Ember12

You're right, that statement was an exaggeration. It is true that you have much less need for cooling out there, though.

That's a cool idea, and might help get more people interested in the game.

I don't understand the thermodynamics of this, but it makes a lot more sense than Laythe.

I'm sorry, I have no clue what you mean by this.

I agree that a Neptune or Uranus analogue would be nice, and would provide unique opportunities for science, but I don't quite follow your logic about the cooling tech thing. You would have no need for cooling tech in a cold place. As far as I can tell, this would be like traveling to the Arctic to learn how to survive the Sahara. I think these bases would be more useful for learning how to deal with very cold places, like interstellar space.

It's not so complicated as you might think. It was discussed in a feature video, and as that video says there were scale tests with conventional explosives. The main obstacle to Orion drives were nuclear test ban treaties. So Orion drives, at least for humans, could very well have been invented before ion engines, or around the same time.

This would be awesome and adorable, as long as it was easy to figure out why.

I'm hoping for some feature that lets you go "back in time" and take control of spent stages while your past self flies the upper stages onward to space. You could have booster recovery, SpaceX style stage recovery, flyback boosters... you name it.

Totally agree. I once tried a contract to fix a rover so that it could be driven a few hundred meters. I ended up propping it on my pilot's head while my engineer moved the wheels. And even then, something weird happened with the physics so it couldn't drive. I ended up sending a larger rover and carrying it to its destination. This is the biggest thing for me, often craft are hit by inexplicable physics breaks that can completely immobilize them. I think this has been mentioned before. Other than the colonies it's definitely the biggest thing I'm looking forward to.

I would love to see more spherical crew capsules, from small pods to big habitats.

You might need a few more colors, for thing like Helium-3, metallic hydrogen, and whatever the "torch-ships" will burn.

Although when you think about it, the humanoid form is not the ideal one for many of the jobs that these bots would be doing. Designs like centaurs and spiders would be generally more effective, if less photogenic.

How exactly would the "specifically designed landing legs" work?

Given that the sailcraft only weigh a few grams, this thrust could easily be compensated for with a small engine on the laser.

By my calculation, to reach the planned speed of 0.2c, you would need to accelerate at 10g for about a week, so Earth's rotation could definitely be an issue. But I had not researched this enough, and it turns out that you need a 100-gigawatt laser pushing the thing the whole way. That much power might be far outside KSP2's engineering scope.

You could, but this would require a lot of very futuristic tech also. I don't doubt that this stuff can be done, but I don't think it can be done within KSP2's technological scope, or if it can, it would not be as practical as conventional mining.

Sure, but the process you described would take an incredible amount of energy, enough that you'd be better off just flying to a gas planet. Plus, the gases in stars are not as good for fusion as the ones found in gas giants.

What I had in mind was a large orbiting laser, so that it could keep its orientation. Aiming manually would not be accurate enough, and you'd have to have something to ensure the sailcraft was properly centered. It could be a sort of mini-VAB, where you send up chips and sails, build the sailcraft at the laser, select a target, then the laser orients toward it. The sailcraft spawns right in front of the laser, and away you go. Of course, the game mechanics needed to do all this would be quite specialized and probably don't exist right now, so it might not be worth all the programming effort. Isn't the purpose of this forum to suggest things that aren't planned for release right now?

So far, pretty much all of the discussion about interstellar travel has been about fusion drives. But there's another sort of spacecraft that can make the journey, which are tiny chips attached to a lightweight reflective sail. If you fire a heckuva powerful laser at the sail, you can get the chip going extremely fast. The Breakthrough Starshot initiative proposed sending a fleet of these at 20% the speed of light to the Alpha Centauri system, which would take only 20 years, with technology that could be developed in only a few decades. In KSP2, these could represent an early-tech-tree method of sending unmanned starships. The ships could be somewhat larger than computer chips, and this would only require a larger sail and "MOAH BOOSTAHS LAZAHS!" These probes could obtain low-definition images of the planets they pass, as well as (more usefully) rough estimates of gravity, and maybe atmosphere density, which could be used to inform the design of later colony ships.

You are right that this is possible. I think this is much too far in the future for KSP2's scope, but I did misspeak when I said that we had established that it was impossible. Correct statement: Flying a ship through a star, with technology we might hope to develop in the next few centuries, is very nearly impossible.

Can you please explain the math that supports this conclusion?

Personally, the first game mode I played was career, and it remains interesting for me despite the terrible execution. If KSP2's resource and science management is anywhere near the promised quality, I don't think I'll do much Sandbox at all.

Assuming that "Adventure Mode" or whatever in KSP2 manages to provide a thorough, well-done approach to material and science management (something that, I think we all agree on this, KSP career absolutely does not) do you still feel that this will be a leash? This is not a loaded question, no gotchas, just curious if you think the game should be only sandbox.

Agreed, although the real issue with dust will happen during interstellar travel.

Are you talking about harvesting from stars, or gas giants? Because we already ruled that stars are not doable, and going through a planet, you won't be going any faster than normal.