Kerbal Space Program 2 (not dying and getting a new owner) Hype Train.

[cocoscacao]

8 hours ago, Grenartia said:

If it wasn't still dead

I am amazed that there's still some activity on this forum... 

[Superfluous J]

6 hours ago, cocoscacao said:

I am amazed that there's still some activity on this forum... 

Dunno, most of what's on here it's a stretch to call it "activity." The only real activity related to the subject of the forum is questions about playing KSP1. The rest is people realizing the KSP2 is actually dead (and a few told-you-so's) and several long-running Lounge threads.

The biggest "new" thread - and biggest collaboration of people in the community that's left - in the past month or so is all the discussions about backing up the forum in case the plug is pulled.

Edited August 10 by Superfluous J

[purpleivan]

Just posted a premature message to the Steam discussion for KSP2, as I thought that the forum had already died.

I came her for the first time in months and found that beyond the most recently updated pages, nothing was accessible. Then I dug around and found out about the develpment team getting canned by Take Two (been in that kind of boat myself re publishers, more than once) and saw posts on Reddit about the forum site possibly closing at any moment, dated a couple months ago.

All that came together as me thinking that the forum had disappeared, followed by desparate attempts to grab copies of the finished versions of stories I'd posted here over the years. I assumed that me being able to find and download them, was due to Google having a cache of them, but instead it was just the site coming back to life again.

[MechBFP]

12 minutes ago, purpleivan said:

Just posted a premature message to the Steam discussion for KSP2, as I thought that the forum had already died.

I came her for the first time in months and found that beyond the most recently updated pages, nothing was accessible. Then I dug around and found out about the develpment team getting canned by Take Two (been in that kind of boat myself re publishers, more than once) and saw posts on Reddit about the forum site possibly closing at any moment, dated a couple months ago.

All that came together as me thinking that the forum had disappeared, followed by desparate attempts to grab copies of the finished versions of stories I'd posted here over the years. I assumed that me being able to find and download them, was due to Google having a cache of them, but instead it was just the site coming back to life again.

Ya it has been having issues for over a month now. If you just keep refreshing it eventually works again.

[Chilkoot]

The most viable path I see for KSP right now is a community-funded (e.g., Kickstarter) project to buy the IP and take it fully open source, community owned and operated.  It would require some herculean volunteer effort to coordinate that kind of distributed development and keep it on the rails, but there are real-world models for success out there.

Let's be honest:  KSP's greatest strength has always been its community contributors, and any "KSP 2+" developer picking up the property today would need extremely deep pockets and resolve to deliver on the promises made by StarTheory/Intercept/PD without community contribution.  A completely new ground-up, community-developed build would also be the only way to guarantee against in-game commercialization (micros/pay-to-wins), and still eventually offer the next-gen KSP experience fans really want.

It's hard to even guess what T2 wants for the IP.  Likely in the ballpark of $30MM, and they would never decouple that from the code base and assets for costing, either.  Probably a pipe dream, but I really don't see any other way this ends well for both fans and some future developer.

[Lisias]

22 minutes ago, Chilkoot said:

The most viable path I see for KSP right now is a community-funded (e.g., Kickstarter) project to buy the IP and take it fully open source, community owned and operated.  It would require some herculean volunteer effort to coordinate that kind of distributed development and keep it on the rails, but there are real-world models for success out there.

I would not bet on this horse, besides not being impossible.

I doubt TTWO would sell the Franchise alone - they want to get rid of the whole PD thingy, portfolio included, but assuming they would, they footed something between 60 and 100M USD on it.

Elite Dangerous managed to raise 350M USD in 2012, and it got 2.5M pledgers. Correcting it to 2024 money, something like 479.5 M USD. Or about 191,8 USD per pledger.

KSP2 have something between 250K and 660K owners, says SteamDB. Assuming all of them would be willing to "buy" KSP2 again (or ever, I heard some speculation about 50% return ration on Steam), it's something between 47.95 M and 126.588M USD (also assuming they would be willing to foot, in average, the same 191.8 USD on it). It's a hell of an assumption, I can say - I really doubt that someone that bought this game for 60USD will be willing to foot another 192USD on this thing.

