starcaptain

Let's look at a specific example. This is one of the screenies of a base on a Mun-like object. Centered in the scene is what appears to be the heart of any colony mission, a self-contained, vacuum-proof, iron-enriched, allegedly portable Exospheric Vehicle Assembly Building. (EVAB?) This building may be invariant apart from color scheme, from level to level. Attached to it at each of its four sides are "stuff", which each look like they're coming from preset attachment nodes, not unlike the Multi-Point Connector hub. Out one side are solar panels. They're such simple constructions that I wonder if they're click-and-drag and procedural generated. Out another side are a handful of modules that I bet are part of the first tech epoch, being roughly analogous to our current level of technology in the real world: with metal tanks and balloonified habitation modules. Or maybe the white things are rigid tanks covered with insulation. Or giant marshmallows. Anything is possible. Everything is suspended above the ground by little stilts. These stilts are just some sufficient length downwards so that you can't see their bottoms after they intersect the surface. I get Pthigrivi's issue: the little supporting stilts should have a few different variants (and perhaps the exterior of some modules and the EVAB too) depending on surface gravity (and/or external pressure). I personally am wondering to what degree we can fiddle with things like rotation or alignment of modules: is everything going to be hard limited to nodes and 90º points of contact, or will we have complete rotation and translation offset tools like in the vehicle editor, where people can build enormously sophisticated facilties that fit inside a single tiny box because of abusing part intersections. Or perhaps we'll have something in-between that's more free than 90º hard points, but less than full 6-axis freedom. I wonder also if space station colony editors function the same as base editors.

Well you've probably disagreed with one another or said something that rubbed the other the wrong way. What I'm talking about is ensuring those kinds of things are addressed: ignoring relation problems or pretending they don't exist are not solutions.

Does this count?

You done did dood it dude. Congratulations! Only 100 years until you need to renew the lease. Marriage tips from my own experiences: Winning your partner's heart is easy. Treasuring it is a lifetime undertaking. Make sure you remember to use conflict as a tool to find your mutual blindspots; then solve them. Conflict does not "stop [me] from getting what I want", it highlights selfishness. If you can't understand why your partner is upset, try reversing your perspective and reverse-engineering their current mood. "I'm [the other] and I'm [annoyed/sad/hangry] because of X and I feel X because of Y..." Do it gently and you'll either diagnose the problem, or your partner will correct you and you'll both root out the issue. Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Which partner it applies to varies, but just keep it in mind. If all else fails, curl in a corner and throw chocolate at them until they go away.

A munrunner-esque rover experience needs only depend on: improved suspension and wheel-ground interactions, and more interesting kinds of groundscatter, both of which i think are barreling towards us. To build ships we only really need two parts: a water propeller (or a jet); a device designed to generate thrust when immersed in liquid, and a hull. Making a variety of hull-like parts sounds like more of a gameplay design decision rather than any heavy load to the people modelling parts and stuff. Also nitpick related to travelling in water: exclusion of water volumes inside of buoyant objects is probably going to be another one of those details that sounds easy to do but is really hard to implement and will probably be ignored in KSP2.

Kinda. That's how I imagine it would be. It would be, to a certain extent, mostly cosmetic to actually simulate missions going on for such economics, and you can imagine how tricky that would be to run real time in the background along with the planets and everything else. The only way it would become not cosmetic is if you rendezvoused with these automated resupply missions. Even touching them would stop it from being automated and then everything about what you're doing and what the computer thought it was doing goes out to lunch. Simpler to just "pretend" such missions are going on in the background.

Get a bot that does both. Then you can go home and have a sandwich.

(-1) 73411082019 All constructible numbers basically round to 0 anyways.

The question is wrong. The problem is, "why lasagna?" How do we accurately map thermal gradients of the Earth to variable depths up to 1km?

Who here cooks? What do you like do cook? What do you find challenging about cooking or baking? Do you have any recipes to share, or recent triumphs to post in the culinary arts? I don't think of myself as a gastronome, but I do enjoy taking on a challenge every once and a while. Earlier this year I tried making souffles. How about you?

