Luriss

I take a more pessimistic view. People will probably just see the things from that are missing while ignoring all the new improvements and QoL stuff. The reception will be more positive in the long term however.

When you consider that this forum is populated by pretty die hard ksp fans that have the energy to speculate about the game months from release, it's no surprise that this forum is pretty tame in terms of criticism. The reaction during release will probably be somewhere between this forum and the steam forums. 60ish% steam review score with the lack of features being the biggest sticking point. Something along the lines of "We waited four years and we don't even get IVA!? This game is a scam just play modded ksp 1" is probably gonna be a pretty standard response during launch.

And I'd bet the next feature video is coming out this month too

Ooooohhhhhhhh The snowy mountains in the second photo look gorgeous.

We seem to be going in circles here so it might be better to try and break things down. Light years are great because they put the ridiculous distances involved into human terms. The obvious problem of course is they're very Earth/Human centric.. Another possibility is to use human light years but downscale them by a factor of 10. This is however still quite Human centric but it does make light years 1/10th scale like the rest of the ksp universe. The problem however is now lightspeed is 10x too fast, and reducing that by a factor of 10 starts to do funny things to other physical laws. Kerbal light years are also an option and they share the positive of being in kerbal terms. However its far less intuitive to us as a result (what is 234 kerbin years in Earth years off the top of your head? Then again maybe this doesn't matter if we have kerbal lifespans for reference.) Alternatively we could just use metric and measure light years in petameters. This really helps dodge the whole time conundrum and as a added bonus keeps it neat and consistent with all other in game distance measurements. The problem however being you're now conveying only one piece of info instead of two; how long does it take light to travel 38 petameters? Honestly? Kerbal light years are probably the way to go. If you put a star at some 4 kerbal ly from kerbol (1.16 ly) it'll take 40 kerbin years (12-ish earth years) to get there at 0.1c. 12 earth years might seem short, but what we can do is make kerbals have a lifespan of 80 kerbin years (23-ish earth year). Now that 40 kerbin ly trip is equivalent to a 40 human ly trip biologically. As a bonus we don't have to use human light years or change the speed of light.

I'd argue that 40 years is even a stretch in terms of an interstellar mission. You'd be sending 20 somethings and then tasking them with colonization in their 60s. You'd need at lest one generation of kerbals.

Now this of course depends on how complex the kerbal side of the game is, but long duration (~50+ years) missions are no small feat. Of course there a few ways it might be done. 1) KSP 2 may have some sort of cryogenic freezing system where you can just put your kerbals in stasis. This would probably be the most simple system that just boils down to managing power and resource consumption. 2) Assuming there is no cryo in the game, you'd have to rely on either really long lived kerbals, or generation ships. Now this opens a whole new can of worms because your interstellar ship is now essentially a completely self sufficient colony with engines strapped to it. Gameplay wise this would probably just reduce down to designing a ship to support x kerbals (+ growth) for y amount of years. This however I'd argue leaves a bit to be desired. Although I don't expect it to be in the game, the social aspect of slapping kerbals on a one way trip out of the system is just as important as the engineering of the ship that carries them. In fact it dictates the engineering of the ship. Say your 50 year long interstellar mission requires you to bring 100 engineers. Now unless you can find candidates that have both no familial ties and no qualms about leaving their homeworld forever, you're going to have to deal with families (read, extra food and living space.) What was previously 100 kerbals can now be as high as 400. Furthermore, standard of living. Kerbals might be fine living in a 0g tin can for a week or so, but not so much for 50 years. This extends beyond simple housing as well, amenities such as recreation and schooling would now also be required (those aforementioned families might include young children). In engineering terms, this is all added mass, power usage, deltaV requirement, and life support in exchange for the capabilites and benefit the extra crew provides. To put it briefly, morale, I'd argue, is kinda important. I hope it finds its way into the game somehow. What do you all think?

I mean, it's doable (I managed to pull it off in KSP 1 on Jool) and would play nicely with the new colony and logistics stuff.

Eh, I think the problem is the lack of new info. We get about one new screenshot a week, nowhere near enough new stuff to generate hype.

Another thing that really helped fix career mode was a mod called strategia. Through the admin building you could set focuses such as a Minmus probe program for instance, which would add bonus science and money for all the related world firsts while adding a penalty to the unrelated ones. It was really great at forcing you to actually explore new places and drive you forward. I don't think I used a contract once in a career game with it.

Provided I can do it, I'm aiming to try build a Von Neumann probe; one big mothership that can build all the infrastructure and industry in a system before the Kerbals arrive, and then build a copy of itself to repeat the process.

Can confirm, I even 3D printed it

Towards the end of the video it actually looks like there's a river going through the KSC. Then again maybe it's just a canal of some sort

As an extension of this I've also noticed a very strong fear on these forums of new, complex features alienating new players, to the point that some argue certain features (such as life support) should be simplified just in case it confuses newcomers. Considering KSP is a game about rocket science, I think people get a bit too hung up on that sort of thing.

Playing off this idea I'd argue it'd be better to just have a different fuel type for each engine type rather than giving chemical rockets two fuel types later on; this way you retain some of the simplicity of the methalox only system while neatly playing into the one fuel per engine type trend with the nuclear and ion engines. Nuclear = Hydrogen, Chemical = Methalox, Jet engines = Kerosene, Ion = Xenon, etc.

