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I'm more interested in the ship design and colony development aspect. I have more fun designing a six launch Duna mission and setting up all the orbital trajectories than I do flying the same ascent to orbit over and over. I also don't have the same amount of gaming time I did when I was younger. I frankly don't have the patience for grinding. Give us the option, and if you don't like it, don't use it. This debate doesn't make sense to me.

Personally something I hope that gets built on. There are some interesting engineering challenges in interplanetary comm networks if the devs are willing to risk a little extra complexity. The tradeoff between omni-directional vs. high-gain would be more interesting if high-gain had to maintain pointing accuracy. If we want to go crazy, whip antennas could maintain over-the-horizon comms using ionsphere reflection on some planets (you can do this on Mars, but not on the Moon).

Visual relativistic effects. Nothing too complicated, but it'd be nice to see the effects of blue/red shifting stars when cruising at some fraction of light speed.

It sounds like you're more interested in playing word games. I just don't want to manually pilot a brachistochrone trajectory, nor do I want it abstracted to something that isn't true to the physics. Call it an autopilot, call it an "automator," it doesn't matter to me. Just don't force me to fly missions I don't want to because that would somehow ruin your fun... somehow. What a weird conversation.

That sounds a lot more gameable than an autopilot. Also the math isn't that hard.

I genuinely have no idea what you're describing if not an autopilot.

Autopilot is not even remotely optional given the scope and technologies this game is addressing. Daedalus drives would burn for months, maybe even years on their way to other star systems. Even with a good physics warp, you would have to put all other missions on hold while it completes, unless you're willing to stop and restart burns while juggling a time table of other missions. Flying two interstellar missions at once would be flat impossible. Colonies won't work either if the player is expected to fly every resupply mission. Even if you get rid of having to move life support resources around, which would be a mistake IMO, do you expect to fuel an orbiting interstellar rocket entirely by hand? That's the "game ruining" kind of tedium. Unless you're into that sort of thing, then go nuts, just don't demand the rest of us enjoy it. Just unlock the autopilot and mission planner gradually as the player demonstrates they know the core concepts. That would hardly ruin anyone's fun.

100% It would be a huge disappointment if the game is designed for a simultaneous release with consoles. It would significantly reduce the scope of possibilities.

Perhaps a split is necessary between science and engineering. Science would be driven by a desire to learn more about the places you're trying to visit, collecting atmospheric samples to learn atmospheric composition for instance. Whereas engineering would be driven by a desire to push limits. Setting altitude records, speed records, acceleration records, completing missions to places you've never been, etc. Contracts could include rewards that have rewards for both science and engineering. For instance, perform a supersonic retro-propulsion at an altitude of above 30km. You could go further and tie requirements for particular parts to completing particular challenges rather than using an abstract point system, but it difficult to walk the line between simple and arbitrary on one hand and overly complicated on the other.

[snip] Huh? I voted for the bottom two only as well, but I don't see a problem with things like Epstein drives. The X-ray flux would turn the vehicle into slag in seconds, but I'm willing to just assume advances in materials science don't rule out the possibility in the somewhat distant future. Taking creative license within the rough limits of the possible is kind of mandatory, unless you want to fly NERVAs to alpha centauri. This seems like nitpicking all the least interesting parts of scientific plausibility.

As I said, KSP1 devs introduced an entire roadmap for these babble resources, but it got discarded for being confusing. There's a few remnants of it, but other than that it was and is a bad idea. [snip]Torch drives are probably bunk as well, but I'm a lot more forgiving of that than I am "magic rockets." [snip]

I really, really do not like the idea of introducing technobabble like "explodium rockets." The cool thing about KSP is you play the game and learn practical real-life terminology (delta-V, apoapsis, ISP, etc.). KSP1 tried to introduce a parallel set of nonsense resources, but it ended up being walked back over time because it was way too confusing and didn't allow for the import of the player's real-world knowledge. Cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen is straightforward and practical, what turns into explodium? Dimeritium and magic dust? I'd rather not have to learn a whole lexicon of babble words to play the game. The game is more than capable of being both fun and scientifically accurate in its terminology. And if it introduces a whole new generation to STEM concepts in the process, all the better.

Bruh, I'm pretty sure you are the sum total of all the people that cares about this. I was trying to give you a hand-wavy explanation so you could move on with your life. It's a game about near-future rockets. If we knew exactly how to make a high-thrust high-ISP rocket, it wouldn't be a near-future rocket. It would be a now-rocket.

If they're going through the trouble of building a powerful automation system, giving us access via some sort of console right out-of-the-box would make me very happy. That would open up so many doors for the community to start writing/sharing scripts. kOS is pretty intimidating for beginners, but if your first experience is no more complicated than "paste this script to do a Brachistochrone trajectory," I'd bet you'd have a lot more people getting interested in it. Same thing with robotics. That didn't become a major part of KSP until it was an out-of-the-box feature, even though it was a mod for years.

