How many star systems do you think there will be in KSP 2?

[Crazy Inventor]

My guess is ten systems some of which are larger, some smaller, average being the kerbol system.

EDIT: after reading The Aziz's comment the guess has been reduced to 4 star systems.

Edited September 12, 2022 by Crazy Inventor

[The Aziz]

 

 

I'd read all these and pick an average.

 

 

[Guest]

How many times a new thread will be opened with this question?

[stephensmat]

I'm betting new systems will be DLC as we go. And I'm fine with that, if the Kerbol system is a decent game length.

[Deadmeat24]

5 hours ago, stephensmat said:

I'm betting new systems will be DLC as we go. And I'm fine with that, if the Kerbol system is a decent game length.

If they do add DLC star systems, I would also want them to progressively add free ones as well. The fact is, for a mostly exploration based rocket sim, new star systems add a LOT of content, you could end up with a situation where far more content in the game is locked behind DLC than what is in the actual base game. Then the game is essentially base game price+all the dlc prices, or base game price for a demo.

[darthgently]

DLC is good to keep the game funded, but I'm also hoping that new systems will also be very mod / planet pack, friendly.

Friendly to the point that actual stars in the skybox are assigned consistently to a system either via DLC or mod.  So modders would need to "register" an actual star, or wish list of actual stars, in the skybox, for their mod and there would be no conflict with DLC systems or other mods systems and a coherent map could emerge.  Perhaps closer systems could even be based on actual mod usage stats with DLCs getting priority?  Maybe the distance could simply depend on popularity of the mod.  I dunno.

Something though would be nice to sort out if multiuser is to make any sense and for the game to have some cohesion and continuity

[TLTay]

Two and a half.

[Strawberry]

For my extended take going into specifics of what I think the solar systems will look like check there, in short Id be shocked if the number isnt in between 4 to 7 solar systems just due to the fact there's only so many unique stars you can do. 

[gussi111]

Weren't all the new planets shown so far in a single star system? 

[Strawberry]

We only know of one solar system's name however I dont think it makes sense for there to be 9 planets in a single solar system (and if its true that lapat has life on it it wouldnt fit in Debdeb a young solar system).

[Rutabaga22]

I think they won't be able to make an entire galaxy 's worth of stars and stuff, so maybe they could have it so people can mod in star systems and the highest quality ones get added in.

[Pthigrivi]

9 hours ago, gussi111 said:

Weren't all the new planets shown so far in a single star system? 

There are probably a few planets like Lepat that are not in the Debdeb system. We are very likely at least getting 3 systems including Kerbol, but I personally don't expect more than 5 total. 

8 hours ago, Rutabaga22 said:

I think they won't be able to make an entire galaxy 's worth of stars and stuff, so maybe they could have it so people can mod in star systems and the highest quality ones get added in.

Certainly not a galaxy full. Even a few dozen sounds difficult to quality control, and excessive given travel times. My hope is that the stock planets establish a baseline level not just of quality of but playable detail--biomes, anomalies, really compelling terrain and content that makes planets worth visiting and exploring and not just essentially empty nothing like we find in KSP1 bodies. 

Edited September 13, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[farelinho]

I'd bet on 2 star systems:

1. That's all we've heard so far

2. The devs have made a big effort to focus their speeches on quality and uniqueness of all those planets presented to date, so I'm not expecting a bunch of random generated 'No Man's Sky' galaxy.

3. Since KSP 1, the goal was making distinct challenges out of each planet, getting progressively harder.  2 star systems can do that just fine.

4.  It's quite possible that the vast majority of players will spend a lot of game-play hours on these two systems.  I'm not a rocket scientist nor all-day intensive player, but it took me months of playing until I made a non catastrophic landing mission on Moho, and even then I had to send a rescue mission due to slightly optimistic deltaV calculations! With all the extras such as colonies, there is time to expand later on, without further delays to the launch date.

A third system would obviously be a very nice surprise!

[Guest]

1 hour ago, farelinho said:

It's quite possible that the vast majority of players will spend a lot of game-play hours on these two systems.  I'm not a rocket scientist nor all-day intensive player, but it took me months of playing until I made a non catastrophic landing mission on Moho, and even then I had to send a rescue mission due to slightly optimistic deltaV calculations! With all the extras such as colonies, there is time to expand later on, without further delays to the launch date.

This.
It takes months if not years to finish the exploration value of the Kerbolar system alone, and that's considering the boring and flat terrain of KSP1 not the improvements of KSP2 terrain system.

