Stuff about science and missions.

[MechBFP]

3 hours ago, Stoup said:

I mean, we already suspend our disbelief at the fact that kerbals don't eat at all, or freeze in the cold of space.

The first one doesn’t need much because they are a) aliens b) we know little about their physiology. 
The 2nd is more relevant but also doesn’t take much given that they are wearing a space suit or in a spacecraft, both of which will keep them warm.

However it’s a bit of a moot point because a “life support system” that doesn’t actually “support life” is no longer a life support system in the first place. 

[Pthigrivi]

To keep things from getting further astray I started a dedicated LS thread over in the suggestions section. 

[Gotmachine]

On 9/10/2023 at 4:13 AM, chefsbrian said:

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

Quite the opposite. Life support needs can easily be quantified, all a player need is a decent in-game estimate. It's no different than delta-v.

Thermal on the other hand is extremely situational and has a tons of hard to estimate inputs. Reentry heat depends on velocity and angle, radiator (and more generally parts) heat balance depends on sunlight/shadow and distance from the nearby stars and bodies, as well as atmospheric temperature. Heat output by various producers depends on their usage.

Life support is a difficult mechanism to get right and interresting, and I'm in the camp that it's a terrible fit for KSP 2, but from a player mission planning perspective, thermal is a mess too, which is why I fully expect its KSP 2 implementation to handwave a lot of it.

[Kimera Industries]

Regarding missions...

I loathe the contract system of KSP 1, and many players do as well. It's directionless, boring, (grindy), etc. 

I think a bit more leeway is needed when designing your own space program. A higher level of customization, I feel, is what KSP 2 is trying to do, as evidenced by new procedural parts and color customization. 

One of the things I'd love to see, though, is more personalization about your own space program. You can already pick your own colors, but those still apply to craft.

For example, maybe when you make a new save, you could pick if your space program is government or private. If you pick the NASA-style one, you don't get contracts (are they called missions, for KSP 2?), and instead get funding. Doing an awesome achievement, (getting into orbit, etc.) gets you higher funding, and something bad (crashed ship, dead kerbals) would mean you lose funding. You might have goals you can choose to accept from your government (Maybe you could pick that, too-dif. governments have dif. advantages, but that sounds complex), like landing on The Mun, but still generally unspecific. If you pick the SpaceX-style one, you do get missions (contracts, whatever) and can offer services, such as "I can place x in x orbit for you, or x satellites in LKO" Having a different style space program could also affect building styles.

[theJesuit]

1 hour ago, Kimera Industries said:

For example, maybe when you make a new save, you could pick if your space program is government or private. If you pick the NASA-style one, you don't get contracts (are they called missions, for KSP 2?), and instead get funding. Doing an awesome achievement, (getting into orbit, etc.) gets you higher funding, and something bad (crashed ship, dead kerbals) would mean you lose funding. You might have goals you can choose to accept from your government

I actually quite like this.  Science and new tech could be implicated by this as well.

[Kimera Industries]

24 minutes ago, theJesuit said:

I actually quite like this.  Science and new tech could be implicated by this as well.

You're right... a NASA-style space agency could work quite well by itself. (Or is that what you meant? I think that's what you meant, it might not be) At the very least, if contracts/missions do end up using the same system as before, make them optional. Something I often wish for in KSP 1 is to not give me any new contracts until I finish all of my current ones because I want to get through them all for once... Or, make it so you can play the game comfortably while doing every contract you're offered because some of us are perfectionists. I got myself into a bad situation in KSP 1 career mode when I wanted to do every contract, and ended up with ones I could not do. Now that I got my first taste of mods, I'm considering getting one that revamps career mode.

[theJesuit]

#shamelessplug AngleCanProgression.  Only World First Contracts which are needed to upgrade the facilities and purchase new kerbals.  Progression Plus adds in cost of resources such as fuel, but not the parts themselves.

