Stock lights aren't very bright

[Tyko]

I keep wondering why the 4 "aircraft landing lights" on my lander aren't as bright as the tiny headmounted lights on my Kerbal space suits. I haven't found a good mod that makes those spotlights brighter or offers alternative spot lights. (I'm not looking for navigation beacons, I'm looking for spot lights)

Is there a way to make them brighter?

 

[THX1138]

I support the idea of brighter lights or arrays of lights (as well as navigation beacons). This thread should probably go into the suggestions sections in any case. I hope someone else can answer your question.

[Mjarf]

The Illuminator Mk1 isn't bright enough for you? From what I see it's extremely bright, it's as bright as your typical Xenon or LED long range beam light. Am I missing something here?

[MalfunctionM1Ke]

I remember the B9-Light that illuminated the Moon from Low Kerbin Orbit

[Overland]

Squad should do something about the "mark two" lights..I get thier ment to be LED but its like there the older type vs modern cree type.. Thier far too dim

 

I use mark ones on all locomotives..full size or scaled down with tweak scale

Their very bright when made orange too more so, they light my way at night easily

Also very useful on struts or Ibeams as floodlights

 

[Snark]

They always seemed plenty bright enough to me.  The Mk1 generates an intensely bright circle of light that covers a big area and has a long range; I have to be careful when I use them in symmetry groups not to let them overlap, or they light stuff up so brightly that I get a "white-out".  It's easily as bright as sunlight.  The Mk2 has a much shorter range, but within its range it seems to me to light stuff up just fine.  Works great for ships that need to self-illuminate, or on landers to light up the area immediately around the ship.

[radonek]

Nah, stock lights suck at illuminating spacecraft. You need lots of them and it looks odd. Aviation Lights mod worked great for me, but it is broken in latest release :-(
 

[Stone Blue]

37 minutes ago, radonek said:

Nah, stock lights suck at illuminating spacecraft. You need lots of them and it looks odd. Aviation Lights mod worked great for me, but it is broken in latest release :-(
 

No, actually, MOARdV released an updated version for 1.1.x... Look in the last couple of pages of the AviationLights thread...

[Overland]

Indicator lights work well too, opposite of stock lights.. they texture change and dont illuminate the surrounds

they work very well as marker lights

[Geschosskopf]

4 hours ago, Mjarf said:

The Illuminator Mk1 isn't bright enough for you? From what I see it's extremely bright, it's as bright as your typical Xenon or LED long range beam light. Am I missing something here?

Yeah, that light will illuminate whole hemispheres of planets from orbit (usually requires time warp for this to happen, but it still happens).  It also totally glares out the other ship if you use it for docking in the dark, to the point that it's almost worse than no light at all.

I personally don't think we need brighter lights.  What we need are:

• Sleek, streamlined versions of the lights we already have, so you don't ruin the looks of your snazzy spaceplanes with big, blocky things.
• Small, dim lights that just illuminate a couple meters around them, so you can see that thermometer in the dark.  You know, like the Surface-Mounted Lights mod.

[Overland]

I agree with this..Ive only just started using tweakscale for lights to illuminate class plates and smaller headlights..

I wish we had stock smaller versions too... Scaled down its evident just how big they are..

1005 uses scaled lights where as 1001 uses full scale

Edited July 1, 2016 by Overland

[NoMrBond]

A surface mountable omni-directional light would be nice, or surface mountable emissive (like the Z100 battery green light) but with the colour tweakable from the lights would also be neat

[klgraham1013]

Huh.  I always that the lights were quite bright.

[Tyko]

I should have been more clear - it's brightness relative to size. The Kerbal's suit lights are tiny compared to the Mk1/Mk2 yet cast a very bright light. It may be shorter ranged, not sure about that. 

[Snark]

On 6/30/2016 at 9:44 PM, NoMrBond said:

surface mountable emissive (like the Z100 battery green light) but with the colour tweakable from the lights would also be neat

I realize that "there's a mod for that" may not be the answer you're looking for, but just in case you're amenable to the idea... there's a mod for that. 

[Frybert]

This came to mind for some reason:

[Corona688]

I think they need to be balanced to keep energy in mind.  I think electricity needs to be rebalanced entirely.  Right now KSP's link between electricity and energy is marginal at best.  As close as I can guess, based on the power output of fuel cells relative to rocket engines on the same fuel, 1 "unit" of electricity is worth about 40 joules.  At 0.04 units per second, that makes the mk1 illuminator a one-watt bulb.  That can't be right.

