Discussion of Challenges for KSP 2.

[GoldForest]

I know it's a little early to start talking about challenges, but I felt it would be a good idea to discuss them, so we have an assortment to pick from when KSP 2 EA hits, and the updates as well. I would also like to discuss how challenges for KSP 1 will have changed in KSP 2.

KSP 1 challenge changes: 

Grand Tour - So, the first challenge I see changing is the Grand Tour challenge. It's going to be super easy now thanks to metallic hydrogen and fusion drive engines. The power of them will allow for some really cut down world record times. Combine that with Interstellar ships built via Orbital Construction, and you got a ship that can visit everywhere no problem. 

World Land Speed Record - Atmospheric MH engines are going to take the current record to new heights. It will also probably make it a lot harder since no doubt MH engines will allow you to reach solar system escape velocity and throw your craft off the ground in seconds.

Mun Run - I mean, MH engines, what else is there to say. MH is going to break everything.

KSP 2 challenges:

Colony Grand Tour - Like the regular Grand Tour, but instead of planting a flag, you have to place down a colony as well as put an orbiting colony around every planet. (Yes, that means every terrestrial planet will have 2, 1 orbital, 1 landed.)

Galactic Grand Tour - Visiting every body, every solar system, and planting a flag on every terrestrial body

Galactic Colony Grand Tour - Like Colony Grand Tour, but with every body in every star system. 

Deb Deb World Speed Record - This comes in two flavors: Flyby and Orbiting

-Flyby: Simple, you just have to flyby the system INSIDE the sphere of influence for Deb Deb, even if it's the outer most point.

--Flyby Hard mode: You have to flyby Ded Deb the star, not the system. You have to be within the inner most planet's orbit for it to count.

---Flyby Super Hard Mode: You have to flyby Deb Deb the star so close that you see the steel on your craft starting to boil. (You have to have your temperature reading warning going off.) Deadalus engine should serve as a good heat shield. I mean, it practically deals with the temperatures of star anyway, right?

-Orbital: You actually have to get into an orbit of Deb Deb, any orbital altitude will do.

--Orbital Hard Model: Your orbit has to be within the inner most planet's orbit.

--Orbital Super Hard mode: You have to get into an orbit of a planet within the Deb Deb system, or you have to orbit so close to the star that your temperature warnings go off.

Lightspeed Colony - Build an orbital colony ship and get it up to light speed as quick as possible.

Lightspeed World Record Time - Get up to lightspeed as quick as possible. (Or at least 99% of it)

Tallest Colony Challenge - Build the tallest colony you can without anything toppling. 

Edited November 27, 2022 by GoldForest

[magnemoe]

Some excellent ideas. Not sure if we get fusion engines before interstellar.  But metalic hydrogen sure. I say good chance for orion pulse nuclear as they are not really interstellar until they get an diameter of kilometers. 
Downside of orion is that the engine is very large and heavy benefit is very high trust and the larger ones should beat metallic hydrogen  in ISP. 

Now an grand tour speed run had been fun with some 100 Km/s dV. It will require some strategy. I guess it would be smarter to do the inner planets relatively slowly and spend most of the budget on the outer ones with long travel time. 

Colony grand tour, well that would need to be an huge ship to transport all the colony modules. 
Interstellar, yes an minimum time flyby would be interesting but I don't thing aiming will be that hard as you could continuing aiming over time up to just before flyby or rater hitting the star. Or perhaps drop a probe who melt. 

[GoldForest]

On 11/27/2022 at 2:50 PM, magnemoe said:

Some excellent ideas. Not sure if we get fusion engines before interstellar.  But metalic hydrogen sure. I say good chance for orion pulse nuclear as they are not really interstellar until they get an diameter of kilometers. 
Downside of orion is that the engine is very large and heavy benefit is very high trust and the larger ones should beat metallic hydrogen  in ISP. 

Well, these challenges are more slated for 1.0 rather than EA, but there's no reason they can't be done when the updates drop. 

