Presto200

What I always imagined is that I can set up a main colony and a couple “mining” colony closer to different resource locations within driving distance then I can truck them to the main colony and set that up as an automated delivery route. Then I can launch rockets with the materials from the main colony to wherever I need them to go

The problem with that is that the camera centers on the center of mass, you can see this when you manage fuel to different tanks in a spacecraft, they probably could find a way to make the camera transition anyways even when the center of mass change is sudden like with a decoupler.

I agree it is too much to put into one update especially if they are figuring out automated delivery routes to colonies and such for the resource gathering update. I also agree colonies needs to be the first thing available to the public but I don’t understand having interstellar before resources. I think the development process should be: Colonies - building colonies, getting familiar with building and launching from places other than kerbin, orbital colonies for orbital launches, probably new missions about establishing colonies different places, tutorials for colony building ect. Resource Gathering - introduce resource gathering and transporting, automated delivery routes, functionality of colonies to their full potential, new parts for drilling with vehicles, tutorials for automated delivery ect. Interstellar - introduce interstellar parts and tutorials on how to manage those maneuvers, Introduce deb-deb system, new missions for interstellar travel, ect. Multiplayer -introduce multiplayer mode/functionality, introduce the next new solar system here (instead of during the resource gathering update) because then you can explore the new system with friends making it extra special, not much has been said about multiplayer so I can’t say much here, ect. I talked more about this in the thread I made specifically for this topic

Most likely outcome but hopefully they can take some ideas

If they turned on collision for the scatter rocks and such then tracks wouldn’t just be cool it would be needed

@Dakota any chance you can let us know if any of this thread is close to what the plan is for the developers?

I didn’t think about this. I guess Kerbals will technically be a valuable “resource” in the game too. That is unless you use probes everywhere. This is a great point there will be circumstances that are new to even veteran KSP players. And when resources comes out there are going to be different resources on different celestial bodies so sometimes you will have to make those awkward missions from Jool to Moho (that is if you want every resource delivered to each of your colonies so you can build whatever ship wherever). That brings a whole new dimension to the gameplay I’m worried that it will be just a magical button on the colonies update but it will be an actual challenge when resources come out. This is again why I think resources should come directly after colonies instead of interstellar.

I think you brought up a good point about missions and colonies. Some missions will be easier with colonies on certain celestial bodies where they can launch wherever. I know they plan to add more missions with each major update. Maybe they will have different missions based on which celestial body you launch from? That’s the only way I can see that become fair.

This could be cool, if it did this for all of them I think it would only be fair that it takes longer for each biome, otherwise you could get all of the biomes in just a couple orbits

I love this post let me give my opinions: I disagree with your first point of "auto-fear" I think that the beauty of the game is getting to learn how to launch rockets and get good at the process. I like that they avoid automating parts of the game because if you automate something people will default to it and not learn the actual game. I can see how you may find that tedious however, luckily for players like you there will be orbital colonies that you can launch from already in orbit! This means once you can set one of these space stations up after the colonies update you wont have to worry about launching from Kerbin again unless you want to. I do agree that the tech tree should be a subject that the developers are always looking over and listening to the community about. I myself haven't really sat down and thought about what I think about the tech tree but I have seen a couple posts here bringing it up. They should make a thread specifically for tech tree improvement suggestions and they should take those suggestions heavily into consideration. Finally I love love love the idea of in game rewards for "failure" because they always say they see the game loop as "design - launch - fail/learn - redesign" and I agree this is a great loop but having in game reward like science (even if it is just 1 per component per failure type) makes the whole process much less frustrating and more rewarding! I think that is a great idea! It does also keep you from just quicksaving and making sure all your launches in the "in game timeline" are perfect. This is one of the best ideas I've heard for new gameplay!

The way I interpret all the interviews/dev talks I’ve seen is that the end goal for the game is to have the different fuel types need to be extracted and processed from different celestial bodies and you would get to do this with colonies and then set up delivery routes to all your different colonies to make sure everywhere has access to all fuel types. This brings a bit more meat to the game so that you can’t just go straight from Kerbin to interstellar when that’s in the game. I think it’s a similar reason that they wanted For Science! Missions to encourage further destinations than the Mun or Minmus. My concern however is that resource gathering isn’t supposed to be in the game until after interstellar. So that brings up that exact question of what’s the point. I think they’ll be great for the final game but they will just be a toy for the colonies update. When it drops it will bring being able to launch ships from these colonies and yes fun of building colonies just to build colonies, but that’s it. Gameplay wise it doesn’t bring much until resources are added. I see the benefit however of not adding that all at once. This would be so that players can get used to building colonies without worrying about resource management etc. but I don’t think it’s a big enough reason to wait so long to add resource gathering. This doesn’t make total sense because a player could just go into sandbox mode if they want to play without worrying about resources. Also version 1.0 is going to have resources so if any new player comes then they’ll have to learn colonies with resources anyways. These are the reasons I will continue to promote my thread on switching the resource gathering milestone and the interstellar milestone so that colonies have complete functionality before we go interstellar

Hopefully they will find ways to use the new engine to it's fullest to solve these problems as well as make the game more accessible for less powerful computers, I'm sure the community will find very interesting ways to build colonies in these epic sceneries (like off a cliff as you said ect.). I hope the system makes sense and gives a good challenge, that's also why in a separate thread I suggested that the developers enable scatter collision when colonies come. This could work because it would be hard to land on the rough terrain but after you build a colony you can make large landing pads/runways to make it easier and smoother for future missions. I think collision with scatter and having time-intensive animations when building colonies will make the experience meaningful and encouraging. I hope development will go down these roads.

