MarcAbaddon

It seems really unlikely that devs will read these suggestion and go "that's such a great suggestion, let's delay the game for another year and implement it". This being said this is probably not an optimal time to make suggestion since Early Access is quite close, which means a lot of systems are already designed but we weren't be able to test them yet. So we are pretty much in the dark. After Early Access goes out we can provide more targeted feedback. But it's still worthwhile even now - might inspire a mod down the road or something. If KSP 2 is a success we'll get a KSP 3 at some point. At the latest when the graphics become very outdated.

I haven't played that much FAR since it feels like a pretty heavy mod and I don't fly enough planes in order to justify it, but I think some of the fundamentals in KSP 1 are ok including stability. But it's also pretty clear that the drag calculations should be a bit more accurate and that you shouldn't be able to clip parts in each other while still getting full lift and drag from both. Also detecting when a part is covered so that it should not produce drag would be nice. With procedural wings hopefully there is less motivation to clip parts into each other in the first place. I am less fussed about adding more complex modeling to simulate the ground effect or similar details. Just take better account of actual wing shape and hidden parts and I am fine. Make it more intuitive, but not harder.

I agree that the time timeline sounds appealing - I am just doubtful it will work out like this. For example, with time constraints I think mostly the timing just won't work. It'll easy either be relatively easy to get there in time or almost impossible. For example, let's assume you have 2 or 3 months to get to Duna in order to save the crew - if you are capable of doing that then you probably have the experience with the game that you won't have had the life support issue in the first place. And you could get the same type of tight timelines gameplay by giving you a contract - that way the time window can also be controlled to be in a target difficulty window. This is possibly even in KSP 1 right now, without adding LS at all. I am less in favor for leaving Kerbals behind in order to save others. What's next, cannibalism when you run out of food? Like weapons that kind of grimness just doesn't fit base KSP for me. Of course, an optional LS hard mode is an improvement. Having options at least some players use is always an improvement, but only when regarded in isolation. Every feature you add takes development time away from other stuff. That's why leaving features that only appeal to a much narrower audience to mods is so often a good call. I sometimes play RO-1 KSP and will probably play a similar mod for KSP 2, but I don't think the developers should spend their time adding everything in it as an option to the main.

I think in general the roadmap looks good. I am a bit dubious about two aspects: Multiplayer seems to be added quite late given that every other system needs to be designed to work in concert with it. At least some limited version would be good to have early. OTH the issue with Early Access is often that people lose interest in testing a bit leaving features added late notoriously undertested. Multiplayer has at least a decent chance to pull people in again. I am also doubtful about the removal of the currency system. Using resources instead of money again makes a lot of sense for the late game when you have colonies. But it means you switch from operating without any restraints at the start to having restraints in the endgame. That's the opposite of what most games do. Both currency and resources also nudge the player into building efficient vessels instead of just overengineering everything. It'd be good to have a nudge like that early in the game as well, and not only when you move your launches extraplanetary. I am also interested to see how Kerbin and colonies will interact later on - realistically speaking Kerbin should have most resources you need. There's not that much stuff in outer space you can't find here, with some notable and relevant exceptions. There should even be resources that can be only found on a living world, making Kerbin one of the few available sources for them. But this would mean that with automated supply runs and no currency system you can simply supply the colonies with most resources, instead of mining them locally. So this seems like a weird balance act, and I am looking forward to see how they do this. Still having currency restraints for vessels launching from Kerbin would instead encourage locally sourcing everything you can. But I guess there could be other restraints we are not aware of right now. This being said, of course the contract system in KSP 1 wasn't that hot and getting currency often was more of a chore. But this seems like an issue that could be tackled instead of removing it completely.

