Hopes and Wishes for KSP 2

[cubinator]

I'd like to have some larger deployable heat shields for aerobraking extremely large vessels.

[Mr.Evil]

1. At first I hope, that everything (features and parts) from KSP 1 is included, so we don't are missing anything.

2. Life Support - They said, that it will not be as detailed as in the life support Mod. For a later Update or Dlc, Oxygen, Water and Food Supplyment would be great (especially for colonies) - not just g force. 

3. Generally better, more and variable assets on planets - maybe some flora and fauna. 

4. Very big Domes for colonies. 5-10 km radius Domes, that cost much of material. With a few gates above for Ships and on the ground for ground vehicles and Kerbals. 

With trees and plants inside, which generate oxygen and fields for farming. 

5. Rails for a Transport Train - On other planets, if you have great mines and you need several resources from different places, to transport them to the raffineries. 

6. Needs for Kerbals - In Space colonies the Kerbals want to sleep, eat, drink, (toilet?), and want some freetime activities (bars, cinema etc.) . So that the productivity of happy Kerbals will growth. 

7. Some more different Music.

8. Please don't make the game easier or faster! 

9. Early access - I know many people don't like it but I think for KSP 1 it was a big win... and It would be a big win for KSP 2,too. 

[probe137]

Hot air balloons

[Wubslin]

Hi all! This is my first post on the forum. Considering I'm coming up on the thousand hour mark in KSP it would do me some good to finally stop lurking and sign up.

There's been a lot on my mind on the topic of what would represent "the perfect Kerbal Space Program 2", and although I don't have the full picture in my brain of what a perfect version of the game would be to everyone, I do have a lot of ideas kicking around that I'm desperate to get out somewhere other than an unseen post on the KSP subreddit.  So with that in mind, my perfect KSP 2 would include things like:

1. A way improved IVA interface. It should be possible to conduct almost your entire mission from within the cockpit of whatever vehicle you're piloting, with the exception of fiddling around with hardware on your ship or doing crew transfers and the like. There definitely should be something approximating the map view on a monitor inside the craft, as well as selectable cameras pointing fore and aft, dorsal/ventral etc. Essentially IVA in KSP 2 ideally would leave the IVAExtended mod in the dust.

2. This one might be a lot to ask for, but an ability to change the orbital mechanics system in the base game at will in the launcher settings would be an amazing feature. There could be a "normal" difficulty setting for instance, and "normal" mode would feature the traditional patched conics system (with the exception of course of Rask and Rusk, which uses restricted three-body mechanics.) I think it would be really cool if there would also be a "hard" difficulty setting which would apply restricted n-body everywhere, so that you get something much more akin to the Principia mod but with a more refined UI. The map mode in this setting would have nice clunky selectable knobs for choosing map frame of reference and whether the view is inertial or not. In situations like flying near Rask and Rusk it will be important to select a non-inertial frame of reference so you know when you're going to make a collision.

3. Projected point of impact when on suborbital trajectories. There's going to be a lot of advanced flying in KSP 2, and I think one of the nicer features that could be included would be a branching line to your trajectory, or perhaps simply an "X marks the spot", which shows where on the relevant body you're going to make an impact. I know there are certain mods that do this already, but having it in the base game would be excellent. In a vacuum the line of impact will branch from your normal orbit line to compensate for the fact that the body is rotating underneath you, and in an atmosphere it will also compensate for your current coefficient of drag and lift and whatnot. Ideally it would also be able to account for having your engines on.

4. Another solar system which is basically our own in scale. This is one of those things that I actually do think the developers might already have planned for the game. We're going to have access to torch drives in the late game which allow for going further (or going the same distance and being able to be lazy, as it were.) One excellent feature would be to have a solar system which is full of planets similar in size to Sol's, complete with far more demanding delta-v challenges that the more futuristic propulsion systems will be up to the challenge of. Or for that matter, far larger conventional ones.

5. A black hole! This is a no-brainer. There will be all kinds of opportunities to include exotic space objects in the game. Black holes, being the coolest of all the exotic space objects, are a natural choice to be included in KSP 2. Depending on how the developers feel about this one there are several ways to do this. You could construct an entire system of planets around an Interstellar-style Gargantua black hole with a gently luminescing accretion disk providing warm "sunlight" to the planets, or you could have a lone Cygnus X-1-style binary pair of a blue supergiant and a solar-mass black hole which is positively SCREAMING X-rays in all directions. It could be a challenge just to get near that one without vaporizing! Either way, I've played the event horizon mod. Just like the mod, any black hole in KSP 2 should be a complete bear to do maneuvers around. I'm talking dozens and dozens of km/s for useful maneuvers.

