Speed of light, pilots, and engineers.

[mikegarrison]

11 hours ago, herbal space program said:

Well it's not like I'm not going to to buy the game if that's what they end up doing!  But I do think it would be fundamentally different from the examples you cited.  No light delay, instant build times,  and no life support are things that exist in the game because not having them would make playing it way too much of a pain in the end that should not point towards space, IOW they were necessary compromises with realism in order to make the game playable.

I'm not at all sure if I will buy KSP2, but that's mostly because I have over 2700 hours logged on KSP1, and I'm not sure I really feel the need to play any more KSP of any flavor at this point.

But I don't think it would be a playable game if it took, for instance 4000 years to cross between one star and another. I mean, you could, I suppose, just have a super timewarp, but if you did -- from a gameplay perspective, would that be any different than having some kind of spacewarp drive?

I'm not actually sold on the idea that there should be multiple star systems. If it were my game, I think I would have gone for more of a realism overhaul approach and made the KSP system bigger and more complicated. Also, I might have tried to implement a "random solar system" function. But, you know, it's not my game to develop.

Edited August 14, 2021 by mikegarrison

[herbal space program]

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

But I don't think it would be a playable game if it took, for instance 4000 years to cross between one star and another. I mean, you could, I suppose, just have a super timewarp, but if you did -- from a gameplay perspective, would that be any different than having some kind of spacewarp drive?

It would be different in the sense that if you have some kind of super-fast drive, whatever else you may have been doing in your home system doesn't have to stop completely for you to timewarp ahead a whole bunch of years, which seems to me like it would be really bad for gameplay overall.  But as I said above, introducing such OP technology will create its own set of problems, which is why I feel like the best solution is to  have the Kerbolar system be in a Kerbal-scaled region of much higher stellar density than the fairly sparse neighborhood our Sun inhabits, so that you can get to the next star system in something like 10 years of game time in a large colony ship that is going only around 100 times faster than  the ships in KSP1 do, i.e. at no more than 1-2% of light speed. Perhaps smaller probes  that can go a few times faster than this could also be possible, to collect information  about other star systems before launching the actual colony ship.

[shdwlrd]

16 hours ago, herbal space program said:

A valid point, although just scaling down by 3.5-fold only gets you a short way towards addressing the multiple-orders-of-magnitude disparity between distance scales within and between systems in the real universe.  At 10km/sec, which is going quite fast in KSP1, it takes about 3 Kerbal years to cross the ~250 million km Kerbolar System.  Even the shorter Kerbal light year is 2.8 trillion km by comparison.  For a distance of 5 Kerbal light years, that represents a 56,000-fold difference in the distances within systems and between them.  From a gameplay standpoint,  I think that having interstellar travel times be more than around 5-fold greater than intra-system times is going to be really unwieldy unless the whole game is just about taking that first trip to another system, i.e. you stop doing anything else back home once you have launched. That seems like it would limit the scope of the game way too much to me, so what I think you're left with is striking some balance between making KSP2 interstellar ships go 10,000 times faster than their fastest KSP1 counterparts and having the next star system be 10,000 times closer than that.  My instinct is that roughly splitting the difference, i.e. putting the other stars 100 times closer and making the ships go 100 times faster, will be close to ideal in terms of both keeping the timescales in balance and not having to invoke Star Trek-type  pure fantasy technology. Maybe some folks aren't so concerned about the latter because  it is after all just a game, but I would say that it is for that very reason that introducing such radically OP elements relative to the prior continuum of technologies is such a problem. Anyway, I'll buy the game no matter what they do, but I do hope they think some of this stuff through.

