Rejected Spawn

Haven't seen any mention of this yet, if I simply missed it then sorry my bad. Was reading up on attitude control mechanisms for spacecraft and came across the mention of small ion thrusters being used in place of common verniers on some craft, now as much as that's terrific and all they are made of pure weaksauce and they do run out of propellant after some time but that's when I had this idea; since thrusters only need to provide a little puff every now and then to make minimal adjustments it wouldn't be unreasonable to run them on just about any gas you happen to have on hand at the cost of reduced fuel efficiency. Now as far as I understand specifically regular "ion" thrusters need a pure noble gas to prevent (maybe more like "slow down"?) erosion and other nasty business, but there are similar systems. I found the one called PIT, Pulsed Inductive Thruster, to be very appealing and the article even makes mention the possibility of scooping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of Mars to use as propellant. My proposal is that KSP2 ought to have "compressed gas" as a resource, it can very rapidly be replenished in an atmosphere or very slowly replenished using special capturing equipment in space. This random unidentified gas along with PIT nozzles would be used just like the monoprop + thrusters in KSP1 and make it possible to keep adjusting a craft slightly over very long periods of time without running out of gas if you have a collector module on the craft. Collecting "space gas" in real life would slow a craft down marginally leading to some slight orbital decay but I think the minute difference might be better omitted in a game, though that's just my personal opinion. Naturally there might very well be some regular engine in KSP2 that runs on this stuff (Time to spill some tasty beans Nate, is it in already?!) but I figured there's a pretty substantial probability that the resource and propulsion types have not yet been included as options for RCS.

I think I did this pack and link thing right, only included the "persistent" files to unbloat the thing. Save me! The science was done a while ago on that profile but it also has 115 kerbals, every single one rescued from orbit, also 65 million pocket money. The entire KSC was fully upgraded before day 2 started, science maxed before day 10 started, just now plucked the last one of these 115 kerbals from orbit and landed about 7 minutes before the start of day 15. More observant folks may have already noticed but yeah, I was going for a speedrun measured in Kerbin time instead of play time, feel like I did a pretty decent job actually. ^___^

Seems like a fun challenge I probably cleared by coincidence some time ago, at least if Mun+Minmus are OK destinations, which I figure they are due to the wording. Used some DLC stuff and gonna have to see if I let some debris hit solar orbit at some point though... uuh, how do I see that again? Never bothered to dig around in the KSC more than I absolutely had to since I never had the blood pressure medicine needed to deal with the excessive load times, can't for the life of me find anything other than the science buildings archive of data... that one says zero data for solar stuff so does that count as a pass or do I need to look elsewhere?

I really don't want to add fuel to a fire that is not proven to be warranted but there is just one thing that strikes me as very "big publisher up to no good" in the whole story we have so far: T2 has not made an official statement explaining all of this. Not saying all the blame lies with T2; not saying it's all on the former Star Theory; not even saying it's both. What I AM saying though is that even after something like this the former ST employees are likely still bound by law not to disclose exactly what happened, the only entity that has full legal rights to shout from the rooftops what happened in unfiltered language and great detail would be T2 and they've kept completely quiet about every last thing they possibly could. Silence from someone allowed to speak up does not equal automatic guilt but hoo boyy does it ever happen A LOT when it comes to publishers doing something fishy to game studios... Given that the only ones that can publicly defend themselves and explain everything are under substantial fire but still not saying anything I find it very difficult to believe they haven't done something really nasty in one form or another, at the very least I find it absurdly unlikely that the folks at Star Theory were in the wrong to an extent greater than what was done to them.

As title says, SAS seems incapable of applying reaction wheels correctly on the roll axis so I keep getting rockets and stations that wriggle back and forth anywhere between a near invisible amount and up to several degrees, typically waaaay worse the bigger the craft is. Could only find quite old threads about this but none of the ones I read had any actual solution, nor has the game been patched to fix the issue. CLARIFICATION: The squirming will self agitate from the slightest fraction up to a certain point, even if a craft looks stable for several minutes it can start wriggling more and more up to a cap where it at least won't get any worse but it will keep rolling back and forth by that amount forever, this can make docking an absolute nightmare. Before you ask; the control of these crafts is completely solidly locked to the entire craft, no noodling causing it to twist and lag behind. Increasing or decreasing reaction wheel capacity only substantially affects frequency of the rolling as far as I can tell. The only temporary workaround I've found is to put three rotors on 3way symmetry with weights on them inside a cargo bay and keep them spinning at some moderate RPM, it causes dampening that makes a substantial difference for up to around 300 ton cafts but becomes very impractical beyond that. (For those not well versed in physics and mechanics: when something spins on one axis it resists having this axis turned in any other direction - having at least three of these pointing away from each other causes the craft to resist turning in all directions and even if you turn off SAS while the craft is rotating on any axis it will eventually slow down to a halt by itself. Yay physics!) Would make me very relieved if the problem could be taken care of once and for all, preferrably already in the upcoming 1.10 patch if possible but I'd settle for 1.10.1 without rioting in the streets. ADDITIONAL EDIT: Hatched the idea while typing up the above and have now tested it properly in several variants, there is a different workaround and probable explanation for why not all players are seeing and reporting this issue. By having the control point sit on a flexible part of the craft immediately connected to reaction wheels (or the control point itself having powerful reaction wheels) the "lag" is in a way shifted to the body of the craft (not technically 100% accurate but easier to understand) instead of the control point and this causes a moderate dampening effect as long as the body has its own set of reaction wheels as well. This method can be very hard to apply to complex craft with multiple control points since you can't use the root autostrut on this bendy part so the root has to be in another place than the control point if the craft needs that particular type of strut to reliably fend off Krakens. Combining this "reverse lag" with the spinning weights method produces reliable results for even stations that weigh many thousands of tons, as long as the spinners are somewhat heavy and attached to the main body of the craft and not the control point of course.

