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.22 Feedback/Suggestions


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Regarding my original thoughts, I think the biggest problem I had when starting career mode was the lack of science parts available at the start. Here's an idea that might solve this problem:

Make ALL science parts available VERY EARLY ... such as from the second tier or in-between the current 2nd and 3rd tier. In addition, the science yield from these parts need to be changed significantly to balance it with the current rate of progression. I think this would simply the system quite a bit, make it more fun, and give players more incentive to do science on Kerbin first rather than current approach. For example, when you've already been to the Mun, you need to return to use newly-unlocked science equipment across multiple tiers -- this feels like going backwards since the natural inclination for the player is to "go further" with each accomplishment.

Edited by Caelib
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Wow! what a bunch of great suggestions. I'd like to add that I think using the jr. science lab to analyze samples and transmit the results back would make sense (I'd like to see a rover with this capability). I think there should be a second pool of science points for sample returns (how else are the Kerbals going to get their pet Mun rocks). Different capsules could have different sample carrying capacities. I don't think we need a separate module for hard drives, once again different capsules could have different data storage capacities.

As far as antennas go I think different antennas could have different science loss rates and ranges. This would give a reason to use different antennas for different missions. It would also make sense to use I high powered antenna if you only had to transmit the data once.

One feature I haven't seen is science for space plane missions. I'd like to get a little bit of science for my first SSTO plane.

I would love to say that I love .22 and have been addicted over the weekend. I've been a little saddened by the criticism I've read so far. Most of the issues people are complaining about are just game play balancing issues. For a first introduction to science I think .22 goes way beyond what I was expecting.

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I found unlocking the tech tree to be fairly challenging but then the only unmanned probes I've launched were a skydiver to Jool and a lander to Eve. The problem I've been having lately is that the landing legs behave inconsistently for me. I have landers that are stable on the light legs which fall over on the heavy-duty legs. The damping on the heavy-duty legs is fine but it seems like the spring constant is too low; after absorbing the initial impact one or two of them creep down to the fully-compressed position while the opposing legs extend. The spacecraft I've attached these to is symmetric and which leg(s) contract seems to not be deterministic. Again, the same craft balances fine on the light legs.

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I've been a little saddened by the criticism I've read so far. Most of the issues people are complaining about are just game play balancing issues.

I write most of that off to people being highly opinionated about anything that they're THIS passionate about. There are a few people that I'm not sure are ever going to be happy until the game is almost finished, if even then, but most of the complaints are just because people aren't patient enough to wait for polish and this has given them ideas about what they really want to see.

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I would like to summ up my thoughts about "making science", although most of these ideas already were mentioned above. Please note, that all of these are only not only my personal opinions, but factors that emerged during debates with fellow Kerbanautists. Still, i do not say its true for everyone.

What IS fun: Collecting data logs from different areas, biomes, celestial bodies and orbital heights, transmitting them to KSC, figuring out new way how to do old thing using only researched parts.

What is NOT fun: Killing my mouse with measurements (greatly reduceable by action groups, but still kinda annoying after few minutes of closing and opening material bay´s doors...), tiny bits of science points left even after dozens of measurements, no point in installing comm dishes (twice the energy consumption for faster upload speeds? No thanks.), Material Bay itself (incredibly fragile, no matter how smooth the landing on water is, it gets everytime destroyed, too big for probes, too small for regular science vessels), no reason why to bring back raw experiments instead of transmitting it.

What WOULD be fun: To have a reason why to bring back raw measurements, samples and data instead of transmitting, to be able to collect the data in few steps (Like 3-5 measurements), transfering data between cabs, data loss with increasing distance from KSC, to be able doing the same experiments as with crew, but with greater science loss and hi-tech instruments down the tech tree (cameras, rock-picking robot arms).

My suggestions how to improve both gameplay and realism at the same time:

- Make science gathering more enjoyable process, less clicking, more measuring. Each measurement might take few seconds of processing by the instrument itsefl, then generating an ammount of Data. Measuring should not be done more than 3-5 times, thats the point when the fun start to transform into annoying requiement for gathering points.

