SciMan

Yes but the time isn't what matters in my example, it's the RATE. Rate of resources transported decreases as travel time increases, if you hold the number of ships and the maximum velocity of those ships constant. I didn't want to get into the math on this, but you've forced my hand. So, allow me to explain why speed matters: Say you have a colony that needs.... let's say 50 units of Oxygen per (in-game) day to keep it's life support systems running (just an example, I have no idea how life support works, but it's the first example that came to mind where there's an obvious "bad things happen" if you don't meet the minimum threshold). OK, you think, no problem, I'll send a lot of oxygen at once so I don't have to send so many small supply ships. 10k sounds like a lot since we're only using 50 per day, you think. So you set up a colony supply route from one of my other colonies (say on Laythe) that supplies 50 units of oxygen per day, in batches of 10k units at a time. Now we have a time constraint. A new shipment of Oxygen must arrive at least every 200 in-game days, in order to maintain the !RATE! of 50 Oxygen supplied per day. Let's say you created this supply route when A and B were on the same side of Kerbol, and enough time has passed that the two planets are now on the opposite side of Kerbol from each other. Well, let's say that when you set up the supply route you built 3 ships to use that route, and were sending one every 190 days (to give some safety margin). Now that the planets are on the other side of the star from each other, the journey is taking much, much longer than 190 days. Let's say it's now taking 600 days for any one ship to cross that distance. Guess what? You don't have enough ships to keep that supply chain's !RATE OF TRANSPORTED REOSURCES! above the minimum anymore. So your colony runs out of life support. OK, now let's turn the clock back some. Say you catch the problem in time. What would you rather do? Spend the resources to build say 20 more ships to put on that route, and not change anything? Or would you rather design a new supply vessel that can still transport 10k Oxygen, but now thanks to the torch drive even when A and B are the furthest apart they will ever be, it only takes FIFTY days for the vessel to make a round-trip, instead of 190. Oh and it uses less fuel to do that, even if it is a harder fuel to manufacture or it needs a more rare resource. Now if you keep the same number of ships (3), and they each take 50 days to make a round trip, I'm sure you can see how that's a much higher rate of resources transported, right? Time only matters as a variable, it's not a PRIMARY constraint. The PRIMARY constraint is the rate you want to transport resources at. But because the rate has time as a factor, time is a (secondary) factor, you see?

I have an excellent idea about what makes torch drives so attractive. And it's not some overly-convoluted resource that has wacky handling restrictions or needs to be processed somewhere other than where it was mined. None of that. That's a good thing, because that kind of stuff tends to be counterintuitive to the point that most people will just look it up rather than learn it themselves. OK, on to the PERFECTLY NATURAL CONSEQUENCE OF INTERPLANETARY LOGISTICS that makes torch drives worth using. Here's the conditions you find that need solving: You want a given rate (aka throughput) of a certain resource to move from say Eeloo to Jool. OK, that's fine, build a ship using any old propulsion system and send it on it's way, problem solved because we can just time-warp, right? WRONG! Sometimes they're on the opposite sides of Kerbol. Sometimes they're practically right next to each other, in a celestial sense. That's a pretty wide variability of journey times, isn't it? Yes it is. And that's a problem that needs solving. OK, but why does that mean going faster is better? Well. think of it like this: You have "a few" ships on the supply route. You can think of that like making a "conveyor belt" stretched between A and B, but the problem is that it's also basically a bungee cord. It's "stretchy" because the time it takes to get from A to B varies, yet the cargo capacity does not. Just like a bungee cord, when you stretch it, it gets thinner. In this case, that means that the further the supply route has to travel, the lower the throughput becomes, because you have different amounts of time taken to transport the same amount of "stuff". On to the solutions. There are at least two good options to combat this throughput reduction with range: 1. You can put more ships on the supply route. 2. You can re-design the ships you already have on the supply route, with new propulsion systems, so that they can sustain a higher average speed over the distance involved. And this right here is what the torch drives do. Since they're also quite efficient, they do so without using ALL the fuel. Putting more ships on the supply route is the obvious solution, and while it's effective, it's also wasteful in a way. The problem is that if you have enough ships in transit to meet the throughput demand when A and B are furthest apart, you have FAR TOO MANY plying the space lanes when they're close together. That's why the ideal solution is to keep the number of ships constant (at a lower number probably determined by some calculation that I don't have figured out or in front of me right now), and instead replace the slow ships with faster ships whenever the opportunity arises. Making the ships go faster does one of two things. Either it allows you to use less ships to transport the same amount of resources, or it lets you use the same amount of ships to transport resources at a faster rate. Or I suppose you could strike a balance, if you want, but the idea is that it always increases capability. And I did all that without even considering what kind of special handling requirements any potential type of cargo could have. See? You don't need a "special" reason to go faster. Just going faster is reason enough itself, when you consider it alongside the other factors of interplanetary logistics.

There's also such a thing as a landing being TOO precise. You know, when you set your colony as your landing target, and then instead of killing off your last bit of horizontal velocity right above the landing area for your colony, you do that, but right above all your carefully-constructed colony instead. EDIT: On further consideration, that's another point in favor of a "designated landing pad" colony part (or just a "landing pad bulls-eye" that you use other normal colony road/runway/launchpad building tools to build your own pad from, or we could get both several sizes of "pre-set pads" as well as the bulls-eye marker for custom and/or very large pads). This type of colony/base part would force the target indicator of any vessel that targets the colony to be placed on the coordinates of that landing pad (or center marker) instead of the "root building" of the colony itself (or however else you'd be able to target a colony that as-yet has no landing pads). If a single surface colony has multiple pads placed, it gets a little more complicated, but from the point of the user it's not that much more to deal with. Instead of the pad being selected instantly, you will be prompted to pick one from a list of empty pads (out of those that the colony has), with that list also giving you information such as the landing pad's name (which you can set as part of placing or editing the landing pad colony part), and the dimensions of the pad as well as (potentially) its shape (if it's not a "pre-set pad", the game will show "Custom" or when placing the pad down you will be able to set a word or short phrase to indicate the shape of the pad). I don't see a reason that this system wouldn't be able to do runways as well, now that I think about it. You'd just need a different type of "bulls-eye" indicator (instead being the touchdown markings of a runway), and the addition of various kinds of lights to make it act like a real runway (PAPI, Glide-slope indicators, you know, the things you think of when you think of an aircraft runway that's illuminated at night). They could even potentially include ILS and glide-slope antennas if cockpit instruments are sophisticated enough to let you fly on instruments in cockpit view.

