Anyone have a summary of the new parts and how they might affect gameplay?

[Xavven]

Hey, everyone! I've watched a few videos on the MH expansion to see what new parts I'd be getting, so I have a general idea but I'd like more details. (I'm in the middle of a non-expansion career so I'm holding off on purchasing for a few weeks.) It looks like the KSP wiki hasn't been updated with new parts and their respective stats, so does anyone have that info handy? Specifically, I'm wondering how the new parts might affect career mode.

For example:

• 5m parts should make heavy launches a bit easier to design.
• The Kodiak seems kind of like a Reliant equivalent, so I don't think it will affect the game at all aside from historical accuracy.
• The Bobcat has ~400 kN of thrust, filling the gap between the Reliant (240 kN) and the Vector (1000 kN) or Skipper (650 kN). This seems like a welcome addition.
• The Cheetah looks like it's meant to be half of a Poodle, with 345 Isp and 125 kN thrust, compared to the Poodle's 350 Isp and 250 kN thrust. Or you could look at it as two Terriers.
• The Skiff looks like it's half a Skipper, at 300 kN thrust and 265-330 Isp. On the Saturn V, it was used for two sustainer stages. I use the Skipper as a sustainer stage but sometimes it's too much engine, but a Poodle isn't appropriate yet due to atmospheric pressure, so this fills a gap I think.
• The Mastodon (F1 analog) looks great for heavy lifters. How does clustering these compare to clustering Vectors? It seems to have ~30% more thrust, but if it's chunkier, I wonder if clustering more Vectors is better.
• The Wolfhound has 412 Isp and a bit more thrust than a poodle, making it a very attractive transfer stage engine for interplanetary missions. Actually, of all the parts, I think this one is the game-changer. I'm doing some Moho missions and this could help me, what with my high dV requirements (and LV-Ns are expensive).
• The Mk2 command pod (Gemini analog) looks ideal for rescuing stranded Kerbals in orbit in early game.
• Engine plates look great for attaching multiple small engines to a big tank. In the base game, you can still technically achieve this using cubic octagonal struts, but the engine plate seems way less hacked-together.
• I don't think the new service bays do anything for me.

What else is there? Any thoughts on their effect on gameplay?

[Aegolius13]

I'm working on a write-up of the new engines; should be done soon.   Generally agree with what you wrote.  A few other notes:

The Skiff has ridiculous TWR.  This makes it excellent as a sustainer, and probably viable as a launch engine.  

The Bobcat has almost top tier ASL ISP which makes it one of the best launch engine choices.   

I find the Mastodon disappointing.  A slightly scaled down Mainsail, less efficient,  but almost TWICE as expensive?  

The Cub is good for more than just attitude control.   It's like two Sparks per engine, and much more efficient than the other radial options.   They seem to work great in landers.

 

Non-engine observation:  the Soviet style radial fuel tanks are nice for boosters, and avoid the need for nose cones. 

[Snark]

11 hours ago, Xavven said:

Engine plates look great for attaching multiple small engines to a big tank. In the base game, you can still technically achieve this using cubic octagonal struts, but the engine plate seems way less hacked-together.

They also serve as a very convenient interstage part.  If you want multiple engines on the bottom of an upper stage... without an engine plate, to what do you couple the stage below it?

Yes, I think it's technically possible to hack together something with a stack decoupler and an upside-down interstage fairing, but it's clunky and awkward and ugly.  The engine plates are a godsend for that, I'm really really glad they added them to the game.

34 minutes ago, Aegolius13 said:

Non-engine observation:  the Soviet style radial fuel tanks are nice for boosters, and avoid the need for nose cones.

^ This.  Those things have incredibly low drag, I absolutely love those tanks, and the built-in sepratrons make them very easy to work with.  I used to be a "lift off the pad mostly on SRBs" kinda guy, but now I'm using these in just about all my designs.  Asparagus just got fun again.    These and the engine plates are my new favorite parts, I think.

 

I notice that nobody has mentioned the new rover wheels, which I like.  A lot.  Aside from being adorable (which they are), they give a nice option for very-small rovers (they're super lightweight), and they're retractable which makes them easier to pack into a fairing or cargo bay for launch.

