Implenting KSP 2 Exoplanets into KSP 1 [DEVLOG/DISCUSSION]

[R-T-B]

On 6/20/2024 at 4:57 PM, Bej Kerman said:

I would try to evaluate how good or bad KSP 1 looks, but there's no proper reference frame because it's a big hideous clash of cartoonish and pseudo-realistic styles, and the clouds provided by EVE don't really help.

You really aren't using the right modpacks then.

That's all I can say.

There is nothing limiting this mod in KSP1.  KSP1 even has floating origin, something everyone here has seemingly glossed over.

Edited June 22 by R-T-B

[herbal space program]

On 6/21/2024 at 11:01 AM, K^2 said:

The biggest blockers for getting Debdeb into KSP2 EA would have been the vast distances involved. They would require origin relocation to work smoothly across interstellar distances, larger rockets being launchable and stable, and time warp being able to go to something like 1M. All of this is... lets say problematic in the current state of KSP2.

I personally think the vast distances involved were going to be problematic for gameplay reasons even if there were no technical issues about it.  Even at the ~0.1X scale of the Kerbalverse, just one light year equivalent  is still about 10¹⁵m, or 10,000X the maximum Kerbol-Eeloo distance. of ~10¹¹m.  Based on my experience building a pseudo-interstellar ship with available parts, with the 1400 ISP SWERV you could make the trip to Eeloo in maybe 100 days with any kind of reasonable payload  if you account for the need to decelerate.  And that's if you build a verrry big ship. That would be 29,000 years to go 1 light year-equivalent,  and if you increase the hypothetical ISP of your interstellar engine to 15 times that, which is about the theoretical maximum for a fusion-powered reaction engine, it's still taking you about 2,000 years to reach your destination even if it's only one scaled-down light year away.  What are you going to do with all the stuff you had going on in the Kerbolar system while you wait for all that time to pass?  You'd basically have to just forget all about it, which seems pretty at odds with their whole colony maintenance model for the next phase of the roadmap that leads to interstellar. So their choices basically would have been  to make interstellar a completely disjoint game phase from everything else if they keep any kind of realistic propulsion system, implement some kind of totally unrealistic propulsion system,  or scale down the interstellar distances at least one more, probably closer to two orders of magnitude.  I wonder if they ever even got to the stage where they seriously decided how they meant to resolve that significant gameplay conundrum.

Edited June 22 by herbal space program

[Bej Kerman]

23 minutes ago, R-T-B said:

You really aren't using the right modpacks then.

Okay, well which modpack do you want me to use that gets the game running within this geological epoch and alleviates its memory leakage and allows the game to run competently with very large vessels?

24 minutes ago, R-T-B said:

There is nothing limiting this mod in KSP1

Well, except for KSP1. And maybe the fact that the mods inside large modpacks always end up conflicting with each other in terms of vision and code.

[K^2]

44 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

Even at the ~0.1X scale of the Kerbalverse, just one light year equivalent  is still about 10¹⁵m, or 10,000X the maximum Kerbol-Eeloo distance. of ~10¹¹m.

You can get another factor of 3.4 by using Kerbin year. Orbital period for Kerbin is about 9Ms vs Earth's 31.6Ms. So you have a built in excuse for KSP interstellar distances to be 34 times shorter. Distance to Proxima would then map to something like 1.2x10¹⁵m.

But yeah. All the problems you highlight persist. I'm sure the ISP and thrust of NPP would be pushed beyond reasonable as has happened with ions, and even so, we're looking at many decades, possibly centuries for transit. The colony gameplay has to work around that.

You really have 3 options here. 1) You don't just fast-forward the transfer. You keep playing colony manager at 100k-1M time warp, checking in on your transfer progress occasionally. 2) Colonies don't "age", much like ships in KSP1. That means no life support or anything like that in the game. The only resource management gameplay for colonies is when you're expanding. 3) You make interstellar distances a lot shorter.

