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I think the thing people are going after with talk of a class-action would be the promises the company made regardless of the product being in EA. All the hype, all the talk about how they'll finish and everything is good. All the tidbits about velocity being good, and timelines are being met. I think this is where people are aiming. And that's a damned hard thing to prove outside of court, let alone inside of one. While there are laws that protect consumers from outright fraud, it's gonna be pretty hard for anyone to prove the company - TT, PD, IG, or some other entity in the umbrella - was intentional in deceiving the community. But, if they want to pursue it...I say good luck, and I hope they have enough cash to see it through.

This was my worry, that we'd see a repeat of for science, dropping a milestone every december-ish. Mathed out a similar prediction earlier, in another thread, actually. On the specific topic of communication, I do think its just as much of a substance issue as it is a cadence issue. We've spent the last year and change being told there's plenty of work going on it the background, things are progressing great, our internal builds are so much fun - And then the community asks to see it, and we get crickets. And while I totally understand a reluctance to show off anything you're not dead certain you can deliver, it doesn't add up to a lot of people, because the trend of it actually happening hasn't been there, even before the game released at all. Lemme break it down here. The game is announced, the community goes wild. we're shown a bunch of cool stuff. Crickets, corporate drama, some date shuffling, and we don't really see much of anything. For the most part the community understands this, as we're being told that we're getting a full release of KSP2. Nearing the dates, it becomes an early access, and most of the stuff we've been talking about for the years between announcement and now is pushed out to roadmap. The community is disappointed but understanding, and takes the reassurances that what is launching will be absolutely solid as solace. The community then gets the first release of the game, and its pretty bad. We're told it'll be fixed up right quick, and the launch window features will be coming shortly. Then its not fixed up quick, and the launch window features are pushed out almost ten months. When asked to explain this both along the way and afterwards, we're more or less told that its because of parallel development in various features that'll speed up the content cadence. But we're given at most some extremely surface glances of this parallel content, and its extremely difficult to actually identify any signs of meaningful progress. The community requests more information and expresses discontent with what is being provided so far, and is promised some level of improved and expanded communication, but with no commitment to any specifics. At the same time, existing communication avenues dry up, providing even less insight into the active progress of development. This triggers another round of communication concern and inquiry, to which the community is told that all the work time has been put into planning out the next levels of work, and therefore communications can't be prepared just yet. This is followed up by information that suggest the patch cycle is stagnating, not accelerating in its timelines. Those last two parts is where it starts to fall apart, because its a bit of a leap for someone to accept that "We have multiple parallel development streams making content" and "We have nothing to talk about because we're planning what we will be doing next" are both true at the same time. If you've had a year of parallel development streams, it doesn't make sense to the average person that you have nothing to show for it across all the streams - While corporate communications is reluctant to talk about anything meaningful that might end up not getting added, the people who already paid just want to understand what the development team is doing and where it might be going, even if they hear that a thing is later cut for non-viability. But if you can move past that and accept that first combination condition, then the patch cycle appearing to be on the same timeline as the last one doesn't add up, suggesting that at a minimum, the parallel development chains aren't going to yield any meaningful increases in patch rates. Effectively, and likely with no malice, the community now has years of being overpromised and underdelivered to, and the scope of those overpromised and underdelivered situations have been coming in smaller and smaller - First it was the entire thing, then parts of the thing, then update cadences, now patch cadences, now communication cadences - Every step feels like its been backwards to many. And I do want to be clear that it is "Many" and not "All" - I don't speak for the whole community, but discontent doesn't have to, not on its own. This isn't an element of the community being told "You won't get this" and then being mad, this is that element being told "We'll do better" and then not getting anything better, over and over and over - Even if the rest is fine, that group is entirely in their rights to be angry about it at this point, because they're feeling lied to. And I think it shows in the cancellation of the KERB and its reception - People for the most part agreed it wasn't working and were ok with it going, the discontent was that it was the only remaining reliable communication path, and that's the thing we keep asking for. Most of us salty folks don't care if we get communications every week, two weeks, month, or even three months - Within reason, we don't want the game to reach that 2028 date in my quoted post . But what we do want to know is that if you come out and say "First of every month, meaningful update", that I can swing in on May 1st and see something that's actually of substance to the game. Not a filler dev article though, I guarantee you that we'd prefer 2 paragraphs and a screenshot of one singular colony feature sliver or a long piece that ends with "None of that worked so we went to the drawing board" over 10 paragraphs and math diagrams about how clouds in gas giants work IRL but why Jool doesn't do it the same way. That might be cool, but its completely irrelevant to the roadmap we want to hear about. The last thing I want to hear is "We'll provide updates on our plans to provide updates two weeks from now" and then come back in two weeks to hear "So we've discussed the initial plans to create a cadence for communications that'll provide details, but we're pushing out that information a few more weeks, check back later". KSP2 is in a bit of a do or die scenario - Not the game as a whole but its communications. You need to decide publicly and vocally, whether you will actually provide more meaningful information and details on a meaningful schedule, or will you prefer to work quiet and just roll in whenever you feel your ready. Trying to play the middle ground of "we'd love to we're totally working on it and doing it" without delivering is just making the whole thing look worse and throwing a lot of doubt on it. You're setting yourself up No Mans Sky style, nodding along to nice sounding things that people ask about without the seeming ability to deliver. You can look at is as "Look how much damage a single comment about development streams has done to expectations" as a reason to clam up, or you can look at it as a reason to speak more to explain what context was missing from that comment as to the actual development streams. But you need to make a decision. And that's the end of my rant from a community perspective. From a personal perspective, I find it disappointing and frustrating that a fully funded and well staffed studio full of professionals are struggling to meet the standards that indie early access games set in the early 2010's, before anyone even knew how to do any of this. There was this indie game called Kerbal Space Program managed to make frequent and meaningful communication updates to its users, while also having frequent and meaningful content patches and enhancements. These updates were relatively small, simple, not particularly heavily edited, and even included stuff that ultimately didn't come to pass that still informed the community as to what the focus at the moment was, and where things might be going. I am getting more and more of the feeling that our "Communications" are being treated as investor statements and press statements rather than being intended for us.