Once electricity units actually mean anything, then and only then can they reasonably define how bright a light should be for the given power.

[cantab]

Yeah, it's inconsistent. In some aspects 1 Ec = 1 kilojoule is about right. In others, not so much.

Edited July 3, 2016 by cantab

[Mjarf]

13 hours ago, Corona688 said:

I think they need to be balanced to keep energy in mind.  I think electricity needs to be rebalanced entirely.  Right now KSP's link between electricity and energy is marginal at best.  As close as I can guess, based on the power output of fuel cells relative to rocket engines on the same fuel, 1 "unit" of electricity is worth about 40 joules.  At 0.04 units per second, that makes the mk1 illuminator a one-watt bulb.  That can't be right.

Once electricity units actually mean anything, then and only then can they reasonably define how bright a light should be for the given power.

That's actually not completely unreasonable, CREE recently passed 1000 lumens form a 1 watt LED bulb. Kerbals obviously have more advance technology than humans, so I'd say it's fairly realistic that a 1 watt light with Kerbal technology is that bright. It's more realistic than the other technology they have anyway.

[Corona688]

7 hours ago, Mjarf said:

That's actually not completely unreasonable, CREE recently passed 1000 lumens form a 1 watt LED bulb. Kerbals obviously have more advance technology than humans, so I'd say it's fairly realistic that a 1 watt light with Kerbal technology is that bright. It's more realistic than the other technology they have anyway.

How many lumens is the mk1 illuminator again?  That's another thing that's very hard to define units for in KSP.

[Corona688]

On 6/30/2016 at 9:45 PM, Geschosskopf said:

I personally don't think we need brighter lights.  What we need are:

• Small, dim lights that just illuminate a couple meters around them, so you can see that thermometer in the dark.  You know, like the Surface-Mounted Lights mod.

Did you know that extendible ladders contain a small, dim light that's always on for free?  That accidentally turned out to be very useful.

Edited July 3, 2016 by Corona688

[Geschosskopf]

2 hours ago, Corona688 said:

Did you know that extendible ladders contain a small, dim light that's always on for free?  That accidentally turned out to be very useful.

Yeah, and you can do the same with retracted landing gear.  But I often want a small light in a place where there's no room for such parts, or where they'd be visible in the IVA of the part they're attached to.  So I use the mod Surface-Mounted Lights instead.  But it would be nice if those were stock.

[swjr-swis]

On 7/1/2016 at 0:27 AM, tjt said:

I keep wondering why the 4 "aircraft landing lights" on my lander aren't as bright as the tiny headmounted lights on my Kerbal space suits.

The Mk1/Mk2 Illuminator spots have become significantly less bright since 1.1.0pre, presumably due to the Unity engine change; they used to be significantly brighter before which allowed for a lot of customization with the scalers. Although for some reason, it seems to only have affected the spots this badly, because the helmet lights and the landing gear lights which are arguably much smaller, greatly outshine the spots.

I was going to link a report from the bug tracker about this, in which I included before and after screenshots to show the very noticeable difference (the screenshots are still on my imgur), but after trying all word combinations I can think of, it doesn't find that report anymore. So all I can say is: it was reported back then, I don't remember seeing it actioned, and now apparently isn't even in the tracker anymore. If you feel lucky, try reporting it again. <shrug>

[samstarman5]

On 6/30/2016 at 10:32 PM, Overland said:

{SNIP}

Why ask for stock when you are already so deep into mods, anyway?

 

As to OP, I am confused as to what you are hoping for?  Are you looking to illuminate kilometers of land with one light?  Because that would make things way too overpowered and ridiculous. I can't speak to the landing gear lights, which are really meant to illuminate just where you are landing, but the Illuminator Mk1 and Mk2 do just fine.  For one thing, if you are finding land or objects before you are seeing either, then you are going way too fast.

[jedensuscg]

I tend to pull lights from other mods to supplement. I don't use most of b9 but love the lights in it so just delete most of the parts. Aviation lights was nice as well been apparently just got updated. There were other awesome lights mods through the years but they tend to get outdated. We have dozens of nearly identical rocket part mods but not a single mod adding useful lights on spacedock right now. 

Edited July 10, 2016 by jedensuscg