- Measurements performed by drones and Kerbals should have semi-shared point pools. Lets say there is a 100 points budged in the Mun high orbit for visual observation (crew report). By using probe with the camera, taking a measurement would yield about 50-75% of the maximum output (based on the quality of the camera, why dont have like 2-3 types unlocked procedurally in the tech tree?). This ammount would be further decreased, if the data is transmitted instead of storing the data and bringing them back to Kerbin. The rest of the points (25-50%) is dedicated to the crew observation. Another flight around the Mun, this time with crew, would extract remaining point, again decreased by transmission loss or brought back withou losses. OR fly around Mun with crew first time, gathering all the points. This mechanic would make sending probes reasonable (gathering partition of the points to get parts to enable player to send there crew), decrease the gameplay-destroying impact of "science combines" (sending probe to Duna/Eve yielding thousands of points) and reasoning making similar missions again other than installment of new measuring devices. The player himself can decide, either to advance steadily, but shurely by sending probes first, or risky and more difficult way of sending crew and returning data back, resulting in greater overall data yield.

- The Data, measured in Mits, should be directly proportional to the science it will yield, opening the availability to transform stored Mits into regular resouce. This way, a whole new opportunities will become avaible: data transfer between parts (like fuel etc.), data storage parts, data loss while transfering onto long distances with low-tier antennas, selecting targets of the upload, allowing players to decrease the data loss by using dedicated satellites or stations as link between uploader and KSC. Also you could only send back databank full of data instead of bringing back entire vessel.

- Increased importance of using high-tier transmitters: Procentual data loss based on the distance between sender - reciever.

- Because of data loss, the advantage of bringing back the raw experiments becomes pretty much obvious: No data loss -> greater overall yield. Not necessary if you dont want to, but still rewarding for players doing it the hard way.

- Probes comparable to crew missions, using cameras and robot arms to do crew stuff, but with lower yield, of course. We simply dont want to send Kerbals on on-way ticket just because there is no other way how to get samples, crew reports and eva reports. How about to rename these to "Sample survey", "Visual observation", "Field observation". Probes, in my opinion, should be the vanguards for manned missions, mapping the ground for later manned missions, gathering some, but not all the science possible in the area.

- Make use of space stations. Use the Hitchhiker as Laboratory, increasing the data value of brought samples, crew and EVA observations based on the number of present Kerbals (and in future, their science skills summary).

- In-game list of biomes present on the celestial body, with values of science points still to be done in those. Maybe ability to map the surface with scanner, revealing the biomes of the scanned areas? Also would be easily used for scanning for resouces for future mining stuff.

And now few suggestion not directly related with 0.22 update:

- Comets, from time to time travelling thru the system, opening only short window of opportunity for flyby or even landing and taking samples of very high scientific value.

- Solar flares, deleting data stored in databanks of exposed vessels, disabling those´s robotic controll cores and harming crew. Player would have to save the crew by taking the ship into the shade of celestial body or escaping in module to safety. This should be turn-off-able in option or difficulty settings (Easy - no flares, medium - flares deleting data, hard - flares killing crew, disabling control computers.)

- Player flags (logos printed on some of the large vessel parts. Maybe even name of the vessel appearing on the hull?

- Floating baloons, preventing parts to sink or get damaged by rougher landing onto liquid surface. Toroidal rings and radial floaters would be great.

- Rings around largest celestial bodies, making low orbit around them an adrenalline and challenging activity.

- Asteroid belt between Dres and Jool would be expectable. Just put there toroidal ring on rails (Thus not melting our computers down when timewarp), decomposing to individual, procedurally generated asteroids only on close wiev. Asteroids would be great source of materials for future mining.

Please excuse my english grammar, i was not using it in a long time and I wrote this in a hurry, so please keep an eye on the content, not the form, thank you.

Edited by Wolfox
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I would like better reentey effects, see the movie Gravity, for example, first in the upper layers the air brushes agains solar panels which can be seen, then the hot plasma comes in. There is actually supposed to be an effect prior to the heat effect.

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Awesome thread :)

I've posted a butt-load of times in the suggestion forums, so I apologize if anyone sees me repeat myself from other threads.

I'd mainly be satisfied if two issues were resolved:

1) I'd like to see the transmission click-fest reworked to automatically transmit a stream of data. The main thing about transmission spamming not being fun for me is having to click (or press action group keys) over and over. It would be nice if you could set your experiments to automatically stream multiple experiments and transmit them. I would like to enjoy the scenery while science is being done.

