Developer Insights #21 - Rockets' Red Glare

[Periple]

I very much like this approach, it should be transparent and close enough to the real thing to be interesting. Much like the aerodynamics!

[regex]

1 hour ago, Scarecrow71 said:

So...when are we getting heat and re-entry effects?

I love how there's a timeline in the post about how things are going to develop alongside other features and the first thing someone asks is "when?". Even I, only skimming the post on my phone (due to miniscule font), can see when these features will come out.

[HammerTyme]

Wow that was a a lot of info.  Thank you for the update!

But, and  I’m sure I’m not alone here when I say this... I was hoping for an estimated release date for some of this stuff. 

[PicoSpace]

As an engineer, this looks like a good solution to a complex problem. I do have a few questions though.
1.  How are we handling Kerbals in this equation (do they produce heat flux) in and out of the ship (EVA Space/Planetside)? What is their Max/Min temperature tolerances?
2.  Are colonies required to be attached in some way to transfer heat from one flux to another (I'm thinking KAS here or something) or will there be an assumed "hidden underground system" between buildings/structures ships etc within the confines of a "colony" whatever that may be.
3. It would be nice if there was a "max/min" or "variance" flux marker for ship/colonies/kerbals which basically forward simulated them for one rotation of their current Planet/Orbit to ensure we don't accidently leave a ship somewhere and think "oh it will be fine" and during its orbit or the planet rotation it bakes/freezes all aboard. Obviously when its active or moving that isn't done but I can see players jumping from one ship to another and totally forget to check for hi/low fluxes.

Adding to my previously suggested Colony Kerbal Idea (Kerbal Colours are based on the planet they are from) - it would be neat if kerbal also acclimatized over time to their environment (so that one day the grand-son of Jeb could walk on the surface of a Lava planet they call home without 4T of support equipment... but going to space they want to keep toasty).
  

29 minutes ago, Acid_Burn9 said:

Well that's a little bit disappointing. Conduction between parts is understandbly hard to make performant on a large scale you'll get no argument from me there, but i was still hoping that it will be a thing at least for the active vessel and maybe ones within the physics range.

Nevertheless a very enjoyable read!

I guess the idea is that ships have internal temperature controls (fluid pumps etc) like you'd have with a water cooled PC, at the end of the day at this macro-level its not "did you provide enough cooling to your CPU" vs. did your PC start to combust because it has no fans.

I'm guessing from the Tempt/Flux that each ship will only have a single number, or is per part? 

15 minutes ago, Strawberry said:

Also mildly unrelated, but we already know at least a good chunk of radiator models are done, would it be possible we see (non functional) radiators before colonies, I love how they make your spacecraft look and Id love to design craft with em.

Yes, I think it would be a good idea, even if not-functional they come out so when the heating system is applied all your ships in your current save don't suddenly combust/freeze.

 

 

4 minutes ago, regex said:

I love how there's a timeline in the post about how things are going to develop alongside other features and the first thing someone asks is "when?". Even I, only skimming the post on my phone (due to miniscule font), can see when these features will come out.

Timelines, even without dates added are always appreciated!

[regex]

1 hour ago, Intercept Games said:

fitting a few thousand square meters of radiator to your interstellar vessel

I sincerely hope this means I'll be able to replicate the Firefly, wouldn't that be a beauty...

[starcaptain]

Parts fail if they get too hot.

Can they fail if they get too cold?

[PicoSpace]

19 minutes ago, starcaptain said:

Parts fail if they get too hot.

Can they fail if they get too cold?

It would be cool if parts melted (needed repair) or exploded if they got too hot, but froze up and didn't work if they got too cold (or in more reasonable terms you'd need to use EC with heaters to keep your ship/kerbal/colony from becoming a popsicle.

[Nexius583]

Thank you for the insights on the thermal management system for the game ! As an aerospace engineer that means a lot to me

Something I did not understand clearly is if there are going to be individual parts temperatures and flux or only a global vessel net flux. For example, if we put a radiator far from a heat source, are the parts between the two going to be gradually hotter ? And will we have some sort of internal heat resistance and heat transfer inside the vessels so that we may need to put some radiatiors close to highly heat-producing parts ?

In any case, I look forward to see my beloved reentry plumes !

[Angelo Kerman]

@Nertea This is a great explanation of the design goals for KSP 2's thermal system. Having seen you struggle with KSP 1's system- and running into the problems of heat management after timewarp or after being away from a vessel for a long time- it's good to know that factors like these are being taken into account in KSP 2.

