Life support - a hard or soft limitation?

[Catonator]

I think some form of life support is almost mandatory. A big issue with unmodded KSP1 is that hurling the kerbals out of the solar system presents no issue whatsoever, outside the deltaV requirements. I personally think, that adding the dynamic of choosing between sending an unmanned probe with less control, and a crew who can maneuver the ships with no contact but have a hard limit on resources presents an interesting choice from a game design perspective.

That being said, I think the stock life support should be relatively simple. I can and will assume that the ultrahard difficulty mods will add a lot more depth to probe control and life support, as usual, so the base game could be treated as the "easy mode" in a way.

[Gotmachine]

It has been strongly hinted in various interviews that life support on vessels won't be a thing at all.
The only thing that was confirmed was that "colony growth (but not survival) requires producing/importing life-support-alike stuff".
I highly doubt it will be a thing on vessels if it's not even a requirement on colonies, and in any case I wouldn't expect anything past a very basic system, probably even more basic than the simplest KSP1 LS mods.

In the context of the "interstellar exploration" gameplay they are pushing forward for stock KSP 2, I can see why life support gameplay elements at the vessel level won't be a thing.
It adds a relatively tedious supply and mission time planning requirement for every single launch, introducing a whole new "micro" gameplay loop conflicting with the "macro" scope of the game, which is clearly large scale interstellar exploration and colonization.

I always comes back to the same point : the intended large scale and speculative future scope of KSP 2 is in conflict with it being a game that takes the actual physics and challenges of spaceflight and transform them in gameplay elements.

Now, I'm sure there will be plenty of mods trying to implement said gameplay elements.
As mentioned in this thread, the main purpose of LS as a gameplay loop is to make mission duration a constraint. Another one is to give value back to unmanned missions.

From there, there are various levels of detail and complexity possible.
But the issue remains that this will always be a "micro" gameplay level, where you have to manage things on a per kerbal, per vessel, per stage, per mission phase basis, doing careful planning, resource input, output and transfer management.
This can go quite far in terms of complexity or realism and make a good gameplay loop, but if the overall game scope is managing hundreds of kerbals, vessels, colonies and stations all around the galaxy, it suddenly becomes completely out of place.

[Pthigrivi]

6 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

It has been strongly hinted in various interviews that life support on vessels won't be a thing at all.

...

As mentioned in this thread, the main purpose of LS as a gameplay loop is to make mission duration a constraint. Another one is to give value back to unmanned missions.

You may well be right, but I hope not. They have made a few mentions of "snacks" in the dev videos as well, though of course there's no way to know if that means anything. We had a good conversation recently in the 'need for speed' thread about the general problem time-warp presents--why would a player tech all the way up and build a massive interstellar drive capable of reaching another star system in 10 years when they could build an underpowered conventional rocket and then time-warp for a few hundred years? Why would a player increase a colony's size and production rate when they can just time-warp the difference? A consumable LS resource solves number of similar problems, and it does so especially well exactly because it can be managed on a vessel-to-vessel basis. I think everyone agrees you don't want KSP to become overburdened with finicky systems, but LS could dovetail very nicely into the same kind of engineering puzzles that rockets and heat management and power generation entail. In some ways the most important thing is the UI, giving a very clear, single-line output for how long your food will last in the VAB and in flight. If you've got 3 Kerbals and you want to keep them happy for 100 days you add 300 snacks, or 150 snacks with a %50 efficient recycler, or 30 snacks with a 90% efficient recycler. If you have a colony and can keep Greenhouses going with ISRU all you need to know is if you're generating more per day than you're consuming. I've personally found with even slightly complicated mods like USI the management is very simple, but it has a pretty profound effect on the way you think about space travel and living off the land and the value of safe harbors. 

Edited August 10, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Gotmachine]

8 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

LS could dovetail very nicely into the same kind of engineering puzzles that rockets and heat management and power generation entail.

