A belated #BringBackTheBarn thread... with a TWIST!

[dryer_lint]

56 minutes ago, regex said:

I disagree, seems more like a stereotypical caricature of poor, rural America.

 

51 minutes ago, Alshain said:

Perhaps in Oregon, but around here poverty is more prevalent in the urban cities and rural houses are usually gorgeous mansions.

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah Alshain, I was about to point that out. Its just reflective of an americanized bias. People see barns and winnebagos and immediately think "redneck" and therefore 'incompetent', when all it really symbolizes is that Jeb, Bill, Bob and Valentina are not well funded at this stage. It could just as easily be an old farm turned airfield in the southwest or Argentina or Australia or anywhere, and given that Kerbin is not real and Kerbals aren't human Im sure these very specific cultural stereotypes need not apply. There seems to be an assumption that the only valid aesthetic is one of a well-funded, industrial, militarized superpower, but just because the space race on earth occurred under militarized circumstances (both literally and for the purposes of propaganda) doesn't mean KSP needs to assume all of that visual language. I tend to think a much more appropriate analogy would be to start with the Wright Brothers and move toward Space X. 

The current tiers are fine, but pretty bland and unimaginative to my mind. I'd much rather see a an abandoned farm/airfield for tier 0, an industrial looking tier 1, space age/oscar niemeyer style tier 2 moving to the modern state of the art tier 3 we have now.

Edited May 8, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Alshain]

11 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yeah Alshain, I was about to point that out. Its just reflective of an americanized bias. People see barns and winnebagos and immediately think "redneck" and therefore 'incompetent', when all it really symbolizes is that Jeb, Bill, Bob and Valentina are not well funded at this stage. It could just as easily be an old farm turned airfield in the southwest or Argentina or Australia or anywhere, and given that Kerbin is not real and Kerbals aren't human Im sure these very specific cultural stereotypes need not apply. There seems to be an assumption that the only valid aesthetic is one of a well-funded, industrial, militarized superpower, but just because the space race on earth occurred under militarized circumstances (both literally and for the purposes of propaganda) doesn't mean KSP needs to assume all of that visual language. I tend to think a much more appropriate analogy would be to start with the Wright Brothers and move toward Space X. 

The current tiers are fine, but pretty bland and unimaginative to my mind. I'd much rather see a an abandoned farm/airfield for tier 0, an industrial looking tier 1, space age/oscar niemeyer style tier 2 moving to the modern state of the art tier 3 we have now.

 

Even then, the American half of the space race wasn't militaristic.  It was up to a point, but that was in the early mach planes phase.  By the time they launched manned rockets it most certainly wasn't.  As for the winnebagos, NASA used Airstreams which were basically the same thing.  It's still a very memorable vehicle.

[Pthigrivi]

3 minutes ago, Alshain said:

 

Even then, the American half of the space race wasn't militaristic.  It was up to a point, but that was in the early mach planes phase.  By the time they launched manned rockets it most certainly wasn't.  As for the winnebagos, NASA used Airstreams which were basically the same thing.  It's still a very memorable vehicle.

That thing is great. And yeah, I only meant militarized in the sense that that it was part of a symbolic propaganda war rather than part of a private or philanthropic enterprise. Im sure it was also considered that technologies developed under the guise of peaceful space exploration could easily be dovetailed with military applications. 

[Alshain]

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

That thing is great. And yeah, I only meant militarized in the sense that that it was part of a symbolic propaganda war rather than part of a private or philanthropic enterprise. Im sure it was also considered that technologies developed under the guise of peaceful space exploration could easily be dovetailed with military applications. 

 

IKR! If you look sharp, Squad parodied it in the 1.1 release video.  It's the little things.

[Wjolcz]

53 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

The current tiers are fine

They are not. Barely acceptable at best. It can be clearly seen that all the tiers and the admin building are different style-wise from the last tier KSC. They look as if the person who made them didn't even take a look at how the last tier KSC is textured and modelled. Let's take the stairs for example. Just take a closer look at the low tier KSC. Simply walk/drive around. Then do the same with the KSC bac9 made and compare both.

And the pond. I still don't understand the idea behind that thing.

[Pthigrivi]

I mean, the thing is they don't actually matter much. Players aren't really interacting with them except to look down on them and sometimes click on them. Im not at all concerned with fidgety little details. What they do is set a mood. They provide some visual context as to your state of development and progression through the game and in that way they actually shouldn't match stylistically. Each should become something newer and better than the one before, which necessarily means the early tiers deliberately shouldn't look as modern or polished as the the upper tiers. Their purpose in the game is to allow players to project a story onto them, and if everything looks the same the story has no real sense of direction. You don't get that motivating feeling of earning something new and special. If they were really clever each could physically adapt from the previous, starting with a the raw site of an abandoned airfield with an old ramshackle hangar and trailers, moving to a skeletal industrial look and then adding slightly glitzier skins. Im an architect by training so I kind of geek out on this stuff, but it would be really cool to sort of progress stylistically through time as well from 50's space age futurism to 70's modern and soviet constructivism into current architecture. 

Here were a few images of things I could imagine for the middle tiers:

Edited May 9, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Renegrade]

5 hours ago, dewin said:

I've had a mod concept that would do precisely this for awhile -- the idea being to replace the current building upgrade system with something akin to the tech tree, but unlocked using funds (and/or possibly other prerequisites) instead of science.

It'd also allow you to upgrade building aspects independently and add in some integration potential with other mods.

This actually sounds like a pretty cool idea.  That would let you spread out the upgrade costs by effectively giving smaller tiers, and better control too.

[tater]

I don't see the barn as "poor," but I do see it as rural. Unless Kerbal architecture goes from primitive, wooden structures from the mid 1800s (as an earth analog) to mid-century modern and beyond in the course of a handful of days, the barn is inappropriate.

[mythbusters844]

On 5/5/2016 at 2:39 PM, Veeltch said:

More like #bringbac9back. He knew what he was doing.

Indeed

If only he could come back...

Edited May 9, 2016 by mythbusters844

[Kerbart]

We can fret over the design, to me a bigger issue would be what tech would go along with the Barn tier? We're talking about sounding rockets and mach 1 experimental airplanes here, I just don't see career mode the way it is right now properly starting with a barn.

I'd love to see a barn. But it should come with a career mode that starts with oversized rocket-club rockets, bumpers, and other unmanned stuff.

[Wjolcz]

7 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I mean, the thing is they don't actually matter much. Players aren't really interacting with them except to look down on them and sometimes click on them.

Which saddens me even more, because there was work put into them and the career is still what it used to be except a bit "tweaked". Those tiers should actually be meaningful and not limiting as they are right now.

 

7 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

They provide some visual context as to your state of development and progression through the game and in that way they actually shouldn't match stylistically.

I agree that they shouldn't match stylistically. But they should have the same levels of quality. We don't start the career with pixelated Minecraft dirt huts and then progress onto something with more polygons and higher texture resolution, even though it kind of feels like it.

 

7 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

You don't get that motivating feeling of earning something new and special. 

The only motivation in career I get is to get to the last stage of KSC because I simply can't look at the previous stages' buildings.