 

On 11/27/2022 at 2:50 PM, magnemoe said:

Now an grand tour speed run had been fun with some 100 Km/s dV. It will require some strategy. I guess it would be smarter to do the inner planets relatively slowly and spend most of the budget on the outer ones with long travel time. 

Yeah, I was thinking the same. 

On 11/27/2022 at 2:50 PM, magnemoe said:

Colony grand tour, well that would need to be an huge ship to transport all the colony modules. 

Going to need a giant interstellar ship.

On 11/27/2022 at 2:50 PM, magnemoe said:

Interstellar, yes an minimum time flyby would be interesting but I don't thing aiming will be that hard as you could continuing aiming over time up to just before flyby or rater hitting the star. Or perhaps drop a probe who melt. 

True, but the challenge isn't aimming. It's timing. You need a craft light enough to build up speed, but large enough to have the fuel. 

[K^2]

On 11/27/2022 at 4:27 AM, GoldForest said:

Grand Tour - So, the first challenge I see changing is the Grand Tour challenge. It's going to be super easy now thanks to metallic hydrogen and fusion drive engines. The power of them will allow for some really cut down world record times. Combine that with Interstellar ships built via Orbital Construction, and you got a ship that can visit everywhere no problem.

That's actually an interesting one. So if this was just a drag race from point A to point B over interplanetary distances, yeah, duration of the burn trumps a burst of power easily, and you're really just looking at getting as much impulse under your bell as you can. But if you have to hit multiple moving targets, now things get interesting. If you get up to 100km/s going to Jool, great, but your turn radius is now half a star system wide. How are you going to visit the moons? You'll have to slow down, then perform sharp turns and speed up again. That means high thrust for the turns. And you don't want to lug a chemical engine with you, unless this is your last stop. The only thing that's going to give you a lot of "thrust' over long enough duration for these turns is gravity assist. So now your race is less about the engines, because, yeah, you pretty much have to go with end-game interstellar to be competitive, but so much of the race duration is going to be about optimizing the route.

I suspect we'll see some serious computational power thrown into analyzing the KSP2's Kerbol system, ideal departure times, and best gravity assist trajectories. These Grand Tour best times are going to be WILD.

[GoldForest]

5 hours ago, K^2 said:

That's actually an interesting one. So if this was just a drag race from point A to point B over interplanetary distances, yeah, duration of the burn trumps a burst of power easily, and you're really just looking at getting as much impulse under your bell as you can. But if you have to hit multiple moving targets, now things get interesting. If you get up to 100km/s going to Jool, great, but your turn radius is now half a star system wide. How are you going to visit the moons? You'll have to slow down, then perform sharp turns and speed up again. That means high thrust for the turns. And you don't want to lug a chemical engine with you, unless this is your last stop. The only thing that's going to give you a lot of "thrust' over long enough duration for these turns is gravity assist. So now your race is less about the engines, because, yeah, you pretty much have to go with end-game interstellar to be competitive, but so much of the race duration is going to be about optimizing the route.

I suspect we'll see some serious computational power thrown into analyzing the KSP2's Kerbol system, ideal departure times, and best gravity assist trajectories. These Grand Tour best times are going to be WILD.

For Jool, there's an easy solution to using an interstellar craft. Put the interstellar craft into a middle or high orbit, and then launch a small moon hopping SSTO with MH engines. No need to lug the giant interstellar craft around. 

Also, you could detach the SSTO while still enroute to Jool. The SSTO goes off to the planets early while the interstellar craft is still getting into orbit. Aerobraking the SSTO will be of paramount at those speeds though, since you'll be coming into Jool at basically Kerbol escape velocity almost. So maybe a slight braking maneuver in Jool's upper atmo might be needed. 

But yeah, we are going to see some wild times. I fully expect under a year in game time trips. 

[SciMan]

I thought of a big way to reduce the mass of the colony grand tour (or galactic colony grand tour).

Don't launch with everything. You're building COLONIES, remember? Colonies can build things.

All you need to do is bring enough things with you to set up ONE colony that can then build a vessel to carry colony building equipment back to the mothership.

