KerikBalm

I disagree, KSP 1 lacks an entire outer solar system. Look at OPM, that's already a huge addition, but it lacks a kuiper belt analogue. What of a mission to a Sedna analogue? We could have HiPEP engines, project Timberwind engines, nuclear lightbulbs, air augmented rockets, nuclear reactors for powering colonies, etc. There's still a lot to be done without going interstellar, and IMO the colony mechanics wouldn't violate near future technology. The technology to make building like we have on earth, but airtight, is not far-future. The issue with colonies is the scale, the sheer mass of what you'd need to send, before it could bootstrap itself. Of course, we have to define what near-future is. I like to take a broader definition: technology we could have soon if there was the political will to have a concerted push to develop it - as opposed to technology that we likely will have soon. One would include nuclear engines like those proposed by the Timberwind project, or even nuclear lightbulds. The other may not even include a flight ready HiPEP propulsion system. Agreed. Interstellar allows for exploring different worlds without cluttering the Kerbin system. An alternative would be an option to start in different systems (currently something offered in KSP through mods like JNSQ) I would simplify, its a simulator of something like our "local" environment and ways which we can move around and interact with it (vehicles). This allows for all of the above. People can build rovers and trek across Kerbin, boat across kerbin, dive down to the depths of its oceans, set land speed record on ice shelves, do aerobatics, make VTOLs and land on high mountain peaks, and go to space and do the previous stuff on other worlds. All the rest emerges from the core simulator aspect. Although KSP1 really isn't A, not without heavy modding. its just Interplanetary And its rather poor at E

There are two things to discuss here: 1)Do we want underwater exploration, and 2)Do we want subsurface oceans? For 1) - definitely yes for me. We should have have Kerbin, Laythe, Eve, Puff, Merbal, and Lapat that should have liquid oceans. That is quite a lot. I would also hope for a more proper titan analogue. I don't see how exploring the seafloor should be any less important than exploring any other planetary surface. Such exploration is already workable in KSP1 (particularly with robotics), and simple modding to add ore and surface features from breaking ground already adds a lot to the incentive for underwater exploration Throw in the parallax mod, with it's much more interesting scatter, and it is even better For 2) If the planets/moons we've seen, this would only seem to apply to the ice shelves of Kerbin, the small ice caps of Laythe, and the massive ice sheets or Merbal (dunno about Lapat) Looking at the parallax mod here, it may be feasible for ice shelves. I haven't tried parallax yet (it's on my to do list, but I have very little time right now), but IIRC I saw a video that showed it added Ice sheets to the surface of Laythe, in the form of collidable procedurally generated scatters that covereed the ocean surface, with some openings. Something like that may be possible, but is not ideal: the planet would fundamentally change depending on scatter settings I think we can pass on 2

Having made submarines for laythe and mod worlds with Oceans, the challenge has always been in getting the craft down in one piece. I additionally took up the challenge of making subs that could deploy from and re-dock with seaplanes, for long distance travel across the water. The subs generally just go nearly straight down, try to find a surface feature that had been modded to be at the bottom of the sea, scan it for science points, and then return to the seaplane Beyond that, I have made diving bells to allow mining of the seafloor at locations where the surface isn't too far above the seafloor -underwater mining without direct connection to the surface is a pain, subs can't transfer much ore to the surface without becoming too buoyant

Well, other games with height maps may have 1 single height vertex depressed to make a hole, and then a 3d object fills the hole. We could make have a cave system/lavatube network object to fill a steep terrain depression

Well, what I ended up doing was attaching a bunch of wings to heavy parts, and then using the part offset tool to move them out, so the wing parts aren't actually attached to one another here: I'm not sure how FAR would interpret this. Also I think it improves computational performance, because there are fewer "links in the chain" of forces. Each wing applies a force just to a part that is very close to the root, as opposed to having to compute a long chain of forces and wings bending, whatever. I'm not sure on this though. Even my lower part count 2.stage designs (for scaled up kerbin, anywhere from 3-6.4x), I'm really not happy with the wing options:

IMO, the biggest hinderence to having more realistic aerodynamics in KSP1 was the lego-like aspect of wing building, and the floppyness of wings parts attached to wing parts attached to wing parts. Now that they have procedural wings,I am very much in favor of a more realistic aero-model. Of course, there are still limits, we can't do "coke-bottle" or "Wasp-waist" parts either to do better area-ruling, so, there should be some limits to aero-realism, recognizing that there are limits to the build process

I wasn't really aware of this, can you supply some pics showing the drag readouts. How much difference are we talking? I have taken to using very long cylindrical fairings at structural elements for lower part counts. While I normally try to keep my AoA close to 0 and rely on incidence, obviously there is some deviation from this

Is that really all that has been asked for, it is not clear to me. I had the impression that the ability to mix and match features, regardless of associated gender, has basically already been conceded (it would take VERY little work to implement, one would think). However, it's not clear to me if those proposing the idea want more than that or not

What are you referring to with first man?

