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Of course. If we only "overreacted" when a hungry lion is in the immediate vicinity, I don't think we would come a long way as a society. A car is just a car, after all. So is money. Music. Computers. Biology.. Whatever tickles you... But it tickles, and that's a good thing. I'm fully aware that I have a first world problem. But if there was no such thing at this point, that would mean that all of us here would be in a nuclear wasteland, fighting over remaining canned food. So I'm happy to battle over opinions @Dakota Maybe this exists, and has slipped my attention... Is there a chance to at least get an overview of how news/updates are done? If you have a feature X, when do you post it as a sneakpeek? How decisions are made to share it at all? What's allowed and not allowed to talk about? I'm having troubles to form a proper question here.

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.

I mean really love this team and I think things are coming along nicely but I believe even they see it as getting on base after a tough at bat. Unfortunately we're living in a really toxic gaming culture and its got to be hard for passionate developers and designers to gauge real reactions and actionable feedback in a clear and honest way. The atmosphere from a vocal player standpoint is to take all of these things really personally, or pretend to take them really personally, and then engage in an over-the-top Kabuki dance of feigned rage demanding groveling supplication from the corporate entities they've been wronged by because they think thats the only way games improve. But it's kind of like Cable news outlets constantly running BREAKING NEWS banners. If you're always turning everything up to 11 then people who might listen might as well just tune you out. If players believe rage-bombing every title that doesn't meet their expectations is the only way to convince developers to improve their products then eventually developers are just going to take those flame-campaigns less seriously. I would guess they already are. They'll look to more balanced and genuinely informative heuristics to identify the worst problems and work their way up from there. As test case lets talk about Cyberpunk--widely dragged and laughed at when it first released and probably deservedly so. It probably should have incubated for a couple more years. And now all of the initial hard work of good writing and good VA and story can be capitalized on because they fixed most of the bugs and redesigned the core mechanics into something incredible. Which is great! I genuinely hope as colonies and interstellar and resources are phased in the folks at Intercept remain open to making big internal changes to game mechanics depending on how things play out. What matters in the end is how the 1.0 product actually plays. Is it fun? Is it deep? Are the actual mechanics well tuned? is QOL up to snuff? Thats what matters. In my experience most people in this world are doing their best to be good at what they do. They're already incentivized to do that. Heaping shame and vitriol on them usually makes things worse, not better. The changes Cyberpunk made weren't just because players dragged CDPR through the mud. In fact the more substantive changes outside of bug-fixes--police system, fixing drops and the tech tree, etc. only come from very specific and clear feedback on whats not working and then having the time and creative process to create new and better systems. I personally would argue if you as a gamer are dissatisfied you produce more specific and actionable feedback on whats wrong--and passionately so!--rather than focus on grievances.

SpaceX/Starship is the go-to option to talk about I think, but I don't think they'll make a proposal, at least on their own (though, that is probably what a lot of people thought before HLS, so what do I know). Relativity/Impulse have a Mars landing mission on the horizon, and could form the backbone to a project to pursue a return mission, as Tom Mueller is leading Impulse, and has a lot of experience with methalox (that he's applying to Helios), while also having looked into ISRU for Starship. They might even pull in SpaceX for this reason - giving them real data on making methalox on the Martain surface. Just based on having a slated Mars mission Blue Origin/RocketLab are another potential team, set to launch this summer (EscaPADE), but it's a pair of satellites, not a lander. So probably not. NASA needs a firmer deadline for sample return, NET 2040 is too far, and runs the risk of eventual cancellation. When NASA makes their selections, they need a closer date, preferably in the early/mid 2030s, about a decade from now.