 

[Datau03]

12 hours ago, Kimera Industries said:

 For example, maybe when you make a new save, you could pick if your space program is government or private. If you pick the NASA-style one, you don't get contracts (are they called missions, for KSP 2?), and instead get funding. Doing an awesome achievement, (getting into orbit, etc.) gets you higher funding, and something bad (crashed ship, dead kerbals) would mean you lose funding. You might have goals you can choose to accept from your government (Maybe you could pick that, too-dif. governments have dif. advantages, but that sounds complex), like landing on The Mun, but still generally unspecific. If you pick the SpaceX-style one, you do get missions (contracts, whatever) and can offer services, such as "I can place x in x orbit for you, or x satellites in LKO" Having a different style space program could also affect building styles.

A NASA like program could maybe also have the option to request and get higher budget for very ambitious missions, like a landing on the mun.

[Kimera Industries]

1 minute ago, Datau03 said:

A NASA like program could maybe also have the option to request and get higher budget for very ambitious missions, like a landing on the mun.

True, but to guarantee they would do it there might be a limited time frame to do the mission in. If it's successfully completed in the timeframe given, (interplanetary stuff could have a few years or decades, and when KSP 2 gets interstellar it might be close to a century, we'll have to see how the big engines perform) then you get to keep that higher funding.

[Pthigrivi]

13 hours ago, Kimera Industries said:

Regarding missions...

I loathe the contract system of KSP 1, and many players do as well. It's directionless, boring, (grindy), etc. 

I think a bit more leeway is needed when designing your own space program. A higher level of customization, I feel, is what KSP 2 is trying to do, as evidenced by new procedural parts and color customization. 

One of the things I'd love to see, though, is more personalization about your own space program. You can already pick your own colors, but those still apply to craft.

For example, maybe when you make a new save, you could pick if your space program is government or private. If you pick the NASA-style one, you don't get contracts (are they called missions, for KSP 2?), and instead get funding. Doing an awesome achievement, (getting into orbit, etc.) gets you higher funding, and something bad (crashed ship, dead kerbals) would mean you lose funding. You might have goals you can choose to accept from your government (Maybe you could pick that, too-dif. governments have dif. advantages, but that sounds complex), like landing on The Mun, but still generally unspecific. If you pick the SpaceX-style one, you do get missions (contracts, whatever) and can offer services, such as "I can place x in x orbit for you, or x satellites in LKO" Having a different style space program could also affect building styles.

These are fun ideas but it doesn't seem the direction the devs are heading in for career (I think they're calling it exploration mode more recently?). They've more or less ruled out money as an in-game currency and they're taking a very open-ended approach to time-based mechanics. Because one player might want to do 10 missions around the Mun and Minmus (which would take a bout 100 days in game) and another player may want to send a probe out to Jool (which takes about 5 years) you have a really wide range of time-warp needs. So something like funding that rolls in over time is pretty hard to make work for diverse playstyles. Rather than give a small slate of codified modes (Government, private, star-trek luxury communism) they're leaving that kind of personal story telling to each players imagination. By not spelling it out the devs let players imagine whatever they prefer about the nature of their program.

They're also trying to do something KSP1 never did all that well--create a structure of base game mechanics that become their own, open-ended reward system. For instance rather than tell players to put a satellite in a specific orbit for cash, there will be experiments that require you to scan a location for a long period of time. This might mean putting a satellite in a geosychronous orbit, or maybe putting a network of satellites that maintain constant coverage. It might mean landing in a very specific place on a moon to study an anomaly. Maybe you master hyper-precise landing, or maybe you include a rover so you can land close-enough and then drive to it. It's left to you how to solve the puzzle. I think leaning more heavily on these kinds of mechanics-based goals will be much more rewarding than KSP1's "Scan X location at altitude Y" or "Deliver this station with random bits stuck to it to X orbit." It seems like there will be some spelled out missions but they've described them as more tailored and less procedural. 