6. Other miscellaneous exotic space objects, even bordering on the fantastical. Rask and Rusk are clearly a toned-down Rocheworld stand-in. What other kinds of crazy destinations could be dreamed up and included in the game? How about a "Mesklin" planet, whose surface gravity is intolerable at the poles yet spins so fast that it deforms into a giant disk which experiences only a few G's of gravity at the equator?Anything like it or other stuff included on the Atomic Rockets "Fabulous Locations" page would be a great choice. You could have a planet that is really just a little nucleus of rock surrounded by an atmosphere thousands of kilometers deep, where the density gradually increases and the distinction between submarine and aircraft becomes blurred. You could have extremely violent binary neutron star pairs whose one-second-long years produce tides that induce deadly stresses in ships that get too near. Tidally locked worlds with halves desert hell  and frozen wasteland separated by a twilight band of alien vegetation and hellish winds. The possibilities are endless.

7. Greatly expanded options for RCS. For starters, a big selection of RCS thrusters ranging from "easily inhaled" to "utterly absurd" would be great, especially if available using a wide variety of fuel types. If you wanna go really crazy you could add the ability to tie main thrusters into your RCS system, so if you wanted to do split-second 180s all you'd have to do is put some quad-clusters of mainsails all over your rocket.

8. Ability to change the amount of SAS authority. There are times when I'm fighting to maintain orientation while plowing through an atmosphere, or when flying an airplane, that I really wish the SAS would have a little more conviction in keeping the nose pointed where it needs to be. A slider which controls SAS aggression, or even the ability to change parameters in the PID system under the hood, would be really handy for moments like that.

9. Sometimes I wish I could Create maneuver nodes while sitting on the ground. This one would be really nice for when I need to lift off from a moon and make a quick intercept, or if I'm unsure of the heading I need to start pitching towards. Being able to know exactly which way to burn off the ground can help a lot with that.

10. Make all auto-timewarps take five seconds, regardless of how much time they're skipping through. Pretty please? Unless there's constant thrust involved of course.

11. Another good one when it comes to flying is to allow for planning periapse passes in maneuver nodes when TWR is low. If I'm in a 70 by 70 parking orbit of Kerbin and need to inject to Jool but my rocket can only pull a tenth of a G, I'm going to need to do a bunch of periapse passes to avoid dumping all my gas straight down Kerbin's gravity well. In current KSP this is all fine and good until you start the burn on the second pass, at which point the maneuver node flips out and begins announcing you need 54687498 m/s in order to complete the injection. A good solution would be the ability to plan periapse passes right into the maneuver node interface. For instance you would start a node, and pull on the icons until you have your burn, but then you click on the "periapse pass" button and your trajectory immediately behind and ahead of the node changes from blue to red- indicating the span of time in which you want to be firing your engines. You can drag this red section to be longer or shorter, but it will always be centered on your node. Depending on how wide the line is i.e. how long you're going to be burning on each pass, a counter will happily report to you the number of passes you'll need. Dragging the red line to be longer means fewer passes but more gravity losses, the counter will stop and warn you when you get to escape velocity, etc. etc.

12. Improved navigation tools in the base game would be awesome. I know they plan on having a delta-v map baked right into the game, but also having diagrams for planetary phase angles required to do transfers and diagrams showing where in orbit said ejection burn should be conducted would be cool. It would also be excellent to have a porkchop plot generator baked in as well. Really a whole suite of navigation tools akin to "diet Mechjeb" would be ideal. I don't think they should go all the way on the automation because sometimes using Mechjeb makes me feel like I'm watching a movie instead of flying a ship myself.

13. Automatic stationkeeping around the Rask/Rusk Lagrange points. How cool would it be to have a huge void city hanging out right there at the Rask/Rusk L2 point for my friends to come and visit? Regular deliveries of whatever RCS fuel I'm using would of course be needed to maintain the halo orbit. Speaking of massive void cities...

14. Treating large structures as single rigid bodies unless violently collided with would do wonders to save my PC from certain torture. The main reason I never really make huge space stations or surface bases in KSP is because I got sick of my frames tanking to 3 per second whenever I closed in less than a couple of kilometers away. If you have elements that move such as centrifugal habitats, those could be a second rigid body. Just keeping the part count below 9,000 would be nice. Of course if your friend comes screaming in and rams the side of your station at 300 m/s then it goes back to many rigid bodies in order to simulate the destruction.

15. On the topic of other players and destruction, an overhaul of the way the game handles high speed spacecraft would allow for things to actually collide in orbit, and in the process open up the potential for orbital combat. I know there are people who maintain that KSP is all about peaceful exploration, but c'mon. I should be able to joust in a retrograde orbit with my friends if I want to.

