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How many MArs manned missions will be sent any time soon? None, because they are prohibitive. This was well hashed over during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, and the science people almost universally agreed that manned flight was not about science, it was entirely political, and even military. KSP is the 1950s and 60s. Manned science might start reaping returns at the point of more continuous habitation, maybe. That's sort of end-game KSP at best, or even beyond scope. You can find modern defense of manned science, but they make huge errors, like comparing 300+ kg of moon rocks to under a kilo returned by probes… forgetting that without the manned missions, they'd have just made probes collect more (why bother when NASA has hundreds of kgs?). Manned spaceflight is not about science, sorry (ISS has contributed about nothing to basic science, for example). Look at what manned flight has done, and remove anything related to human habitation of space (bone loss, studies, etc). Of whatever is left, what requires a human, right there, to do? Almost nothing if there is actually anything that requires a person at all. Every once in a while there is something like the Hubble repair, but the cost of the HST was ~2.5 million including launch… and it used Shuttle, which was ~1.6 million per launch alone. The repair was a launch, so if they could have launched a new HST for under ~700 million launch cost, it would have been cheaper just to replace it. The telescope was around a billion, and the 5 servicing missions cost ~1.6 billion each. Total space only costs were then nearly 10 billion. Even with identical launch costs, it would have been cheaper to launch 3 HSTs than 1 with 5 service missions. I'm all for manned space, JUST BECAUSE, I have no illusions that it results in more/better planetary science, however.

There are always special cases, but the reality is that probes are far more cost effective than people. This is really not debatable. Manned missions, particularly to distant worlds, require vastly more mass than probes to do the same job. Sure, there are isolated places where a scientist might notice something on-site that he'd not notice remotely, but the fact that you could send many, many probes for the cost of a single manned mission puts the balance in favor of robots. The reason for manned flight is not science, it's broader than that. I'm all for manned flight, BTW, just because it is valuable for humanity to strive for such things, and the existence of these programs uplifts us all, IMO. Science is not the reason though. Even in the Kerbol system, which is tiny, if you bother with life support (as you'd have to to make any argument about probes vs manned flight), this is true. It would be particularly true if the game has soil analysis parts (transmitting science) and the capability for a probe part to take surface samples for return.

Excellent point. Can't it do the same thing, and if there is such an event, it drops you out with a message? That's the kind of thing you might miss anyway without KAC.

Keeping track of time for construction is exactly nothing like pay to win in any possible way you want to look at it. It can also have virtually zero impact on the player's workflow playing, except that it uses up a resource that is completely ignored right now for everything but spaceflight, TIME. Have a build in background button, and a warp to rocket completion ("Launch") button. Still one click to launch if you wish. "Revert to launch" does what you'd expect, "Revert to VAB" takes you back to design, before the build is actually started. You can test as you like, and revert to before construction (no time elapsed). NOTHING changes for the way you want to play, whatsoever. The only difference is time passing, and that only matters for launch windows unless you play with life support (and anyone who does probably wants construction time to matter). Anyone aware of launch windows is already planning ahead, so this would not likely be a problem for them, either (and there's always a new, identical window next year, anyway). I'd like to see how such a system would possibly be a problem.

If the goal is basic "science," as in real life, there is no benefit whatsoever to sending people/kerbals instead of probes. The only "science" gained by sending people is the science of keeping people alive in space environments. As you say, science is not in short supply anyway, people willing to game the system can easily get science without ever going past the Mun (or possibly even Kerbin itself, though I personally never take any Kerbin science mission that doesn't require orbit). Look at the issue from the other side, though. Without life support, kerbals might as well be probes/robots. It's easy to send a Duna mission with a mk1 pod as the craft, for example. I've never done that, since I think that being gone that long requires multiple crew, and even before I added a LS mod, I added multiple Hitchhikers, a science lab, etc to any Duna-bound craft because it seemed absurd not to. Seriously, if you can send a kerbal to the far ends of the system in a 1.25m diameter pod for X years, you are treating them as probes, not beings.

Quoted out as reference to Squad's desires, not yours It's no more needless than warping to Jool. If they don't want "needless time warping," then why not make dv requirements for transfers independent of time of year? Select Jool as target, and you always get the best possible dv transfer. That avoids needless time warp, right? Heck, select a target, and it just does the rendezvous like hyperedit, with no "needless" time wasted playing. If they don't include time in a real way, having things take actual time, they should just scrub all references to time out of the game, it means nothing at all right now. There is no difference between maintaining a complex program with many craft in flight at the same time, and simply warping any particular probe/whatever all the way to completion.

Death needs to be explicit on your last step as the primary penalty. Run out, die.

You can alter the cfg in snacks and it kills them instead of just dinging rep, BTW. I think a single resource system (with a power requirement added) is what KSP needs. All more complex systems can in fact be reduced to a single consumable with no meaningful change in fidelity, IMO. MOre complex systems just make the interface busy. The bottom line is that different spacecraft will have different hardware capabilities for LS. The important thing is what % is recycled, which lets you know how much you need to bring with you to make up for those losses. What % of the added mass is food/water/consumable elements of recyclers, etc does't matter, just the total mass needed to bring for a trip of duration X.

Better would be to only warp for construction time. Finish design, and have 2 buttons, "Build in the background (XXX days required) and continue play," or "Skip (warp) to completion and Launch."

