Sev

Well that’s kind of the point. It’s the only inhabited planet in a solar system devoid of life. Shouldn’t it at least look like it’s inhabited rather than just being a green version of Duna? I imagine they could rather painlessly add in stock aerial photographs of real cities and the majority along coasts on each continent along with a few inland with even just one highway connecting each. It doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed, even if the buildings were all one story clones of each other that are indestructible it’s still served its purpose as long as they appear in a realistic layout from above. Anything is an improvement from a planet inhabited by a space-faring civilisation which contains 6 or 7 buildings devoted exclusively to a space program. And why not have fields? They’re rectangular patches of land that’s a different colour than green, hardly difficult to do. There don’t need to be thousands of them, just large patches in certain areas with a few more one story clone buildings scattered at the perimeter to at least break the monotony. You can’t have a space program without central manufacturing and distribution facilities, nearby housing for the workers, outlets to feed and educate the workers, so of course they live in cities.

That’s not my experience. In a new career I started last week I have had a contract offer to measure the temperature on the ground on Eve and another to place a satellite in a stationary orbit above a specific Eve sector, despite not having left Kerbin’s SOI yet and haven’t had any offers to fly by anywhere. Perhaps it depends on difficulty level?

I very much hope it is! I would definitely prefer this to a question mark for the planets, with the moons just being a featureless ball; definitely. On an unrelated point connected to the rest of your post (very nice synopsis!): Le Verrier, who calculated where Neptune would be, also calculated that because of the, at the time, unexplained discrepancy in the orbit of Mercury and where it was believed it should be claimed with full certainty after Neptune was discovered that there was also another planet orbiting closer to the sun inside Mercury’s orbit. He named this planet Vulcan, and 120 years or so later Gene Roddenberry resurrected it for Star Trek

Since this is the official KSP forum I figured I’d post this suggestion here in the small hope that someone somewhere might see it and implement it. It seems to me it would be a relatively easy thing to do and could be something you choose to enable or disable on starting a new game in KSP 2. I love KSP, as we all do, but for me the one thing which ruined the sense of exploration (which is what the game is all about surely) was the fact that as soon as you go into the tracking station or the map view to create a manoeuvre node you see all the planets and moons. You can’t avoid knowing that Duna is red, Jool is green, and all the rest. In a game about the wonders of exploration this defeats the purpose entirely and obliterates the realism and sense of awe when seeing them once you get to them for the first time. Therefore I suggest, in the hope someone somewhere involved in KSP 2 sees this, that instead of showing the celestial bodies as they are now in the tracking station and map view right from the start you instead you have a question mark “?” in the place they should be and that only once you actually enter their SOI does each one appear as how they are represented in KSP. Give me the sense of not knowing what I’m going to see until I actually get there, please. Thanks.