Bej Kerman

I disagree The analogy you gave me just simply doesn't apply - doesn't stand on its own. Street fighter isn't an educational game, nor is its purpose to show you how walking works. KSP 2 is an educational game though, and so is MSFS. Both of those games can't just sidestep such important things as SoL delay and aircraft systems respectively.

No, that's a false analogy. Really, it feels a lot like having to drop the landing gear in a flight simulator that's designed secondarily to teach people how planes work. There's bound to be people who think having to use the landing gear is grindy in a simulator where the most critical part of landing is the landing gear, but it is necessary. And yes, experienced pilots know that this is inaccurate, but a new player wouldn't know better.

You could apply roughly the same arguments to gravity. All punishment, no benefit. It'd be easier to play the game if we could just make a beeline between point A and point B without worrying about Hohmann transfers or developing hyper-efficient engines. But if you get rid of gravity, what are you really teaching the players about how rockets move through space? You can't just be rid of communication delays without misinforming players about how things work over interstellar distances. Just saying "the speed of light is practically infinite" does not teach players what KSP 2 should be demonstrating - the fact that colonies communicating easily is flat out impossible. Anything less is effectively denying the existence of one of the biggest hurdles of interstellar colonization, besides getting the colonies out there in the first place. It tells the player "No, interstellar agencies and nations are not possible" in the same manner KSP 1 tells the player "No, spaceflight does not work the same way that it does in Star Wars".

Why would it be an issue?

And is there any reason you think this?

It must be on a different planet. You might have to mount a rescue mission.

*Three

Oh yeah. Pretty much every change made to landing gears after they were first implemented just made them worse. They were fine as rigid parts with a massive crash tolerance, but Squad completely broke them by hamfisting suspension physics into the game.

Yes. Completely. Again, you don't want players leaving and thinking "well clearly keeping two colonies with light years of separation under one administration should be easy peasy!". SoL cannot even be compared to something as trivial like how bright the skybox is. The skybox being a bit brighter than it should be won't do something as bad as completely mess up a player's perception of the distances between stars. To repeat, the importance of SoL over interstellar distances is being completely undermined. It might not seem important when it's not right in front of you, but it's completely important. Either KSP 2 has a SoL or the devs shouldn't bother making interstellar communication possible - I might even go as far as to say they shouldn't have even bothered with interstellar travel, because the proverbial spanner that is "no SoL please" will just clog the gears of the game. It's one or the other because the alternative third option here is physically and logistically impossible and would send players off thinking that interstellar administrations aren't completely impossible with the technology that'll be available to us in the next millennium. KSP is supposed to be a teaching tool, and sacrificing SoL for something as petty as "I don't want to keep track of a few discrepancies between part trees between colonies" goes completely against its potential to demonstrate to players the true distances involved between stars and also slay misconceptions like "well interstellar administrations/organizations/nations are possible". That's besides the fact that you shouldn't even need to bother with Kerbol or the KSC's tech trees anyway once you're set up elsewhere - you try playing it out in your head and you think it'll be massively complicated, but it wouldn't be.

You're making the debate easier by setting up a false premise? Most people don't know this, probably because of decades of sci-fi media conditioning them to think that having more than one star under the same nation is possible. Seeing is believing; teach people that star systems cannot keep contact with each other by presenting hurdles if they do try keeping contact between star systems. It cannot be made easy without significantly eroding the walls between systems and misrepresenting the true struggles real colonies would face trying to remain in contact.

We can spend all night debating about it, but in the end making science transmission instant is not a good option in the least; it teach players new to the idea of interstellar colonies that keeping contact between anything more than half a light year apart is completely infeasible, and it generally undermines the distance between colonies.

That's a necessary part of interstellar travel. It would be disingenuous for the game to ignore that. You simply cannot have interstellar colonies remain in contact without serious lag. You can't have one president overlooking more than one star system like in Hollywood, that is literally impossible. It'd be like if KSP 1 had infinite fuel by default, because having to use the Hohmann effect or do gravity assists felt too clunky. People can independently invent things without ever knowing each other (like in the case of the Morris-Thorne vs Ellis wormhole, where Kip Thorne & Mike Morris and Homer Ellis came up with almost identical wormhole metrics despite having 0 contact). This isn't breaking any lag rules. It's just a coincidence. With lag times, two colonies sending expeditions to the same system unknowingly is just bound to happen.

This isn’t really a debate on realism but more on preference. To many people (including myself), a pitch black sky just looks better. It reminds you that the universe is an empty, cold, terrifying place, and that your kerbals could die at any moment. If you’ve watched either First Man or Interstellar you’ll know what I’m talking about. Telescopes, having receivers well beyond the pathetic organic cameras humans possess, they don't see an empty cold terrifying place Point being a skybox full of stars with a clearly visible galactic band is no more realistic than a pitch black one. Both are possible, it just depends on what's receiving the light. That being said, surely the imaginary eye/camera orbiting the selected vessel is capable of high dynamic range. Surely the devs can't just implement an option to enable and disable human eye limitations, instead of having it only one way or the other.

