Incarnation of Chaos

I think this is our fundamental disconnect here; i think of KSP "Funds" as an abstraction of the wages paid to workers to build the craft, the people who process the materials, the mission controllers who sit for long hours at the DSN monitoring the signal going to a probe that's been adrift for a decade etc. So in my mind; you would still pay for things on colonial VABs or Orbital VABs. Resources would be an additional constraint on top because we can't assume infrastructure and a supply chain is already in place like there would be on Kerbin and would have to be either built, mined or otherwise developed beforehand.

Fantastic; i was wondering if you'd break this out into it's own thing. For no other reason than to make support and bug reports easier.

Oh dear it appears iv'e been summoned, and because I'm a gentleman i must respond to the hail accordingly.... Um; what even is this thread xD

Follow the logic from the point of a game designer; you want your players to have to spread out to get the needed raw materials for the next stage/tier/tech level. So you either have to provide alternatives that don't require them; or put those materials within a reasonable distance/grasp of the player at the level they're expected to be at before attempting to grab them. You won't need to find them all in one place; just the ones you need to pop off the next series of rockets and colony ships. The moment you've left kerbins gravity well; you have just removed the largest source of inefficiency and waste possible. So without funds there is absolutely no reason to not just keep building bigger and bigger, and use those massive ships to setup a network of mines and layover stations between you and laythe. That scale is WHY i'm worried that there's no money; because with it comes the potential to rapidly snowball into a state of essentially "Iv'e won, but the game won't know it for another 200 turns" very easily. Why reuse anything when all the materials you could ever need are a few moments of timewarp away? Why refuel when you have a massive series of low-gravity moons ready to churn out massive ships with 10-20K DV at a moments notice? Pretty simple; each system has it's own financial account which then is added or subtracted from/to the global account. You would have an administration center that would have policies or cards that would increase the efficiency of this, allow you to change what contracts (Or bias it towards specific ones) you'd be served etc. Also you're not paying for oxygen; you're paying for the rocket that'll deliver the mining and IRSU equipment that'll produce it for the colony.

I still don't like this; because all it means is that if you want to brute-force your way to space instead of cost optimizing that you can just make a mun outpost and let timewarp run for an hour or two until you get enough supplies. It also removes the ability to use contracts to subsidize exploration or establishing a relay network, and doesn't encourage efficient gameplay. Concepts like reusable rockets are also now rendered pointless, along with refueling stations or anything else. And KSP career mode actually didn't really have a "Failure State", at least on normal. You could always take a bailout grant, and keep chugging along with the added sense of tension that this was it. That will now be completely absent, and for me will make KSP2 a straight downgrade from KSP1 if they continue to insist on this.

If i remember correctly it's because FAR no longer "Sees" the wings as part of the aero model, so you have to make it rebuild it. Deploying landing gear and a few other actions that i don't remember can do that.

My solution wouldn't work at all for that; you'd be forced to settle for just copying the inputs to another that would remain at a predetermined distance. It's not "Dual Control" as much as it is "Multiple Control, Same inputs"

They could make a system where you could "Slave" a ship within physics range to a craft within focus, so if you're doing a SpaceX like booster recovery you could punch both boosters and control them while descending. You wouldn't need multiple keyboards or mouse, and the inputs would just be passed from the "Master" craft to the "Slave" and it would attempt to replicate them. There's a couple issues with this though; firstly is that there would need to be a minimum distance between them at all times. Secondly is this would only work for Falcon Heavy style recovery, and only for Return to Launch Site recovery unless we get massive oil-rig sized boats in KSP2. But honestly; replicating FMRS is easier, requires less work and achieves the same results with less code and hassle. Personally i don't see how something like FMRS is "Cheating" considering all it's doing is allowing you to conduct a mission as if you could control all craft, and using save merging to achieve the final result.

Even if it isn't; RAM crushes even the fastest SSD's in raw IOPS by literal orders of magnitude. So PC's with slow storage can just use more RAM to compensate; storage will always be the bottleneck no matter what. PC's are designed to mitigate this with their memory model (Cashe, RAM, VRAM, Storage). Consoles have been using a unified memory model for this and the future gen (Sharing RAM with the GPU), and just like the AMD APU solutions the performance differences are killing them. To me it looks like they're trying to reduce the impact of that shared memory model without going to dedicated VRAM on the GPU, and not much else. Only time will tell realistically, but the current hype and doomsaying about how HDDS are DEAD i think is very much premature. If hardware gets in hand and we see massive performance differences? Then I'll gladly admit I'm wrong, but right now iv'e heard the same extravagant claims before with each previous generation and i have no reason to take any of it at face value. Also much of this is a combination of bespoke hardware and software solutions, and we all know how much people LOVED programming for the PS3's custom CELL processor.... The biggest improvement in the new consoles in my opinion is actually the CPU; Ryzen will make more of a difference than these overhyped SSD's and rayeeeee tracing than i think people realize. The Jaguar cores in the current consoles are basically 6-year old mobile parts from some of AMD's worst architecture choices, and as a result their IPC is abysmal along with their thermals. Just the CPU grunt will make loading times drastically better, and their storage solutions will leverage this to help further. If anything; I'm just excited that the new consoles are actually going to be competitive with current PC offerings rather than absolutely trash-tier garbage that's 3 years obsolete out of the box. The only question is will we actually get GAMES? Or will we get GambleWare, Live-services filled with empty promises and another 7 COD's? All the hardware in the world doesn't matter if people don't actually use it afterall.....