Are you also taking into account that Intercept is adding a more levels to the time warp and adding the ability to thrust under time warp? In KSP1 the max warp level is 100,000x and you can't thrust. (The current max warp for KSP1 works to about 6hrs game time to 1sec real time.) If going interstellar you will need to increase the warp amounts. If they increase the max time warp to say for example 1 light year takes 5 min real time, the distances we're talking about won't be a much of a game play issue. Add in the ability to thrust unfocused and under time warp, the craft itself will be able to achieve a reasonable amount of C before you have to turn around and start decelerating. Between increased time warp levels and accelerating during time warp, the mind boggling distances that we are talking about won't drag down the game play of KSP2. You have to remember, you can't base everything that KSP2 will be doing to KSP1. Intercept is changing and expanding on a lot of the base functionality of KSP1 for KSP2. 

17 hours ago, herbal space program said:

Why even add Kerbals to the game then? 

Well, in KSP1 the Kerbals were no more then fun little pets to get sad about if you killed them. (OK, they did have some usefulness beyond piloting, but Squad never let it be known. You had to figure it out on your own.) Then the mod KIS/KAS was made. Actually gave the Kerbals a good gameplay purpose. But Squad came along and added professions. Instead of helping because of their professions, they limited what the individual Kerbal can do because of their profession. That was stupid. It's the limited capability of the individual Kerbal by professions that I don't want to see continue into KSP2. 

In KSP2, it's looking like Intercept is turning the Kerbals from little pets to an actual usable resource. As being a resource, the limiting of what a Kerbal can do because of their professions needs to go away. Intercept can make much better use of the professions by adding bonuses to the activities that are related to the professions. A scientist will help find resources faster and more accurately. An engineer will add bonuses to ISRU, power generation, and construction. A pilot would add efficiency and reliability to the background resource transfers.

Under the control of the player, they can do anything the player wants them to do. But when left to the background processing, their professions would dictate how efficient the task is performed.

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

Are you also taking into account that Intercept is adding a more levels to the time warp and adding the ability to thrust under time warp? In KSP1 the max warp level is 100,000x and you can't thrust. (The current max warp for KSP1 works to about 6hrs game time to 1sec real time.)

Yes, I understand that, and it does not address the point I was trying to make, which I have tried to explain now at such tiresome length that I am not gonna try again.  I guess we will just have to see what they do, but if they really end up putting different star systems 2-5 ly apart I will be quite surprised and not particularly happy, because of  the other things that will necessarily imply.

[shdwlrd]

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

Yes, I understand that, and it does not address the point I was trying to make, which I have tried to explain now at such tiresome length that I am not gonna try again.  I guess we will just have to see what they do, but if they really end up putting different star systems 2-5 ly apart I will be quite surprised and not particularly happy, because of  the other things that will necessarily imply.

Lol, then say your point as plainly as possible. Because the point I'm thinking you are trying to make is that the distance and time required are impractical for new star systems if done with a realistic scale and will destroy the game play.

[herbal space program]

2 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

Lol, then say your point as plainly as possible. Because the point I'm thinking you are trying to make is that the distance and time required are impractical for new star systems if done with a realistic scale and will destroy the game play.

I thought I made it pretty plain already, but here goes again: Just try to walk yourself mentally through what a KSP2 campaign-mode game is going to be like, with the goal being not to explore just one, but rather multiple star systems in the end. They are apparently keeping pretty much all the old parts, so that sure makes it seem like they mean to have you start where you started in KSP1 in terms of tech,  if not at an even more primitive level. So you play up through all those KSP1 exercises and build all this infrastructure in the Kerbolar system, the main point of which is going to be to enable you to travel to the stars. What happens to all of that after you launch your first interstellar mission if the time it will take to get there is 50 or more times longer than the time it takes to do a Jool return mission at home? Are you just going to put all that on hold while you timewarp at 1,000,000X for 150 years? What if you first need to learn something about the remote system with a probe before it makes any sense to send a larger mission there? How long in terms of the time scale of in-system play are you willing to have that turnaround take?  If there are multiple systems to explore,  how are you going to manage the development of your resources in the first exoplanetary system you reach while other missions are in flight? If the timescales aren't too far apart, it's a manageable issue,  but at some point it will become truly onerous. That is the gameplay problem I am talking about, and it already kind of exists along the lines of "what do I do in the Kerbin SOI to fill up the three or more years it takes for all my interplanetary missions get where they are going there and back?".  Except this would represent that issue writ much larger. The only way to mitigate against that massive discontinuity in time scales if you are going to stick to interstellar distances typical of the Solar neighborhood is to make your interstellar ships go more than half the speed of light, which will require pure fantasy propulsion technologies representing a stark  four-orders-of-magnitude discontinuity with everything that came before them.  OTOH, every order of magnitude you bring your neighboring star systems closer represents an order of magnitude less  ridiculously OP your interstellar propulsion tech needs to be to keep the relative time scales in some reasonable balance.  That is, if you bring the other stars 100 times closer than that, then you are talking about only a 100-fold power-up, translating to ISPs on the order of 100,000 to build usable ships rather than some absurd number like 10,000,000 so that there can be some kind of plausible 2-way aspect to interstellar travel. I don't think I can make it any plainer than that.

