High level challenges: Temperature and radiation - a different kind of life support.

[allmhuran]

Recent threads have inspired me to try to think of new and more difficult challenges that won't affect new players (gotta be careful not to scare off the new players) but create additional challenges for experienced players.

For the record, I'm aware that mods exist.

One such challenge that gets raised quite often is life support, but this does raise issues of resupply during long voyages that might be too much of a distraction.

What if we inverted the idea and had "anti-death support" instead, with death coming in the form of temperature and radiation? They'd work differently, with radiation for the most part being a danger that slowly accumulated, but temperature being something that could swing fairly quickly, making it a more immediate hazard.

There's already a temperature mechanic in the game. This could be extended to give Kerbals a (fairly wide) "comfort zone" temperature range. Outside this range your crewed parts would need to consume electricity, but temperature could also be controlled to some extent by radiators which didn't consume electricity, giving you a way to minimize the "cost" of temperature maintenance using clever construction (radiators radiating into each other wouldn't work very well, so figuring out the geometry of the radiators would be a new construction challenge, much like the challenge NASA faces in real life of figuring out efficeint geometry for solar panels).

Ambient temperature (which is already in the game but doesn't have much effect) would obviously come into play: Hot in direct sun if you're close enough, cold if on the dark side of a body or far enough out.

Temperature could of course vary across different planets and moons, creating a distinguishing factor that would differentiate the requirements for ships, stations and bases depending on where you were going.

The challenge can be kept away from new players by making temperature maintenance cheap, so short term trips of up to a couple of months (such as to the Mun or Minmus) could easily just rely on stored pod power, but longer trips, and trips to more hostile environments, would need to consider solar panels and batteries, and really long trips that go far enough out that solar panels aren't so useful anymore need to consider even more battery storage, radiators... and RTGs.

And so to the second suggestion: Right now the challenge of temperature would be completely negated by just sticking a few RTGs on the ship, so there needs to be some downside to RTGs. Indeed, even now RTG's make electricity consumption a complete non issue, so they need some balancing force already.

I was thinking radiation might be the solution. Have ships subject to radiation when in space and from nuclear engines and RTGs (and, I suppose, some celestial bodies might be given high radiation levels, or perhaps high radiation biomes). The challenge to the player would, again, be largely in terms of construction techniques. Structural panels (or some other new part) could act as radiation sheilds. The heavier pods could have better shielding (creating a balancing force to counteract use of only the lightest pods all the time). Optional water jackets could be provided for things like the hitchhiker module.

This would again encourage players to think about their ship geometry. A large ship with a lot of nuclear engines or banks of RTGs would need to be designed with the engines and RTGs far from the crewed sections (which creates the challenge of building a "spread out" ship, probably requiring orbital docking construction), or with radiation shielding between those components (requiring a heavier ship).

New players could be spared this challenge by again making radiation accumulate very slowly so it's not a major issue for short trips of a couple of months, and/or providing a natural radiation shield in near-Kerbin-space, extending to the Mun and perhaps Minmus (explain it by saying Kerbin has a strong magnetic field if you like). New players will also "naturally" be protected by the tech tree, since they won't gain access to LVN's and RTGs for some time.

Edited May 24, 2014 by allmhuran

[LethalDose]

Eh. I understand what you're going for here (I think "Anti-death support" is a good term for it), but IMO this is beyond what is needed. RE: Temperature, I know TAC-LS already has an electricity requirement for life support, which nominally runs CO2 scrubbers, but in my mind is also running heaters, lights, recorded ker-ball games, etc.

RE radiation: This seems like another timer for space duration, Just one that counts "up" as it accumulates instead of one that counts "down" as a resource is consumed... In which case I don't see a compelling argument for how it's different than current life support mods, other than it maybe it can't be replenished (or, I guess "depleted" if it counts up).

Neat ideas, but I don't think they fit the game. Again, IMO.

[allmhuran]

The distinguishing factor, IMO, is that what I'm proposing provides ways to reduce the cost of maintenance by way of clever ship design. It's not a fixed timer (which you can only extend by adding more "supply" at launch), but rather a timer whose tick rate is influenced by *how* you built your ship, how you fly it, where you park it, and so on.

[Red Iron Crown]

Interesting. You could have kerbals accumulate radiation over their careers, forcing retirement. "Sorry, Jeb, you're not just green anymore, you're glowing."

[rtxoff]

I don't like the idea of dying Kerbals through getting a too high dose of radiation. Beginning to glow is fine and getting some funny face expressions from it would be awesome. But dying? Maybe the radiation to have some other penalties like reduced response time from ship controlls or something like random greenouts.

[allmhuran]

I suppose we could also have parts explode instead of just killing the Kerbals inside (which.... is a bit morbid, yeah). OK, parts exploding due to radiation overdose doesn't make a lot of sense, but it is a bit more Kerbal.

[Red Iron Crown]

Maybe nuclear engines or RTGs destroyed, especially on Kerbin, could make you lose reputation. Not strictly speaking a radiation mechanic, but a related effect.

[RedPine]

There area couple of simplifications that need to be made to the OP, IMO.

As far as kerbonauts are concerned, heat and radiation are the same thing - they are both primarily emitted from the sun and warm bodies such as Jool and Eve. A radiation shield and a heat shield are effectively the same thing, in that they absorb a given kind of radiation to prevent delicate parts from being affected.

Because KSP isn't designed to run the physics of craft not being flown by the player, or not within the loading distance, all radiation/heat penalties would have to be temporary as opposed to cumulative. If a part shuts down unless cooled to a certain heat level, then temperature would only be relevant while actually flying that craft. There would still be no time limit, sure, but it would cause many craft to disintegrate when one engine shuts down before the other due to unequal heating, resulting in a spiral of death or at least an enormous waste of fuel.

Lastly, in on the subject of radiators, consider having non electricity dependent radiators, electricity dependent radiators, and intake air dependent radiators.