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KSP 1.12.x Kerbal Atomics [1.3.4] Last Updated August 18, 2024 This part pack is designed to provide some new nuclear thermal rockets for your spaceship-building pleasure. There are eight new engines, one in the 3.75m size class, four in the 2.5m size class, two in the 1.25m size class and one in the 0.625m size class. They are fuelled with LiquidHydrogen, and in some cases can use Oxidizer to boost their thrust at the cost of specific impulse. Liquid Hydrogen is less dense than liquid fuel, so for the same Delta-V, you will need more tank volume. To store your liquid hydrogen fuels, I've provided ModuleManager/B9PartSwitch configs that allow you to change the contents of stock tanks between LF/O, LH2/O, LF, O and LH2. These should work with most mod tanks, but no promises. However, Liquid Hydrogen is very temperamental and without the proper storage it will slowly evaporate ("boil off"). Therefore, I provide special cryogenic tanks bundled with the mod, that use a small amount of Electric Charge to stop the evaporation. This mod is designed to synergize well with Cryogenic Engines, and with the various Near Future Technologies mods I make. It is also fully integrated into the Community Tech Tree. Full Screenshot Gallery Frequently Asked Questions Q: RealFuels support? A: Talk to RealFuels people, not my issue. Q: Oxidizer isn't LOX, it's something else! A: You are completely free to do whatever you like and change it Q: How do I stop the engines from using LH2 and use LF instead? A: Install the NTRsUseLF patch in the Extras folder. Q: Why can't I refuel the Emancipator? A: It's a cheaty engine. It has a disadvantage. If you want to refuel it, you need to download NF Electrical and install the high complexity reactor integration patch. Licensing All code and cfgs are distributed under the MIT License All art assets (textures, models, animations) are distributed under an All Rights Reserved License. All bundled mods are distributed under their own licenses. Download Mirrors Primary (SpaceDock) Secondary (CurseForge) Tertiary (GitHub) Issue Tracking and Source If you appreciate this project, please consider contributing to my caffeine addiction! I really appreciate it, and also helps justify this time sink to my wife , which results directly in more models.

Chapter 3 This is Walter Kerman reporting on the great day when we finally blow, er blast, er launch a Kerbal off the ground in a rocket. On arrival at the launch pad we were surprised to find that the rocket in front of us was essentially the same rocket as the test of the Flea booster, simply flipped over and a small parachute added to the top. This rocket is the first model of the Halifax rocket, the Halifax class A. The Halifax family of rockets are planned for flight up to low orbit over Kerbin. A new rocket family will be designed once we begin to move beyond low Kerbin orbit. When asked about the lack of landing gear or larger parachutes we received the following quote from Gene Kerman. "Additional parachutes and landing gear would increase the weight of the rocket which would require more fuel to reach the target altitude. As the Mk1 Command Pod has no life support, we are also testing how well our space suit works in the upper atmosphere, before later flights reach into the vacuum of space. Bob has assured us that the rocket engines have sufficient strength to handle touchdown under the parachute on this flight." Gene was further asked what the primary mission objective was for this first launch. “To get it out of sight,”* responded Gene. It is most fortunate this project is being led by the greatest engineering minds of our time. The rocket was named by Jebediah, the Freedom Three.** Freedom was chosen as this is the first step to free Kerbals from the bounds of Kerbin’s gravity, to bring us out to space. The official word is Three was chosen to honor the first three Kerbalnauts, Jebediah, Bill and Bob, though some have noted the command pod is the third one to be produced by the Kerlington Model Rockets and Paper Products Inc. As the countdown reached ten minutes to launch our crew moved to set up coverage of the pad for this historic launch. However before our cameras were set up to capture this moment, the rocket roared off of the pad and disappeared from view. Once our cameras were finally set up we were able to record the aftermath of the flight returning to Kerbin. In conversations with Bob afterward he revealed that the calculations used to determine the strength of the rocket engine used data from engine tests. In these tests the forces were spread across the entire bell of the nozzle. During the launch the force of the booster overcame the command pod’s reactor wheels to a small extent, resulting in an unexpected landing arc. When the force of touchdown was concentrated on one edge of the nozzle, the engine collapsed and detonated the remaining unburnt firework powder in the booster. Fortunately the command pod was strong enough to withstand the explosion. The goo container also survived, giving researchers interesting data about the goo's use as an explosion absorbing material. The mission produced new World Firsts records in top speed of a rocket (over 250m/s), highest altitude of a rocket (over 7,000m), and safe return to the surface of a launched rocket and crew. The launch also completed a contract for World Firsts to launch the first Kerbal piloted rocket. 7.7 units of science were gathered to be analyzed by our scientists, including data on how the goo jiggles and wobbles while flying. Our inside sources tell us that the next launch will be delayed for some time while Jebediah’s researchers ponder safely returning the command pod without risk of booster explosions. Bill discussed thoughts on the goo’s reaction to the explosions to help with designing a larger booster, with the capability to reach into space. Until next time, this was a Walter Kerman report. *Quote from a NASA (NACA?) project manager. https://www.planetary.org/articles/20180412-funpost-funny-thing **Based on the first Mercury rocket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_3 Jebediah Chronicles - Day 15 Gene recommended each astronaut record their thoughts after each mission to help think over how the mission went, how the space program could improve, and how the astronaut could improve. Seems like a good idea given how the aircraft flight testing program went, the number of Kerbals we’ve lost over time. Hopefully these logs never get out as it would shatter my image of a cocky test pilot. The first flight was a success, at least that is how Gene is recording it. The rocket met all of its goals and we brought back a good amount of science. Yet the unplanned failure of the booster on landing, the parachute just didn’t slow the rocket down enough for a safe landing. We were lucky the pod held up to the explosions. I was lucky. And the testing of the booster on the pad could have pancaked the command pod. Did Bill really think this test method was a good idea? I need to talk with Bill and Bob about how to safely land after a launch. Some way for the parachutes to slow the descent more, maybe drop off the weight we don’t need for the landing. Also need to come up with a test stand that lets us perform tests in a safer manner. Especially as Bill comes up with ways to make larger boosters. Not sure how I could improve myself after this mission, I had very little control over anything as the rocket just went up and back down. Best I can do for now is to keep up the confident front for the sake of the program. - Jeb.

(I'm late as hell, I know) Awesome to see one of my favorite threads reborn! Something I love about Beyond, which it has over my threads, are how alive the characters and space program feel. I've attempted to do this as well with dialog and such, but I think I've done a really bad job (I will talk a little more about this in my next DIRECT post including that going forward I will attempt keep it just about the architecture as I feel I am the best at that), compared to how well you've done it! I also love the idea of the format of each post evolving to have the appropriate theme for the time period, that's awesome! Godspeed, Beyond!

That legacy being a dead IP and (as of writing this) the 39th worst reviewed game on Steam of all time. I'm not bringing this up to discuss review bombing or to make anyone feel bad about what KSP2 means to them. Everyone has the right to love or hate this game. But, as time allows us to look back we can see that the overall legacy of KSP2 for most people (outside of our tiny circle of die-hard fans) is shaping up to be a cautionary tale for consumers. KSP is now known to most not as a fun space sim game but rather as a symbol of poor practices in the modern gaming industry. The damage this IP has received from KSP2's development (and the recent lack thereof) can only be harmful. How bad? Time will continue to tell the further we go. But even at the peak of its success KSP was still an indie-level game meant for a niche audience. Add on the "baggage" of KSP2's current reputation, reviews, and the product itself... I just don't see a way any company or player community can redeem KSP2. Blame the publisher, the dev team, the fans - it doesn't matter to me. What does matter is that as the dust has now settled it is clear to see that KSP2 was an overall failure that has greatly hurt the franchise's chances of further existing in the future. Looking at the larger impact this game has had in the world of video games, KSP2's legacy is one that I strongly resent. (thx for coming to my TED Talk rant)

