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I wonder if performative arguments have increased, or if there is simply less substantive stuff to talk about these days, because not much new has happened. Most topics have been worn out, so what is left on the forum is a low volume of posts about an issue that’s still salient, which is the fact that the game is currently a mess. Therefore it seems as if the forum has turned negative or unproductive. I’ll make a prediction: the tedium will become comparatively less impactful once a serious feature update is released in 5 years time. (okay the last bit was sarcastic, I couldn’t help myself)

Yes xD. Though, fun fact: KSP 2 wasn’t going to be early access either until October of 2022! To me, that is one question, but another would be, “why did they pretend like it was ever going to release in 2020, or 2022, or 2022, or 2023?” (in may ‘22 they claimed it would release in early ‘23, with no mention of early access). It did not happen during COVID. In 2019, they claimed the game would release in 2020. How long should COVID extend a year of dev time? Double it? Triple it? Quadrupole it? I don’t think COVID delays were instrumental in causing this debacle. None of those posts conveyed the state that the game was in accurately. If they did, everyone would have been shocked, given what the release date supposedly was! This applies to blogs in 2019-2022, because at any given time, release was supposedly only months away! Personally I read it as two things: 1) Frustration at being lied to wrt. “KSP 2: Lithobraking near you in 2020!” Where else should vent their frustration about KSP 2? Like I said, I find substantive forum threads to be largely rant-free. Others are not. Such is life. 2) A manifestation of concern over a beloved franchise and a would-be beloved game. That is why the issue of developer/manager competence is so present- we may have no control over it so talking about it is in that sense “useless”, but people will still want to talk about it because you add the long dev timeline + repeated false statements over the course of 3+ years and you have one hell of a concerning plot arch if you’re a fan of KSP. Exactly.

We can't possibly know about the past at the fidelity we know current temperature data. We don't know, and we can't know are completely reasonable answers. It's possible to say "we think the temperature was probably in this range" where the range is pretty broad (like a decent ± range of integer °C) assuming your question only pertains to "average temperature"—a nonphysical concept in itself there is no "average temperature," it's never observed, it's only calculated, and not calculated in a simple way where anyone could reproduce the value by taking data. I would say for the distant past, we can broadly talk about climate in terms of what grew or was grown (the latter during recorded history regarding agriculture) in given regions. Really far we might have ideas about the range of habitat where different animals—say dinosaurs—could live, and that could inform us about the probable climate at that time (though much would be assumption regarding dino physiology). Bottom line is if someone shows you a graph of temperature that claims to be accurate to fractions of a degree before the very recent past, they're blowing smoke up your (this is a family forum ). All I want is some epistemic humility.

Knowing in silence is still not owning up to it, it's not explaining why, and it's also not explaining how you expect for the next years to not go the same way. Until that happens, it'll never be "water under the bridge", it's more like water flooding my village and keeping my house under water, the damage is done, they need to face the reality that damage is done, repair it, and then maybe we can talk about how velocity is good and bugs are getting fixed and development is gonna go faster and faster. There's no way I'd believe statements like those whilst the biggest elephant in the room is still there. Heck, it's probably why almost nobody outside the forum believes those statements. If I called you the things Dakota called the reddit community, I'd be out the forums for at least 15 days for insulting language. That's the minimum you get when you insult your community that way.

This is not the first such message. I remember Nate wrote about the state of the game back in the spring and all the fans immediately forgave everything. This is a very superficial confession. It's just that the game is not in the best condition, and why it turned out like that, who misled us a year ago and what was done to prevent the game from being in such a state - there is no talk about this. After all, it's not a game in a bad state, but early access without a huge amount of old and new features in a bad state.