Wouldn't that completely miss the point because it reverts the entire challenge to "build an SSTO that can bring a payload to Duna and back" just that the payload is slightly different from what's been done a thousand times? Anyway wow this challenge is... is it even possible? Love the idea but after a number of attempts I've lost almost all hope of coming up with anything that even gets close to LKO while still being able to get around on EC in the atmosphere... That chopper thing obviously works but my sense of aesthetics would never allow me to build something like that, if I can't fly in style I'd rather walk so to speak.

Something that turned a lot of players off about KSP1 was just how hard it's always been to overcome the initial learning curve before being able to really go somewhere and do anything memorable - it's like making it to Mun is the turning point at which a player sees the light and becomes a long time player while those who fail to get that far in the first few days drop the game forever. Those of us who did overcome may not feel that the hurdle was that bad but I do know some who never managed to climb that mountain far enough to see the view from the top and it's a real shame. So without further stalling, what can we think of that would help smooth out the giant cliff into a gentler hill this time? We're told there will be better tutorials but that remains to be seen and may not cover enough and may not appeal to impatient players who just want to get to the fun stuff quickly - humans are not perfect learning machines and not always willing to sit in a virtual school just to start playing a game. Key bindings: Ensure they are accessible through an options menu while in flight, KSP1 is terribad in this regard as the player must leave the entire playing experience and go back out to the main menu just to see which button did "that one thing" they needed. Even if the keys can't be edited while in flight they should at minimum be possible to view. Pop up tips on a new playthrough: Should be possible to set to multiple levels of "helpfulness". Pretty sure most of us recall how to use the VAB to build a rocket so we don't need to be told this on each new playthrough - however there may be some more advanced tips not all of us are familiar with even after we get a couple of interplanetary voyages under our belt. Having a helpful kerbal linger in the corner of the screen blurting out a little speech bubble at times when you seem lost ("Having trouble with staging?" if you leave a parachute and an engine on the same stage in the editor for more than 15 seconds) so you can click it to get more info if you choose to might be one way to go about this, of course you should at any time be able to just say "Nah I got this." to make the kerbal go away completely but there should also be an option to reactivate from the menu - maybe together with switches to turn on/off subsets of tips depending on our individual knowledge profiles. In game knowledge base: Having at least a collection of helpful information in game is pretty standard stuff, what many games don't do however is get the player to the right page quickly. If you open the menu while in flight and click the knowledge base it would be very helpful for it to display shortcuts to everything that might be relevant to what you were doing 2 seconds ago, such as steering a rocket and orbits and docking and stuff. Of course it should always have shortcut #1 be to the complete list of topics. Any suggestions are welcome, I'll add yours to the list if it seems like a good idea. (moderators please feel free to edit the list as well if I'm absent, my health is very unpredictable) Would like to add that one of the reasons I object to KSP2 having any early access phase is that it has a multitude of pitfalls that are very dangerous for games that are in any way advanced. Most notably it eases the players into new features as they are added and turns them into all-knowing super beings that don't crave tutorials or further information, then when the average joe buys the game on 1.0 day he sits there completely confounded by how any human could have transcended mortality and climbed the intergalactic learning curve right in front of him. I may have exaggerated marginally for effect but you probably get it.

Regarding throttling I like to think of it as a gamey way to compensate for us not having any ship computer assistance in firing the engines; real life rockets can be wired to count the milliseconds of a burn and automatically turn on/off but we have no choice but to whack away at a keyboard all "oldschool" like, fully manual burns at all times. Any burn is simply meant to make a speed alteration, 100 milliseconds at full throttle or 2 seconds at an impossible 5% throttle end up with essentially the same result. Sure it's crazy how many times the rockets we build can reignite by that logic but it feels far less far fetched than throttling being actual throttling; we're simply given an unrealistic limitation and an unrealistic tool to overcome that limitation and make the end result a little more realistic, I'd say that's fair enough. Also apparently two wrongs can make an almost right, how about that. Not expecting any significant changes to throttling in KSP2 (for those "old" chemical rockets, you don't throttle an Orion) and frankly I don't think there needs to be any change either, I'm with the other voices here that speak in favor of games being allowed some creative freedom. Would appreciate automation in burns (and beyond) but that's another topic entirely.

