Kenobi McCormick
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Posts posted by Kenobi McCormick
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On 4/15/2023 at 6:06 PM, Scarecrow71 said:
I use asparagus almost exclusively, and I have never had a problem with auto-stage that didn't trace back to my screwing up.
Every time I tried it I found MechJeb would either not stage at all and waste fuel carrying full tanks around, stage too early and drop useable fuel/engines, or drop too many stages. 'course it could have been a setup thing...I almost never asparagus because I've never felt it benefitted me enough to warrant the CPU drain when mainsails exist...but every time I tried using MJ with Asparagus I had to turn auto-stage off and do that manually else it'd break something.
Just in general I found MechJeb getting confused with more complicated spacecraft, though. -
Reviving the Experimentals program would be a godsend for bugfixing.
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I'd be fine with it. I use the Nexus a TON because I mod the everloving -beep- out of Fallout;NV and Fallout 4.
On 3/6/2023 at 5:23 PM, Halban said:The user experience on Nexus mods is not great: download speeds are capped, it takes two clicks to download anything, you are made to wait 5 seconds before each download, they host ads, and they offer a premium service.
Space Dock has none of that, but there are some features of Nexus Mods that Space Dock could benefit from such as the ability to see what’s popular in a given time frame, download buttons that associate with your mod manager, and a gallery of screenshots on each mod page.
I suppose that’s more of a user’s opinion but as a modder the user experience is what ultimately matters to me. A wider audience would be nice but I think the popularity of the game is much more of a factor than where the mods are hosted; there are lots of games on nexus mods with very few mods available.
Speed cap is fine lol. Especially with the relatively small size of KSP mods. I highly doubt we'll be downloading very many multi-gigabyte megamods for this game like we often do for Fallout and Skyrim, and even on those big mods it isn't that big a deal. The cap's quite generous(And above what my DSL could reach anyway lolol), so honestly, I don't see crying about their speed cap as anything but impatience manifesting.
Ads? Lol what kinda of person browses the internet without a good ad blocker on zero tolerance mode? I used to run ABP until they sold out to advertisers, so I switched to uBlock Origins. I never see ads on the internet. EVER. Not here, not on the NExus, not on YT, NEVER. And it's wonderful.
On 3/13/2023 at 3:44 AM, airtrafficcontroller said:Nexus only exists because Skyrim players don't have a CKAN.
Why would they want to make their modding experience worse like that? It's bad enough Gamebryo games are crash-happy junkpiles that just happen to be addictingly fun without having our mod installs randomly updating here and there sending the whole house of cards tumbling down.
The player having total version control over mods as well as game version is VITAL when running a modded game. Every single time I've updated a mod that did anything more complicated than a basic addition(IE add a gun to Fallout, a part to KSP) it has broken other things with the changes made in that update. Every. Single. Time. Something like CKAN in there making things update whenever there's an update to be had just makes for a compelling argument not to mod at all and is why I don't use CKAN in KSP1 either. It's up to us, as players modding our games, to manage what versions of mods we use and resolve conflicts, and we can't do that if our installs are constantly creating conflicts seemingly at random. And we do this knowing sometimes we might have an issue with one version of a mod that's fixed by updating that mod, but in doing so we break a couple other mods, and have to figure that one out ourselves. It's just part of it.This is also why I HATE using Steam Workshop. One of my biggest gripes with Garry's Mod and American Truck Sim these days; they're both relying on Steam Workshop for mod support these days and it often breaks things with no way for me to restore the older but functional version of the mod. At least if I update a mod manually and it breaks things I can uninstall the new version, reinstall the old one, and get my stuff working again, yanno?
On 3/10/2023 at 2:29 AM, Kaa253 said:GitHub
GitHub is one of the most awful to navigate websites I have ever visited.
On 3/7/2023 at 2:52 PM, VITAS said:@SydKhaosits a central server in Finland. For a while it was on sponsored DigitalOcean geo cluster.
@Stoup you can simply click "browse new mods" ( https://spacedock.info/kerbal-space-program-2/browse/new) and then page trough history.
The best way to find mods is still to search for them. Many people got a more intense introduction to advanced search filters today than they wished for.
Being able to browse mods is a godsend. How am I supposed to know what's out there if I have to throw keywords at an algorithm and hope something interesting comes out the other side?
That is one of my biggest gripe with SpaceDock and is why I almost never use it. It's nigh impossible to find mods you don't already know about on there. NexusMods does this exceptionally well; tons of categories relevant to the game being modded that offer up an easy way to peruse what's up there without having to type a single word in. I've found hundreds of great mods for the three good Fallout games that way, mods I would never have stumbled across if I had to 'search for them' like I do SpaceDock.
'Bout the only time I use SpaceDock is if I'm looking for a mod I know is already there, and I'll search that mod by name. If not that, then it's because I've been browsing the KSP forums and the download is hosted on SpaceDock.
For KSP, I'd split it into VFX, parts, non-part plugins, Tools, Bugfixes, and then subdivide from there as appropriate. Something like, say, MechJeb would fall under non-part plugins since its primary function is plugin based. Something like Kerbal Foundries would fall under Parts - Rover since its primary focus is on rover parts. You get the drift.
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KSP feels wierd without MechJeb at this point. I've been using it since back when the only way to put it on our ships was to use a discrete command pod or control ring. It's an immense help for me. I'll grant a lot of things are a bit wonky with it, but I genuinely can't play KSP1 without it these days.
* Smart-ASS is basically mandatory for everything I fly. The only fly in the ointment? Flying wings. Smart-ASS does not know what to do with flying wings and will almost always crash them. It's also twitchy with canards. Generally, backwards pitch surfaces throw it for a loop and that's something present on both of these types of craft. It's probably not even an issue with MJ, either, because KSP1 itself gets confused with flying wings in particular. Having the elevons so close to CG makes the game's control surface logic lose its marbles and, 99% of the time, the pitch gets inverted because it thinks they are AHEAD of CG and thus acting as canards when in reality they're BEHIND and being asked to work as elevons. Even flying them manually I have to actively remember 'pitch down to pitch up' or I'll bin them as well. This can sometimes affect rockets, too, I've had some of my landers go through control inversion because of CG shift during a mission before.