Edited September 20, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Kimera Industries]

8 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

These are fun ideas but it doesn't seem the direction the devs are heading in for career (I think they're calling it exploration mode more recently?). They've more or less ruled out money as an in-game currency and they're taking a very open-ended approach to time-based mechanics. Because one player might want to do 10 missions around the Mun and Minmus (which would take a bout 100 days in game) and another player may want to send a probe out to Jool (which takes about 5 years) you have a really wide range of time-warp needs. So something like funding that rolls in over time is pretty hard to make work for diverse playstyles. Rather than give a small slate of codified modes (Government, private, star-trek luxury communism) they're leaving that kind of personal story telling to each players imagination. By not spelling it out the devs let players imagine whatever they prefer about the nature of their program.

They're also trying to do something KSP1 never did all that well--create a structure of base game mechanics that become their own, open-ended reward system. For instance rather than tell players to put a satellite in a specific orbit for cash, there will be experiments that require you to scan a location for a long period of time. This might mean putting a satellite in a geosychronous orbit, or maybe putting a network of satellites that maintain constant coverage. It might mean landing in a very specific place on a moon to study an anomaly. Maybe you master hyper-precise landing, or maybe you include a rover so you can land close-enough and then drive to it. It's left to you how to solve the puzzle. I think leaning more heavily on these kinds of mechanics-based goals will be much more rewarding than KSP1's "Scan X location at altitude Y" or "Deliver this station with random bits stuck to it to X orbit." It seems like there will be some spelled out missions but they've described them as more tailored and less procedural. 

Actually... that's way better. You make some great points. As far as a mod though, I'd love my idea for KSP 1, at least.

8 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

They're taking a very open-ended approach to time-based mechanics. Because one player might want to do 10 missions around the Mun and Minmus (which would take about 100 days in game) and another player may want to send a probe out to Jool (which takes about 5 years) you have a really wide range of time-warp needs.

This is also great news. One of the reasons I am scared to do something like a Duna mission in KSP1 on career mode is because if I timewarp to a transfer window, warp to Duna encounter, or warp back to Kerbin, etc. my other contracts will expire. This is my least favorite thing about career mode, and I like the idea of exploration mode much better.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, Kimera Industries said:

Actually... that's way better. You make some great points. As far as a mod though, I'd love my idea for KSP 1, at least.

This is also great news. One of the reasons I am scared to do something like a Duna mission in KSP1 on career mode is because if I timewarp to a transfer window, warp to Duna encounter, or warp back to Kerbin, etc. my other contracts will expire. This is my least favorite thing about career mode, and I like the idea of exploration mode much better.

Agreed, Mods will be epic. And as for full progression the proof is in the pudding. We'll see when Science comes out how things are looking. I do like the way they seem to be thinking about the problem though. I mean you see a game like Factorio that has almost no explicit goals (build a rocket I guess?) and yet the fundamental mechanics and ratios create a huge world of possibilities. I don't think KSP is quite that dogmatic, but Im hoping some of the cool ideas from survival city builders and even starfeild give a bit of license to think about crafting and networking dynamics in a way that tailors well to a light-hearted, hardboiled, space-navigation game.

Edited September 21, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Tw1]

It's been a while since I've been to these parts, so I hope that slow, forum pace is still ok around here. But anyway,

What I wanted to add here was that when it comes to time based game mechanics, it's often missed that warping isn't just a skip button. Things can happen over time, and that imposes a cost, and a challenge.  Maybe you've designed a resource collector wrong, and it runs out of power and fails to collect enough before your planned launch window.  KSP1 kinda did this if you skimped on solar panels. Maybe your thermal system is bad, and means leaving something close to a star too long eventually causes it to overheat - right there could lead to interesting decisions over cheap short lived vs expensive permanent stations and probes. Maybe if you go to long without doing anything of interest, your funding gets cut.