I've actually been thinking about how to tackle a somewhat procedural weather system (No code or textures made, just me looking into it on a conceptual/technical level). The programming to actually do a very rough weather simulation isn't actually all that complex, the difficult parts would be making it perform well, integrating it with things like FAR and the actual clouds themselves. You'd need something like volumetric clouds that could grow, change and develop depending on conditions, and i don't know enough about KSP to know if it would support something like that (And even if it did, again performance is the main question). And the performance end would be a bit tricky; you'd likely need to take a principia-escue approach and have a C# interface that takes your C++ code output and hands it over to KSP. There was a mod that was made for older KSP that tried doing some of this, but it's been abandoned for years, performs pretty badly and is ARR. If i had more time it would be an interesting project, but I'm unlikely to attempt it personally.

Well i saw this about 2 days ago and decided to download and wack it into my current career save running version 1.8.1 which uses FAR, SMURFF and a bunch of other mods. And i must say; I'm actually rather impressed with this little thing. Chemical version using Hydrolox is about 5K DV after wacking in a mobile lab, IRSU equipment and 2 reactors. Nuclear is 15K! This is the Hydrolox version, i wanted to test the aero design before committing to the interplanetary design. And i'm rather glad i did xD I'm pretty sure i did something horribly wrong because people much smarter than me designed this and it was being actively built by NASA before getting canned in 02, but i needed some additional lifting area to prevent it from a pitch down moment upon the final decent after reentry. And it also wanted to enter a flat spin rather badly. I absolutely love the RCS on this thing; not sure if it was intended or somehow patched in by another mod but they use the onboard hydrogen as propellant making this pretty easy to keep stable during reentry. And embarssingly enough this mashup of your X-33 parts and OPT wings that i even hesitate to call a plane actually behaves more like a plane than anything iv'e built prior. All in all; fantastic work on this.

Personally i think retelling the story of the Cold War thru the lens of the space programs is something that's been done and overdone for decades, and that wouldn't add much of anything to the game. Yes it would provide a structure, defined objectives and a clear pathway to a clear goal, but it wouldn't really do anything new or interesting. And i think that present-day is a much more exciting time than Apollo, and that's due to the fact that the massive developments in space haven't been coming from massive government projects. They've been coming from a variety of privately owned companies, pushing the boundaries of what's possible and carving out their niche in the launch market before getting crushed or going bankrupt while trying. Kerbals have been hinted to have an almost fanatical drive to practice aeronautics and rocketry even during their past history. So why retell this story? Why retell Humanities story? Why not tell a different one; one that's inspiring and campy in all the right ways? Why not take the fierce competition we see today, and go full kerbal with it! Instead of retelling our story; make the player compete with other space agencies and create their own story in the process, this would provide the same structure and direction people want (Company X is going to achieve orbit in 2 weeks; we have to beat them to it!) while not railroading the player into just replicating the progression from Mercury>Gemini>Apollo for the 300th time. It would also provide plenty of easily adjusted levers for difficulty or progression; making milestone deadlines come sooner, reducing time between other companies progression, reducing funds or science or removing any of the latter entirely.

While i agree with most of this; i think 2a and 2b are the source of most disagreements you'll find among the KSP community when asking if a "Story" should be implemented or similar. Because to me the direction of Career Mode isn't an issue; it's just an extra set of constraints to make how i choose the direction i want actually require more than just picking the best parts or brute-forcing the issue. And humans didn't need anything beyond curiosity to decide to explore the stars, so i wouldn't think Kerbals would either. Now mind you; those are just my own personal opinions. But i think it would be very difficult to implement a story that would satisfy both of us, and that's why i think KSP and KSP2 aren't for the worse without one. With all of that out of the way; i think career mode for sure should be massively overhauled to accomplish it's maximum potential. And is why i was pretty disheartened when it came out from the PCgamer article that they're intending on simplifying it to the point of pointlessness instead of attempting to make it better.

