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Given the amount of time I've spent enjoying KSP for $25 (or whatever it was), I think it is already free within rounding errors.

I got a small refractor as a kid, and it made me internalize something that I knew intellectually, but had not yet felt in my gut---that I was standing on a tiny ball in the middle of a vast ocean of stars.

I'm pretty sure the large pork jet inflatable (Bigelow looking thing) is actually 2.5m. 2.5m tank left, 3.25m right.

A few things... 1. Porkjet has inflatable parts, and he's said that he means to bring them up to current at some point... something to consider, perhaps. 2. Size wise, you are right, 2.5m is likely the best, though I would like to see larger for planetary base use, perhaps (the Mars Direct concepts show basically 2 floor high cylinders, but they look more squat than 2.5m would be. Even if you don't do an IVA, think in terms of a rough sketch of how it might look so that they are the right size, IMO, I'd rather see them bigger than too small for their supposed job (for example if they are supposed to have an airlock, the storage for kerbal helmets alone eats up most of a 2.5m part ). Functionally, what crew parts are actually needed? Sort of depends on the use of LS mods. A hab part would make sense (fit in some sort of beds), as would perhaps a common area (food prep/eating, etc). 3. The shape change possibilities of SSTU should be used... I agree that resizing the crew parts makes no sense as you have described the problems, but that doesn't mean they could not have elements outside the crew cylinder, right? Like "mount" and "nose"? They could also be like the fairings where there is a diameter setting on that part. So the crew part is 2.5m, and 5m longer a given part. You could set one side to slope to 1.25m, and the other side to go to a larger diameter, for example. The crew part is unchanged, only the external bits to the compartment scale.

The best way to make them more interesting would be to make all of them larger. Since Kerbin has 2 moons, my benchmark would be to scale up the system such that the Mun presents a design challenge to the player in terms of mission mode---Minmus can be kept as a small, low gravity world that requires no special choices. The requirement would be that a staged lander should be a reasonable solution, not utterly pointless. As apparently most players never leave Kerbin SoI anyway, this would at least make Kerbin SoI interesting.

KAS/KIS should be a stock thing, frankly (the base elements of it, not the whole thing) as Kerbals really need more to do, they bothered to animate them, let people do something with the little critters. Personally, my primary interaction with the terrain is landing, hence my want of smaller scale terrain features so that there is a non-zero chance of an interesting landing. The ability to manipulate the terrain (i.e.: crater it) that would be profoundly cool.

Higher terrain detail would always improve things. Terrain that is dangerous to spacecraft that is at the scale size of spacecraft. Right now, the Mun is my benchmark, the rest of the airless worlds look terrible in comparison. Short of in-situ construction (being able to alter the terrain to bury base elements with regolith, or for more realistic mining of some worlds), there really is not much to do once landed.

Not easter eggs, I frankly hate those. The issue is that it's not as simple as making the worlds more interesting. There needs to be something to DO with the interesting worlds. Exploration itself would be a thing, but that requires randomization and fog of war.

Have rescues pull from a folder of craft files, and have the stock game only use X parts per craft, where X is perhaps no more than 10 parts. (a minimal lander is maybe 6 parts, for example).

Having the game able to spawn entire craft files into the game for rescues could well have other uses... the single part rescues (instead of a craft) are not really any more immersive than a lone astronaut, frankly.

I doubt I will use the stock parts much, myself. Too little, too late. And SSTU is just... better. It also uses the stock size adjustments for career, so if that's important, you start with stubby little tanks, and they grow as they should via the tech tree. It will be nice if they ever actually make rocket parts that aren't the really, incredibly ugly stepchildren of the spaceplane parts. Someday.

Use SSTU for the tanks, and you solve this problem, they not only have multiple textures, but multiple shapes. Including the ability to add several different noses, plus numerous "mount" options (from a flat bottom, to flares for multiple engines, etc).

Since I started using SSTU, I've effectively gone this way for tanks. Many parts either don't need this treatment, or it's inappropriate (crew parts, science parts, engines, etc).

Yeah... I'm pretty much despairing of any improvement. Squad's solution was basically to just double-down on what they had by adding more---but still lousy---contracts. The base paradigm is to create novel missions by requiring the player to do some idiotic mission for funds/sci/rep, when the real way to get the player to have to use novel designs or missions should be because of physics limitations, or available tech/funds limitations (or both).