[enewmen]

I've personalty played KSP1 with Interstellar Extended (KSPIE) and Galaxies Unbound (GU).  GU has fairly realistically vast distances between stars. Going between distant stars with high-speed KSPIE warp takes less (Kerbin) time than going to Duna without warp for example. So I don't see any big issues.  With low-tech first generation warp-drive that is near the speed of light, it will take Kerbin years to reach nearby stars and that sounds like a one-way mission.  My 2-cents worth.

[EnderKid2]

On 8/16/2021 at 8:32 PM, enewmen said:

I've personalty played KSP1 with Interstellar Extended (KSPIE) and Galaxies Unbound (GU).  GU has fairly realistically vast distances between stars. Going between distant stars with high-speed KSPIE warp takes less (Kerbin) time than going to Duna without warp for example. So I don't see any big issues.  With low-tech first generation warp-drive that is near the speed of light, it will take Kerbin years to reach nearby stars and that sounds like a one-way mission.  My 2-cents worth.

the whole point of this discussion (as I understand the design goals of KSP2) is we're at most getting fusion/antimatter torch drives capable of getting to a few percent of c with a reasonable payload mass fraction, or yeeting a small probe up to a few times that speed. No warp drives going multiples of c.

[Fletch4]

The devs are trying to reach a lot of people with KSP2, and not everyone wants an ultra-realistic game. If you want speed of light delay(seems pointless with time-warp, and why wait 4 hours to have your game do something), just get a mod, or make it yourself. is it really that much of a problem to pack three different Kerbals on a ship? You already have the mk3 command pod, but if you cant deal with the "complexity" of that, there are already multiple mods that add different professions. If you really have that much trouble with a tiny part of the game, then figure it out.  Of you want an irl experience, mod packs are the way to go.

[enewmen]

4 hours ago, Fletch4 said:

The devs are trying to reach a lot of people with KSP2, and not everyone wants an ultra-realistic game. If you want speed of light delay(seems pointless with time-warp, and why wait 4 hours to have your game do something), just get a mod, or make it yourself. is it really that much of a problem to pack three different Kerbals on a ship? You already have the mk3 command pod, but if you cant deal with the "complexity" of that, there are already multiple mods that add different professions. If you really have that much trouble with a tiny part of the game, then figure it out.  Of you want an irl experience, mod packs are the way to go.

I understand. Most people don't want ultra-realism. But if additional realism (n-body Newtonian gravitation, life support, light-speed communication, nuclear physics, etc) is selectable in some hidden advanced setting. then an even larger population will want this.  The added (optional) realism will also make KSP2 suitable for professional use - IF the devs want this game suitable for professional use or teaching physics (newton and atomic) & logistics.  My 2 cent opinion.

@EnderKid2.  "we're at most getting fusion/antimatter torch drives capable of getting to a few percent of c " Ok, didn't know that. There will be lots of time-warping and babies born between stars then.

Edited September 10, 2021 by enewmen

[shdwlrd]

49 minutes ago, enewmen said:

There will be lots of time-warping and babies born between stars then.

