How do we think Communications will be handled?

[GoldForest]

My guess is that communications will be handled one of two ways:

A) Communications will be split into 2 categories: Probe control and transmissions. No one wants to play KSP with communication delay, but at the same time, it would be nice to introduce it since KSP 2 wants to teach kids, and even adults, about space travel. And communication is a key part of that. So, I think they will implement a two-pronged system.
-Probe control: Sending commands to a probe and waiting for it to react to them would be no fun, so probe control will remain instant.
-Transmissions: They will implement delay for this, mainly in the terms of science transmission. If you're far from Kerbin, you will beam the science report to Kerbin, but you won't receive science or data from it until it reaches Kerbin. So, like Kerbin to Duna, let's say the journey for a transmission is 5 to 20 minutes (Like IRL Earth and Mars). You will have to wait for the science report to reach Kerbin from Duna. Of course, this is barring any colony. With colonies, you will just beam the transmission to the colony or Kerbin, whichever happens to be faster/closer.

Of course, there will be difficulty sliders to change this. Don't want to wait? Bam, instant transmission. Want more difficulty? Turn on line of sight transmission, like in KSP 1. 

B) Everything is instant, just like KSP 1. 

I imagine that they will do it the route of A, just to teach since they want KSP 2 to be a teaching game as well as a simulation game. Of course, I imagine if they don't, someone will come up with a mod to introduce communication delay. 

[Guest]

I think educational games goes like the training montage of Kung Fu Panda, when Devs concentrate on making a good educational game, they always fail.

The only good educational games are accidentally so.

I'm all in favour of transmission delay for data (not control!) but only if it's part of a gameplay system or gameplay loop.

Realism for the sake of realism or educational content will onlyake the game worse at being a game.

[SciMan]

Agreed, that's the same problem Life Support has. What purpose is there to the added realism? What perceived benefit?

We don't need an "enforced iron-man" game mode, as the default game mode, that's what I'm trying to say.

And as much as it's a minor step, putting communication delay of ANY sort into KSP 2 would in fact be a step towards that.

If it's an option that's default off, and if that's the case you can bet every cent you have that 90% of players won't touch that option, why even code it in the first place, especially when you have to hold it to such a high standard as the rest of the game?

Same with life support, aside from being "realistic" what benefit do you gain from preventing the player from sending someone on an interstellar voyage on an external command seat? Not really any benefit that I see, aside from a "you must play my personal own way not your way" kind of message, that I don't think KSP 2 is trying to send.
KSP 2 is trying to tell you to work with the laws of physics, it's not trying to enforce a standardized interstellar vessel design guide, you know? Each player has to come up with their own standards, (or not!) it's totally up to them.

Part of KSP 1's charm is in fact the fact that you CAN do these very "unrealistic" things that a life support system (or communications delay) would prevent.

And if it's only the science transmission that gets delayed, then why would the player not just time warp thru the delay, introducing a waste of time that doesn't actually gain the player anything that they wouldn't have if the transmission completed instantly?

Perhaps an analogy is in order:
Nobody likes having to wait to play with their new toys, right?
Some of you reading this might know that feeling of being told you can't unwrap your winter holiday presents until after the winter holiday dinner.
I know that as a kid if I was told to do that, and I was physically prevented from unwrapping my presents, I'd throw the mother of all temper tantrums.
Even today, if I was told to wait and I saw other people unwrapping presents, I'd start unwrapping my presents, and I wouldn't have a care as to what words my parents said to me regarding "don't do that yet".
This isn't because I'm an entitled brat.
This is because to a kid, the word "wait" means the same as the word "no", and I know my little kid brain would have been thinking "my parents always say no to my fun ideas, so I'm just going to skip the step where I ask and do what I want anyways", despite me now with my adult brain having a good understanding of why they won't for instance "let me play with matches" or "eat the tide pods" or "play with dad's gun" or something else that when I was a kid I thought might be fun, but my parents back then knew that those activities would actually either harm me or destroy things that are valuable to either myself or my parents, so they were forced to say "no" to a lot of things because kids are not logical thinkers.

