What can`t you do in stock KSP or with mods?

[John FX]

After looking at a few threads lately there seems to be a feeling that development may be slowing down or stopping in the near future and this made me wonder.

What would you want the game to be able to do/have that is not currently available through the use of mods?

Myself I would want kerbals to have some form of automation with the ability to make a base or landing area more animated, little kerbals walking between experiments, maybe driving a rover about by themselves, that sort of thing. Maybe an auto follow feature so you only need to control one kerbal and the rest follow like ducklings.

What would you like to see in the game which currently cannot be done stock or with mods?

[p1t1o]

There at least used to be a mod for "follow the leader" type behaviour, which worked for Kerbals *and* vessels IIRC.

[Wjolcz]

A career overhaul that makes it actually enjoyable. I've sort of achieved it with mods, but it's still not it.

[Curveball Anders]

There's nothing I want to do that I can't do in stock.

But there's a number of things I don't want to do, at least not over and over again, like calculating dV, rendezvous, adjust and execute nodes.

Edit:
Oh, there's one thing I can't do in stock, transfer fuel between vehicles.
I need EVA Transfer for that.

 

[ZooNamedGames]

2 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

There's nothing I want to do that I can't do in stock.

But there's a number of things I don't want to do, at least not over and over again, like calculating dV, rendezvous, adjust and execute nodes.

Edit:
Oh, there's one thing I can't do in stock, transfer fuel between vehicles.
I need EVA Transfer for that.

 

...

you can transfer fuel between vehicles. They just have to be docked.

[Curveball Anders]

Just now, ZooNamedGames said:

...

you can transfer fuel between vehicles. They just have to be docked.

Correct, I should have stated "without having to dock".

[DrunkenKerbalnaut]

Kerbals on foot moving freely about my surface bases sounds pretty cool. It could borrow code from the guys you see moving about the interior of the VAB/SPH. Make them stay within, idk, 200 meters of the COM. 

I would suggest that they be non-colliding, though. Ghosts, really. So there's no kraken bait. When you need to do something with a Kerbal, a real version is spawned at -or near- his/her location so you can take control. And only if you've chosen to designate the base as a "base" in the rename vehicle menu. Give the little dudes the ability to open and close experiment doors, toggle lights, and climb ladders. All pretty benign activities, if they were massless while doing so. 

As far as them messing with my rovers... Not sold on that one. To what end? And what risk?

Anyways...

Some stuff I can't do in stock? 

Justify long term habitation on non-Kerbin bodies.

Starve a Kerbal.

LKO telescopes as a lower fidelity alternative to scanning another body with a polar resource scanner.

Advance past the solar system. 

Explain monoliths, and other Easter eggs. 

Something I can't do with a mod? 

...

Edited November 21, 2016 by DrunkenKerbalnaut
a little formatting

[John FX]

Just to be clear, I`m asking for features or things you would want to do that you can`t do in stock OR with mods. If it can be done in stock or with mods, this is not the place to post it.

EDIT : I`m wondering if there are any things left for Squad to do except kill bugs, if it can be done in stock or done in a mod then it can be done. This means a stable version of KSP with the right mods is essentially the same as stock for the purposes of this discussion. You have the feature and it`s stable.

So, what would you want that is currently not possible even with a modded KSP? (might be a better question)

Edited November 21, 2016 by John FX
clarity

[Dafni]

Make the command "control from here" accessible by action groups.

[ZooNamedGames]

1 hour ago, Curveball Anders said:

Correct, I should have stated "without having to dock".

Then how would you transfer fuel? Through magic? If you want connector pipes then I point you to KAS.

[Curveball Anders]

4 minutes ago, ZooNamedGames said:

Then how would you transfer fuel? Through magic? If you want connector pipes then I point you to KAS.

DMagic's EVA Transfer, no need for KAS.

Edit:
Just realised that it's almost magic

Edited November 21, 2016 by Curveball Anders

[Snark]

• Axial tilt for planets.
• Custom ship types (i.e. for tracking station icons).  It's implemented as a C# enum, therefore not moddable.
• Custom science situations (i.e. for new science experiments, such as "Deep Atmosphere" for planets like gas giants with major atmospheres).  Another C# enum, not moddable.
• Custom action groups.  Another C# enum, not moddable.

To be clear:  I'm not listing things that I think are actually going to happen.  All of the above would be big investments for Squad to implement.  I mean, big disruptions, relative to the benefits gained-- so I doubt that any of them are going to be on the table, any time between now and whenever-it-is that KSP turns out the lights.  (Also, implementing them would be significant disruption to modders and require lots of re-coding, but that's less of a concern to me-- I'm confident that the modder community would rise to the occasion.)

Note that it's possible to write a KSP mod that mimics the effects of some of the above-- for example, you can provide UI and so forth to give an experience similar to custom action groups-- but I don't count that as being "possible with mods" because it's a one-off solution that doesn't integrate with the game's UI and other mods can't interact with unless they have a cumbersome individual compatibility patch.

I'm sure there are more.  The above are just a few of the things that have popped out at me-- the enum-based ones in particular, because each of those represents an occasion where I had a bright "Hey, why don't I make a mod that does this" moment that was quickly shot down because "no, it's actually not technically possible."

[Red Iron Crown]

Change the kerbal models to human ones for RSS/RO. If there is a mod that does this I am unaware of it, though I believe 1.2 exposed this to modding.

[Padishar]

18 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

...though I believe 1.2 exposed this to modding.

If that's the case (please let it be) then I'd expect a RealPeople mod to pop up in RO after not too long...

[RX2000]

Mmm.

I thought for a little while, & I think at this point there really isnt anything I would want to be able to do in the game that CANT be done currently with a mod. Wow......

