KerikBalm

Can any of the planetary bodies be backported to KSP1? They have a lot more detail. At this point, the best outcome I see for KSP2 is to backport as much stuff as they can, and offer it as a KSP 1 DLC (free to those who purchased KSP2, so as not to burn all bridges)

And the profits come from the work of a team that delivered a successful product, not from a team that failed miserably. T2 will appreciate the original creators of KSP more

This is equivalent to screaming into a void - utterly pointless Come back to ksp1, if you don't have the breaking ground dlc, buy it, continue making mods

Their solution was just: "we're going to have a solution" They explicitly said the opposite of I recall. If we had N-body physics, Rask and Rusk wouldn't need a bespoke solution, N body physics would be the solution

He can be a "fan" of it without actually playing it regularly. It could be that somebody showed him the game once, he gave it a try, and thought the concept of a game teaching mostly realistic spaceflight principles was great (awesome). He can be a "fan of" kerbal without actually using the product - just like there can be fans of Tesla or SpaceX that don't own a Tesla or pay for launches to orbit.

^This^ The reasons KSP2 failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerbal_Space_Program_2#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerbal_Space_Program_2#Reception https://kerbal-space-program-2.fandom.com/wiki/Version_History They announced in 2019, for release in early 2020 (before lockdowns, don't blame Covid-19) - its unclear when development started. Then they delayed to Q3 2021 (so 1.5 year delay). Then Startheory got canned, and 1/3 of its team continued on the project, and new people were hired. Then from Q3 2021, they delayed until Q1 2023 The Q1 2023 Early Access came out, not version 1.0, it was buggy, with poor performance. No career mode, no reentry heating, nothing new relative to KSP (other than graphics), with bugs breaking core gameplay elements. 4 months went by, with only a few bug fixes, and a few "new" parts (some of which were just carry-overs from KSP1) Another 4 months went by, and they finally fixed some performance issues, and added some new parts - fixed some bugs, but many remained 2 months went by: Science mode added, and reentry heating finally made it in game >4 months went by: IG is closing, and it seems very likely that development will stop in about 2 months KSP2 failed because the dev team failed to make reasonable progress. We're 4 years after the initially planned release, and its still not even close to ready for version 1.0, and still in a much worse state than KSP1 was at 1.0 There was always a competition for resources. The head of development should have seen the technical deficiency, and allocated more resources and focus on improving the technical side.. Art was outpacing the actual game. The art was great for marketing and hype, until it came time to let people actually play the game. Then it came crashing down. Very reminscent of No Man's Sky, except I don't think KSP2 can be saved.

I thought the prevailing theory was rushed release of whatever unfinished assets they have lying around, then no further development

It seems pretty clear that IG is being shut down. Nate Simpson reportedly (I haven't checked) now lists his employer as Private Division, not Intercept Games. While Intercept Games is clearly being shut down, what is not clear is the fate that awaits KSP2. The most optimistic but still realistic outcome is that they cobble together their unreleased content, and try to quickly put together a release version, followed by some bug fix patches, and end it. Maybe in a few years if the playerbase hasn't died, they put out paid DLC.

Ignoring the issue of Elon, whom I have mixed feelings about (and those feelings had much more negativity in the mix after the whole twitter thing and various public statements): He can He won't I don't think he is a giant KSP fan, I think he's got a lot else going on. He's probably familiar with the game, but I really doubt he sits down and plays KSP in his downtime, and reads these forums.

My guess is that they take the content they already have made, and do a quick and dirty (and buggy) release of it, and a skeleton crew to do a patch or two. Meh, he never gave me much confidence, but I kept quiet (after the metallic hydrogen issue) so as not to sabotage the game with negativitiy

Well, it could be they wanted to write the code to make sure they could model other vessels under control of a connected player, within the physics bubble, and in the tracking station view. That seems to be the bare minimum for multiplayer. I'll also note that KSP 1 multiplayer mods already accomplish at least the physics bubble thing (I don't really know, I never used them, only watched a few youtube videos) Meh, It could have had its uses. I like doing multistage but recoverable craft - its hard working with the contstraints of the physics bubble and the things on rails getting deleted in atmospheres. I think there are stage recovery mods for that though. I could also imagine some fun with flying aircraft carriers, etc. Certainly not a make or break function It was never a big priority for me, but just an example of them not even having the concept down. Hype and ambition aren't mutually exclusive. I agree he didn't have what it took to pull it off ("bit off more than he could chew") I had some ideas for mission profiles that require two craft to be under active control. I could imagine some kind of matchmaking service to try and pull them off, starting from the host's quicksave. It would be nice, but something peripheral, not the main focus of the game. To reiterate: It was never a big priority for me, but just an example of them not even having the concept down.

