Axelord FTW

I want more, I always want more, but realistically speaking I think airbags would probably be the only thing we could expect to see, vanilla-wise.

BUILDING a space elevator directly, with parts, would be a major undertaking (not to mention the closest you could get is in form, as I doubt you could simulate it realistically in its entirety all at once). But maybe, just maybe, implement a system you have to 'pay' for somehow through progression, to allow the players to send kerbals and small payloads to high orbit. If not vanilla, then I'm sure it could be modded in. All you would need is to have a 'launchpad' of sort set up in quasi-geostationary and you'd be golden. Same goes for any other exotic ground-to-orbit solutions. All interesting, but the end results are similar enough to be handwaved somehow as a background thing if you wish (as long as you paid for it somehow, obviously).

What stuck out to me the most, out of this was the "over 600 parts" bit. Not to fart higher than the hole, but none of this is exactly a new concept to me. What I am interested in, however, is scope. Over 600 parts is a promising figure. That said, my Faith in Techno Chris(t) is unwavering, and I'm always happy to see how/what he's doing.

A short-hand shortcut system could be nice, especially if you can repath actions to it at will. By that I mean what Tribes(&nt) have been using for dialogue. You relegate one key to an action three, with branching options. For anything bigger than a rover, I tend to run into a wall with action groups already, and this would allow you to map more than ten actions. I prefer keypaths over a visual action wheel. VGS VGS VGS

You know, I'd probably make/buy a custom control-station board if interfacing with KSP2 ends up not being too complicated.

Probably the one planet pack I'll be waiting for out of the gate is the continuation of Outer Planets Mod. I expect more work will be done to 'tweak up' the Kerbol system over adding new interstellar destinations. Likewise, a MechJeb2 will come out relatively quickly, I think. The Smart A.S.S. function is definitely a must for me in KSP1, as the vanilla attitude controls are simply lacking.

Forest are generally intensive things to render. Finding something that add trees would probably not be too hard, but to the point that it becomes an actual forest? A mod that add a particular type of ground scatter under certain biomes would probably be the most expedient and easy to fine tune, but they wouldn't have colliders and you'd start eating up VRAM fast.

If the fact that it's 'stock' is important, then the game should be completely stock in presentation (you could allow QoL mods for building, for example).

It's why I think the 'roadmap' of mods for KSP2 will follow a vastly different path altogether. Though, I'm iffy about giving KSP2 too much leeway until I've seen it for myself. It promises a lot, and I've long since learned to take those kind of things with a hefty grain of salt. I think standalone tweaks, QoL and Utility mods will play a bigger role in KSP2, and only later will 'modpacks' become more commonplace and various playstyles solidify.

You got restock AND restock plus WF configs, right? BOTH of them?

It very much is a visual mod. What matter is why the distinction is important. What's it for?

Wouldn't call it pre-ordering. No more than calling and paying in advance and for take-out food is. The topic is about a very specific marketing scheme after all.

I've been thinking lately about KSP1's mod scene and how it evolved through the years to become what it is, now, on the 'eve' of KSP2's release. More specifically, I've been thinking about what mods came first, what mods became immediately popular, what mods created offshoots and whole dependency subgenres, what mod endured and were refined, what mods faded to obscurity, what mod came and were either supplanted, incorporated, or made defunct by being rolled into the actual base game. As time went on, mods were less and less about making an idea possible, but to work in conjunction as a part of a mod suite with mods made by other people. The RO/RSS scene is a good example of this crystallization in time, as a complete sub-community ultimately congealed around a very, very specific goal. Many may know, but few remember that it effectively all started when someone supersized Kerbin to be earth-sized. Everything else was natural, predictable progression. I daresay modders haven't forgotten the 'good old days.' I expect the modscene to just about explode immediately, just as soon as people take stock of what is, well, stock in KSP2. In a meta sort of way, I'm almost more interested in seeing what modders will prioritize than to see what KSP2 is in and of itself. We can only speculate, of course, but it's kind of a recurring daydream for me at this point. Whatever the sequel brings into the fold as being part of the stock gameplay, we can be certain that it will not be as deep and as complex as what some people want it to be. Life-Support is perhaps the subgenre I expect to see the greatest amount of man-hours poured into right off the bat, no matter how much of it was rolled into stock KSP2 gameplay. Then, as the more casual players come to grip with what exactly the stock game can offer, and what it can't do, we'll see QoL and Utility mods being pushed in a second wave following growing demand. If nothing goes wrong, and I'm usually the pessimistic sort, I think KSP2's initial market grasp will be considerable. When the first game came out, space was not even close to be as popular a topic as it is today. The world has changed a lot since June 2011 (I think some of that change can safely be attributed back to KSP1). Even just the accessibility to videogames in general has made great leaps in the intervening years. KSP1's ongoing development since does help in figuring out how it will work out, but nothing is certain. As long as the launch isn't a total botch job, I expect things to get very interesting in 2023. There's a really good thread up already about what mods people want to see be part of the base game, but since there's no way to please everyone, I imaging a lot of people will be let down, however gently. Whatever is and isn't, I'm looking forward to see how things will progress in the coming years. In my case, I could easily wonder who will be the next Scott Manley, or if the man will reprise his instrumental role? Could he even still be as major a role as he was early on even if he wanted? Like I said, the scene has changed so much since it all started. It's all so wonderful to think about. EDIT: Just in case, I'll clarify this much. I don't consider stock KSP1 to be 'feature-complete' and a modded game only inches closer to an impossible ideal. I consider modded gameplay to be integral to the experience. When I speak of the modscene and modders in general, I understand their existence to be inseparable from the game itself. They are, as far as I am concerned, part of the development process just as much as the actual development team. I don't expect this to change with the sequel. Vanilla is just a flavour.