No, I don't think development of war mods should be banned for KSP 2. However, I think that a more productive avenue of approaching that kind of gameplay experience is to "add KSP stuff to another game", rather than to "Add war stuff to KSP". I think the best phrase I can come up with for what I think of KSP 2 having war mods is this. War mods are a very square peg. And KSP is a very round hole to plug mods into. Can you fit the right sized square peg in a round hole? Yes. But you're leaving a bunch of gaps around the edges, which in my mind are systems in KSP that aren't needed for war mods but are critical to the standard gameplay experience. Do I want to stop people from trying to fit square pegs in round holes? No. I just want to stop people from using hammers to do so. By that I mean "Don't expect KSP 2's dev team to make allowances for war mods in the way the modding API is coded".

Lofstrom loops are a lot more possible than a space elevator because they're a DYNAMICALLY supported structure (as in that loop of iron inside the thing is moving faster than the local circular orbital velocity), sort of similarly to how a chain fountain works, but massively scaled up. Actually, speaking of "chain fountains", there's another one I forgot about. Space Fountains. It's like a space elevator, but it doesn't need "uber-strong materials" to build it. It does need a very reliable source of power, and a very finely tuned control system. But it does what a space elevator does, in a way that we can actually (theoretically) build right now with pretty mundane materials as far as absolute strength goes (the magnets might be the hardest part, but weaker magnets just make the thing bigger and potentially more power-hungry, they don't make it less capable). How it works is like this: Just like a Lofstrom Loop, you have a loop of iron segments. But instead of accelerating it horizontally along the surface until it's going faster than local orbital velocity, it is accelerated VERTICALLY. The upward velocity of the segments is more than capable of bringing it up to geostationary orbit (and then quite a bit more, escape velocity is a good place to start if you want the upper platform to sit at geostationary orbit altitude). The construction is as follows: At the bottom, you have a gigantic magnet that takes downward-traveling parts of the loop of iron segments and re-directs them to go upwards, as well as a bunch of coils arranged to form a linear motor to impart further upward acceleration on to the segments (keeping the speed of the whole loop maintained, and then some margin to spare both for contingencies, startup/shutdown, and for actually performing useful work of lifting payloads to geostationary orbit). The platform at the top has a similar gigantic magnet, however the purpose of that magnet is the reverse of the one on the ground. It bends the trajectory of upward-moving segments of the loop and re-directs them downwards. There are no acceleration coils at the top, however there likely would be trajectory control coils on both ends (with some form of thruster array at the top to cancel out any reaction forces from the control coils). You can take this concept and scale it up or down as well. In the smaller sense, the space fountain becomes a "Dynamic compression beam", because it uses dynamic forces to carry compression loads. Multiples of these can be used to build even larger buildings than current materials science would permit, without having to have the ground floor taken up mostly by structural elements and elevators. In the larger sense, you get Dynamic Orbital Ring structures, which are "orbital" rings that use space-fountain type technology to stay suspended stationary above the surface of a planet while not having the requirement to be at geostationary altitude. This can be used to make multiple sets of rings around a planet, in any given direction. Taking this concept even further, if you weave a dense enough network of these dynamic rings at a given altitude, you can build things suspended in the spaces between the dynamic ring members, leading to the concept of an "orbital super-shell". And if you put that around a star, with solar panels on the inside, you get a supra-stellar shell, or Dyson Sphere. Build that at the right altitude, and somehow manage to dissipate the heat, and you can build a habitable region on the OUTSIDE (not inside) of that Dyson Sphere, with a surface area in the range of hundreds of thousands of times the surface area of Earth. So with that knowledge, you can see how the lowly Lofstrom Loop can be the start of a civilization moving up the Kardashev scale many notches (and 2 is "many" in this case, since just moving up 1 notch is something that would alter everyday life to something only remotely like what we currently know).

It only renders the thread useless for discussion of war mods, or at least that's what my intent was. We shouldn't go right to "we only talk about war mods here" when the topic of the thread doesn't mention war a single time, yet that's exactly what happened with the past few pages of posts. So I suggested that those who wish to discuss such things take their discussion to their own thread. My approach with these kinds of things is often "start off with a blunt instrument, and hone it as needed". So I started off with something very general, to avoid people trying to weasel their way out of it with the old "this isn't that, so it still belongs here" kind of thing. Same reason a lot of places that have need for a moderation team have a rule that goes something like "If you're trying to explain how you're not breaking the rules, you're breaking the rules". But really what I was trying to see no further discussion about in this thread was "war mods and if they're workable and how they'd work and blah blah blah", I won't get into it again. It's not that I'm trying to globally stifle that discussion. I'm just saying that there's too many posts about war mods in this thread within the past few pages, compared to how many people have or will actually install and use war mods in KSP 1 or 2. So I suggested creating a new thread for that thing. If I sounded like I wanted ALL discussion of how a specific kind of mod would work to go to its own thread, that's not what I intended. It's pretty much just the talk about war mods that was bothering me. But I guess if it gets too involved and "stuck" on any one type of mod, I'd probably get a little irritated. Same with how I get irritated when talk about how time warp works seems to be the only thing that ever got discussed in the multiplayer discussion thread. I'm not interested in what everyone's stuck on, no matter what it is. I probably formed my opinion about that subject in a few minutes, and it's gonna stay that way, and I see no need to discuss it further, so the thread should probably move on to another sub-topic of whatever it's about, and yet it gets stuck on one subject for MONTHS. It's like nobody can tell when someone's not willing to be convinced, and so the discussion just goes endlessly in circles, occasionally devolving to less-than-civil discourse. That's how the multiplayer discussion thread died. It's quite irksome to me. I don't like seeing threads die like that. And it's irksome enough that it's the kind of thing that makes me stop browsing the forums for that day. But I don't just stay perturbed at a problem and not try to solve it. So that (thread specific) rule is what I came up with so far to potentially prevent this thread from circling the drain.