I'd like to get in on this with the main reason I'd prefer not to have any black hole in KSP2. Now it really is pretty simple if you think about it; it's not that much fun from a gameplay perspective. We can't portray what's going on near it because we can't real life check it out and we never will, doesn't make sense trying to portray it in game either then because it would be based on nothing more than pure speculation. I'm all for having the "visitable" systems swirling around a common center (static stars would murder the realism to death but having overly complex movement would be quite hard on the average player) however I'd rather it be a huge neutron star or someting, anything that can be observed and is worth checking out relatively close up is nicer than just a dark void and getting a "sry u ded nao" message if you stray too close. Getting chills remembering the "You cannot go that way." message on screen at the edge of the map in certain games, ugh. ...well that was that... On a much more personal note than arguing for gameplay factors I also find black holes to be an endless source of annoyance, their supposed "infinite" mass is nothing more than a hypothesis that was formed without a soild definition of what gravity actually is in the first place. We have observed odd gravitational pull that is hard to explain but we have also observed odd "repulsion" where gravity isn't as strong as it should be and it seems something is pushing back against it, we haven't actually found a carrier particle (I know plenty of theories exist but they suffer from a substantial lack of evidence) and we can't actually get to it and measure it beyond a tiny fraction of how strong we think it should be in certain places in the universe. Since I've been doing my own investigations and calculations for many years (intermittently and with no enthusiasm but still...) I'm extremely sceptical of gravitons in their purest sense existing, what we see as gravity is overwhelmingly likely to be other forces we are familiar with acting on specific particles that are in a low energy state where they don't behave in such a way that we can observe their presence the way we normally look for them - instead they act to pull nearby matter together and appear as a kind of "virtual" gravitons. Would love to go on a major keyboardspree on the topic but that will have to wait until my most important experiments and prototypes are done, hopefully later this year barring any mysterious globally looming virus mutating and killing me or some other such amusing event happening. At any rate all I've found in the raw data everywhere indicates that gravity isn't one monolithic force - just like you can't have a magnet with only one pole, and just like a magnetic field can't get any denser than what the carrier photons permit the gravitational pull has an upper limit of how densely the carrier particles can be packed. This means a neutron star is the densest it gets and a black hole is just an even bigger neutron star with enough surface area for the carrier particles to reach far outside in great enough numbers to affect light substantially. This also makes far more sense when you look at supposed observations of "ring shaped black holes" that are thought to be black holes that somehow became neat little rings that are perfectly stable and balanced. Right. Something as outlandish as infinite density ending up in a perfectly uniform manner so it doesn't break up in two cores but stays as a stable neat donut should have been a pretty good clue that something is amiss with the whole concept. Funny how a rapidly spinning and flattened neutron star fits the observable profile perfectly instead huh? Like I said this all annoys me endlessly, there is actual observational data that directly indicates major faults in a number of widely accepted theories just like this mess. This is what happens when someone forms a hypothesis after playing for too long with too little hard data, any slight faults in the original observations multiply in each step until you end up with nothing but pure speculation.

I'm guessing not even Star Theory knows at this point, it's abundantly clear their original roadmap was too optimistic to the point they can't even keep up with their plans to drop us little bits of info every now and then. My personal bet would be between june and november this year. What they gained through the announcement was the potential for thousands of long time players to help them come up with anything they might have missed that needs to be in the core of the game, before it goes live and some alterations become very difficult and it turns into the same patchwork mess KSP1 did. Unless they tell us otherwise I'm assuming Star Theory is currently making a better game than they originally aimed for, thanks to those of us who have been posting mountains of constructive thoughts that would be difficult for a team with limited manpower to figure out on their own in any short amount of time.