And the surface colonies can easily build the orbital ones in the dead-time when your main colony infrastructure transport mothership is traveling between planets or stars, unless it's from a major planet to its moons.

It's basically "Von Neumann architecture", but for colonization instead of fabricator nanomachines.

[GoldForest]

6 hours ago, SciMan said:

I thought of a big way to reduce the mass of the colony grand tour (or galactic colony grand tour).

Don't launch with everything. You're building COLONIES, remember? Colonies can build things.

All you need to do is bring enough things with you to set up ONE colony that can then build a vessel to carry colony building equipment back to the mothership.

And the surface colonies can easily build the orbital ones in the dead-time when your main colony infrastructure transport mothership is traveling between planets or stars, unless it's from a major planet to its moons.

It's basically "Von Neumann architecture", but for colonization instead of fabricator nanomachines.

That assumes the mothership will enter orbit instead of just flyby dropping the colony modules, which would be way faster than entering orbit.

The orbital colonies could be launched from a landed colony, yes, but it would be much faster if the mothership just flyby dropped that as well. Both modules would aerobrake, just the orbital module would brake less than the landed colony. 

[K^2]

1 hour ago, GoldForest said:

That assumes the mothership will enter orbit instead of just flyby dropping the colony modules, which would be way faster than entering orbit.

This got my gears turning - though, I'm sure other people considered it before. Presumably, an orbital shipyard can be in any valid orbit. So really, its distinction from a ship can't be all that much. So does it mean that we'd be able to use any orbital colony modules on a ship? And if not in vanilla, how hard would it be to enable that in a mod?

In regards to the challenge, the interesting use case is an interstellar colony grand tour. Sending a massive ship that can break into individual colony seeders in a target system is definitely going to be the fastest way to do this in creative, but if you have to extract resources to build it in the home system first, that could be the bottle neck. So why not Von Newman this? Send a colony builder ship that can build replicas of itself to a target system, and use local resources and the power of exponential growth to get all the colonies seeded much faster!

[Jacke]

3 minutes ago, K^2 said:

So why not Von Newman this?

That better be done right.  Else could have something like this....

 

[K^2]

That would require some advanced scripting.

[GoldForest]

2 hours ago, K^2 said:

This got my gears turning - though, I'm sure other people considered it before. Presumably, an orbital shipyard can be in any valid orbit. So really, its distinction from a ship can't be all that much. So does it mean that we'd be able to use any orbital colony modules on a ship? And if not in vanilla, how hard would it be to enable that in a mod?

In regards to the challenge, the interesting use case is an interstellar colony grand tour. Sending a massive ship that can break into individual colony seeders in a target system is definitely going to be the fastest way to do this in creative, but if you have to extract resources to build it in the home system first, that could be the bottle neck. So why not Von Newman this? Send a colony builder ship that can build replicas of itself to a target system, and use local resources and the power of exponential growth to get all the colonies seeded much faster!

I've been thinking about that as well for a while now. Can we strap engines to an orbital colony and just push it around? If so, that would truly break the game. I think a rule against that will have to be put in place for official challenges, because where's the 'challenge' in towing around an orbital VAB and just going ham, spamming out orbital colony and landed colony modules? Of course, this is in sandbox mode. A career run of this challenge would be exponentially harder thanks to the need for resources. 

A self replicationg mothership? That would be... expensive in career mode. Not to mention that you'd have to bring materials on the first mothership to replicate into... actually, only one other mothership. Huh. 

