MH/1.4: Close...but a miss

[Foxster]

There's obviously a lot of excellent work that went into MH but I consider it a failure. Here's why I think this...

The whole challenge system was based on an incorrect assumption: That many players wanted to spend time a lot of time making challenges and that other players wanted to play these challenges. 

It's true that there was a small and regular group of players taking part in the written challenges that players set on this forum, but this is a small percentage of the playerbase. Most other players seemingly engaged in their career game, or building SSTOs, or designing aircraft, or planning a sandbox mission to Eve and back. I see little sign of this changing with the arrival of MH; people are happily continuing doing the same as before rather than using the MH challenge system, just being somewhat fed-up with the bugs introduced and the mods outdated. 

What would have been better is integration with the main game. The challenge system would have made an excellent contract design tool, especially with the addition of allowing contracts to be completed in sandbox and science modes. This would have made the functionality of interest to a much wider audience. The ability to deploy a launchsite on other bodies in sandbox and late career games would have been appreciated by many too. 

To pick challenges as the thing to give KSP players just seems odd. There has been many enhancement suggestions over the years but never this. For a much simpler DLC, another bunch of planets and the parts to reach them would have been easy to do and appreciated by many. A bigger challenge, but something that would have been very well received, would have been the much-asked-for multiplayer mode of some kind.

Then there are the new parts: Another miss. There is nothing new or particulalrly useful in the parts.

The engines are meh and don't fill any new niche, like an expansion to the groups of solid, LF, LF+O, nuke and ion. More nuke and ion engines would have been enjoyed by many.  

Many of the new and altered parts are buggy, with off-centre thrust or mass, broken drag properties, poor visuals, etc.

The new capsules are meh too. The LEM-alike capsule is very un-Kerbal and should have been implemented as a set of parts. The KV capsules look half-finished and have little practical use. 

The new tanks are just more tanks but lacking the adapters that the other sizes have. It is now very difficult to tell the tank diameter and volume in the parts list because all the pictures are similar. Without reading the description (and even then the diameter is not stated) it's not possible to tell from the parts list whether a tall tank is 360, 810, 2880 or 23040 units of LF. 

So, considering all the effort that went into launching KSP into the DLC world, MH/1.4 delivered very little that has been well received. A missed opportunity. 

Edited April 6, 2018 by Foxster

[Hurzelgnurk]

2 hours ago, Foxster said:

Then there are the new parts: Another miss. There is nothing new or particulalrly useful in the parts.

What have the romans Squad ever done for us?! Except the new panels, structural tubes, the 1.875meter parts, capsules (for making ballgames), Thrustplates and some nice rover wheels, but other than that nothing usable.

2 hours ago, Foxster said:

More nuke and ion engines would have been enjoyed by many.

Nuclear engines by itself are a far stretch, afaik every existing one worked only on testbeds. Ion engines without some kind of autopilot are not as usable as they are in reality. I wouldnt have enjoyed that at all. Personal parachutes or another nerva is not a question for me.

2 hours ago, Foxster said:

The new capsules are meh too. The LEM-alike capsule is very un-Kerbal and should have been implemented as a set of parts. The KV capsules look half-finished and have little practical use. 

What do you expect from capsules, a nice little warp drive? The MEM is clearly for flavor as are the Vostok capsules. Where they look half finished I dont get, at all. And yeah the MEM CoM is wierd.

 

I can stronlgy agree that there are several bugs that I should have been corrected, especially with 1.4.2 which is an broken  unnecessary release. I personally like the mission builder concept, there are some nice community missions that were a lot of fun, the stock ones... meh. All in all I don't regret buying it, with time there will be fixes for the problems and if you want something special pretty I'm sure there is a mod for that or at least opportunitys to make new ones. As for multiplay this has been discussed to death and I see no possibility to integrate that, Darkmultiplay doesn't do the trick for me at least.

[KerikBalm]

IMO, the best part about the expansion is the tankbutt switching on some parts, and the engine plate parts. Many of the new parts seem to have questionable purpose or balance, IMP the wolfhound specifically is way OPd.

The ability to place a launchpad on any body with a solid surface is a nice feature, but IMO its a missed opportunity again, because this would go great in sandbox. It would also be amazing if they gave you the ability to construct additional launch sites on Kerbin in career mode.

There are many niches that the stock game leaves unfilled, and I think they can compete with mods (I used to be of a different opinion), due to the desire of the player base craft to remain stock to a certain degree so that designs are shareable and comparable. I also notice that Arma3 has some of its DLC that overlaps with mod content, but they still seem to succeed with the DLC (although multiplayer is a major factor here. When premium DLC vehicles are released, everyone can play on servers with DLC vehicles/weapons, people that don't own the DLC just can't use the DLC content, they can still fight against it/play alongside teammates who have it, and the DLC content is not OP and the DLC does not lead to a pay to win scenario)

[ARS]

On 06/04/2018 at 3:27 PM, Foxster said:

The whole challenge system was based on an incorrect assumption: That many players wanted to spend time a lot of time making challenges and that other players wanted to play these challenges. 