Considering KSP1 already 'reuse' some engines with different configurations and bells, I think quasi-B9-Switch sort of system would do good in KSP2. If only to keep part count in the VAB lower. While were at it, a sort of 'Janitor' to have more control over part being shown or hidden in the VAB/SPH/OAB would be useful. If not I'm pretty sure a mod for that functionality will come soon enough. Not all engines, of course, and certainly not early on in the progression. Engine optimization is a real thing.

Bit of a gauntlet. IS3 has arrived. A rover was sent down unto Alva to find a good spot, which ended up being on top of a mountain. The 'Tylo Special' lander then followed next. Some issues with the landing due to max acceleration being capped by MJ at 20m/s. Still managed to land on target, though I had to burn roughly four times the dV I was expecting to expend. An autofactory was set up, the lander was refueled and then rose up back to orbit to dock again with the NSW-E stage. At this point, I have decided that Alva is unsuitable for long term colonization. Blalo is, thus, my true target. The problem is that Blalo has higher gravity and ASL pressure than Kerbin. Not by much, but enough to matter when you have to build rockets by hand on the ground. Without a KSC and launchpad, it would be very difficult to reach orbit again with any good payload mass. Decided to make a seabase-colony. Haven't done sea launches in ages, since before the water physics were upgraded I think. I did design a boat to carry kerbals around just for fun. It might come in handy. Not pictured: How I went from 4 engines to 2, and put them on swivels to give it the ability to translate and even reverse. In any case, the first task was to find a suitable spot with high-enough concentrations of metal ore. The concentrations of Ore on Blalo are pretty typical, but Metal Ore is very rarely found directly by the sea. Usually there's a band of a few hundred meters between high concentrations and water, but not always. The seaplane drone was thus tasked with finding a good spot. Even in places where Metal Ore reached into the water, it was also usually way too steep to do anything there anyway. Took me a few hours flying around to finally hit the jackpot.

Damn, this give me an idea...

Well this one's a doozy. The IS Relay arrived at KirbaniA and did a general tour of the most promising colony prospects before transferring to KirbaniB and doing the same. That done, it started to transfer back toward KirbaniA. Before it could get back, however, the Drone Factory arrived at KirbaniA, where it entered into an orbit around Blalo, on which the first surface exploring rover will be dropped. Blalo ranks pretty low for me. It's effectively an ideal world to colonize, but it's also kinda hard to use as a primary world because it's a slightly beefed up Kerbin in practice (1.1g, 1.05ASL). Might still make a base there, but getting back up from the surface would be too much of a challenge to do regularly. Unless I can wrap my head around Kerbal Konstructs, Blalo will remain mostly untouched. It has a nice set of satellites, though. Next target would be Alva at this point. It's basically a hot Duna, which is nice. edit: @Admiral Fluffy convinced me to give seafaring another chance. I hope KSP2's water physics is better than KSP1, because this was honestly fun. Initial tests on Kerbin went well, for the most part. In fact I had not intended for this to fly at all, and initially set out to make a boat, but as soon as I tested the bare thrust on the runway I knew it could get lift. An aileron or two, an extra set of reaction wheels in case it flipped over in the water, adjusting the gear a bit, and boom! Top speed is around 230m/s, and it could probable be tuned for more, but the real operational speed (i.e. the not-scared-it-won't-spontaneously-explode speed) is around 175m/s. It doesn't have a name yet, but it has worked really well so far. It kinda look like a Klingon bird of prey? IF I ever do colonize Blalo, maybe I could make a floating base? Sea launches could be fun.

