Kerbart

Cities = something at least 100 times the size of KCS, completely populated with building all unlike their neighbors. We're not talking about landscapes filled with plants that mostly look similar to each other. Astroneer does the same thing. We know that works. But a realistic looking city that doesn't look repetitive or unrealistic?

It still needs to be generated. Producing 100 km2 on the fly, every frame, that’s going to suck up the frame rate.Of course there are ways to optimize it, but there will definitely be a performance hit.

The discussion “driving electric simply moves the exhaust pipe elsewhere” only holds true when that electricity is generated by burning fossil fuel. The difference with a high efficiency ICE car is that five years from now, that car is still burning fossil fuel. The electric car might at that point be driving on a 50/30/20 mix of solar, nuclear and fossil. Coal is rapidly dropping as a means to produce electricity. The problem is always the chicken and the egg; you can’t switch to 100% renewable energy sources overnight and neither does an infrastructure that relies on electric (battery) power sprout up overnight. What the best way to meet demand for electricity will be in the future, time will tell, but it’s becoming increasingly likely that it’s not going to be coal, and unlikely that it’s going to be relying on other fossil fuels for the majority as well. Assuming “the best” technology will be used is risky. The market preferred VHS over Betamax.

Have you seen the number of posts asking if KSP2 would be free for early KSP adapters, just like the DLC they got for free. These are people that paid $15 for a game five years ago, and got hundreds if not thousands of hours of playtime out if. What makes you think they’d donate money? “Give money to Take2? As if they don’t have enough?” When it comes to continuous development for KSP we have four models: It won’t happen. We can all agree that this is not desirable. Subscription. We can all agree that this is not desirable, either. Yearly updates that will cost full price, like FIFA. “KSP 2020” and so on. DLC In a perfect world some space obsessed multi-millionaire will pick up the tab, but until then DLC seems to me the most reasonable option to keep KSP programmers housed, fed, and motivated to continue to improve the game for us. The current business model for KSP seems to work, and will likely continue in KSP2. That means that money earned through DLC is used to update the base game as well. And DLC does go on sale once in a while.

So... since you can't get the DLC you prefer that no one else does, in addition to less funding available to update/maintain the game?

Because they don't like it when development continues after the game is released, I guess.

I will give you this: "non-obvious" is a subjective measure, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way. For years I worked for a marketing department not having the faintest clue what these people were talking about, until they dumped me like a dead raccoon in the gutter. But I digress. Having written software for longer than most of the fine folks of this forum haven been alive (with the exception of wise old @linuxgurugamer). the topology of a ship being a tree structure seems like a reasonable choice to me. Surely there are limitations, but changing that *now* would require a tremendous amount of rewriting that's probably not worth the effort. Besides the consequence of of wobbly sub-assemblies is easily fixed with struts, something I personally don't think of as a big deal but as someone who suffers from borderline OCD I can totally appreciate that others don't like them. The way I look at it is like inertia, or like gravity; it's not really relevant if you like it or not; it's there; deal with it. Software is always a compromise between cost, requirements and performance. You will always run into things it cannot do. Personally I wish you could build "complex" mechanics like the Apollo or SpaceX landing gear, but as a consequence of how parts are organized, you can't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think KSP — and presumably KSP2, if it lives up to even half of what's promised — has too much to offer to dismiss the game. At $50, even if this is in the price range of AAA games, gameplay is going to be measured in hundreds, if not thousands, of hours, as opposed to the maybe 20 hours you'll get out of your average AAA title. It won't hurt me, or anyone else, if you dismiss the game for missing certain features about designing the game; I do think that the one that will be hurting most about it, is yourself. KSP is a fantastic game. It does have its shortcomings, but that doesn't take away that when it comes to stimulating creativity and inventiveness it's out there on a lonely top, together with Lego and Meccano and maybe Minecraft. Not on top of Mount Everest, but on top of Olympus Mons. Again, not for the sake of KSP2 — it will do fine without you — but for the sake of yourself, I ask you to reconsider. The game might not be perfect for what you want, but you'll be challenged to find anything that does it better.

