Kerbonaut experience - we need to talk

[Ser]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

Grinding the current system is easy, make an huge ship like my 20 kerbal starliner, send it to Moon orbit, then land at Minmus to refuel, a short dip outside Kerbins SOI and back this gives 3 stars, If you plant flag on Minmus you can do with an Mun flyby.
Tourist is nice as they pay for this trip. replace base personell with 3 star kerbals on the second round. 
 

What's the problem with that? You send out a ship full of kerbals and in the end you get a bunch of personnel that have a long space travel experience. Note that crew don't just sit there and "travel", they actually crew the ship, i.e. it is only you who just presses buttons, warps time and wait. The engineers, scientists and pilots have a hard time stepping on the pedals inside.

As for getting experience for planting flags... Yes, that's the weirdness. But you may think of it as an allegory of performing some extremely useful activity in the field that gives the EVA experience letting a kerbal to repair a rover wheel.

Edited May 27, 2016 by Ser

[magnemoe]

On 27.5.2016 at 5:34 PM, Ser said:

What's the problem with that? You send out a ship full of kerbals and in the end you get a bunch of personnel that have a long space travel experience. Note that crew don't just sit there and "travel", they actually crew the ship, i.e. it is only you who just presses buttons, warps time and wait. The engineers, scientists and pilots have a hard time stepping on the pedals inside.

As for getting experience for planting flags... Yes, that's the weirdness. But you may think of it as an allegory of performing some extremely useful activity in the field that gives the EVA experience letting a kerbal to repair a rover wheel.

Not saying its much worse than getting XP in most RPG, still remember going downtown and shoot supermutants in Fallout 3 as I needed to increase my science skill for a quest and was close to level up.
Current system has an benefit in that you want to rotate crews. 

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah the important difference is shooting mutants is fun and repeatedly breaking and repairing wheels is not. I can't think of a profession related task I'm interested in doing over and over. 

[tater]

Skills assume a level of "management" in the game that simply doesn't exist. As such, they are sort of pointless.

Right now I can fly any craft with the lowest level pilot just as well as with the highest level pilot. The only pilot skill that matters is MINE. Having that skill at all is pointless, and bad game design unless it can actually be used---which means autonomous piloting. I give them a task, and they do the task without me micromanaging it. "Land this resupply vessel within 100m of Mun Base Alpha." Short of that pilot skill is actually wrong-headed, as for new players the game just becomes easier, not harder.

Engineering and Science skills are at least not stuff that the player actually does, but there are not enough things for them to do, anyway. Same deal, the part of the game that uses "skill" values is career, and career needs to have completely autonomous kerbals for skills to make any sense at all. Engineers can fix stuff on their own, or maintain stuff (we'd then need failure/maintenance as a thing). Scientist can do science. Deliver them someplace, and let them explore. More skilled scientists can collect more per unit time, bu the need to be there for more than just a "click collect surface sample" amount of time. Then add life support at the same time as a trade off (and now resupply can be done on a schedule, because kerbals can actually pilot).

[Pthigrivi]

I think "skills" in Kerbal are more analogous to 'perks' in other games. Like in Skyrim Archery perks will increase your rate of fire or get more damage through but it wont aim the bow for you. In flight in KSP flying the rocket is kind of the one thing you do, so adding things that let you fold up your arms and watch the screen seems odd to me. There could be a few things, like holding angle to horizon or maintaining velocity but Im pretty sure straight auto-pilot has been ruled out by squad. Id much rather see piloting skills give you unique information like drag-overlays, suicide burn times, aerobrake and landing site prediction.

I'm down with making it a reward for exploration, but I think it could be clearer visually. It just seems hard to tell while playing what the rewards will be for going somewhere. What I think would be really cool would be if by traveling around Kerbals earned a series of badges and after a certain number of badges you'd earn a star. There could also be special "Discovery" badges for the first ones there, and might count for anomalies as well. They could be a simple as colored stripes in the kerbal's profile labeled "Minmus Orbiter" or "Discovered the Face of Duna" and could serve as a kind of running log of where that kerbal had been. Beyond roll play its also just handy to know where they've been and what those tasks were worth when making crew decisions.