And for the same 60 bucks, the funding would be something between 15M and 39M USD. And I doubt they would foot (again) even that.

But... It's not impossible. It's almost impossible, but I can't say it's impossible.

IMHO, we would have more chances (anything is bigger than zero, to tell you the true) with KSP¹ Source Code (see my signature).

 

47 minutes ago, Chilkoot said:

It's hard to even guess what T2 wants for the IP.  Likely in the ballpark of $30MM, and they would never decouple that from the code base and assets for costing, either.

That's the problem - they can write some of that money as loss on their IRS. They are keeping PD alive for a reason, and my bet is Fiscal.

The word I heard is that they want to sell the whole Private Division, batteries included. And the whole thing must be valuated to really, really, REALLY more money...

 

1 hour ago, Chilkoot said:

Probably a pipe dream, but I really don't see any other way this ends well for both fans and some future developer.

"Sonhar não paga imposto." as we say around here...

And I agree with you.I don't see a light a the end of the tunnel (that doesn't sounds like PEEEWEEEI) without Open Source or similar.

 

 

[PDCWolf]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

I doubt TTWO would sell the Franchise alone - they want to get rid of the whole PD thingy, portfolio included, but assuming they would, they footed something between 60 and 100M USD on it.

Consider they invested that and then stopped the thing. This is clear proof they know  it's not worth anywhere near that. They're probably just throwing it in "as an extra" for people buying IG/PD.

I don't get people's interest in KSP2 itself. Never did even when it was alive and fresh, much less now we know for sure its flaws and what little hope it had of ever being properly made. I know the name carries some weight, but really, I'm 99% sure people who want to keep development going are gonna be much better off doing their own thing, from which they can start without all the hurried, flimsy mess KSP2 is. Sadly KSP1's source code may be just as messy, but even if more worthwhile it's still also trapped under the pricetag of the whole franchise.

[Chilkoot]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

I doubt TTWO would sell the Franchise alone - they want to get rid of the whole PD thingy, portfolio included

Odds-on, you're right, and this is why Paradox balked.  There's a lot of baggage with PD, and not many current revenue generators to offset initial outlay over projected 36 months.  The few golden geese in their stable are dry on eggs, but T2 still thinks that farm is pouring out milk and honey.

After some cooling off - and some quarters writing off - T2 may be more amenable to slicing the property out and taking what they can as a one-time when the IP has less weight on the balance sheet.  The funny thing is that for a capital venture, raising $30MM USD is not too heavy a lift - I work in the industry, and actual investment capital is pretty accessible right now in many sectors.  However, for something open-source, community owned (i.e., no return), $30MM is a very long yard stick, and 90% of your jar will be stuffed with $10's and $20's.

With that yardstick in mind, if I had to sit across the table from T2 to hammer something out, I'd be planning to leverage their reputational risk/loss calculations on KSP, and promote what could be gained by a perpetual non-commercial open-source license or similar - with restrictions -  rather than a full IP buyout.  No one is going to be paying for a new KSP 2 any time soon - the title will not generate new revenue for 2+ years min no matter who buys it -  so get that carrot of good will and some financial restitution front-of-mind.  T2 knows they they monstrously screwed the pooch on KSP 2, so negotiations would be about presenting options both to save face and a sliver of the balance sheet.  It's always a human on the other side of that table, and surprisingly, when you can isolate them, humans are usually pretty reasonable.

Edited August 15 by Chilkoot
Split infinitive.

[Chilkoot]

3 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

I don't get people's interest in KSP2 itself

KSP2 the game is crap - no argument.  KSP2 the IDEA is awesome.

A new KSP built for performance and extensibility from the ground up, that has all of the most popular mods built in is the right vision.  We know now why it didn't work, finally.  There's a fleeting but non-zero chance to fix it.

[para 9]

You still haven't learned your lesson, if you think a Kickstarter is the answer. 

[Lisias]

12 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

I don't get people's interest in KSP2 itself.

I do. I'm a bitter and harsh criticizer of KSP2 not because I don't see any value on it, but because I see the value it could have.

