Stuff about science and missions.

[MechBFP]

12 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

What is filling players time for hundreds of days in between transfer windows and in transit?

Other missions.

In my opinion nothing in the game, not science, not ISRU, etc, should be time based. Everything should be infrastructure based. 
You want science? You install science instruments on the surface or on a ship and it collects instantly. 

You want something like SCANSAT? You need to get those instruments into orbit, maybe more than one in different orbits, and then it completes instantly.

You want to refuel? You setup a colony or base and then when you land close to it you can click a button to refuel. 
 

Basically any mechanic that can be time warped to bypass is not worth implementing. Some people may not like that, but that is my take. 

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, MechBFP said:

Other missions.

In my opinion nothing in the game, not science, not ISRU, etc, should be time based. Everything should be infrastructure based. 
You want science? You install science instruments on the surface or on a ship and it collects instantly. 

You want something like SCANSAT? You need to get those instruments into orbit, maybe more than one in different orbits, and then it completes instantly.

You want to refuel? You setup a colony or base and then when you land close to it you can click a button to refuel. 
 

Basically any mechanic that can be time warped to bypass is not worth implementing. Some people may not like that, but that is my take. 

No thats legit. I used to feel that way too. Its a hard problem because players like to play at different paces. But games like Factorio allow players to make their own pace between speedrunners and peaceful mode aestheticists even without the option to timewarp. The hard question for Intercept is what is the default/normal experience that satisfies the greatest number of players?

[MechBFP]

12 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

No thats legit. I used to feel that way too. Its a hard problem because players like to play at different paces. But games like Factorio allow players to make their own pace between speedrunners and peaceful mode aestheticists even without the option to timewarp. The hard question for Intercept is what is the default/normal experience that satisfies the greatest number of players?

The main thing is that if none of the mechanics are based around time (other than actual travel time of course) then it doesn't matter if someone does 1 mission at a time and time warps centuries away, or if they do multiple missions at the same time and juggle all the missions together. The end result would be exactly the same.

The only difference would be completing the game at a different date and time based on the in-game clock, which would only be relevant to someone keeping score based on that (like speed runners).

Edited September 6, 2023 by MechBFP
Typo

[Periple]

It is a tricky question! Thinking about a bit more I’m going to have to qualify my categorical statement above: I don’t think time-based progression mechanics would work. Like science accumulating over time even if you do nothing but warp, if science lets you unlock tech. 

I do think time-based mechanics could work for other things, after all space travel itself is time based. With logistics and resources, there should be some tangible benefit to setting up a delivery route with lots of capacity as opposed to little capacity, and delivery of a quantity of the resource over time would do that intuitively.

Would it be a problem if you can just warp past it? Maybe. Maybe not. I think I’d enjoy setting up efficient logistics anyway. 

Would it be possible to set up mechanisms to incentivize efficient use of in-game time? Surely. You can have missions with time limits for example. If you can make your own missions plans, you could scale the reward so that it’s bigger if you do it more quickly. Or similar things.

[Vl3d]

I hope we get some info about how science is going to be implemented soon, we know nothing of the mechanics. But I trust the devs will decide on sane defaults. That's the most important thing.

[DancZer]

I think the the only time based science which makes sense is that to things on the dark side (so when the star does not shine the area of science for longer period (cool down). When the cool down is done, you would be able do run your experiment, if you have enough resource to do that (eg power). 

[Royalswissarmyknife]

I would much prefer Missions to be like Ksp-1's world first's feature but instead being things like "get into mun orbit".

The game would probably be benefitted from having it always be active and never requiring a contract before it to be completed.

It would save me a lot of pain from forgetting to accept them and also allow the player to have much more freedom.

Spoiler

There should still be a mission control building where the game allows you to pin a single mission that the game recommends.

Oh well not like the Ksp-2 devs will even consider our feedback.

Edited September 7, 2023 by Royalswissarmyknife

[MechBFP]

38 minutes ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

 

I would much prefer Missions to be like Ksp-1's world first's feature but instead being things like "get into mun orbit".

 

Ya those were easily one of my most favourite parts of KSP1. 

[Alexoff]

I don't understand, did I start this thread? Is this some kind of joke? Or am I having memory lapses?