Oh I'm aware; i just wanted to point out that there's interesting options going smaller as well. But personally i do think the idea of a Super-Earth Kerbin is nice, so i'm partial to it. Mine is something i'd mod in if i decided i wanted to spend the time on it.

"Paradise for spaceplanes" doesn't actually mean that it's a large planet with a thick atmosphere; because if you had a planet with low gravity but that somehow held onto a dense atmosphere it would be a aviator's dream all the same. Think Titan of our Solar System's Saturn; it has slightly less gravity than Earth's moon but a surface pressure of 1.45atm and that's 98% nitrogen! The amount of lift you can generate in such an environment is extraordinary, and the lift needed to overcome the light gravity is hardly anything. But that's a minor consolation considering the entire moon is essentially a cryogenic fractional separation facility and lies at the triple point of methane.....but if you had methalox engines it would be one of the most lucrative bastions in the outer solar system to launch and fuel all manner of wacky contraptions. Though; what would be cool is a binary system. A large super-earth/kerbin with a duna sized "Moon" with a thick oxygenated atmosphere circling above, that would get you the best of both worlds (No pun intended) and would be as close to aircraft/spaceplane nirvana as i could imagine.

So you'd rather have a one-sized-fits all and likely simplified solution that isn't balanced for the disparity between kerbal and IRL parts than a highly configurable and modular experience you can tailor to your individual preferences?

Or you just let it be a mod like it is in KSP and avoid them entirely.

This was suggested a while back, and actually has more issues than just beginning with a RSS system once you drill down into it.

It was supposed to be a joke, but now that iv'e explained it it's not funny

To achieve the gravity desired with much smaller planets than our own world; KSP's planets are impossibly dense.

No one lives on a planet with densities exceeding a neutron star either, so I think it balances out xD

Alright; i need to take some physics apparently. Though they could just have a seperate layer on each planet to simulate "Bumpy" gravity; there's a mod for KSP that does that with principia installed. So they wouldn't need to have more than 2 planets affecting the ship in theory. This would also make more sense for rask and rusk; since with them being partially molten you could have massive local variations in the density from place to place causing local gravitational anomalies. Also when i said "Singularity" i meant it more in a mathematical sense than something like a black hole; since i was thinking of the massive unintended accelerations you could get from a patched conics workaround for a barycenter. But this does actually seem like it would allow them to keep them on rails.

How do you get that out of "Full-System n-body gravity is not planned for KSP2"? To me it sounds like they're using it as a workaround to prevent the barycenter from becoming a singularity and not much else, multiple points would imply that a larger number of elements in the system would be part of the simulation since they'd have to be calculated to get the forces to cancel at those other points. Overall; i think we just need to sit tight and wait for more information. Because this is pretty interesting as far as i'm concerned, and breaks with many of our previously thought solutions.

Yeah iv'e had plenty of times where i ran the reactors at lower power levels, but sometimes you just NEED all of that power for the entire mission duration. Which is when i'll use multiple reactors, and just bring fresh ones online as they flicker out and die. The reprocessing tech is nice, but comes way after the first reactors and generally isn't my priority. And yeah; the first reactors produced by humans came online in the 40's and submarine-based LWR's were produced in the late 50's- early 60's. Small tangent though; is while we often think of Nuclear Fission as an artificial process (Even though the only reason it's possible is because the elements we use naturally undergo spontaneous fission themselves for the most part) It's very possible that natural reactors were rather common on earth billions of years ago, and i'd love for KSP2 to have planets that had them despite me knowing that anything beyond earth would be older and less likely to have them. Oh and the terrain system wouldn't allow it D: I'm sure there's much more optimization that could be done to a Liquid Thorium design using modern material science and computer design to get the weight down considerably, and provide mounting points for thermal exchange that were much better. But that's speculation at best, and for the moment we really only have a few apollo-era concept designs, and Kilopower to go off of. And honestly even the outer solar system is likely doable with conventional technology; especially if you launch from Mars. But real life doesn't like the "Moar Boosters" approach like KSP, and you'd need some form of magnetics to shield yourself from the massive belts of radiation Jupiter throws off anyway. I mean it's been how many years since 3.75 and 5M parts were introduced? And we haven't gotten any large batteries, engines, wings or anything to match? Heck even the selection of 3.75 M engines is pretty poor, and 5M doesn't have anything besides the thrust plates and spamming 2.5 M engines for it. And the landing legs are barely passable even for 2.5M parts....

Which is a good sign, and means that KSP2 likely didn't get thrown completely in a dumpster between them changing hands.