Trains

[Pthigrivi]

This all sounds awesome as part of an in-depth colony expansion (I do love trains) but on the super, super cheap they could do this with one part: a ball joint. I've done a few land-trains with a single harvesting rover towing modular storage tanks behind it using claws set to free rotate and it works, but some simple mechanical parts and docking ports might do the job better and open up a huge range of other creative applications. 

The advantage of rail trains is two-fold: simplified control engineering and increased efficiency due to reduced friction. In the real world those are hugely powerful advantages, but in KSP that's less certain. If driving a land-train from a colony to a nearby mining outpost one time as a demonstration run is less onerous for the player than crafting a rail system between those two locations then there's no real need for rails, because that delivery could be set as an automated supply run and any difference in energy expenditure along the way is probably not worth worrying about. 

Edited July 15, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[BowlerHatGuy3]

20 hours ago, intelliCom said:

It may not be like KSP's "Brick by Brick" feel, but if we're talking planetary scales, something like that wouldn't matter. When I said "elevated by the player's choice", I should've said that chunks of rail can be modified individually beyond just elevation, allowing the player to do what they want at any point on the track, still fulfilling that "brick by brick" feel you mentioned for rails.

This is the way. Building a train network across a Kerbal sized planet using individual pieces would be an indescribable kind of torture. There would be no point in using the trains.

[BowlerHatGuy3]

59 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

This all sounds awesome as part of an in-depth colony expansion (I do love trains) but on the super, super cheap they could do this with one part: a ball joint. I've done a few land-trains with a single harvesting rover towing modular storage tanks behind it using claws set to free rotate and it works, but some simple mechanical parts and docking ports might do the job better and open up a huge range of other creative applications. 

The advantage of rail trains is two-fold: simplified control engineering and increased efficiency due to reduced friction. In the real world those are hugely powerful advantages, but in KSP that's less certain. If driving a land-train from a colony to a nearby mining outpost one time as a demonstration run is less onerous for the player than crafting a rail system between those two locations then there's no real need for rails, because that delivery could be set as an automated supply run and any difference in energy expenditure along the way is probably not worth worrying about. 

The trains would probably be much farther in the tech tree, as making a train network on another planet would be a tremendous task. I guess it would be in the area of when your about to start interstellar. You wouldn’t want to have to monitor your rovers and planes while your making your interstellar vessels. So it’s a way of guaranteeing that you’re getting a constant flow of resources much quicker and more efficiently than other transports without having to make sure its working correctly (you also wouldn’t have to design unique transports for every planet anymore). 

[Pthigrivi]

I think if supply runs are functioning properly you wouldn't have to monitor them anyway. That would be the whole point, making the transports repeatable and automatic and eliminating the busywork so you could fly or drive unique missions instead of repetitious milk runs. I hear you about designing unique transports, but land-trains aren't much different from planet to planet than rail trains would be. I love trains but its a whole new development project to make them deployable and functional. If driving a rover train is even close to as easy as building a rail network over longish distances I can't imagine the latter is worth it, at least in the immediate sense. Maybe if we're doing a whole expansion about underwater colonies and floating colonies and Factorio-esque resource logistics optimization.

Edited July 15, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[t_v]

A train line for me represents one of the first real megastructures that you will have in the game - connecting two distant bases by rail allows you to transport orders of magnitude more resources in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. Before many countries invested heavily in massive quality road networks, resource transportation by land was very difficult at distance and still today, trains are used to transport huge amounts of resources across many countries. If you removed the roads that modern trucks use, transportation via large all-terrain vehicles would be economically infeasible and trains would be one of the only things to keep long distance trade routes open. 
 

The downside is the cost. Building even the most basic of rails is very expensive, as you either have to terraform or build stable structures to support the rails and the trains. Such a project in KSP 2 would require a massive colony to save resources for a long time or use a lot of production capacity to build enough rails to reach another colony. However, once you have that initial investment down, trains are so ridiculously capable at transporting massive amounts of stuff for very little cost that they will quickly save enough resources compared to slow, bumpy, relatively small rovers that the costs should balance out in a century at most, which is small by interstellar civilization standards. 
 

