Discuss with me, I'm bored.

[PewPewTrash]

Title is as says. Discuss with me, I'm bored.

Any topic really, but I'll start:

 

Why don't they add more official planets in the game? Wasn't the last one Eeloo in like 2015?

[Starhawk]

25 minutes ago, PewPewTrash said:

Wasn't the last one Eeloo in like 2015?

Eeloo was added in 2012, actually.

Before I started playing.

Happy landings!

[PewPewTrash]

9 minutes ago, Starhawk said:

Eeloo was added in 2012, actually.

Before I started playing.

Happy landings!

My point is still in place to be fair, in fact it's even better.

[Starhawk]

40 minutes ago, PewPewTrash said:

Why don't they add more official planets in the game?

I'm not one of the developers, so I can only speculate.

Part of the reason may be that Squad's data shows that most KSP players never leave Kerbin's SOI.

Happy landings!

[PewPewTrash]

Just now, Starhawk said:

I'm not one of the developers, so I can only speculate.

Part of the reason may be that Squad's data shows that most KSP players never leave Kerbin's SOI.

Happy landings!

What? Seriously? That's kinda sad they all never see the other planets.

The first thing I did in the game was basically strap 80 SRBs to a cockpit and goto the next star system.

[EasyAce]

45 minutes ago, PewPewTrash said:

What? Seriously? That's kinda sad they all never see the other planets.

The first thing I did in the game was basically strap 80 SRBs to a cockpit and goto the next star system.

Wait - next star system? Are there more stars than Kerbol?

[PewPewTrash]

26 minutes ago, EasyAce said:

Wait - next star system? Are there more stars than Kerbol?

No, it was a metaphor for just really really far away.

[The Aziz]

Some of these people never go further by choice.

Then, any solar system expansions were provided by mods so hard over the years, that even if they did, all they'd hear would be "ooooh, poor job, planet pack x did it better" or "ooooh, it's a rip-off from planet pack y" (pretty much the same thing happened when stock delta-v reading was added)

Besides, time for adding planets was when the game was in alpha state, not after "full" release. Now they mostly add QOL features, like many other devs that came out of early access phase (excluding minecraft and astroneer, these guys are crazy)

[Yellowburn10]

I know that for a long time, I rarely ventured out of Kerbins SOI, but at the same time, it wasn't for lack of trying. I did send missions out to other planets, and had fun doing it, but despite that, the missions I had close to home were always in greater number. I want to say these close missions were mostly out of convenience, as any interplanetary mission would take up much more time than say a trip to the Mun or Minmus.

[Toucan]

It surprises me that other players don't leave Kerbin SOI. Within a fortnight of discovering KSP I had a station in orbit of Duna. (Granted it was Covid-19 lockdown and I had nothing else to do.)

I find visiting and landing on the other planets much easier than trying to build planes or boats.

[Lewie]

40 minutes ago, Toucan said:

It surprises me that other players don't leave Kerbin SOI. Within a fortnight of discovering KSP I had a station in orbit of Duna.

Dang man! Within the first two weeks of playing ksp I was still messing around in sandbox mode, heavily abusing srbs and the infinite fuel cheat. Kudos to you man, I actually started to ligit play the game a few weeks ago(before I just did random missions in sandbox) What mode do you play? I do Science. Career is incredibly buggy on console...

[Cavscout74]

I don't remember the exact numbers, but <20% reach Duna and <10% go past Duna IIRC. 

Another reason, the dev that was developing the planets left quite a while ago.  There were vague plans for a "GP2"  (Gas Planet 2) that represented Saturn and even vaguer plans for Uranus & Neptune equivalents from what I've seen.  I also seem to remember seeing somewhere the OPM planet pack was based on what information was released before those plans were scrapped.

I actually made it to Duna before Minmus because it never occurred to me to look for a second moon, since at the time I thought the Kerbin system was an exact replica of our solar system.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Cavscout74

[Superfluous J]

Also, adding new planets won't add much new. They've covered most of the bases already, at least those they can cover within the restrictions of the engine.

