nikokespprfan

There are many little things I have to say about this. Regarding the need of supply missions, there are things you can do, for instance automated control (principles currently in game), or just letting the base keep mining even when in hibernation. Since you mention the definition of hibernation, you might be referring to my Hibernating Stable-State LS design earlier in the thread, where indeed all operations will be cut in hibernation, but that plan had automated recurring resupply missions (that you only fly once) built in. So I guess that could mean that stable-state =/= self sufficiency, and you could get a colony stable at any size by automatically shipping in goods (as opposed to making it all yourself, which would be self-sufficiency). Also, the HSS plan only works for craft that are big enough, so small bases ala KSP1 could still be made, exactly what you want, but I digress.... Also, from what we know about bases, they will not grow past a hard cap. You need to enable it to grow to a new cap by meeting requirements, otherwise the kerbals have no reason to celebrate, and the devs have said there will be no new kerbals without reasons to celebrate. So that is one worry less, as the requirements can be build to fit any model necessary.

@Snark thank you and good luck for all of the community.

Aha, Eureka! The walls of the metallic hydrogen tanks are made of frozen Mystery Goo, the only unobtainium in known to be in game. _____ In all seriousness, when talking in principles, saying speculative engineering not speculative science is kinda already rooted in the goal of KSP: a game in which you fly absurd creations under realistic physics. This makes it pretty convincing as a good judgement for any nearfuture drives/tech. I also feel kinda convinced by @Dragon01s' argument that KSP should avoid spreading misconceptions. However I'm at that nasty stage where I don't want to let go of my ambivalence towards metallic hydrogen rockets just yet. (That is, you won, but I feel resistant). Mainly this is because there is the principle of this criterion, and then there is the theory of game development (in which gateway tech might be necessary), and the then there is the practice of actually experiencing the tech progression as a player. So really what would be a constructive thing here is: are there other "speculative engineering but sound science"-drives that we can think of that could take its place. Given all the reasons why a metH-drive might be convenient for the dev's, what would be the more scientifically-sound, better researched alternative. It is a running theme of KSP to find the balance between teaching science and keeping the ultra-complexities out of it. I don't fundamentally think that it's wrong to take some liberties on either side of that tightrope sometimes..... although the above principle is a very useful one. ______ Now that the rammifications of this assumption are well understood, I'm going to do the very mathematical leap of trowing away this assumption, and changing perspective/context of the discussion. My preferred design of life support (no played experience though) thinks about the player not in terms of periodic imputs that the player has to do to every craft with kerbals, which indeed becomes a logistic nightmare that no-one wants to play when you even think about it. But rather it sees it as a part of the game loop, a part of the challenge of getting something done. So what tends to be the game loop for a given mission: build a rocket, test the rocket, fly the rocket, accomplish your goal. You could make it so that part of the game loop of establishing a colony is to make it self sufficient, and then once it is it never needs player input anymore. The player has now completed its objective to establish a colony, and it can go about it's business. An analogy is this. Say, in KSP2, you could have airship colonies or bases on gas giants, or on venus/eve-like planets. While you are setting up the base, you would require the player to make the base floatable. If the player cannot do that, he will fail, that's just part of the challenge. However, if the player succeeds, would you want to simulate the floating stability of that colony for the rest of game time, and require the player to keep fixing any issues that might pop up? NO, just NO. You'd want to accept it was stable, flag something in the code, and tell the player he was ready to move on. Anytime the player comes back, the colony will be there, unadorned, hanging in the sky. No periodic input, but useful as part of the game loop of establishing an air colony. Another anology could potentially be made to leaving space stations be when they are in a suborbital trajectory. I mean, that will fail, you have to get it into a stable orbit before you can look away, that is just part of the challenge. But once you do, the game will not simulate all the microforces that real spacecraft experience, that tug them out of orbit (n-body rammifications, atmo-drag well "out" of the atmosphere, etc.). Those phenomena are approximated away. You space station will now be in a stable orbit forever. (Now, all that's barring the obvious differences that orbital mechanics is more important to the essence of KSP than LS, and that this way of stabilising craft forever was not intentionally for this but instead a result of just using simplified orbital mechanics, however the way the gameplay works out is what I want to demonstrate here) Now I know your opinion on colonies when it comes to self-sufficiently (which is vital to the difference between our assumptions), but colonies have much lower burden of being utterly realistic when compared to, say, near-future engines. You have some liberty, especially after the 3D printing part of the discussion. Besides, when it comes to the "you never have all things you need", I would be very much in favor of the kind automation you mention. Have the player fly a transport mission from a colony to another once, and have the ability to setup automated repetitions of that mission. That would be a very factorio-style automation that makes you (have the ability to) play on a very different scale once you get to a certain point. These transport missions could then be a part of your goal as player to stabilise a colony before absolutely neglecting them for gameplay reasons.