Maybe yes, maybe no. Loosing your job can really really suck. It really depends on individual circumstances how easy it is to bounce back. I agree. I was *almost* about to buy KSP2. I hadn't because I had limited personal time, and the game still seemed to be buggy and offer less features than KSP 1 - with its only selling point being better graphics. I had really high hopes for KSP2, but the EA release also gave me big concerns. I have been silent on KSP2 (since the metallic hydrogen issue :p) because I didn't want my negativity to sabotage a game that I hoped could be saved. If they had simply remade KSP1 with 1) better optimization, 2) less bugs, and 3) better graphics, that would have been enough for me to buy it. They delivered 1 out of 3, and get a -1 for having less features than KSP (robotics, mod support). If they had added colonies, I could have forgiven some misisng KSP 1 features, or some bugs. On release, it had more bugs, less features, worse performance. KSP1's performance had always been mainly CPU limuted, not GPU limited, so I can't even give them a pass for the poor performance being due to better graphics (which I assume could be turned down). As I understand, with the For Science update, the performance/optimization had improved (I don't know how it compared to KSP1 ), and some bugs were fixed (though many remained). At this point, I was considering buying it, even though by all indications, colonies or any "new features" relative to KSP 1 were still looking like they were over a year away, it still lacked KSP1 feautres that I really like (robotics!), and still had many bugs not present in KSP1. The publisher gave them more than enough time. The team did not lack for resources - they had far more resources than KSP 1 ever did. They had access to KSP1's code and assets. Yet in all this time, they only managed to give a graphic overhaul to KSP1, which breaking core parts of the game and failing to add anything really new. There was turnover in the dev team, so the common denominator was not the dev team in general. The common denominator was the dev team leadership, and that is where the blame lies. They oversaw a project that squandered lots of time and resources with only a pretty but buggy and neutered version of KSP1 to show for it. They still hadn't even conceptually solved many of the problems: How was multiplayer going to work? How were Rask and Rusk supposed to work without N-body physics? how were interstellar transfers supposed to work (the thrust while under time acceleration was a big let down, CODE does a better job, and its not even for interstellar transfers)? This was failure of the development team, which means it was a failure of the head of development. "Easy shot" is relative. Nate bit off more than he could chew. I'll give him credit for being ambitious with KSP2, but in shooting for the stars, he crashed on the launchpad.

Monster? looks mid-sized to me by KSP 1 standards. I see that KSP 2's trip planner is very flawed. I assume that the dV requirements shouldn't change betweeen KSP 1 and 2, since the planetary bulk properties are the same This is still an over-estimation. If you aerocapture, then you can cut: "250 Duna flyby to Duna highly elliptical orbit 360 Duna high orbit to Low Duna Orbit" That will already take 7240 down to 6630, which is within the dV budget Also, does docking not work in KSP2? If you do orbital rendezvous above duna with a dedicated lander, then the 1450 dV should be on a separate counter from the main ship/ the total is more complicated to count.

But where on laythe? I favor offshore bases above undersea mounts, so I can drill for ore, with nothing but ocean in sight

Add some wing incidence to decrease how much you need to pitch up, and you'll save a lot of drag from the fuselage Also, I can't help but feel that the wings are too small for that fuselage:

I have no experience with stock Eve SSTOs, that's something that has eluded me - even after stock rotors came out. IIRC, some have been able to do HLHR SSTOs from the tallest mountain on eve (7 or 8km), I don't know if 10km makes a VLHR viable. Myself, I have done *reusable* Eve ascent craft, with rotors, from sea level, carrying 18 tons of payload in a medium mk3 cargo bay with a cargo ramp It's HL HR, but the horizontal speed is negligible. It's got plenty of TWR, and climbs quite steep. vertical launch and tip forward vs horizontal flight and pull up- not much difference These would start the rocket powered climb at 10.5-11 I'm, and as I said, the horizontal velocity at the start doesn't contribute much to the final outcome. If I could start at 11km, I could drop the rotors, the blades, the batteries, a lot of the wings and have something that performs better* So at 11km, you definitely have some options. I don't know if vertical launch SSTOs become practical at that altitude, but I am sure that some kind of reusable system with significant payload can be made to work at that altitude

