SciMan

My personal bit of lore is... not about the Kerbals. Instead it's about Minmus. I think Minmus should still be an ice ball. To make this happen, I also think that Kerbol should be a red dwarf star. Now that brings up an obvious problem. Why does Kerbol when viewed from Kerbin in KSP still look like the Sun when viewed from Earth IRL? The answer is in the eyes of the Kerbals. They're aliens after all. They have different eyes. To see in color, all that is needed is for the eyes to have sensitivity to multiple different wavelengths of light. WHICH wavelengths of light tho? There's the key. If Kerbals eyes are sensitive to three LONGER (redder) wavelengths of light than the three wavelengths of light that Human eyes are sensitive to, then their brains might just put the pieces together in a way that makes what a Kerbal calls "white" a combination of overall longer wavelengths than what Humans call "white". And that little bit of "the brain's using the same name for something that's actually different" thinking is what allows the spectrum of Kerbol to be whatever the heck it needs to be (aka cool enough of a star) to allow Minmus to be a ball of ice at the distance from the star it is in the Kerbol solar system. EDIT: Oh and I did all of that without having to break a single law of physics. That's pretty impressive, if you ask me!

But an offline mode for Steam isn't what I'm asking for. It helps, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't fully solve the problem. An offline mode for steam just stops EVERYTHING updating, and there's other games I play that update thru Steam. I can see a situation happening where I want those other games to update but I DON'T want my KSP 2 to update, because the KSP update just came out and it would break all my mods that haven't updated yet... That's why the ability to play the game (even in multiplayer) without it being forced to update to the latest version by Steam doing whatever it wants out of my control is so critically important. That and a way to tell steam to revert to an older version. What is really needed to fully solve the problem as it appears for KSP 2 is in fact two things: 1. A much finer level of detail over what games update when, along with the universal ability to revert without having to specify a reason you want to do so (critical for KSP and KSP 2 and pretty much every other game that is heavily dependent on mod support for core game sales). 2. A true offline mode that allows you to play the offline content (if any) of any game, in the absence of an internet connection: There would be multiple ways to enter/exit this offline mode. You could do it manually even if you DO have an internet connection, of course. However you would also be able set an option on Steam's connection settings to automatically switch into offline mode if you lose your internet connection. When your internet connection is re-established after such an automatic disconnection, you would be able to pick from a list of set actions to dictate what Steam does when a connection is re-established. Perhaps something like the following options: Automatically exit Offline mode. Prompt the user that Online mode is available, and that they should select if they wish to remain offline or not Remain offline until manually re-set to Online mode. Depending on the kind of game, or what the game's developer wishes, a game could of course be set so that Steam always feeds the client the update, no matter if they want it or not, I know that some kinds of games need this to maintain stability and game balance (mostly competitive multiplayer games, as well as some other kinds of software), but that's a decision that would be communicated by the game's developer or producer when figuring out what way they want to get Steam to distribute it. Steam Client updates (not steam game/software updates) would be downloaded (following the download bandwidth limits set in Steam) at any time that Steam has a valid internet connection, regardless of the user setting Offline mode or not, for security and stability reasons of course. I think that covers everything I want out of what Steam does regarding game updates.

Like usual, my number 1 want for "vanilla mod support" is the functionality of ModuleManager to be implemented in the game without needing to install any mods, which would greatly ease me doing the thing I like doing the most, namely tweaking config files to my liking. It would also make mod inter-compatibility patches much easier to implement, since you wouldn't have to over-write any of a given mod's config files.

I'm sincerely hoping that they allow multiple installs, but specifically with the caveat that any additional installs are NOT shackled to Steam updating them "whenever it feels like it". While that method is critical for a competitive multiplayer game that doesn't support mods, for any game that DOES support mods, it's a deal-breaker. Because at any moment, you could lose your entire save file simply because you can't find the updated mods that were in your save file doing critical things like supplying the data that represents modded parts for your vessels. I'm sure many of us have gone thru that problem with KSP 1, for me it's why I don't have Steam having the ability to track my play-time of KSP. I never play the steam version of KSP, instead I copy all the files from that install, move them "somewhere else" that Steam can't get its hands on them, and then play happily until I tire of that modded install, without fear of an update (that wasn't anticipated or planned for by me) ruining my install in who knows what way. Without the ability to choose when I myself (and nobody else) wants me to update my copy of KSP 2, I'm not so sure I'd be so happy playing it with a lot of mods, as I fully expect to be doing.

Well, that answer gets into human psychology. I might not have a college degree in the subject, but I know how I myself would react. Those of us who desire to do so would be able to start planning out a "practicing for KSP 2" install of KSP 1, and honing my skills. Heck, we might even see a mod-pack show up that allows for such an experience. We'd be able to have far greater peace of mind knowing that certain things aren't in fact "holding the game up" as so many seem to have convinced themselves. We'd finally be able to stop arguing about what Multiplayer and potentially Life Support is/are going to look like. To be honest there would be a lot less overall "but what if it's like this"-type talk on this subforum, because we'd in fact know what the developers want it to be like. But honestly, I think that doing that would utterly kill off most of what passes for discussion on this subforum. Now I'm not sure if that would kill off discussion on this subforum entirely, or if we'd find new things to discuss, but I'm leaning towards the latter, at least for a little while. Ultimately, I think that if they revealed everything right now they'd also have to open up preorders at the same instant, otherwise they would lose out on sales. And yes, discussion on this subforum would take an ultimately downward turn. The tone of discussion would improve, but the overall AMOUNT of discussion would be decreased after a few weeks, just like what happens when any other amount of new info about KSP 2 is released. In summary, while from a selfish perspective I want all the info now, from a wider perspective of the health and continued existence of support for KSP 2 as a game, I don't think they are doing anything wrong right now. And since it's September 3rd as I write this, that puts the game's release (if it's in Q1 2023) at anywhere from just a little over 3 months to a maximum of 6 months away. I don't know about you, but I can wait that long. I have any number of other games I can be playing in the mean time. In fact, I think it's been roughly a week since I came back to the KSP forums, or at least the better part of a week. That's a pace I plan to keep up going forward, I simply don't see the need to look at the KSP forums daily anymore since new news is not released frequently and neither is there much overall new to discuss about KSP 2 every time I check back here.