2) I'd like a sizable portion of the science points for certain experiments to be reserved for recovery (stuff like soil samples, materials testing, etc), and I'd like sensor data to be bumped up to 100% transmission science gain (temperature, barometer, etc). Right now, there's almost no point in recovering. This has been suggested a lot, so I'm just repeating it.

I like a lot of the suggestions in this thread and I'm excited to see KSP go forward :)

Squad is the best.

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my suggestions:

1. Make experiments take reasonable time to complete (i.e. a few hours/days/weeks depending on the module)

2. Let equipment collect data without the need to right click while trying to fly. (its just too tedious and takes away from immersion)

3. Antennae should not get worse as you progress up the tree. (i.e. two com 16's are better than one com 88-88 because of mass and energy use)

4. Antennae should deploy like solar panels/landing gear, and should not retract and extend on their own.

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I Think that the progress system needs some tweaking because now it disencourages us to do complex missions, if you do fly-by and orbit the moon it only records the orbit and discards the fly-by

Yeah but that's just for the craft recovery and quite frankly the amount of science you get for it is peanuts, especially compared to what you get from goo or the materials bay experiments made on the way. I don't think it discourages complex missions much to be honest.

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3. Disallow repeat transmissions

This is the most commonly proposed idea, and I totally agree. Even if you bind your instruments to an action group, pressing the send data button 144 times in a row is neither realistic nor fun. Instead, each experiment should have one maximum transmission per zone. Data-based experiments like the thermometer, grav detector, barometer and crew report should each immediately give 100%. Materials-based experiments like Surface Samples, Mystery Gooâ„¢ and Science Jr. should give 20% once, with full points only available on recovery. This is probably the most important fix and also one of the easiest.

I agree with the fact that the current transmission system renders recovery irrelevant, since you can just asymptotically approach the same science value by spamming the transmitter until you decide the last few science points aren't worth it.

BUT, I'd rather see as a fix to this the requirement that certain types of experiment utterly require return and recovery to matter. If you're just sending data read from instruments then returning does not render a better value than electronic data does. It's the same. But if you're doing a sample return, or a materials study or a goo report, then these should require getting the physical material back for extended study back at home (i.e. make them worth nothing in transmission).

That gives you a good reason to do multiple different types of mission to mine all the types of science.

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I agree with the fact that the current transmission system renders recovery irrelevant, since you can just asymptotically approach the same science value by spamming the transmitter until you decide the last few science points aren't worth it.

BUT, I'd rather see as a fix to this the requirement that certain types of experiment utterly require return and recovery to matter. If you're just sending data read from instruments then returning does not render a better value than electronic data does. It's the same. But if you're doing a sample return, or a materials study or a goo report, then these should require getting the physical material back for extended study back at home (i.e. make them worth nothing in transmission).

That gives you a good reason to do multiple different types of mission to mine all the types of science.

The more I think about it, the more I think the current system may be a little over-complicated. Is the solution as easy as just making two kinds of science: data and physical?

Physical science: goo, rock collection from the surface of a moon/planet, other material in observation chambers

Data science: EVA report, crew report, temp, seismic activity, atmospheric

Physical science items only reward points on return ... and A LOT of them. Data science items can be transmit (or returned) once, for 100% value. The idea being you collect data ONCE per biome/orbit/area/whatever. This idea that you can transmit partial rewards just seems to clunky IMO.

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Physical science items only reward points on return ... and A LOT of them. Data science items can be transmit (or returned) once, for 100% value. The idea being you collect data ONCE per biome/orbit/area/whatever. This idea that you can transmit partial rewards just seems to clunky IMO.

The only problem I have with this is that it would discourage return missions to the same location, since there's nothing to be done...but perhaps that could be overcome with more science parts? You won't have them all unlocked at the start, so you'll have to visit each location several times for full value.

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The only problem I have with this is that it would discourage return missions to the same location, since there's nothing to be done...but perhaps that could be overcome with more science parts? You won't have them all unlocked at the start, so you'll have to visit each location several times for full value.