RocketStar has made discussion on this forum a couple of times, but with some of their older projects. This one's spicier. I just randomly came across an article effectively repeating RocketStar's press release, and I kind of wanted to take this one apart a little bit. To get the tl;dr out of the way, the claim is that they are boosting their 1U pulsed plasma drive with fusion to give it an extra kick "for free". How much of a kick isn't really specified. There is no point of going over an article, so lets just go to the source with RocketStar's Press Release. Note that they are referencing real experiments that have confirmed the reaction and talk about the upcoming flights of their current FireStar drive, but don't say much about the fusion results beyond detection of gamma and alpha radiation. Which is cool in itself, but doesn't say much for the practical side of things. They do specifically clarify in the press release that the "fusion boosted" really means "fusion-triggered-fission-boosted," which is something that needs to be taken apart a bit. Specifically, the claim is that by introducing boron to the water, which is used as main propellant, they are getting boron-proton fusion, which results in an unstable state of carbon, which decays to alpha particles. The release does not specify the isotopes used, but boron does come in 10B and 11B, with the latter being more abundant and more interesting of the two. The process 11B + p -> 12C is of interest here. As we all, know, 12C is stable, however, there is a rather well known Hoyle State of carbon which isn't. The natural way in which Hoyle State comes up is when stars burn helium in their cores. The process involves two 4He nuclei coming together to form a highly unstable 8Be nucleus, which has just enough time to collide with a third 4He nucleus to form the Hoyle State of 12C. The latter is highly unstable, and is almost like the 3 alpha particles bouncing around in a common strong force potential than a real nucleus. Consequently, most of the time it decays back to three alpha particles, and the star has to try again. Occasionally, however, the 12C** state emits a gamma, decays to a lower energy 12C* state and finally to ground state 12C. The Hoyle State has 7.7MeV above carbon's ground state, which is a lot. The full proton-proton cycle is about 24MeV. So we're talking a good fraction of typical nuclear energies. On paper, this works. The total binding energy of 11B is 76.21MeV and ground state 12C is 92.15MeV. That gives 11B + p plenty of energy to form Hoyle State, so long as protons are hot enough to overcome the repulsion barrier. It is much lower for proton-proton or even D-T fusion, since 11B has the charge much more distributed through the larger nucleus, but I don't really have any numbers to attach to it at this time. I'll try to find either something from the cited SBIR experiments or other publications at a later point to try and get a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how much fusion/fission we are actually expecting in a chamber of a plasma drive. What we have that's probably pretty reliable are the specs of the current generation FireStar M 1.4, which does not involve any fusion/fission processes. Just a conventional pulsed plasma propulsion unit, utilizing water, ionizing arc, and an accelerator cavity. Since this is a commercial product, and validation experiments are apparently available under the NDA, I have no reason to suspect them from being far off. Cited directly from RocketStar's website. The ISP cited is consistent with the total impulse with 250g of propellant and implies mean exhaust velocity of about 71km/s. If the protons are accelerated by the field of the same strength, they can be potentially traveling about twice as fast, resulting in effective plasma temperatures of up to low mega-Kelvins on collisions. That feels like ballpark reasonable for what it'd take for 11B + p fusion to take place. But again, I don't have good estimates for that at this time. On the net, interesting. I want to see the numbers attached to the claimed efficiency boost. Also, the fact that they're calling it a fusion rocket when it's really more of a fission rocket feels a little scummy, but maybe they were trying to not scare people with neutron radiation associated with fission? This is, if real, an aneutronic process, so it would be reasonably safe for the applications for which this is meant. Either way, a real nuclear-boosted drive that's commercially available is really exciting, even if the performance benefits are going to be marginal. Finally, even the base model, without fusion/fission is a really nifty example of how far the commercial plasma propulsion has gone. A 1U propulsion unit that can provide a 3U sat with 4.6km/s of delta-V? Yeah, that's not bad. With the right planning, you can take your 3U from LEO all the way to Mars utilizing a boost from Luna. Neat.

I need to talk to the config's owner and ask for permission

It's pretty hard to manage expectations after a huge hype campaign followed by... hummm... a somewhat less than expected initial release. There's a lot of promises (as well tons of plain statements taken as promises) made in the last years that are probably going to be broken, and without a viable release to use as a trade-off (ok, A is not going to happen, but look! B & C were implemented instead!), at least in my book, the less technical details (or any details that can be used by technicians to infer the state of the game) you publish, less work you will have on managing a new loot of fallen short expectations. It's kinda of a catch-22 situation: you talk about, you get screwed. You don't talk about, you get screwed. Finding the less bitter spot in which you get less screwed is the trick. (don't look at me for answers - I'm on the "talk too much" spectrum)

Oh heavens to Betsy, we forgot all about the thread where they joked about putting imperial units in KSP. Quick everyone, we must finish that riveting debate! Seriously though, the thread isn't derailed so much as the topic is now something YOU do not wan't to talk about. No, they are telling you that you think something is fixed because you have not seen the cracks yet. They have been very patient trying to explain it to people in this thread. It is not a difficult concept to grasp. Why do people think the burden of proof is on the poster who went and did reserach on the topic, and not the poster who reads the post and goes "I don't believe you. I haven't looked, but you sound wrong." What about imperial tons? Back to topic and all that. (I know it wasn't you who mentioned getting back to topic, I'm just making a bad joke)

Exactly... currently. When you set out to do something more bigger and ambitious, than KSP 1 in this context, you have to plan ahead. I won't pretend that I know anything about that physics engine. But, I do have a little knowledge about programming, and as stated above, I'm very much curious how they plan to execute many things. Rocket wobble is just one of them. Continuous long burns, heat transfer, battery draining, etc... computations on all vessels during time warp... those are the meat mechanics of the (new) game. Thus far, as @PDCWolf pointed out, there was a talk about a short term and long term solution for rocket wobble. They went with middle term solution, involving autostruts. Why? I'm not dissing devs. If you asked me how to implement these things efficiently, I'd say wait for home quantum computers. The point I'm trying to make is that, we haven't got any indication on how these crucial things will be resolved. After so many years of development apparently,(judging by autostruts, they don't have any indication either. If they do, I'd be very curious to read an update on that. I don't care if I don't get any new parts, or parachute bug resolved within the next few months. I care whether the team is capable of developing the core mechanics needed for this game. Falling back to autostruts doesn't inspire much confidence, and I pray to be proven, oh so very wrong.