With regards to communication, there's been a *really* alarmingly small amount of talk about 'science'. Given that it's the first major content and functionality update to KSP2, and we're sitting at six months after launch. There's been no real detail to this point of what science entails, when it's likely to come, what sort of experiments are going to included. At this point ALL of these should have been finalised for some time now or else, what's been going on at Intercept? So, if all is well and science is finalised and just getting the bells and whistles done then why not share the details with the community? It would add a much needed injection of positivity. Now all I get on Discord is just rebuttal (from fellow users), and 'its being worked on' but how long does 'its being worked on' remain applicable?

Honestly I don't care anymore. Most of the public communication is basically telling lies. I know that sounds harsh but "heat turned off because of small VFX issues" was not the truth. And nothing has changed since that. So I don't care anymore about "announcements for announcements". And i tried to be polite on the forums because what I am actually thinking is not constructive. And then they blame reddit. I have no words. I have lost all hope because 6 month+ for the most basic bugs is too much. Have fun praising the next dev-blog where they tell you why heat is hard and post some short introduction about heat. A rough draft about how heat should work should have been done several years ago. I don't even understand why they post this NOW. Honestly. A lot of stuff people comment with "nice that you talk to us" for me is like: Wait a minute: They are just now thinking about that? OMG this is bad!

Black holes don't work, it's why people asked for a bug tracking forum: if I say A is bad and don't hear anything back, then I assume nothing happened. A lot of people will say A is bad, not hear anything back and move on to another game, I'm sure that if the goal really is to see a good KSP2 somewhere down the line, then you'll easily understand how important is to receive a response when you knock (and in some cases kick) a door. Bugs got their subforum now, with upvotes and bug hunters engaging the community. Now we need CM/PR/Devs or whoever it is to engage the community as they should about the complaints that are not bugs. The apology is more about yesterday, nothing else. I can also obviously not talk about literally anyone else but me, as I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't even care about an apology, or even care about what happened yesterday. I can't talk for them. More to help people avoid what a lot of players seem to perceive as a very toxic customer vs team relationship. You wouldn't join an EA for some game that hasn't been able to put out new content in 6 months and doesn't have it on sight until end of year, whilst also still carrying release bugs and what happened yesterday. There's also the very basic fact that if you don't mess with the hornets they won't sting (not sure how this saying translates to English), what part of the community is doing is a response to what they get. Entirely a matter of perspective. I heavily disliked what Dakota said yesterday on Discord, as that's berating and provoking the community, even if you remove the botting accusations, he still went way over the line. I'm also not sure which threads you happened to visit but it is very obvious that if people are posting evidence of users harassing others, coming at them with "we have a very tight code of conduct" in their faces is not gonna be well received.

Imagine I’m working on another game which no one here has an emotional stake in. I announce in 2019 that it will release in 2020, and then I release videos of a unicorn standing around while I talk about all of the awesome things I’m programming for the unicorn to do, and there is small print at the bottom of the screen that says “Not gameplay footage.” Four years later, I release a demo of a heavily pixelated miniature pony with no wings and no horns. It runs at 5fps, and when you try and mount the horse, it wiggles around uncontrollably before igniting into flames. Remember, when this media was released, it was already after the initial full release date for the game. Many people logically concluded that they didn’t want to show gameplay, but we had no reason to expect it was just “concept art.” Again, I’m not an expert, but in your experience, are you often releasing pure unimplemented concept art a year+ after the game was supposed to release, and months before you claim that you will release the finished game? Surely the consumer is not expected to hear the devs talking about their internal build with colonies in the background of a test asset preview after the game was supposed to release because they’re “taking extra time to ensure quality” and conclude that it’s concept art? There is a difference between “not fully implemented” and “currently a 3-d object in a CAD with lots of hopes and dreams”. When they show a bunch of assets and animations while talking about what they’re going to do (and claiming they are playable in an internal build!) one naturally assumes said assets are in the “not fully implemented” category, but four years later and… I would say that as a non-super-genious-game-developer-savant, I personally was at least led in slightly the wrong direction.

