Pthigrivi

It was pretty interesting to see life support emerge as one of the most popular requests for unannounced features. A number of folks seemed to want to chat about it and rather than clog up the Top 10 thread I thought I'd start new topic. I've written my own proposal on how it could be done but this is a community and Im not an N of 1 kind of person. What are your thoughts? I know some of the devs are skeptical but I think there are some really cool opportunities here.

I mean the larger point is also just being ignored here: that there is a difference between being an embodied pilot physically within the cockpit and viewing your flight space through a horizontal monitor. Here's the typical field of view for a person. Notice you have an aspect ratio thats roughly square and biased downward. If I had a square screen I'd probably also want the navball centered below with other flight information to either side. All of these design considerations are important. Both, my dude. We're using both sources of information.

Hmm. Im not so sure. They each have their own navball and they could have just put the instrument panel directly in front of Armstrong's face with a center window they could both look out through. I think it has to do with having a clear vertical sense of alignment when looking out. Heres another image of a helicopter cockpit with the central view through the windshield and the navball just off to the side. I think its just that when a clear view of the ground is absolutely critical that clear vertical real-estate becomes more important. After all the navball isn't responding to parallax, it shows what it shows no matter which angle you view it from. Looking at an environment does however, especially when in 3rd person. When you drag to shift the view of your vessel off to the right you're no longer looking straight through the center of the vessel and using that information to assess alignment with the terrain below is much more difficult. Of course what would be amazing would be a HUD overlay showing your present trajectory and marking the landing spot on screen similar to the trajectories mod. That would be gold.

I also found this which is interesting--the LEM cockpit. It's a little hard to see but each crewman is standing side by side lined up on the window. You can see the joystick set for the right hand and aligned with the Navball. Again I think this is because having a visual reference as you guide yourself into a nice, flat, debris free LZ is so important. They'll also want to know speed and range and staying level obviously so they're glancing right to left to maintain awareness of all of that information. You'll also notice the crewman optical alignment site which is primarily used for docking.

The other thing that I do all the time in KSP1 is set a lander or new module down just a few meters from an existing base. In that instance one of the biggest worries is landing physically on top of your base and having that clear view below your vessel is really important. With colonies and collidable terrain down the road this kind of thing is going to be more and more important. As players you really need BOTH pieces of information, and given that standard monitors are wider than the they are tall this means you get the best viewing area for each by putting them side by side. If I could rotate my monitor vertically that might even be the best solution, but on a laptop thats just not an option. But again this whole conversation is kind of silly because it's a clearly a matter of personal preference and it should just be adjustable, all agree.

Thanks, Alize, for your perspective on this. I think this kind of accessibility is incredibly important in games and why allowing UI configurability is so key. Interesting to hear about making the UI smaller in some cases. This is unintuitive for folks who would think larger and more readable text would make things easier but it makes sense as you describe it. For some folks bigger might be better be but obviously accessibility isn’t a one size fits all thing. All of these tools are important. I super appreciate your thoughts and don’t hesitate to come and give feedback. And damn, 20k! I thought I was a vet with 6 or so.

Nah bruh. Mine fertilizer on the surface and turn it into snacks with a greenhouse. No way these resupplies need to come all the way from Kerbin. Check out my thread. Im talking a few tons to keep them happy for years. It wouldn’t be hard to overbuild and give yourself flexibility. Learning to think about time is exactly the point. And if not no biggie, its just a bonus. So long as there’s no punishment its no different from mining or experiments taking time.

So many good ideas yall^ 1) Life support! I know its controversial but I think it can be done in an enriching yet forgiving way. I made a thread about it. 2) Flight Planner with a transfer assistant and alarm clock that adds up a dV budget leg by leg to a destination. Bonus points if this can be appended to vessels in the VAB and in flight. 3) Trajectories factoring drag and visible in flight mode. This could be unlocked after performing an atmospheric analysis of a given world. Super important for aerocaptures and precision landing. 4) Scanning and Mapping. This is such a gimme for the science system. The SCANsat style method of building maps was really instructional and overlays for altitude, slope, biome, and later resources would be amazing. 5) Make Kerbals Important at colonies and maybe even on vessels. There should be real in-game benefits to science and resource processing for having more of them and there could be some really simple ways of autofilling job slots when you have lots of them. 6) A Simple habitation mechanic at colonies to increase kerbal productivity. 7) Stage recovery. I think it's possible to use the supply route system to rate subassemblies as recoverable. We've chatted about this in the past. 8) Solid tools for resource flows. When the resource system comes around learn from Starfield's mistakes. Without some basic tools managing resource flows you run into a lot of frustrating issues. 9) 1.875m parts. I know its a bunch of work but man I miss these. 10) Ballutes! Last but not least. These would be amazing for aerocapturing big complex vessels where the center of drag is difficult to manage.

I love this question. I usually bias my view on launch viewing from the south with the rocket heading west to east/left to right. Angle wise this would probably make bottom right the best place for the nav-ball on ascent. But ascents are pretty forgiving for me at this point. The bigger challenge is usually landing and whether easy-peazy minmus flats or precision atmo landings Im still viewing from the south watching the landing coming in west to east. From this angle the bottom left is the best place for the nav-ball as I can maximize the viewing angle diagonally from upper left to lower right view as I come in to land. Either way in those last critical 100m you're heading pretty much straight down and maximizing your vertical screen real-estate becomes paramount.

Id love to see a challenge where players put craft paper over their entire monitor except the nav ball and try to land on the Mun.

Listen everyone knows the correct place for the nav ball is exactly in the center of the screen both vertically and horizontally. Can’t miss it. In fact we should just get rid of all of the other UI and graphics. Kerbal Navball program. Think of the performance boost!

