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.

I was one of those hit hardest by the bugs of CP2077, to the point I made a stand and got a refund. I've had it with games releasing in a horrible state, this has been getting on my nerves for more than a decade. That said, I don't think for a single instant that this thread is going to do anything to affect the actual timetable of KSP2, it seems completely pointless in that regard since it's a business decision of how long the game is allowed to stay in development. However it doesn't hurt to let the devs know that we're on their side in wanting KSP2 to be all it can be, even if that means it's gonna take much longer until we actually get to play around with our green friends. Developers are typically also humans to the best of my knowledge, humans have this peculiar trait that they feel better about making a very tough right call if they get confirmation from others that they are in fact doing the right thing. So yeah hey devs, at least this clown right here is supporting your plan, I'm confident you have a better grasp on this than any backseat experts like us and you're very likely already on as good and clear a path as can be when it comes to game development.

First off: I'm against monoliths entirely. Yes, I'm so against them that I'm bothering to enlarge the text to annoyingly big. Having said that, I'm not at all against remnants of alien shenanigans. But in NO WAY as proposed in the OP, there should be absolutely zero impact on everything that has any effect on gameplay, however there are things other than gameplay I'd think could be seriously nice if done right. Let me give some examples, though not only based on aliens because that's a silly limitation to impose. Crashed alien satellites: Really just piles of twisted metal and mangled electronics of a peculiar design, origin unknown but probably millions of years old. Finding them would unlock alien themed reskins for some drone cores - purely cosmetic of course since nobody can tell how the internals of the alien satellite actually were supposed to operate originally. These relics can only be found on extremely low gravity worlds or very large asteroids, otherwise there'd be nothing to find after the impact. You know, for the +1 realism. Alien cargo crates: Too intact to have ended up in its location via any kind of crash, either forgotten or deliberately left behind since the crate turns out to be empty on closer inspection. Neat looking sides on it however, this inspired your Kerbals to come up with another skin for structural panels! Crates can be found on any world with 0,7 to 1,3x Kerbin gravity. Buried alien rover: Lots of dirt has buried it and it's deteriorated almost beyond recognition but it looks enough like a rover that your Kerbals are pretty sure it was one at some point. One of the wheels did remain sufficienly intact that your Kerbals have now been inspired to come up with pretty cool hubcaps for some of your rover wheels, time to customize your ride and drift in style! Buried rovers only appear on worlds with atmospheres. Out-of-place crystal chunk: There is nothing in the environment that could have caused this crystal to emerge, it's also much too fragile to have survived an impact so it must have been placed here... This crystal is a big mystery but your Kerbals are much too enamored with its gleaming appearance to care about its origin for more than 2 seconds. Congratulations, you can now place shiny dashboard decorations in some cockpits. Crystals like this can only be found on worlds without atmospheres. Mutated specimen of a local plant: This wasn't left by aliens but occured naturally on a world similar to Kerbin, it stands out from other plants as being much bigger and older. Unlocks an additional theme for greenhouses. Shiny impact site: There's a strange long groove in the surface of a moon, at its deepest there's some kind of metal shining. While it's unclear what kind of impact caused this long streak to appear your Kerbals have now started associating long shiny strips with high speeds, you can now add go-faster-stripes in metallic colors to your crafts. Anyway I could go on but it's more fun if we let the devs do the rest as a surprise (though I'll cooperate if they message me asking for more ideas) and now I'd like to explain the spawning I'd most strongly recommend. First off all the sites should be random of course, but each specific thing spawns in 5-10 places in the "universe" when the game starts and once the player locates one of them it gets marked so the player can't lose sight of it again until it's investigated. When this mark appears all other instances of the object are deleted to ensure that you don't come across two identical rovers that got buried in an identical fashion in two separate solar systems, because that's pretty immersion breaking. This isn't exactly a novel approach, a lot of games have this built in but I wanted to lay it out to reassure everyone that you won't have to search every single rock in the game just to find that one piece you're missing to style your stuff. Also to address the craft sharing, via Steam workshop or other channels: Unlocked skins and decals are saved in a way that they only appear on a craft someone downloads if that player has already found the required things in their game.

That's a really good idea, I kind of subconsciously keep doing almost anything to avoid using the KAL so I probably wouldn't have thought of that any time soon. While the KAL is capable of doing a lot of interesting things it really isn't very user friendly, the UI could stand to be vastly improved... Yes yes I know how RGB works, I was coding websites in HTML around "Y2K" already. What I meant was that you can't bind the throttle directly to a light and get a complex color combination because each value is set to exactly the throttle value and any unbound one stays where you left it in the VAB, unless going through the nightmare of setting up the KAL as a translator the moving values are locked side by side. Would be nice if the RGB stayed as is and the devs simply added a separate slider that multiplies all of them by 0 to 1, keeping in mind that the average player isn't actually super tech savvy even if we do happen to have a little bit more useful stuff above the shoulders than most since we're playing around in a game that requires a noticeable degree of thinking. Actually adding the separate multiplier would enable a light to change colors independently of changing its luminosity, would be a pretty neat thing to have for a KAL heavy craft with lots of visual effects. Though admittedly it would be a lot more fun if craft had any sensors instead of everything having to be a manual switch; just imagine if your sci-fi SSTO had some light strips that changed color depending on atmospheric density, or if a rover could sense wheel pressures and tilt to raise or lower wheels in order to get around safer on rugged terrain...

