Wubslin

0.12c is like 20 times less energy than 0.52c. And sure distances may be contracted, but I still maintain that the developers want interstellar flight to take on the order of ten minutes. Aside from stupid long gravity assists that some players do, no competently planned flightpath is longer than just a few minutes in KSP 1 and that's by developer design. In the name of designing a fun video game I don't expect that the amazing people at Intercept will make us do any three hour transits regardless of whether we have to tend to them or not. So again, either timewarp gets beefier or the distances are smaller like you said.

I think the seven segment dealio is just a stylistic thing. But, maybe there will be features you can temporarily enable like "stop timewarp an hour from apo/periapsis". A button that does that would be nice. Although I make it just fine by spamming F5 before warping anywhere.

Ok guys, with all the talk about timewarp discrepancies I want to make some (rambling) assertions about the actual timescales and ship propulsion characteristics that might actually be experienced in the game. We have via (Gameinformer?) a picture of the main flight screen UI of KSP 2. (For the record, I think it's decidedly beautiful. But I digress.) Anyway, of the now front-and center timewarp bar we can see that the little selector is centered on the fourth nock out of eight, which is indicated to be 100x normal speed. If each additional nock is assumed to be an order of magnitude, that means that the maximum timewarp factor is now one million times normal speed, ten times the maximum value in the original game. What does that mean? Well, it depends on how gameplay is going to be designed. I'm really doing Fermi ballparks here, so for the sake of simplicity let's say that flying from Kerbol to some reference star is intended to take on the order of ten minutes. Note that could be five minutes, it could be forty. Just ballpark order of magnitude, ten. So, what does ten minutes at a million times speed get you? 19.03 Earth years, AKA 65.19 Kerbin years. So we're expected to make interstellar transits that take more than one year and less than a hundred, which in this reference example is 20 years. In terms of multiplayer lag times this means we should expect to have to catch up by decades at times, provided the game ends up being designed that way. If the reference star is five light years away, basic naive newtonian math would have you at an average speed of about 0.26c, and given a brachistochrone of half acceleration and half deceleration you actually would hit 0.52c at the halfway point. Lorentz factor makes this math up to 17% off from true at that point, but whatever. Accruing 156 million meters per second in ten years using this math corresponds to a constant acceleration of 0.5 m*s^-2, aka 0.05 G. What can that tell us about the implications of ships and engines in the game, then? For one, this on the surface is a ludicrously powerful drive if it's pushing any real tonnage to that reference star. In fact I'd be inclined to name it the endgame torch drive, simply because of the fact it would enable you to reach half the speed of light. If KSP 2's "reality-inspired" engines acted anything like they would in real life, and I assume they would, then somewhere I have made a wrong assumption. The Daedalus drive was only ever designed to reach single digit percents of c, and drives like project Orion provide so much acceleration and comparatively similar dV that interstellar flights conducted using them would probably look more like an impulsive transfer. Reaching half the speed of light is quite simply not something that actually happens, and in fact it makes me want to believe that those multi-G "Expanse flight" crazy brachistochrones will be entirely confined to interplanetary missions in KSP 2. You're either burning hard and coasting for years or you're pulling milli-G acceleration if you're going to another star. Anyway, I'm forced to conclude something from my analysis is amiss. It could be that this screen has either an un-upgraded timewarp bar, or that its last setting is NOT merely a million times normal speed. Alternatively it is possible interstellar distances have been shrunken as the Kerbolar system was in the name of gameplay consideration. The only alternative to either of these options is that the game contains ships capable of exceeding 10% of c, and I refuse to believe that's the case. End conclusion, either wait times will be on the order of centuries at least or else the stars are gonna be really close together. Ramble over.

Maybe antimatter and other exotic fuels production. It is a method of energy storage and not an energy source, after all. It's not like uranium where it's just there already and you just have to dig it up. Metallic hydrogen is like that, too. I could imagine entire giant banks of Tokamaks hooked up to handwavium machines that produce just grams of metallic H or micrograms of antihydrogen every month or something.

For these huge power generating devices, are we going to need to build up huge banks of radiators or pumping stations to lakes or oceans? Gotta have a cold reservoir somehow, right?

It would have to be a small planetoid, otherwise it would go into hydrostatic equilibrium and the voids would fill. Everything's a fluid at those scales. But yeah, you could have multi-kilometer wide lava tubes, hollowed out asteroids, massive chasms etc. What if that big hole in Puf had a huge underwater cave with massive air pockets lit by glowing lava in it somewhere? That'd be a cool easter egg. Edit: oh and since this is the hopes and wishes thread, I feel like I should express my distaste for the skybox being brown in promotional materials. What's up with all that gas or dust or whatever? Easily customized skyboxes would be a nice touch. There's a (Pood's skyboxes?) mod that blacks out the stars when you're looking at bright things, I think that would be pretty neat to see. Lots more stars, more pinpoint-like and amidst solid black with a just-visible galactic plane would be my ideal skybox.