Spoiler

I'm modding KSP¹ since long time, and I'm not the incompetent some people like to imply I am - if you really dig around, you will see that very people excrementsting my name around getting stuck on the problems I had diagnosed for years, and didn't managed to get around without screwing things even further. I'm stocking pop corns.

I know what happened to KSP¹ over the years (specially since 2016 - but I will let the reason as an exercise to the reader), and unfortunately it's not pretty, neither economically viable to evolve that code as it's now (unless you decide to go back to 1.2.0 and redo everything they started to do since 1.4.0)...

Unless under an Open Source development model (see my signature).

But OSI projects don't cope very well with AAA game development, so the initial decision of starting on a clean slate wasn't uncalled for. This wasn't the reason things goes havoc. And the same reasons are now preventing the whole franchise to keep going.

 

Anyway...

12 hours ago, Chilkoot said:

No one is going to be paying for a new KSP 2 any time soon - the title will not generate new revenue for 2+ years min no matter who buys it -  so get that carrot of good will and some financial restitution front-of-mind.

I completely agree with you. And I say more: by the time the franchise could have any chance of resurrection, the niche will be taken by the competition, that are not going to sit on their hands.

Their less worst (because "best" is not applicable anymore to PD) option is to go Open Source and try to gather OSI developers around the idea. They will earn way less that they would like, but they would earn infinitely more than now - anything is infinitely bigger than Zero.

 

11 hours ago, para 9 said:

You still haven't learned your lesson, if you think a Kickstarter is the answer. 

I agree with reserves.

But, yet, the chances of success on trying a Kickstarter are infinitely better than what we have now. And there are cases of success (hell of game!) on Kickstart! With a ratio way better than PD scored, I must say.

There's one good thing on a Kickstarter - whoever will dare to try it, will put their skin in the game (pun not intended) - reputation matters, and people will eventually learn it sooner or later.

 

 

Edited August 15 by Lisias
Entertaining grammars made less entertaining.

[purpleivan]

I agree with @Lisias that TT squandered a huge opportunity and in doing so have made any attempt to resurect the IP,  much more difficult. TT haven't just made attracting any potential publisher interest a lot harder, but many players of the game have moved away too, stung by the poor state of the new game on launch, which will have sapped the interest of many in the game. On top of that is the issue that the games industry is in the worst state it's been in for many years, with increased studio closures and the funding sources of more benign times drying up.

The crowdfunding and open source route probably has some major obstacles in it's path too, from the likely financial requirements from TT for the rights (a big up front cost), to the sheer quantitiy of work required to set up everything on a new engine, as Unity isn't open source. On top of that there would be the work to fix what's there and to fill the (substantial) gaps of what isn't, if the goal was to create the entirety of the features and content TT set out for KSP2.

[Gargamel]

Guys…. This is the hype train.    I’m not sure what we’re hyping either, but take the general discussion and criticisms to someplace else.   

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Gargamel said:

Guys…. This is the hype train.    I’m not sure what we’re hyping either, but take the general discussion and criticisms to someplace else.   

Perhaps we can salvage the discussion arguing that we are hyping KSP2 reborn under OSI and Kickstarter? 

[purpleivan]

Ahhh... yes.. hype train thread. Hype = positive. Gotcha!

Forgot about that after my initial post, which was a reaction to thinking (inacurately as it turns out) that the forum had disappeared and so letting off some steam in the aftermath of that.

I've ridden the hype train a few times before, so still hoping that this one reaches its destination safely.

[kerbiloid]

On 8/10/2024 at 8:07 PM, cocoscacao said:

I am amazed that there's still some activity on this forum... 

It's a radioactivity.

(Sounds of radioactive decay...)

On 8/11/2024 at 2:46 AM, Superfluous J said:

The only real activity related to the subject of the forum is questions about playing KSP1. The rest is people realizing the KSP2 is actually dead (and a few told-you-so's)

, and the trol...leybus riders.

16 hours ago, Lisias said:

I doubt TTWO would sell the Franchise alone - they want to get rid of the whole PD thingy, portfolio included, but assuming they would, they footed something between 60 and 100M USD on it.

