tater

I have seen a couple names from this forum in the L2 boards, though I'm merely a lurker there. Nibb31, as usual, is spot on above. The cost reductions are complex, and there are also 2 costs to consider, the cost to spacex, and the cost tot he customer, which are not at all the same. My points up the thread about fanciful launch rates was that they cannot get the market to a point where it makes sense for them to do more than just undercut the competition, and pocket the difference between their lower costs and what they charge. Passing along the bulk of savings to the customer at this point would be insane.

@Pthigrivi's post above hits all the major points that have been discussed in so many of these threads. I'd add that while I think it should be scrapped and redone entirely, I agree completely that that's not even on the table, we need to have improvements that at least use the hooks that now exist. I don't disagree with anything on that post. Making science meaningful is the critical take away. I'm a huge proponent of a randomized solar system and fog of war, but with that off the table, there are other things that can be done. There is a mod that predicts flight path through atmosphere... what if specific science turned that capability on, planet by planet? Do some science at Duna, gain the ability to more accurately land organically. Same for Kerbin. It turns on, but only for the worlds you have visited and done the right science for. Scansat-like capability. All ready sort of added, we need cameras, etc, and the ability to map. The current map needs to have fog of war. The map has a default camera position, and allows moving the camera to a certain altitude, and no lower. One, move the default camera view out to what you'd see from Kerbin through a telescope. Two, set the minimum map camera altitude to correspond with the best data over that part of the world in question you have. If you sent a direct-impact camera to the Mun on the Kerbin side of it, you'd be able to zoom in to the whole mun at the lowest alt the entire disk was available to your probe's camera, then in the region of impact, all the way down to 1:1 (in a smaller and smaller region, obviously). This makes mapping useful. It also makes repeat science actually useful as long as you do it in a different location. Throw a probe in low munar polar orbit, and let it map away. @Veeltch makes a good point regarding specific science requirements for parts. One of my early posts on this forum suggested breaking science up into 3 types of science, spaceflight (astronautics?), planetary science, and medical/biological. The first are things like parts testing, or even contracts to do specific things (landing softly would count, or putting something in a specific orbit). Planetary science is most of what we have now. Medical would be for crew in space for certain time periods, science labs in space. Different parts could require different types of science (some might take all 3 ) to unlock, some might require specific parts testing contracts. @regex points out that rejection works better now, but I'd add that the current, misnamed strategies office should allow the player to control the relative abundance of some missions. Also, most contracts are so stupid that they need a global rewrite, IMO. Rescues imply a competing program, and the current paradigm means they are the best way to get crew. You get paid to get crew instead of paying, that's a terrible incentive. Rescues need a major rethinking, IMO, I'd rather they were rare, but possibly much more complex. My short comment is that the solution to awful, random contracts should not be to use the reject functionality, they should be made less random, and less awful---then we can use the reject functionality. Note also that the stock settings have a rep hit for rejection, and no hit for warping a couple days ahead, so the game disincentivizes using reject.

Warping has no drawback, period. It needs none. TIME PASSES. That is all the drawback you need. Why does anyone think that there needs to be a drawback to warping? If missions/contracts had reasonable time limits, the warping thing would be self-regulating. That rescue mission you took? That should have a time limit of a few DAYS, not 10 years. That sat launch contract? Maybe a couple months. The Mun science? A few months. Explore Jool? A few years. The devs have already implicitly told everyone to warp all the time, anyway, as the contract decline involves a rep hit, and you can warp ahead about a week to get new contracts. That means they want people to warp ahead a week constantly (that or they are not good at career game design and did not realize they just created an incentive to warp ahead a week all the time).

They don't have enough to do, anyway, so it's sort of pointless. KIS/KAS as stock would help engineers, but they already have more to do.

Yeah, they're all about mass fraction.

