Being able to collect/drill the seafloor

[Strawberry]

One thing I liked about ksp1 is that through clever engineering through the use of things like ore tanks you could sink to the bottom, however there was really no reason to do this. If you could collect samples from the seafloor this would open a lot of mission possibilities and promote clever engineering (One thing that would be good with this would be scaling water pressure to where you get less buoyant the deeper you go). Also I think the bottom of oceans being rich in ores/fuels would open up a lot of interesting design possibilities as well, and promote using your parts in a clever way. You shouldnt even really need many new parts to facilitate this (nor do I think there should be parts specifically to do this, part of the fun of doing this is using the already existing parts in clever ways), assuming ksp2 has propellers theyd be excellent for undersea travel and if there's fluid tanks for transferring fluids you could use these to simulate ballasts. 

Edited September 3, 2022 by Strawberry

[intelliCom]

At the very least, being able to perform research at the depths of the sea floor would be pretty interesting; studying the ocean floors of other planets provides decent potential for research, and it's never really been done before, so...

Edited September 3, 2022 by intelliCom

[Strawberry]

What if the bottom of eve's ocean was relatively cool and it made a good place to build a colony for living and some mining but not much else, thus promoting you having surface colonies for power generation and trade but having the bulk of your people live undersea

[Ember12]

On 9/3/2022 at 8:29 AM, Strawberry said:

What if the bottom of eve's ocean was relatively cool and it made a good place to build a colony for living and some mining but not much else, thus promoting you having surface colonies for power generation and trade but having the bulk of your people live undersea

I don't understand the thermodynamics of this, but it makes a lot more sense than Laythe.

[Strawberry]

2 hours ago, Ember12 said:

I don't understand the thermodynamics of this, but it makes a lot more sense than Laythe.

The runaway reaction that lead to Eve's thick atmosphere and temperatures is relatively recent leading to an odd situation to where underground/undersea is actually cooler then the surface of Eve.

(unrelated but what if eve went through more extreme Milankovitch cycles and fluctuated from relatively cold scape to the Eve we see now every several ten thousand years or so.)

Edited September 4, 2022 by Strawberry

[Axelord FTW]

The operating word here being relatively.

Sure, for the exploration. Boldly go, etc. etc. But Eve is a deathworld, and not the HFY kind.

[pandaman]

In principle sea floors etc are just as valid targets  for exploration as anywhere else, they can just pose a more difficult challenge.  So yes they IMO they should  be as interesting as anywhere else and appropriate 'tools' made available at appropriate points in the tech tree/progression .

[JadeOfMaar]

On 9/3/2022 at 11:20 AM, Strawberry said:

One thing I liked about ksp1 is that through clever engineering through the use of things like ore tanks you could sink to the bottom, however there was really no reason to do this. If you could collect samples from the seafloor this would open a lot of mission possibilities and promote clever engineering (One thing that would be good with this would be scaling water pressure to where you get less buoyant the deeper you go). Also I think the bottom of oceans being rich in ores/fuels would open up a lot of interesting design possibilities as well, and promote using your parts in a clever way. You shouldnt even really need many new parts to facilitate this (nor do I think there should be parts specifically to do this, part of the fun of doing this is using the already existing parts in clever ways), assuming ksp2 has propellers theyd be excellent for undersea travel and if there's fluid tanks for transferring fluids you could use these to simulate ballasts. 

Buoyancy

Is there a formula or law of physics where buoyancy decreases as pressure decreases? I feel that, instead of inventing or hunting down some kind of logic, KSP2 should do unlike KSP1 and at least don't have max buoyancy by default. In my mod "Rational Hydrodynamics" I patch kerbals and crewed parts to have values around 0.7, and heavy metal things like nuclear reactors and their tanks, and engines, to have roughly 0.3. I'd rather not have to resort to that (filtering parts and giving them different numbers based on these filters) but if I just give everything the same value then some things like engines and heavy metal tanks would still easily float... or crewed parts, lift surfaces and kerbals would sink too easily and they shouldn't.

Just that one thing would make submersible engineering so much easier. Every fuel tank (not just the Ore tanks) should naturally easily be usable as a ballast tank. How much you need to fill it only depends on the density of the tank (its dry mass vs volume) and the mass of the fluid (if not the sea water) or expendable or transferrable solid to be used for ballast.