How about stuff that's not space elevators but is still a way to get something into orbit that doesn't involve rockets all the way up? I'm talking about things like mass drivers, Lofstrom Loops, Laser/Microwave Launch, heck even Rotovators, that kind of thing. Advantage: Much, much, MUCH easier to design the materials for compared to a space elevator even on a reduced gravity world. Disadvantage: Launch happens into a pretty much "fixed" orbit, all you get is a timing choice, the altitude, eccentricity, and inclination are all fixed by where the launch site is on the surface or where you attach to the rotovator tether (rotovators and laser launch are the most flexible of these options, but laser launch doesn't quite count since it's still sort of a type of rocket). Basically, they're all just variations on a method to move the power source from "on the rocket" to "on the ground" and only needing a rocket at apoapsis to circularize the burn (except the rotovator, which can send things to orbit, escape velocity, suborbital, or anywhere in between, and works both for launching and landing payloads). These things never get the attention they deserve. Some of them we could potentially even make happen RIGHT NOW with tech we have RIGHT NOW (except maybe needing a bigger rocket to send up some parts of some of them, like the rotovator). The point I'm trying to make is that everyone focuses on the space elevator because it's the simplest concept to understand. The problem is that with only a tiny bit more complexity, you get something we could actually build, starting TODAY. EDIT: Things like this could be an ideal means to get raw resources from the surface to orbit, to then be collected up and loaded on to a vessel more suited for the depths of interplanetary space. It would trade "colony power output" increase, for "colony fuel consumption" decrease. Additionally, constructing it would obviously require a large amount of raw materials, proportional to the velocity you want to get out of the system, so it would be able to be constructed in "chunks" of a fixed velocity increment, and then on the end of the track you'd be able to set the elevation angle relative to the horizon for the payload's trajectory. This means that while you might not have the space at your Tylo colony site to get up to full orbital velocity, so instead you might opt for a track that is much shorter but the payload is released at a significantly upward trajectory compared to the horizon, that way it still gives an overall reduction in gravity losses but you can use much more efficient, lower thrust engines to circularize the orbit instead of having to rely on high thrust-to-weight engines which tend to have lower specific impulse, thereby increasing the payload mass ratio of a vessel sent to Tylo orbit from such an acceleration track. Mass drivers would would be especially viable on bodies that have no atmosphere and low gravity (which usually go hand-in-hand at least in the inner solar system). For instance, on Gilly you'd need to accelerate something to less than 100 m/s to send it to Gilly escape velocity. Even Minmus is an excellent candidate for this (finally a good use for the vast flat plains of Minmus, might need a ramp on the end of the track tho). Lofstrom Loops are basically mass drivers but for planets that have a significant atmosphere, because they're dynamically suspended above the atmosphere by the velocity of a circulating loop of iron segments held away from the walls of the tube that protects that loop from the atmosphere by magnetic levitation (or during startup/shutdown, regular old roller bearings).

You know, I think I've thought of a rule for this thread. How "war mods" work is off the topic of "what mods you want to see in ksp 2". We're not talking about how we want specific mods to work in KSP 2, or if they're even possible. We're talking about "what mods we want in KSP 2". That's the entirety of the extent of it. It stops right there. If you want to discuss how war mods might or might not work in KSP 2, make your own thread for it. It's a different enough topic that it deserves its own thread. That way I don't have to keep saying I don't want war mods in KSP 2, because that's exactly my stance on it. I don't think they belong in KSP or KSP 2. And apparently ultimately neither did the main modding talent behind the most prevalent war mod for KSP. That's why VTOL VR exists. It was literally a case of "I want to make this mod spun off and turn it into its own game". That's how different war mods are from literally every other kind of mod you can think of for KSP 2. It's apples and corn, not just apples and oranges.

That's not quite right. Science labs are totally viable in career mode in KSP 1, and in fact are the optimal way to beat the tech tree. The problem is the same as ever. You don't even need the science lab to beat the KSP 1 tech tree, and that's without ever leaving Kerbin's sphere of influence. There's more than enough science on Kerbin, the Mun, and Minmus to fully unlock everything, and a large part of why that is is that there's so many biomes all over the place (mostly right at KSC tho, which is kinda stupid). And with a science lab (or many) with it's meager needs of 5 ec/second continuous while doing research, setting up an orbiting base is far too easy of a design challenge compared to the massive reward in science output you get out of it. Solar panels are so easy to spam that you have absolutely no problem coming up with enough electricity to run a science lab, when in fact that requirement for power should be probably 10x more than it is (50ec/s, which is in the range of what a large ISRU converter takes at full speed with any 2 converters running). It should probably also output some low-temperature (aka hard to get rid of) heat, because you know it probably has powerful computers and scientific equipment that needs waste heat removal. But yes, the benefit should be that you get more out of the experiment than just transmitting the data back to KSC. More of what, I'm not sure, but the idea is that it should be a good idea to set up a science lab. Another thing: The ISRU converter. Despite the propensity for people to do so (likely caused by the "bad idea contracts" that require you to ship a container of ore somewhere far from where it was mined), shipping ore to an orbiting station to be converted to fuel "up there", is in fact not the ideal way to run things. The conversion should happen on the ground, and you don't even need an orbital fuel depot station. Instead, what you need are two or three things. 1. A craft to mine ore and convert it into LFO and monoprop. 2. If not part of the 1st craft, a vessel to store large quantities of LFO and monoprop. 3. A lander that transports fuel from the surface to orbit, at which point it will rendezvous with orbiting craft that are in need of propellants. If you don't combine the 1st and 2nd crafts into one before you launch them, you should do it before you land them, because it's so hard to get docking ports to line up on the surface and the act of docking to also not throw your craft spectacularly high into the air and then exploding on impact (yes they "fixed" it, yes it still happens). As for how to dock the fuel tanker to the mining and fuel depot vessel, the best thing for the job is a claw on a robotic arm, with the fuel tanker also having some rover wheels to move about on the surface a little bit (to get the claw in range, so you don't have to land it "almost right on top of the mining vessel"). However, even with those steps, you can still have a case of mysteriously leaping vessels. KSP's physics are not completely stable. Landing gear are often the culprit, but I've had craft launched into the air with no engines that had no landing gear or wheels on them at all, so why it happens I'm not sure. Just to hopefully prevent it from happening, I always install WorldStabilizer, which so far has seemed to fix the problem.