* Maneuver planner is beyond useful. Those nodes are super fiddly to work with and, generally speaking, I can just tell MechJeb to plot a course and the course is good enough to get the job done.
* The informational panels are must-haves. The dV/TWR panel, velocities, distances, etc. Which ones I'm using vary based on what I'm doing but I almost always have a MechJeb info panel up at all times.
* Auto-Launch. Generally speaking, it does the job. I have a config that works 99.9% of the time, and that 0.1% can be attributed to me flying something stupid. Do I need it? Hell no. I'm more than capable of flying missions on my own from launchpad to landing. But do I use it? Hell yeah. Again I've been playing for yonks. 0.17.1 was my first KSP version. I've done thousands of launches. There's no reason for me to manually gravity turn every rocket I send up. NASA doesn't do that, ESA doesn't do that, SpaceX doesn't do that, so why should I? Hell it even stages for me, too, and I can configure it to stage exactly how I want to. I could see this possibly borking up for someone that's hardcore into asparagus, but I never asparagus and generally only have 2-4 stages, so auto-stage works mint. I set it with zero delays either, so it automatically drops the instant a stage runs dry.
* Auto-Land. I don't use this for fixed-wing because fixed-wing...Smart-ASS aside-ish...generally doesn't get along with MJ's automatic ontrol, but when I'm landing a vessel from orbit AutoLand makes the difference between me managing to hit the daylight side and me being able to put the thing down within 5 meters of where I want it.
* Manuver Node Executer. I can do these manually....but why? Just click one button and it handles the whole lot even time warp. No more missing burns, no more over or undershooting them. All I do is plot the node, align to the node(Unless the craft I'm flying is sufficiently maneuverable to align in just a second or two), click the execute button, sit back, and sip my Dr Pepper.
And that's just off the top of my head. MJ is a lifesaver. 'Course I'm patient enough to wait for when it or something like it comes out for KSP2, but ye, I friggin love MJ and it's one of my must-have KSP1 mods. Matter of fact MJ or something like it being available for KSP2 is a strong influence on whether I even buy KSP2 at all... -
14 minutes ago, TheShadow1138 said:
Yeah, it really is just aesthetic since the drive just changes the position of the vessel, and I agree sometimes it's just nice to have a good looking ship. I didn't set any kind of symmetry for the nacelles, so I'm not sure if setting the stackSymmetry in the nacelle's CFG would fix that or not.
Progress Report:
I have exported all of the NX parts from Blender into Unity and let me tell you I had a time getting all of the normals right, but I got it sorted out. Getting the shuttlepod exported shouldn't be much of an issue, so I'm even closer to getting them in-game.
Symmetry working would be sweet for multiple nacelle setups though. Not gonna lie having them in an X or Y formation would look bad ass.
I also wouldn't mind a single 1.5m round part that does the same thing, but fits in a normal rocket stack/on the back of the AM/LD tank as if it were an aerospike or LT-V45 or sommat. Some creative designs could be built around that. No deploy or retract on it of course. -
I don't get any symmetry at all with them. Not the first time I've encountered that and I just put it in snap mode while placing to get around it. I get the feeling it doesn't really matter for purposes of actually warping around due to how warp actually works, but it does look nicer when they're on straight.
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On 6/29/2021 at 7:51 PM, kerbalk said:
Wow, very ambitious, i love it! Can't wait for that.
Edit: Are there going to be Weapons, like Photon Torpedoes, Phasers, and Disruptors?
Also, will there be other factions ships, like Romulan? And will there be Shields? Lots of cool stuff!
I'm more looking forward to the modular parts that we put on our own builds rather than the ships from the show itself. The latter's lookin' boss but I'm of a mind to rock my own designs heh.
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9 minutes ago, TheShadow1138 said:
Just to make sure, did this only happen with this particular craft, or just once with this particular craft? I did go back and look at the code to see if I could see a possible cause, other than just a 1.12 issue. I found a bit of logic that calls the function which sets the orbit upon disengaging the drive if electric charge runs out. There is no check to see if you are currently at warp, which there really should have been, it was only checking if there was enough electric charge. So, if you had anything drawing power on the ship, even with the warp generator disengaged, then when the warp core is drained it would reset the orbit (this causes the violent shaking of the camera, not sure why) as if you had been warping in and throttled down. This could then place you in a very undesired orbit. I've already corrected this oversight in the code so that there is a check to see if you were traveling at warp before triggering the orbit calculation, otherwise it would just deactivate the drive, if active and you wouldn't be able to go to warp until there were enough electric charge.
Just once, and just to that craft. I just got done with a 30 minute round trip to Jool in a MUCH larger craft(Too large to really be practical with chemical rockets go figure) and did not have the issue.
Some of it may also be my controller. I'm using a Futaba 10J as an input device and with the throttle stick fully down it's still something like 1%. That may be enough to cause some wierdness with regard to coming out of warp. And that solution is simple enough; stick to keyboard controls outside of the atmosphere.
I usually MechJeb around space anyway.That is awesome that it's so stable.
To be perfectly frank the thing flies better than some of my real world RC planes do hahahaha. I.....kinda want to build a replica of it as such.
The 1.0 release of the mod will have an impulse drive module, and I may convert the
Phoenix's main thruster to use it. I'm also going to rework the power system to hopefully be more efficient overall. I'm also going to make sure there is a good description/manual included to explain how everything works, and I'll probably do a video to go along with it.
Ooohhh. Proper impulse drives. Be perfect for us to set up our orbits with. Using chemical rockets is tricky and I'm sorta hesitant to use some of the Phoenix rocket engines due to needing that LD/AM for the warp drive itself. -
12 minutes ago, TheShadow1138 said:
That may be what's going on. Are you disengaging the drive after you achieve orbit? That is, going into the PAW for the warp field generator and clicking the "Engage" button to disengage the warp drive so you can use more conventional propulsion. Since the drive uses throttle input, if it is net deactivated before using the throttle for other sunlight engines, it will still use the warp drive. That doesn't seem like what's happening from what you describe, I just wanted to make sure there isn't a possibility of this being the cause of the weird orbit issue. [/quote]
Yeah I'm toggling the drive off before engaging impulse power. I have that little PAW pinned on my screen to make this easier; would prefer being able to action group it but it is what it is.
