Comets and continuous SCIENCE!!!

[Belgurath]

Looking at what's already in place in vanilla (and even in mods) I wanted to make two suggestions: comets and long-term science.

My ideas for making comets are pretty basic - we already have debugged functionality for asteroids, entry effects, smoke-trails, and sun tracking. Just combine the component methods in such a way as to make a new kind of asteroid that spawns on a highly elliptical orbit and is constantly giving off smoke-trails in the direction opposite Kerbol and/or has grey or blue entry effects pointing away from the sun. There are already awesome exhaust effects too that could be nice - cover the surface in small Ant-engine sprays, or have large exhaust sparks (like SRB's have) emanating from it. As I say, shouldn't be too hard to implement. If I ever find the time to learn how to mod I'll do it myself, but in the mean time (when I'm busy) I figured I'd throw it out to the community and Devs.

Second is long-term science. My main complaint with the game is that there's no reason to stay anywhere - not on space stations, not on surfaces, nothing - you just fly new places, plant a flag and grab some dirt, then head for home. Something like what Interstellar had would be ideal: a way to continually generate science that has a multiplier based on location. Clean, simple, a reason for staying. Perhaps make more experiments that each generate just a little bit of science, but that in total create a lot (like a hybrid of Interstellar's continuous science generation lab facility and First Contract's or Magic Orbital Science's varied experiments - magnetometers, telescopes, solar particle detectors, etc). Make it so that they get an additional multiplier if there are Kerbals aboard the parent vessel, so we can have both limited autonomous and manned packages. Also the science variable definition within experiments could be tweaked to have no constant value, but rather accumulate data up to a certain maximum (assuming the Kerbals have finite computer memory to store the data in before transmitting) and then use the usual multipliers for data transmission regarding how much gets recovered from transmitting the data and how many data packets/electricity to use to send it with.

Of the two I think comets are most exciting and would quite possibly be the easiest to implement (again, a pretty simple idea that basically just makes new use of existing code). Duration-science is better for keeping Builder/Engineer-type people playing (there's already no problem for the Pilot types who like to fly more than they like to build) and would possibly require more work.

Already though, excellent game with lots of fun, and I definitely approve of the direction things are moving already with expanding the contract system and such (again, more things to do concurrently over longer time-spans). Keep up the amazing work!

[Joonatan1998]

The problem with continuous science is that even ins stock career time doesnt matter, you can just leave time warp on.

-no constant upkeep for KSC

-no life support

-kerbals don't die because the get old.

The only time you can't just leave time warp on is when you have contracts active.