No, it's not the same. First off, you are most likely to first experience it very early in the game, where you only have a single flight at a time. In the late game most people - especially those a bit newer on the game - do not rely on aerocapture to have enough delta-v. So on late game interplanetary missions, if you burn up in the atmosphere, you can usually load the last save game before your de-orbiting burn. Then you either change the mission parameters or try to somehow get your ship intact through the atmosphere regardless, which is often doable if you have a little of delta-v to spare. If you choose to rely on aerocapture, that's a conscious player choice for a high risk, high reward maneuver. And it interacts strongly with the orbital mechanics, i.e. you really need good heat shields when coming in from a retrograde orbit. Point being HS is unlikely to lead to a loss of a significant amount of gameplay time, unless you make a deliberate choice. With LS it is easy to imagine a situation where for example you already went to Duna, explored the planet but then run out on the return trip. That's a big downside. But it could be worth it if LS offers interesting gameplay. For example, failing orbital mechanics can definitely lead to catastrophes. Here it's worth it because interaction with the mechanics through gameplay is the single most important element of the game. A LS mass tax still doesn't sound interesting to me. To give a stupid analogy, having to go on the toilet would make cRPGs both more complex and realistic. And no one is calling for that. The very fact that LS would need to be generously abstracted is what makes it bad gameplay. The science and engineering behind CO2 scrubbers, effects of zero-g and water recovery are super interesting. You might be able to make an interesting game out of it, when focusing on that. But in KSP the most likely effect is that you will abstract both the entire science out of it which negates the educational aspect and adds a simple mass tax without any interesting interaction with the rest of the game. It'll be another checkbox.

Heatshields are a good comparison, because I agree they are a good comparison to make. Here's some reasons why I think heatshields work: Unless you rely on atmospheric capture, you can recover from failing with your heat shields by reloading to before re-entry. So you rarely have to reload to a long time before, and you can usually salvage by either refueling and going into the atmosphere very slowly or by rescuing your Kerbals. So most of the time you can recover from heatshield failure. There's a definite reward involved with heatshields, in that good heatshields allows you to save delta-v using atmospheric capture, which is a really cool moment in the game when you pull it off. So there's a carrot as well as a stick. They are also cheap and relatively light weight, so it is extremely easy to add to your existing designs when you have forgotten it. So it's a recoverable failure from a rocket design perspective as well. In contrast I don't think everything that adds realism is good - it needs to interact with the rest of the game in a good manner, as heatshields arguably do. For example, minute long airlock cycles are realistic, but how many people want them in the game? The question is still exactly life support would be implemented, and I didn't really see many proposals which don't essentially boil down to a mass tax. Failures would likely occur during transfers, potentially making you miss your insertion burns, so it is much harder to recover from. There's no similar reward to heat shields. If you miss it at the design stage you have to add several tons of mass (admittedly, this depends on the implementation). So I am still doubtful this would improve the game - but again, we are talking without knowing how the system would look like exactly. Maybe the designers thought of a way it would be fun. I just know that to me a simple mass tax with death or craft control as the consequence of failure wouldn't be to me. Fuel is already the main limiting resource and when you run out of that you can at least make sure you end up stranded on a planet or in a relatively nice rendezvous orbit - you have options to mitigate your failure with fuel. Sure, but 95% of the time you can safe your Kerbals by a simple reload, though they might need rescue or have to abort the mission. It's hard to end up in a dead man walking situation where you suddenly realize the craft was doomed for the last in-game year, and there is nothing you can do to salvage the situation. With life support it is easy to imagine a situation where you'd have to reload a long time or accept dead kerbals.

SCANSAT functionality is a rare example where I think it definitely belongs in the base game. So does some form of trajectories (though SCANSAT can be used for this as well, since it shows your trajectory on the maps), because once we have colonies landing at just the right spot is more important, and that is currently annoyingly hard without this feature. But I think it does not need to be in the first release, but we need it at some point before colonies. Research bodies seems more like an optional thing, best left for a mod, unless there are some interesting missions like launching orbital telescopes involved with it.

