StopIteration

By "free" there I wasn't necessarily referring to cost in money, just if you think, gameplay-wise that there should be anything that restricts the player from launching launching whatever they want from Kerbin. So, save for framerate and physics, should all craft be equally easy to launch from Kerbin? My response kinda assumed that you thought there should be absolutely no non-physical restrictions whatsoever, but that's maybe an unfair assumption, so that's why I inquired. This particular question isn't about money at all, just an overall opinion about how gameplay should work.

I never made that argument, and in fact, while money in KSP 1 is not very realistic, I want to make it even less so (removing the ability to sell resources for money). I've given specific ways in which I think having money as a restraint would make the early progression system of the game more interesting and fun. Agreed, the way contracts work in KSP 1 is super grindy, and I don't know exactly how to fix it. But I think it can be implemented in a way that has just the right amount of grindiness to be fun, but not annoying. Though ultimately as you progress in the game, money would stop mattering so much, and the grind would go away. I'm assuming you think launching from Kerbin should be free? I somewhat agree with your point, but there's certainly some satisfaction in creating things that are not only cool, but also useful in furthering your future goals. Colonies are certainly quite cool and I'd want to make them anyway as I do in KSP 1, but that's all they are if you can just build everything on Kerbin and launch it with some obscenely huge rocket for free. I think they can be more than that. The delta-v advantage of launching from an airless moon doesn't matter as much when just adding more boosters is free. You should be able to get to the point where you can build whatever you want without needing to worry about costs (in money or resources), and there should be a sandbox mode where you can do that from the beginning, but I think overcoming obstacles to get to that point makes it all the more satisfying (and filling out a tech tree isn't all that good of a restraint, certainly not on its own).

It'd still cost 50 iron everywhere, but if you only have 30 iron in your stockpile on Kerbin, you can buy the remaining iron for 40 funds. There should maybe be a few resources available to mine on Kerbin, but I think since the goal is mostly to explore space, most resources shouldn't be mineable on Kerbin (too deep maybe). Kerbin should have interesting stuff to explore, but not much in the way of usable resources. Absolutely agree on this. I think money creates this distinction quite neatly, simply by setting the prices of each resource. Raw resources are relatively easy to mine with an early outpost, but certain such resources are expensive to buy on Kerbin. Manufactured materials require advanced colonies to make yourself, but are relatively cheap to buy on Kerbin.

Well, I'd say it's not a farming game, it's an engineering game. And to stretch analogies further, engineering is a little bit like accounting except your costs are more abstract. But sometimes they are actual literal costs.

You need to have different rates at which resources are added to the depo with your suggestion, just as you would need to have different resource costs with money. For money these prices would be fixed (I'm certainly not suggesting simulating an economy), but you propose that the rates at which resources are added would change with upgrades. I'm not totally opposed to the idea, I do think both could work, but in and of itself, it's not really any simpler. Though if the source of money is contracts or similar, which it probably would need to be, it might be more complicated if such a system would not otherwise exist. Still I think it's worth it. As far as complexity for a new player is concerned, as Ryaja said, the resource cost would be almost completely transparent to the player, as you'd never have to buy the resources manually (you wouldn't even be able to). When you go to build the craft, it'd just tell you what the cost is for the resources you don't have, and so all you'd need to think about in the early game is a single resource. Whereas with a slow dribble of resources, there'd be one bottleneck resource after the next that you're running out of. I guess that could give rise to interesting engineering challenges, but more likely I'd just timewarp until I had the resources I wanted rather than trying to make use of what I had on hand. Storage caps don't really change that so much, it just limits the size of the craft you can launch. I don't love the way that contracts are implemented in KSP 1, but they do have the nice property of working almost the same no matter how much you timewarp. I think that's a good thing for the early game. You could have contracts that give resources rather than money, but that would definitely add complexity. Personally, I don't care if there's a failure state, but there are certainly some easy ways to make it so you can get out of a failure state. For example, if the player is out of funds, give occasional lucrative contracts to test parts, where the parts are provided. The player needs to suffer the indignity of launching some sounding rockets maybe, but they wouldn't need to restart.

Well yes, my idea is that money would get increasingly meaningless in the late game (except maybe in multiplayer) as the focus moves to the colonies. The point though is to provide that progression from a fledgling space program to self-sufficient colonies. Money would do basically two things. It would give you an incentive to build self-sufficient colonies so you don't need to worry about money any more, and it would also add nuance to technological progression. You can research and use RTGs, probably pretty early on. But radioisotopes are expensive, so it's much more economical to stick with solar panels on all your craft until you're able to set up a mining operation on Eve or wherever.

