Stratennotblitz

August 30, 2021

On 8/26/2021 at 10:40 AM, magnemoe said:

Did not the pluto nuclear ramjet plan to use star tracking for navigation? It works on earth as its basically old style navigation, not sure how accurate it is. They gave it up on later cruise missiles who used ground features to find its position, or did the 1980s cruise missiles also use it?

it didn't matter because the radioactive trail could kill anything in it's path, so they only needed approximate location and circle around it, by the 70's we already had guidance for cruise missiles, the tomahawk was developed in the 1980's too, the reason why they needed star trackers was because of the amplifying of errors from the radio navigation, so star trackers would help at night snd also offset that error

On 8/29/2021 at 3:05 AM, YNM said:

Maps only tell you the relative positions of features on the surface of the Earth - at no point does it tell where you are exactly. You can't use a map to adjust for errors - you gotta find a reference with 'known' positions then try to determine where you are. And since the comment was made in reply to airborne positioning beacon it's kinda useless IMO if you have a beacon that in itself have to derive their position from a completely different system already all the time (granted GNSS satellites does this - they're tracked by ground stations with known 'fixed' locations - but as with most celestial bodies space ephemeris are pretty accurate). If those airborne positioning beacons have to derive from ground stations we'd probably need a ton more ground stations (since they'd need one at line-of-sight), so much that it'd probably be easier to use the ground stations directly, and if they derive from GNSS themselves why not just use the GNSS directly ?

Well GNSS is the advancement in technology we've finally arrived at.

It's suddenly only 1/20th of it's predecessor, and that was with SA.

EDIT : Although to add, why I brought up the datum as well, is because we haven't been using a unified global datum until GNSS comes along.

Reveal hidden contents

Bit old video for him, so there might be a few things off, but still communicates the point well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decca_Navigator_System

this is what I'm trying to do, as you saw in the graph it's only less accurate than the gps, what I'm wondering is if it can work in land, be more precise with the addition of new inertial and traditional tracking systems like star trackers and better pre disposed software and maps, I'm not looking for gps, I already have that

On 8/29/2021 at 3:05 AM, YNM said:

Maps only tell you the relative positions of features on the surface of the Earth - at no point does it tell where you are exactly. You can't use a map to adjust for errors - you gotta find a reference with 'known' positions then try to determine where you are. And since the comment was made in reply to airborne positioning beacon it's kinda useless IMO if you have a beacon that in itself have to derive their position from a completely different system already all the time (granted GNSS satellites does this - they're tracked by ground stations with known 'fixed' locations - but as with most celestial bodies space ephemeris are pretty accurate). If those airborne positioning beacons have to derive from ground stations we'd probably need a ton more ground stations (since they'd need one at line-of-sight), so much that it'd probably be easier to use the ground stations directly, and if they derive from GNSS themselves why not just use the GNSS directly ?

Well GNSS is the advancement in technology we've finally arrived at.

It's suddenly only 1/20th of it's predecessor, and that was with SA.

EDIT : Although to add, why I brought up the datum as well, is because we haven't been using a unified global datum until GNSS comes along.

Reveal hidden contents

Bit old video for him, so there might be a few things off, but still communicates the point well.

Maps only tell you the relative positions of features on the surface of the Earth - at no point does it tell where you are exactly. You can't use a map to adjust for errors - you gotta find a reference with 'known' positions then try to determine where you are. And since the comment was made in reply to airborne positioning beacon it's kinda useless IMO if you have a beacon that in itself have to derive their position from a completely different system already all the time (granted GNSS satellites does this - they're tracked by ground stations with known 'fixed' locations - but as with most celestial bodies space ephemeris are pretty accurate). If those airborne positioning beacons have to derive from ground stations we'd probably need a ton more ground stations (since they'd need one at line-of-sight), so much that it'd probably be easier to use the ground stations directly, and if they derive from GNSS themselves why not just use the GNSS directly ?

Well GNSS is the advancement in technology we've finally arrived at.