That's a given. (Babies being born) It's been mentioned several times that you can thrust while on time warp and unfocused. It was also mentioned that there will be new higher levels of time warp.

[jimmymcgoochie]

On the topic of “crazy OP interstellar drives”, what do you think the whole metallic hydrogen thing is for? The Daedalus drive (shown in the original trailer for KSP2) has a theoretical ISP in the region of a million seconds using conventional D-He3 fusion and could probably be improved further by using the more exotic propellant/reactant options like antimatter or metallic hydrogen that KSP2 will feature.

In the case of Project Daedalus itself, the end goal was visiting Barnard’s Star ~6 light years away within 50 years, reaching  0.12c in the process and then scattering nuclear-powered ion probes at any planets or interesting features detected at a closer distance. I’d imagine such a system would be entirely feasible within KSP2 and would serve the purpose of scouting out a new star system while the much larger crewed interstellar ship is built back in the Kerbol system.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, enewmen said:

I understand. Most people don't want ultra-realism. But if additional realism (n-body Newtonian gravitation, life support, light-speed communication, nuclear physics, etc) is selectable in some hidden advanced setting. then an even larger population will want this. 

Light delay it's realistic only if you then write your own automation for every probe manually with some KOS equivalent, but if you do that you can also skip having the actual delay in place, just disable direct control and force yourself to only control the craft with the script you write, if you want to go extra hardcore you can program the delay based on the distance in your script, it would be easy to do compared to the other challenges you'll have in programming a probe remote control system.

Delay on its own isn't an "hardcore setting" it's just a setting that shift the game away from manual control and towards autopilot system, it can be either an extreme dumbing down or an extreme hardcore mode accessible only to experienced programmers, and it would be a terrible way of meeting both ends of that spectrum.

 

3 hours ago, enewmen said:

IF the devs want this game suitable for professional use or teaching physics (newton and atomic) & logistics.

That's not a direct goal of the game, just a byproduct. KSP doesn't teach physics buy being serious and accurate, it does so by being actually fun to play and inspiring people to further explore the topics they're playing with, ditching gameplay for realism would actually harm KSP educational potential.

[ave369]

On 8/12/2021 at 8:02 PM, enewmen said:

is there a need for colonies? I never needed a colony for any reason in KSP 1

KSP 1 did not have any exoplanets. When you need a 10 year relativistic flight to reach another star system and each sublight starship costs at least 10,000,000 kerbodollars, will you launch every single piddly probe to the systems where Puf, Gurdamma or Rusk are from Kerbin and spend 10,000,000 kerbodollars and 10 years each time? Or will you plop a colony on Puf, build a space center there and launch from Puf to explore the system as if it was Kerbin?

2 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

On the topic of “crazy OP interstellar drives”, what do you think the whole metallic hydrogen thing is for? The Daedalus drive (shown in the original trailer for KSP2) has a theoretical ISP in the region of a million seconds using conventional D-He3 fusion and could probably be improved further by using the more exotic propellant/reactant options like antimatter or metallic hydrogen that KSP2 will feature.

The metallic hydrogen engine is not a fusion torch, it's a chemical torch. It is intended to launch single stage pulp novel style rockets to LKO, but it will be of little use in deep space, let alone interstellar space. Expect thrust around the same values as Mainsails and Mammoths, and ISP two times that of Mainsails and Mammoths.

Edited September 10, 2021 by ave369

[jimmymcgoochie]

52 minutes ago, ave369 said:

The metallic hydrogen engine is not a fusion torch, it's a chemical torch. It is intended to launch single stage pulp novel style rockets to LKO, but it will be of little use in deep space, let alone interstellar space. Expect thrust around the same values as Mainsails and Mammoths, and ISP two times that of Mainsails and Mammoths.

Everything in that statement is fundamentally not a torch drive. Unless you have some secret insider information from the KSP2 team, which I highly doubt, what you’re describing is woefully underpowered and orders of magnitude below what a true torch drive would be capable of.

