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Good thing my complaints encompass a lot of statements and content posted for about 4 years and not this one time I was almost wrong. You're doing exactly what Razark is doing below here, which is ignoring the dates of the few ones I quoted: 2 out of 6 messages I found on this forum alone, are from before Dakota's clarification that it was gonna be just two hotfixes. People were expecting more than 2 hotfixes. In fact I'll gladly bet all in that most laymen back then expected this to mean the start of rapidly deployed hotfixes as a concurrent practice, and not just 2 "hot" fixes spaced almost a month from the update they were fixing. Dakota's clarification and not Nate's post is an example of how to properly communicate when looking to create and then manage expectations. I'm totally on board with that, though I'd prefer it if had been Nate's post without the need for clarifications. Asterisks like those have been a consistent theme sadly. This is you assuming their work pace and productivity. I'm sure if you told anyone outside this forum or the discord that they're almost crunching to produce the current volume of content, you'd be laughed out of the internet. Sadly, lack of communication is to blame again, as they really haven't shown any other bar of their productive capacity other than delaying a product 3 years and not being able to produce a roadmap feature for at least 7 months. The "5 years ago" thing is brought up constantly because people seem to forget when development started, constantly, or talk about credibility whilst gladly ignoring that. No, looking away from it will not make it go away. [snip] Maybe if people stopped constructing arguments from erroneous facts [snip] then people would stop bringing those things up. You talk as if deadlines and spec sheets are things of the devil. Which is funny considering we now have the design specs for heating thanks to Nertea, but Science being much closer allegedly hasn't been talked about past a part and a screenshot of what could easily be a KSP1 copypaste in KSP2's UI.

I want to do what I can, to give them feedback that might help them make a better KSP2, because I hope that one day the game might approach the heights they've laid out a plan for. I won't ignore the incongruity of the things they've hyped up versus what they've produced, so my practical expectations are not high. What can be done to match hopes with expectations? Since most talk is discarded out of hand, what talk do we feel would be appreciated? I for one would love to hear some reasoning behind their very specific 'Fridays are communication days' kinda idea. I get that they want to have a regular predictable report, but it becomes a pain point when some Fridays pass and there's no word on what progress was made, for example, that very week. Just as an example. Trying to get the ball rolling on that train of thought

Continuing from last time... Some corpo really wanted a useless space station above Kerbin, so they ended up financing part of Watchtower II refuelling depot. We do not talk about Watchtower I. Albion arrived on fumes, puffing monoprop to match vectors, while Luna puffed LOX due to unexpected monoprop shortages... Based around triple core of https://spacedock.info/mod/364/Davon Supply Mod, it will serve to simplify boring parts of space fleet supply chain. Refuelling process highlighted lack of docking port pumps in my modset... Once both cruisers were neatly tucked in and pumped full of explosive goodies, empty drop pod arrived to take current passengers down dirtside. Next pod will be sent full, and wait at Watchtower for return trip, launching Albion full saved a bit of kash but made managing contracts annoying. Tourist bus looks like something made from medical silicon would, and lacks proper deorbit engines so RCS took half of hour to do it... at least it was compact enough to not invoke kraken an physics warp. Bill took a free seat on Albion and organized an adhoc show on servicing a satellite. Turns out nothing was broken, so it took some convincing for contractee to pay out. And after few weeks hoffmaning between moons everyone was back together. Albion got so famous that kerbs want to visit it for bragging rights, however civilians have some trouble booking tickets for docked ships... Not very eventful day, but important milestone non the less.