[well yes, but I'm pretty sure some navigation systems use maps to offset errors as soon as they have food measurement systems and a good initial "ping", gps satellites would be over worked if vehicles pinged them every second, there are better ways]

On 8/27/2021 at 4:32 AM, monophonic said:

The civilian GPS signal used to be artificially noisy to limit the accuracy. This was called "selective availability." They have turned it off now because augmentation methods and other GNSS systems have made it ineffective plus a lot of civil and merchant activities have become dependent on accurate location. To my knowledge the capability still exist even in the newest satellites. But for example my cell phone's navigation chip picks up (at least) GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou satellites. The app I check this with lists a couple more systems and has a category for unknown satellites too. So fiddling with just your own system's output may turn out to be ineffective as a drone protection.

For the curious this also is (one way) how the russian GPS spoofing that's been in the news every once in a while works. They drown out the satellites' transmission with their own that causes the calculated position to drift off the real position. Careful calculation should allow them to control how much and where the drift is at least in a limited target area. Less predictable effects will happen outside the target area, of course. Countermeasures include encrypted transmissions that the malicious party cannot create (GPS at least has these), directional antennas that reject the spoofing signal coming from low elevation and listening to a lot of satellites and rejecting the outliers whose transmission suggest a position far from the others.

I was saying that to someone before, satellites can only give so much accuracy, you need better points of reference

August 29, 2021

[Snip]

ksp can run on ps4/xbox consoles fully well, it runs un my damn Mac laptop, the real question here is wether you wanna gatekeep pc games so you can get them earlier on and feel special, simple as that

ps4 and xbox are more powerful than even some gaming computers, and the way ksp 2 is built should make it easy, especially with the whole build made around efficiency

On 8/25/2021 at 8:29 AM, The Doodling Astronaut said:

It has been coming more and more of a concern in recent months that it feels like PD and Intercept Games are still planning for a full released of KSP 2 on Xbox 1 and PS4. This has me very concerned, I understand that there are KSP players on Console that cannot get the newer generation of consoles. But making a game expected to release in 2022 be able to run on 2013 specs feels like the game is unnecessarily being nerfed.

I could see the reason why they are doing it is because of business, but it feels like this could possibly lead to a bunch of disappointed KSP 2 console players disappointed that their new copy of a long waited game doesn't run smoothly on a near-decade old hardware

ps4 and xbox can run games well, especially ps4, not to mention they got upgrades over the years, the reason why ksp is so bad on console is because it wasn't meant to be on it, especially with the kraken (which is a bug), a proof that the game doesn't use traditional computing methods on it's engine, I don't think you know enough about ps4/xbox architecture to say this, not to mention the devs haven't even mentioned console and Mac, but then again, the game has been in development for some time now, I'm sure the devs can import this into less than traditional gaming setups

August 29, 2021

On 8/26/2021 at 4:34 AM, YNM said:

Yeah but you can very easily describe their trajectory using a geodesic, which you can't do for a flying or floating thing in the air. That's why TLEs have been around since ages ago.

And what are you basing that maps on ? Ground beacons measured with chains and triangulation ? It's better to just use ground beacons then...

GPS/GNSS literally eliminates all of this, look up the recent proposed changes on geodectic systems (at the very least gravitational models), it's all based on the satellites' geodesics.

you can use normal topographic maps, we already have very precise versions of those, I'm not looking to build a satellite and launch it into space, so not sure why gps/gnss is persistent here, just a though experiment to see if it would be cheaper to make with recent advances in tech

August 26, 2021

On 8/22/2021 at 12:57 AM, YNM said:

If it's not fixed to the ground, or it can't be expressed in TLE that doesn't need to be changed every so often, I don't think you can use it to calculate your position wrt the Earth, unless you only want relative positions to the beacon or something.