OK so I got my terms mixed up regarding how oxygen is affected by magnetic fields. Point was, you do NOT need to IONIZE oxygen to get it to respond to a magnetic field. And yes, I know that you'd have to have active cooling in place to keep the antimatter contained. But you know what? You don't have to explain all that to the player to be able to use antimatter. Just say "antimatter will always react with normal matter, so to keep it contained you need to supply power to the antimatter storage vessels". The key is to know when to stop explaining to avoid confusing the player, and also to avoid opening up any holes in your argument. In any case, I personally don't think that antimatter will be introduced into KSP 2. Fusion propulsion is more than capable, and if there is some form of "thrust generating means that doesn't use fuel" then that will also be useful. Of note, you don't need to invoke "warp drives" to get a way to produce motion without consuming reaction mass. You can always use a solar sail to do that. It works even better if you aim a lot of lasers at that sail, rather than depending on the star to provide all the energy. And it works best if you can direct a beam of particles at the sail (so-called mass-beam technology, because instead of a beam of light it's a beam of particles that have mass). With the mass-beam idea, you don't even need a physical sail anymore, you can use a magnetic field. That same magnetic field can be used to decellerate at the target star by using that star's own magnetic field and the charged particle radiation that star outputs as a source of momentum to impart on the interstellar vessel. There's also the potential to build a series of mass drivers in deep space in order to accelerate things to interstellar velocities in a much shorter time period than is tolerable by crewed vessels, this would obviously be useful for sending bulk commodities and specially braced or reinforced infrastructure equipment ahead of sending actual crew to potentially operate that equipment (so you could have the "base in boxes" sent to the other star at the same time as the crew, but the base would get there first because it was sent at a higher acceleration even if the cruising speed was the same).

All I know is that I don't want nor do I think I need any form of faster-than-light drive in order to explore a few stars that are likely rather close to the home system (potentially only a few light years, maybe a maximum of 10-20LY to the furthest one). But at the same time, I do think that Kerbal lifetimes should be measured in centuries, not decades. Maybe only 2-300 years, but that's still both short enough that you can't get to another star using chemical or fission propulsion, and long enough that you don't have to get bogged down in micromanaging where all your crews are going to be when you expect them to expire (in order to prevent losing a crew while on a mission), all while having a life long enough that you don't have to replace them after only say 5 long-duration missions.

Anti-oxygen would be a good candidate for storable antimatter, now that I think of it. Oxygen in its liquid and solid O2 forms is at least a little bit diamagnetic, meaning that a specially configured and/or modulated (time-varying on a static cycle, or actively controlled with something like pulse-width modulation) magnetic field can repel it. Surround a mass of solid anti-oxygen (so no boil-off) with such magnetic fields (to keep it away from the container walls) and you've made yourself a way to store antimatter quite densely, which is one of the chief problems with storing antimatter. To extract it from this storage, hit the mass with a high energy laser at a favorable point, and then use those same magnetic fields to direct the created anti-oxygen plasma where you need it to go. Simple in concept, but probably a nightmare to pull off in practice. But at the same time, if I can think of this and I'm just a college drop-out, either there's some real physicist waiting to tell me why this won't work, or the idea is at least feasible.

I can totally understand wanting to be able to replace the 3d model of a Kerbal crew member with a human astronaut model. I intend to try out RSS/RO (or whatever it ends up being called in KSP 2), and that kind of feature would further put me into the world of such a modded game being maybe only a few conceptual leaps away from giving me the same kind of experience that I got when I played Orbiter Space Flight Simulator so many years ago (Hail Probe!) In fact, I didn't learn how to dock or precision land on a landing pad in KSP at all. Instead, I carried many of my space flight skills over from my many, many hours playing Orbiter pretty much every day after school after I had discovered it. Apparently, that software is still going, I think it got an update in 2016 which is recent enough that modern computers should be able to run it. No idea if any of the older mods are still out for download or even maintained anymore. I would also be utterly unsurprised if many of the well-known KSP mod authors had authored mods for Orbiter as well, despite them using different kinds of authoring tools (However, Blender and/or Maya are still in common between them I think, it's just a matter of what format do you choose to spit out the created 3d models). But KSP 2 with a RSS/RO type mod pack would be a truly incredible experience I think, and from what I've seen on YouTube regarding SOME creator's approach to playing KSP RSS/RO, it doesn't have to be any less silly than "normal" scale KSP. You can still make a rocket that is 5x taller than the VAB (or more!) and then launch it and see if it explodes on launch or not. Surprisingly, this is even possible without using too many parts, thanks to RSS/RO's inclusion of the procedural parts mod and Tweakscale. The only potential problem happens when the numbers representing the forces involved get too large and you start encountering floating-point errors once again (the old Kraken comes back on creations large enough, even without SAS, simply because of the nature of Unity joints). And to be honest, making rockets that are so large you have to build them in the Chesapeake Bay and then tow them out to sea (converting a large section of the causeway that crosses it into a pontoon bridge that can easily and quickly be moved out of the way of such a massive construction) for launch is the kind of thing I've been imagining when I imagine KSP 2, because how else are you going to use a sane number of launches to build something in orbit? EDIT: Of course, with such a KSP 2 RSS/RO mod pack, either the stock life support would have to be "good enough" or be easy to turn off entirely in favor of something added by a mod in the mod pack for KSP 2 RSS/RO.