Plus, scheduling is already a thing in the game - launch windows and rendezvous times. If they can work in time based game mechanics which feel natural like them, it's only going to make KSP feel a little more like you're actually running a space program. Yes, it's going to make going out to Jool quite different than runs to the moon, but that's part of space exploration. Casini launched when I was in pre-school. It arrived when I was about 11, but I'd left university before the mission ended.
Working out what sort of schedule to launch Jool probes at should be part of the challenge. Plus imagine a probe using early tech tree parts at Jool while more advanced ones are landing closer to home - that would be a very authentic space program experience.

As people constantly raised, even back when I was more active here, something about contracts felt off.
I have long suspected it's because KSP never embraced any management sim game mechanics - which made if feel like the player didn't have control over the organization they're supposedly running. In games which do involve both design and management - Cities Skylines for example - if things aren't set right, leaving the game running for too long only leads to problems. If you don't adequacy fund a hospital,  leave the population to grown things might reach a tipping point where people die, then you don't have enough people paying rates, etc, etc. It means you have to get things right and keep what's going to happen over time in mind.
That's why I think the full career mode mode should include such mechanics - those are problems you'd expect to encounter running a space program.
Not a lot, but just a small amount of this sort of higher level thinking could round out the game.

Time based mechanics don't work when if it's always fast forward = more pay out. But fast forward can also mean more costs. Cost/benefit/time is what makes that sort of thing work. It feels more real to have to take time into account, instead of things just happening instantly.

(Plus, having something like experiments that take time to do would make warping the long times between encounters feel less wasteful)

 

 

 

[GluttonyReaper]

18 hours ago, Tw1 said:

Plus, scheduling is already a thing in the game - launch windows and rendezvous times. If they can work in time based game mechanics which feel natural like them, it's only going to make KSP feel a little more like you're actually running a space program. Yes, it's going to make going out to Jool quite different than runs to the moon, but that's part of space exploration. Casini launched when I was in pre-school. It arrived when I was about 11, but I'd left university before the mission ended.
Working out what sort of schedule to launch Jool probes at should be part of the challenge. Plus imagine a probe using early tech tree parts at Jool while more advanced ones are landing closer to home - that would be a very authentic space program experience.

Not saying I disagree, but a big stumbling block here for KSP2 in particular is that eventually there'll be interstellar travel, apparently with no FTL mechanics. This means that at certain point in a career, you might have a spacecraft that's travelling to another star for decades rather than years. Having played with time-mechanic mods in KSP1, I often would almost never actually have a mission arrive at Jool, because I'd end up finishing the tech tree while it was travelling and/or get bored with doing routine inner solar system stuff. I feel like this problem would only get worse when some journeys are a magnitude longer - it'd be pretty frustrating to have to make sure every one of your colonies is resupplied every year or two while trying to timewarp to another star.

[magnemoe]

45 minutes ago, GluttonyReaper said:

Not saying I disagree, but a big stumbling block here for KSP2 in particular is that eventually there'll be interstellar travel, apparently with no FTL mechanics. This means that at certain point in a career, you might have a spacecraft that's travelling to another star for decades rather than years. Having played with time-mechanic mods in KSP1, I often would almost never actually have a mission arrive at Jool, because I'd end up finishing the tech tree while it was travelling and/or get bored with doing routine inner solar system stuff. I feel like this problem would only get worse when some journeys are a magnitude longer - it'd be pretty frustrating to have to make sure every one of your colonies is resupplied every year or two while trying to timewarp to another star.

I tended to finish tech tree in KSP 1 very early. First Mun landing was kind of the turning point, After that I sent an Minmus mission and started spamming Mun missions. At the return of the Minmus mission tech tree was almost filled out and I sent away my first bases. 
But yes contracts inside Kerbin SOI tended to take up so much time planetary missions took a long time to arrive even if going fast as in 100 days to Duna and a bit over a year to Jool. 
Then you get the various contracts on Duna and other bodies who took time to. 
This might be worse in KSP 2. But the lack of contracts probably help here.