[PDCWolf]

The writeup explaining the system is excellent, however the nature of the system and some stuff left out are clear problems:

• You're trying to tell me this is more complex, yet all you talk about is how it is more simple. Telling me how the sequel improves over the original is a main selling point, and whilst you tell me there's more elements, at the same time those elements are handled in a simplified way, in what's certainly a regression.
• Another thing that it fails to address, that seems to be too easy a conclusion for readers to come to: how is the heat system not entirely solved by just "add n radiators or heatshields"? Specially now that radiators are procedural parts.
• Your "shadow of a mountain in a sun-grazing planet" colony example is probably the worst one, since it clearly ignores atmosphere dynamics (hot stuff makes air hot, should saturate radiator output).
• When. Yes, it becomes more important and more glaring of an issue with each passing day. Re-entry heating was promised as a release feature in the media event, then as a coming soon 143 days ago.

 

[Vanamonde]

Some comments removed. Stick to the topic, please, and avoid insulting each other. 

[Stewcooker]

3 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

How this will be implemented, both for heating and other similar systems, is beyond my comprehension... 

With a simple math equation:

(TotalHeatIn - TotalHeatOut) * Time.deltaTime * CurrentTimeWarpSpeed

[Starwaster]

I hope if they include resources in the thermodynamics system that they don't do it the way they did in KSP 1 and just merge it to part thermo as one monolithic thermal mass. Part + resource thermo needs to be separate.

[kurgut]

4 hours ago, Intercept Games said:

Hey everyone!

Thanks a lot for this indepth insights !
Good luck and have fun : )

[RocketRockington]

Ugh.    This is a lot of verbiage and selling to sell a system that, on the whole, seems to summarize to 'massively dumbed down version of KSP1's thermal system'.

So let's break down some of my objections part by part.

12 hours ago, Intercept Games said:

What this fundamentally means is that for KSP2, we have had to redesign the entire thermal system from scratch. This system needs to do a few things right that we felt couldn’t be accomplished by the KSP1 thermal model:

1. It must feel authentic and model the core challenges of heat for spaceflight, atmospheric flight and colony building.
2. At the same time, it should have an appropriate level of abstraction so that it is teachable in the same way that other KSP systems are, such as fuel and power flow.
3. It must be predictable, plannable and stable enough so that players can feel confident planning missions and building vehicles or colonies in contexts that involve heat.
4. It needs to work at different scales –  we need to handle a single heat producing part at 1x time warp, and we need to handle 50 heat producing parts at 10,000,000x time warp.

That starter sentence is so problematic, because it implies that KSP1 doesn't do any of this.

First, on point #1, KSP1 is much better because PARTS TRANFER HEAT TO EACH OTHER.  Noone with more than a toddler's understanding of heat thinks 'if I put my hand on a hot stove, I won't get burnt'.  Yet in this new 'authentic' model, in KSP2 you can put your crew capsule right next to your fusion reactor, because other than radiators, no part transfers heat between other parts.

So we get to point #2, where 'teachable' just means 'completely unrealistic'.  Yes, you can 'teach' this system much more easily because it removes virtually everything that makes heat challenging in space.    

So yes, #3 and #4 are satisfied because of how dumbed down they are - by completely ditching #1 and making #2 consist of teaching nothing.

12 hours ago, Intercept Games said:

Again – this is a similar set of things to KSP1, but we go up in scale again. With more exoplanets, higher velocities and more varied types of atmospheres, we increase the scale of the challenge we need to consider. 

This is a perfect example of more selling.  What additional challenge has KSP2 added here?   "Bigger craft needs bigger heatshield" is not a new challenge, and nothing about the system-as-presented indicates literally anything about reentry is any more interesting than KSP1.  The design is littered with this sort of language, where it speaks in superlatives about itself, while the actual facts of the design don't bear any of this out.

12 hours ago, Intercept Games said:

KSP2, we’ve made the decision to rely on what I’ll call a reality-informed deterministic model with fewer moving parts. This model is still complex enough to hit all the user stories I’ve defined earlier so as not to compromise our commitment to reality but will use a reduction in complexity to achieve much better player comprehension. 

This part is at least honest - though it's coming with terms like 'reality informed' when it means 'completely unrealistic, the most barebones  way we could do heating that we could possibly get away with'.  This is like going to the grocery store and seeing 'cheese-informed dairy-adjacent cheez food product' on the really cheap microwave burritos ingredient list.