Duna has Ike, a navigational hazard the player must overcome. Eve has its thick atmosphere. Moho is hard to get to. Jool has many moons. Tylo is Kerbin with no atmosphere. Laythe is a reason to bring jet engines into space.

Vall is... well it's Mun somewhere else. Pol and Bop are so similar that I keep forgetting which is which, and so similar to Gilly I wonder why they're even there. Eeloo and Dres are just easier Moho clones.

They obviously ran out of unique options before they stopped adding worlds. A third Mun or fourth Moho isn't going to help that situation.

The only thing they never added that I can think of is a moon having a moon. But those tend to be unstable in real life so you can't blame the devs for never doing it.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Superfluous J
Swype attack!

[Lewie]

@Superfluous J you’ve got a really good point. Squad really did cover their bases, and any more planets or moons probably would have been seen unnecessary. Maybe their could’ve been some good ones, but ditto. You really did cover it well.

[Toucan]

4 hours ago, Lewie said:

Dang man! Within the first two weeks of playing ksp I was still messing around in sandbox mode, heavily abusing srbs and the infinite fuel cheat. Kudos to you man, I actually started to ligit play the game a few weeks ago(before I just did random missions in sandbox) What mode do you play? I do Science. Career is incredibly buggy on console...

I dont use any cheats, unless you consider Mechjeb one. 
Currently I play both career and sandbox, but I have restarted the game multiple times. Though now I am working again everything seems to move a lot slower.  

Right now I am working on trying to put together a multiple lander mission for Jools moons.
I had heard of KSP before but I guess I didnt really realise what it was because I think I have been looking for a game like this my entire life so it has a had huge impact on me and I think 100% saved my sanity during lockdown. Started out replicating Matt Lowne missions and worked it out from there.

[Jodo42]

3 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

Also, adding new planets won't add much new. They've covered most of the bases already, at least those they can cover within the restrictions of the engine.

Duna has Ike, a navigational hazard the player must overcome. Eve has its thick atmosphere. Moho is hard to get to. Jool has many moons. Tylo is Kerbin with no atmosphere. Laythe is a reason to bring jet engines into space.

Vall is... well it's Mun somewhere else. Pol and Bop are so similar that I keep forgetting which is which, and so similar to Gilly I wonder why they're even there. Eeloo and Dres are just easier Moho clones.

They obviously ran out of unique options before they stopped adding worlds. A third Mun or fourth Moho isn't going to help that situation.

The only thing they never added that I can think of is a moon having a moon. But those tend to be unstable in real life so you can't blame the devs for never doing it.

There's more than enough interesting stuff left to justify adding at least another gas giant, that is doable with the current engine.

• Co-orbital bodies. Saturn has several moons in this configuration. If you properly incentivized travel between them (say, they both had an atmosphere, or some interesting ISRU resource), it would be an easy teaching moment for resonance orbits, which aren't frequently used elsewhere in the game.
• Highly inclined, eccentric, and retrograde moons. Plenty of the first two in our solar system, and there's Triton for the last.
• Something like Hyperion, with the elongated but still not "lumpy" shape. Plenty of other possible weird shapes, like Pan and Atlas.

This is ignoring both stuff that doesn't exist in our solar system but is still realistic, like your subsatellite suggestion, desert/ice/lava planets, brown dwarfs and Super Earths, contact binaries like Arrokoth, and weirder stuff like stellar remnants, as well as real objects that would require some additions to the current engine, like ring systems and shepherd moons, volcanism like on Io, cryovolcanism like on Europa and Enceladus, content that would make ocean planets and cave systems worth exploring, bodies with unusual axial tilt etc. Much of which is already doable with Kopernicus.

