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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.

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I think ksp 2 is going for early colonization, meaning these are the first people to visit those place and live there. Large megastructures wouldn't be a thing for the first civilization in a star system. Although they would be cool, I just don't think it fits the ksp 2 idea. The first explorers wouldn't be there to build megastructures, they'd be there to begin civilization somewhere else. Here's a good analogy: The pilgrims didn't come to the new world to build skyscrapers and stadiums, they were there to make a new home.

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I think we'll be able to build some big projects in multiplayer, but not civilization-wide mega-structures.

Personally I would love to build a Oort cloud - asteroid hopping network that links two stars (for constant low-tech transport missions).

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9 minutes ago, Rutabaga22 said:

I think ksp 2 is going for early colonization, meaning these are the first people to visit those place and live there. Large megastructures wouldn't be a thing for the first civilization in a star system. Although they would be cool, I just don't think it fits the ksp 2 idea. The first explorers wouldn't be there to build megastructures, they'd be there to begin civilization somewhere else. Here's a good analogy: The pilgrims didn't come to the new world to build skyscrapers and stadiums, they were there to make a new home.

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.

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2 hours ago, KarolOfGutovo said:

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

You gotta remember that those ships are carrying the stuff for an entire colony and come from kerbol, a system with the infrastructure of the kerbals. These colonies don't have the resources or infrastructures to build megastructures. Again, I believe that megastructures do not fit the near future theme of KSP 2, large projects like that wouldn't be done when you are colonizing a system, I get you can build large colonies, but that's nowhere near a dyson swarm or Grey goo. Remember, Pilgrims weren't there to build skyscrapers, they were there to start a new civilization.

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2 hours ago, KarolOfGutovo said:

Going from them to the smallest of megastructures isn't that much of a stretch

You can say that but it is not true. The Empire Stare Building is not "a small stretch" from the tiny wooden raft Christopher Columbus pulled up to America in. The exact same applies to going from large (but actually very small) Interstellar ships to megastructures. It just won't happen in the scope of KSP 2.

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  • 1 month later...
On 7/3/2022 at 7:45 PM, Bej Kerman said:

You can say that but it is not true. The Empire Stare Building is not "a small stretch" from the tiny wooden raft Christopher Columbus pulled up to America in. The exact same applies to going from large (but actually very small) Interstellar ships to megastructures. It just won't happen in the scope of KSP 2.

yeah but when your building interstellar ships that are (at least) 800m to 1.2km in size then something like a mass accelerator on the surface of the mun that is (because this is ksp we have to improvise) 3 km or so or even a stanford tourus no larger than 6km dosen't sound that crazy im not saying that we need o'neil cylinders but mass accelorators, stanford touruses, and maybe even gas giant refineries arent that crazy 

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7 hours ago, jaf said:

yeah but when your building interstellar ships that are (at least) 800m to 1.2km in size then something like a mass accelerator on the surface of the mun that is (because this is ksp we have to improvise) 3 km or so or even a stanford tourus no larger than 6km dosen't sound that crazy im not saying that we need o'neil cylinders but mass accelorators, stanford touruses, and maybe even gas giant refineries arent that crazy 

Mass accelerators don't seem like a wild idea, but I wouldn't consider them megastructures. A Stanford torus doesn't seem like a super far off idea at the proposed 1.5 km, but 6km seems a little too largel, but I wouldn't consider that exactly a megastructure, it's more of a large scale project, but isn't "Mega" imo.

Edited by Rutabaga22
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