KarolOfGutovo

The colonies and interstellar ships shown in the trailer are quite massive. Going from them to the smallest of megastructures isn't that much of a stretch, especially when looking at the colony at the end. Also, each megastructure could be represented by a simple possibility. Like the dyson swarm I described - just the means to automatically direct a vessel to a specific orbit, produce the vessel on repeat and send power wirelessly None of these sound like something impossible to accomplish for beggining stellar colonialists. Very similar situation with the grazing world eaters (in the asteroid mode) - automatically gather resources, prioritise the resources closer to herd's center, deposit resources and get fuel from some service storage ship, take resources from a service storage ship, refuel it and deposit resources at a processing plant and refuel yourself. These all sound like simple bits of automatisation we could play around with to accomplish our goals in KSP2.

When I think of interstellar civilization's infrastructure in the systems that support all that interstellarity, I imagine them being absolutely full of megastructures. It would be very nice if we had the ability to harness the benefits of such massive projects in KSP2. Here are some of my ideas for which megastructures could fit into the scope of KSP2, partly sourced from wikipedia page for megastructures. Orbital elevators and fountains. And A Speedy Track That Apparently Doesn't Have A Non-Proprietary Name These three are the smallest, yet potentially allowing for the largest leap among all megastructures. They all allow for sending objects to space with little to no need for any additional fuel, thus eliminating almost all cost of bringing resources "halfway to anywhere" and letting the spacecraft budget go to crafts that actually stay in space and ferry resources away from arbitrarily large momentum sources. I am not sure how they could be customized, but having them availble as colony buildings would make launch vehicles obsolete for specific orbits, but that could be combated by giving players incentives to keep launch capability on other orbits. Small mega habitats Gigantic colonies, spinning in one way or another. Halos, cyllinders, or more exotic shapes. These could litter the skies of interstellar shipyards and house the engineers who work on yarding all those ships. Due to economy of scale they could house them more economically than smaller colonies, and due to being in space getting to any object on a similar orbit uses barely any energy, in the end possibly allowing players to daisy chain orbital facilities with very fuel-light shuttles ferrying everything between the residential habs, industrial habs, recreation habs etc. to pump out ridiculous numbers of finished products. Energy solutions A dyson swarm. Being able to set a bunch of shipyards to build a specified design on repeat and send it off to a low orbit of the closest star, with parts allowing for wireless transfer of the energy by the means of a weak laser to a power socket sattelite/colony that forwards the energy as a strong laser beam to a distribution station that splits it back into small beams powering the shipyards and expansion projects. World eater swarms Ore is great. But you know what's better? More ore! Being allowed to coordinate asteroid mining drones to graze as a herd would streamline the transport of the ore to places where it's to be used. And maybe, if planets had limited resources, a mode of operation where a swarm of mining drones sucks out all the juicy ore out of the rock and stone of the planet like a true dwarf would would be simply delightfully terrifiyng to the unwitting other players who had not yet reached that system. The last few options would require automated operation of vessels, from launch to deployment. From what I recall routine missions are to be automatable, but all that separates a routine mission from a non routine one is frequency so it's kinda hard to tell wether deployment of world eaters is planned as routine, but I hope it is. Anyways, this all seems to crystallize into one idea - managing a large number of vessels at once. That would be a cherry on top of whatever else is in the KSP2 cake. I just hope we'll get the magna opera to strive for.

Harvesting stranded Kerbals would be a very funny way to grow a colony in a different star system, maybe I will just meddle a bit with contract manager to make those contracts more common.

I have been looking for this, but it seems like growing the population of your colonies without sending busfulls of Kerbals every so often is locked away behind a lot of additional parts from a mod that relies on food/water/air life support mods, both civilian population and MKS kolonization. I found an old mod that did kind of what I needed, but it was outdated. Is there any up to date, patch based mod that allows for generating new Kerbals in-situ? EDIT: this is the one that I talked about https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/191525-1122-moarkerbals-populate-your-colony-in-space-11299-prerelease-20-nov-2021/ EDIT2: I swear it was out of date when I checked earlier today. Whoops.

Or, better yet, release it with no announcement, today.

Giant interplanetary cargo ships with ion engines (unless drastically changed from original game, which they probably will be seeing as their thrust was unrealistically high and now with a solution to that problem the workaround is unnecessary, but still). Also, most of the active part of interstellar travel can be done in solar systems. Just make sure you start on the far side of the system, pass through the centre and use all the solar power you can squeeze from that, and you'll probably only need a very small source of power for the dark stretch of the journey. Also, cool aesthetics. That is a giant part of what KSP is about to me, so I am biased.

When playing KSP I always get annoyed at the small amount of pods. For traditional rocket capsules we basically only have 3 conical, 3 (identical) spherical and (that's a reach since it's designed for vacuum landers) one cylinder. What I would love to see is a large variety of crew parts, some steps in the right direction happened around the making history DLC, but KSP still had less diverse pod library than real life. No matter what rocket you built, it always had almost the same appearance at the end of the mission (unless it was an SSTO or something) once it finally landed. Having different cones of various heights, and small parts designed to be stuck directly onto the pods would make the game much more interesting, maybe parts for alternative landing types? In KSP 2 I feel like that will be an early game thing, but many KSP1 players relish in continually making their way from start to midgame just to repeat, so I assume that this part of the community would hugely appreciate being able to make their ships feel more unique in the closing minutes of missions when they are descending to the green, soft grass of Kerbin. Similar for engines, giving more non modern-US style propulsion would go a long way to making people compete for the most stylish Mun landing without needing to use nontraditional mission profiles.Soyuz got me acting up tbh

The way I see it, excavation could remove the planet collider in a specific volume and replace it with a set of colliders to simulate surface under the removed ground. But that would probably be a development nightmare.

Honestly? Extrakerbin originated lifeforms would be a dlc I would buy. Alternative races (yeah, I know, it IS Kerbal Space Program, but it would be interesting to have like one or two more races close enough in appearance to not look wonky in the same model of spacesuit, maybe with different colonial requirements and benefits?) and starting on other planets, exploring each planet for hundreds of hours and still finding interesting, new artifacts and fossils, maybe mission trees and interstellar cattle theft.

Depends on how you got KSP. But DLCs should be availble as separate products on the same platform, e.g. on steam they are separately purchasable. Just look for "Kerbal Space Program: making history" and "breaking ground" and the DLCs should be there