Poeple think they are plants because the kerbals are green. Now that anything green we asociate with plants is our thing, but there is no reson why (green ==> plants) must be true. In other atmospheres, plants might have diffent colors (although the atmosphere and plantlife of kerbin is very similar to earth) and biospheres might have evelved differently. Life support doesn't imply this per se. It could only matter for colonies, it could put kerbals in hibernation when deprived of stuff, you could have it so that colonies become "magically" self-sufficient if you reach a certain point. It doens't have to be punishing.

1) Can the sources of science/data/etc be modded, and to what extent. I assume this will fall under the category of the science question already in your list. I'm mentioning this related to something you might remember... 2) Will ships be trees, or will they be something more sophisticated. I.e. is multidocking a thing? 3) Will we have bigger asteroids.

We didn't discuss this specifically, but we did touch on the idea sort of tangentially, and it sounds like the answer is "not a lot". Specifically, they said they want this game mainly to be about building and flying rockets-- the phrase they used was "We're not trying to build Kerbal Cities: Skylines". They don't want to take emphasis away from that and make the player worry too much about logistics. Why do I mention this. I mention this because it means the devs have another consideration.This will be useful for any speculative or fantasy LS system designs we make in this thread. Not only does one need to heed micromanagement and the severety of failure, you also need to keep track of the fact that the game keeps being about flying rockets, not logistics. You should be doing restocking missions constantly.

Scott mentioned that he would put a backup up at youtube or something? Most twitch streams get deleted after 14 days I believe, so if there is a backup, we should post that backup.

Genius

I meant this as a jokey comment, just a little jab, that's all.

If you want consequentail life support that is not punishing, this is a no-brainer. I'm willing to put my bets on it that, unless the devs really did not think about it, this will be a feature. heyheyhey, I merely translated it checked its accuracy in Youtube Automated Subtitles and Google Translate. The true source is SpielbaerLP

Or maybe you have textures of objects (stars. galaxies, nebula's etc), that you place in the pitch black background at preset coordinates. You have to make a handful of object textures, generate a nice galaxy skybox once and make everything into a coordinate list. also sharp textures coordinate system can be abused for the doppler effect, ince it needs the positions of stars to change. That is, if players will even see portions of the speed of light. easy moddablilty of the skybox by manipulating the coordinate list. modders can hook onto these objects for things like telescopes. Good idea, you can get pretty accurate with this. Assuming that camera-body geometry is relatively light on the PC (I dunno), you can make a pretty light model, since it's mostly simple equations of variables we already know, such as tweaking variables and radius of different bodies and the like. This model has star-dimming and body-dimming, but no vessel-dimming, that is the only important factor I can think of that's missing. Enfin, this can give people an idea of how heavy this system will be if you do it this accurately.

If you can mess with the renderer, and the renderer does any kind of statistics with screen brightness, then that is your answer right there, tie it to that. Any source of light (including from your craft) will tie into this. If your renderer auto-adjusts the amount of light your screen sees because things are suddenly much more bright/much less bright, then great, because it has to do some brightness statistics. Ahh but what about light that is coming from outside the camera view. If you stand on a atmosphereless body will light reflected from that body mess it up, it doesn't with this model. Darn. Also, I have no clue how renderers work, especially of KSP, so I really shouldn't be talking about this. A well, these are my two cents.