I'm quite certain that they're being very deliberate about what pieces of info they release when, and they might have even done small studies to figure out which things generate the most hype compared to other things. I know that the most recent Dev Diary (even in it's "oops the forum ate it but the community still managed to post some portion of it" state) is one of the things that has generated the most hype for me personally since the larger cinematic trailers were being released. I don't know for sure if that means they're already ramping up, or if it means that that particular dev diary just means more to me personally, and to be honest I'm betting it's that second one. In any case, the developers probably have at least some idea about how much buzz they want to generate about the game right now, and about how much buzz certain pieces of info will generate, pieces of info about what for all we know could be fully finished features of the game. And yes that includes multiplayer. To those who say that they'll have to cut multiplayer to make their deadline, first off they didn't make it a deadline they said "no earlier than" IIRC, and even then if you're not a member of the dev team you're speculating with no info, so it could be that multiplayer is ready to go RIGHT NOW but the rest of the game isnt. In reality, the question of "is multiplayer in KSP 2 what's holding things up" is in a quantum superposition of "all answers are valid and not valid at the same time". This is because the developers haven't "opened the box that the cat (or in this case, game known as KSP2) was put in", to reference the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. And until such time as they do, we'll just be talking in circles about it. Personally, I find speculating with no data to create a set of initial conditions to be a rather fruitless and unsatisfying endeavor because you might as well have an "i wish it was this way" machine except it doesn't work ever, but that's just my feelings on the matter.

I see now, thank you for clarifying. Torch ships should be there to get a resource. But the resource should be "literally any resource". The sole advantage is that it doesn't take as long. That's it. That's all there is. Nothing else. If there was something else, that "something else" would break physics in some way. And that's because none of the elements that we're interested in have a half life shorter than 500 years. Not even uranium-235 or plutonium-239. Go look it up, they have surprisingly long half-lives, how else do you think the US has been able to get away with not making any new nuclear warheads for roughly 30-40 years now? Chemical fuels just plain don't react if stored properly. About the only thing that could possibly expire that quickly is fresh food. But there's 2 problems with that: 1. Because we humans need to eat pretty much every day from birth to death, we've invented TONS of technologies that allow us to preserve food for extremely long periods of time. So "Fresh food" is something you'd be getting from the greenhouses at a colony, not something you'd be packing for a 10-year journey. 2. Because KSP 2 is set in the near-future, I'm absolutely certain that if we do get life support as a gameplay mechanic, it will be with parts that allow the life support loop to be closed almost completely, without needing to keep track of 10 different resources that are only used for the life support systems and nothing else. So maybe you will be able to have fresh food on that 10 year journey after all. But the majority of that will be stuff you didn't have with you when you started, instead it will have been produced from the closed-cycle life support system. Everything else is about as inert as a cargo of rocks, in fact the important ores we'll be looking for and potentially shipping around are literally "just somewhat special rocks". Ok, maybe oil isn't a rock, you got me there. But here me out: Coal is just "rocks that can burn", Radioactive ores are just "rocks that emit invisible energy", metal ores are just "rocks that can be melted down to make shiny rocks", the list goes on. Even water can be a special kind of rock. What do you think Ice is? Ice is just "Rocks that you melt and then drink". Point is, there isn't any "unstable resource" that out-and-out REQUIRES transport by torch ship or you don't get hardly any of it because it decays in transit. EDIT: Having read @JadeOfMaar's reply that was posted before mine, I have something to add on the topic of Tritium: You won't be mining Tritium. Instead, you'll be creating it as you need it, if you need it at all and we're not just presented with fusion drives that solely use Deuterium and Helium-3 as fuels. How? Tritium is easy to create if you have a potent source of neutron radiation, and some Lithium. If you know how modern thermonuclear weapons work, you know what's coming next. Exposing Lithium to a high neutron flux does something useful. The neutrons smash apart the Lithium nucleus, for every Lithium nucleus split, one Tritium nucleus and one Helium-4 isotope are produced (with Lithium-6 the reaction is as indicated and slightly exothermic, with Lithium-7, you also get an extra low-energy neutron and the reaction is instead endothermic). Assuming you use a molten blanket of Lithium surrounding your fusion engine or reactor, you should be able to siphon off the produced tritium and helium. It shouldn't be hard to separate the tritium from the helium, you just need to introduce some Oxygen and ignite the mixture (or send it thru a fuel cell). Then harvest the tritium water from that reaction, and dump the helium either into the exhaust nozzle of the fusion engine or just vent it overboard without the intent to produce extra thrust, you don't need it anymore. Obviously the tritium is then stored and metered into the reaction chamber of the fusion reactor or engine, where it is fused with Deuterium. If tritium production is insufficient, or you're trying to get the thing started, you can use a fission reactor (obviously fueled by uranium or plutonium) to supply the neutrons. There will still be more than enough neutrons to go around to do the job, assuming a fission reactor that is depending on Fast neutrons to continue the chain reaction. And like I said, that's not even considering that these fusion reactors and engines might not even be using D-T fusion. They might be using D-He3 fusion instead. I know, D-He3 fusion doesn't output as much raw power. That's fine, what you lose in raw power you gain in "not needing to worry about Tritium" and "a heck of a lot less neutron radiation", both things that can reduce the dry mass of the propulsion system of your vessel (yes I'm lumping the radiation shielding in with the propulsion mass, maybe that's wrong, but since you always need the radiation shielding when you have both crew and a radioactive drive system I figured it made sense). Not only does D-He3 fusion produce a lot less neutrons (there's still a little bit of it, thanks to some unavoidable D-D fusion happening in side reactions), but the charged reaction products are more energetic as well, which means higher specific impulse, and therefore greater fuel efficiency overall. EDIT 2: Having now fully read Jade's reply, I agree that Kerbals should eventually get old and pass on (if they don't want to put the concept of death in the game, they could just say that they retired from spaceflight to go teach the next generation).