Well, let's say now you're playing KSP 2, and you've just finished a big mission to a distant planet, and you want to send the results home to unlock more parts to use on the next mission to another planet.
".... What do you mean I have to wait for the message to get here?"
(inner kid comes out)
"I wanna play with my new toys!"
"This game sucks!"
"I want a refund!"
"Who cares that science says that signals travel at the speed of light, I read somewhere that the Kerbol solar system is 10x smaller than the IRL solar system, so the speed of light delay should be 10x lower, right?"
.... "Are you kidding me, they ALSO lowered the speed of light by 10x? That just breaks MORE laws of physics!"
"This whole game is full of arbitrary and unrealistic design decisions that just force me to waste the limited time I have available to play it!"
"I'm never playing this again and I'm telling all my friends that we'll just go play some other (less realistic) space game instead, or who knows, we might just play Minecraft or Fortnite anyways because it was already incredibly hard to convince my friends to even look at this game because they saw it and all they saw was a bunch of 'math homework'"

Point is, raising kids is hard (which is why I'm never having them), and video games make terrible parents

So don't make players wait to use the science data they just transmitted from the mission they spent so much effort piloting, which just wastes their precious (irl) play time.

As much as time warp helps, it still takes a few real-life seconds to warp 5-20 minutes in-game. And that only gets worse with increasing signal delay.

This is one of the things KSP got right the first time, and it shouldn't mess with it. Because if they DO mess with it, you just know that there's VERY quickly going to be a mod released that removes that gameplay mechanic entirely, and it's gonna be VERY popular.

EDIT: I guess that puts me firmly in the camp of "option B: No delay for anything" being the option that will most likely be put into the game.

This is very much something that should be left to the modders.

On a side note, there's only one way to include CONTROL signal delay. And that's if you have the rule that "presence of a crew removes signal delay entirely, and probe cores can have sequences of commands uploaded to them to allow for them to complete things despite the signal delay".

That's basically how Remotetech (of it's various versions) worked, it's how you have to play RSS-RO/RP-1, and to be honest it's not that bad.
But it requires something else to be coded, and that kinda kills the whole idea. It requires the includsion of a full-featured autopilot, similar to (and likely superior to) MechJeb. Otherwise, you're pretty much left fumbling in the dark, fighting against game mechanics that bring far more tedium and pain than they bring joy and fulfillment.

Edited October 28, 2022 by SciMan

[regex]

Quote

-Transmissions: They will implement delay for this, mainly in the terms of science transmission. If you're far from Kerbin, you will beam the science report to Kerbin, but you won't receive science or data from it until it reaches Kerbin. So, like Kerbin to Duna, let's say the journey for a transmission is 5 to 20 minutes (Like IRL Earth and Mars). You will have to wait for the science report to reach Kerbin from Duna. Of course, this is barring any colony. With colonies, you will just beam the transmission to the colony or Kerbin, whichever happens to be faster/closer.

Time warp -> How does this actually affect my game?

[SciMan]

It makes the player click more buttons, and use a few more seconds or minutes, for no added benefit (IMO).

[Guest]

59 minutes ago, SciMan said:

Agreed, that's the same problem Life Support has. What purpose is there to the added realism? What perceived benefit?

We don't need an "enforced iron-man" game mode, as the default game mode, that's what I'm trying to say.

And as much as it's a minor step, putting communication delay of ANY sort into KSP 2 would in fact be a step towards that.

If it's an option that's default off, and if that's the case you can bet every cent you have that 90% of players won't touch that option, why even code it in the first place, especially when you have to hold it to such a high standard as the rest of the game?

The same reasoning can be applied to orbital mechanics.

 

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

Not really any benefit that I see, aside from a "you must play my personal own way not your way" kind of message, that I don't think KSP 2 is trying to send.