I fully agree with that, but the fundamental problem with LS is that any miscalculation on the player side results in a bricked mission, there is no real "counterplay", everything is happening at planning time.
On a larger level, such a system is restricting player freedom to do whatever they want and it doesn't meaningfully contribute to the core gameplay loop, which is building creative spacecrafts from various bits using real (to the extent that the average player can understand) orbital and rocket physics to explore and colonize the stars with goofy green humanoids

That "planning must be done right" aspect is already a major weakness in KSP, and a major complaint made by most people trying the game. The "build-launch-crash-try again" loop is a entertaining for the first hours when you discover the game, but it quickly become a source of frustration for the average player. We have heard a lot from the team about how it was crucial for KSP2 to get around that issue.

"Non-hardcore" players are those that will make the game a financial success or not, and the difference between the game being supported for years or shelved a few months after launch. Not the people having poured thousands of hours in KSP 1 and posting on this forum.
Despite what the public facing people are trying to convey, this is no passionate independent game, KSP2 is a financial investment controlled by a huge game publisher that bought a relatively successful independent brand to primarily make money out of it, you can be sure that every single feature that will or won't be present at launch is carefully weighted in terms of player demographics and impact on potential sales.

It is common knowledge that the majority of people having bought KSP are abandoning before even reaching orbit.
It's not what I want to hear, but the main point driving game design decisions is very likely : how to ensure the average player is able to progress steadily toward the mid-end game without too much frustration ? Especially since this mid-end game content is the selling point they are desperately trying to push forward.

That doesn't rule out a very basic system existing as basic time progression limit mechanism, but I really don't expect anything beyond that. The fact that Nate Simpson refused to comment on the subject two/three years ago show that they at least were considering their options.
And if the game is successful and kept alive after launch, a middle-complexity LS system and associated mechanisms (habitat, radiation, repairs, kerbal specialization, ISRU...) could be an opportunity for a DLC, even though I doubt such "complexity adding" systems will ever be the focus.

[Ryaja]

I think it should be very customizable in difficulty settings.

[theJesuit]

43 minutes ago, Gotmachine said:

And if the game is successful and kept alive after launch, a middle-complexity LS system and associated mechanisms (habitat, radiation, repairs, kerbal specialization, ISRU...) could be an opportunity for a DLC, even though I doubt such "complexity adding" systems will ever be the focus.

If Life Support happens i suspect it will be closer to snacks making tourists when they run out.  

Take2 have a history of release the 2xDLC then new release.  See Civilization series. They probably already know what dlcs they will release. 

IMHO kerbalism would have made an excellent dlc.  Still modable.  Gives lifesupport, changes science, adds an additional way of dealing with multiple vessels through background processing.  

[t_v]

2 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

the fundamental problem with LS is that any miscalculation on the player side results in a bricked mission, there is no real "counterplay", everything is happening at planning time.

Here, I’d like to disagree. This isn’t a fundamental problem with LS, only in specific implementation. I bounced off of all the LS mods I’ve tried because of this planning-heavy design (and also because a mk.1 pod can’t wait a few orbits to get to the Mun). But this isn’t a fundamental problem with LS. If you designed your thermals wrong, you might have to alternate between drilling and ISRU, if you design your electricity wrong, you might have to take breaks in whatever activity you are doing or shut down auxiliary systems. Life support could be managed by not giving specific kerbals their LS (assuming it is non lethal), by managing when and how you deliver LS (with, for example, acceleration) or, depending on how related the different resources are, sacrificing a different resource on the ship to keep LS running. Life support has the potential to be just as flight-oriented as the other systems that go into making a ship. 

2 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

That "planning must be done right" aspect is already a major weakness in KSP, and a major complaint made by most people trying the game. The "build-launch-crash-try again" loop is a entertaining for the first hours when you discover the game, but it quickly become a source of frustration for the average player. We have heard a lot from the team about how it was crucial for KSP2 to get around that issue.

I won’t pretend that KSP 1 doesn’t have that problem, but there is much more than ‘try again’ after the ‘crash’ step. I think that KSP actually has really deep and fun gameplay in the flight mode beyond the orbital stuff. My all-time favorite and most memorable moments were those when I had to strip a large craft down to its core because I was running out of delta-v, or finish a burn with most of the engines shut off because my ship grazed a mountain on the way to orbit. I don’t consider myself a hardcore player - I am in no way optimal in flight or design 99% of the time. I also don’t do no-reverting saves. The crazy accidents that happen are after quick saving and quick loading a few times, when I’m happy to have a damaged mission and deal with the consequences rather than fall into that repeat loop. My point is that, if KSP’s design-heavy systems allow for so much flexibility in flight, then KSP 2 should be able to engineer its systems so that players can more easily fix their missions, Andy Weir style. 

