pschlik

Saw the same on my Dres rover design. I think they could have at least made the message more helpful; "Invalid Research Location" implies you are in the completely wrong situation for using the part, like trying to do an orbital survey on the ground, but this is more like "Invalid Part Orientation". In any case, I hope they change the arm to have procedural movement so it can handle being placed in any orientation, otherwise, I'll probably never use it.

Back in October at the Space Creator Day, the For Science! announcement presentation showcased some really good performance improvements with "SimTransform" and as far as I can tell that just...didn't happen? I can understand if there's more work to be done, and I certainly don't think the whole multicore physics thing is vital for the current state of the game, but it would be very useful. The combination of poor single vessel performance and vessels taking up CPU time even in the background meant that I had to scrap a mission to Dres until after completing my Moho mission. Performance is bad enough with just one big interplanetary vessel, having two in existence just makes everything so much slower, even the tiniest probe. But I can work around it (by spending time building a mission then immediately returning the crew to Kerbin yayyyy), even if it is frustrating that my 5800X3D and 3080ti just sit there at like 1/3 utilization. Though it could be worse, at least there seems to be a plan(?) for KSP 2 to learn how to use more of the CPU. We could be playing Cities: Skylines 2, which will peg the GPU and every CPU to 100% utilization and still somehow be unable to run its simulation faster than 2x speed while barely touching 60 fps, and there's not a whisper of any tech that will improve CS2 performance by a factor of 2. Hopefully colonies will put pressure on the team to reduce the processing time of background vessels and to finish up multicore processing. KSP2 won't remain playable for long without it.

I do wonder how resources will interact with launches from KSC. From what I recall, the only tiny hint there's ever been about resources and Kerbin is that Kerbin doesn't have much (any?) uranium. (Of course, Kerbin will probably lack other obscure things to incentivize finding them in nature. ) Will other resources be entirely infinite? Who knows, devs probably won't spill those beans now. I totally agree that Kerbin could do with some sort of limitations beyond just 'sorry, the helium-3 is in another castle' to get those rocket engineer gears turning (having a few limits can lead to much more creativity and fun!) But in my opinion, the devs are right to say money doesn't belong. Here's my alternative: I think it would be more interesting if KSC produced resources at a finite rate with a finite (but large) stockpile. In this plan, the variety of resources available, the speed of production (ie: deliveries from manufacturers, as opposed to player-built factories), and the size of the stockpile could all increase as more technology is unlocked to scale with player ambition. This would add a subtle incentive to be efficient with resources without being too punishing or grindy since this is the early game (run out of rocket parts? Just timewarp until the next delivery from Rockomax-and hope you don't miss that transfer window!) Very large-scale missions could consume months' worth of stockpiled resources, rewarding those who get a head start on assembling the next mothership or thought ahead and built a reusable mothership already. Recovery of stages on Kerbin would make sense as the rocket parts would return to inventory (I'm assuming this is how colonies will operate too) allowing for more frequent launches. Differing delivery rates of different resources would create differing perceived costs for said resources (SRBs would actually be useful as solid fuel comes in bulk and takes the load off the methalox supplier, while uranium and plutonium come in at a trickle, so you have to choose wisely to send up that SWERV, reactor, or big RTG as you won't have enough to build a second one for a whole year.) Of course, colonies should offer this exact sort of emergent gameplay and problem solving, so how does adding it to Kerbin do better than a money system? Well...It trains us players on how resources work (which parts require which resources? are there resources I use more than others? if I don't have what I need, how do I redesign to fit my current limitations?) in a simplified manner (won't need to scan for resources, build mines and factories, nor set up delivery routes) thus offering a gradual introduction to colony resource management and giving an incentive to make those colonies in the first place (I like using the SWERV, but uranium comes in so slowly-let's find uranium somewhere else!) Compare this to funds. Funds wouldn't teach you anything about colony resource management because there's nobody on the Mun to take your funds and give you rocket parts. This also increases the perceived jump in difficulty when going to colonies as you suddenly need to un-learn about funds and learn about whatever a uranium is and how to find it (hey why does the SWERV suddenly say it needs rocket parts and uranium? I thought it just needed 300,000,000 kerbucks!) And that's just the player perspective; imagine being the developer who has to design, build, test, and bugfix and entire game mechanic which exists entirely to become obsolete after 20 hours of gameplay into a 200 hour campaign. (The devs have expressed multiple times that they don't want parts of KSP2 to simply become obsolete because you unlocked something better. Now, how the Terrier will be useful on Ovin is anyone's guess, but they aren't going to waste time making content that is destined to become obsolete.) It just makes more development sense to have one resource system used throughout the entire game.