The ship design limitations don't bother me so much, it's the stiffling lack of creativity in the rest of the game that I find appalling. After all these years we're still limited to elliptical orbits. You'd think that by now they would have introduced square orbits, triangular orbits... imagine an orbit in the shape of a pentagram, how cool would that be! But no, boring Squad insists "the only kind of orbit we offer is elliptical and you are going to like it!" So boring. It seems that KSP2 is heading the same way. What's the point in buying it, I say.

The math might be right, but is it the right math?

We also had a decade and a half with nearly no accidents, which creates complacency. Not necessarily on the design process itself—although hard to believe, Boeing engineers might truly have thought this solution was less prone to failure (less parts after all) or at the very least safe enough. But where the process obviously failed (without being an armchair analyst, or so I'd like to think) is the review process where the FAA left matters to Boeing (basically “when we say it's good, it means it's good and no need to review it” and that has complacency written all over it. From what I read in the press, the FAA is not going to let that happen again (at least not with the 737 MAX) but doesn't have the manpower either, which is why the re-certification is going to take so much time. Sports teams do that, too. Fire the coach. Basically “we ran out of ideas and don't know what to do but we need to do something” It'd be nice to see some people going to jail for this, but the loss of a couple of hundred lives is probably not serious enough; that's reserved for the true villains who cheat on emission tests.

My limited knowledge of physics has the very definition of boiling as some kind of equilibrium between the gas above the fluid and the fluid itself. Which is why adding more heat to a boiling fluid doesn't raise the temperature but just maies it evaporate faster. If the pressure of the gas is higher than the equilibrium requires, the fluid will not boil. That seems to be a problem with vacuum for your solution.

As others pointed out, and to paraphrase John Clark: nuclear fuel has only one advantage, but it's a truly magnificent one: it's available in usable quantities.

I’d love to see some magical device, that would allow you to “grab” another vessel and then magically transfer electricity, propellant, yes even Kerbals through it. A “Collision Lateral Attachment Worktool,” so to say.

Entitlement to unlimited upgrades and DLC, and the moral right to complain about it when DLC is only available after paying for it. I'm going to assume Star Helix Theory learned from Squad's mistakes and will not follow that ill-fated path. Rushing through beta (to make certain -I guess- financial deadlines) was proven to be a very bad idea, given the bugfest the early 1.0 releases were.

When watching the Dres re-texture announcement for 1.9 on Facebook, for the first time I thought about checking the play settings. For some reason the KSP videos are defaulting to play at 480 lines. No wonder I never saw a difference between the 'before" and "after" videos. Doh!

Five or six years ago I would have been so psyched that I'd rush out to get a VR headset. Now? I'll wait until the non-VR version is released. If that never happens? Meh.

Cmdr Taco... how long ago did he retire? 10 years ago?

And now it’s on Slashdot — pretty much as mainstream as it gets in tech. It’s not the first time and won’t be the last time. I remembered that Sony blocked Blender’s yearly movie that they sponsored. I think the sponsoring was actually part of the problem, as the bot likely saw the word “Sony” and assumed it was Sony owned content. As @5thHorseman pointed out; you’re creating content on a platform you don’t own distributed through a platform you don’t own. There’s very little expectations you’re entitled to at that point, sadly.

The Poodle seems to have no sound. Other engines do, so it’s not “you can’t hear sounds in vacuum.” Is it a known issue, or is it me? Or both, and interference with another mod? How can I find out?

Not for NASA. You’re aware that this how they plan their interplanetary missions?

What, a software project being delayed? *Feigns surprise* Good thing Squad continues to work on KSP 1!

That's a lot of work for something that can be achieved much easier by pressing Alt+F12, select "cheats" and give yourself all the science you want. In the end, the game is a sandbox game and most of the limitations are, in the end, self-imposed.I don't use lander cans for atmospheric re-entry. The description of them clearly states they're not made for that, and I consider it a bug that they do survive it. Is that considered cheating? I don't think so; I just don't play the game that way. It's a clever way to bypass some of the game-imposed limitations. If you feel that it shouldn't be exploited; don't. If you see it as a way to cash in on some clever experimenting, do!

What kind of ship dropped the rover off? Is is still on the surface? Perhaps it functions as a relay?

So is life support. Yet the game puts an emphasis on Kerballed flight.

That's like asking who has better food, McDonalds or Burger King.