2 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

It is common knowledge that the majority of people having bought KSP are abandoning before even reaching orbit.

This is definitely the biggest concern for me. I had to learn to manage electric charge on my second Mun mission, and thermals on my first mission with an ISRU (the NERVs were fine), and comms on my first mission to Jool, but those things came alongside learning the other things involved in those missions. The first Mun mission was especially arduous, because it was the largest amount of new things I had to learn at once. This is again why I bounced off of LS mods, because they usually started mattering with the Mun, and I didn’t want to learn that with n-body and random failures at the same time. Im not sure what point in the progression LS should start mattering in, but I am convinced that there is a place where it won’t make that step too annoying or complex to get over for the majority of people. 

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

I fully agree with that, but the fundamental problem with LS is that any miscalculation on the player side results in a bricked mission, there is no real "counterplay", everything is happening at planning time.

...

It is common knowledge that the majority of people having bought KSP are abandoning before even reaching orbit.

As t_v says its all about how its implemented, and why I argued on the previous page that the consequences should be super-soft--only affecting things like resource and research collection and processing. I don't even recommend 'touristification' on normal difficulty because it could make the vessel unflyable. LS should be something you hardly need to worry about in KSOI, and steadily ramps up as you build colonies and start thinking about interstellar travel and have a good handle on the basic aspects of play:
 

Quote

I think this is exactly why on default normal difficulty permadeath should probably not be the consequence. In fact its best if the LS system has a kind of built-in grace period of 10 or 20 days with no ill-effects so you don't really have to worry about it for the first several missions, and even after that consequences can set in slowly. Say you send your kerbals to an asteroid and its going to take 50 days to get there, but you forgot to pack any snacks. After 15 days without food they start to get cranky and the value of any science they collect starts dropping off at 1%/day (we don't even know if science will be a thing, but just as an example). By the time they got there they'd be pretty grumpy, only collecting 65% of full science value, and by the time they got home they'd be downright miserable at 15%. Once they arrive home or to a station or colony with plenty of snacks their happiness would climb back up, say 5%/day to be nice. After 17 days they'd be hale and healthy and back to %100 capacity. There could be similar consequences for lack of habitation space, and similar negative impact on things like mining and research. 

 

Edited August 10, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Timmon26]

Here's my spitball attempt at a highly simplified life support design that still ticks most of the boxes. This is based somewhat on my speculations on colony LS detailed here...  

Spoiler

... as well as the Snacks mod and similar ideas. (Ships ought to work a bit differently from colonies though)

_____

Per the poll, I think life support should be nonlethal on colonies, lethal on vehicles, and take into account food, radiation, living space, flight time, and power. 

All direct consumables like oxygen, water, and food are rolled into one resource - Snacks. Kerbals each consume 1 snacks/day (every 6 hours) and turn them into 1 volatiles/day.  Snacks/Volatiles are stored in radial or inline pods that come in a few sizes and their flow to kerbals obeys crossfeed rules. Command modules and space suits also have token snack storage. Kerbals must continually consume snacks (as if it were electricity) or become Starving. Starving kerbals live for some number of hours to days before they shrivel up like raisins and die.  Starving kerbals lose access to class abilities. Upon entering a craft with available snacks, kerbals immediately lose the starving condition and return to normal activity.

ECLSS modules are radial or inline parts that provide recycling and reduce the rate of snack consumption on the vessel by some factor (I picked 0.9 because that's the reclamation efficiency of the ISS's ECLSS but the factor could be anything for balance). The parts come in a few sizes and each has a certain capacity (points?) representing the number of kerbals the module ideally supports. These points can be stacked with multiple modules. If there are more kerbals on a vessel than the ECLSS modules can support, the reduction in snack consumption is reduced, reflecting the oversaturation of the environment systems. Snacks can only be 100% reclaimed from volatiles by colony greenhouses. Vessels always experience losses. 