Something nice apart from any bug reports in here: This one goes out for @Angelo Kerman for making those possible.... KSC - right before sunrise.... Right before the dawn of the new day Victoria and Kenneth Kerman headed to the pilot's dressing room. A new era of spaceflight was right around the corner. It was the first full integrated test flight of the Sojobo Mk III. The engineers prepared this plane for its maiden flight to space for serveral months now. The start has been postponed again and again. (Last time some worker left his snack packaging right in the graviolium reaction chamber.) "Are you nervous" Victoria asked. "Not yet, but when I get into this machine for sure." Kenneth answered and scratched himself right behind the ear, like he always did when he was afraid. "Nothing will go wrong, I promise." "Sure, sure... at least... If we explode, our atoms will be distributed right through the Kerbol system... Bob said, we won't feel much, if that should happen... But ... I don't wanna die, you know?!" "Zephram said, it could only go to 4,5 c.... So we are gonna keep it in a reasonable ..." Victoria said and was interrupted. "reasonable?! Dying ain't reasonable !!! The Tengu with Rodney McKerman on board almost exploded - even with his expert knowledge in controlling the gravi intermix! The Sojobo is a Tengu on steroids!" "You don't have to do this... But wasn't it you, who told Elsa Kerman, that you are going to be the fastest Kerbal ever?" "Yeah... She's a sweet girl... and so are her cakes." "You want her to bake a cake for you, aren't you?" Kenneth smiled while thinking of Elsa's cake. "Mmmmhhhmmm CAKE!" he daydreamed. "Kenneth.... When we come back, there will be a huuuge cake... and snacks! We girls talk to each other, you know!?" "It's better gonna be a monster of a cake - like those warp engines..." he smiled while he closed his space suit. Both headed to the new warp capable vessel Sojobo Mk3. Valentina was already in the cockpit doing her pre-flight checks. "Alright... Ready to make history?" she asked, while flipping switches. "You were having snacks with Jeb, last night, right?" Val asked. Victoria flushed green. "Not a secret. Everone in the KSC knows." Val continued. "But please make sure, your thoughts are directed to the warp core diagnostics and not to any Kwix chocolate bars you had with Jeb. I don't want this thing to fly apart. I will take us to space - you take us to Eeloo!" She sounded a like a strange mix of a professional and an deeply hurt Kerbal. "Tower, comin' .... Tower...?" "Copy". "Sojobo Mk3 ready to taxing. Mission "Breakthrough 4/5 - 1" ready to go..." "Taxing to runway confirmed. Runway clear." Victoria muted the comlink to the tower. "Val... let's take on our snack dispute at a later point. From this moment on, let's keep it professional". "What ya say, Vica... what ya say..... Alllllllright. Let's give this ride a launch... I kinda dislike those new nuclear drives. They tend do get very hot." Val answered while reaching the runway and aligning for take off. More switches were flipped. "Just like the simulation..." Val mumbled to herself. "Tower.... BT 4/5-1 configured for launch. All systems clear." "BT 4/5-1 got your telemetry. All systems go., runway clear. All activities in the near vicinity have been suspended. We are handing you over to mission control." "Hello... This is Zephram.... You are gonna make history. We all trust in you. You will boldly go, where no Kerbal has gone before. You are going to break the 4c threshold... Best of luck! The pile of the snacks will be waiting for you. And for now, I am honoured to say: "BT 4/5-1 clearance to launch! Vica muted the coms again... "Zephram himself, eh? Let's hope, that this is a good omen." Val nodded, while Kenneth rose his eyebrows. "Let's go...."Val pushed the thrust lever with a determination, that barely finds a match. The atomic engines ramped up their thust with a screaming noise due the huge amounts of super heated gases pushed out of the exhausts. Right in that moment the sun rose slightly above the horizon.... a historic moment... --------------------- Now to the technical point of view.... 2 Warp-SSTOs. May I introduce: The Tengu Mk III Something I worked on quite a while to balance it right [so that I does not become unflyable unstable when completely empty]. It reaches 3,43c (interplanetary, full of fuel) with a 5* engineer on board. It uses the KARE-Mod by @JadeOfMaar to get to orbit and be propelled in space traditionally. And yes, the fins at the ends of the warp coils are unfortunately necessary to keep it stable when completely dry. And here The Sojobo Mk III (the god of the tengu) - It is the next evolution step of the Tengu Class SSTOs: Two badboys of aux-generators drive this vessel to (for an SSTO) insane 4,55c (interplanetary, full of fuel) with a 5* engineer on board. The cockpit is from the Prakasa mod.... Some radiator intercoolers from the Heatcontrol mod by @Nertea. And of cause the wings from procedural wings mod by @linuxgurugamer. Some linear dockingport under the belly is from on of nerteas mods. I guess it was NF Construction and some RTGs by NF Electrical... Craft files here: If somebody wants them. https://www.filemail.com/d/ljnkbkuoweafpie (available for 7 days from now on...) Flight instructions in the ingame vessel description - unfortunately in german... but you manage it, if you really want... Have fun... Both are meant to be proof of concept vessel made by Zephram Kochrane as part of his Warp 5 program. They are only made for interplanetary travel. Please do not leave your homesystem with them, unless you have docked some additional gravi and LqDeut-Tanks under the belly after reaching space. Both are the research results of my first warp flight, the rocket launched Relativity I mission, which reached roughly 3c but was not reuseable. May i deliver a nice soundtrack for their launches ?! Here you are: Have fun !!!

I am not talking about anything to do with airworthiness. I 100% get that C-suite members are not part of the maintenance department. I am talking about public perception. I'm sure all of us who work in aviation have heard the sentiment of" I'm not flying on that "dangerous" turboprop, I'd rather fly on something with "reliable" engines!" My point is the Executive knows that the general public do not have the time or interest to actually get into the details of the malfunction beyond some news bytes, so to those people she is saying "This is NOT a design flaw, this is an installation error. I know you will not take me at face value since I have a conflict of interest in the public thinking this aircraft is safe, so I am personally sitting in the seat." Actions speak louder than words, especially when the "words" usually end with "The described maintenance has been performed in accordance with the applicable airworthiness requirements." What does that even mean to a layperson? They are definitely not looking up the FARs referenced. Its the same way when law firms talk to the press, they speak in English, not legalese. They are trying to communicate a point to a group of people who do not speak the language of the trade.

Honestly I think it is bad. Well it also highlights the currently bad state of development process, so maybe it is good? The reason for me is: Basically every answer about a feature in the post goes like this: Q: "What will be the mechanics of feature X" A: "Well if you do X you have to think about A, B and C and balance them." Then there are some further explanations about A, B and C and how they interact. And that's it. He is usually not answering the question but only explaining some of the things which you have to consider. So the amount of information I got from it was pretty limited because all the talk about "you have to balance different things" is not that complicated actually. Doing the balancing is however difficult and he does not really say how they will even try to balance it. And I think that is what some of us don't like. Another example of this is "New features in 1.5". But they don't say which feature. The feature could simply be the new Unity version. Maybe they do talk a lot. But the amount of information is very limited. Actually I am starting to think that they haven't even started to think about anything on the roadmap yet. Which is probably why we have not seen any gameplay for science yet.

The thing that gets me is the talk from the Devs about the different biomes of each world. That's a really cool idea. I'm assuming some planning and development went into creating those regions. It would be cool if exploring them felt meaningful. As is, the only challenge seems to be landing. Some quick (too quick) button pushes later and the only thing you have is SP. There is no gameplay component or information stored that tells the player anything interesting. Nothing persistent. The regions are just landing areas containing SP. Maybe - just maybe - that changes with the implementation / release of Colonies & Resource Management? The information is sparse. I'd really like a Roadmap / development direction update - but given everything I don't blame them for keeping stuff close to the breast.

However, considering a few years ago the other "government officials meeting" in Singapore - Their news is quite a lot of nighttime footage of bustling Singapore. And said that "hey look that's Singapore." Meanwhile, many of them have been to China and Russia as foreign students. So, it's very likely that what you think they're going to talk to you about, "I can't find the money for my next meal", but they actually going to talk to you about "how well DJI drones can be modified and carried".