MISSION_UPDATE - Tour de Minmus - Johndin and Podcal looking on the ancient relic found in the mysterious crater on Minmus. While Poduki relays their findings to KSC FOREWORD: Before we start - I would like to say that this post became a lot longer than I anticipated. I would very much like some honest feedback on weather I should dial it down a notch and be less detailed. Or cut it into more edible pieces. or if its just all good and fun. Before we start - I would like to thank all who indulge in my increasingly longer forum posts. Any way.. Funny story! A mistake was made by my internet provider and I was without internet this weekend! It was an odd experience.. I mean I grew up without internet.. but I realized how much of my home is setup to use internet.. I hear my radio through my Sonos and see TV through my Chromecast. At least when I was a child we had antenna tv and FM radio. It actually made my wife and I talk about getting a low tech FM radio - Just incase the political climate deteriorate even further in Europe.. and we need to be able to get news from the government. But before we go all doom and gloom... let's keep on topic... Without internet, the only game I could play was KSP - the others required internet in varying degree. So I managed to get the rover the last stretch to the mysterious crater in record time. Before being offgrid for an weekend, I was only driving the rover, half attentive, while listening to Audio Books or Podcasts with my wife. This weekend, the journey was done with plenty of whiskey in the glass and vinyls on the record player. You may be thinking, why plenty of whiskey? is Rovers that bad? well no... whiskey is a nice drink of course.. but also yes.. let's talk about Rovers.. and how much I dislike the Rover Game Mechanics. MISSION TASKS: A. Test the Rovers functionality and maneuverability - Success B. Drive an expedition to explore the North of Minmus - Success C. Drive the Rover back to Base Camp One C. Recover Rover via Dropship and return it to base- Success D. Return Dropship to ICV Explorer - Success LESSONS LEARNED; LESSONS IDENTIFIED: Section A: The Rover has left the Sheet Ice of the frozen lake and drive in the Snowdrifts that cover most of the little moon. Let's talk about rovers: I... HATE the way rovers drive in this game. It is not that I expected it to be Snow Runners, with the game simulating every minute physics detail of sand, snow and mud.. But man It would be nice if rovers at least drove like a car... and not a shopping trolley... It would be so nice if the wheels had just an inch of traction.. Speaking of traction.. What does the traction slider even do? It seems very backwards. If I turn traction up, the engines cannot turn the wheels, it feels like the engines are terrible underpowered (are they that weak?). But if you keep the tracktion down, you'll be wheel spinning like mad.. but unlike in our world, were the vehicle would dig it self down.. In the solar system of Kerbol the vehicle will gain momentum... a lot of momentum. I found I could get my rover to ~10 m/s on rough terrain (the only limiting factor being that it's hard to gain speed when the wheels dont have a lot of contact with the ground from all the jumps) and I never reached the limit on the flats of the Sheet Ice lakes.. the rover hit a small bump and tumbled. The science junior on the front broke off. - It was a bloody miracle the antenna didn't break off or the vehicle exploded.. So Johndin had to pick up sample and take readings by hand after that. The rest of the journey was done with the antenna folded down... and then only folded up to send situation reports to Kerbin, or the ICV when it passed by. After realizing this was how it was going to be - the only thing left to do was to strap in hit the speeder and tune the radio in on: And Start drift.. I mean driving. I found that the only reliable way to turn was to create a custom made Action Group for turning the Reaction Wheels ON - do the course correction and then press another custom made Action Group turning OFF all reaction wheels (to avoid the rover doing flips from the torque power when pressing forward). Because of course the "Only online when SAS is on" is bugged. The rest of the lessons learned Lessons identified I've put in spoiler sections for those interested to keep a bloated post more streamlined: 1. Axle configuration and angle of climb: 3. Thrusters: 4. Lights: 5. Power and Recharging: Section B: The rover - stopped in the snowdrifts - to enable Johndin to take samples and readings - While a cresended Kerbin is setting in the horizon. The Expedition to the Northern parts of Minmus was divided into 5 legs: Leg 1: Contained the initial testing of the Rover on the Sheet Ice Flats of (what I have Identified to be?) The Greater Flats that Base Camp One was established on. After that it took a sharp turn North East to get to new terrain that was found to be snowdrifts. This was done in the hopes that the reason the rover drove like a elephant on ice skates was because of the sheet ice - and not game mechanics.. Unfortunately I was to be disappointed. The rest of the leg consisted of the traversal of the Sheet Ice by night - Heading North West. Leg 2 + 3: Would be traversal of the hardest terrain the Rover forced. It was the heavy cratered mountains North of The Greater Flats. Leg 4: Would be the traversal of the less demanding rolling hils on the path North West - Dont let the map fool you - it looks way more smooth than it is. I thought it would be quickly traversed at high speeds. But the low gravity and rolling hills meant that as soon as the rover exceeded 10 m/s - it would spend the same time in the air (between jumps) as it did on ground. Making it impossible to really pick up more momentum. Leg 4 ended shortly before the destination. (My kids wanted to see what was in the crater, and were sleeping at the time) Leg 5: would be the last short stretch to the edge of the crater with the mysterious lightsource. (My daughter was so impressed by the monument that she had to call my wife so she could see it) Bellow a Map showing the approximated route with legs marked: From Right to Left: Leg 1, Leg 2, Leg 3, Leg 4 and Leg 5 Bellow in the spoiler section you can see a detailed walkthrough of the Journey: The Minmus Monument: Here, at the end of the journey I was presented with a choice - Call the mission done and drive home. Or, in the true spirit of the great kerbalnaut Jebidiah, drive down the cliff side and study the monument up close - though with the chance of not being able to get up again... or worse.. crash and burn The Rover had shown itself to be quite tough - It had survived landings with up to 20m/s - And no way in hell I was going to drive the rover all the way back again. No... going down would be a great excuse for a pick up via Dropshop and be flown back to Base Camp One, Johndin argued. So down the slope it was. Geronimo! - the rover going down the slope. While it is true the rover had survived traversing a chasm with the thrusters - and subsequently bounced in the rolling hills for several km going 20 m/s (it's hard to break when your wheels hardly touch the ground). Going down the cliff side quickly accelerated the rover to 40-50 m/s. and worse still, it was aiming directly for the statue. While I was positive that I could survive these speeds on uneven terrain as long as I kept the wheels leveled with the ground.. I was sure the suspension would not "tank" slamming into the statue at the center of the monument. In a last ditch maneuver Johndin, (who had pitched the idea of going down), managed to pull hard on the controls, pitch the rover up and break the rover with the thrusters. - a daring move! Having redeemed himself, he was given the honour of planting the flag.. and take another sample. KSC was still just visible over the ridge.. and the call for a taxi was relayed to ICV Explorer. While waiting for the dropship to arrive. Johndin, Podcal and Poduki had ample time to study the ancient ruin. Who was it depicting? How was it build? By Whom was it build.. answers I will likely only get once I've exhausted the sandbox experience - and try the campaign. Section C: Dropship arriving at The Minmus Monument - ready to pick up the Rover Crew. I had a feeling that by diverting the remaining fuel from the 3 Dropship to 1 - I would be able to complete the taxi mission. I was correct. It was strange to zoom past the terrain I had just spend the better of 4 evening to cross in meer minutes. Playing with audio on for once, I found that the Minmus Orbit Theme is really awesome - it made the tour back to Base Camp One felt like a final victory lap. I was to make one important Lesson Identified though: When correcting inclination - eyeball it - maneuver nodes are unreliable, as seen from the example bellow: The maneuver nodes are weird around extreme inclination burns - If I told the node just to burn Normal it would say that my craft would leave Minmus SOI before reaching the northern hemisphere. I had to adjust by also pulling on the retrograde node for the maneuver to stay in orbit. In the end the maneuver node did not work - and I ended up just burning Normal and eyeballing it. (without leaving the Minmus SOI) The result was this: Notice how much much further apart the two vehicles would be before the burn was complete. As well as the wrong fuel bars from image 1 to 2 (which had a quick load between them) For detailed walkthrough of the pick up - see spoiler section bellow: Plotting the course to Base Camp One: the next leg - getting the rover back to Base Camp One was a simple maneuver that did not require a lot of Δv - since there was no need for a expensive correction inclination burn. And the correct direction could be picked from the start, The maneuver wasn't even required to be orbital and a sub-orbital path was charted: The rest was just a final victory lap, were the achievement could be marveled at. - a few course correction had to be done as I forgot to take the rotation of Minmus into account. The last thing to do was to pluck the rover back into base for a refuel - I was a bit nervous about this since the rover tilted the base when I tested this feature on the runway of KSC - the alignment was slightly off. My fix to this was to give all the base elements landing legs - not only because I anticipated it would be nice on uneven terrain, but also because I thought it would fix the tipping issue spoiler alert - it did: As you can see it worked fine - but for a moment I had real fears that docking the rover to the base would cause it all to do flips in the low gravity. My fears were unjustified - The rover was refueled. Although not to full, as I didn't want to empty the G.P.U - the G.P.U was dropped only half full because of weight synergy between the base modules and the dropships performance window (around ~10t cargo each) - but I expect that I need to either downgrade the rover fuel levels (which is fine) or upgrade the fuel amount for the generator (which is harder to pull off). there are many things to consider for future base missions. In the spoiler section below you will find a detailed walkthrough of the tour. Section D: The dropship tacking off after waiting for ICV - Explorer to get into an optimal position for rendezvous. I thought i was smart and waited for the ICV - Explorer to get around Minmus, so I didn't have to play catch up - I did not wait enough though. After doing the initial sub orbital burn to get the right AP for a intercept orbit set, I realized that I was going to get ahead of the target... New plan had to be made. I had 2 options: A. Make a inclination correction burn and set an orbit 10km higher than target - wait for it to catch up and perform rendezvous maneuver. B. extend the AP and to meet target on the other side of the planet - making use of the approx 30° difference in path and correct inclination and make the path orbital at target. Option A. was the safest - but would use more Δv - something that was a bit on the low side (in hindsight it would not have been an issue) - option B used less fuel - but would need to perform both circulisation and inclination correction at the same time (this would also not be an issue due to the low orbit speeds around Minmus) I decided upon B and in the end the relatively speed to target was only 50 m/s opun arrival- an easy correction. the dropship safely docked back at ICV - Explorer. The Δv between the dropships are all but spend now - which means It will be hard to perform another pick up of the rover in the future. Although that being said - the Crew Shuttles have enough Δv to land and take off on the Mun from a 10km orbit. and the two that landed the crew at Base Camp One only spend 1/3 of their Δv - having 921 left - so Δv could be taken from the Crew Shuttle still docked to the ICV - as it only need enough to perform an emergency landing in case of catastrophic event. Now the only thing left - was to dock the dropship back at the mothership and call it the day.For detailed walkthrough see spoiler section bellow: Moving Forward: Where as I have done the long stretch from a bit south of the Minmus Equator - to the northern hemisphere. I only came across 2 different biomes. And can I truly call the expedition a success when so many more biomes are left to be explored? So much Science can be done? The Δv of the Dropships may be spend - I may have done enough Rover Driving on Minmus for 1 life - But.. there are two perfectly well functioning Crew Shuttles at Base Camp One - with ~920 Δv on them each. Maybe a few further excursions to the other flats - the south pole etc. can be done to gather more science with them? Am I done with Minmus, or should I explore further before closing down the Minmus Base for now and fly the Kerbals home. I need to ponder on this. Stay Tuned for More!

