Wheehaw Kerman

In your view. It seems we have pretty much opposite opinions on all of these points, but that’s fine, and you do you. Me? I come down pretty far out on the simulation end of the simulation/gaminess spectrum. IMHO, game quality correlates strongly to realism. In KSP, I’d support things like realistic atmospheres/orbital decay, reaction wheel saturation, boiloff, ullage, RTG decay, limits on throttleability and restarts, and pretty much anything that adds challenge by increasing realism and eliminating that sort of annoying, immersion-wrecking unrealistic omission/copout. As I’ve said, I’m sure there’s a point where I’d stop enjoying the additional realism, but stock KSP1 is nowhere near that. I’m never going to pilot a spacecraft, and the closest thing I’ll ever get to that not simulating that sort of think kinda irks me.

I think that penalizing colonies for fatal LS management makes perfect sense; “no way am I going THERE! Have you seen their casualty rates?” Being able to rescue a Kerbal after three years (heck, three weeks) in the equivalent of a Mercury capsule doesn’t really add much in terms of gameplay, IMHO. It’s painfully, glaringly unrealistic: we all know it’s BS and would never work in the real world. I’ll do rescue missions in Career because they are a huge money saver, but I don’t like them. OTOH, careful calibration of deadlines on rescue contracts (or building your own craft with typical Kerbal levels of over engineering in terms of LS reserves) could lead to some nailbitingly tight and therefore more dramatic, fun, and memorable rescue missions.

I’ll just point to The Cold Equations. Imagine yourself imagining Jeb, Bill, Bob and Reddshurt Kerman eyeing each other in a Hitchhiker Can after Bill announces they have only enough air for three on the return trip. Imagine Gene Kerman and the Mission Control Kerbs’ reactions to Jeb talking a long spacewalk for bonus drama. Imagine the boredom at the ceremony when they raise a monument to Jeb’s heroic sacrifice. Imagine the reaction at the Astronaut Center when Jeb shows up for work the next Monday. Imagine the gameplay when a rescue mission has a tight timeline due to low LS, and you can either drop everything, strap some solids together and slap a command module on top, and go go go, versus just saving up some rescue missions for when you need some more Kerbals. I’m not a heartless monster: I always bring stranded Kerbals home, eventually. But being able to park them on Eeloo indefinitely irks me. I do think that games get better when the stakes get higher, up to a point. And Kerbals being at risk of death is a major stake of this game. I don’t think LS would raise the stakes to anywhere near the point of diminished enjoyment. Sure, Kerbals might die, and missions might be lost (maybe twice for each player max). That danger is ever-present in real spaceflight and happens so rarely because NASA and Roscosmos got gud. And getting gud at KSP has been so fun and rewarding that we’re still here talking about how to improve its sequel, a decade after it launched. I can’t see an optional LS hard mode as being anything but an improvement.

I don’t think that this is any different from forgetting heatshields or parachutes. Do that, don’t notice it, and the result on arrival at Laythe or Eve or heaven forfend DebDeb will be every bit as terminal and game-delaying as not providing adequate LS. And then you won’t do that again :). When they brought in re-entry heating, everybody lost a few crews of screaming flaming dead Kerbals. Then we adapted, learning to enjoy the fine tuning of ablator levels and parachute selection and placement. I can’t remember the last time I lost a crew on re-entry. I can’t see the veteran players messing LS up much, and presumably there’ll be tutorial support for the new players. If they scale LS to the same level of generous abstraction as they do the rest of the game, we won’t suffer too hard :).

I think we’re thinking about reward versus punishment all wrong. If we define reward as “Kerbals arrive alive at destination, mission accomplished break out the champagne” and punishment as “Kerbals die in any of the numerous ways in which space travel can and will kill you oh god the paperwork”, then we realize that punishment is just part of the fun, and that KSP has always been pretty punitive.

I remember when aerodynamics came in; things got a little more realistic and a bit harder, but also more fun. And when I couldn’t just slam returning interplanetary vehicles into the atmosphere anymore but had to add heatshields and re-enter on more realistic trajectories, the difficulty increased, but I learned to deal with it, and had more fun. Comms? Again, the increase in difficulty and realism led to more fun. KSP gets more fun the more realistic it gets, and the less it abstracts: the more it teaches us and the more difficult it gets, the more I enjoy the game (and I don’t think I’m alone in this - in fact, I’d bet that most of us feel the same way). It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun played with all the “Space is hard” stuff switched off, and I expect LS will be no different. In fact, I’d bet that if KSP2 adds LS, inside of a month we’d have it figured out, be enjoying it, and wouldn’t want to play without it.

Field Marshal Jebediah Kerman will not have read Sun Kzu.

