Wubslin

Where's the spirit in that? My mechjeb is the vis-viva equation and a list of planetary orbital info lol

Of course. But I care less about messing with video game construction UI and more about having the navigational tools necessary to improve my flying skills. I have 1200+ hours in KSP and I still never know how to inject directly into an inclination for a conjunction-class transfer to another planet. I either need to have the target planet be coplanar with Kerbin/Earth, or I need to coincidentally have my transfer orbit's apse line be collinear with the ascending or descending node to the target planet, or else I just need to do a bigass plane change in solar orbit which is wastes delta-v. Can't I have some really simple vector addition tools or a Children of a Dead Earth-style reference frame switcher or something?

Even if I don't end up working as a part designer, it's not going to stop me from making unsolicited input lol

Or struggled to know your ascending node relative to Duna while still in orbit of Kerbin? Or your planetary phase angle?

Wait what the hell

You are thirty seconds from reaching apoapsis. You may be eaten by a grue.

I'll take a guess... KERBAL SPACE PROGRAM MMO Move over, EVE Online. We've got a bunch of nerds that know ten dollar words like "hyperbolic excess" and "oberth effect", lol.

The disk would be rigid and its own structural integrity would be the thing that keeps it in shape during acceleration. As I've said before it's just an exploration of concept and not any attempt at optimizing anything, but at the risk of derailing the thread (what topic is there to derail? I already applied, lol) I do want to go into design of spacecraft for combat application a second here. So there's two kinds of weapons that you'll see in space combat: kinetic, and radiative. Kinetic weapons include projectiles, fragmentation, and plasma like would be projected from casaba howitzers. Radiative weapons include lasers and nuclear weapons. Now the thing about radiators is that they must have a clear view of the sky and maximum surface area, which precludes the use of anti-kinetic whipple shields and means spindly construction. Any Children of a Dead Earth player will tell you that they're an ideal target to aim for. So what can you do to make high-temp radiators a hardier component of your ship? The obvious step is to remove them entirely. If you use open cycle propulsion such as nuclear thermal and weapons powered by chemical reactions (yes, including lasers) then you can remove the need for big sheets hanging off your ship. Avoiding a large heat engine power plant means you can do low-temp planel mount radiators or even evaporative cooling. If you absolutely need to get rid of a bunch of waste heat and therefore must have big radiators, a surefire way to make them a smaller target is to get them rejecting heat at a higher temperature. I'm going to steal a screenshot from the ToughSF blog to illustrate what I mean: This is great for minimizing the target cross section of a radiator, but does little to make it robust to attack. High temperature radiators are always optimized for high emmissivity, but that also means consequently that they have high absorptivity as well. Nukes and lasers would eat them at close range. Not to mention that puncturing the coolant pipes and causinfg a leak would be a death sentence. Combined with the need for a good view of the sky you'd think there would be no way to protect one of these high-temp radiators, right? Well, that was the thinking that got me coming up with concepts like that disk radiator. If you take that little high temp panel and have it constantly broiling a disk that rolls by, you suddenly have the ability to jacket that radiator in a box made of low absorptivity whipple shielding. Which means that the snaking pipe carrying your white hot coolant is now effectively shielded from weapons. As for the disk itself, making it out of a material which is designed to ablate away on extreme heating can make it resistant to nuclear weapons and lasers. Increasing the density of the disk would decrease any ablative recoil effect which could threaten to snap the disk or damage its mounting hardware. The simple fact that no coolant runs through it means it is also far more robust to kinetic attack. If I would change anything about that disk radiator design it would be to change from conductive coolant rollers to a radiative "broiler box" so that a damaged disk wouldn't chew up any sensitive mechanisms.

True, it is less efficient than a traditional "plate with a coolant snake" and it would also be robust to damage. I think the design is especially resistant to high acceleration through the axis of the craft because the radiating surface is comparatively low mass compared to a coolant snake, which minimizes weight under high thrust gravity. The bending moments occurring from high acceleration would impact the rollers in a nontrivial way that I don't want to think about right now, but some kind of track structure or else small non-coolant bearing rollers that contact the outer and inner circumference of the ring could be used to prevent slipping. You're making me think more and more about this for a war design though. Slap on some whipple shields, some emergency de-spin yo-yos, and a few hundred casaba howitzer drones on it and you've got yourself a corvette!

Luckily there is no universal 2021. Each of us has our own internal clock - our own four-velocity equal to the speed of light, c. Moving faster angles the vector more and more into space so that you travel less and less through time. Go fast enough, and 2022 will be here in an instant for you! Thus we can do many things to get to release date sooner. Board an interstellar spaceship, keep bumping this thread increasingly often for no reason, we could even drive in a circle at high speed!

Lol 10/10 post. Avatar on point

This. This so much. We all know and love the "selectable style" buttons on the context menus for parts in the VAB, right? They can just have all the different wing types be there if there need to be multiple types. Or there can be two or three wing "parts" to choose from.

And it is! In fact what could be done with conductive rollers could be achieved radiatively in an "oven", and then simply opening that oven represents a far hotter and more efficient radiator. Heat output goes with the fourth power of temperature for a given emissivity, so having that "oven" be open to the stars represents a brighter, smaller, lighter, radiator with more output. But the point is not to be efficient in that drawing, the point was to explore ideas that would be technically possible yet have never been seen before. And for the record, heat pipes are insufficient to cool a beefy heat engine like you might find on a craft that has a thermal reactor and an electric propulsion system. You definitely need pumps to circulate coolant. It's important to get creative and try to imagine all sorts of concepts that have never been seen before, regardless of if they're really the best option in the first place.

You should hire Nertea. The dude's a legend. Near future, far future... waterfall??? Come on.

