What areas of future technology would you like to see?

[Axelord FTW]

BUILDING a space elevator directly, with parts, would be a major undertaking (not to mention the closest you could get is in form, as I doubt you could simulate it realistically in its entirety all at once).
But maybe, just maybe, implement a system you have to 'pay' for somehow through progression, to allow the players to send kerbals and small payloads to high orbit. If not vanilla, then I'm sure it could be modded in. All you would need is to have a 'launchpad' of sort set up in quasi-geostationary and you'd be golden.  Same goes for any other exotic ground-to-orbit solutions. All interesting, but the end results are similar enough to be handwaved somehow as a background thing if you wish (as long as you paid for it somehow, obviously).

 

[SciMan]

"Same goes for any other exotic ground-to-orbit solutions"

Well not quite. Some of them shouldn't have "just an orbital VAB that takes time instead of resources to build vessels at", which seems like the closest thing to what you're proposing.

Most of them in fact should be visible from extremely long distances, or put some sort of visible mark on the surface of Kerbin where they're set up.
Like the Lofstrom loop should have a "line hanging in the air" with a really weird looking support system since it's under tension not compression.
Like the Space Elevator (on a small planet) should be an incredibly long line between the surface equator and some spot in orbit (the counterweight would actually have to be a little bit beyond geostationary orbit, in order to balance out the forces of gravity on the length of the tether and the centripital force of the counterweight being forced to rotate at geostationary speed when the circular orbit velocity at its altitude is in fact slower(resulting in a net outward force calculated to balance the mass of the tether hanging down in the gravity well)).
And like a linear accelerator long enough to launch crew without lethal G-loads should perhaps show up as a long track on the surface of the celestial body it's installed at.

It's hard to even know they're there if they don't show up as visible from low orbit because you "abstracted" their functionality away.

Now at no point did I say you should be able to build any of these from parts. Oh no, I know the can of worms that opens, and I'm intentionally avoiding it.

Instead, these should be monolithic creations more akin to the buildings at the KSC in KSP 1, in that "they exist, and they have physical collision layers on them so things don't just go straight thru, but they're not part of the physics simulation other than that because they're a static object", if that makes any sense.

So, visible from space, and able to be physically interacted with, and perhaps, with great effort (gonna take a gigantic rocket to outright destroy it, unlike the KSP 1 VAB, etc.), destroyed by accident or on purpose, but purposefully NOT simulated as it's own "vessel-like" creation that has joint stresses and things of that like to worry about.

Edited August 18, 2022 by SciMan

[Axelord FTW]

Life support, underwater stuff.
P.S. Sometime you forget which threads you've already posted in.

Edited September 4, 2022 by Axelord FTW

[Davi SDF]

I would love to see advanced Nuclear Thermal Rockets and even advanced Chemical Rockets! Like tripropellant rocket engines, wich can have even higher ISPs than bipropellant rockets!

[SciMan]

Well, tripropellant rockets "can" have better ISP than bipropellant rockets. Or you could do what the Russians did when they were trying to make a spaceplane.

Make a rocket engine that is normally Hydrolox, but at launch you can inject extra LOX and Kerosene (RP-1 or RG-1 or even Syntin which isn't quite kerosene but it acts like it except for better ISP I think) to get more thrust out of the engines for when you really need to push up and out of the atmosphere with all that fuel that you haven't burnt yet.

Enter the RD-701

Now, like you said, you can in theory use a tripropellant rocket engine to get improved performance. However, most of the studies that I have read were about using Hydrogen, Lox, and Lithium in combination.

I don't know about you, but last I checked, Lithium is... problematic to handle, because you have to keep it hot enough to stay melted. That means the fuel tanks are gonna be heavy, and as every study I read found out (by doing the math), that is more than enough extra weight to chew right thru all that extra margin you got by "improving" the performance of the rocket engine.

Gotta watch out for those kinds of things when you think you're on to something "better". It usually has a critical downside that might be getting overlooked.

That's why the RD-701 is such an interesting engine. It's not trying to improve performance over a Hydrolox engine, it's trying to be what's basically a dual-mode engine.