I'm going to say something contentious. Now that manned flights are growing closer, we have to address a fact that isn't being spoken: space travel is dangerous. The Artemis program, or something connected to it, may have the first death in space in over a decade. Maybe not in the first launch, not in the second, hopefully never. But for all the talk about commercialisation, this is space exploration and it is not safe. This isn't pronouncing doom. As Chris Hadfield says in his TED talk on fear versus danger, NASA has considered risk, reduced it where possible. He also said that the Space Shuttle was a complex flying machine and the chances of a catastrophic event was, when he flew, 1 in 38. He still went. SLS and Orion is less complex, we have far better robotics than Apollo ever did, and an honest-to-Oberth partially-reusable 'space truck' in Falcon 9. However... we cannot fully design out the chance of death, nor pretend that we are not putting people in harm's way. SpaceX makes it look easy. SpaceX also has "Stay Paranoid" emblazoned on the desks of Mission Control. Even the Apollo 9-like mission proposed in tandem with SpaceX could result in deaths. What brought this on? A blog post by Wayne Hale on the laser-focus on monetary cost as the be-all, end-all of space exploration: https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/blood-and-money/ If in the future something does go wrong, I have a polite request for the few people reading this: don't go mad. Do not argue yourself into the hole that all exploration should be done robotically. That you knew this would happen and humans should never have left the ground, never mind Earth. Do not let your fear control you. If you see someone else who likes space falling into the same trap, I request - because I can't make you do a damn thing - that you pull them out. Wayne Hale thinks the risk is worth the reward, that it is brave to take on this risk, and so do I.