This seems to be one of those things that we can only hope to get a definitive answer on by letting a group of people who have literally never played KSP before try to play a build of KSP 2 with axial tilt and see how fast they progress or what complaints they might have about things being hard to figure out, and then for the "control" group, a separate group of KSP veterans that understand axial tilt and orbital mechanics quite well, and see how fast they progress or what complaints they might have. You can't figure this one out with just one test group. You need "new players" to judge the quality of the "new player experience", because there's too many things that anyone who has played KSP for long enough will think are so obvious that they don't bear mentioning, and yet will be entirely confounding sources of confusion for a truly new player. Yes, KSP 2 is basically developed for fans of KSP 1, but it shouldn't be that way to the point that it excludes people with no knowledge of orbital mechanics. I really hope to see axial tilt in the game in the Kerbol system, but Kerbin and the Mun probably shouldn't have it. Everything beyond that is up for grabs tho, and usually aligning the plane of the planet's rotation with the plane of its orbit is the thing that will make the most sense from a "what happens in real life" standpoint, and introduce the least confusion to players both new and returning from KSP 1.

Basically the reason I haven't really gone to the other planets in KSP 1 isn't lack of ability. It's lack of need. If I needed to go to a given planet to unlock a given kind of part, I'd probably do it. Of course, that's only if the game is also not engineered in a way that you "totally don't have to have that part to get everywhere", so maybe make the Delta-V different or re-balance the engines so that using advanced propulsion like the ion engine or Nerv is worth the many hassles that they have (low TWR and special needs of electricity and non-minable Xenon, or low TWR and proclivity to become far too hot), rather than just using the ubiquitous Rhino or Poodle or Cheetah or LV-909 vacuum LFO engines "and so what if I have to have an extra stage to get there, it beats having the burn take half an hour or more of IRL time that I can't skip". So for instance you might need to go to Moho to unlock the radiator type parts, Minmus for LFO/monoprop ISRU, Mun (maybe crashing a few times) for something like landing gear, and you'd have to make Kerbin orbit to unlock heat shields. Even then, those would only be the "starter parts" of those types of technologies. You'd be able to use the science points you get from doing all of this to unlock more advanced versions of these parts. And heck, you'd probably have to send something out of the solar system in order to unlock the notion of an interstellar-capable drive system (this is easily doable in KSP 1 with a Jool flyby, takes a few years tho).

If you really want war in space, there's actually a game for exactly that, and it's still not KSP nor kSP 2. It's called Children of a Dead Earth and it's available on Steam. The best part is that you are fully able to go thru designing every aspect of your ship, from space-faring systems (propulsion, avionics, RCS, etc), all the way to designing your own nuclear weapons (tho it doesn't do thermonuclear, the best you can get is boosted fission, that's still more than enough for the task at hand). But you can do missiles, cannons, cannons that fire missiles, nuclear missiles, cannons that fire nuclear shells, and even cannons that fire nuclear missiles. Oh and there's laser weapons too, but you're gonna need a lot more power for those so you're gonna have to have vulnerable radiators. And the best part? You can do all of that without having a single chance of slagging any part of my carefully orchestrated peaceful exploration/industrial/trade empire. That's nice. Because if you did that, I could take a rock and throw it so hard that not only will the KSC no longer exist, neither will half the continent it was on. Because with KSP 2 they've given us drives powerful enough to be used as weapons, one way or another. And a rock flung at nearly the speed of light will do quite a lot of damage. Why is that? Well it's simple physics. Remember that kinetic energy is 1/2 MV2? Now imagine that V is a number that is close to the speed of light, and then remember that you need to square that. Sound familiar? It should. It's getting close to E=MC2. OK, so it's roughly half that. Still a stupendously large amount of kinetic energy. As in, "gonna have to measure the impact energy in gigatons" type "large" amount of kinetic energy. I don't even need antimatter to obliterate half a continent. I just need to get a rock going fast enough. This whole concept is called a Relativistic Kinetic Kill System, or RKKS for short. So flinging "rocks" is one thing. But if they're flinging "RKKS", you and your whole civilization should be either scared into compliance with whatever their demands are, or evacuating whatever was targeted. Because you can't stop it, you can't destroy it, because destroying it will only turn it from a bullet into a load of buckshot, and so the only option is to run from it. My personal "demands" are quite simple. Just leave me to exploit resources and trade with other players in peace. Or you and maybe several others near you will be reduced to atoms. My main point here is "Do not upset someone who knows the laws of physics, and has access to high-power propulsion systems". I'm not afraid of becoming one of the reasons that the various theories about the "Great Filter" exist, at least in-game. Anyways, the thing I want most out of mods of KSP 2 is more planetary systems, and maybe a mod that changes over entirely to restricted n-body physics (planets and moons on rails, asteroids and player constructed vessels subject to forces from ALL of those planets and moons no matter how far away they are). So basically "planet packs and Principia, but for KSP 2". Oh yeah and a MechJeb type mod if the stock game doesn't have a tedium-reducing autopilot of some sort.