I think it's only misleading if you mislead! Mockups, concept art, in-progress models, test scenes etc are a part of normal game development, and there's nothing wrong with showing them off and explaining what you're working on. It's only misleading if you show a mockup and say that it's actual gameplay. Or do you think they should only ever talk about things that are finalized and complete and ready to roll out to the public? Moreover, the multiplayer screenshots they've shown don't look like mockups at all. You make mockups to help design things, so they need to look more or less like what you think the final product will look like when it's done. The screenshots look nothing like that, instead they look like what an engineer would have running on their box when working on a feature. That's for sure! And it's certainly hard to tell what stage their multiplayer feature is right now, but the fact that they've got it in from the start is the right thing to do. I do think that "conspiracy theory" is a pretty good description of the claim that they're faking screenshots and flat-out lying about having working multiplayer at all. It would have to be a conspiracy by everybody who knows it's not true, which must be over a hundred people, and all of those people would have to be keeping the secret knowing that it's really likely they'll get caught, and when they do, it will do really bad things to their company and their career personally. It'd ruin their reputation not just with the public but also within the industry, I wouldn't consider hiring somebody who got caught blatantly lying about something like that. It's just not a done thing. Additional context: person B works in gamedev and has seen loads of mockups, concept art, test scenes, and how things look in various stages of development, while person A has only ever seen the finished product. This scenario doesn't sound plausible to me at all! I think it would be more like: Person A: There’s no way they have a clean UI but no anti aliasing yet. Prob fake. Person B: Did they say if it's a fully-functional in-engine UI or a design mockup? You really shouldn't latch onto superficial features like AA or other rendering-related stuff. They will go in when they'll get around to it. Also the people working on the UI likely won't be the same people who are working on rendering (they're different specialities), so it's to be expected that they're at different stages of readiness. When you make a game with a team everything proceeds in parallel and you will see some extremely rough bits side by side with finished or nearly finished things. So a conversation like that would be as likely as looking at a screenshot of one of the beautiful part models and going "probably fake, no way you'd see something that nice when they don't even have AA in yet." It just betrays a lack of understanding of how these things are made!

To my eye they’re the opposite. They’re very rough, with no UI and ugly placeholder info about each of the players overlaid on the scene. That’s exactly what I’d expect to see of a feature that’s in development but not close to release. If they did mock them up, why do you think they didn’t bother using the game UI as a base and pasting in some pretty multiplayer labels and controls? Scenario one: screenshots show rudimentary UI. Person a: The screenshots look fake Person b: Obviously they look bare bones- what else would you expect at this stage? Scenario two: screenshots have clean multiplayer UI. Person a: There’s no way they have a clean UI but no anti aliasing yet. Prob fake. Person b: Why would they fake this? The UI looks so advanced- if they were faking it, it would look much simpler because why bother with making it look finished? In all seriousness, I do think Alexoff has a point about the dev screenshots, at the very least in the sense that it’s misleading to show a bunch of assets and talk about all the great things you’re implementing when they are at that point just 3-D models. With respect to multiplayer, I’m not an expert, but I expect that it’s much easier to get a basic multiplayer that allows devs to be in the same world thrown together than it is to make something which has 100% functionality and stability like an actual multiplayer release. So again, it’s not really “fake” but is misleading. With regards to the screenshot at hand about heating, who knows.

Ok so I know this is quite a bit early but I wanted to start a discussion about what end game content might look like for KSP 2. I’m the kind of player who needs the game to provide me with goals to stay interested. However, in KSP 1 I usually played on science mode because the missions in KSP 1 weren’t super fun. There were a few milestone missions like Reach Duna, or task missions like Rescue This Kerbal who got stuck in orbit. But for the most part they felt tedious, like reaching this highly specific orbit, or flying your plane for about seven hours in real time to take the temperature at a specific altitude. On the other hand, just playing on science mode I tended to set out with the goal of reaching some distant planet I’d never reached before, but by the time I unlocked all the tech to get there, there no longer felt like there was much reason to go, since I’d already completed the tech tree. Plus getting to that point required about a hundred plus very similar launches from the same launch pad. Already I think there’s been a lot of talk about improving career mode so the missions aren’t so tedious. But I also want to hear what other driving forces might push us to continue to explore, even if we’ve unlocked all the tech? Some of that could just be simply improving time warp, or adding autopilot (presumably as an unlock in the tech tree), to generally reduce the tedium. If I can prove a plane can fly then time warp/autopilot it to a given location, that’s much less tedious then having to fly the entire mission in real time. Similarly I expect orbital construction will reduce a lot of tedium, since you can launch closer to your destination. Whether that’s making an interplanetary leap from Kerbin to Duna, or landing shuttles on Duna from an orbital base, not having to start every mission from the Kerbin launch pad will definitely reduce tedium, and make it easier to break the more ambitious missions into smaller more achievable chunks. Honestly this is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been excited for KSP 2 in the first place. So yeah! This might actually be a problem that’s already solved on paper. I just haven’t seen it yet since those features aren’t implemented. Thoughts? Ideas?

I wouldn't call it conspiracy theories. The developers are constantly forced to think everything for them, and I decided to think that everything that is not presented in the game on Steam or not posted on the gameplay video exists only in the form of concepts. And whether these concepts will be in the game is unclear, scattering has not been added to the game, only distant fog. So I only believe my eyes, and the screenshots of the multiplayer are extremely unconvincing, I would say that the developers seem to be trolling us with such screenshots. In a game that hundred (?) of developers are creating, they haven't added destructible buildings or banal anti-aliasing in half a year, what kind of multiplayer can we talk about?

Well, their problem is they spaced out the updates even more. This gets you more time but it further increases expectations for what your updates contain, and I’m not yet sure if it was wise of them or not. I hope they delay the patch to add more features, instead of coming up with an update comparable to what we had before when the space between them was much smaller. I have a similar feeling that they bit more than they can chew. I hope they do the right thing and leave the smart people some room to work and talk, and quit marketing nothing burgers.

Cheaty post to unbury the thread, but seriously, it would be nice to have a megathread like this to talk about lore.

YEAR 3, DAY 149 - LIBRA 3 Crew: Lebro, Malgard, Genenie After some redesigns to Libra Orbit, Jeb's Junkyard shipped us their new model just last week. This flight is quite important, as it's the first crewed test flight to dock with Kerman Station. Much like the flight plan of Nova 3, Libra 3 will spend about 10 days at Kerman Station. As usual, the flight has two pilots and one engineer, just wring out the spacecraft as thoroughly as possible. If this flight is a success, the Libra Orbit will be free for a tourist flight for Kerman Station. And there's a long line of Kerbals who want his once in a lifetime experience. While all of them are of... the higher classes, one Kerbal in administration put forth the idea of "affordable space travel". What?! Who let this guys into the meeting?! Fire him immediately! Liftoff of Libra 3! Jet engine separation. Libra 3 is in orbit (The ascent, I must say, was quite painful though. I genuinely got mad at the game, and had to take a break to cool down. That's why there's a lack of screenshots.)! A maneuver is planned out, and the Libra Orbit begins to make its way to Kerman Station. While braking at Kerman Station, the Libra Orbit ran out of fuel! Good thing it was moving slow enough that RCS could slow it down. It was quite the nerve wracking experience. But, in the end, the spacecraft successfully docked to Kerman Station. Oh yeah, and the fuel issue was fixed. The MPCF is VERY over engineered. I could just put some of the fuel from its tanks onto the Libra Orbit, and everything is perfectly fine. The station's looking... a little cluttered right now. Also, for the next 10 days it may be a little cramped. On the bright side, they have more lab assistants, and more friends to talk to. So everything may have worked out fine. We would like to congratulate Jeb's Junkyard and their engineers for their tireless work on the Libra Orbit! It has now entered the books as a perfectly functioning spacecraft, and is also perfect for providing a cheap way for resupplying Kerman Station and sending tourists into space!

It's conditioning, because most people do want the combo. You stand in a spot, listen to people say the same things over and over for hours, and automatic mode kicks in and you start punching the buttons while putting as little thought into it as possible. Not to mention there may be other things going on, especially when it's busy. When I worked the window, I also had to make sure the cooks were cooking what we needed, side items were prepped, keep an eye on the front counter, make sure the lobby was kept up, handle customer complaints, talk to one customer at the window and one on the speaker, count change, keep 4 or more different orders straight so I could verify my packer was doing it correctly, and make sure the order I was handing out the window was the right one. While filling drinks, too. Edit: Further, corporate probably has an order to try and upsell whenever possible.

A Ship of Theseus with minds. I wonder about that as well (and about people who talk about uploading consciousness to a machine, my intuition is that it's a copy, not the actual person). With something akin to Neuralink, I suppose I get around some of the issues. You start storing some memories in an external device (external to your gray matter, though it might be inside you), are those memories organically "you" if backed up, etc, when you call them forth seamlessly? Seems like they are. If you could then offload more and more brain functionality to the external device, then at some point you're walking around, and the external device might as well be you—it stops feeling like a copy, at least intuitively. This line of discussion reminds me of talking about Star Trek transporters in a dorm room, and how they are clearly killing you (my take) and replicating a copy (Ship of Theseus be damned).

Regular advertising. No whiskey commercial will ever tell you that you won't become a chick magnet without a hideous headache next morning. You need 3rd party sources. That's normal. and I'm questioning those too on occasion... It gets progressively harder because it dissolves into speculation (or even more ridiculous stuff, check a few posts above). Those with positive opinions usually end up with something like: "You can't know that yet", which is fair assessment... I can't. As an example, my biggest worry is the implementation of calculating heat transfers, electric and fuel consumption on so many active vessels. I have no idea how that can be done. There's a whole thread on it, where a few members contributed with their thoughts. I'm still in the dark regardless. Probably my ignorance on the subject. If so many people are committed to see that implemented, I guess they have some idea how. Or all of that talk is just cat urine, and the game will cease development at some point... But now we're getting back to speculation. I hope more dev diaries will be released...

Then I don't ask, how it should distinguish nail (a sharp iron stick) and nail (a finger cover). P.S. Just noticed, that it's very dangerous to talk to AI in English, "Open the chest."

Leg 10: Kermundsen -> Harvester Jeb's plane gets fixed up in a jiffy. Off to Harvester Airfield! These weirdly shaped mountains are a result of "polar pinching", where a planet's texture is distorted significantly at the poles. Back on grasslands now... Over here it's almost always sunset, so nothing special. The airfield is on the top of that plauteau... Just before landing, Jeb experiments with activating his suit parachute. But this only causes the plane to spin out, so he has to cut it. Ho-hum. Leg 11: Harvester -> Kerman Atoll Now this time, the engineers try putting the OneOscar in a tricycle configuration. Hopefully this will stop it blowing up. What interesting buildings this airport has. A observatory, many hangars, and a spaceplane hangar-thing??? How intriguing. Leaving the mountains behind me... i thought i only had one visual mod why this look so aesthetic or something? Approaching the Kerman Atoll. And yes it's a big kerbal face. This sunset has been going on a long time thanks to our speed eastwards. Jeb don't mess this up- *vine boom* Leg 12: Kerman Atoll to KSC (i hope) Well that was quick. Bye, suspiciously large airport on a tiny island! This kerbal face is so menacing up close... ] THE MUN!!!!!!!!!!!!! and besides that I'm flying blind. Jeb:Wait is that the Kola Airport Jeb: That really is the Airport. And that's the KSC! Jeb: Better not botch this up when everyone's watching. Jeb: Nailed it! Shortly after Jeb lands at KSC, he is quickly brought into the Admin building to talk to Gene. Jeb: Hey Gene, can I have my job back now? Gene: I wouldn't want to, but we would look bad if you went through all that trouble for nothing. So welcome back to the team! Please don't do anything idiotic... Jeb: Of course I wouldn't! This flying house is very safe I promise! ------------------------------------------ Big thanks to @Socraticat for the plane ideas! I guess this is the end so bye!