Self proclaimed generally knowledgeable and logically adept guy here. There is little wrong with your argument if seen from a Generic Game Development perspective but you're applying the wrong logic to the wrong game and in the wrong way. "There's a mod for that" is essentially your closing argument to excuse not putting options in a game but that's not how it works. Steam Workshop functionality and other integrated systems that let players browse and use mods with no knowledge of how installation works have in recent years made the mod scene more appealing for the general audience that only cares about getting to play a game in a way they like, however if you reach above a certain percentage of the playerbase using the same mod then you can conclude the base game itself has a very real problem with its design. If we assume a mod to have a substantial number of players deeply against it I dare say it's safe to conclude that putting it in the game as a mandatory feature is controversial and unwise since riled up players tend to voice their opinions at least as much as overjoyed players - both groups greatly influence those who are still unsure if they want to buy a game. The Number One Long Term Sales Rule: try to upset as few players as you possibly can at every single moment. Rather than try to make a game full of dream content one should first and foremost strive to make a game that "doesn't have anything that sucks" and after that has been taken care of go for the bonus round of wonderful extra stuff - this part seems to align with your viewpoint as well. Our take on what's essential to have on launch day seems to differ greatly though. KSP2 won't be about looking in the rearview mirror at underfunded NASA mission replays, it will be about the near future and embody wild ambition. Taking such spirit into account it's very difficult to justify not having some degree of craft automation already in the game on launch day, however there will be those who can't restrain themselves from abusing it and think it makes the game too easy - these are the prime candidates for playing on a higher difficulty that will let them challenge themselves fully under the restrictions of the official game content and never need to go download a mod, it sets a standard they can use to measure their success and compare with others if they choose to. One should also mention that some players just Don't want to mod their game and don't need to justify their choice, there is no shortage of players who will never mod a game unless it is a complete disappointment and can't be enjoyed at all without being altered. At the end of the day there are only two factors deciding what goes in a game and what doesn't. #1: What the devs want to include, people produce better results when they feel motivated and essentially "not miserable". #2: What's profitable. Even an optional feature that only a subset of players will enjoy can cover its own development cost many times over, once again the key is that people on both far ends of the spectrum of love and hate for something are far more likely to talk about it and be the ones that potential new players will see. Doing nearly anything that can be done to pull a few people out of the hate end and put some others in the love end is essential in the long run. Even if many optional bits are not in KSP2 on launch day it would be absolutely foolish to not have the game built to be painlessly upgraded with as many of those as possible in mind. If nobody hates a feature then make it standard as soon as possible - if some love it and some hate it then try to make it optional as long as it fits the vision the devs have for the game, it's as simple as that.

Here's another thought... well, not just one actually. (1) How about having autopilots tied to difficulty settings to some degree? Could look like this maybe; Easy - Autopilots in everything, can get you anywhere. Medium - Autopilots can go where you've boldly gone before. Hard - Autopilot probes off but read point 2 below... (2) What form should autopilots really have in the game? How about having the kerbals themselves be the pilots? Rather than the rank system in KSP1 it would be neat if they could learn actual skills from experiencing flights firsthand. Let's say we'd like a kerbal to learn how to get to a stable orbit from KSC, to gain this skill the kerbal would need to be in a pilot seat and experience the flight firsthand a small number of times. To train multiple kerbals at once they all have to fit in some manner of "pilot grade seat" (anywhere with a bunch of buttons and displays and stuff) regardless of where it happens to be located in the craft. To learn docking they need to dock a few times, to learn landing they need to land a few times. You get the picture. (3) Autopilot probes could need supporting "supercomputers" at KSC and colonies, or be a really heavy contraption to bring. You need a very short distance between a probe and what's controlling it, otherwise the lag can easily ruin the day. Going off to explore unknown areas would have to be done by the player if no "supercomputer" is nearby (or built into the ship) so there is still the element of having to do some flying yourself but if you invest enough you can set up "zones" where any ship can be automated. Obviously in real life the actual computer needed to autopilot things isn't all that big or heavy, however this is made by kerbals with their iconic severely skewed skillsets of being able to build some amazingly complex gadgets while being too dumb to even use them properly. Small note here; I don't expect any of what I've said in this thread to be in the game at launch, I'm only hoping that Star Theory absorbs all the information and plans accordingly so that any core functions in KSP2 won't get in the way of implementing stuff like this at a later date. "Victory loves preparation."

Not fond of just being able to tell a ship to "go win for me" at the click of a button so I'm conflicted here but hey fellas, this would be LEGENDARY: Have a seat on an orbital shipyard and just enjoy the view as 5 ships come in to dock at the same time. How about also: Several large modules come floating together and turn themselves into a beautiful giant space station while you get to spam the screenshot button from any angle you like... Don't forget: The little colony with a launch platform on top of a mountain, a stream of rovers coming and going to drop off resources from carefully placed extractors around the planet. The Kerbal universe would finally feel alive, you're not the only force in the universe that can make them do things. Would knock my socks off, like playing multiplayer but without the pains of actually having some other doofus go mess up all my plans with completely different plans. Just realised I'm not wearing socks, hey Star Theory if you put the above in the game I'll make sure to put my socks on while downloading KSP2.

