different ways a career could work in ksp2

[shdwlrd]

56 minutes ago, jastrone said:

that is a core feature. and it isnt just a core feature for ksp it is for every game in the genre. and have you seen the vab ui pretty much the same as ksp1. it is still a sequell it will add features not replace them

Just because something looks the same, and to you, functions the same, means what happens underneath is the same. (Ex. All CPUs do the same thing eventhough the architectures are different. The same can be said with cars. Different powertrain, creature comfort options but you operate them the same.)

Anyway we're getting off topic. Adventure mode in KSP2 will be nothing like the career and science modes in KSP1. Very early on in the development, Nate had said they are completely replacing the career and science modes. So I don't expect to see funds playing such a central role in the progression.

[Pthigrivi]

We've talked about the money thing before and I think its an interesting question. There's no particular reason it absolutely needs money, and a lot of my favorite games don't have it. But we really don't know how Intercept feels. It has a lot to do with that transition from Kerbin-based launches in the early game to colonization and offworld production chains in the later game. @shdwlrd is right it also has a bit to do with fail-states. Presumably off-world parts will have part-costs in terms of resources, and you could just skip money and supply players with a certain amount of resources from which to build their first few rockets on Kerbin. This however wouldn't avoid the failure state pitfall because you could launch a few rockets and fail to meet any goals and find yourself 'broke' and unable to do more. So perhaps rockets are simply 'free' on Kerbin, but you're limited instead by available parts and stricter height and mass limitations in the tier 1 VAB. (I've never liked the part-count limitation, but thats me.) You still have to think about efficiency because the name of the game is seeing how far you can go with smaller, lighter rockets. Thats where your bang for the buck comes from--unlocking more with less. In a way this disincentivizes colony building because parts cost resources off kerbin while they're 'free' on Kerbin. But in another way parts are 'free' in both places. The reason to build something at the mun with local resources rather than building it on Kerbin and shipping it there is that it's easier. The drive to produce things locally is not economic but logistical, and is ultimately driven naturally by gravity wells and transit times rather than artificial value. 

Edited October 4, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[SciMan]

Revert (both to VAB and to launch) and quick-save/quick-load (on hot-keys) are features in KSP 1 that NEED to be in KSP 2 if there is ANY KIND of penalty on the failure of a launch or mission.

I already get demoralized when I fat-finger the landing burn of a Mun landing rocket and my whole vessel goes into the Mun's surface at 50m/s or more.
It's much less demoralizing when I can just hold F9 and re-load the point before the landing burn was even considered.
That has to stay, and if it's not staying, there will be a mod made EXTREMELY QUICKLY that does exactly that.

Furthermore there should be a way to simulate landing or taking off from any planet or moon, without actually having to transport the whole vessel (whatever it might be) to where you want to test it.
Okay, maybe I wasn't entirely clear, what I mean is "simulate it according to the data you have on the place"
So for a planet around another star, you might be simulating the landing only on a featureless sphere of roughly the right color that has the right surface gravity, SOI range, and radius, and perhaps a crude approximation of the atmosphere if that's detected at those ranges.
This simulation wouldn't be something that costs anything, and furthermore you would be able to test science instruments but they would not provide any actual scientific data, merely a report that they functioned as intended or not.

EDIT:
Oh yeah, about the whole "money thing":
What's so wrong with failure states? Every game has to have a way to lose, if not, "winning" doesn't feel like you accomplished anything since you were basically destined to win from the start.
Put another way, IMO a game where you push a button and it says "you win" isn't a game at all. Even if you have to press a million buttons to get it to do that, it's still not a game unless there's a way to lose.
Losing is NOT BAD. Losing (and maybe youtube or in-game tutorials) is how you learn how to win.

Edited October 4, 2021 by SciMan

[jastrone]

13 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

Nate had said they are completely replacing the career and science modes. So I don't expect to see funds playing such a central role in the progression.

just because they replace the mode entirerly doesnt mean funds whont be there. what they want to fix is the grindyness and boring missions not the fact that there is funds. 

