Rejected Spawn

Let me just be the one to kill the party mood. Space elevators are only really sensible (yes even by Kerbal standards) on somewhat low gravity bodies that rotate reasonably fast. Which is the last place you'd have any use for one since, as Neoks already mentioned, mass drivers are a good option there. Though I'd argue that mass drivers are usable for manned vessels too, just don't fire them at maximum force and you still get at least 500dV to start your journey with. Elevators only make even the slightest shred of sense with extremely limited payloads, if it would be treated as a cheat object in the game that teleports payloads instantly from ground to space then sure you could use one more creatively but that really doesn't fit with the essence of the game in my eyes and I think a lot of players would object to this, not to mention the devs probably don't want deliberate cheats in vanilla gameplay. The entire game is being made to handle ships bigger than what would make KSP1 go down in flames and blow out your local power grid, we're talking the possibility of making ships that can carry thousands of times what an elevator can in even an optimistic scenario. And those giants can be automated to some unknown extent to cut down on repeat manual flights. The only remaining argument in uncrippled favor of elevators is "because they're kind of cool", and that I agree with. Can't really say that factor alone justifies their addition to the game though. Almost forgot to mention but "skyhooks" are complete insanity, if any such project is ever attempted in real life it will be one for the history books under the chapter of how to nearly guarantee that everyone involved will die horribly.

You seem to misunderstand my point. My point is that there is still plenty of gameplay around the colonies, KSP2 will not be exclusively about piloting a bunch of stuff, it will be about so much more that appeals to so many more players in so many more ways and your strange aversion to letting these other types of players have fun with the game is completely irrational in my eyes. I can't see at all why you obsessively object to expanding the target audience and providing a much appreciated convenience for a lot of experienced players, forcing the player to pilot ships endlessly is like adding Preston Garvey to KSP, "Another ship needs your guidance!"

Clarification; you selected a part that taken out of context sounds like it validates your standpoint. The text goes on to say the following: While colonies are subservient to rockets, that does not mean that colonies are a dry, minimal experience. We’re researching the mechanics of space colonization with the same attention to detail that we apply to vehicle parts and planets. We want players to build crazy orbital drydocks and mining colonies on stalactites. Colonies need to be fun to create and build up, and they need a wealth of possibilities. Nate describes this as a “toyetic” experience. If someone happily spends their play session rearranging the modules on their Ultimate Mun Spaceport, then we’re doing the right thing. Much like a toy, the experience is in how these modules fit together and give the player new things to do. And the four pillars they boldly proclaim in a nice picture are still "building cool and unique rockets", "exploring new planets", "realistic space flight" and "defining and achieving unique goals" -- none of which has anything to do with being stuck in a pilot seat, we've already seen Percy safely drop down on the surface of Mars after figuring out a good spot to land and getting to it entirely automatically. They want the player to learn how to do as much as possible, they don't want to force the player to keep doing all of it.

