Signal delay?

[Drakenred65]

The basic reality is.
 

1 coms delay is a thing.  It’s not a fun thing. Adding coms delay to anything remote controlled really is not that Much  fun, and often seems to be agrivating for the sake of frustrating people.
 

2 Kerbals are far more amusing than probes and sounding rockets unless you have a payload that’s interesting.  And even then that payload + Kerbal = interesting and amusing.

 

3 talking about Signal delay, KSP 2 is launching .... when? 
it’s already overdue. 
in fact they recently admitted its being pushed back again. And even then it’s not going to feature anything not in KSP 1 apart from some of the more likely Sci Fi  interstellar concepts, multiplayer,  and some Exoplanets in Kerbols local stellar cluster.

 

so how much longer do you want Them to go past Fall/winter 2022/23? 

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

Massive, game-altering mechanics should be in stock, whether people feel like playing with them or not.

Some things cannot just be "make it an option".

Right now the core of KSP is "build and fly cool rockets", even as a difficulty option something like Signal Delay changes completely that core, flying things manually is downgraded from being a prevalent game mechanic down to being an option and since this game seems to be designed around progression a lot more than KSP1 it would ruin the game for everyone not using it.

If they can implement signal delay while also completely ignoring its existence while designing and balancing the rest of the game I'm ok with it being in the advanced options.

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

You clearly read my piece about crewed telerobotic missions since you excluded it from the rest of your post. 

"Commnet already does that", done.

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

Nowhere do I say "instead." Good luck putting boots on Venus.

Eve missions are some of the most fun in vanilla KSP, both manned and unmanned, but I'm ready to loose the ability to set foot on the surface if they give me cloud bases and stations (prop plane paradise).

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

So now a one-way mission becomes two-way

Killing any and all interesting probe designs and unmanned exploration, because on one hand you just can't do anything even remotely interesting with a probe and signal delay and on the other you can't just send a crew and with every single probe you want to land and move on a surface and if you do at that point you can just pack a lander instead of a probe and send a Kerbal down.

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

Suggesting that the devs should implement signal delay that only goes one way instead of signal delay is just creating an unnecessarily contrived solution.

I'm not suggesting they should, I don't want it in the game at all, but if they do it only for science and data recovery at least they make official that you're not playing as a guy at the KSC but as the probe/rocket own control systems and that's why you manually control rockets and remote probes.

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

If you build your CommNet probes so that they only have power on the day side then they won't relay your signal when they're on the night side. If you've set up some high-eccentricity orbits for your relays (like Molniya and orbits in real life) then they're going be spending a lot of time in darkness for part of the year. Your signal delay could be significantly increased if you haven't planned your constellations properly and the signal needs to reroute to avoid hibernating satellites.

Just like you've said, Commnet already provides all of that, nothing here is enhanced by signal delay.

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

I don't think being forced to plan your maneuvers in advance, and in a way that's simple enough to be done with signal delay, is removing flying.

If orbital flying is everything you ever do with probes.

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

It's addition through subtraction- it's a completely different way of flying and a new set of challenges for players to figure out. In the example with early interplanetary probes without onboard pilot functions, you might fly an entire extra mission to test passive reentry around Kerbin.  Even if it is "removing flying"- signal delay adds more than enough gameplay in the planning stage to compensate.

It doesn't add anything that isn't already there if you set commnet right.

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

It's addition through subtraction- it's a completely different way of flying and a new set of challenges for players to figure out. In the example with early interplanetary probes without onboard pilot functions, you might fly an entire extra mission to test passive reentry around Kerbin.  Even if it is "removing flying"- signal delay adds more than enough gameplay in the planning stage to compensate.

Let's talk about reentry and pinpoint landing. With signal delay you either do it always with a crew on site (goodbye "The Martian" styled missions, with the pre-supplies coming in years before any crew) or you have to code your own landing automation system (goodbye any player that doesn't want to code complex systems for a game) or having the game automatically land things for you (and that's a subtraction that lacks the addition part).

 

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

I don't know about you, but a big chunk of my enjoyment of this game- perhaps even the majority- is in the mission planning and building phase. As I explained, signal delay adds a lot to this phase that gets little attention without its presence. 

Let's talk about my last Eve program, it was structured as follows:

• A couple of Dragonfly flying probes, small foldable planes driven by elettric propellers, the objective was testing atmospheric flight on Eve and find a suitable landing spot. 
• A bigger Firefly probe, basically a rocket with plane and probe parts strapped onto it, land, scan some rocks with the robotic arm, repeat it for multiple locations/biomes and then fly as high as possible before the rocket lights on and detaches the plane parts to go back to orbit where the samples are recovered by another return probe.  The objective was testing the Eve return via air-launched rockets.
• A proper manned mission which was composed of an Habitat, a Firefly return rocketplane (landed unmanned), a Dragonfly Rider probe (same as above but with an external seat), a reentry capsule for the Kerbal (simpler and safer on reentry than the Firefly plane), a backup Firefly plane in orbit and a mothership to bring the Kerbal to Eve and then back to Kerbin.

All of that required an insane amount of designing and planning, more than half of the time I spent on this program was designing around the difficult Eve reentry and the need to land multiple crafts relatively close to each other (the mission had a 100 km range thanks to the flying probes acting as a taxi, but still it's a relatively small target to hit from orbit).

I definitely spent most of the time in planning and building the required crafts (and a dozen other to test single portions of a craft like the wing folding mechanism or the propeller engines that needed in flight testing), what would add signal delay to this complex mission?

More design and test? Some crazy design challenges? Nope and nope. Just 3 more round trips for the interplanetary mothership and the subsequent refueling missions, a chore. Maybe, 2 or 3 low tech relays launched from the mothership to cover the opposite side of the orbit, but I hardly consider relay spamming an engaging gameplay mechanic.

It just limits your options without adding any gameplay that wasn't already added by commnet.

8 hours ago, Jodo42 said:

It should be an option, in stock. It doesn't need to release with the game. It could be a later patch or DLC. It doesn't need to be super high priority. But it should absolutely make its way into the dev-updated versions of the game at some point.

As I said I've no problem with it being an option if they completely ignore it while balancing and designing the progression gamemode, which should be balanced around something like commnet and around flying manually not being optional.

[Davi SDF]

I think it would take out a lot of fun from the game, sure its realistic, but realism doesnt means its fun. I mean, that's why I Play KSP in the first place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