Also by "cheap" I mean to the end user. Sure yes some government's tax money had to pay for the satellites and maintaining them, but even if it never sees direct financial returns, much like the idea of weather reconnaisance satellite/stations - or emergency and disaster relief - it's just one of those things you don't do and expect any sort of financial incentives back. Though arguably it's still better than most other alternatives (like with ground stations who owns the land becomes important).

gps satellites move, in fact they move faster than atmospheric electric planes for navigation, about 2 times circling the earth in a day compared to more than 3 days for electric planes, meaning they can stay in a specific area longer, the only issues would be atmospheric turbulences, but that could be fixed by using topographic maps to adjust craft error

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Aquila

August 22, 2021

On 8/18/2021 at 10:51 PM, cubinator said:

Considering you can do it with a big book of tables and holding your hand up to the sky, I'd say all it takes is a sensor that can figure out which star it's looking at. I'd start it off with the sun for an easy estimate. Pretty sure spacecraft/people who drive spacecraft do this with the starfield.

yup, they're called star trackers :

On 8/19/2021 at 2:27 AM, YNM said:

LORAN too ?

But actually even back in the age of CDMA and GSM mobile signals (so 2G) it was possible to roughly locate where you are. I still remember during our yearly mudik trip those nokia phones from the early 2000s would tell you which city are you in/passing through (I believe it was down to which district but not sure).

These days I presume if you designate every 4G and 5G transmitter with a GPS coordinate and/or equip it with a GPS base receiver (the stuff that calculates their position for years on end stationarily to achieve extremely high precision) you can easily lose the GPS satellite and just rely on that maybe for a decade or two.

But GPS/GNSS is always going to be far superior and cheaper. There's a reason GNSS approach minimums are equal to ILS Cat I approach minimums.

I doubt gps/gnss are going to be cheaper in the future, we could use atmospheric satellites in the future, just like Facebook did with their flying internet planes to beam down positional data, it's far cheaper and reliable, since there are thousands of those (possible) compared to only a few gps systems, not to mention using radio antennas with better inertial measurement units to communicate, the us military already wants a better gps for national security reasons so that industry might develop in the future, the optimal system would be a mix of all the previous nav methods

August 19, 2021

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

Commercial aviation "ditched" radio for INS because flying over oceans made using radio towers for navigation a little difficult. It took decades of improvements before INS was good enough to get you to a specific location, rather than just a vague area, because it's actually a very hard problem. Typical off-the-shelf accelerometers aren't remotely good enough for such work. And even with commercial INS systems, your terminal approach is still by-radio. The INS is still only meant to get you to a radio system that's going to guide you to the landing strip. Not to mention that GPS has become the primary system now, with INS being effectively a backup in case GPS goes down.

If you shop for high precision accelerometers for UAVs etc, you'll see VRW on the order of 0.05mg/√Hz. This adds up to about 3cm/s per root hour. After a 9 hour flight, your position error is going to be about 1.6km. Which is actually quite amazing, but you don't want to be a mile off course if you are trying to find an airport in low visibility. You will have to rely on radio navigation. And this is with top shelf component that you have to sample and integrate at nearly 1kHz to get that level of precision, and we haven't even talked about orientation of the INS. Because if your axes are misaligned even the tiniest bit, the component of the gravity onto your XY plane will put you way, way off course. Not to mention the fact that gravity itself isn't uniform around the world, so you are going to get a drift in the Z direction as well.

You can improve on that by combining input from several accelerometers and optical gyros and running output through an optimal filter. That's effectively what a modern INS does. But if you are anywhere over land, it's far easier and far cheaper to use existing radio stations for precise positioning.

Or better yet, just buy a cheap GPS chip and read from it using an Arduino or something. Unless you are explicitly building something for safety and redundancy as a backup, GPS is by far your best option.

Edit: Only marginally related, but I it's just too awesome not to mention: Pulsar-based Navigation. It still only puts you within a few km, but it will work anywhere on Earth, and on a flight to the Moon, and on a voyage to any other part of the Solar System, and on an interstellar trip to basically any star you can see in the sky with an unaided eye... And it will still be good to within a few km after you've traveled lightyears, because you're just counting the pulses and comparing it to frequencies observed from reference location.

yup

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

Commercial aviation "ditched" radio for INS because flying over oceans made using radio towers for navigation a little difficult. It took decades of improvements before INS was good enough to get you to a specific location, rather than just a vague area, because it's actually a very hard problem. Typical off-the-shelf accelerometers aren't remotely good enough for such work. And even with commercial INS systems, your terminal approach is still by-radio. The INS is still only meant to get you to a radio system that's going to guide you to the landing strip. Not to mention that GPS has become the primary system now, with INS being effectively a backup in case GPS goes down.

