Let the game clock run in buildings

[tater]

...I think it falls in the scope of what Squad doesn't want as far as "needless" time warping,

Quoted out as reference to Squad's desires, not yours

It's no more needless than warping to Jool. If they don't want "needless time warping," then why not make dv requirements for transfers independent of time of year? Select Jool as target, and you always get the best possible dv transfer. That avoids needless time warp, right? Heck, select a target, and it just does the rendezvous like hyperedit, with no "needless" time wasted playing.

If they don't include time in a real way, having things take actual time, they should just scrub all references to time out of the game, it means nothing at all right now. There is no difference between maintaining a complex program with many craft in flight at the same time, and simply warping any particular probe/whatever all the way to completion.

[mattinoz]

Perhaps it could scale with difficulty. Easy=1x, then 5x, then 10x, with perhaps an optional super hard difficulty level of 50x.

The reason it is an abstraction is because it simulates things inside the VAB (workers, cranes, welders, etc) working more slowly than a 1:1 time passage. It accounts for the fact that building rockets is a time consuming process.

To me I'd tie it to the Building Tier level.

Early on in the game when the time factors involved generally are short, the part are small and light so easy to handle time moves 1:1.

As the building goes up tiers you get heavier, larger more complex parts being moved around then the time scale adjusts to be also the mission times are getting longer so the whole time scale of the game just stretches out but the timing on windows more critical.

So if you scale with building tier you're also scaling with the players experience in the game.

To me is there is nothing in the game that valves time or puts pressure on time to encourage planning and thinking about what is coming up.

Then again if they do this then there needs to be tools in game to flag transfer windows to plan for.

Sure there will be lots of way around it like revert to saved and things that should add to the sense of achievement like building up your own library of stock lifters and designs that you can then use with on time cost.

Then you could do both.

Building tier , 1x, 2x, 5x, 10x, 50x

Game hardness 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x

Times the two together to get your game speed. Sure at top level 1/2 hour in VAB is close to two weeks but with the size of craft you can build at that time that's still pretty reasonable.

[Shalkka]

Time should pass in the VAB only if you spent more time there than in the rest of the game. If you've warped past 10 years, you can spend 10 years of real time for free in the VAB.

Support for this and elaboration to get the idea working forward. When time passes KSC generates "office time". When you enter the VAB you start up eating "office time". When you run out of office time the world clock starts ticking (ie you eat it at the same rate that you generate). For short visits it would work the same as currently but only would change with little to no time acceleration or camping in the VAB an excessive amout of time.