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How do we land accurately


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11 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Why do we have to accept that? Whats wrong with KSP2 behaving exactly the way space-x does with automated landing features?

If you're going to compare with SpaceX, consider that it took multiple attempts to get them where they are today. Now, we hear a SpaceX booster returned and landed back at the pad or on the drone ship and we don't even bat an eye. But remember all the failures that came before. So, no, getting something like that right on the first attempt isn't the norm.

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3 hours ago, PlutoISaPlanet said:

It would be nice to be able to set launch pads as targets. Atmospheres make landing on launch pads with precision very difficult.

That among other things, like a reliable trajectory predictor, proper air brakes with heat shielding, etc. The difficult part about atmospheric landing in KSP 1 is the complete lack of data and tools needed to do it properly.

Edited by MechBFP
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3 hours ago, Starwaster said:

If you're going to compare with SpaceX, consider that it took multiple attempts to get them where they are today. Now, we hear a SpaceX booster returned and landed back at the pad or on the drone ship and we don't even bat an eye. But remember all the failures that came before. So, no, getting something like that right on the first attempt isn't the norm.

Of course, which is why I think this should be held back sufficiently far into progression that players will likely have landed capsules, shuttles and lifters as close as they could to KSC many times. My point was that at no point did spaceX attempt landing on a drone ship manually. Its one thing to get good at landing right next to your munbase. But even the best players in the world take several to a dozen reloads to land on a small pad on kerbin on each attempt. My feeling is without autopilot those landing pads they’ve shown near ksc and on colonies will be purely decorative for the vast majority of players and the only time they’ll see space-x style landings will be on youtube. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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They pretty much have to have an accurate landing autopilot worked out for the AI to use if the supply run mechanic will be anything more than abstracted, so why not let the player use it after they've proven themselves capable?

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On 9/5/2021 at 9:31 AM, shdwlrd said:

The other problem is the inherent drifting that craft will do. I can't see what direction I'm drifting and the navball is useless. 1 m/s horizontally is more than enough momentum to tip a lander. So without something to indicate the direction of drift and what key you need to press to cancel the drift, I will never be able to land the precisely.

Keep practicing and make sure you don't lose focus on your surroundings. Crafts drifting during landing isn't an inherent problem with the game, it's just a consequence of Newton's basic laws (your craft won't stop drifting unless you tilt your ship a bit towards retrograde), the way you've distributed your mass (COM near the bottom will make it less likely to tip on touchdown) and the very topology of the terrain (sloped terrain is obviously not ideal) that you'll have to overcome if you want to succeed in the late game - especially if you want to do somewhat accurate atmospheric landings to save on recovery costs.

On 9/5/2021 at 1:11 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:

it just changes how we interact with it. You still need the know how to build a ship capable of flight/space maneuvers and you still need to know how to fly to tell the autopilot what you want it to do.

1. The player is supposed to interact with their rockets directly, not through an autopilot. It'd be cheap if you could orbit Duna once, unlock it as a dest, and never have to do the route again, and it wouldn't be up to the player to create an absurdly Delta-V efficient route. Even before KSP had spherical planets back before 0.7.3, the goal was to see how high you could get your rockets, not just make a good rocket and watch the game do the flying part.

22 hours ago, TLTay said:

They pretty much have to have an accurate landing autopilot worked out for the AI to use if the supply run mechanic will be anything more than abstracted, so why not let the player use it after they've proven themselves capable?

Well it very likely is abstracted because otherwise it wouldn't work out in time warp. How would a physical approach to automated milkruns work if it had to work while the player was timewarping through several decades of interstellar travel?

Edited by Bej Kerman
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1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

1. The player is supposed to interact with their rockets directly, not through an autopilot.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

It'd be cheap if you could orbit Duna once, unlock it as a dest, and never have to do the route again, and it wouldn't be up to the player to create an absurdly Delta-V efficient route. Even before KSP had spherical planets back before 0.7.3, the goal was to see how high you could get your rockets, not just make a good rocket and watch the game do the flying part.

sir. Sir. SIR!

please, stop... my mouth is full and it can't handle you putting any more words in there.

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@Bej Kerman If your such an expert, which way am I drifting? I'm using TCA to hold my vertical velocity at 0. So the velocity shown is my horizontal movement. You can't tell in a screen shot. That's the problem I have. If you were able to tell in a screen shot, you would be able to help yourself and be able to easily control your horizontal velocity.