This would be acceptable on a planetary timescale where delays are barely a few hours (even in a real-scale system), and even then it's a somewhat big liberty when IRL a big challenge for spaceflight that can already be seen over the horizon is the fact that message travel times between a short distance (say, Mars) already puts the crew under psychological pressure. "Taking liberties" won't cut it for interstellar distances where you're completely isolated from your home base. It makes no sense that the KSC could receive research points from an interstellar ship that literally only just arrived at its destination. Now I'm not saying probes should suffer input delay. I'm sure by now, most KSP players aware of this have already independently invented a headcanon where all player inputs are just a part of the probe's script, or maybe the probe's controlled by an AI. Either way, I'm merely saying that research and tech unlocks should be delayed. A colony builds an antimatter engine 15 light years from Kerbol - how and why does the KSC need to instantly get antimatter engines when the plyer can just use timewarp or occupy themselves with something else - for example, keep themselves busy with AM engines at the colony that created them while waiting for the KSC to receive the blueprints? They just unlocked AM engines, why must they be in a rush to get it back to the KSC when they can just play around elsewhere? That's another thing, I'm sure we are all used to the KSC being the primary space center we use in KSP, but with KSP 2 well-developed colonies should be functionally identical to the KSC seeing as KSP 2 isn't a mod, but a different game whose systems are more robust than those in, say, the Kerbal Konstructs mod. What's the big rush to get a shiny new technology back to Kerbol if you've already got a set of colonies space centers in a more interesting system whose interesting planets are more deserving of attention from rockets equipped with AM engines than the planets around Kerbol? I think what I'm trying to say is that going into KSP 2 (especially with lightspeed delays) requires that you don't use the exact same mindset as KSP 1. It's a different game that might not even demand that you keep the original KSC around when your other space centers ran under the same agency are low on funds. Maybe distant colonies can't even operate under the same agency because the physical distance between stars makes it impossible for them to remain connected to their roots back at Kerbol. Again, this isn't KSP 1, not everything is centered around the original KSC. If your AM engine blueprints take the same length of time as a super-efficient Jool mission to get back to Kerbol, so what? Just don't play with Kerbol, the other systems are more interesting. TL;DR: The KSC doesn't need to receive all tech instantly. It might not even have to exist when you've got other space centers and colonies elsewhere - KSP 2 has got to have a way of letting you liquidate unneeded colonies, for example, the KSC. That's to say it's not important if the KSC (and other Kerbol colonies) don't need to get unlocks instantly - it quite literally does not matter, especially considering that timewarp is an option already. From how I feel when playing KSP, and how some marketing words the 'about' section of the game in some stores, I figured that the player is just a god helping the Kerbals get to space. For switching between vessels in that case, I think we can ignore lightspeed delay. I said it's a big liberty when it comes to unlocking tech, but it's not like the player can convey technologies to colonies faster than light just by switching vessels. Sort of like another instance of the no-communication theorem.

Hm. What made it bad, if the core aspects were good? Bad science doesn't mean bad, it just means the writers didn't feel like restricting their visions to what physics says is possible.

No-communication theorem Touché

Why would you need to communicate? Colonies need to be self-sustaining, and when you've got a self-sustaining colony there's not really any use in keeping touch with the KSC.

Like MultiMC which keeps all the instances separate automatically, or the vanilla launcher which keeps every instance jumbled in the same place by default?

Interplanetary, maybe. Not interstellar.

This is somewhat hard to believe; it'd be a bit unrealistic to expect any technology short of antimatter to be able to sustain full thrust for the entirety of an interstellar journey. There will 100% be a cruise phase unless you somehow managed to pack enough fuel and thrust into one vessel to get there in a single continuous burn, which I deem unlikely.

This is simply incorrect, or at least a vast oversimplification. Isp, fuel, dry mass, etc. are all factors that need to be considered. If you want some actual maths... Figures to me that they're simply slowing down KSP's speed of light to match everything else.

Decades. Don't expect anything specific, we don't know much right now.

oh. weird. Yeah I agree that it wouldn't appeal to current players of KSP in regards to having stories for the Kerbals with the lacking the rocket science part of it. There's a like button for when you agree with something but don't have much else to add.

Did you mean to type something?

"ksp story mode" doesn't really mean anything until you elaborate on what you specifically mean. If you mean stories about Jeb, Bill and Bob's adventures, that would not appeal to people who play KSP because it'd lack the rocket science that makes KSP appealing (and in addition would go against the make-your-own-stories appeal) nor would it appeal to people who've never played KSP before as it's a niche product. I'm putting my money on an Outer Wilds clone (stylized, science, adventure), where the progression is in the player's knowledge of the game and a clear save is almost identical to a new one.