New Specializations

[Peculiar Harmony]

Instead of being an expert in just one field, a kerbal can be an engineer, a pilot and a scientist at the same time but they have to be trained to be so. They come with their default degree just like in KSP 1 and they have to be trained specifically for the field. i.e, an engineer has to be trained in the specified way to become a pilot or a scientist and vice versa.

An idea:

For other kerbals to become a

Pilot -  Can be left as in KSP 1.

Engineer - Assisting in builds

Scientist - Collecting experiments and being in the science module that is actively producing science.

 

Added advantages:

We will care for our kerbals more as they can not just not be replaced  as we've trained them specially and new kerbals not only lack experience but also the ability to do multiple jobs.

Less kerbals on a ship can work.

 

 

Edited December 5, 2022 by Peculiar Harmony

[Peculiar Harmony]

A slight extension to my previous topic  'polymath kerbals' :

Yes, specialised skills. Instead of just being a 'pilot', a kerbonaut can either be a plane pilot or a rocket pilot and why not both? A pilot has to be trained in both fields to fly our dear SSTO(as mentioned, I have posted this new multiproficiency idea in a different topic) which adds a nice little challenge to SSTOs and not all pilots are qualified to fly out state of the art piece of arts.

Scientists can be labrats or field researchers.

I don't have any idea for engineers yet.

Although I think having too many specialisations would be overwhelming, 2 specialisations for each skill in my opinion would be enough!

[TheTennesseeFireman]

I’ve seen some discussion around the KSP2 specialization system, including whether it should be present at all and if it should be expanded. While I understand a fear of micromanagement, I do think expanding Kerbal classes are a good way to make colonies feel more personalized and important to the overall gameplay.  With all the new mechanics and gameplay elements being introduced, I thought it would be good to have a thread to compile potential ideas for what new classes could do or what could be given to existing classes.

Doctor- Allows your Kerbals to function longer without life support, improves G force tolerance of other Kerbals, and improves reproduction rate.

Salvager- Improves resource recovery from landed crafts and can passively mine certain materials without equipment.

Teacher- Increases rate of experience gain for other Kerbals and upgrades some of their abilities.

Hero- Has the highest survivability of any Kerbal and the abilities of all other classes. Creating one is a rare outcome of a colony boom event. Only one can exist at a time per space program.

[Gargamel]

Overlapping threads have been merged. 

[TheTennesseeFireman]

Thanks, didn’t catch this suggestion thread.

[Bej Kerman]

45 minutes ago, TheTennesseeFireman said:

Hero- Has the highest survivability of any Kerbal and the abilities of all other classes. Creating one is a rare outcome of a colony boom event. Only one can exist at a time per space program.

Overpowered, creating a Kerbal like this should be a case of using them a lot on many missions as opposed to getting one because a dice roll said so.

[TheTennesseeFireman]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

Overpowered, creating a Kerbal like this should be a case of using them a lot on many missions as opposed to getting one because a dice roll said so.

Perhaps that’s a better system, but I do think getting one like this should be restricted to the late game (which colony booms would theoretically be a part of) and even then rarely available. Once you start cross-training Kerbals on everything, you lose part of the incentive to do expeditions with larger crews, which is part of why this system exists in the first place and why I think it should be expanded.

That being said, I like the idea of a “protagonist” Kerbal that isn’t interchangeable and that you have incentive to get attached to and use on many missions.

[Bej Kerman]

35 minutes ago, TheTennesseeFireman said:

That being said, I like the idea of a “protagonist” Kerbal that isn’t interchangeable and that you have incentive to get attached to and use on many missions.

I wouldn't agree. What use is a special kid in a universe of incomprehensible size?

[TheTennesseeFireman]

I think it could make for some interesting decisions. For example, imagine you’re looking to start a new colony. Your hero (let’s say, Valentina) could consolidate a lot of roles, but if you have her stationed elsewhere, do you run a setup mission to bring her to your launch site? Or maybe try to rendezvous with her along the way? If she gets lost in space, do you organize a rescue mission you otherwise wouldn’t? I think there’s gameplay value to be had in making Kerbals less disposable and interchangeable at times.

