tempdoom

TL:DR I have a proposal for career mode that would shift progression onto a system in which different celestial bodies are assigned to their respective “programs” which contain progressively more and more difficult missions rather than focusing on random contracts. Additionally, science would become a gradual process more akin to the breaking ground research stations in addition to making R&D a better organized but gradual and automatic process. KSP’s career mode is one of my biggest pet peeves in the game. It feels incredibly grindy and more like a chore than anything. It discourages exploratory progress and takes a lot of choice out of the player’s hand with unrealistic, overly specific and repetitive goals. Career mode should have fairly vague goals allowing the player to figure out how to accomplish them on their own and give them a lot of room to just have fun and experiment. Career mode should focus on exploration and milestone-based progress rather than “do x to collect $y so you can do it all over again until you have enough $ to launch a probe to Eeloo” Overall the goal of this proposal is to give a better sense of progression and gradual realistic progress, and to make the goal of the game exploration not funding, which it seems career mode perhaps unintentionally does now. Career mode should make you feel great about your accomplishments and lay out your goals clearly so that progress can be driven by the player’s curiosity rather than by repetitive contracts. Here’s my proposal for Career Mode 2: Electric Boogaloo: Contracts -Contracts are still around, but they would likely not be the primary focus of career mode as they are now. They would be like an easy and reliable instant source of cash and reputation points to be put toward other projects. They would not be exploration- or colony-based. That is reserved for exploration programs (see below) -Contract deadlines would actually mean something. You won’t get paid for failed contracts, but you also won’t really lose much reputation either. -They would be fairly simple and also realistic. Launch/construct a space hotel to low kerbin orbit, launch a geostationary satellite constellation, polar satellites, orbital tourism flights, etc. Nothing too crazy. -More contracts become available as you progress through different programs. Once you’ve sufficiently advanced progress on the Mun program, you could be given tourism contracts there and so on. -Some contracts would exist to test experimental parts. You get no money for them and would have to eat the mission cost but they can lower the bar of the respective tier of research to which that object belongs, effectively letting you use it earlier than you would be able to naturally. Science -Science ticks up automatically, but slowly. Science experiments would increase the speed at which this rate ticks but there would not be instant dumps of science like there are now except perhaps impact data, returned surface samples or rocks, etc. -Rather than a bunch of nodes with arbitrary groups of parts inside them, R&D would be a slow and constant progression you’d use to work towards greater tech to help you with more advanced and distant missions. You would select a science path, and let it go while you send your missions away. Over time, new parts from the selected category will be “developed” as higher and higher tiers within the subcategory become unlocked which then become available to use. -The parts in each category would be decided by function and would consist of several main categories in which subcategories can be selected i.e. “engine systems” could be a subcategory of “propulsion”, as would “fuel containment”. This subcategory system is more for making it not a messy web of stuff to look at. -Science data would be collected more over time than it is currently. Rather than opening the door of the materials bay and instantly transmitting 600 science from orbit of some distant planet, you’d collect more science up until a limit over time, with the longer the module is active and collecting science determining just how much you can squeeze out of it. Certain modules take more time to process than others, but might yield more science. While the module is active, your science tickrate would be increased. The new breaking ground surface modules are great examples of how science really ought to work although I could do without the constant notifications at the top of the screen (lol) -This is an idea I have that I think might overcomplicate, but perhaps part tiers which are researched at say 75% could be used but might fail, with the rate of failure decreasing until 0 at 100. This could be tuned based on difficulty I suppose. Programs Programs will be the bread and butter of career mode. Rather than just getting random “explore jool” contracts, you’d be able to progress through different programs of exploration, similar to Apollo or Venera etc. -Each program contains missions. These missions would start simple i.e. “enter the sphere of influence of Jool” and eventually progress to “build a colony around Jool” and “construct and launch a spacecraft from the Jool colony to another body” or whatever. -Missions would be arranged in tiers based on your reputation. A mission to do a manned flyby of Jool for example might be equivalent in tier to a Mun station or something. Balance-wise this would of course really have to be hashed out so the tiers align with difficulty well. -Missions would be given a specific budget. Exceeding this budget is fine if you have extra money in the bank from other missions or contracts. -Missions have specific, kind of short deadlines, meaning you shouldn’t bite off more than you can chew or risk losing a lot of reputation and kovernment funding for your other missions. -Successful missions reward some instant science, but this science value diminishes rather quickly giving you a reason for pushing towards better and better projects quickly rather than letting science slowly tick up from your deployed experiments until it’s easy. It does not force you to hurry to certain programs, however, as the science reward is not game-changing but just a bonus for quick work. -You don’t have to do all the missions in order. If you have the reputation you can skip missions or even skip entire programs. Maybe you hate Minmus and want to get straight to Duna. That’s totally fine! Other Stuff -Astronauts level up over time by doing their respective jobs. Pilots level up by actively piloting ships, Scientists level up by performing science or working in labs, engineers level up by repairing, replacing, or attaching new parts to ships or stations. (I do hope we get a base game Kerbal Attachment System analog, it honestly is basically a base game mod to me as-is and would give engineers something to do.) What do you guys think? Any good? I wonder how feasible it is to implement such a system at this point in development or whether this is even worth writing only a year out from release. Or even if the devs are listening. Maybe a modder is at least!

I'm pretty excited for this. KSP with some much needed ground-up bug fixes would be enough for me to want this. I get the sense from what I saw in the trailer as well as the dev post that many of the beloved huge mods that added mechanics like colonization, life support, and cooler late game propulsion etc. are being mostly folded into the main game. This is cool, and IMO exactly what KSP needs. But I'd like to know about some of the simpler mods for the game which at this point in my many years of playing the game are to me basic game functions. Would love to see some be folded into the base game for the sake of simplicity and cleaner implementation. There are a few things I have pretty much always modded into my games for as long as these mods have been available: -Precise Maneuvers (believe me I know how nice the maneuver system is already compared to before it existed, I've played since the VAB looked like the diner from attack of the clones) -Transfer Window Planning -Kerbal Alarm Clock -Docking assist tools like the alignment indicator on the navball and the camera -Kerbal Engineer -Mods that track science and let you deploy things easily -More/Outer Planets (from the looks of the trailer there is a Saturn lookalike already?) -More default action groups, Like press P to open all solar panels etc. -Life support (there is clearly some sort of life support for colonies, but I'd like to know more about how that actually works?) There are many more features which deserve to be added to the base game and I wonder if that's part of your plan for KSP2. Are you guys actually trying to build things similar to the mods that add these features, or do they just happen to be where you wanted to go next with development?