Ha ha I don't know about my own credibility/experience but I love being an armchair part designer!

Lol you'd have to be a complete maniac to like the KSP 1 wing system. That whole section of the video was a love letter to the fanbase.

Wow, BIG update video. Hell yeah!

I just want more unique blurbs to show up when I hit the surface sample button, man.

The idea should be to minimize or eliminate grinding and to increase the number of destinations the player visits. I know it's too late for the game to take this approach, but I would have greatly simplified the science collecting mechanic. Or maybe just make it so that each instrument is only really effective for a specific place. Like the magnetometer boom could get 100% science collection around Moho but take a 90% penalty elsewhere, for instance. Depending on how instrumentation is scattered through the tech tree that could serve as encouragement to go new places. Finally unlocked the seismometer? Time to land on Vall!

Wow, really? They need to tighten those numbers WAY down then. Unlocking branches in parallel, you should exhaust the Kerbin-Mun-Minmus system before you even get done unlocking the fifth tier.

Speaking of, why can't Squad make an update for KSP that nerfs science collection more and more the closer you get to Kerbin? It would be great for novice and intermediate players if it turned out the only way to unlock some of the final tier parts without a massive grind was by launching manned expeditions somewhere other than just the Mun, Minmus, Ike, and Duna. Or maybe instead of doing diminishing returns, there can be a finite amount of science that can be gathered from any one location in the game. That would be extra cool. Imagine KSP 1 except you need to progressively hollow out the entire system for science. As the player runs out of low hanging fruit to collect science from, they'd need to step further and further out into the system. The player would be forced to do ever more technically challenging things for science points, but in return they could have the ability to unlock ever more OP parts. Imagine if Nertea's near future and far future propulsion mods were an extra two levels on the tech tree, and to get to them you would finally have to do that last mission you'd been dreading. Perfect opportunity to make a mini-project out of solving that problem.

I'm not trying to tear anything apart, just reply to the parts I have either a good idea about what's going to be in the game or do know some solid information on. Sorry if it came across that way.

I could not care any less for the procedural terrain in most places - I kind of wish there were more canonized glitches like the Mohole, but various canyons and things have been alright to land in. How about an algorithm with some muscle, you know? And not just height mapping - it would be cool to see some caves or something. That said, the one thing in KSP that has the highest entertainment to effort ratio is the EVA text blurbs. I literally have flown entire manned Tylo and back missions just to see what it said when you walked around on it. And one of the biggest disappointments I've had in the game was installing the outer planets mod and seeing that all surface sample and crew reports simply say things like "you've recorded your observations about the situation".

In KSP 1 the planets were a backdrop and the star of the show was the spaceflight. Apart from easter eggs and text blurbs when taking surface samples or EVA reports there wasn't much to explore. Such a development would be a big departure from the first game, but it does align with the leftmost philosophical pillar in that one post the devs made. We can all agree on that, right? If there was a wobbly leg on the barstool below it would definitely be exploration.

My my. Titling suggestion threads in the third person, are we? Fancy. No lol, but I do love these when they come along. To me the only question is not the "up and down" organization of the tree i.e. which branches relate to what, but the "left and right" parts of the tree. That is, since the KSP 2 tech tree is going to be vastly advanced in excess of what was available in KSP 1, are they still going to include all of the parts present in 1? Are they going to condense the "KSP 1" phase of the tree into fewer unlockable nodes? Are they going to truncate the beginning entirely and just start you off with more parts? I can't see needing to plow through that entire thing just to get the first metallic Hydrogen engine. That would be too unfriendly to players. It's not about technology or futurism. It's about having lots of experience in KSP 1 and being liquided at a bunch of inconveniences that crop up. Loads of stuff don't deserve to make it into KSP 2. The whole engine plate/decoupler business? Chuck it in the garbage. The maximum wing panel size being tiny can go, too. Ladders suck royally and need a rework. If you're worried about functional parts like monoprop engines or other specialty items going, I can't say much aside from the fact that there was a Gameinformer interview and there was a quote saying there were so many more parts in the sequel that the VAB menu had to be reworked. KSP 2 is going to have better navigational features. Let's not hold our breath waiting to hear what those are. They've been showing off stock planet shine in the promotional material. You do know there's going to be an original score, right? It'll be the intellectual property of Intercept but it won't get you dinged on a stream like if Roundabout popped up on Los Santos Rock Radio or something. If you play KSP 2 then you're going to hear the KSP 2 OST. Everyone knows KSP 1 was lacking in the music department. I've had it disabled for so long that watching a video on youtube where someone hasn't turned it off takes me back. Oh, those dulcet tones of Kevin MacLeod's royalty-free xylophones... I don't think there's any danger of other gamemodes (read: THE other gamemode) in KSP 2 becoming identical to sandbox. Namely, it seems that you're going to need physical resources to build structures and vehicles which aren't simply "credits". So I think that a sandbox mode will not only see free reign of the initial VAB, but also the cost of building everything would be reduced to zero resources. When you're playing adventure mode in KSP 2 the only way you should be remotely approaching this whole "never wanting for resources" thing is when you're really, really late game. Like, 100+ nuclear salt water ferries doing automated runs from an asteroid mine every synod to your main orbital shipyard level of late game. Or whatever the equivalent to that is as actually implemented. The difference between sandbox and any other mode is thinking to yourself "I want to build a 200 meter long colony ship to go to this other star system!" and then not having to grind for resources to make the parts. Anyway I have nothing else constructive to add, but this does seem to be a suggestion thread so have an MS Paint concept doodle I made for a radiator part ages ago! Now this would be cool to see in the game. Who knows, maybe I'll get into modding in order to make it a reality...