16. I guess I've kind of been implying it but multiplayer needs to be separate craft flying simultaneously. Time warp craziness aside, multiplayer where your friend is having all the fun flying and you're just sitting there as a copilot is no fun. I've heard people suggest that's how it's going to be pulled off to solve the timewarp problem, but what kind of fun would that be? You should be able to race jets.

17. I think it would be really cool to see resource trading in multiplayer to act as an incentive to play the game more. It would also be a good mechanic to diversify interactions with other players. Maybe someone else has spec'd out into mining X resource on a celestial body which is basically the only place to get that resource, and you need some. Rather than go to the trouble of constructing a huge refinery there (or facing an attack of some sort if they have their refinery on the only good deposit), you could trade with that person using something that you have. Maybe you're the only guy on the (server?) with a high enough tech level to manufacture Wyvern engines. You contact them, and strike up a deal. Side note: making certain critical resources endemic to certain areas (especially small ones) would be a good way to encourage staking of territories.

18. Finally, I think that the general form that KSP 2 multiplayer should take is that of large multiplayer servers with the server available for download so that it can still be played years and years down the line. Central servers are nice and all, but no one wants to see multiplayer disappear altogether just because somebody decides that they don't need to support it years and years down the line. I should be able to take an old rig and keep it in the corner as a KSP 2 server in 2042 if I want to. Either way, a big point I would love to see is that any given server is a persistent game hosting many, many players all interacting with each other.

19. Have kerbals react appropriately to extreme G forces. I wanna see Jeb struggle to breathe if I step on the gas and pull seven G's! I know they already move around a bit but "extreme G load" would be something you could add as easily as "state of extreme panic".

20. It would be great if you could smoothly change the rigidity of part connections in the VAB. In the original KSP there's either 0% rigid or 100% rigid with no in-between. I think it would be nice to be able to reduce the amount of back and forth hotdogging my especially-long rocket will do on ascent without having it be extremely brittle.

21. Something that would go nice with that weird deep atmosphere world is the inclusion of lighter than air lifting bodies whether blimp, dirigible, hot air balloon, vacuum shell etc. would be cool for making floating bases. The vacuum shells would be for thinner atmospheres only.

22. Tons more things to do on the surface of various planets and bodies would be excellent. More interesting terrain, more in-depth resource harvesting, more in-depth base construction and manufacturing supply chains would all be things ripe for gameplay opportunities.

23. Lastly, it would be really cool to see the remnants of some long-dead alien civilization in the form of an abandoned stanford torus or hollowed-out asteroid that you could potentially land on/in and explore. If you wanted to go really crazy you could make it a giant Banksian orbital or something. On the more realistic end of the scale, it would at least be fun if there was an easter egg in the form of the bottom of the Apollo 11 LEM on the moon of a conspicuously Earth-sized desert planet.

 

That's all the things I can think of at the moment, and I get that the developers are only human. Implementing every single one of these ideas would not be feasible, but again I just had to list off all the things I'd want to see in a hypothetical "perfect" KSP 2. Apologies if I listed off anything that people have already covered in this thread.

Edited January 18, 2021 by Wubslin
Added stuff

[Dr. Kerbal]

What I want to see.

1. More science!
2. More parts
3. Stars orbiting black hole
4. More time warp!
5. More preside menuvers
6. Less Kraken Attacks
7. Easter Eggs
8. Easter Eggs that bring reference from the first game.
9. Colonies
10. IVA and EVA
11. First person view on EVA
12. Different hair styles for Kerbals
13. Kerbals with same and different eye sizes
14. Riuns if the Pre-Alpha Kerbal Space Program Space Center
15. More launch pads available for stock KSP2
16. Better physics
17. Better faring construction
18.  More science experiments available for stock KSP2
19. Be able to biuld in space
20. Better RCS controls for EVA
21. Improved FPS
22. KerbalX debris on Mun
23. Matt Lowne’s Eeloo base ruin on Eeloo (Eeloo)
24. Easter egg that is where are all the developers names are
25. Mars 2020 rover Easter Egg
26. Multiplayer cross platforms (know it’s already coming)
27. Mods
28. Better DLC download
29. Frequent updates
30. Console version up to date with PC version
31. Science Mode
32. Kerbal Voice over
33. More explosions
34. More Kerbal names
35. Cheat screen but disables all achievements and etc
36. Better game engine (Ya!)
37. Kraken in Pol
38. Skme lava on Moho. Not a lot though. Like very very very very very little
39. Mohole
40. Some KSP1 mods used or similar added to KSP2
41. More star variants (like sun type to red dwarf, you know)

[Popestar]

After starting a new career on Hard today in KSP1, my sincere wish and hope for KSP2 is the ability to take and store multiple scientific readings with a single instrument.  Like, why can't we take multiple readings with the Thermometer?

