Kerbart

No feathering paddles?

No offense taken. I agree that what someone else thinks has little bearing on what your own opinion of the game is. My feeling is just that the trend (not the absolute number) of the Steam chart indicates what the general feeling of the audience is, and that can be a benchmark for "is it me or am I not the only one who thinks that..." There's good reason to be happy about the state of the game; it's a whole lot better than at launch. And one can back that up with pointing to the many improvements. There's also reason to have reservations about the state of the game. There's game play now, but barely; the worst of the worst bugs are fixed, but there are many left. And the stats suggest that those who have that opinion are far from alone. In the end we both want the game to be great, aside from colorful parts that's the most important common ground there is to share!

Complexity compounds. There’s a lot less maintenance required if there’s no crew and failures often can be mitigated with redundancy. Even to the point of sending multiple drones as was done with the Mariners and Voyagers.

That’s your assumption. Mine is that this is the Kerbal space program. It’s about sending Kerbals to space. They’ve already done the remote operated probes but now they want their species to go there. You’ll still need relays and there’s no need to fly manned supply missions, so yes there are probes in the program. But the priority is getting Kerbals to places. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t observed those places before. I’m sure there are holes in “my” lore but it plugs a lot of those in the game lore for me, so I’m sticking with it.

I doubt the show aims for scientific accuracy. But it’s similar to The Expanse (same showrunner) in the sense that it wants technology to be realistic and not some magic and handwaving that is limitless. It’s interesting to see it tackles similar themes like greed, suppression and power politics. Just in a different way. After Season 2 I was ready to drop it from my watchlist, but they transformed it into what I think is a really strong TV series, And I love the redemption arc the Ed Baldwin character went through this season. That was written very well.

“Completely fictional” is a bit harsh. SOI's are central in patched conics, and used a lot for initial interplanetary calculations (“good enough for practical purposes”) by NASA. Any model is just that, a model. N-body calculations are also fiction and even relativity might just be a model of what “really” goes on in our universe. So while reality doesn't behave like that, SOI's do form a workable model for orbital mechanics where computational efficiency is preferred over multi-decimal accuracy. They're also not limited to patched conics. When calculating a trans lunar injection burn with n-body physics, no one is going to take the gravitational influence of Phobos and Deimos into account. SOI's are a useful tool to decide where the cut-offs for calculations lie.

“Actions have consequences” Each season I think at the start “this will be the last one I watch” but they manage to come up with fresh story lines and twists so I'll be happy when S5 comes out.

I'm not smart enough to figure it out based on that sentence. @Mister Spock perhaps clarify: You were a docking shaolin in KSP1. Docking would take 3 minutes real world time, spending .1 units of mono prop. But you forgot all of that. What was the trick again? Same docking shaolin. You can still do it like that in KSP1 but how on earth do you do it in KSP2? After rendez vous you're just trying random things and it's not working And so on Docking is counter intuitive. Yes, move towards the vessel you want to dock with, but if that's from a few km away you don't want to do that too slow. Because different velocity means different orbits and those will eventually result in the exact opposite of what you want to achieve. There's tons of good advice here but it would help if we know with a bit more focus what exactly it is you are struggling with.

The navball monumentally blows in this regard. It's very hard to see the target and velocity markers in the first place, or distinguish them.

Does it has to be the ship the rover originated from or can you use another probe to return the sample?

Based on the lack of innovative content and the trend early on, that's what I feared would happen, and it does. As you say, hopefully this will be an incentive for the team to know that interest in the game will go up when they deliver something new, and will stay up if it's really new. And it will decline when it's same old, rehashed. You can see the price tag back in the steam chart too, by the way. The wave pattern is cleary synced to free time in the US timezone, with the top when most US players are playing, and bottom when they're not and the numbers are made from "the rest of the world." Assuming buying power/disposable income is stronger in the US, the willingness to fork over $50 (or the equivalent adjust to local price levels) is a lot less outside. That's at least my theory why the fluctuations in the KSP2 graph are bigger than for the KSP1 graph. I don't mind the looks but the 2-color scheme doesn't work for me. Give me back SAS rings with yellow-black warning bands, batteries that look like batteries and in general parts with metallic bits whose color doesn't get overwritten by the color scheme. I don't want to use the word lazy, because (to paraphrase Oddball), “those are, like, negative vibes, bro.” The streamlining is not a bad thing as it takes some of the drudgery out of science, but unless we see an expansion in the future it certainly feels minimalist. I liked the Breaking Ground science where you set up a seismometer and then slam something into the surface. I was hoping for more of that. A sentinel and a DART mission, orbital surveys to find monuments, that mind of stuff. Let's hope that colonies will bring some truly new things to the table. I suspect it'll be a lot less innovative than we hope for. But at least the game is noticeably improving now.