That's a KAS problem, not Pathfinder. The following (old) post and the one after it talk about some work arounds for when this happens - to my knowledge no complete fix was ever made (at least there's nothing in the releases changelog that looks like it addresses this issue):

Hey! I’m Jon Cioletti, the Senior Technical Artist focused on lighting and VFX here at Intercept Games! In celebration of the upcoming total solar eclipse, today we are looking at some of the lighting tech around eclipses in KSP2 - but first we have to talk about eclipses in REAL life! To help with that, we reached out to one of our friends over at NASA: Senior Visualization Designer AJ Christensen. AJ works at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS), where he develops visualization techniques and designs data-driven imagery for scientific analysis and public outreach. AJ was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to answer a few questions to kick this Dev Diary off right: Can you very basically describe an eclipse and why it is a special event? There are a lot of objects in space that pass between the Earth and the Sun at various times. We usually call it a “transit” when something that appears much smaller than the disk of the Sun passes in front of it, like an asteroid, or the International Space Station, or Venus. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky But through a crazy coincidence of physical size and distance from Earth, the apparent size of the disk of the Moon in the sky is almost exactly the same as the apparent size of the disk of the Sun in the sky, and so when the Moon transits in front of the Sun, we call it an eclipse because it blocks out a significant part of the Sun’s light. The Moon actually orbits around Earth approximately every 27 days, so you might think we would see an eclipse every 27 days, but because of the tilt of that orbit, the Moon is usually not lined up with the Earth and Sun. For this reason, a lot of orbits result in no eclipse, or only a partial eclipse. The total eclipse happening on April 8th is a rare event where the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun are all in a straight line, and the United States will be on the “day side” of the planet, meaning we get to experience the Sun being completely blocked out by the Moon for a few minutes in any given location along the path of totality. eclipseElements60fps_4-11-2023a_total_diagram.mp4 Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio What should people expect to see when viewing the eclipse? Anyone within the contiguous United States will be able to see the eclipse in some way on April 8th. If you are outside the path of totality, you will have several hours to witness a partial eclipse in the middle of the day. This means that the Sun will have a bit of a crescent shape, but it will not completely block the Sun. This is a fun time to put on approved solar eclipse viewing protective glasses and look at the shape of the sun, and to make pinhole projectors out of colanders or crisscrossed fingers to see lots of little crescent shadows on the ground. If you are inside the path of totality, which is about 100 miles wide and travels from Texas to Maine, you will see that partial eclipse for several hours, but right in the middle will be 3-4 minutes of totality when the bright disk of the Sun called the “photosphere” is completely blocked. During totality, the temperature will drop, crickets may start chirping, and you will see sunset colors in the sky in 360-degrees all around you. totalGlow_4k_60fps_4-14-2023a_2160p60_2 (1).mp4 Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio If you are able, it is definitely worth trying to get inside the path of totality. One place of many that you can find more information to plan a trip is this visualization my colleagues made: Credit: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio What happens to the Sun’s light during an eclipse? In the words of “Mr. Eclipse” Fred Espenak, a retired NASA astrophysicist, “there are no special eclipse rays.” The Sun continues to be what it always is – an extremely bright object in the sky that hurts to look at. This is why NASA insists that anyone viewing the eclipse should wear approved eclipse-viewing lenses, because even during a partial eclipse, you are still looking directly at the Sun. (Note, cameras can also be damaged if they look directly at the sun without a solar filter.) However, in the last seconds before totality, there are some dazzling effects we can see. The first to occur is called the “Diamond Ring Effect”. This is where some of the sun’s light wraps around the horizon of the moon like a ring, and a sliver of light still at the edge creates a huge amount of glare like a diamond. Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas The next effect we call “Baily’s Beads” which are visible for only a moment – these are a line of bright spots of light that poke through the valleys on the edge of the Moon. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani And finally, once the Sun is completely covered by the moon, we get to see magic of the Solar corona, long tendrils of illuminated plasma in the Sun’s atmosphere. The corona is always there in the sky, but it is usually completely covered up by glare from the disk of the Sun, which is about 1 million times brighter than the corona. For these 3 or 4 minutes of totality, we recommend taking off your eclipse glasses and soaking in the corona with your bare eyes. Credit: Miloslav Druckmüller, Peter Aniol, Shadia Habbal/NASA Goddard, Joy Ng Once totality ends, Baily’s Beads and the Diamond Ring will appear again and we recommend putting your eclipse glasses back on to enjoy the rest of the partial eclipse. How does that inform your work with the Visualizations team at NASA? My team is called the Scientific Visualization Studio, and we use both observed and computed data to make images and videos that explain science research. We have been working closely with scientists and communicators across NASA to create computer graphics imagery to help explain what the April 8th eclipse will look like on the Earth’s surface and in the sky, the surprising geometry of the Earth-Moon-Sun system, and more. We even recently published a game aimed toward younger audiences on NASA’s SpacePlace website called “Snap It!” that gets into what transits are and how eclipses are a special kind of transit. You can find it at this link: https://go.nasa.gov/SnapIt. And, of course, you can view thousands of visualizations about the eclipse and other science topics at our website: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov. ---- So now that we have a good idea of what happens during eclipses in real life, let's jump into the game! Directional Lighting To try and simulate the lighting we see in our solar system we use a variety of systems, but for the eclipse we’ll be focusing on our direct lighting solution with the star of the solar system: Kerbol. While a star technically emits light in all directions, in our game we only really need to care about the star’s light that reaches our player. To handle this, we use a Directional Light which, by definition, is located infinitely far away and emits in one direction only. This works great for lighting our worlds with an intense light from a single distant source like a star. This directional light is also responsible for the direction that all shadows are cast in game. To make this directional light behave more like an actual star, we attenuate its intensity based on distance and occlusion. Distance is the easier of the two. If the player flies their Kerbals way out towards Eeloo they’ll noticed their vessel gets much dimmer. Looking back at Kerbol they can see it shrinking in the skybox as well. To manage this, in the lighting code we attenuate the light’s intensity based on the Inverse Square Law which states that “the intensity of the radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance”. The formula looks a little something like this: 1 /x ² . Things like artist adjustable overrides and camera auto-exposure play into the lighting too, but in general throughout the solar system, the further you get from the star, the dimmer it gets. For smaller objects like terrain, buildings, and parts, we use shadows to show light being occluded. But for something as huge as a celestial body we track how much they block our Kerbals from the star itself to attenuate the light intensity appropriately. As an example, we’ll use a solar eclipse with Kerbol and the Mun. Simulated eclipse Intersection of Circles When you think about it in a flat 2D space, this is just two circles intersecting each other. If that’s the case then we can solve for the area of overlap to determine how occluded Kerbol is. The diagrams and formulas below show more of the math being done behind the scenes: Our lighting system holds a reference to the current SOI celestial body, that body’s star and any neighboring bodies. All of these bodies are projected into a normalized sphere around the player where the system checks if any bodies are going to intersect. We can quickly verify this by checking if the sum of the body’s radii are greater than or equal to the distance between them. Once we pass this check, the intersection code starts and we begin solving for the amount of overlap to determine the percentage a body is blocked. First step is to solve for the distance each circle is from the center of the intersection. To do this we use the equation of a circle and populate it with the values we know. C₁: x ² + y ² = r ₁² C₂: ( x - d )² + y ² = r ₂² Then, isolate y ² in each equation and combine both equations like so: y ²= r ₁² - d ₁² y ²= r ₂² - ( d₁ - d )² r ₁² - d ₁² = r ₂² - ( d ₁ - d )² Finally, we can solve for d ₁ and d ₂ : d ₁ = ( r ₁² - r ₂² + d ²) / 2d d ₂ = d - d ₁ After that we can begin solving for the angle of the sector formed when tracing the radii of our celestial body to the intersection points: With our new θ₁ and θ₂ in radians, we can solve for the area of each body’s overlapping segment A₁ and A₂. The following formula is derived by subtracting the area of the triangle from the area of the sector formed by this angle: Area of a triangle = ( 1 / 2 ) r² sin⁡θ Area of a sector = ( 1 / 2 ) r² θ Area of segment = ( ( 1 / 2 ) r² θ ) - ( ( 1 / 2 ) r² sin⁡θ ) = ( r² / 2 ) * ( θ - sin⁡θ ) A1 = ( ( r₁² ) / 2 ) * ( θ₁ - sin⁡θ₁ ) A2 = ( ( r₂² ) / 2 ) * ( θ₂ - sin⁡θ₂ ) Total Area = A1 + A2 And there you have it, the area of overlap for the celestial body. This can then be used to determine the percentage of visibility the further body has by subtracting the occluded area from the total projected circle area and with that number we can scale the intensity of the light emitted by that source body. In our case for the eclipse that will dim the Kerbol’s intensity as the Mun passes over EclipseAtKSC_Attenuation.mp4 Simulated eclipse over the KSC Lens Flare Occlusion The final piece of the puzzle here is the lens flare of the star changing to show that it has been occluded by the Mun. The same visible percentage value is passed through to the lens flare system where it attenuates the scale of the flare to match the reduction of directional lighting in the environment. Unfortunately, this doesn’t capture the details of a total solar eclipse though. EclipseAtKSC_LensFlareAndAttenuation.mp4 Simulated eclipse over the KSC from the ground We have plans to improve the look of eclipses and celestial body occlusion beyond attenuation and add more noticeable “flair” to a total eclipse like Kerbol’s corona peeking out from behind the Mun! We’ll be keeping a close eye on the next total solar eclipse as reference and inspiration! And, if you're nearby and able to, we hope that you join us on April 8th in safely viewing this awesome event right above our heads. Thanks to AJ and everyone over at NASA for contributing to this Dev Diary - and thanks to you for reading! Cioletti .ipsEmbeddedVideo { width: 700px; }