 

Also, the inflatable airlocks have some interesting possibilities for gameplay:

• As space station components.  An easy, lightweight, launchable solution for putting a small docking port on the station that sticks out from the main body and is therefore easier for incoming ships to dock to.
• As a lightweight alternative for escape pods and what-not.  Heat-resistant, holds a kerbal safely, compact at launch, only 0.1 ton.
• As a handy alternative to very tall ladder assemblies.  You've just landed your huge, tall Eve lander on the surface, with your kerbal in the command pod perched dozens of meters above the surface... how does he get down there to plant a flag?  You can set up a whole bunch of ladders... or, now, just have an inflatable airlock stuck to the bottom of one of your radial boosters, angled down so that the end is about at ground level when it's inflated.  Inflate it, transfer the kerbal to it, done.

[LoSBoL]

+1 on those engine plates, they are really helping me out when building without tedious workarounds, they shroud perfectly and serve as a decoupler as well. Only KER needs an update to calculate D/V, I guess KER also sees the engine mounting plates as decouplers, with the engines on the wrong side of them.

I also like the structural tubes, they are perfect for stuffing all kinds of stuff in them, so you can get nice and clean rockets.

[klesh]

5 hours ago, Snark said:

Those things have incredibly low drag, I absolutely love those tanks, and the built-in sepratrons make them very easy to work with.  I used to be a "lift off the pad mostly on SRBs" kinda guy, but now I'm using these in just about all my designs. 

 

As an aside, are you fellas able to get them to separate in a straight fashion, such that they make a nice, pretty Korolev cross?  Mine seem to twist and corkscrew when they separate, though it might be due to my flight profile.

[Snark]

30 minutes ago, klesh said:

As an aside, are you fellas able to get them to separate in a straight fashion, such that they make a nice, pretty Korolev cross?

Answer is "I couldn't possibly care less about what happens to the ejected part, as long as it doesn't smash into the ship after ejecting." 

So the answer for me is "no", simply because I've never bothered to look.

[DerekL1963]

On the structural cylinders, there's a seperate thread detailing their usage.  I find them very useful.
 

 

[Aegolius13]

10 hours ago, Aegolius13 said:

I'm working on a write-up of the new engines; should be done soon. 

Aforementioned write-up now posted at:

 

 

[Xavven]

11 hours ago, Snark said:

They also serve as a very convenient interstage part.  If you want multiple engines on the bottom of an upper stage... without an engine plate, to what do you couple the stage below it?

Yes, I think it's technically possible to hack together something with a stack decoupler and an upside-down interstage fairing, but it's clunky and awkward and ugly.  The engine plates are a godsend for that, I'm really really glad they added them to the game.

 

Yeah, the thrust plate looks like a much more elegant solution. I think I make my "thrust plates" in the base game in a different way than you, though. I put a small decoupler below the central engine and the interstage fairing below it, not upside down. It doesn't work at all for configurations that don't have a center engine, though, such as 2 side-by-side, or 4 in a square, etc. But in case this is helpful to anyone, I'll post some screenshots:

 

https://imgur.com/a/QnV5E

Edited March 20, 2018 by Xavven

[cw193]

On 3/19/2018 at 10:17 AM, Snark said:

The engine plates are a godsend for that, I'm really really glad they added them to the game.

Agreed! Filed feedback asking for them to be moved to the base game since they enable so much and aren't really specific to historic spaceflight: https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/18600

[Snark]

16 hours ago, cw193 said:

Filed feedback asking for them to be moved to the base game since they enable so much and aren't really specific to historic spaceflight

Sure, but I'd be astonished if they did this.  After all, you could say the same thing about all the 1.875m parts.

The thing is... They could have put all this stuff into the stock game and given it away to everyone for free, if they wanted to.  However, they didn't-- they deliberately put it into a separate expansion pack that costs money.  I assume that's for business reasons, because they're a company and they need to sell stuff in order to make money.

Every part that they take out of Making History and put into the base game instead represents an investment of expensive engineer time that they then give away for free instead of selling to generate income.  And is also one less reason for someone to buy the expansion pack.

Think about it for a moment.  Obviously, if you bought Making History, you wouldn't need to request this, right?  Because then you'd have it anyway.  So the only reason for you to want these parts in the stock game is so that you don't have to buy Making History.

So essentially you're saying to them, "Hi, you know this stuff you've been spending all this money to develop because you wanted to sell it?  Well, I'd like it if you could just give it to me for free, instead."  Seems to me that that would... um... not be a super persuasive argument to them. 