Using throttle input to control warp factor is the bomb, though. Helps avoid krakening on SoI changes; I've always had issues with high speed SoI changes going all the way back to 0.17.1. I usually throttle well back to something like Warp 0.1 before I let it change SoI. I feel like I can also use it to fine tune where my final orbit ends up to within a few megameters which greatly cuts down on LF/O usage for final orbital setting. When returning to Kerbin I use the warp drive to set myself on a re-entry path and let it coast the rest of the way; I have re-entry heating turned off(personal preference) and just let it faceplant into the atmosphere at 3-4km/s haha.QuoteWhile the drive is active it draws power, so time warping will drain Liquid Deuterium and Antimatter quickly sometimes, though that does seem like an extreme amount in only half a frame.
Yeah it only used a couple hundred units warping basically from the runway...I engage the warp drive at about 2500m ASL because hey it works in atmosphere...all the way out to Eeloo. then the screen violently shakes when time warping and suddenly I've got neither resource at all? Wierd. Definitely isn't intentional behavior either because I've flown a couple other missions and it hasn't happened since.
QuoteThough, if you were using physical time warp and trying to use a conventional engine without disengaging the warp field generator, then it would enter warp and change the orbit, but that's the only thing I can think of, other than it's some weirdness with the plugin and 1.12.
I seldom, if ever, use physwarp. One too many kraken attacks over the years has made me reticent to use it.QuoteThat is one cool looking ship, if you're going to go warp, you might as well go in style.
Hehe, thanks. I figured I'd make something that would at least look like it flies in atmo...turns out the thing flies like a homesick angel! No SAS no trim hands off rock solid. Love it. Uses three RAPIERs for impulse power; they're in LF/O mode in space and turbine mode in atmo. Not really a very useful craft but eh. Jeb wanted a relativistic hotrod so I built him one.
Also a good bird to learn how to use the warp parts on.
QuoteI think the coils had the max warp of 2 set by me during testing of the new heating setup and I didn't change it back before releasing that update. The warp coil maximum warp ratings don't determine the ship's maximum warp, it's more of a "this coil could handle this maximum warp factor". The warp field generator is what determines the maximum warp factor at which the ship can travel. The warp coil max warp setting also has an effect on the heating of the coil. You could use a warp 2 coil with a warp 1 generator, or any other generator for that matter, but if the warp generator's rating is higher than the attached coil(s), the coils will heat up faster as the system is injecting plasma at a higher rate than the coil can handle, and so it heats faster, while the opposite is true that if the coil is rated higher than the drive, it will not heat as fast.
Ahh so basically I just increased the skookum factor of the nacelles. Time to tweak the generator itself then haha.
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Absolutely lovin' the Phoenix parts right now. I don't know if it's just a quirk of running them in 1.12.0 or not but I do have to do some exploitey nonsense to drop out of warp and into a stable orbit; once said orbit is achieved I have to quicksave and then quick load to 'lock in' that orbit elsewise the next time warp changes it to a hyperbolic trajectory. And I had one moment where time warp emptied out 7500 units of Liquid Deuterium and Antimatter in half a frame. That was fun.
I'm assuming that, for now, this is just a side effect of running it in 1.12.0 before it's updated for 1.12.0, and overall it's great fun to run! So nice being able to pop over to Jool in 15 minutes flat.....
One happy Jeb after a 34 day round trip sightseeing voyage to Moho. Relatavistic speeds, didn't break C even though I should have as the .cfgs for the warp coils have a max warp setting of 2. Oh well. Only took 5 minutes to warp there, warp back, rest of the time was spent time warping and orbiting.
That bird flies like a homesick angel too. And technically it's an SSTO; warp drive engagement at 2,500 meters ASL may not be advised but it does seem to work quite nicely. -
16 hours ago, theonegalen said:
This sounds to me like you might be using female Kerbals in IVA. Squad, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make male and female kerbals have different eye levels when in IVA view. To compensate for this, I have put seat position switches in all but the most basic of my IVAs. I don't think the Vintage Kerbonov or the SXT Bonny have them, but I believe the rest of mine should.
I have had absolutely no trouble flying with these cockpits. I use them all the time. Remember, you can also double click on most of the front windscreens to get a better view, as if your Kerbal had sat up to peer over the dashboard.
Nah, it has been an issue I've had with Kerbal IVAs since long before we ever got female kerbs. They've sat so low in the seat that all I can see is sky and gauges since we first got IVA in aircraft cockpits.
I'm well aware that you can doubleclick the windshield to glue their eyes to it, but that's not really a solution either, because then I can't see any instruments at all. When I fly an airplane I want my airspeed, altitude, and artificial horizon visible, but I also want to be able to see in front and sufficiently below the cockpit that I could see the runway while sitting on the runway(excluding taildraggers but they're rare in KSP).
If I were setting up the IVA of an aircraft cockpit I'd rig it such that the default view has the bottom third of the screen showing the dashboard, with the relevant instruments to actually flying the thing(Navball, radar altimeter, regular altimeter, airspeed indicator) positioned on said dashboard such that they'd be visible, while the upper 2/3rds of the screen is looking out the window such that you can actually taxi around, or use the cockpit on a rover, et-al. You'd be able to see ground, your relevant instruments, and the sky, all without touching any camera controls whatsoever beyond hitting the 'View' button to get into IVA in the first place.
Incidentally, this is also why I don't like driving cars in real life. I feel like I sit too low in them as well. It's not as bad as KSP IVAs, but even when driving an automobile I prefer to sit quite high up in the vehicle so I can see over the nose well, and cars generally don't let me do this very easy. Usually hit my head on the roof before I get a view I like. Part of why I love my old pickup so much, sit straight up in that thing can see for days.
20 hours ago, Beetlecat said:Low? As in located in the lower portion of the cockpit panels? I'm assuming you know you can pan your view around when you're in IVA?
