Bartybum

The answer's somewhere in the topic, you can verify for yourself. Safe to say though that if Blackrack were to have any plans to discontinue because of KSP2, then it would be news to me

God damn this is an absolute monster of an achievement dude, you should be proud. The Dunian sandstorm also blows my mind, I never would've thought of that Any idea how transferable something like this would be to engine smoke effects, in light of a question a few pages back asking about lighting from engines? I ask because something I've always hated about KSP's engine smoke particles is that they have a constant brightness totally independent of the time of day. lol

I'd really like a topic dedicated to the colony system and the core meat and potatoes behind it, i.e. resource management, expansion, automation, the whole lot. We've had functionally nothing beyond pretty asset renders and I'm starting to get worried that the colony system is one of the big things delaying the game.

Gah this is amazing Seeing that you can directional sound working, how simple would it be to have engine sound that changes depending on direction? i.e., fan noise dominates the front, but exhaust noise dominates the rear

Oh man I love the work you're doing. The synthesized rotor sounds are amazing, even if they're still WIP Also would be really keen to see this include ReStock Plus one day, if you ever get around to doing it

Yeah same here. I don't need answers, but I want to get in on mystery and speculation. I always thought it was a missed opportunity that anomalies didn't contribute towards science (could have been done via surface outposts and science labs), and that they didn't contribute towards any actual lore of the game by the time of release. There was NovaSilisko's Duna SSTV signal, but beyond that there wasn't really anything else. This leads into what always bothered me about KSP, which was that there wasn't any point to the career mode beyond the tech tree. It was far too quick to complete (and the science labs basically broke the game), so once you had all the parts unlocked there wasn't really anything left to do. Anomaly science and lore would have made for some cool progression, and could have easily been done via contracts

@Radekpl It does look awesome, but from what I can tell the bottom linkage isn't fully constrained. I think something a little simpler/more conventional would do better, like halfway between that and what it was originally.

+1 for Komondors

I agree. I think the best case for this game would be to be KSP 1 (although a proper career mode), as well as 2. It really needs to explore the same stuff the first did, as well as all the new stuff too.

What can I say, I have magic powers

Could this not be solved fairly easy with some programming? Check whether the ship's a dirigible, and if it is and it's at a standstill then freeze it in place. The only real problem I could see would be weather currents affecting the ship's position

Oh no no, I mean have a mining ship that takes raw resources to a nearby processing facility. To separate helium and hydrogen there may be some more complex and heavy equipment required than what can be afforded on a spacecraft.

A derrick/floating installation kinda seems superfluous if you think about the logistics of the whole operation. At its most basic, the derrick is just a floating pump with a reactor to power it. If you have a tanker ship that needs to rendezvous with the derrick to load the gas, then you're burning through a lot of fuel to slow all the way down, collect it and then get back into orbit. You'll end up chewing through all that dV just to stop and hook up with a pump. At that rate you may as well just carry the pump with you, scoop up the gas, and take it to an orbital refinery. If you're flying a ship with an efficient fusion reactor then you have no need for a mining installation to begin with.

As long as you have an atmosphere, you can have lift. Assuming you have a flying fusion reactor that can scoop up the hydrogen and extract energy from it without violating energy conservation laws then it's totally possible. In reality though, a permanent fusion aircraft would be neither possible nor responsible, because of material fatigue life and safety precautions (what if you experience a reactor shut down in flight? That's a likely goodbye sweet prince). Eventually you'd need to punch back into orbit, dock with a newer transport and then discard the old one. At that rate, it's likely more convenient just to have a dirigible. To be honest, while they are cool as hell, I wouldn't really see any purpose in having dirigible installations/colonies versus orbital counterparts equipped with atmospheric skimmer aircraft to handle mining. Assuming compact fusion works, I feel like there's less material speculation with orbital installations anyway.

I probably should've asked about density rather than pressure.

Wow, now isn't that spicy. Cheers peeps

Are floating bases in gas giants even possible in real life? Would the pressures and temperatures not be too high for current material capabilities?

I think it's not even remotely worth worrying about

I consider myself in the core group, because I think options are necessary to help cater to more casual and inexperienced players, which has been the general consensus here AFAIK. However, I've seen no indication of us in this thread wanting mods to be made standard. I also don't agree with the idea that we have an agenda to rush the game. To me opt-out is by far the way to go - this is the game, and if it's too hard for your liking, here's some things you can disable to help you along. Balance the game to be played to its fullest first, and then sort the other stuff out.

Amen, wouldn't mind if people were kinder to each other. Big deal if someone wants weapons in stock. I don't care much for weapons either, but there's no need to gate-keep over different tastes. "WeApOnS dOn'T bElOnG iN KsP" Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, maaan Peeps definitely need so be a bit more tolerant of one another.

Lol no. We can wait and play KSP in the mean time

You misunderstand me. He's just playing around

Because he likes explosions, clearly. I'm surprised you two are taking Bej seriously lmao

Hurr durr I doubt that it'll affect balancing, but then I just say oh they don't care about balancing anyway. You are correct, and I apologise. I was under the impression we were talking about sandbox, and forgot about career. After thinking about it, I can see how optional/difficulty-based features like aero heating, and comm line of sight may affect career balancing, regarding funding rewards. If I don't need to set up a relay network first to send probes to a low orbit, the surface, or really far away from mission control, then my spacecraft will be cheaper. The reward I get will hence be worth more than the effort I put in. Likewise, if I can ignore aero heating, then I don't need to pay for heat shielding, nor do I need to carry as much life support (if enabled) to support multiple aerobraking events, and/or fuel for capture burns. I don't really see plasma blackout and G-limits impacting reward balance. For the player who doesn't really want to be penalised, leaving rewards alone would be okay. However, for the player that feels that they shouldn't be receiving as many rewards because they're not using all the hard features, fixing these balancing issues could entail identifying what each reward in the game is based on, and making them based on what features are and aren't enabled. Assuming the rewards are all hand crafted (I don't really think this is unreasonable), then I don't really see this as much of an issue in regards to balancing, as they need to spend time figuring out appropriate rewards anyway. So I'll concede that balancing may be impacted, but I don't think that balancing would necessarily be very difficult to do, at least from a rewards perspective. For the moment I think it's still too early in development to tell whether optional difficult features will have other balancing issues that negatively affect career mode.

I'll take "gatekeeping" for $500, Alex. That sort of game really seems to be hostile to those who may just want something a little bit between relaxed and full on.