Bunks represent the living space a kerbal needs to be comfortable on a long trip. Habitat modules like the Hitchhiker provide bunks. A Kerbal with a claimed bunk on their vessel will remain happy indefinitely. A kerbal without access to a bunk (if you didn't include one or they left their ship temporarily on a rover mission or something) will remain happy for some number of days before becoming Grumpy. A grumpy kerbal loses access to class abilities. Upon returning to a vessel with an open bunk, a grumpy kerbal becomes happy again. Bunk-providing modules generally require power. 

Kerbals can handle a certain amount of constant radiation flux up to some threshold (in watts). If the threshold is exceeded, the kerbal becomes Irradiated for the duration of the exposure. While irradiated, kerbals lose access to class abilities. Radiation sources include nuclear engines, radiation belts, and stars. If kerbals are exposed to a radiation flux past a second, higher threshold, they melt and die. Basically, walking on the Mun is fine, standing next to an active fission reactor is bad, and staring into a running open-cycle NTR is deadly.

Kerbals also have a limited endurance for space missions, and eventually will go Space Crazy. Kerbals that have gone crazy lose access to class abilities and must return to Kerbin or a colony for them to be restored. Craziness typically takes a long time to set in; probably a few Kerbin years.  

The statuses and cutoffs above would be affected by a Kerbal's Level and their attributes - Courage and Stupidity. 
Higher level kerbals take longer to starve, can handle more radiation, and can stave off grumpiness and craziness for longer.
Courageous Kerbals tend to be bad a rationing and don't heed radiation warnings, reducing their starvation time and radiation thresholds, but they're better at staying happy and sane no matter their living conditions. 
Stupid Kerbals' small brains require less food, and are highly resistant to boredom. But they tend to wander into radiation fields and become upset if they aren't kept comfortable. 

I like reversible class ability loss, then outright death, as consequences of life support failure. Class ability loss would be punishing but not crippling, hurting the player for making suboptimal or unrealistic decisions but giving them a way to recover. Death only occurs when the player truly screws up, like forgetting to pack any food or blasting their kerbals with NSWRs. I don't consider kerbal death unfair so long as it comes with forewarning. If the UI gives the player enough information, like how long a trip will take and how long their Snacks will last, then packing enough life support for a mission becomes part of the play/fail/learn/play loop just like packing enough fuel. Space missions revolve around time, and it's reasonable for time limits (what life support effectively is) to be a part of that gameplay.
____

Colonies, on the other hand, are a whole other ballgame. The purpose of colonies is to be sort of like "checkpoints" that the player builds themselves; safe spaces they can retreat back to or sortie out from as they explore deeper into space. They should be more or less closed-cycle and never fail once established, and their life support systems have to be stable for the colony to grow at all, making them effectively timeless and impervious to time warp, much like KSC already is. Of course, for this to work, the technical division between what is a "colony" and what is a "vessel" needs to be precisely defined.

[shdwlrd]

28 minutes ago, Timmon26 said:

Per the poll, I think life support should be nonlethal on colonies, lethal on vehicles, and take into account food, radiation, living space, flight time, and power. 

No to all of it. I've bricked too many missions because of LS. Because of LS problems and such, I've got to the point of only doing unmanned missions outside of Kerbin's atmo before discontinuing use of them. That is what will end up happening in the long run. Most players, if they continue playing after a few failures because of LS, will only send unmanned missions. And that's not the point of KSP2. What's the point of colonies if you can't safely transport them to the colony sites because of LS failures. 

It's a huge HELL NO!!! to anything that can brick a players mission outside of their direct control.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

It should be an opt in system. In the menu when creating a new game, have all the options from the poll as options, and you can select/deselect at will. This system should make noobs happy, and pros happy.

[Xelo]

7 hours ago, Timmon26 said:

If the UI gives the player enough information, like how long a trip will take and how long their Snacks will last, then packing enough life support for a mission becomes part of the play/fail/learn/play loop just like packing enough fuel.

