herbal space program

Not actually talking about the trigonometric function. In basic geometry, a secant is any line that intersects a circle or ellipse in two spots, dividing it into two separate areas. In this context, I was saying that if you have a prograde maneuver node placed in KSP1, the vector defined by boosting on your target marker anyplace other than exactly at the node will be a secant of your orbit that is parallel to the (tangent) vector that would be defined by boosting exactly at the node. It actually works the same way for boosting in any direction in the prograde/radial plane, except that both vectors would be secants if the node is in any direction other than pure prograde or retrograde. Anyway, in the KSP1 system, that means that boosting on your target vector a short time before and after the node does a pretty good job of maintaining the optimal attitude to actually achieve the trajectory you want. I'm not quite sure how that idea translates to the KSP2 system, since if you are boosting prograde at the spot you placed your node, you won't be boosting prograde anymore at the midpoint of your burn.

Wow, I was totally unaware that such things were available in that interface. I will take another look at it. The nice thing in KSP1 is that if you set the node at the spot that would give you the most efficient trajectory change as an instantaneous impulse, aligning to that target marker automatically points you along the secant parallel to your optimal burn vector wherever you are in your orbit. I am certain that there are even more efficient ways to calculate your optimal start time and attitude through the burn, but that was really pretty good, at least in short burns that involved small changes in heading. I don't really understand how to do that in the KSP2 representation yet, so it seems worse to me, but maybe once I figure it out it will be as good.

Maybe it will just take some getting used to on my part, since I'm so familiar with the old system. It would certainly help me a lot if they had an indicator for the midpoint of the burn, so I could line that up with my PE. I don't actually recall seeing two different versions of my PE when did this before, but maybe they were right on top of each other. Actual numbers instead of that clunky bar indicator would also be quite helpful, as would some provision for serial periapsis kicks, but of course KSP1 didn't have that either.

If that's really the way they tried to design it, then it's pretty dumb, because if you're trying to do a series of periapsis kicks, you have to estimate for yourself where to place the node so the burn is symmetrical around your periapsis. It would be much better they let you place the node as if it was an instantaneous impulse at a given point, and then spread it out before and after that point, maybe even trying to correct for the additional dV, and giving you some kind of warning if your cosine losses are going to be excessive. This system is actually significantly harder than what KSP1 had for no good reason I can see. Well then they way they've defined them is dumb, as I said above.

That's not how it works period. If you place a maneuver node, your burn needs to be symmetrically timed around it for maximum efficiency regardless of the game version. Putting it all on one side of the node is never the best. That's just orbital mechanics, not the game.

I have to believe that this feature is just not properly implemented yet in KSP2. It tells you to start right where you placed your node, and we all know that's not how it works. It would also be great if like in KSP1, the dV countdown showed you what is actually left on the burn rather than just statically what the initial dV was. But I guess we'll have to wait for that.

I'm very glad to see these issues getting knocked off in real time rather than having to wait for months. Now if you can get the orbital decay bug and all that crazy weird stuff about docking fixed, the game will start to become playable for real!

Good decision to issue a hotfix for that one!

The price tag doesn't bother me so much, but those bugs are a big aside. I started playing KSP1 at 0.18 (I think), and although docking, wobbliness, and SAS were still kind of a mess, there weren't nearly as many really bad core gameplay bugs at that time as there are now. I mean, with the latest patch, you can't even de-orbit a Mk1 capsule because of the no-drag-when-pointed-retrograde bug. The FPS performance wasn't nearly as bad either, and that was on machines that wouldn't even qualify as potatoes now. As a very experienced KSP1 player, I can battle my way through these things, but there still isn't a lot for me to do that's new, so I'm getting bored pretty quickly. Imagining myself as a new-to-the-franchise user, I can see that what's there constitutes a pretty good amount of gameplay, but between the awful performance and the really bad bugs, I'm not sure I'd have the patience to put up with all of that frustration while trying to ascend an already pretty challenging learning curve. So I stand by my prior statement that this is really no time for them to have an EA promotion. I think they need to get the most basic things all working properly and maybe throw the old hands a bone or two first.

I'm not about to cry foul over spending $10 more than I might have if I had waited. I bought the game as it is, for the price they were charging, with my eyes open. But I have to agree that all they are going to do by having a sale at this point is generate more unsatisfied customers, who will still complain about how slow and buggy it is even though they paid less than I did. They would be far better off IMO if they held off on having any big promotions until they have a better experience to offer those who take them up on it.