Alright well the solution to my problem is indeed "more parts" or at least more variety in parts. Ballutes would help (while being realistic) as would just normal heat shields that are bigger. Because 99% of the time, I don't need the inflatable heat shield because I need to save mass. I need it because I need a really large heat shield, and the inflatable one happens to be the largest one available. An ablative one would do just fine, it's just they aren't in the game in a large enough diameter. So, procedural heat shields would be nice. And no, I don't tend to build "noodle" craft. I'm landing colony modules, I'm not trying to aerobrake at Jool or Laythe. These colony modules have a length-to-diameter ratio that tops out at maybe 3:1, and I do my best to put the heaviest parts closest to the heat shield (such as full fuel tanks that will be used for landing, I've even tried a cluster of 6 full large ore tanks purely as ballast with the heat shield attached directly to the core part that those ore tanks attach to). Heck, I even test in water to make sure that the balance is right (without the heat shield deployed). Unfortunately, reliably, when it comes time to reenter, the thing flips end-for-end and burns up. Despite me doing everything right. I'll wait for you to explain why when I did everything right it still doesn't work. My simple explanation is that the cone shape of the inflatable heat shield is too flat, so you can't nestle something heavy deep within the cone to make the passive stability work right. That's why I said it might be a case of where it has to be unrealistic to be realistic. That other bit about changing the drag model so that it isn't just a flat plate face-on to the oncoming atmosphere might also help somewhat, because currently if it gets even a little bit off-axis to the incoming airflow it will tend to cause forces that work to increase that angle, until again, the heat shield is facing the wrong way. Because it is a well known fact that a flat plate (of any shape, round square triangle other polygons doesn't matter) is incapable of being stable in flight when the oncoming atmosphere is directed at one of the large flat faces of the plate (aka flat-on not edge-on, = plate starts flipping end-for-end all the way till impact). Even edge-on, without a little rotation to give it some dynamic stability that type of shape will still not be passively stable in the atmosphere (this is why you need to spin a Frisbee when you throw it).

Oh boy that's another thing I don't want returning from KSP 1. The idea that no matter what you do the drag forces must make the thing act like a parachute. It's not just wrong, it's not realistic enough. Why don't I want that returning? It's quite easy to answer that, to be honest. No sane spacecraft IRL would be designed to use an inflatable heat shield and then (as the picture in the post above this shows) 2 more on outriggers behind the center-of-mass to make it passively stable. If I can make my entire spacecraft fit behind an inflatable heat shield, I shouldn't need "drogue heatshields" to stabilize it. It should be stable by the fact that the rest of the craft is in the massive low-pressure zone created by the heat shield. This should mean that the craft will STAY in that orientation despite occasional minor perturbations, instead of having an irresistible urge to swap ends and put the heat shield at the back of the craft, right where it can't do the very job it was designed to do. Not only is the KSP 1 behavior of the inflatable heat shield nonsensical and aerodynamically wrong, it makes the part useless if you use only one (unless you put a stupid number of fins on the rear of the craft to offset the rather stupid (too high) amount of drag that the heatshield creates). In other words, yes it's built like an asbestos bouncy castle. But it shouldn't act like a parachute, because that's not what it is. It's a heat shield, it goes first thru the atmosphere, then whatever it's protecting from the thermal extremes of atmospheric reentry goes behind that. That's just common sense, it's a heat shield, it should "shield" from "heat". But if it's stuck to the back (or what is now the back) of the craft, it can't really do that, now can it? To be honest, I think that this is a case where something has to be "unrealistic to be realistic". It's a heat shield. If it has to be aerodynamically unrealistic to be functionally realistic (aka not making your craft flip ends), well then something's wrong with your physics simulation, isn't it?

Should be 2 primary types of heat shield in KSP 2, with the potential for a 3rd that is a hybrid of the first two. Type 1. KSP 1's Ablative heat shields. They were pretty good for what they were, I never had need to put more than one on a craft, but that might be because I wasn't in the habit of simultaneously going fast thru the atmosphere and being at a low altitude at the same time. This type of heat shielding is most similar to that used on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsule heat shields, a derivative of which is used on modern capsule-type spacecraft. Type 2. "reusable" heat shield tiles (aka refractory material heat shield tiles). All that is needed to create one of these kinds of heat shields is to adjust the part's heat tolerance to be especially high while also preventing heat from transferring to other parts. Obviously, the IRL type of heat shield that is closest to this is that used on the Buran orbiter of the USSR Space Shuttle orbiter from NASA (actually on both, but the Space Shuttle had more flights). Of course, the only difference is that in KSP 2 this kind of heat shielding wouldn't have the nasty habit of being especially sensitive to damage, or you know plain falling off if the weather is too humid. Type 3. Hybrid approach. These would have two operating modes, and would be slightly more massive than the type 2 tiles, because they're more capable. Like the refractory tiles, they would have the ability to operate as a refractory tile at low (aka Duna reentry/aerobraking or LKO reentry), but at higher temperatures (such as a direct reentry from the Mun or Minmus or an interplanetary trajectory), they would be able to add in additional performance (aka resist even higher temperatures) from an Ablative operating mode (at least temporarily, until the tile's ablator is depleted). It is for this reason that I refer to them as "Hybrid" tiles. IRL the thing that comes closest to this type of heat shielding is the heat shield on the X-37, which is NOT at all the same as the heat shield used on the Space Shuttle. As for what form factor these heat shields can take, well there's a list. Stand-alone circular heat shields would be available in all 3 types, in many sizes. There would be an inflatable version of type 2 heat shields, available in many sizes (and notably lacking the aerodynamics of a bouncy castle in a strong breeze, I shouldn't have to use one on each end of my vessel in order to make it not flip on reentry, that's not how supersonic or hypersonic or even subsonic aerodynamics work dagnabbit!). But most interestingly, there would be a third form that all three types of heat shielding would be available in, and it's most similar to the idea of "painting" heat shield tiles on to a vessel. The good news is that I think my method can actually be coded into the game without much effort (if not by vanilla KSP 2, then by a mod). To flesh out that third method of applying heat shields to a vessel, my thinking is that these heat shield tiles would be able to be applied as some sort of procedural part (derived from a flag maybe?) that not only automatically conforms to whatever surface it is applied to (which makes it much less complex to use than the IRL task of laying heat shielding tiles) but also adjusts its own mass depending on how much (as a percentage) of the part actually covers other parts of the craft. The part that is covered by such tiling would gain an increased heat tolerance (up to the maximum limit of the heat shield tile part being used) based on how much surface area of the part (in a given direction) is covered by tiles (with an info readout showing the per-direction heat tolerance of a part so tiled), in order to allow people to use less tiles on parts or sides of parts that don't need as high of a heat tolerance (such as the top of a Space Shuttle replica). Obviously these "procedurally painted-on" tile parts would be unable to be the root part of a vessel because of the way it works, but that's not a big problem. In fact, that can be a good thing. This part doesn't technically need its own drag cube or have independently calculated rigid-body physics, instead it could be directly parented to the part it attaches to (similarly to how many science parts and surface-attach batteries and notably the Puff engine work with respect to physics), which would simplify the physics of the simulation somewhat by reducing the true number of parts that need to have calculations done on them.