ISRU

Adding rare resource hotspots to sea floors is one of, I think, the three great things that can be done to draw players in (the other two being ease of buoyancy control and science opportunities). If buoyancy ceases to be an absolute pain then a lot more players will actually build to dive and will actually approach the sea floor with something bigger than a bare minimum science shuttle.

Except for ocean worlds (where there's no dry land) how would you approach resource placement?

[Strawberry]

1 hour ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Adding rare resource hotspots to sea floors is one of, I think, the three great things that can be done to draw players in (the other two being ease of buoyancy control and science opportunities). If buoyancy ceases to be an absolute pain then a lot more players will actually build to dive and will actually approach the sea floor with something bigger than a bare minimum science shuttle.

Except for ocean worlds (where there's no dry land) how would you approach resource placement?

Id imagine there'd be some sort of mining scanner that would tell you where resources are, that way people dont need to send a submarine everywhere to find a bundle of deep sea nodules to mine. If there was an ocean planet Id imagine itd be similar.

[JadeOfMaar]

21 minutes ago, Strawberry said:

some sort of mining scanner

That won't be too necesary. SCANsat for KSP1 shows what's in the sea floor. It doesn't care that there's water (or whatever) and atmosphere in the way.

Detecting what's in the sea, and harvesting that, are another story.

[t_v]

1 hour ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Buoyancy

Is there a formula or law of physics where buoyancy decreases as pressure decreases? I feel that, instead of inventing or hunting down some kind of logic, KSP2 should do unlike KSP1 and at least don't have max buoyancy by default.

In non-compressible liquids, the density of the liquid is constant, so buoyancy will work the same at any point below the surface. In compressible liquids, this is different, but liquids such as Water, Mercury, and Methane are not compressible enough to make a significant difference at ocean depths. I definitely think that having better buoyancy values and calculations is better (something that a voxel based model would help with), but the density of the oceans should not change with depth. 

[Ember12]

41 minutes ago, t_v said:

I definitely think that having better buoyancy values and calculations is better (something that a voxel based model would help with), but the density of the oceans should not change with depth. 

The density of Earth's oceans  do change slightly with depth, because of small differences in salinity.  This difference is only on the order of centigrams/cm^3, so it doesn't effect buoyancy much, but alien oceans could potentially have much steeper changes.  

Edited September 17, 2022 by Ember12

[t_v]

52 minutes ago, Ember12 said:

The density of Earth's oceans  do change slightly with depth, because of small differences in salinity.  This difference is only on the order of centigrams/cm^3, so it doesn't effect buoyancy much, but alien oceans could potentially have much steeper changes.  

This is sort of what I meant, that the differences would be small enough to be worth not simulating. I'd like to know of what sort of oceans you would see in space that are either highly compressible or have strong gradients of other materials in them. I'm sure that there are some and I don't want to pressure you to find them, I am genuinely curious. 

[Ember12]

15 hours ago, t_v said:

This is sort of what I meant, that the differences would be small enough to be worth not simulating. I'd like to know of what sort of oceans you would see in space that are either highly compressible or have strong gradients of other materials in them. I'm sure that there are some and I don't want to pressure you to find them, I am genuinely curious.

I'm not an oceanographer, so all of this just represents my brief (non-Wikipedia, but still) internet research.  Apparently, the salinity of the ocean at the surface varies between 33 and 37 grams per kilogram of salt.  Two factors that influence that are a) precipitation and evaporation, and b) proximity to freshwater sources like rivers.  High-salinity water, being slightly heavier, sinks, so lower layers of water are usually slightly denser than those above them.  

If I had to made something up that would increase this difference, I'd say that if you had a watery world with a lot of salt, humidity and precipitation, the surface water would be continually freshened while the large amounts of salt would concentrate deeper down.  

EDIT: I just realized that, obviously, there have to be large amounts of evaporation somewhere to keep up a lot of precipitation.  So on a world like this, there would be places where lots of evaporating surface seawater would decrease the salinity differential. 

Edited September 18, 2022 by Ember12