[Pthigrivi]

We've had some fun debates in the past and I'm torn on this. On the one hand I totally get players' desire to role play and give Kerbals more meaning, but having played a few long saves with 50-100 kerbals the leveling and specialization and shuffling crews around gets old real quick. Its fine when you've got a dozen total Kerbals to worry about but after the 20th and 30th time its just not fun. And in theory for KSP2 we might have a few hundred colonists spread around and running various research missions and mining rigs and freighters. I don't think players actually want to individually track and manage the careers of 100+ kerbals. It would be like having to manually define the jobs and workplaces for everyone in a city building sim.  I would absolutely recommend removing individual leveling in favor of across-the-board skill upgrades. Im also not personally convinced we need kerbal classes or specialization at all. I know thats a controversial opinion because players have gotten used to Pilots, Engineers and Scientists but it doesn't really add anything to gameplay as currently implemented. I know players like to role play and thats great, but lots of players role play in different ways and it seems like codifying that within the game and turning it into a management hassle isn't really the right way to encourage that. Its fine if the original 3 classes exist I guess but only if its really, really easy to shuffle them around and re-assign their roles so you don't get stuck with a glut of pilots when all you need is a scientist. 

Edited December 7, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Strawberry]

The way Id like it done is kerbals gain traits and "specialize" with them, but they do it passively. Kerbals would get exp through doing colony stuff, and get a lot of exp through doing mission stuff. So a scientist can get exp by being assigned to a nuclear reactor, and they get a lot of exp by going on a trip around eeloo with lots of science modules. With a decently done search filter and autofill, you can just check if a kerbal has the specific skill you want before you bring them on your mission, however you will not need to care whatsoever if you dont want to. This would reduce the tedium but keep the gameplay advantage.

I do think Kerbals should have big power gaps, but I dont want it to be just this kerbal is twice as good as science. I think having kerbals naturally become senior engineers (etc), would be good, but Id like your really noticeable kerbals to take on traits that make them leaders. Traits that do things like increase the rate others learn (good for missions with lots of new kerbals), traits that buff productivity, etc. These kerbals would arise from senior kerbals, and generally benefit there job the most (but still specialize other jobs). These would be your most valuable kerbals because they help out the whole base, and losing them would be a noticeable lost because it effects everyone that was nearby them. 

[Pthigrivi]

My issue with the XP system is it creates a ton of hard to resist incentive to do lots of repetitive things and ends up driving grind, just the way it does now. No matter how you structure it the system depends on Kerbals doing a thing a lot, and as is my mantra here: repetition = grind. In fact once you get above a dozen or so you really don't want kerbals to need individual management or attention at all, because the fuss you put into training one scientist is just repeated for every subsequent scientist. If individually managing the careers and XP leveling of hundreds of kerbals is the cost to produce unequal power rankings I deem it not worth the price. Just put skill bonuses on the tech tree, or give them as rewards for higher populations and apply them to every kerbal. Again I say this as a player who frequently has several dozen kerbals--touring them from place to place to level them up is the biggest grind inducer in an already incredibly grindy game. Anything you do that requires individual repetitive management is an enormous time-suck. If players want to role play they should just role play. By all means pick your favorites and put them on all the cool missions! The game doesn't need track anything to allow that. 

As for actually managing larger populations some games do this better than others. In the ballpark are games like Frostpunk and others with a few hundred workers. There are other games that function similarly but they do have just a few simple classes and they allocate their behavior by focusing on the building (or in our case part or module) be it a production facility or research lab or whatever, and you just max out or fine tune as you please and the jobs autofill. No individual assignments are needed. 

[TheTennesseeFireman]

55 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

My issue with the XP system is it creates a ton of hard to resist incentive to do lots of repetitive things and ends up driving grind, just the way it does now. No matter how you structure it the system depends on Kerbals doing a thing a lot, and as is my mantra here: repetition = grind. In fact once you get above a dozen or so you really don't want kerbals to need individual management or attention at all, because the fuss you put into training one scientist is just repeated for every subsequent scientist. If individually managing the careers and XP leveling of hundreds of kerbals is the cost to produce unequal power rankings I deem it not worth the price. Just put skill bonuses on the tech tree, or give them as rewards for higher populations and apply them to every kerbal. Again I say this as a player who frequently has several dozen kerbals--touring them from place to place to level them up is the biggest grind inducer in an already incredibly grindy game. Anything you do that requires individual repetitive management is an enormous time-suck. If players want to role play they should just role play. By all means pick your favorites and put them on all the cool missions! The game doesn't need track anything to allow that. 