Assuming that's not a silly question, I can't remember if the Hullcam(or something similar) mod provides a popup window you could drag anywhere you want on-screen...Low as in 'I can't see a damn thing in front of the airplane, only above it'. And this isn't limited to just a specific mod, even the stock aircraft IVAs have done it for as long as we've had them. And it's annoying as hell, since I want to fly IVA and can't readily do so when the camera is so low inside the cockpit that all I can see is sky and instruments.
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These look awesome. I don't know if it's just a quirk of the screenshots, though, but the IVA camera is so low that it's almost useless. And that's something I notice with the sweeping majority of KSP IVAs.
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7 hours ago, KerikBalm said:
Well, I was envisioning these not as large WW2 bomber type things, but little scouts for Duna and Eve... like so:
Those are tasks I build rovers for. I don't waste three hours of my evening trying to engineer an aircraft that can gain sufficient lift and control in Duna's paper thin atmo when I can spend 20 minutes throwing some tracks and a reactor on a sheet of structural steel to achieving the same exact mission goal.
QuoteNow I do have quite a few solar panels on those, but there's nothing preventing the use of a single RTG and limiting the flight to short hops. It depends if you want to be able to cruise non-stop or not.
What's the point of an airplane that can only do short hops? Just build a rover instead. If the airplane can't fly continuously for distances and/or at speeds higher than I can manage with a rover and MechJeb's cruise control it's not worth a single speso.
QuoteIf I want to go faster or lift more, jet engines on kerbin and laythe (and mod worlds with O2) work even better.
Sure, but sometimes the task doesn't necessitate a jet engine. I'm not gonna waste my time engineering a supersonic airliner to send four kerbals across to the island runway. I'm gonna dust off the ol' Cessna or hand 'em the keys to a P-47 instead.
QuoteThat would be nice, but I really doubt they'll do that, I think we'd be lucky to get 1 new engine for atmospheric stuff. Given the similarity in purpose between props and turbofans, it should be one that works on Eve/Duna/without O2. If we had to have just 1, I'd choose electric for the most gameplay versatility. If we get 2, then I'd want an electric and an air augmented rocket.
We should get the whole smattering.
QuoteStrongly disagree. LF/IA would be the most redundant and least versatile.
Then I guess we're never going to agree, because I don't see the versatility or scalability.
QuoteTheir role would overlap with the Wheesley and Goliath, but have a lower max speed and altitude.
And come far earlier in the tech tree, if not being unlocked right from the beginning. They'd let us move those engines farther down the science tree.
QuoteThey wouldn't work on Duna or Eve,
They'd work fine if they had a dual-mode intake system like I proposed the other night.
Quotethey'd be worse than electric for subs
You wouldn't use an aircraft engine on a submarine anyway.
Quoteand worse for spaceplanes on Duna and Eve.
You also wouldn't be using a prop powerplant on a spaceplane.
QuoteElectric props scale linearly with payload, they seem to scale just fine in my modded experiments..
The problem is their power consumption doesn't scale well. You end up needing so many batteries and RTGs and solar panels that either A: the damn thing's too heavy to lift itself off the runway or B: Your processor starts trying to get you on the hook for war crimes.
QuoteI've always used them for small surface exploration craft (particularly for science gathering).
Rovers are great for that. So much so, in fact, that I've been using the same design for about six or seven game patches now. Simple little craft, ~2.5 tons on two KF Long tracks, has two of every vanilla science experiment and two of most mod experiments on board. Can pull 10,000 science out of one Mun mission with that thing. Also seats two kerbals, so that's two surface samples and two crew reports on top of the rest of the science it can gather. On top of that, it's got a MechJeb AR202 strapped to the side of the cockpit and some antennae, so it can be run autonomously as well, and the MJ unit lets me set waypoints and sip a Mountain Dew while the rover drives itself wherever I want it to go.
I have no use case for an extraplanetary surface exploring aircraft.
QuoteIf I want to lift large payloads (also... to where, props generally aren't helping you get to space to space), that's the work of a jet turbine/air augmented rocket, IMO.
Maybe there's something else at play, then, 'cause the largest payloads my processor can handle are well within the capabilities of an aircraft with four Pratt 2800s on it. I can't get an acceptable framerate on a payload too large for those engines to lift.
QuoteSee, that's where we fundamentally disagree... to me the whole point of props is to aid exploration of bodies without O2 in their atmosphere.
To me that's the point of rovers. To me, props are an early science tech that's used to help gather those first five or six nodes a little quicker and with a little more variety, and then from there, for making really cheap aircraft good for doing tourist contracts and testing parts in the lower atmosphere. The use-case for recips on other worlds just isn't there to me, everything you've mentioned you'd use them for I'd use a rover for.
QuoteYou can unlock the Juno after just a couple launches, which is still early in career. I would not be opposed to a piston engine and basic wings and control surface being unlocked right from the start alongside the flea booster...
That's precisely where I'd have them in the tree, and alongside the Juno, I'd have a larger LF/IA recip sitting there to tide players over until they got their hands on a larger jet engine. You know, exactly the way we did it in real life. The ME-262 brought us the jet engine but the super-connie was still running passenger flights 15-20 years after that. It took a while for jet engine tech to get big enough to run craft that large and that should be represented in the tech tree as well. You unlock the juno and, in that same node, you get an 18 cylinder radial with some 2,000HP to its name to build larger aircraft with. Then later on you get the bigger jet engine that renders the radial obsolete.
Quotebut I recognize the limited resources and will of squad, and I would want to focus on just one or two parts that would open up the most gameplay possibilities for us.
If they were allowed to care about that they'd be working on new planets for us to visit and new methods of rendering those planets that'd make it more interesting to visit them in the first place.
QuoteBy adding 1 part (an electric motor), we get a lot of gameplay options.
Yeah, and by adding one part(An LF/IA burning recip), we get a lot of gameplay options too.
QuoteFuel cells would turn it into effectively an LFO burning prop engine, and reducing part count is a good goal, but then to get the same gameplay possibilities, we need 2 new parts, instead of 1 new part that can be used in combination with existing parts for different effects.