I don't work for Squad and therefore am not privy to their business decisions, of course, but I have worked in the software biz for a very long time and therefore have a reasonable familiarity with how things work in general.  "Companies sell stuff for money."

I'm not saying that you're making an unreasonable suggestion-- you've certainly identified why a player would want this.  But what would Squad's reason be, here?

I think part of the problem is that those of us who have been getting thousands of hours of entertainment, for years, out of a game we purchased for the cost of a couple of movie tickets, while Squad keeps giving us new releases and new features at no additional cost... well, I've certainly enjoyed the ride, but I think we may have gotten a bit "spoiled" by this.  The ride couldn't go on forever-- it costs money to run a business, and they can't keep operating unless they start charging people for stuff.

So, "Take this thing you're trying to sell and give it to me for free instead" isn't a persuasive argument.  It's simply a non-starter.

What would be more a persuasive argument would be "Please add <more nifty things> to this thing you're trying to sell me, so I'm more likely to buy it."  In other words... if you came up with feedback of additional stuff you'd like to see in Making History, i.e. stuff that would bring you to the "Oh, okay, I guess I'll buy it, then" point... well, that is the kind of thing that tends to get a company's attention, in my experience.

They've got no business reason to give you additional free stuff.  But they do have excellent business reasons to persuade you to buy the thing they're trying to sell.

[cw193]

12 hours ago, Snark said:

Sure, but I'd be astonished if they did this.  After all, you could say the same thing about all the 1.875m parts.

The thing is... They could have put all this stuff into the stock game and given it away to everyone for free, if they wanted to.  However, they didn't-- they deliberately put it into a separate expansion pack that costs money.  I assume that's for business reasons, because they're a company and they need to sell stuff in order to make money.

Every part that they take out of Making History and put into the base game instead represents an investment of expensive engineer time that they then give away for free instead of selling to generate income.  And is also one less reason for someone to buy the expansion pack.

Think about it for a moment.  Obviously, if you bought Making History, you wouldn't need to request this, right?  Because then you'd have it anyway.  So the only reason for you to want these parts in the stock game is so that you don't have to buy Making History.

So essentially you're saying to them, "Hi, you know this stuff you've been spending all this money to develop because you wanted to sell it?  Well, I'd like it if you could just give it to me for free, instead."  Seems to me that that would... um... not be a super persuasive argument to them. 

I don't work for Squad and therefore am not privy to their business decisions, of course, but I have worked in the software biz for a very long time and therefore have a reasonable familiarity with how things work in general.  "Companies sell stuff for money."

I'm not saying that you're making an unreasonable suggestion-- you've certainly identified why a player would want this.  But what would Squad's reason be, here?

I think part of the problem is that those of us who have been getting thousands of hours of entertainment, for years, out of a game we purchased for the cost of a couple of movie tickets, while Squad keeps giving us new releases and new features at no additional cost... well, I've certainly enjoyed the ride, but I think we may have gotten a bit "spoiled" by this.  The ride couldn't go on forever-- it costs money to run a business, and they can't keep operating unless they start charging people for stuff.

So, "Take this thing you're trying to sell and give it to me for free instead" isn't a persuasive argument.  It's simply a non-starter.

What would be more a persuasive argument would be "Please add <more nifty things> to this thing you're trying to sell me, so I'm more likely to buy it."  In other words... if you came up with feedback of additional stuff you'd like to see in Making History, i.e. stuff that would bring you to the "Oh, okay, I guess I'll buy it, then" point... well, that is the kind of thing that tends to get a company's attention, in my experience.

They've got no business reason to give you additional free stuff.  But they do have excellent business reasons to persuade you to buy the thing they're trying to sell.

All good points -- I was definitely one of the ones who bought the expansion on the day it came out :-)

I think the 1.875m parts are different, though -- mods can already make their own 1.875m parts. My point was (and I'm not a mod author so I may be mistaken) that the new engine plates seem to function beyond what's possible for a mod in the base game. Or maybe it's *possible*, but making it *standard* simplifies mod code, enables sharing, and encourages mods to extend the system even further in new ways. Take the new variant system -- it was already possible (I think) to accomplish similar part (or at least texture) switching through mods, but by standardizing a variant system in the base game and exposing it to mods, people can build from there to create even more amazing mods without having to code and maintain that themselves.