Most of the time video games are basically required to use UDP to send data, simply because the video game has it's own ideas about what the data protocols should be. If there was a video game specific protocol out there, they would probably use that instead, but there's not. Setting a standard for video game communication would probably not help things in any case, as it's not like video game developers are looking to make their video games interact with each other (eg being able to start up Minecraft and log into a Roblox server), instead each game's networking protocols are intended for that game only. Even being able to connect to the same game on another platform is not commonly seen (this is known as cross-play when it happens, and it's not common at all because the console makers don't care if your game does well on the competition's console or PC or what have you, only on their own platform that they're making money off of). EDIT: In any case, what specific behind-the-scenes networking stuff they use doesn't matter that much to how enjoyable the multiplayer experience is, assuming it works and that the ping time between the players is both low and stable. To be honest, what you've said about the alternatives does sound like a good idea for many factory games, because of the need to keep everything synchronized. Otherwise it seems to me like you'd need to label your packets with what order they were sent in, or things would either catastrophically de-synchronize (in games where the order things happen in matters a great deal, like turn based games and factory games), or you'd get things like player avatars teleporting around erratically (in games that are less sensitive to order of operations, such as an FPS).

You don't "NEED" antimatter to make a torch-ship drive, per se. The nuclear salt water rocket is VERY MUCH a torch drive, at least when you do the math using weapons-grade enriched uranium (typically enriched to 90% or greater). Pulse-fusion ICF drives (like Dadelus but using a magnetic nozzle and much faster pulse repetition rate) can also be Torch drives, it's just a matter of increasing the mass flow rate and power output to a high enough level. Something that can help with increasing that mass flow rate is operating these pulse type drives in "afterburning" mode (injecting extra hydrogen into the exhaust to "shift gears" by trading away some fraction of the total ISP of the drive to gain a lot more thrust output, the energy provided to the propellants remains the same because the rate of consumption of fusion fuel remains the same). With this, it's theoretically possible to build a drive that can accelerate a quite large ship at very close to 1 G for months on end or longer. And if that's not a torch drive, I don't know what is. Pretty much all drives "can" shift gears in this way. Oddly, even chemical engines can "shift gears" like this, at least to some extent. For a somewhat odd example the RS-25 SSME runs notably fuel-rich. I'll start off with why it's an odd example. Running fuel rich with hydrolox propellants means that the engine is actually able to "up-shift", trading thrust for ISP. That's unusual because most times when an engine is capable of "gear shifting" like this, it will be an extremely high ISP drive and you dump "something extra" into the exhaust to LOWER ISP and INCREASE thrust, but the exact opposite is happening with the RS-25 SSME. In any case, running fuel rich with hydrolox increases specific impulse because given a constant temperature and pressure in the combustion chamber, if the exhaust products are of a lighter molecular weight they will have a higher linear velocity out the exhaust nozzle, which is exactly the same thing as saying "higher average exhaust velocity" and that translates directly to an increase in ISP since ISP is directly correlated to exhaust velocity (no matter what system of units you're using). Even a lowly nuclear thermal rocket running on pure hydrogen propellant can "gear-shift" to the point that it becomes an engine with a high enough TWR to be able to launch directly to orbit, switching at altitude to hydrogen-only use. What does it inject into the exhaust to get all this extra thrust? Oxygen! Now it's true, that basically turns the NTR into a "hydrolox rocket with extra steps" in the lox-augmented mode, but that's fine, the performance advantages of the "NTR only" mode outweigh the disadvantages of the more complex plumbing that happen because of the LANTR mode addition. So too can electric propulsion systems like ion engines, hall effect thrusters, and others shift gears. Most of the time they do this by switching propellants, because any kind of electric propulsion system should in theory be able to use any noble gas as a propellant. Xenon is chosen because of its low ionization energy and high atomic mass, meaning it actually is the "lowest gear" for an electric thruster. SpaceX with their Starlink satellites quickly figured out that if they were to use Xenon they would consume more than the world's yearly production of the stuff, and so for logistical reasons they chose the next best candidate noble gas, Krypton. Krypton is still a very "heavy" gas as far as the noble gases go, but the electric thrusters on Starlink satellites did take a hit to the thrust output. This is part of the reason that SpaceX lost a batch of Starlink satellites a few months ago, the increased solar activity at this time of the roughly 12-year solar cycle made the earth's atmosphere extend to a higher altitude than normal, which increased atmospheric drag to the point that the electric propulsion systems couldn't even orient the sattelites correctly so that their solar panels faced the sun enough to generate enough power for the electric thrusters to raise the orbit, so they all reentered within a few days (with maybe one or two survivors out of around 60 satellites). Even the highest power electric thrusters we have, running on Xenon (so highest thrust possible) generate less thrust force than the gravitational force of a single sheet of letter/A4 paper resting on your hand. Electric thrusters literally only work because there's no real "opposing" drag force in space.