So, just wondering.... I've never built a solar system or made a mod, but would it be possible to make large bodies collide? I am just seeing the possibilities with interstellar in the base game of an occurrence where a solar system or rogue planet comes into the Kerbolar system and perhaps worlds collide. I realize I am asking a bit (maybe more than a bit) much. But even then nuclear explosions will be base game as well (praying for mushroom clouds....) so would it at least be possible to have asteroid impacts (on impact replace the asteroid with a comparable resized nuclear explosion)? Maybe even world ender ones like the one that killed the dinosaurs. Then we could have "save kerbin" missions

Some content has been removed, and a number of posts quoting said content have also been removed. Feel free to state your opinions as you wish. We don’t care if your opinion is for or against. It doesn’t matter. That’s what the forums are here for. What we don’t allow is to make comments about a person, or people in general. Do not tell others how to post, or what to post. Do not make comments about others motives or intent. If you disagree with another person, use facts, logic and reasoning to counter their arguments. Even then, they may still disagree with you, and that’s OK. Reasonable minds can disagree. That means we don’t need to delve into the same arguments in every thread. If a comment had been addressed in a previous thread, it’s often best to reference that thread and continue the discussion there, as the topic has been covered. Granted, given the state of the game right now, that might not give us a lot to talk about. Until we do get more stuff to talk about, rehashing the same arguments over and over won’t do any good.

how does one make, keep, and better friendships? i struggle with all of these- if you're trying to make a friendship, you talk to someone, right? say hi? well after that what do you say? talk about the weather? well that's only gonna get you so far. you could talk about common interests, but having common interests means you both know what is to be known about the subject. and keeping/bettering friendships- how does that work? so far playing video games together is a pretty good way to keep a friendship, i've found, but what if the person doesn't play games? and how much should you text people, and what should you text them? because i don't know, i only text people when necessary for practical reasons, but i've been told that i should text more. I'd certainly like to text more, especially if it'll help friendships, but I don't know what to say, and when I have an idea, I'm too anxious to put it to any use- am I being annoying? if it's a question or advice, am I just selfishly using them as a resource and nothing more? and how much should I text? and how do I get out of what I call the "acquaintance-zone", where you've talked to someone, kinda know them, but not that well, especially if you don't get to see the person too much?

I never thought that on that evening in 2012 that a random game would eventually set me on a course to where I am now. Now that we are upon the eve of KSP1's great adventure, I wanted to highlight how KSP has affected me. I remember the first time I landed on the moon. At first, I was stupefied and elated at finally - finally! - succeeding where I'd failed dozens of times before. My lander parked beside me, I looked homeward to that beautiful blue and green marble - Kerbin. I was introduced to Kerbal Space Program at the age of eight. Over the course of the decade past, Kerbal has taught me the allure of spaceflight, from the celestial clockwork of orbital mechanics to the vast expanse of space. Ever since I first launched my first rocket all those years ago, I have been captivated by spaceflight. Kerbal taught me to love science, spaceflight, and engineering. It also changed the course of my life immensely. I will be attending college this year to pursue further education in physics and engineering. It is my hope that one day I will fulfill my dream of working in astronautics – a dream inspired by Kerbal Space Program. I’d like to extend my deepest thanks to the developers - the people who made Kerbal possible. Kerbal never would be as it is today if not for your enthusiasm, care, and dedication to Kerbal and its community. I’d also like to express my gratitude to the Kerbal community. Your passion for space exploration, commitment to teaching others, and infinite creativity and innovation has truly made an impact on my life. As a homage to KSP, I created a 10-minute long cinematic video montage. Go check it out if you want! (Moderators: please don't move this to Fan Works if you're considering it - the main point of this post is to talk about how KSP has influenced my life and give thanks, not the cinematic. )