Well this thread sure kept a high pace, nearly all that I'd like to interject on all sides of all arguments has been covered already. Anyway @Brikoleur I still take issue with your assertion that it's a waste of development resources to have more advanced autopilots as a stock feature, all development of all features are (assuming devs have even the slightest bit of competence) weighted measures of three primary factors, 1: how essential is it to the vision of the game, 2: how much does it cost to develop, 3: how much does it improve sales of the game. I'd like to just quickly comment on these three factors. 1: The vision of KSP 2 is actually the less "knowable" factor to us at this point, given that the devs need to avoid spoilers and making promises that possibly don't pan out I think we'll have to largely set this aside for now. 2: The development cost is hard to estimate but you seem to assume that they work on a system where they have absolutely no room for anything that isn't critical to just getting the core running, I don't think this is the case since they were able to extend the deadline by a massive leap and seem to have enough personnel to get a lot of less critical features implemented. This is just my impression though. 3: The community reception is what really has the power to largely override both of the two factors if it's substantial enough. These days a game isn't something that sells 90% of its total in a single week and then gets played for a month and forgotten, we mostly live in a connected world where a platform like Steam manages to keep games selling for ages and the opinions of existing players greatly influence the long term sales through reviews and other feedback. If we step away from the automation for a moment and just take a general feature that would cost time and money to develop, the question is just how much of an impact it has on the long term sales and the happiness of players. If it costs 50k currency to implement and makes up for it with 100k currency in additional sales then it's likely a good idea to make the investment. Going back to the case at hand, KSP2 isn't KSP 2.0, it's an entirely different beast and your argument that convenience for casual/lazy/incompetent players is too expensive to add would result in the effect that they just aren't going to play the game rather than suddenly stop wanting to be casual, or somehow develop skills they literally can't. You're cutting out a section of the potential audience. Even worse you're not factoring in that long term a game keeps selling more the more its players enjoy messing around in it, because if your Steam friend Bob is popping up a notification that he keeps playing the same game 5 days every week then of course you'll wonder what's so good about it, this is how an important number of sales are made after the initial rush. An important aspect to this is to keep players from getting tired of the game because it's the same old thing, now in KSP we've seen that a select portion keeps doing Apollo reimaginations to death but for most players the game is more engaging the more they can do with it and the less it gets in the way of any one thing they enjoy about it, I have a very hard time imagining that anyone would complain if KSP2 makes sure players experience and understand flight before letting them automate flight but it would go a tremendously long way when it comes to ensuring that players don't get sick of having to manually fly things when they just want a craft to go to some specific location. @mcwaffles2003 already mentioned this, KSP2 will be far more drawn out across very big stages and I think it's very foolish to cut the game off from those who mostly just want to enjoy the last stage of large scale management. Not sure how well known the X series of games is here, the overlap with KSP is very slight and mostly just that both are space games, but I'd like to just mention that in the latest one (X4 Foundations) there is a huge array of play styles being enabled without compromising one another. Want to get in the pilot seat and go blast some pirates? Sure, knock yourself out endlessly! Want to be a peaceful trader? No problem, buy low and sell high on the ever fluctuating markets! Want to build factories? Go right ahead, set up a giant complex that takes raw resources and churns out expensive high tech goods and watch your bank account... recover the initial 600 million credit investment over a couple of real life weeks! This is starting to sound like a shabby advertisement but the point is; provide a wide array of possible ways to play a game and as much as possible don't force any of it on the player, this IS a good approach to making games that have more to them than just "run & gun".

I don't get the impression you bothered actually reading what I wrote, you're just about saying that those who don't actually WANT to learn to fly properly are wrong and shouldn't be allowed to play the game, they're just terrible people who don't understand when you're explaining to them that it's fun and they're just wrong if they don't find it fun because obviously it's super great. Seriously take a step back and look at what you're saying, and what I'm saying, and try to realise that you're being one of those "you're not playing the game the way I think you should so you're playing it wrong" people. What I additionally said was that this whole autopilot function can be tied to "you have to prove you can" before you get to not do it any more.

I still have a hard time believing how intense the undertones of "you're playing the game wrong" still show in threads like this one, seriously the only ways to play a game wrong are to either keep attempting something the game shows is impossible or to set a goal that the game permits and then endlessly fail to achieve that goal. There is no other wrong way to play any game, if you want to put a kerbal on a walking robot and giggle for 6 hours while it clumsily barely makes progress hobbling forward you're ENJOYING the game perfectly fine and nobody can say otherwise. With that opening statement out of the way, I'm intensely opposed to "if it exists it's gonna make someone have an easy time with it so it shouldn't exist" arguments. I know the "make it optional" line is deeply frowned upon in a lot of circumstances but this would be a valid place for it to be used, but there's also the possibility of having one of the ways suggested in the thread that doesn't give instant access to more elaborate automated flight or if I may be so bold, there's this: The player has to unlock at least some tech through relevant actions. Rather than cash in a mystery goo sample from orbit to suddenly get a more powerful jet engine the player should for instance fly a jet plane for at least a consecutive minute at low and high altitudes and then return the plane to examine the flight data in detail. Likewise you could "teach" the kerbals and probes to fly by gathering tons of flight data to gradually expand their options, and rather than level up each kerbal your flight data is included in their training programs so they learn most of it before showing up as usable crew in the first place. (Old pilots who missed out on this education can go home for a quick crash course to learn a few new tricks.) The balance of this could be tied to game difficulty, for a normal playthrough you can unlock smarter probes and more useful pilots by just doing a small number of simpler flights with minimal guidance requirements but for harder modes you will need to fly a number of difficult specific routes successfully and at least deposit an intact "black box" on return home. This way nobody gets to just "not ever learn to fly" but those who would rather focus on the joy of building ships and seeing them in their majestic glory as they traverse the cosmos don't need to get told they have to stay in the pilot seat themselves, we all get to enjoy the game our individual ways.