Wow I had totally missed that it was possible to map luminosity per RGB channel already, thanks for the heads up on that! Unfortunately this can't be used to get nuanced color variants like bright blue since it's "all or nothing" per channel, I'd still very much like to be able to set the coloring and luminosity separately... or even better; define custom ranges for each value. This might be a bit much to ask for though, maybe it appears in some patch down the road if they run out of other things to improve. Tried using a KAL to toggle the lights, after some messing around I got it to "sort of" work but it's very unreliable even by Kerbal standards, the KAL doesn't handle manual sliding very well and misbehaves quite a lot no matter how I try to set its parameters...

Feature request: Throttle binding for lights to adjust their luminosity together with engines! Watched a Matt Lowne video of a Kraken drive SSTO today, he set some lights to the same toggle key as the drive function for effect to get that ridiculous contraption to look more "sci-fi credible" and setting aside everything else I thought it would be pretty cool to have the option of linking lights with throttle on regular crafts as well. Of course this is just a silly cosmetic thing but being able to throttle up a futuristic ship and having the rear look like some kind of giant ion drive while propulsion itself is only coming from a small part of it (maybe an aerospike surrounded by a glowing disc? maybe a flat ship with a long glowing strip ending in a real ion drive on each side?) would be a serious boost to the aesthetics of futuristic ships.

Almost a bit surprised nobody asked yet, guess I'll do it myself... Will any of this engineer epicness be accessible while an engineer is sitting in an external command seat? First reason I'm asking: My flight skill in EVA expressed in percentage from none to legendary is dangerously close to a negative value. I prefer my little green friends to stay safe so it would be nice to make a movable robotic arm with a seat and stick onto a construction vessel that grabs the soon-to-be-remodeled craft with a klaw and holds it nice and steady. Second reason: Seriously the above use case description would look madly cool, imagine a shuttle that opens its bay and extends one pistoned klaw to grab a satellite and a more flexible arm that reaches out with a kerbal on it to modify the sat... Not really expecting this functionality (yet) but it would look seriously professional.

At first glance this seems like a good point but why use a youtuber over a professional VA then? The problem is that the only youtubers who ever gain a substantial enough following that someone "wants to hear them in a game" are the ones that "ooze personality" but that's also always the exact same thing that will set some players off as just not being appropriate in the game in question. Going for the super plain option isn't going to be liked by everyone for sure but the key is still that nobody would flat out actually "hate" that option, and that's surprisingly important. Humans aren't particularly good at general information retention in the first place, we vividly remember anything that leaves a strong impression and easily forget anything that doesn't, that's why it's such a minefield to put in anything that someone could intensely dislike. (I'm sure thousands of Fallout 4 players eventually gave up because of Preston Garvey's antics alone.) I'm not advocating unreasonable caution like "maybe someone hates jet engines" so KSP2 won't have jet engines, I'm just very concerned that any "personality" imbued into the game that isn't strictly a Kerbal variety is going to ruffle some really sensitive feathers and there's nothing of any substantial value to gain from that risk in this case... Best of all would be if the tutorials and stuff just explain things with such good and right-to-the-point illustrations that only 5-10 words on screen will suffice to fill in any blanks and if memory serves they said the game will pause when displaying this sort of stuff anyway, there's really no way to justify being too lazy to read 10 words on screen when playing a game that's literally about rocket science. As for the probability of there being any human voice at all, I'm inclined to agree that it's not very likely.

I reserve the right not to name any specific person I would personally loathe to hear in KSP2. For the record I'm watching just about everything Matt Lowne ever posts and mostly not because of the footage but because he's amusing thanks to the rambly and relaxed way he talks, I still wouldn't want him voicing anything at all anywhere in the game except AT MOST a very short easter egg recording on some mysterious storage device buried at the foot of a monolith left by a long gone and very bored alien who was just messing around. What sounds like a "knowledgeable teacher" to someone can sound like a "smug condescending prick" to another, what sounds like a "funny accent and style" to someone can sound like a "dumb clown" to another. The only thing in Kerbal Space Program that can safely incorporate any noticeable "personality" would be a Kerbal, if there is a need for human voices to break the kerbal immersion then make them as plain as possible.

I'm against any youtuber voicing anything in the game, it's a small and mostly short lived novelty value for some players but it will never stop being irritating for those who happen to dislike whichever youtuber is chosen. The only thing more important in game development than adding stuff that players like is to NOT add stuff that even a small percentage of players hate. Thought this whole topic was covered in another thread btw, am I just remembering wrong or is there a thread merge imminent?

Something that a lot of players ended up having trouble with in KSP1 when docking things on the surface of any planet or moon was that the height of the ports didn't always match. To the best of my knowledge everyone just had to "pick a height" and try to remember it to at least be able to dock their own crafts together, but if anyone wanted to download a cool rover or base to dock with they had to just hope for the best with the port offset and adjust their own version to try to make it fit closely enough. The "all purpose" solution I ended up with was to always use something I call the "one up standard"; all docking ports are always offset by exactly the height they'd end up if they were stuck to the end of one same diameter part on top of an identical same diameter part - essentially a 1,25m port is offset by 1,25m from the ground. The height isn't ideal in all cases but so very easy to remember and to work with since you only need to temporarily stick one or two fuel tanks to any craft to see with utmost precision how high the port needs to be. With the colony system the need for keeping track of ports for mobile pieces might be lower but it could also be higher, since surely many players would like to build spacecrafts that can land and drop an exploration rover that is meant to go out and collect information and then come back to dock with its mothership. So back to the headline, should KSP2 include a protip to use "1up" as a standard, to make it easier for players to remember how to dock their own creations and also to make it easier for them to dock with stuff made by others - not least because of multiplayer? Should it rather be called "X up" where X can be any number but the default is one? Is there another system that's better somehow? Discussion time! \o/