hi I don't understand those joints. First, I do have this situation: root -> ... something -> truss -> FL-R10 RCS Fuel Tank (0.1 t) -> Extendatron Basic (0.2 t) -> Extendatron Stackable (0.15 t) -> something -> massive heavy tank The Extendatrons are horizontaly attached. Now, the first joint is massively bended and unstable, while the second one is strong like hell (but both use the same force/spring/whatever values). Fine... this can be explained with the "lower mass == weaker". But: is it just the relation of those masses or is it the absolute mass as well that's influencing the strength?? ... and what I don't understand: why is the rigidBody.mass 1 for both parts? and... which mass is now the relevant one? how can I find it? (I need it, if I want to set the new "massScale" correctly) And... massScale... does it help, to set massScale and connectedMassScale to let's say 10 ? or is just the relation between those masses interesting? ... do further child/parent objects of the 2 connected object also have an influence on the joint? Would be nice if we could answer some questions about joints, now that we got a new Unity version.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/06/ars-live-recap-is-spacex-a-launch-company-or-a-satellite-communications-company/ Transcript of talk here: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Starlink-Conversation-Transcript.txt tl;dr With Starlink, SpaceX is the largest satellite operator in the world right now, both in sheer numbers of sats and ground stations, and in revenue: Viasat/Inmarsat and Intelsat/SES ~$4 billion, Starlink $6.6 billion. They have a foot in the door with Indonesia, which is a prime market for satellite internet. If they enter India, despite the recalcitrance India is showing to OneWeb, that's an even bigger market. Estimated launch costs are below $20 million.

