Basic Auto pilot features?

[Cloakedwand72]

Would their be a basic ascent autopilot in the sequel? Like telling it to activate 1st stage and fly said amount of seconds and pitch to 45 degrees etc? To make launches less tedious?

[DStaal]

Unknown at this point.  It's possible.

(If you're looking for one for KSP1, I recommend the mod GravityTurn.)

[MaxxQ]

4 hours ago, DStaal said:

Unknown at this point.  It's possible.

(If you're looking for one for KSP1, I recommend the mod GravityTurn.)

Seconded.  I can do a decent enough manual gravity turn, but automating it really removes the tedium (it's also nice that you can use auto-warp during the launch).

[OutOfAblator]

Flying the spaceship up into space is what makes the game fun for me, but an autopilot would be nice I guess.

[shdwlrd]

41 minutes ago, OutOfAblator said:

Flying the spaceship up into space is what makes the game fun for me, but an autopilot would be nice I guess.

It gets boring after a couple thousand launches of play. So yes to a stock autopilot.

[Gargamel]

I'm really against a *stock* autopilot feature.   I am a MechJeb user, (one for my potato machine, and two because I've done it all by hand already, I let the AP take it) so understand I am not coming from a purist point of view. 

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the reason the @sarbian (et al) made mech jeb they way they did was because there was never a good stopping point.   The made it to do the simple things, and then realized the next step wasn't that far away.   So they adding docking, and then landing, and then it could make waffles and summon nyan cats from the depths of an alternate universe (sorry the cold medicine is kicking in). 

There's not a good place for a simple autopilot to stop being simple.  If they make it do launches.... why can't the (stock KSP2) devs make it do landings, or transfers, or any of the other dozens of actions that are variations of pointing the vessel in a direction and lighting the engine.    The requests would be endless, and the work would be so also.  

If they do put in a stock autopilot, it better have all the bells and whistles.

[Rejected Spawn]

I'm at the very least all for the idea of stage automation. Being able to have stages fire in response to specific conditions would be very nice for contraptions with a ton of small stages. Let's say we just want to burn and then decouple a few cheap stages to get somewhere on a tight budget, being able to tell the next stage to fire when a specific event happens (like a selectable tank runs out of fuel or there is a specific atmospheric pressure) or a set time has passed since a trigger was activated (such as 45 seconds have passed since the previous stage was activated) would be super nice. Being able to completely remove any stageable part from staging and setting conditions on it individually would also be really cool, though it would need the ability to have more than one condition and fire on both and and or conditions; like fire an upper stage booster if the decoupler attached under it has already been decoupled and the atmosphere is thin, or activate emergency landing parachutes and deploy aerobrakes if Main Tank fuel drops to zero or the craft is losing altitude too fast while in a low part of an atmosphere. Finally there needs to be a way to disable and enable all this stuff in flight, obviously.

Of course if you pile a ton of conditional stuff on a ship you can program it to reach a stable orbit or even land safely all by itself but that's not really autopilot in the sense that anyone else did the work for you, the player still needs to figure out every last detail and the only difference to a flight is not having to do it in real time. (Well yeah, also being able to launch a copy of the automated ship if needed.) Essentially I'm in favor of the OP but don't agree with calling it "autopilot", neither do I like the idea of adding a "real" autopilot - the ships should just be more "programmable" by the player and not go play the game by themselves... unless there are such amazingly programmable parts that the player can personally rig a ship to go play by itself, that's the opposite of "cheating" - would be more appropriate to call it "impressive".

As a bit of a sidenote some gamers have physical disabilities and KSP1 has certainly not been kind to people who have trouble timing their staging and such. Taking the quick reflexes requirement out of the picture would no doubt be welcome to some unfortunate players who'd rather their efforts not be thwarted by the same body that already causes enough issues in their lives. I personally know what it's like to end up with injuries that don't get much better in years and get stuck at home with nothing but a meager wallet and a PC and nothing your body can handle but play games, the last thing you want at that time is for an injury or disability to also get in the way of those games.

[linuxgurugamer]

15 minutes ago, Rejected Spawn said:

I'm at the very least all for the idea of stage automation. Being able to have stages fire in response to specific conditions would be very nice for contraptions with a ton of small stages. Let's say we just want to burn and then decouple a few cheap stages to get somewhere on a tight budget, being able to tell the next stage to fire when a specific event happens (like a selectable tank runs out of fuel or there is a specific atmospheric pressure) or a set time has passed since a trigger was activated (such as 45 seconds have passed since the previous stage was activated) would be super nice. Being able to completely remove any stageable part from staging and setting conditions on it individually would also be really cool, though it would need the ability to have more than one condition and fire on both and and or conditions; like fire an upper stage booster if the decoupler attached under it has already been decoupled and the atmosphere is thin, or activate emergency landing parachutes and deploy aerobrakes if Main Tank fuel drops to zero or the craft is losing altitude too fast while in a low part of an atmosphere. Finally there needs to be a way to disable and enable all this stuff in flight, obviously.

For now, there is this:

 

[magnemoe]

KSP2 support very long burns so long that you do not need to have the craft in focus during the burn. 
this will imply some sort of autopilot holding your trajectory. Its not known how this will work if you try to do an burn from LKO to Duna with an Ion engine, probably as well as with mechjeb 
 

[DStaal]

10 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

KSP2 support very long burns so long that you do not need to have the craft in focus during the burn. 
this will imply some sort of autopilot holding your trajectory. Its not known how this will work if you try to do an burn from LKO to Duna with an Ion engine, probably as well as with mechjeb 

I don't believe I've seen anything saying you don't need to have the craft in focus during the burn.  I believe they have said that you could timewarp during a burn using some new timewarp mechanics, but nothing that would require an autopilot.