Luriss
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Posts posted by Luriss
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42 minutes ago, Xelo said:
That is until you've seen the circus that is steam community discussions on ksp2 o-o
I have fears this forum is incredibly tame compared to a more general sample of prospective KSP 2 buyers.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.
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4 hours ago, LHACK4142 said:
Kerbal Space Program 2 is in the NEAR FUTURE!!!
And I'd bet the next feature video is coming out this month too
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42 minutes ago, Xelo said:
I dunno how new this is, but KSP 2's steam page now has beta screenshots!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/954850/Kerbal_Space_Program_2
(theres alot more then this)
Ooooohhhhhhhh
The snowy mountains in the second photo look gorgeous.
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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.
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31 minutes ago, Drakenred65 said:
Right now all we know is that we have the properly working time warp physics. For some of the longer flights? Time dialation will have some impact on how long it takes to fly, but only at far higher Sustained Gload and duration than I’m expecting to be in game being perfectly honest…maybee a later drive?
if the average speed is .1 C your looking at ~40 years flight time and I think you age I think 38 or 39 years.
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.
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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?
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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.
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3 minutes ago, stephensmat said:
Well, it's less about hype and more about waiting now. We've got a release date, and it's not even that far away. The sense of 'maybe today we'll know' is gone.
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.
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47 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:
Oh I don’t know if it was that bad. I mostly played career mode and it worked fine so long as you knew one thing: you can fund your whole program with the invisible World First contracts and you should only take other contracts if they dovetail into a mission you’re doing anyway. Grindy science was also a real problem, only somewhat mitigated by hotkeyes and the experiment storage unit. Breaking ground helped too. The craziest thing was that no one ever really made sense of the exploration/world first contracts so they reliably appeared up-front-and-center in Mission control. It would be like if you were playing Skyrim and none of the main or faction quests showed up in your quest journal, just the rando villager fetch quests. Bizarre.
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.
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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.
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11 hours ago, TheOrios said:
the clarke is really wel designed ok
Can confirm, I even 3D printed it
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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
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1 hour ago, Wheehaw Kerman said:
Well said. I don’t identify as a gamer, or hang around in gaming circles, so I don’t know whether this notion of “punitiveness” is widespread or just a KSP forums thing, but I find it really, really strange. Life is punitive as hell in this sense, risk taking has consequences, and failure can be catastrophic as hell.
Especially in space exploration. The history of space exploration is one epic saga of engineers and scientists and pilots deploying all their skills and ingenuity to overcome technical challenges and risks, and the consequences of failure were fatalities. Astronauts die when the engineers and scientists and technicians make mistakes. And that is a big part of what makes the whole endeavour of spaceflight thrilling and fascinating and worthwhile. People do strap their tender pink anatomies onto huge tanks of toxic and explosive chemicals and launch themselves clean outside our biosphere. It is sheer heroism in the literal, classical sense. Homer would have been hugely inspired by the Apollo program.
And the need for life support is fundamental to the whole enterprise. Which is why I find it baffling that people are so opposed to it on the grounds of this notion of punitiveness, in a game that’s about iterative experimentation in spaceflight. Build an unstable rocket? Not enough fuel? Didn’t pack enough snacks? Forgot parachutes?
The crew dies. Back to the VAB, brothers!
(It sounds even better in Latin: “redeamus ad vehiculi fabricam, fratres!”)
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.
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15 minutes ago, Turbo Ben said:
3. This is what I would like to see and satisfies the dev's criteria as far as I can make out. Early game, to aid onboarding, kerosene is used for both rockets and jets. Later on, once players are onboarded, Methane is unlocked for rocket engines only. Methane can be produced by ISRU, kerosene cannot.
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.
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3 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
The only thing that kind of confuses me is why they decided to go 'methalox' and not just stick with LF+O. That worked for KSP... So I'm guessing that having this slight level of specificity is because they will have parts (later) that carry liquid fuel but don't work with keralox engines. Kind of like a xenon tank or a monopropellant tank.
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.
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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.
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8 hours ago, GoldForest said:
You can't really bring down the speed of light. It's a universal law, and KSP follows universal law.
Why would you want to bring down the speed of light anyway? There's no real reason to. We'll never reach light speed is stock KSP, even with the Daedalus engine. You'll have to turn around and start burning to slow down before you even reach any large percentage of lightspeed, let alone the fuel requirements to take your ship to full 0.999999% of lightspeed.
The IRL project Daedalus had two stages too, and would take a total of 3.8 years to reach 0.12 of C, then coast for 46 before doing a braking burn of about another 4 to 5 years.
With acceleration during time zoom, that's nothing at any distance.
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.15 hours ago, GoldForest said:1) 4 IRL Lightyears in distance = 9460730472580800 m x 4 = 37,842,921,890,323,200 m or 37,842,921,890,323.2 km
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.
15 hours ago, GoldForest said:3) 4 Kerbin Light Year in distance = 299,792,458 m/s x 60 x 60 x 24 x 106.5 = 2,758,570,281,532,800 m or 2,758,570,281,532.8 km x 4 = 11,034,281,126,131.2 km
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.
