Nuranon

are there any more details on what Squad is thinking about doing? I think another system - the equivalent fo several light years away - would make visiting it tevhnically possible but kinda pointless (the time scale doesn't fit with teh other gameplay)...the technologies - as you pointed out - could in theory get integrated into the game but it wouldn't fit with the theme I think. But with current systems it should be possbile to create another system in orbit around Kerbol, possibly a brown or red dwarf (much lower mass making it plausible that it orbits Kerbol) with a small number of Planets orbiting it - if that Star would be 2-7 Eeloo distances away it could be reached with traditional means (chemical propulsion combined with gravity assists) within a reasonable amount of time (under 10 years I guess).

you have a point - black is perhaps a bit extreme, I guess (one dark colour) would only work if these parts were not actually black but a grey closer to the jet engine or the MK1 Pod and base parts would have to get some more grey to make combinations plausible. A heat shielded bottom would be cool too - but the front (usually the cockpit) would have to to be next to completly covered in heat shielding. Edit: partly covering it in heat shielding could be done via making it available in the parts options (like with normal heat shields) - this wouldn't be too difficult and changing the texture (and skin heat resistance) based on the whether you have heat shielding equiped.

Yes in the USA its the range safety officer. I like the idea - make at an abort option and I am fine. I would like to see - if used - to let fuel tanks (excluding liquid fuel in space and RCS & Xenon fuel in general) and engines to explode instantly - the rest only if that happens due to phyiscs.

What happens if you go into space with the not vacuum rated one? What happens if you allready researched EVA? Loosing control seems plausible but its somewhat unrealistic and just letting the pilot die is even more problematic (loosing control on the other hand could be easily bypassed by controling the craft from an onboard probe core). I prefer the idea of having more or less heat & crash resistant version of mk1-3 parts, currently you can fly all this stuff at high speeds, close to mach 4...if you lowered the heat resistance of the base version (with higher relative crash tolerance and lower price but similiar weight), make the second version black like the base pod - clear distinction to the normal models and a nice nod to the X-15 and Blackbird. The black version should have a heat resistance a bit above the current. The command pods have a heat resistance of 2400K while the current "plane" parts are at 2000K...make that 2300 or for the black versions and perhaps 1400K (or even lower) for the base versions - this would also include other aerodynamic parts like Wings, Intakes (there are allready differences here) and landing gears. The current crash tolerances of plane cockpits are 40-60m/s, I think this should be reduced to 5-15 for the black versions (the MK1 Pod currently has a crash tolerance of 14m/s while the lander cans are at 8m/s), make these planes fragile while cool - landing outside the Space Center would be quite a challenge giving them a disadvantage compared to their normal versions.

I really like the idea...make it 2 to 3 buildings each time, perhaps a random selection (without doubles) between 10 models or so - should be possible work load wise, 5 more locations is a minimum I guess - make it 11 and I am happy, 5 more locations on the equator, and 3 on a higher latitude (60-75°) to the south and north. It would also make it more plausible why Mun or Minmus aren't blocking the signal - they aren't big enough to block all stations with line of sight on Kerbal - unless you are in orbit around one of them but thats the case for all bodies. Runways and landing pads would be glorious but it won't happen anytime soon, I guess. If they would introduce these we should have to pay for them though - I don't think that should be the case for the other ground stations since they don't give you any advantage, either you have them all from the start or teh number just increases with sensor range upgrades.

Well so far boats and submarines are not a "official" part of KSP...I mean you can build them but they aren't really intended to be a legit part of the game and I doubt Squad will change that soon, the game is still very much about flying stuff - possibly driving although that too is not the main gameplay. I don't know the issues involved but I guess making some sort of port or dock would be a real hustle - I guess new crafts could be somehow dropped into the water but I imagine placing it in it might result in physic problems, if they did such a (dry)dock, than it would also work fine for submarines, consider that underwater submarine bay aren't really a thing and that we have so far no means to move Kerbals underwater (and i guess an air bubble underwater is just an inpossible thing without redoing the complete water model).