Well, I've tried to reserve my judgment until I've had time to really evaluate performance after the patch, but I've seen no improvement in frame rate AFAICT with the Jool 5 mission I'm currently trying to fly. Perhaps it's because it was a save file from before? I dunno, but for me it's still <4FPS with my 650-part mothership, and maybe 7-8 FPS with the detached ~100-part Laythe space plane. The latter also lost literally all its forward motion in Laythe orbit due to the decay bug, after I flew it out of physics range and then switched back and forth between it and the mothership. It just dropped like a stone when I came back to it, which is luckily not the worst situation you can find yourself in with a space plane, at least if you have plenty of fuel for the jet engines and reasonable aerodynamic trim. I was able to bring it in over land under good control pretty easily, but even though I landed it with only ~70m/s forward motion and maybe 2m/s vertical, on level ground, it totally exploded on contact, killing the crew. That definitely would not have happened in KSP1, and combined with all the other problems I have to say it's getting really hard for me to keep going with this the way the game is now. I only have so much patience for this stuff.

Not to mention that as it stands now, compounding the failure of craft to slow down as expected in the atmosphere with also blowing them up due to overheating would just be adding insult to injury.

I finally got my whole Jool-5 platform assembled, 562 tons, 862 parts (probably half struts), and 7.4 km of SWERV dV at a not-too-shabby 0.37 initial TWR. Framerate is about a glacial 4/s, seemingly without regard to the graphics settings, so some other calculations must be borking that: I've already shown the Laythe plane, and docking that up was surprisingly easy, but then I had to add my dual-stage vacuum lander. It has a SWRV-powered Tylo descent stage that will also serves as an orbital transfer engine on the full ship. The descent stage will land and then provide about the first 300m/s of ascent dV before the Poodle-powered upper stage completes the journey to orbit. That stage will do the landings on every body besides Laythe. If I manage to finish the Jool-5 with enough dV on the mothership, I'll probably do a side trip to Dres or Duna/Ike, both systems the smaller lander could manage: On the frowny side, successfully getting that docked up took me 7 tries (only counting good trips to orbit), including completely rebuilding the whole stack in the middle because something got irretrievably corrupted in the first version. Time and again, everything would blow up or bug out as soon as I made contact, even if it was dead-on at 0.2m/s. I was almost ready to give up in disgust, but the last time it finally worked, probably because I turned off the SAS on both vessels right before they connected. Still, both the plane and the vacuum lander were wagging back and forth like dog tails for no good reason for quite a while, but thankfully the vibrations damped out that time instead of amplifying themselves into oblivion as they had previously. Sorry, but you guys have got a long way to go before colony ships! Anyway, I just need to FF about 40 days to the Jool transfer window, and off we go!

I'd love to have a system that lets me place additional reinforcing attachment points (for a nominal mass penalty) on high-stress part interfaces, without them adding to part count or all having to look like the butt-ugly struts we have now. Those should be reserved for situations where you need to attach two distant parts.

I think it would be a big mistake for them anyway to introduce any new ways your ship can get destroyed before getting rid of some of the existing ones from bugs. The last thing they need to do right now is make things even harder. That can wait until the other parts of the game are on a stable footing.

It's pretty hard to keep playing it the way it is now, especially if you are going to try to do anything large and complicated. The game just has too many ways to destroy hours of work in an instant and not enough new content to really motivate us to keep putting up with having to do stuff that ought to work the first time over and over again. And although FWIW I intend to keep soldiering on with the Jool5 mission I'm playing now, once that's done I don't see much reason to keep going until there is significant improvement on multiple fronts. I have to believe it is not going to stay that way however, and moreover that there is still a large fanbase out there of people like me who have basically just gone into hibernation until matters improve. I think the devs have a significant but not endless amount of time to get me and all those other people back, and I certainly hope they will rise to the occasion. KSP1 was also in pretty rough shape when it first came out in EA, as I well remember, although back then the sheer novelty of the concept was easily sufficient to keep me interested in spite of the bugs. Unfortunately this time the devs don't have that luxury, as they are dealing with a bunch of KSP1 fans who are jaded wrt what they could do in the old game, and won't really get very interested in the new one until it has something genuinely new to offer, even if they deal with the most egregious bugs and performance issues. For that reason, it doesn't surprise me that the number of people playing currently is so low, but OTOH it won't surprise me either, if and when they have thrown down something really worthwhile, to see a huge number of players come roaring back.

In the last few days I've finished assembling my Jool5 mothership, flying 4 missions to dock up one jumbo hydrogen tank each: First tank docked: Final approach of 4th tank: Finished mothership: The finished ship weighs 464 tons, has 639 parts, and has 8.2km/s of dV at a pokey TWR of 0.15. That poor TWR will be significantly improved when I have my two landing modules, each with a SWERV of its own, docked to the open rearward-facing ports visible in the image above. Not sure exactly how much dV it will have in that configuration, but I'm sure it will be enough to get to Jool and back as well as do a fair bit of maneuvering around in the Jool system. Lastly, in a bizarre case of the disappearing strut bug apparently working in my favor, both times when I docked the second member of one of my 2 symmetrical tank module pairs to the station, it magically reconnected all the broken struts that were holding it to the booster (as well as some of those holding it together) to the module on the opposite side!: The resulting rats' nest of crisscrossing struts is pretty ugly, but fortunately it does not block any important docking ports, and most fortuitously, it is going to stabilize the overall structure immensely. I was quite concerned that the protruding H2 tanks were going to end up being so flopsy that they were going to cause all kinds of problems, but it looks like that definitely won't be happening! Now I just have to build my 2 stage Tylo-Vall-Pol-Bop vacuum lander in a manner such that it and my Laythe space plane (which will be docked to the opposite port) can be balanced for the ejection boost by moving fuel around. Then it's off to Jool at a roaring 40 frames per minute!!