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1 hour ago, GoldForest said:
You never know, they may decide to base KSP 2 lightyears off a Kerbin year. Developers have done crazy stuff before. I'm not saying it's a likely scenario, just saying it is one.
So we could end up with 1 of 3 options for how far Deb Deb is from Kerbol: (Light year distance was taken from William Shoetz on Quora: (4) How many meters are there in 1.00 light-year? - Quora )
1) 4 IRL Lightyears in distance = 9460730472580800 m x 4 = 37,842,921,890,323,200 m or 37,842,921,890,323.2 km
2) 4 1/10th scale lightyears in distance = 37,842,921,890,323.2 km / 10 = 3,784,292,189,032.32 km
3) 4 Kerbin Light Year in distance = 299,792,458 m/s x 60 x 60 x 24 x 106.5 = 2,758,570,281,532,800 m or 2,758,570,281,532.8 km x 4 = 11,034,281,126,131.2 km
Those are all drastically different distances that will have to be covered. 3.8 trillion kms, 11 Trillion kms or 37.8 Trillion kms. That makes a huge difference, pun not intended.
All of these are great distances and will show off a light year in game. I'm just wondering which it will be at this point.
(Also, pardon me if my math is wrong, kind of just did some quick math)
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.
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22 hours ago, Laikanaut said:
1, along with a whole lot of other things that would better fit any old sci-fi game than a game grounded in real world science. Interstellar flight is the biggest one of these, since humans will likely not be capable of this for a very long time. This isn't even near future for us, we haven't even begun to experiment with it. It doesn't fit the theme of KSP, and never will, but they added it in because they couldn't figure out how to add depth to this game, without forcing a playerbase who mostly hasn't gone any further than Minmus, to now travel light years away.
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.
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2 hours ago, GoldForest said:
Of course, now that I think about it, micromanagement might be in game. We do have refineries, so Kerbals might be assigned 'jobs'. Jobs would more than likely require kerbals at least have a bed or their own room, otherwise they might be considered 'homeless' and won't go do their job.... gosh, I hope it's not that micro managey.
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.
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5 minutes ago, GoldForest said:
I doubt we'll see a social aspect to the colony system, not like what you're talking about. I also don't ever see "Jebidiah Kerman doesn't want to go to Eeloo because he thinks it is too cold." or anything like that. KSP 2 is going to be more about macro management rather than micromanagement. Frankly, I would not like to see any micromanagement stuff in KSP 2, like worrying about Jeb's 'home sickness' level or 'social interactions' level. Leave that up to the mods. The only real social aspect I would like to see is at bare minimum something like a 'friends' aspect. I.e., having other Kerbals in the colony that closely match Jeb's stupidity and bravery level within a certain percentage. (Something like 25% to make it more forgiving. A difficulty slider could bring it down to 10% or even 5%)
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.
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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)
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1 hour ago, GoldForest said:
I've been thinking about that as well for a while now. Can we strap engines to an orbital colony and just push it around? If so, that would truly break the game. I think a rule against that will have to be put in place for official challenges, because where's the 'challenge' in towing around an orbital VAB and just going ham, spamming out orbital colony and landed colony modules? Of course, this is in sandbox mode. A career run of this challenge would be exponentially harder thanks to the need for resources.
A self replicationg mothership? That would be... expensive in career mode. Not to mention that you'd have to bring materials on the first mothership to replicate into... actually, only one other mothership. Huh.
If Mothership 1 replicates Mothership 2 on the way to Deb Deb, Mothership 1 could break off, go for a sling shot to To Be Announced (TBA) while Mothership 2 broke for orbit in Deb Deb, or vice versa.... ah, but you'd need Mothership 1 to carry all the supplies to make at least one colony in both Deb Deb and TBA. And then there's the thing about resource storage. Will we be able to create MS2 so it has full resource storage tanks or will they be empty and need to be filled after creation? If the latter, then you need some way to dock the two-giant craft (Sunshine Icarus 1 and 2 docking vibes). On top of that, you have to worry about your braking burn for Deb Deb, so you'll have a very small window of opportunity to: create MS2, dock, transfer resources, undock, setup slingshot for MS 1 to TBA and start braking burn for MS 2 to Deb Deb. I mean, yeah, you could stop short of your top speed to Deb Deb, or even include a few more engines to help with the braking burn so MS 2 doesn't overshoot Deb Deb, but you would still want to keep your speed high. At minimum you want to keep the coasting period down to about 30 mins to an hour. Oh, another problem, this all assumes that Career mode won't have Unrapid Planned Construction involved. If you have to WAIT for MS 2 to be built, then you have to plan out everything even MORE.
Oy vey, that is complicated. I do NOT envy anyone who goes for this replicating mothership idea. I think I'll just stick with the supersized Mothership that carries 50 Colony modules idea....
And actually... come to think of it. Doesn't MS 2 break the idea of a grand tour? Doesn't a grand tour entail having ONE craft that can do it ALL? Having a lander on a mothership is fine I feel, but having a second mothership? I think that goes against the nature.
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.
First beta KSP2 images
in Prelaunch KSP2 Discussion
Posted
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.