I'll just say meh to the challenge system. The charm of KSP is "construction is awesome", not presented with challenge. 3 years playing KSP and I still enjoy doing a lot of stuff with much more sense of achievement than "challenge", which is basically glorified contract. IMO, they should presented it as contract maker tool or better yet, do reverse contract, you ask agencies to do stuff for science, funds or reps (it's not 100 percent successful, to prevent being gamebreaking)

On 06/04/2018 at 3:27 PM, Foxster said:

The ability to deploy a launchsite on other bodies in sandbox and late career games would have been appreciated by many too. 

I would like to agree with you

On 06/04/2018 at 3:27 PM, Foxster said:

What would have been better is integration with the main game

Integrate many siple, yet extremely useful mods, such as Dv readout, we need that stock

On 06/04/2018 at 3:27 PM, Foxster said:

The engines are meh and don't fill any new niche, like an expansion to the groups of solid, LF, LF+O, nuke and ion. More nuke and ion engines would have been enjoyed by many.  

We need at least another version of nuke, ion, and hybrid engine. Stock version doesn't seem to offer much, which makes a problem when trying to specialize the ship for specific mission profile, which leads to us resorting to mods. Wolfhound is ridiculously broken

On 06/04/2018 at 3:27 PM, Foxster said:

The new capsules are meh too. The LEM-alike capsule is very un-Kerbal and should have been implemented as a set of parts. The KV capsules look half-finished and have little practical use. 

The only parts that I appreciated is vostok capsule, nothing more. Since it's very rare yo find KSP mod that contains spherical capsule with IVA. The last that I saw having IVA is HomeGrown Rocket, which has been discontinued

On 06/04/2018 at 3:27 PM, Foxster said:

The new tanks are just more tanks

 You know what I want to see? A type of fuel tank that no one ever thought? Segmented SRB. Basically, separate the SRBs, so it becomes a solid rocket motor and bunch of solid fuel blocks. Makes it easier to build properly-sized SRBs and stacking more solid fuel blocks leads to longer burn time (still being unstoppable once being lit, no thrust control in-flight, and cannot be asparagus-staged)

[AlonzoTG]

I'm feeling lots of love for those thrust plates, but all other points in the OP stand. 

[Foxster]

1 hour ago, AlonzoTG said:

I'm feeling lots of love for those thrust plates, but all other points in the OP stand. 

I must be missing something...what's the attraction of the thrust plates?

[AlonzoTG]

For one thing they don't need a decoupler on the bottom so therefore you can be obnoxious and put a reaction wheel below the stage, and then adjust the length to clip the upper stage engines into the wheel, which is legal because the wheel is hollow on the inside. Also, it opens up many hundreds of new engine configurations in stock play.... 

[Aegolius13]

1 hour ago, Foxster said:

I must be missing something...what's the attraction of the thrust plates?

They provide an easy, good-looking and aerodynamically-sound way of using engine clusters, or engines with smaller form factors than your tank.  Yeah, you could probably do the same things with fairings and girders and whatnot, but the plates just make it so much cleaner.

[KerikBalm]

Thrust plates allow for engine clusters without inflating part count - like using cubic octo struts- and  the associated drag penalty.

It also allows for engine clusters to be placed as 2nd and 3rd stages, without clunky workarounds like upside down payload fairings (which also add to part count, which is already a problem with using engine clusters).

They aren't super amazing, but they are a nice feature that makes doing engine clusters a much more "pleasant" experience.

I still want to be able to use the woomerang and island airfield sites in career.

I would have liked a "contract pack" that integrates with career mode, where the contract pact is essentially a set of missions recreating historical programs (Sputnik, Gemini, Apollo, etc), and unlocking the parts the way experimental parts are temporarily unlocked already.

 

[Bill Phil]

Thrust plates need to be stock. 

They definitely didn't hit the mark with MH. Integration with career mode would've been amazing, although definitely difficult. 

[AlonzoTG]

On 4/7/2018 at 4:33 PM, KerikBalm said:

I still want to be able to use the woomerang and island airfield sites in career.

Check the difficulty settings, yeah it's annoying....

[cw193]

On 4/7/2018 at 9:36 PM, Bill Phil said:

Thrust plates need to be stock. 

Agreed. Filed feedback: https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/18600

[Wjolcz]

What I think would fix some of this is an in-game online challenge browser and Mission Designer for career mode. With simplified UI, and simplified logic. Just stick together a bunch of experiments/requirements to a "mother" (defining which planetary body you have to visit) node, pick how much and of what (rep/money/science) you want to get, go do it.

Seriously. The random mission generator is nauseating to deal with. Get rid of it. Put the DLC system into its place instead. Or just add a simplified version. It could probably use the same UI too.

Edited April 18, 2018 by Wjolcz