Chapter 2 This is Walter Kerman with an in-depth look into the testing involved and development of the first piloted Kerbal rocket. Welcome to the Kerbal Space Center, the facility developed by Jebediah Kerman as the first facility on Kerbin dedicated to spaceflight. You will travel alongside us as we are provided unprecedented access to this new facility. “You!” exclaimed a Kerbal moving quickly toward us. “You are Walter Kerman, the journalist!” Um, yes I am, and you are? “Hello Walter, I am Walt!” What can we do for you Walt? “It's about what I can do for you Walter!” Walt grabbed my hand and dropped a handful of dust into it. “What is this?” Dust? “Exactly!” beamed Walt. “Nearly everything we know about how Kerbin was formed can be found in rocks in dust. There is limitless science in that handful of dust! “The KSC will be launching Kerbals higher and further than ever. They will be performing science observations and measurements and bringing back samples from their travels. “Just think, dust and rocks from the Mun and Minmus! Everything we have learned from Kerbin we can learn and more from rockets launched from the KSC! “People need to be told! Exciting times are here and people can participate by following the space program and encouraging companies to provide contracts to help the KSC launch rockets higher and further!” Um yes, thank you Walt. “Thank you Walter!” Walt rushed off as quickly as he arrived. Our team scoured the KSC personnel records as I talked with Walt. It seems he is the head of public relations for the KSC. He certainly is enthusiastic about his job. Next we visit the Vehicle Assembly Building, known as the VAB, is where our rockets will be assembled, and then rolled out to the launch pad. Ah! Here we have Bill Kerman working hard on the command pod that will protect our Kerbalnauts while traveling through space. Bill is our expert engineer, who will be taking the scientists’ ideas and turning them into real equipment for the space program that the ground crew will then assemble into rockets. Bill! What can you tell us about the work you are doing here! “Hi Walt!” exclaimed Bill in a high squeaky voice. It’s Walter, I am not your public relations officer. “I’m working on the Mk1 Command Pod,” Bill’s voice continued to be very high and squeaky. “The pod uses reaction control wheels to control its orientation during flight.” He pointed up at the top of the Command Pod. “A Mk16 Parachute slows the pod’s descent enough at sea level to ensure no damage to the equipment aboard the pod. The only issue we’ve had so far is the little cone shape refuses to maintain air pressure, so the pilot will need to wear a space suit while outside of the atmosphere.” Thank you Bill, that was very informative. Um… why is your voice so strange? “We have a small helium leak,”* squeaked Bill. “It's fine, completely harmless to the pilot.” Alright then, ah we have Wernher von Kerman nearby. Wernher developed the original rocket designs and has been working on bigger and better rockets for the future of the space program. Wernher! What can you tell us about your latest rocket design? “It will free Kerbals from their remaining chains,” Wernher said without looking up from his schematics. “the chains of gravity which still tie us to this planet. It will open to us the gates of heaven."** Hmm, not quite what I meant, but an interesting statement to contemplate. The ground crew is working hard at setting up the manufacturing lines for rockets. The lead of the ground crew tells me they have enough personnel and space to produce one small rocket every two weeks. Wernher has theorized about the design of large and extra large sizes, which would currently take four weeks and eight weeks to construct respectively. The ground crew has proposed two vehicle assembly building upgrades that can each double the speed at which rockets are constructed. We should move on to the science lab. Here we have Bob Kerman developing the future technology that will allow Kerbals to travel deeper into space. Let us listen to one of our great scientific minds at work. “Report communications quality,” Bob said to the electronics laid out before him. “<skirt> he <snikt> ve <crackle>,” emanated from a speaker. “Oh for Kerbol’s sake,” Bob adjusted a few knobs. “Can you hear me now?” “<crackle> wha <snikt> ing <skirt>,” the sounds from the speaker seemed even worse than before. “To Moho with this,” grumbled Bob, putting his head in his hands. I am told that radio communications will not be important to the missions until a rocket reaches orbit. I am sure Bob will soon work out the issues he is encountering. The program is already making notable strides in science, with experiments on a Mystery Goo and Kerbalnauts practicing scientific reports on the ground already producing 3.4 units of science. Bob has informed me this science data is already being applied to better rocket technology. Next we will visit mission control where they are preparing for operation of the many rockets that will be traveling to the various bodies in the Kerbol system. Gene! What is the latest in preparations for all of the space flights you will be organizing! “No time to talk now,” Gene held his microphone away as he spoke. “All of the computer stations in the command center came with Windows installed! We have to get Kubuntu running on all these stations before we can properly track spaceflights.” Too much is happening in the command center right now. I am told Jeb is at the launch pad running a test of our first rocket engine. This should be very exciting to observe! Here we see the test stand for the RT-5 Solid Fuel Booster. This booster is nicknamed the “Flea” for its small size. The booster was found discarded after a fireworks show, packed with extra fireworks explosives, and adapted to mate with a Mk1 Command Pod. This configuration provides enough thrust to blast a single Kerbal into the upper atmosphere. First, however, the booster needs to be tested to ensure it will safely launch our Kerbalnaut. Jebediah has determined the best method is to test the booster inverted to avoid accidentally launching the rocket into the air, as one of the competing space programs had occur in a recent test.*** The Mk1 Command Pod is attached for full control of the booster, as well as a test of the structural integrity of the pod. Jebediah is very confident the pod will not be squashed like a pancake during the test. We would love to provide you a live interview with Jebediah as preparations continue before igniting the booster, however all communications have been hard wired to the pod, with the Kerbal Space Center providing video only data from the pod. We are told this is to perform testing without worrying about EMI effects. However our directional microphones picked up Gene Kerman muttering something about keeping Jebediah from saying something dumb while hyped up for igniting a booster. And we have ignition of the booster! You can really feel the roar of the booster in your chest as it burns like an oversized bottle rocket! The test seems to be progressing well as Jebediah looks very pleased. Wait, Jebediah is exiting the rocket. He seems to be deploying something on the ground as the test completes and echoes of the booster’s roar continue bouncing off the distant mountains. IV Ah, it seems Jebediah has found a way to communicate despite the radio lock out from KSC. It seems our Kerbalnauts are as excited as we are about the space program moving forward. With the completion of the booster test, my understanding is in two weeks time the first complete rocket will finish assembly on the launch pad and be ready to lift Jeb into the upper atmosphere. Until next time, this was a Walter Kerman report. * Not sure how things can keep getting worse for Boeing products. I hope this little reference does not turn tragic. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/nasa-considers-keeping-boeing-astronauts-space-station-february-rcna165587 ** Quote from Wernher von Braun. https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/283265.Wernher_von_Braun# *** Accidental launch of Chinese rocket from test stand. https://www.space.com/space-pioneer-tianlong-3-rocket-accidental-launch IV Mangled Alan Shepard quote. https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/alan-shepard-freedom-7

