it isn't ready by then. As a fan of the game, I really wonder why you'd want to be right about it too? Being right is ultimately extremely overrated, especially in the case where it means I can't watch my friend blow up his Kerbals because he didn't check his staging ;D

So if your a software engineer/engineering manager I'm sure you'd be familiar with the idea of risk management, and how Intercept Game, or Star Theory, or even Squad would of done their research on adding multiplayer into a game like KSP. Even if you had minimal experience as an organization, you'd could do this as an MVP using pre-existing assets and focus entirely on architecture, just to see how it would work and if it could work, and how much work it would take. From those tests you can at least determine what level of risk you'd be undertaking. Later once Intercept/Star Theory gets the green light on the project, its already determined that multiplayer will be a key feature, as its already marketed, and you'd already be able to more or less know what it would take to build out that feature. At a bare minimum, core early high risk features aren't high risk by the time you launch. Unless of course you suck at your job and didn't manage risk, but any one with a basic understanding of project management would know to focus on high risk areas of the project first. The fact multiplayer is a known high risk, a well researched high risk, and a highly demanded feature it makes it a no brainier to invest time and energy into it early in the process that I'm sure was executed, if Nate's enjoyment with multiplayer is any confirmation. So a small team can make a large-team+comm-based multiplayer-only FPS using Unreal engine, but a team of a similar size, using Unity can't make a smaller scale game with multiplayer using a previous game as a starting point? That doesn't make any sense. Unless Unity3D as a company doesn't like money, and leaves a giant gap in its ecosystem and lets them walk over to the competition, they'd offer similar capabilities. So yes its possible for Intercept games to add multiplayer into KSP and have it ready by launch. Finally a "director engineering manager" is determining project risk based primarily on LinkedIn profiles, while also ignoring stakeholder expectations, and being worried about "not having enough bodies" on a given problem, as if that actually works. Seems kinda like the traditional "lead from the top management" sorta thinking that creates large bureaucratic systems that are slow, difficult to change and require larger amounts of people to make any "move". So I can see why your hung up on the idea "its not possible without more resources and thus wont make it to launch". I have my opinions on such approaches to software, but this isn't the time or place for those XD. Its ironic that we are concerned about the developer resources, when the first game was made by a gosh darn advertising company.

My guess is you'll be able to play the game. But I don't think it will be a great experience. I'm sure KSP 2 will be CPU heavy no matter what, which means the game will run slow regardless of what you do settings wise. I'd use KSP 1 as a gauge for what KSP 2 would run like, with the high likely hood it will run slightly worse due to more expansive gameplay. Its also possible performance in this area is improved due to increased optimization, and best case you'll be able to fly around blobs to other round blobs. I'm not sure if they will focus on optimization around the orbital mechanics part however, so the game might just play incredible slow I was able to play KSP 1 on a weak laptop, but the performance was utterly terrible, where gameplay was essentially 1/3rd the normal speed regardless of how big my craft was. This was back in the early days of me playing KSP, and performance never changed much when it came to running the game on my weaker systems. KSP is built on Unity, so cross platform deployments should made easier by the engines to the point its technically possible for KSP to be deployed to mobile. But I'm not sure if the physics calculation can be optimized much further to support such weak systems, so it all goes back to physics and your CPU performance.

Absurd? Its the main reason there is a code overhaul. Source: https://nordic.ign.com/kerbal-space-program-2/29231/interview/kerbal-space-program-2-interview-with-nate-simpson-creative-director-at-star-theory Mind you this was even before Intercept Games. You know someone titled "software engineer" can still do all that right? Its a very generic title. You might not slap all the specific architecture labels on your job title, but that doesn't mean you don't know anything about building server architecture to support a multiplayer game. You also don't magically need 20+ engineers to build a multiplayer game. Don't believe me? Think of all the indie game developers who support multiplayer, I'm pretty sure none of them had 20+ people with the title of "multiplayer engineer" working under them, let alone 20 employees. If you can't think of an example, I throw out the game Hell Let Loose, which is a realistic WW2 FPS with 50v50 teams, with focus on voice communication and teamwork. Its created by a company called Black Matter, which was created just to build the game and has roughly 20 employees in total. (Its also a very fun, but very punishing game) Source: https://hellletloose.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Matter However I think that comparison is way beyond what KSP 2 needs. KSP 2 wont need anywhere near 100 player dedicated server capacity. The team could of just pulled the technology off the shelf and not have anyone actually dedicated to it. Or literally just follow the docs: https://docs-multiplayer.unity3d.com/ Unity might have some flaws, but it does have its advantages in being well supported by a huge number of technologies.