The city needs a hero!

Preferrably, a rich one. Poor heroes are already had.

Spoiler

 

14 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

I don't get people's interest in KSP2 itself.

Poking a dead insect with a stick to see if it jumps.
 

3 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Guys…. This is the hype train.    I’m not sure what we’re hyping either, but take the general discussion and criticisms to someplace else.   

Spoiler

"KSP-2! It's made of bugs!"

[caipi]

On 8/8/2024 at 2:20 AM, Lisias said:

Available in Early Access in 2036! Stay tuned!

Doesn't that clash with the Portal 3 (EA?) release?

[Carraux]

On 8/14/2024 at 11:18 PM, Chilkoot said:

The most viable path I see for KSP right now is a community-funded (e.g., Kickstarter) project to buy the IP and take it fully open source, community owned and operated.

You would need a middle class eight digit figure...

[Bioman222]

On 8/14/2024 at 9:18 PM, Chilkoot said:

The most viable path I see for KSP right now is a community-funded (e.g., Kickstarter) project to buy the IP and take it fully open source, community owned and operated.  It would require some herculean volunteer effort to coordinate that kind of distributed development and keep it on the rails, but there are real-world models for success out there.

Let's be honest:  KSP's greatest strength has always been its community contributors, and any "KSP 2+" developer picking up the property today would need extremely deep pockets and resolve to deliver on the promises made by StarTheory/Intercept/PD without community contribution.  A completely new ground-up, community-developed build would also be the only way to guarantee against in-game commercialization (micros/pay-to-wins), and still eventually offer the next-gen KSP experience fans really want.

It's hard to even guess what T2 wants for the IP.  Likely in the ballpark of $30MM, and they would never decouple that from the code base and assets for costing, either.  Probably a pipe dream, but I really don't see any other way this ends well for both fans and some future developer.

Honestly, I think instead of spending millions of dollars and hundreds of person-hours getting together a legal team to broker a deal to buy the "Kerbal Space Program" IP from Take Two, it would be better if the community started a differently-branded spiritual successor to KSP2 a la Juno: New Origins. Sure, you could get the source code from TakeTwo, but whatever money/time is spent on that would be better spent developing Schmerbal Space Project. Doing a Kickstarter to get the IP would be wasting millions of dollars and hundreds of hours to get source code for an unfinished game and the right to name it "Kerbal Space Program".

[Scarecrow71]

3 hours ago, Bioman222 said:

it would be better if the community started a differently-branded spiritual successor to KSP2

They already have.  @munix has a Discord server dedicated to Project Launch Escape (I believe that's what it is called), and they are currently attempting to get a proof-of-concept up and running in Unity.  The server has been a bit quiet for some time now, so it's hard to determine whether or not they are making any headway.

In addition to this, I'm running myself through an RTS tutorial in Unreal Engine 5.4 to see if that might be the way to go.  I think RTS is probably the best way to handle gathering resources, especially early on...but I'm not sure yet how to combine that with the build-a-bear concept for rockets/planes, nor how to deal with the solar system and flight.  There are tutorials out there, which I'll have to go through at some point.  My point here is that several people are already going down this path.

3 hours ago, Bioman222 said:

Doing a Kickstarter to get the IP would be wasting millions of dollars and hundreds of hours to get source code for an unfinished game and the right to name it "Kerbal Space Program".

Only KSP2 is unfinished.  Keep in mind that acquiring the IP would also give one access to the original, which is, technically, a finished game.  Granted, the source code for KSP also has issues and needs a fair amount of optimization.  But it is still feature complete.

[caipi]

If I could do a spiritual successor (which I cannot!), I would probably call it something like "Jebediah's Space Program" - or "Projekt" or whatever. Just to annoy TakeAllYouMoney Initiative (or whatever they are called nowadays).

Although naming it that would of course set the bar and expectations very high. So I'd feel obliged and pressured to really to deliver a good game... Glad I can't even attempt it.