История разработки KSP 2: что мы знаем? Эта история разработки KSP 2 является пересказом этого видео. Всё расследование и изыскания провел ShadowZone и вся информация, упомянутая здесь, является спекулятивной и не должна восприниматься как факт. Спасибо ShadowZone за нейтральную позицию и непредвзятость при исследовании. Имена, названия и важные события выделены жирным шрифтом. Полные названия сокращены до аббревиатур и упомянуты в скобках для дальнейшего облегчения чтения. Проблемные места в данной истории помечены «❗». Все пометки отражают только мнение автора статьи или переводчика. Данная статья является вольным переводом. Перевод выполнил atomontage. Прошу указывать как автора перевода, так и автора исходного расследования (ShadowZone) при копировании данного материала. Оригинальная статья находится здесь. Подготовка к производству, 2017 – 2018 (Star Theory) Take Two (T2) выбирает Uber Entertainment, позднее переименованную в Star Theory (ST), в качестве разработчика Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2) T2 выделяет 2 года и $10 миллионов ST на разработку KSP 2 Управляющий студией Джереми Эйбл, владельцы ST Боб Бэрри и Джонатан Мэйвор (в дальнейшем «руководство ST») предполагают, что этого достаточно. План руководства ST на текущий момент предполагает перевыпуск KSP 1, что подразумевает использование оригинального исходного кода, его полировку согласно современным стандартам, добавление графики, нового контента и продажу как новой версии. У креативного директора Нэйта Симпсона видение несколько шире: полное переосмысление игры, а не простой перевыпуск, запланированный руководством ST Это включает в себя межзвездные полеты и колонии На текущий момент Нэйт уже давно играет в KSP У Нэйта Симпсона получается согласовать с T2 свое видение игры ❗ Несмотря на это, выделенных сроков и бюджета на реализацию данного видения игры уже недостаточно Это рассматривается как начало каскада проблем для разработки KSP 2 На текущий момент единственным инженером в проекте является главный инженер Чак Нобл, опытный программист со степенью в отрасли аэрокосмической инженерии ❗ T2 сохраняет разработку KSP2 в полном секрете Это вынуждает команду ST заниматься поиском и наймом новых сотрудников в дополнение к своим прямым обязанностям, тормозя разработку Команде ST не разрешается сообщать кандидатам о том, над какой игрой идет работа, в каком жанре игра и что из себя представляет геймплей ❗ Из-за ограничений по бюджету получается нанять только несколько неопытных junior-разработчиков (начального уровня); опытные senior-разработчики будут со временем также наняты, но намного позже Все разработчики, кроме одного, никогда не играли в KSP 1 ❗ Junior-разработчики хотели создать KSP 2 на Unreal Engine вместо Unity. Однако, руководство ST приказало придерживаться оригинального исходного кода KSP 1 и движка Unity Как следствие, ранние прототипы KSP 2 имели графику и интерфейс первой части Ранняя разработка, 2018-2019 (Star Theory) Изменение целей: колонии, межзвездные полеты и мультиплеер теперь являются обязательными фичами ❗ Весна 2020 года объявлена команде в качестве даты выхода. Обсуждению не подлежит. Это вызывает напряжение и стресс у команды, что могло спровоцировать некоторые неверные и поспешные решения ❗ Решение руководстваST «впихнуть невпихуемое» (все заявленные фичи) в код KSP 1 стоило команде огромного количества времени По оценке работавших над проектом на тот момент людей это решение стоило команде приблизительно один год потраченного времени против написания кода с нуля Мультиплеер оказывается несовместим с текущей кодовой базой KSP 1 ❗ Любой контакт со Squad (разработчиком KSP 1) строго запрещен (вероятно, по решению самой Squad, прим. пер.: ссылка ведет на официальный Discord-сервер KSP 2 https://discord.gg/interceptgames , может не работать для тех, кого там нет) В итоге помочь разобраться в коде KSP 1 некому и команда вынуждена исследовать его самостоятельно Разработчики KSP 2 с удовольствием связались бы с коллегами из Squad, но из-за страха потери работы не стали рисковать ❗ Страх оказывается оправдан: один разработчик из ST уволен из-за того, что ответил на вопрос сообщества ПОСЛЕ того, как игра была официально анонсирована. T2 утверждает, что это было «неправомерное раскрытие информации» и что «взаимодействие с сообществом это задача Издателя, а не Star Theory». В конечном счете заявленные фичи и в частности мультиплеер оказываются непреодолимой преградой и разработчики осознают, что потребуется переписать огромную часть кода, чтобы реализовать видение игры Нэйта Симпсона. ❗ Такой подход не понравился правлению ST, которые не понимали, почему это нужно сделать На этом этапе предполагается, что разработка теперь ведется с нуля T2 одобряет все больше решений ST по части дорожной карты разработки; близкие к таким встречам люди не ожидали этого ❗ Предполагается, что наиболее вероятной причиной такого развития событий является тот факт, что ST убедила T2, что они «сидят на золотой жиле» и работа ведется над «культурным наследником Minecraft» Эти утверждения приводят к тому, что T2 начинает рассматривать кербалов как свою версию «миньонов» (желтых созданий из мультфильмов серии «Гадкий я»); постепенно планируется сотрудничество с производителем игрушек Нэйт Симпсон пытается угодить как T2, так и существующему сообществу KSP в стремлении сделать игру более доступной для новой аудитории и расширить базу игроков, сохранив при этом основные механики KSP 1 ❗ Руководство ST покорно соблюдает секретность, предписанную Т2; одной из причин этого является стремление оградить игроков KSP 1 от «вмешательства» в работу над продолжением Они явно не хотели, чтобы ветеран KSP 1 и известный ютубер Скотт Мэнли внес какой-либо вклад в разработку Еще одна причина секретности - плохая репутация Uber Entertainment (нынче Star Theory) из-за предыдущих ее игр ❗ Причиной, по которой T2 так долго хранила молчание о проекте, очевидно, являлось желание избежать конфликта с сообществом, пока не стало слишком поздно На данный момент из-за полного отсутствия участия извне креативный директор Нэйт Симпсон является, по сути, единственным человеком, который принимает решения по игровому процессу Несмотря на то, что Нэйт разработал свою первую игру в 13 лет, он не является инженером. Однако, у него есть степень бакалавра искусств (люди, работающие над игрой, описывают его как «очень визуального человека») ❗ Из-за этого огромная доля внимания была уделена визуальной составляющей игры, что, в свою очередь, порой приводило к тому, что фундаментальные решения по игровым механикам и процессу отходили на второй план Нэйт иногда слишком увлекался микроменеджментом отдельных элементов игры (о чем он позже признался в интервью), одним из которых была т.н. «макаронность» ракет (их неустойчивость и гибкость) Еще до переписывания исходного кода было установлено, что оригинальный исходный код KSP 1 в состоянии поддерживать куда большую жесткость ракет с сохранением возможности разрушения соединений под высокими нагрузками ❗ Нэйт был убежден, что «макаронность» ракет, разрушение креплений и решение связанных с этим трудностей - весело. Он принимает исполнительное решение оставить это в игре Несмотря на сказанное выше, все, с кем разговаривал ShadowZone (SZ; прим. пер.: проводивший данное расследование человек), будь то разработчики или авторы контента, общавшиеся с Нэйтом, считают его ярым фанатом KSP, который в глубине души заботится только об интересах сообщества при принятии решений. Периодические разногласия между ним и разработчиками последние объясняют неопытностью Нэйта в аэрокосмической отрасли, а не злонамеренным умыслом ❗ Эта неопытность в сочетании с желанием Нэйта расширить аудиторию игры за счет новых игроков в некоторой степени привела к обратному результату и уменьшило возможности игры служить учебным пособием для людей, увлекающихся аэрокосмической техникой и космическими полетами, а также в целом снизило приоритет реализма во время разработки KSP 2 официально анонсирована и анонс был встречен крайне тепло. Датой выхода назначен следующий год (2020) Такие авторы контента как Скотт Мэнли, Мэтт Лоун и SZ впервые привлечены к работе «Враждебное поглощение», 2019-2020 ST наконец нанимает опытных разработчиков. Переписывание кода закончено лишь наполовину ❗ К этому времени становится ясно, что установленная дата выхода (весна 2020) недостижима. Несмотря на этот факт, руководство ST ясно дает понять команде разработки, что дедлайн и ключевые фичи игры (колонии, межзвездные полеты и мультиплеер) обсуждению не подлежат Чак Нобл, единственный разработчик со стажем, кто был в проекте с самого начала, покидает команду Владельцы ST Боб Бэрри и Джонатан Мэйвор начинают переговоры с T2 о продаже им студии, которые к концу 2019 года уже идут полным ходом ❗ Конец 2019 года: переговоры с Take Two срываются и Star Theory теряет проект. ❗ Владельцы ST Боб Бэрри и Джонатан Мэйвор поднимают цену в последний момент, делая ставку на то, что T2 готова скорее купить студию, чем искать другую для работы над KSP 2, что сделало бы их мультимиллионерами В ответ на это T2 отозвала интеллектуальную собственность у Star Theory и начала попытки переманивания сотрудников, предлагая всем членам команды перейти к ним и продолжить работу над проектом ❗ Отчасти из-за полного отсутствия эмоциональной привязанности к франшизе KSP у большинства инженеров (на тот момент они еще не играли в KSP 1) и отчасти из-за нежелания T2 согласиться на более выгодные условия работы попытка найма в основном провалилась. Изначально лишь 4 инженера перешли в новую студию, которая в дальнейшем станет известна как Intercept Games (IG) ❗ Со временем в новую студию перешло порядка 20 человек, но в большинстве своем это были разработчики без опыта, художники и производственный персонал, что снова привело к формированию небольшой неопытной студии Star Theory удалось оставаться на плаву на протяжение лишь нескольких месяцев, но в итоге из-за отсутствия идей новых проектов для издателей (предположительно из-за пандемии COVID-19, что привело к отмене выставки, в которой студия планировала принять участие), что привело к скорому закрытию Технический директор Пол Фурио присоединяется к недавно созданной IG с миссией по восстановлению команды разработчиков и налаживанию процессов, которые позволят KSP 2 добиться успеха. Тернистый путь к Раннему доступу, 2020-2023 (Intercept Games) ❗ T2 требует от IG сохранить старый и сломанный код Star Theory и работать с ним вместо того, чтобы начать с нуля По-видимому, такое решение было принято по той причине, что T2 чувствовала дискомфорт из-за нужды вновь переписывать код «Сломанность» кода Star Theory - вопрос дебатов и дискуссий Человек, работавший