I see peregrine falcons all the time, they nest on a cliff north of me a few miles, and we sometimes hear them vocalizing in mating flights over the house. The cliff in the center of the image is actually a big wall call the Shield. From the town side (left) it's a wide slightly curved face, this image shows it from the side. They nest there on the side of the cliff, so it's closed to climbers (and even hiking just above/below) during the breeding season. My house is just to the left of this image, and nearly straight down a few thousand feet

Such parts would need to not actually look like Soviet stuff any more than stock parts look like NASA stuff.

Including Fahrenheit at all. I don't like seeing fps, pounds of thrust, etc on real launches, either. Yuck. I'd be fine with C°, though.

Krafft Ehricke's books on space flight are good. Good luck finding volume 2 though (it's usually over $100).

As an American with a science background, and 2 kids in school, this idea makes me die a little inside.

"Stock-a-like" would mean that the parts should be fairly generic, and able to be used in "Lego" fashion. Soviet parts don't match the others. That said, with 1.1 fixing the memory issue, I'm all for adding a variant set of parts to stock. My suggestion would be that in sandbox they'd obviously all be available, but in career, you'd pick the country/style of parts. So you'd have a NASA set (what we have now), and then maybe a Soviet set with a different look (obviously some parts can be shared, like cylindrical tanks, though ideally stock would then get right-click options in the VAB to change the skin on the tank). I would then have all the rescue contract always pull from the other side's parts, so you'd end up seeing both kinds in your career in a fun context.

I'm not the one claiming simulation, you are. Since we don't know what realistic outcomes would be, then we can both agree that for this game it's simply made up, with no data. If you want to claim simulation, then you need to simulate. What happens when a non-microscopic particle hits a LH tank at a closing velocity of 10 km/s? Do you know, because I don't know. To know as best we can, we'd simulate it. That means code that is likely not in this game, including the CFD code to model the projectile through the tank. If we both admit that this has not been done, then any claims of "simulation" regarding damage are just a different kind of lookup table based on what "seems reasonable," we'd just hope the real world is not counter to our intuition. Realistic outcomes requires that we have some idea what happens when different things hit a target characterized in the game (and how often they can hit, etc). We need to know what the chances are of a mission kill on the target with certain types of hits. If the game is predicated on ships having many holes punched in them with little effect (the video makes it look that way), then I want to see why a few hundred kg at 10km/s does't deposit more energy/damage in the target than my gut tells me it should. Whats the RL difference between putting a 10g chunk through the hull every m2 at 10km/s and hitting it in one place with 400kg? Again, I don't know. You did;t read, or understand what I said. I said that in fact we only need to simulate what is relevant. What happens when particles of 1gm (shrapnel), 10g, 100g, 100kg, and so forth hit a target at various velocities absolutely matters to the simulation of damage. You either abstract it as I suggested, which was poo-pooed because this is a "simulation," or you actually simulate it. My point is that simulating it is not the same as having it hit multiple abstracted volumes where damage is applied (you're just abstracting, but using smaller hit boxes, it's still a made-up abstraction). Damage is damage, and the same fidelity is required. If the ship has crew, they do jobs, so it matters when there are fewer crew once it's past a certain level. It also matters from a "victory" level, winning the battle with a loss of all hands is not desirable. I'm not the one claiming this is a simulation, I'm FINE with abstraction. But don;t claim that damage is "simulated" accurately if you in fact have no idea if the outcomes map even a little to reality.

I was intentionally exaggerating Look at the context. I suggested they would be better to use lookup tables for damage, and the response was that they were in fact "simulating" it, and it wasn't "a game." Here's what I was replying to: He's saying it's a simulation, but it's just lookup tables anyway, without actually understanding what would happen in a given volume area via simulation. I'm arguing it is in fact a game WRT damage unless they actually simulate damage to relevant scale sizes of structures within targets. (good luck with that)

I never said one goal per year, I said that goals would have reasonable time constraints. You might pick 5 at once. During Apollo NASA ran Gemini, plus the various lunar probes (related to Apollo, but not manned missions) all while also doing satellites, and BEO probes.