12 hours ago, Intercept Games said:

As a last example, let’s make it complicated (I’ve simplified the doodle though). Here’s a colony in an atmosphere. The cooling tower is using 2 MW of heat flux, the reactor is making 2 MW, the factory is making 1 MW, and we’re using the water as a heat sink to dump 2 MW of flux. We have a nice little negative flux and our colony is happy because the engineers considered the environment. It’s a great story because it starts to show you where you might end up with advantages and disadvantages in terms of colony placement. If that water was lava, this would not be a good thermal situation

This is an example of making things 'complicated' in KSP2 land.  Having to add the effects of three parts together!   Simple arithmetic is complicated w/respect to how KSP2 designers view KSP2 users!    You do realize people have to learn how to make transfer orbits in this game, and adding two numbers and subtracting a third isn't that challenging in comparison?

So overall as presented, this design glosses over the actual hard things (reentry heating/how occlusion works), presents a model that has been reduced to the point where heat can be treated like any other resource in the craft - every part has a simple heat 'bucket' that very few other parts interact with, so modelling it is about as challenging as modelling EC over time (presumably the intent since they certainly don't want to deal with writing more code) but it's wrapped up in a lot of pretty pictures to make it sound like KSP2 is doing the most amazingest and hardest and wonderfulest job ever - because that's how KSP2 works, it markets and it hypes, and doesn't deliver.

It's just shocking that this ultra-dumbed-down system is something that took 6 months past launch to deliver, with all the obfuscation on when it's going to be delivered.  How is THIS the thing that we've been waiting on so long?    How was this not designed before EA?  The KSP2 designers were transferred from Uber to Star Theory to Intercept - and had 6 years to design a heat system - and this is the result, that was apparently still up in the air and being debated the ship of the EA?  Why did Chris even get handed this to work on, he's a new designer to the team with clearly many other responsibilities.   

Edited July 22, 2023 by RocketRockington

[cocoscacao]

41 minutes ago, Stewcooker said:

(TotalHeatIn - TotalHeatOut) * Time.deltaTime * CurrentTimeWarpSpeed

TotalHeatIn, TotalHeatOut (who the hell names variables in pascal case these days???) can vary while orbiting a star for example... 

[RyanRising]

The approach outlined here seems to be lacking a temperature-dependent heat generation or rejection property? Without that feedback, won’t systems either cool to the temperature of their environment, heat until something explodes, or remain constant at whatever temperature they happen to be? This is fine if that temperature happens to be what you want to operate at, but if parts are to have different behaviour based on their temp doesn’t the lack of any feedback loops make getting a part to a desired temperature frustrating at best?

Edited July 21, 2023 by RyanRising

[Scarecrow71]

3 hours ago, regex said:

I love how there's a timeline in the post about how things are going to develop alongside other features and the first thing someone asks is "when?". Even I, only skimming the post on my phone (due to miniscule font), can see when these features will come out.

The sarcasm and personal attack wasn't necessary.  If it's so blatantly obvious, would you mind pointing it out for those of us who seemed to have missed it?

[Nertea]

   

3 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Can we get inline radial heat sinks though? I know the idea is to go procedural for side mounted ones, but circular ones would be super cool.

There's lot of interesting concepts out there for radiators and I would certainly like to represent more stuff than just linear things. Look up Curie Fountain radiators for example. Cool ideas!

3 hours ago, Strawberry said:

We will see heating V1 with or before science, as mentioned previously vfx may come before this. The dev diary does imply that SWERV wont make heat, which is dissapointing, That being said, colonies having to deal with heat from the sun and ground is something I was very interested in and glad that it will be a thing. 

I am definitely no stranger to making nuclear engines of lower power create heat, and I can say with some certainty that it isn't fun (can probably dig up a few pages of arguments from one of my older mod threads, haha). You need a big gameplay bonus to saddle the player with the negative results of heat production, or it feels like busy work. The studies the SWERV is based on also effectively say that the math works out if you keep the Isp below 1800s or so, and the engine's heat generation is fully covered by the exhausted propellant, and while I'm a little skeptical, it's not like we've ever built a functional closed-cycle gas core reactor to check. 

That being said when these capabilities come in, we'll definitely figure out what plays well, and what appropriate trades to make a player try to work in. It might be that the SWERV is a good place to introduce a player to the concepts of having to add a little cooling for a powerful engine. 

3 hours ago, Acid_Burn9 said:

Well that's a little bit disappointing. Conduction between parts is understandbly hard to make performant on a large scale you'll get no argument from me there, but i was still hoping that it will be a thing at least for the active vessel and maybe ones within the physics range.