Where's the second part? They throw us an LF/IA recip and we only need one part to explore those gameplay possibilities. We won't need to engineer an entirely new power system for the aircraft with it, we'd just use the same exact liquid fuel tanks we've been using for jets since C7 Aerospace was a mod back in 0.14. We wouldn't need to dick around with solar panels and RTGs and fuel cells, we wouldn't need to have all that added kraken-attracting complexity...it's KISS in action.
QuoteWhat do lift and batteries have to do with anything?
Batteries have weight. Batteries are necessary to run an electric prop in KSP. Lift is what gets craft off the ground. See the connection now?
QuoteI didn't even bring them up.
You literally said 'subs', which is bringing them up.
QuoteAnyway, KSP's turbofans (and jets in general) are already ludicrously efficient (about 2x RL values, except for the Rapier, which is about right if we assume H2 as fuel and not kerosene). We don't need something with 20,000 Isp (since the goliath is already over 10,000 Isp). What would that add to gameplay?
The ability to circumnavigate the planet with an airplane that'll give acceptable framerates on a craptop isn't a valuable addition to gameplay? Or the ability to free up more fuselage room in a given plane for useful payload items? That doesn't hold value either?
Quoteto space exploration?
You could say that to the new spacesuits Squad gave us, too. Literally just a cosmetic update, zero gameplay changes whatsoever, yet we got it anyway. And far as I can tell nobody was even asking for it.
QuoteAlso electric motors have great power to weight ratios (its why the old tesla roadster was a very very sporty car, particularly in acceleration. The problem is and has been for a long time, the battery capacity, and duration. If you want to lift a large plane, electric motors are more than capable of doing it. If you want to lift a large plane, and fly it for hours, electric motors start to have a problem.
And that's why they're not practical in large planes. What's the point of a large airplane that can't fly more than a handful of miles before it has to land and recharge for 8 hours? It's the same reason I don't want anything to do with an electric car. Batteries suck. They're heavy and they have a fraction the energy density that even a low grade hydrocarbon has. Something high grade and refined is lightyears more dense than the best battery chemistry we can dream up right now and that's not lookin' to change anytime soon.
Only way you're getting more energy density is if you start splitting atoms...
QuoteThis of course swings in the favor of electric propulsion when operating a spaceprogram and an exploration craft on another world where it can recharge batteries, but not refuel itself.
I have no problem with fuel on my rovers. Generally I either use a fuel cell running off LF/O or a nuclear reactor for that. My fuel cell rovers have no batteries capable of moving them, what little battery capacity they do have is there solely so I can set the parking brake without a kerbal in it. Never even come close to running one out of fuel either, usually get bored and RTB long before then.
You might have a point if there was a reason to venture more than a couple kilometers from your lander, but as the game currently sits, there just sort of isnt'. Land within that distance of a biome border, use a rover to cross it, get your science, head back to kerbin. That's pretty much it. Large reason I don't play the game very much anymore...
QuoteI guess we have fundamentally different gameplay goals here.
Yeah, mine's to add something fun to the game, whereas yours seems to be to add....what is it again? The ability to run short hops on non-O2-bearing worlds that, by your own words, can be done better with other engine types?
QuoteOf course, many electric things are already OP'd in KSP... like Ion engines and reaction wheels, so I wouldn't object if it was relatively easy for solar panels to supply the needed power for sustained flight.
The only panels we can use are the little 1x1 tiles, on account of everything else being too fragile to survive flight speeds. And those things are inefficient on a good day, doubly so on an an airplane where they're almost never going to have ideal tracking.
QuoteYou'd only space panels if you want continuous flight,
Again, what's the point of an airplane that can't do that? Especially an electric one?
You want to argue electric airplanes and then in the same breath argue that it's ok for them to be utterly pointless when their practical range can be bested by a space car you're just going to confuse and bewilder the audience.
QuoteAlso, I'm still confused by what exactly this payload is supposed to be, if its not going to space?
Whatever the hell I want to shove up the cheeks end of a cargo plane. It might be a science package, it might be a rover, or a base part or a deployable ISRU system. Hell it might be a nuclear bomb, I don't know. Half the time I don't know what i'm going to be putting in the thing while I'm building it.
QuoteiI am also not arguing against getting ICE props.
Every post you've sent my way has been 'We don't need ICE props just give us electric props'.
IF you're not arguing against ICE props you're doin' an awfully good job of making me think you are with every word you type.
Quote1) electric
2) air augmented rocket
3) 0.625 or1.25m piston/turboprop (either monoprop or duel mode with LFO/LF+IA option)
4) 2.5m piston/turboprop (either monoprop or duel mode with LFO/LF+IA option)
5) 0.625m or 1.25m basic piston engine, unlocked from the start of the career alongside the flea
My wishlist?
1: Some sort of 4 or 6 cylinder Lycominc boxer in a housing on the half meter size(Available right from game start)
2: A small single-row radial on the half meter size.(Available right at game start)
3: A large liquid cooled V-12 on the one meter size.(Unlocked alongside the Juno)
4: A dual row 18 cylinder radial on the one meter size.(Unlocked alongside the Juno)
5: a four row radial on the one-meter size.(Unlocked one node past the Juno, also unlocks dual-mode operation on all ICE engines)
6: An electric prop on the half-meter size.(Unlocked the same time we get fuel cells so players can actually run the thing for a reasonable amount of time)
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4 hours ago, KerikBalm said:
but I don't know what you mean about a mountain of support systems
Monoprop tanks are tiny and have love all monoprop in them. You need far more of your craft dedicated to containing fuel than you would an LF/IA engine. Electric? If you're building anything practically large you're gonna need far more than 'a battery and an RTG/Solar Panel' to get reasoanble performance out of the thing, and if you want to be able to run it full throttle it's gonna have to be 70% generation equipment. Even then it's gonna be beat out by a big ol' Pratt R2800 every time.
QuoteAs for vacuum thrust, it shouldn't have any. Its super easy to add another intake resource (often named IntakeAtm instead of IntakeAir in mods, such as the community resource pack), and have intakes produce that regardless of O2 presence. Then the engine only works in an atmosphere, but it doesn't require O2. You'd have one mode using LiquidFuel + IntakeAir, and another version using LiquidFuel + Oxidizer + IntakeAtm.