And of course, there's plenty more mundane stuff. Procedural asteroids generating as trojans, Kupier Belt/scattered disc/Oort cloud bodies. Small bodies in general are great for complex moon/binary systems (see: Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, asteroids with moons, etc). I'm sure others can go on. Our universe is an amazing place with a huge amount of diversity among its objects. And we've been blessed with a pretty amazing, diverse solar system, too. Imagine a species that lived in a "boring" system with few large objects. Or even just imagine we were like Venus, with no Moon. How would the course of human history be altered if our closest explorable worlds were only bright specks in the sky, featureless and indistinguishable from stars to an untrained eye? How much longer would it take such a civilization to explore the cosmos?

Whatever reason they have for not adding new bodies, it's surely not because of a lack of options.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

49 minutes ago, Jodo42 said:

There's more than enough interesting stuff left to justify adding at least another gas giant, that is doable with the current engine.

• Co-orbital bodies. Saturn has several moons in this configuration. If you properly incentivized travel between them (say, they both had an atmosphere, or some interesting ISRU resource), it would be an easy teaching moment for resonance orbits, which aren't frequently used elsewhere in the game.
• Highly inclined, eccentric, and retrograde moons. Plenty of the first two in our solar system, and there's Triton for the last.
• Something like Hyperion, with the elongated but still not "lumpy" shape. Plenty of other possible weird shapes, like Pan and Atlas.

This is ignoring both stuff that doesn't exist in our solar system but is still realistic, like your subsatellite suggestion, desert/ice/lava planets, brown dwarfs and Super Earths, contact binaries like Arrokoth, and weirder stuff like stellar remnants, as well as real objects that would require some additions to the current engine, like ring systems and shepherd moons, volcanism like on Io, cryovolcanism like on Europa and Enceladus, content that would make ocean planets and cave systems worth exploring, bodies with unusual axial tilt etc. Much of which is already doable with Kopernicus.

And of course, there's plenty more mundane stuff. Procedural asteroids generating as trojans, Kupier Belt/scattered disc/Oort cloud bodies. Small bodies in general are great for complex moon/binary systems (see: Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, asteroids with moons, etc). I'm sure others can go on. Our universe is an amazing place with a huge amount of diversity among its objects. And we've been blessed with a pretty amazing, diverse solar system, too. Imagine a species that lived in a "boring" system with few large objects. Or even just imagine we were like Venus, with no Moon. How would the course of human history be altered if our closest explorable worlds were only bright specks in the sky, featureless and indistinguishable from stars to an untrained eye? How much longer would it take such a civilization to explore the cosmos?

Whatever reason they have for not adding new bodies, it's surely not because of a lack of options.

Good points - but then that's strongly a reason for a KSP2, nicht wahr?

If they're going to try to add new stuff at this late date... that seems counter productive toward promoting the new title.  It can't be merely - go to space and build bases (they're bloody difficult for us duffers).  KSP2 should have a mix of what we have now, what we want, and hey I never thought of that; good onya devs!

[KerikBalm]

I'd say just get OPM.

As to what stock lacks, I would say a body like Titan- Opm has tekto, and a body with a real thin atmosphere like Mars - duna's is about an order of magnitude thicker, with only 80% of the gravity... Opm has Thatmo(?) Which really has a thin atmosphere...

And co-orbital bodies as mentioned.

[Lewie]

I don’t use cheats anymore, I did when I was a noob (ok...when I was more of a noob. I’m not anywhere close to the master level of a thousand hours) but I used them Cus I could barely figure out how anything worked.

[Fraston]

On 5/26/2020 at 1:32 PM, Starhawk said:

I'm not one of the developers, so I can only speculate.

Part of the reason may be that Squad's data shows that most KSP players never leave Kerbin's SOI.

Happy landings!

Shame. My very first science save (my second save!) I went escape velocity with a very simple rocket that consisted of a twin boar, the orange tank (it was still orange at the version I played, 1.3. I got the game the 12 of September, 2017.), 2 thumper boosters, a second stage with a quarter size 2.5m tank, and the 2.5 command pod. I had the game for less than a week, and I had no idea how to make orbit, so I burned straight up with this rocket and exited Kerbin SOI. Kids these days.