над проектом в Intercept Games, так прокомментировал код Star Theory: «у них нет шансов что-либо выпустить с таким кодом» Человек, работавший с проектом в Star Theory, напротив сказал, что будь у них еще немного времени, все получилось бы. Однако, этот человек согласен, что было бы лучше, если бы IG начала с нуля, но не из-за качества кода, а потому что команда новая и у нее нет никакого контакта с разработчиками KSP 1 В целом все, с кем говорил SZ согласны, что запрет начать с нуля являлось неверным решением Тот факт, что разработка не была начата с нуля, означал, что мультиплеер остается крупнейшим вызовом на пути к полноценному релизу В одном из интервью с Нэйтом Симпсоном казалось, что у KSP 2 уже есть работающий мультиплеер, когда он сказал «мы тестируем его внутри студии и я никогда еще не слышал, чтобы люди так громко смеялись». Судя по всему, речь шла о мультиплеерном моде к KSP 1. Однако, также стоит заметить, что в KSP 2 также была зачаточная форма мультиплеера, унаследованная от ST. Но он был полон багов, далек от стабильности и тем более выпуска в свет. ❗ На этом этапе мультиплеер оставался второстепенной задачей в то время как основное внимание по-прежнему уделялось визуальной составляющей. Мультиплеер все еще не был заложен в геймплей и архитектуру игры и это являлось проблемой на данном этапе разработки Однако, за этот период разработчики добились некоторого прогресса; более поздние сборки позволяли нескольким игрокам находиться в одном мире и вместе запускать ракеты Через несколько месяцев после выхода игры в ранний доступ всю команду мультиплеера распустили. Разработчики утверждали, что они все еще создавали игру с мыслью, что многопользовательская игра однажды станет ее важной частью, но по сути она была полностью отложена на второй план Несмотря на то, что старый код тормозил разработку, а COVID-19 распространялся по всему миру, прогресс, наконец, был достигнут, и к участию в проекте были привлечены такие эксперты, как инженер-физик доктор Майкл Додд и Крис Эддерли (также известный как Nertea), автор множества модов для KSP 1 ❗ Лишь в середине 2021 года разработчики KSP 1 смогли наконец присоединиться к команде KSP 2. До этого момента запрет на контакты оставался в силе. После этого, судя по всему, их реакция была примерно такой: «вы должны были обратиться к нам еще год назад!» (что и хотели сделать разработчики KSP 2, но им было запрещено) Этот запрет может объясняться нежеланием Squad отвлекать команду разработки KSP 1 от разработки последних обновлений Однако, это не объясняет, почему с бывшими сотрудниками Squad, которые покинули команду годами ранее (например, с создателем KSP Felipe Falanghe, также известным как HarvesteR), никто так и не связался ❗ Проблемы продолжают становиться очевидными по мере развития проекта. Некоторые из них усугубляются или даже вызваны тем, что продюсеры меняют приоритеты разработчиков, часто вынуждая их переключаться между совершенно разными фичами Позже эта проблема была решена, когда в IG была введена «структура функциональных команд» (описанная здесь; англ. «feature team structure»). Эту структуру Пол Фурио пытался сформировать еще до Раннего доступа, но создана она была только после его ухода Take Two устанавливает дату выхода: февраль 2023 К этому времени проект уже превысил выделенный бюджет Сразу становится очевидно, что все ключевые фичи не будут готовы в срок. Считается, что колонии можно было успеть доделать, но несколько месяцев спустя это было исключено В сентябре 2022 года принято решение выпустить игру в Ранний доступ с урезанной версией песочницы ❗ Это порождает существенные проблемы в разработке, т.к. проект никогда не планировалось выпускать по частям. Менеджеры по продукту начали отрывать разработчиков от их текущих задач и поручать им новые, что вызвало еще больше проблем Примером этого является разработчик, которому оставалось несколько недель до завершения работы над инструментом для постройки колоний, и который в итоге был отстранен от выполнения этой задачи и назначен на другую. Колонии были отложены ❗ Возникает еще одна проблема: инженеры-программисты, пользовавшиеся большим спросом в то время, могли зарабатывать от 200 до 250 тысяч долларов в год в таких крупных компаниях как Microsoft или Amazon. Однако, в IG их максимальная годовая зарплата держалась на уровне 150 тысяч долларов из-за бюджетных ограничений. Это не только приводит к трудностям с набором персонала, но и вынуждает некоторых людей, таких как доктор Майкл Додд, покинуть проект. Самый большой урон был нанесен уходом специалиста по графике Эрика Де Фелиза, работавшего над шейдерами. Никто не смог продолжить его работу, в результате чего игра поставлялась с крайне неоптимизированными шейдерами Инженеры по графике в то время были также крайне востребованы, что привело к еще худшей оптимизации ❗ Несмотря на неоднократные запросы, ИТ-команда не может вовремя предоставить необходимые инструменты для тестирования производительности, что еще больше способствует плохой оптимизации и позднему выпуску минимальных и рекомендуемых системных требований Ранний доступ, 2023-2024 (Intercept Games) Take Two и Private Division запускают маркетинговую кампанию на полную катушку, еще больше стимулируя волну хайпа В Нидерландах совместно с Европейским космическим агентством (ESA) проводится мероприятие, на котором авторы контента впервые получают шанс сыграть в игру. Проблемы постепенно становятся очевидными для публики, поскольку игравшие дают неоднозначные отзывы Тем временем напряжение между IG и PD нарастает. Некоторых людей не устраивает часть принятых решений и они понимают, что игра находится не на том уровне, которого они хотели бы достичь. Беспокойство по поводу встречи игры игроками велико. Несмотря на это, цифры продаж Steam выводятся на большой экран в конференц-зале: ожидается превысить отметку в 100,000 продаж в первый же день. KSP 2 официально выходит в Ранний доступ. Игра получает смешанные и отрицательные отзывы. Становится ясно, что секретность, продвигаемая T2, навредила отношениям между разработчиком и сообществом. Человек, работавший над проектом, позже признал, что отсутствие обратной связи от сообщества было одной из самых больших ошибок. Он заявил: «в итоге мы выпустили не тот продукт и не сосредоточились на нужных фичах». Маркетинговая кампания T2 имеет неприятные последствия, поскольку люди начинают осознавать недостатки игры, которую они купили по практически цене готового продукта (50 долларов), а от разгневанных и разочарованных клиентов начинают поступать негативные отзывы Количество продаж не соответствует ожидаемым цифрам и достигает лишь 80,000. Это не учитывая большого количества возвратов ❗ Через несколько недель после выхода в Раннем доступе руководитель студии Джереми Эйблс и технический директор Пол Фурио были уволены высшим руководством, которое считало их самыми дорогостоящими людьми в студии. Фурио немедленно ушел, а Эйблс остался еще на несколько недель. Майкл Кук, ранее занимавший должность бренд-менеджера в PD, занял пост руководителя студии. Примерно в это же время были уволены разработчики многопользовательской части игры На этом этапе мультиплеер все еще был проблемным и содержал массу багов, но в некоторой степени работал. Несмотря на это, в воздухе витало осознание того, что увольнение команды мультиплеера могло означать, что эта фича теперь отложена на неопределенный срок Фокус смещается на исправление ошибок и работу над первым важным обновлением, позже получившим название «For Science!» (FS!) FS! увидела свет в декабре 2023 года через 10 месяцев после того, как игра вышла в раннем доступе, и получила в целом положительные отзывы . Это была значительная задержка по сравнению с внутренней оценкой в 3 месяца, вызванная смещением фокуса после негативной реакции сообщества на состояние игры. Именно в этот период окончательно реализуется структура функциональных команд Фурио (англ. «feature team structure») Закрытие студии, 2024 (Intercept Games) В конце апреля 2024 года появилось предупреждение WARN (прим. пер.: оповещение о сокращении), указывающее на закрытие офиса T2 в Сиэтле, где находится Intercept Games, а 70 человек будут уволены 28 июня (примерно столько же людей состояли в команде разработки KSP 2). Студия погрузилась в почти полное радиомолчание и единственное заявление было сделано от аккаунта @KerbalSpaceP в X (запрещенная на территории РФ социальная сеть): «Мы все еще усердно работаем над KSP2. Мы скажем больше, когда сможем» (англ.: «We’re still hard at work on KSP2. We’ll talk more when we can.») Примечание переводчика на состояние 03.07.2024: с тех пор многие разработчики и коммьюнити менеджеры написали прощальные посты о покидании студии (в рамках массового увольнения), а 11-го июня компания выпустила предположительно последний патч 0.2.2.0. По состоянию на 3 июля 2024 года будущее Kerbal Space Program неизвестно. Заключение (мнение ShadowZone) Разработка KSP 2 с самого начала сопровождалась множеством проблем: от расхождения во взглядах до корпоративных поглощений и повседневных проблем (таких как неготовность инструментов вовремя). Проект изначально основывался на неверных вводных данных Технические решения принимались людьми, не имеющими компетенции в соответствующей области Оплата труда разработчиков была занижена Было множество догадок и домыслов о геймплее и механиках, которые, возможно, хотело бы сообщество, но они не были проверены, пока не стало слишком поздно Отсутствие открытого диалога и строжайшая секретность нанесли существенный ущерб доверию сообщества особенно после выхода игры в раннем доступе Предположительно: общая стоимость проекта на данный момент может составлять от 40 до 60 миллионов долларов по сравнению с предполагаемым доходом в Steam от 30 до 40 миллионов. Заметки (от ShadowZone, LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne и Scott Manley) Не стоит винить Нэйта Симпсона: он отнесся к проекту со всей страстью и, похоже, искренне хотел создать отличную игру для сообщества KSP. Однако, он откусил кусок, который не смог прожевать, и допустил такие ошибки в решениях как «макаронность» ракет. В целом он не смог выполнить обещания (несмотря на все желание) из-за технических и бизнес-ограничений (пример: API для разработки модов) Мнение LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne и Scott Manley: KSP 2 не может быть закончена или выпущена Take Two. Наилучшим решением было бы сфокусироваться на поддержке модов в оставшееся время, однако, моды имеют свои ограничения и их недостаточно, чтобы «спасти игру». Послание от переводчика (atomontage) Будем держаться, дорогое сообщество Kerbal Space Program. Любимая игра нас объединила и, в общем-то, она никуда не делась. Long live KSP!

