Life support - a hard or soft limitation?

[Redneck]

I like this thread. And turning my KSP2 into a type of realistic flight sim has always appealed to me. Failures are indeed a part of that. It could be a structural failure, electrical, life support, or just making bad decisions . Either way i think all play a part in the real world so why not in KSP? I vote yes on all the above with the option of course to have the freedom to turn them off as well. Space is hard and i want that aspect or feel in my game as well. I would also like the ability to mod the 3d Kerbals model with modern day astronaut 3d models which we could not do in KSP1 (sorry kerbal lovers but thats just me. No hate please!) 

[SciMan]

I can totally understand wanting to be able to replace the 3d model of a Kerbal crew member with a human astronaut model.

I intend to try out RSS/RO (or whatever it ends up being called in KSP 2), and that kind of feature would further put me into the world of such a modded game being maybe only a few conceptual leaps away from giving me the same kind of experience that I got when I played Orbiter Space Flight Simulator so many years ago (Hail Probe!)

In fact, I didn't learn how to dock or precision land on a landing pad in KSP at all. Instead, I carried many of my space flight skills over from my many, many hours playing Orbiter pretty much every day after school after I had discovered it.

Apparently, that software is still going, I think it got an update in 2016 which is recent enough that modern computers should be able to run it. No idea if any of the older mods are still out for download or even maintained anymore. I would also be utterly unsurprised if many of the well-known KSP mod authors had authored mods for Orbiter as well, despite them using different kinds of authoring tools (However, Blender and/or Maya are still in common between them I think, it's just a matter of what format do you choose to spit out the created 3d models).

But KSP 2 with a RSS/RO type mod pack would be a truly incredible experience I think, and from what I've seen on YouTube regarding SOME creator's approach to playing KSP RSS/RO, it doesn't have to be any less silly than "normal" scale KSP. You can still make a rocket that is 5x taller than the VAB (or more!) and then launch it and see if it explodes on launch or not. Surprisingly, this is even possible without using too many parts, thanks to RSS/RO's inclusion of the procedural parts mod and Tweakscale. The only potential problem happens when the numbers representing the forces involved get too large and you start encountering floating-point errors once again (the old Kraken comes back on creations large enough, even without SAS, simply because of the nature of Unity joints).

And to be honest, making rockets that are so large you have to build them in the Chesapeake Bay and then tow them out to sea (converting a large section of the causeway that crosses it into a pontoon bridge that can easily and quickly be moved out of the way of such a massive construction) for launch is the kind of thing I've been imagining when I imagine KSP 2, because how else are you going to use a sane number of launches to build something in orbit?

EDIT: Of course, with such a KSP 2 RSS/RO mod pack, either the stock life support would have to be "good enough" or be easy to turn off entirely in favor of something added by a mod in the mod pack for KSP 2 RSS/RO.

Edited August 30, 2022 by SciMan