[Superfluous J]

44 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

I don't understand, did I start this thread? Is this some kind of joke? Or am I having memory lapses?

All 3 are possible though regarding the first question, it's also possible this was split off of another thread by a mod and you were the one who happened to write the oldest post.

 

[MechBFP]

2 hours ago, Superfluous J said:

it's also possible this was split off of another thread by a mod and you were the one who happened to write the oldest post.

That one. 

[Strawberry]

5 hours ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

I would much prefer Missions to be like Ksp-1's world first's feature but instead being things like "get into mun orbit".

This is pure speculation but if I were to read into this image:

We see a primary and secondary category for missions. My guess is that the primary category will be primarily your "land on duna"s, and your secondary missions will be your "visit the mun arch" style of missions primarily.  The fact that orbit around kerbin is a secondary mission means I could be completely wrong about this though (though it could also just be like that because its kinda unfair for visit mount gregory on kerbin to be your second mission in the game for that category).

[Pthigrivi]

9 hours ago, Strawberry said:

We see a primary and secondary category for missions. My guess is that the primary category will be primarily your "land on duna"s, and your secondary missions will be your "visit the mun arch" style of missions primarily.  The fact that orbit around kerbin is a secondary mission means I could be completely wrong about this though (though it could also just be like that because its kinda unfair for visit mount gregory on kerbin to be your second mission in the game for that category).

 

Yeah I’ll be curious to see. The other challenge as things get rolling is to not let the experience get too linear. Off the bat many (most?) recommend new players land on Minmus first because the low gravity is more forgiving for practicing landing. The Mun though is an easier target for getting your first intercept and orbital capture. Then things really branch out when you start sending interplanetary probes, possibly building stations and colonies. So it’ll be interesting to see how that tree structure of missions opens up as you progress. 

[Infinite Aerospace]

On 9/5/2023 at 4:08 PM, Pthigrivi said:

In some ways it is the number of biomes because keeping the same number and reducing the return could potentially just make the biome-hopping grind even worse. This problem of getting bogged down smurfing science with dozens of Munar/Minmar missions in the early game is one of the key challenges in overhauling science. Chris Adderley did say in his AMA that this pacing and scaling problem has been the hardest hurdle in developing science, and that some of the key problems they hoped to address are opacity and balance. Folks have brought up introducing different flavors of science--atmospheric science, moon science, inner planets science, outer planets science, etc. I do think that could help. Another idea would be that bodies only have a 3 or 4 big general biomes but there were other much smaller biomes around anomalies that would need to be scanned for to find easily. That way most players would only really be doing 6 or 8 missions around the Mun and Minmus before they felt like the next step was to send out interplanetary probes. 

This is the other thing Chris hinted at: different experiments requiring different locations, different amounts of time, and even different resources to work. Im happy to hear that. My feeling has been that it was never really the principle of science points that was fundamentally unworkable just that the experiments themselves were all so similar that you didn't really need to think about how to employ them. That reduced the experience to land anywhere, click half a dozen times, land somewhere else, rinse, repeat. 

And yeah there's not such a big problem with time because ideally players would be filling in time between interplanetary windows anyway, but definitely....life support helps. (DEVS PLZ LS!)

Life support I think is perhaps the biggest omission from the 'roadmap'. I can't understand the reason why it's being left out, though I might be in a minority of people who want life support.

[Periple]

5 hours ago, Infinite Aerospace said:

Life support I think is perhaps the biggest omission from the 'roadmap'. I can't understand the reason why it's being left out, though I might be in a minority of people who want life support.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and it is a tough nut to crack actually! You’ll want something that introduces meaningful gameplay, it’ll have to work across timescales from a few days to a hundred years, size scales from a single kerbal to hundreds, it mustn’t be grindy, and it’ll have to challenge rather than frustrate. Balancing all those constraints will be really hard and would likely result in something that makes nobody happy.

I think it’s best left to mods. That way you can tailor it for different user stories without having to balance it for everything, and tune it for your mod’s audience rather than the entire KSP player base!