Moved to mod talk. Have you tried asking in the mod thread?

Maybe I should talk about Nate's Mün Landing and that it has been a hoax. It was only a recording made in some VFX studios... You think it would get me some steam forum points?

Hello. Why can't I talk in Welcome Aboard, I am new, and it would be weird if new people can't talk in the subforum made for that.

It's one of my favorite books in spite of a few things, at least one of which breaks the forum rules to talk about. In addition to the Ansible, there's that pesky antigravity device that was well hidden through most of the book and then dropped in our laps as a megaweapon. However aside from those few things (which are fine. If you don't bend the rules a bit it's not SCIENCE fiction, it's just regular old fiction) the story is frighteningly believable. The 2nd book, Ender's Shadow, is just as good. I heard bad things about the rest so skipped them. The movie was ... fine I guess but it missed out on a lot that I thought was important - including ACTUALLY SHOWING US THE F'IN GAMES I mean that's what I wanted to see I'd happily watch JUST the game for 2 hours and we get like 5 minutes and montage. Grumble grumble grumble. To this day, whenever I'm about to do something difficult, I pause and think to myself, "The enemy's gate is down."

Hello guys, gals, and nonbinary pals! The purpose of this thread is to act as a place where we can brainstorm ideas for how we would want to see an eventual sequel to KSP be developed so that it can avoid the pitfalls the current KSP 2 fell into. That is to say, I want to try identifying what went wrong with KSP 2 development, and much more importantly, figure out a plan of attack for how a hypothetical future attempt to develop a KSP sequel could work. After all, there is an argument to be made that a lot of the issues that occurred with the KSP 2 development were from the people in charge not understanding the community and what it actually wanted, so by getting together as a community and brainstorming all of this now, if someone does try making a KSP sequel in the future they’ll already have this as a good jumping-off point for what they should do to make us happy. So, without further ado, to start us off with here are my thoughts: Based on the recent digging by ShadowZone along with trawling acorss the various threads on these fourms, I think it’s fair to say that KSP 2 failed for the following primary reasons, in rough decreasing order of importance; 1 - Company upper leadership not understanding how game design works, leading to such problems as a refusal to commit to changing engines or refactoring code despite the scope of the project requiring it 2 - An overcomittance to secrecy causing years of work being wasted on reverse-engineering KSP 1 code rather than just asking the KSP 1 devs, among other associated problems 3 - Improper management resulting in massive efficacy losses (e.g. developers being moved around constantly and not being given time to settle) 4 - An unwillingness to pay developers respectable amounts 5 - A lack of interest in community input resulting in prioritization of the wrong things When designing a KSP sequel, there are basically two options. The first is to use the unity engine, reuse much of the KSP 1 code, and essentially aim to run a short, cheap project that delivers a highly polished version of KSP 1 with a bunch of the best mods being incorporated into the stock game. This is, to put it mildly, a bad idea, given that the KSP 1 engine and code is almost completely incapable of properly handling that, as anyone who has played heavily modded KSP 1 will know. Implementing anything like interstellar, colonies, and especially multiplayer, would require so much work to update the existing code and systems, and work around the limitations of unity, that it would be cheaper and faster to go with option 2. Speaking of which, the second option is to start from scratch in a new engine, and develop a game that is a true successor to KSP 1 rather than a polished version. I think this is the objectively correct course of action to take, however it seems the upper leadership for KSP 2 disagreed. The original plan as I understand it was to do option 1, delivering a better version of KSP one with some mods made stock, using the same engine and code. However, scope creep then very rapidly increased the goals to include interstellar, colonies, and probably the thing that killed it; multiplayer. This would require a new engine and refactored code to work, but the upper leadership was made up of business executives that had never coded a game in their life and who decided to explicitly make that not an option. Thus, the KSP 2 team was forced to develop a game of impossible scale using old, outdated code, and a bad engine, and to make it worse, while they were handed all of the KSP 1 code to work from, they were not allowed to talk to the original KSP 1 devs. That decision alone probably cost them a year or more of development time. With all that out of the way, if a development project for KSP 3 was announced tomorrow (or if KSP 2 was restarted from scratch), and I was somehow placed in charge of setting the development goals and pacing, here’s what I’d do. Firstly, start from scratch in a new engine, probably Unreal. As far as I’m aware the only good alternative to this would be building a custom engine, but from how I understand it the development costs and amount of time required would be incredibly prohibitive, so Unreal it is. Secondly, don’t have any secrecy. Have all of the developers talking with the public, be very transparent about what people are working on, and what the roadmap is, and be prepared to listen to community feedback and change accordingly. Release to EA as early as physically possible, and while we would probably have to charge full price for it, make it exceedingly clear (and in legal writing) that if we don’t fulfill our roadmap goals within a certain amount of time we’ll refund all the copies sold regardless of playtime. Also set realistic goals, and prioritize getting code and core system mechanics working first, then optimisation, and only then user experience and graphics. Of course in reality all of these would have to be developed in parallel, but I would want there to be a heavy emphasis on leaving anything that's purely visual/graphical for as late as possible (though obviously you still have to develop your systems so the visual stuff is fully integrated when the time comes and isn’t just duct-taped on top like most KSP 1 graphics mods are). Design the game's code and systems from the start for modability. I’m not sure if we could do something quite as far as what, say, Hades and Hades 2 do, where literally all of the game's code is unencrypted and open for anyone to see and edit, but if that’s possible it would be great (I’m not aware of actual downsides to doing this, it’s just that there’s so much cultural momentum in the industry against it that it would be hard to the leadership to allow it even if it would make the game way better for no extra cost). Pay the developers properly, and don’t put people in management positions who don’t have the experience required to fulfill that role properly. In fact, if possible a worker-led development program, such as one done in a cooperative or other worker-led company, would be ideal. All empirical data collected to date indicates that worker-led companies are multiple times less likely to fail, are more stable, produce higher-quality products, have way better working conditions, and the workers enjoy their jobs orders of magnitudes more. Interestingly, the people in worker-led companies usually vote to reduce wages rather than lay people off in times of hardship, which is usually the right move because losing talent is really bad. The only downside is that the per-unit cost of their products is usually higher because they pay their workers more, so even if they never go out of business, they have trouble climbing up the ranks in the market as it were. Still, for developing a game like this a high amount of workplace democracy would seem to be key. Oh, and don’t implement multiplayer. From what I’ve seen, everyone on here who’s familiar with game design seems to agree that it’s a massive undertaking that would take an insane amount of effort to pull off even when starting from scratch, and it’s not super clear to me if the demand is even remotely high enough to justify that. I would love to hear all of your thoughts on that though. So, with all that being said, here’s a rough roadmap of what I would expect from release onwards. Of course, I’m not a software engineer, so I may be overly optimistic or pessimistic here. Also, keep in mind that while I lay it out in just a couple of major updates, I think in reality it would be better to do this with a much larger number of individually smaller updates, but I don't have the patience to write all of that out, sorry about that. Oh, and I would love to hear all your thoughts on the order I've put all of this in, especially the career mode release, since I'm not certian myself if it's the best. Initial full release (1.0) - Recoded from scratch in Unreal engine, utilizing 100% new code, and heavily optimized. - Graphics on par with KSP1, but using all-new systems and with allowances in place for them to be properly improved in the future without it just being a series of patchworks and band-aid fixes like it is in KSP1. - All new parts, most redesigned from the ground up to be more internally consistent and fill gaps, and with most stock KSP1 parts represented out of the box. - Complete UI revamp across the entire game to improve user experience as much as possible, including a redesigned parts window and filters in the VAB so that when thousands of parts are added in the future finding and sorting them doesn't become a pain. - New resources and resource systems, including new ISRU systems, for a more detailed and realistic experience while still being streamlined and easy to understand. - Systems in place to allow for easy integration of robotics parts and kerbal-deployable parts in the future, maybe with some limited number of them already implemented. - Very basic science mode implemented, but no career mode yet. First major update (1.1) - Graphics improvements. - More parts, think stuff from stockalike station expansion, planetside, the near future mods, etc, along with all the KSP1 DLCs and some of the stuff they planned for KSP2 (Orion etc). - Basic life support system, with 5-6 new resources, as well as simple crew habitable volume requirements, all togglable in options. - Interiors properly modeled and visible through windows, and going on EVA fully animated with the hatch opening and everything. - Kerbals now only carry small SAFER-style jetpacks in their inventory, and go on EVA by default using by fully modeled tethers and climb along the outside of vessels using a completely new set of climbing mechanics. MMUs are separate parts like command chairs that they can get in to fly around properly. Second major update (1.2) - More graphics improvements (now up to the standard of heavily modded KSP1). - More parts, mainly focusing on high-tech stuff. - Other star systems and interstellar gameplay mechanics. - More structures on Kerbin, including entire cities, along with new launch sites. Third major update (1.3) - More graphics improvements. - More parts. - Career mode, completely overhauled to use a better progression system that feels more like an actual space agency, with programs instead of contracts, and part unlocking based both on science collection and the programs you’re running. - Colony system similar to what was planned for KSP2. - FreeIVA polished and implemented into stock, maybe with VR support. Real History DLC - Basically Bluedog Design Bureau, Tantares, SOCK, KNES, and every other stockalike historical parts mod you can think of, but all put on several metric tonnes of steroids. - Virtually every spacecraft ever conceptualized or designed, let alone actually flown, in the history of the human race, all meticulously modeled to 99% accuracy (more accurate than BDB for example), while maintaining a stockalike style (though they would all be fully in scale to each other, not shifted to conform with KSP's 2.5m, 3.75m, etc diameters). - Plus all the launch stands and pads to go along with them. - And a revamped VAB parts list system to allow for you to actually navigate all that. - Would probably require a significant team of 3d modelers working around the clock for years to complete, hence why it’s a paid DLC. - Full compatibility with the RO DLC mentioned next if you have it installed. Realism Overhaul DLC - Pretty much RSS/RO, but with the polish one would expect if it was properly integrated into the game itself, and even more attention to detail and features, for example: - Procedural crewed pods and modules, with editable interior layouts and systems. - Procedural engines on top of a selection of most real ones. - Procedural tanks, with the internal bulkhead arrangements and all that being customizable. - Human rather than kerbal astronaut models (togglable if you don’t want that). - Improved structural simulation system, with internal part stresses properly modeled, so the weight of your tankage and structure now actually depends on what it’s supporting and how many gees it’s expected to endure, etc. - An aerodynamic simulation system that could make FAR blush, plus a thermodynamic simulation system to match (togglable). - Principia-level n-body physics (togglable). - The option to play in either RSS (plus real nearby star systems) or 10x stock. From what I can tell KSP 1 got developed to 1.0 in around 4 years, by about 12 people, and KSP 2 went from having all work on it restart to 0.2 in a little over 3 years with a team of 70 people, while also dealing with massive management inefficiencies and trying to work systems into the KSP engine and code that would be faster to just do from scratch. Therefore, I would optimistically estimate that we could probably get from development go-ahead to 1.0 on my roadmap here in about 3 years, assuming a development team of 70 people like KSP 2 and it’s properly managed and well-funded. From how I understand it the fully burdened cost (e.g. the entire cost the company pays, not just their salary alone) of a software development employee for this sort of role is typically about 200k per year, and the KSP 2 team had it capped at 150k by upper leadership that led to severe issues. For some margin of error, let’s say 250k then. That means, for 70 people for 3 years, the total dev cost to 1.0 will be about 52.5 million dollars. To get to 1.3 and then the DLCs is harder to estimate for me, but let’s assume 5 years, so 8 years total. That means the total dev cost from development go-ahead to DLC#2 will be 140 million dollars. KSP 1 has around 100,000 reviews on Steam. On average, games on Steam have 63 sales per review, and though this can be lower, it increases the older a game is so it’s probably actually higher. In any case, going by those figures that means KSP 1 sold 6.3 million copies. The price of it changed a bit over time, but was usually around 40-50 dollars. That means we have an existing playerbase of 6.3 million players to attract, not counting new players. If we price KSP 2 at 50 dollars, and only half of them transition over to KSP 2, that’s 157.5 million dollars. If the two DLCs each sell for 10 dollars and attract a total of 0.5 million players, that’s another 5 million dollars for a total of 162.5 million. That gives us a total profit margin of 22.5 million dollars, which is very tight, but might be just about doable. Keep in mind, that was assuming 70 people and a total dev time of 8 years. Given the DLCs are unlikely to be very profitable relative to the cost of making them, if we delete those and scale down to, say, 3 years to 1.0 and 2 years to 1.3, so 5 in total, and redo all the math, accounting for no sales from the DLCs, we get a total dev cost of 87. 