They've actively, literally, contradicted this by saying work was continued between the restructuring. Plus it's literally the same upper management minus Paul Furio who got fired early on, so it's either them practicing corporate diplomacy (with themselves?) or development really wasn't interrupted. Hope one day we get a proper post mortem and a case for devs and publishers to look at and learn from. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. They work super slowly > they can't show progress because there's none > there's nothing solid to talk about (and they don't want to talk about plans either because they know they'll be held up to their words, the horror). > they need to space posts more > those posts are still empty because (start cycle again here). Basic bug-reporting feedback right there that you should be telling the authors of reports. In github you get your issues properly tagged if they can't be reproduced, or are believed to be hardware related, or whatever. Reports being archived without saying a single word is a big no no, no matter what single excuse you could write for doing it. Even a "not important" provides at least some closure and safety that the thing was at least read. Not only is the faith in QA testing for this project under the ground, but the bug tracker that had to be fought for "happens" to be ignored and users are made to wait ~1 month to see if top voted issues are even being looked at. Because even those barely have developer interaction, only to be met with "can't reproduce lol". The whole bug reporting-to-feedback process (let alone a "hot" fix that's cold by 2 months at the minimum) is laughably bad and should be set as an example to every dev running a bug tracker on how exactly to not do things. Great way of putting it into words. We're 1+ years into the project and these very basic doubts still linger. Even if they work at the pace of a DMV, they should have a vision they want to pursue and a reason for wanting to repeat all the same mistakes KSP1 made. For all the hate KSP1 received in these forums once 2 dropped, from some people, they're really doing a very basic rerun with a fresh coat of paint and a bigger price tag. Doesn't matter, there's still a missing part to close the loop. It's the same issue the old "mail us the bug" reporting system had. You have no idea what they're doing, if they're doing anything at all, with your report. On which everybody complained about readability and what we got in return was "replace font 2 hard" and some color changes on the navball which is still a mess. Great feedback loop, at least that issue had some closure and we know we need mods to fix that. So you get another black hole place where you don't even know where your feedback goes. The K.E.R.B. is so vital and wanted because it's what's missing to close the loop: feedback on feedback. It's the only time we get to hear about what devs are actually working on, without marketeer language, without hypebeasting, and so on.