If I understand correctly, the mission automation is probably going to be something like an economics "Resupply" page: You do a mission, finish a goal, and then note it in the "Resupply" page (or whatever it gets called); now the mission you just finished is going to be reported to the Resupply as 'Resource/ExpenseTime". (For example: "1390 Xenon gas supplied, took 7 days 9 hours to arrive, cost 21000 funds to build and launch, minus the cost of recovered parts") A supply route is then opened between A and B supplying that Resource at that rate. If you want to get more supplies or faster or cheaper, you need to do another mission with an improved vehicle. Such missions may be ambivalent about what constitutes a "mission" to deliver these resources. It could be a rocket or a spaceplane or a rover or a submarine. All the 'Resupply' page cares about is the bottom line: resources, time, price.

Surface textures: Rock Loose aggregate Fine aggregate Sand Loamy dirt High viscosity liquid (marsh, slime, tar, lava (assuming temperature resilience) ) Low viscosity liquid (water, low weight hydrocarbons, liquified gasses)

One of the big things i always wished i could do in KSP1 was making a grand tour mission out of one glorious mothership, and in so doing, visiting every biome. Ostensibly such a huge project scope was because i wanted to do more interesting things than footprints on each world but i had to work within the gameplay constraints. With KSP2 I'll be able to do such things and beyond.

I think one thing the devteam is working very hard on is high levels of mod integration. This would enable lots of new kinds of parts and stuff from users' own creativity. Maybe some really good mods could get canonized (like PorkJet's Mk.II Fuselage parts) but generally I'm pretty sure it's a bit early to be thinking about DLC parts.

Team Fortress 2 and Spore have already trained me well to wait a long time for the video games I like. Except Spore lacked all the featured I ever cared about, and KSP2 promises all of them. Shows who's pudding is on the wrong foot now!

Making a colony on a comet sounds like a great way to hitchhike out to the Koort Kloud. Automating the process of resource delivery sounds kind of weird to think about though, unless that's the true gaming-the-system. Comet is near the sun: relatively cheap and short to resupply colony. Do 1 resupply mission, now the system has a "Resources/TimeCost" interval that it can just multiply. If the Resource/TimeCost unit doesn't take into account the significant difference in distance or eccentricity that the comet has with respect to the resupply mission origin, then you can always get resupply budgets as if the comet was close to home, even when its not. It's kind of gamebreaking in terms of economics, except for the fact that it's such a specific edge case that I'm not sure if it makes a difference in the grand scheme of things.

It's difficult to paramaterize how to involve them at the canon game scale. I mean, mods sure. But if I'm allowed to build the Death Star and not a Space Elevator, it doesn't make much sense in terms of scale consistency. Moreover, where's the line drawn for what's too big? O'Niel Cylinders? Niven Ringworlds? Matrioshka Brains?

If posting it here is an opportunity for us to load more onto Matt's plate: The footwells of pilot climbing points and ladders probably doesn't have as much gloss as the rest of the vessel body. I was thinking about recommending giving the canopy glass that golden tinge the F22 Raptor has, but Iridium-Tin-Oxide coatings are for stealth purposes and not useful for spacecraft, so I won't do that. Jolly good, keep up the amazing work everyone.