How is the Nerv anything like a closed cycle rankine plant? If you're running the alternators it means you're actively running out of working fluid and changing your momentum at the same time. All I'm saying is that there needs to be a part where you put in heat and it spits out angry pixies.

Man, there are so many opportunities for wacky types of drives. Ever heard of the gas core "nuclear lightbulb" rocket? It's a type of nuclear thermal which is designed to circumvent limitations in materials science in order to reach absolutely insane core temperatures. The core is a gaseous mass of some U-235 containing compound, held supercritical inside double layered quartz bulbs with coolant flowing between the walls. It's important to get the core EXTREMELY hot, such that the bulk of produced heat is radiatively emitted and may pass through the "bulb" walls in order to be absorbed by some propellant which is opaque to the light. Interestingly some artist at NASA had the idea of depicting the outer casing of such an engine as an actual bulb containing many cores, and the design stuck. There's another technology which I think belongs in the game as a separate component, even if it's not directly related to propulsion technologies. Let's say you've got a big beefy nuclear reactor on your rocket, and you're using some sort of electrically driven propulsion system like an MPD or one of those vaporware VASIMR things propelling your craft. Naturally, you've got a couple of red hot radiators hanging off the side of your vehicle. But why? The obvious answer is that the sky is a hell of a cold reservoir, and you've got to have some way of rejecting waste heat without having to constantly dump fluid overboard. But a more nuanced answer is that you have some sort of miniaturized closed-cycle heat engine on board which is supplying those radiators with a coolant which is red hot, and I think that should be a part in and of itself. The only other way of extracting huge amounts of electricity is by using Maxwell wizardry to brake charged particles as they come screaming off the griddle in a fusion reactor, but even then there'll be extra heat. Attaching one of these heat plants to a direct capture fusion ramp would be a good way to get even more current out than you already are. I've been picturing some sort of compact Rankine plant that uses vaporized metal such as NaK as its working fluid and coolant. Practically speaking, this part would be a cylindrical bit, and angrily glowing dual contra-rotating turbines would add to the look of it. It would function a bit like one of those heat collector hubs in the realheat mod but it would generate electricity, and you could either hang radiators directly off of it or else off parts with crossfeed capability. This part could also just be directly integrated with whatever nuclear reactor parts already exist in the game. Or alternately, if separate there could be a multitude of engines which operate at all sorts of temperatures, and using a cooler one (like one of those dinky NASA kilopower stirling jigglers) will provide a longer lifespan but lower power. Food for thought.

HOW SOON

I'm hoping it goes something like the machines that put that one machinist out of a job in Vonnegut's Player Piano. Turn on your KAL 10,000 MCU's record function, fly as best as you can from point A to B, hit stop, and let that flight recording serve as the template for all the automated runs of that route. Better make sure your escape asymptote's lined up nice and tidy with planetary prograde and your gravity losses minimal the first time around, or you'll be flushing a lot of resources down the drain with every run. Else get better ships or a better understanding of spaceflight, and re-record those runs to be more efficient down the line.

Nowhere. That's why I said "provided they do it".

That's a rather salty outlook. Some of the best fun I've had has been me and my friends avoiding lunatics in games like Minecraft and GTA Online. Those games are rockin' and they are FULL of mean spirit. (Well, GTA:O used to be fun...)

Don't you think it would be more fun if the platform you were meeting people through was the game itself, and you didn't have to like break off into weird groups of two or three people to play the game? I'd love a community like a KSP discord all playing in the same game together.

What is even going on in this thread??? Warp drives are totally speculative (and probably impossible) technology, space elevators are not. An atmosphere is not required to "protect" a space elevator, it's a huge detriment to it. The less crap you have in the way of your elevator the better. The only real consideration about practical space elevator operation is being a complete obsessive freak about keeping your orbital airspace clear of debris. Space elevators are likely not going to exist on Earth because of materials science constraints. As for smaller bodies, it's completely possible and there's tons of advantages to stealing planetary rotational energy as your mechanism of getting into orbit. What's impossible about it? It's a cable between two spinny things. The math checks out there. The same goes for skyhooks - they really would do better somewhere without an atmosphere and are best utilized at scales where materials need to be magic and the factor of safety needs to be 1.0001. Imagine Ceres, for instance. Building a space elevator off Ceres would likely be trivial using modern materials science. It has a rotational period of only 9 hours. Climbing a big rope out to a counterweight held taught by being synchronous with its rotation can give you like half a kilometer per second of delta-v, "completely free". For more massive bodies lacking an atmosphere, the ideal launch system would be a linear accelerator. It would simply be a powered maglev track hugging the surface of the body. You get in your rocket, and the track speeds you up until it can gently let you go and your altitude starts to increase. You do a couple of "kick off" binormal phase burns to make sure you don't decapitate any skyscrapers, do a puny circularization burn at the top of your arc, and you're in orbit for next to nothing. The tallest end of the track might not even need to be much more than a hundred meters off the ground. The only downside as compared to a space elevator is that you don't have a big crazy space station thing with a catch ramp that could be used to slow down incoming spacecraft. That big counterweight would after all have artificial spin gravity pointing towards its "ceiling"... easy to build a big landing strip on.

