Stock fairings are cursed...

[AlamoVampire]

@selfish_meme I repudiate your opinion on the quality of the stock fairings. I ask you a simple question, how many steps for you does it take to make your fairing, and should you have need of altering your payload in a SIGNIFICANT way because of a sudden change in mission ideology <it happens dont deny it lol, happens to me a LOT> how fast or many steps for you will it take to redesign your fairing to accommodate the new payload size and or shape? For me? its nearly instantaneous. I pull the fairing shell off and make sure I am in the correct symmetry and replace, and BAM the thing has resized and reshaped to fit the new payload. The stocks cannot do this, not in as little as 1 click. Also, inside this fairing is a quad set of keostationary communication sats on a 5m probe core courtesy of SpaceY. This fairing is Procedural Fairings, and its smooth and is elegant and on deploy will produce 2 halves.

the fairings in yours have harsh boundaries that show each and every single layer where you had to click to set it and on deploy id wager they potato chip out.

OP 23:15:30

[selfish_meme]

15 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

@selfish_meme I repudiate your opinion on the quality of the stock fairings. I ask you a simple question, how many steps for you does it take to make your fairing, and should you have need of altering your payload in a SIGNIFICANT way because of a sudden change in mission ideology <it happens dont deny it lol, happens to me a LOT> how fast or many steps for you will it take to redesign your fairing to accommodate the new payload size and or shape? For me? its nearly instantaneous. I pull the fairing shell off and make sure I am in the correct symmetry and replace, and BAM the thing has resized and reshaped to fit the new payload. The stocks cannot do this, not in as little as 1 click. Also, inside this fairing is a quad set of keostationary communication sats on a 5m probe core courtesy of SpaceY. This fairing is Procedural Fairings, and its smooth and is elegant and on deploy will produce 2 halves.

 

the fairings in yours have harsh boundaries that show each and every single layer where you had to click to set it and on deploy id wager they potato chip out.

OP 23:15:30

I admit that one feature is good, and how smooth you want the fairings depends on how much work you want to put into them, but they won't be as smooth as that. Granted that procedural fairings may be better, however compared to the first iteration, the stock fairings have come a long way, they are good enough in a lot of instances. I can also shape them to create bearings and other things. I am unsure whether or not you can do that with procedural fairings, I have never seen anyone try.

Clamshell release is a thing now, no potato chips unless you want them

Edited August 9, 2017 by selfish_meme

[AlamoVampire]

@selfish_meme it may be a thing with the stock, but, sadly, its an option one must TURN ON, this is a negative. I just grabbed a MK1-2 command pod and one of the stock fairings to see about your claim. and this is what I found:

1. Clam Shell deploy is a MUST TOGGLE ON feature.

2. No indication is given that I must have some space to grab the "fairing" in order to generate it.

3. Still not intuitive in the slightest.

4. Still clunky beyond reason.

5. Still not elegant.

With regards to your claim making bearings and "other things" I fail to grasp why I or anyone would want a fairing to serve a purpose of being a bearing <picturing a device to allow rotation of two items, just so you know where I am looking when I see "bearing" > as to your further claim of "other things" the only other thing I can think of is as a heat shield of sorts, which I have used PF as an all encompassing shield for entry into Eve's atmosphere twice now for lander probes. Provides a staggering <AFAIR> amount of stability in flight for the period of maximum heating. 

OP 00:08:30

[selfish_meme]

36 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

@selfish_meme it may be a thing with the stock, but, sadly, its an option one must TURN ON, this is a negative. I just grabbed a MK1-2 command pod and one of the stock fairings to see about your claim. and this is what I found:

1. Clam Shell deploy is a MUST TOGGLE ON feature.

2. No indication is given that I must have some space to grab the "fairing" in order to generate it.

3. Still not intuitive in the slightest.

4. Still clunky beyond reason.

5. Still not elegant.

With regards to your claim making bearings and "other things" I fail to grasp why I or anyone would want a fairing to serve a purpose of being a bearing <picturing a device to allow rotation of two items, just so you know where I am looking when I see "bearing" > as to your further claim of "other things" the only other thing I can think of is as a heat shield of sorts, which I have used PF as an all encompassing shield for entry into Eve's atmosphere twice now for lander probes. Provides a staggering <AFAIR> amount of stability in flight for the period of maximum heating. 