True, and I'm inclined to believe you. However, unlike squad with KSP 1, STar.theory has the advantage of hindsight. The code is developed from scratch, but they know for at least 50% how each system will interact with other systems. They can see pitfalls coming, they know the big issues. That is all time you aren't trying to figure stuff out, from how it should work (barring changes) to what to look out for. And figuring stuff out tends to be a big part of software development, next to testing.

I am a non-expert, so do with this as you like. https://hjson.org/

Depends, will the game simulate SR? And will players ever get to SR speeds very often. But if they are going to change dynamically how the skybox looks, please also make it adjust to the brightness of the observer, as to how many stars are visible. I think all of it might be just changing how the skybox is rendered. (can't you just make all the colors a little bit more blue/red, or a little bit more dark/light)

Should we though. But seriously in good faith, what is the use of a space colony (apart from intrinsic undenyable coolness and my desire to see mars and come back some day, both of which are not valid reasons.) Geschosskopf layd out good arguments as to why it is not necessary. If anything blooming a solar system wide population might make it very difficult to take step to determine humanities fate if necessary (i.e. 2015 paris accords and the like), unless humanity has sorted itself out (whatever that may mean) before that and is ready to take that next step. As for motives, we still have the space race. Ahh, the space race. The space race was a political thing for prestige, a competition between two systems of government trying to one-up each other. So good for politics sitting in the way. Sure there is this thing about nukes in space, but I kind of like the fact that we don't have orion drives launching 400,000 people off earth each day, or even have these drives in orbit. That is not fear, that is the understanding that these things are basically nuketrowers. Alas, politics is the only motive we've had so far. But science. Science was later bolted onto the initial moon landing plan to get people to the moon. They'd rather just put one man there and bring it back. All of this as far as I know, of course.

That part sizes foloow an adding series (+0.625 each time) does not mean that the sizes that are picked from that series for use in the game can't be chosen by a multiplying series. Probably that is how it went down. the adding series is useful for realtive sizes from one tio the next: you can always fit this and that exactly in that other thing, while the multiplying series is chosen for a proper upscaling of parts.

ABout the german interview, I made a mistake in translation: About the performance section: should translate to where everything between parentheses was not added the first time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

About the performance section: should translate to where everything between parentheses was not added the first time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

why, whywhywhywhywhywhy,.... why please elaborate.

It seems this is the proper place for good information, instead of Some more KSP2 footage. So how about this, let's keep this one for storing informative references, and keep the other one for discussion of the new news, and well, also posting the links. This way readers from some time in the future can easily find all the info they might want without clutter.

on the other hand, how many minutes do you need to spend to make this. Finding out how bright you surroundings are is the hard part, and that can maybe gotten directly from the renderer. You are probably still right though.

What made you come up with this. Was there some gamplay role you wanted this proficiency to have, or is this a "it'd be cool"-mechanic? If I understand correctly (your posts are quite dense) the idea is to have a proficiency varable to each kerbal, earned from repeting a task, that can be used to train other kerbals. The speed of this training is dependend on the stupidity of the kerbal (is that already a thing?), and the result of the training can never be better than what the mentor has. Furthermore, training occurs only when both the mentor and the trainee are in the same astronaut complex. Then, remoteness, a necessary variable for experience/proficiency, is calculated based on the last place where that kerbal checked in their experience/proficiency points, effectively this measures the distance traveled by that kerbal. And lastly, you want this training mechanic to improve colony functions. ______ What about making profiency increase something that phases in with repetition, as opposed to a static gain for every repetition. I believe currently experience is a diminishing returns thing for every repetition, proficiency can be an increasing returns thing.

I hope they do two things: 1) make ships undirected graphs, no tree structure 2) mak science situations around bodies moddable. I was very disappointed when I learned that I couldn't make a "deep atmosphere of jool" below it's surface height, because they were hardcoded into the game. Pet peeve?, well of course not, how would you dare correctly interpret me like that!

Ok fair.