Answers to some questions we had to skip over during the AMA but I still wanted to get to: Alexoff What percentage of the parts in KSP2 was created by you personally? Depends how you measure it. Effectively zero because I don’t do the asset work, by one definition. In terms of maybe inception/concepting, in the EA release I’d say I had a hand in about 10%? What is the largest part will be in KSP2? The largest part I have in my list right now is in the 80m+ size category. It’s a lot harder to measure these colony parts versus vehicle parts though… Do you participate in the creation of parts for the colonies? I participate in the concepting and design phase yes. It’s where I’m focusing a lot of my ‘thinking time’ these days. Colony parts are both similar and different from vehicles – in what they look like, how they assemble, etc. As we get to those milestones we refine our designs from player feedback. How difficult is it to add a new part to KSP2? Is there a big difference? Is it harder than creating a new part for KSP1 for a modder? Most things in KSP2 end up being more complex than KSP1. As an example at a basic level the PBR shading model that we use requires more texture maps than KSP1. That is mitigated by having access to internal tooling and a faster iteration loop (click Play in Unity rather than load the game). Stephensan is there any more concepts for more air-breathing engines like the J-90 smaller or larger There’s been team interest in larger air breather engines, but as always that’s not so simple – adding an air breather of say, 2.5m size requires us to also look at the supporting parts in that size, like intakes and cockpits, so the player can have a good experience when using those engines. That balloons the required work significantly. I would want to push out the different technologies rather than footprints first. Nuclear jets, propellers, all unlock interesting new player stories! is there gear that is going to be angled from the fuselage not straight up and down and finally more tires/wheels in the concept stage, or even remotely thought of... We definitely have people who want that on the team . LunarMetis How will the sizes of different stars be scaled with respect to Kerbol? Will they be scaled at 1/3 their real-life analogs like Kerbol and the Sun? Specific scaling of the actual meshes is less important than defining their specific insolation numbers for input into solar panel math but yeah they’ll be Kerbol-relative. How do you plan to implement proper motion of other star systems, and how do you expect that to add to the challenges of interstellar travel? Hah, interstellar travel is going to be hard enough already. Proper motion is something we need to balance carefully there. Pthigviri Hi, Chris! Im sure you've been deep in colony part design. What are your thoughts on greenhouses and simple life support with snacks for example? How do you see conveying that colonies are both real places where kerbals live and 'working machines' much the way vessels are? Honestly I don’t like basic life support (by basic I mean something like having Kerbals on a ship consume a resource). I’ve played all* of the KSP1 mods for it, and I haven’t found something that is interesting and holds my interest beyond frustration for more than a few hours – just not my cup of warm beverage. More seriously though, systems like this need to have a bunch of considerations: - They need really carefully crafted player stories. Those stories need to support lots of different player archetypes – not just advanced players. - They often should work on a carrot rather than stick-based approach. KSP has a lot of sticks right now. - They need scalable solutions that are plannable and toolable. That’s a big thing and that’s where LS gets expensive in dev-hours We have some things in the works around Colonies that ape some of the ‘results’ of life support, which I hope will get at the idea of colonies being a little more kerbal-involved than just plunking Kerbals in a command part. * I think all? It has been a while, maybe some new ones have cropped up. PDCWolf Has the concept of heating changed at any point based on the feedback posted to its thread? I read every post in the thread, which was nontrivial because it was a long and uh, vibrant thread. The short version is no, the long version is yes but… A lot of the interesting discussions sat around things that are further down the roadmap, and they provided us with a couple additional things to consider. Interestingly, the player stories we have were well aligned with the comments that I read, but the way the player stories were addressed were not unanimously approved. That’s fine – part of the EA conversation– and in particular with a lot of discussion being on items later in the roadmap, this makes me confident in the iterative model. We’ll get the basics of the system focusing on reentry stories out to everyone. We’ll evaluate how that works with the playerbase. As we move towards the next milestones, we can use the information encoded in the thread, which I’ve collected internally, to make sure we’re making choices (engineering or design-wise) in conjunction with the feedback from reentry to get good solutions. One thing that jumped out for me was that there’s a lot of talk about macro vs micro solutions. I’ll be the first to admit that the current solution is a macro solution. So future design work will probably focus on whether there’s more microscale interaction to look at. If I know the peak or average specific heat flux a vessel is gonna go through on its final orbit/landing spot, what stops me from just adding enough negative heat flux parts to counteract it? Nothing. That’s what you should be doing. Of course, it’s not really that simple. If this is atmospheric heat from going fast, adding a big radiator is likely to just increase the amount of next flux, because it has a large surface area. Most heat mitigation tools need something else too – a radiator might need electricity, which means you need to supply that, which will enforce additional constraints. Considering its possible uses on the automated logistics network, long missions, and just straight up anything that only requires time to pass, how do you balance not timewarping versus just letting things happen in ultra-fast time? These are the best questions because they’re the hard ones. Often we trend towards supporting a player path that doesn’t reward excessive timewarping, but doesn’t exclude it either. A good case study is resource extraction and deposit concentrations. There’s definitely fun in seeking out and finding the best deposit for mining. Obviously though timewarp makes that kinda moot in timing. You could just start mining a hypothetically low-grade deposit and warp for 50 days. That tells us that time and rate -based mechanics need to have more to work well. A specific example here is that a newly accessible resource should be constrained differently – challenging location, resource transport limitations, etc. We try to move the real player decisions to things that are interesting with and without time as a mechanic. Mostly hypothetical examples, but here’s a few ways of thinking of these things on top of my head: Put a locational constraint on something. If you need to do something in orbit over a specific part of a planet, make it take longer than the average orbital cycle. This might encourage a player to put a satellite in GEO orbit over that place. If you do the work to put it in GEO, you get the benefit of being able to timewarp. Use binaries instead of gradients. Does ore concentration really benefit from a really detailed gradient from 0.0001% to 100%, or can you look at it as a yes/no? Trade that, see if you’re damaging player stories with that simplification. Use supporting systems. Sure, you could mine that deposit at high timewarp. But the deposit is on a planet with a day length of 200 days, and you need power, and the area has no fissionables. How are you going to power it? If you solve this problem, it is satisfying and you get a cookie. You did the work, enjoy your timewarpable extraction! These are really big problems we look at for all of the more complex systems because hey, an interstellar transfer could be 100 years. Players will timewarp that and that’s… the whole length of a KSP1 campaign. Fun with and without timewarping like this is essential. Socraticat What are your favorite tips and tools for new modders? My biggest tip is to do what you want to do and not focus on what others want. Lots of the most creative KSP1 mods didn’t hitch themselves to any one concept of the game, and that’s what made KSP1 modding so successful. You want RO? You’ve got RO. You want to launch kerbals in a cardboard box rocket? That’s there too. You want life support? Oh hey there’s about 5 different concepts out there to pick from. Also don’t try to form a team day 1 . Get some experience, release some stuff, and the team will come to you! Tools - Blender is an amazing piece of free software, and there are a ton of good coding tools out there for the software-minded as well. It has never been a better time to be an independent purveyor of these kind of things, you don’t need to suffer through e.g. gmax or the trial version of Milkshape3D anymore. Royalswissarmyknife Is there any consideration of 1.875 meter parts Building out a whole family of 1.875m parts that includes the core stuff (engines and tanks) plus the necessary ancillaries is a lot of work and not something the team is committing to right now. Strawberry While we do know it wont be added in the short term, the team has previously been wishy washy if radiation/life support will make it into the game. Are these topics something that the team has decided wont be in the game until maybe after 1.0, something the team has a firm answer on what they want to do with but does not wish to disclose it (though if you