Pthigrivi

Point taken, I hear you. I’ll leave it alone in the interest of peace. Needless to say in the real world this is a problem and its really too bad for all the legit folks working on this thing.

This isn’t political. This is a commercial, private enterprise with, at this point, no lives at stake. If the self appointed owner, CEO, and chief technology officer has utterly lost his mind that seems apropos to the future and value of this enterprise. We’re all talking about “hey kids! Go watch the cool shiney rocket and don’t think too much about where the money is coming from or where its going!” Thats feeling increasingly irresponsible. At this point it might be better for the industry and humanity generally if this spruce goose was put to bed and let Stoke or any number of other companies take up the mantle.

I guess we’re also not gonna talk about it here but boy this would be a whole lot easier to get exited about if it wasn’t entangled with the Elons increasingly impossible to ignore moral and emotional implosion. Hard not to root for this thing blowing up on the pad at this point.

I will say at least our pedantic debates are about somewhat real things recently. Thats nice to see.

Haha well for you and probably me you could include more dire consequences on higher difficulties. I just wouldn't recommend that for the default/normal experience most players dive into because it would be unnecessarily punishing in an already tricky game. You have to keep in mind theres a pretty big overrepresentation of long-time players who have all the easy stuff down pat and are looking for additional challenges. I don't expect many of us would ever actually suffer those dire consequences because we already know how to avoid them. Thats not as certain for the general playerbase.

Those mechanics don't exist in the game yet, but science and ISRU are definitely going to be in the game and thats enough. Kerbals should certainly be important to science, for surface sample collection, crew reports, possibly in science labs. If those kinds of experiments produced 25% more if conducted by a well fed crew thats plenty of incentive because unlocking the tech-tree faster is what most players deep down are trying to do. When ISRU gets added those resources are your main line to expanding colonies and building and fueling ships making that extraction process more efficient becomes a big deal. It creates a strategic choice between uncrewed resource harvesters and crewed harvesters, where because of efficiency bonuses you can collect faster with lighter equipment or fewer harvesters with the same starting resources. Now, you could of course just time-warp with a tiny setup but then you risk blowing through transfer windows and loosing out on LS based science bonuses elsewhere in your program. That's the key thing a depletable LS resource brings--strategic choice--and strategic choice breeds greater design diversity and deeper gameplay.

Totally. Its probably less efficient in terms of resources/science payout but if you're timewarping like crazy anyway maybe that doesn't matter. Thats the nice thing--its there for folks who enjoy that kind of planning and optimization and it integrates with other systems that are time based. If you're ignoring both and bowling headfirst there's no harm.

Take this for example. If LS is just a science and ISRU bonus for adequately providing food then you can happily ignore it and timewarp all you like. Nothing bad will happen to your kerbals or your game. Its just a science bonus you weren't interested in. You can compensate by taking that time to go explore faster. Totally your choice.

I don't know I just feel like all of these problems are being created by an insistence that the mechanic relies on overly harsh stick-based punishments that mostly only very hardcore veteran players want. If life support is more about bonuses and carrots its no different from science experiments or resources being harvested over time--its just a time-based reward with engineering implications. That seems perfectly sensible and doesn't create all of these other gameplay problems. Permadeath especially either creates some weird grisly questions about what happens to dead kerbals and the vessels they're in or they just go poof, in which case players will come back to find their vessel simply empty and be confused about what went wrong. For me--maybe hold hibernation for hard mode because others are right there is some rescue-mission utility there for those who want the challenge. Leave permadeth to very hard or mods.

Ooh I’ll have to try that. Thanks!

No, hearsay is a re-telling of something you heard from someone else. If you told someone else you heard from me that I had a better experience with Macs that would be hearsay. Me telling you exactly what I've personally seen is not. That said I think we're well off-topic at this point.

Haha well Im telling you that over 20 years and dozens of machines that have gone through our office the PCs have limped and stumbled along and eventually failed while the Macs worked pretty flawlessly for 8 or more years until they simply became outdated. That may be hearsay to you, but its my direct experience.

You can just google it. The experience I've had and the businesses I've worked for have had over dozens of machines over decades isn't hearsay, and its a pretty widely accepted trend. PCs have a lot of pros--out of the box performance/dollar, broad compatibly, better for gaming, etc. For work though the down-time created by constant restarts, hardware failures, troubleshooting software issues and high machine turnover just wasn't worth it, at least not 5 years ago and certainly not 15 years ago.

Its been my experience, historically, that the Macs I've owned have lasted much longer and hand many fewer issues over time than the PCs I've used. The business I work for used to use both--PC's for some tasks and Macs for others--but over 20 years or so the PCs had problems and disrupted productivity often enough that we phased them out and run PC only tasks on Parallels. Again though tough to know if this still the case.

Im sure Im not going to repeat the Mac vs PC debate. We can leave it as I prefer them

For my part I do prefer the interface, but mainly it comes down to stability and reliability as I use my laptop both for fun and for work (our firm all runs on macs.) This advantage was probably more pronounced in decades past.

