Mods that should be integrated into ksp2.

[Hyperspace Industries]

(by integrated I mean a similar system put in the game, since the code is brand new) What ksp1 mods do you think should be put into ksp2, it doesn't have to be the entire mod, just one feature is also acceptable. 

My picks:

1. Trajectories, or at least the red orbit line in atmosphere, you won't know exactly where you will land (no exact bullseye landing sites), but atmospheric landings would be much more precise, without leaving out the need for decent skill when doing precise landings, like a colony module.

2. Kerbal attachment system, specifically, the winches, which would give so much more interesting gameplay, a lander could winch up a stuck rover, and you could build skycranes!

But which mods, other than what we already know about being in the game, do you want in ksp2?

Edited August 28, 2021 by Hyperspace Industries
specified "integrated"

[WelshSteW]

Given the absolute horror show that is the stock alarm clock, I hope they don't put any mods into the stock game. Leave it to people who can do it properly.

[The Flying Kerbal]

1 hour ago, WelshSteW said:

Given the absolute horror show that is the stock alarm clock, I hope they don't put any mods into the stock game. Leave it to people who can do it properly.

Perfect idea, I can't get my head around having the author of KAC - who works for them - downgrade his fantastic mod to make it the pile of rubbish they now supply as stock.

A little less time spent destroying mods, and a little more sorting out bugs might have made 1.12 a better release?

[Kerminator K-100]

9 hours ago, WelshSteW said:

Given the absolute horror show that is the stock alarm clock, I hope they don't put any mods into the stock game. Leave it to people who can do it properly.

IDK what people where using KAC for before, but I think the stock alarm clock is great

[archiebald]

1 hour ago, Kerminator K-100 said:

IDK what people where using KAC for before, but I think the stock alarm clock is great

Seriously dude, the difference is like night and day, as in one works (KAC) and the other is a steaming pile (new stock).

[RealKerbal3x]

On 8/29/2021 at 1:02 AM, Kerminator K-100 said:

IDK what people where using KAC for before, but I think the stock alarm clock is great

 

On 8/29/2021 at 2:05 AM, archiebald said:

Seriously dude, the difference is like night and day, as in one works (KAC) and the other is a steaming pile (new stock).

The stock alarm clock may be missing some of the alarm options that KAC has, but the core functionality of setting and receiving alarms is working just fine in 1.12.2. Unless you have a wildly different meaning for the phrase 'it works', it's fine. (There's even a mod that fills in some of the gaps with it)

[SciMan]

Yeah, the Stock Alarm Clock is horrible at predicting transfer windows, but then again TWP (which was a companion mod that integrated excellently with KAC) wasn't ever giving me the right answers for transfer windows or trajectories and burns either, so that might be because they copied that functionality a little "too" well.

Anyways, Back on the OP's topic.
What mod or mods do I think should be integrated in KSP 2?

ModuleManager That's it. That's the one single mod I unconditionally want integrated into KSP 2 (working in a way that's as close to exactly as it is in KSP-1).

Pretty much 3/4 of the currently maintained mods rely on ModuleManager to (most importantly) de-conflict and (still very importantly) balance the mess of part config files out there.

Other things that might be nice to have in KSP 2: Distant Object Enhancement (puts a tiny little "flare" effect on distant planets, and more importantly shows their name on mouse-over, but I guess if you want to hide the bodies in other star systems you could make it need a telescope part on the vessel to enable the "highlight on mouse-over" functionality).

