Ember12

I did see that message, and I agree that thermal jets would make this much more feasible.

Even if there are, they couldn't get close to this level of resolution.

But if it's a gas giant like Jool, getting up again will take some serious delta V.

As a potential compromise, what if the trajectory prediction tool had an option to factor in atmospheric drag? Something that you can tell "I'm going to keep my ship pointed retrograde/prograde" and it will give a rough estimation of the effect of atmospheric drag, based on the drag force that your ship would experience at that orientation. Of course, it would present only a rough estimate of where you're going to land, which might make it a good solution. You use this tool to aim roughly at your colony- maybe even from a flyby- but you still have the challenge of braking in the right manner, and executing the landing. In my view, this would provide a substitute for the intuitive knowledge needed to aerobrake well, without negating much of the interesting challenge of making a precision landing.

I'm not sure where the ambiguity is, so I will answer both possibilities that I can see. If you meant "Why is timewarping through manufacturing bad?" my answer is that no one will want to build up big colonies if one tiny factory+timewarp will get stuff made. I think that there should be incentives for building up large-scale infrastructure. If there isn't, the colony system will be shallow. If you meant, "I agree that timewarping a lot through manufacturing is bad, but you haven't given any good ideas for how to set up an incentive system" then one idea is for milestones to be in-game time sensitive, so you have to build things that make stuff fast. If you meant neither of these, please clarify.

I think this is a cool idea. Another exhaust-related effect that I think would add a lot is the merging of smaller exhaust trails. For instance, the N1's engines were pretty small, only 2 meters across, but it had 30 of them and produced a very impressive effect (see 1:18 to 2:34 of this video). Starship's first stage will have 33. If you made these in KSP you would only get a bunch of little exhaust trails. If these could be combined somehow that would add a lot.

That's a very good question. I don't know why it does matter, but in a game like KSP2 it will have to. Given that colonies have various production machines, there has to be something to stop the player from making one small mine on the Mun and then timewarping until they have enough for a Duna mission.

If radiation is a thing in the game, then you'll probably need a bunch of shielding for the uranium that is just dead weight for steel. Another issue is the mass difference. IRL uranium is heavier than steel, so a ship that can carry a cubic meter of steel wouldn't be able to manage a cubic meter of uranium on the same run (unless it had a lot of extra dV). The same applies to deuterium and xenon, LH2 and LO2, et cetera. So in order to have that sort of standardization, you'd have to make all materials of the same type have the same density.

Totally agree on the crew front. It would be very useful for staffing colonies with the Kerbals you need. About cargo though, I'm not sure how this would be done well, because a fuel tanker can't hold uranium (safely), and a uranium carrier can't hold kerosene (at least, not much). Assuming that the player has to fly each mission once before making it into a supply route, you'll probably have to start a new one for different types of cargo.

I think this idea has a wonderful amount of potential. It could also facilitate different "styles" of ship construction. You could run science missions that get you great big rocket parts for Saturn V and SLS type boosters, or research into sturdy side decouplers for Soyuz-like or asparagus rockets, or advanced control systems for SpaceX style reusability. This, plus a mechanic making it more profitable to build on existing tech than to make new stuff, would make each game different as you follow different courses of tech development in each one.

If you mean a train that doesn't need rails but hovers over anything, well, you could just point the front end up and you'd have an SSTO.

That's a good point. I'd only been thinking about worlds like Earth.

I'd be surprised if the game had space elevators. KSP2 focuses on tech that, even if we can't make, we understand about how it works. Nobody known how to make a space elevator though. At least, not the cable. You need a LOT of tensile strength.

I think you can already see contracts from the VAB.

Ah, I did miss a platform. Until now I had never even heard of Proton. Edit: Turns out Proton isn't really a platform. Probably I should have asked which version of the game people want.

Definitely Mac for me. The results of the poll are very interesting. Both Mac and Linux have more players than Console, yet they're not confirmed and Console is.

That wouldn't be as flexible as just assigning the actions themselves. Assigning the actions, rather than groups, to staging means you can free up more action groups for other purposes, things you have to do more than once.

There has been a lot of discussion about that availability of KSP2 on Mac/Linux, and one question that has never been well answered is what proportion of players play on these platforms. Hopefully this poll will shed some light on the matter.

If all actions could be activated by staging, then you could close them, toggle them, anything.

From what I've gathered, hibernation is unlikely to be in the game because no one knows how to do it. About the space requirement, I very much agree about the necessity of recreational facilities, but I don't think that it has to be temporary. If you have a ship with thousands of cubic meters per Kerbal, that's comparable to the density of a suburb, which should be fine indefinitely.

One large hurdle to sending humans to Mars is that, if you coop up a few people in a van-sized compartment for nine months, they will go insane. However, in KSP you can send a Kerbal to Eeloo in a MK1 pod, and I think that could use a change. My thought is, each ship has an internal-volume/crew-count ratio, and the higher it is, the longer you can go without your Kerbals starting to lose effectiveness. So you can go to the Mun in a packed-full command pod and that's fine, but if you go to Minmus in that capsule you'll start to lose Kerbal effectiveness on the way back. If you're going to Duna or Eve, you need some empty crew compartments. Centrifuge modules could provide a disproportionately high benefit for their mass, and if you reach a very high ratio of volume/crew then you don't have any time restriction at all.

I agree. In general, it would be useful for things that are now in action groups (i.e. opening solar panels, shutting off engines, deploying landing legs, etc.) to be accessible in the staging lineup.

If there's no functional difference, this could simply be a texture option on ropes/winches.

What would chains do that ropes and winches can't?