Pthigrivi

Im also thinking a tutorial on strutting might be a good idea. I even see really experienced folks like Matt Lowne using them really inefficiently which is why they end up with so many. Its probably because so many players rely on autostrut and so they kind of stop thinking about structure. In fact I see a lot of players who look like they’re trying to mimic autostrut: just putting connections absolutely everywhere, which creates the same performance issues that autostrut has. With a bit of education I think players could make their vessels even sturdier than Autostrut and with much less overhead. Ive never used Autostrut in KSP1 even for great big modded motherships. You just need to think about where these forces are coming from and counteract them in all 3 directions. This isn’t a ‘get gud’ argument though. KSP2 feels spongier than KSP1 did even without autostrut, and I think everyone feels like single diameter stacks should not wobble around the way they do. So maybe treating those as rigid could be an option. If a player goes from 3.75m down to 1.25m that would still flex, but if you could solve that with a shroud. And I do still think radial attachments should still flex, though perhaps not as much as they do now. Nate brought up the robotics parts from KSP1 which famously performed like rubber and made for a really unrealistic and poor experience.

My suspicion is giant parts are only likely to pose problems if you go from a 50m part with a 10m attachment to a 1.25m part and then back to 10m. Having such a weak intermediary would form a hinge in the middle of your vessel. Nate mentioned solutions like making sure stacks of similar diameter all kind of ignore joint deflection. So if you connect a 2.5m part to a 2.5m part to a 2.5m part it would all just act as if welded. It would probably help with performance. Its a little cheaty, because in theory a player could attach 100 1.25m tanks and it would all behave as rigid despite its real-world implausibility. On launch it wouldn't spagetti, but it would still be unflyable. The question for me is what happens at colonies? I'd love to see players get creative with structural ideas under different gravity loads and that process gets a little warped if players are just deliberately connecting like-diameters to like-diameters because it acts like a brick and you can make a 100/1 cantilever and nothing moves. I imagine this gets complicated because you're trying to approximate real behavior when real behavior on the granular, real-time basis is crazy complex. Lets take a look at whats probably actually happening with the falcon heavy booster connectors. In my life doing really basic wind-load calcs for buildings this is actually a pretty simple example: Granted this is a rendering and Im speculating a bit because the structure is embedded in the aeroshell. These aren't just pin connections (well, some, but not all.) The upper brace prior to separation is acting as a lateral truss keeping the lateral forces (labled X+Y here) under control. These forces are induced whenever the rocket maneuvers because the force is coming from thrust vectoring at the base of the vehicle. This creates add-on aerodynamic forces as you deviate from prograde as we've all experienced. Thought experiment: Imagine you want to balance 3 brooms on your fingers. What will happen if you wrap masking tape around them just at the bottom? As soon as you move even a little the 3 brooms are going to come tumbling apart. But if you tape them both at the top and the bottom you might have a chance. This truss at the top of the rocket is that upper-masking tape. It doesn't have to carry the whole weight of the broom, just keep them together. There's another structure you can just see between the boosters and the center that counters forces in-line with thrust (labelled in blue, Z here.) Notice they're also diagonal. For most of flight there's very little differential in this directions because all of these engines are designed to keep everything mostly even, but I bet there's a subtle advantage to burning the side boosters a little hot, tugging the center stage up. There are probably also moments nearing separation when you have differential thrust. Thats what those subtle struts labeled in blue are handling. So, for folks designing KSP's physics and deflection calcs... are they gonna do all that? Should players worry about all that? Probably not. It should probably be simplified. But how exactly that gets simplified and still allows for the basically infinite configuration KSP allows is not a trivial problem.

To this point Nate also mentioned huge interstellar vessels and colony parts. A solution that only makes sense for simple Kerbin ascent vehicles may not be robust or flexible enough to handle what comes later.