Huh? I'm not comparing anything. I am stating that the inclusion of female kerbals is done, the resources were spent. Complaining or asking for their removal won't suddenly make resources available for something else (such as fixing the robotic drift bug, or whatever else you wish had been developed more, like stock scatterer or something) If non-binary kerbals are implemented beyond unrestricted mixing of stereotypical male/female characteristics, and it's done, I won't complain. Just as I didn't when the (IMO) useless Kerbal customization was shown(until now), because it was clear it had already largely been implemented. I don't object to it per se, I object to it's opportunity cost.

I am not one of those people, and I didn't think KSP was one of those games... I am not alone (hmm, perhaps I should start a poll, but how to avoid sampling bias?) I view the Kerbal customization that they've already shown for KSP2 as a waste of development resources. I do not wish further resources to be wasted on it. Just curious, are you even out of school? While ambition is often good, this comes across as naïve to the true challenges. I suspect "early design" is more of a "vague concept", perhaps with some rather basic calculations as to required masses and dimensions. Widows peaks are not male specific. Neither are "square heads"... a quick google search:

It is over, the effort and resources were spent. Removing female kerbals won't, for example, fix the robotic drift bug. I see it as just more of a distraction that will take resources away from the core gameplay that actually matters. That said, as I have repeatedly said in this thread, since they have already wasted (IMO) their resources on Kerbal customization, I have no issue with removing any gender restrictions on kerbal customization options. If you want the eye-lashes and hair styles that go with "conventionally female" kerbals, and a beard, or whatever, go for it.

Yea, and I am still not convinced that it was a better idea than making them androgenous or asexual. As @Aliquido said, they might as well be space broccoli

Another definition: "Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals" Biological sex at least is important to current group decisions: who to send to war, how much time off one is allotted after the birth of a child, who is allowed to compete with whom. Similarly, whether any credence should be given to the differentiation between subjective gender vs objective sex in relation to the above issues is an undecided matter. It is political, but then again, almost anything relevant to anyone can be political, I would just limit it to matters currently under public debate, "decided issues" are no longer political (such as slavery is bad, at least in most of the world) But we don't need to discuss the politics My view is that in KSP 1, there are 3 types of kerbals that I care about: scientists, engineers, and pilots The only Kerbal customization I would care to see in KSP2 would be some sort of RPG skill tree, allowing for cross-training of skills, allowing there to be just one type of kerbal - or maybe 2: ground bound scrubs and astronaut kerbals

Is this confirmed? What about when you pilot a multi kerbal ship in multiplayer. Personally, I never cared for the focus on Kerbal customization in the first place. This proposal is just more irrelevant diversion of resources from what I care about Well, people often speak about gender and sex (but from an etymology standpoint, the meanings are reversed) We only ever see 1-2 biological sexes in a given species, for fundamental reasons that should be valid for aliens as well. Of course the biological sex could be like we see in Yeast, with mating type A and mating type Alpha, and the ability to switch mating type. Or as in C elegans, males and hemaphrodites, and so on. I also don't see why gender needs to be codified in the code itself. "Male" and "female" kerbals should behave the same. I don't object to allowing mixing of "male" and "female" features. Why not. Gender is many non-mutually exclusive things. It is a political subject, that's just the reality Indeed, just allow Kerbal customization, with traits unrestricted by a male or female status, and be done with it. No more labelling. Its already something they've focused on, even though I really don't care if all my Kerbals are 100% identical clones, and Kerbal biology is such that they reproduce by asexual budding. Well, before Valentina, it was just a set of identical looking aliens. One could write off any resemblance to a certain human gender as coincidental/irrelevant. Then valentina came in, and the parallels with human sex/gender became obvious

Like... a panther? :p Well, I don't know of many heroic figures from native American tribes. There are some famous figures, like: Geronimo, Hiawatha, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, Pontiac... But they don't seem like good names, and many are in fact tragic figures (not surprising given what happened to most of the Native American tribes). And to illustrate the point re: 5th gen fighter profiles:

Its not that heavy, and its got a very good TWR. Compared to something like an F-15 or a SU-35, it is positively light. Its profile is a bit "fatter" looking than previous aircraft, but so is something like the J-20, its the nature of aircraft that carry their weapons internally My bad, drop the numbers, they aren't useful. Phantom IIs are out essentially of service. There won't be any confusion. I did check though, while development started in WW2, its first flight was 1947, not 1945

Phantom (2?) Lime the F-4 Phantom which was a successful multi-service fighter, "phantom" also evokes the stealth factor. But I do like "panther" too