13 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

ust because something looks the same, and to you, functions the same, means what happens underneath is the same.

but that is what matters. and funds isnt really something "underneath the game"

[SciMan]

Exactly, money isn't something that's going to go away just because your economy has transitioned into a post-scarcity economy. Additionally, "Global" scarcity might be gone, but Local scarcity is likely still going to be a thing at least initially. Therefore, I don't see how you can get away from the need for a "universally accepted fungible token" (aka money) to facilitate exchanging the things you have too much of for the things you don't have enough of, wherever you are.

Yes, that's mostly where the automation of missions comes in, but to be honest setting up the logistics lines themselves could itself become rather tiring and tedious when you're trying to make a colony bigger and you have to run all new (bigger) cargo ships to handle the higher demand on materials inputs that your colony will be demanding once it starts to expand, and especially when it gets a VAB of its own. Even more so for orbital colonies, since they will be places resources go ONLY to be consumed or forwarded on to other colonies.
This could happen several times for each colony, so I'm hoping that there's some way to tell the game "Okay this vessel with this much delta-v and this TWR made it from Colony ABC to Colony XYZ just fine, so if I build a BIGGER ship that can carry more stuff, but also has at least as much delta-V and a similar TWR, then it should ALSO be able to automatically use the same route that I already set up with the older cargo ship, without me having to fly it manually to prove that that's the case."

We're going to need a lot of automation to make this game not "the most tedious thing ever", and automation solves the money problem neatly so I don't really see what the problem with money is, when you can ALSO use the money to do things like buy the rights to use proven designs from either the game itself (which might have a small library of such designs), or from OTHER PLAYERS who choose to share their designs on the Steam Workshop. And you'd be able to make (in-game only) money depending on how many people use your designs off the workshop too.
Another way to make money would be to sell your designs to the other (ai controlled) space agencies in the game, who would likely also be setting up colonies and the like.
Not trying to turn this into a 4x game, but KSP 2 looks like it already has at least 2 of those Xs covered.

EDIT: The point I'm trying to make is that yes, money as a concept can create failure states, but it can also be combined with other tools (that we're pretty sure are already going to be in KSP 2) in a way that either mitigates or entirely eliminates those failure states, while additionally mitigating or eliminating many OTHER failure states that might exist.

Plus like I said, without losing there is no winning.

Edited October 5, 2021 by SciMan

[shdwlrd]

10 hours ago, jastrone said:

just because they replace the mode entirerly doesnt mean funds whont be there. what they want to fix is the grindyness and boring missions not the fact that there is funds. 

but that is what matters. and funds isnt really something "underneath the game"

Funds can be in the game. It can't be a fail point.

Take for example Avorion, you can be bankrupt and lose you ship and fleet. That's not the end of the game, you don't lose your progress. Yes, you have to start building up your ship and funds again, but they give you the ability to continue your save.

The way KSP is now is akin to FTL. If you make a mistake, your done. It doesn't matter how much time you have on that save, your done, start over. (Obviously I'm ignoring the save and reverts, but by the time you realize you're in trouble financially, it's too late. You can't go back to an earlier save in the vanilla game. Don't say there's mods for that, mods don't help the console players.)

33 minutes ago, SciMan said:

Plus like I said, without losing there is no winning.

There is no winning in KSP. There's no competition in KSP. It's about exploration and discovery, not whether you win or lose. 

[Pthigrivi]

18 hours ago, SciMan said:

What's so wrong with failure states? 

It's a good question, and yeah lots of games do have failure states. It depends a great deal on the type of game it is. To me it would be nice to avoid failure states for the same reason you want reverts and quick-saves--to cut down on the amount of time and frustration lost to backtracking. Its one thing to lose 15m or an hour to a bad landing, but having to restart your whole career and start from scratch because you painted yourself into a corner seems probably too unforgiving.

