A Couple of Ideas

[Rithaniel]

So, I kind of want to do this myself, but I actually have no expertise with coding or 3d modeling, and I dread the idea of using up even more free time attempting to learn. Though, I had a couple of ideas that I think would be interesting to play around with in gam.

First idea was a couple of parts, the first, and simplest, being a bulldozer plow. You attach it to the front of rovers, and with it, you can bite into the terrain of the Mun or whatever other place you land it on, and making new shapes and terrains, though the bulldozer plow would be used primarily to create flat places for landing things. There would also be perhaps large scoops to dig out alcoves in the sides of hills, or maybe even tunnel all the way through to allow a service road. Then you have dump truck beds that you could fill up with dirt, their appearance changing as they go, and then they could drive to a new location and dump the dirt there, allowing bulldozers and cranes the chance to make terrain there as well. It would be fairly difficult, as the rovers would be needing to move several dozen tons of dirt at a time, so rovers would need to be particularly beefy to handle the load. On top of that, it would allow a direct segue into the next idea I had: Bases.

Okay, so, officially, bases are already a part of the game, but whenever I look at one, I just see a really large ship that has landed on the surface. There is no mechanic to place a building on the surface. What I am thinking is something similar to KAS, where you place parts and it builds up into a new thing, but more than that. You would unlock blueprints (not parts) via a tech tree or the similar, which would give engineers new abilities. You right click on them, select something like "Set foundation", and then you click and drag the mouse to create a square foundation of whatever size you want, and maybe we have multiple kinds of foundations, like "space concrete" or "struts" or maybe something a little scifi sounding like "ripple weave nanotubes" and they could have different stats, like supporting different weights, or having different resistances to seismic activities. But I digress. Anyways, as the foundation is being placed, it gives a listed amount of required materials (which would be it's own set of resources held in a nearby ship, and would probably include ore from the mining equipment) and a listed amount of time it would take to build it, such as "1 hour per square meter", but you can have other engineers walk up right click, and "join work", splitting the amount of time down to smaller and smaller fractions, with little animations of them walking around the foundation and working away until they bump into another Kerbal and go the other direction. Also, the bulldozer and building parts from above could likewise lower the required time.

Anyways, beyond foundations, you would build walls, windows, hatches, maybe even domes, each with their own variations and customizable details. Once that's all been sorted out, you could fill a structure with oxygen, and begin interior work, customizing it towards a specific task, such as making it a power plant, a habitation module, or a farm. These would be unlocked with their own blueprints, and require their own resources, requiring facilities to be above a particular size, and taking time as well. Once a facility is complete, it would have to be staffed, which you could do one of two ways: use Kerbal astronauts to work there, which would require potentially dozens of astronauts using up all their time to keep one building working, or you could ferry up civilians specially trained for such a task, but with the added caveat that these are not astronauts, comfortable to survive in a pod for months, and they would need facilities specifically directed towards them, such as apartments, farms, an administration facility, communications with home, entertainment, and whatever else we could dream up, each with their own Kerbals running them. We build this all up toward an extraterrestrial VAB, which is obviously going to be a massive building and require huge amounts of time and Kerbal to crew it. Maybe a fabrication building to emulate the R&D building back home, meaning we could only build with parts we could fabricate, and unlocking new fabrication requires science. We'd likely have a thing of one fabrication building per planet or moon, or a fabrication building can supply a VAB within 100 km of it.

Third mostly builds on the previous idea, as it is based around the idea of civilians in extended journeys through space, but you could easily have such a thing via other mods or even in stock KSP, though not in large enough numbers for this to really make sense. But it would probably be very 3D-modeling-light, as it would just be a series of messages that pop up with an appropriate image displayed to the right. It would then explain that something has happened, such as a new generation of Kerbals being born off Kerbal, meaning you need to build more structures to accommodate them, or disease has spread through a civilian base and cut the population drastically. Maybe this is the reason for the administration building listed in the above idea, as politics becomes important, else civil disputes can escalate and give rise to new factions, that go off and build their own base nearby and begin competing for resources with you. Some of these messages would have actions for you to take, and they would be semi-random and numerous, each with it's own weights and triggers that affect all other possible eventualities, but this could give a base it's own narrative. I've only thought about this idea in passing, though, and there is certainly a lot more than what I've listed here.

Fourth, and lastly, is a very simple idea: Trains and monorails. This would simply be a less tedious version of rovers, allowing you to connect two bases, set a vehicle towards them which will get there in a few days, and then just send it, and go do something else, like launching a new ship.

Clearly, these four ideas could be summed up into a single mod, and, in my humble opinion, that would be the most kick ass mod ever, but it would clearly be a very time consuming undertaking. Thus, I decided to present them as four different ideas, to take and think about in their own right. If I ever achieve the expertise to make something like this happen, and nothing has been done in regards to it yet, I'd gladly come back and give it a go, but that probably wouldn't be for quite some time.

PS. This was a very long post, so I haven't checked for spelling or grammatical errors. Apologies if any exist.

Edited June 18, 2015 by sumghai
Changed content to use default font for readability

[*Aqua*]

Please don't force a small font size. It breaks the zoom functionally in some browsers. I always view websites in 150% to go easy on my eyes.

1) Deformable terrain

It won't happen ever. Terrain in KSP is static to increase processing speed and to lower memory requirements. Nonetheless the switch between different LOD (level of detail) states are still slow.

Also don't forget the game has to store the terrain of whole planets. Deformed terrain needs to be stored in memory and on the harddrive and increases everytime you plow some land. After a few hours the game will run out of memory. Maybe a 64 bit KSP can get around that limitation but SQUAD wasn't able to release a stable 64 bit KSP for Window up till now.