Y'all need to relax. Torch ships would emit so many X-rays they'd turn any ship into slag after a few seconds, but I don't see much complaining about the realism of them. The assumption is we'll figure out something in the near-future that'll make high-thrust, high-ISP rockets possible, so we may as well start with concepts we know at least a little about. Assume there's some breakthrough in nano-composites that enables extremely light high-pressure resistant vessels, or a doping technique that makes it more stable at lower pressures, or some combination of the two. The space shuttle would have seemed pretty implausible to someone designing it with 1920s tech. Besides, there's a metallic hydrogen rocket page on Atomic Rockets, which is pretty much the gold standard for plausible near-future rocket concepts. http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Chemical--Metastable--Metallic_Hydrogen Alright, can we move on?

In line with the OP, Kerbalism is a fantastic mod that rethinks the science system in a really cool way. It's unfortunately pretty intimidating because it's still buggy and isn't explained well to new players, but it is a vast improvement over the old "click button for science" system. There are a lot of good ideas to borrow from it since it does a good job encouraging the player to think about what orbits they want to deploy different science payloads into. The more interesting engineering problems I have to solve, the happier I'll be.

This is a good thread so I'm bumping it. The KSP1 system of launching missions to accomplish contracts to get money in order to do the missions you actually want to do is a workable system, but it's not a great system. I think a better model would be encouraging players to launch missions for no other reason than their own curiosity. For a game about exploration, a lot of the magic is ruined by being able to open the map and zoom over Jool to look around. Though its inevitable you need it as a system to gatekeep the higher end tech from players, grinding out new parts shouldn't be the focus of the game. Science shouldn't just be an abstract representation of progress, but should accurately shape what you know about the universe. The main map should start as a stylized representation of what ground telescopes would know that grows more detailed over time. Duna should have an entire Wikipedia of history to learn, but you're not going to know anything about it until you get boots on the ground visiting all the different biomes and setting up outposts. But you'll need to do recon first. Duna should be nothing more than a fuzzy red dot until you preform your first flyby. Your knowledge of its atmosphere or soil shouldn't be available until you drop in a lander with the right equipment or perform the right scan from orbit, but this would be important information to know before designing the manned missions that will get you the interesting stuff. This could be a really cool process for interstellar missions. Even knowing if they have planets should require launching a Kepler-like mission and knowing anything more than their size and mass should require launching something like the FOCAL mission (sending a telescope to the solar gravitational focal point way out in the Kuiper belt to get a halfway decent snapshot of an exo-planet). Learning more than a simple picture might start with flyby missions where you try to jam as much science equipment as possible into the tiniest probe you can, then flinging at the nearest star system with as much delta-V as you can manage. All of this would happen before you even think about doing some insane Daedalus drive project. Point being, designing each new mission should start with the question "what do I want to learn?"

There's a ton of interesting stuff to talk about if a telescope feature is introduced. Including my favorite, launching a probe way out into the Kuiper belt to use the sun as a giant gravitational lens in order to directly image exoplanets. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20180002197.pdf If the point of KSP2 is to go interstellar, those would be some pretty cool missions to launch before picking a star system to visit.

Yeah I agree with this sentiment. I feel like construction should be a little more complicated on colony bases, but I can't see how it would be anything other than annoying to have a build timer. And this is coming from the guy that always argues things should be complexified in other threads.

Probably a typo or misunderstanding. There's no reasonable non-physics breaking way to achieve inter-galactic travel, and there's not really any point. Travel millions of years just to arrive at a place that only has more of the same stars you left behind.

Yeah, exactly. I wrote up something earlier on how a progression system could gradually unlock tools to accomplish things like orbital ascent, hohmann transfers, orbital rendezvous, landings, etc. as the player proved they could do each task. Pair a system like that with a powerful mission planner and you basically take all the monotony out of the game to focus on the fun stuff: engineering and exploration.

I think the best way to keep life support simple, regardless of how it is implemented, is just to build a superb mission planner. You tell it what you are trying to do and it tells you exactly what parameters you're going to have to design and where you are falling short. For instance, I create a mission titled "Odyssey III" and set the parameter "3 kerbal round-trip to Duna," select "Next Hohmann transfer window" and it gives me the following parameters: - Mission duration - (Kerbin departure date / Duna departure date / Kerbin arrival date) - Delta-V requirements - Life support requirements Then I can design a transfer vehicle, lander, and habitation model and assign them to each phase of the mission, checking them against delta-V and life support requirements in the mission planner. Finally, I can assign launchers to each component and check their delta-V requirements, possibly going so far as to set launch dates, rendezvous windows, landing sites, etc. if I wanted to go that far. You know, like a space program. Just build the tools to take the math and guesswork out of mission planning, introduce them to the concepts gradually, and I doubt the average player would be all that intimidated by having to deal with things like oxygen, water, or living space.

Solid idea. If it isn't in the base game, that sounds like something that would make for a good expansion.

It is far too premature to be having this discussion.

Without knowing the whole story I think it's premature to jump to conclusions about bullying corporate practices or whatever. My buy/no-buy decision still comes down to whether there's micro-transactions or not. If it has that slimy feel of mobile games, I'm out. I've never enjoyed a game that felt like a casino.