I had something very similar happen while testing a rover on Dres. After time warping while stationary on the surface, the rover teleported to a different place on Dres and ended up underground at the same time. I did record a video, but only after I was already underground (at this point I'm considering leaving recording running all the time). Wish I could be of more use, but I wasn't making saves since I was only doing testing, and I have a plethora of mods which could be causing all sorts of havoc. Next time I'll try recreating the problem in vanilla.

The tutorials and missions really lack enough (any) discussion of rendezvous and docking. While it's reasonable to do Mun and Minmus missions with direct returns, by the time someone is doing a Duna mission they really should be thinking of doing something Apollo-style with a separate 'mothership' and lander. It's just so much easier when you don't waste energy bringing an entire return trip's worth of fuel to the surface, but is so involved I wouldn't expect a new user to A: figure out how to build following the Apollo style, and B: actually execute docking, without some guidance. I'd expect some tutorials for docking and rendezvous, ideally covering elements of both in-orbit rendezvous (I'm at 80 km, the space station is at 100 km and at a totally different orbital phase + inclination, what now?), launch-to-rendezvous (I'm on the surface of the Mun at some high latitude and my transfer vessel is in a similarly inclined orbit, how do I launch to meet up with it?), and the whole docking process with RCS translation controls. From there, it would be important to also have missions that explicitly require docking to encourage everyone to get practice in. Ideally, there would even be some missions to practice good Apollo-style missions (even something as open-ended as 'Split any vessel in two in orbit of a CB, land one part of the vessel on that CB, then rejoin the two', though I can imagine that's more than the current mission system can handle). This is such an important set of skills to have for any interplanetary mission, and I'd say my inability to pull off a good Apollo-style mission is why I personally 'never left Kerbin-Mun-Minmus in KSP1' (I did learn eventually, but not from material presented inside KSP1 itself!) With the future of interstellar vessels and cargo deliveries, I can only imagine docking becoming an even more important skill, so we really should teach it as early as possible.

Surprised this isn't getting as much attention as the thread about this from previous versions did. I was getting frustrated by low FPS despite my GPU running at around 25% load and none of my CPU cores seeing sustained load and managed to gain around 10 fps (from ~35 to ~45 in space) just by removing 16 random bits of debris. If I then also removed the 19 vessels other than my own I was suddenly getting more than triple the fps (up to ~120)! What is in essence a background task shouldn't be slowing the game down, and it really shouldn't be slowing the game down when there are more than enough system resources to handle more computation. The fact that this much of a slowdown isn't coming from a hardware bottleneck is baffling...I can't imagine what this would be like with multiple solar systems and colonies if it's this impactful in the midgame of the Kerbol system. 5 fps at 5% CPU and GPU use? We'll see...but I hope not.

Reported Version: v0.2.0 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: Windows 11 | CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D | GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080ti | RAM: 64 GB DDR4-3600 I have noticed some occasions where the science counter normally seen in the KSC view, R&D center, and Mission Control will appear in other views after entering the R&D center even once. This is a minor nuisance as it's a small enough element to not cover much of the screen, though in flight mode it does slightly overlap the vessel resources display. This is fairly straightforward to reproduce: Load exploration mode game Enter the VAB, Training Center, and Tracking Station to observe there is NOT a science counter in the top right of the screen Launch the Kerbal K0 from a launchpad to enter flight mode, and verify there is also NOT a science counter in the top right of the screen Use the ESC menu to the R&D Center Return to the KSC again, then enter the VAB, Training Center, and Tracking Station once more A science counter should now be present in all of these buildings: The attached screenshot shows a collage of the science counter in places it's not expected In the VAB, the counter seems to be present, but hidden behind the save/load buttons (thank goodness it's not the other way around!) In the tracking station, take control of the Kerbal K0 launched before, the science counter should also be visible in flight view now I would expect the science counter to not be present in the VAB, Training Center, Tracking Station, and flight view both before and after entering R&D. It seems that, regardless of the exact steps taken, if you ever visit R&D at all, the science counter will then appear in every single scene, even where it shouldn't. Perhaps the element is never removed from the UI after being created. But this begs the question of why the counter only appears in the wrong places after visiting R&D specifically (there is a counter in mission control, but visiting mission control instead of R&D in step #4 does not cause the bug to happen!). Included Attachments:

Here to report I am seeing the same thing with ion engines as well. This will make my Jool ion probe far more cumbersome than I was hoping it would be... The theory that small accelerations are getting neglected due to rounding error makes sense to me, this particular probe was only pulling a pitiful 0.002 G of acceleration, easily low enough to say it's 'close enough to 0'.