Somebody was going to be upset with either pick, but there would be mods giving you all 3 options, I'm sure.

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, K^2 said:

You really have 3 options here. 1) You don't just fast-forward the transfer. You keep playing colony manager at 100k-1M time warp, checking in on your transfer progress occasionally. 2) Colonies don't "age", much like ships in KSP1. That means no life support or anything like that in the game. The only resource management gameplay for colonies is when you're expanding. 3) You make interstellar distances a lot shorter.

For my part, I would vote for much shorter interstellar distances, since that wouldn't require you to egregiously violate physics with your propulsion systems,  and  there  are in fact places in real galaxies where  the stars are much closer together than they are in our immediate neighborhood. If transit times could be 20-50 Kerbin years with a propulsion system that is only moderately impossible, then I think it would be feasible to get the intra- and inter-system timescales to mesh in a playable way.

Edited June 22 by herbal space program

[K^2]

21 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

For my part, I would vote for much shorter interstellar distances, since that wouldn't require you to egregiously violate physics with your propulsion systems,  and  there  are in fact places in real galaxies where  the stars are much closer together than they are in our immediate neighborhood. If transit times could be 20-50 Kerbin years with a propulsion system that is only moderately impossible, then it may be possible to get the intra- and inter-system timescales to mesh in a playable way.

Yeah, especially if you throw in some outer planets with longer periods, and have to manage Hohmann transfers to these at the same time to reduce overhead of supplying colonies. It would make years and decades a more natural scale for the colony progression, which is probably not unrealistic.

What I don't know is if it's the right choice for everyone. Not being a game designer professionally, one thing I never learned is the skill of making a game that's fun to play for a given target demographic. Making a game that's fun for the team that works on it is a great strategy for an indy studio, and we did get KSP1 out of that kind of strategy, but KSP2 was rather larger and more expensive, meaning Intercept was solving a fundamentally different problem than you and I are thinking of when trying to balance the game.

To bring this back to the thread topic, for anyone trying to mod Debdeb into KSP1, yeah, I think that's the right strategy. You just don't have the tools to mold KSP1 into something that would let you deal with centuries and millennia time scales efficiently. So smaller interstellar distances would make something a lot more playable. Especially when 100k time warp is already pushing the system if you have enough debris floating about.

[herbal space program]

3 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Yeah, especially if you throw in some outer planets with longer periods, and have to manage Hohmann transfers to these at the same time to reduce overhead of supplying colonies. It would make years and decades a more natural scale for the colony progression, which is probably not unrealistic.

You could add those and also have a whole Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud beyond that, with objects containing resources to make propellant and perhaps even  some easter eggs indicating places to seek out in the other star systems. Establishing colonies in such  places, with the need to go back and forth between those and the inner Kerbolar System rapidly,  would also be a good test bed for potential interstellar designs, as well as practice for the whole enterprise of navigating with direct, high velocity burns rather than Hohman transfers.  The SWERV puts a lot of that in reach, but the current KSP2 version doesn't give you much reason to use it that way.

[R-T-B]

4 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Okay, well which modpack do you want me to use that gets the game running within this geological epoch and alleviates its memory leakage and allows the game to run competently with very large vessels?

That wasn't your initial question (nor is it AT ALL about "this mod". )  It was visual styles.  I can give you a list to make Kerbin look and run better than KSP2 if thats your goal, with consistent visual styling.

The vessels problem is a design problem with being a rigid body physics game that is inherently singlethreaded and makes your answer well, impossible to satisfy I suspect.  KSP2 isn't better here.

Edited June 23 by R-T-B

[K^2]

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

You could add those and also have a whole Kuiper Belt and Oort cloud beyond that, with objects containing resources to make propellant and perhaps even  some easter eggs indicating places to seek out in the other star systems.

I really want a rogue planet Easter egg. Something that looks like a once habitable (or even industrialized?) world that got flung out of its ancestral home eons ago and has been floating through the void of space ever since, its atmosphere having condensed and subsequently frozen as vast "oceans" between the elevated areas that were once its continents.

