Skorj

For volume, sure, but normally I'd love to see fuel just measured in tons. It's so annoying trying to figure out how many tons of fuel are in any of the irregularly-shape fuel tanks, and when building rockets it's always tons of fuel vs total tonnage one cares about. (Well, maybe that's a bit less important now that delta-V is auto-calculated, but still, fuel mass ratio will always be important). I don't see how they can do without it for long. I'd be fine with that being a v1.1 fix or something, as fundamentally it's a rocket simulator and not X-Plane, and so it might not be top priority, but I do hope they don't stop where KSP1 did with "almost nearly decent aerodynamics, but not". But darn it, they should have a center-of-drag display day 1. Or, better, a proper aerodynamic center that takes lift and drag into account like it's supposed to. I'd really like to see in the VAB (or whatever) whether my rocket is stable, and how unstable it is. A space elevator in particular is maybe not the best choice of megastructures, with an orbital ring being easier to build with ordinary materials, and much more useful. But anything like that could just be a "building" in the new base building mechanic, and fairly simply I'd think, not something you build from parts. Sounds like a fun DLC. BTW, you can't build a space elevator on Earths moon, as it would be too long (past the point where Earth's gravity would dominate). You also can't build one on Mars unless it can somehow dodge Phobos 3 times a day, as it would extend past Phobos's orbit. It's also not clear that a space elevator would actually work on Earth, even with unobtainium to build it from, as each payload would add some energy to the system (swinging it like a pendulum, bouncing it, and vibrating the cable), because half the energy for GEO must come from lateral acceleration, and there's not a good way to damp that accumulated energy. It would just build up until something bad happened.

I've had to learn to make a much more aggressive initial turn than I had thought was right. For the TWR 1.65 ship I just built, for example, it's at least 20 degrees at 40 m/s. Less for lower TWR. I tune it to see a few temp gauges, but nothing getting high up the gauge. Once I get to 50s to Ap, I throttle back to hold 50s for a few seconds, then I can just leave the ship alone to 100 km. This gives me pretty good results, and is easy enough to fly. I flip from prograde surface to prograde orbit at 24 km. I avoid any approach where I have to pay too much attention to "this angle at that attitude", as anything beyond the initial turn, prograde, and throttle down at 50s to Ap now seems inelegant.

Is there a mod that shows altitude at a point in orbit? Or the altitude of a maneuver node, just as good? Seems simple, but my google-fu fails me.

Thanks! That will sure make deploying a swarm of RA-2s easier.

All this time I've been playing, I've put large batteries on my commsats - large enough to relay large amount of science without running out. But that's not needed, right? As long as the commsat is out of physics range when I'm transmitting science, it doesn't consume electrical power? It seems obvious now that I say it, but I've been building RA-2s with huge battery packs for so long that I forget why I thought I needed to.

I suspect we're talking past each other. I'll try to clarify my terms. There's no absolute minimum to the angular size we can see, it's a matter of brightness. I can certainly see a single white pixel against a black background on my monitor, just as I can see some stars. But perhaps you're talking about when we can no longer see the difference between 1 and 2 pixels. For comparison, a "pixel" on my monitor (27" 1440p at ~36") is about 47 arc seconds (so the individual OLEDs are probably ~20 arc seconds), while Pollux (to pick a bright star at random) is about 0.008 arc seconds. Now, even with my pupils fully dilated on a very dark night, Pollux (or any star I can see at night) is going to be smeared out across ~16 arc seconds by my "mark 1 eyeball", but that's basically the size of a pixel, no? I mean, sure, on a modest-sized 4k monitor a 2x2 pixel area looks about the same, as a 1x1 pixel area, but that's not at all what I'm talking about: there are stars in the KSP skybox that are 3mm across on my monitor. Stars big enough to look like a disk instead of a pinpoint are everywhere.

In my limited understanding that's something different - it's saying that multiple light sources are all one "pixel" if they're under that resolution in separation. Stars all appear to my human eyes as smaller than a pixel on my monitor, as they're so very much smaller than the resolution the eye is capable of. In any case, anything that shows a disk should be a planet, that's my particular pet peeve.

I'd really like to see the stars in the skybox fixed to be 1-pixel stars. The big, blobby stars we have now, while pretty, are my personal "cavemen riding dinosaurs" realism pet peeve. I was thinking just the same, but I've been struggling to think of what they might actually be. All I can think of is metallic ores, organics (for fuel and life support if that's in game), and maybe He3? But instead of more realistic resources, we could also just have game-y ones, where you just need ore from specific places in order to progress, because of Kerbal physics. I'd love that.

