Bej Kerman

is not a part of stock kerbal, and won't be in the sequel. so what's your point? Just to be clear, did you just say KSP 2 won't have procedural wings? https://i.imgur.com/tEvXaYx.mp4 That's not what I am seeing here.

All of my points have been based on streamlining gameplay e.g. the devs adding routine missions so you aren't doing the same resupply mission over and over again, so players can focus on worthwhile gameplay. Sticking together bits of cardboard in a futile attempt to make a coherent wing all while being distracted from the problem of making a wing design that makes sense for the target speed your aircraft is aiming for is not worthwhile gameplay, and the devs are streamlining gameplay here by allowing the player to focus on the problem of figuring out how to make wings that properly serve the aircraft they are attached to - or, as you said it for some reason, allowing the player to use an "easy button". Can't stress this enough, a QOL feature that makes gameplay less mundane and allows the game's aero simulation to properly shine isn't equal to an "I win" button.

Small bodies can form rings.

I'm just saying, if the way you fix your SSTO is by removing FAR and using the woefully underqualified stock aero instead rather than tackling whatever issues your SSTO has (undersized fin?), I think I am allowed to have my doubts. The spirit of "working with what you have" adds nada to the game and detracts from the challenge of creating wing designs. Players shouldn't be thinking "how can I get this approximate shape using these janky wing parts?", they need to be thinking "using these tweakables, how can I make a wing that allows my aircraft to maintain supercruise?". Having to work with LEGO does not add anything but an unnecessary layer of tedium that detracts from being able to properly tackle the challenges of capturing the flight dynamics you want for your aircraft. I'm just not seeing how the left one looks good. The one on the right has wings that are actually coherent.

Pre-recorded missions take a lot of time to make and don't react to external events. This would also fall flat very quickly.

Not a lot from what I hear...

You're saying this a lot but I don't understand what it has to do with anything beyond not having to juggle missions like you had to in KSP 1.

How? KSP is a very complicated game, and unless you give the AI the ability to build its own rockets (which in of itself entails training an advanced AI to be able to make educated decisions in building rockets), just using the stock crafts isn't a feasible solution. At some point the AI will need a rocket built for a specific purpose.

(Please quote me in future ) KSP 2 should avoid having buttons to enable and disable things that massively alter the balance of the game. KSP 1 only lets you disable some massive mechanics because half of them weren't baked for long enough.

Before, you were complaining about the idea of habitable planets. Wouldn't you want this, if anything? I know I want a colony under a star that regularly fluctuates in brightness.

You hate the idea of habitability so your mind fixates on the habitable planets, creating a bias. Think clearly for a moment, we've seen plenty of planets that aren't habitable. Look at Rask and Rusk.

Really? Is KSP 1 one of those games? CKAN handles manual additions fine and even adds it to your mod list.

Building wings isn't something that needs to be difficult. Your sense of accomplishment came not from solving an aerodynamics problem or refining a design, but rather working around an obtuse artefact of the LEGO paradigm. If players feel proud for managing to work around a needlessly complicated part of the game, the game has messed up. When Pwings come round with EA, your sense of accomplishment should come from making a wing that works how you want it to, not merely managing to get a wing together. Hopefully this will incentivise thinking "How can I make a wing that is efficient in the speed regime I am targeting?" as opposed to "How can I make something that remotely looks like a wing?". This is a hideous oversimplification. You still need to consider things like e.g. what shape wings you need in order to fly supersonic efficiently, something you likely didn't think about because you were too distracted by KSP 1's awful wing building. A QOL that lets you focus on the actual physics of wings isn't an "easy button". The last thing Pwings is, is an "easy button". If you install FAR and actually begin thinking about what kinds of wings you need for certain tasks rather than just making sure the CoL is right without thinking any deeper, you'll see clear as day that it isn't an easy button and merely places challenge where the challenge should be in a game where having spaceplanes to use puts you at a massive advantage to people using typical rockets. You still need to design wings and anyone who is using the feature properly isn't just bashing out things that look like wings in 5 seconds without any deeper thought to how the used wings might impact the flight dynamics.

Not to mention after ring collisions appear some players will understandably be confused to see vessels disappearing from the map view.

What fireworks are you using that are methane powered? It's an analogy.

They literally don't. You're getting to orbit using fireworks. You want to use something more efficient if you want to be sustainable.

Also that chemical engines are good jack of all trades and are also very cheap. Chemical engines, in the grand scheme of things, are utterly terrible. Not at all a jack of all trades. Yes, and the difference is more than made up by the additional ISP. Your dV will go up even with the added power production. Probably not a problem for colonies that are millions of kilometers, if not light years, from the nearest bank or political border that has an associated currency. Not really. As I said, chemical engines are steaming trash. The benefit of metallic hydrogen in making rockets smaller can't be overstated, and this just gets better the more efficient you get.

Like the fact nothing else has been approved for spaceflight yet? With metallic engines, all its flaws will be more than accounted for with its high ISP. Don't think that just because an engine weighs a bit more and needs extra power generation that a massive increase in ISP won't be able to reduce the wet mass enough to account for it. To make a comparison with already-known technologies, "the engines found on boosters are bulky and consume a lot of power, so the rockets you see on fireworks might still have uses because they aren't nearly as big and heavy".

Again, this isn't some game about fighting monsters and you've got 50 niche swords to pick from, KSP needs to at least reflect reality on a surface-level so as to achieve its goal of demonstrating roughly how spaceflight works in the real world. Tech has to become obsolete. But a metallic engine or something similar could probably achieve that same maneuverability with a similar Isp. Either way, you might as well just use RCS thrusters, which themselves will probably get late-game alternatives like in Near Future. By the time you can make a hyper torchship 9000, you'll probably never touch methalox engines again. Why bother when metallic engines work in an atmosphere as well and are much more efficient? Unless you're doing miniaturization and don't need anything bigger than the rocket Goddard built, of course.

Yes you can? For example we know that nuclear technology will produce radiation and produce heat, this means that nuclear ships need additional space and shadow shields, things that methalox engines dont need. This allows methalox to have the niche of being compact in regards to nuclear engines. For very niche cases where you really can't take the slight size increase and somehow don't have anything better to use than methalox engines, sure. But for general use, you can't avoid obsolescence. Rockets today don't use the engine used on Goddard's rocket, even if you insist they might have a niche use that somehow avoids obsolescence.

Well parts will sit as soon as far future tech comes around, especially the engines that work in atmosphere. You can't avoid things becoming obsolete.

KSP isn't a typical game, it's a game that also serves as a simulation that approximates real life. If you've got an engine that outclasses the others but you don't want it to outclass the others, tough luck. That's just the march of technology. I hope you enjoy seeing methalox engines rot, because you'll see a whole lot more of it when you get to metallic engines and torch drives that render them completely obsolete.

I don't understand the realism in having an increased range because you put more antennas on.

You think there's an "integrate" button somewhere that'll do all the magic quickly and effortlessly? To answer your question, yeah, probably.

It's tempting, but it takes the fun out of exploration and removes part of the incentive to build new / better / faster / hybrid vehicles. You could just explore the whole celestial body with just one rover with solar panels.. not ideal. I think we're forgetting the pillars of KSP here. Driving for hours on end isn't one of them. It does occur to me that all of this could be avoided just by sending the vehicle on a rocket and skipping the drive in the first place.