Let pilots be able to land a ship.

[Fraston]

One word: Mechjeb.

Its a beautiful thing, just embrace its properties and not need squad to be yanked into this. The only thing I use it for is rendezvousing, because, for me anyway, it is pretty much damn near impossible for me do so. I have tried, I have tested. Docking is easy for me, orbit is easy, landing is like doing 2+2, and aerobraking isn’t difficult.

So, a mod can usually do what you want, with little to no fuss.

[Lapis]

11 minutes ago, Fraston said:

I use it for is rendezvousing

I used to do so, until it slowed my computer down. I think that ksp is not for everyone but the solution is not to make it too easy for the existing players bored, I think that the solution is for squad to embrace it. Putting on the steam and download page that if it's too hard to get to orbit then you should  install mechjeb.

 

Edited January 31, 2019 by lapis

[razark]

27 minutes ago, Fraston said:

One word: Mechjeb.

That's too many words.  It's like buying a hardware store because you need a screwdriver.

[Fraston]

33 minutes ago, razark said:

That's too many words.  It's like buying a hardware store because you need a screwdriver.

For the people in any realism thread, it seems to them like its buying a screwdriver when you really need a hardware store.

[mattinoz]

On 1/31/2019 at 11:33 AM, Fraston said:

One word: Mechjeb.

Its a beautiful thing, just embrace its properties and not need squad to be yanked into this. The only thing I use it for is rendezvousing, because, for me anyway, it is pretty much damn near impossible for me do so. I have tried, I have tested. Docking is easy for me, orbit is easy, landing is like doing 2+2, and aerobraking isn’t difficult.

So, a mod can usually do what you want, with little to no fuss.

MechJeb mechanical Jeb billed as all Jebs skills in an easy to attach box. But Jeb has no skills and is not allowed to have skills because people on the forums insist we use the box.

Irony much?

[Superfluous J]

12 minutes ago, mattinoz said:

MechJeb mechanical Jeb billed as all Jebs skills in an easy to attach box. But Jeb has no skills and is not allowed to have skills because people on the forums insist we use the box.

Irony much?

I'm not insisting you use MechJeb. I'm insisting they don't put it in the game.

[astronomical]

In my opinion, landing should be hard. Like in many adventure games, there is a final boss. Someone/something that is going to take a little more effort to beat. Landing is KSP's final boss for every mission. Taking that away is removing one of the most challenging and exciting parts of the game, watching your ship succeed or be blown to shreds.

[JadeOfMaar]

I don't like the idea of a stock one-button thing like landing a craft. I rather like manually operating my craft (except when my ship is really complicated and I'll want the likes of Throttle Controlled Avionics to sync all my engine thrust limits and therefore CoT to the CoM for landings) and I reject MechJeb because I get the impression that it's overhyped, and that a lot of its users depend on it too much and are powerless without it.  KSP will indeed start to look like Astroneer if stock automated launches/gravity turn, landing and docking do happen. 

1.6 does make pilots a little more relevant now. Probe cores by default now may never have all the navball vector holds (or unless specified they do have all the holds which would be dumb), and if "require commnet for signal" is turned on, even better. But I do agree that still, there's a unique and somewhat vital ability that pilots are really missing, like only engineers can fix stuff and only scientists can reset experiments like goo and Sci Jr.

Somewhat unrelated but answering a sentiment shown by the OP:

The idea of feeling cheated when you can't play the game without mods and the idea that using mods is cheating are both very wrong. The thing is, KSP is made to be modded. If you play a certain way and need a certain feature, find or make the mods for it. The upside to KSP being featureless on its own is that the burden is not on Squad alone to provide everything players need. And as often shown, modders tend to do better at providing these features than Squad. If Squad was more transparent about why they do or don't add features, there'd be less hostility between the camps here (Squad, the Purists, and the Mod makers  )

Example case:

• Squad: Okay. Let's be real. We're not bringing multiplayer. The way KSP plays cannot facilitate this feature.
• Mod makers: Okay, let's see how well we can compromise on that and make something.
• Squad: We wish you well. Go for it. o7
• Newbies: Stock multiplayer when?
• Mod makers: Stock multiplayer's not happening. Squad said so for this reason....
• Newbies: ok
• -thread locked-
• -everyone goes back to business-

[SlinkyMcman]

Isn't landing supposed to be the "fun" part?

[Orc]

6 hours ago, SlinkyMcman said:

Isn't landing supposed to be the "fun" part?