A note in defense of currencies though: parts aren't the only things in the game with potential costs. There are tech unlocks, potential building upgrades, kerbal skills, etc. Im really happy they're taking a hard look at some of the fundamental game dynamics like these cause they need work. I might be in the minority in my feeling that science is salvageable with a deep overhaul. All of the manual right-clicking and dismissing pop-up windows while in flight is maddening. Having different experiments could still work but you need a "collect all" button, or just make them harvest automatically. Right now they're a grindy distraction. I actually like the idea of processing things like surface samples in off-world labs but they should chew through data at a steady rate and then halt, not taper off into annoying endless diminishing returns. Same with collection--all collection should be 100%, and there should be much less science out there so the Mun and Minmus mine-out relatively early and you have to press on to interplanetary missions to keep advancing. Breaking Ground was in the right direction with surface features that require precise landing and surface exploration, but this was somewhat undermined by the lack of orbital mapping. As far as Im concerned you could cut out all of the "high above" and "low over" data, reduce the number of biomes, and add scannable surface features and you'd be half-way there. Basically a lot of streamlining to cut down on micromanagement and tedious repeat missions to nowhere. Maybe I'll take another stab at thinking this all through later. 

Point is, some sort of simplified way of gathering scientific data from other planets and points of interest and processing it in labs could be one form of currency, whatever you chose to call it. It would augment flags + footprints missions nicely and deepen the exploration process. I think this currency could be spent both on tech unlocks and on building upgrades, though each of these need major work. Having that one currency for both creates an important strategic fork, because players have the option to, say, get a fancier engine and make a better rocket or upgrade their VAB to make a bigger one. Those kinds of strategic tradeoffs are super important. Then there's stuff like repair abilities, varying autopilot capacities, mining and research efficiencies--the kinds of things that were tackled by Kerbal skills in KSP1. Honestly touring kerbals around to level them up individually is tedious enough in KSP1, and doing that for hundreds of colonists sounds like a nightmare. I think all these could be abstracted and earned collectively by meeting off-world population thresholds. This would create an underlying incentive for growing your colonies without requiring a lot of micromanagement. 

Edited October 5, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Bej Kerman]

18 hours ago, SciMan said:

What's so wrong with failure states?

1. KSP is not that sort of game, where you have winning, losing and horrible artificial limitations. Those were bolted on later into the games' life cycle and Intercept is going to make sure they don't make it into the sequel. And, as the above posters have said, KSP isn't about winning and losing - it's not a competitive game, it's a sandbox for exploration and discovery, Having fails and wins would destroy that element.

2.  KSC will be decentralized, with space centers on all different bodies. How do you lose the game to a bad decision on the KSC's part when you have 50 other self sufficient, independant bases?

[Guest]

Per-mission money at the start of the game penalises the "trial and error" mentality and teaches the player that save scumming (revert or quickload) is the intended way to play (like it is in KSP1).

I think the early career should be about experimentation and exploration with exploitation becoming a thing only later in the progression.

We don't talk about the Gemini program in terms of profit per launch, and the same should apply to a KSP2 player early career.

[t_v]

I really like @Pthigrivi’s idea of turning research into a currency which are mostly spent on upgrades instead is parts, it incentivizes accomplishing goals over optimizing and resetting missions, which feels like a more “kerbal” way of doing things. Ridiculous rescue missions are now expected instead of simply getting a rocket back the “first time”.

I was thinking of another system of funds that would be available on kerbin to change resources into other resources. We’ve seen that parts cost resources, so on colonies we need to deliver those. But what if you want to build a ship that requires uranium on minmus but you don’t have uranium mines yet? You can build that ship on kerbin because you have access to most resources there but you want it on minmus. So you can turn funds into uranium and send it to minmus. And you can take volatiles from minmus and sell them on kerbin. Basically, funds could be a way to balance your economy easily by having essentially a “resource converter-o-tron” on kerbin in the form of money. Then you would have to set up your supply lines to ferry resources around. 

Edited October 5, 2021 by t_v

[Pthigrivi]

Apparently Im going to dance all around this topic today. I'll thank @SciMan for making me consider the cons here. There are a couple of problems with the 'free parts on Kerbin' model:

1) If parts are free, is recovery meaningless on Kerbin? It seems like there would be no real point in recovering anything but live Kerbals on Kerbin if rockets are reproducible for free. This would also mean there's no incentive for stage recovery, even if it was logistically feasible. This isn't a huge problem , but it does take some of the SpaceX-ey challenge out of it in the latter half of the early game as you're sending up multiple modules and trying to get established. You're better off ditching everything but the crew capsule which means there's very little creativity encouraged in re-entry and recovery strategies and could make all launch configuration profiles from Kerbin very same-same. 