If you shop for high precision accelerometers for UAVs etc, you'll see VRW on the order of 0.05mg/√Hz. This adds up to about 3cm/s per root hour. After a 9 hour flight, your position error is going to be about 1.6km. Which is actually quite amazing, but you don't want to be a mile off course if you are trying to find an airport in low visibility. You will have to rely on radio navigation. And this is with top shelf component that you have to sample and integrate at nearly 1kHz to get that level of precision, and we haven't even talked about orientation of the INS. Because if your axes are misaligned even the tiniest bit, the component of the gravity onto your XY plane will put you way, way off course. Not to mention the fact that gravity itself isn't uniform around the world, so you are going to get a drift in the Z direction as well.

You can improve on that by combining input from several accelerometers and optical gyros and running output through an optimal filter. That's effectively what a modern INS does. But if you are anywhere over land, it's far easier and far cheaper to use existing radio stations for precise positioning.

Or better yet, just buy a cheap GPS chip and read from it using an Arduino or something. Unless you are explicitly building something for safety and redundancy as a backup, GPS is by far your best option.

Edit: Only marginally related, but I it's just too awesome not to mention: Pulsar-based Navigation. It still only puts you within a few km, but it will work anywhere on Earth, and on a flight to the Moon, and on a voyage to any other part of the Solar System, and on an interstellar trip to basically any star you can see in the sky with an unaided eye... And it will still be good to within a few km after you've traveled lightyears, because you're just counting the pulses and comparing it to frequencies observed from reference location.

yup! had this idea from it, watched a documentary about redundant nav systems

On 8/14/2021 at 10:51 PM, cubinator said:

Like a ground-based GPS backup? The towers are in known positions on the Earth, and so can be used as reference.

Star tracking doesn't really need this, though, all you need is an accurate clock and a view of the sky. Even works during the day. "For what latitudes and longitudes is the Sun supposed to be as high as I measure it right now?" Repeat over the course of a few hours and you'll have your position.

damn, I didn't know that, I wonder if someone could pull full nav off with good enough software and day/night trackers

8 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

I would like more information from the OP about the goal of this work.

Is this simply for the experience of doing it? Are you trying to do it with real hardware or just figure out how it is done? What kind of error rates are acceptable?

In the real world, GPS is the best and also the cheapest option. Airplane-quality inertial navigation systems are expensive and these days almost always involve laser ring gyros (which are not actually gyros but have a similar functionality of detecting rotational rates).

This guy actually did a short video about the subject which seems to me like a good intro, though of course doesn't really tell you how to build one.

thanks for the answer, I just wanna experiment with navigation systems for developing countries

On 8/15/2021 at 7:04 PM, Meecrob said:

Your first idea is essentially an inertial navigation system, which is far superior to radio beacons/broadcasting towers. Commercial aviation ditched radio for INS decades ago.

yes

On 8/14/2021 at 11:23 PM, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Far easier is to write an app that leverages the radio receiver on your phone and measures the relative distance to known towers.

By the way - I officially copyright this idea

already patented (kinda) https://patents.google.com/patent/US7945271B1/en

August 15, 2021

so my idea is to use 3 axis accelerometers and star trackers to create a homemade navigational system, it would use the star trackers at night to give the user a "position 0" and the accelerometers, as the user walks would be able to pick up rotation(you could use a compass as backup), speed (thus position relative to position 0) etc, you could overlay that info on a pre-existing map and make some sort of gps system homemade,

a version 2.0 would use radio signals with broadcasting towers and their exact coordinates to triangulate a more precise position, per example you have a rotating antenna that picks up and bounces signals to other radios and measures the intensity of the signal (you could use a barometer and altimeter to correct atmospheric distortion etc)

if you have a stronger signal from 3 radio sources relative to you position 0 and you, you can use that to correct your actual position more correctly by figuring out the different signal intensities between them (distance) and comparing it to your distance from the position 0 and their distance from it.