So do you mean like Kerbin would have a passive +X metal/year, +Y methane/year, etc by default without building any infrastructure? How should X and Y be chosen? I think it would make more sense if you just had +Z money/year (or +Z money for completing contracts) and then you could buy the resources that you need on Kerbin. Part costs would still be consistent, it's just that on Kerbin you get to substitute money for missing resources.

I'm not sure about multiplayer, but I do agree that having money in the game to buy basic resources on Kerbin makes a lot of sense and would enhance the game. I think that whether on Kerbin or not, building things should cost resources. However, if you are on Kerbin, any (or at least almost any) resources that you are missing will automatically be bought using money when you build a craft. If there is no money, then I would have to assume that building things on Kerbin is free, which I think would actually somewhat undermine colonies (where you would need resources to build things). I do not think that you should be able to sell resources though, only buy them. Late game resources should be prohibitively expensive to buy on Kerbin, incentivizing you to go to space to mine them. --- As far as multiplayer is concerned, if there is trading in the game (which I'm not sure there should be) I do agree money would have advantages over resources for it. With money, you could set up, for example, a gas station which other players could visit to refuel at, which might be fun. It doesn't make sense to trade resources in such a case, since the visiting craft wouldn't have any.

Kraken drives are basically unrealistic by definition. In earlier versions of the game, linear RCS thrusters were OP, and may have fit your desire to have limitations for your kraken drive (if you even consider that to be a kraken drive), but I don't know of anything similar in the current game. Of course you can always impose your own limitations in how you choose to use a kraken drive. Other than that, you can use a mod to get some sort of torch drive with both high specific impulse and a lot of thrust, or you could also maybe try using less Dawn engines than "enough to cover planet Earth" and accept the lower acceleration in exchange for more delta v. Nuclear engines might also be a good option depending on what you want.

I'd be happy with having some of the promised features get added in later DLCs, but I consider colonies and resource management to be a core part of what I'm expecting in KSP 2 and would be somewhat disappointed if they were not in the game at launch. If they can't get multiplayer (or even interstellar travel) working satisfactorily at launch, those would be fine to add either as a future free update or as DLC as far as I'm concerned. However, in a game like KSP, not all features are good to put in a DLC. I am opposed to DLCs that add more variety to the parts you can use for some task (a la Making History) because sharing the crafts you build in KSP is I think an important part of the game, and if you build with DLC parts, then not everyone can use your craft. So then when building craft you always need to keep in the back of your mind if it's really a good idea to use those parts when you could just use a base-game alternative that any player would have access to. DLC like Breaking Ground are better because there are no base-game alternatives worth considering when building crafts - robotics are a novel feature, so fairly good as a DLC. Ideally though, DLC that doesn't introduce any new parts (only new gameplay features or new planets) would be best. I'd be fine with KSP 2 not having much part variety at launch, but new parts that are not fundamentally different from the existing base-game parts should only ever be added in free updates IMO.

Of course the problem with a base income (at least with no limits on funds - though in some ways a fund limit might make it worse) is you have no reason not to timewarp for 1000 years or so at the start of the game and end up with more funds than you could ever use. That sort of cheese is probably somewhat inevitable with colonies, since they would presumably require passive ISRU gathering of resources rather than money to build things, but at least with colonies, you'd probably need a pretty well-developed colony in order to do that (since you'd need to be gathering a large variety of resources, would need enough storage space to store the resources, and also any life-support mechanic would force your colony to be fully self-sufficient in order to timewarp a lot). One possible alternative to tourist missions would be to have colonists who pay rent to live on off-world colonies and space stations. They'd pay a premium for new and exciting (read inhospitable) destinations, and they might eventually get bored and want to leave. They could also occasionally make demands for you to improve the colony in some way. And of course, like tourists, they don't work for you. This would provide you with a passive income, but would be somewhat safe from excessive timewarp cheesing. But I do agree that money should be somewhat de-emphasized in KSP 2. Since you wouldn't use money to build things at your colonies, you would eventually transition over to building everything with the resources you produce, rather than funds. In the late game, your colonies would passively produce all the resources you could ever need, and so long as all your colonies are self-sufficient, you can go ahead and timewarp-scum for those resources to your heart's content, you've earned it. In the early game, you'd be building most of your stuff on Kerbin using funds, which would be hard to come by, maybe even more so than in KSP 1. I think the way it should work is that even on Kerbin, you build things with resources rather than funds, but on Kerbin you have the option to buy certain resources that you don't have using funds (though not the other way around - no selling resources like in KSP 1).