Yea, it's not ideal in kep 1 using a bunch of ore tanks and jet engines or breaking ground rotors+ lifting surfaces for propellers (generally more if a hassle than jets, but what else can you do on Eve or a mod world like Tekto)

I think they said no to "teraforming", which could be something like being able to change duna to have oceans and a thicker atmosphere this is just "landscaping" Almost certainly not. I am counting on this in the launch. I can already do all that in unmodded KSP1 (granted, the "colony" just mines and produces ore/fuel) It would be nice if we could get some sort of oblate spheroid instead of a sphere, to allow for simple modelling of tides

Not wanting to restart the metallic hydrogen debate, I will just say that I agree with everything else Strawberry said (although Orion drive is *certainly* possible). It is Sci-Fi, but so we're communication satellites at one point. It is (mostly) not fictional science/fantasy in space. Back to the topic, I expect many planet mods to be carried over with extensive reworking since much finer scale details are possible

Indeed, this isn't meant to be a KSP vs Arma comparison, I just got excited by a game using an interation of a very old engine doing what had been said for decades to not be possible on the engine. It made me rethink my position on KSP. It would be rather nice to be able to flatten ground for bases and where craft will land, rather than raising structures up on variable length struts

WHile it is true that the scale is quite different, its not as different as it appears at first. Most heighmaps for planets (stock and mod) are in the form of 1024x2048 or 2048x4096 black&white images. Arma 3 most commonly uses a 4096x4096 grid size (with cell size varying from 3.75 meters to 7.5 meters, for (15.36x15.36 km or 30.72x30.72 km maps). In terms of the base heightmap unit size, they are actually quite comparable, but you don't find terrain vertices every few meters in KSP. However, KSP does have a noise overlay, which I think can make procedural detail on a scale much lower than the grid size. Here's a heightmap I applied to a mod planet with no noise overlay: Here the grid is quite obvious but applying some noise overlay can mask that... no not that much: that looks better, plus the visual mods help I think: So, I don't know. On the one hand, changing the base heightmap makes more sense when its every few meters. Changing it on KSP reshapes huge tiles of ground, maybe less useful. The smaller scale details, being likely procedurally generated, seem harder to change, maybe one can change the parameters for a tile? to make an area less bumpy and more suitable for landing (or less collidable scatter?) Here's an example of a runway I "built" on a mod planet, by changing the heightmap: This was before applying a noise overlay, I wonder if I could specifically remove the noise around the airstrip... Building ground based colonies seems like it would be hard to make a suitable runway. Even the one at KSC is rather small, and if you want a longer runway because you are operating spaceplanes on a body with a thin atmosphere (thus higher landing speeds, much larger turn radiius, etc), it seems like suitable runways would be hard to make out of objects, and would be better done by reshaping terrain

There's probably been a thread about this before, but I would love to see the ability to dynamically alter the height map I previously thought this impossible, similar to how it had been impossible in another game I play (Arma 3). Yet last month, nearly a decade after Arma 3 released(2013), they released an update that allowed for dynamic terrain deformation. This game uses a version of the Real Virtuality engine that has been in use (with updates) since their first title in 1999. Somehow, what was regarded as impossible was quietly dropped into an otherwise seemingly minor update. Supposedly they have developed an entirely new engine for their latest title in the series, but it surely brings a lot of stuff from their old engine - speculation is that whatever they were doing for the new engine actually could be applied to the old one This situation re: taking apart an old engine and re-building the next iteration from the ground up reminds me of what they are doing with KSP 2 In Arma 3, one of the first uses has been to make airstrips suitable for planes landing where there was none before - something that would also be a great ability in KSP2, particularly with the colony mechanics. So, any chance of deformable terrain in KSP2?

Indeed, rapiers are terrible once in orbit. Bad TWR (high dry mass) Bad Isp Terrible Going to oribt? for only 0.2 tons more than a Whiplash, you get 180kn of closed cyclethrust. Plus you get higher and faster so that you don't need as much closed cycle dV. If going for maximum SSTO payload fraction to orbit, that's hard to beat. Sure, other engines have higher closed cycle Isp, but how many do you need to supply enough thrust? how much dry mass do they add? what does that dry mass do to your dV? This is all fine and good when you're talking <1,000 m/s of closed cycle dV from a single stage. Going beyond that - forget it. I have almost always left the rapiers in LKO or suborbital (exception: going to laythe). Get to orbit, decouple a spacecraft from the deadweight of the rapiers, intakes, wings, etc (ideally in the form of a very light plane that you can recover)- go where you want- possibly coming back to redock with your wings and airbreathing engines to land back on kerbin. I find the easiest way to do 100% reusable to Mun-surface and back is to take a multi-stage approach: SSTO to LKO, undock the transfer stage and lander>go to low mun orbit> detach lander, land, redock in low Mun orbit> go back to LKO (using aerobraking)> dock with the SSTO plane> land