There's too many mods to name them all that add more varieties of RCS thruster to the game, but we need that too. Just 12kn for the Vernor (in only one axis) and 1kn for the rest of the monopropellant RCS thrusters just isn't enough when you're building ships that might be over a kilometer long in-game like they're going to be in KSP 2 (I foresee that we'll need thrusters that react to the RCS controls at the 10, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 kilonewton levels, and it would be really handy to have many versions of thrusters down at the 1kn and 0.1kn level too, look at the configurations of RCS blocks in "Near Future Spacecraft" for the specific nozzle configurations that would likely be the most useful in the widest variety of situations)
Not only should we have more variety of RCS thruster thrust levels, we should be able to choose which fuel combinations they run off of. We'd ideally have "one" thruster part for each combination of "propellant(s)" and "size/thrust", and then we'd have a way to select which nozzle configuration we want. Kind of like how the stock RCS block now allows you to choose which nozzle arrangement you want (but that does miss a configuration of 3 RCS nozzles with each nozzle aligned with one of the XYZ axes).
Wait a second, on the high thrust side, there's an entirely too easy solution for this that I just thought of. Make "any" engine able to respond to either the main throttle input OR the RCS controls (EDIT: Chemically-fueled or standard NTR or ion thruster would work, "mothership main drive" class thrusters would probably not need such functionality, because "orion drive RCS" is just plain silly unless you're trying to jink away from lasers at 1LS from the laser emitter in a orion-drive battleship), with the setting being configurable in the VAB/SPH/Orbital-VAB.
Doesn't solve the "3-axis 3 nozzle RCS block" problem, but it sure helps when you've built something so large that getting it to turn is becoming a real nightmare, and you need RCS thrusters of hundreds of kilonewtons just to get the dang ship to turn without taking a full minute to complete a 180 and stabilize on a heading with SAS engaged.

Back on why we NEED something like ModuleManager, Another reason I use ModuleManager is to make custom patches that make some of the parts behave differently compared to stock, for me it's usually because I don't agree with it's balancing (or I see a lack of a part in a certain size category).

On the mild side, I use it to make scaled-up RTGs so that I don't have to spam 50 parts to be able to generate enough electricity to power my ion engine probes (thanks to those RTGs I need 2-4 ion engines, which means more RTGs) out near Jool or Eeloo where solar power isn't "cheap and easy" like it is even as far out as Duna.

On the more controversial side, I use it to make the Nerv (NTR) and Dawn (ion engine) actually worth using (without much thought) for an in-space engine on a large craft, instead of (for the Nerv) the heavy, overheating, and "why the heck aren't you just using a Poodle or Rhino" mess that it is in stock KSP. The Dawn ion engine is mostly "alright", it just weighs too much when you have like 20 of them propelling a "go to one of the Jool moons and come back to Kerbin" mothership.

(rant starts)

Spoiler

Why do I think the Nerv is such a useless lead weight of an engine?
Well for starters I think the Nerv is more useless than the Thud, I at least can see a use for the Thud when you want to make a larger Skycrane-type lander for Duna or the Mun or the like.
With the Nerv, I once wanted to make a Jool-V mission, and because I wanted to be true to the IRL way they'd do it within the next say 50 years I wanted to use the Nerv. However, when I actually went in and did the math, I figured out that I'd need like 40 Nervs to get the whole blasted mess to Jool and back, and the transfer burn to get to Jool with those engines would take longer than 15 minutes, and I saw all that and I just said to myself "I guess I won't be exploring all these nice planets with manned missions like they want me to!". I didn't start up a game to stare at mostly the same screen for more than 15 minutes, that's what time warp is for. Even 4x physical time warp won't really cut into the time I need that much, because with the number of parts I have on the mission's lander and mining vessel and then the mothership itself, I'm up around 500 parts so 4x physical time warp is basically taking the (already red) MET timer and going "What if it wasn't any faster, but instead it was CHOPPIER?, wouldn't that just be GREAT?".
Heck, the long Hohmann transfers to the outer planets already take long enough in 100k-x on-rails time warp
Double heck, that's what an entirely different genre of games is for (I think they're called "idle/AFK games" and I'm utterly disinterested in them)