(https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/radio-navigation-set-to-make-global-return-as-gps-backup-because-cyber/)

essentially this image but with modern additional equipment

August 3, 2021

4 hours ago, Corona688 said:

So... mission mode?

yeah but with more accessibility

July 31, 2021

5 hours ago, Dientus said:

There have been a couple of threads about putting it in the original KSP and each had various opinions about it. As an example:

While I wouldn't mind it being available for KSP 2 for flying craft (space, plane, sub, rover),but I look at it as more of a novelty than necessity. One concern is the amount of dev time and resources it would take to do WELL, and not look like a thrown together POV mess. Would it take needed attention away from other parts of the game, especially if it's not planned for in the beginning? (I assume it's not with all info I have seen on KSP 2 to date)

However there was one thread someone made a very compelling argument for it if KSP were to have targeted VR support. Then of course, there is the MP aspect of the game.

I guess what I am trying to say is a long-winded version of: Meh, I can take it or leave it as an option if it doesn't detract from the main themes/elements in any way.

shouldn't tale that much time, the code for the original mod wasn't a lot, less than a mega byte

July 31, 2021

3 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

Never used the mod nor do I care to. KSP isn't about running around in a 1st person view with a kerbal with me. The only 1st person view I care about is landing a plane. If I want to float in space playing with space craft, I'll tear one apart in Hardspace: Shipbreakers.

we're gonna be able to make better game art, screenshots and movies with it, it doesn't take that much energy and if the devs don't want that then it's ok the possibilities are endless, also what if you're in a parafoil and want to land, or in the external seat, hell even on a glider, you have to think this trough

8 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

Never used the mod nor do I care to. KSP isn't about running around in a 1st person view with a kerbal with me. The only 1st person view I care about is landing a plane. If I want to float in space playing with space craft, I'll tear one apart in Hardspace: Shipbreakers.

Never used the mod nor do I care to

uh the mod from version 0.25? it doesn't work anymore... there's not even a mod for that currently

July 31, 2021

anyone want this too? I'd be amazing tp land a whole mission in iva first person then eva first person, planting a flag etc, I'd be easy for the devs since you can just put an invisible camera in the helmet area, the issue would be now adding breathing effects when running without obstructing the view, reducing the cameras shakiness and stopping the helmet from jumping around causing "space sickness", a future upgrade to the helmet adding it an antenna, better jet pack and a hud, with gps and view of the kerbal explorer relative to the Eva'd ship

main-qimg-ef5d383158798210ee4029be1bc8b7

even further if the mods add an oxygen and Eva fuel you could see the levels here too!

hell let's go further, temperature limits on suits with low upgrades

July 31, 2021

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

THIS. So few spend time around Jool they don’t realize what a big deal this is. And maybe I mistook your meaning but if biomes still exist we absolutely need maps of them. You should have to do the work scansat style but its actually insane that you can’t view biome map overlays in map and flight mode in KSP1, and altitude/topo and slope maps for that matter.

absolutely!, we need altitude and biome maps, I wanna make a surface access lander with Kos in the future with those maps, the original ksp does not have them and mechjeb assumes it's ground level until it isn't per example a mountain

so we do need slope, topographic altitude maps/biome (with ground slope in degrees), I wanna make or would like to see a navigation mod made of them, can you imagine a live cam with biome colours, velocity vectors etc morpheus-free-flight-11.jpg&client=amp-b

like the nasa morpheus lander : https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/exploration/morpheus/index.html

July 30, 2021

5 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

That's a very convincing argument. I am convinced that trying to debate with you about how this should all work is a waste of time!

learn to take a joke, I'm satiring hardcore realism payers

July 30, 2021

13 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

Surprisingly enough, MJ can't control a poorly designed rocket or plane. If the CoM and CoL is too far out whack, MJ will crash the craft faster than the player. Make a offset thrust rocket and you will see MJ fail almost every time. (It took me 6 months of tinkering to get my KSOS patches to work with MJ. And I still have to override MJ until it reaches 100m/s.) Set MJ to fly a multi engine plane and create an asymmetrical thrust situation and MJ will crash it. (PA will account for asymmetric thrust, MJ won't.)