Really no one should be using struts that are parallel to thrust, as even in KSP that doesn’t help with wobble. Struts are there both in KSP and in real life to resist lateral forces. They can be angled (mine usually are to form trusses) but if they’re straight up and down they’re not resisting the right forces. Instances where you might see struts within the center stack would be like the Soyus hotstage ring or maybe securing a heavy payload with a small base attachment. In both cases you’re looking to strut diagonally to form a truss. Side boosters absolutely need to be attached in at least 3 places. For smaller boosters I often put the decoupler near the top and two diagonal struts near the base. The decoupler force is enough to kick them out and away from the center stack. For larger boosters I’ll use the doupler near the base and struts at the top with sepratrons around 3/4 the way up the booster. This usually creates a nice balanced kick-out so the base of the booster doesn’t over-rotate inward and clip the center engines. Again attaching in three places is what gives you your structural triangle for resisting lateral loads.

Dude they’re still holding the side boosters in place prior to separation. Do you have any idea the moment that you’d see if it was only attached at the bottom?

Have you seen the Aviator? I can't post it because of swearing but there's an incredible scene between DiCaprio and Alda that feels like this.

I don’t think thats what he meant. I think he meant the devs would need to eat their vegetables aka digging into a more robust and sustainable solution. The central problem is that neither spaghetti nor a flying brick are good solutions. I think Nates comment that these parts should behave close to our intuition is exactly right, but even that is a spectrum. Being an architect I absolutely expect things to bend and flex because thats what real materials do. People don’t normally see that because if a bridge or building is visibly flexing something has gone horribly wrong. You also wouldn’t expect a plane’s fuselage to flex, but it does slightly under lateral loads. You can also see wings flexing if you look out the window under turbulence. So Im happy to see the commitment to really solving this problem long term. Obviously what we’re currently seeing isn’t right. And if autostrut puts a finger in the dyke until the real solution is ready thats fine too.

True this is dangerously close to the ‘p’ word. Just curious about the administrative consequences.

You also have to wonder if some of the not-so-well-timed decisions regarding starlink access in Ukraine has made the feds less inclined to offer blank checks of late. Things take less time when pressure comes down from above. If that pressure is absent though... Being a big defense contractor can be a double edged sword.

Nice. I think a lot of folks have wildly oversimplified this problem so it'll be interesting to hear the thinking going forward.

Hey and best wishes for your growing fam! Thats a lot of diapers all at once

The title is a joke. This thread is actually a bit of shadenfreude seeing non-factorio games dealing with factorio problems. As soon as KSP introduces supply lines it incurs a huge number of these same networking problems. The good news is managing these kinds of complex supply lines is actually a really interesting engineering puzzle. The bad news is the devs really need to study successes and failures across genres in this field to give players robust and intuitive UI tools to manage them.

I have this coworker who has a few roles because we're a small firm and part of it is IT and and he really seems to relish in loudly berating tech support folks who are trying to help him, to little effect. Everyone else in the office has to have real conversations about actual business while rolling our eyes at the stream of expletives from the other room. Sidebar: One time I had a Macbook that was 3 years and 2 weeks old, but Apple had (possibly deliberately) failed to notify older owners that laptops have a humidity problem that in the end compromises monitors and the motherboard. It took a couple of weeks of calling, but eventually I was able--with determined, polite conversations with tech support, to have the recall covered under Applecare. Im sure there's a macro-strategy of waging a social media campaign against a particular company which might raise the heat enough to make its way into an actual upper-management meeting. Maybe Im more cynical than some imagine but I don't think they much care. At that level your [complaints] about bugs and communication is weighed against investor demands and you will absolutely lose. There's a famous scene in the life-lesson that is The Wire wherein Bunny Colvin declares: “Middle management means that you got just enough responsibility to listen when people talk, but not so much you can't tell anybody to go [snip] themselves.” For those of you using fellow forum members as a prop in a theatrical pressure campaign against a subsidiary of a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation this is who you actually want to direct your attention to. Please don't waste your time bickering with hopeful fans. We have our own campaign: to as best we can accurately and conceptually convey to the actual makers of this game what real meaning, quality, and value translates to in concrete deliverable terms in the context of KSP.

