Kerbart

Quitting the game requires far less mouse-clicks than KSP1. And it's also a feature I use a lot more than in KSP1. Good anticipation and implementation. So there's that.

Launch for orbit in the 0° direction to get a 90° inclined orbit and let me know how that works out. BUT LAUNCH EXACTLY NORTH. Not 10-15° off of it to counter the Coriolis effect.

Cruise ships do. They enter ports on a nearly daily basis and need to be maneuverable. Container ships, on the other hand, need to be economic; that's the reason they're so large for starters. So it's nearly always single screw, direct drive powered by a two-stroke Diesel engine that rivals power plants in thermal efficiency. This is one of the reasons 50" TV's sell for less than $250, as the transport cost for SEA to the US east coast (nearly 14,000 nautical miles) is nearly negligible. Once the engine stops there's not enough water flowing over the rudder to be effective; even with the rudder operable after backup systems came online. Surely tugs would have been able to stop the ship, but you'd need 4 or 6 tugs, and what for, a contingency that hasn't happened for decades and decades? Your TV would cost $50 more and ocean shipping is enough of a cutthroat business that shippers would pick a cheaper carrier instead, so no one does that. The crew did everything in their power after power went out: Drop anchor — which didn't do anything due to the amount of silt on the channel floor. Contact shore immediately to warn about a possible allision with the bridge. This saved countless lives. Hope for the best as they're now passengers on this ride. Probably desperately trying to get the engine going again. The power failure will surely be one of the things the NTSB will focus on.

The Jones Act prevents unloading cargo on board of foreign vessels in US ports that was loaded from US ports. The FMC really doesn't care what your circumstances are, you will need to get an extension for that. Last time a Jones Act extension was granted, if memory serves me right, was after hurricane Sandy to allow repositioning of empty containers, just to give an idea on how rare those occasions are. Now, I don't think it will be an issue in this case, but it does need to be cleared first and it's not an insignificant administrative hurdle. Because of laws that protect US Maritime interests.

That's going to take an act of congress though. Literally.

Power failure. Perhaps there's a relation with the owner of the ship skimping on maintenance but I doubt it. This was a new vessel (2015), they're incredibly expensive to own and operate so they're generally kept in good condition. As for the crew, they were competent enough to raise the alarm that stopped traffic on the bridge. Had they not done that, the number of casualties would have been much higher. Not exactly matching the picture that you paint (without any credible citations) of a bunch of clowns.

It looks to me that the problem is mainly precision. If you have the ability to focus a laser beam so it converges to a single point at 1000 km, you should also have the ability to focus it in such a way that it is perfectly parallel and doesn't converge at all. Then it's just a matter of projecting that narrow beam wherever you want. The optical systems required should be relatively simple; the main reasons refractors tend to have complex elements is because they need to be consistent through all wavelengths and with laser light you don't have that issue. Likely the precision needed for that is beyond our technical capacities. That doesn't mean we can't do it though; feedback mechanisms can correct things but now you have to observe the target and adjust focusing on the fly. In a combat scenario I can see challenges with that. Then of course there's the energy question. Putting this on a space ship will be a challenge as you'll need a serious powerplant to feed it.

Keep in mind that if your TWR is 1.5, ⅔ of your thrust—and thus ⅔ of the fuel— is spent battling gravity. That fraction goes down as the TWR increases, with a TWR of 3.0 it's “only” ⅓ but we all know what the issues are with launching at such a high TWR. The flatter the trajectory, those fractions go down and if you're able to go fully horizontal, all of your thrust goes into velocity. Yes, there's atmospheric drag and you do have to get out of the thicker atmosphere, but at a 45° angle you'll gain velocity faster to do that.

You can only lose something that is there.

I just hope this will explore new worlds, and new civilizations. To boldly go where KSP1 hasn't gone before.

I'm confused. Artillery would do the job where missiles won't?

You make a good point, and I did not think my words through enough. It's not bad that the game forces the player to explore. There's a lot to explore that players are simply unaware of if all they do is land on the Mun equator. That part I'm very happy about. What's bad—is the very "in yer face" mechanics that are applied. "Land near the monument and get a boatload of science points as a reward." It's contracts, with a different sauce poured on top. Maybe it's just that with only one roadmap milestone unlocked (we're a mere 13 months in the EA release after all) the building blocks are missing to do something more elaborate. But I was hoping for things that require more action from the player. And maybe that'll be done in the future. The monument could have been a "regular" arc with some cracks and the player has to fly into it to uncover it. Or there's a buried artifact, TMA-1 style, that needs a nearby colony to get uncovered, and once exposed to sunlight, it will fire off a signal to the outer planets we have to follow. We wanted story, we got story. And that part is great. What bugs me is that the level of interaction feels like the Seinfeld guy, sitting in his car, honking at women, because he ran out of ideas on how else to get their attention. Learning clues about Kerbal Lore through 12 page mission reports is better than no lore, but is it truly a journey of discovery? Not as much as I think it can be.