true! a human can control a crashing planes in this game better than a robot, yesterday I was trying to dock a return sample rover to a lander and get the science and it was on the moon's North Pole, meaning that I couldn't drive automatically with the automated rover, so I had to do maneuvers to avoid blocking my antenna, another example is after returning the sample in low mun orbit I choose to rendezvous automatically, and mechjeb put the orbit at -10 km so it wouldn't skip faster than 4 times, so I boosted the orbit and made a Homman maneuver to then dock, mechjeb can teach people but it won't do excrements for you, DO NOT TRUST MECHJEB

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

I have no problem at all with whatever MechJeb features getting unlocked in some normal level of Career difficulty as you demonstrate in-game that you can do those things. Even the MechJeb mod as it exists now only unlocks its features incrementally as you advance up the tech tree, precisely to keep you from using it as a crutch to avoid all the deliberately imposed challenges of early career. I mean, what is even the point of having a progression of more and more capable pilots, probe cores, and remote control units in the tech tree if you can just slap all that on your ship from the get-go? It all only makes sense if you have to earn these features of convenience by jumping through the hoops that the career game sets for you. And isn't that how pretty much all computer games work in campaign mode? And having said that, as you point out there are some MechJeb features that don't currently exist in stock that I actively want the stock game to have, above all some kind of pitch angle hold for planes. But I want those to have to be earned as well, unless you are playing in either sandbox or some kind of Beginner Career mode.

I could say the same thing for the stabilization systems, you won't learn to pid manually if you have a probe core doing for you, hell why do we even use docking magnets do the real thing

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

Yep, let's talk specifics.

With rovers and walking Kerbals, I would like a cruise control. I don't want to be pressing W the whole time. For example in Valheim if you press Q the character will continue walking without any other input. I don't want to have to use a hacky trick to hold down the W key when I want to do a driving tour of the area. Waypoint guidance would be a nice addition, but not necessary.

With aircraft I would like a basic hold function. So you don't have to have your hands on the keyboard or controller the whole time. Some automatic subsystems like spoilers and auto braking upon landing. Visual references near the craft when lining up to a runway or landing spot. Optional auto leveling of wings to help the keyboard users. Again waypoint guidance would be a nice plus, but not necessary.

Something to help with hovering and pointing out the your horizontal movement.

I would like auto execution of maneuver nodes. Not because I'm lazy, but because it's more accurate that I can be. Plus it would be helpful when you have an unfocused burn happening.

Suggested time and orientation depending on craft type for deorbit burns to increase accuracy for pin point landings. Something to help with suicide burns taking TWR into account.

I can't think of any useful suggestions for the background transfers without some idea of how it will work.

we need better burn time!!! it's gonna be so hard to change orbit with an Orion exploding each second

July 30, 2021

37 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

It has to do with how planes behave. I've noticed that planes don't like to decend while flaring. They have a tendency to float. You only have either air brakes or reverse thrust to force it to the ground, which in turn can force a bounce and your gear explode. The other issue is that the yaw, roll, and pitch controls are on top of each other when using a keyboard. It makes it very difficult to use yaw and control your roll while lining up to the runway. And God forbid that you need to start your flare too.

All the planes I use have stall speeds between 30-40 m/s, and mimic real aircraft designs.

so basically planes in ksp suck

38 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

It has to do with how planes behave. I've noticed that planes don't like to decend while flaring. They have a tendency to float. You only have either air brakes or reverse thrust to force it to the ground, which in turn can force a bounce and your gear explode. The other issue is that the yaw, roll, and pitch controls are on top of each other when using a keyboard. It makes it very difficult to use yaw and control your roll while lining up to the runway. And God forbid that you need to start your flare too.