Because it would be far enough out from Kerbol, it would make sense for it to be uncharted and nearly undetectable, but it can also stay entirely fixed.

Though, I do recall some speculation sparked by the discussion of the stellar movement being a factor Intercept is considering, potentially indicating Kerbol being part of a binary with a nearby star. That would both be a great excuse to bring in the nearby star system closer to Kerbol, as 0.1ly or even smaller distances aren't unusual for such configurations, and would allow the formerly rogue planet to be a Kerbol capture, still being absurdly far away and entirely uncharted until you put an effort into it, but nonetheless, being on orbital rails, making it a little easier to plan transfers to it.

Again, not a bad way to bring all of the concepts and planet work already done by the authors of this thread into KSP1. (Edit: Though, I'll be honest. I'm growing more and more tempted to build an engine in Unreal as a proof of concept.)

Edited June 23 by K^2

[herbal space program]

13 minutes ago, K^2 said:

I really want a rogue planet Easter egg. Something that looks like a once habitable (or even industrialized?) world that got flung out of its ancestral home eons ago and has been floating through the void of space ever since, its atmosphere having condensed and subsequently frozen as vast "oceans" between the elevated areas that were once its continents.

Sounds like a great idea to me! Having it be full of relics from an ancient civilization would of course also provide a great pretext for having the building of a colony there to excavate such artifacts be the last step before getting whatever advanced drive ultimately enables interstellar travel. And of course such a platform, orbiting at a creepingly slow pace right at the edge of Kerbol's SOI, would probably be the ideal base for launching an interstellar expedition.

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, R-T-B said:

  7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

 

U+1F44D

[R-T-B]

41 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

U+1F44D

Man we are on a roll.

[AVaughan]

On 6/23/2024 at 5:38 AM, Bej Kerman said:

Okay, well which modpack do you want me to use that gets the game running within this geological epoch and alleviates its memory leakage and allows the game to run competently with very large vessels?

The way to cope with large vessels is to use mods that add larger fuel tanks, and larger engines.  Large fuel tanks replace multiple smaller fuel tanks.  Replace 4-5 Nervs with a single larger 2.5m nuclear engine with the similar total thrust and isp, or 7+ Nervs with a 3.75m or 5m version.  That lets you reduce part count, which means you can still have huge vessels and a decent framerate.

[Skorj]

On 6/22/2024 at 3:38 PM, K^2 said:

You really have 3 options here. 1) You don't just fast-forward the transfer. You keep playing colony manager at 100k-1M time warp, checking in on your transfer progress occasionally. 2) Colonies don't "age", much like ships in KSP1. That means no life support or anything like that in the game. The only resource management gameplay for colonies is when you're expanding. 3) You make interstellar distances a lot shorter.

Somebody was going to be upset with either pick, but there would be mods giving you all 3 options, I'm sure.

I think it would be a lot easier to go with option 4: build a jump gate.  Any solution is going to involve some science fiction component and huge construction.  Just bypass the problem with high timewarp for a large ship.  Instead of a SF engine, we have a SF jump gate.  Still a huge and intricate construction in orbit, so lots of fun to be had launching/building it, but this way we can use a small number of very large parts, and no need for high timewarp.  Exploring the new system is the same either way, and this approach works within the limits of what KSP1 can reasonably do.

[NexusHelium]

Holy moly @wpetula these later renditions are incredible! I remember you sharing something on the discord once but these later ones are certainly better. This might not really be in any of your areas of expertise but scatterer and EVE (especially with the volumetrics) would be fantastic for it graphics wise. But overall this looks incredible so far.

And hey... if you ever need music for Glumo or the other planets... feel free to call me up  

[James Kerman]

Thread moved from KSP 2 Discussion to KSP 1 mod development.

[JustDark]

Is there any new progress on this mod?

[MushyR]

Volumetric rings please! I want some ring dust