Do you think Life Support should be Vanilla?

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, Veeltch said:

Awww man. By voting on the third option I feel like I wasted my vote. But I think it should be optional. Seems not everyone likes it.

Maybe/depends: the Green Party of LS polls. 

[Red Iron Crown]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

USILS addresses this.

I haven't used it in a long while, how does it do so?

3 minutes ago, tater said:

Time limits are great gameplay. Take a common occurrence in stock KSP. You strand a kerbal. So you build a slightly more capable craft to go fetch him. This is a pretty trivial exercise. When you have to get to him with a clock ticking down, it's much more interesting (throw in KCT, and it can become positively nail-biting). A stranded Duna mission could easily result in the player having to make "the Martian" type choices regarding rescue ops... They might lack the parts to make anything substantially better than what stranded the crew, so they elect to send a LS resupply while they work on unlocking whatever part it is that will make a proper rescue possible.

Have to agree, count me in the "life support makes for more interesting gameplay" camp. It gives a reason to do high energy transfers rather than the usual Hohmanns (both to reduce requirements and for emergency resupply when things go awry). It penalizes messing up orbital maneuvers, you often can't just wait for the next orbit to fix things.

I have also had the grim situation of having to sacrifice two kerbals so that the other four would have enough supplies. It was a truly heartbreaking moment, and a strong lesson in allowing for contingencies. While some may feel this isn't a good addition to the game, it was one of the most memorable moments in KSP for me, being forced to make a tough choice to save part of the mission.

[tater]

It's funny that the people that tend to be against LS also talk as if blowing kerbals up is a common occurrence. I play with LS (death=true), and I don't manage to kill any via LS OR explosions for the most part. 

Stock travel times are so short, it's just a slight engineering challenge with LS added. Heck, I'd argue that in stock the problem with adding LS is that it's not hard enough, not that it's too hard. I play with LS and at 6.4X usually, and then it becomes more of a challenge. The Mun looks like stock Mun missions mostly, but I bring a Hab to Minmus (think Orion with a small Bigelow) as it's a much longer mission architecture. Dun starts looking like Mars Direct.

From a gameplay standpoint, and I'm talking career mode here, the problem with KSP is that it gets easier as you play. It's literally the hardest for the noob starting their first career right at the start than at any other time. LS as a default mode in career (again, USILS as a benchmark) basically makes Kerbin SoI operations effectively "stock," but farther missions require some planning... making them slightly harder than they are in stock, but right now they are easier in a career setting than the first Mun missions without LS. 

8 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

I haven't used it in a long while, how does it do so?

They raid any LS supplies on the ship if there are any. If you manage to separate some---say you disconnect a section and let them drift together towards Duna, and then you use that section to resupply after letting them starve a while (assuming death is not turned on), then as soon as it docks, they raid all the new supplies. He has a handle on exploits. Honestly, if someone wants to cheat it that badly, they can just turn it off, or edit the save, right?

With 3 allowed modes, OFF, ON (no death), and ON (death), everyone can be happy.

12 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Have to agree, count me in the "life support makes for more interesting gameplay" camp. It gives a reason to do high energy transfers rather than the usual Hohmanns (both to reduce requirements and for emergency resupply when things go awry). It penalizes messing up orbital maneuvers, you often can't just wait for the next orbit to fix things.

I have also had the grim situation of having to sacrifice two kerbals so that the other four would have enough supplies. It was a truly heartbreaking moment, and a strong lesson in allowing for contingencies. While some may feel this isn't a good addition to the game, it was one of the most memorable moments in KSP for me, being forced to make a tough choice to save part of the mission.

That last is a great example, and something that has been SF fodder for a while.

[Van Disaster]

If it's just storing food & oxygen, and a recycler, then no - that's just adding another fuel tank. If it's a more complex solution involving needing to keep kerbals mentally & physically fit over the course of a voyage, then yes that would definitely add something, including tradeoffs between crew efficiency & craft design.

[Glaran K'erman]

This topic shouldn't even be debated, life support is a core element of manned spaceflight. The fact it is left out is an embarrassment to this game.

This topic was edited without my input. Merely a factual statement, no feelings either way 

 

Spoiler

 

And it will continue to be edited every time you try to revert an edit a moderator made and/or insult people in posts.

--Technicalfool

 

 

Edited August 27, 2016 by technicalfool
There. Now everyone can see it's been edited.

[Wjolcz]

I like how the rest of S&DD threads went silent and this one is being pushed up all the time. This only means how controversial this kind of topic is.

I don't envy SQUAD.

 

[HoloYolo]

8 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

I like how the rest of S&DD threads went silent and this one is being pushed up all the time. This only means how controversial this kind of topic is.