yeah such a helipad would be great. I wouldn't make the new runway larger one than the old one, as I wrote I would make it shorter and not as wide, our current one is on Tier 3 2.5km long and 70m wide, I would imagine the new one with the sky jumb in the area of 1.5km length with 50m width. But nothing speaks against introducing a Tier 4 for the original runway: the real Shuttle runway at KSC is 5182 meters long, I think thats a bit extreme for KSP (since everything is smaller anyway and in reality every normal plane can land at sea level on a runway with the length of about 3km) but increasing the runway length to perhaps 3.5km seems sensible, I don't know about the width though, the current one is 70m wide which isn't much less than the aboth metioned one at KSC which is 90 meters wide...I wouldn't increase that over 80m - perhaps there should be some lights on the shores before the airfield, making lining up a bit easier. In an emergency you still can land on the flat gras surrounding KSP although I think that it shouldn't be so flat if we had another runway (with sky jump) and a larger original one, possibly plus a VTOL/helicopter pad (large circular conrete area)...if we had all this the totaly flat area should perhaps be limited to everything directly around the Space center and the rest should be a bit more uneven - like the TIER 1 airfield, making its usage as landing site not impossible but definetly worse than the runway

Okay, I don't know if there is a mod for this but I couldn't find one so here is the idea: A second runway at the Space Center - with a sky jump at the end, basically a ramp launching your craft (picture) into the sky, I know this isn't super important or anything but I think its a nice idea to have something to make a take-off with unwilling aircrafts easier (without having to pray that they get their nose up before hitting water). I know that proper aircraft design should make something like that (with such a long runway available) unnecessary but I think it could allow more diverse crafts which otherwise wouldn't be able to take-off because they wouldn't get their nose up. The angle of the Sky Jump wouldn't have to be big, possibly just 5-10°, the new runway could lie parallel to the normal runway or - more interesting - in an angle (45° or so) to it, starting between the kerbonaut center and the start of the normal runway, crossing it and ending left too it, I guess it should ba a lot shorter too: half to 2/3 the length of the fully upgraded runway and not as wide.

yep, just disable crossfeed...but this can't be done in flight can it? Basically locking you in on your decission if you want to have it or not.

agree with Red Cloud - not everybody would be a fan of such a heavily "scripted" career, I guess this could be some sort of "story" or "campaign" mode, very similiar to career but closer to reality and more requirements to make progress. Launching uncrewed could also make the early game more meaningfull - you only get very small engines and tanks - limiting you to suborital trajectories and you would have to do training flights & assignments with your pilots first before they become usefull (otherwise basically tourists) - basically making them plane test pilots before they become Kerbonauts, the same goes later for engineers and scientists. Specific missions could also be required to unlock skills once you reached the next level. "realisticly" testing stuff before putting kerbals in it makes sense...I guess in theory that could be done with more missions you have to accomplish or by giving new parts a precentage based failure chance (such a failure would have to be connected to the safe system - making it impossible to reverse it once it happened), lets say a new pod has a 30% chance of failing, you could ignore that and possibly your newly trained Jebediah goes KIA because the capsule lsot atmosphere in space, if that doesn't happen - you get lucky - the failure chance than drops to 10% and then to 1% and finally to 0% if you test it uncrewed first though, then it goes directly to 0%, regardless if it failed in flight. I wouldn't require testing for every new part but for certain new technologies certainly and perhaps even not test required parts should get a 1% failure rate on the first flight...giving an incentive to use prooven technology for important/expensive missions.