Its a pretty big IF I feel. You have to pack food before you can fly, and you can only really know how long until after you fly. Knowing how much time you will need is far more difficult then the amount of delta V you need. Fuel doesn't care how long you wait until a good transfer window arrives. There's considerably more 'fail' in the gameplay loop if kerbal deaths are involved. If you screw up a landing on duna or run out of dV in orbit, you can consider your kerbals basically dead unless youve somehow packed an extra year of food. Largely removing the gameplay variety of rescue missions in no revert runs.
If deaths have to exist I would only have them happen after a month+ with no food, like well, a normal person, or even far longer then that. As in  it only starts to really matter once going interplanetary. A few hours or days of no food being death is far too extreme I feel, it would mean beginning players having to worry about life support before even reaching the mun sometimes? Maybe id do it like this, with time until total incapacitation and disabled abilities dependent on difficulty, ranging between incapacitation in a year and death in a month . Below might be a default difficulty setting.

Incapacitation is when the kerbal cant do anything and if they are the only pilot, needs to rely on a probe core ( if in comm-net range) on the ship or a rescue vessel to bring them back to a colony (or a ship that has a medical facility/advanced life support of some sort). The kerbal uh, hibernates in these scenarios c:
To avoid cheesy scenarios where you just EVA and let the kerbal occasionally back into the ship to 'heal' suddenly, the kerbal doesn't regain its abilities right away, and with starvation instead eats at 10x the rate, slowly decreasing its starvation until it is healthy again.

7 hours ago, Timmon26 said:

Per the poll, I think life support should be nonlethal on colonies, lethal on vehicles

Also that's a little odd, since vehicle lethality was the least highest rated option out of all 4. Taking into consideration that there are a disproportionate amount of veteran players here, the actual number may be considerably lower in popularity.

5 hours ago, TKMK said:

It should be an opt in system. In the menu when creating a new game, have all the options from the poll as options, and you can select/deselect at will. This system should make noobs happy, and pros happy.

Don't think the devs will make a system with its own huge diverse set of parts that 80% of players opt out of.  They are targeting ""noobs"" after-all, they don't really have to worry about whether veteran KSP fans will buy and play the new game. It is also bad practice to put these 'feature' settings in front of new players before they've even played the game and know what the features/mechanics are, and say that it's a solution to allow the game to be accessible to more people. Would even you know what exactly the hypothetical 'enable life support' checkbox entails when opening KSP2 for the first time? It may be nothing like what you wanted.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Xelo

[Guest]

13 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

I fully agree with that, but the fundamental problem with LS is that any miscalculation on the player side results in a bricked mission, there is no real "counterplay", everything is happening at planning time.

It's a problem with every system if it's designed that way. Just like we have delta-V calculators and maps in the VAB the same can happen with every other system using consumables.

Kerbal-fuel is not the only way of doing LS. Probably habitat requirements and environmental protection could be a more interesting way of playing it. Immagine if you couldn't just plop your standard space station inflatable module and your standard soft orbital EVA suit when exploring the  surface of EVE? Or that a fuel tank with 16 external seats and a command pod doesn't count as a 17 crew capable fully working space station?

There are many ways of having LS, and I don't think we should be limited by what KSP1 mods already did.

 

13 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

"Non-hardcore" players are those that will make the game a financial success or not, and the difference between the game being supported for years or shelved a few months after launch. Not the people having poured thousands of hours in KSP 1 and posting on this forum.
Despite what the public facing people are trying to convey, this is no passionate independent game, KSP2 is a financial investment controlled by a huge game publisher that bought a relatively successful independent brand to primarily make money out of it, you can be sure that every single feature that will or won't be present at launch is carefully weighted in terms of player demographics and impact on potential sales.

There are plenty of successful games and series catered toward more "hardcore" players, the fact that every game has to be dumbed down to oblivion is a misconception.

If anything there's more to be gained from catering to the space enthusiast niche than from launching yet another space game with NMS's flight model.

You can spin it how you want but the presence of orbital mechanics puts KSP automatically in the most hardcore niche category you can possibly think of, if you don't remove that there's no point in making everything else easier and more casual-friendly.