The whole point of my argument is that there needs to be something on the navball or somewhere on the screen that shows the direction of the transitional velocity of your craft. Preferably marking whatever your control scheme is. In this case an arrow with WASD (or IJKL if RCS is active) so you know which way you have to pitch (translate if RCS is active) to cancel your movement.

Spoiler

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3 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

You can't tell in a screen shot. That's the problem I have. 

Why screenshot? If you took a picture of a car in a parking lot, if you didn't see the rear end (where the lights are) you wouldn't be able to tell if it's reversing into a spot or driving out of it. You are there, live, see what's going on each millisecond.

And you're not in IFR, you're not lamding in thick fog, you can see the ground below the ship. Use it as a point of reference maybe? 1.6m/s is not fast but definitely noticeable, so just look at the surface, if it's moving to the left, pitch to the right.

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10 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

 If your such an expert, which way am I drifting? I'm using TCA to hold my vertical velocity at 0. So the velocity shown is my horizontal movement. You can't tell in a screen shot. That's the problem I have. If you were able to tell in a screen shot, you would be able to help yourself and be able to easily control your horizontal velocity.

The only way to prevent that is to just not hover. You just need to make sure that "surface" is selected and then set SAS to track retrograde and then land going at least 2-4 m/s so it keeps locked to retrograde without oscillating.

Therefore the only way to land accurately with this is mind is to put a waypoint marker directly on where you want to land, and then have it selected as the target. It will then appear on your Navball and as long as the retrograde marker overlaps with the target indicator, you will land on the target, at least on vacuum bodies.

Its generally easier to try to stop your horizontal velocity quite some distance above the target (2-3 kilometers) and then drop down from above, as that gives you more time to overlap the two markers than you would get during a normal landing approach (i.e. going sideways for as long as possible before cancelling your velocity).

Edited by MechBFP
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1 hour ago, MechBFP said:

The only way to prevent that is to just not hover. You just need to make sure that "surface" is selected and then set SAS to track retrograde and then land going at least 2-4 m/s so it keeps locked to retrograde without oscillating.

Therefore the only way to land accurately with this is mind is to put a waypoint marker directly on where you want to land, and then have it selected as the target. It will then appear on your Navball and as long as the retrograde marker overlaps with the target indicator, you will land on the target, at least on vacuum bodies.

That wont work since you are being accelerated by gravity differently than your target on approach and will always end up short using this method. The target marker will remain in the same place as the retrograde marker moves to the -90 deg heading

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2 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

That wont work since you are being accelerated by gravity differently than your target on approach and will always end up short using this method. The target marker will remain in the same place as the retrograde marker moves to the -90 deg heading

Mechjeb has an landing indicator trajectory and show estimated landing zone, this is more useful for manual landing, and yes it take manoeuvre nodes and  planet rotation into account, find it very nice. 
It also work in atmosphere but here its much more inaccurate because drag depend on orientation, still I can get within an kilometer of KSP with an craft I know well and this is just adjusting drag,
Pretty useless for planes because of lift so here you want experience, I tend to land outside the runway as bad stuff happens if you run off it or worse run off and hit an access way. 
And you are not landing tiny rockets like the LEM either, think starship as in 100 ton crafts with hot gas thrusters for reaction control. 

Used to it, an typical Minmus base 
ihfsn4th.png
From the left two tankers with 3 long MK3 tanks two with fuel and one with fuel and oxidizer. Also two 3.5 meter ore tanks and some other resources. Minmus express for 18 kerbals. Mobile Munar base who is moved to Minmus for helping with mining and refining, the only of the towers who is 2.5 meter, then at the bottom Minmus central, control, living quarters for 16 kerbals with cabins, large lab and greenhouse. 
Above the mining and extraction, storage for ore and other resources then workshop, reactor and uranium enrichment in the half circle modules. 
The black thing in the left bottom corner is an Minmus science lander, an 1.25 meter stack with 4 others on the side, the 2.5 meter white square is an utility rover mostly used to moving parts. 
Its used to support stuff like this. 
ntOU4ujh.png
Laythe base with SSTO on top, an nuclear tug below then an nuclear drop stage cross feed to tug. followed by the chemical engine booster, launched the base and SSTO separate, then the bottom stack as an SSTO LKO.
Dock base and SSTO to it and go to Minmus, top stack up with everything including ore but not much oxidizer as you was only landing the base on Pol for refueling before going to Laythe. 
Jeb was so mad at Val as he vent for the Duna mission who made him an commodore  and doing the thing he loves most. 
Zmb10mAh.png
Val got the Jool mission with 5 ships and bases. Stationary it was 5 bases, 3 shuttles and 5 tugs. Making her an admiral. 