"Same goes for any other exotic ground-to-orbit solutions" Well not quite. Some of them shouldn't have "just an orbital VAB that takes time instead of resources to build vessels at", which seems like the closest thing to what you're proposing. Most of them in fact should be visible from extremely long distances, or put some sort of visible mark on the surface of Kerbin where they're set up. Like the Lofstrom loop should have a "line hanging in the air" with a really weird looking support system since it's under tension not compression. Like the Space Elevator (on a small planet) should be an incredibly long line between the surface equator and some spot in orbit (the counterweight would actually have to be a little bit beyond geostationary orbit, in order to balance out the forces of gravity on the length of the tether and the centripital force of the counterweight being forced to rotate at geostationary speed when the circular orbit velocity at its altitude is in fact slower(resulting in a net outward force calculated to balance the mass of the tether hanging down in the gravity well)). And like a linear accelerator long enough to launch crew without lethal G-loads should perhaps show up as a long track on the surface of the celestial body it's installed at. It's hard to even know they're there if they don't show up as visible from low orbit because you "abstracted" their functionality away. Now at no point did I say you should be able to build any of these from parts. Oh no, I know the can of worms that opens, and I'm intentionally avoiding it. Instead, these should be monolithic creations more akin to the buildings at the KSC in KSP 1, in that "they exist, and they have physical collision layers on them so things don't just go straight thru, but they're not part of the physics simulation other than that because they're a static object", if that makes any sense. So, visible from space, and able to be physically interacted with, and perhaps, with great effort (gonna take a gigantic rocket to outright destroy it, unlike the KSP 1 VAB, etc.), destroyed by accident or on purpose, but purposefully NOT simulated as it's own "vessel-like" creation that has joint stresses and things of that like to worry about.

I mean, I wouldn't object to having an RL-10 CECE or RL-10 LUNEX replica in KSP2. Basically, I just like the RL-10 in general, whatever the variant. But if we could also have the RL-60 that would be great too. For reference, those two specific types of RL-10 were purpose-designed to be lander engines, but they're still hydrolox so they're still very good upper stage engines too. And you can easily cluster them (the Centaur upper stage, which was the first application for any RL-10, initially used 2 of them). In fact, there are probably enough hydrolox engines out there that we could have the entire KSP 2 hydrolox engine family be replicas of IRL engines (with stats chosen for game balance and not realism of course), and probably end up spoiled for choice when designing a hydrolox spacecraft.

That's another thing. What about antimatter? No it doesn't decay, but guess where the best place to make it is (no, not harvest it, we need far too much of it to be harvesting it)? Nope! It's not Jool. That's where you'd go if you wanted to harvest it tho, the Jool radiation belts are chock full of antimatter. Might be enough for early antimatter drives that just use the antimatter to get a fusion reaction started tho. No, you need to go deeper into a much larger gravity well than Jool's. That's right, I'm talking about low orbit around a star. Why? Power. You need SO MUCH POWER to make antimatter. It makes making metallic hydrogen look like child's play, cause you're literally running E=MC2 in reverse, and C2 is a terrifically large number to have as the denominator of your fraction. So, you go to low orbit around a star (like Kerbol) to get power. What kind of power? Solar power, of course. Now, I suppose in an indirect fashion it's really fusion power, but that's just me being pedantic. Anyways, what do you do with all this power? You use it to run a very large particle collider. And by large, I mean "20 thousand kilometers might be on the small side". We're in orbit remember? There's very little need for structure when you don't have to worry about gravity, so your structures can become truly massive in scale. If in KSP 2, the structures would be each counted as their own orbital "colony", operating automatically and unmanned, dedicated solely to the purpose of creating antimatter. No crew needed, nor would any sane person want to visit such a place, not only is the solar particle radiation flux far too high to allow crew to live there long-term, there is the constant (small) danger of high-energy particles escaping the beam-line, and the far more present danger of an antimatter containment failure. And no, you don't stop at just one of those. In fact, you make many such antimatter factory stations in low orbit around the star. Where do you get the material to do this? Probably the nearest possible place. That means Moho. By volume, the excavation needed would make the Mohole look like a pinhole in the earth. We're not worried about any life existing on Moho except ourselves, so strip mining and large-scale solar-powered smelting is the order of the day, with refined metals (in the form of powders or wire suitable for use in a 3d printer) being sent to orbit, where they are manufactured into finished parts before being sent onward to the site of the newest particle accelerator construction site (which is being run remotely from a control center located under the surface of Moho, placed there for radiation protection purposes). So what do you do with antimatter once you have it safely contained? Well, it's basically pure energy that has taken the form of matter, so you handle it carefully, but what you do is you react it with regular hydrogen and use the resulting energy to push vessels around both the solar system and onward to other stars. Antimatter would be useful for both interstellar and interplanetary propulsion, as well as being the fuel of choice for lightweight, high power output reactors for ship-board and orbital colony power generation needs. It would be the last word in both propulsion and power generation, tho in actuality antimatter is not power GENERATION per se, it is a particularly dense means of storing energy.

