Sharpy

Oh c'mon. Switch the computer on, start KSP, go unpack groceries, use the bathroom, make a tea, plug the phone and netbook into chargers, etc etc. Didn't count how long it loads, but I'd guesstimate 8 minutes or so, easily filled. Mod it till it breaks too. It was around a minute without mods.

You can do this indirectly, through the orbit editor. Your Cartesian state vector corresponds to a certain set of Keplerian elements. Setting these elements all at once is possible through Hyperedit.

Ah, our old friend Shaken Kraken. The reason I abandoned KSP some year or more ago. So I see it still happens....

I've returned to KSP after a lengthy break recently, and got a good bit of progress, unlocked a good bit of the research tree, everything still within Kerbin system (Kerbin, Mun, Minmus) though. I have a bunch of parts mods, tech tree, near future everything, and so on, but I realized once I unlock the awesome high-speed propulsion, I'll still have nowhere farther than Eeloo to go. I definitely should install *some* planet pack. They often mess with the existing system though; moving/tweaking Minmus is one of more notorious habits. Which planet pack can I add, that will add some new targets, maybe separate star systems, and not break my current save - leave the Kerbin moons untouched?

The idea is that it would NOT be limited to current vessel. And with sufficient optimization, it could run dozens, maybe hundreds vessels simultaneously. Take your average CRPG like Skyrim... and it does run hundreds of scripts simultaneously. Look at the gameplay trailer for Cyberbunk 2077, each of hundreds of NPCs runs a script. This IS doable. Applying physics like a planet surface vs wheels would be trickier, but again, not so much it couldn't be done. And there's a lot of room for optimization.

Lots of instances of the physics engine, origins, all working in the background whenever needed. Probably a bunch of optimizations of the engine, e.g. deep, flexible integration of the 'welding' mod concept where the inactive craft becomes a single rigid body instead of a collection of parts bound by flexible physics engine joints. Would also require more RAM and good CPU, definitely make use of many cores... the PC did move ahead from where it was when KSP came out though. You never programmed a PLC? Ladder languages are still common with these. The graphical/flowchart has a very friendly learning curve. Give it good subdivision interface (subroutine/function blocks) and it isn't that horrible. And it could always compile to a text script, and they could leave the scripting layer accessible/editable, like advanced tweakables. Besides, it should be easier than programming in Minecraft Redstone, Factorio or SpaceChem. Try "Automate" for Android, a very useful graphical scripting tool for controlling your Android device - and while yes, writing anything harder isn't all that nice, it really has a very friendly learning curve. Designing it so that's simultaneously powerful, friendly and fun would be difficult, but I think possible and worth it.

Now as I think of it, what would really make 2.0 a real 2.0, would be introduction of a programming language. Capabilities of KOS, but much more kid-friendly syntax - most probably, "connect blocks" graphical style. Inputs from sensors, arrows connecting to processing blocks and output to actuators or just flight parameters. Tutorials for PID, pathfinding, etc. And craft run on their own following the script. Autonomous rovers, autonomous probes, swarms, self-synchronizing constellations, and so on, and so forth. Plus recording, so that you could replay how it ran. That way it would provide the autopilot for the slow rovers, let us have actual orbit decay with automated station-keeping, low-thrust engines that won't suck, life support. base maintenance, with enforcing sustainability through scheduled automated tasks, and generally all kinds of wonders... as soon as you write them. More advanced, more "high level" commands could be unlocked with science like parts, so instead of writing your own maneuver-executing autopilot command you can purchase the block; more advanced cores would provide more space for the programs and so on.

Without a reaction wheel? I had a sweet Mun rover based on these, the entire volume was framed by the four wheels, so no matter how it would tumble, it would land on its wheels anyway. Although the wheels upside-down don't work... but still absorb the shock, and the reaction wheel could flip it back up. I could utilize the entire 50m/s or so (180 km/h). Within an hour I managed to reach 3 nearby biomes. Another 3 hours for one more biome, and I ran out of patience. And yes, it was flying most of the time, touching the ground was brief and rare between the jumps, and it would be pointless without the reaction wheel. And that's why I feel biomes should be places you reach by rocket propulsion or on wings, with only rare cases where you have access to 2-3 biomes in close vicinity; microbiomes should be a rover thing. So that you could reach 3-4 within less than an hour of driving a small, fragile, slow rover - as these built on Rovemax S2 (the tiny wheels) as they are currently. As for time/range... Lunokhod top speed was 2km/h. And within these 2km you should find all microbiomes given biome has to offer. With terrain being more varied you'd need to pay attention to driving more too, so it won't be as boring as driving a 2km/h rover would be currently.