For a limited definition of fun. Confession time: I have NEVER managed to land anything on the runway at KSC without it turning into a fireworks display. The flat area around KSC is much better. Heck the not so flat desert to the south western edge of the same continent as KSC is easier to land on. 

I've botched a couple of landings following extremely long (atmospheric) flights because of sheer physical fatigue (me, personally, not the Kerbals). And you can't (AFAIK) save during in-atmosphere flights. The botched landings tend to lead to a total loss of the vehicle and usually the crew as well. Since these are typically long range science gathering missions, coupled with multiple contract missions on the opposite side of Kerban the flight is long, the science is valuable and the aircraft is expensive.

 

Maybe now that Kerbals have parachutes, and all Science onboard can be stored in a couple of the science containers (can't remember what they're called) I could build the plane so that I can jettison the Science for a safe parachute landing and then abandon the aircraft and let the pilot float down on his / her chute. 

 

Failing that, pack enough chutes on the actual aircraft to do a parachute landing. Cut the engines over KSC, circle a bit until your velocity is below 250 m/s and then pop open a dozen Radial mounted Mk16s. If that can't get you safely on the ground then your airframe was too big to start with.

 

Anyway, most of the time I'd rather be landing on Minmus. Or salvaging some abandoned part in Munar orbit.

 

Regards

Orc

[Gr@y]

On 1/29/2019 at 5:22 PM, Daveroski said:

The single hardest thing to learn in this game is landing.

What is difficult in killing vertical and horizontal speed about 100 meters above surface? Just face retrograde, switch navball to surface and burn. Physics do all the rest. I suxessfully landed on Mun before I've figured out what is TWR and SOI. In stock 1.4.1, without Delta-V counters. From the third attempt.

I vote for executing maneur nodes at skill 5.

Edited February 6, 2019 by Gr@y

[MiscelanousItem]

I have to agree with @Gr@y about this and even so the F9 button exists you know

[Daveroski]

4 hours ago, Gr@y said:

What is difficult in killing vertical and horizontal speed about 100 meters above surface? Just face retrograde, switch navball to surface and burn. Physics do all the rest. I suxessfully landed on Mun before I've figured out what is TWR and SOI. In stock 1.4.1, without Delta-V counters. From the third attempt.

I vote for executing maneur nodes at skill 5.

Nothing for me, or you apparently. I and probably many others nailed landing on our first attempt. As I mentioned earlier, I and probably many others can land from orbit onto an upturned docking port on a base on the ground. Some of us have even done it on Tylo. The largest proportion of KSP owners have never even been out of the Kerbin System.

This is NOT about what I can do or you can do. There are still a greater number of players who try several times (Using F9) and still are unable to achieve it. Most of those never even make it into these forums.

By making it possible for others there would be more players, more people in these forums where I dare say that some of those who can't would be lorded over by some of those who can. Some of us have better control over our bodies than others. I can belch and fart at will, does that mean that there is something wrong with those who can't? No. It certainly does not.

The reason that landing is harder is that in real time is that it is time limited and there is little room for error. Get it right or they die.
With docking one has all the time in the world. Once one has learned that a pssssst in one direction requires and equal pssssst in the opposite direction to cancel out the first pssssst. Docking becomes much easier. Docking can take as long as you need it to.
With intercepts, if you miss and go sailing past, no one has to die. It's recoverable. There is a chance one could get it wrong and go sailing into the atmosphere without enough fuel for a safety net. There is a chance that you aim on intercept could be such that one ends up ramming the target.

While I agree that having the pilot be able to perform node executions would make things easier for us, that is only because for us it's routine and for some of us a bit boring. But it wouldn't be as big a help to a noob without our 3D spacial awareness and motor skills as having the pilot be able to perform a basic landing at (or close to) a target location.

It's all about getting bums on seats.

 

D.

 

[harrisjosh2711]

I would like it if auto landing were only enabled within a certain distance of a player landed vessel, especially in career mode. I think a stock trajectories should be added. While it's possible to land near your vessels once you get the hang on non-atmospheric planets, it's darn near impossible, even for a veteran, to try and land something on target in atmosphere without a mod. One positive aspect I see in Auto pilot is that it would lead to a better understanding of how its done in the real world. For example, I've never been able to bring a ship accurately down on duna in a ballistic trajectory from interstellar space. Which is how every mars landing has taken place, correct? I need to bring extra fuel along, circularize, line up inclinations, then use the, god sent, trajectories mod.