I think the comparison is about the "frosty blue" color of the building catagory elements. Personally I think I liked KSP2's old direction of the UI more than the current version Awesome photos, thanks for showing those for people who don't know how to "code dive" hopefully it will be a good system combining VAB build style with someway to intuitively make sure the pieces are secured and stable on the ground

speaking of this I think the animations don't speed up when under time warp either

Great thoughts! I think auto-resume feature on experiments was added in the last patch but I might be wrong. I do think you bring up a good point with the animation time though. Maybe if they really wanted to keep a visual indicator for players to know when an experiment isn't running they could have a animation that closes some things but not all that takes significantly less time (like 2 seconds max).

New types of wheels (in the form of these tracks or otherwise) would be awesome! Also hopefully a rework on how the current wheels work would come with it

Hopefully the next update will fix a good chunk of the remaining bugs so that we can at least feel like the development team is making progress on the game. And hopefully we wont have to have too many updates/months in-between now and colonies.

I’ve been saying for a while that they should restructure the roadmap to have resource delivery routes come before interstellar. It would make the colonies have full functionality before going onto the next big thing for KSP2. I made a thread about it earlier

True! this post I haven't even touched the resource management side of things, thanks for bringing that up!

I wanted to voice my concern about how the devs are going to handle the actually building of the colonies in the next major roadmap update. I was thinking that the best guess as to how they will do it is you get something on the ground with a bunch of resources and a special module that allows you to go into "Colony Building Mode" wherever you have landed. Then I imagine they just put a camera above that module that you can treat like a camera in the VAB and start building your colony like you would a craft in the VAB except you are outside on whatever celestial body you landed on. I think this would be a good system at it's base and makes sense. My concern however, is that I don't want the colony building process to feel too "God-like" if that makes sense. It doesn't make sense for a colony to essentially spawn there instantly after I build it, especially if I built some massive colony with many different buildings ect. It wouldn't feel like the massive accomplishment that it should feel like, the VAB gets away with it because the building feels like it is separate from the rest of the game. once you finish your craft you get it onto the launchpad or runway and the process seems like there is an implied amount of work that the Kerbals went through to get it there. That's why in the VAB you can see the Kerbals on the ground doing "work" and get an atmosphere that they are actually putting together your design (even if it isn't seen explicitly). For colony building, there are a couple things that the devs could do to avoid this feeling. They could make the colony building process more of a colony designing process, that once you exit the build, you see Kerbals build what you just designed from the ground up. They could either do this in a quick animation or in a long period of time (maybe weeks/months depending on size of colony) where the player can time-warp past to see the finished result. This would give the opportunity to put fun little details of Kerbals working in a kerbal way to build the colony when the player is watching it in real time. There could also be a functionality that based on how many kerbals you have with you to build the colonies, the animation could be faster or slower, this would give players incentive to bring massive "colony builder" ships to their build site so they can waste no time! I feel like getting to add those details will give the game a little bit more polish that the community is looking for and give the feeling of accomplishment of something big and new. This would also pay dividends once multiplayer comes out! The devs have talked about how players will not be on the same timeline unless they decide to "sync-up" for in person interactions. I think it would be so cool to go to some celestial body and to see that your friend's Kerbals are in the middle of building his colony instead of it just suddenly being there from one moment to the next. I do see how some players would see this as just annoying though, they might say that it just is an extra waste of time before getting to actually use the colony. I think this is a fair assessment and I think a solution that doesn't use week-long animations could be having a quick animation every time you put down/remove a part/building/road when building colonies. It would differ from the VAB, instead of just some sparks that imply welding and such it could be a sped up animation of Kerbals building the colonies. Having an animation for each part of the colony will still give you the feeling of it being a massive effort of the Kerbals without it taking a while for the player to enjoy their spoils. I hope others can see my vision, I just dont want something so big to feel like such low effort in game. Please give your opinions and hopefully the devs have something good cooking up for us. ^ Like seriously, it just makes sense that something like this should take time or at least look/feel special during the build process^

I recently saw this video about someone making an aircraft carrier in KSP2 and it made me think: "Is there a possibility of aquatic colonies for the colonies update?". We have heard and seen things about land colonies and orbital colonies but aquatic colonies could just bring that extra bit of gameplay to the update (seeing that resource delivery routes wont be in the game yet). It is nice timing that they fixed the buoyancy for the most part with the For Science! update. Obviously if the devs haven't been working on this then it won't be able to happen in the update but maybe later down the line it could be added. Or maybe they're keeping it a surprise just for a little bit of shock when the release comes. I thought it would be cool but what does everyone else think? P.S. here's the video that I saw with the aircraft carrier, awesome stuff! ^ credit: Aeolica for video ^

I’m hoping others can give opinions or suggestions of other systems

I Agree that we should be able to pause to use the maneuver node, this will make it easier for new players who need to play around with the maneuver tool to learn. It also is just a quality of life thing that gives more use to the functionality of pausing the game, currently it is only used for taking screenshots and working with the parts manager. I think if we can change things in the part manager it’s logical that we should be able to change things with our maneuver plan

I just had a thought about how once these new systems come into the game it will be the first time that KSP1 players will have the option to watch tutorials and it actually matter kinda. I just thought that was funny. It is nice that they are trying to make the learning be in game instead of making us have to look up a bunch of videos on how to play like I had to for KSP1.

I think for a base game tools to help you do it manually is better than having something do it automatically for you. That's also why many don't like the science button doing all the science things at once, it takes away from the experience of the game for lots of people. If you enjoy having the automated things I hope mods come to KSP2 that allow you to do that just like in KSP1, more power to you know. However I think if it was implemented into the game, new players would just always use that and never learn how to do it for themselves.