Rep is a stand in for the reason behind the real Space Race, for example, which was a PR battle between the US and CCCP for "hearts and minds." I suppose in the modern world, it's a stand in for if you're a fanboy of SpaceX, or Blue Origin (or pithy tweets between the two founders). It also fills the role of public support for a national program. Regarding the extant contracts, the survey contracts from Fine Print could easily be included. I look at them this way, instead of being "contracts" from third parties, think of them as your science guy at KSC, Linus, sitting down at the conference table saying, "Look, boss, we've decided to go to the Mun in the next 2 years, here are the areas where we should explore to find landing spots to get us the most science." Then a few survey contracts... though slightly less random than now, and perhaps sorted at some level by "biome." Player choses broad goal, science guy starts throwing out mission suggestions within that program---and perhaps you need to accept a certain number as part of an "exploration" program---you decide where to go, and your science guys tell you where the landings need to happen---and some might be tricky. Answering some of wumpus's comments: Regarding penalizing players for "wanting to complete a mission," That's the problem, I think that Squad has only ever flown single missions. That's how it seems like they mean the game to be played. Launch a sample return probe to Eeloo, and warp for years. Hence no LS. My argument was that if you want no penalty for this, play another mode. I like the idea of having to think about getting my ducks in a row for the next Duna window (and I tend to play at 6.4X distances with stock parts, plus LS). The problem in terms of discussing all this, is that it tends to require ideas dropped as complete systems, as they all interact. Time becomes more important when LS enters the equation. Say you crash your Mun lander, or it lacks sufficient dv to return. It has XX days of LS, and you have no rescue craft already built... they die. What if you have some craft in flight, but not designed for the job... maybe you can top off the tanks, and land it to pick up the crew, or maybe you can use a probe with LS supplies added to buy time... those become fun play, in my experience (using KCT). I'm not saying it's easy, either, but the first step is to decide what career is supposed to be, or bossily a couple career modes if one type will not cut it.

What Veeltch said. The game would know what excessive warping is. If you warp past deadlines (including the end of the fiscal year when you get your new budget) too much, that's "excessive." It's organic to the changes made. With nothing but stock and Life Support, excessive warping is characterized, and enforced. War too long, and your station crew dies, un-resupplied. I would add that from a management POV---and career is supposed to be management---ideally kerbals could do some things by themselves. It would be nice to be able to demonstrate resupply, then have it occur, even if abstracted, by itself.

^^yeah, the simulation thing is hard... it doesn't help that KSP gives the player no information. With KER, then you can tell in the VAB what your craft can do, and there is less need to guess. The revert/simulation thing was why I suggested just X reverts allowed. Maybe X is lower with diff level.

I'm not as keen on blowing up the R&D lab. I'd prefer a chance to lose the progress on a given node, and you're back to square one on that node. Perhaps testing comes into play here. Say there are (and I assume a decent tech tree, not stock, so more like CTT or ETT) 4 parts in a node. Starting R&D tells the game to generate parts test contracts from those manufacturers. Every test you do reduces the (already very low) chance of failure a little. SO you can pay max funds/science for short delivery time, but there is some risk the thing goes X months, then an explosion in the lab puts them back at square 1 and the X month development starts over.