do wish to disclose please do), or something that the team is geniunely undecided on See answer to Pthigviri about LS stuff. Radiation is a bit more interesting to me because I have a fair bit of history in mods with it, and I’ve eagerly assimilated the early concept work the team has done for KSP2. There are two tradespaces in terms of vessel design, point sources and ambient radiation that we at least nominally want to think about including. Ambient radiation is basically a time trade. How long can you spend in a radioactive environment? You can throw things like radiation shielding, storm shelters, etc but ultimately it all comes down to time to Bad Things. It’s harder to help a player to plan. You have to give them tools to determine how much radiation there is around somewhere and how to figure out how long they can spend there, etc. Point radiation is nuclear engines and reactors. This is harder to implement but is definitely relevant in terms of craft design, because it is a big part of why fictional interstellar ships look the way they do. Interestingly it is easier to model and communicate to the player because you know lots of the variables at vessel build time. One of the messy things here though is that as soon as you throw in radiation, you railroad players into building ships with nuclear engines in a very specific way. We have to craft a solution that hits a nice middle ground. See this comment. I’m candidly going to say that we don’t have the ideal solution in the bag right now – but that’s what EA is all about. I’m sure I’ll write some kinda discourse on radiation eventually for a dev blog and everyone can weigh in on why I’m wrong :P. Pokaia Are there any features you modded into KSP 1 that you are bringing into KSP2? What is your favorite? I wouldn’t want to port anything specific without a good justification, but I really want to bring in more planning tools. The only ones I built were around heat and power management, but yeah. Something like that. One of the cool things about this job is that I get to start again, so to speak, with the support of people who have been in the industry for a while. So if I want to bring in nuclear reactors, I can take my concepts from Near Future Electrical, talk to some Real Designers ™ and get their opinions on what works and what didn’t work, and make something cleaner for KSP2. Filip Hudak What are next parts that are comming into the game? Science parts! But also those gridfins we teased a while ago should appear. stoup Are there any kinds of parts you're going to be adding to KSP2, that as far as you know, weren't even really available as mods in KSP1? Some unexpected bits and bobs, maybe The entire colony loop is more or less stuff that was never really available in KSP1 mods from a system perspective. Modding KSP1 was really wide though – hard for me to say. Kalessin1 Are all parts from Your mods to KSP1 will be implemented in KSP2? Especially large solar panels, station parts & MK4 spaceplane? Hah, no not at all. I like to re-use concepts, but this is a great opportunity to start afresh and to fix some stupid things I did in development of those in my mods. Gotta somehow get more Thunderbirds in the game though. Cocoscacao Will we get all size variants for all parts? Example, hydrogen tank with the smallest radius, only has long option. Why "semi procedural" parts weren't considered, where you can select a tank and set its lenght/radius to some of the predsfined available values? You definitely have me to blame for no smaller hydrogen tanks – just don’t think they’re useful with the low density. Why wobblyness still exists? What are design choices and reasons to keep it, if there is a way to remove it? If there is indeed a way to remove it... I have a post on my thoughts about this as a player. Generally though – it’s not where we want it to be and we’re trying to figure out how to get it there. That’s extremely non-trivial, there are various posts in the forum that do a good job of explaining some of the whys. SAP KSP How advanced will the Kerbal's technology be, will there be very advanced parts such as anti-particle devices? We’ll definitely get way up there in the tech tree. I do want to keep those under wraps for now tho. Infinite Aerospace Are you able to tell us 'something' about science and career modes, there's been an alarming lack of any real information regarding the two. Well! Science mode is cool. It is designed to be a progression-based mode that takes the aspects of KSP1’s Science mode that we like and build upon them to create a solid progression experience that has higher level of agency and approachability. You can expect the return of the experiment loop, with changes, and the inclusion of a very different mission paradigm from Career. One of the fiddlier aspects of the last few months has been taking our full set of concepts from KSP2 1.0 and figuring out how they break down into the early access structure. Delving deeper, what can we expect from science mode, is it the same ‘click and reward’ setup as KSP1 or are you going for a ‘science over time’ sorta approach more akin to Kerbalism? The system as designed is independent from things like Kerbalism, but you could say there’s some concepts that aren’t dissimilar in there. It has been a while since I have played with that mod tough. We definitely want to get to more player agency in science. Instead of it effectively being mandatory to hide 4 tiny science experiments on every craft you send anywhere, we want you to make a more informed decision about what you take with you, and make the actions you take a bit more specific too. I should write a little dev blog on this. What sort of part numbers are we looking at, is there going to be the same sorta number of experiments as KSP1, or significantly more? What does that entail, are the experiments something more dynamic this time, looking at things like NASA’s GRACE mission for example? I should definitely write a little dev blog on this. Similar number, more impactful. In terms of career mode, is there a more dynamic contract system in place rather than the rather ‘rinse and repeat’ system of KSP1? There’s still going to be funding, reputation? I believe we are on record about not using the same framework there. Funding and reputation weren’t our favorite systems and didn’t have the gameplay impact we wanted. As a side question, stations and bases. Are these going to have something of a real use this time around, given that stations were limited to more or less just fuel depots in KSP1. I'm thinking more along the lines of long term research projects, with big pay-off for significant durations of time. Is there some sort of requirement to resupply the stations, perhaps required crew rotation, stuff like that? The progression we want to deliver for bases and stations mirrors IRL conceptions about how these things should work. You will start out with outposts that have limited utility – let’s call that KSP1-like. Fuel depots, maybe comms relays, etc. As you progress through the tech tree, you’ll get access to stuff that provides them with greater utility. That’s shipyards and docks, fuel factories, launch pads, etc. Eventually you’ll get the biggest parts, which are mostly focused on giving you the full capabilities of the KSC at a colony. A core piece of the utility in my mind comes with resource gathering (which is a ways off in the roadmap,) when the specific positioning and configuration of a colony becomes really important. Placing a colony with good access to progression-related resources and having easy access to heat management/power sources will allow you to build specific functions and cool vibes into each colony. Crew rotations and resupply are not currently something we would want to enforce. I hope that when we get resources and delivery routes fully operational though, that this is something modders will hit really hard because the framework of stuff like delivery routes will be there. TheAziz Pineapple on pizza or not? I don’t like it, but recently I was made aware that liking baked potato pizza was weird so I can’t really judge. Superfluous J Having done both, what do you think are the main differences between adding a part (or set of parts) to the game as a modder, vs as a paid member of the team? Accountability and justification are big. It’s easy enough to incept a new part as a generalist modder. I just say that I want it and make the time to model/integrate/QA it myself. In a professional context, that involves the use of studio resources and we have to balance that versus other work we want the staff that would be executing that work to do. A new part needs a concept, it needs artist time, it needs designer time, and it needs QA time. We have to really be sure we want a part before we do it. Pat2099 Will the salt water nuclear engine make a return? I’d like instead introduce the artisanal nuclear fresh water engine, using only the purest Vall-ian glacial meltwater and hand-centrifuged Pol-ian uranium. But yes. TwoCalories You've made several mods for KSP1 in the past. Will parts from any of those mods, like Restock, Far Future Tech, Near Future Tech, and Stockalike Station Parts make a comeback in KSP2? Never exactly, though there’s similar roles. I have a 3.75m command pod in Near Future Spacecraft that is pretty similar in role and profile to one in KSP2, for example. What was the transition like going from being a modder (or, more honestly, a pillar of the modding community) to working on the development team? It was really weird to come into the project and find pictures of my work as references in the team wiki. But it has been great. We have a really solid team working to replicate what amounts to 10 years of hard KSP1 development work. Ways to go though. Justspace103 Is the same approach to design & diameter consistency going to be applied to KSP2, similar to what you did with