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One thing I'm hoping for is a way to edit/add to vehicles in flight like KSP1's engineer construction mode (DLC?) Has there been any talk of this making its way into KSP2? Would it be handled by engineers or could some kind of colony building also offer something similar to vessels landed on the colony pads/runways?

If that's the case, why would they pre-emptively disappoint everybody by talking about it? Better to shut up, release it, and let the chips fall where they may. And if it's not the case, why try to describe it to a public that's not receptive to anything they say? Once again, better to shut up, release it, and give everybody a pleasant surprise. I think it's pretty obvious — the mood right now is such that anything they say will be used against them. Game systems are especially tricky because really often something that sounds fun on paper, isn't, and conversely, changes that sound bad on paper actually improve the experience (or have other benefits). Look what happened with the dev update on heating — a bunch of people immediately started screaming about dumbed-down streamlined systems that totally ruin the experience, without ever having actually experienced how it works in practice and in which situations it even makes a noticeable difference. (My suspicion is, "almost none." As in, if you did a re-entry with the old thermals and the new thermals and asked the player to guess which is which, most players wouldn't be able to tell. While on the upside it makes it much easier to compute equilibriums and handle high time warp factors.) And if they say it's deep in production and close to QA, many of you will loudly say "LIES!" and hate them even more. Summa summarum, I think it's pointless of them to even try to talk to the fans right now. Get the game right first, release a solid roadmap update or two, however long it takes, then start communicating again. The fans are going to vent their outrage regardless of what they say.

With all the talk about mk2 landers, would it be possible to use the robotic parts to incraese stability/footprint? I don't have the DLCs, but maybe it is possible for at least some extra landing legs and equipment to telescope or fold out from the fuselage

I know that it is complicated which is why I don't care about long explanations why it is complicated. So here is a RL example: You ask a politician the question how they want to prevent climate change. And the person is not answering the question how they actually want to prevent it but only starts to talk about how difficult it is and that you also have to think about industry, etc. Everyone knows that. That was not the question. The question was what they want to do. If you ask that question a politician and he is unable to say what he/she wants to do then at least I start to think that this person has no plan at all yet. And that is basically what I meant. And why I think they are just now starting to think about how they will implement the roadmap.

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.

So, let's talk about this statement shall we? You purchase a game, a small indie unity game for 19.99$ Steam, will take 30-33% of that which is roughly 6.66$ Epic waves the fee on the store and will take roughly 9%, which is just a bit under that 1.99$ If you have a publisher, they're taking anywhere from 20% to 50% (especially if you have a horrible contract) Then, Unity is charging you 0.20$ per Install.. What's the actual developer left with?

Congratulations on your discovery! Looks really cool. So a 324 ton "asteroid" hidden somewhere in the Kerbol system? Talk about a needle in the haystack

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".

Talk about exiting in style!

Lot of talk of ungulates on this board, lately

So the next KERB will come out at friday 15.09.2023? I really had to read the whole thread and all the linked discord images. What I got was: KERB is a friday thing Comes out every 2 weeks unless there is a release in the week the KERB would happen, then 2 weeks after the release Last KERB was 8/11 and now next date is 9/15 Did I get this right? And about the hint about 0.1.5 features: Is there any indication what these features are? Because usually you do not tease stuff you are not sure if you can actually deliver it. You only talk about things which you are 100% sure will come. At least that is what we do where I work. So what are the features which will be included in 0.1.5?

And water takeoff's Well we dont talk about that.

https://news.sky.com/story/libya-flooding-more-than-5-300-feared-dead-after-dams-burst-12959679 I've seen some weather enthusiasts talk about an unprecedented 400, maybe even 600 mm of precipitation in the desert areas around here - that's almost two or even ten years' worth of total precipitation in the area all at once. More than 400mm of precipitation (in 6 hours) is enough for the coastal city with subtropical monsoon climate where I live to pump three to four days of water out of the metro stations and underground parking lots. It is hard to imagine how this happened in desert cities. Whatever you think about climate change, there's really something happening in every corner of this planet.

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.

Oh no, I'm totally in the wrong for not knowing, I get that, however think for a second why didn't I know: I'm not on the discord, and even then, it seems the discord is also not the place to get the complete news about the game, and that's even if you do spend the time going back and forth tracking every message by the about 5 different people that talk officially about the game's progress, updates, and such. Plus, it's hard to think about joining the discord when considering the stuff that's allowed in there, which you know about.

My guy, you're telling me that whilst posting lost bits from the discord that unless you scroll the dev tracker every single day, you're 90% sure gonna miss. We have threads about small posts on twitter, we have threads about reddit posts/announcements, we have threads about literal discord screencaps, we have the K.E.R.B., we have Patch Notes, we have AMAs. It sure does sound like a lot, yet here we are, trying to go piece by piece to see what the heck they're doing with bugfixes because they can't bother to make complete patchnotes, or keep the K.E.R.B. updated, or talk in any sort of official manner because they canned the upnates, and they refuse to answer anything useful about the game in AMAs. I'm seeing incompetence first, with a smell of "maybe they're doing it on purpose" second.