2) Are supply-routes from Kerbin also free? And if not, what do they cost? Let's consider @t_v's example. I've built a small colony on Minmus mining fuels and metals to make rockets but I need more uranium to make NERVAs and boost energy production. I know there's uranium on the Mun and dV-wise it would be worth setting up a mining colony and shipping it from there, but if I can just launch it from Kerbin for nothing why would I bother? The more I think about it the disincentive against building colonies and ISRU is kind of strong here, which is the opposite of what you want.  And if money does only serve as a medium of exchange is that its only use-case? What is and isn't part of of the transport 'cost'? I think it gets really complicated, which we're also trying to avoid. 
 

Edited October 5, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I know there's uranium on the Mun and dV-wise it would be worth setting up a mining colony and shipping it from there, but if I can just launch it from Kerbin for nothing why would I bother?

Cost wise exporting from Kerbin should be cheaper than building the whole infrastructure on Mun, and Kerbin relevance become smaller with your expansion toward interplanetary space.

When you'll get to your first Duna colony setting up a Mining outpost on Ike will be easier and faster than an interplanetary supply route.

[Pthigrivi]

So I came up with one possible solution to a few of these problems: having a fuel plant at KSC. It seems to me like the hardest thing to implement and manage in a game like this is a resource, because each resource is interacting all over the game and it needs sources and sinks and has to be carefully balanced with everything else and if its fundamental like money its taking up player time and attention throughout the game. And since, ultimately, this is a rocket sim and with some economy elements rather than other other way around ideally you'd have as few basic currencies as possible. Then you've got all these other pitfalls like incentive imbalances and failure states and obsolescence to worry about.  So I'd love if the logic of colonization just applied from the beginning of the game to the end and we could skip money entirely for simplicity's sake.

What I thought might solve a lot of these problems at once without creating a wholly new system would be to treat KSC kind of like a colony, and right from the beginning one of the buildings would be a fuel plant. When you first started it would just produce Methalox, and it would have a decent recharge rate and capacity so you could do anything you wanted in the Tier 1 VAB and get yourself to the Mun just fine. But it would take a few or several days to recharge between launches and start to introduce players to thinking about time as a resource. As you expanded though you could spend research points on upgrading its supply rate, capacity, and start adding on things like Uranium and fancier fuels over time. Rather than introduce a whole new system that fades away in the middle of the game this instead begins to introduce players to the way colonies will work right away, balancing production and capacity, thinking carefully about fuel efficiency, etc. Most importantly to my mind it doesn't exhaust and force you to start over. It also creates another important strategic choice for players. They can either invest their research on augmenting fuel production on Kerbin and focus on launches from there, or they can spend it on ISRU tech at the science facility. This makes it much easier to incentivize colonization and manage difficulty settings because you can just jigger the research costs. 

This does bring the whole time element into it because you are time warping for a few days between launches until your storage tanks are full, but I personally like that. Again it's introducing players to what they can expect when they start colonizing, and it spaces things out so you aren't maxing out everything you can do in KSOI in a month and then time-warping 200 days to the first Duna window. 

Edited October 6, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[shdwlrd]

41 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

What I thought might solve a lot of these problems at once without creating a wholly new system would be to treat KSC kind of like a colony, and right from the beginning one of the buildings would be a fuel plant. When you first started it would just produce Methalox, and it would have a decent recharge rate and capacity so you could do anything you wanted in the Tier 1 VAB and get yourself to the Mun just fine. But it would take a few or several days to recharge between launches and start to introduce players to thinking about time as a resource. As you expanded though you could spend research points on upgrading its supply rate, capacity, and start adding on things like Uranium and fancier fuels over time. Rather than introduce a whole new system that fades away in the middle of the game this instead begins to introduce players to the way colonies will work, balancing production and capacity, thinking carefully about fuel efficiency, etc. Most importantly to my mind it doesn't halt and force you to start over, and it creates another important strategic choice for players. They can either invest their research on augmenting fuel production on Kerbin and focus on launches from there, or they can spend it on ISRU tech at the science facility. This makes it much easier to incentivize colonization and manage difficulty settings because you can just jigger the research costs. 