Respectfully, The post did talk about them working on each of these problems: And even more he talked about fixing one of the main annoyances that come with the problem. While this doesn't necessarily fix the Delta-V calculator, It shows that they are committed to fixing the issue and making sure that the game stays fun while they work on it: I don't mean to disregard your concerns but I think if we are asking for more quality communication we should keep a positive attitude when they deliver, especially when it's specifically acknowledging what we have been saying for a while. I'm not saying anyone HAS TO be happy with where we are but I think a positive outlook is always better especially if one main complaint was asking for them to talk about what they are working on before it's here.

Gotta agree to disagree then, that was a painful read. Whilst you're free to like what you like, I fail to agree on any of the things you like, and some other things are plainly not a matter of personal opinion, like not being able to read the fonts on the UI, or loading times, or "potential" and so on. For loading times, on a new and clean game, the loading speed difference between KSP1 and 2 is minimal. Sure, the initial load is faster, but at the end of the day, a game made 10 years ago loads a whole *checks notes* 15 seconds slower from startup to flight. And that's with KSP2 still being in its incomplete infancy. Potential does not define a foundation. Foundation is a word reserved for how well the codebase and the game systems are put together. If "what I believe this game can be" was a metric, then every game in development has infinite potential and thus the strongest foundation. That's just not how it works. In reality KSP2 has the same engine as the prequel, the same middleware for some features, but a much heavier save system, and also a much heavier inactive-vessel simulation. KSP2 will be thwarted by that in the future. It also still builds and saves vessels as a tree, it still calculates fuel flow mostly the same way (something something "inspiration" from the code of the previous game), it still handles the atmosphere like the previous game, but thanks to that passive simulation and bad saving system, vessels popping into range still kill your game, orbits change randomly, and the game grinds to a halt with vessels and partcounts much faster than the prequel, to the point systems (like heating) have to be "streamlined", and part-counts have to be hammered down with new, revolutionary "all in one" science modules, station modules, and in the future colony modules too... or having the logistics layer be abstracted to numbers instead of seeing your vessels come and go. Right now, saves are just a couple vessels for 99% of players, let alone making any vessel in the hundreds of parts for maybe the last couple missions, and most people play serially too (fully complete one mission before launching the next). So really, KSP2s limits haven't yet applied to most people and thus it's no wonder they really think the game is better off. When colonies and interstellar arrive, along with more resources to keep track of... it's gonna be a mess, yet devs refuse to address it and have let the bug report sit unattended, and only mentioned the problem once in the K.E.R.B. and that's... the opposite of potential. So yeah, you might slowly start to realize why people who talk highly of the foundation, potential, and what not don't seem completely grounded in reality to me, and why the lack of proper technical talk in devblogs is worrying. I don't care at all for how they failed to replicate eclipses, or how they had to tesselate a line to draw a circle, I care to know why we're still stuck on something as primitive as tree based vessels, and how they plan to deal with high part counts, or even something as basic as what their target is.

Again, we fall under the same disagreement: If your boss tells you to do bad work, and you just follow his instructions, you are a bad worker. I understand office politics and lazyness leading to you to just follow those orders because it can prove beneficial, however you don't get to also complain about the state of the industry, layoffs and what not when you're being exactly part of the problem by taking 4 weeks to produce some basic code. So when you're cleaning house of bad apples, you need to fire the musicians, and the people ready to dance to them. Sadly, when most of these layoffs happen, they fire only the dancers, but some very scarce times they also fire only the musicians. I don't remember a case where both get the boot. Voting with your wallet can be completely irrelevant depending on scale. In our current case, even if we round up everybody left in this forum and the discord (~1000 active people) we'll never get TTI to do anything about it but laugh. This is my last message on this topic as I don't want to do off topic. If we can continue this talk, hopefully it'll be on another thread that isn't sent to get lost in the shadow real of irrelevant subforums.