 

14 hours ago, Gotmachine said:

It is common knowledge that the majority of people having bought KSP are abandoning before even reaching orbit.
It's not what I want to hear, but the main point driving game design decisions is very likely : how to ensure the average player is able to progress steadily toward the mid-end game without too much frustration ? Especially since this mid-end game content is the selling point they are desperately trying to push forward.

An the problem is 110% the fact that you need to study externally from the game to even understand what you're doing.

As I recently said in another post, the fact that KSP teaches you orbital mechanics is not true, KSP teaches you nothing.

It only gives you a sandbox of Lego parts to play with and apply what you studied elsewhere. That's why people abandon the game before reaching orbit. Not because it's difficult or impossible, but because the game never tells you what you're supposed to do. You have to go on Youtube and watch hours of videos there if you want to play KSP, and not everyone is willing to do that. 

 

That's not to say that KSP isn't a good product, it's a pretty good Sim, and as one it starts from the assumption that you know what you're doing beforehand, that you studied and did your homework elsewhere.

Games are not supposed to do that, they're supposed to be self-contained products, requiring no external support, study or help to be experienced. That's what makes most people leave KSP and what the KSP2 dev team has to fix.

[The Aziz]

48 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Just like we have delta-V calculators and maps in the VAB the same can happen with every other system using consumables.

Except I theoretically can work my way out if I discover mid flight that I don't have enough fuel for landing or something. Plan a gravity assist to get me back home instead of landing, like Apollo 13 did. In fact I've done a similar thing before, a "routine" mission, where return from the Mun lasted nearly 30 days. But if I discover on the way I'm gonna run out of food, that's the end. I can't simply make a U-turn in space to go back, and any return attempts will take probably twice as long. And if out of food situation is lethal, it means complete mission failure.

If there's life support, make it so that running out means limited functionalities, reduced productivity, that kind of thing. And don't overdo it with a dozen different resources, we already have to work with at least 6 fuel types, and Kraken knows how many more construction materials. Keep it at food, water, maybe rad protection. Electricity is rather obvious since it's needed for everything. Don't bother with waste since it's just a material to get rid of, pointless. You've seen the greenhouses in old footage, they don't look overly complicated.

[t_v]

10 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Except I theoretically can work my way out if I discover mid flight that I don't have enough fuel for landing or something

And you can't do that with LS? As I've said before, it matters how the system is designed. Cutting corners on fuel and cutting corners on LS can be done the same way: If you don't have enough dV to land on Duna, then you can try to slingshot back to Kerbin, and you can do the same thing if you don't have enough LS. If you don't even have enough dV to make the initial transfer, you won't do it, similar to how if you don't have enough LS to make the initial transfer, you don't do it. And then messing with fuel levels, changing engine setups, and making riskier maneuvers can be likened to moving LS resources around (such as dedicating more or less EC to different areas, offloading excess resources of one type to make the other last longer, etc.), changing LS setups (e.g. squeezing more kerbals in areas of the ship further away from the irradiated engine), and making riskier or more expensive maneuvers as a result. 

22 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

If there's life support, make it so that running out means limited functionalities, reduced productivity, that kind of thing. And don't overdo it with a dozen different resources,

Definitely agree there, especially if the UI is designed so that more resources just means more lines of text and more bars to read through. 

25 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Keep it at food, water, ... Electricity 

I think that these are the only resources that need to be kept track of as "resources" but as you mentioned, rad protection would be a good addition. the thing with radiation protection is that it isn't a "resource" per se, because it is something that is only based on the configuration of your ship, your delicates (including kerbals), and your behavior in flight (engine burning mostly, although running reactors qualifies as well). This doesn't add too much additional clutter to look through when you are trying to get an overview of your ship because you can tell with a simple gradient how much radiation any parts of the ship are getting. Other things like that, such as living space, are easy to grasp (you can tell just by looking how many kerbals should reasonably fit into your ship) and could be added without creating more clutter. I'm not advocating for any of these (except gravity, because I like it), but I'm saying they could be implemented without increasing complexity too much

[The Aziz]

42 minutes ago, t_v said:

If you don't have enough dV to land on Duna, then you can try to slingshot back to Kerbin, and you can do the same thing if you don't have enough LS

Slingshot back could require only a fraction of fuel required for full mission. However, LS, or more specifically food+water, is a time based resource. It's not like I can stop it from being used, and thanks to orbital physics, Kerbin may not be in spot which ensures quick return.