Having done some unmanned missions myself, I agree that the lack of celestial occlusion is noticeable and is contributing (in part; I believe there are other ways probes should be nerfed) to unmanned missions being pretty overpowered for science gathering. The ability to go to Jool and do all manner of maneuvers, even sending sub-probes into Jool itself, without ever needing to worry about being unable to transmit data back, execute a maneuver, avoid being thrown into space by Tylo, etc. is not compelling. Also feels like it's worth mentioning that comms networks in KSP2 would (should?) still be relevant into the endgame as every new solar system is going to be a blank slate with absolutely no radio infrastructure. Imagine deciding a gas giant moon is the most convenient place for a starter colony but lacking the resources and kermans to wing it by building extra colonies everywhere, you choose to probe the system first to find the absolute best places to mine. With the current system, that would mean simply slapping the longest-range antenna on each probe and being done. But with occlusion you'd have the far more interesting problem of setting up robust communications first in order to avoid an eclipse from the gas giant completely shutting down every ongoing mission...or being risky/cheap and dealing with intermittent connection as it happens. And that experience could be totally different on your next playthrough should you decide to bootstrap on a different planet/moon. Honestly sounds way more interesting than just "use big antenna". Sure, that makes it more difficult, but there are reasonable ways to mitigate that, eg: a visualization in map view that shows comms deadzones as 3D blobs or something (bonus points for allowing this visualization to not only show the deadzones right now, but also show areas that are intermittent deadzones), or other similar ideas to demistify the problem of "my probe can't talk to KSC". Instead, the feature just gets simplified to oblivion with no option to retain the more complex version. It worries me that Intercept chose to take this route in 'solving' the problem, I hope it doesn't reflect their attitude toward other game mechanics.

I experienced something similar when working on my air launch challenge. I noticed when staging decouplers on my probe that a 'connection lost' notification would appear for a moment, coinciding with the throttle and SAS being reset. I suspect the momentary connection loss is what's causing trouble. That would also explain why I never experienced this sort of thing with a manned craft.

Personally, I'm fine with this. Always thought they should have left it at 2020 (like they say in the trailer and on the Steam page-those never specified spring!) instead of specifying spring in some places, specifically this fiscal year in others, and leaving it at 2020 elsewhere. Leaving more specific timings to when they had more firm plans would have been a bit better, but oh well. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if the success of Outer Worlds plays into this a bit. Maybe that success has given plenty more resources to work with in the budget department...

Hey, finally some new stuff! In this video, Nate talks about the trailer, specifically the drawings that guided the creation of the full-quality trailer. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXnTR99iofs Unfortunately, the video is only as long as the trailer, which doesn't quite give Nate enough time to explain the thinking behind literally everything. But it is interesting to note how the original idea isn't entirely what the final trailer became-the animators had some clever ideas of their own that led to a pretty epic final product. Also, the video description hints at a dev blog post, but there's no link...guess that's not posted yet? More to look forward to, I guess!

Oh gosh no. There have been so many articles and videos each with slightly different information that I can't remember at all where specifically I heard them. And it's been two weeks. Airplane parts have been a bit quiet though. Not many questions asked, and when they are asked there usually wasn't an answer. I'd have to assume we'll see all the usual plane parts, but it feels like there is more to the story than that.

Ah I didn't realize that's the same thing you had in mind. Come full circle (or orbit) then.

I remember hearing somewhere that there is a new planet specifically designed so that airplanes are basically the only practical option for landing and takeoff. Now there’s nothing said on how that was achieved, guess we’ll have to wait for that info, but planes aren’t getting abandoned. It’s nice that the new planets sound like they’ll offer some really interesting challenges.

Personally, I don’t like such arbitrary gates to progression. It doesn’t seem right to force you to do things in a rigid order in a sandbox simulation, where you should be free to choose whatever path you want. And that’s why I simply suggest making science harder to grind for-it slows things down without directly saying “nope, no more tech for you.” If someone wants to grind Kerbin/Mun/Minmus for the science to get fusion drives, so be it. But I want it to at least be hard to do that. Not outright impossible, but that is what an arbitrary restriction would do...make it impossible. Regardless, this is also the game where arbitrary milestones determine colony growth (I do not like the ‘baby boom’ idea) so I guess I can’t expect many open gates. They have said that the ‘Progression Mode’ thing will reward exploration (science mode half) [and completing contracts as the career mode half] which might just mean gating tech behind going places.

