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The idea that manned capsules are somehow controlled at all is sort of funny. It's not like the astronauts/cosmonauts flew their craft off the pad, they were along for the ride.

@5thHorseman, sorry, honestly, I conflated the OPM stuff with another thread about difficulty levels, and rescaling things upwards certainly changes difficulty, which is the same as more distant worlds (more dv required, hence larger ships). I was replying in effect to your statement as if it was in the other tab I had open. My bad. This is I suppose actually on topic WRT the end of the tech tree, and the fact that KSP get easier as you play, not harder. So we have a game that only has any chance of failure at the very beginning, and actually becomes easier with tech improvements, and those tech improvements are literally all completed before you even have a good Duna launch window. Unsure what could eb done with tech in this regard. Perhaps certain tech requires more specific use requirements for testing? Instead of unlocking the seismometer and using it anywhere, perhaps it doesn't work generally until after you complete a survey mission---the sites are not chosen at random, the idea is that they made the thing, and it needs to be tested on these 3 spots on the Mun to make sure it's working right. Do that mission, and it's unlocked. The grav detector might be provisional and require testing above Jool... Dunno, it's tricky.

Dunno, I have a love-hate relationship with HE. I keep it around for certain testing applications, and sometimes to replace stuff wrecked by the kraken, but it has its own kraken within, I think

Forget the planets, keep the same ones. The point is that there is a HUGE difference in gameplay choices even without LS for a 6.4X system vs stock. Or a 3.2x planets with 6.4x distances. Your biggest stock craft for a given job won't even come close to cutting it. The Mun takes over 5000 m/s from LKO. That's almost as much as to land on Tylo, right? No more 1.25m rockets to the Mun with crew as your 4th launch. Throw in LS and it becomes a really substantial gameplay change.

I'm a fan of both outfits, though if I was forced to rank capabilities I'd currently put SpaceX ahead of BO because I think they are doing something harder (and different, obviously). That said, in a few years I might say something completely different.

You don't need to have to invent the telescope, or invent aircraft for a good KSP career. That would be terrible, IMHO. Having a realistic "fog of war" would be fine---that you would start the game knowing what humans knew about our solar system in ~1960, and would learn more as you sent appropriate probes. That's outside the scope of this thread, however. Kerbals need not have the same, exact history, but given an attempt to make KSP physics sort of realistic, the relative difficulty of coming up with spacecraft systems would also scale to reality.

I'm not familiar with that tree. By "really far back" do you mean early in the tree, cause it sounds like you mean later in the tree. Odd that this would be the case in a "historical" tree since the NTR existed before the first manned spaceflights ever happened in RL. Honestly, using reality as a benchmark, most everything in the current tech tree should be tier 0. I'd have a much wider, flatter tree. In a perfect world, parts could then improve. LT-30X, LT-30 mk1, LT-30 mk2, and so forth. I'd have the experimental versions (marked X) actually have a failure chance. Improved versions could have slight improvements, weight reduction, etc. There might be vacuum variants of some engines (higher Isp, lower thrust). Having a progression like this would commit the player to certain technologies, then maybe they find it cost-effective to stick with it, instead of starting with something else. Note that for engines, a stock ability to cluster engines would be awesome to have. So you've invested in 1.25m engines... just cluster them. Bam, we just had someone replicate the R-7 vs US launchers because they decided to stick with their LT-45 mk2 engines, just use more of them. No it doesn't, it also increases the dv required, or do you think it takes the same craft to get to Eeloo as the Mun?

That's a great idea, and what the tree system needs in general. Really, the point of stations is to leave the human factors issues (kerbal factors issues ).

Seeing the SSTU centrifuge parts made me want to see the inside, lol His smallest is still larger than the centrifuge demonstrator, however.