While Jeb and DONN try to detain MJ-0, suddenly, MJ-0 transfers his robotic soul (I guess his code?) into the nearby Ranger-1! He takes control of the autopilot, and attempts to depressurize the cabin, but Val, Bill, and Bob bail out. GALE notices all the trouble and flies down in Ranger-2 to pick up the five crew members. They rush into orbit and find MJ-0 trying to dock to the Delta-19. However, DONN had taken precautions when he and Jeb left the Ranger and disabled the auto-dock sequence. MJ-0 attempted to dock manually. "MJ-0, do not attempt docking," Val radioed to MJ-0. "Do not attempt-" "Valentina?" MJ-0 said. "I don't know what Jebediah told you, but I am taking command of Delta-19, and then we'll talk about the fate of you and your friends. This is not about my life or Jebediah's life. This is about all MechJeb-kind! There is a moment-" Silence. An explosion, silenced by the vacuum of space. Ranger-1 had rammed into the Portside docking port and caused a depressurization. The Ranger crashed into a solar array and into the centrifuge habitat, which immediately depressurized. MJ-0 was now, for sure, dead. The atmosphere blasting out of the centrifuge forced the Delta-19 into a spin on its X-axis. It was also powerful enough to knock it out of its orbit. As Jeb observed the spinning Delta-19, blowing debris all over the place, epic organ/piano music starts playing. Jeb knows what to do.

Probes require commnet infrastructure, turning one launch into potentially a hundred. Even with a level 3 tracking station, you'd require the biggest antenna to talk back to the DSN, and even then you'd need other comm relays in the way to keep control all the time. The command pods being all less than 10 tons mean they're negligible as payloads and you always have control no matter what.

Reported Version: v0.1.5 (latest) | Mods: none | Can replicate without mods? Yes OS: windows 10 | CPU: Intel i5 4690K | GPU: NVIDEA GTX 1070 | RAM: 16gb When throttling up before you should, PAIGE goes beatbox mode. She can only talk when thrust is 0, but as soon as there's thrust she gets in a loop of starting to talk https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1039965578754007060/1149998890121187368/Kerbal_Space_Program_2_2023-09-09_11-24-26.mp4

We talk about this one: This is ksp1, ISRU, everything is dim, different kerbal model, different solar flare... To come back to the post, a lot of creative use of the procedural wings. I don't know if the devs thought players would have used them like that lmao.

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!

So much talk about colonies and interstellar travel. I don't want any of these if the game is in a state like this. Devs are constantly hyping what should we expect... Multiplayer Colonies Interstellar travel I think they should first assure people that state of the game is going to get better, because if until now orbits are unstable, it is impossible to build more crafts. For now, it's a single mission game (if you overcome the bugs). Somehow it frightens me how it will work all together with al the features they promised. The base game is not working well at all.

And exactly how did you arrive at that conclusion? Go check out what some of the things people who got inspired by this game have went on to do. Kinda like when I was 7 years old, my Mom won a hot air balloon ride. Now you might call it "just a balloon ride" but that day, I knew that I wanted to be in the sky...like as a career. And it has influenced many of my big decisions since. If you've got an entire village getting on someone's case because their balloon didn't break the sound barrier, I can't say anything besides the fact it's just a balloon. Not on vacation they aren't. Developers deserve vacations. It's hard to talk about a game you like or have hope for if any discussion is going to invite pessimism. Implement submillimeter precision for interstellar distances, run several systems of colonies in the background... simple, right? Here's something that's simple: drop any pre-2020 expectations because the old technical manager was out of their depth with these promises KSP 2 is still trying to reach.

If you are using the patreon volumetric clouds and not the standard ones, they are yet to be optimized and frame drops are to be expected, we aren't really allowed to talk about those here though because they aren't free yet. If not, then I really have no idea, sorry.

Speaking of skepticism, I've been doing a bit of a deeper examination than I usually do. The following is entirely speculative, wildly so even. You know how people talk about whether they ever mentioned 1000+ parts ships and such... Of course the reality is they've never mentioned any number, only hints here and there. We don't know the part budget they have in mind and they refuse to put a number on it, so speculation is sure to come up. Now, if you go around the bug report subforum, you'll see this new one (which I recommend you upvote as it's pretty critical IMO): I... couldn't really think of that as a bug, maybe inefficient or hard to scale, but not a bug: we want colonies, orbital shipyards, miners, processors, thrusting vessels and such to work whilst we're away, we also want the heat system and to work whilst vessels are unloaded... At the same time we don't have any effective way to differentiate which vessels shouldn't be part of this system: Heat buildup and such could take a really long time, so just assuming equilibrium doesn't work, thus all vessels should remain simulated. Almost any vessel could be used to thrust whilst in warp, so all of those should be part of the simulation as well. Lastly we definitely want colonies and shipyards with their logistic lines working (we know there'll be a proof of concept system so logistic journeys don't load yet another vessel in the simulation). Of course there's a lot of simplification to be made: Colonies can extract to an abstract pool of resources to not account for individual tanks (unlike ships), craft in equilibrium and unloaded can probably ignore the whole heating system, and probably a lot more that I'm missing, so the system can be reduced a bit. But still, the system is not really scalable as more craft are added... and I can't imagine how multiplayer handles it (if it even attempts to at all). Then I remembered the stuff that has been shown the whole way about colonies and interstellar, and the stuff said on the interviews about those topics. Everything hints to monolithic "One big part for a lot of stuff" pieces being the norm. Plus now procedural parts help cut down some of the main part-count wasters like wings and radiators, like this single ring part transforms like 40 into one: So, they have this seemingly inefficient system that doesn't scale well with partcounts, they're really trying to stop us from lego-ing solutions to certain stuff like we would in KSP1, and they also have a clear aversion to tell us the partcounts they're aiming for... Once again my nose picks up a sour smell.