You could also apply a KISS approach and just set its ISP curve properly. The recips we get with Firespitter produce love all thrust above 15,000km even if you use cheats to keep them running that high up. The game fully supports engines having different thrusts at different altitudes and it'd be trivial for a skilled modder to set that curve up such that the engine just flat out stops doing anything useful above the sort of atomspheric densities required for a propeller to work at all. It's already done in the recip mods we have now.
QuoteA selection???
Yes. A selection. Small, Med, Large LF/IA recips, an electric, and a monoprop.
Quoteand the simplest and most versatile would be an electric one.
No. The most versatile would be the LF/IA recips. You can't scale the electric ones up very large before the weight of the support equipment exceeds the craft's ability to get off the ground, a problem that doesn't exist with ICE powerplants. You're not gonna be building any fully electric four engine propjobs that can carry several tons of payload, such a craft would be so heavy from all the batteries and such that it'd barely be able to carry itself to the heavens.
Quote+1 part (fuel cell array) and its an LFO engine (we could make Fuel cells essentially dual mode, using Oxidizer or IntakeAir)
Fuel cells? Well hell, you're still burning LF/O, why not cut the middleman out and just pipe the LF straight into the engine? KISS is a wonderful thing to apply when it comes to engineering, especially when you're looking at early game tech which is where these engines would fall. The whole point of giving us prop jobs is to make fixed wing atmospheric flight more viable early game.
QuoteThey'd work for subs (plus with RTG instead of fuel, they'd never have buoyancy issues), they'd be simpler to operate long term (no ISRU). There'd be no mode switching needed or wondering if you need to bring oxidizer or how much fuel is needed, etc.
Subs don't have to worry about lift. The also don't have to worry about batteries. Submarines in modern navies haven't run on batteries in 40 or 50 years, what with them all being run straight off a massive nuclear reactor and all. The only navies still using batteries in their subs are using hilariously outdated antiques that were state of the art back when the finest fighter planes in theskies were armed with nothing but machine guns.
Large electric props work here, but they'd have to come with nuclear reactors to power them. Also not the scope of our discussion, we're referring to aviation usage, not naval usage.
QuoteAn electric propeller would be way better than reciprocating engines.
For certain applications, yes. For general usage, no. The best prop powerplant for general aviation has remained the gasoline fuelled recip for over a hundred years and doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. If it does, itt'l be to move towards diesel, provided the tech inherent in manufacturing a reliable aviation diesel engine matures enough that they don't end up excessively heavy.
QuoteReciprocating engines would be almost worthless compared to turbofans.
They'd use a fraction of the fuel a turbofan uses and an order of magnitude less fuel than a non-turbofan jet engine uses. You'd be trading off the ability to cruise along 575MPH @ 35,000' for being able to go nearly twice as far on the same quantity of fuel. Turbine engines are LUDICROUSLY thirsty and you need only look at the M1 Abrams to see this in action. Abrams has roughly the same shaft horsepower going to its tracks that the Leo 2 has, yet needs twice as much fuel to go the same distance.
Gas turbine engines are stupidly thirsty and will never match the fuel economy of a piston engine. The only reason we use them in aviation is because of the equally excessive amounts of thrust they can provide.
QuoteDual-mode airbreathing/closed cycle atmospheric engines would be nice, but such a dual mode engine doesn't need to be a reciprocating one.
And yet it'd be nice to have one. Would let you operate a big ol' Pratt radial on Eve.
Quoteand for the goal of the game it might as well be something more like a turboramjet (Ie a turbo-ramrocket).
We already have one of those, in case you weren't aware. We've had it for ages, too.
QuoteI'd much rather have air augmented rockets/turbo-rockets
we already have a similar enough engine in the game.
Quotepropellers turned by electric motors over propellers turned by reciprocating engines.
I'd rather have a Pratt R2800 and R4360 in my game. I can do far more with one of those monsters than I ever could with a desk fan taped to the front of the plane. I don't build small recips, I build big ones. Think B-29, B-36, B-24, Lockheed Super-Connie. Planes like that are too large to be practical on an electric power system. You might could sorta half-assedly get away with jury-rigging a Cessna 172 using the ludicrously advanced batteries and generation systems Kerbals have but you're not gonna get a super-connie off the ground on batteries. Not even using Kerbal batteries. Thing's just too big and too heavy.
There's also another factor you're not considering that's incredibly relevant...perhaps moreso than any other point you've brought up so far...to our discussion: Part count.
I don't know the details of your machine, but I know mine well enough, and I know my framerate goes to absolute horseexcrements if I have more than about 150 parts on screen at any one given time. With fixed wing flight I like to keep part counts below half that just to guarantee at least 30FPS. So, 75 parts total. That's the part budget for my aircraft.
If I want to build a four engine long range prop plane, I need...let's say ten parts for the fuselage, the FAT-A55 wing parts add another ten, throw 5 more on for flaps and ailerons, three for LG, a MechJeb unit...we're at, what,28 parts already? Up to 32 for the engine nacelles, 36 with the engines mounted to those nacelles. The basic airframe comes in at 36 parts, not too shabby considering the size of the vessel, and certainly one flyable even on a potato grade laptop. But it's just a glider, so let's fit some engines...
Now, let's say you get your way and all I have are electric powerplants. That means I'd have to spam batteries all over the fuselage and solar panels will need to coat every last square inch of the sun-facing side of this airplane(Which due to its size we will assume is only the top, not something generally expected to fly inverted). Ok, my part count's now hovering around 130 parts, and I haven't even begun to apply a useful payload yet.
If I get my way and we get electric props and ICE props(Keep in mind I'm not arguing against having electrics, I'm arguing for having them alongside piston engines, something I think you're missing somehow), I throw a few stonkin' huge radials on the necelles, add a single 1 meter fuel tank to each nacelle, and some fuel lines to the main fuel reserve. I'm still well within my part budget...somewhere around 40-45 parts...with adequate performance in flight and room to add a useful payload! I have room in the part budget to pack the thing full of every science experiment in the game if I want to, or I can load it up with a rover, or deploy an ISRU, base parts, passengers, whatever I want. I have room in the part budget to actually do things with the vessel without my framerate going to hell the instant I spawn in on the runway.