Ideas I had: Landing Craters When landing on a world with a dusty or powdery surface, or anywhere if you crash, it makes an indent and texture that sticks around (unless the surface weather makes it go away). Instead of having to store surface deformations, each are just model objects that are seeded by the event. The model objects themselves are stored similarly to plants and other surface objects, so that they can be unloaded and reloaded easily with the rest of the surface seed. Thin Ice Not sure how to implement it, but I think it would be a delightfully sadistic kaizo-sort of implement to manage landing on an ice world, only to unluckily land in the one place where there's thin ice and your vessel sinks in liquid unless it was made buoyant. Or icebergs that can flip over. Programmable Thrust Profiles for Solid Fuel boosters Like real life. They can't be throttled, but their thrust changes according to a pre-programmed shape. More complex thrust control makes the booster more expensive. Ice Giant Buoyancy Zones Planets like Neptune and Uranus likely have gas layers where the pressure, temperature and gravity all make balloon buoyancy feasible for vessels that would be a mixture of spaceplanes, submarines and zeppelins. Bases could be set up here to mine for gasses, or explore the deeper regions using submersibles or perhaps even rovers to access their highly intensified liquid/solid surfaces, several hundred kms down. Space Automatons Inspired by the AREE project by NASA, a person can trade control-ability and versatility of a vessel for extremely high resilience, because it's clockwork or mechanical logic, instead of electrical. Because it's a purely mechanical system, it trades communication and control for insane levels of ruggedness, temperature resilience, radiation-hardness and invulnerability to pressure. An example of this, would be AREE directly: a rover that can't talk, and can't be re-instructed of where to go. It just dithers around as long as it has power. It can collect basic science data, move, and maybe have a passive signal reflector of some kind. Actual electrics like computers and batteries are an option to complement, but they are extremely simple and cumbersome. Test Tank It was mentioned in a podcast recently that they may resize the pool at the KSC. I think the pool would be a great way to do limited-scope environmental testing. "I want to land on Vall but I don't know if my vessel can do it!" Well we stick a scale model in the tank, have flavor text saying that the vessel and tank have had their physical properties scaled to mirror the environment (with jell-o and lead weights or whatever). The vessel starts attached with cabled hoists above the pool, and 'go!' see if you can maneuver in the tank. It's not the same as actually being there. It's a limited analogue, but that's the point. The point of testing is not certainty of the design, but enough assurance to make it worth trying. And also to shakedown, and catch basic things, like crew access or landing legs being long enough. It's weaksauce to say in the game that you're doing a computer simulation of such testing. Such ridiculousness is much more thingy and material in a silly way, which makes it more appropriate as a kerbal solution. Imagine doing this kind of thing, but with actual vessels with firing engines:

Protip: if you're going for max science, DO NOT make a Vall biome hopper. It's gravity makes this a painfully slow process due to all the mining you'll have to do. Bring a rover! (I did but it's attached by a decoupler and will only be used for Tylo. In this regard, I'd recommend treating Vall and Tylo the same.)

Paradoxical success! I've managed to procure all science from Pol (52 data slots, exactly as predicted), but it all fit in one science box (???). Well, at least I've spare room. The only downside is the fact that I've spent an additional year and a half mining new fuel because I rolled poor ore content for Pol. I'll just pretend they have hibernation berths inside their cabins or whatever.

There's no "correct" approach. Nukes are efficient but not powerful, so they're best used getting you into orbit after you already have some time before you reach apogee. But they're not so good for landing or the first moments of liftoff, since that's when you really need a good TWR: you'll only have maybe 4 minutes to change your speed as much as 1200m/s during those phases.

I disagree with the people who say that official release and mods should have mutually exclusive content. The makers of Team Fortress 2 realized quickly that official game makers can't compete with the rate of content generation and creativity. So instead, they compliment them by awarding stability and version robustness to the best content. Think about Porkjet's additions of the mk2 fuselage system. It's so integrated that no one really thinks about the fact that it came into being through a modder. There are many lovely ideas that I thin deserve to be 'canonized', even if it means paying for them. Even if it's just a single new Gas Giant planetary system "comes with rings, a moon with an atmosphere and a mountain that reaches above the clouds, a moon with a volcano, trench land that totally isn't the death star Mimas, etc" yes I know I *can* download that for free, but I would be willing to shell out $20 so I don't have to have all that "only works with a five-month old version" nonsense.

There's a fair rule of thumb for making a Tylo Lander: if it can ssto from Kerbin to orbit, it can land and take off of Tylo with fuel to spare for orbital maneuvering.

I've been playing since 0.13, but many times my grandest expeditions were frustrated by two things: 1. my computer wasn't powerful enough to do a grand mission because it couldn't handle the large crafts. (Not a problem anymore) 2. I would get into a vicious cycle: make grand mission, launch , think "it'll be a while until it arrives. I could use the time to start another grand mission", make a grand mission, launch, think "it'll be a while until-- and my calendar gets bogged down in the game where I'm paralyzed with not knowing when what's supposed to arrive. I should've got Kerbal Alarm Clock. But I'm committing myself to the effort of putting 1 flag on every biome before the end of the year, and then I'll say I've reached the end of what I started.