5 million and a profit of 70 million dollars, which is much more workable. So, does anyone have any thoughts on these ideas? Am I being completely nonsensical and not understanding how game design works? I would love to hear some input on all that, and also if you have completely different ideas on how to go about redeveloping KSP 2 I would love to hear them as well! There was after all also that recent tweet after all from Jundroo, the Juno New Origins devs, about potentially getting some of the KSP devs onboard and reworking Juno into essentially a KSP sequel, I would love to talk about that but unfortunately I just don’t have the knowledge about Juno to be able to comment, especially given I’ve never played it or followed it’s development, but I'd be happy to hear others discuss it. EDIT: Okay, so, I wrote that post pretty late last night, and I’ve now had the chance to think about some stuff, and I want to expand a bit on my thoughts. Firstly, timescales. I’ve gone crawling across the forums once again for some more information, and I realized I misremembered some of the stuff relating to KSP 2’s development, specifically they didn’t restart development in 2020 but kept on using the old work they had, but started refactoring it. However, given the way people talk about how this decision cost them time, I think it’s fair to assume they could have restarted from scratch code-wise and still gotten to the point they did, or even further perhaps, in 3 years with their team of 70 people, so my estimates still seem reasonable. Also, apparently the KSP 2 devs were really close to having colonies and interstellar in the game for the initial EA release, and the fact they’re still not out even now was mostly due to them getting tied down fixing things and optimizing and whatnot, along with a lot of mismanagement. So it’s possible we could aim to have those in the base game for the initial release of this hypothetical reboot, though I still think it would be a better idea to build the game’s code ready to accept that, but not actually include it until a future update. Also, I must have been really tired yesterday because it seems I missed this, but there are actually already a couple of threads on here talking about pretty much exactly this. Sorry about that, if the mods deem that this one is redundant and close it I fully understand. Now, the key question. What do people actually want from a KSP game? There’s been some talk of a colony-designer game where you start out with something akin to cities skylines or something like that, and then start launching rockets later. I don’t agree with this idea personally, while I do like the idea of something city-builder style for the colonies I think that should be a late-game thing. However, one thing I am thinking about would be for the KSC upgrade system in career to be replaced with a city-builder style system where you get to actually build the KSC. So you start out with just, I don’t know, a small airfield and tiny pad for sounding rockets, and you get to, using a cities-skylines style system and interface perhaps, redesign and expand it over time until eventually you have an entire space center. Of course, unless you just want to be placing down upgraded versions of the same 8 buildings over and over, we would have to find new buildings to add and things for them to do. Maybe have it so that placing multiple launch pads could have an actual benefit, such as introducing a system like kerbal construction time where refurbishing pads take time? You could have that be togglable in settings as well - I know adding togglable stuff like that massively increases development costs but for stuff like construction time etc it doesn't seem like it would be a massive issue compared to some other ideas. And maybe we should make the players put a lot of thought into how they lay out their space center, with the way buildings are connected to each other and the distances involved all being important. For example, make your crawlerways too long, and it takes a while for the rockets to get to the pads. Make them too short, and if a rocket explodes not only does your pad get destroyed but your VAB might as well. While we’re talking about this, I may as well brainstorm other ideas for career mode as well. Instead of contracts, maybe we could have programs, which each contain several goals and milestones, and give you research benefits. And instead of like it is in KSP 1, we could lay the programs out on a tree. Selecting a program to do could give you research benefits to the parts that would be involved with it, like a lunar landing program reducing the unlock cost of the LM-style lander pod. And to stop the game from becoming linear, we could make it so that you can skip further down the tree and initiate a later program if you want to without doing the ones leading into it, but that would incur penalties like lower rewards or less research benefits. And we could make it so that if you landed on the moon without ever actually selecting the lunar landing program, it would autocomplete it but not give you any rewards for doing so. I think a good way of doing this would be for each program to have a set end goal, or maybe multiple, and also have several milestones along the way. For example, if you take the lunar landing program, it will give you individual missions for a crewed lunar flyby, orbital mission, and the landing, each with their own rewards and research benefits, on top of the rewards and benefits from the overall program, which could be set so that the more of the individual missions you complete in a program the higher the total bonus reward you get will be from the entire program itself when you complete it. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this though, given I’m pretty much just spitballing here. I’m also not sure if this would completely replace the contract system, or if we should still have some conventional one-off contracts as well to supplement it. In any case, to round all of this off, I think there should be three main difficulty settings for career mode. In easy mode, the city-builder elements of the KSC are disabled, and it just expands automatically over time or maybe it starts out really big. The core gameplay loop here would be similar to KSP 1. There would also be no life support, no commnet, and no construction time. On regular default difficulty, life support and commnet is enabled, as are the city-builder elements for the KSC, but construction time is still turned off. On hard difficulty, not only is construction time turned on, but life support now takes into account not just the resources you have, but also how much livable space there is, and also radiation becomes a factor. When starting a new game, after picking career mode large buttons would appear for these three difficulties, with description below them fully explaining all of this to avoid confusion, and of course there would still be the option to go into the advanced settings and mix and match all of this. Next, changes outside the space center part of the game. Going over to spacedock and looking at the most popular mods can give us an idea of what the community seems to want most, and so let’s go over that real quick. Firstly, visual improvements. Given we’re switching to a new engine and rewriting everything from scratch, building these into the base game to a level that even surpasses KSP 1 should be possible. I would prioritize getting the underlying systems needed for the visuals to work done first, and then actually adding all the visual stuff later though. Next, stockalike parts mods, especially the near future series along with some others. Adding a much larger selection of parts in a stockalike style should be possible, hell it’s probably one of the easiest parts of the entire development process, though if we’re redoing everything from scratch I think we should take the opportunity to completely redo the stock parts as well rather than just copy them. However, after doing some thinking I do believe the stock 1.25m, 2.5m, etc scales should stay, but with additions like 0.9375m, 1.5m, 2.1875m, 3.125m, 4.25m, and 6m, along with maybe even larger scales than that. We would need a new parts sorting system to deal with all that without it getting confusing, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near impossible to come up with one that would still be easy to use and beginner-friendly. I considered upscaling everything by 1.5 to 2 to be more or less actual scale (in terms of the spacecraft), but I think part of the kerbal charm as it were is that they’re slighter smaller than humans are. This decision may come back to bite us later with RO/RSS DLCs and mods though. Oh, and more spaceplane parts sizes would be nice, right now we just really have three. If we’re really clever with how we choose them and model the adapter pieces for them, we could even allow people to make unusually shaped vehicles like an X-33 by stacking various adapter pieces in front of each other. After that, we have interstellar extended, which again should be easy to implement compared to everything else. There are also a lot of quality-of-life things, better burn time and docking port alignment indicator for example, which again should be relatively easy. Kerbal attachment system, kerbal inventory system, and ground construction as well, we’re already close to that with the braking ground stuff anyway for the former and the latter would come with colonies. You have to keep going a while before finding any planet mods, even kerbalism seems to come before that, but nonetheless I think an overhaul and expansion to the stock kerbal system, along with more star systems for interstellar, would be nice. Actual asteroid belts, way more asteroids and comets, rings that have actual particles in them, all sound like amazing ideas if they could be properly implemented. Another gas giant as a Saturn analoge, and an ice giant or two, would also be really nice, and completely revamping all of their moons to be more realistic would be awesome. Jupiter has almost a hundred moons and thousands of smaller objects orbiting it, and Saturn has even more. Most of them would be very small, but even then, it would add a lot of interest to those systems I think, and I can’t imagine it would be hard to implement compared to all the other stuff we’re talking about. It would also be nice to see some more interesting features on the planetary bodies themselves, especially ones that require specially designed equipment, and effort and skill, to get to, like deep ravines that require kerbals to bring climbing equipment or winches to get to the bottom of. Also, stuff like FreeIVA and through the eyes of a kerbal are really cool, and it would be neat if we could get those fully implemented at some point, maybe even with VR support, though for all I know that might be as difficult as multiplayer would be. But in any case, fully modeling the interiors of spacecraft and having them be visible through windows also seems like an awesome idea, and since KSP 2 did it it probably is possible, though we might want it to be togglable for low-end computers. Also, I really like the idea of having kerbals go on EVA properly, by getting in an airlock, depressurizing it, and opening the hatch to step outside, all fully animated. We could have it so that kerbals can’t just exit from any random hatch, thus making having actual airlocks important on larger ships. Some smaller pods, Apollo-style ones for example, obviously could just have the entire thing depressurize as they did IRL. And once on EVA, it would be cool if we could have fully modeled tethers, and redo the climbing system from scratch so the kerbals have to clamber across the sides of the spacecraft until you unlock EVA jetpacks. I’m not sure whether the EVA packs should be modeled like they are in stock, or if they should be large, clunky things that have to be stored externally and entered like an external command seat, like the real ones are, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. Of course, we could still give the kerbals smaller and less powerful SAFER-like packs that they can carry on them. Alright, that’s about all I can think of for now. I’m sure I’ll come up with more ideas in the future, and I might keep on posting them, but for now I’d love to hear some feedback on all this. I’m trying to figure out what the community wants most from a KSP sequel, not just what I do personally, so it’s important I don’t just ramble on about my own thoughts unchecked.