While I somewhat doubt that you will go through half the tech tree in 100 days, a duna transfer needs longer (okay its true you can get pretty far only with biomes on Mun and Minmus), you have a point. I guess that also shows the core weakness of career mode, you aren't actually simulating a career, you are doing missions, to fund more missions to get science, in order to research stuff which allows you to do more missions meaning more money and science and so on...while this grind is pretty common for games (and at least here somewhat rooted in reality) it misses the context other games usually have and you can rush through it since only transfer times limit slow your progress meaningfully (beyond the technology limitations in the beginning). A Solution could be to have more Kerbin based stuff, sounding rockets - possibly starting uncrewed with a heavier focus on planes. Perhaps you should have to "train" Kerbonauts before they can actually do stuff, require Pilots to fly certain assignments before they can handle a rocket, let Scientists take meassurements & crew reports on certain areas of Kerbin - either they drive or a pilot in training flies them there, no idea though what engineers could do. This wouldn't change the gameplay too much (you get these jobs anyway) but it gives a good structure to the early game...in theory missions like that could be required a lot more: you start with only pilots who you have to train, by the time you would land teh first time on mun/minmus you are required to train your first scientist (requiring a trained pilot to fly him/her places), higher levels could also require to accomplish certain assignments like (for pilots) flying a given lander on Kerbin to a certain location without crashing it and so on. tl;dr: give players more stuff to do, require them to do more things (which have to make sense) before taking certain steps, as I wrote this should be a sepperate mode from career - a bit closer to story mode or so. ...so perhaps every 10 days would be better than 100 - nothing against 6 but it doesn't fit with a 400 day year

had a similiar thought a while ago...first: This should be an addition to the current system - it makes time an actual factor which it currently isn't (ignoring ore mining and the research lab), there should be: Sandbox Science Mode Career Mode Historical Mode (or however you want to call it) ...this idea increases the difficulty by screwing you over exponantially, every failure makes it harder to recover. Now to the idea itself: I think a yearly payment - while realistic - is a bit much, make it 100 days, meaning 4 payments per year which would be based on the performance in the last year: if you screw up in Q1 then you might compensate for that in Q2 returning to budget to normality in Q3 without totally being fucked in Q2 (after the failure) because the Q2 budget is not only based on Q1 but also on the Q2,3,4 of the year before, if you underperform (meaning time accelerate) a whole year or so you would have to come back from that by giving a good performance on a very small budget, which would return slowly to normality over 1 year. Perhaps upgrading a building should take time (50, 100, 250 days perhaps?) and it should be disabled for the time (you could still design new rockets for example but not actually build them), this would require you to plan carefully - upgrading the Kerbalnaut building to Tier 3 should perhaps be done after the launch of a large crewed mission to Duna or so, not before. Perhaps you should get a small stream of income from archiving Milestones, a flag on Mun might give you an additional 2.000 funds every 100 days, the usual multpliers could work for this - the same could be done for kerbalnaut levels, making them even more valuable - there should be the possibility of retiring a kerbalnauts (giving you double the funds) of level 3 or above. These amounts could also vary based on your reputation.

I like the idea of having the possibility to improve the stats of parts, allowing parts to be "upgraded" up to three times (perhaps costing x1.25, x2.5 and x7.5) increasing key stats like thrust of an 1st stage engine, or the ISP on jet or 2nd stage engine. But these improvements should be small (thrust increase of perhaps up to 30% and ISP increase of perhaps 10% on the 7.5 times more expensive upgrade) - and they should be shown at the model (which would be a ton of work). These upgrades could close the gap between two existing parts...or a thrust increase of the 1st stage engine and ISP increase on the 3rd stage might allow you to use the same rocket with a slightly increased payload. An upgrade on jet cockpits and parts might make them more heat resistant (paint it black then). Even if there weren't upgrades for all parts, it would seriously screw with the balance of the game and redsigning existing (old) parts is currently more than enough work for Squad.

I like the idea...but its a lot of work. You would need voice actors, chatter triggering mechanics and - most importantly - lots of recorded lines. I mean this has a lot of potential and it would be really cool to have Jebediah humming while you do mid course corrections but beyond that it also has the very real possiblity to be super annoying! Imagine doing a number of solo missions at one point Jebediah always comments that he is alone...I mean you could make it better by having lines like: or even later but even that might get old fast. Contextual chatter might be really cool but its very easy to get stuff wrong there - and I don't think it would be the best use of Squad's limited resources, at least at the moment.