Is the base foundation there yet to add the Science Milestone?

[LoSBoL]

So, we are being teased a bit that we'll be having our heads in Science soon enough, but to me I'm still missing some QOL features to be in the base we currently have.

Just a few examples;

I see that artists are working on 'stuff', but I also see non complete IVA's and no IVA view.

I'm still missing some maneuver tools like to plan a maneuver in the next orbit instead of just the current orbit.

I'm missing a transfer window planner which gives more info than just how much DV would be needed to get somewhere.

EVA chutes and EVA lights not available yet or not working.

TWR tools that only uses Kerbin as a reference and not being able to plot for other bodies.

No reentry heating yet?

I explicitly do not mention 'bugs', it has plenty but that's not the point of this pole. I'd like to know how others feel about the foundation we have now. Is it ready for science?

[Alexoff]

Science can add a lot of meaning to flying and, in principle, it could be seen in the rawest early access. Playing in the sandbox is pretty boring, you can quickly take the most powerful engines and fly to all the planets, where you can only plant a flag and take a picture. However, the game is now too buggy and failing the science mission  due to bug is much more painful than failing a single flight in the sandbox.

[stephensmat]

There are two or three major bugs that make longer missions unsustainable. The Devs know what they are, and are working them already.

We know some of the code is already included, like anomalies and such. Data miners have found evidence of that.

Things like precision manouvers and QOL additions can come from modders as well as Devs. Which sounds like an excuse, but people are willing to invest the time.

36 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

Science can add a lot of meaning to flying and, in principle, it could be seen in the rawest early access.

That's where I'm at too. I'll be investing a lot more time once Science happens. And I think, at this point, having more people involved is worth it to the Devs, given how much feedback they rely on for EA testing.

36 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

However, the game is now too buggy and failing the science mission  due to bug is much more painful than failing a single flight in the sandbox.

Also true. The main things that need to be fixed right now are orbital decays, RUD errors, and Heat effects. All things that are the current top priority.

The problem is that KSP is a "Try,  Fail,  Fail Better" game. We need to be REALLY sure when something falls apart because we screwed up, as opposed to when the game screws up.

[LoSBoL]

I can certainly understand as to why the base we have now feels empty due to not having progression or science. I have not been to all Celestial bodies in the Kerbal System, so for me it has plenty right now to build and explore. It's making it hard for me now within the game without a transfer planner or being unable to just make a maneuver in a future orbit. Those things can off course be added through mods (or in future development down the road), but they feel like they should be basic foundations to be added to me.

[Alexoff]

18 minutes ago, stephensmat said:

The main things that need to be fixed right now are orbital decays, RUD errors, and Heat effects. All things that are the current top priority.

There is also the question of how science itself will be bugged with such a game. It's one thing if the craft was attacked by a kraken and you have to press F9, and it's quite another thing if the missions turn out to be impossible to complete due to incomprehensible bugs in the code and this result to Alt-F4

[LoSBoL]

There's going to be bugs, like we have them now and probably even worse ones in the future, we'll have to live with that. But that's not really the point of this particular topic. It's more about if the current development progressed far enough to consider the base finished enough for the next big step? 

[cocoscacao]

I have zero idea how people manage to send large crafts into orbit, because wobble. My record is 10k meters... Then the rocket flips, and I flip out

[LoSBoL]

2 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

I have zero idea how people manage to send large crafts into orbit, because wobble. My record is 10k meters... Then the rocket flips, and I flip out

By forgetting a gravity turn, brute force by expending huge amounts of dV going straight up and slowly reaching high atmosphere, and off course a massive amount of patience. It took me about 1,5 evening to get this up in orbit. Fun? No, but boi did it feel like an accomplishment in the end.

[Superfluous J]

Not yet. They need to fix orbit degradation at the very least, I'd think. or at the EXTREME least make it not affect ships "on rails" which I'm not even sure is a thing in KSP2 (the way it was in KSP1).

[cocoscacao]

3 minutes ago, LoSBoL said:

By forgetting a gravity turn

I've tried that. Sooner or later, wobble takes over, and craft rotates unexpectedly and violently.

[Alexoff]

46 minutes ago, cocoscacao said:

I've tried that. Sooner or later, wobble takes over, and craft rotates unexpectedly and violently.