Edited May 30, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[Stoney3K]

On 14/05/2016 at 1:03 AM, Pthigrivi said:

Oh I'd love some kind of KAS integrated for levels 4 and 5. There are a ton of cool things scientists and pilots could do too. Some time ago I also suggested each Kerbal might have a really basic 3-branch skill tree. When they earn levels they can choose to level-up in Piloting, Science, or Engineering. It be really nice for instance to give a level 3 Engineer the basic ability to pilot. At the same time maybe thats a lot of time spent micro-managing kerbals... I guess I could go either way at this point.

I would support this. Crew management is definitely an important part of your space program, and it would also give the Astronaut Complex more meaning beyond spending funds on purchasing as much expendable Kerbals as possible.

The exploityness could be balanced by having a multiplier for certain bodies and a maximum XP that a Kerbal can achieve within a certain SOI, much like the science system is set up now. Sure, you can tell Bill to swap a few tires and repack some chutes on the runway, but once he has done that on the runway ONCE, his 'tire swapping and chute packing' XP on the surface of Kerbin is done. Similarly, Jeb would have a maximum of flight time that would gain him XP in a certain SOI, and Bob would only gain so many XP from each science point that was collected by a flight with him on board.

On 27/05/2016 at 2:44 PM, Ser said:

Nothing grows on Moon, and Mars, and Venus that could be used as food, not to mention oxygen. The closed cycle planetary and orbital bases are a science fiction for the nearest future and thus some kind of cheat in the game.

Not so fast there. The ISS's water, waste and oxygen systems are completely closed cycle. The only resupply required is the astronauts' food, as well as some small amounts of water and other chemicals that are lost due to leakage.

ISS is even looking into growing their own food crops in space.

Edited May 31, 2016 by Stoney3K

[Ser]

15 minutes ago, Stoney3K said:

Not so fast there. The ISS's water, waste and oxygen systems are completely closed cycle. The only resupply required is the astronauts' food, as well as some small amounts of water and other chemicals that are lost due to leakage.

The short answer: no

The long answer here. Some citations:

"The heart of the Oxygen Generation Assembly is the cell stack, which electrolyzes, or breaks apart, water provided by the Water Recovery System, yielding oxygen and hydrogen as byproducts. The oxygen is delivered to the cabin atmosphere while the hydrogen is vented overboard."

"The Water Recovery System is designed to recycle crew member urine and wastewater for reuse as clean water. By doing so, the system reduces the net mass of water and consumables that would need to be launched from Earth to support six crewmembers by 15,000 pounds (6800 kg) per year." And that is obviously only a part, not even a half of all water, and thus oxygen, that still needs to be delivered.

As I've already said, completely closed cycle is a science fiction. No perpetual motion machine is invented yet.

(Here we have gone a little offtopic)

[cantab]

On 14/05/2016 at 7:42 PM, Pthigrivi said:

The trouble with linking XP to field related tasks is that they are easily exploitable and generally not-fun. The IRSU units don't show up till late in the tech tree, so how do you level up Kerbals before that? Fixing things? Repacking chutes?

To get around this problem, maybe grant the experience for flight on a vessel with certain parts. So an engineer doesn't need to fix a wheel to gain experience, they just need to be on a wheeled vehicle on the surface of another planet and that gains them the "wheels" piece of experience. Imagine they're monitoring systems, maybe pushing buttons to tweak motor torque and tyre pressures.

[tater]

I still think that for skills to actually be meaningful, the kerbals need autonomy.

[ag3nt108]

First time I sent good Ol'e Jeb sub orbital, he reached space by quite a large margin but of course failed to orbit.  Mission summary no XP!!!  the first Kerbal to enter space apparently learnt nothing from the experience........mind blown.