Any chance on a Kerbal Aeronautics Program?

[SignalCorps]

I think it would be pretty cool to do a KSP game, but focus on air-based flight. Start out with rickety prop planes, and science your way up through jet, pulse and scram jet, and suborbital aircraft. I guess you can slap a prop-plane mod onto KSP, but the S stands for space, and prop planes generally don't do well there. It would be fun to have a game along the same lines, but focused on the air travel with the parts to go along with it.

Any chance of this happening?

[Thomas988]

I've thought of this before, too! Kerbal has such a huge potential of being an awesome franchise. In a game such as this, Kerbin could get proper cities, high-definition terrain, or even perhaps better graphics since an aeronautics program wouldn't need an entire solar system. I'm sure the devs have learned a lot over the course of KSP, and with Unity 5 now out I'm sure they could totally pull it off.

[razark]

I'd love to see a KSP tech tree organized with prop planes and sounding rockets at the lowest level, and working upwards to bigger and better rockets, crewed capsules, and spaceplanes.

The Right Stuff, Kerbal Edition

[Bilfr3d]

They should make a special launcher, which you then choose which "type" of Kerbal you want to launch into, each with their own "edition"

[Wanderfound]

Five starting levels: Wright, Goddard, Sputnik, Apollo, SpaceX. Starting contracts: low level flight, high level flight, unkerballed exploration, kerballed exploration, tourism/satellites.

[Tw1]

IDK.

Sure, kerbal could become a franchise, but I'm not sure this is the sort of thing I'd like to see out of it. The tech tree and collection grind are some of its weaker features, IMHO. The strength of KSP is that it's you against physics, and if you can tame them, you're able to achieve things.

With a more realistic aerodynamics model, and a more detailed planet to explore, it could work, maybe, but it seems to be it would be a poor cousin to KSP.

[Tourist]

I like this idea in theory, I wonder if it would really work that well. There is a bit you can do with spaceplanes currently. There is really not that much you can do with Planes currently, and I'm not sure Test flight missions are enough to build a game around.

So I guess my question for this thread is, how would this concept be filled out into a game (using a KSP approach). My ideas would be, firstly a more detailed Kerbin, lots of places to go, other landing strips, maybe some in tricky places. Ones close to the primary landing strip (the KSC) for short trips (maybe speed missions), others on the other side, requiring sub-orbital or orbital flight to reach within a reasonable period.

More atmospheric mission types, Cargo, Test Flight, Passenger transport, long haul, (more interesting) survey missions, search and rescue, etc.

and of course, more plane bits. As noted by others above. Parts from the beginnings of aviation until the future.