I don't envy SQUAD.

 

I'm quite surprised as well.

[Tex_NL]

Do you think Life Support should be Vanilla?

If done properly, life support could add a very interesting extra dimension to the game.
But if it's done half-arsed like pretty much everything else then I have to wholeheartedly say NO!

Please, fix the darn bugs first. Get the game working again. Only then should new features be added.

P.S.
I am willing to bet that if life support is added to the game within a week after release there will be a mod that removes it.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Tex_NL

[Capt Snuggler]

47 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

I haven't used it in a long while, how does it do so?

Have to agree, count me in the "life support makes for more interesting gameplay" camp. It gives a reason to do high energy transfers rather than the usual Hohmanns (both to reduce requirements and for emergency resupply when things go awry). It penalizes messing up orbital maneuvers, you often can't just wait for the next orbit to fix things.

I have also had the grim situation of having to sacrifice two kerbals so that the other four would have enough supplies. It was a truly heartbreaking moment, and a strong lesson in allowing for contingencies. While some may feel this isn't a good addition to the game, it was one of the most memorable moments in KSP for me, being forced to make a tough choice to save part of the mission.

well said.

This raises a good point for all the people who argue "this is a game about orbital mechanics".

life support budget is tied to transfer time and the orbital manoeuvres you decide to perform to complete the mission with crew alive.

 

Edited August 26, 2016 by Capt Snuggler

[Andem]

17 minutes ago, Van Disaster said:

If it's just storing food & oxygen, and a recycler, then no - that's just adding another fuel tank. If it's a more complex solution involving needing to keep kerbals mentally & physically fit over the course of a voyage, then yes that would definitely add something, including tradeoffs between crew efficiency & craft design.

^^This. Is the biggest reason that I have chosen to use USILS.

[SSgt Baloo]

Life support adds complexity that a beginner might find overwhelming. If it were included, it ought to be a difficulty option, allowing increased difficulty at higher settings. The option to use the system already in place should remain.

Edited August 26, 2016 by SSgt Baloo

[Leafbaron]

Yes, but with a toggle option. Most of the time I give myself a healthy dV budget and when I'm finished with my primary mission, if every thing lines up and I can get gravity assists or am just in the right place to visit another planet with minimal dv expenditure I usually will the take the opportunity and squeeze every last bit of usefulness from the space craft. I do not want to have to worry about giving my kerbals an extra 2 years or 2 weeks etc extra worth of life support. But if I was playing a realistic career mode which I do from time to time, it is definitely something I would want.  

Edit: If they added additional parts like agricultural bays that produce oxygen and food (only deployable on a planets surface) so that landing missions to far out planets required less contingencies it would be a definite yes. In addition, it would be good insurance to keep one on board so if unexpected events occur you actually have some shot at rescuing stranded kerbals.  

Cheers,

Leafy. 

Edited August 26, 2016 by Leafbaron
addition of a new thought.

[TheSaint]

Yes, if-and-only-if there is an option to disable it if you don't want it. 

[tater]

43 minutes ago, Van Disaster said:

If it's just storing food & oxygen, and a recycler, then no - that's just adding another fuel tank. If it's a more complex solution involving needing to keep kerbals mentally & physically fit over the course of a voyage, then yes that would definitely add something, including tradeoffs between crew efficiency & craft design.

Roverdude's mod,

includes habitability. So you can have the "stuff" to live, but if you just add tanks to a mk1 pod, that won't cut it.

 

[technicalfool]

34 minutes ago, Tex_NL said:

within a week after release there will be a mod that removes it.

I'd say within an hour.

My opinion of life support is "meh". I'm sure it'll be balanced to the point where it's actually playable, but the main result will be zero crewed flights beyond suborbital hops until I can build an entire biosphere in orbit.

[Snark]

49 minutes ago, Van Disaster said:

If it's just storing food & oxygen, and a recycler, then no - that's just adding another fuel tank. If it's a more complex solution involving needing to keep kerbals mentally & physically fit over the course of a voyage, then yes that would definitely add something, including tradeoffs between crew efficiency & craft design.

Which serves to underscore the difficulty of the problem.

I would be strongly against such a life support design.  I do want it to just be supplies, and/or machinery for stretching them.  It's not "just adding another fuel tank", because it adds a dimension to the game that fuel tanks don't, i.e. the time element.  There are plenty of challenges that LS would add, without the quality-of-life-stuff, as various folks in this thread have pointed out.

That doesn't mean that "having quality of life as part of LS" is a "bad" or "wrong" idea-- it's a matter of taste.  Clearly you're in favor of it, and @Andem is, too.  I would loathe it, myself-- if it were part of a single "life support" feature that's either all-on or all-off, then I'd either have to just turn off the life support feature completely, or else figure out some way to mod it to get rid of that element.