To add to the above, putting your probe cores on "hibernate in warp: auto" solves many problems (probe-lems?). It should really be the default IMO.

Spoken like someone computer-savvy who's comfortable with modding games. Just knowing what "github" is put you in rare company. Admittedly, KSP is a niche game with heavy overlap with people who use git in their day job. Still, Steam workshop is really great for people who don't know where Steam lands their game files in the first place. It would open the use of mods up to a much broader crowd. Personally, I'm hoping the question is moot and the base KSP2 is good enough where "basic quality of life" mods like KER won't be needed. Heck, if they do it right, the common mod dependencies like Kopernicus and texture replacers won't be needed, as the base game will be sufficiently moddable. Hey, a guy can hope.

I'd love to see the common non-parts mods become part of the base game. The stuff in KER, for example, has been gradually trickling into KSP1, and that's great. Better visuals seem to be coming already, from what we've seen. OTOH, the game is already pretty overwhelming for new players in sandbox mode: just so many parts. When you start adding parts mods, it gets nuts. This is why I would love procedural-height fuel tanks and wings, as it would cull the part count back down without changing the "Lego spaceship" nature of KSP. I'd really like to see RSS as a DLC. Of all the ways to "monetize" KSP, new star systems, especially our own, is the one I'd like best.

Fair point, though that's unrelated to the discussion on mapping (and we know we're not getting the robotic parts in KSP2 at launch). My frustration with career mode in KSP1 is that you can do almost everything in the game with a few low tech parts, plus nuclear engines. From the user statistics, it's clearly a very challenging learning curve, as almost no one makes it past the Mun, but once you've get the hang of it there's no endgame. There's all kinds of cool stuff for sandbox play, and that's great, but all that same cool stuff just makes the career mode endgame less and less interesting. Right now, career mode feels like most "sandbox" games, where there's very little structure and no real plot except what you invent yourself. Which is totally fine for an indie game, don't get me wrong, but I'm hoping there will be more to KSP2. It looks like they're focused on future tech and interstellar travel, but I'd love to have objectives along the way that made "plot-based" use of cool ideas like resource scanning and asteroid capture, missions that made those thing a means to an end, not merely an arbitrary goal.

I found no appeal to Breaking Ground at all. It's still just randomly driving about on a rover. It needs to be a quest. (And the science gadgets are just a harder way to get science, never was sure what the point was other than for neat screenshots).

I want something better than ScanSat. I want actual in-game objectives (in Career mode) that make you want to scan a planet thoroughly in order to discover cool areas. To me, the biggest disappointment of KSP, career mode, and missions in general, is that there's not really any reason to explore places thoroughly, nor is there any way do do so. Driving around in a rover is no way to explore, even if it doesn't flip constantly. I'd love to have objectives like: find this interesting scientific anomaly (needed to unlock some tech in career mode), or find a large flat spot perfect for landings (for ideal bases, if bases mattered), or that sort of thing. I'd like to accomplish that by: Launching scan sats into orbit over the target planet/moon Having them actually need to orbit the planet/moon to build data Being able to see various map information as a real-time overlay whenever I look at that planet/moon (except maybe EVA), whether biome boundaries, resources, or cool points of interest for the above Getting to that objective however I want, guided by the very clear and straightforward map information, with no janky UI business to see where I'm going Driving around on a rover just to do it gets old fast. Driving around to get into the cave that my map tells me has my mission objective (after I did the work to get the map via scan sats)? That would be very cool.

Just in general, a cylinder is not aerodynamically stable end-on. It wants to turn to the longest diagonal through the cylinder, more or less, to be forward. You'll notice there's a sort of ring of stability at a fixed angle off prograde/retrograde. Your craft then makes this less stable, because it drops abruptly from a wide cylinder to a narrow cylinder. That puts even more drag near the front (well, the windward side as it re-enters). Note that in Kerbal physics, the drag due to the leading edge and the drag due to the trailing edge are basically the same, given the same shape on both ends. What you want is more drag at the rear than at the front. (Or fins as above, but it can sometimes be quite awkward to launch that way.) That's quite tricky. If you re-enter nosecone first with a flat rear, it can be stable depending on the cylinder, but then of course you burn up in the atmosphere because you don't have enough drag. Note that the capsule shapes are very stable, despite what I said above. In real life, this is just how blunt body physics in a supersonic airstream work. It's very stable in Kerbal physics as well. You can take a Mk1-3 Command Pod and stack a Mk1 Crew Cabin or two on top and it remains very stable, despite looking almost the same as above. Also note: if something is almost working, and just leaning out a little bit into the airstream to burn up, adding a reaction wheel or two can fix the problem. The reason it work without time acceletation but fail if you warp is that for some reason reaction wheels and/or SAS just work less will during warp. Sometimes quite a bit less well. I struggle with that all the time, both on launch and re-entry, with craft that are fine at 1x but flip out at 3x or 4x. Fingers crossed KSP2 won't have that particular problem.