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12 hours ago, The Aziz said:

Why screenshot?

Maybe because I can't capture video? Maybe because I don't want to spend forever uploading a video? Maybe I don't care to join a service to host a video? Maybe the image has all the information I need to show my point. Again, my point is there's nothing telling me which way the craft is moving. All that's showing is that there is motion, but not direction of motion.

12 hours ago, The Aziz said:

If you took a picture of a car in a parking lot, if you didn't see the rear end (where the lights are) you wouldn't be able to tell if it's reversing into a spot or driving out of it. You are there, live, see what's going on each millisecond.

So you couldn't take a picture of an airplanes instrument panel or flight data and not tell what the plane was doing at that moment in time? What's the point of a flight data recorder then? If I hidden the UI, you would have a valid point, but the UI is up and showing almost everything that is happening in the moment.

12 hours ago, The Aziz said:

And you're not in IFR, you're not lamding in thick fog, you can see the ground below the ship. Use it as a point of reference maybe? 1.6m/s is not fast but definitely noticeable, so just look at the surface, if it's moving to the left, pitch to the right.

It doesn't matter what I see outside of the craft, the instruments are not telling me what I want to know. Your eyes can lie to you. The camera in the wrong alignment to the craft will give you false information.

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4 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

That wont work since you are being accelerated by gravity differently than your target on approach and will always end up short using this method. The target marker will remain in the same place as the retrograde marker moves to the -90 deg heading

You keep adjusting, obviously. This is why I said stop high above the target, to remove as much manual adjusting as necessary. And no the retrograde marker does not move to -90 while falling at a minimum of 2 m/s. You don’t have “target” selected on the navball, you have “surface” selected on the navball AND have a target selected

Edited by MechBFP
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This reminds me though what I'd really like to see is the target and projected landing point painted both in map mode and in flight mode. I find its much easier to control my vessel when I'm looking over its shoulder at the target and can see which way Im tilting to make corrections as I burn. Its still a funky thing because the landing site moves opposite to the way you tilt and only moves while you're burning, but I think seeing all that on the screen at once would make the experience much more intuitive. 

Edited by Pthigrivi
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On 9/7/2021 at 11:54 PM, mcwaffles2003 said:
On 9/7/2021 at 10:10 PM, Bej Kerman said:

1. The player is supposed to interact with their rockets directly, not through an autopilot.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.

It's such an opinion that in fact it's what the devs were aiming for when they conceived the game.

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4 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

It's such an opinion that in fact it's what the devs were aiming for when they conceived the game.

Where did harvester say that automation wasn't intended nor wanted for KSP? When did Intercept that autopilots won't be allowed in the game?

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On 9/8/2021 at 3:15 AM, shdwlrd said:

 If your such an expert, which way am I drifting? I'm using TCA to hold my vertical velocity at 0. So the velocity shown is my horizontal movement. You can't tell in a screen shot.

Well of course I can't tell from a screenshot, but in person, it's not hard to take a glance at the view of the lander to tell what direction it's going in compared to the landscape. If you have trouble keeping your controls aligned to your view, use the locked view. I suppose the view toggle is easy to forget about. I will point out that the navball's flawed here as the retrograde indicator fades out near the edge, and having it there would make it easier to zero out your lateral - but, still, as a backup, you have a great view of your lander you can use to estimate your speed and direction. If you want to land consistently you have to get used to spacial awareness because 1.6m/s is way too fast for a certain landing. As I've already established, there's nothing wrong with the game here, even if it could be a teensy bit more helpful. This is all on your side - you just need to get used to making fool-proof craft, and not having to be the target demographic of a fool-proof craft in the first place. We've all been on this part of the learning curve before but it's surmountable.

7 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:
17 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

It's such an opinion that in fact it's what the devs were aiming for when they conceived the game.

Where did harvester say that automation wasn't intended nor wanted for KSP? When did Intercept that autopilots won't be allowed in the game?