All the planes I use have stall speeds between 30-40 m/s, and mimic real aircraft designs.

the issue with kerbin is it's low gravity, in reality when you touch the ground you will bounce but not as hard as the game wants you to think, hopefully the base game will add some sort of suction when landing just like docking

4 hours ago, herbal space program said:

I don't even know what you mean by that. What is so reprehensible about awarding achievement badges for feats of flying in a game that is at least in large measure about flying spaceships?

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

why would I spend hours reloading a save when I can have a computer do it for me? It's not like I need to prove myself, I fly. on way more difficult sims (dcx, mfs etc)

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

no I'm really good at building planes it turns out, my landings however

6 minutes ago, Stratennotblitz said:

so basically planes in ksp suck

the issue with kerbin is it's low gravity, in reality when you touch the ground you will bounce but not as hard as the game wants you to think, hopefully the base game will add some sort of suction when landing just like docking

why would I spend hours reloading a save when I can have a computer do it for me? It's not like I need to prove myself, I fly. on way more difficult sims (dcx, mfs etc)

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

no I'm really good at building planes it turns out, my landings however

the issue with the game is the lack of air brake, per example in real life you can have different modes on your elevators, combat, which makes it more manoeuvrable, landing which uses the air resistance on them to slow down and align the gliding slope, and take off to make it stable

ksp doesn't have those

July 29, 2021

14 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

Lol... not doing that with docking, but it does take me a little time to do so.

You actually hit the runway from space?! I'm lucky if I can get within 50km of the KSC if I don't have atmo engines on my plane.

Seriously though, landing a plane in KSP is a lot harder than it should be. In any other flight sim, I can land a plane in without a much of a problem. In KSP, I'm lucky if I don't crash.

I play on flight sims can confirm ksp is harder

July 29, 2021

16 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

Agreed, but I also think the latter of those two things is quite a bit harder than the former. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've made a perfect runway landing from space on the first try, and I've flown a lot of space planes. I'm sure I could get the hang of it eventually though, and I'll happily afford an extra measure of prestige to those who can. I even think there should be in-game badges for such achievements.

so you're willingly brigading lmao

July 29, 2021

4 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Without backseat moderating I'd just like to say I think we can all express our opinions without being rude or disparaging others' playstyles. We're all just here to have fun.

I still use Mech Jeb but I use it almost entirely for information purposes. There are some really great tools around landing and aerobrake prediction like trajectory factoring drag and estimated landing distance to target that I find absolutely vital. Better Burn Time also has some really important tools for docking approaches and managing suicide burns that I desperately hope make it into KSP2. These kind of things as well as the basic stock piloting and maneuver node abilities in KSP1 should really be available to the player from the first launch.

Now, while I don't use autoland or maneuver execution or any of that because I personally like doing them manually I do recognize the value for a couple of reasons:

1) KSP2 promises to be a lot more expansive and much more demanding in terms of logistics, deliveries, and infrastructure building, and for anyone who's spent time delivering a starter base to Minmus or Duna you know just how much time it takes. Intercept has already suggested that there will be automated milk-runs, which is nice, but I doubt they're going to let you auto-deliver your first several modules when you're getting set up. I actually agree with the 'purists' that precision landing like this is an important skill that players should learn manually, but after the 10th, 20th, and 30th module drop I wouldn't blame players for wanting to have an option to let Jeb take the wheel to speed things up.

2) There are also some tasks like precision landing re-usable first stages and boosters back at KSC or on a drone ship that are legitimately effing difficult. People can do it, but it took me years to get good at landing within 1km of KSC let alone on a floating barge. Because space-x style reusability is such a big part of modern day spaceflight economics I think it would be a shame to only enable that for master pilots. Even space-x would never have someone land those things manually. Not to mention when you have multiple boosters or a second stage moving to orbit while your first stage lands you can't be two places at once.

Based on this my personal feeling is some of these automation tools and also things like rover-automation, hold altitude and heading for planes, and hover and translate for landers would be great additions to KSP2. One nice way to handle it would be to make the informational assets there from the beginning but hold back some of the real autopilot and auto-land/auto-ascend tools as progression rewards. If they only unlocked after you'd say landed on Duna or reached a certain off-world population you'd still be encouraging players to learn these skills manually while giving a break later as things like precision landing became old-hat and tedious.

absolutely, thanks for intervening lol

17 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

@Bej Kerman how come you always claim that MJ doesn't encourage someone to learn eventhough there are players who learned to play KSP because of MJ? Why do you consistently ignore that fact? I learned the basics of orbital mechanics because of MJ. I learned the proper way to do gravity turns because of MJ. I learned how TWR, DV, and mass are related because of MJ. I learned how to build rockets properly because of MJ.