That would make sense when thinking about the quick tour of the KSC that Intercept showed awhile back. Treating the KSC as a colony could solve the progression and learning curve for building and maintaining colonies.

The reason to build colonies and not send everything from Kerbin would be the amount of needed resources. I could imagine that the limits placed on launch mass and size of your lifters would severely limit the amount of resources that could be sent from Kerbin. So if you have a colony on Minmus, you could get more resources off the surface with the same size lifter.

Just food for thought, think about the amount of resources that are required for any large scale construction projects. Think of the time involved in the collection, transportation, and construction of said project. A large cargo or small military vessel takes a couple years to build. A large carrier takes several years. A skyscraper can take several years to finish. Even in different sci-fi universes it takes a considerable amount of time and resources to build the largest of ships.

[SciMan]

Okay, so limit the number of currencies to a minimum to minimize complexity. But some people LIKE complexity. For example I play several factory games. Factorio, Satisfactory, and Dyson Sphere Program right now. (that last one seems the most applicable here, since it eventually turns into setting up many factories on different planets and moons in a solar system, and then even further into the same on MULTIPLE solar systems to get access to rare resources).

However, I get that we're not trying to turn KSP 2 into "Dyson Sphere Program but you can fly the rockets yourself".
At the same time, NOT ENOUGH complexity leads to boring and repetitive gameplay. So however many currencies DO end up existing in KSP 2, they all need to have the player interacting with each one in a meaningfully different way.

We already have several rocket fuel resources in KSP 2, but that's fine because the player interacts with them in meaningfully different ways, because the fuel choice makes a rather large impact on the design of the resulting rocket using that fuel to go to a specified destination. It could even be the difference between being able to get there and forever falling short of the required Delta-V no matter how big the rocket is (I mean it's probably possible with a very detailed and time-consuming study, but on the surface of it doing something like trying to get an Eeloo landing and return mission with only solid fueled rockets seems to me like it is nigh-on impossible, and for my purposes it's already difficult enough that I won't even bother thinking of doing the math to make it work, but using a methalox rocket to get an ion engine probe into orbit of Eeloo seems nearly trivial if it weren't for the factor of the long burn times).
Yes, the different fuels are mostly different because they're at different points on a chart of "TWR versus Specific Impulse", but that makes meaningful differences in the kinds of rockets the player makes with the different fuels, so even tho from certain points of view there's redundancy, in reality they don't fully replace each other.
And that's without even considering the more exotic fuel choices that have been confirmed in KSP 2, such as fusion fuel, metallic hydrogen (please don't derail the thread, just mentioning it for completeness's sake), Orion drive "pulse units" aka bombs, and whatever that 4th engine runs on (potentially a nuclear salt water rocket of some form).

Likewise, we could easily have several different materials to make rocket fuel tanks and structural bits out of, potentially including Stainless Steel, Aerospace Aluminum alloys, Al-Li alloys, Aerospace Titanium alloys (a good "middle ground" between Stainless and Aluminum as far as heat, but also stronger than either for the same dimensions), or even historically more unusual choices like Carbon Fiber composites (hey, the RocketLab Electron is using those already and they've never had a fuel tank problem cause their rocket to crash).
Since KSP 2 uses PROPULSION technologies of the future, it might even have things like Graphene or Carbon Nanotubes.

Now, as history has shown, most of the time you can get enough performance out of your rocket engines that an aluminum alloy fuel tank is just fine. However, I love the idea of later tech unlocking higher performance options, while not completely eliminating the advantages that the starting tech has (you'd start off with Stainless Steel, and that would always make parts that have the highest temperature limits before they fail, so you'd use that for things like bits on a spaceplane that have to stick out during reentry and for some reason might not be able to have heat shielding tiles placed on them, or a reusable 2nd stage that has to survive reentering from orbital velocity even with a heatshield, because that makes the thing fail more gracefully than if you used an aluminum part contacting the heatshield).

