Discovery / doing actual science

[monamipierrot]

1 hour ago, tater said:

any mode of play where "discovery" or "exploration" is truly a thing cannot have to use the same worlds over and over.

A simple example... Minecraft. I play that rarely, and sometimes new seeds are just "cool," and you feel compelled to walk around just to see what;s around the corner.

I give this for granted, and obvious. Is there really anyone that would love to replay minecraft with the SAME SEED? This would be authentical psychiatry meat, believe me. Me, for instance, I play KSP with NO REVERT (and no quicksave) because I want things to go on and never be the same. Complexity: +100% Emotive experience: +1,000% Depthness: +10,000% Fun: +100,000%

I would give a half  a toe nail for a official working procedural bodies (or random handmade, ok, for me it's the same) version of KSP. Combined with exploration... I would give a whole nail. Seriously.

[Pthigrivi]

14 hours ago, monamipierrot said:

I still find the Material bay thing a little bit grinding but your ideas are awesome and still simple.

Of course, I still am a fan of having fog of war.

Glad you like! It's true some would be quite simple, but others, the Materials Bay and Seismometer in particular would take quite a bit of work to implement. I think especially the impactor experiment would be a ton of fun for people and well worth it. The thinking with Materials Bays is that its really a routing problem. Its not just one-off missions to any old place on the surface. The samples you're collecting are tangible and useful. You can collect a few samples from the Mun and Minmus, deliver them to a science station in Kerbin orbit, analyze them, then load them into probes destined for Eve or Laythe and expose them there. In my mind once a sample was analyzed you could load it into Materials Bays from that location indefinitely, so it's not like you'd be pressed to collect 20 or 30 different samples every time you landed. Think of it like they're collecting a nice size Munrock, then filing off little specs of it into into Materials Bays for exposure. It could look something like this:

I like fog too, Im just thinking it might be more successful as applied within the existing worlds, withholding new and interesting things hidden there, rather than hiding new, mostly empty worlds.

Edited April 10, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Kerbalstar]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Glad you like! It's true some would be quite simple, but others, the Materials Bay and Seismometer in particular would take quite a bit of work to implement. I think especially the impactor experiment would be a ton of fun for people and well worth it. The thinking with Materials Bays is that its really a routing problem. Its not just one-off missions to any old place on the surface. The samples you're collecting are tangible and useful. You can collect a few samples from the Mun and Minmus, deliver them to a science station in Kerbin orbit, analyze them, then load them into a probes destined for Eve or Laythe and expose them there. In my mind once a sample was analyzed you could load it into Materials Bays from that location indefinitely, so it's not like you'd be pressed to collect 20 or 30 different samples every time you landed. Think of it like they're collecting a nice size Munrock, then filing off little specs of it into into Materials Bays for exposure. It could look something like this:

<Snip>

Please! Me want! Really I the whole science needs a revamp. And that Materials Bay. That is what we need.

[NotAgain]

On ‎10‎/‎04‎/‎2015 at 6:01 AM, Twreed87 said:

Life support tech should progress like any other. Each capsule has a certain amount of the resource (snacks). That's enough for that crew to go a few days in orbit. Then you unlock extra containers you can add to the ship to extend that. Make it so that it's not unreasonable to be able to pack enough for a Duna mission and return. Then near the end of the tree you unlock the ability to regenerate snacks (I'm imagining something the size of a hitchhiker container that has like a little farm inside), that would allow you to set up a permanent base.

USI Life Support is a lot like this, but you may be running a mostly/entirely stock game.

[tater]

On April 10, 2016 at 8:31 PM, Pthigrivi said:

Glad you like! It's true some would be quite simple, but others, the Materials Bay and Seismometer in particular would take quite a bit of work to implement. I think especially the impactor experiment would be a ton of fun for people and well worth it. The thinking with Materials Bays is that its really a routing problem. Its not just one-off missions to any old place on the surface. The samples you're collecting are tangible and useful. You can collect a few samples from the Mun and Minmus, deliver them to a science station in Kerbin orbit, analyze them, then load them into probes destined for Eve or Laythe and expose them there. In my mind once a sample was analyzed you could load it into Materials Bays from that location indefinitely, so it's not like you'd be pressed to collect 20 or 30 different samples every time you landed. Think of it like they're collecting a nice size Munrock, then filing off little specs of it into into Materials Bays for exposure. It could look something like this:

I like fog too, Im just thinking it might be more successful as applied within the existing worlds, withholding new and interesting things hidden there, rather than hiding new, mostly empty worlds.

^^^^ This would be one less part I'd ever have to put on any spacecraft, ever. Hauling stuff from one place to another is a silly side quest thing, just like all the grand tour contracts (that I don't have any interest in doing, ever, either).

New, empty worlds would not be hidden (except maybe small moons undetected astronomically), but the specifics of them would be hidden... maybe that world has a canal system built by aliens! Nope, just craters. Thanks, Mariner 4.

The extant world certainly need small scale detail, but I'm unsure what could be added that would make it truly novel to go to the Mun again. On top of that, once you discover such a place, you then know where it is in all future play unless they come up with a way to randomize surface features. Also, and this is important, it changes nothing at all about the types of craft you need to build. Nothing. Changing the size/distance of worlds means that your rut of building stuff for the kernel system goes out the window.

Edited April 11, 2016 by tater

[Pthigrivi]

Well that depends how it's done. First, you'll need to carefully plan your landing site and land precisely, which at the moment there's no real incentive for. A biome map might show a surface feature as only a small blip from orbit, but on the surface that area could be several kilometers across. This means you might want to bring a rover or a plane with you to survey the area, which would have a huge impact on mission design. You might want to daisy-chain several sites together to maximize your payout. It opens up new strategies and design criteria beyond the basic flags and footprints one-off missions most people are doing now. 

And Im a little confused by your phrasing,.. you hate that idea for the materials bay? You can still just retrieve surface samples back to Kerbin. This is just a way to further capitalize on them if you're clever. There might also be contracts to expose special samples at a given location or an existing station, which would encourage delivery systems, traveling from one planet to another and building a real space infrastructure. Its much like when experiments get delivered to the ISS. I think this is one of the stronger ideas I proposed.