@Andrew1233 I didn't say you have to go supersonic like the concord: just that you go too slow. Airlinerd cruise at 250-270 m/s at those altitudes, you're going about 100 m/s - that is way too slow. My comments about hypersonics only meant to imply that I can't give you any rules of thumb off the top of my head for wingloading or TWR for those sort of planes. As for the altitude: kerbin's atmosphere is about 80% to scale. 8500m on kerbin has the same pressure as about 35'000 feet on Earth. Regarding rotors, I said subsonic, not transonic, but yes, you can almost go supersonic with rotors: And that was a tilt-rotor VTOL carrying a 36 ton rockonax 64 fuel tank as payload

You are going way too slow to be flying in air that thin. I don't really play much with the high bypass turbofans. I do a lot of air launch to orbit, but those are with hypersonic spaceplanes. When I do play around with subsonic aircraft, it's mostly using electric rotors, for operation on Duna, Eve etc.

I added a gas giant, "Soong", for it to orbit. Here's my modified system at Stock scale: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/tis6c6bzmam4kwo4oycyk/KBCS.zip?rlkey=zfs4kdti2ok3ysnp54mop1s4r&st=ljiaer6r&dl=0 Take the whole thing*, or just take Soong and Brumo * The whole thing changes the stock system up significantly:

Today, I ditched sigma dimensions, and just moded my custom system to 4x manually, after playing at 6.25x with KR&D. Managed to get fully stock reusable spaceplanes taking >100 tons to orbit at 4x I also got to a point that I was pretty happy with my 'Brumo' moon, but then accidentally posted the ksp2 rather than ksp1 mod forum

Ooops, meant for ksp1

So I will release this soon, and I know there are already some titan analogues out there (Huygens from JNSQ, Tekto from OPM), but whatever, I wanted to make my own. It uses a high-res heightmap (8192 x 4096) that is a (mostly) composite of real terrain data. Respect to anyone who can pick out the real world locations used to make most of this heightmap: There is one section there that made heavy use of the spot healing tool from photoshop Here are some screenshots at 1x rescale (I normally play somewhere between 3 to 6.25x rescale), from a few different iterations:

Clever, I'll have to make use of that sometime. I don't have the screenshots, but I finally figured out what the problem was with my normal maps (or at least a way to make them work, I don't know why they weren't working before) for a new planet I'm working on. Its meant as a titan analogue, and thus has many similarities to Tekto. Previously my personal planet mods all focused on the inner solar system, and thuse would be compatible with OPM, but no longer. I added a Saturn analogue (can't get Kopernicus rings working, the textures don't show up, need to figure that out), that just uses a texture of Saturn. Jool's smaller sister I'm calling Soong. At the moment, it only has one moon (I think I will move Minmus and Ike there to keep it company): Brumo Brumo's stats are more like Titan than Tekto's: 0.14 G (vs 0.25 of Tekto), and 1.5 atmospheres at sea level (vs 1.25 of Tekto). The Mk2 lifting body parts + a few control surfaces are perfectly sufficient for touchdown at 10-20 m/s. The heightmap is still WIP, there are large flat plains (from the sides of the heightmap) that I plan to add some more features to (respect to anyone who can identify what this heightmap is derived from) The color map is even more WIP: Titan may have polar lakes, but Brumo has polar seas (bonus: much easier to avoid artifacts at the poles). Its got mountains, drainage channels, rivers, lakes (well, one, more to come), bays, a cryovolcano (smaller ones to be added). I also plan on adding: undersea mounts (so you can make offshore mining bases like this): Undersea trenches and ridges, some polygonal terrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterned_ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_patterned_ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto#Surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Chaos_and_lenticulae sand dunes; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#Dark_equatorial_terrain And, why not some mesas too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_Valley It's a really high res heightmap (8192x4096), about 4x most heightmap resolutions (2048x1024), so I want to pack a lot of detail and interesting features into this "medium-sized" moon. I say medium-sized, because it is proportionately sized - bigger than Mun, but about half the size of the giant moons of Jool (Laythe and Tylo), which are significantly bigger than duna and moho, and are proportionately much bigger than the moons of Jupiter.

So its been some time since I made a planet, but I am trying to make a titan analogue (Tekto is nice, but not what I'm looking for), and I'm having the same problem. I don't remember what I did last time. Can anyone tell me what needs to be done to generate a proper normal map from a heightmap?

My main use of the Kal was for differential torque/throttling of engines/motors for quad copters and similar vtols. Anyway, I consider it better than making history. Robotics open up so many possibilities (particularly with underwater exploration, which may not be expected), and surface features add a little something to surface exploration (I love the animated geysers and cryo volcanoes)