That's a message you automatically send the moment you write the very first line of your very first game.

That's basically the definition of a game developer.

 

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

And if it's only the science transmission that gets delayed, then why would the player not just time warp thru the delay, introducing a waste of time that doesn't actually gain the player anything that they wouldn't have if the transmission completed instantly?

For the same reason people usually don't timewarp through research in literally every strategy and city builder out there. There's gameplay happening between you and the end of the waiting time.

Games have had timewarp and time-delayed gameplay ever since Transporter Tycoon was released in '94 (probably even earlier).

 

 

As for the rest of it was for your line of reasoning KSP2 would just be a PNG with "YOU WIN!" Written in a bold, reassuring font.

[Pthigrivi]

On 10/27/2022 at 12:37 AM, GoldForest said:

-Transmissions: They will implement delay for this, mainly in the terms of science transmission. If you're far from Kerbin, you will beam the science report to Kerbin, but you won't receive science or data from it until it reaches Kerbin. So, like Kerbin to Duna, let's say the journey for a transmission is 5 to 20 minutes (Like IRL Earth and Mars). You will have to wait for the science report to reach Kerbin from Duna. Of course, this is barring any colony. With colonies, you will just beam the transmission to the colony or Kerbin, whichever happens to be faster/closer.

This has been brought up before and I don’t personally see any reason for it to be. At some point when science arrives (somewhere?) you want exactly one screen in which you unlock new parts. You don’t want to unlock new parts at one colony and then wait for the speed of light to unlock that part again somewhere else. Its a recipe for confusion and wasted time with no real benefit. 
 

There are definitely interesting questions about transmission: when you can transmit, how much energy it costs, whether you can transmit slowly and partially, but the speed of light questions are better left to mods. 

[mcwaffles2003]

On 10/27/2022 at 12:43 AM, Master39 said:

The only good educational games are accidentally so.

Jumpstart went pretty hard in the 90's for me, just sayin

 

 

[SciMan]

On 10/28/2022 at 5:27 PM, Master39 said:

The same reasoning can be applied to orbital mechanics.

 

That's a message you automatically send the moment you write the very first line of your very first game.

That's basically the definition of a game developer.

 

For the same reason people usually don't timewarp through research in literally every strategy and city builder out there. There's gameplay happening between you and the end of the waiting time.

Games have had timewarp and time-delayed gameplay ever since Transporter Tycoon was released in '94 (probably even earlier).

 

 

As for the rest of it was for your line of reasoning KSP2 would just be a PNG with "YOU WIN!" Written in a bold, reassuring font.

I'm sorry, but you're going to have to elaborate on your points a little bit better than that. Because right now, all I see is you saying "I don't agree" with every single point I mentioned, without making note of "why" you think that way, or "how is that wrong".

For instance, when you say that the same reasoning can be applied to orbital mechanics. Maybe you're misinterpreting my statement, I'll admit it was quite vague.
I disagree with you saying that you can apply the same reasoning. But the reason is this. Life support as a game mechanic is very hard to implement in a way that isn't "purely punitive".
In other words, what do you get for having a working life support system on your vessel when it needs one? Your crew doesn't die. That's it, that's all you get, you get no "benefit", you just "don't get punished". That's not fun to me, and I doubt it's fun to many other people either. Now I get how that could be applied to craft design, because for instance if you build a gigantic fairing on the front of your rocket and you don't put large fins on the bottom of the rocket, it's gonna flip out and probably crash.
But I don't get how that can be applied to orbital mechanics. Well, I guess I see a few ways that invalidate it is what I'm trying to say. What do you get for not putting enough fuel on your rocket, you don't get to space, yeah that's a point for you. But what do you get if you ignore orbital mechanics and you just build a gigantic high power rocket that can just burn towards the target for half the journey and burn to slow down for half the journey? You've ignored orbital mechanics again, but this time you achieved your mission goals, so that's the way I see that you can't apply the "it's only ever neutral or not fun" logic to orbital mechanics.

When I said that I didn't like the "you must play my way and not your way" kind of message that some of those choices I mentioned seem to imply, I didn't mean "someone might want to play a different video game entirely" like you seem to have interpreted it.
Instead, I meant that KSP 2, like KSP 1 before it, is going to be a sandboxed game focused on enabling player creativity, and a "only punish, never reward" type system is a system that restricts player creativity more than I think is warranted.

When I said "why wouldn't people just time warp thru the signal delay", well you may have said there's other things going on, but that's not a 100% true fact, it's an assumption.
There are cases where you're stuck without anything else to do and all you can do is just time warp thru that signal delay, and that doesn't sound like fun to me.

As for your final statement, well I'll be slightly blunt, since it looks to me like you were similarly blunt. I don't see what your line of reasoning is to be able to reduce the entirety of that multi-faceted statement to such a simple thing as an "i win button" type game. To be honest, it strikes me as slightly offensive. I am aware of the "reduce to an absurdity" format of some logical arguments, but at the same time in this case I'll simply reject it unless you can go into more detail on how you've reduced my argument to that point, hopefully over the course of several steps. In other words, "Show your work".
EDIT: If the "show your work" line of argument fails, I'm going to just have to agree to disagree, as I've realized that we're just comparing opinions, not facts.
EDIT 2: Additionally, if we were able to reduce such a game to that PNG of "you win" as you mention, well that's obviously not a game, and nobody with any kind of sense would pay $50 for it. The "theoretical simplest game" isn't a game. IDK what it is, but it's not enough of a game to be a game, even if it meets the established requirements for "a game". Because that's the problem with defining what a game is, for every time you change the definitions, I could make a "different game" that doesn't "feel like a game". That's what happens when you try to use numbers to describe things that are better described with words or feelings.

Edited November 1, 2022 by SciMan

[Guest]

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

I'm sorry, but you're going to have to elaborate on your points a little bit better than that. Because right now, all I see is you saying "I don't agree" with every single point I mentioned, without making note of "why" you think that way, or "how is that wrong".

For instance, when you say that the same reasoning can be applied to orbital mechanics. Maybe you're misinterpreting my statement, I'll admit it was quite vague.
I disagree with you saying that you can apply the same reasoning. But the reason is this. Life support as a game mechanic is very hard to implement in a way that isn't "purely punitive".
In other words, what do you get for having a working life support system on your vessel when it needs one? Your crew doesn't die. That's it, that's all you get, you get no "benefit", you just "don't get punished". That's not fun to me, and I doubt it's fun to many other people either. Now I get how that could be applied to craft design, because for instance if you build a gigantic fairing on the front of your rocket and you don't put large fins on the bottom of the rocket, it's gonna flip out and probably crash.
But I don't get how that can be applied to orbital mechanics. Well, I guess I see a few ways that invalidate it is what I'm trying to say. What do you get for not putting enough fuel on your rocket, you don't get to space, yeah that's a point for you. But what do you get if you ignore orbital mechanics and you just build a gigantic high power rocket that can just burn towards the target for half the journey and burn to slow down for half the journey? You've ignored orbital mechanics again, but this time you achieved your mission goals, so that's the way I see that you can't apply the "it's only ever neutral or not fun" logic to orbital mechanics.

When I said that I didn't like the "you must play my way and not your way" kind of message that some of those choices I mentioned seem to imply, I didn't mean "someone might want to play a different video game entirely" like you seem to have interpreted it.
Instead, I meant that KSP 2, like KSP 1 before it, is going to be a sandboxed game focused on enabling player creativity, and a "only punish, never reward" type system is a system that restricts player creativity more than I think is warranted.

When I said "why wouldn't people just time warp thru the signal delay", well you may have said there's other things going on, but that's not a 100% true fact, it's an assumption.
There are cases where you're stuck without anything else to do and all you can do is just time warp thru that signal delay, and that doesn't sound like fun to me.

As for your final statement, well I'll be slightly blunt, since it looks to me like you were similarly blunt. I don't see what your line of reasoning is to be able to reduce the entirety of that multi-faceted statement to such a simple thing as an "i win button" type game. To be honest, it strikes me as slightly offensive. I am aware of the "reduce to an absurdity" format of some logical arguments, but at the same time in this case I'll simply reject it unless you can go into more detail on how you've reduced my argument to that point, hopefully over the course of several steps. In other words, "Show your work".
EDIT: If the "show your work" line of argument fails, I'm going to just have to agree to disagree, as I've realized that we're just comparing opinions, not facts.
EDIT 2: Additionally, if we were able to reduce such a game to that PNG of "you win" as you mention, well that's obviously not a game, and nobody with any kind of sense would pay $50 for it. The "theoretical simplest game" isn't a game. IDK what it is, but it's not enough of a game to be a game, even if it meets the established requirements for "a game". Because that's the problem with defining what a game is, for every time you change the definitions, I could make a "different game" that doesn't "feel like a game". That's what happens when you try to use numbers to describe things that are better described with words or feelings.

Your way of defining a "punitive" gameplay element is entirely arbitrary and based on how you personally like to play the game. Once we remove your personal preference from your argument they can be applied to every other gameplay system, existent, proposed or planned.

You're just labeling every possible new gameplay loop or challenge as "punitive", if things like reentry heating, commnet, and things exploding on impact weren't already gameplay elements for KSP1 you would label those as "too punitive and not fun" too.

By your standard every obstacle and piece of gameplay between you and that imaginary "you win!" screen can be considered a useless and punitive delay. 

 

You asking to do interstellar missions on an external seat makes just as much sense as anyone asking to have a TARDIS and be able to directly materialize on the surface of a planet in another star system, everything in the middle is going to be timewarped away anyway isn't it?

 

Frankly speaking the challenge of interstellar manned travel is 99% in the "keeping that crew alive" department, if that's not a problem you can just put a jumbo tank with an external seat and a single terrier engine in orbit and get to the other solar system with chemical rockets and by timewarping a couple of million years away.

If KSP2 doesn't have a way of representing the true challenge and distances involved in such a voyage then they may as well drop the facade and add curvature drives, wormhole, hyperspace and other sci-fi technologies.

[Axelord FTW]

On 10/27/2022 at 12:37 AM, GoldForest said:

-Probe control: Sending commands to a probe and waiting for it to react to them would be no fun, so probe control will remain instant.

I'm sorry, but light lag brings complexity and raise the skill bar. 100% fun zone.

From a balance perspective, I hope light lag plays counter to life support. I'm thinking LS will be part of vanilla KSP2 to some extent, considering its scope, but if light lag isn't a thing I'm definitely waiting for a mod to bring it in.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Axelord FTW

[GoldForest]

11 minutes ago, Axelord FTW said:

I'm sorry, but light lag brings complexity and raise the skill bar. 100% fun zone.

From a balance perspective, I hope light lag plays counter to life support.

Not fun for new players or players who don't want to program their probe to do a course correction and hope it goes well. 

If people want command and control lag, then leave it as a default off option in the difficulty settings.

[MarcAbaddon]

Probe control with a delay could easily be a mess. If you don't allow programming the probe in advance then it becomes almost impossible to actually land them somewhere, but if you have to program them then in order to play the game as a newcomer you have to learn not only orbital mechanics but also basic programming skills on top of that. I have my doubts that this is a worthwhile addition, except when added for mods or higher difficulty levels for those who get bored with the core parts of the game.

Honestly, I don't even think it really adds realism. Just consider that when you fly the probe that you are essential the piloting program reacting to sensory inputs - the same way as you don't have to relay orders to Jeb for him to execute. When flying you are playing Jeb. 

As for light lag for things like transmitting science, it seems to not really matter much when in the Kerbin system, but afterwards it would. But is waiting 4 years for your science to arrive really that interesting of a gameplay element?

[GoldForest]

41 minutes ago, MarcAbaddon said:

Probe control with a delay could easily be a mess. If you don't allow programming the probe in advance then it becomes almost impossible to actually land them somewhere, but if you have to program them then in order to play the game as a newcomer you have to learn not only orbital mechanics but also basic programming skills on top of that. I have my doubts that this is a worthwhile addition, except when added for mods or higher difficulty levels for those who get bored with the core parts of the game.

Honestly, I don't even think it really adds realism. Just consider that when you fly the probe that you are essential the piloting program reacting to sensory inputs - the same way as you don't have to relay orders to Jeb for him to execute. When flying you are playing Jeb. 

As for light lag for things like transmitting science, it seems to not really matter much when in the Kerbin system, but afterwards it would. But is waiting 4 years for your science to arrive really that interesting of a gameplay element?

I imagine that colonies can serve to recieve and process science, so if you setup a science colony on Eeloo, or put orbital colonies outside of Eeloo in an evenly spread-out fashion, then the science would go to them and take maybe a year instead of four. 

I think it would be kind of nice to have delayed science, making it to where you have to plan out your career path more carefully instead of going, "Yay, science, unlock all the nodes now!"

[MarcAbaddon]

Maybe.

But I even struggle a bit with having light speed lag from a theoretical perspective, since light behaving the way it goes it basically a relativistic phenomena and KSP doesn't simulate that.

Likely most of the time your vessel will not move at speeds where it matters much, but given that KSP is Newtonian should the signal from a vessel moving towards you at a speed of 0.1c have a speed of 1.1c? Should you be able to overtake a signal if you somehow manage to travel at > 1.0 c? Neither of this is possible in the real universe, but KSP doesn't implement those physical laws. This undermines the education appeal for me -you might end up teaching some very inconsistent ideas. 

Instantaneous signals somehow seem more consistent with the rest of the game physics. 

[GoldForest]

27 minutes ago, MarcAbaddon said:

Maybe.

But I even struggle a bit with having light speed lag from a theoretical perspective, since light behaving the way it goes it basically a relativistic phenomena and KSP doesn't simulate that.

Likely most of the time your vessel will not move at speeds where it matters much, but given that KSP is Newtonian should the signal from a vessel moving towards you at a speed of 0.1c have a speed of 1.1c? Should you be able to overtake a signal if you somehow manage to travel at > 1.0 c? Neither of this is possible in the real universe, but KSP doesn't implement those physical laws. This undermines the education appeal for me -you might end up teaching some very inconsistent ideas. 

Instantaneous signals somehow seem more consistent with the rest of the game physics. 

I'm not advocating for breaking the laws that govern light, just transmission delay. 

[MarcAbaddon]

1 minute ago, GoldForest said:

I'm not advocating for breaking the laws that govern light, just transmission delay. 

But how are you going to calculate the transmission delay? It'll be either inconsistent with the rest of KSP physics or with relativity. 

[GoldForest]

3 minutes ago, MarcAbaddon said:

But how are you going to calculate the transmission delay? It'll be either inconsistent with the rest of KSP physics or with relativity. 

It's simple. 

(Distance to KSC or nearest science processing colony/station in meters) / (speed of light in m/s) = (Time it takes for Science to arrive)

Edited November 2, 2022 by GoldForest

[Vl3d]

On 10/28/2022 at 11:05 PM, SciMan said:

It makes the player click more buttons, and use a few more seconds or minutes, for no added benefit (IMO).

Wow, a short SciMan comment!

[SciMan]

It appears my reputation precedes me. Oh well.

I usually have a lot to say about something, but that one, well I had basically already said mostly the same thing above it so I didn't feel the need to expand on it even further.

[GoldForest]

Okay, so I just realized something, and instead of starting a new thread, I'm just going to add it on to this one since it is pretty much on topic.

So, I just realized that we don't know anything about communications technology. Obvious we'll need new tech, but what are they going to give us? What's possible in the 'near future' and isn't 'magic'?

Daedalus was supposedly going to act as a laser transmission antenna when not in use for propulsion, or something to the effect, don't remember the exact details. MEV for KSP 1 mimics this by giving the Daedalus engine comms capability. I'm hoping that KSP 2 will mimic this as well, allowing for lightspeed transmission. Other than that, what other possible methods will we see from Intercept Games? Or is optical communication the best that can be done outside of wormholes, "subspace" and the like? If optical is the best, I'm assuming we'll see different levels of optical communication dishes?

[MK2-DroneCore]

why we will need remoted control? Maybe a KOS like operate system is better.

You may not be able to remote your MarsRover instantly, You will need to update its software after 20 minute's transmit delay. That will be fun(Espacilly for a Programmer like me!)

[Guest]

4 hours ago, MK2-DroneCore said:

why we will need remoted control? Maybe a KOS like operate system is better.

You may not be able to remote your MarsRover instantly, You will need to update its software after 20 minute's transmit delay. That will be fun(Espacilly for a Programmer like me!)

You can program and make completely autonomous missions even without signal delay.

[Bej Kerman]

On 11/2/2022 at 12:16 PM, MarcAbaddon said:

As for light lag for things like transmitting science, it seems to not really matter much when in the Kerbin system, but afterwards it would. But is waiting 4 years for your science to arrive really that interesting of a gameplay element?

The devs said they want you to feel the size of a light year, and it's not like it matters if some backwater Betelgeuse colony doesn't immediately get a technology you unlocked at Alpha Centauri and will primarily use there anyway.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Bej Kerman

[Wheehaw Kerman]

On 11/1/2022 at 6:38 PM, Master39 said:

Your way of defining a "punitive" gameplay element is entirely arbitrary and based on how you personally like to play the game. Once we remove your personal preference from your argument they can be applied to every other gameplay system, existent, proposed or planned.

You're just labeling every possible new gameplay loop or challenge as "punitive", if things like reentry heating, commnet, and things exploding on impact weren't already gameplay elements for KSP1 you would label those as "too punitive and not fun" too.

By your standard every obstacle and piece of gameplay between you and that imaginary "you win!" screen can be considered a useless and punitive delay. 

Well said.  I don’t identify as a gamer, or hang around in gaming circles, so I don’t know whether this notion of “punitiveness” is widespread or just a KSP forums thing, but I find it really, really strange.  Life is punitive as hell in this sense, risk taking has consequences, and failure can be catastrophic as hell.  

Especially in space exploration.  The history of space exploration is one epic saga of engineers and scientists and pilots deploying all their skills and ingenuity to overcome technical challenges and risks, and the consequences of failure were fatalities.  Astronauts die when the engineers and scientists and technicians make mistakes.  And that is a big part of what makes the whole endeavour of spaceflight thrilling and fascinating and worthwhile.  People do strap their tender pink anatomies onto huge tanks of toxic and explosive chemicals and launch themselves clean outside our biosphere.  It is sheer heroism in the literal, classical sense.  Homer would have been hugely inspired by the Apollo program.

And the need for life support is fundamental to the whole enterprise.  Which is why I find it baffling that people are so opposed to it on the grounds of this notion of punitiveness, in a game that’s about iterative experimentation in spaceflight.  Build an unstable rocket?  Not enough fuel?  Didn’t pack enough snacks?  Forgot parachutes?  
 

The crew dies.  Back to the VAB, brothers!  

(It sounds even better in Latin: “redeamus ad vehiculi fabricam, fratres!”)

Edited December 20, 2022 by Wheehaw Kerman