While I agree that the most likely solution would not be "start over," honestly, the best and easiest possible solution is... "start over." The career system is fundamentally flawed, IMO, and I really don't think it is capable of being more than a sort of side-quest system. Sure, maybe you could make a better side quest system, but it will still never actually be good.

So the only way to play the sandbox game, Minecraft, is in "creative" mode, with an ultra-flat world? If you need the game to give you mountains, clearly you lack the creativity to build your own mountains, right? Even KSP Sandbox could use the ability to turn on all the science/career stuff piecemeal, frankly---which getting back to the thread could be done with a 'Career mode editor" (I'm using that term instead of "level design"). Sandbox with science points turned on. The paradigm of the current Career mode throwing contracts at you is not the only possible career mode, as we have been discussing, and in fact that model is a large part of the problem with career mode. Many of us would prefer a career model where we pick/design the missions---almost all of them (sat launches would be services done for a 3d party, so if they need polar, you can hardly tell a customer they want GEO, instead).

I agree completely about the ease of moving to greener pastures on Earth vs space (space has no desirable destinations from a "living" standpoint). The point is that humans moved to less green pastures in many respects. Europe is certainly pretty, but it's also rather cold compared to the ease of walking around naked in Africa. It required technologies to be invented that didn't exist previously. So humans like to explore new places as part of our nature---but on Earth, that exploration can easily lead to nice places to live, unlike space where we have to build a nice place to live (which as you say could just as well be built here).

Ask the archaic Homo sapiens or Homo erectus who left Africa that question. His point was that people---and our very close ancestors were also "people"---like to explore, and hence spread out of Africa. Given the environments they moved to with such small populations, it seems unlikely that the only driver was population pressure.

You can land a larger rover and use claw-magic to refuel the ships in question. Alternately, land a rover that can seat all the stranded kerbals, and use claw-magic to transfer them to the rover, then claw the rover to a better ship, and fly them home in that.

I'd hardly put the challenges of large, rotating space colonies in the realms of warp drive or time travel. That's a pretty hyperbolic comparison. LS systems are already pretty effective, and while I agree that getting from 90-something % recycling to near 100% is a real challenge, it's not fantasy. Also, the colonies would really need to be considered as a system, not just the torus/vernal sphere/cylinder of the actual station, but also whatever capability they have to secure external resources---you can add materials from comet or asteroid captures and still be "self-sufficient" as a closed system, even if the colony itself leaks, for example. Again, I'm not saying they are in a near timeframe, or a few generations, but I think that the technical challenges, unlike time or warp travel are actually real, not fantasy, and could be worked out.

I think that with a real effort (think Apollo or the Manhattan Project) the technology would not be a major hurdle, it's will, which from a practical standpoint means money. Those resources are not likely to be forthcoming in even the distant foreseeable future since there is not a plausible motivation to expend that sort of effort. I agree very theoretically in the "safeguard humanity" argument, but I really do mean theoretically. It's true, assuming you put people sufficiently far away from Earth to be safe from a planet-killer, and in sufficiently large numbers for there to be appropriate genetic diversity---and they need to be 100% self-sufficient. While possible, it's incredibly unlikely.