ReStock? This is already ongoing – we sneak in consistency work where we can depending on the team’s bandwidth. We’ve sorted at least a dozen parts since EA release. The part-ists are probably sick of my hOw’S tHe SiDe CoUnT questions. Mushylog Hello Chris Adderley. How detailed will the reentry VFX be, on the vessel's parts? Will we be able to see the heat propagate relative to what part of the ship is hitting atmosphere the most? (As in, will there be a glow on the entire vessel that spreads as atmosphere becomes more dense, in a reentry? Or will the heating visuals display in every single parts of the vessel individually?) I will leave this one completely to allow future dev communication to represent it. It’s really cool and I think the path to get to what we think is our final solution would be a fun thing to tell people about. Heretic391 What steps is the development team taking to make KSP2 accessible and appealing to new players who may not have played the previous game or are new to the genre? Obviously, the tutorialization we worked into EA will continue as we add new systems. Eventually though we want to enable players to do more with the same skill level. There’s some really big difficulty jumps in the game, and while we are more confident in the ‘get into orbit’ jump, we still need tools and strategies to tackle the next one, which I’d peg as going to another planet. After that, go to another solar system. I saw a really cool concept from the UX team about this last week which made me squeal in happiness. I hope we get to it. VlonaldKerman Can you give some more detail on the supply route system? Can you automate the construction of supply vessels, or does a vessel have to be built to assign an automated route to it? In other words, when the route is finished, does the vessel have to be intact? That system is a ways off and while I think our concepts are pretty solid, they have to survive another round of detailed design, and the EA feedback we get through that time period. So let’s save that for a dev diary later. Intactness is an interesting thing that the system does need to consider. On the one hand, we obviously want you to not crash your ship to create a delivery route. However, we also don’t want to disallow multi-stage approaches to routes. You should be able to create a delivery route with a two-stage rocket. It won’t be as resource effective as a single stage one, but particularly for routes that launch from high G or atmospheric planets, we need to have a design that eventually supports this. It is possible that this could be delivered in phases for effective development – consider a V1 of routes that focuses on single-stage-to-place deliveries and a V2 that is more comprehensive. Also, will metal to build basic rockets and methalox fuel be limited in the early game, or will there be infinite fuel on Kerbin? If so, how is this balanced against the ability to send an arbitrary number of refueling ships to a colony, as opposed to what I think you probably want to encourage, which is ISRU? If you want to create an interstellar empire based on shipping methalox light years from Kerbin, I don’t want to discourage that. That’s kinda cool and would be a big investment in player time and resources, so we would reward that by not constraining it. You’re also probably not going interstellar on methalox… so you are going to be incentivized to not do that in a particular way. Psycho_zs In KSP1 some realism enhancements can be achieved with a relatively simple MM patch, because those mechanics are already in the game, but not used in stock (i.e. engine spool up time, throttle depth limits). Are there any realism mechanics that you wanted to put into KSP2, but couldn't because of the gameplay balance? Any of those that you or somebody else sneaked in for config tinkerers to find? What are the limits of stock realism options and will there be something extra under the hood, in a space between stock and full blown mods? Yeah some of those do exist in the game. Part of that comes in the engine module that supports most of the ‘fancy’ stuff from KSP1 like spool up. As for new things, yeah I’m pretty sure there are some things we’ve asked for but not ended up using. I can’t really think of them off the top of my head. NovaRaptorTV What's your favorite part of the game to work on? I really enjoy the small part of my job that’s artistic – making sketches, concept models and stuff to pass over to the team is quite fun. I also like to make the project plan go brr, ticking off things on milestones makes me happy. M4D_Mat7 Will there be hydrolox fuel type given how we already have hydrogen as a fuel type for nuclear engines? If we get the NERV-US in that will be a need for Hydrolox there. jaypegiscool Are there going to be more design challenges implemented with more fuel tanks and such? E.g. will there be fuel tanks that don't have a centered COM? Fuel tanks are a basic component of ships that we don’t want to have players need to manage too much. There are some interesting trades about that for far future fuel types though. As we get there we’ll examine if they’re interesting to support or whether to leave it to the modding community. norminaluser Are there plans for adding nostalgia/legacy parts? aka, adding some revamps of the KSP1 parts? I mean, some old users would be delighted with these. I’d argue that anytime we have a part that comes from KSP1 it is already a revamp, so I’d be interested to understand what that actually means to you. barrackar In the upcoming Science update - does conducting experiments give you science points? Will there be a tech tree? There will certainly be a tech tree, and science points! For colonies, do we know if/how lifesupport will work? Simple colony expansion or more complicated management of individual resource routes? Will users be surveyed for whether or not we want lifesupport? See answer about life support from Pthigviri. For interstellar, will there be astronomy aspects required to detect/map the other system(s)? Fun things for the future! I can’t be more specific at this time. poodmund Why Quenya and not Sindarin, Telerin or Noldorin? Do you have something against Elves that went to Middle Earth? By the Ninth, I must know the answer. The real answer is that the corpus of Quenya is a lot more complete than say, Sindarin, so when I went to try to learn it, that’s where I went. piotr.__ What real life concept / scientific work gave you the most headache? Is there something you are really proud of, that your creations will introduce to players? Heat and radiation are the hardest concepts to map to gameplay, so I’ll say those. Every time we get a system that is showing a new scientific or engineering reality I get excited. Example - with 0.1.3’s new extensible engines, we’re showing the community that doesn’t follow aerospace precisely than extending engines exist and are useful in some ways. bygermanknight#0 (554725693590732801) Are we going to get some engines like the Orbital Maneuvering System from the Space Shuttle because the current (and only) monopropellant engine is not very liked among the community. The Puff is pretty OMS-like. I’d turn that around and say that something more conventional in terms of attachment modality is probably more useful than something that tries to ape the OMS a lot. M4D_Mat7 When will we see more interiors for the command parts? We want to fully define the IVA system and experience before we commit to more interiors so we limit possible rework. Will the team add RCS to the space shuttle front cockpit section eventually? This is not planned. suppise How do you go about balancing new engines with twr/isp/cost/size/etc? Check out the Engine Archetypes dev blog for the framework – but the overall concepts we use are related to… · Spreadsheeting versus comparables, · Looking sneakily at how mods have done things when possible, · PLAYTESTING Follow up question, with the full 1.0 tech tree, aside from cost/resources, will there be a reason to still use the basic methalox atmo/vac engines we have now, over newer engines/fuel types? Resources accessible to a colony will drive this. Say you’re mining a frozen ice ball of a planet with water ice – that’ll be something that would drive you to hydrogen engines. However, maybe you’ve got a colony on a world with trace atmosphere of CO2 – that might make methalox attractive. mgb125 I routinely exceed 150 parts for spacecraft in KSP 1, would the team consider a higher baseline for the “typical” vehicle? Do you have stats on how many parts players use for their EA KSP 2 craft? We are building our analytics pipeline to give us that data. We have lots of legacy data from KSP1 to help us in the meantime. sylvifisthaug So someone in the KSP2_general channel have pointed out that the "brass line" vacuum engines in KSP2 have some resemblance to your previous modded content as Nertea. How is the process like with implementing these similar designs into KSP2? Do you do it entirely by yourself, texturing and all? Do you do 3D models, coding, or maybe nothing? You just manage the team to do it? I do very little of those things. Effectively I… 1. Try to incept the concept and discuss its utility with the rest of the team, 2. Make sure we can support it with the engineering that has been done, a. There’s a whole side thread about when we need to ask for new gameplay functions. 3. Make concept models, 4. Hand it off to the art team, 5. Coordinate other things we might need for the model – VFX, SFX, animations, 6. Come back once we’ve got all that sorted and do the final integration into the game, and some tuning later on. If you as a team manager delegate others to recreate your parts, how does it feel to let others rummage with your own engines? To be clear, we’re not really recreating parts – when things are similar, there’s often just convergent evolution. But our art team is equal to the task!