[Skorj]

6 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

In addition to this, I'm running myself through an RTS tutorial in Unreal Engine 5.4 to see if that might be the way to go.  I think RTS is probably the best way to handle gathering resources, especially early on...but I'm not sure yet how to combine that with the build-a-bear concept for rockets/planes, nor how to deal with the solar system and flight.  There are tutorials out there, which I'll have to go through at some point.  My point here is that several people are already going down this path.

While I don't know about RTS per se, I do that that's a great approach: start with what will make the game new, and work on making a fun system first, then add the physics.  We already have Juno, after all, but there's so much room for actual game ideas on top of the "rocket sandbox" foundation.  My hype for KSP2 was all around the new stuff.

Edited August 28 by Skorj

[Singhnaut]

When the world needed him most, he returned (HarvestR)

[chefsbrian]

8 hours ago, Scarecrow71 said:

In addition to this, I'm running myself through an RTS tutorial in Unreal Engine 5.4 to see if that might be the way to go.  I think RTS is probably the best way to handle gathering resources, especially early on...but I'm not sure yet how to combine that with the build-a-bear concept for rockets/planes, nor how to deal with the solar system and flight.  There are tutorials out there, which I'll have to go through at some point.  My point here is that several people are already going down this path.

2 hours ago, Skorj said:

While I don't know about RTS per se, I do that that's a great approach: start with what will make the game new, and work on making a fun system first, then add the physics.  We already have Juno, after all, but there's so much room for actual game ideas on top of the "rocket sandbox" foundation.  My hype for KSP2 was all around the new stuff.

Well if we're hyping/pitching ideas, the whole 'expanded' premise of KSP2 to me was always "Make an actual kerbal civilization". And that's where I'd go. The biggest controversial change I'd probably make is that vehicle assembly might resemble KSP, vehicle disassembly would not - I'd be baking things down into singular physics objects at launch/dock/undock to try and sidestep a lot of the worst of the physics problems. I'd also entirely be ok with a somewhat reduced simulation accuracy - my goal would be verisimilitude, not realism, it should feel like its working realistically, even if that means cutting out counter intuitive but realistic aspects. Structural failure may split up a craft into fragments, but they're non-recoverable or functional, and 'little' things like an antenna popping off wouldn't be in the scope. Ship works until it don't, then it comes apart permanently and preferably in a glorious fashion. 

While this doesn't make the space simulation vastly easier, it does make it vastly less error prone from edgecase physics schenanigans. Taking a functionally single-entity physics object and moving it off/on rails isn't going to incurr phantom forces the way a joint and spring system will, and only has to content with the usual floating point inaccuracies over time. Rather than breaking new ground, we've reduced the ship flying portion of the mechanics to mostly a known problem space, people have done this before.

What I would want to expand more is the ship mechanics in so far as what parts actually 'do'. Early tech, modern era stuff would be very similar to KSP - multifunction tin cans, mostly barrels of boom with a few pieces slapped on for utility purpose. Short lived, single mission type craft. But once you start doing the interplanetary civ thing, with orbital stations and a moon colony and whatnot, I'd want to see the new unlocked parts open the realm for semi-permanent ships, and the design considerations they have - crew comfort, cargo, zero-g exclusive design sensibilities, etc. Think less Saturn 5, more Expanse. I wouldn't want this to be onerous, but the design goal would be to tie your colonial/civilization infrastructure into being useful for these new permanent ships, and limiting them at the same time. That orbital colony isn't just a shipyard with people in a can, but berthing for these new ships. They might not have the long legs to go across the solar system just yet, so hopping world to world and expanding to meet the needs of your ships would become a significant aspect. Mission planning and ship design for general mission categories would become more important than autostrut and "will that bend in half and explode at full thrust". We'd lose the flight sim design considerations, and gain new ones.