Best not get your hopes up. We just now got a DV calculator. How in the world can anyone do anything without knowing their delta V?

[Superfluous J]

On 2/5/2019 at 2:08 AM, Orc said:

And you can't (AFAIK) save during in-atmosphere flights.

I have bad - or good - news for you. You can't save and exit the game, but you can quicksave, nosedive into a fiery crash, exit the game, come back in, and load your quicksave and be flying the plane. It's a bit safer to alt-f5 to make a named quicksave. Just don't alt-f4 by accident

 

[adsii1970]

Just now, 5thHorseman said:

I have bad - or good - news for you. You can't save and exit the game, but you can quicksave, nosedive into a fiery crash, exit the game, come back in, and load your quicksave and be flying the plane. It's a bit safer to alt-f5 to make a named quicksave. Just don't alt-f4 by accident

 

Alt-F5 to quick save and Alt-F9 to reload the last quick save. So you can practice your runway approach until you get it right...

[HebaruSan]

On 2/6/2019 at 6:00 AM, Daveroski said:

It's all about getting bums on seats.

The problem I see is that making it less difficult also devalues the payoff of completing it. If I click a "land" button and it just works... why would that put my bum in a seat? There's nothing to do on the surface other than take off again. The excitement is because it's hard and prone to explosions. All I've done is skip the playing of the game.

[adsii1970]

3 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

The problem I see is that making it less difficult also devalues the payoff of completing it. If I click a "land" button and it just works... why would that put my bum in a seat? There's nothing to do on the surface other than take off again. The excitement is because it's hard and prone to explosions. All I've done is skip the playing of the game.

I agree totally with this... especially explosions!

 

[Loskene]

I think if (higher ranked) pilots should have any function, seeing as unlike engineers and scientists most of their "real life" functions are things that the player is responsible for in-game (similar to how probe cores' "programming" is just the player telling them what to do), it should be to automate some of the micromanagement and busywork that players will be sick of doing over and over later in their careers. I believe, unlike others here, that is what most people use mechjeb for, rather than as a crutch to compensate for having to learn orbital mechanics. Efficient gravity turns, executing manoeuvres and landings, once you've done them once you can easily do them again, you don't need to "prove yourself" every single time, and they can quickly become more of a chore than a challenge in a late career game with many missions running. Though any functions that can be assigned to pilots can remain optional for those who like to do everything manually. If less skilled players want to use them (or any mechjeb-like functions) as instructional tools to help them learn how to do them manually, they can do that with all the level 5 pilots in sandbox mode before trying it in career. There's no reason something like this can't just be a helpful extra without "ruining" or "cheating" on the base game experience, and refusing that as a concept outright under the old adage of git gud is, frankly, elitist ignorance. I see no reason it can't be something appreciated by noobs and veterans alike for different reasons, without devolving into slippery slope arguments about the game playing itself. Though let's be honest, if the game were full realism, it would play itself, as pilots (aka the player in this scenario) don't do anything but read dials and push the appropriate buttons when ground control says go. Since KSP aims to strike the middle ground between realistic and engaging/fun, some concessions from both sides must always be considered.

Full mechjeb in the stock game? Nah, it has a lot of unnecessary functions with respect to the base game, and more granular control than most players will need on the average playthrough. Some of its more useful or basic functions being used to make pilots more than self-loading cargo, particularly if it's a late-game feature to tone down the micromanagement? Sure, why not, doesn't harm anyone.

I'd also like some stock implementation of kerbal alarm clock and transfer window planner, since the lack of these are probably half the reason new players never make it as far as Duna, but other than that the stock game as of 1.6 is reasonably well supplied with tools new players might need to get a handle on the basics. Some small additions like those mentioned here would help round out the experience and make it significantly less intimidating for people who've never made it further than the Mun unassisted, without having to go overboard and automate everything.

[Mountainjk]

The game is meant to be hard, MechJeb can do that anyway. If it's made easy for new players then they won't be able to fly a ship properly since all they have to do is press a button.

[HebaruSan]

7 hours ago, Loskene said:

once you've done them once you can easily do them again, you don't need to "prove yourself" every single time

That's quite a bit different from what's being proposed here, which is that new players would click a "land" button and likely never learn to do those things themselves.