As for actually managing larger populations some games do this better than others. In the ballpark are games like Frostpunk and others with a few hundred workers. There are other games that function similarly but they do have just a few simple classes and they allocate their behavior by focusing on the building (or in our case part or module) be it a production facility or research lab or whatever, and you just max out or fine tune as you please and the jobs autofill. No individual assignments are needed. 

You make a compelling argument, and I think I agree that the specialization system would work better without XP. Micromanaging an individual Kerbal’s growth doesn’t really make sense at an interstellar scale. Instead, just let a class have all the abilities from the start. Done this way, you could expand the classes without overly adding to complexity, since you’re mostly just interested in your colony having a good mix than focusing on an individual Kerbal. In a sense you can treat them more like a part that you can easily move around and create more of.

[AtomicTech]

Perhaps we'd like subsets of our existing Kerbal roles?

Pilot 

-> Rocket Pilot (General Purpose, closer to the existing KSP pilot role but missing the ability to lock towards normal and anti-normal, radial and anti-radial and lock towards target, away from target, and towards maneuver while flying aircraft or SSTOs.)

-> Aircraft Pilot (Like the Rocket Pilot but missing those attributes when flying more traditional rockets)

-> Racecar Pilot (Special stability and control assist when driving high speed vehicles.)

-> Rover Pilot (Special stability and control assist when driving low to medium speed vehicles. Also the inclusion of a Bon Voyage-like function.)

-> Interstellar Pilot (All other pilots are unable to plan interstellar manuver nodes so this one specializes in it. Essentially a Rocket Pilot but with interstellar manuvers.)

-> Lander Pilot (Like the Rocket Pilot but with finer control over rocket throttle. Everyone else has control down to the 1% [i.e. you can set throttle to every integer from 0 to 100] while the Lander Pilot has control down to the 0.1% [i.e. you can set the throttle from every tenths place decimal from 0 to 100.])

Scientist

-> Graduate Student (This role is, more or less, the classic scientist.)

-> Field Scientist (Science bonus for deployed experiments and science collected on the surface of planets, comets, asteriods, etc.)

-> Labratory Scientist (Science bonus on research performed in a laboratory.)

-> Greenhouse Scientist (Higher efficiency on food and air-producing modules.)

-> Habitation Scientist (Access to new parts for colonies and also grants ISRU bonuses for building materials.)

-> Radiation Scientist (The effects of raditation slightly mitigated and antennas are more efficient.)

-> Propellant Scientist (Required for the production of new fuels and ISRU bonuses for fuel production.)

Engineer

-> Handyman Engineer (This role is, more or less, the classic engineer.)

-> Habitation Engineer (Required to build new parts for colonies and also grants ISRU bonuses for building materials.)

-> Propellant Engineer (Required for the production of new fuels and grants ISRU bonuses for fuel production.)

-> Colony Engineer (Required to plan and build colonies.)

->Life Support Engineer (Higher efficiency on food and air-producing modules.)

 

 

[daninplainsight]

2 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

Perhaps we'd like subsets of our existing Kerbal roles?

Pilot 

-> Rocket Pilot (General Purpose, closer to the existing KSP pilot role but missing the ability to lock towards normal and anti-normal, radial and anti-radial and lock towards target, away from target, and towards maneuver while flying aircraft or SSTOs.)

-> Aircraft Pilot (Like the Rocket Pilot but missing those attributes when flying more traditional rockets)

-> Racecar Pilot (Special stability and control assist when driving high speed vehicles.)

-> Rover Pilot (Special stability and control assist when driving low to medium speed vehicles. Also the inclusion of a Bon Voyage-like function.)

-> Interstellar Pilot (All other pilots are unable to plan interstellar manuver nodes so this one specializes in it. Essentially a Rocket Pilot but with interstellar manuvers.)

-> Lander Pilot (Like the Rocket Pilot but with finer control over rocket throttle. Everyone else has control down to the 1% [i.e. you can set throttle to every integer from 0 to 100] while the Lander Pilot has control down to the 0.1% [i.e. you can set the throttle from every tenths place decimal from 0 to 100.])

Scientist

-> Graduate Student (This role is, more or less, the classic scientist.)

-> Field Scientist (Science bonus for deployed experiments and science collected on the surface of planets, comets, asteriods, etc.)

-> Labratory Scientist (Science bonus on research performed in a laboratory.)

-> Greenhouse Scientist (Higher efficiency on food and air-producing modules.)

-> Habitation Scientist (Access to new parts for colonies and also grants ISRU bonuses for building materials.)