In concept this is my favorite idea as well - player does the run once to demonstrate it can be done, and then repeat flights can be performed automatically. In practice, I think identifying repeat flights will be quite a challenge for the design team. Just to start with consider the following: On interplanetary missions how strict are you with transfer windows? There's a transfer window for Duna on a regular basis, but with they differ with delta-v requirements. What happens if you take control of the space station while docking to it on your qualifying flight and maybe even use a limited resource like monopropellant? What if your target orbits changes slightly, e.g. due to numerical inaccuracies or even a very minor change due to impulses transmitted by previous dockings?

I feel discussing the tech tree as a separate topic from science progress (see the other thread) might already be a mistake. Preferably tech tree and science points should be linked together more tightly, rather than have science points as a generic currency. Have specific science experiments performed under specific circumstances allow progress towards specific tech tree nodes. Regarding the order of technology, I think a lot of the "not historically accurate stuff" such as rockets before planes and manned before unmanned flight should stay since it's part of the appeal, and this is primarily a game about rockets with planes being a valuable but secondary part. Ideally, now that technology goes a lot further than it did in the past, I'd like to unlock a solid foundation of standard rocketry quite early - maybe up to the current 3rd tier or so. Put fuel cells before solar panels. Mainly for educational purposes I also would like if it is very transparent when we transition from actual known technology into speculative sci-fi with engine concepts like metallic hydrogen and interstellar travel in general.

The more I think about it the more I become convinced that the educational argument is a red herring. Survival in space is hard is just not much of an education. Contrast it with the orbital mechanics part of the game: you don't just learn that navigating in space is hard, but you learn how to solve those issues in some detail: Hohmann-transfers, orbital rendezvous, geostationary orbits and docking procedures. What makes it educational is that you are not just presented with a set of problems, but you learn concepts of how to solve those problems. Now look at the same with life support and let's start with air as an example. I don't think simply needing CO2 scrubbers on your ship works. You can implement it as a part and require the player to bring sufficient CO2 scrubbing capability for the length of the trip, but it's really swallow since it won't teach you *anything* about how a CO2 scrubber would work. A loading screen tooltip pointing out that in a real space mission you would need CO2 scrubbing has close to the same education value. You could even argue that this makes it seem simpler than it is in real life, since it simply boils down to bringing the real parts. It makes life support in space seem like a solved problem, when it isn't. I'll do one step further and say that the fact that you learn how to solve the problems with orbital mechanics is also what makes the complexity and the educational aspect fun in the first place.

Well, why not discuss those features? It's detailed that it's worth a post of it own. Just a comment since it's coming from the 'space is hard' person asking for lots of details like life support and other systems I think having to find out some of those things on your own is actually a more fitting challenge than life support as most of it is directly linked to the core of the game (orbital mechanics). But I still think an assistant is important to have, but I would love if it shows you the math by which to calculate things like the window, ejection angles and delta-v. At the bottom so you can ignore it if you are not interested.

But how are you going to calculate the transmission delay? It'll be either inconsistent with the rest of KSP physics or with relativity.

That's true - KSP 1 science is very grindy, especially with being able to collect from all biomes. My ideal science progression would be milestone driven - in the very early stage you would only need to do obvious tasks, so that simply launching your first rocket with some kind of telemetry part would unlock some parts. Same with suborbital and orbital flights. And afterwards you would need to collect data under more specific circumstances to unlock more parts, e.g. to unlock the first set of colony parts you might have to both do some kind of specific research on a space station for X amount of time plus collect some measurements from a number of different celestial bodies.

Maybe. But I even struggle a bit with having light speed lag from a theoretical perspective, since light behaving the way it goes it basically a relativistic phenomena and KSP doesn't simulate that. Likely most of the time your vessel will not move at speeds where it matters much, but given that KSP is Newtonian should the signal from a vessel moving towards you at a speed of 0.1c have a speed of 1.1c? Should you be able to overtake a signal if you somehow manage to travel at > 1.0 c? Neither of this is possible in the real universe, but KSP doesn't implement those physical laws. This undermines the education appeal for me -you might end up teaching some very inconsistent ideas. Instantaneous signals somehow seem more consistent with the rest of the game physics.