Nevertheless a very enjoyable read!

In addition to what's said in the devlog, it might be worth highlighting a few things

1. Conduction 'resolves' effectively instantly on any significant timewarp unless you are using a thermally isolating piece of kit. Your vessel just tends to a specific equilibrium - one that results in everything being fine if you have enough heat rejectors, or death if you don't. It is more math for the same result.
2. KSP1's conduction model was... interestingly used. The two places you'd run into it most in average gameplay was reentry, where the tools you used were heat shields and service bays, which actually had special modifiers to NOT conduct effectively (or eliminate flux altogether). 
3. If you run conductive physics only the vessel that's in focus, you've now created two different thermal paradigms, and a player has to understand what context their ship is operating in to predict their regime. Both regimes should operate in the same way. 
4. If your fission reactor is running at 3000K, yes, you will probably bleed heat to things beside it. However, your reactor has probably melted down now and you've got way larger problems.  Those problems are the ones we want to focus on. From my previous employment and analysis of these kind of problems, that aligns with mission-level reality. Specifically
   1. Systems that are thermally vulnerable are thermally isolated, and tend to be very vulnerable (+/-50 K is the highest range I've seen between difference between instrument death and survival)
   2. Environmental conditions are far more important than other spacecraft components. Two macroscale components next to each other don't affect each other at anywhere near the same scale. Both are affected by the local environment before either (this isn't strictly true for the microscale, for example an imaging device increases in temperature while it takes pictures, which could bleed to the other side of the detector array. But even then, we'd thermally isolate them and then supply external cooling or specify a duty cycle for cooling off)

3 hours ago, Clayel said:

are there any plans to implement systems for the reverse, aka when parts get too cold? i wouldnt want my kerbals to be at 50 kelvin!

I've got some ideas, but the first iteration of this system definitely focuses on cold = good, hot = bad. 

3 hours ago, JedTech said:

After reading the whole article I see that and am impressed with their approach.

Thanks! It's important to not go to deep, but also represent it as a real challenge. 

2 hours ago, PicoSpace said:

As an engineer, this looks like a good solution to a complex problem. I do have a few questions though.
1.  How are we handling Kerbals in this equation (do they produce heat flux) in and out of the ship (EVA Space/Planetside)? What is their Max/Min temperature tolerances?
2.  Are colonies required to be attached in some way to transfer heat from one flux to another (I'm thinking KAS here or something) or will there be an assumed "hidden underground system" between buildings/structures ships etc within the confines of a "colony" whatever that may be.
3. It would be nice if there was a "max/min" or "variance" flux marker for ship/colonies/kerbals which basically forward simulated them for one rotation of their current Planet/Orbit to ensure we don't accidently leave a ship somewhere and think "oh it will be fine" and during its orbit or the planet rotation it bakes/freezes all aboard. Obviously when its active or moving that isn't done but I can see players jumping from one ship to another and totally forget to check for hi/low fluxes.

I guess the idea is that ships have internal temperature controls (fluid pumps etc) like you'd have with a water cooled PC, at the end of the day at this macro-level its not "did you provide enough cooling to your CPU" vs. did your PC start to combust because it has no fans.

I'm guessing from the Tempt/Flux that each ship will only have a single number, or is per part? 

Good questions!

1. Kerbals don't produce any heat, but they do participate in the simulation. So they are an object when outside of their capsule that can be affected by flux, and have a temperature increase. They'll be thermally squishier than parts, as they should be, so that having things like thermally resistant rovers might be fun. 
2. I can't really talk about that too much right now, stay tuned!
3. Yeah this is one of the big pain points of a high resolution system. That goes into player UI tooling. We have solutions in mind, but have to see exactly how you all use the system and where the pain points are. 

Your comment about inputs and outputs is exactly right - we look at it as making sure you balanced the I/O. We assume the kerbals build their capsules correctly and that they know the heat exchange piping better than you do! 

2 hours ago, regex said:

I sincerely hope this means I'll be able to replicate the Firefly, wouldn't that be a beauty...

That would be a good goal, I personally don't love its looks though, so it'll be reluctantly  

1 hour ago, Nexius583 said:

Thank you for the insights on the thermal management system for the game ! As an aerospace engineer that means a lot to me

Something I did not understand clearly is if there are going to be individual parts temperatures and flux or only a global vessel net flux. For example, if we put a radiator far from a heat source, are the parts between the two going to be gradually hotter ? And will we have some sort of internal heat resistance and heat transfer inside the vessels so that we may need to put some radiatiors close to highly heat-producing parts ?