OP 00:08:30

All good reasons that procedural fairings are better fairings, I am not disputing that, but stock fairings are 'better' than they were. Here are some 'other' things done with stock fairings

[Champ]

On 08/08/2017 at 6:21 AM, AlamoVampire said:

<most likely the selfsame hoops needed to make SPP into stock, so, um why did they not?>

Most likely not. (Different licences).

 

[p1t1o]

@AlamoVampire

Maybe one day you will spend several years of your life on a project, and when people start hassling you to ditch part of it and replace it with someone else's - with all of the commercial and business complications thereof - you might have a better insight.

Have you considered the possibility that they asked and were refused? That there are other options besides selling it to KSP, for what to do with a piece of decent code you wrote? Or that, considering that the devs fully support a moddable game, they consider working fairings already done? Why would they spend time and money adopting ProcFairings if it is already available to everybody for free?

This conversation - "Why oh why oh why havnt they adopted this mod I like yet??" - has happened a million times over the years, and yet the answers have not changed.

[Gaarst]

12 minutes ago, p1t1o said:

Or that, considering that the devs fully support a moddable game, they consider working fairings already done? Why would they spend time and money adopting ProcFairings if it is already available to everybody for free?

This conversation - "Why oh why oh why havnt they adopted this mod I like yet??" - has happened a million times over the years, and yet the answers have not changed.

And over the million times it has happened, "there is already a mod for that" has never been, is not and will never be a valid argument.

Having a community doing great mods is not an excuse for devs slacking. If something in the game is broken, the devs have to fix it, even if a mod fixing the issue already exists.

Also, since over a year, KSP has been available on consoles, which do not support mods (at least not for KSP and I doubt they will ever implement it). Console players paying full price for KSP are entitled to have a polished (or working for that matter) game as much as the PCers are, and mods can't fix problems for them.

 

Stock fairings are terrible, whether you prefer PF or stock style fairings, and they need to be worked on. PF doing it better is not an excuse.

Edited August 10, 2017 by Gaarst

[Mako]

@Gaarst

What about them, besides the bug that prompted this thread (which was reported earlier in this thread to have been acknowledged and addressed by the devs) is so wrong in your opinion? They've been improved since they were first implemented and I don't recall them ever being unusable for me. Admittedly I don't have the most inventive play style, so I doubt I've pushed them to their limits, but I've not had difficulty using them.

I totally understand and respect other players' preferences, and I'm glad we have multiple options. More options are usually better, in my opinion. In this case we have a stock option that is functional and fits the no-procedural-parts plan that the devs had (whether or not there should be procedural parts is a completely different discussion that goes well beyond fairings), and a mod option that people seem to be very fond of.  (I can't say I'm concerned for the console players on the topic of fairings because as of right now barely anything works for them; fairings are probably the least of their struggles.)

Although, everyone should probably completely disregard everything I say on the topic of fairings: I was one of those crazy people who recognized the confetti fairing separation was not realistic or ideal but wasn't bothered by it at all. Though I am glad clamshell separation is a thing, because, as I said earlier, I like options.

[Julian.]

About That Base... What If You Deploy The Fairing? Would It Not Be Annoying To Have To Replace The Base Part?

[AlamoVampire]

@p1t1o I do not like repeating myself. I have in this thread already addressed the possibility of the Original Modder saying no. The blue print is there. They saw an elegant way to do fairings. They could have followed a similar tack but chose a beyond flawed, unintuitive disaster instead. Its like a car, many ways to do it, many ways to be elegant and just as many ways to be a disaster.

Procedural fairings is the Rolls Royce of fairings where the stock are the Ford Pinto. Does it work? Kinda. Elegant? Nope.

Some of you make them work, thats awesome. You took the time to find the single kernal of wheat in a literal ton of chaff, I commend you that.

op 20:16:30

[Randox]

I just wanted to say that at least one person legitimately likes the stock fairings. I like the angular look and ability to make the shapes, and above all I like building the darned things. I play this game to build, so a part that would build itself for me is...sacrilege. Auto adjusting parts are as unkerbal as round edges

Just my feeling on the matter of course. A lot of people obviously disagree and power to them.

The current bug is an issue, but it's a new one, and nothing against the base system. Just a bug that needs fixing. Good to know that fairings that close around a part (blue) don't seem to suffer from the issue too. I've not updated yet because I can't be bothered getting new versions of the mods, so maybe I'll sit this one out

Edited August 11, 2017 by Randox

[Mako]

@AlamoVampire

There is no vessel part in the game that is procedural. Whether Procedural Fairings could have been used in whole, in part, or not at all is completely irrelevent: it was never going to happen. I believe HarvesteR said they specifically wanted vessels in KSP to be built from fixed-size, prefabricated parts. Therefore, procedural parts, such as fairings, were not a possibility no matter how much anyone wanted them. I'm actually surprised stock fairings have as much flexibility as they do because of this.