KSP 1 - MOAR BOOSTERS!!!1111

KSP 2 - MOAR STRUTS!!!!11111

[cocoscacao]

21 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

KSP 2 - MOAR STRUTS

Yeah, but no thanks. Getting back on topic, I think that getting science while major bugs are still out is pointless.

[chefsbrian]

7 hours ago, LoSBoL said:

I explicitly do not mention 'bugs', it has plenty but that's not the point of this pole. I'd like to know how others feel about the foundation we have now. Is it ready for science?

If we follow this and disregard some of the game breakers, then I'm tenatively voting yes - Purely from a game design and game architecture perspective, the Science elements require nothing further to be put in place. Without knowing the exact details of science and its parts, we do know that science will involve flying parts to locations, which (Disregarding bugs) is implemented in the current game design. Those flights can become more or less difficult based on thermals, limited part selection, and other such factors, but you can put a science component on the surface of the Mun. Similarly, the science milestone is solely responsible for bringing the architecture and programming implementation of save-wide resources (science points), the research tree, mission control and experiment/contract(?) selection. None of these elements make sense to be implemented in advance and in isolation, and therefore don't make reasonable prerequisites.

So yes, if we ignore the elephant in the room, then we can confidently say the stage has been set for Science to join us.

1 hour ago, cocoscacao said:

Yeah, but no thanks. Getting back on topic, I think that getting science while major bugs are still out is pointless.

I'd half-agree with you, in so far as I think getting science out with major bugs would be a bad idea. Science coming out does solve one of the problems from the whole "Is the game fun" debate in that it provides an actual mechanical reason to want to fly missions. However, if a lot of players come back around/new players wander in looking for a KSP2 experience with more to it than a sandbox, and run into the various mission-killing bugs that are out there, this long after launch, the games reception and public opinion is going to crater even farther. Its one thing to be widely known as a game with launch day problems, its another to 'appear' to have ignored those in favor of other things. Most people are completely ignorant to game development and programming, so the idea that six months might not be enough to chase down such a major bug as orbital decay isn't really conceivable to the average person, sounds like copium. Hell, even to me its a bit of a stretch and I actively make games as a competitive hobby lol.

I think it'd be twisting the knife a bit to provide mechanical reasons to play, with reward systems, and then still have my decoupler take a few souvenir's with it - Goes from just messing with a random self driven mission, to feeling like active malice on the games behalf when it steals my experiment module and costs me the mission. 

[Turbo Ben]

I think it would be a bad idea to start layering science onto what we currently have. There are still several serious bugs that need attention before trying to add more content, which will inevitably come with a raft of new bugs. I don't think that's what will happen though. Judging by the lack lustre patch 4, my guess is they're putting almost all their resources into content and hardly any into bug fixing.

[Lyneira]

It's likely not feasible to put a lot of devs on particular bugfixing/stability issues like orbital decay and wobbly rockets because their strength lies elsewhere, because it would take time to get them familiar with the landscape of engine bugs and/or because putting more people on one issue would cause interference. Better to have them working on things that are their strength or in areas with a lot of room for gains to be made.

Furthermore, since the goal of this early access is to gather feedback, I'd rather we have an initial implementation of science to comment on a little sooner rather than after every single game impeding bug is fixed (which may be never).

[Alexoff]

I hope the devs don't take this poll as a reason to delay science...

[Guest]

Yes and no.

Basically every fundamental mechanic is broken. TBH I did not try 0.1.4.0 but I do watch the bug reports forum, so orbital decay is still there.

But:

• orbits don' t work
• staging/docking doesn't work. You get RUD for no reason
• There are so many smaller things like CommNet which have been somewhat implemented but it is so bare bones that it is hard to guess if it actually work

But since every other aspect of the game is basically broken they can implement science anyway. It will be broken as well, won't make a difference.

I am back to KSP1. Will not touch KSP2 for half a year because it took them too long for me to fix orbital decay. 

Also I don't care anymore about "dev chats" or something. We have been shown colonies and stuff before the release. And now we should be grateful about "dev chats" which show reentry heating and telling us that science is basically the same thing as KSP1.

Don't care about "Hype videos" anymore. Will check back in 1 or 2 years.