If Mothership 1 replicates Mothership 2 on the way to Deb Deb, Mothership 1 could break off, go for a sling shot to To Be Announced (TBA) while Mothership 2 broke for orbit in Deb Deb, or vice versa.... ah, but you'd need Mothership 1 to carry all the supplies to make at least one colony in both Deb Deb and TBA. And then there's the thing about resource storage. Will we be able to create MS2 so it has full resource storage tanks or will they be empty and need to be filled after creation? If the latter, then you need some way to dock the two-giant craft (Sunshine Icarus 1 and 2 docking vibes). On top of that, you have to worry about your braking burn for Deb Deb, so you'll have a very small window of opportunity to: create MS2, dock, transfer resources, undock, setup slingshot for MS 1 to TBA and start braking burn for MS 2 to Deb Deb. I mean, yeah, you could stop short of your top speed to Deb Deb, or even include a few more engines to help with the braking burn so MS 2 doesn't overshoot Deb Deb, but you would still want to keep your speed high. At minimum you want to keep the coasting period down to about 30 mins to an hour.  Oh, another problem, this all assumes that Career mode won't have Unrapid Planned Construction involved. If you have to WAIT for MS 2 to be built, then you have to plan out everything even MORE.

Oy vey, that is complicated. I do NOT envy anyone who goes for this replicating mothership idea. I think I'll just stick with the supersized Mothership that carries 50 Colony modules idea.... 

And actually... come to think of it. Doesn't MS 2 break the idea of a grand tour? Doesn't a grand tour entail having ONE craft that can do it ALL? Having a lander on a mothership is fine I feel, but having a second mothership? I think that goes against the nature. 

Edited December 5, 2022 by GoldForest

[K^2]

1 hour ago, GoldForest said:

And actually... come to think of it. Doesn't MS 2 break the idea of a grand tour? Doesn't a grand tour entail having ONE craft that can do it ALL?

Grand Tour rules allow ships to refuel, that is, to harvest materials and refine them into something that adds to the ship. So naturally, should the ship be able to manufacture parts for repair, it would be strange for the rules not to allow building replacement parts from harvested materials. Skipping through the Ship of Theseus right to the point where we have a second ship made out of discarded parts and the question of which one is the original ship, we clearly have a path to making two ships out of one without ever deviating from the typical concessions of the Grand Tour rules.

Also, I don't know about you, but as someone who self-replicated from a single cell, I would feel hypocritical to deny it to a vessel.

On a slightly more serious note, yes, I do suspect there will have to be subcategories. I believe, "No refueling," is already a typical subcategory, so part fabrication would likely have to be a category split as well. Especially, if orbital yard components aren't available for ships in stock, requiring a mod to actually do any of this to begin with.

[GoldForest]

1 minute ago, K^2 said:

Grand Tour rules allow ships to refuel, that is, to harvest materials and refine them into something that adds to the ship. So naturally, should the ship be able to manufacture parts for repair, it would be strange for the rules not to allow building replacement parts from harvested materials. Skipping through the Ship of Theseus right to the point where we have a second ship made out of discarded parts and the question of which one is the original ship, we clearly have a path to making two ships out of one without ever deviating from the typical concessions of the Grand Tour rules.

Also, I don't know about you, but as someone who self-replicated from a single cell, I would feel hypocritical to deny it to a vessel.

On a slightly more serious note, yes, I do suspect there will have to be subcategories. I believe, "No refueling," is already a typical subcategory, so part fabrication would likely have to be a category split as well. Especially, if orbital yard components aren't available for ships in stock, requiring a mod to actually do any of this to begin with.

Would we be able to sacrifice parts of MS 1 to create MS 2? That would be... interesting if they thought to put a mechanic like that in.  I was assuming that the shipyard would use the metal storage and fuel storages to create a new ship, not pry parts of MS 1 off to create MS 2.

A vessel that isn't alive, nor has an AI computer? 

Oh, definitely. Tons and tons. 

[Luriss]

1 hour ago, GoldForest said:

I've been thinking about that as well for a while now. Can we strap engines to an orbital colony and just push it around? If so, that would truly break the game. I think a rule against that will have to be put in place for official challenges, because where's the 'challenge' in towing around an orbital VAB and just going ham, spamming out orbital colony and landed colony modules? Of course, this is in sandbox mode. A career run of this challenge would be exponentially harder thanks to the need for resources. 

A self replicationg mothership? That would be... expensive in career mode. Not to mention that you'd have to bring materials on the first mothership to replicate into... actually, only one other mothership. Huh. 