However, there are other means to improve the specific impulse of a hydrolox rocket without sacrificing so much performance by extra weight in the fuel tanks. It doesn't involve a third propellant tank tho, so technically it's still a bipropellant chemical rocket.

The idea is that you add something more reactive than oxygen to the oxidizer. Most of the time this ended up being Fluorine, because that's the most reactive halogen (Oxygen is technically a halogen, but biology likes that one so most people think of it as it's own thing unrelated to the other halogen-type elements like iodine, chlorine, fluorine, bromine, oh and Fermium, but that one's so radioactive that it decays before it can react chemically most of the time, so that's another one considered to be its own thing).

The oxidizer created is named "FLOX", for "fluorine-doped LOX". Studies showed that when you could stop the stuff from rapidly corroding literally anything made of metal to the point of nonfunctionality, it provided a specific impulse boost of I think 20-30s or more over the ideal ISP of straight hydrolox.

However, like you might have caught on to, that's "when you can stop the stuff from eating the metal parts of your rocket". And that took some careful design and engineering work on protective coatings.

Of course, the exhaust from such a rocket engine is also spectacularly toxic, seeing as it has a high proportion of anhydrous Hydrofluoric Acid in it, and if anyone here has experience with that stuff you know that the best reaction to seeing that stuff leak is a good pair of running shoes. Not because it'll eat you alive. No, the stuff is acutely toxic to life as we know it, AND it'll eat you alive in sufficient quantities. You'll get poisoned first tho.

[Tundra]

Number 1 thing I need in KSP2 is movement tech.  I'm talking treads, repulsers, grappling hooks, the ability to leap (imagine a rover curling its legs and then jumping up).  Also some far future stuff like Mag field riding or laser propelled rockets.  I just want to have a reason to move around on the surface and a way to make it fun.

[SciMan]

Well, wheels are "good enough" for movement tech, provided they ACTUALLY WORK (which takes far too much fiddling with the KSP 1 wheels, and even then you still flip over and crash and explode after 5 minutes of driving in any case, so I basically only ever use wheels to move around surface base parts when docking them together).

But yes, having some tank tread type parts would be nice, as well as some sort of ground movement option that has HIGH SUSPENSION TRAVEL.

I feel the need to put that in all-caps because while some of the wheels in KSP 1 do have high suspension travel compared to the size of the wheel when compared to typical automobiles seen here on the roads on Earth, it's still not enough.

I'm an auto mechanic, and it's not just because there's good money to be made in this line of work. No, it's because I like cars, and I like working on cars.
That means I probably have some knowledge about pretty much anything with wheels.
And it just so happens that I know of a type of suspension that is suitable.

The idea is to optimize for high suspension travel. Go look at a "Stadium truck" suspension, or the suspension on a "baja desert race" type truck.

That's what I want out of a wheel. Not the giant "tank turning only" type wheel that is the largest one in the game right now.

No, I want a wheel at least as big as that (physical size of the wheel itself minus everything else), with a tunable suspension, actual "pivoting wheel" based steering like the rest of the wheels in KSP 1, and a suspension travel of something like 1.5-2 meters from fully extended to fully depressed.
Also needing to be addressed is the "binary" way that KSP 1 wheels lose their grip on the terrain, either they grip so well that you you flip, or they can't grip at all and you get the feeling that instead of being on another planet you might as well have stumbled into a banana peeling factory where the floor is both Teflon coated and you can't put your foot down anywhere without stepping on a banana peel, so you can't climb any slopes at all, and there seems to be not much of a range in between those two behaviors to me, so it seems you're stuck with one or the other, and no "happy middle ground".

If KSP 2 wheels had a much more GRADUAL grip failure than that, then I think that we'd be able to build rovers that can navigate over the surface of pretty much any planet, at high speed, without worrying about the rover flipping over every 5 minutes or more often. And that's key if we want to use rovers to transfer resources between surface outposts on a given planet, which is what I would love to be able to do but can't even think about doing it in KSP 1 because the systems in place just aren't up to the task.

[magnemoe]

On 9/5/2022 at 6:04 PM, SciMan said:

Well, wheels are "good enough" for movement tech, provided they ACTUALLY WORK (which takes far too much fiddling with the KSP 1 wheels, and even then you still flip over and crash and explode after 5 minutes of driving in any case, so I basically only ever use wheels to move around surface base parts when docking them together).

