A Sketch for Stock LS

[mattihase]

17 hours ago, PicoSpace said:

It would be interesting if hungry Kerbals did "less" that negatively effected the mission or basically paused it until you got those hungry tummys fed.

Pilots Refused to Fly
Science Can't be done.
Repairs Can't be Made.
Construction doesn't happen and all your kerbal operated equipment sort of just sits there.
Kerbals don't die, but if they get too hungry at the wrong time, well ships crash and other things are the fatalities.

Just because we're adding colonies doesn't mean we have to ape the most frustrating bits of Dwarf Fortress.
*Urist Kerman cancels Perform Suicide Burn, distracted by Snacks*

On 9/12/2023 at 9:14 AM, Gotmachine said:

KSP 2 made the choice to expand the scope to science-fiction territory. It certainly opened some new shiny opportunities, but by doing so it also threw away a lot of potential rooted in real-world space exploration challenges. Personnaly I think this was a mistake. What was setting KSP apart from the crowd of other space themed games is being rooted in what we can relate to in the real world.

*Points at NERVA*

*Points at R.A.P.I.E.R.*

 

KSP embracing a bit of spec fiction and concept only stuff for gameplay reasons is nothing new and it's fine.

And personally, as a bit of a self-imposed challenge I do try and avoid using those parts myself unless I have to, because they are a little OP, but I do think they're still part of the core sandbox of the games in terms of making long distance interplanetary and SSTO missions practical enough to do ambitious stuff in.

[Pthigrivi]

On 9/13/2023 at 2:56 AM, Lowi_Sace said:

One thing that does need to happen before life support is a more advanced mission planner which takes stuff like launch windows and aviable deltaV for every burn into account. In this way you could better plan a mission and estimate mission lenght

I think this is absolutely critical. We would need a way to very quickly estimate flight duration and raise a flag if the vessel in the VAB was short. I personally would love to see flight plans see more love regardless because its so important for new players to go interplanetary. I also figure they’re going to have a series of storage tanks for all the other resources so I don't think this generates dozens of parts that need to br made. I figure it could be done with these 8 parts plus some larger variants for colonies. Maybe a dozen total? Id like to see LS considered for the colony update but it doesn’t really make sense until resources are added. More on that in a sec. 
 

On 9/14/2023 at 4:30 PM, HephaistosFnord said:

- Sociability - determines whether the Kerbal is a net drag or boost on others, as well as their own social needs (slight boost with experience)
- Health - determines G-force robustness, endurance, impact tolerance, etc., as well as how quickly they suffer from adverse life support conditions (slight boost with experience)
- Intelligence - how capable they are at doing science and engineering type tasks (multiplies with experience)
- Reflexes - how capable they are at flying the ship (multiplies with experience) 

On 9/14/2023 at 1:57 PM, PicoSpace said:

It would be interesting if hungry Kerbals did "less" that negatively effected the mission or basically paused it until you got those hungry tummys fed.

Pilots Refused to Fly
Science Can't be done.
Repairs Can't be Made.
Construction doesn't happen and all your kerbal operated equipment sort of just sits there.
Kerbals don't die, but if they get too hungry at the wrong time, well ships crash and other things are the fatalities.

So this applies to a number of posts suggesting other criteria to keep kerbals happy and also to increasing the kinds of drawbacks that you’d expect if LS ran out. The OP proposal is designed as workable stock, normal settings foundation for life support but also for a range of other options that could apply to hard mode (hibernation perhaps) and future updates (habitation, radiation) and a huge range of ideas through mods. This could happen on either end, adding needed resources, social stuff, etc on the front end or adding more complex consequences on the back end. I think having a viable base, stock mechanic that works for most players would make for a nice jumping off point for all those other systems and would make the experience more coherent.

Edited September 16, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Gotmachine]

6 hours ago, mattihase said:

KSP embracing a bit of spec fiction and concept only stuff for gameplay reasons is nothing new and it's fine.

There is a difference between "a bit" and interstellar travel, nuclear fusion, and metallic hydrogen.

[mattihase]

If interstellar travel is too science fiction then manned interplanetary travel is too.

[Periple]

7 hours ago, mattihase said:

If interstellar travel is too science fiction then manned interplanetary travel is too.

I like the interstellar thing but I disagree! I think there are about three tiers here.

Crewed interplanetary travel isn’t all that speculative, we have the technology to go to Mars or even the outer Solar System’s moons if we want to invest the ridiculous amount of money it would cost for very little benefit, scientific or otherwise.

Self-sustaining interplanetary colonies are a LOT more speculative but there I think we at least understand the problems and I think it’s conceivable that we could solve them, given enough time, resources, and trial and (tragic) error. 

Interstellar travel, especially crewed interstellar travel is a whole different level of speculative. All we know about that is that it’s not physically impossible, that is, we can conceive of propulsion technologies that could get us there. We don’t know if it’s biologically or socially impossible, and the unknowns are so big that we have to do a lot of sci-fi hand-waving to make it work — for example we really don’t know how we’d deal with cosmic radiation when going through the interstellar medium at a significant factor of c, or how not to get the crew/colonists not to go insane during the trip, or if humans can be re-engineered to survive hibernation, or any number of other things. (I’m going to be a Debbie Downer and say “almost certainly impossible” but there is always the “almost.”)

So I agree with @Gotmachine that it’s much more speculative and something of value has been lost by going in that direction, although I don’t think the difficulty is with propulsion. Unlike him I like the idea — but I do hope that there will be mods that explore the harder, more realistic side of space exploration.

[Pthigrivi]

On 9/12/2023 at 8:39 AM, Vl3d said:

6. The main gameplay impact of adding life support is incentivising using probes instead of kerbals. This can be done by adding a craft designs / mission "complexity tax" to manned exploration - this is the main argument of adding life support.

 

On 9/12/2023 at 11:56 AM, PDCWolf said:

Even if you propose the whole system as a way to gain efficiency (or bring lower efficiency to normal levels), nothing stops the player from just going around the system by spamming, or timewarping. Kerbals slow when mining/performing experiments? send more Kerbals with more drills/experiments and so on. It'll end up just being a mass tax in one way or the other, either by requiring the player to include those modules to extend the efficient time of a Kerbal, or bigger capsules to send more inefficient Kerbals.

Further on, when a system is this simple and linear, it really doesn't bring in to the table any sort of engineering challenge. It ends up being "add more part to live longer". A system like life support needs to have a certain depth and complexity to it to hit just right and not become a straight up mass tax. You need to give players a myriad of tools to experiment and design mission profiles to their liking. Maybe they want to just spam LS cargo without any recycling for a simple mission to a colony? Maybe they want a self-sustaining, no-waste, closed loop of LS for a 100 years long interstellar mission? Maybe they want a quick Kerbin to Mun shuttle that packs barely enough food and water for the trip and just drops waste into space?

 

On 9/13/2023 at 9:25 AM, VlonaldKerman said:

I fell in love with KSP because I could immerse myself completely into a mission. I could transform my room into a ghetto KSC planning room with whiteboards full of mission profiles and weighing the pros and cons, etc. I feel like a LS system that’s all carrot, no stick is inconsistent with this vibe, and I may be wrong, but this vibe is that which I feel is fundamentally associated with KSP in a unique way.

Im going to answer these at once because they get to the heart of the matter. What is the point of a LS? Is it actually fun? To me things like the balance between crewed vs uncrewed missions should really have its own fundamental dynamic, with probes being lighter and often being one-way vs crew gaining more science. PDCwolf made a great point in a previous discussion that this balance is counteracted by the need for probe control and often relay networks which puts an additional complexity tax on top of probes. I think LS could rebalance this for Kerbals on in an interesting way because of the time element, but I wouldn't say thats the reason for adding it. The reason to add LS is it’s actually pretty fun to engineer. 

USI-LS is not very well balanced, its a bit clunky, and I really don't like the way it calculates homesickness (Kerbals are adventurers! Let them explore!) I also don't think manually pumping waste around is very fun. But there are some solid gem ideas there at the roots.  The key thing is the relationship between supplies, recyclers, and the ability to mine fertilizer. There are just enough ingredients here to open up real creative solutions that change the way you think about mission profiles and your entire space program. I opted to simplify basically everything except this core mechanic for exactly that reason.  I'll give a few examples:

Early game example: Its early in your space program, you've built your first LKO station, and you're planning to build a colony on Minmus. You've sent probes to scan Minmus's surface and found 3 good sites for your colony: 1 is in a flat with good access to Methalox, another is near the pole and has good access to  Fertlizer and Methalox, but another is in the hills and has access to Metals and Methalox. Now you've got a real puzzle: do you march toward greenhouse tech and set up a more permanent location where you have access to fertilizer? and then send a supply route to gather the metals? or do you build your main colony near the metals and just ship snacks from Kerbin for a while? Say you've chosen the latter but you'd like to use reusable tugs to deliver your initial colony parts to the surface and station parts to orbit. You could just make these tugs autonomous, but you're also trying to staff your nascent colony and a science outpost or two so it makes sense to shuttle a few kerbals along each time. At that point you might add rehydrators, because what you really care about is extending the usefulness of the snacks until the colony is fully established. Keep in mind a very casual player who's just getting used to the idea of space travel is still going to play it simple: for them its the choice between adding snacks to long-term science missions, adding snacks everywhere because they like the idea of Kerbals being happy and fed, or just not worry about that aspect until later in the game. 

