Bej Kerman

I guess that sucks for new players then. In either case they are starting with unfamiliar lands. How very sad. I'm not sure why I spent my time on this debate, because the official game isn't going to release with you starting on some random unimportant planet, however big this debate gets. It's going to do the logical thing and start you off on Kerbin and give you novel and interesting alien planets only when you put the effort and time in. How unfortunate.

It’s not whether it’s alien or not, it’s how familiar it is. Kerbin is just a small earth, is it not? Most of the Kerbol system follows this rule as well, as almost every planet or moon has a real world counterpart. This doesn’t have to be the case in KSP2 though. You don’t start a space program on a ringed planet, Tatooine equivalent or irregularly shaped body every day. It would spice things up a bit. No, it would just make things boring. You said it yourself, Kerbin is very familiar, and it'd be dandy if KSP 2 didn't immediately give us unfamiliar lands at the very start of a game.

Gene designed a vinegar-and-bicarbonate broom rather than wear a dress into a Dres. Nobody expects the Mohole to appear before dark. The doctors thought of massive booster shots to counter the massive lack of superior thrusters on brooms

The game has bugged out on people before, launching them away at many times the diameter of the observable universe a second, and they haven't escaped the SOI. At most the game will break from floating point errors, and when you get to a point the physics will stop (probably giving you either the NaN Kraken or the Hell Kraken) or the game will crash. It really is impossible.

Ask real questions instead of rhetorical ones if you actually want an answer. Or do you not have an answer in the first place? The point at which you drew the line between rhetorical and "real" is arbitrary.

Yes, you can put yourself on a hyperbolic orbit, but you won't ever actually reach the edge of Kerbol's SOI. It's infinite. That being said, you say all mods are allowed, which sort of undercuts the point of a challenge when you can just write or install a mod that does drastically limit the SOI.

Salavage from the crashed mothership, local mining, etc. Surely you have somewhat of an imagination that you can think of some of this stuff yourself rather than having me spell it out to you. I am sure the creative writers could think of a lot of other things too. And this is supposed to be better than starting on Kerbin, how? What motive is there to reach for the unfamiliarity in the stars if you're already on an alien planet?

Crash landing on a planet with neither the resources or infrastructure. Pretty simple. Then where do the resources and infrastructure for an entire launch pad and space colony come from? Mark Watney didn't build the base he lived in all on his own, nor could he just build rockets like that.

You never explain how it's a non-sequitur. What crazy scenario leads to "we forgot how to make all the technology we had getting here, and now we want to go back to the Kerbol system"? Is starting at Kerbol and wanting to leave the familiarity of Kerbin to visit other stars too straight forward?

Iota is not inclined. Ceti is though, like Minmus. dV requirements for Iota are similar to stock, just the transfer times take longer. It also has much less gravity, actually making it easier than the Mun. The launch site could obviously be changed. I was not thinking of a carbon copy of GPP either folks. It doesn't need to be anything other than Kerbin. Without the Kerbol system, it would not be a Kerbal game. The very start of KSP 2 does not need to have any more challenge than the original game had, either - there are systems for you to reach and set up colonies on if you're desperate for a challenge.

Oh, I haven't made a SSTO since beta. What's fixed about it? I'm not sure what specifically changed about it, or if it was fixed before 1.0's aero overhaul, I just know it doesn't work nowadays.

Intake spamming was fixed almost a yonk ago, not really relevant now is it?

I think the 1.0 Kerbals look ugly. A low poly head with a hair texture haphazardly pasted over the texture-space coordinate singularity on top of their head. The KSP 2 Kerbals just look better, more fleshed out. They might only look like fan renders because you're not used to them.

Then it wouldn't exactly be Kerbal, would it? There's literally no point in starting anywhere else when it's supposed to start with the same challenges. Setting it somewhere difficult doesn't exactly make it easier for the new players that KSP 2 is supposed to be helping.

Does the guy ever get around to how massive the planet would need to be for the moon to have such a big orbit and the influence such a massive planet would have on its parent star? Massive doubts on my end.

I'm not sure why bother thinking a lot about the hard-science aspects if we're just gonna resort to soft-scifi gibberish like "antigravity rays". You can only pick one lane, there's no reason whatsoever to overthink the physics of everything if in the end you're gonna throw any realism in the bin.

If you have a technology that allows you to literally manipulate gravity at will, why do you need an Orion? Why do you need any kind of rocket at all? This is again running into the problem in which you try to optimise the Orion design and completely obviate it in the process. That's besides the fact that Orion drives will be older than stone tablets when we figure out how to manipulate gravity.

Must have been about metallic hydrogen? Good ol times, telling people that technology which isn't possible today shouldn't be automatically crossed off for a futuristic setting.

Yep. Wind and weather are important aspects of spaceflight and should be treated as another challenge like structural integrity and heat, but don't need too much detail. I do think that just a single mildly random force may be too simple for aircraft, even if sufficient for rockets.

Except your argument doesn't make sense. Pitch blackness is needless visual realism (key word: visual, distinct from actual gameplay realism) that leads to unrealistic solutions I.E. light spamming. Practice doesn't give you laser vision. Practice does let you fly better in windy conditions which is realistic in terms of gameplay and "I want to do a gravity turn" is no excuse when the obvious solution is to practice with navigating hard conditions, as you did when learning to do gravity turns in the first place. Pilots do need to navigate windy conditions, but don't need things on the exterior of the jet to be lit up to interface with its mechanisms, which is why vessels should just be lit up anyway seeing as Jebediah on the inside should not need a light attached to the exterior in order to activate a thermometer. Ambient lighting is only a reflection in gameplay of the fact that astronauts don't need arbitrary lighting on the exterior of the craft in order to interface with various systems. If Jeb wants to activate a thermometer on the hull, he does so without ever seeing the exterior. The player has ambient lighting to show that Jeb really doesn't care how black it is outside. TL;DR: Turns out "reversing the argument" does not make a good argument in of itself. Again, lighting is completely different from actual gameplay, and the sterile windless plains of Kerbin make for boring flights and landings. Having to deal with wind during booster landing would make things more interesting than just hovering at 50% throttle until the landing legs touch something - a hovering vessel with its thrusters fine tuned to perfect 1TWR should not just hover stationary as if in a vacuum.

There's a great big blinding difference between how realistic the graphics are and how realistic the gameplay is. Wind is a challenge that can be overcome with practice. Pitch blackness between the stars is just a hinderance that makes the player resort to spamming lights (which, let's face it, is hardly a realistic solution). Don't think you were admonishing me for a good reason; you missed the big difference in context between posts.

When?

What if other people do? Would a little wind direction arrow be that bad? No, it's a simulation with a game on top of it and having wind effects would go a long way to making routine rocket trajectories and aircraft physics not feel so sterile. A choice between "Wind and longer loading" and "no wind and faster loading" is a false dichotomy. Did you forget about how well KSP 2 will be optimized from KSP 1? No reason at all to bring KSP 1 up when KSP 2 is going to be built completely different.

It's an alright suggestion, it's just being suggested for the wrong reasons. There should be an actual application for it, not just this...

Space Engineers has an inertia dampener that can match velocities with ships automatically, Outer Wilds has a better balanced version of the system where you have to manually hold the match velocity button if you and your ship change directions, and KSP already has a precise control system in it - just that it only applies to ship thrusters (last time I checked, anyway).