So yeah, I definitely have no qualms paying $15 extra for all the time KSP has given me -- I was just thinking aloud about the difference between isolated changes (like new 1.875m parts) that make sense for a DLC, and lower-level, fundamental changes (like the variant system) that make sense to expose in the base game because of the community effects, then still make specific use of them in the DLC. I could see the engine plates going either way.

[Snark]

14 hours ago, cw193 said:

the new engine plates seem to function beyond what's possible for a mod in the base game.

No, I'm pretty sure a mod could do this.  As far as I can tell, basically the only thing in Making History that wouldn't really work as a mod is the mission builder and mission play.  Everything else can be done as a mod, because basically Making History is a mod, for most practical purposes.

14 hours ago, cw193 said:

but making it *standard* simplifies mod code, enables sharing, and encourages mods to extend the system even further in new ways

Exactly!  That's why they made it standard.  By putting it in the official Making History expansion, rather than leaving it up to a modder somewhere.

So it's "standard", and easy to write mods against, and everyone can have it.

As long as they pony up $15.

Which, from a business' point of view, is the whole point.

14 hours ago, cw193 said:

• Take the new variant system -- it was already possible (I think) to accomplish similar part (or at least texture) switching through mods

Yep.  I believe Firespitter was the go-to mod of choice for that.

14 hours ago, cw193 said:

by standardizing a variant system in the base game and exposing it to mods, people can build from there to create even more amazing mods without having to code and maintain that themselves.

You're mixing apples and oranges.

Standardizing it so that it's part of an official Squad released product is the relevant thing for the point you're making here.

Whether it happens to be in Making History or in the stock game... is completely irrelevant.  No matter which one it's in, people can build on it and use it.

From a business' point of view... they'd want to put everything new in the paid DLC, and not in the stock game.  Because if there's a thing that technically could go in either place, then all they accomplish by putting it in the stock game is taking away a reason for people to buy the DLC.  And why on earth would they do that?

I can think of only a few reasons why a rational company would put stuff in the base game at this point:

1. Technical necessity.  Let's say there's a cool new feature (e.g. "variant parts") that they want to make heavy use of in the new expansion... but it runs into a wall because making it work requires changing some aspect of the core game that the mod depends upon.  Well then... solve that by putting that feature into the core game, specifically because it enables content in the mod.  My guess is that this is why the variant part-switching is in the base game:  "part" is a base KSP concept, and they're tinkering with that, so I'm guessing it was technically needed in order to make the new Making History parts work as desired.
2. Synergy with DLC.  Okay, so, let's say that they added the variant functionality itself to the stock game because they had to, so that they could enable all the nifty variant parts they wanted in Making History.  Why, then, did they take the trouble to offer Rockomax variants in the stock game?  Well... my guess would be, the new Making History parts have a fairly different look-and-feel to the old stock parts, so by doing this, they let players build ships that look nicer when they put the Rockomax parts together with the new MH parts.  So, it was a fairly easy bone to throw to the stock players, and also made MH more attractive.  At least, that's my take on it.
3. Simple feel-good pandering.  Nothing wrong with spending a little bit of time and effort to appeal to your fan base and make people happy.    This is necessarily pretty limited, since it doesn't directly generate any revenue, but a little can go a long way.  The Rockomax reskins kinda fit here (though they also help leverage MH's look-and-feel).  About the only things I can think of in KSP 1.4 that feels like pure gimme is the EVA parachutes and the Mk 1-3 command pod.

My take on what you're asking for, here, is that you'd like to see a bit more of #3.    However... like I said, that generally tends to be really limited.  They need to give people reasons to shell out $15 for the expansion, and the engine plates are really cool and useful and don't depend on making any changes to the core game, so that's a perfect reason to put them in the DLC instead of stock.

15 hours ago, cw193 said:

lower-level, fundamental changes (like the variant system) that make sense to expose in the base game because of the community effects

Pretty sure that this was for technical reasons 'coz it had to be that way in this case.

There's nothing special in the base game about "community effects".  The community can benefit from Making History, too.  As long as the community shells out $15 a pop, thus giving T2 / Squad a reason to keep making shiny kerbal stuff for us.

If the community's not willing or able to do that... well then, that's when KSP closes up shop and they turn out the lights and no more shiny kerbal toys for us.  Because why would they?

[cw193]

Well said :-)

[banderling]