Gonna have to man up and admit this topic has grown on me over the past 24 hours. Though interstellar use immediately struck me as foolish and seems like an even worse idea the more I look at all the factors. The way I'd personally use solar sails would be for very small probes (comms and orbital scanning and stuff) but not as a way to get to a destination; it would make far more sense to get a probe where it's needed when it's needed than sit and wait forever just because the "fuel" is free - I'd get my probes to where I want them with more traditional rockets and have the sails packed on board so that when the situation changes and I need to alter the orbit of a probe I'd unfold the sail and be able to adjust it to my hearts content. Of course the option to use it for bigger moves still exists, for those who like sitting around waiting, even if I'd personally never bother. At any rate packing a solar sail on every small probe would be the sensible thing to do, no probe would need to become obsolete just because it's out of fuel in slightly the wrong orbit and this just seems a little romantic to me. I feel a sense of shame in terminating probes when they can no longer fulfill their role just because I didn't get them to the perfect long term spot... This brings up other problems though, "sailing" in an orbit around something other than the star that is providing the thrust is a lot more bothersome because of two factors... One: Part of the orbit is likely in the shadow of whatever planet or moon it's located around. Two: The gravity pulls in a different direction than opposite the strongest potential thrust and it constantly changes through the orbit. I actually watched a video about this stuff some time ago laying it out, it's not that it's in any way impossible to "sail away" from a planet, it is however complicated to do it correctly without dipping any part of the orbit lower and the closer the probe is to the planet the more difficult everything about it becomes. The probe would have to keep flipping around in specific directions multiple times per orbit and for numerous orbits to start making a real difference, this would surely appeal to some more hardcore players to do manually but for me and other more casual players it's something that would lose novelty quickly. Having a powerful enough probe core on board that the probe can make its own adjustments automatically would help enormously, if implemented into a tech tree this could unlock once the player personally actually puts a sailor in some specific situations and succeeds in orbit manipulation; the KSC geniuses then use the flight data from the players movements to write a program that they automatically upload to all high tier probe cores already in use and of course install in all new ones launched later. Of course this is some pretty high level stuff to ask of Star Theory while they're already working themselves half to death but keeping it on the radar and making any necessary preparations to the core of the game ahead of time might be good, that way it might be a little less painful to add this kind of stuff a few patches later when things have calmed down a bit. It would not only require all the work in having the game pointing a sail in the right directions depending on multiple factors and then ensuring that the sail is inactive in the shadow of a planet, it would also involve adding an ability for a craft to calculate on its own how to reach a target orbit... and it would require a novice friendly UI capable of letting the player graphically set the target orbit. Since the Star Theory fellows have been quiet for a long time we don't know if some of it is already in there but I'm leaning more to "probably not", so the workload of adding all the necessary components would probably be a big ouchie.

Wasn't going to get involved in this at first due to lukewarm interest in playing with others and a depressing number of friends with the kind of brain needed to play something like KSP, however you fellows hit a home run on some very important questions... How will that mythical magic called multiplayer really work? Has anything been said about it at all other than confirming its existence, I can't recall noticing anything that stood out? Personally I'd like to know three things, listed below. Will there be Steam connectivity allowing the type of smooth "click to join" feature @Master39 mentioned? If so that would be super great, even if it's unlikely my mentally limited friends would join me it's a "feel good option" that would just warm me a little bit inside if it exists. Will there be cross platform mutiplayer? While it doesn't matter to me personally in a direct sense, I'm betting some not insignificant subset of the playerbase would appreciate it and that could lead to noticeably better sales figures over time which in turn leads to better funding and better chances of keeping up a high budget post launch refinement program. Will dedicated private servers be a thing? Daring to use a bit of personal impresion I'd say KSP is a universe that attracts a more tech savvy audience than many other types of games, making privately run servers a more attractive prospect than for other games. Even I with my near non existant circle of friends have experience in running game servers from home, it's a fun way to play together even if your schedules don't overlap very often. The single glaring issue is that time warp would be very problematic this way, every player would need to always remember to set their stuff in stable orbits before they sign out or things could take a turn for the fatal if someone else goes on to fast forward a century to reach the next solar system. The issue also exists even in non dedicated servers but is limited to everyone except the host - which is likely the one most dedicated to playing the game. Star Theory must have already got this figured out long ago and by now I can't imagine the vast majority of it not already being set in stone so getting official word about this would be nice, as a way to enable daydreaming and planning in a constructive light until we get our hands on the real thing.