Yeah, I agree. Think about our own space program -- our Apollo missions to the moon mostly went to all different landing sites to collect different samples. So given my statements above, as long as a moon/planet has biomes, return missions would be fully justified by gathering data/physical from different areas. Or as you stated, but unlocking new science equipment.

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one thing I find kind of annoying presently is the lack of a fix for some nodes, such as the 2m inline battery.

Though that's a minor complaint.

more pressing is that the developers apparently forcing players to build relay/communication network (remote-tech style for transmitting science, you could still control out of contact probes, just not transmit science from them) would be too hard for players. to manage

Personally, I would prefer something like remote-tech to be integrated into game though (full on, lines of communication necessary for remote-controlled/unmanned-craft), so I might be a bad judge.

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my suggestions:

1. Make experiments take reasonable time to complete (i.e. a few hours/days/weeks depending on the module)

You dont need weeks to measure temperature, also, this would almost completely burry the beauty of flybys, and all players would skip that with timewarp anyway.

3. Antennae should not get worse as you progress up the tree. (i.e. two com 16's are better than one com 88-88 because of mass and energy use)

I completely agree with that. Smart people rather mount up lots of basic antennaes instead of few dishes, and take their time to transmit. I suggest to make them influence the data loss during the transmission. I understand that making it dependable on the distance might be problematic, but simple adding the data decay factor to these like "80% science value when using low tech, 90% science value when using middle tech and 100% science value when using high tech" should be pretty easy to make, and would do a great difference. No longer would tiny probes covered up in basic antennaes be exactly as effective as huge scientific vessels with hi-tech comm dishes.

4. Antennae should deploy like solar panels/landing gear, and should not retract and extend on their own.

Its in fact an indication of idle transmitter, and if they will bump down the number of experiments down to one per piece of equipment, that wont be as annoying as it is now, when you have to transmit dozens of times. Lets keep this one like it is.

My main problem when playing career is the unability to transfer any data from lander to return ship. No soil samples can make it home unless you dont let Kerbal inside the lander can (fly with him hanging on the ladder) or return with entire lander. This one really annoys me.

Edited by Wolfox
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What I want is a big heavy station or base part that would require effort to get up there and then land any particular place... maybe make it need to be resupplied... and have that be a place where you could "recover" the science from you ships so you didn't need to go back to Kerbin.

I'd propose it to have a range where if you get a craft within say 50m of it you can recover it like from the tracking station. Then I'd have it have "analysis supplies" or what ever you want to call them... that get taken up by the amount of science on the vessel. If the ship has too much then it'd pop up saying that and you'd have to send up a resupply to be able to analyze it. It'd be nice if this all didn't destroy the craft too... So you could send it out again to collect more. Though I'd want to have that option eventually... for when resources are implemented and orbital construction and or ground based construction either gets added or is modded in...

Another way would be to allow transfers of experiment data between docked pods. So you could have a station with a bunch of "drop pods" for returning science and you could have your science ship just stop by to clear its storage and go off again. You'd have to send up more drop pods as they were used up.

I don't see why they couldn't do both.

Edited by FITorion
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Another way would be to allow transfers of experiment data between docked pods.

Neat idea! This would be great for Mun landings where the lander needs to transfer data back to the command module for return. I haven't tested this theory yet ... maybe it already does? Anyone know for sure?

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Neat idea! This would be great for Mun landings where the lander needs to transfer data back to the command module for return. I haven't tested this theory yet ... maybe it already does? Anyone know for sure?

It doesn't... I did a Apollo style mission hoping against hope that it would work... It doesn't. My Mun samples went poof as the Mun lander which wasn't designed to return to Kerbin impacted after being ripped from the command pod when the only parachutes... opened.

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It doesn't... I did a Apollo style mission hoping against hope that it would work... It doesn't. My Mun samples went poof as the Mun lander which wasn't designed to return to Kerbin impacted after being ripped from the command pod when the only parachutes... opened.

There's a small part on Spaceport that accepts samples and EVA reports. You can either mount that on something small with a docking port on both ends and have the lander pass it off to the orbiter, or you could add KAS to the mix and have a kerbal unmount the part from the lander and remount it on the orbiter. Neither is an ideal solution as any of your other results won't transfer. Personally, until this gets fixed, I'm just not doing apollo style missions. I'll leave a transfer module in orbit if I want to, and dock back up with it.

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