-> Radiation Scientist (The effects of raditation slightly mitigated and antennas are more efficient.)

-> Propellant Scientist (Required for the production of new fuels and ISRU bonuses for fuel production.)

Engineer

-> Handyman Engineer (This role is, more or less, the classic engineer.)

-> Habitation Engineer (Required to build new parts for colonies and also grants ISRU bonuses for building materials.)

-> Propellant Engineer (Required for the production of new fuels and grants ISRU bonuses for fuel production.)

-> Colony Engineer (Required to plan and build colonies.)

->Life Support Engineer (Higher efficiency on food and air-producing modules.)

 

 

Your classes have the benefit of all fitting together pretty cohesively, but I don't think functionally increasing the number of classes from 3 to 18 would streamline gameplay. Anticipating that we'll likely have hundreds Kerbals, keeping track of so many specializations would quickly become a massive headache without some major automation. And if you're going to automate away managing so many classes, it begs the question of why you even have that many in the first place.

[AtomicTech]

39 minutes ago, daninplainsight said:

Your classes have the benefit of all fitting together pretty cohesively, but I don't think functionally increasing the number of classes from 3 to 18 would streamline gameplay. Anticipating that we'll likely have hundreds Kerbals, keeping track of so many specializations would quickly become a massive headache without some major automation. And if you're going to automate away managing so many classes, it begs the question of why you even have that many in the first place.

Gotcha

What would you see as a acceptable compromise for this?

[daninplainsight]

3 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

Gotcha

What would you see as a acceptable compromise for this?

I like Pthigrivi's notion of having unlocked bonuses applied across the board. The way I would envision it is we keep the original 3 classes, but you can unlock class-specific bonuses that would automatically apply to all Kerbals of that class. But, again, I'm of the opinion that the average KSP2 save will likely have many more Kerbals than in the original, so anything we can do to simplify the class system would be beneficial.

However, something else that may potentially balance having a more complex class system is having a colonist ("Kolonist"?) class. Kolonists would be entirely autonomous, separate from your main Kerbonaut corps. So you may be able to have hundreds of Kolonists that act as a single mass, and perform day-to-day maintenance tasks in colonies or huge motherships, and then you have maybe a couple dozen Kerbonauts that can run your active missions or do anything else that is directly controlled by the player. Basically, you'd have a smaller group of PCs that would be easier to manage, and then hundreds of NPCs that do automated work.

Edited December 8, 2022 by daninplainsight
Clarification

[TheTennesseeFireman]

21 minutes ago, daninplainsight said:

I like Pthigrivi's notion of having unlocked bonuses applied across the board. The way I would envision it is we keep the original 3 classes, but you can unlock class-specific bonuses that would automatically apply to all Kerbals of that class. But, again, I'm of the opinion that the average KSP2 save will likely have many more Kerbals than in the original, so anything we can do to simplify the class system would be beneficial.

However, something else that may potentially balance having a more complex class system is having a colonist ("Kolonist"?) class. Kolonists would be entirely autonomous, separate from your main Kerbonaut corps. So you may be able to have hundreds of Kolonists that act as a single mass, and perform day-to-day maintenance tasks in colonies or huge motherships, and then you have maybe a couple dozen Kerbonauts that can run your active missions or do anything else that is directly controlled by the player. Basically, you'd have a smaller group of PCs that would be easier to manage, and then hundreds of NPCs that do automated work.

This could be an interesting idea, depending on how big colonies can get. If we’re building colonies that can house more than 50 Kerbals, it gets hard simulating every one of them, and you could just treat population as a matter of overall colony performance this way.

I do think the class system needs to be streamlined in general, because as mentioned before, caring about XP is a struggle on this scale. But once you remove that tracking element, I think you can expand the number of classes without necessarily introducing complexity. 18 classes is probably too many, but 7-10 could work just fine. I like the idea of being able to tailor a crew for a particular mission and have a real reason to have a big, 7+ person expedition to a new planet. You could even make it part of the tech tree, where you start with the three main classes but are able to unlock new types of Kerbals with different bonuses.

Edited December 8, 2022 by TheTennesseeFireman
Typo

[Strawberry]

On 12/7/2022 at 7:38 PM, Pthigrivi said:

My issue with the XP system is it creates a ton of hard to resist incentive to do lots of repetitive things and ends up driving grind, just the way it does now. No matter how you structure it the system depends on Kerbals doing a thing a lot, and as is my mantra here: repetition = grind. In fact once you get above a dozen or so you really don't want kerbals to need individual management or attention at all, because the fuss you put into training one scientist is just repeated for every subsequent scientist. 