I'd do this because space flight, dock, assembly etc is in pursuit of creating craft to go do things under a "build a civilization" concept - the thing you do with a ship is the part of interest, and the less places that the game development/design can fail in regards to that, the better. I'd instead focus on trying to make the science and expansion of the kerbal civilization more involved - Research should be a protracted thing, even with equipment, and bring some design considerations to the ships beyond slapping a cylinder on and calling it a day. I'd absolutely steal colonies and resources as KSP2 hinted at them being, although I'd probably drop flying supply routes in favor of a more abstracted system in the background, consuming resources to provide logistical support. Supporting the homeworld with its new little colonies, and using both together to expand and build up would be the main loop. Increasing your off-world population and returning new materials to the homeworld would drive unlocking new experiments to perform, experiments would drive a science system that yields new parts and colony options, and the cycle feeds itself. Locationally rare resources would make this cycle naturally encourage expanding out, and deeper techs with more exotic materials would unlock new parts for ships and colonies alike, under a tree design as opposed to a linear one - the fissile materials on the local moon would open up nuclear drives and power sources, but if you ignored them and dead headed to the nearest world to unlock fusion, you'd still be able to just use that tree. Having both could unlock intermingled options. 

I'm not sure I'd want to tackle interstellar at first, but if I did, I'd actually be inclined to abstract it somewhat. Rather than having all the star systems physically there at all times, you have the active one with the active ship, and everything else on-rails, ticking up to finish simulating when they're loaded back in. For the engine literate, I'd effectively treat them as separate scenes or scene data sets, with only one actually existing at a given time. Fly past some far out point in a given system, and its an interstellar transition, abstracting a prolonged maneuver to allow entry into the system you were flying at, at a velocity and time based on your ships capabilities and choices - if you have the fuel, you can do a full 50/50 burn and come out the other side as fast as you came in, or you could spend longer coasting, etc. If your ship isn't capable of reaching the star, or you flew really off target, etc, you are lost to the void. The main relevant element here is it completely leaves the simulated volume for that trip. This would all be highly experimental and I have no idea what would work or be fun in any high confidence. Its just my observation that over simulation here doesn't actually give us anything meaningful from a gameplay perspective, but incurs a lot of headaches.

The long term goal here is that the player is building ships, potentially with more freedom on a part to part level due to reduced simulation accuracy, but a potential

I could carry on with my thoughts for colonies and resources at a finer level of detail, but its late. I think what I would summarize is that if I sat down and decided to show Take2 how its done, I'd honestly not really be making a Space Flight Simulator. I'd be making a Space Civ Simulator, with flight as the main method of interacting with the world. Very different design goals at the end of the day, because I don't think full flight and vehicle simulation and the gameplay incentives/loop of a civ builder are actually the path to a coherent gameplay experience. We already saw cracks in this in KSP2 where there were some big nebulous questions about the onerous nature of setting up mining or logistics in a flight sim to facilitate colonies, and the solutions they proposed were to simply abstract away the flight sim. Rather than using that as a bandaid solution in the edge cases, I'd just embrace it as the actual solution to the problem from the get go, and design from that starting point immediately.

[wantstofly]

On 8/28/2024 at 6:53 AM, chefsbrian said:

Well if we're hyping/pitching ideas, the whole 'expanded' premise of KSP2 to me was always "Make an actual kerbal civilization". And that's where I'd go. The biggest controversial change I'd probably make is that vehicle assembly might resemble KSP, vehicle disassembly would not - I'd be baking things down into singular physics objects at launch/dock/undock to try and sidestep a lot of the worst of the physics problems. I'd also entirely be ok with a somewhat reduced simulation accuracy - my goal would be verisimilitude, not realism, it should feel like its working realistically, even if that means cutting out counter intuitive but realistic aspects. Structural failure may split up a craft into fragments, but they're non-recoverable or functional, and 'little' things like an antenna popping off wouldn't be in the scope. Ship works until it don't, then it comes apart permanently and preferably in a glorious fashion. 

While this doesn't make the space simulation vastly easier, it does make it vastly less error prone from edgecase physics schenanigans. Taking a functionally single-entity physics object and moving it off/on rails isn't going to incurr phantom forces the way a joint and spring system will, and only has to content with the usual floating point inaccuracies over time. Rather than breaking new ground, we've reduced the ship flying portion of the mechanics to mostly a known problem space, people have done this before.