You keep suggesting that MJ is worthless and never should be used. But there are long-term players that swear by MJ. You seem to think because someone uses MJ regularly means that they don't know what they are doing. I personally can tell you how wrong you are. You believe that a player should never walk away while playing KSP or take their hands off the keyboard or controller. I believe that it's the players game and they can do whatever they want.

me too

July 29, 2021

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

KSP 2 is introducing automated milk runs that happen in the background for transporting lots of resources. The best thing is that there's no autopilot; newbies can't sidestep having to develop an intuition for spaceflight in order to be good at flying. Mechjeb has no place in a game where to objective is to get good at flying through space without having to use training wheels

You can do all that but you won't actually be developing an intuition for orbital mechanics; you're not flying rockets, just building them and not leaning how to space.

you can do all that but you're not learning how to transport resources, you won't get an intuition for resource sharing

July 29, 2021

5 hours ago, The Aziz said:

I think you're missing a very important bit here (and all people who say mechjeb bad). The game with it doesn't play itself. You can't push space on the launchpad and go make a coffee, while your game lands on the Mun. You still set up pretty much everything, including launch profile, maneuvers precision, ship's attitude, etc etc. You can't compare that to clicking "drive" at the start of a race. It's more like setting up speeds at every corner, overtaking maneuvers, pit stops, and then watch the car do it. You don't play using QWEASDZX, (actually you do if when MJ screws up, and does often) instead you click buttons with your mouse, and, what some people fail to understand, it can be fun too. I'm still flying rockets, I just don't use manual controls for everything.

I always use mechjeb to make cool things like hovering to get to another base, but if you set it to land at target you're fd I think it's intentional that they made it this way so it wouldn't be so easy

16 hours ago, pandaman said:

It had been asked for on multipke occasions, so yes, some people do actually

console players kinda need a dumb version of it the only advantage console has is on landing, they are GOOD at it

July 29, 2021

22 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Overcomplicating a trivial part of the game. Pass.

it could be on hard mode, just like relay is on the base game except with continual positional locking

bruh do you even play ksp>?

July 29, 2021

3 minutes ago, GKSP said:

I'm excited for the automation and regular flight routes. My main wish is that they use the ships you brought there, and you can interact with them and the like, instead of being simulated by say just transferring fuel from a surface base to a station instantly.

yeah absolutely, I hope I can be in a rover waiting for a lander to land then receive the resources, my guess is this is how they'll do it, ksp really is next level

July 29, 2021

5 hours ago, MKI said:

I'm personally surprised they added parafoils to individual Kerbals, but never added a part dedicated to the same feature. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter too much on how it works, since most of the time you just want to get your parts to the ground. Its also true such a part could easily become OP, relative to all other parachutes, but that's a whole issue in itself.

I also wanted to bring up there was a concept for Gemini to use a parafoil to allow for on-land landings, but ultimately was dropped:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gemini#Gemini_Paraglider

Its very possible such a feature could of made it into KSP 1, but also got dropped for the same reasons they were in real life haha.

Regardless having a similar part in KSP 2 would be awesome and support some interesting builds

yep was thinking about the gemini regallo? wing

July 29, 2021

2 hours ago, Dman979 said:

Less talking about MechJeb and more talking about how the satellite network will work in KSP2, please.

well I was thinking maybe we'd have space based gps so we could land and maneuver more precisely, per example your landing node will be off by 3 kilometres less everytime you upgrade your comms network, also more ground station building just like nasa's deep space network receivers

July 28, 2021

51 minutes ago, Dientus said:

Ahhh ok. I would still end up sailing mine into the control tower I think

Thank you for clarifying.

no issues

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