Unless we have hibernation chambers. But in that case LS requirements become far less restrictive, when Kerbals are only active when the ship is active, as in not on rails, with nothing happening internally (research, production etc)

[t_v]

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

Unless we have hibernation chambers. But in that case LS requirements become far less restrictive, when Kerbals are only active when the ship is active, as in not on rails, with nothing happening internally (research, production etc)

there are ways to have LS matter while also allowing you to shut it off and decide how to spend it. If shutting off LS just disables kerbals and they are fine as soon as the LS gets turned back on, then you can just warp away and have one "awake" kerbal (kind of like in most KSP 1 LS mods), which I don't particularly like. But if, for example, you have lingering effects, then suddenly there is a decision to make about whether you leave the LS on, consuming extra resources, or turn it off and face the consequences when you reach your destination.

Going without gravity means kerbals will be very weak and unable to undergo sustained acceleration. Going in a lot of radiation means that kerbals will need time and medical care before they get their class abilities back. Going without food means an irreplaceable "kick-start" of water and maybe a period of increased consumption to un-unconsious the kerbal.

All of these allow for interesting gameplay decisions to balance when a mission goes wrong, while making sure that there is rarely (if ever) a situation in which a mission is completely bricked due to LS. Similar to how there are lots of gameplay options and rarely (if ever) a mission that is completely bricked due to fuel, electricity, or thermals. 

[Pthigrivi]

6 hours ago, Xelo said:

Its a pretty big IF I feel. You have to pack food before you can fly, and you can only really know how long until after you fly.

I think a really important part of the solution to this will be in flight planning tools. We know they'd like to work in tools to help players estimate end-to-end dV without having to consult a dV map in a browser, and if you do have the ability to select your window on a porkchop (or just click "Next launch window" and let it do it for you) then you've also got access to your flight duration and could post that planned mission in an alarm clock. Of course just like fuel it'll be wise to add some overage to cover for imperfect transfer burns and unforeseen events, but it'll let you know basically what to plan for before you start designing. 

And all of the other things mentioned above are exactly why I don't think either permadeath or non-functioning kerbals should be the default/normal consequence for running out of food. Remember that we've got a much deeper tech tree to unlock and resource gathering will be a much larger part of the game. If unfed kerbals lose the ability to mine or do research efficiently that could be plenty consequence enough. Nate has said he doesn't want to see a system that punishes players for failure, but rather rewards players for doing things well. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Guest]

Kerbals have emergency hibernation.

You can hit the button and send the crew in ibernation at any point, but only the KSC and late-tier colonies equipped with some advanced medical facility can revive them.

 

You can keep control of the ship with a probe core, choose to hibernate only part of the crew to savage at least part of the mission and still have the possibility of a rescue if things go wrong.

 

But you can't turn on and off the crew as needed to avoid LS altogether.

[Pthigrivi]

For fun though let's do some math: The average person eats about 900kg of food per year, or about 2.5kg/day. Lets say a kerbal weighs half what person weighs without the suit, so that's 1.25kg of Snacks/kerbal/day. We'd like to get this down to as few resources as possible that need management, so for simplicity's sake lets assume all O2 and water are recycled at 100% by the habitation module itself so long as it had power--they're just part of the build-cost and don't require you to manually pump it around. But half of the food you eat is also water, so maybe your first "recycler" is actually just a food-rehydrator that assumes the water is perfectly recycled (don't think about it) and halves the rate at which snacks are consumed. If it the rehydrator weighed 1t or so it would be worth it mass-wise on stations and bases and interplanetary flights, but in local Kerbin SOI flights it's just as easy to pack Snacks. For bigger colonies and longer/larger flights you might be inclined to incorporate greenhouses or hydroponics bays. These might come in a few weight/efficiency classes and would recycle snacks between 75% and 99%, or could generate new snacks with fertilizer produced via ISRU. I would personally add a waste resource like "compost" that could retain the used LS mass rather than venting it because it would offer some flexibility and efficiency for transport flights across a whole infrastructure network, but again it wouldn't be something you needed to worry about until you had multiple stations and colonies and flights in between. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[shdwlrd]

30 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Nate has said he doesn't want to see a system that punishes players for failure, but rather rewards players for doing things well.