Reason why I would hate it:  it would turn KSP into a micromanaging-stuff-that's-not-about-flying-rocket-ships game.  Which is not the game I bought, and not the game I want to play.  There's a reason I don't run UKS/MKS routinely.  (Played it once, it's an amazing mod, glad I did, but never want to do so again.  It's simply not my cup of tea.)

I don't care about the "psychology" or "well-being" of kerbals.  It's not that I don't care about them-- I care about them a lot, and have a "no kerbal deaths, ever" policy in my games.  (I use quicksave-and-revert a lot.)  It's just that kerbals are me, when I'm playing.  I think the reason that the idea of "well-being" rubs me the wrong way is that it would feel like some game designer is making arbitrary decisions about "how kerbals feel" and "what can kerbals tolerate", and it takes away from the engineering aspect of the game.

"If you don't have life support, you die" makes sense to me.  It's even quantifiable:  "You need X kilograms of life support supplies per hour" also makes sense.  "You start to do <hard-to-quantify psychologically unfortunate things> based on <complex personality factors> due to <situations that different individuals handle differently>" is something that's basically impossible to get right because there are so many interpretations of what it could mean that you're pretty much guaranteed to irritate lots of players no matter what you do.

I'm not trying to persuade anyone, here, or try to argue that my point of view is somehow more "right" than anyone else's-- simply that this is how I feel, and it's a valid point of view.  Add touchy-feely stuff to a life support feature, and you've lost me as a user of that feature.  It's a complete non-starter.

The fact that I can feel that strongly this way, whereas other folks equally legitimately feel just as strongly in the precise opposite way, just goes to underscore this:

1 hour ago, Veeltch said:

I don't envy SQUAD.

I think the criterion for any new feature (assuming that it's not too technically expensive to implement) needs to be this:

1. Is useful/interesting enough that a large-enough proportion of the player base would use it
2. Doesn't alienate a substantial number of players by its very existence
3. Values "have-to-have" aspects over likely highly-controversial aspects

The challenge here is that, first, lots of KSP players want life support, but others don't want it at all; and, second, of the people who want it, they want different things.

Even granting those challenges, though, I think there's room for a modest KSP life support feature in stock, which meets the above criteria.

I'm taking #1 for granted:  there are lots of KSP players who would like to have some sort of life support.  If Squad implemented one, I don't think it would be the case that "this was wasted dev effort because nobody uses the feature."

#2 is trivially easy to solve.  It's a toggleable feature, on a per-game basis, in difficulty settings.  People who don't like it can just turn it off, and "off" would be the behavior for any "legacy" saves that were created before the feature was released.  This is a no-brainer, and I'm dead certain that this is what Squad would do if they implemented the feature.  It's not only the clearly correct solution, but they also have a track record with this-- look at what they're doing with the comms feature in 1.2.  So I don't think anyone has anything to worry about there.  They won't alienate anyone, because nobody has to use the feature if they don't want it.  (At most they'll get complaints from folks who are irate "why did you spend time implementing <feature I personally don't use>, instead of <feature I personally would like better>."  But you can't please everyone, there will always be such complaints no matter what you do.)

As for #3... well, one can argue that point, but I think a reasonable approach is:  Go for the least common denominator.  Aim for the simplest system that provides the interesting challenges of life support, and which are impossible to argue with.  For life support, I think that means:  include some basic supplies and/or related equipment, such that they're used up at some rate and kerbals die without them.  That's what life support is; if you don't do that, the idea of life support and the challenges it brings is basically meaningless.  Do that, and call it done.  Extra, fancier stuff-- such as quality-of-life, living space, etc.-- would be anathema to some, must-have to others, but I think falls into controversial territory, and should be treated as a separate feature from the central life support functionality.

[regex]

5 minutes ago, Snark said:

Add touchy-feely stuff to a life support feature, and you've lost me as a user of that feature.  It's a complete non-starter.

^^ This. I find it fine and good to require enough space for Kerbals for a given voyage, and generally try to provide that as an RP exercise (also makes for cooler ships in general), but micromanaging them isn't why I play this game.

Also, not having Kerbals die from lack of life support is a non-starter for me, just like any sort of recycler/extender machinery (although I just don't use those so ...)

[pheenix99]

I would condone vanilla life support only if it could be turned on/off when a game save is first created

[tater]

I think the habitation issue is reasonably well-treated in USILS, actually. It's not "micromanaging," perhaps because it basically rewards what I did anyway. I make my long-duration vessels look rather like Mars DRA concepts. They require similar volumes of living space (to scale).