So, I go in and I edit it so that it produces zero "extra" heat that needs radiators to get rid of (as an IRL well-engineered NTR would, being entirely cooled by the propellant flowing thru it).
I also cut the mass in half so it's not not "denser than a black hole" (it doesn't need shielding in all 360 degrees of all 3 rotational axes because the crew should be in the pointy end of the vessel, far far away from the radioactive bit)
Then I change it so instead of an "alternator" that only produces power when the engine's producing thrust, it just produces a steady 5EC/s (it's basically a "big RTG" from the point of how it would make electricity, which saves me having to include MORE parts in the form of multiple RTGs to power the reaction wheels on the mothership, because KSP's SAS just loves to use ALL your RCS fuel when you enable both RCS and SAS at the same time, so reaction wheels it is).
And then after all that, I also double the thrust, because no way is an NTR (for moving around big things in space) producing just 20% more thrust than an LV-909, at like 3-4x the mass, for only maybe 2.5-3x the ISP. The IRL NERVA was designed for use on the 3rd stage of a modified Saturn-V rocket, for sending missions to Mars and further out. It was designed to do that with A SINGLE ENGINE. Not 40.
Then, because that's still not enough to make my computer not lag (needing still around 20 of the now-buffed Nervs to get an acceptable-to-me TWR and delta-V for a Jool-V mothership), I also go in and make a 2.5m and 3.75m version, based on just re-scaling the existing part model and boosting the max thrust (by a factor of 8 for the 2.5m version, and 27 for the 3.75m version, because square cube law, but not changing anything else). That gets me to being able to actually FLY a Jool-V mothership on its intended mission, instead of being stuck watching time flow by at 0.25x real speed because the game can't handle it.
It's not my computer being potato, my CPU is a desktop-spec (not laptop-spec) i7-9700k (water cooled, always at full turbo speed of 3.9GHZ on all 8 cores no matter how much load it's under), I have 32GB of 3200mhz DDR4 RAM, and a RTX 3070ti which is also soon to be water cooled when I get around to installing the water cooling heatsink for it.
You would think that it's vastly overkill for KSP (and most other non-AAA games running on Unity), but no. I can start to see my MET timer flashing yellow at only ~about 275 parts, and red 100% of the time at 350, and you can just forget about physical time warp (nothing explodes, but the game doesn't seem to run any faster no matter what physical time warp I'm at).
Trying to do that with a LV-N (or a bunch of LV-N's) is an entirely useless waste of time, because not only are you saddled with the dead weight of unneeded reactor shielding in the engine itself, you're saddled with the equally useless weight of delicate heat radiators that might just glitch out and suddenly every part on your ship has a thermal gauge on it because somehow a part that's designed to GET RID of heat magically generated EXACTLY enough heat to heat the ENTIRETY of your ship up to almost the point that parts start blowing up (if you use certain parts on it, you WILL get parts blowing up due to overheating). And the only way to solve THAT problem (the heat glitch) is to shut down all the radiators on the ship (every last one), and then rely on normal parts passive radiation stats to cool the entire ship to below some "critical" temperature below which the radiators will work as designed. Oh and those radiators also add to the part count, and you'll need A LOT of them to cool the Nervs, so have fun with your extra 50 parts just because "we don't want this to be the engine to replace all other engines" or something. I really don't get that objection to making the LV-N a good engine. Not every part NEEDS to be useful. But the ones at the end of the tech tree branches DO need to be useful, or else people (like me) are going to basically not bother unlocking and using them, and then you get this whole issue with the progression system where there's not a good enough reward at the end of it so people never finish your game (tho I'm aware that "finishing" a "sandbox" game isn't exactly possible by the classic statistics, I think you get what I'm trying to say).

For similar reasons, I also cut the mass of the ion engine in half, because I'm still not using these engines for landers with only 2kn thrust, and the solar panels already weigh down the probes I use ion engines on enough.

Thankfully in KSP 2 we'll have the ability to have vessels burning their engines while we do something else, or while in (in ksp 1 terms) "on rails" time-warp (and even when they're not the focused vessel!).

So they can make the engine as "bad" as they want, people will just "time warp around the problem". You can't stop that.