So, if my memory serves me, the dev team wanted it this way. It was a conscious decision. They understood the arguement for procedural parts, but felt that functionality didn't fit with everything else so they made their own version that fit what they wanted. That's also why we don't have stock modular/procedural fuel tanks. At this point I doubt we'd see this design change significantly. Perhaps a new product with a different design philosophy would have a better chance of implementing procedural parts in stock.

I'm just glad options exist, even if it's in the form of mods, so that players (at least those on PC) can tailor their experiences to their preferences.

[selfish_meme]

7 hours ago, Julian. said:

About That Base... What If You Deploy The Fairing? Would It Not Be Annoying To Have To Replace The Base Part?

You can set the fairings to not stage as well

 

57 minutes ago, Mako said:

the dev team wanted it this way

Really this is the only thing that matters, there are no 'lazy' devs, this is the game they wanted to make, if they were lazy they would not have made it, I understand people may want things, we all want things, and want things in this game. But it's not within our right to demand the devs do anything, except fix something that is broken and the stock fairings are not broken, they just work differently than the way some of you want them to work. They purposely made the game to be mod friendly, but that in itself then puts a compunction on them to not annoy the modders by taking the need for their work away. They incorporate some things, like SP+ which was not open source and specifically designed to be very stock like, so the integration fit in with their plans.

[AlamoVampire]

@Mako What harvester wanted isnt relevant anymore. This game has evolved beyond his initial dream. There simply is no defense for a bad design. There is no defense for a part that is not intuitive or easy to use. To be blunt the implementation as it is now in stock is bad. Period. Any part that at its core that is flawed needs redressing not defending. It would be like saying eh the vanguard rocket is good enough or that the V1 is good enough. 

Times change, things evolve. Who is to say that procedural wont become a thing? You cant. Why? Even as bad as the stock fairings are they are semi procedural as it is. The door has opened, we need but walk through.

agree or disagree at your call.

op time 23:32:30

[Snark]

13 hours ago, Randox said:

I just wanted to say that at least one person legitimately likes the stock fairings. I like the angular look and ability to make the shapes, and above all I like building the darned things. I play this game to build, so a part that would build itself for me is...sacrilege. Auto adjusting parts are as unkerbal as round edges

This pretty much sums up my own attitude about 'em-- I'm fairly fond of the current design, and strongly prefer it to procedural.  It has a couple of minor bugs in it, but that can happen with any implementation (even if they handed us procedural fairings tomorrow, they'd likely have some bugs that would take some time to get sorted out).

The concept of "better" is a lot more complex than one might think, since there are different axes upon which to measure:

• "Better" from the individual player viewpoint, as in "it's just superior, mkay?":  Completely subjective.  Some folks like one way, some folks like it the other.  Nobody's in any position to be able to say that one opinion is superior to the other.
• "Better" from the community viewpoint, as in "what the large majority of players want":  I'd buy an argument based on this, if it had the actual data necessary to back it up.  Except that we don't actually have any numbers as to what most KSP players would actually want.  We do have some very vocal threads in the forums with people who have very strong personal opinions in the matter, but that's not "data", that's just a vocal minority.
• "Better" from the development viewpoint, as in "how much of our finite, limited development budget can we spend on the feature?  How much time will it take to implement, test, and debug?":  remember that every feature is competing for attention.  Doing one thing means not doing something else.  If there's a development decision where are two alternatives (such as "manual fairings" versus "procedural fairings", for example), and if it happens to be the case that one of those is enormously cheaper to develop and test than the other, then that can present a strong motivation to do it that way-- it's a more efficient use of the development budget, and means more time can be spent on other features.

Of those three interpretations, the latter two make actual sense and are reasonably measurable.  The first one isn't something that it's possible to base any rational development decisions on, since it's entirely subjective and nobody can claim their opinion's more valid than someone else's.

The main thing I'd be interested to know is just how the bulk of KSP players feel about this-- i.e. would an overwhelming majority prefer one or the other, or is it a bunch of "meh".  A pity that we don't know the answer, and there's probably no way to know.  The only tools we have at our disposal are forum threads and polls, but since those are critically impacted by selection bias, they won't really give us any actual "answers".

Basically just a place for interesting and lively discussions, in which interested parties can say "well, I like it better this way".