i renumber burt rutan's tech talk about how fast we went from shoddy gliders to landing on moon, and that the past few decades have done nothing nearly as impressive as that burst in development. with spacex and others pushing the envelope again, this slump seems like its to come to an end. these kind of development cycles seem to happen in bursts. we just get to the point where we dont feel like barking up the same tree even though there might be juicer fruit on the higher branches. nuclear is in a similar situation and because of a couple bombs and 3 accidents at powerplants were afraid a coconut will land on our head and we leave that tree alone. based entirely off the half a paragraph i managed to read before my eyes wigged out. also i do kind of like the idea of winged boosters. its kind of the role skylon should be designed for rather than ssto. it doesnt even need to go to orbit or even build up enough speed where reentry becomes a hot mess. it just needs to loft stage two high enough so it has time to complete a circularization burn. of course the end result to that is an overcomplicated falcon that can take off from any airport. what we need to do is figure out how to make that kick stage recoverable. but it has to deal with the same issues that starship does. so again it feels like a hard way to reinvent the wheel. still the landing part of reusable second stages is going to be a huge problem both here and on other bodies (heat shield is still an issue but it looks like we have made some headway at least, eg move the flap roots leeward as planned, even make them retractable, eg on linear bearings). think we really need to start looking at lateral engine mounting, except now the turbopumps have to be able to move propellant half way up the ship under thrust gravity. as a second stage this can be reduced depending on whatever loft time your first stage (winged or otherwise) gave you. also fine for lifting off of moon/mars and keeps the regolith out of the engines. but then your structural loads from thrust need to be handled and more mass required (possibly also from a slightly bigger turbopump) again less of a problem at low gravity (real or otherwise) but you must also support the weight of the engine. and losing one of the two pods would be bad. multiple engines per pod would be better but then you need to isolate them better so you dont get a cascade failure in the pod. complex geometry like this also makes re-entry problematic (see starship's liquid metal flaps). heat shields like to be simple.

Here where I live, we call this the Mediocrity Pact: you pretend you are doing meaningful work, I pretend I'm doing meaningful work, and we cover our arses so no one will caught us. 10 to 15 years ago, I was hired on a Industry to help code some firmware - not going to give too much details on this one, you will understand soon. First thing I did: I spend a whole week reading every single piece of technical paper the project had, including protocol specifications. Second thing I did, I specified exactly what I would be doing, feature by feature, with alternative paths to handle the expected exceptions. It became a PHD thesis compared to the specification documents they were used to. It took me a month and a half, a time my immediate manager wanted me to do some coding. But I had someone above him getting my back, because I did my way nevertheless. On a conversation, with that manager visibly nervous, he bluntly told me that I was going to be responsible for that use-cases, and I will be responsabilised if the use-cases would not be validated by the QAS team. I remember looking at them with a puzzled face (or at least, it's how I felt my face's muscles) and asked: "And there's any other way to get the job done?" TL;DR: The Company had outsourced the development of the product to a company (mine), but also outsourced the QAS to a direct competitor. So it would be the best interest of that competitor to get rid of us to score the positions for their own contractors. So my direct manager's problem was that he had hired my company to the development job, and he didn't wanted to lose points on his boss if we fail on the job - what, in theory, would be our competitor's best interest and, so, writing a so detailed and specific Requirements would play against our best interest. Problem: such Requirements was still the best (if not the only) way to get the fracking job done! What follows was probably my finest hours on that Industry: I had already worked for that Company, so I knew how they think and I understood why they hired competitors for Development and Quality. TL;DR: if the project fails, BOTH OF US would be sacked, so we were all in the same boat. So my next task, after writing that document, was to talk with the QAS guys and explain to them (including their manager, that understood and agreed) that our best interest was to work together in this project, and let our respective bosses to handle politics up there in the top floor - far away from the trenches. I did everything I could to make their lives easier, and they made everything they could to make my job effective (not exactly easier however ), and we delivered the product not as specified, but better. EDIT: I want to stress the pronoun WE. I didn't saved the day, I just did my job while they did their job and together we delivered the product. Unfortunately, that project was an exception on our Customer, not the norm. That Industry had already started to crumb - in the exact same way this one is doing now. It's the reason I think the Game Industry is "over firing", not to mention firing the wrong guys. The real troublemakers depicted by this video are not the cheeks-covering developers that wanted 4 weeks for a simple task. The real culprit is the idiot that negotiated the 2 weeks. Get rid of that idiot, and the developers will just cope with the demand, or they will be punctually replaced - and problem solved. It's exactly about "seniority". Under par people were hired as "Seniors" without the merit. And these people climbed the corporate ladder and started solving technical problems with politics. Firing the people that danced with their music is not going to fix anything. You need to fire the musicians.

The Wikipedia articles on the Uranprojekt are quite enlightening: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=German_nuclear_program_during_World_War_II&diffonly=true Even more interesting are the Transkription of the talk of impridoned German scientists envolved in the Uranprojekt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Epsilon They show that ( imho luckily) they did have quite some failure in estamting the needed amount of Uran, needed devices etc. But in the end if sonething don't work you mess around until you find sonething that works.

They. Did. Not. They moderated people who were yelling and screaming and frothing at the mouth. You've always been able to talk bad about the game and the developers. The problem comes when anybody disagrees with you and you freak out.