The way I envisioned it is that first time exploration/science generation would get far more xp then repeats, so this would make these missions special, and doing repeat missions would have diminishing returns the more experienced a kerbal is. We now have a system to automate flights, so I'd imagine that you could automate setting up training flights to get your new kerbals ready, however if you want to train kerbals farther, you can let them do there thing in colonies or send them on new missions.

Personally I dont like the idea of using a specialization to limit what kerbals can do, and Id much prefer it if it was implemented as ways to give kerbals things that benefit what they're doing. The way I envisioned it is that as kerbals levelled up, they'd pick up traits (if you've ever played stellaris, similar to the leaders in that game). These traits would offer buffs to various things, this can be as simple as +20% to power generation, or it can be things that are more wide effecting like increases XP gain of nearby kerbals by 25%

 

[机械主教71号]

Yes! That's a grest idea!

[Drakenred65]

Gahh 

 

there’s a mod for Ffallout 4 called sim cities 2.

 

it basicaly does 2 things. Automates the creation of Settlments.

 

let’s you train settlers to be better at there jobs so they produce mere resources.

 

it’s a great mod, but dealing with the chaos that happens when your settlers start training skills? Oy. Especialy when some production lots need specific high level skills and the game decides to randomly reassign your settlers away from plants you shought were properly staffed and things stop happening.

[Pthigrivi]

On 12/8/2022 at 1:53 PM, AtomicTech said:

Gotcha

What would you see as a acceptable compromise for this?

I would personally lean toward getting rid of classes entirely, so I guess my compromise would be to keep the original 3.  Even then with so many crew members you’re going to run into mismatches—too many engineers, not enough scientists, too many pilots, not enough engineers etc. so you’ll want a way to retrain them to fix that. And if you can just retrain and reallocate them is there really any point in having separate classes to begin with? Just have a kerbal skill tree that unlocks abilities for everyone and skip the fuss. Instead make the classes separate branches on the tree. You could even include some of the bonuses from your list. 

Edited December 13, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[AtomicTech]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

I would personally lean toward getting rid of classes entirely, so I guess my compromise would be to keep the original 3.  Even then with so many crew members you’re going to run into mismatches—too many engineers, not enough scientists, too many pilots, not enough engineers etc. so you’ll want a way to retrain them to fix that. And if you can just retrain and reallocate them is there really any point in having separate classes to begin with? Just have a kerbal skill tree that unlocks abilities for everyone and skip the fuss. Instead make the classes separate branches on the tree. You could even include some of the bonuses from your list. 

That'd be an interesting inclusion

I like the class system; to me, it makes each individual kerbal unique and important on its mission y'know? 

It might just be an issue of realism and compromises thereof. Heck, had you put an RF engineer on Mars instead of a Botanist in the Martian, you'd have communications back to Earth faster but perhaps the food situation might've been a lot closer. Just that extra level of difficulty that I enjoy

[kerbiloid]

On 12/8/2022 at 6:13 PM, AtomicTech said:

> Rocket Pilot (General Purpose, closer to the existing KSP pilot role but missing the ability to lock towards normal and anti-normal, radial and anti-radial and lock towards target, away from target, and towards maneuver while flying aircraft or SSTOs.)

-> Aircraft Pilot (Like the Rocket Pilot but missing those attributes when flying more traditional rockets)

-> Racecar Pilot (Special stability and control assist when driving high speed vehicles.)

-> Rover Pilot (Special stability and control assist when driving low to medium speed vehicles. Also the inclusion of a Bon Voyage-like function.)

-> Interstellar Pilot (All other pilots are unable to plan interstellar manuver nodes so this one specializes in it. Essentially a Rocket Pilot but with interstellar manuvers.)

-> Lander Pilot (Like the Rocket Pilot but with finer control over rocket throttle. Everyone else has control down to the 1% [i.e. you can set throttle to every integer from 0 to 100] while the Lander Pilot has control down to the 0.1% [i.e. you can set the throttle from every tenths place decimal from 0 to 100.])

In fantasy RPG they just use personal weapon skills.

Axes and halberds +4, Swords and daggers +2, Clubs +3, etc.

Every time you use some weapon, it skill points grow.

[Vl3d]

Medic: improves life support etc.

Edited December 13, 2022 by Vl3d