My guess is that they were forced to pick a fuel because of the new mining and colony stuff; if you use water ice to make "liquid fuel" you're really just making hydrogen with a fancy name. Same goes for any other resource.

Wait, it's been 19 hours and no one's posted? Huh This post is really cool too. Gives a lot of insight into the thinking behind the engines that really shines through in the finished models. Great job! Furthermore, communicating to the player what each engine does really is important even if it doesn't seem big deal at first (if you've ever tried playing with the KSP Interstellar mod you'll know what I mean).

Seeing as the new dev log mentioned that Scott Manley named one of the new engines, I have an increasingly strong suspicion that Scott will voice the in game tutorials.

Because if you have a 1:1 scale speed of light in a 1/10th scale universe travel times and the like start to get a bit out of whack. Say for instance I was going to hit that 0.12c max speed and my target is 5 ly away. As the KSP universe is 1/10th scale, that 5 ly becomes 0.5ly. So, (5 x 9.461x10^{14}) / 3.5975x10^{7} = 131494093.1 seconds, or, 4.1 years. In other words, you're crossing the Kerbal equivalent of 5 ly in 4 years. Now if we scale the speed of light down by a factor of 10 also, that 0.12c becomes 0.012c. So, (5 x 9.461x10^{14}) / 3.5975x10^{6} = 1.31494093×10^{9} seconds, or 41.7 years. Now the time taken is 1:1 with reality while distances and the speed of light is the same 1/10th scale as everything else in the Kerbal universe. If you're adamant about keeping the speed of light 1:1 scale with our own universe you can do that, but in order to do that you'll have to use option 1 to keep the time taken to travel those distances consistent with reality. The problem with that however is now the Kerbal universe no longer has consistent scaling; interplanetary distances are 1/10th scale while interstellar distances are 1:1 scale. To put it plainly, it's very messy and needlessly complicated. Eh? It has merit. Seeing as missions are counted in Kerbin years it would make sense that Kerbin years are used to calculate interstellar distances. This would also mean that you'll have more consistency with Kerbal aging and the like (A Kerbal that's 80 years old in Earth years is 68.5 years old in Kerbin years). It is also consistent with the 1/10th universe scale as long as you calculate a Kerbal light year using a 1/10th scale speed of light. The more I think about it the more it makes sense to do it this way. Using a 1/10th "Kerbal scale" speed of light you can use Kerbin years to define a 1/10th scale "Kerbin Light Year," which clearly denotes itself as different from normal Earth light years, has the correct scale, and is relative to Kerbal aging and mission clocks.

I've said it before but I really hope they go with option 2 but they also scale down the speed of light by a factor of 10. That way its both scaled consistently with the rest of the kerbal universe and the passage of time remains 1:1 with reality.

What else were they meant to do? If they were to stay within the bounds of near future technology you'd at absolute most be able to plonk an inflatable colony on Duna; in other words, you be stuck remaking KSP 1 with little to no new features. Besides, what's the harm in interstellar travel and more far future technologies? You're going to be getting all the KSP 1 features (eventually, probably) anyway so it's not like you're being forced to play with the interstellar features. If you really want to play only with current-ish technologies you can do that. The only real downside is that specific aspect of the game won't be as fleshed out as you might like. And to be honest, most people will be in a similar camp. I'd personally love to see in depth colony management, very harsh and unforgiving life support, part failures, and megastructures, but I know that none of that will be in the vanilla game and that's fine. I know I'm not going to like all of the devs decisions and choices but that's just how it is, at the very least we'll have mods that can add features and tweak things to each of our own individual preferences.

I'd expect a certain amount of abstraction. I'd imagine it'd probably be a case of your population being represented by a number x, and then you'd have y and z number of job positions. Something along those lines.

Apologies, I should've been clearer When I say social aspects I'm not saying you have to track how many friends your colonists have or anything like that, more things like avoiding overpopulation/crowding, or kerbals getting unhappy if you don't have enough food producing buildings/imports. Things you have to consider when building or expanding but not constantly monitor. Of course, I'd personally love to create colonies with specific political systems and the like but that's just a me thing. I would be surprised to see it implemented in mod form let alone vanilla.

One thing I think has been somewhat neglected in favour of the engineering side of colony building is the social aspect. It's important to keep in mind that colonies aren't just machines with an input and output of resources but also a place where people (in this case kerbals) have to live. As an illustration of this idea, imagine a small research outpost on Luna with some 5 - 10 people. All the crew would be specialists with a clearly defined role, living on the base for a temporary and predetermined period with extensive support from ground based teams on Earth. Now imagine a lunar settlement consisting of some 5000 - 10000 people. All the methods that were used to manage the research base have gone out the window; in other words, you're no longer tasked with managing a space mission but rather a state building project. In this context, how do you create a functional society on Duna? Of course, all this is inherently political and hence very much outside the scope of KSP 2. I just hope there'll be some aspect represented in game (e.g. having a hard time finding colonists who want to live on Eeloo)

What you're describing is essentially a Von Neumann probe; an AI controlled mothership that goes to a star system, colonizes it (minus the Humans, they come later), builds copies of itself, repeat. From memory you can colonize the entire galaxy in two millions years or so with this method. I've actually been planning to try colonize a system using this method in KSP 2.