The terrain is a little less spiky, generally. You can control the vertical scaling independently (look at sigma dimensions as an example for an easy interface). 3.2X seems to be the sweet spot for rescaling existing worlds, retaining their visual appeal. 3.2X is not enough to make a huge difference in gameplay, however. From a difficulty standpoint, I think rescaling combined with life support makes a substantial difference. I could see fixed rescales at each size, and perhaps it requires new world models built at this scales. From a gameplay standpoint, I would want to see the scales introduce meaningful design challenges. For example, the Mun. Given available parts, I think that there should be multiple, plausiblely efficient mission strategies---Kerbin orbit rendezvous, direct ascent, and munar orbit rendezvous (or combinations). Any Mun landing where a staged lander is not a reasonable design option is not different from stock. Right now, a tiny craft with a mk1 pod is trivial to get to the Mun, anything else is roleplaying, or overkill.

The gameplay issue of not going past Minmus to unlock everything is also predicated on lack of information. I think many players are unaware of the required geometry for interplanetary flights, frankly. Combined with no dv data, it's no wonder apparently many (most?) KSP players never leave Kerbin SoI. It's also part of the problem that "science" in KSP is almost entirely planetary science, and planetary science has exactly nothing to do with building spacecraft.

Ever considered Nautilus X-like parts?

Doesn't matter to me, I haven't used a stock engine since I started using SSTU, lol.

I never build any aircraft at all. I don't even upgrade the SPH more than once (I want the part count, as I use the "hanger" as a "garage" for rover and base designs, instead. I leave the runway dirt to test said rovers and bases. The idea that tanks and engines are separate is kooky. Systems are designed to work together, and since KSP stock does;t have clustered engines that tank/engine separation is silly.

Using @cxg2827's excellent parts as an IVA analog again (I should have rotated them slightly so the floors were level)... The small torus has a fair bit of room. They would actually fit entirely inside the torus, they are stuck on the skin, so the torus looking smaller is perspective only. The KHM-3-1 holds 2 crew, so there are 16 slots there. Each kerbal could get one as a room, and there is still room for a lab and a common area for meals. For reference, the stock MPL part is about 1.5X the length of those pods. So there is room for a lab, plus 6.5 of these habs. So your crew rating of 5 is very generous to them, they each get a room of their own, plus 1.5 of those as a common area, plus a lab. You could have a crew of 6, and have 5 of these hab volumes available for common space, equipment/supplies, and a lab. I lean towards that as a number.

I've never cared even a little about breaking saves. I start fresh every single update.

In stock KSP the NTR is not needed to do anything at all, IMO. If you are roleplaying the need for reasonable craft, then sure, but if you are content to play the game as-is, you can throw Jeb in a mk1 pod, and send him to Duna pretty much immediately with a slightly larger craft than you'd send to the Mun.

I've said the same in various threads, and it makes worlds of sense. Honestly, scale is by far more of a difficulty modifier than the other stuff. Easy = current scale. Normal = 3.2X. Hard = ? (6.4X is doable with stock parts, but rough in the stock game (no KJR, etc).). I think you are right that 4, or maybe 5X is possible. I played the 365 mod for a while, which was 3.2 planet rescales with 6.4X distances and liked it.

Well said, @GoSlash27. As I think I said above (I deleted a couple drafts here and there), one problem is a lack of choices regarding similar technologies. Right now, there is an obvious size/capability progression of parts, and for good gameplay, we really need more tech to do the same job, but with pros and cons. Sadly, that is likely going to stay in mod territory. Take part failures as an example. Squad doesn't like them, but in RL, reliability was a reason for many choices. Other RL considerations that we have in mods factored in as well, like boil off of cryofuels. So Apollo had 3 different propellants. Kerlox for the booster for thrust, then hydrolox for Isp, then hypergolics for reliability. So realism shows us a few things that add not just complexity, but interesting gameplay. If you used hydrolox for your rocket, you'd need to get your mission done without any messing around, since you'd lose 1% of the hydrogen or more per day. I'm not sure what could be done short of that in stock... what about engine restarts, and throttling? Different engines might be available in a tree that follow a path towards deeper throttling. Add some monoprop engines (since we have that, it could be an analog for hypergolics) and allow deeper throttling of those, having the others only to 75% or something like that. Perhaps early engines can only start once, then you can unlock the ability to restart multiple times. The idea is to make sure that if you looked at 10 people's career games after 10 launches, you might actually see different looking unlock strategies. The goal is gameplay complexity, which I'd argue is always a good thing (that's different that complexity of play/controls, it's intellectual complexity).