It's pretty heavily implied, from promo material including the words "build and fly your own rocket" to the basis of the original 2.5D concept of the game being about trying to get a rocket as high as possible. Why would HarvesteR implement automation in a game he so heavily banked towards letting the players interact themselves with orbital mechanics?

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1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

It's pretty heavily implied

That's how you interpret it.

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

from promo material including the words "build and fly your own rocket"

Well, automation doesn't stop us from building or flying our own craft, sooo...

Also, you wouldn't be suggesting that airline pilots don't fly planes because they contain many automated systems, would you? But hey, maybe many of us are plebs and just cant handle the delicate intricacy of the great binary WASD system of flying. So enthralling...

 

 

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7 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

It's pretty heavily implied, from promo material including the words "build and fly your own rocket" to the basis of the original 2.5D concept of the game being about trying to get a rocket as high as possible. Why would HarvesteR implement automation in a game he so heavily banked towards letting the players interact themselves with orbital mechanics?

I agree with mcwaffles2003, that's your interpretation. I'm not taking it literally. Most commercial pilots fly their planes, but spend most of the cruise portion on autopilot supervising. Hell, most commercial aircraft can land themselves at appropriately equipped airfields.

Harvester never answered questions about how you have to play KSP. He only describes what he wanted KSP to be. His refusal to answer how KSP should be played showed he didn't care how you played KSP, as long as you're playing and enjoying his creation. I remember him chiming in on some of the weird and cool creations players had made that had nothing to do with space. I know he was always impressed with the creativity of the KSP community, whether it had to do with space travel or not.

The reason why an autopilot was never added to KSP1 was because it was out of scope. But that was Squad. Intercept can do whatever they like with KSP2, and they are. It's been said many times that there will be changes in KSP2 from what was in KSP1. (And I don't mean just cosmetic changes either.)

I'm hoping that some of the changes will take the most difficult tasks and make them easier to complete without the use of autopilots.

8 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

Well of course I can't tell from a screenshot, but in person, it's not hard to take a glance at the view of the lander to tell what direction it's going in compared to the landscape. If you have trouble keeping your controls aligned to your view, use the locked view. I suppose the view toggle is easy to forget about.

And as a I explained to Aziz, that is the root cause of my issue. You should be able to see exactly what your flight situation is by a simple picture of the UI. And as you said, the camera isn't helpful at times and locking it doesn't help when you can't tell which direction is considered forward on the craft. (Plus the camera will also drift on you even if it is locked.)

8 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

I will point out that the navball's flawed here as the retrograde indicator fades out near the edge, and having it there would make it easier to zero out your lateral

Completely agree with that. That's why in the helicopter sims I've played they had gauges that showed you your side slip and angle from prograde. 

8 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

but, still, as a backup, you have a great view of your lander you can use to estimate your speed and direction.

Doesn't help on the dark side of a planet. 

8 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

If you want to land consistently you have to get used to spacial awareness because 1.6m/s is way too fast for a certain landing.

Nope, I've never been able to properly judge distance in a third person view. (I even have problems with the platforming sections of the Lego games because of that.) I normally play sims in either a cockpit or forward (in front, or bumper)  view. We all know that the IVA view is useless since you can't get the angles you need to see. There is no forward camera in KSP. So I'm perpetually at a loss with my spacial awareness in KSP. 

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1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

Doesn't help on the dark side of a planet. 

Well, don't land in the dark side of a planet or, you know, pack some lights, we have had those for half a decade now.

A lot of these "problems" are really stretching it to find every possible imaginary problem you can possibly have while landing.

We already covered the need for a better UI , but what you're saying here is the equivalent of saying that it's impossible to rendezvous and dock manually because you can't do it in the first half of the first orbit on an inclined orbit and with both the UI and the map view turned off, at night.

 

KSP has few tools for landing and landing it's an inherently time sensitive operation with less margin for error, that's true, but I find quite dishonest to use quite extreme stunts as examples of average landings. You don't need to center the landing pad with cm of error, with a direct approach and a single suicide burn at night with no lights, that's not an average landing, that's a stunt, and if that's the kind of situation you find yourself into every time you land then your problem have nothing to do with being able to land you should work instead on your mission planning / craft designing. 

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I don't have a citation on hand, but actually HarvesteR did oppose piloting assistance in the stock game. However, he didn't care if modders added it. I neither support nor oppose such a thing myself and mention this only as a matter of historical interest. 

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