To follow up on that: the contract system keeps geeting even more contracts with major updates (hence the titel of this thread) and they already overwhelm the contract system, plus they never go away, they drop in number to a quite noticeable degree when declined enough (not enough to not just check them) and contracts that keep getting accepted will increase in number but this is only a moderate increase. The problem is that once you go literally anywhere or do literally anything the entire contract list explodes with stuff that individually drops in recurrence but the sheer number of different ones that vye for attention is causing the pathetically tiny number of contracts on offer at any one time to simply not list much of any desirable type for any player not interested in being a slave to insane irrational randomness. Personally I like to do tourism contracts and a few more types but it's not even profitable to send a rocket with just the tourists from a single contract so of course I try to get more of them... I've had instances where I spent more time declining other contracts than acually flying the tourists. Not even kidding. This was after trying as hard as possible to drop the recurrence of verything else to rock bottom and raising the tourism contracts as high as possible by never declining any contracts (except the 1% that gets bugged) and I still got dozens of identical "plant a flag on Bill's forehead and take 86000 temperature measurements for each micrometer as he falls from an altitude of 3000 above that one speck of dirt to the left of a tree up the mountan in the distance" and it's absolutely maddening. I can very much state that the game is broken, when I get the same contract I've never once accepted in 1000+ hours respawning in my face 6 times in a row after I already declined it a few dozen times in the last hour.

To adress this in turn. (A) I don't want to be handed infinite resources for free forever, only one game mode offers this. (B) You do realise that this section of the forum is for suggestions of improvements and fixes to the actual game itself, right? (C) Not even gonna comment on this, also see point B. (D) See point B. Yeah I still have under 2000 hours of play time in KSP but oh so luckily they give me decades to complete a task I would hate every second of doing for the 50 attempts it takes me to actually complete. Maybe you need to take a good long moment and think about players who are stuck in front of games all day because of disabilites, are we supposed to git gud at medicine and surgically alter our bodies until we can play the game as amazingly good as you clearly can? For the record I don't feel inclined to read and much less respond to any further comment down this path so don't trouble yourself. Agreed that a different system would be an ideal solution but there's still enormous room for improvement and not all of it is particularly hard to implement, but I get the impression that career is "unpopular and therefore does not get improved" while being "unpopular because it needs to be improved"... Anyway since KSP2 is still at least a year away and they claim to want to keep supporting KSP1 even after that point I think it's still highly relevant to request improvements and provide feedback on things that really get on players nerves. Not to say I'll ever waste another second on KSP1 after KSP2 finally drops but some players still will, not everyone is after the futuristic stuff and not everyone painlessly spends money on games so there will surely be some that stick around for years. I'm tempted to dump the penalty as well, though it would pain me since I couldn't then claim to be strictly sticking to the difficulty setting I've chosen, there should be some way to take a one time massive reputation penalty for blocking any specific contract type instead. Alternatively just offer a lot more contracts (about 100-200 of them split into multiple tabs) or maybe do a PR campaign through the strategy interface to explosively increase generation of specific contracts while taking a penalty to their profitability. There's no shortage of solutions, many of which don't even involve much effort at all compared to how much goes into improving random little bits all over the game, I'm seriously just baffled by the development focus being so averse to doing even the slightest bit of work to alleviate the worst issues.

I've been bringing this up more than once but since it seemingly falls on deaf ears every single time you leave me little choice but to reiterate: Adding MORE contract types WITHOUT adding any way for the player to STOP the undesirable ones from respawning endlessly is a nightmare. With the addition of EVA contracts in 1.11 things have gotten near unbearable, my career profile now has horrible reputation because the game keeps shoving contracts in my face that I either hate so much that I'd rather not even play the game or ones that I can't even complete due to lack of flight skills. Numerous suggestions for improvements to the contract system have been made numerous times, at this point I don't even have the patience left to be polite about this and list the best ones. Additionally the tourism contracts are still bugged, the ones that generate when other contracts complete (not the ones that generate when you decline a contract) have roughly a flat 1% probability of not spawning one of the tourists if you accept the contract. Also, anyone about to say "there's a mod for that" please just stop. I don't want to play modded and I don't need to justify this to you.

Terraforming won't be a big part of reality any time soon either, much to my personal dissatisfaction. Some time ago I was curious how much atmosphere needs to be added to Mars to merely get the pressure suitable for humans, since we can't absorb oxygen or otherwise stay healthy without substantial pressure and living in thick steel cans there would feel rather uncomfortable... I figured being able to strut around with just an oxygen tank would be seriously out of this world level fun so disregarding the specific composition of the gas I set out to find the total mass needed to get the pressure up to roughly a high altitude but still somewhat habitable environment on earth, we know that sea level pressure is 1.2kg of gas sitting on top of every single cm2... so given the low gravity of Mars we need to stack more like about 2kg on top of every cm2, then multiply this by the surface area and you get...... Wanna guess before I tell you? Here's your chance! Go! So after playing with the numbers a while I'm pretty sure I got the right ones, what I ended up with was that we'd need to ship a million tons... per second... for a hundred years. Even puny planets like Mars are actually really big, when seen from certain perspectives.