So, Im a pretty strong advocate for stock LS even for newcomers to KSP. As Im sure you've experienced there are inherently tricky factors in the game because it's not Starfield, it's not NMS, we're contending with a simplified version of real physics. This comes up pretty early as players start to understand delta-v, rocket efficiency, TWR, + ISP, and gravity turns. Thats all coming at players in the first 10h of gameplay. There are more complex maneuvers after you've achieved orbit and start thinking about how to intercept and land on the Mun. I 100% agree up to this point players really shouldn't be worried about LS at all. There's plenty enough to think about. But if players have stuck with it this far and are looking at how much delta-v they'll need to go to Duna and beyond they've already shown a pretty keen appetite for cool engineering puzzles. Fortunately as part of KSP2's planned features there's going to be an intermediary stage building your first space station and establishing starter colonies. These are a kind of interim bridge where players are thinking about more complex kinds of delivery systems, probably sending their first exploratory interplanetary probes, etc. To me thats the kind of player space where you're considering long-term habitation--even 50 or 100 days or more--when the idea of not just traversing space but living in space could become a real gameplay element. Even then I disagree with many other commenters that lethality or even hibernation are needed as a consequence, certainly not on default-normal difficulty. It looks like we have a science system in which surface samples are a factor, possibly other roles for kerbals themselves, and since science is the central currency with which you buy access to parts I think its a strong incentive lever. I think the safest and strongest way to introduce LS is to say to the player--Kerbals are plants or whatever and they're resilient, but they're much happier and more productive if they have food over long journeys. We can assume that oxygen and water are being recycled by the capsule, but food is a different story that requires a little bit of thought and planning. This becomes like most other elements of KSP--a simplified, toy version of real considerations in space exploration and long-term colonization, and like those other elements it can be considered in engineering terms. You could provide greenhouses and rehydrators to produce and extend the amount of food available and thereby keep your kerbals happier for longer. And if you don't, no biggie! It's just a points bonus that allows you to unlock tech and mine resources faster than you would otherwise.

Ahhh I heard. We'll see. I wish at least there was a workaround for the black-sky bug in KSP2. I've been losing myself in Factorio for the last few months but the number of other PC games I want to play has been mounting up. Maybe I'll see what I can and cant do when Frostpunk 2 releases next year.

I don't think it should be introduced till the resources update since players should really be able to produce it offworld. And to the latter question again I think it should always be on but apply to bonuses only. That way any player in a multiplayer group can either use it or not depending on their personal speed and preference. If players are on higher difficulties with hibernation I guess it would apply to their vessels only? There are probably a bunch of issues around difficulties and multiplayer that go beyond LS.

This has be pretty sad, and has had me locked out of playing for a few months now Given how far behind Mac has fallen in the gaming world Im going to have to ditch them for a PC next year after being a pretty loyal customer for 30+ years. It sucks.

And yeah having a mission planner with transfer window calculator that lets you set alarms and establish dV budgets just needs to be in the game no matter what. Absent those tools we'll see very few players going interplanetary, and when they do they'll be doing it like Vl3d, launching to orbit and then time-warping for months or years waiting for phase angles at best or guessing arbitrarily at transfer maneuvers at worst. Once you have a proper mission planner, which we need anyway, estimating flight durations with a comfortable buffer is no biggie.

This is also why I think structuring LS as a non-lethal system that provides bonuses to science and ISRU is the best route for default difficulty. It's kind of optional because you can just collect the standard rewards without it, but it's not something you switch off at the beginning of a save and lock yourself out of those parts. People respond pretty well to incentives and if you can get 25% more science out of a mission with a little extra planning I think a lot of players will dig into it. If players want to flirt with the potential for hibernation or death those should be left to higher difficulties.

It was pretty interesting to see life support emerge as one of the most popular requests for unannounced features. A number of folks seemed to want to chat about it and rather than clog up the Top 10 thread I thought I'd start new topic. I've written my own proposal on how it could be done but this is a community and Im not an N of 1 kind of person. What are your thoughts? I know some of the devs are skeptical but I think there are some really cool opportunities here.

I mean the larger point is also just being ignored here: that there is a difference between being an embodied pilot physically within the cockpit and viewing your flight space through a horizontal monitor. Here's the typical field of view for a person. Notice you have an aspect ratio thats roughly square and biased downward. If I had a square screen I'd probably also want the navball centered below with other flight information to either side. All of these design considerations are important. Both, my dude. We're using both sources of information.

Hmm. Im not so sure. They each have their own navball and they could have just put the instrument panel directly in front of Armstrong's face with a center window they could both look out through. I think it has to do with having a clear vertical sense of alignment when looking out. Heres another image of a helicopter cockpit with the central view through the windshield and the navball just off to the side. I think its just that when a clear view of the ground is absolutely critical that clear vertical real-estate becomes more important. After all the navball isn't responding to parallax, it shows what it shows no matter which angle you view it from. Looking at an environment does however, especially when in 3rd person. When you drag to shift the view of your vessel off to the right you're no longer looking straight through the center of the vessel and using that information to assess alignment with the terrain below is much more difficult. Of course what would be amazing would be a HUD overlay showing your present trajectory and marking the landing spot on screen similar to the trajectories mod. That would be gold.