It’ll depend on what you can use the colonies for. I’m really looking forward to interstellar. I expect my first play through is going to be all about quickly getting the tech and the infrastructure so that I can launch to the new systems, and once I get there, building the infrastructure so that I can give them a nice comfy thorough exploring. I expect I’ll spend more time building more and larger bases in the new systems than I will in the Kerbol system. I’ve got 3K hours plus into Kerbol. The new horizons are calling. (Then again, the Mün, Duna, and Laythe really deserve more colonization than KSP1 permits and with the new graphics the colonies are likely to be very easy on the eyes indeed…)

Thing about rescue missions now is that I think: “oh, geez, Jeb is stranded on the Mün in a lander can again. Realistically the time to procure and build a rescue craft, plan the mission, train the crew and launch and fly it is going to mean that the little spud will have run out of air and food a year before we can rescue him.” Those of you who watch For All Mankind will remember the Apollo 11 episodes in S1; there simply wasn’t any way to rescue a crashed Apollo crew. It still gives me goosebumps after multiple rematches. And The Martian would have been a completely different movie if Damon’s character didn’t need to eat and breathe. The thing about pulling off a rescue mission is that I (heck, we all) know that I’m exploiting a design gap in the original game that’s every bit as glaring as omitting aerodynamics (which Squad fixed) or reentry heating (which Squad fixed) or comms blackouts (which Squad fixed). I expect that Squad would have fixed the absence of LS, too, given better initial game design and coding and a bigger budget. I’m fine with casual players being able to turn all that off if they want, but coming at the game as a spaceflight history nerd with a preference for realism, lack of life support is IMHO a worse flaw than, say, infinitely restartable engines with 100% throttle range. LS is as essential to manned spaceflight as rocket engines. It’s been central to the plot of a hell of a lot of bad SF and some of the best. A new and much improved KSP with an educational vocation should aim to address KSP1’s failings in that respect. Leaving it to the modders would be a failure and a copout.

Somewhat off topic, but I build anything going past Minmus with two extra seats and ideally one compartment per Kerbal. Self imposed requirement for living space. Command chair builds are fun and hats off to the minimalists, but I tend to lean in favour of real(isticish)ism… To your point earlier about large ships with large crews running out of LS, I’d suggest that that’s just an engineering challenge. A lot of people build huge delta-v margins into their crafts and spam landing legs and parachutes. I’d bet most of us never bother trimming excess ablator on our heatshields. I think that life support will be similar; until we get good recycling tech farther up the tree (or the individual players’ urge to refine and perfect and hone kicks in), LS overkill will be common. But making it toggleable like comms is really the ideal approach, IMHO. Easy accommodation of both ends of the spectrum :).

*Space* is the sort of harsh mistress you only find on, um, VERY niche sites ;). Point taken on long missions in large saves, although, TBH, I’m not a big fan of quicksaving. I’ll use it, but it diminishes the experience. Having life support toggleable just like comms is a very workable approach and I’d be happy with that.

I don’t see it as any more frustrating than realizing you forgot the parachutes when you get to destination, or forgetting to deploy solar panels or losing comms on an unmanned probe, or staging errors, all of which nobody would want to nerf?

Thing is, we wind up screwing up and killing vessel-fuls of dead Kerbals on the regular. Even most of the time until we get the hang of things. We’re all fine with crashes and bad re-entries and explosions killing Kerbals; they all add value pedagogically and gameplaywise. I don’t see life support as being any different.

I’d like to see life support: air, snacks, radiation, temperature, and on the longer missions, living space. With running out of air and snacks, and too much radiation and too much or not enough heat being fatal. Space is hard, and life support failures are every bit as lethal as crashing, burning up on re-entry, rapid unplanned disassemblies and so forth. I’d even argue making it the default is the way to go, with option to switch it off. Initially I found comms a bit challenging, but now I really enjoy it. The slight added complexity and challenge adds a lot of fun, I find.

Go to Dres. Play with its new rings.

I can live with that. It’ll be fun poking around seeing whether old designs still work, revisiting old haunts and admiring the shiny new scenery, and testing out the new bits.

Perhaps keep the pilots, scientists, and engineers, and add “colonists” to operate colonies (mostly by just being in them, I’d think)?

Awesome. I am less sad now. Thanks!

One thing that I’m hoping to see is more crewed parts. I’m one of those guys who likes to give his Kerbals living space on missions beyond Minmus or longer term missions like stations and bases. I like to have at least two seats per Kerbal, and the lack of command modules and Hitchhiker cans in the larger part sizes makes me sad. The shuttle parts are just too… spaceplane-specific.

Coming in a bit late. Longtime lurker here, much longer time player (since late 2012 (?) north of 3K hours, been and returned from everywhere but Tylo and surface of Eve) last I looked. I’m pumped, and am looking forward to Early Access with great anticipation. I had a hell of a good time playing KSP1 in early access, learning the new systems, upping my game because of the sudden lack of souposphere, and so forth. I can’t wait to get started with an improved, more polished, much bigger version of my favourite game ever.