Using RCS for translation is usually associated with docking. In turn, unless one is, let's just say, unorthodox, docking is done by making the smaller ship dock with the larger ship. Pray tell what behemoth sized ship you have that is the smaller one that needs mainsails as RCS thrusters?

Yes, at least we understand each other here. The less technically inclined think it's important their interstellar ship, en route for decades, needs to spin around in a matter of seconds, but we realize that at ships that size, the crew at the far end of the ship is going to pass out from g-forces if you try to spin it in less than half a minute.

It's harmless — check out this thread for more info:

When you say too much/too little... based on what? Effort required? Tech tree progression? The need to visit too many/not enough biomes? For the casual reader it looks right now as if you’re saying “I don’t like it because I don’t like it.” Adding some rationale adds weight to your suggestions and opens an avenue for a meaningful discussion.

The term “frosted” while suggesting winter and frozenness(?) can also refer to a glass texture, and would probably address this. So you'd have the Frosted Fields and Frosted Barrens or something along those lines. One can even argue that these are historic names based on telescope observations, and kept, while it's not frozen, it looks like it's frozen even when it's glassy.

The ask is for “more planets so we have more places to go to.” At the same time, the current system is made up with planets that form a decent representation of what we have in our own system: The inner planets with clear equivalents A gas giant with many moons A ringed planet Any additions would have to add something that is missing, I don’t see value in adding “yet another ___” and while some may applaud it, most of the players won’t, I assume. So the question then becomes “what is currently missing?” For instance: An asteroid belt, perhaps made from procedural generated asteroids. I'm not sure how it would work out performance wise, but it would be a great educational tool to show that it's really not the densely populated boulder field the average SF movie makes it out to be An Oort cloud where comets come from. Real comets in the sense that they have more going on than the ones we see in KSP1. But they move fast in highly elliptical orbits A second gas giant but with some added challenges. Like Jupiter it has high radiation, rendering antenna's close by useless and causing equipment to malfunction. Throw in an Enceladus-style moon (I know it's not a moon of Jupiter) where you can gather science by flying through a volcanic plume and maybe some picture opportunities for cool shots of one moon passing in front of the other. I don't think adding more for the sake of adding more is the way to go, but adding other experiences is. Whether that should be stock or mods is a different story, but the base game should at least have the option to be able to add planets in a mod (I know nothing about modding planets so I'm not sure if that's an issue or not)

Agree, I've done a couple of 20 km drives in For Science. I did encounter some rollovers but I suspect that was just due to terrain, they didn't seem like the "random" 1000m glitches I encountered before.

Is carrying a methalox tank for RCS purposes any different from carrying a monopropellant tank?

The vernier RCS thruster delivers 12 kN of thrust. You need more than that?!

I would assume that the devs don't make decisions on a single statement, but do want to see depth to it. If that depth comes from a discord discussion, they'll take it; if it comes from here, they'll take it. Random example: font colors. What will be ignored is "the vessel name is in an ugly color. Change it!" On the other hand "the vessel name is displayed in neatly the same color as the box it is in, the lack of contrast makes it impossible to read" will likely result in action. In the same way, a statement regarding game mechanics like (and I'm making this up) "Science is pretty much stupid, just get rid of it" is equally opinionated and lacks substance. I do think that the fast paced nature of discord will result in a few responses—either in agreement or not—while such a subject on the forum will probably launch a discussion with lots of valid points on either side, perhaps going along for 8, 9, dare I say even 10 pages (as unlikely as that number sounds I have faith in my fellow forumites). I'm sure the dev team would do something with such a discussion. In the end it's not the location but the content that gives weight to a discussion. Now get off my lawn!

It's a bit difficult to discuss since we're in physics La-La-Land here. The “shrapnel” has minimal penetration power as it has absolutely no mass. Unless we pretend that it can. Once we're in the realm of “supervillains with unstoppable weapons” the outcome is quite predictable, when we're calling the weapons unstoppable. On the other hand, modern army units are modern army units. By itself, maybe not. But in a modern combat environment it's very unlikely they wouldn't call in air support, artillery, mortars, and so on. “But imagine it's only them and they only carry guns.” The reason units don’t carry everything but the kitchen sink around with them is because they do have support. That allows them to afford walking around relatively lightly armed and be mobile. In the end the outcome is defined by the constraints you come up with. Make the super weapons really super weapons, and handcuff the good guys, and the bad guys will win.

We were quite discrete about it, but you had to bring it up... Just kidding!

Technically, furthest distance or any of the other ones would happen at least once a year as well... it probably doesn't matter that much, it's more how they relate to each other.

Not really. The first video has the helpful caption of "watch what happens" so after looking at it for two minutes in which nothing happens I kinda gave up. Here's a tip: if you expect people to take 10 minutes to listen to you story, make it worth for them. Tell them what the bug is. "This video shows how it takes two minutes for things to explode without a heatshield", "this video shows it takes only 30 seconds with a heatshield" and so on.