No hate on others preferences but I do find the corner nav ball much more usable. The really critical moments in most missions are ascents and landings, and you almost always have a vessel thats taller than it is wide so that vertical real estate in the center of the screen is a key factor to optimize for. Especially on landings you're looking at the orientation of your vessel but also how you're looking in relation to the ground below, so its a matter of looking side to side at your nav ball, altitude, relative speed, and how your lander is lining up on the LZ.

Maybe both!

At the very least biome maps and anomalies. We should really be able to see what and where the biomes are so we can keep easy visual track of where we've been. That seems essential to giving a players a clear picture of what this game is actually about. Again, for science to actually feel like science it should really be revealing information thats useful to the player. I know a lot of hoped-for features like trajectories factoring drag and visible in flight mode aren't there yet but those could be really important for aerocapture maneuvers and precision landings on planets with atmospheres. Same with slope maps for finding good landing zones. There's a lot there that could help players get better at the core aspects of the game.

I think a slope map would be nice especially if you were able to zoom in and put a marker, but being able to see it as an overlay while in flight would be great too. Its no biggie to land on the flats on Minmus, but on bodies as heavy or heavier than the Mun it would be really helpful to guide yourself down onto a nice flat landing zone. Some players may find an altitude overlay more intuitive--if there's a big zone where the altitude doesn't change then that area is going to be pretty flat. Maybe especially for new and learning players this would be a big help, not landing weird or tipping over because they didn't realize they were on a 40 degree slope until it was too late. For anomalies I honestly think they're entirely irrelevant to gameplay if you can't find them with a special scanner. You're still going to need to learn to land precisely and/or scout around in a rover, which is in itself a key challenge that KSP1 was missing. Easter eggs are fine but easter eggs aren't meaningful game elements. Its okay if players want to look something up online to play a game, but no game element should require looking up the answer online.

The main kinds of maps/overlays I'd really like to see are altitude, slope, biome, and anomalies. This kind of information makes landing easier, makes understanding the science system less opaque, and certainly would help with colony site selection down the road. Im sure there are performance issues which is I believe why we had to look at kerbnet through a tiny window, but really you should be be able to see this kind of information in map and flight mode.

I hope it's not gated that way. One of the big problems with KSP1's progression was the way the exploration contracts were handled, and the fact that the whole system seemed to break if you just went on a head and explored somewhere that wasn't wasn't on the list. The missions should just be suggestions rather than a checklist, and if you happen to deviate or just decide for some reason you want to send a probe to Eve those rewards should still trigger even if the mission hasn't shown up for you yet. Yeah this may be part of the way they're encouraging players to jump out to explore other planets, that its just not feasible to unlock a whole lot of the tech tree fully within KSOI. I think this will come down a bit to how many biomes there are and how widely applicable science experiments are. Based on the way experiments are doled out Im still a bit worried about incentivizing going back and doing a lot of repeat missions, but maybe they're structured in a way that even if you're going back to Minmus for a 6th or 10th mission you're collecting science in a different way with different design requirements.

Looks like even with a wild success they wouldn't try an SS soft water landing?

Maybe this is just a word interpretation issue. By problems I mean challenges--fundamental physical and programming solutions that need to be found one way or another. They're running into many of the same issues because they're trying to solve many of the same challenges, but now with added constraints imposed by new features and systems.

I mean I think the answer to this: is this... Because the underlying structure needs to be much different in order to accommodate things like acceleration under timewarp, interstellar scales, and future multiplayer implementation they can't just copy paste solutions from one game to the other. They do still have to solve all the problems KSP1 encountered but in a different way. As a far as I understand it even something like axial tilt would have been very difficult to implement in KSP1 because its fundamental code was structured the way it was.

I think it depends on how many kerbals we end up needing for colonies and what their role and utility is. If you have potentially dozens or hundreds of kerbals across your space program managing all that personnel becomes a real slog. You really want the process for allocating kerbals to different tasks to be really fast and easy. With KSP1s classes Kerbals barely had a function. Pilots could be replaced with probecores and engineers aren’t really needed either because of quicksaves and timewarp. So you really only had one useful class anyway. Id much rather see KSP2 employ kerbals in more direct ways. Some of the most obvious ways would be in boosting science gains and resource collection but those are both rate-based benefits. Its one of several reasons I hope they reconsider life support because its a really useful and scalable check that ties directly into the core engineering puzzle of the game.

Another thing that we weirdly have not discussed at all are the new 'discoverables' locations and what they might mean for science. Im actually really happy to see some localized surface features with a more sciencey feel, not just because they're less hokey but also because I think there's finally going to be some real structured incentives for orbital scanning, precise landing and/or surface exploration. This was a huge missing piece in KSP1 and by itself could radically augment the kinds of missions players engage in.

Yeah hard to talk about this without digging into the P word. Im just looking at total system efficiency and how the question 'who's paying?' affects what does and doesn't happen and who the real beneficiaries end up being.

I know Im in the minority but I still don't think kerbal classes need to exist at all. It's a solution looking for a problem, and almost all of the problems folks conjure up to justify it fall way outside of core gameplay.

I don't know, call me skeptical that ad revenue is going to pay for much in the way of real science, most of which is incredibly boring for the general public. Universities are more likely, but again these are the same institutions which have sucked 2 generations dry with student loans, and now we're going to shunt the cost of space research onto those same kids? With 6 layers of rent-seeking middlemen in between? Honestly the entire premise that private finance is always more efficient than government spending is just wrong. It ignores the fact that for every SpaceX half a dozen other companies limp along on smoke and mirrors and failed business models until they fold. You can also look at how much Americans spend on healthcare for worse outcomes than most other first world countries. Both companies and governments can be run poorly or run well. When you're asking the question 'what way is more efficient' you also need to ask yourself 'efficient for whom.'