Yeah, actually you can. They only get punished if they warp excessively. They need to do something per year with their budget. So if they chose to no nothing, and warp month by month till next tear, next year they get less funding. Boo hoo. Right now it is nearly impossible to lose KSP career, ever, as far as I can tell, even not reverting. It's possible in "grind" ("HARD") mode, but it's just a grind, it's not difficult. Your statement about running hundreds of garbage contracts does't apply, since those don't even exist any more in this scheme. All the bad contracts go away to start (which is most of them, sadly). "Program" spending is annual, and is a budget from Kongress---but as I said, it is doled out monthly. Out of cash? Warp to next month. This budget is pretty much for all science missions and is based on rep, what programs you want, etc. No more 3d parties asking you for science from orbit around the Mun. Linus and Werner ask for funds to do science. Commercial contracts are commercial, and are an external income stream. Tourism has to self-fund as well. Warping to Jool mission completion, ignoring everything else you have going on? That's not a thing, play sandbox for that. Besides, you don't need to, as routine play will actually move time forward, unlike now, where it ONLY moves forward due to players warping mission transit. Warp to next transfer window? If the next transfer window is in a year, guess what, you don't warp to it, you do a few other things, and since time actually moves forward in smaller wars, you don't need to do this. Building a rocket could take a few weeks, for example. Stop with the straw man, no one has ever suggested "messing with paperwork" in relation to career mode. Ever. Career is supposed to have management aspects, and the ability to fail as a program. In replay it is simply not possible to fail. There are not even alternate strategies to bother taking. Squad hasn't tackled this because they have no decent conception of what career should be, and they tacked on the current system, then just ran with it as it was easier to "finish" this one than make one that is actually good. The current career is random side quests. That's it. The "strategies," are not strategies. The Mission Control does;t control missions, it's a contract office. The rescues and milestones imply a space race... that doesn't exist. It's a cobbled together mess. I agree that getting the balance right on a new career system is non-trivial, but it would be time well spent. Things required to make career decent, plus have a chance of failure in any normal play mode, IMO: 1. Time needs to progress for normal operations. This means that warping has to become standard at some level due to budgets doled out over X week timeframes, construction taking time (a whole bunch of KCT stuff could be used here), etc. Life support? Maybe (could be Hard mode, as LS actually makes a qualitative difference in play, not just grind). 2. Dump absurd contracts. Hauling ore is not a thing, making a base with ISRU is. Suborbital is no different than orbital for part testing, ever, but being in or out of an atmosphere is meaningful, or reentering might be a new one (heat above some value). Most contracts are goofy. They need to make sense in the career context, instead---designed to make sense in that context from both directions. 3. Revert and quicksave... QS is pretty necessary for crashes, but using them in the course of regular play is a problem for career mode. In Sandbox, try things back from orbit all you like, but in career, since there are no random failures, the player has to be allowed (forced) to deal with their mistakes. That;s kind of the point of career, else why not play sandbox/science? I'd have a revert quota per year, dunno if that is possible for loading or making saves. So the revert quota is for simulation (or it could go the KCT route). Then you actually end up testing stuff to save a revert for when you might really need it (you launched the Duna ship, but forgot to put an antenna on it). If building takes time, then just some testing moves the clock. We want testing, and failures to take time, so that you might end up with time pressure at some point if you've not done well. 4. Make Program/mission/contract (whatever we call them) time limits sensible. 5. Allow the players to set the agenda. There are finite bodies to visit, and finite ways to visit them---from orbit, in the atmosphere (if any), or on the surface), manned or unmanned. That's it. It would be easy to have a "build your program" section with pull downs. Allowable budget, timeframe, rep, min science gathered, all these can be interactive sliders... do the same mission for fewer funds, and watch the rep reward slider move up automatically, build a trivial mission, and the rep slider goes down, unless you can do it far cheaper than average. There has to be a way, and the entire Squad career paradigm is broken now. I just started a 1.1.2 career (mostly normal settings, dead crew is dead, and I don't revert except from the pad for dumb stuff (forgot to change the crew, or forgot some part, etc), and I only use QS for crash recovery. I take contracts that make sense, and parts contracts have to be part of a launch on an actual rocket. I've unlocked the first few tiers of the tree, it's like day 61, and I have a million funds, and a few buildings upgraded. At this point, the game in terms of win/lose is long over. There is zero probability my funds and science don't just grow like crazy. Every career I start is like this, I'd have to fubar several launches in a row early on to have a chance of failure. In hard mode, it would be similar, except I'd have to take contracts I'd never take otherwise (which I hate).