If Mothership 1 replicates Mothership 2 on the way to Deb Deb, Mothership 1 could break off, go for a sling shot to To Be Announced (TBA) while Mothership 2 broke for orbit in Deb Deb, or vice versa.... ah, but you'd need Mothership 1 to carry all the supplies to make at least one colony in both Deb Deb and TBA. And then there's the thing about resource storage. Will we be able to create MS2 so it has full resource storage tanks or will they be empty and need to be filled after creation? If the latter, then you need some way to dock the two-giant craft (Sunshine Icarus 1 and 2 docking vibes). On top of that, you have to worry about your braking burn for Deb Deb, so you'll have a very small window of opportunity to: create MS2, dock, transfer resources, undock, setup slingshot for MS 1 to TBA and start braking burn for MS 2 to Deb Deb. I mean, yeah, you could stop short of your top speed to Deb Deb, or even include a few more engines to help with the braking burn so MS 2 doesn't overshoot Deb Deb, but you would still want to keep your speed high. At minimum you want to keep the coasting period down to about 30 mins to an hour.  Oh, another problem, this all assumes that Career mode won't have Unrapid Planned Construction involved. If you have to WAIT for MS 2 to be built, then you have to plan out everything even MORE.

Oy vey, that is complicated. I do NOT envy anyone who goes for this replicating mothership idea. I think I'll just stick with the supersized Mothership that carries 50 Colony modules idea.... 

And actually... come to think of it. Doesn't MS 2 break the idea of a grand tour? Doesn't a grand tour entail having ONE craft that can do it ALL? Having a lander on a mothership is fine I feel, but having a second mothership? I think that goes against the nature. 

What you're describing is essentially a Von Neumann probe; an AI controlled mothership that goes to a star system, colonizes it (minus the Humans, they come later), builds copies of itself, repeat. From memory you can colonize the entire galaxy in two millions years or so with this method.

I've actually been planning to try colonize a system using this method in KSP 2.

[K^2]

1 minute ago, GoldForest said:

Would we be able to sacrifice parts of MS 1 to create MS 2?

We sort of have this option now with orbital assembly. It's of limited use in current challenges, though. You could save a bit of weight by moving one of the descent engines to an ascent stage of a staged lander, for example, but often it's just easier to build a single-stage.

Of course, being able to scrap parts back into resources and use these to make new parts would be rather a change. That might alter how people plan for the mission.

[GoldForest]

7 minutes ago, Luriss said:

What you're describing is essentially a Von Neumann probe; an AI controlled mothership that goes to a star system, colonizes it (minus the Humans, they come later), builds copies of itself, repeat. From memory you can colonize the entire galaxy in two millions years or so with this method.

I've actually been planning to try colonize a system using this method in KSP 2.

You're a freakin mad lad then. Good luck with all the problems, like the creation and docking (if the second ship can't be constructed fully loaded) and undocking in the span of an hour, or less.

3 minutes ago, K^2 said:

We sort of have this option now with orbital assembly. It's of limited use in current challenges, though. You could save a bit of weight by moving one of the descent engines to an ascent stage of a staged lander, for example, but often it's just easier to build a single-stage.

Of course, being able to scrap parts back into resources and use these to make new parts would be rather a change. That might alter how people plan for the mission.

Oh god, I'm just picturing... crap, I forgot what show or movie it's from, but this one ship literally changes to suit the needs of the mission by scrapping and reforming parts of itself. I know that REALLY narrows it down. /s

But in seriousness, being able to do that will break this challenge. The problem is, you'd have to calculate the losses and bring the right amount of resources to offset the losses, because you never get a 1:1 scrapping. 

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, K^2 said:

This got my gears turning - though, I'm sure other people considered it before. Presumably, an orbital shipyard can be in any valid orbit. So really, its distinction from a ship can't be all that much. So does it mean that we'd be able to use any orbital colony modules on a ship? And if not in vanilla, how hard would it be to enable that in a mod?