For structural panels I'd actually like to see the variants I suggested for KSP2 in this thread some time ago: Structural part suggestions - KSP 2 Discussion - Kerbal Space Program Forums Essentially the pic shows what I mean with curved and rounded, at least a 90 degree example. Would be possible to make bases and rovers look very good with that kind of stuff. For other parts I'd like in KSP1 from the same thread I'd really appreciate glass panels and stack manipulators, such as a 2,5m that goes into 3 standard 1,25m nodes but instead of in a triangle they'd be in a row, also of course I'd love stack splitters for the bigger sizes as well since we currently have none of that. When it comes to struts I'm with OP that they look weird, in my opinion there should also be some additional kind of strut that can only be seen in editors and only reaches a very short distance - kind of like a blob of space grade glue. Lastly I keep reiterating this every once in a while but here goes; the sizes of the biggest and smallest pieces of any same type in the whole game are almost universally not ever nearly far enough apart to allow detailed looking crafts without reaching absurdly laggy part counts. This isn't at all limited to structural pieces though, so a partially off topic remark, but still relevant.

I'd prefer if the docking ports were MORE helpful. Elaboration time: Rather than have some universal magnetic pull I'd like the docking ports to come with a small robotic arm that grabs any nearby ports by a specific "handle" (resulting in precise alignment to whichever direction you've rotated one of those handles) and then gently guides the incoming vessel to the correct spot for a soft, safe and automatic docking. Something similar (manually operated) is already being used at times in real life, I'd think people working to develop "space stuff" won't be too dumb to extend this functionality a little over time. Of course I'd like around 8 different sizes for the ports, and a functionality to have the arm fold away and hide while not set to look for dockings and a built in ability for the arm and handles to rotate along the outside of the port rather than having the entire port rotate, you only need the comparatively flimsy guide stuff to move like on a little ring sitting around the port itself.

Technically it's entirely possible to reach any destination in the solar system in less than a year, I got in my head that I wanted to plant a relay in orbit around everything that can be orbited and a probe lander on everything that can be landed on, all in the first year of career mode. Eeloo sitting at an angle behind Kerbin was honestly hard and took 45000dv but was entirely possible - by leaping a 25000 ton 12 stage rocket off the launch pad and reversing the orbit around the sun and spending several real life hours burning ion engines at 4X physical timewarp and eyeballing the target because the trajectory indicator stops working at the speed required. Doing test flights like that was a bit of a chore but I landed a few tons of junk on Eeloo in around 400 days. My insanity aside though 2 years is of course a weird time limit, just wanted to be "that guy" and point out that it's not actually impossible to handle.

I dunno, there's a lot that would be really cool if it's possible but races over distances that require timewarp are probably not gonna be much fun. Bit of a tangent though; would be rather epicsauce to arrange for competitors to try to fly a pure jet or propeller plane to a moving target in the sky that's operated by a "game master", the simplest form would be to just hit some kind of flimsy marker on the target ship to win but I would love to see a race that has the target act as a flying runway and the participants need to ace a landing - this would make the ship designs very important since the landing zone is small so a plane designed to only fly well at very high speeds might be near impossible to land but you'd still need a ship that's fast enough to get there before someone else pulls it off... The runway plane would need to be seriously sturdy of course, here's hoping we can get some large structural pieces that weigh 5x as much as normal ones but are also 5x stronger.

Well I didn't even address my post to you, would have used a quote or tag otherwise so no I haven't called anyone but myself a clown, that entire section was directly from my heart to the devs how I feel about their work. As for the ability of a forum thread to affect the outcome of KSP2 that depends on how well thought out it is compared to what the devs already had in mind, at no point have I said that I think any impressive percentage of threads posted in this section of the forum actually bring anything useful to the table but in most cases the truly useless ones can't be salvaged by any means in my sight and I simply don't get involved with them or even talk about them. This one looks like it spawned out of frustration and began by asking a loaded question to which no serious and sane person would say they would prefer the game to be unplayable, rather than getting on your case about this and flat out asking why you're posting a joke poll I opted to change the direction of my own message towards broad strokes and being supportive of the devs since they already set a far future deadline which must have been a tough call to make with all the pressure. I'm not interested in locking horns with anyone, if I see a huge problem somewhere I'll usually call it out if it's bad enough to make me itch but my main interest is in being a generally supportive and constructive person and if given a good reason to praise someone I'd much rather do that even if it makes me look like a cheesy dork.