[Sharpy]

Yup... something beyond generic contracts. A storyline, or an in-game set of challenges, or something. To make KSP less of a sandbox and more of a, you know, game?

[John FX]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

• Axial tilt for planets.
• Custom ship types (i.e. for tracking station icons).  It's implemented as a C# enum, therefore not moddable.
• Custom science situations (i.e. for new science experiments, such as "Deep Atmosphere" for planets like gas giants with major atmospheres).  Another C# enum, not moddable.
• Custom action groups.  Another C# enum, not moddable.

To be clear:  I'm not listing things that I think are actually going to happen.  All of the above would be big investments for Squad to implement.  I mean, big disruptions, relative to the benefits gained-- so I doubt that any of them are going to be on the table, any time between now and whenever-it-is that KSP turns out the lights.  (Also, implementing them would be significant disruption to modders and require lots of re-coding, but that's less of a concern to me-- I'm confident that the modder community would rise to the occasion.)

Note that it's possible to write a KSP mod that mimics the effects of some of the above-- for example, you can provide UI and so forth to give an experience similar to custom action groups-- but I don't count that as being "possible with mods" because it's a one-off solution that doesn't integrate with the game's UI and other mods can't interact with unless they have a cumbersome individual compatibility patch.

I'm sure there are more.  The above are just a few of the things that have popped out at me-- the enum-based ones in particular, because each of those represents an occasion where I had a bright "Hey, why don't I make a mod that does this" moment that was quickly shot down because "no, it's actually not technically possible."

This is the sort of stuff I was thinking of, stuff that would open up more elements of the game to modders. I would particularly like to see the modability of science to be worked on as well as custom action groups.

I`m thinking that at some point work on the game will stop and at that point the life of the game will be decided by how many options are open to modders. The more things we know are `missing` the more chance there is of them being opened up.

Would be good the be able to change the kerbal model/animations too.

[Dafni]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

• Axial tilt for planets.

Did you really have to say this? I never thought about it, but now I want it too! 

(I always assumed RSS would have tilted rotation axes on planets and moons)

[panzer1b]

2 hours ago, Snark said:

• Custom ship types (i.e. for tracking station icons).  It's implemented as a C# enum, therefore not moddable.

Id absolutely love to have this in game.  Considering that none of the stock icons make much sense for me (KSP is a game about capital ships, starfighters, armored vehicles, ect), i want my icons for tanks of different classes (heavy, light, apc, ect), capital ship classes (corvettes, frigates, carriers, ect), icons for smaller ships (starfighter, heavy fighter, bomber, dropship, ground attack ship, ect). 

That and id love the ability to define when i make a ship what icon it spawns with.  Right now its extremely annoying that anything with a airplane cockpit is automatically assumed to be a airplane, especially land vehicles that happen to have a aircraft cockpit as command module because i just like the way it looks.  Same thing with the rovers, anything that has external command seats on it is automatically made into a rover, and not that many rovers even use those things (im much more likely to have ext seats on dropships and escape pods then actual land vehicles that are going to be shot at and thus its not exactly safe to have exposed kerbals on em).  If we cant get custom icons/ship categories, at the least allow us to define what sort of icon we want per command module (right click context menu) when we build a vessel!

 

 

Also, unrelated to that, i think it would be very nice to bring all of the game textures out of the assets files and into folders that allow people to edit them.  Yes im aware we have texture replacer, but it only works right with a few textures, not all of em.  Allowing people to alter the textures as desired will open the door to things like UI skins (not that i have anything against the stock UI, but id much prefer something sci-fiy and less stockish), easier universe texture replacement (yeah there is a mod for that but its laggy and this would be much better done by just editing textures you want the same way we can do so with parts which have their respective .dds files sitting in folders where we can edit em), ect.  Right now the textures are all locked behind sharedassets.assets files (cant exactly alter those), and itd just be so much better for everyone with every single (or at least the non-critical ones) texture put in a folder where it can be accessed by us without any issues.

[Red Iron Crown]

1 hour ago, Dafni said:

Did you really have to say this? I never thought about it, but now I want it too! 

(I always assumed RSS would have tilted rotation axes on planets and moons)

Snark is a bit imprecise there, axial tilt does exist in KSP, it's just that it is always equal to inclination. So all celestial bodies have parallel axes of rotation, but some have different axial tilt than others.

RSS sort of sidesteps this by setting this universal axis angle to be correct for Earth's axial tilt, the other bodies are largely incorrect. I have read some rumblings about a possible solution for varying axial tilt done through changing the universe orientation in each SoI, but I don't think it is fully implemented yet.

[Geschosskopf]

9 hours ago, John FX said:

What would you want the game to be able to do/have that is not currently available through the use of mods?

Deformable terrain.  I want the ability to bulldoze flat runways and base sites.  It would be nice also to be able to dig tunnels but I'd settle for just the flat terrain.

[HoloYolo]

Knowing my delta-v without doing to me is a half an hour of math.

[DrunkenKerbalnaut]

10 hours ago, John FX said:

Just to be clear, I`m asking for features or things you would want to do that you can`t do in stock OR with mods. If it can be done in stock or with mods, this is not the place to post it.

...snip...

So, what would you want that is currently not possible even with a modded KSP? (might be a better question)

Sorry John, guess I misunderstood the underlined part. 

I stand by the Easter egg comment. They should revisit the original story they had going. I'm not aware of a single mod that adds story (here's hoping one of you folks has, here to prove me wrong  ), and the stock career contract system is no substitute. 

[paul23]

Automatic (simple) missions without intervention from myself - not even loading them. (Thinking about weekly fuel resupply missions from a base to an orbital station).

[W. Kerman]

Being able to switch fuel usage on/off on certain tanks via action groups.