Wow it makes me kind of happy to have someone around who gets this stuff. Sorry to say I can't elaborate on it too much just yet, I have to keep my big mouth shut about a lot of details for a few more months in order to capitalize on the insights a little first. Let's both keep our fingers crossed nothing goes wrong and I'm able to finish at least one of my prototypes, my budget is terrible and some of this stuff is pretty dangerous but I've finally got both a modified CR10 S5 (capable of printing polycarbonate, wohoo!) and a CR10 MAX (for much better accuracy of general support parts) to help me create the bits and bobs needed so I should be able to get some solid data with very minimal risk of electrocution, explosion or fire. Stay tuned and hopefully I'll appear on youtube with results! As for cryostasis I'll touch on it a little again below... Regarding that plasma bubble, I'm gonna simplify the math a little and boil it down to what matters for those who may be interested but not *super* interested. First of all; some kind of non solid shield around the ship would be 100% essential for survival, we could get wiped out before even making it past the moon if we didn't have that since space does have tiny debris all over the place and the debris by itself is moving at deadly speeds. Let's look at what kinds of speeds we're talking about for the ship then. The speed of light with a bit of rounding is 300.000.000m/s. The speed of sound in our thick atmosphere is about 343m/s. When we fire a rifle bullet that travels at the speed of sound, that thing gets pretty gosh darn far and is still rather deadly. Increasing the speed of the bullet means it's going to break apart - higher speeds make it break apart more, but it will keep posing a major threat for a very long distance no matter what. Reach a high enough speed and the bullet essentially vaporizes in a microsecond but the individual atoms (or even ions) will still be travelling a very substantial distance and rip apart anything in their path as well as create a massive shockwave and releasing immense heat. Taking the speed up to just 1% of the speed of light, this bullet is going to be so deadly it's not even funny. That's in our thick atmosphere. How dense and big would the cloud of gas or plasma have to be to shield our precious ship from the impact of something like that? Don't ask me, I'm not interested enough to do the math properly to be honest, however using any ballpark estimate we probably all conclude that it would have to be impossibly huge, way beyond what seems to be within the realm of what we can build any decade soon. Interstellar space isn't empty, there will be pebbles far bigger than a meek bullet out there and we're more than a little likely to hit one dead on. My take on this is that we just won't be going anywhere all that fast. On a related sidenote, everyone keeps asking why the aliens that should be out there haven't come over to play... yeah, they probably like being alive and won't be going interstellar unless they have to for survival reasons. I'm in agreement that planets solve a number of issues but don't forget that they also come with other issues instead. Any planet that has an atmosphere is most likely a toxic wasteland, any that doesn't have one is not going to provide much better shielding against radiation and space debris than if you were on a space station, it just limits how many directions you can get hit from. Sitting on a planet means that if there is an asteroid heading for it you have no choice but to drop everything and evacuate, a space station however is both a smaller target and can just get out of the way if need be. Now if we presume we find a planet like earth, it doesn't have terrible atmosphere and it has all the good stuff we liked about this ball of dirt, it may also have life on it... Does that mean we're better off or worse off? Probably worse off. If any complex life has evolved in a similar fashion to earth life there's a high probability some of this life will be bacterial, viral, parasitic or severely toxic - in an alien fashion that our bodies have never evolved to handle. There are tribes of humans on earth that can't be contacted because they'd likely die from exposure to the bacterial and viral evolution that's been going on in the rest of the worlds population, their immune system is just outdated by hundreds of generations... imagine your immune system being many times worse off than that. Our best planetary bet is to claim a guaranteed dead world, terraform it over a huge span of time and then hope we can stay there without any issues. Compared to that I think a colossal space station where hundreds of millions of us live in comfort and safety sounds like a much better idea. Keep in mind that the station might as well be as big as we can possibly make it, if we have the waste heat problem covered the upper size limit skyrockets. Regarding non frozen cryostasis, there are loads of things in our blood other than oxygen carriers and immune cells, this video by Kurzgesagt covers a bit of the complexity involved: https://youtu.be/BSypUV6QUNw (good channel, usually almost completely objective, does inject opinion in some topics though so take those with a bucket of salt) Moving further from regular cells we are also home to a huge amount of bacteria that are essential to our health, if we modify our bodies and become an unsuitable home for them, there is substantial risk it will greatly affect our health. If you take an interest here's a rather amusing Joe Scott video on the topic: https://youtu.be/iytAHXo2_V8 Anyway I'd say cryostasis (as a broad term including just "chilling out") is way too dangerous to get into any decade soon, there are far too many factors that we know far too little about to safely mess with. I'd strongly prefer simply staying awake playing tetris for a thousand years instead of taking a potentially deadly powernap on the way over to the nearest star.

