[Idea] AI-Powered Dynamic & Narrative Mission Generator for Science Mode

[Jorntmeister]

Hi everyone,

Like many of you, I absolutely love Kerbal Space Program 1. Science Mode, in particular, hits a sweet spot for me – the joy of exploration and unlocking new tech without the financial pressures of Career Mode is fantastic.

However, I often find myself hitting a bit of a wall. After landing on the Mun, maybe Minmus, and perhaps a trip to Duna, I've unlocked a significant portion of the tech tree, but my motivation starts to dwindle. I lack compelling, long-term goals or a guiding structure to push me further into the solar system or towards more complex constructions. While mods with contract packs offer more variety, they often feel somewhat predefined.

I was inspired by the idea behind KSP2's missions – a system that provides clearer objectives and weaves a bit of a storyline to keep things engaging (even with KSP2's current development state). This got me thinking: could we bring something similar, but perhaps more dynamic, to KSP1 using its modding capabilities?

The Core Idea: An AI-Driven Mission Generator Mod

Imagine a mod that acts like an intelligent Mission Control for Science Mode. It would:

1. Analyze Player Progress: Look at the currently unlocked tech nodes, which celestial bodies have been visited/explored, maybe even recent vessel capabilities.
2. Dynamically Generate Missions: Based on this progress, use AI (either via an external API like GPT/Gemini/Claude, or potentially through sophisticated local procedural generation) to create unique, challenging, and relevant missions. These wouldn't be just random contracts, but tailored goals that make sense for the player's current stage in the game.
3. Incorporate Narrative (Optional but cool!): The AI could potentially weave flavour text or even a light, evolving narrative into the missions. Think competing space agencies, unfolding scientific mysteries, colonization drives, etc., that adapt based on player actions and achievements.
4. Create Custom Contracts: Use the KSP API to generate these missions as actual, acceptable contracts within the game.

Why Would This Be Awesome?

• Sustained Engagement: Provides continuous, meaningful goals beyond the initial exploration milestones.
• Personalized Challenge: Missions adapt to the player's specific tech level and progress.
• Enhanced Replayability: Every playthrough could feel different based on the generated missions and narratives.
• Emergent Storytelling: Could create unique stories based on the AI's generation and the player's execution (or failures!).
• Fills a Niche: Goes beyond static contract packs by offering truly dynamic, context-aware objectives.

Feasibility:

From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong!), the KSP1 API is quite powerful. Mods can already access tech tree status, vessel info, and progression data. They can also create custom contracts and potentially make web requests to external APIs. So, the building blocks seem to be there. The main challenge would lie in the AI integration/logic and designing the system to generate good, balanced, and fun missions.

Is Anyone Interested?

I'm not a modder myself, but I do have a little knowledge of coding (in python), and I am a fast learner so i'm totally down to help with the development and I'm really passionate about this concept and believe it could significantly enhance the KSP1 Science Mode experience for many players. Is there any talented mod developer out there who finds this idea intriguing and might be interested in exploring it further or even taking it on as a project?

I'd be happy to discuss the idea in more detail, brainstorm features!

Thanks for reading!

[Natorius]

AI is not as powerful as this post implies, at least for the use-cases you specified.

Let's assume you're talking about large-language models, which is what stuff like ChatGPT is (other types of models are a whole other can of worms).

To start with, AI hallucinates - it invents information which is logically inconsistent with its prompt and history. Some hallucinations can be countered through careful prompt design, but over time, the chance of these hallucinations becoming major enough to harm player immersion becomes basically guaranteed. This basically precludes the AI from writing any self-consistent overarching narrative.

Even if we could get an LLM to maintain a self-consistent and immersive narrative, it has no way to interpret the current game state in a way which would form any interesting summaries or stories. All an LLM really understands is how sentences are put together. In other words, even if it could write a narrative to follow, it wouldn't be able to integrate the player's actions into that narrative.

Then we get to your suggestion about the AI designing contracts. This is a very poor fit for LLMs. What's to stop it from generating a contract to travel to Mars in a stock playthrough, or Duna in a RSS playthrough? Nothing inherent to the LLM prevents that, so you add a condition to the prompt. Okay, so then it generates a Duna contract for the stock system... which requires orbiting at a 621° inclination with a semimajor axis of 80 Mm - an impossible inclination which is also outside Duna's SOI. So you write a prompt case or some code to catch that, and requiring parts not unlocked, and requiring scientific experiments which don't exist, and requiring paradoxical mission parameters (like make a satellite that's also a colony), and so on and so forth... and the question becomes, why are you using an LLM for this, and not just improving the stock contract system? Writing contract parameters appeals to none of the strengths of LLMs, and while I won't say it's strictly impossible to make it work, it's sure as hell harder than just improving the contract generator.

Remember: LLMs are not intelligent. All they do is combine words in a way which is consistent with their training. They have no concept of orbital mechanics, career unlocks, or fun mission design. Nor do they understand game mechanics and player actions. They know words; that's it. Putting one in charge of such tasks would be pointless at best.

[Arju2011]

I have worked with AI. It cant do this. I had an idea for AI air traffic like Gran turismo.