Of course, if you're building a building on another planet and you're also mining the materials to make that building on the same planet, something like plain old high strength Steel alloys is almost the universal choice unless you have another factor to deal with like a corrosive atmosphere (and yes, I'm looking at you, Eve). However, even with those other factors, you can likely solve the problem with some form of surface coating.

The point is that you can't just simplify all the parts of rocket design away. There's always going to be a "most optimal" material for the job, even if you could use almost any of them and make something that "works".

So the entire point of that whole bit was to hopefully convince people that having multiple resources that "do the same thing" doesn't have to be "needless" complexity.
The entire point of building rockets is that you need to OPTIMIZE OPTIMIZE OPTIMIZE! Every gram counts! Every m/s of Delta-V you don't use in a meaningful way is another few kilograms of propellant you could have left on the ground, and therefore saved resources or money.

 

On the other hand, having more than one Life Support resource might be needless complexity, because even if they're used at different rates and have different masses and densities, the problem is you always need all of them at the same time (that's assuming we even HAVE a life support resource, of course).

[Bej Kerman]

20 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

1) If parts are free

Which they won't be, they'll cost ore (probably) and I'd imagine the KSC will get a monthly ore allowance that can be saved by recovering parts.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

So I came up with one possible solution to a few of these problems: having a fuel plant at KSC. It seems to me like the hardest thing to implement and manage in a game like this is a resource, because each resource is interacting all over the game and it needs sources and sinks and has to be carefully balanced with everything else and if its fundamental like money its taking up player time and attention throughout the game. And since, ultimately, this is a rocket sim and with some economy elements rather than other other way around ideally you'd have as few basic currencies as possible. Then you've got all these other pitfalls like incentive imbalances and failure states and obsolescence to worry about.  So I'd love if the logic of colonization just applied from the beginning of the game to the end and we could skip money entirely for simplicity's sake.

What I thought might solve a lot of these problems at once without creating a wholly new system would be to treat KSC kind of like a colony, and right from the beginning one of the buildings would be a fuel plant. When you first started it would just produce Methalox, and it would have a decent recharge rate and capacity so you could do anything you wanted in the Tier 1 VAB and get yourself to the Mun just fine. But it would take a few or several days to recharge between launches and start to introduce players to thinking about time as a resource. As you expanded though you could spend research points on upgrading its supply rate, capacity, and start adding on things like Uranium and fancier fuels over time. Rather than introduce a whole new system that fades away in the middle of the game this instead begins to introduce players to the way colonies will work right away, balancing production and capacity, thinking carefully about fuel efficiency, etc. Most importantly to my mind it doesn't exhaust and force you to start over. It also creates another important strategic choice for players. They can either invest their research on augmenting fuel production on Kerbin and focus on launches from there, or they can spend it on ISRU tech at the science facility. This makes it much easier to incentivize colonization and manage difficulty settings because you can just jigger the research costs. 

This does bring the whole time element into it because you are time warping for a few days between launches until your storage tanks are full, but I personally like that. Again it's introducing players to what they can expect when they start colonizing, and it spaces things out so you aren't maxing out everything you can do in KSOI in a month and then time-warping 200 days to the first Duna window. 

Wouldn't be easier to just add construction times?

It would also justify reusable crafts (I hope there's a well thought and solid system for that, I want a fleet of named spaceships and spaceplanes) and solve the problem of just spamming free supply routes from Kerbin (yep, you can send 50 free ships to make a constant influx of a resource to a Duna colony but the setup alone is going to take a couple of decades).

[Bej Kerman]

2 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Wouldn't be easier to just add construction times?

I have never seen a problem with being able to click 'fly' and be there ready to fly my rocket. I'm not sure what's wrong with not having the intermediate step of waiting out a timer.

[Guest]

26 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Which they won't be, they'll cost ore (probably) 

 

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

we could easily have several different materials to make rocket fuel tanks and structural bits out of, potentially including Stainless Steel, Aerospace Aluminum alloys, Al-Li alloys, Aerospace Titanium alloys (a good "middle....