Any of you ever have one of those moments when there's a bunch of strangers talking about stuff and they just keep saying things that are based on completely skewed theories and make assumptions that large sections of the populace thinks are correct but you happen to know loads of evidence that disproves it all right at the root? I'm having SO much of that moment right here. Don't get me wrong, I like the musings about what interstellar human voyages could look like but I feel itchy all over just observing the mountains of outdated arguments being used. The biological side of it, Part One: We are highly unlikely to be able to come back to life after getting turned into meat popsicles. Our cells just don't work that way, the biggest problem is that the water that is actually the majority of our body mass turns into sharp crystals that cut our cells to ribbons - but even if that somehow gets solved against all odds there are other molecular structures inside us that don't take well to getting frozen. Getting around all the limits of our own bodies would mean modifying every cell in our bodies to somehow get through being frozen - but would such an organism even be called human at that point? More like some remote sub species that (presumably still) resembles humans. Biology Part Two: Guess you fellows don't check out much science that isn't about rockets, however there have been some major breakthroughs in figuring out why and how we age down on the molecular level, our life expectancy is quite possibly about to jump sky high and closely match that of Kerbals and we would easily live for multiple centuries - as long as our stupidity doesn't get to us first. Those who are interested in finding out more can check this video that does an adequate job of explaining it so the average person can easily understand; https://youtu.be/QRt7LjqJ45k Do note however that this isn't even the only stuff going on in the field. Ship travel speed: I'm gonna have to call absolute scifi daydreaming on anything close to lightspeed. Having spent a bit of time working on my own projects in physics over the past 15 years (mainly investigating particle physics) I've come to learn that a lot of widely accepted physics "stuff" is solid if you only look at the math - but the numbers and their formulas are coming from far too little observational data (sometimes essentially none at all) to have any relevance outside of pure speculation. I've yet to see anyone other than myself easily and immediately explain why identical particles accelerated to identical speed end up with different mass depending on the type of particle accelerator used, though I've given up on waiting for others to wrap their heads around that one so maybe someone else has finally noticed by now and I'll be pleasantly surprised one day. Getting back to the "travel speed" I'm calling complete fantasy on moving at any speed too high to survive colliding with stray atoms (plenty of those all over interstellar space) and any ship unable to detect and dodge (or push aside/obliterate with 1337 lazorzzz) any bigger obstacles in its way. "But we rarely hit anything at all in space, we have thousands of satellites doing fine?" Well those are tiny, our ship would have to be several orders of magnitude bigger and get through a mind blowing volume of space. Ship travel time: Since we won't be going extremely fast unless we want to die extremely fast the ship MUST have its own recycling system on an unprecedented scale, I've been saying a related thing for some time - "By the time we can reach planets in other solar systems, we no longer need planets at all." - because the immense scale of an interstellar ship and the mad timeframe involved make it ridiculous to get adamantly hung up on landing somewhere instead of just living on the ship perpetually. We'd be better off just migrating to a gigantic space station in the first place, hang out in nice scenic spots around this local star until it starts getting iffy and then pack up the entire station and migrate to the next star. By then the station might give the Death Star a real challenge in terms of size. Ship energy source: We're not getting anywhere until we have reliable fusion power. Most of you probably know the long running joke of fusion always being "20 years in the future" but some proper big steps based on proper modern science have made the statement far less of a joke and way more of a realistic estimate. I'm still sceptical regarding the immediate energy released from a fusion reaction being absorbed well enough to sustain the reaction the way they're going about it since there is so much waste heat leeching away, however there's a lot of room for another piece of tech to save the day there - conversion of pure thermal energy into electricity. We already know that infrared light (heat radiation) can be absorbed and converted to usable power by certain advanced solar cells, it's only a matter of the efficiency being too low to make economical sense so far. There have also been some interesting other concepts such as nano antennas that succeeded in capture of heat and generation of an electric current, though it was far too costly to develop the stuff needed to efficiently extract the current. Seeing how we've already had multiple unrelated techs proving the conversion of heat directly to electricity is possible I'd bet quite a bit we'll have some relatively potent stuff by the time that fusion reactor becomes more of an everyday thing. As for the fuel, we only need to occasionally pick up some to keep the reactor firing every now and then. We don't need to keep it on at all times if we manage to recycle most waste heat aboard the ship. So yeah hey there Star Theory, if you want a particle physics backseat driver telling you a bunch of random crazy not-rocket-centric stuff you know where to find me. \o/

I've yet to come across any game capable of causing my PC to smell like yeast. Even if such a groundbreaking feat of science would suddenly become possible I wouldn't care for it. Bad jokes aside your reasoning is just incomplete: Not everyone takes an interest in playing with someone else, regardless of the option existing or not.

Well the official stuff already informed us (at some point, not gonna dig through the mountain again) that kerbals don't die of age. Never said anything about players or krakens, isn't relevant for this thread either really since sending kerbals on interplanetary or interstellar voyages only differs significantly in how long it takes to arrive. Point being, it's officially confirmed kerbals don't die of age so the thread itself has very little meaning other than as a topic of "what mod would you make to increase the difficulty of going interstellar?" Also I'd never install that mod, my Jeb will know eternal glory from this side of the grave.

Just an FYI here: Kerbals don't die of age. Ever. Will not change in KSP2. Also the only confirmed multiplying of kerbals is in colonies. Guess the thread is over already.

Oh my, what a blast from the past, donations. They sound good enough in theory but in reality generate almost no money for anyone ever, barring some extreme cases - which this wouldn't be for sure. Something else that actually works instead is to sell a small thing at a very inflated price, many game companies sell stuff like old concept art and other halfway-behind-the-scenes things in small packages that don't really do anything to the game itself, these things are essentially like donations that grant the donor a small token of appreciation in return. However I doubt that Star Theory would get anything out of that because there is a major common factor among games companies that do this kind of thing; most don't sit under the thumb of a publisher that will simply take most of the profit. I'm not averse to buying extras when most of the money goes directly to the developers. I'm highly averse to generously filling the pocket of a publisher in hopes that some of it will go to the developers. Please note I'm not looking to start any squibbles about publishers, some of them are literally murdering entire game series just to squeeze profit but I'm not in the know when it comes to T2/PD. Publishers are not always automatically evil, they can provide massive initial funding for studios and let them make a 10 times as good and profitable game, it's just that they take a giant chunk of the profits from sales and we gamers who want to support the devs directly just can't get most of our money to go where we want. Studios under publishers essentially exchange "high risk, high reward" for job security, an understandable choice and it's no surprise studios tend to get absorbed by publishers eventually. Egosoft is the only studio I've ever heard of that instead got rid of a publisher and gained the freedom to set their own policies, they pretty much immediately got on much better terms with their community and the fans are more devoted than ever...

