KSK

Count me out then. A marvellous, photorealistc galaxy to explore and the only gameplay they can work around it is space combat? And space combat where you actively have to comb through goodness knows how many star systems to deliberately rain on somebody's parade. How incredibly deep and inspiring. A game based on exploration, the logistical challenge of building and maintaining the space infrastructure to support an interstellar empire, meaningful diplomatic and political interactions with either your own colonies or any alien worlds you come across, preferably skewed towards peacekeeping, cooperation and freedom rather than conquest. A game about the technical and scientific challenges of surviving on strange new worlds. Bonus points if any aliens you come across are more original than your standard, feline, reptilian and ethereal space elf tropes. I would be all over that. A tired old MMORPG where a significant percentage of the playerbase won't even regard it as a game unless they can go out and spoil somebody else's day for no reason at all (because only carebears don't like that stuff amirite)? Blow that for a warp drive and a handful of space marines. Edit: For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not aiming this rant at DAL59 personally. His description of the planned gameplay for SE just provided a convenient jumping-off point for it.

In most cases, the operative word was 'had'. Edit. Sorry - replying to old post. Please disregard or delete if a friendly moderator is passing by.

Yup - not dissimilar to fermented yak milk in tea (although I think the quantities are about equal in practice or favour the milk). Very traditional in Mongolia, Tibet and neighbouring parts of the world (I think). Probably a Ussari delicacy too but naturally we do not speak of this. Or you could consume them separately I guess.

This. Personally, I wouldn't count any 'dogfights in space' kind of game as particularly hard sci-fi. At best you might get a Star Citizen / Elite: Dangerous style hand-waving away of some of the issues (well it's all proper physics beneath the surface but your fly-by-wire system makes your ship handle like this.) Elite II: Frontier was somewhat hardcore space combat, at least in the sense that it used a 6 degrees of freedom, Newtonian flight model. In my limited experience and skill, most combat turned into high speed Space Jousting. Possibly somewhat realistic but a bit lacking in visceral, exciting gameplay.

If it's not aboard a secret base in synchronous orbit over Mexico, I'm going to be disappointed.

S'OK - pretty sure that they don't need to stir the tanks for this one.

Which would be Kerbulan Ale of course.

That's an ending that needs some music... Dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum... Val! Aaaaah-ahh! Shavior of the universe! I'm sorry - the bad voices made me do it.

I'm trying to think of another Chess Cheks related situation that might apply but I'm coming up a bit short. We've seen gambits used already - I was wondering if the Intrepid crew could engineer a stalemate situation somehow where anything the Kerbulans do next will put them in such an objectively worse situation that even Evil Val would recognize that there was no good way out. That would kind of fit with Kerbfleet's aversion to violence but at the same time it does rather side-step any actual resolution to Kerbfleet's moral dilemma about how to deal with the murdery murderers, so might not be very satisfactory from a storytelling perspective. There's also the slight drawback that I can't imagine how the Intrepid crew would actually engineer a stalemate but that's probably more a limitation of my imagination. Edit - stalemate would also fit with the 'no way we can win' motif. No you can't, Intrepid - but sometimes a draw is enough. Random other thought - Cheks is great and all but it is only a training tool. Real life sometimes requires you to think outside your training - although that only really works if you have a command structure in place that recognizes that and actively supports it where necessary. It strikes me that Kerbfleet are probably very good at such command structures but the Kerbulans would be incredibly bad at them. And if Dilsby(?) has learned to think like a Kerbulan then perhaps he's also learned how to think outside of their strictures. In any case, I await developments with anticipation!

Oh yeah! Nice update. For the record, I would trust in Kerbfleet AI (Artistic Integrity) to prevent cheating, even without having Mr Blocko there to enforce it.

There would even be some scientific merit in it. If I remember rightly, the Apollo 12 crew brought bits of the Surveyor back home (Pete Conrad chose the Surveyor camera as his 'trophy fish') so that the effects of long term exposure of those bits to the lunar environment could be studied. Well now you've got quite a lot of extra data points to continue those studies if you could bring home samples from Surveyor (yay for time resolved samples), the Apollo 12 LEM descent stage and whatever gear (including ahem, surplus organic material) was left on the surface. I can't see much merit in doing more than one of those sample return missions but that little corner of the Ocean of Storms would be the place to do it.