Ah yes, love the hyperbole. Also, you can clearly check that I'm a man of my word: i said that if FS! failed to deliver, I'd no longer have any hope or playtime for this game, and that's exactly what happened. I booted FS! a couple times to see what it was about, the game is still bad, and broken, science is a bad streamlined copy of KSP1 and now I post here with weeks or months inbetween right as I said I would. That you still have to strawman my posts as some sort of angry, rabid hater wanting change is funny, specially when I didn't ask for anything to change since before For Science! because that update showed me this project is hopeless. They're clearly not obvious for the devs, given how many remain unaddressed (can't address anything if you don't communicate), that's exactly why the community feels unheard. Very little people posts here anymore thinking the devs are gonna read their feedback unless it's a bug. That's as evident as checking the suggestions subforum and seeing the only people suggesting stuff is new users. Expectations remain unaddressed and unmanaged past the roadmap and some handwavy answers at the AMAs and will remain so until the devs decide to man up and come out with serious talk about the final shape of KSP2, so the people wanting something different can move on if they haven't yet.

Calling 911 to talk to King Richard.

agreed, I would appreciate more activity on the forums. Even if it was just a simple post saying "heard" on a popular thread that day. I would even settle for a cold "this is /is not part of the current plan" to at least get an idea of where we are going I also wanted to come back to this point I made a little bit ago. I think the best example of this would be this video from the KSP YouTube channel. It's a quick 5 min video talking about reentry heating which a lot of the community had questions about, even just the quick look at it and talk from an actual person working on it was great to see at the time. This in my opinion is the perfect amount of communication and is exactly what the community needs. Maybe once a month on a feature or a bug that there has been a lot of questions about.