That's just backward logic. There will either be a way to stretch out of the VAB whilst in it or there will be another, superior tier to the VAB that doesn't care about volume (whether or not it will be only be accessible for space construction is another matter). We already know some parts in KSP2 will be too big in and of themselves to fit in the VAB as we know it. So you know, that torch drive is bigger than the Sea Dragon main stage engine bell. There's obviously a solution for this. Hangar Extender (or any equivalent part of an overhaul mod, etc.) is a de-facto necessity for KSP1 as soon as you start looking at bigger crafts, and I'm willing to bet KSP2 will have something like that out of the gate. Size is also of no issue when you simply need to strap on more boosters. I wonder how close the finished product will be to Extraplanetary Launchpads, or if it'll use a completely different approach. I kinda like building stuff in space, or on other worlds. While boosters are one of the solutions, sending stuff in bits and pieces is another. Launching containers of raw and processed materials up to LKO is how I built my latest station, which in turn built the last (of four) interstellar ships in my current KSP1 playthrough. Once you get an operation stable on the Mun or Minmus, and as soon as it can start producing materials, then you're golden. The initial installation cost is prohibitive, but it very quickly becomes viable. Heck, I sometime boost my funds by returning highly valuable materials to Kerbin to cash in. I don't feel like this is cheap or cheat-y because this is literally on the books in real life. It's one of the major driving force behind the current space boom.

Dammit forum stop letting me cancel a post and then still post it anyway! Ignore this.

Started recovering every remaining Kerbal crews left in the field. The Mun surface factory crew and the Mun orbital factory crew were the two main contingents. The last leg of my interstellar colonization effort was coming, with three ships on their way, all that remained was to send the last one containing pretty much every Kerbals part of my space agency after them. The Cascade Z-Pinch engine was chosen, and a design was drafted. In all, this craft would carry 52 Kerbals in total. Before that could happen, though, a lot of Helium-3 and deuterium was needed, and a new orbital factory around Kerbin had to be assembled. This time, the Deuterium and Helium-3 would be made directly instead of bought or harvested in the field, thanks to a set of patch I made. Helium-3 needed an initial investment of over 9 million kosh to produce, all this after I had found a very nice article titled "Helium-3 Production via Lithium-6 Activation in an Accelerator-Driven Reactor" and decided I could just jerryrig the antimatter linear accelerator plant into an effective Helium-3 plant. With a little bit of lithium, an unreactive pressure sump (i.e. a noble gas, so Xenon or Argon), and a little bit of handwavium, producing the stable isotope relatively quickly. Deuterium I just bought. The initial automated core of the new Kerbin station was sent up, and topped up with four shipments of Rocket Parts over the next few days. A slightly modified version of the Munar orbital facility was born. From this point, I shipped up LHe3 and Deuterium, plus a few other resources over the next week. From this, the last interstellar ship was built and fueled up. The crew was lifted up in a few installments and transferred over. The burn has begun. EDIT: Burn was completed, and I began to timewarp until the first ship (the relay) entered the greater Kirbani SOI. As soon as it did, I adjusted course for the Kirbani Alpha system. Still 70+ years of travel time. All three following vessels got the same treatment a few years apart. Greater SOI arrival, adjust, create an alarm. Hardest adjust burn was 2,300ms. I seriously wonder how KSP2 will handle interplanetary planning. KSP1 doesn't generally like dealing with such high values across the board, and you can somehow feel the game's jank seeping through more than usual.

I'd pay full 'AAA pricing' thought I'd honestly prefer to pay less. Buy, never pre-order. NEVER. PRE-ORDER! I don't care if they're upselling you [snip], pre-ordering anything is dumb.