Wait, you think direct ascent would have been cheaper than doing lunar orbit rendezvous for Apollo? Because I've always heard the opposite. A few hundred million dollars is how much SpaceX would charge for the Falcon heavy launch vehicle itself. But the only thing you're really saving by getting a bigger payload to Mars is the Mars orbit rendezvous part. All the rest of the stuff that makes the mission difficult you still have to do. And then you have the added challenge of landing such a huge payload on Mars, especially if you're trying to aerocapture it (which I'm pretty sure is a lot harder in real life than in KSP). The engineering costs would still be very high.

I mean it's not all that much more Rube Goldberg than Apollo was.

Actually this raises a good question: what do rocket engines really sound like from inside the spaceship when in vacuum? I would imagine that it might sound quite different (not just muffled). This is a question I actually tried to figure out before for making sound effects for my own game, but I struggled to find any good source material so I pretty much gave up and made a pretty generic sound like you would hear from a rocket launch in the atmosphere. But I still wonder what it actually sounds like.

Yeah, and what kind of propulsion system do you think the UFO uses? It's clearly based on cultural depictions of flying saucers that would have FTL or a reactionless drive. You can pretend it's just a one-way atmospheric entry capsule and that the aliens got here on an orion drive, but I'm pretty sure that's not what's being implied. My main point from the beginning was that I think it'd be great if there were easter eggs that can be interacted with. I gave two examples to explain what I meant because I knew if I just gave the example of the stargates that this would be the knee-jerk response. To be even more clear about what I'm getting at, most of the easter eggs in KSP 1 don't have much revisitability. You find them once, say "oh that's neat", then never bother returning. A notable exception is the Mun arch, which although static, is fun because you can create your own minigames with flying through it, etc. I want more easter eggs like that. An easy way to do that is by having easter eggs with unique functionality, being either fun to play with or slightly useful. It doesn't need to be stargates. That said, I still think the stargate easter egg could fit into KSP 2. Yes, they obviously conflict with the literal stated goal of not having wormholes, but the reason for this avoidance of wormholes is because of the effect they would have on gameplay. In the way that I described them, there would be almost no effect on gameplay. Aesthetically, I can see how they might seem out of place, but to the extent that that even matters for an easter egg in a game that already has flying saucers, you could get the exact same effect without wormholes by replacing it with a brain-scanning cloning device that transmits signals over the CommNet (which is instantaneous in KSP 1).

There's a huge difference between being able to build stargates and having a single pair of stargates exist as an easter egg. Yes, it's scifi tech, but it would exist as a novelty rather than a core game mechanic. As long as the stargates are placed with care (ie far from kerbin, and not on places like eve that have special challenges), it'd be infeasible to use them to get around. This is why I suggested a link between Dres and Vall. Maybe you could save a little bit of dV for some very specific missions if you knew where the stargates were, but IMO that'd make the game more interesting without really compromising the spirit of realistic spaceflight. Besides, easter eggs like crashed UFOs somewhat imply scifi tech anyway.

Personally, I'd love to see a few easter eggs that can be interacted with to do interesting things. For example: A pair of functioning stargates between two bodies. This could be very OP depending on where they were placed, but it wouldn't need to be. A link between Dres and Vall that let kerbals and small craft through for example could be quite interesting without being game changing. A kerbal-sized mass-driver on a small airless body like Bop. It'd be so much fun to cannonball kerbals from the surface and use their jetpacks to rendezvous with a craft in orbit. Of course this one could be constructed instead (I think people have done similar things with rocket engines in KSP 1 even), but an ancient alien kerbal cannon would still be quite cool.

Since they don't require food to live they are obviously completely photosynthetic and don't eat other plants. "Snacks" refer to sources of ionizing radiation, which kerbals find particularly tasty. Kerbals are simply a manifestation of the plant life that covers Kerbin. They were created by Kerbin's sentient biosphere to allow it to extend its green tendrils into space.

It's just a random name you get by default when you mark a position I think. They have that sort of format, like <Name>'s <Something>

"was", I assume. Thankfully, Wikipedia uses "is", so he's fine.

Eccentricity is really just a way to describe the shape of the orbit geometrically, assuming that it's a perfect ellipse/other conic. In real life, the trajectories of planets would only approximate these shapes. You can still assign an eccentricity based on the best-fitting shape that describes the trajectory though. As a quantity, the eccentricity is more just useful for us humans to describe what the shape of the orbit is in a way that is both easy to understand and mathematically convenient. Nothing particularly exciting happens if you have exactly 0 eccentricity vs 0.000001 eccentricity, though the boundary at eccentricity 1 is a bit more exciting since then the orbiting body would escape! Physically, there is no reason why you couldn't have perfectly circular orbits, since in physics we can have a perfect universe with only two objects in it in exactly whatever configuration we want. Real life isn't quite so perfect, but it doesn't really matter. As others said, you can still get as close to zero eccentricity as you like within measurement error.