In any case, I look forward to see my beloved reentry plumes !

Flux and temperature have to be tracked per part. We assume that radiators added to a vessel include the piping for a high efficiency heat transfer system, because well, we do that with electricity and fuel flow. It's a similar level of detail. 

1 hour ago, Angelo Kerman said:

@Nertea This is a great explanation of the design goals for KSP 2's thermal system. Having seen you struggle with KSP 1's system- and running into the problems of heat management after timewarp or after being away from a vessel for a long time- it's good to know that factors like these are being taken into account in KSP 2.

Yes, I took a ton of lessons learned here to heart when we were building the concepts for this out. 

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

The writeup explaining the system is excellent, however the nature of the system and some stuff left out are clear problems:

• You're trying to tell me this is more complex, yet all you talk about is how it is more simple. Telling me how the sequel improves over the original is a main selling point, and whilst you tell me there's more elements, at the same time those elements are handled in a simplified way, in what's certainly a regression.

It's important to make a distinction between element complexity and system complexity, because that's a trade you are often making in any system.  If you make a system out of high complexity elements and plug it into a high complexity system, that's scary. It's very challenging to design, implement and particularly, test and tune. Complexity isn't necessarily good, and though reality is complex, representing reality through system complexity isn't always good. A nice self contained example is how parts in KSP1 have heat tolerances in the 1-2 thousand K - though the system is more complex at the part to part level, the result of the complex interactions creates a need to balance out heat spikes with unrealistically high heat tolerances. 

The core requirements for this system have to cover more user stories than KSP1, and I'm definitely aware that in doing this, I'm always going to break someone's workflow, or create something some players won't like. In this area, we think that serving stories that are completely unavailable in KSP1, like coherent heating from systems, tracking of part heat at high timewarps, and simulating heat items on vessels that aren't in focus, are more important than that. 

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

• Another thing that it fails to address, that seems to be too easy a conclusion for readers to come to: how is the heat system not entirely solved by just "add n radiators or heatshields"? Specially now that radiators are procedural parts.

I don't think that's actually wrong. If you have excess heat in space, you can solve it by one of two ways: add a system to take heat off (let's call that vessel architecture) or don't go into that situation in the first place (let's call that mission architecture). That's what we get here. We have situations where you solve a problem with vessel architecture and a ton of heat rejection equipment, and we have situations where you solve a problem by changing your mission. The latter is pretty wide, but that includes things like flying skimming reentries to bleed off speed so you don't need a heatshield, or building your colony near a water body so you have access to easy water cooling. The essence of this is making sure we are representing the right problems, and making sure the right tools are there to use them

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

• Your "shadow of a mountain in a sun-grazing planet" colony example is probably the worst one, since it clearly ignores atmosphere dynamics (hot stuff makes air hot, should saturate radiator output).

Hey, that could be a airless planet you're talking about!

The point is there though, and functionally, there will always be places where a system will not represent reality. In even more places, a system will not be plannable. Lack of plannability is bad. The example there is pretty interesting because when you dig into it, you need to know a lot of variables. How long is the day? Is the colony ever exposed? Is there orbital eccentricity? What happens if a tiny edge of the colony is exposed? Even if you ignore atmosphere dynamics, radiator re-emission, etc, it's a really hard problem!

[cocoscacao]

12 minutes ago, Nertea said:

or building your colony near a water body so you have access to easy water cooling.

Wait... This is gonna be a thing? Base building sounds awfully more fun now

[Strawberry]

4 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

This is a perfect example of more selling.  What additional challenge has KSP2 added here?   "Bigger craft needs bigger heatshield" is not a new challenge, and nothing about the system-as-presented indicates literally anything about reentry is any more interesting than KSP1.  The design is littered with this sort of language, where it speaks in superlatives about itself, while the actual facts of the design don't bear any of this out.

I think a lot of this stuff is designed more towards colonies then spacecraft itself. For spacecraft, honestly, even with a more simulated approach, heat management will oftentimes just become "add more radiators". While I think there's potential for interesting design space regarding thermodynamics for spacecraft, a lot of that stuff is impractical to implement I think. For an example here, liquid metal droplets are very effective, but they have a high minimum operating tempature, so you'd want to use those for your engines, but use traditional radiators for your crew areas. This could lead to some interesting vehicle design, but not only would this system be much more difficult to implement and optimize, it would also be harder to teach, there's definitely be advantages to this approach, but I dont think the downsides outweigh it at least in the short term. So for spacecraft, heating is basically just a mass tax, it means that if you want to use your super engines, you need to sacrifice a bit of performance. Its not the most complex thing, but it helps with engine design as it means super engines benefit more from economies of scale.