I'm still in the upper 40th percentile as far as CPU power goes. The vast majority of KSP players are either on hilariously outdated consoles that make my computer look like the CRAY Supercomputer, or they're on craptops that can barely run Firefox properly. If I can't even run such an aircraft on electric power with an acceptable framerate how the hell are they gonna do so?
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On 11/5/2018 at 1:42 AM, KerikBalm said:
And there's no reason that you can't do that with a turbofan, or a turbojet, or a ramjet. Then you've got what are known as ram-rockets/turbo-rockets/air-augmented-rockets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-augmented_rocket
They use the atmosphere as working mass, but not a source of chemical energy. For the same amount of chemical energy as it takes to throw 1kg of mass back at 200 meters/second, you could throw 4kg of mass back at 100 meters/second for 2x the thrust, or 16 kg of mass back at 50 meters/second for 4x the thrust. If the reaction mass is "free", your effective Isp could go up by a factor of 4x.
This is a major part of the efficiency gain of jet engines, and why high bypass turbofans do so much better than turbojets. The other efficiency gain is of course taking O2 from the atmosphere (in real rockets/jets has an Oxidizer:Fuel mass ratio of around 2-3 : 1 ... in KSP it is only 1.1 : 0.9)
Still, it would be simpler to just use monoprop, which is why I suggested a monoprop powered reciprocating engine. After all, we don't currently have a lot of use for the larger mono-prop tanks (unless you just like using monoprop engines for the lulz, or are really, really, really bad at docking, or decide that reaction wheels are OP'd, and only use RCS to maneuver).
If you make a LF+O consuming recip engine.. you might as well just make it electric charge consuming, and give players the option of pairing it with fuel cells for more flexibility.
Mm, but LF+O is more versatile. Can get a lot more power out of it without requiring a mountain of support systems, or scale it down to something barely larger than a soda can. Atop that, it can be dual mode, just as the SABRE engines we already have, burning intake air when available and liquid oxidizer when necessary. Of course it would need a vacuum thrust of basically nil, but yeah.
A monoprop engine, an electric engine, and a turboprop engine would all be nice little niche products, but the bread-and-butter oughtta be a selection of LF/IA recips with LF/O dual mode operation unlocked later in the science tree. They'd be the most versatile, and also the simplest, options here, good for general usage with the other engines available for specific missions that necessitate them.
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On 10/14/2018 at 9:03 AM, KerikBalm said:
If they add prop motors, I really hope they don't just add a recirpocating internal combustion engine. As you may have seen in my previous posts, for me the biggest use of props would be on worlds lacking atmospheric O2, I'm not looking for another air breathing engine. I wouldn't mind recips if there are multiple new prop motors. I could see 3 types of propeller atmospheric propulsions: 1) Electric motor (2) Monoprop powered (see this thread:
Late reply I know, but...mm, there's no reason you can't pipe LO2 into a standard recip with the right manifolds. Engine doesn't care where it gets its oxygen, only that it gets oxygen. I can't imagine the efficiency would be all that good, but hell, it at least should be better than an LF/O2 rocket engine.
I 'spose that's also a valid use case for recips in KSP, but to me, recips in KSP are an early game tech that is to be rendered obsolete later on down the line by more advanced systems. Kinda like what we've done in real life, generally, recips are only used on light personal craft and historic craft that originally had them.
Turboprops would be a nice addition too, I'll admit. Not quite a recip but the end result isn't much different.
Quote1) assuming you don't crash, the costs of a turboramjet flight won't be anywhere near 125,000. They'd be an order of magnitude or two less.
2) Its not that hard to make a working turboramjet craft, and for what you describe, the turbofans work fine
The use on Eve and Duna + mod worlds like Tekto are what appeal to me
It costs maybe two thousand to throw a recip that'll carry 12 kerbals up. They're cheap as chips. Simple to engineer. Barely use fuel. Can just throw 'em together and generally they'll fly. I've found jets can be quite finicky at times but recips are pretty much 'throw airplane shaped boards at a washing machine and the end result flies half-decent'. If I try I can get pretty damn good performance out of them, too.
Some of it might have something to do with how slow they are, though. Typical stall speeds for my recips fall in the 25-45m/s range. With a stall speed that low you really have to balls it up to crash one, and landing gets rather easy. By default they tend to be seaplanes too on that same basis, they land so slowly that they can reliably splash down undamaged.
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On 9/26/2018 at 10:40 PM, sumghai said:
My personal opinion is that given the theme of the game is Kerbal Space Program, any aircraft parts included in the stock game are those that can be feasibly used to construct spaceplanes - fixed wing aircraft that can transition between atmospheric and spaceflight. The fact that a player could also use some of the engines to build aircraft capable of only atmospheric flight just happens to be a bonus.
No propeller-powered aircraft are capable of escaping from or operating outside of the atmosphere, therefore they would see limited use. If propellers are added to the game, the title and theme would then have to be changed to Kerbal Aircraft and Space Program.
Uhh, no. I can think of three uses for recips in KSP right off the top of my head:
* Early game science gathering.
* Sightseeing contracts.
* Cheap long-range aircraft.
That's, coincidentally, what I use the recips I build using mods for as well. I don't waste my time engineering some fancy-pants expensive jet to take a tourist over to the nearby island runway, I just warm up the cessna or throw 'em the keys to an old warbird. Why spend 125,000 spesos on an SR71 flight to satisfy a contract that only pays out 12,500 spesos?
I honestly think recips have a valid place in KSP right as they are and including them as options will not require a name change. If it did, then we were overdue for it when they decided to add all of C7 Aerospace's jet parts to the game back before it even went behind a paywall.
Also, yes, yes you bloody well can put a recip into orbit. I might actually give it a try tonight or tomorrow, build some sort of twin engine recip that can carry enough boosters to get it into orbit. Failing that, I'll just shove a normal launcher up the cheeks end of a Spitfire...