OK yes, you're pretty much right that "you don't have LS anymore" that was my intention. I don't like the current version of LS mods that are available for KSP 1. Too much micromanagement, and from what I've seen, LS is one of those "only stick, no carrot" types of things. What's the reward for having a functional life support system? Your crew doesn't die. Last I checked, there's a whole lot more than "not dying" needed before you start experiencing the feeling known as "Fun". Also, You'll note I did mention "if the recyclers aren't procedural" in there. My main complaint about "it's gonna take too many parts" goes away entirely if you're able to make the recycler just one part that's the right size and mass and power draw for the capabilities you need. Perhaps you add some safety margin on top of that, but that's something "you" the vessel designer have to do when designing the craft, rather than the safety margin being incorporated by the mechanics of the game when you punch in how many crew you want it to support indefinitely. And no matter how else the life support works, there SHOULD be a single-part solution for "indefinite duration life support just add power", independent of the other considerations you may have about life support and its various converters and recyclers. Because I want life support to be a problem that I can make go away, with enough technology. Let me close the loop, aside from electricity and waste heat. Now that I mentioned it, there's another factor I'd like to talk about. Waste heat. Waste heat from life support is very different from waste heat from something like a reactor or nuclear engine of some sort Yes, it's still "heat energy", but the difference is that the output temperature of the life support waste heat is much much much lower than that of a nuclear reactor or nuclear engine. This means something when you're placing the radiators for the craft. It means you're going to need either one or more heat pumps in a chain (to pump that heat energy up the heat gradient to the higher temperature of the main reactor radiators), or you're going to need a separate radiator array that only deals with waste heat from the life support and any other low-grade waste heat sources, in addition to the radiator array you need to handle the heat from the main reactor(s) and/or nuclear engine(s). EDIT: Another thing, since I've seen a few posts claiming that greenhouses should only be a colony part, and not a vessel part. I respectfully disagree with that idea, as well as the idea that crew would go "space crazy". Neither idea is viable when the travel time to another star could be on the order of 10 years. You're not going to go interstellar by building a series of stops along the way. No, you're going to go from "home system" to "destination system" with no stops in between. So your crew must be able to stay sane and supplied for likely DOUBLE that time at the minimum, because you're going to need more time at the destination to find a planetary body where it's both possible and worth it to set up a colony. And if that takes 10 years, there is no substitute for a completely closed cycle life support system and some way to mitigate the crew going insane or becoming bored. Now on to the greenhouse thing. Greenhouses don't have to be big. Humans aren't herbivores, and genetically-engineered vat-grown steak (pretty much the only option for a morale-boosting protein source on a long duration mission since "cows" would be far too heavy) doesn't eat grass. Oh and greenhouses don't even need sunlight to work. Well, not "real" sunlight anyways. Light is indeed needed, of a similar spectrum and intensity to that of the home star, but the photons do NOT have to come from a gravitationally contained fusion reactor using the triple-alpha process. What I'm saying is that the right kinds of electrically-powered lights can do the job just fine. Usually they're called "grow lights". And with grow lights, water, and the right mix of fertilizer chemicals (nearly always able to be derived from crew waste), you can make a hydroponic garden, which doesn't even need dirt! Combine this with genetic engineering and you can get high-yield crops that provide an excellent source of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. But I suppose if you want to provide protein as well (and don't like the idea of vat-grown steaks), you could have a garden growing a crop of something like peanuts as well (crew screening would include instant and non-negotiable disqualification for anyone allergic to peanuts in that case, naturally). If it needs gravity, that's fine too, you can still do it on a vessel. We have centrifuge parts, remember? All that is needed is to take the guts out of a centrifuge and dedicate the space to hydroponic gardens instead of crew habitation spaces. It probably doesn't even need as much gravity as crew does, so you could even have it be in another ring inside the crew habitation ring, with them either connected or counter-rotating. My point is that engineering is extremely flexible. It's the coding of the game that is (potentially) not (well without mods at least). I do like the idea of life support on vessels, but it should VERY MUCH be a problem that can be made to "disappear with the proper planning". If that means putting the right sized recycler and maybe a greenhouse centrifuge on the vessel, then so be it. But it shouldn't require dozens of single-resource tanks or single-function converters. If you have a bunch of different resources and always need all of them, COMBINE their storage tanks and/or converters and recylcers into ONE unit that stores some amount of all of them, in the right proportions needed for use, otherwise you're just wasting my time and CPU resources with all these extra parts that wouldn't mean anything if the life support "just took electricity and nothing more". It should be a "one part solves all your problems" solution. I can't stress how easy you have to make the life support problem for me to be on-board with having it in my game. If it requires any more interaction than me remembering to turn on the recycler when in the VAB, I'm not gonna play with it.

I do like the idea that whenever you launch something from the Sandbox VAB, you'd be able to dictate where exactly you're launching it FROM. And by "where", I mean "what coordinates on the surface of which planetary (EDIT: planetary body)", or "what specific orbit of which planetary body", or "which existing launch site" (such as launch pads on Kerbin, or any colonies you have set up). The idea here is to make it easy to use Sandbox as an "R&D simulation" for designing craft for your main adventure mode save. That's most of what I'm looking for out of sandbox, because as much as I hated KSP 1's progression system, the problem was the specific way it was implemented, not the general intent. I liked the idea that you would have restrictions upon what you could build that could be improved, I liked the idea that building rockets had a cost, I liked the idea that you would have a technological progression. The problem is that there wasn't any "glue" holding the whole thing together into one integrated system, so if you broke one part of it the rest of it broke too. Figure out how to make a kraken drive in KSP 1 (Aka break the physics engine)? Congratulations, since you unlocked all the landing gear you now have the best rocket engine in the game (made of landing gear). Not only best in terms of nearly infinite thrust, but best in terms of it being pretty dang cheap, and not even needing fuel (just electricity, the idea is that you use a motor to rotate it and a piston to apply force to a radially-symmetric array of landing gear that are bottomed-out on their travel limits). And that breaks the economy, because now you don't have to pay for rocket fuel or even for a gigantic pile of rocket fuel tanks (which are way too expensive when empty in KSP 1) or rocket engines. ... And now I'm starting to wonder if I could make a ROTARY kraken engine (as in it provides torque not thrust) and connect that to an electric motor to also get free electricity with no need of sun or even an RTG, but that's not on topic. Point is, I want a way to test my craft in KSP 2 with no consequences to my adventure mode save. Structural issues can take a while to figure out on some craft types (mostly the extremely large ones), and I'd like to be able to do so without having to spend the resources to launch 20 versions of such a gigantic craft that aren't quite right, and only the 21'st one is something I'm willing to actually use. I'd prefer to be able to launch those 20 "not quite right" versions of that craft in the Sandbox (aka testing) mode. Additionally and relatedly, I'd like it if in adventure mode we could recycle old ships and get 100% of the resources back from it (maybe only 90% of the propellants in it, it's hard to truly evacuate a fuel tank even in the vacuum of space cause usually you need "something" to push the propellants out). Of course, if and when I do tire of the Adventure mode, I'd ALSO like a sandbox mode to come back to, in order to "play the game my way" so to speak, as others have said. Who knows, maybe I want to place MORE severe restrictions on myself, maybe less, maybe I just want to play the game "Starting in one of the other solar systems", who knows but I want to be able to do it.