I originally posted the following in the April Fool's Day thread about converting to imperial units. However, to avoid turning that thread into another one like this, I'm moving the post here so, in the event people want to discuss it, they can do so in this thread, where it belongs. A lot has been made of the development teams (coders, artists, etc.) not having anything to do with communicating with the community, and I'll say up front that I agree with that statement. No, I do not want the developers to sit around and talk on the forums or Discord all day long; they have a game to write, for pete's sake. I'd rather they spend their time on the clock coding, or drawing, or whatever it is they need to do to get the game done. Go. Please. With that said, it is the job of the Community Managers to interact and engage with the community. As far as EA goes, it should be their job to engage with us and let us know exactly what is happening with the development of the game. Yes, this involves interviewing the developers, and compiling lists of bugs, and all the other stuff that goes along with that. But it is their literal job to interact with the community, and the issue here is that instead of the CM's doing this, they are worrying about things that the community quite frankly as a whole doesn't care about. This leads me to believe that one of the following 2 situations is true: The CM's are understaffed and overworked to the point where they simply cannot interact in meaningful ways. Dakota is on his own right now as Mike is off on paternity leave (and coming back this month, I think?), and the organization either hired but has not trained the new person they posted for months ago OR they simply decided not to do it. And this is on top of all of the vacation and time off that was taken over the holidays. If this is the case, if it is a situation where Dakota simply does not have the time to effectively do his job and interact with the community in thoughtful and meaningful ways, then I have to ask why he has the time to come up with weekly challenges and joke threads. I get that those things may be part of his job, but we have begged for more meaningful communication and have not gotten it. Does he not have time to ask the developers where they are at? Do the CM's not have the ability or authority to ask the artists what they have drawn up lately? Has Nate decided that he doesn't need to give interviews to the CM's or host AMA's any longer? And if this is all the case, why hasn't the company hired more CM's to help alleviate the strain on Dakota? It's either this, or... The developers honestly have nothing to show or discuss at this point. And if this is the case, there's a whole box of Lego's that need to be unpacked with this. Because, quite frankly, how can you be 6 years into development, and 1 year+ into early access, and have nothing to discuss? We have bugs that have been persistent since launch, promises made both before and during launch that haven't been met, and yet they have nothing to divulge? Bug reports that aren't discussed but end up in the archive with no explanation, and no talking about them? The company hired 2 of the best and brightest minds from the KSP1 mod community to help write this game, and you've got nothing to show at this point? For Science! dropped almost 4 months ago, and since then we've seen like 1 or 2 images of what might be in colonies, but you have no words to go with that? Where are we at on the road map as far as colonies goes? I know you can't give any dates, but are we even close? And those images of gigantic parts in space - are they going to be in the game, and if so, how do we get them up into space? Where are we at with all those bugs for months you just keep saying "Researching"? On those bugs you are looking for additional feedback on - what do you need from us to help you? What information are you looking for that we haven't already provided? And what do you say to those people - like myself - who have mid-range equipment and are supposed to see performance increases but aren't? (Side note - anything greater than 200 parts on my rig drops my FPS to 10. In orbit. 32 GB RAM, 2060 Super, Ryzen 9 3900 12 core. Tell me again how performance has gotten better.) It's no secret that I have been very vocal about where I think the game is at, and where it is headed. I've complained enough, so I'm trying not to do more of the same here (even though I'm sure this will all still be seen as complaining). But I want this game to succeed. I want this game to outplay, outperform, and outlast the original. I do not want to have to see the community come together and have the modders create KSP3. Nobody wants that. We shouldn't even have to float that idea, to be honest. But enough. Enough of the joke threads. Enough of the weekly challenges. Enough of the silence. We have held up our end of the bargain here in EA by not only shelling out the cost of the full release game, but we've been up front and honest with you about bugs, feedback, and telling you what it is we want. We are simply asking for the company to hold up their end. Too much damage has been done over this, but we are still willing to overlook that and give you back our trust if you would simply communicate with us and let us know where this whole thing stands. No corp-speak, no double meanings, no half-truths. Just be honest. We will understand. Heck, we've been understanding for the better part of a decade now; honesty will only help to repair the relationship.

A lot has been made of the development teams (coders, artists, etc.) not having anything to do with communicating with the community, and I'll say up front that I agree with that statement. No, I do not want the developers to sit around and talk on the forums or Discord all day long; they have a game to write, for pete's sake. I'd rather they spend their time on the clock coding, or drawing, or whatever it is they need to do to get the game done. Go. Please. With that said, it is the job of the Community Managers to interact and engage with the community. As far as EA goes, it should be their job to engage with us and let us know exactly what is happening with the development of the game. Yes, this involves interviewing the developers, and compiling lists of bugs, and all the other stuff that goes along with that. But it is their literal job to interact with the community, and the issue here is that instead of the CM's doing this, they are worrying about things that the community quite frankly as a whole doesn't care about. This leads me to believe that one of the following 2 situations is true: The CM's are understaffed and overworked to the point where they simply cannot interact in meaningful ways. Dakota is on his own right now as Mike is off on paternity leave (and coming back this month, I think?), and the organization either hired but has not trained the new person they posted for months ago OR they simply decided not to do it. And this is on top of all of the vacation and time off that was taken over the holidays. If this is the case, if it is a situation where Dakota simply does not have the time to effectively do his job and interact with the community in thoughtful and meaningful ways, then I have to ask why he has the time to come up with weekly challenges and joke threads. I get that those things may be part of his job, but we have begged for more meaningful communication and have not gotten it. Does he not have time to ask the developers where they are at? Do the CM's not have the ability or authority to ask the artists what they have drawn up lately? Has Nate decided that he doesn't need to give interviews to the CM's or host AMA's any longer? And if this is all the case, why hasn't the company hired more CM's to help alleviate the strain on Dakota? It's either this, or... The developers honestly have nothing to show or discuss at this point. And if this is the case, there's a whole box of Lego's that need to be unpacked with this. Because, quite frankly, how can you be 6 years into development, and 1 year+ into early access, and have nothing to discuss? We have bugs that have been persistent since launch, promises made both before and during launch that haven't been met, and yet they have nothing to divulge? Bug reports that aren't discussed but end up in the archive with no explanation, and no talking about them? The company hired 2 of the best and brightest minds from the KSP1 mod community to help write this game, and you've got nothing to show at this point? For Science! dropped almost 4 months ago, and since then we've seen like 1 or 2 images of what might be in colonies, but you have no words to go with that? Where are we at on the road map as far as colonies goes? I know you can't give any dates, but are we even close? And those images of gigantic parts in space - are they going to be in the game, and if so, how do we get them up into space? Where are we at with all those bugs for months you just keep saying "Researching"? On those bugs you are looking for additional feedback on - what do you need from us to help you? What information are you looking for that we haven't already provided? And what do you say to those people - like myself - who have mid-range equipment and are supposed to see performance increases but aren't? (Side note - anything greater than 200 parts on my rig drops my FPS to 10. In orbit. 32 GB RAM, 2060 Super, Ryzen 9 3900 12 core. Tell me again how performance has gotten better.) It's no secret that I have been very vocal about where I think the game is at, and where it is headed. I've complained enough, so I'm trying not to do more of the same here (even though I'm sure this will all still be seen as complaining). But I want this game to succeed. I want this game to outplay, outperform, and outlast the original. I do not want to have to see the community come together and have the modders create KSP3. Nobody wants that. We shouldn't even have to float that idea, to be honest. But enough. Enough of the joke threads. Enough of the weekly challenges. Enough of the silence. We have held up our end of the bargain here in EA by not only shelling out the cost of the full release game, but we've been up front and honest with you about bugs, feedback, and telling you what it is we want. We are simply asking for the company to hold up their end. Too much damage has been done over this, but we are still willing to overlook that and give you back our trust if you would simply communicate with us and let us know where this whole thing stands. No corp-speak, no double meanings, no half-truths. Just be honest. We will understand. Heck, we've been understanding for the better part of a decade now; honesty will only help to repair the relationship.