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I'm not really referring to the specifics of science in career. I'm talking more in general terms, in terms that apply equally to career and sandbox. Though I'm also in favor of doing something to the science system that makes it less of a grind, as that's precisely why I don't play it. It's just grinding. Go here, run the same experiments, take htme there, run them again, unlock more parts, repeat ad nauseum.
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KSP is a great foundation for space exploration, no denying that. Between the breadth of stock content and the inundation of mods that expand upon and even add new features outright, there's no shortage of parts to use, of types of craft to build, bases, et-al. And that's great!
But it gets old fast when there's nowhere exciting to send any of it.
I may just be burned out....I've had the game since V0.17 after all...but lately, KSP has lost my interest because there's just not anything new to discover in the game. I've been everywhere. At some point between V0.17 and V1.4.4, I've landed on every orbital body, I've escaped the system, crashed into the sun, spaghettified, got kraken'd, you name it. I'm out of cool and interesting things to catapult Kerbals towards. And that's what I think the next major update should add in. Give us something cool to go to. Land on Duna twice...once at a snowy pole once off the ice...you've seen it all. There's nothing new to be found landing in a different spot once you've landed in those two spots. Land on Val? You've seen everything there is to see, it's just the same texture tiled over and over and over and over. Anomalies? Yeah they were neat. Were. I explored them in Versions 0.18-0.21 or so, in fact I remember using the old precursor to SCANSat to find them(I forget what it's called). Same logic applies to pretty much every oribtal body, there's only a small handful of POIs on each one and once you've ticked the boxes there's just not any reason to fly past the Mun. I've even tried mod planets, which is amazing in and of itself....but they have the same problem. Once you land on them a couple times, that's it. They, like the vanilla planets, are just the same texture tiled over and over and over, and like the vanilla planets the terrain itself isn't really varied. You can tell just how 'digital' they really are when you drive across them and see how each area is a perfectly flat tile that's tilted to some degree. Sure, landing on mod planets means it's a different texture to the vanilla planets, but once you've seen it a couple times you've pretty much seen the whole thing.
I'm sure I'm not alone. There's tons of people who've just got into the game recently, I'm sure, and to them they still discover new things with every launch. But there's a lot of us here who've already been there, done that, got the t-shirt, and I'm sure the vast majority of us would come flocking back in droves if the next update to the game gave us a metric -beep-tonne of new things to explore, even if they're on the planets we already have. Varied terrain, weather patterns, things floating around in the solar system that aren't planets, let the imagination wander and then whatever it wanders to that the game engine supports should go into the game.
I dearly want to come back to KSP but I can't bring myself to do it. I usually load up the game, doddle around the space center for 20 minutes building a rover, launch it at a random planet, land, see nothing new, get bored, and go back to ATS or Fallout 4. Can I, and everyone else like me, get our wonderment and sense of discovery back? Can we get new places to go, new things to see on the places we've already been?
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4 minutes ago, Cheif Operations Director said:
Exactly
Mmm.
As far as the original topic goes, I have two serious suggestions for you that help me greatly:
1: Stop using the stock rover wheels. They don't slide readily and that's why you flip so easily. Mod wheels...my favorites are the tracks floating around...tend to be willing to slide a little instead of just traction rolling you every time you try to steer.
2: Get a gamepad of some sort and drive your rovers with that. It's harder to flip the thing over if you've got proportional steering as you can feed it in juuuust enough to turn without rolling it.
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On 8/29/2018 at 12:35 PM, Kerbart said:
One can argue that your problem is quicksave. Without something to bail you out when things go wrong, the lesson would sink in much deeper and you’d replace the convenience of speed by the virtues of taking it slow.
Right now there’s no pay-off for carefulness; you simply hit F9when things go wrong. There’s a reason the real Mars rovers move at snail’s speed.
Quicksaving isn't the problem, and as I've said countless times in Fallout 4 discussions regarding the restrictions on game saves in Survival mode, it does nobody any favors to restrict or block saving the game when the game is full of bugs, glitches, and unintended incidents. KSP isn't much better than Fallout 4 in that regard, especially when dealing with rovers.
As far as NASA's rovers....they move at a snail's pace less because they can't just hit F9 and more because designing a vehicle that can bomb across the Martian surface at 50+ MPH isn't designing a vehicle current rocketry can deliver to the Martian surface. We could easily design a rover that would be able to race across at highway speeds, in fact all it takes is just one phone call between NASA and anyone running in the Baja 1000, but the resulting vehicle would be too heavy and too power hungry to be feasible to deploy.
Lastly...what's so virtuous about taking it slow in a game where there's nothing noteworthy to explore nearby? You land on a planet's surface and, unless you land RIGHT ON TOP of a biome divider, there's nothing any different 200m from your lander as there is right between the landing legs, or 2 miles out. Being able to haul ass in a rover isn't a matter of convenience, it's a matter of spending less time staring at the same texture tiles waiting for a new biome in which to run the same exact experiments for the 95th time.
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On 4/20/2018 at 3:26 PM, Booots said:
My bad, I didn't realize I had set the links to specific versions rather than just the release page. Fixed now. (At least for GitHub, my work's filter won't let me change the SpaceDock one
S'all good, homey! Honestly thought I'd just not seen the right link or something, haha.
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Am I missing something here? Title says mod supports 1.4.x, I'm on 1.4.2, but the only download links in the OP are for game version 1.2.
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Is there any way to turn off the version checker? I'm on 1.4.2 and FAR keeps telling me I'm not on 1.4.2.
Would interstellar be fun?
in KSP2 Discussion
Posted · Edited by Kenobi McCormick
What made me stop playing KSP1 was that I ran out of stuff to do. I had visited every orbital body in the Kerbin system, I had landed on all of the solid ones, orbited them, drifted space cars around on them, I'd done spaceplanes, a grand tour, built colonies, explored all the easter eggs. What I pined for most of all was other star systems to fling my kerbals at.
So, yes, interstellar travel would be fun. It would keep me playing a hell of a lot longer. And with that comes trans-luminal and super-luminal engines. I wouldn't recommend using such engines inside a solar system, but between them? Hell yeah.