War is not something that has a place in a game like KSP (or by extension, KSP 2), despite the existence of mods that attempt to shoehorn it in (to varying degrees of effectiveness). Because if you have to worry about war, you'll never get to the real thing the game was designed for, which is exploring both the Kerbol and other solar systems. Think about it. How far would you get if you have to worry about someone else even just accidentally crashing into your carefully constructed orbital stations and ground colonies and the vessels that are on automated supply routes? With a sufficiently determined opponent, it would be relatively trivial to make sure you don't get anywhere. See IRL, it's taken us just about 50 years to even get to the point where we can think about re-visiting the Moon with humans. Yeah, 50 years JUST to re-visit the moon. Not Mars, not any other planets, literally the closest non-Earth celestial body that we know of. [snip]

@Bej Kerman ... And then you get another dose of bias because the only responses you get will be from the ones that are sufficiently motivated to answer the question in the first place. In other words, you'll only get responses from ones that firstly understand what the question means, and secondly have a strong enough opinion that they feel like they need to reply. EDIT: My personal opinion on the matter is that the Kerbin/Mun/Minmus system should be kept as it is, but the other planets should introduce the concept of axial tilt. We already have orbital inclination, and in fact the way things typically work, introducing the right kind of axial tilt would actually counter-intuitively REDUCE difficulty rather than increase it. Think about it. Is it more difficult right now with (for example only, I don't want it actually changed) Minmus rotation not being aligned with its orbital inclination, or would it be easier to get back to Kerbin or to the Mun from Minmus if the rotation of Minmus was off-axis by 6 degrees in order to align Minmus' equator with its orbit? I think it would be easier, because then if you want to have an equatorial orbit of Minmus from an incoming transfer trajectory you don't have to do a burn to change inclination.

Well you've gotta take into account that the average person who posts on the forums isn't the average KSP player. The average KSP player probably hasn't even landed on the Mun. So with that in mind, there's not that much incentive to have much more than one or maybe two craft in orbit at a time. Only when you start exploring Minmus does the timeline really start (and only just start) to open up to the point that you can think about having multiple concurrent missions at a time. Now that we have the stock alarm clock the ability to have multiple missions happening at the same time is much greater, but I still think the average KSP player doesn't do that. Because the average KSP player isn't even posting on these forums. EDIT: About the max time warp we're going to get, they confirmed it was going to be "higher" but not what the fastest would be nor how many more levels of it there would be.

Here's the way it works as I understand it (and it's a pain in the butt, more so than is warranted IMO). You can't just have the enriched uranium in a processor and transfer it to a reactor. Nope. That would be "too easy", because this is MAGICAL stuff called uranium (in reality it's perfectly plausible, you'd just need specialized equipment to do it, which could be contained in both the reactor and the processor, but "muh game balance" or something, IDK, I hate that it's such a pain in the butt). Instead, you need the enriched uranium in the processor, and then you need the processor to be below I think 400K (in other words the processor must be made to work in batches). Once the processor is cooled off enough, you can probably make the transfer happen. I'm not sure, but I think you also need your high-level Engineer kerbal to go on EVA with a kerbal-scale nuclear fuel canister (should be in the "cargo" tab) and interact with the processor to get some uranium, then go to the reactor and insert it. I don't remember if the reactor also has to be "cold" for the fuel to be inserted or not. I hope not, that would cause SO many problems. I do know that you have to have the reactor cold to be able to extract depleted fuel from the reactor and feed it to the processor, but I'm also not sure if the processor has to be cold to feed it depleted fuel, it might need that and again that's another massive pain in the butt. Then again you might be able to do all this without going on EVA, requiring just the high level kerbal in the craft to do the work. This is the kind of thing that makes me take the NFElectrical ASRG, scale it up by about a factor of 4 (in all respects, size mass and power output), and just use that rather than having to bother with handling enriched uranium. The problem is the resource transfer rules on the converter. I know Nertea wants the thing to have to cool down before you can transfer the stuff, but that just doesn't work. It takes too long if you "right-size" your radiators so that they just about meet the needs of the converter. Cooling from operational temperatures to 400k takes what seems to me to be a week of Kerbin days in that case. Maybe it's shorter than that, maybe massively so. But the point is that it's still too dang long no matter how long it is. It would be fine if the converter had to be turned off to transfer the stuff. But the temperature shouldn't be how you determine that, else the best way to deal with it would be to size the radiators so that the converter never exceeds the safe temperature of transferring resources. In fact, there's already another enriched uranium converter (in USI) that is overall much easier to deal with. No "batch mode operation" needed, it just sits there and does its job without needing any micromanagement. IMO that's what an ISRU converter should do. Sit there and convert things, drawing from and depositing in the requisite containers with absolutely no micro-management needed, no matter if it's Antimatter or Monopropellant or enriched uranium. That might be because I have 4000 hours of playing Factorio under my belt, and it is my firm opinion that if you can't automate a task, there's probably a reason for that other than "because we want this to be tedious". Yet requiring enriched uranium to be transferred manually seems nothing BUT tedious to me. Sure it's enriched uranium, but it's not like there aren't ways to handle the stuff no matter how radioactive it may be at the time. Hot cells exist, and the only thing preventing them from handling even more radiation is the fact that they need a human operator. I can see a way to make a much better hot cell using a system of stuff as simple as lead bricks, mechanical periscopes using first-surface metallic mirrors for viewing the task and providing illumination (good luck having radiation damage THAT, also you could theoretically harness some of that intense radiation for the purpose of illumination by having fluorescent tubes in the hot cell and relying on the ambient high radiation of the environment itself to excite the gas contained within, effectively sustaining a mercury gas discharge but with no electrical input), an inert Helium atmosphere (to avoid the atmosphere itself becoming radioactive, or if it does at least the products are useful elsewhere (He3) instead of being pesky radioisotopes of nitrogen and oxygen) and yes, to work on the stuff you'd use very long mechanical or hydro-mechanical remote manipulators. Note I used no electronics anywhere near the radioactive stuff. Does it have to use lead bricks? Nope you can make the whole thing a lot bigger and just rely on the 1/R2 falloff of radiation with distance instead. That makes it a lot longer, but also a lot lighter. Lead bricks are just used on the "Earth-based" version, for the sake of making it more compact. I guess you could also use lithium bricks if you wanted to harvest some fusion fuel from the whole thing over a really long time, but that starts to sound like an optimization for an actual reactor rather than just a "hot cell". Oh and those remote manipulators (esp. the hydro-mechanical ones) could totally be controlled electronically, and doing that would also make the hot cell smaller because generally its easier to radiation harden electronics than it is to radiation harden humans. And why do I mention a hot cell in the first place? Well if you have robot arms in a hot cell that's on the output of a nuclear enrichment converter, what's to stop you from extending that hot cell all the way to say a reactor or other converter that needs enriched uranium? Would it be heavy? Maybe a little bit, but in space you can skip the heaviest part (radiation shielding aka lead bricks) in favor of distance, like I mentioned earlier. And control cables or electrical power/data wires can be made long without being that heavy, same with structural trusses.