Colonies is where stuff gets interesting. For craft, you can't realistically design around all three forms of heat, your primary thing dictating how much touches the ground isn't thermal in nature, its getting this thing to stay straight up in a variety of conditions. For colonies, you can much more easily design around the methods of thermodynamic transfer. For example, let's say you have a very hot planet close to the sun. You will want to minimize heat transfer as much as possible. So you may make something like this to minimize  thermal conduct. If you have high gravity, you'd probably need closer to a pyramid shape so your thing doesnt fold over, but yeah. There also could be some fun stuff when it comes to minimizing heat transfer from the sun too, for example if youre in a tidally locked planet, all you really care about is one face of your colony, meaning your colony may end up being basically a straight line to minimize transfer from the heat. I could go on and on with examples, but colonies to me is the much more promising place for thermodynamics.

[RocketRockington]

35 minutes ago, Nertea said:

Conduction 'resolves' effectively instantly on any significant timewarp unless you are using a thermally isolating piece of kit. Your vessel just tends to a specific equilibrium - one that results in everything being fine if you have enough heat rejectors, or death if you don't. It is more math for the same result.

Your system also resolves to 'blow up if not enough radiators, perfectly cool if enough radiators' so I don't see your objection here being valid at all. 

At least with conduction, some consideration of where and how parts are placed is a thing, which isn't the case under this extremely unrealistic heat model.

This model is about as realistic as 'sum thrust of all engines.  If thrust > weight, reach orbit, if not, stay on ground'.  Regardless of which direction the engines were pointing or aerodynamics or anything else.

Which is fine.  If heat isn't gonna be an interesting gameplay mechanic, dumb it down.  But after the years of Nate selling how heat and radiation are going to be more interesting than KSP1 and the language used in this article trying to imply the same thing while clearly not...yeah, I'm just tired of the hype.

Edited July 21, 2023 by RocketRockington

[Sesshaku]

As far as I understood it, multiple radiators in weird angles radiate heat to each other reducing efficiency. Will inter-reflection be included in the "deterministic" simulation? @Nertea

 

[RocketRockington]

18 minutes ago, Strawberry said:

So you may make something like this to minimize  thermal conduct. If you have high gravity, you'd probably need closer to a pyramid shape so your thing doesnt fold over, but yeah. There also could be some fun stuff when it comes to minimizing heat transfer from the sun too, for example if youre in a tidally locked planet, all you really care about is one face of your colony, meaning your colony may end up being basically a straight line to minimize transfer from the heat. I could go on and on with examples, but colonies to me is the much more promising place for thermodynamics.

You're just inventing these examples though none of this is supported by the design described here.  There's no thermal conductivity in the dev images for colony parts, other than the global heat reduction from radiator parts (eg the cooling tower), and the rest of what you've listed is just your own invention afaict.  Feel free to imagine more stuff is coming than listed, but from prior evidence, ksp2 tends to under deliver vs over deliver when it comes to fan expectations.

[Strawberry]

7 minutes ago, RocketRockington said:

You're just inventing these examples though none of this is supported by the design described here.  There's no thermal conductivity in the dev images for colony parts, other than the global heat reduction from radiator parts (eg the cooling tower), and the rest of what you've listed is just your own invention afaict.  Feel free to imagine more stuff is coming than listed, but from prior evidence, ksp2 tends to under deliver vs over deliver when it comes to fan expectations.

The colony image mentions using water as a heat sink here, and it lists contact with surface should conduct heat. There's a few more examples of stuff like this throughout the diary, however its definitely confirmed that there will be conductivity for colonies (though they probably shouldve showcased why thats important more). Not to mention, there is code in game since release for thermal conductivity with colonies.

12 minutes ago, Spicat said:

Well, the problem is that he's spreading misinformation and other people seeing this might also share that thing. No timing was ever communicated aside from the Nate message a few weeks ago which was way after this message. Besides that, CMs kept repeating that they were no ETA on science.

It is definitely good to clarify where context is missing, however assuming malice just leads to people trying to defend themselves from malice instead of actually discussing the thing relevant here. 

Edited July 21, 2023 by Strawberry