Intentionally? Not really. Is it harder? Well, when you're used to things working they way they are supposed to, then most definitely. Exploration mode is harder in the sense that it really forces you to leave the Kerbin system. If a trip to Jool is your daily KSP1 routine then it's not that much harder. Sadly, the improvement over Career is mainly cutting down the reward points. Yes, we need go and on land on Duna. Not because the game makes you want to go there, but simply because it forces you to do so. Basically it's a two-circle Venn Diagram. Reasons it's harder Bugs Missions with further destinations required to progress tech tree Reasons it could be harder but it's not Inclined orbits Axial tilt Persistent rotation Life support Complex resources The latter is of course something the community looks forward to. "To build part X you need resource Y, only available on planet Z." But the community has done a lot of projecting on what they want the game to be, and what's been delivered so far has been streamlined (the word "dumbed down" sounds so negative), so I'm not going to expect too much out of it.

I see this at work all the time. "We will reveal feature X once it's finished." After reveal, feature X shows some fatal flaws. "That's important to know, unfortunately we can't change it because feature X has now gone in production, you'll just have to deal with it."

I hate to break this to you but predicting this right doesn't make you exactly gifted ya'know. More like Capt'n Obvious

Only going up, weirdly enough. Not that big of a deal though, going down is never an issue.

You have to press F for each segment. On the other hand, I haven't encountered a situation yet where you can't make it all the way into a capsule doing that. In that sense it's a step forward from KSP1 where, if the game decided the ladders were not aligned under specific gravity (testing at the launchpad wouldn't always reveal the issue) you weren't able to make it back in. Even I prefer it over KSP1.

If we consider "you can macgyver something instead of needing this part" we can probably get rid of half the parts list. Angled launches do exist. Maybe I want to see if I can get something to orbit with zero input. Maybe I want to launch some ballistic missile. Maybe I want to replicate a real life nission where it's done. The "challenge" was that there were zero reasons to use launch clamps. I merely pointed out that this is not the case.

Hold down a vehicle with atmospheric engines while they spool up before launch (yes a single T400 tank is all you need to get into orbit) Stabilize sketchy (aka "Kerbal") rockets that would otherwise topple over before launch Keep more boosters pointed up instead of dangling diagonally before launch If you want to launch a rocket at an angle instead of 90° upward they're very essential Opinions vary. It looks cool. I dare say more than zero.

Attitude is also what's not written and can be read in between the lines. When looking at the videos released the message was, for a long time, "the game is great, we love playing it, and we're working hard to fix the bugs." It's kind of impossible to deny the existence of bugs, and selling the game you really don't want to say "right now it sucks" but Nate speaking at that German space convention was at a considerable different tone than the one at the launch of the game. If you feel they were admitting the game wasn't great when it was released, good for you. Personally I don't feel that way, and I'm happy they do now. It's easier to take them serious when they're not displaying a state of denial regarding the quality of the game.

Maybe... looking back, the main problem—and releasing the game after the first patch would not have changed that—was the wide gap between the expectations that were raised and the game that was delivered, combined with an attitude of "we delivered everything we promised and we're not aware of any bugs that need urgent fixing" It took IG about six months to develop the humbleness to admit that there are significant issues to fix, while the community came to grips with the reality of the state the game is in, and that gap has now closed significantly. I'm not sure the timelines match precisely. In KSP1 a lot of emphasis was put on getting the mechanics right before game play development took place. KSP2 doesn't follow that route. Which can be frustrating because we're used to a lot of things that "should work" right now and are not. In fairness, because there was no vision, game play in KSP1 was never a thoroughly developed feature and only now are we starting to see how IG takes a more integrated approach on that. You're absolutely right that it might take a couple of years before the physics part of the game is as good and stable as is in KSP1. But by then it should be a fantastic game.

Rushing? It took them three years, that's hardly rushing. Yes, it launched in an unfinished state, but if T2 had said "take all the time you need" we'd probably be another 3 years away from launch. Nobody is happy with the state the game is in right now, but I don't blame them for forcing a release; otherwise it would have been kept pushed over the horizon forever.

In the tracking station. I thought it was in the map as well, my bad https://imgur.com/X8kDituhttps://imgur.com/a/nVYdSr9

Yes, I did. Well, that is disappointing. Surely the KERB that comes out on the 23rd will have nothing but good news, all open bugs are fixed and a call for more so they can keep fixing.

As The Aziz points out, zoom in. It's incredibly hard for the devs to write code that basically goes like "when selecting an object from outside the SOI it's in, just pick the object that rendered the icon rendered on top, and not the body that defines the SOI" so we're stuck with that. You can try a trick though: in the map view, use to filter button, click on "clear all" and then only select "celestial bodies." If that filter would actually filter what you see in the map, that would work.