Probe control with a delay could easily be a mess. If you don't allow programming the probe in advance then it becomes almost impossible to actually land them somewhere, but if you have to program them then in order to play the game as a newcomer you have to learn not only orbital mechanics but also basic programming skills on top of that. I have my doubts that this is a worthwhile addition, except when added for mods or higher difficulty levels for those who get bored with the core parts of the game. Honestly, I don't even think it really adds realism. Just consider that when you fly the probe that you are essential the piloting program reacting to sensory inputs - the same way as you don't have to relay orders to Jeb for him to execute. When flying you are playing Jeb. As for light lag for things like transmitting science, it seems to not really matter much when in the Kerbin system, but afterwards it would. But is waiting 4 years for your science to arrive really that interesting of a gameplay element?

I don't agree that the game needs to simulate life support for rockets. There's two ways you could go with this: one is to keep it very simple such as suggested by Ashandalar. But done that way it's really only a mass tax to increase the expiration date of your vessel. It feels punitive if you fail, but not really rewarding if you manage it. Alternately you could make it very realistic and detailed in which case it could simply become overwhelming to new players. It'd become an issue starting when trying to go to Duna, and newer players have enough on their hand at that time planning their first mission of that length and their first interplanetary transfer. In general, I feel that one of the things behind the success of KSP was that it did focus strongly on core aspects of gameplay instead of trying to add every major consideration that real rocket designers would have to struggle with. In the end KSP is not about showing all engineering challenging or simulating everything - it's a game with (roughly) accurate orbital mechanics with a lot of the other stuff being abstracted away for the sake of fun. It doesn't have you design rocket nozzles, handle 10+ different types of fuels which detract from the main experience. The orbital mechanics should remain the centerpiece of gameplay, especially at the start. Sure, you could hide it behind a difficulty toggle but it'd still take valuable developer time. However with colonies and colonists I could see it become a valuable aspect of game play - if you want to make self sufficient colonies elsewhere then it is something that the late game could focus on. It'd introduce it at a much later point in a typical playthrough, at which point the player is better equipped and has at least mastered the basics of flying rockets. Other than that I would be perfectly fine with this feature being left up to mods.

I'll go against the grain and hope that manned space flight is still the start of the tech tree, before unmanned tech and planes. It's obviously not similar to our technological development, but KSP always was about rockets and Kerbals. Forcing the player to develop planes first would detract from this, as would only launching remotely controlled rockets. Since KSP also had a progression from normal plane tech into spaceplanes it can't be completely divorced from the main tech tree either. The design considerations for planes are *very* different from rockets (and they are harder to fly) so it wouldn't be a good tutorial for the rocket part either. What I wouldn't mind is having the unmanned parts appear a bit earlier in the tech tree and I do agree about having fairings a lot earlier. More realistic tech trees have their place, but IMHO that's something better left for mods same as ullage motors, limited ignitions and gimbal lock.

First example: In your own rest frame you can observe relative speeds between different objects greater than 1c. Easiest example is if you emit two photons in opposite direction. What you will not be able to observe is a speed greater than 1c relative to *yourself*. Second example: This one is more interesting. Time dilation and length contractions are the items that are important here. For an observer outside the spaceship (observing the spaceship at 0.99 c) the smaller ship will expend a lot of energy to move just slightly faster. But much less time will seem to pass for the smaller ship than for the larger ship. So for the observer the ships will arrive at some distant target at almost the same time, but the crew of the smaller ship will have aged much less. For an observer inside the spaceship, the smaller ship will have a larger relative speed but the difference in perceived time will be smaller. So for the larger ship the smaller ship seems to reach the target much faster. So putting it in a simplified matter, in one frame (from inside the larger ship) the crew of the smaller space ship arrives at a younger age because they just got there a lot faster in the classical manner (assuming the relative speed is still small in relativistic terms). For the outside observer the ships arrive at roughly the same time, but the crew of the smaller space ship is still younger, but this time due to time dilation. However, this is a bit simplified as I do not define the target and the speed of this would need to be taken into account.