Before Constellation, during the Shuttle era, there was talk about cislunar architectures using Shuttle, and later using Shuttle-derived vehicles like Shuttle-C. One was the Early Lunar Access concept: That (ELA) was a pathfinder for the later First Lunar Outpost: Projects like this, but with a modern take could certainly work, but the dev time would be substantial.

Calling 911 to talk about aggregate storage. (Operator: "Unless you need someone dug out of a gravel pile in a hurry, we're not interested.")

Watch your language. Y’all are gonna summon up the R demon with that kinda talk, you mark me.

RIP Ingenuity. It's not actually dead, just crippled by a broken wing From NASA Ingenuity helicopter mission on Mars ends after three years | CNN Hmm, was that divot carved out by a hard landing (or the blade itself?), or was it pre-existing? And what is that blue speck in the middle of the divot? E: It's so easy to imagine the comm dropping out as the equivalent of "Can't talk, trying to land in one piece!"

Think exporting fuel off the moon will require something more like an industrial town than an base. More so if this was set over 50 years ago so little automation. I and other talk about learning to build an base on the moon helping building it on mars. Also water at the pole was not really an thing back then. Oxygen and aluminum yes but its not very practical for an mars ship

Talk about loaded questions. My biggest gripe with the talk about performance is that 90% of all the "gains" comes from removing elements from screen. Take a look at how low graphics looked in 0.1.0 vs 0.1.4 and it's pretty damning that there's been minimal performance gains, only fidelity losses.