Editing to give a few numbers: Let’s say that you build a really big rover, weighing in at 500 tons with a carrying capacity of another 500 tons, and that rover can consistently go at 50 m/s over the rocky terrain of the Mun (just to be generous). A fully loaded, medium-large freight train weighs in at around 14-16,000 tons, which is around 13-15,000 tons of cargo (apparently train cars are pretty light). This train goes at around 30 m/s, to be safe. More advanced trains could definitely bring this up by a factor iof at least 5. It would take 16 rovers constantly transporting materials to match even just one basic train on one track. And there can be multiple trains on one track, loading, unloading and moving alternately. Add tech upgrades, and trains are a great endgame goal when you have too many resources for your own good. 

Edited July 15, 2022 by t_v

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, t_v said:

Add tech upgrades, and trains are a great endgame goal when you have too many resources for your own good. 

But by that point you’re already generating terrawatts of energy to process exotic fuels and god knows what else. Each rover-train journey is maybe a tiny nuclear reactor for 20m? Maybe twice a day? When you’ve gotten to the point that you’re swimming in resources does it even matter that a minuscule transport cost is 20x times more efficient? 
 

Dont get me wrong it sounds cool but if thats the kind of optimization we’re trying to achieve Im going to want pipelines and logic gates and programmable buffer management and a whole bunch of things to keep things running tightly. 
 

Edit: Im no fun at all lately. Ignore me. Keep dreaming up cool things!

Edited July 16, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[intelliCom]

9 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

I've been trying to think of an counter argument for this. But in all reality, I can't figure out a good logical counter. Let me explain.

Drawing your train line is the quickest way to create one. But there are examples of single players taking on huge tasks themselves and completing them. (Too many examples seen within Minecraft, Satisfactory, Space Engineers to count.) So both schools of thought hold true and is dependent on the individual player's own goals. 

Without KSP2 in our hands and knowing what the capabilities of the game are, there's no real way forward on that front. Most would be guessing and assumptions. I don't really want to do that.

So at this point in time, we'll have to agree to disagree.

I think I know what you're referring to. Just pointing and clicking one to the other doesn't create a proper sense of achievement. I recall there being mention of automated milk runs, so perhaps what the player does instead of clicking one to the other is to drive a vehicle from point a to b, drawing out the entire path necessary. Also forces the player to explore their environment more, perhaps find a really cool mountain or valley that they could put a base in.

Once the drive is finished, the player will be able to generate rails based on that path, where the game can now construct the rail (production rates and materials also limit how fast this goes.) Once automated, the player could even go to where the rail is being constructed, and watch it being built.

[Guest]

It would be epic to play with trains in KSP but, does it fit the gameplay? Or will it just be a "One size fits all" solution to medium and long distance planetary transport?

The problem I see with trains is that once you build the tracks the trains are all the same, no space for the player to make decisions like "here I have an atmosphere with oxygen, I could transfer that resource using cargo planes" or "this moon is tiny, I can suborbitally hop things around over long distances with tiny amounts of fuel", or even "rocket launching this sub-orbital plane and making it glide back toward the destination".

Supply routes remove the need to manually fly (or drive) every single route, it feels to me that train do the same for the "actually designing a cool rocket to solve this problem" part of that equation.

Which is a bummer because I like trains, in the Factorio games I have with friends I always am the "trains guy".

[t_v]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Supply routes remove the need to manually fly (or drive) every single route, it feels to me that train do the same for the "actually designing a cool rocket to solve this problem" part of that equation.