[chefsbrian]

On 9/4/2023 at 8:55 AM, Alexoff said:

I hope the devs don't take this poll as a reason to delay science...

If its any consolation, they shouldn't. Its not like pulling designer hands off the science development will help much with the core bugfixes - I imagine the science team (and every milestone team, really) is having to do with every tool and core engine programmer having been pulled off, leaving them to design and iterate with whatever was ready at the time. The guy who's designing up new parts and implementing the little details like the animations for deploying it is exceedingly unlikely to also be the guy who knows the fine details of the ghost physics interactions causing our stuff to fall outta space. So he's gonna be still playing with whatever toys they made to find out what's fun.

It'll still slow things down as stuff they don't have tools for yet either gets shelved or done by hand, and some iterations and experiments are gonna be blocked by bugs not getting fixed or functionality not getting changed. But if they don't need either of those things, then there's no reason for it to block science from launching. And frankly, the peanut gallery is not who the devs should be looking to for release timing advice . The longer science goes undelivered, the saltier we get (justifiably). The longer core bugs remain unfixed, the saltier we get (justifiably). If they're already disappointing all of us, its probably preferable in the grand scale of things to make some of us happy with a science launch, even if it makes a bunch of us madder at a perceived misallocation of resources - Its not like the steam reviews from us can get much worse, Gabe hasn't implemented a "Two Thumbs Down" option yet.

[Alexoff]

11 minutes ago, chefsbrian said:

And frankly, the peanut gallery is not who the devs should be looking to for release timing advice . The longer science goes undelivered, the saltier we get (justifiably). The longer core bugs remain unfixed, the saltier we get (justifiably). If they're already disappointing all of us, its probably preferable in the grand scale of things to make some of us happy with a science launch, even if it makes a bunch of us madder at a perceived misallocation of resources - Its not like the steam reviews from us can get much worse, Gabe hasn't implemented a "Two Thumbs Down" option yet.

Man, I don't know anything you just said to me, but you reached out, you touch it by the heart...

[PDCWolf]

Yes because...

I believe science is not gonna be much more than what it was in KSP1. I'm of the opinion that nothing they've shown suggests more than simple conceptual changes to the original right-click-everywhere formula from KSP1. I don't expect new mechanics.

[Alpha_star]

Probably yes. Just my very own opinion.

First of all, the base code does not contain features, it's simply the foundation which all codes will/would be written upon. Thus, whether a base code is good depends on how well it could support features in the future and how well it works with the current one, not the number of features currently open to the public. KSP2 is (supposed to be) such a foundation, and we knows that it at least works to some extent.

However, I do feel that your worries. There are still some game breaking bugs that exist after 6 months and almost nothing added. I partially agree with you, but not entirely.

[Guest]

On 9/5/2023 at 2:10 AM, running_bird said:

Don't care about "Hype videos" anymore. Will check back in 1 or 2 years.

I think this is a very good idea and and everybody would be happier if the people who are disappointed in KSP2 just tuned out for a year or two!

Edited September 6, 2023 by Guest

[Chilkoot]

Right now, we're all just flying for the sake of flying, so every bug becomes the focus and feels like a big deal™.

If we're flying to try and accomplish something, we see the bugs as barriers and focus on getting around them to achieve our goal.

This game isn't just ready for Science Mode, this game needs Science Mode.

[Pthigrivi]

Im glad its improving and I think its close. I do think they need to solve orbital decay and a few other biggies first so players can actually get invested in complex program development. 

[Strawberry]

They're definitely working on it and I feel like its getting close. Its been accidentally confirmed that next update will be 1.5 so no science no next update, but I wont be suprised if its 2 updates from now for like real this time. There's a few code changes that got pushed in with 1.4 that are almost certainly for science (spoilers for that code

Spoiler

Interestingly it looks like some parts will have external prerequisites for being able to generate science. The three prerequisites we saw the tooltips for are time needed to run the experiment, minimum crew to run the experiment, and resource cost to run an experiment (I have a feeling that prerequisite wont be in 2.0). 

My take on what to expect for ksp2 science is the science side of kerbalism lite. Still going to get generic science points and stuff like that so zoomed out enough is similar, but there will be focused tweaks and stuff that will make the gameplay more engaging.