This is lovely. They're hard at work and may not respond but I know they watch in this subsection.

Agreed, Mods will be epic. And as for full progression the proof is in the pudding. We'll see when Science comes out how things are looking. I do like the way they seem to be thinking about the problem though. I mean you see a game like Factorio that has almost no explicit goals (build a rocket I guess?) and yet the fundamental mechanics and ratios create a huge world of possibilities. I don't think KSP is quite that dogmatic, but Im hoping some of the cool ideas from survival city builders and even starfeild give a bit of license to think about crafting and networking dynamics in a way that tailors well to a light-hearted, hardboiled, space-navigation game.

Oh hmm I exclusively use Myspace.

I call 4. Whats the prize?

These are fun ideas but it doesn't seem the direction the devs are heading in for career (I think they're calling it exploration mode more recently?). They've more or less ruled out money as an in-game currency and they're taking a very open-ended approach to time-based mechanics. Because one player might want to do 10 missions around the Mun and Minmus (which would take a bout 100 days in game) and another player may want to send a probe out to Jool (which takes about 5 years) you have a really wide range of time-warp needs. So something like funding that rolls in over time is pretty hard to make work for diverse playstyles. Rather than give a small slate of codified modes (Government, private, star-trek luxury communism) they're leaving that kind of personal story telling to each players imagination. By not spelling it out the devs let players imagine whatever they prefer about the nature of their program. They're also trying to do something KSP1 never did all that well--create a structure of base game mechanics that become their own, open-ended reward system. For instance rather than tell players to put a satellite in a specific orbit for cash, there will be experiments that require you to scan a location for a long period of time. This might mean putting a satellite in a geosychronous orbit, or maybe putting a network of satellites that maintain constant coverage. It might mean landing in a very specific place on a moon to study an anomaly. Maybe you master hyper-precise landing, or maybe you include a rover so you can land close-enough and then drive to it. It's left to you how to solve the puzzle. I think leaning more heavily on these kinds of mechanics-based goals will be much more rewarding than KSP1's "Scan X location at altitude Y" or "Deliver this station with random bits stuck to it to X orbit." It seems like there will be some spelled out missions but they've described them as more tailored and less procedural.

Yeah it sure feels like SLS is on a road to cancellation unless SS blows up on the pad.

Im guessing they could set up the refuel depot at a higher orbit too, or even have a refuel location in Lunar orbit. Once you've got big mobile fuel tanks there are a lot of options.

This is what Im thinking, and I'd much prefer it. Trying to get RCS blocks all nice and lined up in the field when you forgot to add them in the VAB is not really a pleasant experience.

I did say ‘some’. Im sure many have moved on. Others are Mac and linux people out in the cold. Others lurk but wont have much to say until bugs get fixed and content gets added. Thats pretty understandable.

But did you get food poisoning? Or did you buy a buggy video game? Restaurants have regulars, and so does KSP. They have a new chef, new menu, and some of us are hopeful they can work out the bugs. You can’t be too surprised when after the 500th time loudly complaining at the bar to anyone who happens to wander by the regulars roll their eyes and say “Okay buddy. Thanks. We heard you.”

To use your analogy though typically folks who get served a bad meal send it back, talk to the waitress about it, or if its really bad maybe they leave a nasty review. They don’t typically return to the same restaurant day after day for months on end to harangue other costumers about it. That would be seen as a bit weird.

Im not so sure. We already know some experiments and ISRU will will take time so those resources are already in a sense time-constrained. Since this scheme creates bonuses to those very resources I think it's much in the same spirit as putting a satellite in geosynchronous orbit so it will scan a specific location faster and other examples Nertea gave in his AMA redux; its a way to maximize your time and yields with a little planning. Getting a little extra science and faster harvesting with a healthy, fed crew acts as a reward for solving LS as an engineering puzzle and in the process gives players a better sense of the meaning of time and distance--two core lessons KSP is attempting to teach. Here's Chris' quote on how they're thinking about time-based mechanics: