Making Places Interesting

[Whirligig Girl]

One of the major points of why gas planets and moons won't be added any time soon is because there's not enough interesting stuff on the planets as is. Here's a few ideas. The ideas are all meant to be exciting, action-y things that can be fixed with either smart building or smart manuevering. preferably not easily predictable except for a vague "It will probably happen." There should always be some way of getting around these with a craft if you know the dangers. And these would not be known or detectable in career mode without science parts.

Sun

-Prominences and flares that could strike a craft flying close to the Sun. They'd be slow moving, massive objects, but you might be able to adjust your orbit to fly through a prominence instead of being hit by it.

-Overheating, based upon orientation. (A barbecue roll might fix such problems, as might a heatshield)

Moho

-Random, slowly changing molten areas that act like water except falling into them rapidly overheats parts that are not protected by a heatshield landing base. And area might suddenly begin to melt or solidify

--This might be really really hard to program.

Eve

-Hot atmosphere?

-Lots of wind, might blow your ship apart or simply off course. Makes parachute landings unpredictable.

-Seas are destructive to rocket parts (Made out of mercury or gallium, thus it would eat away at spacecraft)

-Overheating EVA suits, Kerbals will die if they're out too long?

-Clouds block solar panels all the time, bringing their output down. Wind gusts might tear off extendable solar panels.

Minmus

-Sudden outgassing of material around the flats, might rip off solar panels or push around light craft.

Duna

-Dust storms cover solar panels with dust, cleanable by EVA Kerbanauts. Rovers could drive away from whirlwinds?

Dres

-Spinny-spinny Dres. With an oblate shape. Maybe even an unpredictable, changing spin?

Jool

-Winds, different directions in the different cloud bands

-Lightning strikes momentarily cut off electric charge and lock all control inputs.

Laythe

-Volcanoes, in set locations, If a craft is on a volcano at eruption it will overheat and potentially get knocked up in the air. Ash and dust might block out solar panels for a few days, planetwide, after an erruption.

-Sea Monster (If life is found on Europa, this would be serious)

Vall

-Cryovolcanism in random spots every once in a while. Pushes the craft around, if a craft flies into a plume of ice and water in orbit it will be slowed down, but this can also be a very valuable science thing.

-Vallquakes that violently shake the area every once in a while.

-Not a hazard, but still an interesting idea: Ice Fishing on Vall for fish or bacteria samples. You'd have to bring a special aquarium part to hold the samples and bring them back to Kerbin. (If life was found on Europa, this would be serious)

Bop

-Going near the Kraken shakes the craft around? Valuable science if you can get near enough for a surface sample.

Pol

-Kerbal sneezes?

Eeloo

-Cryovolcanism in predictable spots? (Like around the brown areas, perhaps?)

And yes, I know aliens are on the WNTS list.

[dryer_lint]

Sounds cool. But what about the Mun?

You forgot it!? YOU MONSTER!

Seriously though, all this sounds pretty dang cool.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

With the Moho lake one

Lets see, so we would have to program random areas (or set) to toggle between liquid and solid. At random times. I assume you would have to update physics on moho craft. Can take a while. And don't forget to replace the whole planet of Moho with a Moho with liquid there

A bit time inducing, not necessarily hard or practical

[Superfluous J]

Dres really can't change its spin randomly, but a super high spin is kind of a cool idea. Also, spinning faster than orbital is impossible unless Dres is a solid object, like a ball of metal.

But say 50% orbital velocity or something? Sure!

[LABHOUSE]

Lets see, so we would have to program random areas (or set) to toggle between liquid and solid. At random times. I assume you would have to update physics on moho craft. Can take a while. And don't forget to replace the whole planet of Moho with a Moho with liquid there

A bit time inducing, not necessarily hard or practical

Or all of moho could randomly become liquid (for lava lakes), and it would only affect the physics range too, so it is close.

[Tw1]

Eve

-Hot atmosphere?

-Lots of wind, might blow your ship apart or simply off course. Makes parachute landings unpredictable.

-Seas are destructive to rocket parts (Made out of mercury or gallium, thus it would eat away at spacecraft)

-Overheating EVA suits, Kerbals will die if they're out too long?

-Clouds block solar panels all the time, bringing their output down. Wind gusts might tear off extendable solar panels.

I don't think mercury in such volumes is a naturally occurring possibility. Eve seems like a cross between Venus and Titan, it strikes me as more likely to be a carbon rich planet.

Plus, Eve is one of only three planets where oceanic exploration is possible, so it would be nice to not rule that out.

I'd like to keep the Mun and Minmus fairly tame for new players. That said, I don't see why standard space dangers should not be present.

Not sure about shacking near the kracken. It's dead. Maybe some interference to science equipment could happen. As long as whatever data remains mysterious, getting specific science reports from it could be cool.

Duna needs some signs of past water activity you can hunt for. Sure, they are there if you use your imagination, but it is the Mars analogue.

The sun stuff could be cool, but they'd need to implement persistent spinning first.

Edited February 11, 2015 by Tw1

[Superfluous J]

Kerbin (and Laythe and Eve) has a "water planet" sphere in addition to the land sphere. Could the same be done with Moho and have a "Lava" sphere?

And could you dynamically cause that sphere to grow and shrink, so the lowlands (which of course are science rich) have unpredictable periods where lava slowly rises, sits, and then lowers?

And then could we make it so you can get more science by taking readings inside that biome while the lava is rising?

[Robotengineer]

These ideas seem to be more environmental and difficulty issues rather than actually more interesting terrain, features, etc. I like them though, they would be nice in stock.

[Tw1]

And could you dynamically cause that sphere to grow and shrink, so the lowlands (which of course are science rich) have unpredictable periods where lava slowly rises, sits, and then lowers?

Something like this would be a great way to implement tides on Kerbin and Laythe.

With the resonance between the other moons, and the force of Jool, the laythe tides should be predicable enough to not need to b calculated dynamically.

A much lazier way would be to just have the lava sphere rotate differently to the rest of thed planet. I hope they leave a gap so the moholes are still accessible.

[Sirrobert]

While I don't agree on the random elements (devs have made it clear that they don't want random elements in the game. Everything needs to be predictable), so no random winds that blow off solarpanels or something.

But if you take out the random asspects, it does sound really cool

[mdg583]

Even if most of these were just visual effects, they would still add something to the game.

(I haven't actually gone to any other planets, so I don't know if there are things like this already.)

[panzer1b]

While its a nice idea, id rather limit things like random failures/destruction to not exist. Randomness is not fun at all in my opinion, as its especially aggravating when something random fails very far away from home after you spent hours building/launching craft somewhere.

Now as for locations with increased heat, or destructive spots (say volcanoes that are always turned on), im all for it, but plz ditch the random junk.

[Tuareg]

While its a nice idea, id rather limit things like random failures/destruction to not exist. Randomness is not fun at all in my opinion, as its especially aggravating when something random fails very far away from home after you spent hours building/launching craft somewhere.

Now as for locations with increased heat, or destructive spots (say volcanoes that are always turned on), im all for it, but plz ditch the random junk.

agree. actually the most boring thing in this game is the launch... launch... launch... once i build a nice ship and i launch it i want it to serve its purpose. not wrecks all around with dead kerbals. or wait...

[Daze]

Wow amazing suggestiona!

It would be great to see places actually dangerous like in real life where if you want to make a good landing you have to a make a pinpoint one

[BudgetHedgehog]

This isn't random failures, these are predictable ones. Random would be getting to Ike and your RCS thruster exploding. Knowing there are high winds on Eve would mean you either take RTGs, static solar panels or the shielded extendable ones that you can retract and protect when you see a storm coming. Not sure if go for that kind of thing on Minmus, it needs to be a fairly serene place. But OWK, I hear you say, how will players know there are winds down there? Well duh, that's why we send probes beforehand.. Random part failures I am against. But a more interactive environment than grey surface, red surface, purple surface etc is something I'd love KSP to have.

For Pol, the devs just need to make ground scatter collidable

[Superfluous J]

I would personally love HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of things on the surface of each world, procedurally placed and chosen from a large enough set of things that they remain interesting. These things would have little biomes that gave extra science, or money for surface samples, or .... I don't know. These biomes would literally be "landed on this thing" which could make getting temperature readings... interesting.

And all surface survey contracts should be centered on these items, and instead of just taking the reading within 5km of the random point, you'd actually have to nail the item.

Oh, and they'd be targetable, once you were within visual range of them.

[Wallygator]

I was under the impression that Squad was intent on maintaining a common user experience for players. I think this is fair from a flight planning, dV perspective and also from a "general" planetary terrain POV.

But... taking 5thHorseman's idea further it would be really cool if the little details of each players landing zone were spawned unique for each instance. You might share common ideas and data concerning flight planning with other players to get to a general surface location, but there might be a plethora of unique visual and interactive items of interest every time a landing takes place. Ok so this might not work the same for multiplayer, but hopefully you get the idea.

[Van Disaster]

Agreed on wanting planets to be a bit more unique.

I'm not sure that really makes them that much more interesting though - there needs to be more things to actually *do*. For instance - I know Laythe is not meant to be as friendly as it is, but given it is what it now is, it would be nice if it was sufficiently Kerbin-like that you could start colonising it, and the game gave you options to actually do this. KSP is a logistics simulator - supporting a colony's logistics whether it's on the colony or interplanetary gives a *huge* amount to do, the colonialisation part doesn't have to be that detailed, just persistent and visibly making a difference.

Likewise exploiting other planets - resource gathering and so on, all the things we are currently attempting to work out how to do ourselves.