Saying something so condescending and negative about someone, so confidently and with such little information is absolute bananas to me. Just because some YouTube influencers did some "research" and forum members have obsessively scrutinized every pointless scrap of info doesn't mean we have any clue who's to blame. We don't know what the day to day operations were like. We don't know who was pushing for what, or who was expressing doubts. We don't know what was said at meetings. Nobody who was there can apparently talk at the moment. To publicly condemn a man and call for harm to his career based on so little, and while hiding behind a pseudonym, should be embarrassing.

You know, i didn't even think about FAR affecting seaplanes in that way. As for the rest, yeah i left prior to KSP2's "Launch" and then came back to talk mad **** when it went EA lol (Then left again because bored). But that's good to know. Thanks Marr! I need to do some testing now.

Yes and the M-21/D-21 incident did lead to the cancellation of these concepts. But there was a group of aerodynamicsts and Physicists who pointed out that the B-70 and the A-12/SR-70 are aerodynamically VERY different aircraft. Also the X-15 would be mounted 3x higher off the wing than the M-21/D-21 combo with Vertical fins instead of inward canted fins (which is what the D-21 actually struck first.) And lastly, The D-21 had a rudimentary Autopilot that couldn't compensate for anything (exactly how many D-21 pods were recovered.... 1!) So on the scale of tolerances; we are talking about is almost an order of a magnitude greater than the very tightly fit M-21/D-21. All that being said. Yes I agree this was risky. (Note the D-21 wingtips are almost the same width as the rudders!) Re the B-52/X-15 issue. It couldn't at all have to do with the fact they had to cut a huge NOTCH out of the B-52s wing and the eddy and vortice generated were striking the rudder directly on the X-15. B-52 was not an ideal launch platform for something the Size of the X-15. If the B-36 would have been able to fly Faster/Higher it Might have been ok. There was even talk about re-tasking one of the two YB-60s (B-36 with 8 J57s and swept wings) to carry the X-15 in the bomb bay like the B-36 did with its FICON aircraft (Which dropped away, flew their mission and then RETURNED and landed in the B-36 Bomb bay! (In theory) Note the B-60 would not actually do well because the wing was so thick (it was just a B-36 wing with a new center section that gave it a 35 degree sweep) that the B-60 could barely fly once it actually flew and it's handling was... in a word... atrocious. Look how thick the wing is! It is still the worlds largest (in size) all jet bomber aircraft in the world. The Bomb-bay, when equipped with cutouts for the wings, could hold an X-15 similar to how Maestro carried the X-1 and X-2s. I actually know one of the Engineers who flew on Maestro for some of those fascinating X-plane flights. BTW Said engineer was scheduled to fly on the X-1-3 flight under the B-50 mother-ship (I don't remember that one's name now) At the end of the flight (they did not drop the X-1) they were de-fuling the X-1 when the plane exploded. The F-84 there is roughly 4/5ths the size fuselage to fuselage of an X-15. In the Case of the FICON the tail goes into the bomb-bay.

Do not use post it notes to talk on the web.

I am going to start my comment with a question for the CMs and then I will go into my further suggestions My question to the CM comes from the conversations that @Nerdy_Mike was having in the discord, he was talking about the roadmap and how development will follow it and all milestones will be fulfilled. This is obviously great news long term as we will get all that was promised on that front. I also remember many instances where CMs have talked about the ideas of polls and wanting to them but not knowing how to go about doing them correctly. I think some polls that will work are ones about which things should come first, meaning that the "losing" side of the poll will still know they will get the content they voted for. Anyways, my question is would KSP2 ever consider making a poll for if Recourses should come before Interstellar? I ask this because there has been a good amount of people talk about their concerns about not having resources when colonies drop and then having to wait until after interstellar for this feature. @Dakota and @Nerdy_Mike, I would love an answer to this question so I know whether to keep voicing my concerns about this subject or if I should use my time more wisely on commenting on other aspects of the game. I understand that there are reasons that would make these decisions out of your control or if this just plain is impossible with the current development process. I would love clarification on this. Alrighty, now that that is out of the way, I'll give my ideas towards communications: (Note) I think the major thing that is frustrating the community is that we just don't know what is going at all, this both goes for colonies and the next patch. I understand there are powers that be that keep you from giving information about colonies very often, so I'm going to focus on communications patch-to-patch 1. I think a good idea could be a "next patch bugs squashed counter" (the name needs some work ) somewhere on the forums that updates each week. You wouldn't even need to put in a bunch of details about the bugs, just a range based on the current "dev-version" of the game that is being focused on to give an idea of progress in development to the community. You could put a disclaimer that the number can fluctuate upwards and downwards because of different "dev-versions" of the game being considered the focused version, or because some changes broke something and now you are fixing those things while keeping what the original change fixed (this is what I imagine is happening right now and why its taken a while longer for this patch). Anyways I think this would be good because then the community would have a constant feeling of progress as the weeks go on. 2. I think more engagement in the individual forums would be nice, not just when we ask but kinda closer to how the interactions on discord are. It would be nice to see everyday at least one thought given on a thread somewhere about something. It wouldn't always have to be serious stuff either, right now I am realizing a lot of the community gets a bit upset at the "joking" and more "fun-oriented" posts being made right now but that is more because they don't have much communications and want quality/qualitative posts when they happen. After getting over the hump, and when seeing CM posts are much more common, then the forums will feel more like a conversation with CMs than complaints to them constantly. Really just like once a day would be enough, even if half are joke/fun posts. 3. I think that suggestions or things that CMs cant talk about should not be met with radio silence, but instead with a "heard*" or a "there is no information we are able to give right now*". This would give us more communication and make it feel like we aren't just talking into the void hoping that something sticks. (the * would be to indicate that these communications are not a direct "this will be in the game" or a "this will not be in the game"). Anyways these are my thoughts on improvements to the current communications (as far as patch to patch goes). All of these suggestions/criticisms come from a place of respect and excitement for what is to come next both in the game and in the community.