Mid game example: Its time to send your first mission to Duna. From your flight planner you can see that the mission consists of 3 phases: about 250 days on the way there, about 600 days on the surface, and another 250 days traveling back. There are a number of ways to solve this: you could just keep it simple and pack enough Snacks for the whole trip, you could add rehydrators to save a bit of mass at the expense of a bit more power, or you could think about whether this first trip there isn't just flags and footprints: you're going to bring 6 Kerbals along and leave 3 there to start setting up your first colony. For this you might skip rehydrators and incorporate a greenhouse that stays on the surface with a separate Duna Ascent Vehicle which brings your return-crew back to orbit and back home. Maybe the lower section of the lander is your starter base and the DAV is attached to the top like the Lunar Lander.  You might send ahead a one-way automated ISRU rig that scans the surface and then lands to gather Methalox and Fertilizer ahead of time ala Mars Direct. Maybe you already know you can harvest Methalox on Ike for your return trip and so all you need is 250 days of snacks for your transit back to Kerbin. All of these design decisions change both the way you build your vessel and what you plan to do with it. But even if all you cared about was keeping Kerbals happy on a 3-crew Duna and back you could just bring a few tons of snacks and the Engineers report would give a green check telling you you were all set. 

Late game example: By this point in the game you've really got things down. You've got colonies and supply routes on a few planets all self-sufficient with Greenhouses and you're mounting your first big interstellar colony ship. You're going to use Jool's moons with an orbital construction platform above Vall and various resources being mined and harvested from Laythe and Tylo. You find that there are lots of other resources but almost no fertilizer on Tylo. Since its gravity is so high its actually worth building a Nutrient reprocessor at your Tylo base to eek the most out of the fertlizer you deliver there from Laythe. You also realize you could get your interstellar ship ready faster if you can start ferrying colonists to Jool from Kerbin and Duna, so you build a big 24 Kerbal cruise liner to make stops at a few colonies before traveling out to Jool and back. You could take your time and add a Nutrient reporocessor to this vessel as well, or because you now have Metallic Hydrogen you can push much more direct routes without needing to wait for ideal windows. There's no harm of course in taking it slow, Time-warp as always is your friend, but the less time things take across your whole program the more you can devote your available power and resources to construction rather than upkeep. 

These are the kinds of deep engineering and systems puzzles that  LS opens up and I think it really changes the way you think about space travel--which is really the main idea behind KSP.  In each of these examples time is the fundamental driver, but there are lots of ways to go about approaching that idea. That allows for new and casual players to slowly get their feet wet while providing open ended challenges to hardcore players, so there's a really wide swath of user profiles that are being catered to. 

Edited September 17, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Vl3d]

@Pthigrivi you are going deep into details but you are still not addressing the heart of the matter at a principled level: stock KSP cannot and will never use time-constrained resources as a gameplay mechanic, because the player has to be able to at any point create a stable equilibrium that does not break under any amount of time warp. Thus all systems - electricity, heat, radiation (which I bet will be used as a stand-in for life-support) have to be stable in essence. What you are proposing is in many cases using time as a resource (the need to pack enough snacks before the trip, the need to ensure logistics for new LS consumables etc.) - which is not compatible with stock KSP.

On 9/12/2023 at 3:39 PM, Vl3d said:

2. Because of the fact that devs have not communicated plans to implement a mechanic which allows sequentially performing parallel missions (by going back in time after finishing a mission), in stock KSP life support cannot depend on time variables. You have to be able to leave kerbals in orbit or in Interstellar transit for 100+ years.

3. Point 2 means that LS can only be implemented as non-consumables (recyclers / radiation protection) added as parts with a mass / EC / thermal cost which add a bonus to the kerbals on mission (improved performance, extra capabilities - this can include experiments for extra science rewards). But that's not what is important about LS (see point 6).

4. I consider radiation management protection to be part of the life support concept. But it's not enough.

TLDR: Devs will probably add a radiation management system that plays the role of life support. But I would also like some dedicated LS parts which give bonuses and/or capabilities to kerbals.. like a med pod and a kerbal medic class.