Oh and the fact that ANY engine has a "tendency to overheat" in general is a really really horribly bad way to "balance" an otherwise (you think) OP engine. Either make the engine have integrated radiators as part of the engine model if you think it's gonna be hot, or alternatively don't make the engine as OP as it is, and you can get rid of the radiators. I shouldn't need to stuff extra radiators on my craft unless it has a reactor on it that's powering something else.

When the Mainsail was first introduced, it too had an overheating issue when connected directly to a Jumbo-64 fuel tank.
I tweaked that part so I didn't have that problem also, because "engines overheating is stupid and says negative things about the design of the engine, not the designs of the player". Back then I didn't know about how to mess with the engine part module, but I could mess with other things. I modified the config of the Mainsail to allow me to attach parts to the surface of it, because you could solve the overheating issue if you were able to START a single strut part on the Mainsail, and then attach the other end of the strut to the Jumbo-64 fuel tank.
Thankfully I don't have to do that anymore, but for I think about 5 versions of KSP I had to make that change. Mind you this was before ModuleManager, so I had to go into the Squad files and change things manually (I did NOT ever distribute my changed files, this was entirely for personal use).

(rant ends)

Edited September 2, 2021 by SciMan

[viperwolf]

I would like to see tweakscale be a stock feature.  Especially for robotic parts, being stuck with one size makes designs hard.

[SciMan]

Tweakscale would also solve the issues I have with RCS block thrust levels being inadequate for humongous ships.

Another thing that would be nice to have in KSP 2 would be something like InterstellarFuelSwitch or B9FuelSwitch, that way you could have any tank have (almost) any propellant in it (It's very flexible, you can still have "only some tanks" for exotic propellant types like Orion drive bombs or metallic hydrogen or fusion fuel or antimatter). Being able to have practically any tank filled with monoprop, LFO, hydrolox, just LH2 for the NTRs, LiquidFuel alone for jets, or perhaps even things like Water or Ore would be really nice (perhaps ore belongs in cargo containers tho, IDK).

[archiebald]

11 hours ago, RealKerbal3x said:

 

The stock alarm clock may be missing some of the alarm options that KAC has, but the core functionality of setting and receiving alarms is working just fine in 1.12.2. Unless you have a wildly different meaning for the phrase 'it works', it's fine. (There's even a mod that fills in some of the gaps with it)

Well, it just doesn't "work", at least for me in career mode.

No matter how I set it to pause the game and sound an alarm, once I have transferred to another vessel, any alarms on other vessels may as well not exist.  Totally broken.

I completely stopped using it, and simply reinstalled the original KAC mod.  Life is peachy again.

[shdwlrd]

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

Another thing that would be nice to have in KSP 2 would be something like InterstellarFuelSwitch or B9FuelSwitch, that way you could have any tank have (almost) any propellant in it (It's very flexible, you can still have "only some tanks" for exotic propellant types like Orion drive bombs or metallic hydrogen or fusion fuel or antimatter). Being able to have practically any tank filled with monoprop, LFO, hydrolox, just LH2 for the NTRs, LiquidFuel alone for jets, or perhaps even things like Water or Ore would be really nice (perhaps ore belongs in cargo containers tho, IDK).

It's been speculated that an fuel/resource switcher will be stock from the earliest days of KSP2. If you look at the original ships used, they are using the same 1.25m and Mk2 parts showing a LFO, metallic hydrogen, pure hydrogen engines. It was speculated that Intercept will have to trim down the parts carried over from KSP1 considering all the new parts that will have to be added to KSP2. A rough guesstimate is that adding fuel switching you can reduce the number of tanks from KSP1 to about half. If you add a part scaler too, you can reduce the number of tanks by about 80%. The same can be said about the structural parts too.

As you can see, it would be advantageous to add fuel/resource switching and part scaling from the very start of the project.

[HyperDraco]

TweakScale, Interstellar Fuel Switch, KJR, MechJeb and all of the Near Future family of mods.

[Mikenike]

Mechjeb, Tweakscale, and maybe BDA for fun.

[RealKerbal3x]

21 hours ago, Mikenike said:

BDA

I'm perfectly happy for things like this to be available in mods, but please, no weapons of any kind in the stock game, ever.