Alright, after having learned all I could from the first two test voyages in the Kerbin system for the Interstellar ships, now the time has come to send the first (and maybe) only batch of Kerbals into the great void. The design for the IS3 is effectively a toned-down IS2, with some of the superfluous structure and resources stripped away. No science lab. No LH2. Much less monopropellant, less liquid methane. More rocket parts, though, but it's otherwise very slimmed down in comparison. All I needed to do now was construct the vessel in questions. This required some rocket parts, some lithium, some enricher uranium, some liquid methane, not to mention a ludicrous amount of nuclear salt water. The lander is still the overly-powerful Tylo Lander 2, since it worked so well before. Another tentative design had been to use a Z-pinch engine, and I could have gotten a LOT more dV that way, but I decided against it if only because I can't get that mod that let you warp under thrust to work (this is, incidentally, the engine the Interstellar Relay is using. In any case, construction and the final fueling procedures only took about a month and a half in Kerbal time. That done, a crew was selected. Three pilots, three engineers, and two scientist. Normally I would have had one extra engineer and one extra scientist but the IS3 has two spots fewer since it lacks a science lab. The IS3 was boosted up to a 30km circular orbit beforehand, and there the rendez-vous was done. Crew transferred over without issue, and the 'shuttle' was boosted back down to rendez-vous with the orbital facility, which promptly ate the shuttle. With everything ready, the IS3 targeted the Drone Factory which was sent out on its way two years prior, and effectively started a burn to match its velocity. I'm letting MechJeb do this burn, for obvious reasons. When this is all done, I will have three vessels en-route to the nearest solar system in the planet pack I'm using. The IS-Relay, the IS-Drone Factory and the crewed IS3. Each travelling at similar speeds, each left from the Kerbol system a few years from each other.

Alright, where to begin... The 'rescue' mission to Jool to pick up the exospheric collector crew was half-diverted to do something else I was meaning to do already. Namely replace the rover-factory on the surface of Tylo with an automated plant instead. The Exospheric collector ship itself had JUST enough dV remaining to get into a circular, 15km high orbit around Tylo using Laythe for a gravity assist. Once there, they waited for the NSW-driven rescue craft to arrive, which it eventually did. Once it did arrive and the crew was transferred, I used it to land on Tylo next to the mega-rover very carefully, as it was not designed to land anywhere. As for the collector, it was simply deorbited and made to crash into Tylo, somewhere. Not important. First thing first, the autofactory would need a relay, but instead of putting a small craft into orbit, I drove a ground-relay station to the top of a 'nearby' mountain with LOS to the rover. The drive was a 100km+ pain in the ass, considering Tylo's gravity and the low torque output of most rover wheels. Any incline steeper than 15% I had to zig-zag my way up. Once in place, the relay undercarriage was removed and driven down the slope until it crashed, leaving the relay itself on top of the mountain. While THAT was going on, efforts were being made on the Mun to roll the surface facilities into a single, comprehensive base. The HEPF and Factory were both incorporated into a new, better mega-rover. The HEPF crew of two simply had to leap 6km over the surface. Then the Tylo rover-factory finished constructing its automated replacement, and then also a replacement for the NSW-E rescue craft since it didn't have any ladders. Fuels were transferred, pipes were connected, crew disembarked and embarked, etc. etc. New craft lifted off the surface, and almost immediately transferred to Kerbin with a 4500ms burn. The return was without incidents also, and the crew was recovered. With that done, now the only Kerbals out in the field are either on the Mun, or in low Munar orbit.

Well the Jool harvester is a bust. It works, that much isn't being disputed. I can collect exospheric LH2 and antimatter, but the rates at which this happens is slow enough that even counting all the extra EnUr I included on board, I wouldn't be able to fill up the AM tanks even a third of the way before the powerplant ran dry. Math kinda checks out for the LH2, but barely. That's roughly thirty years in game time, which is ridiculously long and inefficient compared to me just refining everything groundside. Only thing I can't produce handily is deuterium, but I'm thinking of making a patch over one converter or another to allow me to make it. 3He I'll keep as something that can only be harvested. It can theoretically be produced using a special sort of nuclear reactor... so maybe the FFT exotic fuel plant could do it? In any case, with the quasi-inability of getting new fuel, the return from Jool is looking iffy. The remaining dV margins are getting slim, so I'm sending up a 'rescue' craft that will also act as a Tylo lander, something that will come in handy because of the Tylo mega refinery-factory-rover. It has automated controls but no antenna strong enough to reach Kerbin at the moment. EDIT: Actually, since 3He can be made... So I'll also patch the AM facility for lithium-bombardment to be able to make small amounts of Helium-3. Also, it works! I'll tune the amounts for balance purposes, but it works perfectly for now.

Yeah but does it have a rover and a crane system that can unfold out from its side?