Hardware prices are indeed coming down (most GPUs are back to MSRP or very close to it, and the used ones are below MSRP where they belong), and yeah the main game is gonna be $60 USD. EDIT: Now I don't know your financial situation, but for myself personally, $60 is not a large outlay considering that most games with all DLC included cost around double that or more, and that's before micro-transactions. Myself I already have a computer that should be able to handle KSP 2 quite well (built most of it in 2019 right before the Covid thing happened, so prices were mostly sane back then too). The GPU I did have to get during the pandemic, and I payed far too much for it, probably from a scalper or someone who was opportunistically pricing their existing inventory (but at least I didn't have to jump thru the flaming hoops of the "newegg shuffle" or some other lottery system to get it, so if I did buy it from a scalper that's fine by me, I'll gladly pay quite a lot more to not have to deal with that bull excrement).

As far as "more boosters" goes, it's a lot easier to strap a bunch of Scud's together than it is to make a whole new rocket stage (then again all it would need to be would be a new fuel tank and a bunch of Scud engines on the bottom, and that would look a lot less Kerbal). I wonder if the Scud engine can be easily switched from hypergolics to Kerolox propellants? Anyways, that brings me to another real life Kerbalism. The LR87 rocket engine. Now you might say "hey wait a minute, how is the main engine of the Titan I and Titan II ICBM/launch vehicle a Kerbal design?" Well, can you think of any other rocket engine that was designed for ONLY Kerolox, but later (with minimal modification) converted to Hypergolic propellants (NTO/Aerozine-50), and then converted AGAIN (once more without too severe of modifications) to use Hydrolox? Sure it didn't launch anything with those hydrolox propellants, but that's more because we figured out quickly that at the time hydrolox was best used in upper stages, and using a 1st stage engine on an upper stage would pose problems that were easier solved by just using the purpose-built RL-10 on the Centaur upper stage (creating the Titan II or III with Centaur upper stage). I don't think you could think of any pump-fed engines that were so easily converted between not just two, but THREE different propellant combinations, with the initial engine having no intent to be adapted for its later propellants. Oh and the Titan II version of the LR87 (the hypergolic one) was EXTREMELY RELIABLE, to the point that for a long time it served as the main engine for one of the larger ICBMs in the ICBM portion of our nuclear triad. Actually, the only one that I don't know to be extremely reliable is the Hydrolox one, and that's only because it never launched anything. If it had, I'm sure it would have been quite reliable, despite the unique challenges of dealing with hydrolox. EDIT: If I'm not being clear, the reason I consider it such a Kerbal engine is because it's a case of "We didn't design it to do that, but hey it works so we're gonna go with it!" It could also be one of those "accidental genius" designs that Kerbals occasionally come up with.

The "Fly" part of "build fly dream" means different things to different people. Some people want to program their mission so it all happens on autopilot without them pressing a button other than "launch". Some people want to fully manually pilot their vessel to wherever it's going. Some people want the autopilot to handle the parts of flying a vessel that they're not as good at, so they can learn to do it better on their own Some people have flown things manually so many times for a certain phase of the flight that it's no longer fun even if it's an entirely new vessel type that they've never flown thru that phase of flight before (that's where I am, I use MechJeb for launch landing and maneuver execution, not because I can't do it but because I've done it so many times that I'd rather just get it over with and get to the parts that I find actually fun). Light speed communications delay might make a difference in some of these play styles more than others. Light speed communications delay would also likely take time away from other more critical features of the game if it's not already in the game at this point. IMO it belongs firmly in the "let the mods do it" category. But it would be nice if the game is coded in a way that makes such a thing not so difficult to implement. But the main thing to take away from this post on this thread is that none of that matters as far as axial tilt on new or old planets in KSP 2. Back on topic, about "axial tilts in the Kerbol system as a difficulty option" I don't particularly have a preference if it's done that way or not. But if it IS done as a difficulty option, the only way to do it that makes sense to me is to have it be one of the difficulty options you set at the time you start the save file (aka you can't change it once you set it unless you either start an entirely new save or edit the save file with an external application if that's even potentially possible). That's the only way that makes sense to me, because any other way of implementing it would mean that you could essentially "warp reality" in an entirely non-physical way. Considering how seriously KSP takes its physics simulations compared to other games (and even other space games at that), that kind of "reality warping" seems like a big no-no.