Edited September 17, 2023 by Vl3d

[Pthigrivi]

26 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

@Pthigrivi you are going deep into details but you are still not addressing the heart of the matter at a principled level: stock KSP cannot and will never use time-constrained resources as a gameplay mechanic, because the player has to be able to at any point create a stable equilibrium that does not break under any amount of time warp. Thus all systems - electricity, heat, radiation (which I bet will be used as a stand-in for life-support) have to be stable in essence. What you are proposing is in many cases using time as a resource (the need to pack enough snacks before the trip, the need to ensure logistics for new LS consumables etc.) - which is not compatible with stock KSP.

Im not so sure. We already know some experiments and ISRU will will take time so those resources are already in a sense time-constrained. Since this scheme creates bonuses to those very resources I think it's much in the same spirit as putting a satellite in geosynchronous orbit so it will scan a specific location faster and other examples Nertea gave in his AMA redux; its a way to maximize your time and yields with a little planning. Getting a little extra science and faster harvesting with a healthy, fed crew acts as a reward for solving LS as an engineering puzzle and in the process gives players a better sense of the meaning of time and distance--two core lessons KSP is attempting to teach. 

Here's Chris' quote on how they're thinking about time-based mechanics: 

Quote

These are the best questions because they’re the hard ones. Often we trend towards supporting a player path that doesn’t reward excessive timewarping, but doesn’t exclude it either. A good case study is resource extraction and deposit concentrations. There’s definitely fun in seeking out and finding the best deposit for mining. Obviously though timewarp makes that kinda moot in timing. You could just start mining a hypothetically low-grade deposit and warp for 50 days. That tells us that time and rate -based mechanics need to have more to work well. A specific example here is that a newly accessible resource should be constrained differently – challenging location, resource transport limitations, etc.

 We try to move the real player decisions to things that are interesting with and without time as a mechanic. Mostly hypothetical examples, but here’s a few ways of thinking of these things on top of my head:

• Put a locational constraint on something. If you need to do something in orbit over a specific part of a planet, make it take longer than the average orbital cycle. This might encourage a player to put a satellite in GEO orbit over that place. If you do the work to put it in GEO, you get the benefit of being able to timewarp.
• Use binaries instead of gradients. Does ore concentration really benefit from a really detailed gradient from 0.0001% to 100%, or can you look at it as a yes/no? Trade that, see if you’re damaging player stories with that simplification.
• Use supporting systems. Sure, you could mine that deposit at high timewarp. But the deposit is on a planet with a day length of 200 days, and you need power, and the area has no fissionables. How are you going to power it? If you solve this problem, it is satisfying and you get a cookie. You did the work, enjoy your timewarpable extraction!

These are really big problems we look at for all of the more complex systems because hey, an interstellar transfer could be 100 years. Players will timewarp that and that’s… the whole length of a KSP1 campaign. Fun with and without timewarping like this is essential.

 

[Periple]

5 hours ago, Vl3d said:

gameplay mechanic, because the player has to be able to at any point create a stable equilibrium that does not break under any amount of time warp

As soon as supply line automation is up, it will be possible to create a stable equilibrium. That could happen quite early in the game!

[VlonaldKerman]

On 9/16/2023 at 12:31 PM, Pthigrivi said:

 

 

Im going to answer these at once because they get to the heart of the matter. What is the point of a LS? Is it actually fun? To me things like the balance of crewed vs uncrewed missions should really have its own fundamental dynamic, with probes being lighter and often being one-way vs crew gaining more science. PDCwolf made a great point in a previous discussion that this balance is counteracted by the need for probe control and often relay networks which puts an additional complexity tax on top of probes. I think LS could rebalance this for Kerbals on in an interesting way because of the time element, but I wouldn't say thats the reason for adding it. The reason to add LS is it’s actually pretty fun to engineer. 

USI-LS is not very well balanced, its a bit clunky, and I really don't like the way it calculates homesickness (Kerbals are adventurers! Let them explore!) I also don't think manually pumping waste around is very fun. But there are some solid gem ideas there at the roots.  The key thing is the relationship between supplies, recyclers, and the ability to mine fertilizer. There are just enough ingredients here to open up real creative solutions that change the way you think about mission profiles and your entire space program. I opted to simplify basically everything except this core mechanic for exactly that reason.  I'll give a few examples:

Early game example: Its early in your space program and you've built your first LKO station and you're planning to build a colony on Minmus. You've sent probes to scan Minmus's surface and found 3 good sites for your colony: 1 is in a flat with good access to Methalox, another is near the pole and has good access to  Fertlizer and Methalox, but another is in the hills and has access to Metals and Methalox. Now you've got a real puzzle: do you march toward greenhouse tech and set up a more permanant location where you have access to fertlizer? and then send a supply route to gather the metals? or do you build your main colony near the metals and just ship snacks from Kerbin for a while? Say you've chosen the latter but you'd like to use reusable tugs to deliver your initial colony parts to the surface and station parts to orbit. You could just make these tugs autonomous, but you're also trying to staff your nascent colony and a science outpost or two so it makes sense to shuttle a few kerbals along each time. At that point you might add rehydrators, because what you really care about is extending the usefulness of the snacks until the colony is fully established. Keep in mind a very casual player who's just getting used to the idea of space travel is still going to play it simple: for them its the choice between adding snacks to long-term science missions, adding snacks everywhere because they like the idea of Kerbals being happy and fed, or just not worry about that aspect until later in the game. 

Mid game example: Its time to send your first mission to Duna. From your flight planner you can see that the mission consists of 3 phases: about 250 days on the way there, about 600 days on the surface, and another 250 days traveling back. There are a number of ways to solve this: you could just keep it simple and pack enough Snacks for the whole trip, you could add rehydrators to save a bit of mass at the expense of a bit more power, or you could think about whether this first trip there isn't just flags and footprints: you're going to bring 6 Kerbals along and leave 3 there to start setting up your first colony. For this you might skip rehydrators and incorporate a greenhouse that stays on the surface with a separate Duna Ascent Vehicle which brings your return-crew back to orbit and back home. Maybe the lower section of the lander is your starter base and the DAV is attached to the top like the Lunar Lander.  You might send ahead a one-way automated ISRU rig that scans the surface and then lands to gather Methalox and Fertilizer ahead of time ala Mars Direct. Maybe you already know you can harvest Methalox on Ike for your return trip and so all you need is 250 days of snacks for your transit back to Kerbin. All of these design decisions change both the way you build your vessel and what you plan to do with it. But even if all you cared about was keeping Kerbals happy on a 3-crew Duna and back you could just bring a few tons of snacks and the Engineers report would give a green check telling you you were all set. 

Late game example: By this point in the game you've really got things down. You've got colonies and supply routes on a few planets all self-sufficient with Greenhouses and you're mounting your first big interstellar colony ship. You're going to use Jool's moons with an orbital construction platform above Vall and various resources being mined and harvested from Laythe and Tylo. You find that there are lots of other resources but almost no fertilizer on Tylo. Since its gravity is so high its actually worth building a Nutrient reprocessor at your Tylo base to eek the most out of the fertlizer you deliver there from Laythe. You also realize you could get your interstellar ship ready faster if you can start ferrying colonists to Jool from Kerbin and Duna, so you build a big 24 Kerbal cruise liner to make stops at a few colonies before traveling out to Jool and back. You could take your time and add a Nutrient reporocessor to this vessel as well, or because you now have Metallic Hydrogen you can push much more direct routes without needing to wait for ideal windows. There's no harm of course in taking it slow, Time-warp as always is your friend, but the less time things take across your whole program the more you can devote your available power and resources to construction rather than upkeep. 

These are the kinds of deep engineering and systems puzzles that  LS opens up and I think it really changes the way you think about space travel--which is really the main idea behind KSP.  In each of these examples time is the fundamental driver, but there are lots of ways to go about approaching that idea. That allows for new and casual players to slowly get their feet wet while providing open ended challenges to hardcore players, so there's a really wide swath of user profiles that are being catered to. 

I agree with basically all of this, including your view on USI LS. I think that a resource-based system with supply chains is something that could be balanced to be a net-positive for the game.

One thing just occurred to me though, which some have alluded to… when you start sending your first interstellar missions, they will take a LONG time. That’s the sort of thing where it’s reasonable for the player to want to be able to time warp for long amounts of time, because much of the rest of their missions are probably comparatively small or at a standstill.

So they would have to be really careful to make sure that you can feasibly use automation, etc. to set up a system that requires no player intervention for LS.

Just now, VlonaldKerman said:

I agree with basically all of this, including your view on USI LS. I think that a resource-based system with supply chains is something that could be balanced to be a net-positive for the game.

One thing just occurred to me though, which some have alluded to… when you start sending your first interstellar missions, they will take a LONG time. That’s the sort of thing where it’s reasonable for the player to want to be able to time warp for long amounts of time, because much of the rest of their missions are probably comparatively small or at a standstill.

So they would have to be really careful to make sure that you can feasibly use automation, etc. to set up a system that requires no player intervention for LS.

Edit: I just saw that this is literally what the previous two posts were about, lol.