A booster engine producing 1.5MN with an ISP of 650 to 700 seconds is little more than an oversized NTR- in fact there are some engines in Kerbal Atomics that outperform it, using high-heat fission reactors and liquid hydrogen as propellant. What would be the point in spending all that time and effort setting up a metallic hydrogen production system just to waste it on that sort of dismal performance throwing stuff into orbit? 

A torch drive needs to produce high levels of thrust for days with a fairly high TWR and a usable payload fraction too, so needs an extremely high ISP to reduce the fuel mass it’s lugging around with it; metallic hydrogen is extremely dense and can cram a lot of fuel into a small space, perfect for a long-burning torch drive making interplanetary journeys in a few days via semi-brachistochrone trajectories. (See The Expanse which does a pretty good job of showing how torch ships would work, even if the physics of their torch drives is a bit handwave-y.)

Besides all that, metallic Hydrogen is endgame tech, long after launching from Kerbin has ceased to be relevant as anything you need, you’d make in a colony somewhere instead. Flinging resources from planet to planet with next-day delivery is exactly what a torch drive is for, not launching stuff up to low orbit from the surface of a planet; accelerating at 2g for a few days, not a few minutes.

[ave369]

Everything in YOUR statement is fundamentally not factual.

> A torch drive needs to produce high levels of thrust for days with a fairly high TWR and a usable payload fraction too

A torch drive is a drive that has more thrust,  more TWR AND, especially, drastically more Isp than a conventional engine of the same class. The metallic hydrogen engine has more thrust, TWR and drastically more Isp than other engines of the class it belongs to, namely chemical engines. It is not a fusion engine and not a fission engine, it is a chemical engine.

> metallic hydrogen is extremely dense

No, it is not. It is formed under extremely high pressure, but it does not mean it is extremely dense. Density of metallic hydrogen is theoretized to be around 0.7 g/cm3.

> a long-burning torch drive making interplanetary journeys in a few days via semi-brachistochrone trajectories

This is not what metallic hydrogen engines are developed for in real life. They are developed for single stage rockets to low Earth orbit in real life. The benefits of metallic hydrogen is high thrust (as it is a chemical engine), while having a better Isp than conventional chemical engines.

> metallic Hydrogen is endgame tech

Citation needed.

Edited September 10, 2021 by ave369

[Vanamonde]

Guys, the subject of this thread is the desirability of simulated communication delays. Not the utility of colonies nor kinds of engines. Please start threads for those other topics if you'd like to continue talking about them. 

[ave369]

Point taken. I submit.

[Daniel Prates]

On 8/11/2021 at 1:17 PM, jimmymcgoochie said:

I'm pretty sure it's confirmed that there will be no speed of light delay of any kind in KSP2. Why would that be in any way useful or fun? "Oops, your staggeringly expensive interstellar ship that took decades of game time to develop the colonies and infrastructure to build just crashed into Rask because you pressed the throttle up button three years before the burn instead of four, too bad so sad."

No thanks.

 

"What I like has to be mandatory for everyone, what I dislike has to be forbiden for everyone" type of thinking huh?

@enewmen you are not only right, in fact that is true even for much closer distances, let alone such far away distances as other stars. KSP1 never tackled signal delay and no wonder, even in a decade there is only so much you can do. Must be a hard thing to program as there isn't even a mod that does it competently. I use "smart parts" for some "meh" results in some limited situations.

So yeah, I am looking foward for more usefullness for crews, they have been slowly brougth into more useful roles over the years (engineers amd repairs for instance, scinetists and surface experiments is another) but I expect KSP2 to expand on that. The impossibility to remotelly command over long distances should be one such case, I am hoping.

And then the guy who wants it easier just goes to the settings screen and tones down the game realism. Boom, everyone is haopy.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Daniel Prates

[Bej Kerman]

On 8/11/2021 at 5:38 PM, enewmen said:

Ok, if there is no speed of light delay and no one wants it, then what good is a pilot for after a few tech levels ?