Chickens can in fact sneeze. Amusingly so.

Can't wait!

Here you go @Alpha 360

I sense a Kobayashi Maru moment approaching. If you can't possibly win - change the rules. Oh - and @Nimzo Kerman - for the record, I associate with the Honourable Brotherhood of the Noble and Most Learned Fruitloops. Since you weren't asking.

Actually, if you look at this thread, it started off with a modest proposal, no super kerbals of either gender suggested or required. The first page of comments were variations on a theme of 'yeah, why not', with some discussion over details. Then Cassel steps in with his 'is this a game for kids or feminists' comment and things got a bit more disputational. Why not - purely from a gameplay perspective, more variety in colour would make the legions of white-suits a bit more interesting. As for the your second point - probably yes if you could figure out a way of visually representing, for example, a gay kerbal, without descending into cliche. @Rocket In My Pocket - please accept my apologies. My reply to your post was more aggressive than it needed to be and your idea of having a 2x2 orange suit team to start with is a perfectly sensible one that solves the balance and bloat issues together. Sorry. @adsii1970 - with respect, there's quite a bit more difference than just hair and eyebrows. And yes, in hindsight it might have headed off a number of threads if Squad had chosen a more neutral design for the kerbals. A green version of the Grays perhaps, only less sinister. Then again, there's a definite sub-set of players that like to identify with their kerbals and then you get examples like @James Kerman's daughter where having a kerbal avatar she can relate to has drawn her into the game. Then you get the folks that like the parallels between KSP and real life space programs - and they're getting a whole expansion aimed at them, so presumably Squad thinks they're a big enough player demographic to matter. So I would argue that having gendered characters has helped drive KSP's popularity (leaving aside any arguments as to whether that was right or necessary). And as soon as you have gendered characters then the sorts of arguments you refer to are pretty much inevitable because some folks do see balance between those characters as important. But I've already said my piece on that topic and the OP has been kind enough to quote it in the first post, so I won't rehash it here.

I would be honoured. I can't claim any of those thoughts are particularly original mind - others have expressed them far more eloquently than me - but they're ones that I strongly agree with.

No, I don't think I will thank you. I'll feel free to express my views here (politely I hope) in the same way that you obviously feel free to express yours. As for creating a game with my view of equality, in my own limited way, I am. I'm not much of a coder or an artist which does limit what I can do when it comes to creating video games, but I can write, so that's what my mod is about. Personally, I get annoyed when people don't bother engaging with what I'm saying but jump straight into personal attacks and getting offended just by the fact I'm saying something they disagree with. But "equality" - that's a good point. What is equality and (back on topic) why does having three female orange suits on KSP rather than one, actually matter? All I can give you here is my answer to that question which I'll warn you now, is a bit long-winded and one which folks on this thread - including the ones that voted 'yes' in the poll - may well disagree with. So here goes. I would define equality as not letting a person's gender, orientation, colour, religious beliefs etc. affect the respect they're given, the dignity they're afforded or the opportunities made available to them. That doesn't necessarily mean treating everybody exactly the same. To use a slightly contrived example, if I'm advertising a job and one of the absolute 'can't-do-the-job-without-this' requirements is that the successful candidate must be able to benchpress 300lbs, then that's probably going to rule out most women from applying for the job - certainly more women than men. What equality means in this context does mean is that if I do get a female interviewee (or a candidate identifying in any other way for that matter) that can benchpress those 300lbs, then the fact that she's also female is irrelevant. Likewise, equality is not adding a bogus 'must be able to benchpress 300lb' requirement to my job advert, purely to discourage women from applying. To use a different example, if I feel that somebody is being an idiot, then I'm not obliged to give them any respect - but whether they're a male idiot or a female idiot shouldn't affect how little respect I give them. Likewise, I shouldn't be giving the female idiot any more respect just because she's female. Equality goes both ways. I'm kinda hoping we can agree on this much, or at least not disagree too badly on this much, because otherwise we're really just talking past each other. So yeah, going back to my definition. As I see it, there all sorts of ways in which people are not treated with equality according to that definition. There are the overt 'isms' - racism, sexism and the like. Then there are the, much more insidious, social narratives. Those are a real problem - you can be the most genuinely equal-opportunities employer ever but if the prevailing social narrative is that "girls don't do those jobs" then you're probably not going to see a whole of lot of women replying to your job advert. Even worse, it simply may not occur to women that applying for those jobs is even an option. That's a real thing by the way - go look up the "Draw a Scientist" test if you want an example. Which brings us back to this thread and back to my earlier point. KSP matters when it comes to equality because to some extent KSP will be shaping that social narrative. KSP is also all about science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), which are all fields where women tend to be poorly represented. Which, at face value, is strange because there's no good physical or mental reason why that should be the case. Doing maths doesn't require a mathematician to benchpress 300lb. Therefore the reasons for that poor representation are largely due to social narrative. Therefore shaping the narrative around STEM is especially important. Therefore KSP is more important to that than you'd perhaps give it credit for. And actually, to be fair, KSP isn’t all bad at equality. It does have male and female astronauts, it does pay tribute to notable real-life female astronauts. But most of the females are faceless white suits and the tribute names are buried in amongst a heap of procedurally generated ones. The notable characters - the orange suits, the guys in the strategy building, Gene, Wernher - are, apart from Val, all male. At which point, Val does start to look just a little bit like the token female. Which isn’t a helpful narrative - ‘space and science are mainly for guys but hey we’ve got this one woman here too, so that’s OK.’ Which is why I’m all in favour of at least making the orange suits gender balanced. TL:DR. I can’t force you to agree with me but yes, I believe that better gender representation in KSP is important. And I vigorously disagree with folks that want to hand-wave it away or dismiss it because ‘KSP is only a game’ or ‘you’re just being a crazy-wing propagandist about this.’ Here endeth the lecture.