[Pthigrivi]

53 minutes ago, Periple said:

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and it is a tough nut to crack actually! You’ll want something that introduces meaningful gameplay, it’ll have to work across timescales from a few days to a hundred years, size scales from a single kerbal to hundreds, it mustn’t be grindy, and it’ll have to challenge rather than frustrate. Balancing all those constraints will be really hard and would likely result in something that makes nobody happy.

I think it’s best left to mods. That way you can tailor it for different user stories without having to balance it for everything, and tune it for your mod’s audience rather than the entire KSP player base!

I think though this could be said of science or resources or colonies or heat or any broad system in the game. Its definitely a hard problem but I also think there are clever solutions that would enhance the experience for and satisfy the broadest majority of players. Im on the road today but rather than tie up a bunch of threads Im going to start an LS thread in the suggestions section in the next couple days. 

[Periple]

8 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think though this could be said of science or resources or colonies or heat or any broad system in the game. Its definitely a hard problem but I also think there are clever solutions that would enhance the experience for and satisfy the broadest majority of players. Im on the road today but rather than tie up a bunch of threads Im going to start an LS thread in the suggestions section in the next couple days. 

I think the difference is that the other things are enabling whereas LS is punitive and also tied to in-game time.  LS is inherently a stick, the other systems you listed are mostly carrots. “Do this or bad things will happen” as opposed to “do that to get good things.”

It will be hard to find something that’s meaningful enough to engage with (not just a mass tax, not just a drop in efficiency you can warp past) but won’t cause busywork or catastrophic failures in your interplanetary stuff when your warp 100 years on an interstellar mission.

I’ve no doubt it can be done but my spider sense says this is a potential development black hole, hard to design and even harder to balance and make it fun all through the game.

As a player I would want it but as a developer I’d hate to have to make it!

[chefsbrian]

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think though this could be said of science or resources or colonies or heat or any broad system in the game.

Not quite. All of those systems except for heat all share the same premise of being systems you engage with for a reward, situationally - Not every mission is a science or colony mission, and you pursue them for specific mechanical reward (Science points or new launch sites) in the goal of furthering what you are capable of doing. Heats closer to what life support, acting as an additional design challenge for certain mission profiles, or hopefully anything using nuclear or similar advanced power systems. The major differentiation between Heat and Life Support though is that heat is situational, consistent, and reliably addressed - If you're reentering, you need heat shield coverage. If you're disposing of waste heat, you need radiation. The system is easy to explain and address.

Life support meanwhile, is highly variable, and ranges from extremely simple and uninteresting (Add literal metric tons of snacks) to very complex (Manage multiple resource recycler operations), and either side of the equation appeals to a very different crowd. Aggressively realistic life support systems paradoxically limit a lot of the ship design space - The requirement to carry a huge life support tonnage overhead is restrictive as to what else that mission can do, not creative. They also require a lot of mental overhead and consideration - Balancing input to output to avoid dying of CO2 poisoning halfway to the Jool moons takes some thought, and then multiply this with water and food as well. This tends to limit such a system to the more involved, systemic players - Its not at all friendly or useful to the players who just wanna slap a crew cabin onto a big cool rocket and go see the stars. On the opposite end of the design spectrum, aggressively pared down and simplified life support systems such as a single consumable 'snacks' resource only leads to it being treated as another fuel variable, consumed over time. There's little room for interesting design decisions or considerations, and any effort to merge the two leads to a worst of both worlds, not best. Introducing some complexity still fails to promote interesting rocket design, only checklisting, and that complexity still falls short of what the simulationist players would want.

Ultimately, as long as KSP aims to be a rocketry sandbox that's focused on being an approachable way to learn and play with orbital mechanics, then the mechanics in the game should support that, not get in its way. Science, Colonies, and Resource gathering all encourage learning to fly new and varied mission profiles, forcing you to face space travel challenges that you may not have dealt with before as you suddenly have to plot routes between bodies you wouldn't have otherwise ventured between - Such as Moho to Duna, for a resource run. Life support doesn't encourage new mission profiles, it just puts some overhead in rocket design that either makes longer missions into prohibitive technical problems for rookies, or inflexible checklists of carrying extra tons with you.