[Mr.Evil]

I didn't find it before, so for automatic landing you could program the probe core to burst at a specific height in a specific angle for a specific time. This could be used also for landing boosters.

In a later research stage the probe cores executes landing by itself. 

In the early stages of the game you would land it by manual control, in mid game you are able to automatically has land the vessel but first have to trial and error for perfect program and in the end game you just need to say "land on position x". 

The same for launching. 

[Mikenike]

1 minute ago, Mr.Evil said:

I didn't find it before, so for automatic landing you could program the probe core to burst at a specific height in a specific angle for a specific time. This could be used also for landing boosters.

In a later research stage the probe cores executes landing by itself. 

In the early stages of the game you would land it by manual control, in mid game you are able to automatically has land the vessel but first have to trial and error for perfect program and in the end game you just need to say "land on position x". 

The same for launching. 

Stop trying to make it super simple, make it landing boosters only, similar to SpaceX's Falcon.

[Mr.Evil]

16 minutes ago, Mikenike said:

Stop trying to make it super simple, make it landing boosters only, similar to SpaceX's Falcon.

In my opinion, if you say in vab "burn retrograde at 400 km at 100% for 20 seconds (or for 1000 delta v)" and this is just wrong, you have to rebuild your whole vessel.

[ash73]

I hope they just build their own vision for the game, good or bad. Designing by committee is never a good idea.

But anyhow... things I'd like:

1. (Keep) sandbox mode. I'm not interesting in grinding out missions, or mapping planets, or repeat trips to build bases. I just want a library of interesting parts and an open universe to explore. I can easily keep myself amused without artificial objectives. I'm slightly worried the new colony system may prevent this.

2. (Keep) single player mode. I'm not interested in multiplayer. I like isolated worlds. I like being the first person to land on a planet or moon, and the sense of wonder. The thought of landing on a populated Mun with huge bases and rockets zooming around everywhere wrecking everything fills me with dread.

3. Lots of interesting propulsion tech and construction methods, on small scales as well as large. I'm worried KSP seems to be evolving into ever bigger and more robust parts with everyone building enormous rockets. I like building small stuff and refining it to be as efficient as possible.

4. Better predictions for target intersects on the map screen. The current prediction only seems to update when you pass a certain point on the orbit, sometimes can't predict more than one orbit, and often just turns into a flickering confused mess.

5. Some simple remote control or programming of detached stages, and them being subject to physics rather than on rails, e.g. probes attached to first stages to recover them to the pad or later stages or landers that can be de-orbited while you continue to fly the primary craft.

6. Options to remove categories of parts you never use. I only build rockets, I don't care about aeroplane parts and I certainly don't want to build boats or submarines(!). The game would load faster if I could de-activate selected categories.

Some of the preview graphics look amazing. Multiple star systems sounds great, colonies could be fun. Looking forward to it.

[Wubslin]

Here's another idea I've got, and the ratio of developer effort to player enjoyment is practically zero on it.

If science is even remotely similar to how it is in KSP 1, then adding dozens of times the number of blurbs would make it. Blurbs for every biome, every situation, thirty unique ones to have one chosen at random in a given situation, anything at all that isn't just "you've recorded your observations about the situation" would be amazing. One time I went all the way to Tylo and back just to see what the Kerbals would say down there. And it's just plain text! Please tell me more about what color sandcastles are and aren't possible, KSP 2 team. 

[Kernel Kraken]

I want some really good mod support. Maybe a template or guide to uploading your own parts, or having a CKAN-esqe system built in. I think the tools to go above and beyond the game's limited limitations should be included in the box.

[Wubslin]

Gonna repost this MS Paint doodle here since it was probably out of place to have posted it in the "Speculated planets" thread...

Huh, it's only now hitting me that the guy who came up with the oblate disk planet idea basically named it "mescaline"...

[Lo.M]

 

5 hours ago, Wubslin said:

Gonna repost this MS Paint doodle here since it was probably out of place to have posted it in the "Speculated planets" thread...

Huh, it's only now hitting me that the guy who came up with the oblate disk planet idea basically named it "mescaline"...

What do you think of a gaseous planet with mega rings like J1407b

[Kernel Kraken]

3 hours ago, Lo.M said:

 

What do you think of a gaseous planet with mega rings like J1407b

I want a planet with rings made out of dwarf planets.