What I would want to expand more is the ship mechanics in so far as what parts actually 'do'. Early tech, modern era stuff would be very similar to KSP - multifunction tin cans, mostly barrels of boom with a few pieces slapped on for utility purpose. Short lived, single mission type craft. But once you start doing the interplanetary civ thing, with orbital stations and a moon colony and whatnot, I'd want to see the new unlocked parts open the realm for semi-permanent ships, and the design considerations they have - crew comfort, cargo, zero-g exclusive design sensibilities, etc. Think less Saturn 5, more Expanse. I wouldn't want this to be onerous, but the design goal would be to tie your colonial/civilization infrastructure into being useful for these new permanent ships, and limiting them at the same time. That orbital colony isn't just a shipyard with people in a can, but berthing for these new ships. They might not have the long legs to go across the solar system just yet, so hopping world to world and expanding to meet the needs of your ships would become a significant aspect. Mission planning and ship design for general mission categories would become more important than autostrut and "will that bend in half and explode at full thrust". We'd lose the flight sim design considerations, and gain new ones.

I'd do this because space flight, dock, assembly etc is in pursuit of creating craft to go do things under a "build a civilization" concept - the thing you do with a ship is the part of interest, and the less places that the game development/design can fail in regards to that, the better. I'd instead focus on trying to make the science and expansion of the kerbal civilization more involved - Research should be a protracted thing, even with equipment, and bring some design considerations to the ships beyond slapping a cylinder on and calling it a day. I'd absolutely steal colonies and resources as KSP2 hinted at them being, although I'd probably drop flying supply routes in favor of a more abstracted system in the background, consuming resources to provide logistical support. Supporting the homeworld with its new little colonies, and using both together to expand and build up would be the main loop. Increasing your off-world population and returning new materials to the homeworld would drive unlocking new experiments to perform, experiments would drive a science system that yields new parts and colony options, and the cycle feeds itself. Locationally rare resources would make this cycle naturally encourage expanding out, and deeper techs with more exotic materials would unlock new parts for ships and colonies alike, under a tree design as opposed to a linear one - the fissile materials on the local moon would open up nuclear drives and power sources, but if you ignored them and dead headed to the nearest world to unlock fusion, you'd still be able to just use that tree. Having both could unlock intermingled options. 

I'm not sure I'd want to tackle interstellar at first, but if I did, I'd actually be inclined to abstract it somewhat. Rather than having all the star systems physically there at all times, you have the active one with the active ship, and everything else on-rails, ticking up to finish simulating when they're loaded back in. For the engine literate, I'd effectively treat them as separate scenes or scene data sets, with only one actually existing at a given time. Fly past some far out point in a given system, and its an interstellar transition, abstracting a prolonged maneuver to allow entry into the system you were flying at, at a velocity and time based on your ships capabilities and choices - if you have the fuel, you can do a full 50/50 burn and come out the other side as fast as you came in, or you could spend longer coasting, etc. If your ship isn't capable of reaching the star, or you flew really off target, etc, you are lost to the void. The main relevant element here is it completely leaves the simulated volume for that trip. This would all be highly experimental and I have no idea what would work or be fun in any high confidence. Its just my observation that over simulation here doesn't actually give us anything meaningful from a gameplay perspective, but incurs a lot of headaches.

The long term goal here is that the player is building ships, potentially with more freedom on a part to part level due to reduced simulation accuracy, but a potential

I could carry on with my thoughts for colonies and resources at a finer level of detail, but its late. I think what I would summarize is that if I sat down and decided to show Take2 how its done, I'd honestly not really be making a Space Flight Simulator. I'd be making a Space Civ Simulator, with flight as the main method of interacting with the world. Very different design goals at the end of the day, because I don't think full flight and vehicle simulation and the gameplay incentives/loop of a civ builder are actually the path to a coherent gameplay experience. We already saw cracks in this in KSP2 where there were some big nebulous questions about the onerous nature of setting up mining or logistics in a flight sim to facilitate colonies, and the solutions they proposed were to simply abstract away the flight sim. Rather than using that as a bandaid solution in the edge cases, I'd just embrace it as the actual solution to the problem from the get go, and design from that starting point immediately.

I would love playing this game ! when do we start making it ?