Just to be clear: I'm not defending anything. I'm stating facts. That those facts are contrary to what people want is not really my problem. To also be clear: Of course I want a perfect game delivered 12 months ago with no bugs and a $10 price tag. However I live in the real world and understand that in the vast majority of cases I will never ever get what I want. So, I determine if what is offered is worth what I'm willing to pay and if it is, great. If not, oh well maybe I'll leave a bad review and then I'll move on. Complaining about obvious things over and over is such a useless exercise it frustrates me that so many enjoy it. Talk about twisting your brain into a torus, that's the idea that after the first 300 times, the 301st complaint will make some sort of difference.

Talk about beating a dead horse - at this point y'all are knocking on a skeleton Last I checked, SpaceX was doing perfectly fine without needing to check arbitrary boxes set by not-SpaceX on SpaceX's own missions.

Again, not talking about "magic me to orbit" - but I am choosing to be a little evocative in the hopes some will think about their own carte-blanche aversion to any kind of orbit assist. I used to work for an MMO called WWII Online, half-scale map of Europe with realistic guns/tanks/planes/yadda. When it launched, you could spawn at any friendly forward base alone the front line, and drive, ride, or walk, towards the nearest "enemy" town. The dream come true. Do you know how fun it is to talk 15km in a video game with birds tweeting in the distance, only to find an empty, poorly modelled village? Or to crawl thru ditches towards one for 2 hours only to have your screen go black inexplicably, because the bullet reaches you before the sound of the shot. Well, that's one of the reasons not many people have heard of the game (even tho it is *still* running, lol). One of the biggest cluster-fs in the game was finally realizing the melding of the naval aspect of the game and the land aspect: cargo ships. But, not wanting to break the spirit of the simulation, every troop and vehicle that the ship was going to carry had to be loaded onto the ship. That is: 1. Spawn the ship, 2. Convince people they want to ride a freighter to the battle happening _right now_ in Kaalmthout or Antwerp or somewhere, 3. Sail the ship into harbor and line it up against the dock, 4. Raise the crane and turn it out over the side of the ship, 5. Get a tank/atg/truck to drive in under the crane, 6. Lower the crane, find the hitching point, get the vehicle hitched, 7. Raise the crane, carefully, swing it over the hatch, 8. Gently lower the vehicle without damaging it and place it onto the cargo bay, 9. Unhitch the vehicle without dropping it, 10. Have the vehicle find the parking spot and "mount" the ship, 11. Repeat, 12. Sail a WWII freighter vessel across a half-scale English channel, while the players stay connected to their in-game troopers/vehicles, 13. Hope the fight remains at a coastal town you can reach during the *2 hours sailing time*, 14. Try not to get bombed/strafed/sunk by enemy air patrols who have a reasonably good sense of where freighters would be launching from, 15. Try to reach a piece of coastline sufficiently far away from the fight that you won't get shelled/bombed before you can unload, 16. The freighter didn't have a cargo ramp, so ... find a spot where you can use the crane to unload vehicles without dropping them into the water. Use the life boats to lower troopers down and hope you're not too far out... 17. Despawn, because f**k sailing back. 18. Never do this again after all the complaints you get from people who disco'd, sank, drowned, or who didn't get to the target until after it had been captured and the frontline moved away. It absolutely made sense that there be a player-investment in the loading of the vehicle, so that it wasn't just a magic firehose-for-one whereby if one player can get a boat into position X they could spawn an entire army on the enemy; but the vice-like grip of the auto-fear meant that there was no willingness by certain team members to even consider ideas where any part of that process wasn't entirely manual/humanized. My concept was for to add supply trucks/engineers who could execute sorties to the docked ship, the ship would operate its crane to take loads onboard, and then when it reached the opposite end it would be able to provide/deploy an amount of resources corresponding to the amount of effort that went into loading. Because on the rare occasion when people were insane enough to mount actual coastal assaults, almost invariably the outcome was that the reduction in number of combatants *at* the fight ended up killing the fight. You might be willing to spend 2.5 hours boarding a ship and sailing to 50km away from your planned destination, but will the enemy wait there or despawn and go someplace else? What I'm aspiring to here for KSP2 is that it be possible in some game modes to earn additional launch assistance so that you can *feel* you are moving your focus onto the next stage of gameplay. And yes, some people will hit launch and then timewarp. But what of it? How does that affect you? I dunno about you but when I watch Matt Lowne videos I'm always glad he doesn't show the whole thing in real time? I mean: tell me how much of *this* video you actually watch, and how much you think anyone else would watch?