No, the problem with KSP 1 is you can just mine ore on the launch pad, sell it for money, and use that money to buy whatever you want. But as long as all you get back is the resources you mined rather than money, that's fine. You'd be no better off than if you set up an independent colony on kerbin to mine / refine ore to build ships from (which will presumably be possible regardless since you can build such colonies on other planets). Also the area around the KSC can be made very poor in most resources so that you really would need to set up a separate colony away from the KSC in order to do any mining on kerbin (but again there would be little advantage to doing so). In this case, you wouldn't be able to sell the resources you have, so there would be limited fungibility, but there'd still be some so that you can build an empty fuel tank out of the metal from a recovered command module (minus scrapping losses), but not vice versa (because presumably a command module would require some other resources, depending on how complicated the resource system in the game is). And you certainly wouldn't be able to turn that metal into fuel. Another option with less fungability (but still more than recovering whole crafts) would just be to have scrapping store all component parts + stored resources, and then tack on a refurbishing cost when you want to use the parts. But this has several complications, such as for procedural parts, so I think scrapping to get component resources would be simpler because the system of needing to build stuff with resources would presumably already exist for off-planet bases, so the only change would be to make it so that building stuff on kerbin auto-buys resources you're missing. And I think some fungability is good. No matter what, the ability to build craft off-world with in-situ resources will change the economics of the game quite a bit and de-emphasize the importance of money for ship construction in the mid to late-game. However, there could be some manufactured resources that can only be bought on kerbin (or with advanced colony equipment that would be completely impractical to setup on kerbin just to bypass purchasing those resources). Also kerbals could have salaries. No way to pay that with a pile of ore. In any case, this is a bit off topic to the progression system, though it is somewhat related and an interesting discussion.

Good points. Yeah I think that second option would work well for the economy, although it wouldn't be necessarily need to store full ships, they could just be scrapped for resources, both for their fuel and for the materials used to build the parts. Building stuff on kerbin would give you the option of automatically buying any (non-scifi) resources that you need with money when you try to build a craft but don't have enough resources in store, but otherwise you can use what you already have to save cash. And off-planet you obviously can't just buy stuff.

I've seen some stuff about the logistics, mining and base building, but it's not clear to me if those would actually gate the progression. Certainly it's useful to have mining bases even without having there be exclusive resources where you need to go certain places to get, but that's not really the same thing. My concern with the metallic hydrogen specifically is that if you can just make it from hydrogen gas with a big compressor thing there would be no reason why you can't just make it on kerbin. That would seem to make the progression more like in KSP 1 where all you really need to do is gather enough science points to unlock more parts. And I haven't heard of any other scifi resources other than metallic hydrogen. So I want to know what the progression to get access to the future techs would look like.

I am very curious about the details of how late-game progression will work in KSP 2, specifically in relation to resources. I know that metastable metallic hydrogen is a resource that is planned for some late-game engines, but how will it be obtained? I think it would be a missed opportunity if scifi resources can be obtained basically anywhere. Since KSP is a game about space exploration, I think that (realistic or not), scifi resources should be scattered throughout the kerbin system and you have to go out and make mining outposts all over the place in order to be able to make the high tech engines and parts you need to progress in career mode. I haven't been following KSP 2 development too closely and I can't easily find too much about this, so I'm curious if anything has been said about this. --- Also, I think there should be many kinds of resources with different challenges in obtaining them. Some example ideas (IDK how fun they would actually be): A super-metal that (at least in the kerbin system) is only found in some rare asteroids. It is required in order to build some high-tech engines (eg the orion drive would benefit from a super-strong, but light material to withstand the nuclear bombs and protect against radiation, and in game this resource could be required for that). You would need to set up a network of asteroid scanning satellites and wait until anomalous asteroids pop up and then send missions to mine them. These asteroids only have a limited amount of the metal, though there could be exoplanets with huge (probably inexhaustible) deposits. Some kind of exotic material that can only be found on planets very close to the sun, like on the poles of Moho. Think dilithium crystals or something, it could be some kind of compound that can trap antimatter or other exotic particles in a stable way, like positronium but much more stable. This could be required for high-tech engines and power sources. A super volatile primordial ice that can only be found in planets very far away from the sun (otherwise it all just gets sublimated away). Perhaps this could be the metastable metallic hydrogen, or a precursor to it -- the conceit being that it was somehow formed in abundance in the early universe but now this is all that's left. A trace gas that can only be found deep within the atmospheres of some gas giants, IDK what it would be used for, I just want refineries floating in the clouds of gas giants. Obviously all of these ideas are on very shaky scientific ground, but the point is to gate late-game progression in the game based on exploring and colonizing many worlds.