If you routinely send kerbals to Jool in a craft that's basically a spaceplane the size of a Gulfstream, then yeah, you're gonna have a problem. If you're like me and you have 4 habs, a central lab, a mk1-2, and a lander on the thing for a crew of 4, then it's not an issue.

21 minutes ago, regex said:

^^ This. I find it fine and good to require enough space for Kerbals for a given voyage, and generally try to provide that as an RP exercise (also makes for cooler ships in general), but micromanaging them isn't why I play this game.

Also, not having Kerbals die from lack of life support is a non-starter for me, just like any sort of recycler/extender machinery (although I just don't use those so ...)

I think it's not a bad idea to codify it in some fashion. Like you need a dedicated "habitat" to get past XX days for every X crew (2? 4?). Perhaps the recycler elements get scaled such that you need a hitchhiker for every 2 crew for max effect (because the LS machinery is considered to be on that part, and works indefinitely for 2, or limited time for 4). It need not be terribly complex.

[pincushionman]

Wow, I'm late to this party.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: No.

Wait what?

Not yet. First, time needs to be made a proper resource (because it sure as hell will be with LS), and the game balanced around that. We need the absurd building-upgrade and kerbal-hiring costs reduced to something manageable, with a monthly cost based on building state and number of kerbonauts added to the pie. This gives us a framework to add in time-based mechanics like construction time, long-duration experiments, and, yes, life support. Right now the kerbonaut-replacement cost is too high a burden. This also allows the main difference between difficulty levels to be life-support and communication limits rather than upgrade costs, making harder actually harder, instead of more grindy.

Second, it needs to be simple, like Snacks! Or USI-LS. One generic resource that gets used; one generic "waste" that can potentially be stored, recycled if your tech is good enough, or ditched. Anything more would be more micromanagey than I'd like. Bigger living/activity spaces can be abstracted by having those parts contain disproportionately more LS resource.

But most importantly, we need better mission-planning tools. We need an orrerry where we can build missions given starting/target bodies and start times, and it will spit out the required dV and transit time estimates for that leg. Then you add wait/loiter times and chain them together. Then we need decent dV info in the VAB and in-flight. Otherwise many new users (and let's be honest, many old ones too) will not know how many lunches to pack. We need these tools first. Not least because we need these tools anyway.

[ShotgunNinja]

The consequence of life support resource exhaustion has to be death: mission failed, try again.

For quality-of-life (or habitation, whatever the name) however it can't be death. Because people don't die after living for long times in cramped spaces and isolation. But they do lose it to the point of being non-functional.

This could have consequences for the mission different from death, representing the fact that they are non-functional. Ideally it should escalate with time, spiraling out of control and making the mission impossible. Some of the consequences may be: loss of science data, loss of resources, damage to components.

[Andem]

The reason that I love USILS so much is that every facet of the mod is configurable. If you don't want the Hab/Home times, you don't have too. I think that USILS is the perfect LS model to build off of. It allows for every playstyle except for Balance 30 different resources all at once on 68 crafts!

[Superfluous J]

13 minutes ago, pincushionman said:

But most importantly, we need better mission-planning tools. We need an orrerry where we can build missions given starting/target bodies and start times, and it will spit out the required dV and transit time estimates for that leg. Then you add wait/loiter times and chain them together. Then we need decent dV info in the VAB and in-flight. Otherwise many new users (and let's be honest, many old ones too) will not know how many lunches to pack. We need these tools first. Not least because we need these tools anyway.

This times a billion, especially the part I would have bolded but didn't have to because you did that perfectly as well.

THIS is what the Mission Control building should do. Contracts should be in the Administration building. Strategies? I don't use them so I don't know where they should go, or I can't say it here

[tater]

@ShotgunNinja, I agree, ideally habitation would have the end result tend towards tourism (astronauts become tourists), with LS failure meaning death (which I always turn on in a LS mod if it's an option). That would be a nice thing to see in USILS (as least as a configurable thing).

Anyone here listen to the Space Rocket History Podcast? A few episodes ago was Apollo 8. Borman became ill not long after launch---a GI illness. Spewing from both ends. They had no LEM, so it was 3 guys in a volume not dissimilar from a small SUV for days that was also effectively an outhouse. The diver that was there when the hatch opened after splashdown apparently reeled backwards, and the strongest asked if it was because they looked so bad, and he said, "no, it's the smell!" Quality of life matters  .

[Randazzo]

All life support boils down to is "You have to add x amount of mass to your rocket to provide for y amount of Kerbals."

It's just not that impressive of a gameplay mechanic, in my opinion.

Edited August 26, 2016 by Randazzo