Trouble with landing on Australia's north coast is that you need to overfly Australia to get there, because it will be coming from the south. Pacific Islands would be safer in that regard, but maybe they're not ready to count on a de-orbit burn to accurately bring it down, just yet? Didn't they originally talk about bringing it down NE of Barking Sands on Kauai, but scrubbed that plan because it would require Starship to first be orbital and the de-orbit it?

Side effect: diabetes Superpower: be able to talk to women

Is there talk in here somewhere about starting a new forum if this one gets shut down? I see talk above about backing this one up, but nothing about a new forum. I would be highly interested in having a conversation about starting up a new forum should it come to that. Moderators, cost, DBA work, front end scripting...all the pieces.

You can count me as a hard skeptic on this. I've seen a number of analyses of the 'go-fast', 'gimbal' and 'flir' videos and I remain unconvinced there's any actual hard evidence there. The recent testimony is really bizarre and interesting. Still, without like actual instrument data to back this stuff up I can't help but feel unconvinced. Anyone else been following this? https://thehill.com/homenews/4118340-ufo-hearing-live-updates-lawmakers-former-officials-strange-sightings/

This is an entire speculative timeline of KSP2 development based on Investigative Journalism done by ShadowZone, extracted from this video. A thank you goes out to @ShadowZone for doing thorough research on KSP2’s development, while remaining neutral and preserving integrity in the reporting of his finding. Recurring names and important concepts or events are in bold. Abbreviations are noted between brackets in (cursive) next to full names. Problematic events are denoted with !. All markings are applied by me and represent my own personal opinion. A PDF version of this summary is available at the bottom of this page, for easier reading. Pre-production, 2017 – 2018 (Star Theory) Take Two (T2) chooses Uber Entertainment, Later renamed Star Theory (ST), to develop Kerbal Space Program 2 (KSP2) T2 allocates 2 years and 10 million $ to ST to develop KSP2 This was supposedly seen as doable by the Studio Manager Jeremy Able)and ST Owners Bob Berry & Jonathan Mavor (referred to as ‘ST Management’ from hereon) ST Management’s plan at this time was to do a Revision of KSP1, meaning; take the original code, polish it up to modern standards, add new graphics and content and sell it as new version The creative direction, Nate Simpson, has a broader vision: a Reimagining rather than the Revision planned by ST management This would have included Interstellar and Colonies. Nate was a long-standing fan of KSP at this point Nate Simpson is able to convince T2 to approve his Reimagining ! Despite this, the timeline and budget already allocated by T2 would not be sufficient for the studio to pull of this Reimagining This is regarded as the start of a cascade of problems for KSP2 development At this time, the only engineer on the project is Principal Engineer Chuck Noble, an experienced software engineer with a degree in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering ! T2 keeps development of KSP2 highly secretive This forces ST team members to do recruiting and hiring in addition to their normal duties, hindering development ST team members are not allowed to tell potential hires what game or even what type of game they will be working on ! Due to budgetary constraints, only a few junior engineers with little to no experience are hired (senior engineers are brought onboard eventually, but much later on) All but one of these engineers had never played KSP1 before ! The junior engineers were considering building KSP2 on Unreal Engine instead of Unity, but were ordered by ST management to stick to the original code and engine (Unity) used by KSP1 As a result of this, some early prototype builds of KSP2 were done on KSP1’s user interface and graphics Early Production, 2018-2019 (Star Theory) Scope Change: Colonies, Interstellar and Multiplayer now considered “must-deliver features” ! Spring 2020 release date is communicated to the development team, and is considered Non-Negotiable This causes stress within development team, which possibly contributed to some wrong and hastily made decisions ! The decision to cram all these features into KSP1’s code, as ordered by ST management, ends up costing the engineers a lot of time People working on the project during this time estimate this resulted in around one year of wasted development time, compared to if they had been allowed to rewrite the code Multiplayer especially turns out to be incompatible with this framework ! Contact with Squad, the developers of KSP1, is prohibited (possibly by Squad upper management) This leads to nobody being available to guide the KSP2 engineers through the KSP1 code they were ordered to work with, forcing them to work in the dark and figure it out themselves The KSP2 engineers at ST would have loved to talk with the engineers at Squad, but they fear for their jobs being terminated by T2 should they do so ! This fear turns out to be warranted: a developer from ST is let go after answering a community question AFTER the game was announced, with T2 claiming it was an “unlawful disclosure” and that “communication to the public was not star Theory's decision, but the Publishers” Ultimately, the two previous points prove insurmountable and the engineers realize a significant Refactor of the code is needed to support Nate’s Reimagining ! This decision does not go down well with ST management, who do not understand the reasons behind it From this point onward, it is assumed new code is being written from scratch T2 continues to give ST pass after pass in Milestone meetings, despite people familiar with these meetings believing they should not have passed ! The most likely reason for this is that ST management had convinced T2 that they were sitting on a potential goldmine, claiming they were working on a ‘cultural successor to Minecraft’ These claims drive T2 to see Kerbals as their version of ‘Minions’ (A.N. The yellow creatures from the ‘despicable me’ movies), even planning a collaboration with a toy manufacturer Nate Simpson tries to appease both T2 and the existing KSP community by aiming to have the game be more accessible to a new audience and expand its player base, while also sticking to the core mechanics of KSP1 ! ST Management meekly goes along with the secrecy ordered by T2; one of the reasons for this being the aim to keep people familiar with KSP1 away from ‘interfering’ in the sequel They explicitly did not want KSP1 Veteran and well-known Youtuber Scott Manley to have any input in development Another reason for staying silent was that Uber Entertainment (now ST) had a bad reputation for previous games ! T2’s reasoning for keeping the project silent so long was apparently driven by a desire to avoid conflict with the community until it was too late At this point, due to the complete lack of outsider input, Creative Director Nate Simpson is basically the only person making gameplay decisions espite developing his first game at the age of 13, Nate is not an engineer; he instead has a bachelors degree in Arts (people working on the game describe him as a ‘very visual person’) ! This in turn caused a lot of focus to be placed on the visuals of the game, sometimes resulting in fundamental design and gameplay decisions to take the back seat Nate sometimes had a tendency to micromanage (something he admitted to in an interview) single elements of the game; one of which was wobbly rockets. Even before the Refactoring of the code, it was discovered the original KSP1 code could support significantly reduced wobble while also maintaining the option for joints to break under high stress ! Nate however was convinced that the difficulty from wobble and breaking joints was necessary for a fun game and made executive decision to keep them in the game Despite these flaws, Nate is considered by everyone spoken to by ShadowZone (SZ), be it someone who worked on the project or other content creators who interacted with him, to be a KSP Superfan with nothing but the community’s best interests at heart in his decision-making. The occasional disagreements between him and the engineers are attributed by the latter to Nate’s inexperience with aerospace, not to any form of malice. ! This inexperience, combined with Nate’s desire to expand the audience of the game to new players, somewhat resulted in the opposite happening; it reduced the capability of the game to serve as a teaching tool for people going into aerospace engineering and spaceflight, and overall reduced the priority of realism during development KSP2 is officially announced to very warm reception, with a release date set for the next year (2020) Content creators like Scott Manley, Matt Lowne and SZ are also brought onboard for the first time Hostile Takeover, 2019-2020 ST finally bring some Senior Engineers onboard. The Refactoring of the code is still only halfway done at this point in time ! By this time is has become clear that the release date of Spring 2020 is not achievable; despite this, ST Management continues to communicate to the team that this deadline and key features like colonies, interstellar and multiplayer are non-negotiable Chuck Noble, the only senior engineer who had been with the project since the start, leaves the team ST Owners Bob Berry & Jonathan Mavor begin negotiations with T2 to sell the studio to them, which are well underway by late 2019 ! Late 2019: Negotiations with Take Two break down and Star Theory loses the project ! ST’s Owners, Bob Berry and Jonathan Mavor, raised their price last-minute betting on T2 being willing to cash them out before finding another studio to work on KSP2, making them multi-millionaires in the process In response, T2 pulled the intellectual property from Star Theory and started a poaching attempt, offering everyone on the team to transition over to continue working on the project ! Partially due to the complete lack of emotional attachment to the KSP franchise on the part of most engineers(they still had not played ksp1 at this point) and partially due to T2’s refusal to budge when senior engineers tried to get better deals and compensation, the poaching attempt mostly failed, with only 4 engineers initially making the transition to the new studio that would become Intercept Games(IG) ! A total of around 20 people ended up making the transition eventually, but most of these were either junior engineers, artists or production people, resulting in a small and inexperienced team once again Star Theory continued to survive for a few more months, but ultimately failed to pitch new projects ideas (supposedly due to Covid cancelling an expo they were planning to attend) to publishers, resulting in their closure not much after. Technical Director Paul Furio is brought aboard the newly created IG with the mission of rebuilding the development team and setting processes in place to allow KSP2 to succeed Bumpy Road To Early Access, 2020-2023 (Intercept Games) ! T2 gives IG the stipulation to keep the old, broken code from Star Theory and work with it instead of starting again from scratch Apparently this was done because T2 management felt uneasy about ‘Refactoring’ the code yet again, so the decision was made to keep the existing code There is some debate as to the ‘broken-ness’ of the Star Theory Code; A person working on the project under Intercept Games said “they had 0% chance of releasing anything with that" about Star Theory code. A person working on the project under Star Theory, on the other hand, said with a little more time it would have worked. This person does however agree that it would have been better for IG to start again from scratch, not because of code quality but because of fresh team and still no contact to KSP1 devs. In general, everyone SZ spoke to agrees that not starting from scratch was the wrong move Not starting from scratch also meant Multiplayer remained one the biggest challenges to making the game feature-complete In an interview with Nate Simpson, it appeared that KSP2 already had working multiplayer when he said “as we've been testing it internally, I have never heard people laugh so hard”. Apparently, this ‘testing’ was actually done using a multiplayer mod in KSP1. It is however worth pointing out that KSP2 did have some form of rudimentary multiplayer by this time, inherited from ST, but it was incredibly buggy, unstable and nowhere near shippable. ! At this point, multiplayer remained a secondary objective while the main focus was still very much on art and visuals. This lack of baking multiplayer into the design remained a problem throughout this stage of development. They did however make progress during this period; later builds allowed multiple players to inhabit the same world and launch rockets together A few months after the game released into early access, the entire multiplayer team was let go. The developers claimed they were still designing the game with the thought that multiplayer would one day be a big part of it in the back of their minds, but it essentially was put on the backburner entirely Despite the old code hindering development and Covid hitting the globe, progress was finally being made and experts like Dr. Michael Dodd, a physics engineer, and Chris Adderly (also known as Nertea), a prominent KSP1 modder were brought onboard the project. ! It would still be until mid 2021 before KSP1 developers could finally join the KSP2 team. The ban on contact remained in place until then. Upon joining the team, apparently their reaction was “you should have asked us a year ago!” (which the KSP2 devs wanted to, but still weren’t allowed to) This ban may be explained by Squad not wanting KSP1 developers to be distracted from the final KSP1 updates This does not however explain why ex-Squad employees who had left years prior, like KSP1’s original creator Felipe Falange (known as HarvesteR), were never contacted ! Problems continue to become apparent as development goes on. Some of these are exacerbated or even caused by producers changing priorities for developers, often forcing them to switch between very different features This was later addressed withing IG when the ‘feature team structure’ (detailed here) was introduced. This structure was something Paul Furio has tried to establish before Early Access, but it was only established after his departure Take Two forces a release deadline of February 2023 by this time, the project is already over its allocated budget It immediately becomes apparent that all key features would not be ready in time for this deadline. It is believed there was a chance Colonies could have made it, but this was foregone a few months later In September 2022 the decision is made to go to Early Access with a stripped down sandbox version of the game ! This causes a massive upheaval of development, as the project was never intended to be released in parts. Product managers started pulling developers from their tasks and assigning them new ones, causing even more problems An example of this is an engineer who was weeks away from finishing a colony builder tool being pulled from the task and assigned to another item that had to be ticked off a project list, as colonies were shelved ! Yet another problem presents itself; software engineers, in high demand at the time, could make $200 to $250K a year at large companies like Microsoft or Amazon, but at IG their maximum yearly pay was kept at $150K due to budgetary constraints. Not only does this result in difficulties with recruiting, it also drives several people, such as Dr. Micheal Dodd, to leave the project The biggest blow comes from the departure of Eric De Feliz, a Graphics Specialist working on shaders. Nobody was present to pick up where he left off, resulting in the game being shipped with seriously unoptimized shaders GPU engineers especially were in high demand around this time, resulting in even worse optimization ! Despite being requisitioned multiple times, the IT team is not able to provide the necessary tools to test performance in time, further contributing to poor optimization and a late release of minimum and recommended specifications to the public Early Access, 2023-2024 (Intercept Games) Take Two and Private Division put their marketing into full gear, encouraging the ‘hype train’ even more An event is held in the Netherlands where content creators get their first chance to play the game. The first problems start to become apparent to the public as the creators give mixed reviews. Meanwhile, tensions are high at IG and PD. Some people are not happy with some of the decisions made, and they are aware the game is not at the level they wanted to deliver. Anxiety about community reception is large. In spite of this, steam sale numbers are put on a big screen in the conference room as they hope to breach 100K sales on day one. KSP2 Officially releases into Early Access. The game receives mixed to negative reviews, and it becomes clear the secrecy pushed by T2 has hurt the relation between developer and community A person working on the project later admits not getting community feedback was one of the biggest mistakes. They go on record to say “We wound up shipping the wrong product and not focusing on the right features” T2’s marketing campaign backfires as people start to realize the flaws of the game they bought for (nearly) full price ($50) and negative reviews start pouring in from angry and disappointed customers Sale numbers fall short of the numbers hoped for, only reaching 80K. This number does not account for the many refunds that happened ! A few weeks after the early access release, Studio Head Jeremy Ables and Technical Director Paul Furio were let go by higher-up management, which deemed them as the most expensive people in the studio. Furio left immediately while Ables stayed on a few more weeks. Michael Cook, previously Brand Manager at PD, took over the job of Studio Manager. It is also around this time the multiplayer developers were let go. Multiplayer was still janky and buggy at this point, but it was functional in some capacity. Despite this, there was a silent understanding that the layoff of the multiplayer team might have meant the feature was now shelved indefinitely. Focus shifts to bug fixing and working towards the first milestone update, later dubbed ‘For Science!’ (FS!) FS! came out in December 2023 to generally positive reviews, 10 months after the game entered early access. This was a significant delay from the internal estimate of 3 months, brought on by the shift in focus after community backlash about the state of the game. It is during this period that Furio’s cross functional feature team structure is finally implemented Studio Closure, 2024 (Intercept Games) In late April 2024, a WARN notice appeared indicating T2’s Seattle office, where Intercept Games is located, is being closed with 70 people (about the size of KSP2’s full dev team) being laid off starting June 28th. The studio went into near-complete radio silence, with the only statement made on @KerbalSpaceP’s X account “We’re still hard at work on KSP2. We’ll talk more when we can.”. This is a developing situation, and the impact of this on the future of the game is still unknown at this time. Conclusion (ShadowZone’s Opinions) KSP2 development has been plagued by a multitude of issues from the very beginning, ranging from diverging vision to corporate takeovers to mundane issues like tools not being ready in time The project was based on the wrong parameters from the start Technical decisions were made by people that had no business making them The developers were not paid accordingly There were a lot of assumptions about gameplay and mechanics that the community might have wanted that were not verified until it was basically too late The lack of open communication and extreme secrecy did severely harm to the trust of the already existing fanbase, especially after the game went into early access Speculative: the total cost of the project so far is assumed to be around 40 to 60 million dollars so far, compared to an estimated revenue from Steam of Only 30 to 40 million Notes (from ShadowZone, LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne and Scott Manley) Nate Simpson should not take the blame; this was a passion project from him, and he genuinely appeared to want to deliver a great fun game for the existing KSP community, but he might have bit off more then he could chew, and made mistakes such as wobble. A big part of why he might not always have been able to deliver what he promised (despite wanting to do so) are technical and business constraints (example: modding API) Opinion from LinuxGuruGamer, Matt Lowne and Scott Manley: KSP2 can not reach completion under Take Two. The best way forward might be to focus on the modding API in the remaining time, but; mods have their limitations and they will not suffice to ‘save the game’ **PDF VERSION** KSP2 Development Timeline.pdf

talk wike you are thwee ill go first: mommy said i cant eat the wrapper! waaa

I listened in on the last one and was highly disappointed. I will be on a plane during this one, so I am hoping someone else out here is able to summarize all the bullet points they didn't talk about.

Ever since the news dropped, things here in the forum have been rather depressing. Negative, questioning what is happening, attacks on other forum members. Things have taken a turn for the worse, and it makes me sad. We were hungry for KSP2, and in spite of its problems, we played it. Fired it up, dealt with bugs, went on missions. Some people are still playing it, and are still creating oddities. @ShadowZone released a video recently where he flung the four OG Kerbals into the farthest recesses of space. spacetime development might be dead, some people are still playing and getting enjoyment. With that said, I'd like to try something new here. I'd like to have a thread where people talk about things in the game that made them feel happy or good about it. Was it some mission you flew? Or perhaps a discoverable you, um, discovered? Something the game has that you didn't realize before that made you think " all righty then!"? I will start. I've got more than 1000 hours in KSP1, but I had never flown to Jool before. I've been to all the other planets, and landed on all of them. Notice I said landed; I still have not gotten back off Eve. But in KSP2, thanks to For Science!, I flew to and landed on Pol, Bop, and Tylo. I was able to return from both Pol and Bop, while leaving a rover on Tylo. Landing that rover on Tylo was the single biggest achievement in my KSP playing time. I'd like to ask that anyone who responds here to please only talk about things in KSP2 that you either never did in KSP1, or that made you feel good about the game. Nothing negative! We have a ton of those threads already; I do not want this thread to get locked because it dives into what is wrong or that TT is evil. Positivity only!

Greetings, fellow KSP 1 enthusiasts. This forum post is a fun one. A "give a little, get a lot" type of post. After much thought and excitement, I’ve decided to make the leap and become a KSP YouTuber! I used to deem myself too shy and reserved for that, but I decided to make the leap as you can tell. That’s one small step for a Kerbal, but one giant leap for Kerbalkind! Basically, long story short, I gave making a Kerbal Space Program video a try the day before I wrote this post (July 4th, 2024!!!!) and found that it actually felt quite natural. There I was thinking that my voice might have been a bit too grating or whatever-you-want-to-call-it for that, but upon listening back to it that day, I realized it was the contrary. So, that being said, my request is simple: send me whatever KSP video idea you have, as long as it's actually feasible, which is much different from practical, so that I can try it out! I feel like, in doing that with all of you, that might serve to be one of the best parts, if not the. Whether it’s challenges, mission concepts, or spacecraft designs, I want to hear it all. I’m ready to take on ambitious, daring, and out-of-the-box ideas that do things like play around with the boundaries of what can be done in Kerbal Space Program and such. It’s like taking a piece of your imagination and beaming it up by broadcasting it to the entire community. How legendary is that? It's a win-win: you get the perks that come with being the one who gave me my video idea, and I get the fun challenge. And, well, people need things to help them stay sane, right? Well, KSP is one of those things for sure, and I feel like what I have described would and will be a welcome supplementary addition. Got things too adventurous, crazy, simply plain dumb, or maybe even merely too involved to try out, but still want to see? I got you covered. Keep those Kerbals safe and sound. I'll do it. This is about unity... Unity Engine unity, even — coming together as a fandom and showing what happens when you pool collective genius. It’s about creating something epic together, turning the spotlight on each and every one of you who wants it, whilst giving credit where it’s due. As of writing this post, I was ready to start making KSP videos for all of you to watch short of having the channel for it created yet. But that is precisely the plan, and, as much skill as I may have with making KSP videos, I want and even need your ideas, which is why I wrote this post. So... go ahead! Type out what you want to see, and I will talk to you about it ASAP. What are you waiting for?! I'd count "Make it rain Kerbals on the KSC!!!" as a valid request and do it if that's what you asked. Your idea, my execution! Minimal effort, maximum reward! Get a shoutout! Be a part of something fun!

@JadeOfMaar This all looks very promising. I've also been thinking about harvesting since I'm a little bit unsatisfied with my current approach of having a few drill types for whole sets of resources but still having them be harvested individually. The idea of sifting useful resources from regolith mixtures has been on my mind for a while, we should talk more about this. I'm interested to see how your converters end up since I think we have quite different approaches there (I just posted some thoughts about chemical converters over in my thread).

The satellite is equipped with a software defined radiometer. At the risk of overexplaining, software defined radio technology replaces what would be physical components with code. It samples the incoming radio signal a bajillion times per second, and computers are so good these days that stuff like filters, modulators, demodulators, attenuators, and a bunch of other stuff, can be emulated via software. You don't need to go out and buy (and have space for) those components, you just drag them into the flowchart. You can also do this at the same time as stuff which would typically already be done in code, in the same interface. Doing math on the data, bit stuffing, printing it to a live spectrum plot, etc. This is traditionally used for amateur radio (and indeed our ground station setup does use software defined radio for some of it) but our mission wants to see if this same technology can be used to make a low cost radiometer. How exactly it works is beyond me, the instrument is the product of the thesis of the professor running the satellite team. While I didn't have to make it, I did have to fix it and modify it and get it to talk nicely with the satellite's main computer, and calibrate it, and figure out how to power the 9 Watt instrument from a power supply that was not designed to power something that power hungry and... If all goes well we should be able to point it at Earth and see how much moisture is in the soil in any given (large) area. The satellite is capable of taking a 10 minute measurement at 1 sample per second every 2 ground station passes, assuming the battery is filled up in that time, although we will start slower. I'm not sure how precise the data will be. I will be ecstatic if we get back data at all, moreso if we can tell apart an ocean from a desert. I'll be ecstatic if the thing even beeps at us. I forget the exact statistic, but half of all university cubesats either don't succeed or don't even get to the point where they can beep (which puts full successes much lower). And I think that number includes graduate teams, our team has been entirely undergraduate except for the professor writing the program for the experiment and doing a lot of administrative stuff. Given the seemingly endless troubles we've had, the issues that were cropping up until the last minute, and many other things, I'm not expecting much. My personal victory threshold is a single occurrence of 2 way communication.

thats the problem with the little guys, they never seem to have the money to do the research they want. there was some mention on the talk-polywell.org forum that emc2 and others presented at tofe 2024 last month, though nothing seems to have been released to the public on that yet. will keep an eye on that. bussard had wanted to move directly to a full scale demo before he died, when park took over he scaled back to some smaller tests and later to computer models, preferring a more thorough and conservative approach. rather than releasing whatever they had in a desperate attempt for capital (which seems like what fusion startups like to do). im not holding my breath. but with recent iter delays it seems like some venture capitalists might surge fund startups again hoping to get in before iter, though it might turn them off to fusion all together. iter is probibly going to do what it says on the tin, but in another decade or two, again and still require a demo to follow it up. so 50 years?

YEAR -5, DAY SOMETHING - USC-1 Over the next nine years, the Kerbals working at the DLC/A would continue to do extraordinary things. Every launch seemed to be something new. New data, new milestones, the world was entranced by these Kerbals who were seemingly magic. And recently, they’d been toying with the idea of a more advanced rocket. Sounding rockets so far have all been based off of the SNAC-Corporal, which was powered by solid fuel. While it was quite cheap, it was also very inefficient. So far the highest the KAS Rocket Program had gone was about 105km. If they wanted to go any higher and get more valuable data, they’d have to create something powerful and efficient. One of the engineers recalled their middle school science fair project, which was a baking soda volcano. He said that if they used more flammable materials, they would be able to create a similar reaction that could actually lift a rocket. After some thought, they realized that perhaps the idea wasn’t too farfetched. Immediately they got to work trying to find materials that could create an explosive reaction powerful enough to carry a sizable payload into the air. After researching various fuels, they decided on using a fuel simply called “Liquid fuel” and Oxidizer, which when mixed together would combust and release a HUGE amount of force, which could be harnessed into an engine. It isn’t rocket science. The engine born from this concept was the LV-T30 “Reliant” engine, the very first liquid fuel engine! However, they still needed an actual rocket body if any vehicle was to actually be created. After many late night coffee sessions and fireside chatter, the team of engineers was able to create the USC-1, the very first liquid fuel rocket! Its goal was to become the highest flying object created by Kerbals. It took around 8 months to build, even with the fairly saturated budget the team had, but when they finished they had created the most powerful flying machine in Kerbalkind’s history. After some talk, they agreed to broadcast the launch live to all of Kerbin. The UKA would broadcast publicly via the Kerbin Broadcasting Network (KBN). The following photos and quotes are taken from that brodcast. The USC-1 sits poised and ready on the launchpad. Image credit: KBN “This is the Dessert Launch Facility flight tower, reporting clear conditions. We are GO for launch.” - Boston Kerman “Pad technicians confirm all systems look good, and we are GO for launch.” - Wernher Von Kerman “Roger that pad, we are GO for launch in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, engine startup, 4, 3, 2, 1…” - Boston Kerman USC-1 high in the air. Image credit: KBN “Liftoff on the USC-1!” - Boston Kerman USC-1 at its highest point. Image credit: KBN “Boston, can we get an altitude reading?” - Wernher Von Kerman “Sure thing. We’ve tracked the payload to about… 134km!” - Boston Kerman Yes, that’s right. The USC-1 became the highest flying object Kerbals had ever launched! On board the spacecraft were cameras that, while not of the highest quality, could snap some of the best pictures of Kerbin ever seen. Picture of Kerbin snapped by USC-1. Image credit: KAS, Beyond Once the spacecraft had moved past the zenith of its flight path, its next challenge stood in the way: getting it back to the surface. Research suggests that the atmosphere does not like when you go through really fast, and punishes you by lighting you on fire (or covering you in really, really hot plasma). At first the engineers were sure that the return capsule could survive the heat of re-entry, but now they had second thoughts. However, they thought of a solution in advance. They decided that the capsule would spin like crazy on re-entry. This would evenly distribute heat among the capsules surface, and damage to it would be minimal. Everyone holds their breath during re-entry… USC-1 is caught by cameras once again! Image credit: KBN “Successful parachute deployment confirmed!” - Boston Kerman …and it makes it! The data returned is overwhelming! Pictures from the mission are plastered on newspapers across Kerbin the next day, with headlines like “KAS Does the Impossible”, “Engineering Reaches New Heights”, and “You WON’T Believe what SCIENCE just did! *insane*”. However, the founding five Kerbals were starting to get sick of being stuck to the planet. They believed that there was more for Kerbalkind, beyond the confines of Kerbin. After seeing what the USC-1 did, they knew that its capabilities far exceeded what they expected. Their new plans were to expand the USC-1, with liquid fuel second stages, and capabilities to carry satellites and even Kerbals into Kerbin orbit. However, the KAS couldn’t do any of what they dreamed of. They needed more space to work with, and all the workers and administrators of the rocket program needed their own organization. Then it hit them. Beyond the confines of Kerbin. They rounded up some officials from the rocket program, and off they went again to the capital. This time with more serious ambitions…

late introduction, hi guys, join my discord server to talk with me