I like the button indicator that there is science in this region to collect. The button bothers me because its broken.. It always flashes science that nets 0 return because its not account based but kerbal based. Likewise if you had transmitted all the data but then moved your kerbal to a rescue video.. all that data is still there but has to be fully resent again. I think its just a quick work in progress. I think it would aid exploration, if all the science zones etc were listed or ? if bioms are not found, so it shows that there are more things to find on moons. Just some feedback. Also and this gets super annoying.. Observation probe in high and low orbit... STOPS but does not RESUME when running science.. so if you moved from highlands to lowlands it pauses, moving back to highlands does not unpause. Also I found running out of EC destroys the experiment. Its 6 minutes long too. Talk about a painful science experiment to get it to actually work. Oh and I've had the light indicator not glow when there is science available.. at least I can spam the button to resume science (or go to the parts menu and spam it) but if you hover on the button it shows the biom, so when it changes.. can easily just press it to return to scanning.

You can talk trivial if you want, but me with over a decade of experience in KSP, only managed to safely land on Tylo twice, once per game. And never took off of it. Probably could've done it if I sent the isru in 1, but here, I'm stuck until resources come.

There are a few things like this that need tightening up. I also just put 4 wheels on a rocket to complete that mission. Also the Laythe plane mission works if you turn on a rapier anywhere in the SOI of Laythe, even though the mission complete text goes onto talk about the atmosphere and how the plane flew. My plane was an engine on the side of a rocket nd it didn't get anywhere near an atmosphere.

It’s like they picked the worst of both worlds. Talking a lot at times but only about insubstantial stuff (amas with softball questions, dev insights into features that were supposed to come a brief window after launch) And then trying to change to a “under promise over deliver strategy” without acknowledging or wrapping up the loose ends of everything they’ve already discussed (reentry heat video was supposedly supposed to come out 11 days ago, has since then not been even acknowledged) all the while not actually delivering everything. It’s like they keep flip flopping on how much to talk thinking that’s the reason the player base is grumpy when, if the game was making progress, they could talk a lot or not at all and many would be happier. Because the communication style isn’t the reason for the backlash, the state of the game is the reason.

Hardly a deliberate tactic, just passion. Remember that a forum (or any community) is mostly made up of the most passionate people for a project, both positive and negative. Those who don't really care and just play occasionally tend to lurk at best, but usually just don't engage these kinds of spaces at all. The negative speakers are speaking out because they want to be heard - the prospect of driving others away makes that harder, not easier. And its not some effort to tank/punish/etc the developers for it, as again, the majority of people don't interact with communities at this level. They'll see the steam ratings, a few suggested and top reviews, and make a decision there. Folks are upset with the state of things, and they want to talk with other people who are upset with the state of things. Others are ok with the state of things, and they want to talk to people who are ok with the state of things. Both groups want to feel vindicated, justified in how they feel by confirming that no, they're not just crazy or stupid, others feel the same way. Some of those people just take it a bit too personally when they stumble across someone who doesn't feel the same way they do. The community ends up on defense mode, with all members wary that someone's there to tear them down for hate/hope for the project. Which in turn leads most conversations to be snippy and aggressive as everyone takes every quip by assuming the worst. The gap between the groups grows wider, and the outliers become more extreme. Back immediately following launch, the extreme positive side was "Wow this is rough but the bones are so good, they'll sort it out soon" and the extreme negative side was "Wow the games in a terrible state, how'd they think this was ok to release?". Now, six months on, the extreme positive side is more or less saying "Lol why did you expect a full price game to be any good or playable when its got the Early Access label? You're a fool if you expected anything else" and the extreme negative side is "The devs have cut and run, the ones left over can't tie their own shoelaces much less write a line of code, how hard is it to copypaste from a decade old game?". The moderate opinions and positions are still here, but frankly, nobody listens much to them lol, quirk of human nature. So long as these narratives remain so extreme and so divergent, things won't get better in the community. The devs actions will shift the dial one way or another, but from a community perspective its in the worst possible state - Maximum risk of genuine incompetence and failure in the game, and maximum possibility that its all just around the corner. Six months with minimal quality patching is extremely poor. But six months plus change to a major feature release is pretty good. Frankly, until the devs land it, flat on their face or perfectly, its going to continue to diverge. Once they do the narrative will likely unify, either to "Yea it sucks" and "It sucks but recovery narrative NMS guys", or it lands it and goes "It sucked but its turning around" and "I told you guys to stop crying, its great". But all the while, as the passionate community divides and bickers and hopes for some proof one way or another, the real danger is the quiet majority audience. They're not hanging around reading devblogs. They're not digging deep into community discussions and roadmap details and the rocky development cycle the game has. They're seeing a 29% Mostly Negative recent review score on steam, and skipping the game. They're taking a gamble, buying it, having a bad time, and refunding it with a negative review. They're folks who bought the game, tried playing for a bit, left a negative review and put the game down and probably won't come back, alter reviews if it gets good, etc. The easiest representation of this I can see is the mission reports forums for the two games. The first games one is still pretty active, with the entire first page of threads having been posted in this month. KSP2 has six threads that've been active this month, and its first page goes back to April. If the passionate forum goers aren't flying as much, what do you think the casual audience is doing? Nothing much, I'd imagine. Balls in the developers court, but the clocks ticking - This lurch period of uncertainty isn't helping any aspect of the game or the community.

I have been strongly considering some flavor of integration with EVE. However, I might implement it such that the effects lead gameplay, rather than the other way around. (that is to say, EVE could supply wind data based on the effects). Also, I don't want EVE to be the only mod that can interact with this thing. However, this is all stuff for the future. I will talk to blaccracc when the time comes. I've been working on this steaming pile of code for a while now (I actually started a few weeks before I posted this thread. This is an idea that has been living rent-free in my brain for some time now). I should be coming out with an alpha release Soon™. :3