Real spacewalking?

[G'th]

Been thinking a lot about how to make real spacewalking viable in KSP, as right now whether you're just beginning your space program or just about to land on Mars your kerbals have this really powerful Jetpack integrated into their suits that even with a limited amount of fuel lasts basically forever. And game wise this makes some sense as its relatively complicated to conduct a realistic spacewalk using whats available to us in the stock game.  However, with certain mods this becomes less of an issue.

We've seen things like the Nebula handholds mod that gives us more options for moving about the spacecraft without having to use the jetpack. And even in stock, the ladders can perform this function fairly well even if they look weird. Then we see something like KAS with its winches, which perform very well as a tether system to keep you attached to the spacecraft, though they're not perfect, and to replicate how its actually done in real life (specially in regards to larger crafts where you'd have to retether periodically) we'd need either a dedicated winch-type part that can be put in the carry slot of a kerbal, so that the kerbal could re-tether properly. Though of course this can be worked around a bit by just placing dozens of winches all over the place, but this is also inefficient as not only do you get your KAS menu super crowded but you're increasing your part count dramatically as you'd need these winches in several places on every single module of the station.

And another part of the problem is simply our ability to control our kerbals. We have some control over kerbals following a ladder in that we can change direction (Sort of), but this isn't great. We can only change the kerbals direction on a single plane, and this only kind of works and requires very careful handhold placement for it to not be janky or even work for that matter. Meanwhile we can't change directions any other way, so if we want a kerbal to be moving along but then change a module that goes perpendicular to the module its currently on, it can't do it unless you use a relatively complicated "curved" handhold path. Again, doesn't look great and takes much tweaking to get working properly.

As for how these things could be solved, well I've figured out some ways, though what it'd take to actually get all of these things working is beyond me. But presumably they should work:

1. Tethers. Carryable tether part that preferably should be able to be attached arbitrarily to module (similar to hooks) or directly to handholds if this is possible. Could use separate dedicated parts for the tether to attach to, (and may be have these double up as handholds?) but that could increase part count unnecessarily.  Naturally this tether would have a tweakable length. 

Another thing that could be done for earlier style spacewalks, is to introduce optional "auto-tethers" to command pods, essentially mimicking the how the Gemini and early Soviet spacewalks worked. Kerbal pops out of the capsule but is permanently attached via a tether, and the capsule could behave similarly to the KAS winch and would be able to reel in the kerbal if he floats off structure. 

Finally, you could use a combination of these two things for more advanced spacewalks. The kerbal pops out of the airlock with the auto-tether enabled, but because he has the carryable tether,  he can disconnect the auto-tether and then move along the station as needed.

KAS/KIS is pretty prefect for this particular issue, so no reason I think to reinvent the wheel. 

2. Handholds. This is pretty straightforward and again no reason to reinvent the wheel here. CX Aerospace introduced integrated handholds to its station parts, and many parts, stock and mod alike also have parts of their structure that logically speaking a kerbal could grab onto and use to move around with, so where appropriate its just a matter of enabling this functionality. Is probably a more complicated solution to implement than it sounds (as I'm unsure if ladders are pure config work or if they do require model work to work properly) but even so. 

3. Control. Not much that modders can do to change how a kerbal moves along ladders, I would think as thats something thats more to do with the games code rather than a "kerbal part" that can be tweaked. However, something I think might be very simple to implement at least for separate handhold parts (like ladders) is the a right click ability to "grab" it. Essentially if the kerbal is within arm range (which can just piggy back off of the already implemented grab range kerbals have) then you could just right click and grab the part, and the kerbal will switch to holding onto that part instead. 

Bit hacky but at the same time for game purposes should be a fairly clean way to make kerbals more mobile without relying on an unrealistic jetpack.

4. Balancing non-tethered spacewalks. Probably the simplest part of this. Disable the stock suit jetpacks, and introduce separate EVA parts for this purpose. Cormorant Aeronologies MMU is a great example of how that can work, something like SAFER should be relatively simple to make in the same way. Perhaps take Universal Storage's EVA-X and make that the stock jetpack? Thers a lot of things that can be done here. The realistic amounts of fuel these things would have (and in case of MMU limited amount of power) would balance them against simply just crawling over your craft, but at the same time would still enable you do non-tethered spacewalks for whatever purpose.

But anyway theres the topic. Again gonna state I'm unsure of what it'd take for some of this, but just going off of my limited knowledge I'd think these would be pretty clean solutions that would also presumably be possible with what can be done in a mod.