Launch them attached to a manned vessel. Release the first one above KSC so it has connection. The rest can talk through it.

just a small thing dakota has done this week alone, communication requires more people a decent talk today with them on discord (dakota and darrin) they wish to have more CM's to help workload but he would rather have the resources spent elsewhere. and finally, dakota somewhat ratio of workload he has to do until April 1st (then it MIGHT change) hopefully there will be less stuff on dakotas plate when mike is back.. also Just because dakota said he is working on it doesn't mean its coming soon just shows what is needed for a single person in a week, and there is more that is missing from that list. why none of this was in dev tracker... and finally dakota said he will do this once in a while telling what he did that week increased communication

Expansions add to what is already there. Without being argumentative, please reconsider your choice of vocabulary. There is no complete gameplay loop to KSP2, not for those of use that play career mode. I feel when it is done, it still will not be an expansion.. but something else entirely. As far as the simplifications: They have said that omitting occlusion from the game was a choice. They may revisit that at a later time, but [it was not implemented from the very beginning because they wanted it to be easier to have communication with far out craft]. One per system is all you should really need to talk to all the cosmos, right? The entire idea of Commnet was abandoned as an unnecessary complication. Perhaps exitc alloys will be relegated to nice shiny scatters [nodes] with collision mechanics. Im sure the pretty visuals will go over well with the kids. You can mine it like all the other survival crafters. Not being able to create maneuver nodes in another SOI is definitely a simplification over a feature already implemented and well established in KSP1 (Whether the wish to change that later due to feedback remains to be seen) The maneuver node itself used to split the burn time in a manner that felt more intuitive. I do not know advance math related to this, but all the math i do daily with circles involves ratios related to the arc. It feels simpler. There is no longer fuel priority assignment No longer mission specialists No longer experiments that require physical interaction during EVA The proposed colony design will be like craftin in Planet Crafter or Subnautica instead of the way people have spent up to 15 years building colonies? [Instead of having to Scan for ores with polar arrays, build complex SSRUs, develop solid engineering designs to connect orbital structures]... Granted some of this was mod function. But it was built around the core mechanics of the base game in such away to enhance. I really want to say something to all the people that keep saying .. "KSP1 didn't have that, that was a mod" The developers may not consider mods when evaluating what they want to replicate from the first. Considering Adderly's history that is asanine. Perhaps he only considers the mods he wrote to have enough significant meritory value to include into KSP2 From a community stance. The mods HAVE to be considered by the developement team... They have kept this game alive long after release. I want to figure out a series of polls to determine the length of time people have played the game, and if they use mods. The question becomes which mod features from KSP1 should be included in the BASE game. This is before the massive roadmap that included features we could only dream of without modded support. [My own deductions lens through perspective]

But Starship isn’t exactly reliable. It fails almost every flight, and frankly I don’t even know why they’re shooting for orbit, considering it could barely go to sub orbit. And Starship is taking so long to fix, yet it’s advertised as the future of space travel. Also, let’s talk about Elon himself. You really want our future to belong to a Reddit bro? He’s openly anti-Semitic, has 10 children among three women, half of whom won’t speak to him. But no, he can run a colony. He can’t even keep his own family together, and somehow you expect to run a city on another planet. People just listen to anyone with money.

This is the only project I've heard of that people feel needs more CMs. They don't even engage in moderation duty nor are they too public other than random tidbits on the Discord. This is just work not being done, not short-handedness. Sadly it seems to be the case for the game too: Bi-weekly KERB failed multiple times. They stopped giving certain dates because they failed multiple times. They stopped upnates because they failed to understand basic interaction rules and what the community wants to hear from them. They announced their new devblog system with videos and what not and we got... 1 deep dive, 2 interviews... and that was it, months ago. We as a community wanting to engage with an EA need to see plans, specs, designs, ideas, a smidge of compromise (as in being invested in the realization of your promises, not as in tradeoff) both with a vision and the steps required for its execution. Instead what we get is the inability to even make a list of 20 bugs every 2 weeks, let alone knowing anything else about the plans for the game. That's not even going, as other users have, into how feedback that's not bugs just goes into a dark hole, if it goes anywhere. Aaaaaand that's not even going into actual stuff relating to the development of the game. It's incredible to me people are still here. Remember when they laid off the whole community team after the paul furio fiasco? oh wait, the community team wasn't affected at all. Plus, it's not really the place to talk about the huge work of the community team when they're just announcing they can't do a single post every two weeks.