wandering planets

[jastrone]

is there a possibility that there will be planets that are not in orbit of a star in ksp2? or would it be to hard to get there?

[Kerminator K-100]

Kind of like this Kurzgesagt video?

 

[K^2]

I would absolutely love for there to be a rogue planet with remnants of a dead civilization on it. Unlike a world around a star, a structure on a rogue planet can be perfectly preserved for millions and millions of years. Once the atmosphere rains out and becomes part of the planet's oceans, eventually freezing solid, and the planet leaves behind the danger of asteroids lurking in star systems, the only thing that can alter the landscape is tectonic activity, and there can be entire continents worth of land that remain untouched for a very, very, very long time.

[starcaptain]

It would certainly be a unique challenge to reach.

It would be more like trying to rendezvous with another spacecraft in deep solar orbit, rather than just transferring out to another planet or star, because the SOI for even a substantial rocky planet or rogue gas giant would be so tiny compared to its stellar neighbors.

To say nothing of operations in almost complete external darkeness.

Personally, my preference would be a brown dwarf rogue, and one with moons.

[Souptime]

It would be really cool if earth was a rouge planet in KSP 2, and if you land in the icy remains of mexico city you could find an old SQUAD headquarters

[cubinator]

I'd love to visit rogue planets in KSP2. As many types of objects as they can add, I want to see.

I also wonder to what extent they will make interstellar debris a danger to spacecraft, as travelling at high speed can make shields a requirement.

[mcwaffles2003]

11 hours ago, cubinator said:

I also wonder to what extent they will make interstellar debris a danger to spacecraft, as travelling at high speed can make shields a requirement.

If I recall in a previous interview nate said they wanted to model space dust but felt it would either make the game to intensive or require to much processing 

[Guest]

IDK how you would make rouge planets work, as we now know you have to use telescopes to discover planets. But I could see two in the game.

[mcwaffles2003]

On 12/28/2020 at 12:19 AM, The Doodling Astronaut said:

IDK how you would make rouge planets work, as we now know you have to use telescopes to discover planets. But I could see two in the game.

Just make them wandering easter eggs for us to find. Someone will find their orbits in the code and release their location to the community and a  challenge in the future will be intercepting them blind based on an ephemeris that gets made by users

[LittleBitMore]

The issues I'd think would be encountered would be, "How do you hide it?"

Rogue planets would be near impossible to find without extremely advanced tech, and I hope KSP2 mirrors this by adding some sort of part, like a space telescope, that needs to be used to see rogue planets and the planets around stars.

Sorta a topic derailment but also sorta fitting.

[starcaptain]

On 12/24/2020 at 11:58 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:

If I recall in a previous interview nate said they wanted to model space dust but felt it would either make the game to intensive or require to much processing 

I recall the reason spacedust would be forgone is gameplay reasons. Late game would result in ships being predominately optimized for bi-directional shielding and resembling giant pills, which is boring so they left that part out.  Having players decide what to optimize for is more diverse and interesting. 

42 minutes ago, LittleBitMore said:

The issues I'd think would be encountered would be, "How do you hide it?"

Rogue planets would be near impossible to find without extremely advanced tech, and I hope KSP2 mirrors this by adding some sort of part, like a space telescope, that needs to be used to see rogue planets and the planets around stars.

Sorta a topic derailment but also sorta fitting.

Discovery of rogues might become akin to discovering asteroids,  writ large. 

That makes me think of procedural generation of new planets,  given a large space (literally) to insert them and make them free to explore or ignore. Planets and stars are fixed that the designers intended, but procedural ones could be in the interstellar void.

[ffx]

space pills

 

[starcaptain]

13 hours ago, ffx said:

space pills

Well nothing's fundamentally wrong with space pills.

But building the game so that everyone's designs converge on that shape isn't as fun as not doing that.

[crenelatedcheese]

Sounds interesting, maybe have some valuable stuff to mine or science deep inside; may I suggest caves?

[Incarnation of Chaos]

On 1/6/2021 at 7:27 PM, LittleBitMore said:

The issues I'd think would be encountered would be, "How do you hide it?"

Rogue planets would be near impossible to find without extremely advanced tech, and I hope KSP2 mirrors this by adding some sort of part, like a space telescope, that needs to be used to see rogue planets and the planets around stars.

Sorta a topic derailment but also sorta fitting.

Visible spectrum they're difficult, they'd light up in the infrared once you filtered out known light sources (Galaxies/Stars/Etc.). These things are cold, but they'd likely have some kind of atmosphere (Either existing before being ejected, or accumulated over eons drifting in the void). And they have internal heat, so while still basically trying to find a needle in a haystack...

It's possible, the issue is just that IRL there hasn't been much demand for this kind of observation. But Kerbals aren't limited in such ways, so you could launch specialized telescopes (Or if you had a hubble-like scope, refit it with a different instrument package with engineers on EVA).

I'm talking rogue planets specifically here, Exoplanets with parent stars have far better ways to detect them.

Discovering Exoplanets *Sigh*

If we want something immersive, then it might actually be best to go for a long-term science experiment route. Not only because the time periods needed to constrain candidate stars is long, but because we only very recently had determined methods to find these things in the first place. Then refined them from there, etc.  So your first discoveries should be the most massive, closest "Hot Jupiters". Then after enough data is accumulated, you get a quest/mission/whatever to build a new generation of telescopes to find smaller planets using methods the Kerbals totally think will work now that they know they're not the center of the universe!

And then on from there, i normally don't like the idea of science experiments taking time in KSP. But to me, this should definitely be a long-term, kerbin-wide project. Because not only does that mirror IRL, but it also helps naturally provide a lever for player progression. 51 Pegasi was discovered in 95, we'd been to the moon and back by then. So, you could use this milestone to essentially gate the player from going Interstellar "Too early" and encouraging them to explore the Kerbol system naturally.  It's also very configurable, this milestone can just be automatically granted in "Sandbox" for instance.  You could also set the amount of "Data" needed to trip the threshold, making it easier or harder to get access to Exoplanets.

On 1/6/2021 at 8:13 PM, starcaptain said:

I recall the reason spacedust would be forgone is gameplay reasons. Late game would result in ships being predominately optimized for bi-directional shielding and resembling giant pills, which is boring so they left that part out.  Having players decide what to optimize for is more diverse and interesting. 

Discovery of rogues might become akin to discovering asteroids,  writ large. 

That makes me think of procedural generation of new planets,  given a large space (literally) to insert them and make them free to explore or ignore. Planets and stars are fixed that the designers intended, but procedural ones could be in the interstellar void.

If it's not on rails but still patched conics, then you limit where you can spawn them (And now you have to keep that object in mind for new spawns). Or it has to be N-body, and calculated at all times.

There's a couple ways they could make it work, you could just have a set of pathways that are pseudorandomly seeded per save instance. (These would basically be your voids, but constrained to make sure they couldn't muck anything up physics-wise) This would determine which ones could even have planets, and then which ones would spawn. You might even be able to randomize these pathways as well, so that you can create enough variation in each save instance that it's less predictable.

If you want to go N-body, then you could just limit the number of objects to something they'd demonstrate in testing wouldn't cause too many issues.

But all of this is more work, on top of whatever they already have. I think this would be far better as a DLC or Mod personally.