Thanks for bringing this up Pthigrivi. Everyone seems to be ignoring this want from the devs in this discussion. If anything LS related is added to the game, don't expect Kerbals to actually die or become nonfunctional. So you're just debating the next LS mod at this point.

[t_v]

38 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Nate has said he doesn't want to see a system that punishes players for failure, but rather rewards players for doing things well. 

Just now, shdwlrd said:

Thanks for bringing this up Pthigrivi. Everyone seems to be ignoring this want from the devs in this discussion. If anything LS related is added to the game, don't expect Kerbals to actually die or become nonfunctional. So you're just debating the next LS mod at this point.

This is an excellent point and I hadn’t realized that this was stated. Again, it comes down to implementation. Instead of kerbals becoming nonfunctional when LS isn’t provided, there should be a baseline functionality that kerbals have that is expanded when LS is taken care of. However, it is easy to perceive these benefits as losses, especially when LS is provided at the start of the game and by default. As a silly example, letting kerbals sprint when they are well fed is equally likely to be perceived as removing the ability to sprint when they are not well fed. This places a lot of restrictions on how LS could work which makes it less likely. Still, even if we’re discussing the next LS mod instead of anything that could reasonably be in the game, working through these problems is worthwhile. 

[MechBFP]

On one hand a LS system without significant consequences is a bit of an oxymoron in a way (not exactly supporting life if it isn’t needed.)

On the other hand if they did stuff like have the Kerbals start chewing on their ship controls and other comedic things like that when those resources run out that would at least add some value back. 
 

I am aware that the “No Fun Allowed” group wouldn’t appreciate that, but oh well.

Edited August 11, 2022 by MechBFP

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

On one hand a LS system without significant consequences is a bit of an oxymoron in a way (not exactly supporting life if it isn’t needed.)

On the other hand if they did stuff like have the Kerbals start chewing on their ship controls and other comedic things like that when those resources run out that would at least add some value back. 
 

I am aware that the “No Fun Allowed” group wouldn’t appreciate that, but oh well.

Well I would say that the "emergency hibernation" idea gives you significant consequences without straight out killing your kerbals and making rescue missions impossible.

 

[Gotmachine]

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Nate has said he doesn't want to see a system that punishes players for failure, but rather rewards players for doing things well.

Thanks for bringing this up Pthigrivi. Everyone seems to be ignoring this want from the devs in this discussion. If anything LS related is added to the game, don't expect Kerbals to actually die or become nonfunctional. So you're just debating the next LS mod at this point.

Exactly, that's why any kind of LS system is very unlikely.

The central point of a LS mechanism is to introduce a new constraint in the form of max crewed mission time, and gameplay loops revolving around mission planning, manned vs unmanned choices, supply and ISRU. Those can be interesting gameplay elements, but they are in direct opposition with the core intended gameplay loop which is to freely and goofily assembling vastly overpowered rocket components to play with the rocket equation, playing around with orbital mechanics, and landing on unreachable worlds. I'm quite confident that people expecting KSP 2 to have more in depth simulation/gameplay mechanisms than KSP 1 are going to be utterly disappointed. If anything, they will be vastly simplified.

It has been clearly stated that KSP 2 is about making a more accessible game but with vastly more content. Said otherwise, the stock game is all about exploring gorgeous planets, flying shiny interstellar engines and building humongous bases and stations. They will certainly put a lot of effort into making a smooth progression system to back that, but it's pretty certain that the "simulation gameplay" part will be simplified as far as they can without betraying too much the "grounded in real world/physics" premise.

Not only because such systems are getting in the way of the core gameplay loop, but also because they are very difficult to design, program and balance, especially if you want to satisfy the whole player base. No matter what the stock system is, there will be a bunch of mods proposing their own take on it, providing a much better fit for the various player demographics.