And third I'm not sure if the terrain system supports the needed resolution. I'm pretty sure the game can't show smaller terrain details than 50x50 meters on Kerbin. There needs to be either an additional terrain LOD (increasing it to a total of 11[!]) or a complete replacement of how terrain is generated and calculated breaking everything terrain-related in the game.

Those are common reasons why most games don't feature deformable terrain. It raises complexity and system requirements by a lot compaired to the benefits.

2) Base building

This might be possible. There's KAS and there this other mod which allows you to place static objects (this mod is related to Kerbin city IIRC).

3) Base features

This is a completely new game. Space Engineers is what you want. And Sims.

4) Trains

This could be possible but is difficult. I think Kerbin City had a monorail which was static and couldn't be placed by the player. Maybe someone could use that as a working base. See 2).

Edited June 18, 2015 by *Aqua*

[hab136]

>There is no mechanic to place a building on the surface.

Take a look at the survey stakes in EPL. For the actual buildings, you can use MKS or any of the habitat mods.

It's not the same thing that you're looking for, but it is off-world building.

With KIS you could construct a base piece by piece. If it worked with subassemblies, then you could set down your foundation in one go, then walls, then a roof, that kind of thing. KIS is instant though.

>civilians

Civilian Population is awesome

>Trains and monorails

That would be interesting. You can make moving but otherwise non-functional ones with Kerbal Konstructs (see Kerbin-Side for a bunch of content packs). Someone made a Mass Driver out of it once, so I'm sure you could make a train too (just despawn at one site, then spawn several hours later at the other site).

[Rithaniel]

Please don't force a small font size. It breaks the zoom functionally in some browsers. I always view websites in 150% to go easy on my eyes.

1) Deformable terrain

It won't happen ever. Terrain in KSP is static to increase processing speed and to lower memory requirements. Nonetheless the switch between different LOD (level of detail) states are still slow.

Also don't forget the game has to store the terrain of whole planets. Deformed terrain needs to be stored in memory and on the harddrive and increases everytime you plow some land. After a few hours the game will run out of memory. Maybe a 64 bit KSP can get around that limitation but SQUAD wasn't able to release a stable 64 bit KSP for Window up till now.

And third I'm not sure if the terrain system supports the needed resolution. I'm pretty sure the game can't show smaller terrain details than 50x50 meters on Kerbin. There needs to be either an additional terrain LOD (increasing it to a total of 11[!]) or a complete replacement of how terrain is generated and calculated breaking everything terrain-related in the game.

Those are common reasons why most games don't feature deformable terrain. It raises complexity and system requirements by a lot compaired to the benefits.

2) Base building

This might be possible. There's KAS and there this other mod which allows you to place static objects (this mod is related to Kerbin city IIRC).

3) Base features

This is a completely new game. Space Engineers is what you want. And Sims.

4) Trains

This could be possible but is difficult. I think Kerbin City had a monorail which was static and couldn't be placed by the player. Maybe someone could use that as a working base. See 2).

How did I force smaller font? It originally looked normal from my screen, but I do everything from my phone, so that's probably the source of the issue. I just don't know what would cause fonts to shrink.

1. It wouldn't have to be deformable terrain. Maybe it could generate static parts spontaneously on the planet surface, which act as part of the planet surface. For tunnels or alcoves, you could have it appear transparent and teleport anything moving through it to something like an instance.

2. I hope someone picks up this concept. It's is the main idea I'd like to see exist in this shape.

3. Who says it would be like any other game?

4. I had a thought: In game, how are the Kerbals setting the lines? But yeah, any attempt to get this done would be epic.

>There is no mechanic to place a building on the surface.

Take a look at the survey stakes in EPL. For the actual buildings, you can use MKS or any of the habitat mods.

It's not the same thing that you're looking for, but it is off-world building.

With KIS you could construct a base piece by piece. If it worked with subassemblies, then you could set down your foundation in one go, then walls, then a roof, that kind of thing. KIS is instant though.

>civilians

Civilian Population is awesome

>Trains and monorails

That would be interesting. You can make moving but otherwise non-functional ones with Kerbal Konstructs (see Kerbin-Side for a bunch of content packs). Someone made a Mass Driver out of it once, so I'm sure you could make a train too (just despawn at one site, then spawn several hours later at the other site).

Interestingly close parallels. Out of everything you linked, MKS looks the best, giving bases that feel more like bases. I'm still not perfectly clear on what the survey stakes do. As for civilian population, it looks like an awesome idea, but how everything is shaped doesn't feel right. The width of these parts would create huge amounts of drag trying to get it out of the atmosphere, and everything being spherical results in non-perfect space usage. I assume you would just wanna go with domes for things like observation windows or farms. Really, your base would either look like the stuff in MKS, or construction equipment would be sent up and built elsewhere. I like the mod for the civilian aspects, though, that is indeed epic.

[hab136]

I'm still not perfectly clear on what the survey stakes do.

Put stake in ground. Click "build" in EPL. New ship/building appear where stake is (or next to the stake, or between two stakes - lots of placement options).

Without the stakes, the new ship/building would appear attached to the existing ship/building. That's fine for orbit, but usually not what you want for ground bases.

Really, your base would either look like the stuff in MKS, or construction equipment would be sent up and built elsewhere.

Indeed, you can send up an EPL factory and then build all the parts in orbit or on-site; then their aerodynamic properties make no difference.

That said, someone (not me) could make new models for CivilianPopulation that are more MKS-like.