Granted. The thread is alive again! So alive that it grew arms and legs and can now walk and talk. (Make a Wish, and Have it Horribly Corrupted)

You're mistaking style and user experience. Making ksp2 style skeuomorphic wouldn't change a thing on its ergonomics (Well a bit on contrast), same as changing ksp1 style to a more "modern" design. That's why I said it's something we can like, because it's subjective. And no, everything in the ksp1 interface is not logical or polished. That was the point of my post, that we should talk about specific points to take the best of both worlds. (We don't even know if we are talking about the flight UI, the vab or the map view). For the improvement of ksp2 over ksp1 (that I don't want them to undo, even if some of those are really tiny things): Flight UI: The staging placement on the right: much more logical, same side in the vab and in flight (and on the same side than the MP, EC... infos) Important flight info located in one place: the navball (I don't know why those infos where separated one at the top and one at the bottom) The navball to the side: highly controversial take but I'm sorry, apart from nostalgia it makes no sense to block the view with this. At least we could change it. We can grab the throtle Fuel remaining showed with numbers Vertical acceleration is a much more readable thing (a round indicator is imo very bad) Timewarp always shown SAS controls are a bit more intuitive (and icons change when you are in a landing/launching situation), maybe a bit too big though VAB: Subcategories: that's saving lives, so much better to have things organized Size on each parts: same when I go back to ksp1 I hate that this feature is not there Craft saves pictures are bigger, it lets me see a bit more what I'm looking at Icons are more logical, coherent and polished (Also a bit bigger sometimes) Translation and rotation tools squished together Map view: Altimeter doesn't disappear when I'm switching to map view Can move the focus with the mouse (not only on a planet/rocket) The maneuver trajectory is shown and is not instantaneous: This one is less of a UI thing (I think?) but still is much more intuitive that way. Orbit tesselation (Dev diary about that: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/201736-developer-insights-9-–-orbit-tessellation/) No need to double click to focus, but right click and click on the button "focus": I think it's better because you're not missclicking and we can focus on our vessel without shortcut. (I went back to ksp1 and omg I can't focus on a planet easily) SOI displayed The UI intercept icons are better for colorblind: This one is not quite perfect because it's actually confusing to know what 1A and 2A means, but I suggested a better solution here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/215896-intercept-ui-indicator-is-confusing/?do=findComment&comment=4265820 which was improved by Kavaeric (last link of this post)). I wanted to mention this because in a UI we also think about accessibility (and not just make it an option), contrast also falls under that. For the things that ksp1 does better: Flight UI: PAW obviously (but I want both because the PAM is sometimes useful; as linked in my original post: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/218109-bring-back-ksp1s-paw-menu-system-alongside-ksp2s-current-pam-menu-system/) Smaller white space in the PAW (The PAM in ksp2 has too much white space) VAB Info per stages (TWR my beloved) When we grab thing for staging, it's more clear what you grab (It follows your mouse) Map view The DeltaV remaining in the maneuver is shown More saturated orbit colors Most of what I want is here and I won't list them all (Even if it's not all of what ksp1 does): https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/217412-uiux-suggestion-patched-conics-ui-proposal/ Note: I probably forgot a lot of things (Making a UI is hard). I didn't necessarily state features that were missing from ksp2 which can still be added easily without changing the UI (like a maneuver editor) so you would maybe want to add some things in the "what ksp1 does better". I also didn't mention bugs because those are not intentional and are meant to be in the bug reports forum and it's not relevant for the suggestions forum. (Like the maneuver clipping through planets or the PE missing on different SOI). Finally some of the things are not strictly UI. That's how I want to hear about the UI: precise point. Then we can discuss what's specifically wrong. We can't guess what people are talking about when they say "The UI is bad".