In regards to the challenge, the interesting use case is an interstellar colony grand tour. Sending a massive ship that can break into individual colony seeders in a target system is definitely going to be the fastest way to do this in creative, but if you have to extract resources to build it in the home system first, that could be the bottle neck. So why not Von Newman this? Send a colony builder ship that can build replicas of itself to a target system, and use local resources and the power of exponential growth to get all the colonies seeded much faster!

Thought of the same if you can move an orbital shipyard it should be possible to move it around setting up new colonies. Now you could do the same thing with an large freighter, include all the modules needed to set up an mining and manufacturing colony, a lot depend on who modules is needed and so on. 

[Minmus Taster]

Travel to and land on a planet in Debdeb with the least advanced parts. Like using coventional rockets and flybys to reach the star. (Return trip ideal but not essential)

[GoldForest]

1 hour ago, Minmus Taster said:

Travel to and land on a planet in Debdeb with the least advanced parts. Like using coventional rockets and flybys to reach the star. (Return trip ideal but not essential)

Good god... going 4 lightyears on a Nerva... no thanks

[K^2]

7 hours ago, GoldForest said:

Good god... going 4 lightyears on a Nerva... no thanks

"Nerva?" says Jeb, as he straps himself into a command chair sitting on top of an SRB stack.

[Bej Kerman]

8 hours ago, Minmus Taster said:

Travel to and land on a planet in Debdeb with the least advanced parts. Like using coventional rockets and flybys to reach the star. (Return trip ideal but not essential)

Perhaps now would be a good time to begin trying to understand how far a light year is.

Travelling 4 light years after scraping up 100km/s using, say, Ion engines, would take 11,000 years...

[K^2]

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Travelling 4 light years after scraping up 100km/s using, say, Ion engines, would take 11,000 years...

Yeah, but that's less than two months on 100k warp! Start a server, join in ever few days to check in and make course corrections. Piece of cake.

P.S. Yes, I do really enjoy the sci-fi trope of the FTL civilization catching up to a cryosleep vessel that's been coasting for centuries, why do you ask?

Edited December 6, 2022 by K^2

[Minmus Taster]

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Perhaps now would be a good time to begin trying to understand how far a light year is.

Travelling 4 light years after scraping up 100km/s using, say, Ion engines, would take 11,000 years...

Well then I guess were gonna need timewarp mods after all.

[GoldForest]

New challenge idea: Mk1 pod interplanetary challenge. You have to get a kerbal from Kerbin to Deb Deb or To Be Announced without them leaving the Mk1 pod except for life support needs if there are any. 

Hard mode: You have to get the Mk1 pod from Kerbin to another system, without self-replenishing life support (If it's in game.) That means no greenhouses and no food synthesizers. You also can't use cyropods if they're in game.

Super hard mode: You have to make a return trip...

[SciMan]

On 12/5/2022 at 6:01 PM, K^2 said:

"Nerva?" says Jeb, as he straps himself into a command chair sitting on top of an SRB stack.

Hmm. You know, there's this thing that's a lot like an SRB, but it uses the power of the Atom.

It's called a "Fizzer" over on Atomic Rockets (search the word, and don't choose the option that's talking about a gas core nuclear thermal rocket)

That's basically an SRB, but also sort of a nuclear thermal rocket.

Use some of THOSE to get to DebDeb and it shouldn't be that hard at all. But the G forces from lighting these "nuclear candles" might turn the crew into goo (if you even send a crew).

Or you know, just use an Orion drive (which isn't technically an interstellar drive system, it's more of a torch drive if anything, and even then it doesn't quite have the performance for that category).

EDIT: Propellant is lithium HYDRIDE. Make VERY sure that's what you're using, not lithium DEUTERIDE, or else you're gonna have a real "lightbulb moment" and I mean the lightbulb will be an uncontrolled unconfined fusion reaction consuming the entirety of the craft and payload in the blink of an eye.

But I suppose you might be able to turn that to your advantage if you dope your lithium hydride with a SMALL amount of lithium deuteride, in order to increase ISP.

Edited December 14, 2022 by SciMan