Bej Kerman

Worth calling back to the fact KSP 1 has already traded realism for the sake of fun in the past. The planets are at 1/10th scale, atmospheres stop abruptly and Kerbals can stay in space indefinitely. Pointless collision checks are no exception.

Why is this under KSP 1 suggestions/development?

I know the difference between difficulty and challenge, and I'm not sure why you are calling them the same thing. I also don't know why you bring career up.

Or just use starship?

Weird milestone, I know. Worth bringing up, though. The forum's oldest archive is now 3535 days old (9 years 8 months) and has been archived a thousand times - see the first archive of the forum here, archived October 12th 2012. Feel free to discuss the forum's history here including the Wayback Machine and other historic archives.

It's not like this would mean anything besides more busy work for the one unlucky player who happens to have two vessels approaching each other. KSP 1 lets vessels phase through each other but still checks for collisions with planets. Why are you making the assertion that if KSP 2 lets vessels phase through each other (so you aren't having to micromanage orbits around small bodies), then that'll mean phasing through entire planets? if that alarm bugs out, as games are known to do, then you'll come back to a cloud of debris. Maybe the alarm works, but puts you too close to the collision and you barely have enough time to engage thrusters... Maybe just don't simulate collisions between unloaded vessels. That's another thing - the game has to load these vessels momentarily to generate accurate results for the collision. Again, just more detriment for the one player on Earth who ends up with two colliding vessels.

Okay - now I'm trying to picture sky boxes from Portal 2 (where I spent most of the time testing in underground environments and looking for cake... 2D planes that project a much smaller area onto the backdrop of the level, providing the illusion that the level is much bigger than it actually is, as explained in Shesez's Boundary Break series.

Would having dynamic skyboxes (like Portal 2) of a starfield blown up in size across the sky work better? There's no seams and your vessel could travel very far away from the main cluster of stars and see the skybox update according to what it should see in its part of the galaxy.

Nothing here said you'll need to worry about vessels colliding during timewarp - only that you'll have to worry about the vessel you are controlling right now colliding with another vessel in orbit while you're busy using it.

A stellar mass black hole will only look like a neutron star until you're well beyond the point a Kerbal could go without being spaghettified. A supermassive black hole, you could approach the event horizon before being spaghettified. But you would never be able to go anywhere near the black hole due to intense radiation.

You cannot have a hud that resembles this without looking busy. KSP 1 UI is about as busy as you can make a UI before it turns into a joke (KSP 1 UI is arguably already a joke), and that's still far from looking like a real spacecraft control panel.

[snip] Show us or it never happened

I agree with everything else, but 1. this is a tutorial and onboarding issue, and 2. this same argument could be used as ammunition for someone who is against the devs bothering to implement anything beyond the Mun. No-one gets far, why bother with other star systems, or other planets?

They did a dev blog about that. You will have to worry about crossing orbits with time warp. If there's going to be a collision, it's going to happen, time warp or not. Link or it didn't happen

I'm hearing something else

Honestly, it might be safer to enforce a vanilla-only install just to ensure that no-one inadvertently leaves a mod on that, say, alters how the thermal mechanics work.

Wait, so you don't want challenge?

I guess that sucks for new players then. In either case they are starting with unfamiliar lands. How very sad. I'm not sure why I spent my time on this debate, because the official game isn't going to release with you starting on some random unimportant planet, however big this debate gets. It's going to do the logical thing and start you off on Kerbin and give you novel and interesting alien planets only when you put the effort and time in. How unfortunate.

It’s not whether it’s alien or not, it’s how familiar it is. Kerbin is just a small earth, is it not? Most of the Kerbol system follows this rule as well, as almost every planet or moon has a real world counterpart. This doesn’t have to be the case in KSP2 though. You don’t start a space program on a ringed planet, Tatooine equivalent or irregularly shaped body every day. It would spice things up a bit. No, it would just make things boring. You said it yourself, Kerbin is very familiar, and it'd be dandy if KSP 2 didn't immediately give us unfamiliar lands at the very start of a game.

Gene designed a vinegar-and-bicarbonate broom rather than wear a dress into a Dres. Nobody expects the Mohole to appear before dark. The doctors thought of massive booster shots to counter the massive lack of superior thrusters on brooms

The game has bugged out on people before, launching them away at many times the diameter of the observable universe a second, and they haven't escaped the SOI. At most the game will break from floating point errors, and when you get to a point the physics will stop (probably giving you either the NaN Kraken or the Hell Kraken) or the game will crash. It really is impossible.

Ask real questions instead of rhetorical ones if you actually want an answer. Or do you not have an answer in the first place? The point at which you drew the line between rhetorical and "real" is arbitrary.

Yes, you can put yourself on a hyperbolic orbit, but you won't ever actually reach the edge of Kerbol's SOI. It's infinite. That being said, you say all mods are allowed, which sort of undercuts the point of a challenge when you can just write or install a mod that does drastically limit the SOI.

Salavage from the crashed mothership, local mining, etc. Surely you have somewhat of an imagination that you can think of some of this stuff yourself rather than having me spell it out to you. I am sure the creative writers could think of a lot of other things too. And this is supposed to be better than starting on Kerbin, how? What motive is there to reach for the unfamiliarity in the stars if you're already on an alien planet?

Crash landing on a planet with neither the resources or infrastructure. Pretty simple. Then where do the resources and infrastructure for an entire launch pad and space colony come from? Mark Watney didn't build the base he lived in all on his own, nor could he just build rockets like that.