Yeah, I fear the current career paradigm will not grossly change, so some of the ideas in this thread are possible, because they work with what we have. New tech tree shape: there are mods that already do this. And overhaul gets something like CTT/ETT. New tech tree currencies: maybe add time as a currency (it takes a certain minimum time, but that time can increase and save science/funds, or decrease to min, and increase science/funds expense. Parts testing can also be used to modify the time/funds/science required, and ideally with some chance of failure as this is a voluntary decision by the player (engines have a small % chance to fail (function at some level between 0 and 90%, say) at each control input (throttle on/off), tanks have a small chance of developing a leak every XX hours, RCS can work or not work by unit, batteries can leak charge, experiments produce lower (or no) science, etc). If you add in LS (something like USILS for stock, as it has no default death penalty), then time really matters with no other changes.

Time warping is not a problem. In fact, we WANT time warping, that's the point, in fact. A system with budgets would have the budget level predicated on Rep, probably. Congress gives you funds for a year based on how you've done with what they gave you last year. If you warp a year, and do nothing... your Rep plummets, and the new budget suffers a great deal. You get budgets for projects, and the projects would have reasonable time limits (or indeed, the player can slide the time limit around in return for more Rep reward, etc, upon completion). Reasonable in this case means weeks, maybe months for many goals. They would be calibrated to the new system under the assumption people will warp. Perhaps "reverts" could be limited to X per budget year (they are simulations). This would allow warping as much as you like, but it has a cost, loss of Rep. Regarding the R&D, adding time as a currency would encourage warping (min funds and science, max time, so you warp). This is GOOD. It means that say you have an orbital program (Mercury/Gemini/Soyuz-like) going, AND a Mun program to land and return within 3 years (dunno where time limits should be set, so don't get hung up on the number). You need certain parts you don't have for your planned Mun mission that you lack. So you set the tech tree to research the important part node you want using minimal science and funds, and it will take a year, and you'll need at least 1 more node unlocked after that. You work away on your orbital stuff, run out of budget for the year, and warp ahead a couple months to the new year. You get some funds, do some more science, complete more orbital program stuff (docking, etc). You decide to make a Munar flyby, warp a few more months to secure the funds (dolled out monthly), then do that mission (completing part of the Munar program, adding some Rep. You might at this point just warp to R&D completion. Now you do the next tree node, but you spend some extra funds and some science, so instead of a year, it's 6 months. You do a few contracts, just because, and get some extra funds. You buy some cheap nodes you had not unlocked yet outright with science and funds. You warp to completion of the required node. You now have under 3 months to complete your Munar Program on time, and now you have the parts to build the craft you want to build. 3 years have passed, and much of it was hitting a warp button. So what? In stock KSP, all that would have happened in 3 DAYS.

Not really. You need to look at the context. Our conversation was originally the claim that the prices might drop low enough that they create new markets such that the current, limited number of customers would expand and allow for substantially more commercial launches. My point was that a small reduction of 20% is not transformative... I'm frankly unsure that a 90% reduction is that transformative---again, how many cubesats do we need? I have no doubt that there can be an increase in demand with lower prices, I merely argue it will be incremental. We've already looked at the available commercial launches, and there are not that many in the first place, so even a large % increase is not huge. Someone in that back and forth said they launch twice as many this year, then twice as many the next, and so forth. I don't see that as plausible. I wish it was, but it's not. John Jack also ended a reply something like "---then Mars." Mars has no possible business model, it can only be done as a hobby. The nice thing about SpaceX is that by getting other people to buy a rocket that is not destroyed, SpaceX ends up with "free" rockets lying around. Red Dragon could be the nth flight of their all-up commercial crew test vehicle, for example (strip out the stuff that is not needed to reduce mass, and go). Then he gets RD for the price of propellant, an upper stage, and perhaps a FH core (unless he lands one, then he has a free FH, too). Mars is a hobby, and a cool hobby indeed, but it's not a business.

I knew that, I just spaced it after hours of homework wrangling and getting my daughter ready for a school camping trip she left for today. Sorry, my bad.