The upcoming supply lines in KSP 2 could require the player manually perform the route and operations involved periodically to "requalify" the technology and kerbals involved. To keep it real

[Guest]

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Edited June 20, 2021 by Guest

[Guest]

16 hours ago, Brikoleur said:

Round trips with backhauls would certainly be more efficient, but I would expect it’d be fairly uncommon to have a situation where it’s possible. You might have two roughly equal-sized colonies that produce different resources and swap them, but most of the time I think you’d be hauling stuff outwards. If your supply runs keep the orbital shipyard where you’re building your colony ship in materials, what is there to haul back? And wouldn’t it make more sense to incorporate the freighter into the colony ship?

An orbital shipyard orbiting a body, a bunch of bases for mining and production on the ground, a bunch of ships bring up resources and down fuel and supplies.

Reusability of crafts will have to be a factor taken care of in the whole gameplay ladder, from the first reusable booster, to SSTO planes resupplying the Kerbin SOI all the way up to inter system interplanetary cargo ships and reusable landers and maybe even ground vehicles between nearby colonies / outposts / mines.

 

There's also the matter of not every small outpost having their own VAB capability built in with a full resource production and mining ongoing, that would be a hefty requirement to put on supply lines availability. I can totally see a Laythe reusable lander SSTO plane being built at Pol Shipyards and sent to Laythe with an expendable tug to enter service in a supply route.

[Jack Mcslay]

I'm wondering how will the automation work going to/from eccentric orbits, like, if you're going to Eeloo, the amount  of delta-v required to reach it can differ close to 1000m/s depending on launch window

[darthgently]

1 minute ago, Jack Mcslay said:

I'm wondering how will the automation work going to/from eccentric orbits, like, if you're going to Eeloo, the amount  of delta-v required to reach it can differ close to 1000m/s depending on launch window

Me too.  I'm basically assuming that it will all be based on optimal windows for regular routes.  Some of those could be very few and far between

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Jack Mcslay said:

I'm wondering how will the automation work going to/from eccentric orbits, like, if you're going to Eeloo, the amount  of delta-v required to reach it can differ close to 1000m/s depending on launch window

We have web tools and mods capable of calculating the windows, with little work I think it's possible to use the Delta V budget demonstrated in the certification mission and use it as the maximum budget to calculate all the future possible windows.

From there there's probably some work to do on the logic of the feature if you want to give the player the ability to plan fully automated routine routes or conditional ones ("if x shipyard has less than y iron start a supply run") instead of just per-craft player planned runs.

 

There's a lot of wiggle room for this system to be anything from a simplified abstraction all the way to a fully simulated system down to being able of seeing the crafts moving around on their own, but to me none of that complexities are going to be on the player side even for the most realistic and simulated option since in that case the craft would just behave according to the same rules you already had to follow and understand to make the certification mission.

As an example let's use the transfer window thing, it's obviously more complex to have a realistic simulation with the automated routes respecting actual  available transfer windows but it's not less intuitive for the player, the opposite, if the game completely ignores them the risk is for it to be confusing, especially since the player in question had to know how a transfer window works and probably watch a bunch of related tutorials to do the certification mission. 

[darthgently]

10 minutes ago, Master39 said:

We have web tools and mods capable of calculating the windows, with little work I think it's possible to use the Delta V budget demonstrated in the certification mission and use it as the maximum budget to calculate all the future possible windows.

From there there's probably some work to do on the logic of the feature if you want to give the player the ability to plan fully automated routine routes or conditional ones ("if x shipyard has less than y iron start a supply run") instead of just per-craft player planned runs.

 

There's a lot of wiggle room for this system to be anything from a simplified abstraction all the way to a fully simulated system down to being able of seeing the crafts moving around on their own, but to me none of that complexities are going to be on the player side even for the most realistic and simulated option since in that case the craft would just behave according to the same rules you already had to follow and understand to make the certification mission.

As an example let's use the transfer window thing, it's obviously more complex to have a realistic simulation with the automated routes respecting actual  available transfer windows but it's not less intuitive for the player, the opposite, if the game completely ignores them the risk is for it to be confusing, especially since the player in question had to know how a transfer window works and probably watch a bunch of related tutorials to do the certification mission. 

Ideally, supply routes in stock KSP2 would allow the ability to set schedules based on user set priorities with regards to time between shipments, trip duration, and fuel costs.  Then the underlying code just picks the best match with player override capability.  For example, I'd like to be able to set a fuel cost limit, then later, when my fuel is coming from Minmus instead of Kerbin, and presumably the cost goes down, the algorithm would not be as picky about the narrowness of the transfer window

[darthgently]

On 6/2/2021 at 5:18 PM, Master39 said:

An orbital shipyard orbiting a body, a bunch of bases for mining and production on the ground, a bunch of ships bring up resources and down fuel and supplies.

Reusability of crafts will have to be a factor taken care of in the whole gameplay ladder, from the first reusable booster, to SSTO planes resupplying the Kerbin SOI all the way up to inter system interplanetary cargo ships and reusable landers and maybe even ground vehicles between nearby colonies / outposts / mines.

 

There's also the matter of not every small outpost having their own VAB capability built in with a full resource production and mining ongoing, that would be a hefty requirement to put on supply lines availability. I can totally see a Laythe reusable lander SSTO plane being built at Pol Shipyards and sent to Laythe with an expendable tug to enter service in a supply route.

I couldn't have written it better

[Incarnation of Chaos]

I think it should be a difficulty setting if they decide to go for it, and should only kick in after a certain amount of hours of the craft running the route. 

We don't requalify aircraft every time they land afterall, and it also would allow technology to improve the time between mirroring IRL improvement in materials and technology extending time between rebuilds on turbine engines.