I disagree. I think that a (relatively) popular game about science and spaceflight is exactly the kind of forum where ideas on gender balance can make a difference. The more an idea permeates popular culture, the more likely it is to be seen as the new normal and popular culture is far more powerful in that respect than any number of well meaning policies. So I'd say this is a topic worth paying attention to and doesn't reflect a low sense of self worth in anyone at all. If that makes me a crazy-wing propagandist, I'll own that title with pride.

Sorry but saying that you're not against gender inequality but you are against changing the status quo to make it more equal - is just lame. And the 'we don't know know if Kerbals have gender' argument is equally lame. The short answer is 'no we don't because there's almost no official lore about the kerbals.' The long answer is 'despite this lack of lore, kerbals are presented in-game as having a clearly human-male or human-female facial characteristics and given either clearly human-male and human-female names, or names drawn from two different pools of syllables to reflect the fact that there are two types of Kerbal. Therefore they are perceived as male and female.' Not aiming this last comment at you specifically but every time this kind of thread crops up, I'm left wondering what would have happened if Squad had named the Original Three, Josephine, Barbara and Belinda? We'll never know, but I'm prepared to bet a substantial amount of money that: a) There would have been a large number of threads complaining about the lack of male named kerbals because real world astronauts are mostly men so KSP wasn't being 'realistic'. b) That there would have very few to no protests about including more male named kerbals, or spurious appeals to the status quo (kerbals have always had female names - giving them male names too would be wrong), or appeals to non-human biology. (Hey maybe these kerbals just choose to wear short hair.) OK, that last one was aimed at you a bit - sorry.

Well it wouldn't have been much of a nod to the early game otherwise would it?

Can't really say I'm either but somehow I'm still playing KSP. Be off with you, pesky false dichotomy - shoo! Hmmm, I don't recall ever seeing a single kerbal on the ISS though. Perhaps KSP isn't real life and doesn't have to include the same historical baggage that real life space programs come with. That makes zero sense from any perspective, gameplay or otherwise. It would however, be an excellent way of making a highly contentious mountain out of a small cosmetic molehill. I use cosmetic in a gameplay sense - in the same way that an open world RPG for example might include male and female avatars that are functionally identical so far as the game is concerned. Oh, please. The orange suits are a nod to the early days of KSP - nothing more, nothing less. You may as well get worried about Jeb not earning his Duna landing, because Duna wasn't in the first version of the game.

Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen.

I'd be all for this. I'd be up for making the ground crew roster a bit less lopsided too, although I appreciate that would be rather more work than adding a couple of new orange suits. Margaret Kerman anyone?

Of course. Cheks is life. And possibly death.