Career is too short as it is, IMO. From "what's a rocket?" to NTRs to Duna in 200 six hour days. For a noob, any rockets would be fun, it's only a grind for repeat play, IMO. I'd add a couple things. One, the grind is not the result of the choice of parts, it's the result of bad game design. Two, the early game is the only part of repeat play that is even slightly challenging (and it's not challenging in repeat stock play). I disagree with the notion that the current tree is somehow ideally designed to introduce new players to concepts. Any halfway realistic tech progression would by definition do this, since the second or third rocket any human ever launched wasn't Vostok 1. The goal of an improved tech paradigm is NOT "realism," per se, it's better gameplay.

The beginning would have been visible out the window across from me right now, July 16, 1945 (except there were no houses up on the side of his mountain back then (kept maybe some sheep herder huts) here in New Mexico. I'd take a brighter view of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not the lives daily lost, but the multiple of those lives lost who were saved as a result. The bombings without question shortened a war which was killing thousands of people every single day it went on. It not only saved the lives of people scheduled for invasion (the only lives concerning the decision makers), but Japanese.

LS includes keeping people (erm, kerbals) healthy, not just "not dead." That's part of what the habitation value is about (in addition to morale/psych issues). It is becoming clear that artificial gravity is not so much a quality of life issue as a significant health requirement. How that maps to simplified LS is complex. Strikes me that it's a habitation issue for this mod (nice to have that functionality), and that artificial gravity would be a substantial hab multiplier. Two equal volumes, one spun for gravity should have different habitation times. I don't know how landed bases would deal with this unless landed status could be checked, and a habitation multiplier added just for that. Heck, the ability to use a toilet that just works without it taking a long time (having a real "down" vs suction is a huge thing) is a huge quality of life improvement. I'm also specifically looking at SSTU here.

While I might agree that computer versions are better than consoles, this is a suggestion thread for the stock game, not for mods, and the 98% and 70% figures obviously are made up, lol.

It's tough because science is the "point" of career, with tech as the reward system. It really needs to be balanced in a far more complex way (complex to balance, play should be straightforward). Also, since everything is connected in career, it sort of requires a total redo. Time also being a thing, frankly, not as complex as KCT, but have things take some amount of time. There are whole threads on what should happen. Suffice it to say that the goal of the tech tree should be to require the career player to make "strategic" choices in terms of what line of technology they pursue, instead of what it is, road bumps to getting stuff done. That's how I see it, anyway. To use RL analogs, when you've invested in the R-7 and related hardware (Soyuz), you craft a lunar mission using those tools, even to the point if using them unmanned as probes (Zond). The issue with this concept is that there are not enough parts for it, really, we'd need more variability. In a modded world, I'd break the different fuel types into branches, for example---"Hmm, maybe I should not have put all my effort into hydrolox rockets, boil-off is killing my Duna mission." Complexity can add a lot to gameplay, but t needs to be the right complexity. Think about Apollo as another RL example. KSP lacks the complexity of gameplay required to make the Mun an interesting target. This is because of the mini nature of the KSP solar system. It adds a lot to have the Mun large enough that a trivially tiny craft cannot do a direct ascent mission. All of a sudden at ~6.4X rescale, staged landers become a thing. You need to think about design, which is kind of the point, right? So Apollo... hypergolics, vs hydrolox, vs kerlox. They used all 3. The hypergolics for reliability. Squad has said that reliability will not be a thing, which is a mistake, IMHO. A tech tree can fix this, because under a new tech paradigm, perhaps the parts come earlier as "eXperimental" hardware that can fail, which become 100% reliable after they are unlocked. If the R&D is done right, that balance of X parts vs reliable parts becomes a thing. Then, certain tech can be more reliable anyway. I'm rambling, lol.

My negativity assumes that someone who has a job description that is less than "100% MP coding" might spend any of their time fixing stuff that MP breaks. Since I almost certainly won't do any MP, if the non-MP devs spend even 1% of their time on MP related issues, I'm 1% behind where I would have been.