I honestly don't care if it releases and everything after comes for free or if they make a dozen DLCs with a moderate price tag as long as they are content filled enough. What matters to me is that they don't try to suck our wallets dry but also don't run out of funding to keep evolving the game into all that it can be. Would be nice if this section of the forum had anything going on other than a constant stream of filler threads acting as a constant reminder that we haven't gotten any new info in a long time. Now I'm not saying Star Theory should infodump like there's no tomorrow but a fun little trivia nugget once every few weeks until launch would go a long way to douse the flames of boredom and bring back some solid reality and relevance. Just enough info so nobody can say "there's no new info" - while not being more than a fun screenshot and some random notes that someone could whip up in 10 minutes so nobody can complain the devs are goofing off with the community instead of working on the game.

The KSP2 section of the forum has only really died down because we have run out of new information long ago, the ratio between interesting information sharing and bored/impatient folks just flat out posting very questionable filler has passed the critical turning point where many forumites have just given up on sticking around. Normally it would be a terrible idea for a "fad game" to generate hype too long before launch since sales ride almost entirely on temporary popularity, KSP however has never been a fad, KSP2 has no reason to try becoming a fad either. KSP2 will in all likelihood keep selling well for an incredibly much longer time than most games, huge initial sales would barely do anything more than alter the curve. The early teaser was a good way to let the community know that we no longer have to sit in the suggestion section for KSP1 day and night to come up with incremental duct tape to take it further, it also served to generate a mountain of feedback and ideas in this forum section that could be used to refine the foundation of KSP2 long BEFORE it ends up in the hands of us players and Star Theory can no longer rip out a system that doesn't do its job. Whether this was the intent of an early teaser or if it was a happy bonus isn't something I'd know, all I know is that right after this mountain of feedback was created Star Theory immediately went almost totally silent and pushed the launch date furter into the future, I'll take that as a good sign unless they suddenly show up and flat out say it was unrelated.

Allow me to interject a relevant question into this debate: Are we all specifically talking about Kerbin being the site for a space elevator? As far as I can tell it would be a preposterous undertaking to make one work for our real life home world, both when it comes to its creation and long term stability. Earth is essentially in the grey zone where it's hard to tell if a space elevator is even possible or not, however if we did live on a tiny diameter ball that has a 6 hour long day/night cycle it would move a space elevator far towards the "looks entirely possible" end of the spectrum. The question in that case is how do we as a community want to treat Kerbin; do we want to highlight its "playground" characteristics or do we want to keep it toned down to lend a bit more feeling of realism to the game? Normally I lean more towards freedom than realism but I have to vote against blatantly showcasing the unrealistic properties of Kerbin this way. What I'd entirely support would be any number of much smaller space elevators being possible to construct from colonies that sit on lower gravity bodies that have a reasonably high rotational speed, personally I'd prefer to draw a hard line at the point where the whole thing can be built entirely using materials that CAN be mass produced with the tech of today as opposed to somehow shoving a rock through a magical grinder and getting 1km of perfectly knitted atoms neatly lined up to a level that the best labs in the world can barely replicate at the scale of a needle. Aside from the "it looks cool" argument the only reason for a space elevator to exist is to shuttle small quantities of materials and crew at a time between the surface of a planet/moon/whatever and a point at least at the height of a stable orbit, in real life as a way to cut costs and in games simply for convenience. Given that some manner of yet unnamed Craft Building Thing for space is already in the game and needs to be supplied with loads and loads of materials to actually produce anything it would be reasonable to provide players an elevator as an option other than doing a huge number of supply runs for every large construction project. At the end of the day though I'd be surprised if space elevators appear in KSP2 in any form at all, they'd have to be a bit of a nightmare to make without completely disregarding any of several realism points and I shudder to think how powerful Kraken bait they'd be...

I'm on the fence with this, on one hand it adds little to the game just like 5th says but on the other it would probably be a little bit of an eyesore not to include because it's likely many of us actually will see playtime in the thousands of years. On that note I'd like to pose a related question: KSP1 can orbit a vessel around a moon that orbits a planet that orbits a star, but what if we must go deeper? (I'll skip the meme necromancy for today though.) Having one of the star systems provide a colossal star for all other systems to orbit around would vastly reduce the brain strain for both players and devs IF the game permits additional "layers" of orbits. Now I can't wait to put Jeb in orbit around a 20km asteroid that orbits a moon that orbits a planetlike moon that orbits a gas giant that orbits a small star that orbits a giant star.