If they want to have a gameplay system that values huge amounts of solar system they would have to railroad new players away from chemical rockets and directly to the end game stuff, and even then exploration wouldn't be fast enough to make new solar system a viable product as DLCs.

Before asking to have as many solar system as games like NMS, Elite or the incoming Starfield remember that implicit in that request there is the requirement of making the flight model and jumping between planets and systems as simple, fast and dumbed down as those games.

I hope that there aren't more than 5 or 6 additional solar systems, because a number that high would mean that they designed the game around an easy progression. You can certainly help a lot of the players that never reached the Mun with tutorials and a bit of hand-holding, but to justify tons of star systems you would have to have most of those players travel to several of them in the time it usually takes a KSP1 player to figure out rendezvous and docking, and that is quite difficult to accomplish on tutorials and QOL improvements alone.

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, farelinho said:

Since KSP 1, the goal was making distinct challenges out of each planet, getting progressively harder. 

Which isn't the case now. In KSP2 it's about a unique challenge, not necessarily making it harder. Flying around Gurdamma doesn't have to be harder than navigating around Jool moons without hitting one. It's about Kerbin size, so it's familiar, but there's no oxygen so jets won't work. Donk appears closer than the Mun, so it's easier, but you have to worry about not getting close to the rings. Then of course there would be different challenges in Debdeb with varying difficulty, 

33 minutes ago, Master39 said:

It takes months if not years to finish the exploration value of the Kerbolar system alone,

Because you're only doing one thing at a time. And traversing the terrain can be difficult thanks to the way wheels work. Still, if you're refueling your grand tour ship in orbit with fuel extracted on the surface, you can't send a scout rover to investigate an anomaly at the same time. 

Being able to do many more things simultaneously will save tons of time.

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Because you're only doing one thing at a time. And traversing the terrain can be difficult thanks to the way wheels work. Still, if you're refueling your grand tour ship in orbit with fuel extracted on the surface, you can't send a scout rover to investigate an anomaly at the same time. 

Being able to do many more things simultaneously will save tons of time.

I'm not talking about a veteran speedrunning through a "land on every body" challenge.

I'm talking about a new-ish player exploring the game for their first few saves. Learning how to do things, playing with the progression. A "normal" playthrough.

 

The future economical success of the game being based on selling additional star systems requires the jumping between star system to be as trivial as landing on Mun is for most veteran KSP players.

[pandaman]

On release I'm going to take a guess at 3.  So 2 additional systems,  One of which will be 'older' and more established/stable with more bodies than  Kerbol.  The other quite 'new'  with fewer more quirky and challenging bodies.

[shdwlrd]

Does anyone want to hazard a guess to how many celestial bodies will be in each star system? Everybody is talking like there will be a dozen or more CB per system. Which is definitely possible, but doesn't seem likely.

Let's say there's 50 planets/moons. There can be a few large systems (10+ cb), or several smaller systems (<10 cb), or a mixture of the two. 

So it really depends on what the devs want to do. Do they want only a few external star systems or many star systems. Or they can surprise us with more CB and star systems than we ever would expect.

[The Aziz]

I suppose devs wouldn't want the stars to repeat either. We have typical, "yellow/white" main sequence star as Kerbol. I don't think too extreme main bodies would be a thing, at least from day 1, what else do we have? Red dwarf, blue and orange giant, red supergiant, white dwarf, maaaybe a brown dwarf (though an interesting planetary system around one is unlikely), neutron star and black hole are not something I'd have high hopes for. Binary system is most likely out of the question unless each star has its own planets and both stars orbit an artificial barycenter at sub-lightyear distance from each other.

So, 7 maaaybe 8, if we take all possibilities into account? That, times 7 ((dwarf) planets, which is what Kerbol has), equals around 50. Checks out. I'd be happy if I saw even 20 new bodies, that is a lot already.

[Strawberry]

For DebDeb we know of at least 3 planets (5 CB counting the moon of Donk and Glumo) that are a part of it, and Rusk and Rask is very likely a part of DebDeb system, so we're looking at 4 fully separate bodies and 7 CB,  Im personally guessing theres one or two more bodies in DebDeb we haven't seen. It's important to note that DebDeb was likely the only planned solar system pre first delay so Im pretty sure itll have the most celestial bodies because of that. Im guessing an average of 5 planets per system considering thats roughly equivalent to how many kerbol has. Just going off of what stars I think would make sense in terms of varied gameplay (DebDeb will likely be similar to kerbol's star precisely to have it not be too different as it's likely a "tutorial" system), would be a red dwarf for more precision + no solar, white dwarf for lots of radiation, and a supergiant to vastly increase the distance between planets. Also maybe a blue hypergiant to require you to basically use interstellar engines to transfer between planets before unlocking torchships and also deal with the extreme radiation from the hypergiant and maybe a brown dwarf with 3 moons or so that's basically there to be a fuel stop for interstellar engines.