But yes, having some tank tread type parts would be nice, as well as some sort of ground movement option that has HIGH SUSPENSION TRAVEL.

I feel the need to put that in all-caps because while some of the wheels in KSP 1 do have high suspension travel compared to the size of the wheel when compared to typical automobiles seen here on the roads on Earth, it's still not enough.

I'm an auto mechanic, and it's not just because there's good money to be made in this line of work. No, it's because I like cars, and I like working on cars.
That means I probably have some knowledge about pretty much anything with wheels.
And it just so happens that I know of a type of suspension that is suitable.

The idea is to optimize for high suspension travel. Go look at a "Stadium truck" suspension, or the suspension on a "baja desert race" type truck.

That's what I want out of a wheel. Not the giant "tank turning only" type wheel that is the largest one in the game right now.

No, I want a wheel at least as big as that (physical size of the wheel itself minus everything else), with a tunable suspension, actual "pivoting wheel" based steering like the rest of the wheels in KSP 1, and a suspension travel of something like 1.5-2 meters from fully extended to fully depressed.
Also needing to be addressed is the "binary" way that KSP 1 wheels lose their grip on the terrain, either they grip so well that you you flip, or they can't grip at all and you get the feeling that instead of being on another planet you might as well have stumbled into a banana peeling factory where the floor is both Teflon coated and you can't put your foot down anywhere without stepping on a banana peel, so you can't climb any slopes at all, and there seems to be not much of a range in between those two behaviors to me, so it seems you're stuck with one or the other, and no "happy middle ground".

If KSP 2 wheels had a much more GRADUAL grip failure than that, then I think that we'd be able to build rovers that can navigate over the surface of pretty much any planet, at high speed, without worrying about the rover flipping over every 5 minutes or more often. And that's key if we want to use rovers to transfer resources between surface outposts on a given planet, which is what I would love to be able to do but can't even think about doing it in KSP 1 because the systems in place just aren't up to the task.

This, and this will be much more important in KSP 2 with the rugged terrain we seen images of. 
No real rovers don't have huge suspensions and they don't need them as they move very slowly as in meters pr day. Now the moon buggies was faster but still more like golf carts I assume. 
KSP rovers drive at highway speeds off road: 30 m/s is 108 km/h, 50 m/s is 180 km/h or as fast as my car will go, even 15 m/s is 54 km/h or above speed limit on city streets.
And we want to drive fast because its fun and we get to places faster. 

Now how to make small rovers fast: first long arms from the rover out to the wheels in 4 or 6 directions. two 45 degree forward and backward and optional two center line out.
These fold up during transit, then extend and increase length and width multiple times and is also your suspension, with an 2 meter long arm pointing downward 30-45 degree you get a lot of suspension travel, you might want to get the body closer to the ground for high speed and higher for more ground clearance in broken terrain there you can not go fast. 
Second large inflatable wheels, keep the weight down and larger wheels travel more smoothly over broken terrain and is hard to get stuck. 
Now this is for smaller rovers only, unmanned, buggies, even smaller crew cabins, not large trucks but they naturally have larger wheels and wheel base and people accept they are slower. 
I see main use for them in KSP 2 is to carry supply to an from an cargo lander landing say a km from an base so short trips. 

No this is not very advanced technology and it has been some talk about it but current rovers have limited power and have control issues. 
But something who has been discussed and I assume who will change with SpaceX, 

Last is the option to use the wheels and suspension arms as legs able to raise and move forward and back for climbing. This does not have to be fast as its an last resort option if stuck or facing very broken areas, obviously more useful who smaller the rover is and works better with 6 wheels. Larger rovers might have 8 wheels. 

[AceofSpades308]

I would like more launch systems. Maybe not something that will get a craft into orbit but more along the lines of catapult like an aircraft carrier or the mass driver from Ace Combat 5 and 7. To go along with the prior Ace Combat systems a space elevator would be cool but  it's not necessary air launch systems like airborne aircraft carriers are technically possible in ksp 1 but having an aircraft fly almost indefinitely would be cool.