KSP is one of a relatively rare breed of games that contains no violence of any kind, and I'd prefer for it to stay that way.

[HyperDraco]

On 9/9/2021 at 5:45 PM, RealKerbal3x said:

I'm perfectly happy for things like this to be available in mods, but please, no weapons of any kind in the stock game, ever.

KSP is one of a relatively rare breed of games that contains no violence of any kind, and I'd prefer for it to stay that way.

bold of you to assume I don't massacre kerbals in stock KSP.

[Bej Kerman]

On 8/28/2021 at 3:25 PM, WelshSteW said:

Given the absolute horror show that is the stock alarm clock, I hope they don't put any mods into the stock game. Leave it to people who can do it properly.

47% of KSP 1's development was a horror show. Landing gear, Kerbal ragdoll physics becoming more prone to freaking out, dull part revamps and an incomplete part catalog... I could go on all night listing examples of sloppy development.

[magnemoe]

Something like Station Parts Expansion Redux, seen the centrifugal habitats on the huge interplanetary ship, but it also has larger and better looking ones. 
https://i.imgur.com/2Ziw8oX.png

On the other hand we has seen the colonies so I guess we get cool ships too. 

[AtomicTech]

On 8/28/2021 at 9:25 AM, WelshSteW said:

Given the absolute horror show that is the stock alarm clock, I hope they don't put any mods into the stock game. Leave it to people who can do it properly.

Well, it was weirdly integrated but maybe having the mods' ideas/concepts from the beginning could lead to a much better integration.

[mcwaffles2003]

I'd like to see something like kerbal construction time to be included as it would bring an extra value to creating reusable spacecraft

[magnemoe]

On 9/3/2021 at 3:55 AM, archiebald said:

Well, it just doesn't "work", at least for me in career mode.

No matter how I set it to pause the game and sound an alarm, once I have transferred to another vessel, any alarms on other vessels may as well not exist.  Totally broken.

I completely stopped using it, and simply reinstalled the original KAC mod.  Life is peachy again.

Not tried it but that sounds totally useless to me, I uses alarm clock to keep tag on perhaps 20 missions at once in my typical career plays. This includes not only active missions but also bases on various bodies and todo stuff like got the Duna science explorer back to Ike orbit but want to land it next to the base in daylight so I just put on an alarm on it and do something else. 
If you only have one mission you don't need it at all. 

[SciMan]

Right, can we maybe take the ranting about the failures of the Stock Alarm Clock somewhere else? That's not what this thread seems to be for.

However, a parting note about Stock Alarm Clock. It was coded by LITERALLY THE SAME PERSON who wrote KAC and TWP, and I've only noticed bugs in SAC that were ALSO existing unsolved bugs in KAC and TWP already, so it's perhaps a "too faithful" 1:1 translation of those mods into stock.
If it's not working for you, you probably have something messing it up on your end, like maybe corrupted game files or a mod interfering with it.

[EnderKid2]

In addition to modulemanager, I think Kerbal Engineer Redux and all its info readouts, in the VAB but most importantly in flight, would be great.

[razark]

Chatterer and Final Frontier need to be in KSP2.

[SciMan]

I just had another thought of something that I'd really like in KSP 2.

The "Editor Extensions" mod. Or more specifically, I'd like to be able to choose for myself exactly what symmetry modes and how many parts in symmetry I can actually have, as well as being able to have vertical snapping of the center of a part to the center of another part (like when you're setting up side boosters, so you can center the decoupler on the core fuel tank, then center the side booster fuel tank on the decoupler, effectively centering the side booster tank on the core tank).

Plus being able to have more freedom of where I offset parts to (who cares if it's 5m away from the part I connected it to, if I want it to look like it's connected I'll use struts or put girders between them, but let me (for structural reasons) have the parts be connected the way I want them).

[awsumguy76801]

OPM feels like a required addition to KSP 2. Same for Galaxies Unbound and Minor Planets Expansion.