I was actually very concerned with this side of the problem, and then I realized that no matter how aggressively you import materials from off world, by the time you have the resources to build megastructures like train lines, you have already explored the surface quite a bit and made those decisions many times. I’ll explain why trains are useful instead of ever-increasing amounts of rovers and planes here:

6 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

When you’ve gotten to the point that you’re swimming in resources does it even matter that a minuscule transport cost is 20x times more efficient? 

It matters for not making the player grind unnecessarily. If you want to increase the amount of resources you are shipping between two colonies, do you really want to run the same rover mission twenty times or would you rather put down the resources for one train line? Trains offer much easier scalability, and make it so that managing resource flows does not require countless hours of creating or deleting essentially identical routes. And they don’t even negate the gameplay, as you will definitely be running rover supply lines for a long time before you can think about building train tracks. 

[Pthigrivi]

4 hours ago, t_v said:

It matters for not making the player grind unnecessarily. If you want to increase the amount of resources you are shipping between two colonies, do you really want to run the same rover mission twenty times or would you rather put down the resources for one train line? 

I think I see the miscommunication. In my understanding the way supply routes will work is that you do the run once and then can set it to repeat indefinitely after that, and that you can do that with rovers, planes, anything. You set the schedule and the transfers happen automatically, no different from a train, except with considerably less set up time. 

[t_v]

40 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think I see the miscommunication. In my understanding the way supply routes will work is that you do the run once and then can set it to repeat indefinitely after that, and that you can do that with rovers, planes, anything. You set the schedule and the transfers happen automatically, no different from a train, except with considerably less set up time. 

That is my understanding of supply routes as well, except with supply routes on a planet’s surface, I don’t think you will be able to have the same supply route that takes an hour run every 5 minutes. Even though routes with rovers and planes can repeat indefinitely, they are still limited in how often they can repeat, as well as how easy they are to modify and set up. If you were moving 1000 units of Metal per hour from colony A to colony B and you suddenly needed to triple that amount, you might have to run several new rovers to get rates up. Then, if colony B didn’t need any more Metal but needed a lot of Snacks, you’d have to slow down or cancel a lot of rover supply routes and create new ones for snacks. Ideally, I’d love it if you could change what resource is being transported after a supply route is created, but I see problems with that. Trains, on the other hand, can be as easy to set up as drawing a curve across the planet (and then driving a construction mission perhaps) and would be designed to have swappable resources so changing what you transport is easy. 
 

In short, I think the miscommunication is not in how supply routes can be repeated but in how simple, flexible, and scalable they are. I don’t think you can run a rover and then scale it up to have that same rover spewing off the launchpad every 30 seconds, and I don’t think it will be that easy to change resources with regular supply routes, while I think that trains are easy to set up and powerful enough to offset the need to decuple the rate at which your supply missions are run. 

[Pthigrivi]

6 hours ago, t_v said:

That is my understanding of supply routes as well, except with supply routes on a planet’s surface, I don’t think you will be able to have the same supply route that takes an hour run every 5 minutes.
 

Yeah this gets into some things we don’t know about supply routes. My hope is that you could run more than one at once by just making more copies of the hauler (whether they’re modeled physically or virtually). Because you have more haulers in use simultaneously you’d have to invest more raw materials in their construction, but its still going to be a heck of a lot less than building rails overland. And if you can swap or adjust resources in a train-based supply route why couldn’t you do the same with a rover train?

Edited July 16, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[BowlerHatGuy3]

8 hours ago, intelliCom said:

I think I know what you're referring to. Just pointing and clicking one to the other doesn't create a proper sense of achievement. I recall there being mention of automated milk runs, so perhaps what the player does instead of clicking one to the other is to drive a vehicle from point a to b, drawing out the entire path necessary. Also forces the player to explore their environment more, perhaps find a really cool mountain or valley that they could put a base in.

Once the drive is finished, the player will be able to generate rails based on that path, where the game can now construct the rail (production rates and materials also limit how fast this goes.) Once automated, the player could even go to where the rail is being constructed, and watch it being built.