Well, one thing I'd like to see since it will inevitably become an issue is a mod that helps reduce the part count on a vessel. Basically, a KSP 2 version of UbioZor Part welding mod, but hopefully it won't require the game to be restarted to see the new parts. This would help consolidate large numbers of smaller parts, which some players might want to use to show greater detail in their vessel, or they're trying to build around some odd-shaped payload that they want to keep separate, or who knows what but they'll have their reasons.

Doesn't matter if you call it "sandbox" or "creative" or what-have-you, but some sort of easily-accessible game mode that allows you to build things "for looks" rather than "for function" should be possible. Like if someone wants to build a 10 kilometer long interstellar ship but can't do that in the "normal" game mode, they should be able to do it in Creative. And if they want to launch said ship from Kerbin's surface (EDIT: or at least attempt to), they should be able to do that in Sandbox or whatever it's called as well. That's just another limitation that should be able to be broken. Even if we do get the "difficulty toggles and cheats" way to "emulate" a sandbox experience, I think we should still get a "dedicated Sandbox" game mode, if only to make such a thing easier for the average player to understand what it is they are setting up. That is still the case even if "under the hood" all it does is toggle those same cheats and difficulty options. Sometimes the names matter for some people. In any case, we should probably also get a photo mode, which should be able to be entered from any game mode included in the game.

I think we can combine Food, Water, Recycling, and Electricity into just Electricity (since closed cycle life support shouldn't require any parts outside the habitat modules or else how are you going to fix them cause working in a space suit is in fact super difficult because of the lack of dexterity and the problems with needing high strength because the suit's fighting your every move). Additionally, we further shouldn't need separate recycling parts because hey guess what more parts means more lag, and if they're not procedural then you'll eventually be needing more than one recycler on your ship or colony. We can intentionally ignore the fact that things break down over time, just like we can ignore the fact that sometimes rocket engines randomly fail, because "don't play dice with my design decisions", your ship or colony shouldn't fail for a reason outside your control, literally ever. If it does, someone was building a mobile game and trying to find a way to monetize it, not building KSP 2. Radiation, Gravity, Temperature, Hazardous gas, those are all things that you can't solve by "adding some new part to your ship", instead you might need to combine "adding things" with "changing how the ship is constructed" (don't put monoprop tanks or nuclear reactors next to habitat modules, and make sure you use centrifuges or some other way of creating artificial gravity such as "tumbling pigeon" design). Oxygen aka "breathable gas" might need to be its own thing, if only because EVA suits might only be capable of holding a very small quantity of it (still enough for an EVA of a few hours duration, but that's about it), and the idea of needing greenhouses to keep the life support going makes a lot of sense. Also I can't really answer the "lethal/non-lethal" question the way I want in the check-boxes provided. What i want is some combination of the two. Gross negligence should still be lethal. Say, you designed a vessel with a nuclear-powered rocket motor right next to a habitat module, that should (in short order) kill anyone in that habitat module if that engine is activated, unless a suitably thick (and heavy) layer of radiation shielding is put between the two. Of course the less massive solution is to simply put the "glowy bits" on the other end of the ship from the "squishy bits". Additionally, anything that would normally kill a kerbal should still do so, such as subjecting them to the exhaust of a rocket engine, especially if it's nuclear powered. Yes, I'm looking at those of you that want to use that new Mammoth-II as a Kerbal cannon, nobody should be able to survive that because JUST the sound of the rocket engine firing would liquefy your brain (there IS such a thing as "a sound that's so loud it just kills you"). However, a small oversight shouldn't be quite so deadly. Say you forgot to calculate the radiation environment with nearly empty fuel tanks (and you were relying on the fuel in those tanks to provide some of the radiation shielding), This should impair crew function, but it shouldn't be immediately lethal. The crew won't be happy for the duration of the trip spent at this higher radiation environment, and you might only be able to have the "glowy bits" active for short periods at a time to avoid outright (semi-permanently) disabling the crew, but it shouldn't outright kill them. If that crew does become "semi-permanently disabled" as I was describing, the function of "Medical care" would be solely available at colonies with gravity in a certain range (more than Mun but less than Eve). There would be no "dedicated doctor-type crew", the fact that the crew becomes part of the population of a colony would be enough to say that you "saved" them. EDIT: I guess what I'm saying is that if I'm going to have to deal with a Life Support mechanic, it should punish me if I mess up the DESIGN of the craft or colony, but if I don't mess up then I shouldn't have to pay any attention to it while I'm FLYING the craft or doing things with the colony that aren't specifically about the life support.

I think that if you DO get automated launch and landing capabilities, it should be something you earn. Not by a colony milestone. But instead it should be something that a colony can invest in to enable the functionality for all vessels within that SOI. Such as a "local traffic coordination center" sort of thing to act as a "Space ATC" for incoming and outgoing craft. And then the automated launch and landing functions would further only work with craft that have compatible equipment fitted, as well as a compatible landing site. So you'd need the specialized building, the landing pad would have to be built with the idea that you're going to want to land automatically (which could, as you said for manual landing, introduce design constraints regarding what you can build around the landing pad), and the vessel to be landed or launched would also have to have a compatible control element of some sort. You know the more I talk about it the more it sounds like just MechJeb, but that's not a bad thing. I like how MechJeb unlocks different capabilities as you progress thru the tech tree. It doesn't let you do all the autopilot things right from the start unless you edit the config files to tell it to do so, which I don't think is the intended way to use that mod.