But some can. Using Ant to help uphill, copious use of brakes, fine-tuning wheel parameters... Challenge and reward. Want easy 1x, land on the Flats. Want 5x? Make something that can climb the slopes! They don't need to be slower than they are now - or maybe at worst a little slower. There could be a phys-warp higher than 4x to reduce the travel time... but that would need physics engine overhaul again, 'cause 4x is unreliable enough.

I'd say "some experiments are per macrobiome, some are per microbiome", temperature, pressure and atmosphere composition won't be much different 15 meters away, but the goo might react differently, and metal content from a meteorite may throw a magnetometer off, a ground sampler will definitely find something new. Plus that wouldn't be an infinite number of microbiomes. Maybe same number as general biomes on a planet, maybe a little more; no biome would contain every kind of microbiome of a planet either, so multiple landers, hoppers or long-range rovers would still make sense. But landing a small, slow rover would yield about 2-3 times the reward of landing an inert one; you get 1x the biome-specific science (as with a lander), and can expect to find 3-4 microbiomes within range, gaining 3x-4x microbiome-specific science, for about 2x total. Maybe in more exotic biomes, more microbiomes. In more generic ones - just 2 or even the single, global one - say, Minmus Flats would be flat, uniform and featureless, but Slopes could contain quite a variety of exposed goods - simultaneously making a robust rover and precise landing more rewarding.

For spaceplanes, there's at least the alternate use as less practical rockets. Rovers... as less practical landers? I think expanding the game mechanics so that a family of parts, and a family of associated crafts actually begins serving a purpose, especially one that is mirrored in real life, would be a worthy endeavor. Especially, that we already have micro-biomes in the game. All around KSC. You can test your Opportunity and make full use of its capabilities, driving it around KSC. But wherever else you fly it, it will be a lousy lander that can move slowly around for no good reason.

What is the purpose for small rovers that don't fit the ruggedized wheel?

Fixed that for you. Let me remind you of these parts: RoveMax Model S2 Max speed 12m/s, about never practically achievable. Fragile as heck. If you luckily land at the border of two biomes, an hour of driving can double your science reward once you reach the other biome. Otherwise, useless. RoveMax Model M1 Decent speed, will break as soon as you start utilizing it. Drive 15m/s max if you want the rover to live longer than a couple minutes. RoveMax Model XL3 Rugged, heavy and SLOW. 15.5m/s max speed, realistically a little less. Useful if you want a reconfigurable base. Not useful if you want to go anywhere.. The only reasonably useful rover building part is the ruggedized wheel, which allows both for a reasonable payload and a reasonable speed... so within 2-3 hours you may cover 3-4 biomes. The remaining three are written for the type of gameplay that simply doesn't exist in KSP. They only make sense for aesthetics and fun, they serve no purpose for the gameplay mechanics - everything they can do, a rocket-based biome hopper (in case of M1 and XL3), or a dumb non-restartable static lander (in case of S2) does better.

...but that still leaves realistic rovers useless, and speedy rovers unrewarding. My point is less about "looks" and more about having planets "higher resolution" conceptually - make things differ meaningfully on scale of meters, not kilometers. For Mun to have craters that can barely fit a kerbal, and return a different science data than if you climb out of such a crater.

Might be the reason. I joined around 1.1, and got orbiting and landing within 1 day. Can't remember how long until Mun, but I didn't hurry too much nor had too much problems doing it. Rendezvous took me a longer while, primarily because I didn't know about marking objects as target. Took a couple tries to get through the tutorial for that, and a big "whoa" that you can set planets as targets (had a really, really bad time returning from a Duna flyby without knowing this...)

Did you per chance do this while KSP still didn't have the Tutorials option available?

Natural progression in computer games. For now we have none, just a bad texture over enormous boring polygons. Sorry to say, no matter how avid a fan and player you are, you are no longer a customer. Nor are most people with old hardware they won't keep up to date. Yes, people buy games for graphics. Money change hands, the developer is happy. The player will be happy if there's a captivating gameplay behind that graphics. I don't think many people will find KSP too hard. 10yo kids play it, and the gameplay at the core wouldn't change much. Playstyle would need to change - making an all-terrain buggy and completing the Elcano challenge would become much harder, but you would no longer *need* to drive 80km/h to be able to get anywhere new within the week. You'd poke around a single valley like Curiosity. Rocketeering wouldn't change much. Aviation - similarly, except for landing at random spots; the terrain generator could actually make it better, providing areas that are much more flat than currently; safer to land. KSP's beauty is in that you can make it as hard or as easy as you like, and that would be unchanged.