Musk has always been a manipulating idiot who's failed upwards getting a bigger pile of cash. He's never been actually good, just good at corporate manipulation and control and selling himself as doing things he never did. He's always bought into corporations and manipulated his way to control--sometimes failing and getting fired. Along the way, Musk gathered a cult following who just think he's the best thing since sliced bread. He may have slowly grown to believe his own propaganda, maybe. Careful examination of Musk has always shown this. However, when he played silly buggers with Twitter and got caught in a deal to buy it--which the Twitter Board held him to--Musk got forced to buy Twitter. And now has demonstrated no matter how bad Twitter was before Musk, it was a paradise compared to how it is now. Showing how bad his decisions are about an actual tech company has really shown to more that Musk isn't a genius but an idiot. But I think it's likely his long pile of promises for Tesla will be what sinks him. It will eventually become like Enron but even bigger. How long this will take to play out and how is unknown. But despite Musk convincing first his tame Tesla Board of Directors and then the Shareholders, there's no true justification for him being paid US $45 billion for what he has done. That's a massive share of the profit for every vehicle that Tesla has sold. When its latest vehicle, the Cybertruck, is a horrible design--demanded by Musk--and a complete failure. They and other sane investors likely voted against Musk's bonus. But he apparently convinced enough of the Shareholders to get that past. There was a "fear" that Musk would quit as CEO if he didn't get his massive bonus. There's some crazy talk about Musk being vital for the success of Tesla. HOW?!? He's the one destroying it. And the value of Tesla Stock went up after the vote was announced. Stock Market Investors can be quite stupid in the short run. However, when real sales and finance figures come out and it's more and rising failure, things will get rebalanced. When this will catch up to Musk, not sure. But I think it will eventually.

I am going to ask that you stop acting like the majority of this commentary is somehow without merit. When the points you attempt to make are so eloquently rebutted, you shift the goal post to "its just game" I do not think that "its just an X,Y,Z" is as acceptable excuse for the very last point that @PCDWolf made. It is not about patience. The majority of the rebuttal addressed that very issue and the last year we have been actively attempting to gain insight on the direction this game plans to take. They have been tight lipped because the community was promised for years that this game would have a certain goal. KSP PLUS. It was immediately apparent that a different direction was chosen and we clamored for something of substance regarding this. The stuff that does come out is pure PR content and nothing of merit with regard to game direction. The only thing worth a dang at all on the future of this game was completely compiled by @The Space Peacock... with much of it dated. How much of these old conversations and ideas are going to stay? You are not understanding how long it took for took to get them to even consider certain important things seriously... Like Wobble Font UI TimeWarp Constraints Things that are not "official' bugs are often ignored when we question specifics or insight in decisions. Official Bugs (Up Until Recently) has been difficult to navigate with key word searches not always resulting in success. This compounds with many redundant postings and ignored issues NO ONE can say that this game was playtesting in an organic manner. EA is not for Alpha State drops.. not traditionally. This leaves us guessing as to why and what.. with the track record our imaginations see "the best prediction for the future is the past" WE want this game to succeed. But we also want that success to be within some realm of what we enjoyed about the first game... People would talk about other things than how crappy "radio silence is" if we were given something to talk about.

We don't really need to make up any announcements. The official KSP X feed said it best: We are continuing to support, and we will talk when we can. That's about the best you are ever going to get.

Granted. The bottle opener can not only talk, but can automatically identify and open bottles. Unfortunately it thinks you're a bottle and "opens" you (i.e. removes your head). I wish for nothing in particular.

Has been a while since I commented on my own post but I hope that people continue to talk on this post.

They get cancelled quickly because of corporate greed. I wish for one of those lost 2003 bottle openers that talk

Not necessarily. Do you know the Enigma encoder machine from Germany used during WWII? Someone coded it in VB6, creating the machine application where you pressed buttons. At the same time, he released the source code. Various applications could be developed by reusing the code already written on the rotors and pegboard. An interesting application is that you typed the message, pressed a button, it was encoded with the Enigma and it was passed to Morse effortlessly. And vice versa. That is why I do not think we have to start from scratch, but we have to access what has already been written and talk to those who participated. Documentation is very important, whether written or transmitted verbally.