One thing that’s always bugged me about science is the whole biome thing, and I think that’s part of the reason why you could unlock interstellar stuff before even leaving Kerbin’s SOI. There are just too many biomes in this area and that increases the amount of science you can get dramatically. They definitely need a nerf, regardless of what science is used for. I get what the biomes are trying to do, encouraging exploration and all, but I don’t think the sheer amount of science each biome can provide makes sense. I think biomes should be more the icing on the cake of science; they add some extra information with repeated experiments, but it’s just doing the experiment the first time that really counts. To achieve this, that experiment which gives you that 100 science could be separated from biomes, and instead of each biome giving you another 100 science, it would only be like 10. Maybe with some bias so more interesting biomes give more bonus science. This way, the first time you do something still gives the big burst of 110 science (100 for doing it + 10 for the biome you are in), but repetition in other biomes is much less significant than before, giving only 10 science instead of 110 again and again. For example: you land on the Mun and take the temperature for the first time. Finally knowing the temperature of the Mun gets the science community interested, so 30 science comes from that. But you were also in the midlands specifically, so this one experiment is worth 5 science more, for a total of 35. You move over to the lowlands and take more temperature readings. Everyone already knows the temperature of the Mun, but not the Lowlands, so this is a fairly minor discovery and will only provide the 5 biome science as the 30 science for doing a temperature reading landed has already been achieved. But if you move to the poles temperature gets a little more interesting, so maybe that’s worth 10 science instead. Still, each biome individually would not be as major as the very first experiment. But despite that, if you visit all biomes, that could easily be an extra 50 science you wouldn’t get otherwise. I think that could still encourage exploring the biomes without making the biome grind too rewarding, which means you have to actually do something outside of Kerbin before you get the best stuff there is.

I’m of the thought that KSP LFO was always meant to represent RP1 KeralOx. (Sure it doesn’t perfectly match any fuel, but it’s pretty close to Kerosene and Oxygen) However, I have not heard the devs talking about any fuels outside of MethalOx and Metallic Hydrogen. Im all for rebalancing the fuels to represent something real (with real names too) but Methane fuel has only gained traction recently which doesn’t fit in the style and performance of many of the KSP 1 engines. Also it’s not used as jet fuel. So...we’ll see, I guess.

The Kerbals in the KSP 2 trailer can get to the Mun, make a base on Duna, send their people to a completely different star system, and even create some massive colonies so far from home. Sure, they aren’t perfect, but nothing about that trailer says “lol Kerbal dumb.” It’s true that some other marketing has indeed been “lol dum” but this isn’t about old marketing. If you think a couple of structural failures and solar panel clippings being featured suddenly means the entire trailer is about Kerbals screwing up, then you’ve really missed the point. And when those Kerbals do mess up, they don’t die or anything, they are just lost in the moment basking in the scenery. Maybe that’s a lesson for everyone here-stop worrying so darn much about messing up. Whether that’s worrying about your own mistakes or worrying about the mistakes featured in someone else’s trailer, stop being so darn dramatic about it and focus on what really matters: exploring space, suckers.

And if there isn’t a difficulty option for something, there is almost a guarantee for a mod to do the job. Though in KSP 1 the mods usually added the extra constraints like radiation, not removed them. Guess what comes around goes around.

Lots of cool stuff! I’m just happy to hear that acceleration and rotation are persistent. No more of this ‘the only ship that matters is the one I’m looking at right now’!

The multi colored things in the trailer and pre alpha gameplay are indeed a real feature. The color is entirely up to user choice.

Will we have any form of automation? For example, if I were to launch my Daedalus and then swap over to some other craft, would the Daedalus continue accelerating? Or would I have to be in control of the Daedalus throughout the entire thrusting cycle?

Huh, I never thought of it as a retrofit option. That does sound far more practical than attempting to create a whole suite of new parts for new fuel types. MethalOx has been mentioned before, and I could easily see the devs getting quite tired of making chemical rocket motors over and over with only slight differences. I guess we will have to leave it to mods for the purpose-built engines.

That's what I figured...so what part of that Mun rocket has anything to do with metallic hydrogen?