Never say never. KSP is aging. And it's a valuable franchize in hands of a commercial entity. And one of good ways to "refresh" a franchize is to provide a graphics overhaul. Take World of Tanks, a 2012 game which suffered a serious decline in the player base. Last year it undervent a "HD" refresh. Original 2012: Still the same game, same rules, lots of tweaks and expansion but it's still the same game in 2018: And it helped. It attracted a bunch of new players. The small facelift KSP got with the part texture and model updates isn't enough. If KSP is ever going to shine again, it needs a massive graphics overhaul.

Gfx is a GPU thing, physics is CPU and physics co-processor (often a part of a gfx card but not the same hardware that runs gfx.) It would be difficult to make because the terrain needs to be generated procedurally only with rough guidance from the devs, and on top of that with this sort of quality you need to write aggressive culling reducing quality of distant terrain, and that's tricky to do seamlessly. It's definitely not a thing for a mod or even KSP 1.5 or 1.6, that's a heavy rewrite of the underlying engine, a clean 2.0 stuff. But it could be done - it's a matter of work, effort and skill, not of impossible trade-offs.

I posted it to show what was possible 14 years ago - and ran smoothly on more than 14 years old hardware. Back then Unity didn't exist. Want something more relevant? That's a quick example from Unity.

You mean realistic planet surfaces exist? With pebbles, rock outcrops, something that looks realistic up close? Something that the landscape stuff look like... uh, let's not be too demanding, say, Half-Life 2 minus all the industrial stuff. I know there was a texture randomizer that somewhat prevented the land from looking like a grid, and there was atmospheric scatterer, but is there really something that makes a rover with 2m/s of max speed make sense in the game? I mean this is one of the best gfx overhauls available to KSP: And this is the real thing: And this is a screenshot from Half-Life 2, Lost Coast. 2004 game.

Saved the rescue ship or dropped it after transferring the fuel?

First, a definite overhaul of the world generator. Something that makes planet surfaces look like planet surfaces, not that low-poly thing with same textures repeating indefinitely and random identical intangible scatters. Actual terrain, different surfaces of different properties. Something that makes a difference on the scale of a meter, not on the scale of a kilometer. Make the tiny rover wheels relevant, so that you can travel 50 meters to find a new, valuable object, not just 50 kilometers to the next biome. Currently any rovers that resemble actual real rovers like these on Mars or the Moon are completely pointless. You need to build a rugged, speedy thing to cross several biomes for the rover to be of any purpose. Then I'd love an expanded star system. Interstellar travel and planet(s) with life "out there". And technology to reach there. Colonization, terraformation. And maybe, just maybe, a Story Mode - or several. A "Career" mode but with predefined set of missions, involving secrets across the system, beating the competition in a space race, etc. I'd also see an expansion/DLC: KIS and KAS integrated into the game, alongside with a simplified version of OSE Workshop. Assembling vehicles "by hand" from parts you must manufacture yourself. And a related story mode: you start at completely ruined KSC, as Bill Kerman, with a KIS screwdriver in your inventory. No funds, no buildings, just ruins - and various parts scattered throughout the terrain. You must find other Kerbals, possibly saving them from whatever distress they found themselves in, you must gather, transport and assemble everything by hand, you discover clues as to where more esoteric parts are, where other Kerbals are - on, or out of Kerbin. Cobble together the first car to haul larger parts to assembly site, then build a plane to visit more distant parts of Kerbin, and then a rocket to reach an orbital station, a colony on Minmus...

Still can't hit ground *too* fast because if it clips into ground deep enough within 1 frame, other parts will get destroyed. Now get this: the fairing exhibits similar behavior, only the base plate of it is vulnerable. I built a craft that had a fairing as tall as the entire KSC. I was able to land at Mun at over 300m/s. Took some tricks not to blow up when tipping over afterwards.

I built something around a similar concept; an entire "train" of MK3 segments, meant as a mission to Duna, along with a mining lander, ISRU and lab in orbit, a science lander, two fuel segments, return/reentry capsules segment etc. I assembled it in Minmus orbit, refueled from Minmus, and it was a thing of beauty. Took a month or so, the unmanned lander bringing the ore to orbit was a terrible idea with abysmal efficiency. (never mind it was meant to go between the science lander and the rest, as the science lander didn't have a port to dock). The idea was to get a gravity assist / Oberth maneuver against Kerbin going to Duna. TWR was poor but not hopeless. Delta-V - well, sufficient to get there, then I'd refuel from Ike. Finally, transfer window came, and... I botched the transfer burn, missing Dune by a wide margin. Was unable to burn at full power as the whole thing nearly shook apart, entering wild vibrations when the engines worked. After that I think I abandoned KSP for a year or so.