[Loskene]

3 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

That's quite a bit different from what's being proposed here, which is that new players would click a "land" button and likely never learn to do those things themselves.

Well then isn't it a good thing I look a bit more deeply than a binary for/against the OP suggestion. Though to be honest, I don't really care whether or not anyone learns how to do it, it's a single player game and an extremely heavily moddable one at that. People can learn whatever they feel they need to learn, or as much as they want to learn for them to have fun. We do have to address the fact a lot of players, more than those of us who "get it" care to admit, quit playing this game once they find it too hard to scale the learning cliff. I think my suggestions address that as well as possible, without going too far in the handholding direction. A game should have difficulty settings that meaningfully reflect different approaches to learning the game, and I don't think KSP does right now. The only thing the difficulty settings change is costs/rewards and revert/kerbal death. Even when at their most lenient none of these things actually make the game any easier for someone who doesn't know how orbits work. Being able to dip into sandbox mode, watch the process being done properly by a max ranked pilot, and saying "oh so THAT'S how you're meant to do it", will do a lot more to help these players and keep them engaged than anything else we have going for us right now. That's what I used mechjeb (and youtube) for when I found myself stuck trying to figure something out. The assumption that players are lazy and only use these tools to avoid learning, rather than being excited by being shown how to do it by themselves, says more about the proverbial speaker than the player to me. This isn't about giving a man a fish, even if it may appear so from some angles, this is about teaching him to fish.

If the original suggestions had flaws, well that's the point of this discussion, to come to a meaningful middle ground we can agree on before Squad decide what to add.

[Tyko]

15 minutes ago, Loskene said:

Being able to dip into sandbox mode, watch the process being done properly by a max ranked pilot, and saying "oh so THAT'S how you're meant to do it", will do a lot more to help these players and keep them engaged than anything else we have going for us right now.

Or a well-written tutorial...isn't that what tutorial are for? Instead of asking Squad to write entirely new complex automation systems for the game, how about they pay someone to spend a week developing a few decent tutorials?

[Loskene]

16 minutes ago, Tyko said:

Or a well-written tutorial...isn't that what tutorial are for? Instead of asking Squad to write entirely new complex automation systems for the game, how about they pay someone to spend a week developing a few decent tutorials?

Because nobody plays the tutorials. People learn by pushing buttons and seeing what they do. In fact I was only looking at the steam page for the game a short while ago and more than one review was complaining about the paragraphs upon paragraphs of tutorials they don't actually learn anything from. Besides, a decent tutorial will take longer to implement than asking the mechjeb devs to integrate some of their code into the base game, if they wanted to be cheap about it. This game has staked its reputation as a useful tool for teaching people an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics not by telling them how it works, as many physics students who've played the game will tell you, but by letting them play around and seeing how it works for themselves.

Plus, how the hell is a tutorial meant to help me as a late game player who already knows all the basics and just wants someone to do the 517th bloody manoeuvre node by themselves for once. I have 12 other missions to land around that 2.6m/s correction burn.

Would that make the game too "easy"? Well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. I'd go and ask all the noobs what they thought, but they quit playing 3.5 years ago.

[Tonka Crash]

44 minutes ago, Tyko said:

Or a well-written tutorial...isn't that what tutorial are for? Instead of asking Squad to write entirely new complex automation systems for the game, how about they pay someone to spend a week developing a few decent tutorials?

There are tutorials already built in that cover all phases of a mission to the Mun and back. But I doubt many of the newbies that would depend on a Land Button would actually make it through the tutorials either through laziness or just being too stupid to realize the tutorials are there. I remember going through several of them when I first got KSP less than a year ago even though I have a degree in aerospace engineering and have understood the basics of orbital dynamics since I was about 10. 

All games expect a minimum level of proficiency for a player to be successful be it physical dexterity or mental acuity. Squad shouldn't need to aim at the least capable players, just point out that if you need help there's probably a mod for that and include a tutorial built into the game on how to install mods for those incapable of using Google or a forum search and let them install MechJeb and be done with it. 

I'm 100% against Squad adding any MechJeb functions beyond the SAS modes currently implemented. Mainly because this will be an area that: 

1. Autopilots are very difficult to make 100% reliable for the general case 
2. It probably won't work as well as MechJeb. 
3. Bug fixes are few and far between from Squad and these would tend to be buggy.
4. Everyone will argue about what should be included.
5. It would never replace MechJeb

Edited February 8, 2019 by Tonka Crash