Life Support Let's Play.

[Beeman]

The problem is that they've said they don't have any interest in implementing a "difficulty" setting. There's been a discussion or two in the development forum regarding difficulty options or toggle-able features to customize your play experience but people tend to go either way on how they feel about it. Some people love it, some people hate it(even though options like that literally benefit everyone). So I don't know.

The most recent one was here:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/46048-Adjustable-difficulty?highlight=difficulty

The thread got closed, even though it was a pretty good discussion and the developers have said before that they love to see people discussing things, even things they've said they'd never implement. But no worries, it'll get brought up again at some point inevitably.

I still feel that life support and other such things would fit into that type of difficulty(or realism) menu perfectly and you could have people running let's plays with all hardcore settings and some people being silly with easier settings and they wouldn't have to download a bunch of mods to make it happen so you'd get people who don't even know how to edit video and such trying their hand at running a video series about KSP. So I feel it's definitely worth looking into for that and the sheer gameplay customization of it all.

[Valley]

When resources and mining are added if they fail to add life support it will, in fact, make it easier. After all, many people launch huge ships into orbit around other planets, without mods or anything outside of their own skills. Now add the fact that there will be resources at the other end and they could send unmanned missions ahead to collect material and fuel. A arriving colony ship could find tons of fuel, buildings, and stations already waiting for it. I mean, I am playing with Kethane and, so far, while I am still figuring out how to use it I can see how small, unmanned craft could search out and mine kethane for their Kerbal masters ahead of the living crew even showing up. Fueling stations could be sent ahead and filled up years ahead of time. The life support makes this a tad different - but the Ironcross has a air intake that allows you to add to your air supply, allowing for colonies of you plan it out ahead of time.

How much easier does that make it to design a colony ship if you know a certain amount of fuel and other items were waiting in orbit around Jool, for example, for you on the other end of the journey? And how much easier if you DON'T have to worry about Life Support?

I understand why they don't want to add aliens and military stuff. Not sure why they don't want computers...but surely they would want to add life support sooner or later, once they deal with the other issues.