GregA

You could tell your daughter that Gwynne Shotwell is CEO of the biggest most powerful space services company in the history of the world as a consolation for there not being enough androgenous female Kerbals in the game. Space services is about the best of the best of the best, the highest qualified, and most capable people in the world. That means that women in the Space Services Business are going to look and dress the part. No half assing it here. The same is true for men in the space services business, don't see a lot of potato shaped men in the space services business. Only the most motivated and capable individuals allowed. That means women in space services are going to put on some eyeliner, and get their hair done.

KSP 2 makes me feel more

We also need a Necromonger Kerbal aka Space Goth Kids. From Chronicles of Riddick. While we are at it, there seem to be lots of Texan Hippy space fans as well. Those ones would have longer hair, lots of denim, and a big bowie knife.

If I were the level designer for a gamified KSP, I would have it set up so that once the infrastructure is in place, the Kerbol engineers have the resources from a particular celestial body. Then make the Kerbols themselves the probe cores. So to get the particular set of unobtanium that is on Tylo, you need a laboratory and a big ISRU drill working on surface of Tylo, and radio contact, and 2 Kerbols in the lab then as long as that condition remains true the VAB has access to that resource. Then that makes objectives like, Get enough kerbols for the base. Which would be scouting and rescue return missions. A Sat com network. And whatever the prerequisites were for the particular ISRU structure. I would get rid of the concept of money and limited resources that needs to be spent, because that inhibits experimentation.

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Speak for your self, cool skins on the rockets is easily one of the most important features in the game. I am a little disappointed there is no micro transaction store where I can buy decals to apply to my space ships.

Wait 18 months and buy any old potato computer off the shelf and it will work fine. You are not missing much you didn't have in KSP 1 right now anyhow. The Bitcoin menace is finally winding down (I hope plz) and you will be able to buy crazy GPU's in few months for few duckets now that NVidia and AMD can no longer sell everything they can make at the maximum price to block chain miners. Or, bitcoin and Ethereum prices will skyrocket again, and it will be hard to find GPU's at all again soon. It is the future, I am just terrible at guessing what will happen next.

When interstellar content is opened up, I wonder what sort of mechanism will be used to get to other solar systems.

I loved saving Kerbols in the Career mode. Those were my favorite missions. I felt like the tech tree, currency and science was a missed opportunity. The science and materials should have been collectables that were found on the various moons and planets. All the sudden there is a reason to build planes, rovers, landers and space stations that facilitated ISRU. Scanning planets would have a point. Etc.

I would hope that KSP2 gets gamified in a more better/funner way than Career/science mode was in KSP 1. Right off the top of my head I can think of at least three better meta games to play in the KSP sandbox.

I think it comes down to limited developer time. Would you rather the developers be spending their time making a good space ship simulator, or a solar system simulator? For a truly dynamic system like you are describing the developers would spend a bunch of time tuning it and getting it right, and those are resources that would be better spent making a good space ship simulator. For the time being I think most folks reading and posting would rather the developers be working on their spaceship simulator, if forum thread titles are to be believed. I have been playing with Unreal Engine a lot recently, it would be almost trivial to make a gravity orbit tool toy thingie in UE with blueprints. Maybe I do that tonight and post some screen caps of what I come up with.

One of my favorite developments of the original KSP was the communication satellite story line. It necessitated building bigger more complex rockets so that constellations of satellites could be built to establish reliable communication with the outer planets. If I were to gamify the original KSP with the original economy/science mission system, I would start by giving the player 1 Kerbol to work with, get rid of the classes, and make the player save kerbols in order to use as probe cores. With more advanced tech being found scattered around the kerbol , and not purchasable with money. I also found enough challenge with the technical requirements of the missions, that MechJeb landing component should have been included with the base game, rather than always save scumming the landings.

I wasn't being argumentative, I just wanted to make sure other thread readers who maybe don't have an education in math to understand why planets are on rails. It seems to me that the game could have defined regions on rails around the planets and large moons where effects like Lagrange points exist, and there could be clumps of game content in those regions and open the Kerbol system up to lots of additional destinations/navigation hazards. For example, passing Tylo on a particular trajectory to get in orbit around Jool... Putting a telescope in a particular Lagrange point around Kerbol, but it only being able to stay there for as long as it has fuel. etc.

Indeed that is the three body problem, it would be impossible to implement in a deterministic way. That is the nature of the three body problem. Three-body problem - Wikipedia

A smashed burger or a Smash Burger? Because Smash Burgers are awesome.