As much as I know this is totally how the game is going to turn out, I kind of hate it as well. Being a big spaceflight nut is a rare enough interest that I really don't share it with any of my real life close friends. A few of my friends have said they'll buy KSP 2 when it comes out to play with me because they know how much I get out of KSP 1, but the truth is that I know they're not going to stick with it like I have to KSP 1 and so I'll have to reach out to find people to play with. And at that point, it's the more the merrier. I would totally love to join a vibrant server with like 35 people tooling around three solar systems. And having some sort of communication system with like one voice chat channel per system or something would be perfect for that. It would be great to meet people that way. But with KSP 2 as it's looking like it'll turn out, I guess I'll just have to join a discord server or something. But how cool would it be to be able to meet other people through the game? I've got a couple of really close friends that my other friend initially met through the Rainbow Six: Siege matchmaking system (god rest that game's soul).

I'm not trying to say the game should become some sort of war game. I'm trying to say that in the scenario you described, there being zero ability to get physical in the midst of dispute and conflict over resources is an artificial restriction of an entire dimension of who we are. It will fundamentally flatten what can be done when interacting with lots of players. As far as what we know about KSP 2, chances are the multiplayer won't even support enough players in one game for factions and trading disputes to even develop. In which case any weapons or guidance systems modders may develop will be as much toys as the thruster tool in Garry's mod is. So there's either limited multiplayer, where weapons are a silly mechanic to reach for when trying to have fun and screw around with your friends, or there's expansive multiplayer, in which case you'll have to literally put serverwide bans on high speed ship collision if you don't want violence to arise. People are violent animals. Whether you want them to or not, they'll find a way to kill you with a sepratron unless you specifically bar it from gameplay. Might as well make doing it fun, right?

There are solutions for n-body systems with larger numbers of bodies, but there is a point that it all gets to be too much, I think.

Imagine the absurd yet physically possible that could be included in the game. You could have a triple planetoid system locked in one of the special solutions to the three body problem, their delicate motion as transient as Saturn's rings. Of course in-game they would be on rails and therefore stable. But implementing such a system would be able to piggyback off of the mechanics already implemented for Rask and Rusk! Now that would be interesting.

If planetary rings in the game have any level of realism, I can't imagine colliding with material in them being a thing without trying really hard to make it happen.

You said yourself that playing multiplayer meant needing the ability to synchronize with other players. All I'm doing is bringing up an extreme example of this happening. Why would this situation be "basically singleplayer"? I'm just saying that when you hit the synchronize button you may be warping forward potentially hundreds of years without doing anything.

Might be cool, although I don't know what interesting gameplay that would bring to the table that the other ringed planets don't provide. For all the times I played KSP with the bazillion new solar systems provided by Kopernicus, I found myself only ever interested in reading about unique crew report blurbs that came with being at new locations. To me, a planet with bigger rings in a game with multiple ringed planets is about on the interest level to me as all those samey multicolored balls and lumpy potatoes across all those mod planets. I'd like to see rings inclined from each other, moons in gaps between rings. I think KSP 2 would be an excellent opportunity to include some of the most out there planets and planetoids imaginable.

You do know there's going to be interstellar flight in this game, right?

So let's say you're trying to assemble a big space station in LKO, and while you're doing it I decide I want to use some kind of constant acceleration drive to go to a distant star and back. You take two hours to put together your space station (warping to year 1, day 23 in the process) and I take two hours to swing around the star and come all the way back, but by the time I get back into LKO from the trip it's year 520, day 402 for me. If I want to go to your station, are you saying you need to click a button and then loiter in LKO doing nothing for almost 521 years?

Gonna repost this MS Paint doodle here since it was probably out of place to have posted it in the "Speculated planets" thread... Huh, it's only now hitting me that the guy who came up with the oblate disk planet idea basically named it "mescaline"...

There's two ways this can play out. The first way is that KSP 2 multiplayer is a "with your friends" basis, in which case the barrier to being griefed is your friends not being jerks. The second way is that KSP 2 multiplayer is large servers with lots of people, in which case they may need to add some of the militaristic elements I was mentioning earlier in the thread. After all, you need to be able to defend yourself somehow against randos. Or maybe there would be admins with the ability to roll back your stuff, or anti-griefing rules, or a passive mode that you can enable. I wouldn't worry about it, it's kind of a solved problem in multiplayer video games. I do hope the multiplayer ends up like the second of the two options, though. More people can always allow for more interesting gameplay.