Hopefully it will not meet either of those extremes. 

[shdwlrd]

@SciMan so you personally would like several options for every part you can use in the game? I wouldn't envy your play through. 

As you said, too little complexity can be boring. But for the lazy or time strapped players, something that's not straightforward or is overly complicated will cause them to pass on the game.

To use DSP for an example, I've completed about half of my Dyson sphere and haven't had time to go any further. I don't have time to wait or to increase my production rates. The same goes with Factorio. I've never built the rocket because the production gets too complicated. 

There has to be a balance to the complexity of the resource and production chains and the time it takes to complete them. USI or Pathfinder have acceptable production chains and resources without being overwhelming. If KSP2 does does something akin to one of the above mentioned mods, it would be complicated enough without feeling overwhelming with the resource collection and conversions.

[t_v]

I’m going to reiterate my previous point as I feel that it was misunderstood. Kerbin would act like a colony but the key difference is that you can turn one type of resource into another at kerbin. A big part of this discussion has been about how to avoid Lao feeling like an economy management game and I think this does just that. In my previous example, I didn’t want to imply that supply routes from kerbin would be preferable because they were cheaper, but rather that it could correct an imbalance in the economy of resources. If you need uranium on minmus then your best option is to get it from the moon but if there is no uranium on the moon, then you can get it from kerbin, which is assumed to have all the resources, although you still need to pay to get them. This would remain relevant throughout the game and is an easy way for players to get back to building rockets instead of spending time optimizing the economy and tweaking production rates. Essentially this means you still need colonies to progress and get lots for resources but you don’t need to fiddle around with production chains as much. 

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

I have never seen a problem with being able to click 'fly' and be there ready to fly my rocket. I'm not sure what's wrong with not having the intermediate step of waiting out a timer.

"Warp to completion and fly"

Solved.

There's nothing "wrong" in not having construction times, I mentioned it in a specific context, what's the difference between a currency that it's useful only on Kerbin (funds) or the KSC generating resources both on a timed budget and just having the construction/preparation/refurbishment itself take time so you can skip money, leave resources for the colonies and just hit "warp and skip" if you want to launch immediately?

In this specific case construction time it's not a gameplay element for its own sake, it's a simplifying tool that solves most of the problems we're arguing about.

Edited October 6, 2021 by Master39

[Bej Kerman]

23 minutes ago, Master39 said:

51 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Which they won't be, they'll cost ore (probably) 

 

You have a way with words.

16 minutes ago, Master39 said:

"Warp to completion and fly"

Solved.

That's still an unnecessary step.

18 minutes ago, Master39 said:

it's a simplifying tool that solves most of the problems we're arguing about.

I don't get how a glorified loading screen that doesn't even load anything solves anything.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I don't get how a glorified loading screen that doesn't even load anything solves anything.

The options we were discussing about were:

• Money from missions like in KSP 1: disincentives trial and error and teaches the player to just use revert and quicksaves. Money become more and more meaningless the farther away you go from Kerbin.
• Money from a budget: still a resource that's meaningful basically only in the early game, after that it becomes clutter.
• A single resource "ore" from a budget: oversimplification of the colonies resource system to basically turn minable resources into minable money.
• Multiple resources generated by the KSC at different rates: overcomplicated for what it's replacing.
• Free everything at the KSC: makes reusable designs pointless and allows for resource routes spamming of free, expendable, cargo ships to everywhere.

That's were construction times come in, it has the same effects of a budget with a simpler setup.

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, Master39 said:

Multiple resources generated by the KSC at different rates: overcomplicated for what it's replacing.

This is what Im wrestling with. In a sense its more complicated locally but less complicated globally, because its copying a simplified version of a system already in the game for consistency rather than inventing a new one. You’d also start tanks-full so it wouldn’t really effect you for the first few launches. Still, its pushing something a little complicated pretty early in the progression, so its worth a doubt. 
 

Im open minded about all this and taking the title of the thread literally. Im just letting all these tumble around like sneakers in a dryer for the moment.