It's rare to see such a concise and useful statement of a problem. Yes, it would be non-trivial, but I think that this really would have been the best possible way to go with a "kerbal" career system since it focusses on the one huge difference between KSP and so many other games, it's entirely peaceful nature, and the fact that anyone playing it is actually learning something, even in a watered-down kerbal way, about the way rockets work in the real world. It's the hardest to do given the current system in place (meaning it's a fundamental change, not tweaking the existing system), but if KSP was a blank slate career wise, I think exploration is actually the easiest road to a really good career system to please a wide array of players as it is not artificially constraining the player through limits, it constrains the player via physics. Ie: you have a new set of design choices because this career iteration, you might actually need to contemplate a staged lander for the Mun since in this new career, the Mun is 5X more massive than the stock Mun. Exploration would also be predicated upon meaningful science, I think. Camera probes (or astronauts) improve map zoom level. Atmospheric science unlocks (by world) the ability to predict reentries more accurately. Medical science (say space station science) can improve LS tech, etc. This addresses one of the critical gameplay issues with stock KSP career---it gets easier as you progress, not harder, or even flat. LS mean that you not only might go farther away in later career, you need to drag more mass along with you. I think that the logistics of later career games really begs for some AI, though. Design a craft to be assembled in orbit, then have the ability for the 10 launches it takes to get ready to happen without the player having to do it all by hand (you could choose to, obviously). I think LS plus time really requires the ability to manage a program, meaning scheduled resupply missions, etc. Perhaps they have a failure chance as well---eliminate most of those "rescue" contracts, and allow your own scheduled flights to have some (small) chance of needing rescue, instead. This is it in a nutshell. Choices and trade offs. That's really the point of a career mode. To create novel problems for the player to solve. Not random side-quest problems (fire an SRB on a suborbital trajectory over the Mun---for reasons), but rational trade-offs. The real Apollo program debate over Earth Orbit Rendezvous vs Direct Ascent, vs Lunar Orbit rendezvous being a real life example. That's the level I think we are all talking about in terms of meaningful design choices. There was a thread that said that most players don't leave Kerbin SoI. Assume that is true. It's really sad that the Mun isn't big enough to require real choices for Mun missions, particularly when we also have Minmus as an easy option. In a simple rescale (say 6.4X which I play) with LS added (simple, like USILS), you end up with an early career choice of going to Minmus, which takes a lot of LS (it's like a 45 day trip there), but landing/return is trivial, or the Mun, which takes no additional LS (USILS gives you 15 days with nothing added), but the lander needs to be larger, possibly staged. It's a fun trade off. ISRU is a late game thing, but yeah, it opens things up for that phase. ISRU changes are certainly easy to mess with compared to fog of war. Sorry for contributing in taking this thread entirely off the rails of a campaign editor.

Populating the worlds with more to see would help a lot, but it's not enough. It merely makes the grind more interesting visually. To be an exploration game, you need to actually explore, period. It needs to have unknowns, and as a "science" game, ideally some of the unknowns would be determined via science, and might even have some utility on future flights. This requires random worlds---people get hung up on this, but they could be from a vetted library of worlds, plus some rescaling, and perhaps even classes of worlds that might allow the base world to have variant atmospheres that make sense, etc. What should be known from the ground is known---orbital parameters, and an image that matches a telescope image from the ground (or in orbit should that "part" be added). Perhaps atmospheric science instruments unlock something like the mod that shows a realistic flight path through an atmosphere, facilitating planned landing locations better. I have gone on at length about this in other threads, to me this would be ideal, with the "career" mechanics otherwise not changing all that much. Thee are a couple ways to look at it. One was the sort of role-playing sense I got from his post---kerbals as characters you care about... somehow. Little else would change, except for them having more personality so that you care about them... I tend to not lose any, but except for a couple that had my kid's names within them, I have little attachment to them The fact that the whole thing comes and goes in a couple years does;t help, there is no sense of time progression. It's not a management game because there is zero management enabled, or required. Management requires people (kerbals) to manage. That means tasking them to do things, and having them do them. No AI kerbals, no management game, IMHO. That is a necessary condition.

I'd instead say that your post (quoted above) is perhaps the best summary of Career Mode that I've read. I could not possibly agree with every line of this more than I do. I'll not break your post up to comment, people need to read it again so it sinks in as written .Your bullet points are telling, and point to what should be done, IMO. I've addressed your first one many times, with my dream of "fog of war" and a true exploration game. Your second and third points, the story driven hits at something I had not really considered much, but would be a great game I think people would like to play. Something, anything, that gives the characters life so that you care about them. I'm at a loss as to how, but man that would be cool. Management? Yeah, it fails at multiple levels. I suppose the reason I harp about a randomized, explore option is that I see "explore" as the easiest to actually accomplish. A better program management game pretty much requires some sort of AI kerbals, plus a robust economic model so that it feels like it makes sense.

I think that O'Neil colonies present less of a challenge than Mars. I don't see either happening in my lifetime, or my kids lifetimes. I think that the primary issue is need, or rather lack of a need. There are no compelling economic reasons, so neither will happen in the private sector. There are no geopolitical reasons, so it will not happen in the government sector.