Life support is a more realistically complete vision of space travels complexity, but KSP is about space exploration, not space complexity. Best left to the mods at the end of the day.

[Pthigrivi]

8 hours ago, Periple said:

I think the difference is that the other things are enabling whereas LS is punitive and also tied to in-game time.  LS is inherently a stick, the other systems you listed are mostly carrots. “Do this or bad things will happen” as opposed to “do that to get good things.”

8 hours ago, chefsbrian said:

Not quite. All of those systems except for heat all share the same premise of being systems you engage with for a reward, situationally - Not every mission is a science or colony mission, and you pursue them for specific mechanical reward (Science points or new launch sites) in the goal of furthering what you are capable of doing. 

The answer to both is to structure LS mission payoffs as bonus rewards rather than ships full of dead or comatose kerbals. And successfully navigating time as a variable is exactly what expands the way in which players approach space travel—both by finding faster routes from one body to another and later by taking advantage of more advanced engines and brachistochrone trajectories. Having this layer as a manageable consideration also gives meaning to other time-based elements of the game like ISRU and science over time similarly to how comnet gives meaning to distance and LoS.  But like I said I’ll make my case in a dedicated thread. 

Edited September 10, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Periple]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

The answer to both is to structure LS mission payoffs as bonus rewards rather than ships full of dead or comatose kerbals.

Would it still feel like LS though? 

[Infinite Aerospace]

11 hours ago, Periple said:

I’ve been thinking about it a lot and it is a tough nut to crack actually! You’ll want something that introduces meaningful gameplay, it’ll have to work across timescales from a few days to a hundred years, size scales from a single kerbal to hundreds, it mustn’t be grindy, and it’ll have to challenge rather than frustrate. Balancing all those constraints will be really hard and would likely result in something that makes nobody happy.

I think it’s best left to mods. That way you can tailor it for different user stories without having to balance it for everything, and tune it for your mod’s audience rather than the entire KSP player base!

Why not have it and leave it optional, and even at that point 'optional' meaning you can either have all of the life support goodness, or just certain parts like. Let's say you want food, water, oxygen and such but nothing beyond that. What's to stop the developers doing what modders have done before and just have boxes that can be checked (or left unchecked).

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, Periple said:

Would it still feel like LS though? 

I think so, because the fun of LS really shouldn’t be “oh damn I screwed up my transfer and now its twice as long, pilot out of commission, so the whole mission is ruined.” It should be more like other systems like engines and solar where its really about understanding how the systems work, understanding efficiency and how to combine everything in a satisfying way. Thinking about kerbals and their needs should have a similar simplified, light-hearted, creative engineering/ problem solving character involving inputs and outputs and mass efficiency as the rest of the game. 

Edited September 10, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[MechBFP]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think so, because the fun of LS really shouldn’t be “oh damn I screwed up my transfer and now its twice as long, pilot out of commission, so the whole mission is ruined.” It should be more like other systems like engines and solar where its really about understanding how the systems work, understanding efficiency and how to combine everything in a satisfying way. Thinking about kerbals and their needs should have a similar simplified, light-hearted, creative engineering/ problem solving character involving inputs and outputs and mass efficiency as the rest of the game. 

I believe any system that isn’t inherently punishing would knock up against players suspension of disbelief more than they can handle. 

[Stoup]

Not to keep diving into a topic that is undeniably, off topic, but I don't agree. I mean, we already suspend our disbelief at the fact that kerbals don't eat at all, or freeze in the cold of space. I can say for myself, having played with mods like, for example, USI life support, that it feels like a decent balance to have kerbals just not serve their role as effectively if they're not given LS resources, effectively going "on strike". I don't think a directly analogous system to this is the right approach either, but it touches on the same realm of handling LS in a less binary way.

[joratto]

On 9/5/2023 at 7:40 PM, MechBFP said:

Other missions.

In my opinion nothing in the game, not science, not ISRU, etc, should be time based. Everything should be infrastructure based. 
You want science? You install science instruments on the surface or on a ship and it collects instantly. 

You want something like SCANSAT? You need to get those instruments into orbit, maybe more than one in different orbits, and then it completes instantly.

You want to refuel? You setup a colony or base and then when you land close to it you can click a button to refuel. 
 