I'm all for a single resource LS system. Bottom line is that a % is recovered, and a % is lost. The gear to recover is already included in the habs/pods, and the number of kerbal-days LS carried is a measure of both the mass of carried consumables, and the efficiency of the recovery gear. The only thing that I'd add to Snacks! is a power requirement. To utilize kerbal skills, perhaps if you run out of LS (or get within X% of running out) the engineering skill aboard can function as an extension (delivered by adding X days of supplies) using some improvisation (buys a couple days to get a rescue there, perhaps). Another thread proposed morale, and I like that as well (no one goes on a multi-year mission alone).

The problem is, that everything is connected. They don't way X in the game, but X impacts so many different things that are really required for meaningful career gameplay. Sandbox is sandbox, and science mode uses science points as the goal. Career needs to be more all-inclusive of management issues. I say that as someone who does't care in the least for a "management" game. I look at it like a "campaign" game that supports a tactical game. What you like to play is the tactical game, the units on the battlefield. The campaign is abstracted, and exists solely to create novel battles to fight. If all the battles were evenly matched, on the same terrain, with the same victory conditions, the game would be BORING. Sort of like what you might see in an exploration game where you already know where everything is, and exactly how to get there before you start, and you can in fact explore the entire game in a very short period of time, every time (since it is always exactly the same). Hmm, what game is like that in career that we all know? People whine that X, Y, and Z additions are "too hard" or in the case of time progression that "people will just warp past it." They miss the point that everything is connected. Missing an ideal launch window because of lack of planning… is a good thing. It rewards planning ahead. Just like the current game rewards planning ahead and putting solar panels on a ship, or attitude control if all you have is an OCTO2 probe core. Combine time for construction with life support and you get some interesting (and FUN) gameplay problems for people to solve. Lander tips, and you need a rescue mission before LS runs out. You might have a stock launch vehicle already built, and in the time remaining you might be able to slap on a lander using parts you already have… not ideal, but they can work. Or maybe you cannot alter the launch vehicle/probe enough for rescue, but there is a cheap, fast part that can be bolted on to land LS supplies such that you have time to mount a proper rescue. I just like the idea that a Kerbol system spanning program might take more than a couple years to happen, I suppose. - - - Updated - - - This makes no sense at all. You are already "rushed," you go from no spaceflight, to manned missioned everywhere in a year or so. How is that not rushed? Time moving for construction is the opposite of rushed.

Planets need not be a ?, they can have map view just as they do now… but move the POV of the map view FAR away to match what is observable from Kerbin. For worlds like Duna, Jool, etc, use the image you see when it first renders. That's it, as good as map view gets. When you send a flyby, you get map view something like the flyby periapsis (say a multiple). When you orbit, you get that distance to start with, and the more science you do, the better map zoom gets.

Most people don't spend 12 actual hours in the VAB. Even if they did… 2 days. That's nothing. It's not like they designed Apollo, then built it in 2 days. Doesn't need to be years, but it should be many weeks for large designs at least to be meaningful.

Real time management should be a thing, but this suggestion is pointless, IMO. 15 minutes passing in the VAB is pretty much meaningless. People routinely time warp many months at a time (yet some get upset at the notion that building a huge rocket might do the same exact thing, inexplicably).

The trouble is constant acceleration trajectories.

Time passing in the VAB would have to be accelerated or it would be useless. Many weeks need to pass, not minutes.

^^^^^excellent post. resources yet another reason for time to matter.

First, rkman is right about LS. Kerbin SoI missions would largely be unaffected, the diff level would be for Duna, Jool, etc. The place where build time (many weeks) would matter is if you have an accident without another rocket already built, then life support might not last.

Time passing in the VAB is fine, but it should then zoom past as if warped. Better to have time still in the VAB, then jump forward to completion if you hit "launch." Another button could be added for "build" which would start building, but time still 1:1. Note that Squad said that for 1.0, they'd have warp to maneuver node. No reason not to "warp to rocket completion." Time really needs to be added.

A simple solution: If you exit the VAB to KSC, time is still clicking along, real time. If you hit "launch" time jumps forward to the time when construction is completed. The player sees no difference in terms of annoyance, but that time DOES pass. If you were running with a life support mod, weeks might have passed, for example. It's a no-brainer. Right now elapsed time from your first 1km suborbital flight to unlocking everything and having bases on the Mun is a handful of months.

This. It's meaningful to have time pass, it's the only possible way for contract deadlines to make any sense since in normal KSP, the only time you get time passing is on flights to Jool, etc---in time warp.

That's just getting more science. Science is not the reward, buying new tech is the reward. I could get 1,000,000 science for something… what would the point be, exactly?

You need to bore down and find the dev version. There are links to it near the end of the KJR thread. Changing to that version will instantly fix the problem.

Actually, that would be interesting… say life support was optional, or just a mod as it is now, but there is a rival agency. Jeb is trapped on the Mun, and you cannot build, launch, and reach him before his LS runs out… but the UKR has a ship nearby on the Mun, or in orbit. You hit "SOS" for Jeb, and he gets rescued, which lowers your rep, and raises the rep of the rival program.

I said manned space flight has nothing to do with science. I should have been clear that I meant planetary science. Men or kerbals are entirely unnecessary to do planetary science (collecting a rock is 120 points, science from orbit crew reports are 1-2, do the math), and are in fact counterproductive if the goal is doing that science in a cost effective way. On topic, this means that the primary motivation for manned flight is rivalry.