Even the Making History parts? I had heard the robotics wouldn't be there, and understandably so, but I'm surprised they're not adding the MH stuff. Well, I really hope they have something like engine plates and structural tubes - those were really missing from the base game.

It's not at all intuitive that you can't, for example, attach a side booster with 2 radial decouplers, top and bottom. It's seems the obvious thing to do. The fact that you can't, and have to use 1 decoupler and 1 strut, is an arbitrary quirk that worsens the learning curve. There's lots of non-obvious restrictions like that, e.g. the above-mentioned restriction that you can't split into 4 tanks with a quad-coupler, then put another quad-coupler at the bottom and attack 1 engine. Why not? Quirky, arbitrary game logic in what looks like a sim. It's all stuff you get used to, of course, but why should people have to get used to it? There's a reason that most new players "bounce off" the game before they get to orbit, and most people who make it to orbit never land on the Mun. They better not dumb down the physics in KSP2, but there are good ways to smooth out the learning curve!

Caseless ammo is already a thing. FN had a couple models, as did others, and militaries tried them out. Turns out ejecting hot brass is just too important to cooling - plays far more of a role than anyone really expected. Tank level targeting computers are gradually coming downmarket. There are scopes now that do most of the same work, though they don't account for stuff like barrel droop due to heating. The main advantage a tank has is active sensors, flooding the area with IR and mm microwave. That tells everyone where you are, but heck at least you're in a tank. I'd say scopes and targeting in general is starting to plateau.

Believe it or not, it's in the stock game. Probably the best-hidden feature of KSP. If you have an advanced pod, like the OTKO2, you can right-click on it, bring up KerbNet, and show biomes. It's clunky and awkward, though, and the best auto-refresh is every 3.5 seconds. I'd love to see a mod that just shows biomes or ore concentration as a planet overlay from map view. But for the specific problem of trying to land in a given biome, KER has an "impact biome" display in it's landing tab (can't remember if it's displayed by default, but I think it is). I've added that to my KER HUD, so I can always see where I'll land.

I take a lot of extra delta-V to Mun and Minmus, but only because I like to shorten the trip. An extra 500 m/s comoing home from Minmus makes a huge difference. I generally bring about 100m/s over my plan, in Kerbal's SOI, and a few hundred elsewhere. You really pay for over-engineering in this game, so I don't like to go much beyond that.

No aliens in our game about little green men! I wouldn't mind Matt Lowne-style different-colored Kerbals as an Easter egg somewhere, but gameplay around Extra-Kerbal Intelligence doesn't seem to fit the game. Wormholes, OTOH, well I'm not sure how interstellar travel will be realized, but that was in the interviews, no? I mean, I guess in a Kerbal-scale universe, there would be a star one light year away, but even with some futuristic propulsion that would get a rocket to some small % of the speed of light, that would be a lot of timewarping without a wormhole. Good thing we brought infinite snacks.

FYI, the sub assembly tab sort of has this. You can create custom sub-categories, give each an icon from the list, and add your assemblies to the sub-category you choose. It's only one level deep, but I find it useful.

This part I think would fit well with KSP. Specifically, procedural tank height. Adding stuff like procedural engines changes the game away from "space Legos", but if the only thing procedural is tank height, then it gets rid of the annoying problem of having to leave small tank half empty (and lose significant delta-V, or have too much fuel and lose TWR) to keep the look you want on your rocket. Procedural wings would be great for KSP1, since you could limit it to wings you could build anyhow, just with a lower part count, but maybe we won't care about part count in KSP2!

It would be a complete overhaul of the engine, but then in interviews they said they did a complete overhall of the engine, so I'm hopeful. The tree structure of parts was the hardest thing for me to get my head around as a new player.

A full RSS and Realism Overhaul is exactly the sort of thing I'd be happy to see as DLC. Of all the ways to "monetize" KSP2, I hope they go the way of complex alternative ways to play the game. RSS is the "new game plus" of KSP, after all.