Basically any mechanic that can be time warped to bypass is not worth implementing. Some people may not like that, but that is my take. 

I think something like scansat should take a realistic amount of time proportional to the rotation rate of the body in question and the orbital inclination of the satellite, even if only for the sake of realism. Maybe you need to think about the planet temporarily blocking your satellite’s access to the sun, for example. Features that encourage consideration of orbital parameters are generally a good thing.

But in general I agree that time constraints usually don’t matter when we have time warp.

13 hours ago, chefsbrian said:

Life support meanwhile, is highly variable, and ranges from extremely simple and uninteresting (Add literal metric tons of snacks) to very complex (Manage multiple resource recycler operations), and either side of the equation appeals to a very different crowd. Aggressively realistic life support systems paradoxically limit a lot of the ship design space - The requirement to carry a huge life support tonnage overhead is restrictive as to what else that mission can do, not creative. They also require a lot of mental overhead and consideration - Balancing input to output to avoid dying of CO2 poisoning halfway to the Jool moons takes some thought, and then multiply this with water and food as well. This tends to limit such a system to the more involved, systemic players - Its not at all friendly or useful to the players who just wanna slap a crew cabin onto a big cool rocket and go see the stars. On the opposite end of the design spectrum, aggressively pared down and simplified life support systems such as a single consumable 'snacks' resource only leads to it being treated as another fuel variable, consumed over time. There's little room for interesting design decisions or considerations, and any effort to merge the two leads to a worst of both worlds, not best. Introducing some complexity still fails to promote interesting rocket design, only checklisting, and that complexity still falls short of what the simulationist players would want.

Ultimately, as long as KSP aims to be a rocketry sandbox that's focused on being an approachable way to learn and play with orbital mechanics, then the mechanics in the game should support that, not get in its way. Science, Colonies, and Resource gathering all encourage learning to fly new and varied mission profiles, forcing you to face space travel challenges that you may not have dealt with before as you suddenly have to plot routes between bodies you wouldn't have otherwise ventured between - Such as Moho to Duna, for a resource run. Life support doesn't encourage new mission profiles, it just puts some overhead in rocket design that either makes longer missions into prohibitive technical problems for rookies, or inflexible checklists of carrying extra tons with you.

Life support is a more realistically complete vision of space travels complexity, but KSP is about space exploration, not space complexity. Best left to the mods at the end of the day.

My take is that if you only want to “slap a crew cabin onto a big cool rocket and see the stars”, you could just play starfield. KSP is not special because it’s about space exploration OR spaceship building. Lots of games already fulfil those requirements. KSP is special because it’s about space complexity. If players didn’t feel their options constrained by realistic design considerations, it wouldn’t be KSP. Constraints are what make problem solving fun.

I like the idea of snacks/living space/comfort requirements that would discourage players from sending Jeb on a 300y journey to Deb Deb in a mk1 command pod. I think longer missions should encourage players to think more about life support. Take the example of a player planning a multi-year manned mission to Jool. With Kerbal well-being requirements, the player might be faced with a few very different mission design options. They could:

- assemble a massive spin-gravity hab module for their transfer stage in LKO with plenty of snacks, living space, and radiation protection 

- look for faster, non-Hohmann transfer trajectories that minimise life support requirements, allowing for a simpler hab module

- invest in the construction of refuelling outposts/hotels between kerbin and jool, where kerbals could rest in between trips. These could evolve into full blown colonies that can launch to jool directly

The first option can have snack masses tuned so it’s not too debilitating, while still discouraging mk1 command module transfer stages.

The second option in particular would be a great way to encourage players to branch out from the faithful Hohmann and discover new orbital mechanics with real world applications. There is currently very little reason not to use a Hohmann transfer for every interplanetary mission (Gilly doesn’t count), and we shouldn’t need to wait for torch drives and interstellar for other trajectories to be practical.

The third option plays into the entire core gameplay loop of this game, and finally gives us more realistic reasons to have space stations.

Also, Mars Cycler anyone???

I think constraints inspire creativity, and we should be careful about giving players too much agency to optimise the fun out the game.

Edited September 10, 2023 by joratto