[Wubslin]

3 hours ago, Lo.M said:

 

What do you think of a gaseous planet with mega rings like J1407b

Might be cool, although I don't know what interesting gameplay that would bring to the table that the other ringed planets don't provide. For all the times I played KSP with the bazillion new solar systems provided by Kopernicus, I found myself only ever interested in reading about unique crew report blurbs that came with being at new locations. To me, a planet with bigger rings in a game with multiple ringed planets is about on the interest level to me as all those samey multicolored balls and lumpy potatoes across all those mod planets. I'd like to see rings inclined from each other, moons in gaps between rings. I think KSP 2 would be an excellent opportunity to include some of the most out there planets and planetoids imaginable.

[Bej Kerman]

1 minute ago, Wubslin said:

3 hours ago, Lo.M said:

What do you think of a gaseous planet with mega rings like J1407b

Might be cool, although I don't know what interesting gameplay that would bring to the table that the other ringed planets don't provide.

It's easy to avoid a (relatively) small set of rings like around Saturn with sufficient Delta-V, but having to maintain a very low orbit or end up shredded without a lot of planning would be quite fun.

[Wubslin]

2 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

It's easy to avoid a (relatively) small set of rings like around Saturn with sufficient Delta-V, but having to maintain a very low orbit or end up shredded without a lot of planning would be quite fun.

If planetary rings in the game have any level of realism, I can't imagine colliding with material in them being a thing without trying really hard to make it happen.

[Kernel Kraken]

6 minutes ago, Wubslin said:

Might be cool, although I don't know what interesting gameplay that would bring to the table that the other ringed planets don't provide. For all the times I played KSP with the bazillion new solar systems provided by Kopernicus, I found myself only ever interested in reading about unique crew report blurbs that came with being at new locations. To me, a planet with bigger rings in a game with multiple ringed planets is about on the interest level to me as all those samey multicolored balls and lumpy potatoes across all those mod planets. I'd like to see rings inclined from each other, moons in gaps between rings. I think KSP 2 would be an excellent opportunity to include some of the most out there planets and planetoids imaginable.

Absolutely. What if there was a moon with rings? A planet orbiting over the top of the sun instead of around it? Two gas giants, orbiting each other, giving and taking away chunks of atmosphere? There's so much possibility!

[Wubslin]

4 minutes ago, Kernel Kraken said:

Absolutely. What if there was a moon with rings? A planet orbiting over the top of the sun instead of around it? Two gas giants, orbiting each other, giving and taking away chunks of atmosphere? There's so much possibility!

Imagine the absurd yet physically possible that could be included in the game. You could have a triple planetoid system locked in one of the special solutions to the three body problem, their delicate motion as transient as Saturn's rings. Of course in-game they would be on rails and therefore stable. But implementing such a system would be able to piggyback off of the mechanics already implemented for Rask and Rusk! Now that would be interesting.

[Kernel Kraken]

1 minute ago, Wubslin said:

Imagine the absurd yet physically possible that could be included in the game. You could have a triple planetoid system locked in one of the special solutions to the three body problem, their delicate motion as transient as Saturn's rings. Of course in-game they would be on rails and therefore stable. But implementing such a system would be able to piggyback off of the mechanics already implemented for Rask and Rusk! Now that would be interesting.

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to see. KSP has always had slightly exaggerated aspects, and I don't see why the planets shouldn't be as interesting and insane. Are there orbital diagrams for 4-planet systems?

[Lo.M]

4 hours ago, Lo.M said:

J1407b

[Wubslin]

21 minutes ago, Kernel Kraken said:

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to see. KSP has always had slightly exaggerated aspects, and I don't see why the planets shouldn't be as interesting and insane. Are there orbital diagrams for 4-planet systems?

There are solutions for n-body systems with larger numbers of bodies, but there is a point that it all gets to be too much, I think.

[Bej Kerman]

37 minutes ago, Wubslin said:

59 minutes ago, Kernel Kraken said:

Absolutely. What if there was a moon with rings? A planet orbiting over the top of the sun instead of around it? Two gas giants, orbiting each other, giving and taking away chunks of atmosphere? There's so much possibility!

Imagine the absurd yet physically possible that could be included in the game. You could have a triple planetoid system locked in one of the special solutions to the three body problem, their delicate motion as transient as Saturn's rings. Of course in-game they would be on rails and therefore stable. But implementing such a system would be able to piggyback off of the mechanics already implemented for Rask and Rusk! Now that would be interesting.

Good material for a mod, but the setup of such configurations in a natural environment are pretty much next to impossible.

[InfernoSD]

How about a planet with giant pits in the surface going through to the core? I can't speak to how realistic that would be, but it would be fun to fly in.