I didn't say they made them more accurate, I said maybe they were trying to make them so. An that's not a fantasy to defend the devs, it's pure, neutral speculation on my part, based on certain assumptions I consider reasonable, which as far as I can tell is not against the forum rules. Thinking about it more, I suspect that rather than making the calculations more accurate, they're actually trying to make them simpler, because somewhere down the line there are going to be these gigantic ships with so many parts that you're going to need 500 processor cores and 10 GPUs to get above 2FPS the way it was before.

To be clear, I'm only defending the general concept, not how it has been implemented, which clearly still needs a lot of work. I would also say what you said above doesn't really apply to the structural behavior of rockets either, because the elastic modulus of the elements you use as an example is so high relative to the forces acting upon them that they will behave like perfectly rigid bodies. A rocket is not like a stack of solid blocks. It is more like a stack of thin-walled beer cans with heavy weights suspended inside them, held together by a few tack welds. Each of the cans is both elastically deformable to some small degree and prone to buckling completely if the forces get too large. But modeling that accurately is pretty much out of the question, so they are instead making the parts themselves perfectly rigid and trying to represent their real-world properties with spring-like attachment points, which I gather from the posts above is what Unity gives them. However, why they ever thought they could get acceptable behavior from making it just one such attachment point per joint is a mystery to me, especially if they are trying to model shear forces. For a stack of cylindrical objects it should be at least three per joint, and those should have both a very high elastic modulus and a very high damping coefficient so that they act much more like shock absorbers than plain springs. However unless Unity doesn't actually support multiple attachment points and/or dialing those parameters up and down for same, it is kind of weird that they didn't spend more time tuning this critical element before dropping the game.

My personal feeling is that representing ships you put together in a Lego-like click-on parts format in some real-time manner, which reflects your design decisions in an understandable way, including structural integrity in regard to internal and external forces, is an essential aspect of what made the game so very engrossing for me. I would hate to lose that. However, if you have some representation of that factor in mind that you think would be better, I'd love to know about it.

This game selects pretty strongly for people who have patience! Still, I think they have lots of options for exactly how to implement this feature, and I'm hoping they'll choose one that won't moot the other parts of the game.

The truth is that KSP1 had all kinds of problems with phantom forces, even in the latest version, so that's not really a fair point. Also, the fact that KSP2 seems to have different problems in that regard could perhaps be because KSP2 is trying to increase realism with more complex calculations that go off the rails more easily, or perhaps because whatever physics engine they are using for KSP2 produces errors in those calculations that are not all covered by whatever workarounds they used in KSP1. Either way, fudging the numbers to zero everything out is the only way it is ultimately going to work.

It seems that many fixes will be software workarounds, which will only complicate further work. Calculating all the momentum transfers between a complex tree of dozens to hundreds of elastically coupled rigid bodies through time, so that overall momentum is exactly conserved, is basically an impossible computational problem, because among other things nature does not have to worry about floating point precision. Any solution to make that work in a manner resembling reality is therefore by definition going to have to involve significant workarounds.

Thank you for the update Nate. This all sounds very encouraging with respect to some of the worst bugs affecting playability, and June 20th is not so long to wait, so I'm pretty jazzed. Not having to spam struts all over my wings so they don't snap off will be a very welcome upgrade, as will not having my planes suddenly and irreversibly turn into hideous drag monsters in the VAB for no apparent reason. One issue that I haven't seen specifically addressed that is really causing me a lot of problems is all kinds of weird stuff happening when I get two large craft within physics range of each other for docking. Often the focused or target craft will just blow up or disappear as soon as I hit the edge of the physics bubble, and even if that doesn't happen, often I'm getting all kinds of weird camera behavior trying to switch back and forth between orbiting craft when they are in physics range. I also often seem to lose my target selection and then have no ability to properly re-select that target. In KSP1 that was as simple as double clicking on the target or target part in the flight view, but that doesn't seem to work at all in KSP2, and doing so in the map view with two closely spaced ships seems well nigh impossible. Hopefully that one's on the "lesser known" list, because it would sure be great to have a fix for it soon!

I'm finding that with the immense bulk of the new hydrogen tanks the Nerf has basically become useless as an interplanetary transfer engine. They need to either up its ISP to be comparable to the SWERV or else increase its TWR, or it will pretty much never be the best choice IMO, especially once they get the high ISP deep space engines implemented.