I don’t know if that would work. If they have a good science system you’re already going to be exploring planets anyways. Also, if your rover falls down a hill or does some tight turns (which is inevitable) the track is going to be all sorts of screwed up.

[t_v]

47 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

And if you can swap or adjust resources in a train-based supply route why couldn’t you do the same with a rover train?

For adjusting, you certainly can, up to a point. Because they n spots where the original mission slowed down, you could get pileups of rovers when transporting ludicrous amounts of resources, creating a maximum speed to repeat the route based on the slowest point in the mission whereas trains run on tracks and there aren’t really points where the train is really slow or stationary (except for the endpoints, which are abstracted anyways) so missions running right behind each other won’t crash. 
 

And for swapping resources, you run into problems with rockets, planes, boats and rovers that you don’t have with trains. If you swap resources by volume, you run into problems when you put the same volume of a heavier resource into a mission, reducing delta-v. If you swap them by mass, you run out of storage space when storing less dense materials. You have to transport fewer resources, whereas with trains, volume can be scaled dramatically without much of an impact. That’s just the density problem, then you get other transportation difficulties. If I ran a rover mission transporting ore over a bumpy area, and then switched to antimatter later on… Or, like I learned in modded playthroughs, some fuels must be kept cool or boil off. If you ran a low solar mission and the swapped to one of those fuels, either you have an exploration t or the mission won’t run and you have to make a new one. Trains, on the other hand, are relatively stable systems that won’t be undergoing reentry or bouncing and impacting surfaces. Therefore, when you have a train, you can easily change what is inside without worrying about it not fitting or exploding. 
 

In the end, I think having swappable resources is too much of a headache for the devs to implement without annoyances or exploits, so if you want to connect a new resource to a known route, you’ll need to run a new mission. 

[intelliCom]

11 hours ago, BowlerHatGuy2 said:

I don’t know if that would work. If they have a good science system you’re already going to be exploring planets anyways. Also, if your rover falls down a hill or does some tight turns (which is inevitable) the track is going to be all sorts of screwed up.

That's why players should be able to modify any part of the path they want. Maybe give them an overview, then they can scroll through the path and find all the parts where things went wrong.

Alternatively, flying a spacecraft in a straight line over the area that needs a rail.

Edited July 17, 2022 by intelliCom

[Pthigrivi]

^All good questions. We’ll have to see how they handle it. I mean we don’t really even know what the tank types are or how swappable they’ll be. It makes sense to me that fuel/cargo swap would be a good idea so long as you don’t exceed launch mass or launch volume of the qualified supply run, but it gets complicated if you’re delivering LH2 with a vehicle thats also burning LH2 to get around like most of my fuel tankers do. Presumably you can do a round-trip run, but can you do a 3 or 5 stop transfer? 
 

My guess is that all/most of these same issues matter for trains as well (can you arbitrarily add more cars or increase mass and know it can tow that hill? Does fuel expenditure change with total mass?) and you need to solve these problems anyway, plus a bunch if new ones (How are tracks generated and connected? How do stops work? Are there splits/ switches?)

And another question: if you’re designing a system for procedural infrastructure over long distances wouldn’t pipelines be easier and better in most situations?

Edited July 17, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Ember12]

29 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

if you’re designing a system for procedural infrastructure over long distances wouldn’t pipelines be easier and better in most situations?

Unless you want to move solid material.

[Arugela]

On 7/12/2022 at 2:04 AM, shdwlrd said:

Trains have been suggested and discussed before. I think it was in one of the automation or ground vehicles threads. I think the main hang-up was how to construct the rails for it.

hover train. Or the ability to add the ground like sim city. Or preset nodes that you buy like an upgrade to the main base. But it opens up an invisible pre placed track.

Edited July 25, 2022 by Arugela

[Ember12]

7 minutes ago, Arugela said:

hover train

If you mean a train that doesn't need rails but hovers over anything, well, you could just point the front end up and you'd have an SSTO.