Sorry about this in advance, but I have multiple parts of my psyche voting to question something, without fail, every single time someone says "don't question it". I'm outvoted. My inner contrarian is saying "You can't tell me what to do!", and wants to question it. This is the weakest one. My inner cynic is saying "If they don't want me questioning it, they're trying to hide something, figure out the truth of the matter!", and wants to question it. EDIT: Given recent events [snip]. this part of my psyche is speaking louder than usual right now, and in any case it doesn't take much to get me to listen to this part of me. My inner comedian is in agreement with my inner contrarian, and is saying "Not doing what I'm told can be funny sometimes, let's see what happens!" To counter this, the Patient part of myself is saying "Your patience has been rewarded, even if it wasn't on the schedule predicted by others", and will not question the timing, as new news will be released when it is released and not a moment before or after, even if that was not the developer's plan. Another counter to this, my inner Logic is saying "This is not enough data to form a theory, it isn't yet worth thinking about the timing being off", and instead of outright saying that it will or won't question it, is intentionally withholding judgement until more data is available. I hope that we all know that many conspiracy theories form when insufficient evidence meets the desire to see something go the way you want, and that desire is not snuffed out by lack of evidence. Here I know I don't have enough evidence for a new trend (yet). Awaiting further input. . . On the whole, I'm gonna question it, but not because i should. At the same time I don't know what to make of it. It's probably something like what @Vl3d said, "didn't get the thing finished quite in time". As far as the reason for that, I don't think I have to reach very far to find something suitable. Chris was simply too busy working on more important things, like oh I don't know, "making KSP 2"

With the way heating works in KSP 1, putting an extremely hot but "literally one LSB more dense than actually no atmosphere" atmosphere (so it doesn't decay orbits or allow for aerodynamic effects) is the best way to apply heat in the vicinity of a planet. Before Moho arrived at its current form (when the planets and moons other than Kerbin Mun and Minmus got added, ancient history yes but it happened and I was there for it), Moho was a place that you had to design your craft specially for, because it had just such an atmosphere as I have described (thin enough that wings and parachutes never work, but thick enough to transfer large amounts of heat, and yes it was indeed quite hot). That got removed I think the (major) patch right after it was added, because people complained about their ships exploding for "seemingly no reason". But it would be nice to see it make a return, if not around Moho then around another planet perhaps around another star. We don't have an Io-like planet in KSP 1, maybe we get one around another star in KSP 2? Only time (or the developers) will tell, and I'm not going to even try to put odds on when the developers will reveal any new info about the universe they're creating, but if they do anything before the game releases, it will likely not be enough to answer all our questions.

Well with using the CRP you'd also be able to use LqdWater, tho that doesn't reflect the fact that it's incredibly hot water. But I have a thought regarding performance of the hot water propellant. It should have terrible specific impulse but amazing thrust. Like, "under 100s" ISP in a vacuum, and maybe around 80s at sea level, and it shouldn't work that well on Eve either. This is realistic, and it's that terrible specific impulse that is the majority of my main complaint about the whole "no toxic chemicals and very safe" aim of the ARCA rocket. So why should it be terrible? Allow me to explain: The problem is that you're trying to win an argument, but your opponent is the laws of physics. In other words, if that steam coming out of that nozzle isn't at an extremely high temperature and pressure, say several thousand degrees C and several hundred bar, you're not gonna have the requisite performance to get to orbit, not even with 5 stages, let alone two. And guess what, water at that temperature is NASTY stuff. Know what steam burns do to flesh? It's not pretty. Strip the meat right off your bones, and that's not even the superheated stuff, which is what this rocket better be using. But that's not even the biggest problem with the ARCASpace use of steam. The biggest problem is that they aren't generating the steam in flight. No they're doing that on the ground. That means storing steam. And if you know anything about steam power you know how bad of an idea that is. Not only will the steam tank be weighed down by the need to contain incredible pressures (more than several hundred bar if you want to make orbit even with 3 stages), it will also be weighed down by the likely several tons of both heating elements and thermal insulation to keep the steam a gas while the thing is sitting on the pad waiting for launch. So that mass fraction (one of the key performance criteria of a rocket stage) is gonna be TERRIBLE as well. OK, so terrible ISP, terrible mass fraction, what do we end up with? By my estimation, if you nerfed the numbers to convert from "IRL space program" to "KSP" suitable statistics (mostly extra dry mass), the thing won't be able to get 2 kilometers in the air before it runs out of fuel, and that's with no payload other than "more steam tanks" to the point that it has a 1.1 TWR. The statistics are SO bad IRL, that in fact if you want this thing to be actually able to accomplish useful work in KSP, you're going to have to use the numbers "as-is", with no nerfs to account for Kerbin's smaller size. If you do that the thing ends up being "still worse than an SRB, but I guess you can do something with it". In a much much shorter version, "Stored steam rocket = bad". And that's why most people that have any background in aerospace are either politely holding their tongue (which IMO is a lie of omission), or they're saying the facts as they see them, which are "Either this thing is a scam or the person behind it has no idea how rockets work and wants to make one, and so made some incredibly bad design decisions". Doesn't help that they guy running the thing formerly was working on a "cold fusion" reactor (and no I don't mean sci-fi cold fusion, I mean IRL cold fusion, you know, the kind that's been proven to be pseudoscience so many times that I ran out of fingers and toes counting).