Edited September 13, 2022 by Strawberry

[shdwlrd]

I doubt that the devs will have a different types of stars for each star system. I can see a possibility for a brown dwarf or a red giant for some variation, but I'm expecting mostly the typical yellow/white dwarf stars. I can't see a neutron or a singularity, or white giants.

[Pthigrivi]

Right near the beginning of the Interstellar vid they zoom out on what appears to be a ring/debris map of Gurdamma, and as they do we see circles indicating at least one other moon besides Donk, plus at least 4 other planets in the Debdeb system. One of these circles might be Char, and one (actually 2) might include both Rask and Rusk (it would make sense that these are in a young system. That would leave one more planet a little further away than Gurdamma and one last one that just appears past multiple debris belts. This last one may be Glumo, but it's possible Glumo is even further out. Id expect a big gas giant to clear much more of its local orbit than Gurdamma has.  It probably also has a couple other moons besides Merbel. Based on that Id expect at least 10 CB's in Debdeb and probably closer to 15, similar enough to Kerbol (16). If there were two other systems of similar scale that would give us probably 30-50 new bodies. That sounds like PLENTY to get us going. It'll probably take years to explore just that. 

Edited September 14, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Strawberry]

44 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

I doubt that the devs will have a different types of stars for each star system.

Actually making unique stars will probably be relatively easy (no having to deal with placing down resources and stuff, meaning art and game design is simplified a lot), but you can't have a solar system that only has 2 planets in it, which leads to making stars relatively cheap in terms of development but making solar systems really expensive, which means you want your stars to be as unique as possible, to not do so would be a massive waste of potential. Gurdamma will definitely be some sort of yellow star due to it being a young kerbol + very likely the first solar system people are expected to travel to, but the others will definitely be different.

16 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Right near the beginning of the Interstellar vid they zoom out on what appears to be a ring/debris map of Gurdamma

This is a really interesting thing Ive never noticed, Im guessing the order of planets for deb deb will be charr (self explanatory), rusk and rask (more metallic, makes sense for it to be more inwards), Gurdamma (young kerbol/earth analog, makes sense to be third planet), mystery planet (Skutt sorta fits for DebDeb , but I have a feeling its a different planet because I dont think theyd want to reveal all the planets for one system.) and Glumo.

A lot of celestial bodies for kerbol come from jool and I doubt there will be another 5 moon planet with the possible exception of a brown dwarf or if all the moons are captured bodies and have really messed up and varied orbitals just because that's already jools thing so there's not much of a point in doing it again. Considering DebDeb was likely was initially planned to be the only solar system it likely has more then the other new solar systems but I doubt itll have as much as kerbol. I'd be shocked if the average amount of CB for new solar systems is greater then 10, honestly I'm guessing per solar system itll be an average of 5 planets and 3 moons per system. 

[shdwlrd]

4 hours ago, Strawberry said:

Actually making unique stars will probably be relatively easy (no having to deal with placing down resources and stuff, meaning art and game design is simplified a lot), but you can't have a solar system that only has 2 planets in it, which leads to making stars relatively cheap in terms of development but making solar systems really expensive, which means you want your stars to be as unique as possible, to not do so would be a massive waste of potential. Gurdamma will definitely be some sort of yellow star due to it being a young kerbol + very likely the first solar system people are expected to travel to, but the others will definitely be different.

Oh, it would be easy to create different types of stars, art wise. But being scientific accurate to what we know about star distribution, the smaller cooler dwarves are much more common than giants. I mean a total of about 4% is much higher than the .000001% for giant stars. Just food for thought.

[The Aziz]

And yet we have in our own neighborhood a couple of bright white main sequence stars, and a white dwarf. Even a giant if we look a bit further out (30 or so ly). The absence of anything else nearby is because of our timeline, we still have to wait ~4billion years for our sun to turn into a red giant for example. Maybe Kerbals are lucky and they have somewhere an old star system with a big, old star near the end of its life. Now it occured to me that planetary systems around supergiants are unlikely, these stars live too short for anything sensible and interesting to form around them.