Why is your solution to mess anything up that happens a bit too far from home? Pilots already unlock more SAS toggles. Besides that, It's basically soft lore now that anything the player does with their probe are predetermined instructions anyway.

On 8/11/2021 at 4:06 PM, enewmen said:

So, we need rare random breaking (in some advanced setting) and more things like parachutes that need to be repacked.  Help me think of other ways an engineer is needed.

  RNG is never good. Why break a player's intricate starship just to implement a bit of chaos? Like, no-one needs this, and few want this. Your solutions to Kerbal jobs seems to just be introduce needless difficulty that lacks any challenges. There are definitely ways to improve this sector of the game than a half-baked gimmick; for instance, the ability to add and move parts on vessels in-flight, which is something 1.11 did iirc - sure, that was half baked itself as with most other stock mod implementations, but conceptually it was a solid idea and the KIS mod proves it can be done well.

Edited September 13, 2021 by Bej Kerman

[jimmymcgoochie]

6 hours ago, Daniel Prates said:

"What I like has to be mandatory for everyone, what I dislike has to be forbiden for everyone" type of thinking huh?

That's what you're saying too though- you must have crew or your probe is just a dumb box of electronics programmed well in advance. Sure, that's been the case so far with real probes, but right now Perseverance is self-navigating across Mars and in the future missions will no doubt take advantage of various machine learning/AI-type programs to make basic mission decisions without the need to wait for potentially hours for a response from Earth; if Kerbals are going interstellar, why wouldn't they have advanced self-piloting probe systems? At which point you're just role-playing as the probe when you're flying it, much like you do now in KSP only without the hazards and pitfalls of writing code in advance and hoping it works or else you'll lose your big important interstellar probe.

I write code for a living; tracking down the cause of a flaky piece of code is a headache when you can hit run and get results in a few seconds, never mind waiting years of Kerbal time only to have a minor calculation error or any number of game physics based slip-ups disrupt your trajectory slightly so your pre-planned braking burn puts you into Ovin, not into Ovin orbit.

What are Kerbals good for when you unlock the good probe tech? Well, not that much: they're much harder to work with in many respects- less resistant to high acceleration, require heavier and larger parts which costs more fuel to get places, generally are supposed to be brought back home after a mission (thus requiring even more fuel), and that's not even counting the real-life problems of life support, radiation, temperature regulation, the stresses of being stuck in a tin can millions of miles from home surrounded by endless hard vacuum, long-term health effects of microgravity and so on and so forth- but while just landing a little probe on Duna is an achievement, it pales in comparison to those first small steps (and trips, falls, faceplants, awkward jumps because you forgot a ladder etc.) and planting that flag in the rusty red soil. Not just because it's a more difficult thing to do, but because those grinning green faces are that much more endearing than a grey brick full of circuitry with some blinky lights on it. Probes are expendable, crash one and it's a bit annoying but no biggie, but losing a Kerbal hurts when they lithobrake a bit too enthusiastically, hit the atmosphere a bit too energetically or the parachutes somehow never make it onto the pod and you only notice when you're seconds away from that mountain.

Adding a SOL delay would require a fairly sophisticated automation system, which is great if you actually know how to code or want to plan everything out ahead of time and watch passively as it happens later, but that's a significant departure from the current KSP and so far I've seen nothing to indicate that this will be the case.

We still haven't seen all that much of what's going to come between the current bounds of KSP- basic stations, bases and interplanetary voyages- and the big title stuff in KSP2- those massive colonies, spacedocks and interstellar megaships- and no doubt those pilots, engineers and scientists are going to have their work cut out turning a rudimentary collection of modules into a functioning space colony. I think it's very likely the KSP2 devs have already thought of solutions to make Kerbals more worth bringing on missions beyond repacking parachutes or restocking experiments, and I'd be interested to see more of the new "mid game" area that picks up where (stock) KSP leaves off, moving from simple there-and-back flying visits to more permanent settlements and Kerbals that don't go back to Kerbin by design rather than by accident.