Take away... all of human history. So the counterfactual with no atomic bomb research involves no WW1, am I right? In which case fission is discovered and people understand the implications (power/bombs), but no one works the military angle because Kaiser Wilhelm II (he died in 1941) has no military interests, nor does the crown prince—who was kinda hoping Hitler would restore the monarchy, so... nah, he's all in for peace, he probably turns Germany into a hippie commune or something. Without WW1, Ludendorff doesn't send Lenin to Russia. There's likely no revolution precipitated by the terrible losses in WW1 in the first place, so the Tsar is still around, least til he expires naturally. Unsure who follows, his son was not very healthy. Archduke Franz Ferdinand presumably never gets killed, or are we assuming WW1 doesn;t start for some other reason? So his son now head Austria-Hungary I guess. Europe is still the "Diplomacy" map—but totally peaceful. For reasons. And somehow the Japanese, run my militarists after the Meiji Restoration—interested in chemical and even bio-warfare have no interest, again, for reasons. Sorry, they are inevitable. Not if, when. That's all that changes. The US started because they thought the Germans were working the issue—having just discovered fission. That the Soviets did the same is unsurprising. The Germans might have had more luck had they stolen from people working harder on it (espionage), too. The reality is that fission bombs are not hard to conceive of, the stumbling block is the materials. As soon as people try for the peaceful use for just power, they will get bomb grade stuff as "waste," so bombs are inevitable. Yes, I am counting air attack. I was explicit in saying the Japanese Empire was under attack, not Japan (though they had been bombed, once). Japan (meaning home islands) was impacted from the start (not huge in 1942, but increasing over time). They imported all their oil (80% from the US before the war), and most other inputs into their economy. The war started to capture the Netherlands East Indies—for oil. They succeeded, but they never had a large enough merchant marine to supply themselves on their own, and they started a war with... everyone. Then the US submarines of course waged unrestricted warfare on their merchant shipping. This was incredibly effective, though the sinkings right off the coast of Japan were minor to start. Much of their wartime supply came across the Sea of Japan from China, though, which kept them going until our subs owned those waters as well. Japan would need to literally mine Uranium from somewhere they controlled, this was likely a huge limiting factor. Not to mention they just had so few other resources. Minus ww2, do they still occupy much of China, or does our no WW1 counterfactual result in a peaceful Japan? Japan had already lost long before, but they refused to surrender. The bombs absolutely worked, and precipitated surrender. For many years histories would show that Japanese diplomats were cabling home saying they should negotiate, and that they tried to talk to the Soviets. Books before 1996 lack some of the declassified codebreaking information—now we know what the replies were from Tokyo. In short, "No negotiation until after we bleed them on the beaches." (paraphrase). We might have put off the invasion, and merely burned their cities to the ground the "old fashioned way" (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had only been spared as test targets). They still burn, it just takes more sorties. Course the Soviets then invade Manchuria, and the IJA forces in China that had a fairly calm war, then get clobbered by 1945 Soviet power, which would make their previous interaction with the Soviets look like a garden party. They would have likely been killed to a man by the Soviets, just as the Marines had to kill virtually all (they rarely surrendered), so would the Soviets. Only in fixed, old fashioned land battle, no islands... real TANKS (which the IJA lacked and were kinda terrified of). Also artillery. The Japanese were incredibly weak on artillery. So the Soviets grab up much of China, and the US has to invade Japan (which was planned—read Downfall, if you haven't, great book).

3 cores, three times the number of sensor limits that could be violated. I also think talk of reusability limits being violated is premature. Also, the centre core is never before flown and the side boosters have flown twice. This falcon heavy is a rookie by falcon standards. It could be they've recently encountered a new fleet issue that they're currently keeping an enhanced eye on, or it may be a higher number of scrubs right now is just dumb luck.