I was also operating under the assumption that torch engines (EDIT: And not necessarily only the small ones, it could be the case that you can get even the biggest and best torch drives long before you get truly interstellar capable drives, but the largest and best torch drives might be useful to send a few "prospecting" type probes to other stars to see which ones have the stuff you want to build your colonies near) would usually become available to the player before true interstellar engines. That's why I was using the example of traveling between the most distant planets in the Kerbol solar system (a cargo of Oxygen or Oxidizer from Laythe to Eeloo, but with Jool and Eeloo at opposition with respect to Kerbol). After all, "going fast from planet to planet quickly" type torch engines have specific impulse that is terrifically high, but still a few orders of magnitude below what is required to truly go interstellar. Now, yes, you could go interstellar with a torch drive, if you don't mind waiting a really long time for the transit to happen. However, that's not realistic. Even spending 10y on a ship with a crew large enough to start a colony around another star requires solving other problems (such as how to adapt humans to microgravity and the higher radiation environment of deep space, and how to create a truly closed-loop life support system that not only regenerates oxygen to breathe but also provides food for as long as it has its power needs and waste heat removal needs satisfied), but the alternative to going "Fast" using "proper" interstellar-capable drives, is using torch drives and going slower. Like, a lot slower. As in, "takes over 100 years to get there" kind of slower. This would require the construction of truly incomprehensibly large vessels called "Generation Ships" that are so large that they can support a whole civilization inside them. They're called Generation ships because the trip takes so long that multiple generations of crew will live and die on the ship in-transit. This causes severe social problems, like how do you keep the crew dedicated to the primary tasks critical to the success of the mission, namely keeping the ship running, keeping in constant communication with the home planet, and building a colony (either in space or on the surface of a suitable planet, depending on circumstances) once they reach the destination. As we know, over the course of just 100 years human civilization has changed DRAMATICALLY (mostly for the better). But the problem is that that's exactly what you DON'T want to happen inside a generation ship, because it leads to the extremely highly likelihood that the population inside decides that they don't want to do what the mission was intended to do, for some reason or another that I don't have the knowledge of societal progression to understand. Personally, I think the propulsion problem is the much more approachable problem to solve. At least with rocket science, for at least 50 years things have been able to be reduced to a bunch of (possibly complex) math equations with precise, repeatable results. We can't do that with our own society yet, largely because you can't rely on everyone to be a "reasonable person" 100% of the time. Sometimes we make our decisions with our feelings instead of our logic, and that makes our actions unpredictable on large time scales (at least so far). However, building a torch drive is something humanity has at least one design for that could have work started on building it TOMORROW, given enough societal will to do so. I'm talking about the Orion Drive of course, and while you might not call it a "Torch drive" per se, the versions that run mostly on fusion energy (with only a really tiny fission explosion used to start each shaped-charge pulse unit (and yes those are a thing, you can in fact bias the direction that a thermonuclear explosion will exert the most force)) are of rather high specific impulse and you can even add a magnetic field to be used as a pusher plate or nozzle for even greater efficiency. The thing that makes it a torch drive is that at no point is the thrust in any way able to be considered "low". Orion drives actually work best IN atmosphere, because that increases the amount of reaction mass hitting the pusher plate. But that aside, other types of Torch drive are available at least in theory. Such as the nuclear salt water rocket. Which is basically what happens when someone crazy says "What happens if the explosion of an Orion drive was continuous instead of intermittent?". Yes, it's a continuously-detonating nuclear fireball propelling your ship. Materials science is not yet advanced enough to contain such a thing, and the currently going estimates are that we'll never get to that point. But there's nothing in the laws of physics that expressly forbids such a drive from existing, and they offer say 500k seconds ISP and meganewtons of thrust at the same time, using only water with a bit of dissolved (enriched) uranium-235 in it. So technically it's the final evolution of the "steam rocket", in the same way that a pressurized water fission reactor or boiling water fission reactor is the final evolution of the steam boiler. So in closing, I'd much rather solve the propulsion problem to reduce travel time, because the alternative is to somehow create a utopian society, and if I know anything about those, it's that there's no such thing as a universal utopian society, they're all every one of them only a utopia for some, for the rest they're very much a dystopia.

I can't answer the "why not just time warp" question in a way that is satisfactory to me. However, while I can't explain it well, something about that question seems... wrong. Wrong like you're asking the wrong question, or expecting me to answer a certain way. The baseline answer I can think of is "because that's not realistic". Perhaps the developers would put a maximum constraint on how long it takes to build a ship, and if you exceed that maximum, you can't build the ship because it would take too long. However that only works to be a specific "don't do that" mechanic for that specific play style, and I don't like that. That's why I say I can't answer the question satisfactorily.

If you want to increase the size of your colony and it's not self-sufficient, it's gonna need resources from somewhere, at a given rate. EDIT 2: That need is not going to go away just because you go into max time warp. See, it's an IN-GAME need for a rate of resources, since it's "what you need to keep the lights on in the colony", not the "extra" you need to start building ships from that colony. : END EDIT 2 Time warp doesn't matter if both things that care about resources are locked to the same time clock, which is the case when both things are in-game EDIT: I suppose if it were TRULY "without consequence", it wouldn't matter. But they're not going to compensate you with free resources to offset your bad decisions, so in fact there ARE consequences. : END EDIT I've taken the player out of the equation. Generally, a bigger colony needs a bigger rate of resources, especially when considering life support resources. So to support a larger (not self-sufficient) colony, you need either more ships, or faster ships. Torch drives give you faster ships. I believe that to encourage use of torch drives, the game will make "add more ships to the supply line" expensive (as in each ship will cost a lot of resources to build no matter what propulsion technology they use), and "build faster ships with torch drives" not so expensive (the torch drives won't be fantastically expensive in terms of resources, because that would make them so heavy that they're no longer good drives).