cpast

Wait, what? There's another one on the forums?

The issue I have isn't pancake rockets. That's not the fairing system's job to discourage; it's the aero system's (and no, a pancake fairing shouldn't make your rocket particularly aerodynamic). While ultra-wide fairings should probably cost somewhat more (say, multiply your base price by the ratio between fairing max width and rocket max width to the 1.1 power, so pancake rockets cost a lot but you can do them), the issue isn't actually the width. The thing with infinite-resolution procedural fairings is that there's no "box" to fit things into -- shaving 0.1m off the diameter never has a big effect, so there's much less reason to care about a bit of optimizing. Now, this is how KSP works now; adding a box for fixed fairings changes the game more than pure proc fairings. However, I think it's an *interesting* change; it means fitting payloads in rockets is more akin to fitting cargo bays. Now, as people have pointed out, there's not all that much fun in totally banning pancake rockets - they should be hard (because they make very little sense physically), but possible, and the fairing system shouldn't just be for sane designs. The interesting gameplay aspect from my point of view has nothing whatsoever to do with generally limiting diameter, and everything to do with *having* a box that you want to fit it within. And that can be done fairly well if proc fairings *aren't* infinitely scalable, but rather come in fixed size increments. Want to build a pancake rocket? Fine, but there aren't fairings of 9.5 m wide -- you'll have to take the 10m fairing, unless you can get your payload inside 9m, which will bring the cost/mass down somewhat noticeably. That adds the aspect of wanting things to fit, without a penalty of "you can't use fairings on this craft" if you can't make them fit -- just a bit of a price/mass increase, but nothing you can't put more rocket or funds into.

That actually makes a *lot* of sense. That way, there can be an advantage in squeezing out that 0.1 meters of diameter if it lets you use a smaller fairing, but you aren't *forced* to do so if you're willing to take the price hit of the next bigger one. Some form of procedural is likely necessary; this seems like a good balance.

I think they said they actually split, like into two corporations (possibly one owned by the other, not sure). However, Adrian and Ezequiel are the executive producers, which does kinda give them a say in what happens with the game. From a less purely financial point of view, one role of an executive producer is to have a broader view of things, and to say "stepping back from the deep involvement you guys have where you know and constantly think about every flaw in this game so you can fix it, is it really still early access-level, or are the issues minor enough to go gold?"

Also the Soyuz orbital module (and equivalent bits on Soyuz derivatives); that's not used during ascent or descent, only in space.

AFAIK, on helicopters similar attachments are called wings, even though they aren't there for lift.

This poll is a self-selected sample of a community which is highly unrepresentative of the average player of KSP, a game reviewer, or anyone looking to buy KSP. It has no statistical significance; you can't get good data out of a self-selected poll, nor out of such an unrepresentative community as this one. FlowerChild has it right -- number of responses is meaningless, because the quality of the sample is so awful. The poll is good for some things, but should not be taken as a representative sample of anything at all. About "bugfixing comes last:" Well, yes, there is a way in which it normally does come last. Specifically, at the end of development, you should just be doing bugfixing; it's not that you leave it till the end, it's that as you approach release date you shouldn't be making any changes to the code that aren't necessary to fix a bug. When read like that, it suggests that it's not necessarily a good sign to add tons of features for the 1.0 release. (that said: I like KSP so far; Squad has proven that they can make a game I really like, so I'm really not all that worried. If I had more big-project experience I might be more worried, but I assume that Squad knows what they're doing. I do think people assuming they know exactly what reviewers will say should give some reason why they think reviewers will say that: particularly about modding, the average user, as a rule, does not mod their games)

The thing is, a common argument for procedural fairings is "it's realistic, because while space agencies can't customize a new engine for each launch, they do just build a new fairing per payload." That's an argument I've seen a *lot* for procedural fairings - people who admit that real space agencies use standardized parts for most things, but think it's more realistic to have them custom-making fairings. It's also totally wrong. That's how we got on this topic in the first place. (Also, the standardization of fairings is not arbitrary, it's because it's hugely expensive to design a new one. While the exact size *is* somewhat arbitrary, the fact that you have a short list of fixed fairing sizes for a rocket is not.)

They need to redesign the structure to support the increased weight and loads. They need to evaluate the effect of that on the rest of the rocket. They need to reevaluate separation systems, consider how payload will be supported in the new fairing, consider what materials are suitable, and run lots of simulations and tests. The personnel involved are highly skilled, and such people don't come cheap. They then need to re-tool production systems (production lines are optimized to produce a single thing of a single design; they are not flexible, and you need to change them when changing the design of what you're making). You can't just scale a system up and expect it to work; KSP allows that because "worry about internal structure of your parts" is out of KSP scope, but it doesn't work in real life. Real rocket science is quite a bit more involved than "slap another 5 meters on it and call it a day." You don't seem to understand the relationship between ESA and Arianespace. ESA is in charge of the Ariane project. It's a pan-European project. They give significant support to Arianespace, not in the form of contracts, but in the form of direct financial support. ESA literally pays a subsidy to Arianespace solely to support them financially. ESA isn't paying this cost so they can use the fairing. They spend money on Ariane so Arianespace can provide a European launch capability. Similar things happen with Airbus. To call Arianespace just a company selling to ESA is simply untrue, because simple contractors aren't paid substantial direct subsidies to enable them to stay in business. The ESA is paying for development of Ariane improvements for the commercial launch market. They aren't buying 100 million euro fairings, they're spending 100 million euros so that future Ariane rockets can better support commercial launches.

But ESA isn't buying a modification. They are, however, in charge of Ariane design (it's not an Arianespace product, it's an ESA vehicle made by Airbus that Arianespace sells launches on). Arianespace's job is to buy Ariane launchers and sell and operate launches. ESA is not a customer for this modification; they're doing it because Ariane is their responsibility (it's an ESA project to design a European launch system). As for "my smartphone costs 10 euros" - Do you understand the difference between development costs and marginal costs? The *marginal* cost of a fairing is nowhere near a hundred million euros. Fairings are also not sold for that price. No customer is paying a hundred million for individual fairings. ESA's hundred million is buying them a total of *zero* fairings. What it does is pay for development costs, allowing Arianespace to just charge customers for the marginal cost. Look. No one claims fairing design is expensive because new designs have much higher marginal costs. The issue is *development* cost, which is huge. That's why it costs 100,000,000 euros to develop these larger fairings. That price is completely disconnected from the price a customer pays for the fairings, because by the time the customer's buying them, the price is already spent, so Arianespace doesn't have to charge a ton (and so they can reasonably compete on price). The reason new designs are so rare is precisely because development costs are so high; those tend to be paid by governments or outside funding, while marginal costs are paid by customers. If you don't understand the difference between the two types of cost, you don't understand how the economics of rocketry work.

Reread the article. This is pretty much the *opposite* of a one-off fairing. It's the launch provider deciding, as part of a tweak to their offerings, to offer larger fairings. The *development* is what's costing 100,000,000 euros, but it's not designed for any individual payload; it's designed to offer this for future payloads. The development isn't being funded by customers, it's being funded by ESA (who have a pretty close relationship with Arianespace). The construction isn't the expensive part; the expensive part is that it costs quite a lot of money to develop and test rocket-grade parts, and quite a lot of money to set up the manufacturing process to make fairings of that size with necessary tolerances. The marginal cost of a fairing will be well under a hundred million euros, but that's because the development has already been done for that exact fairing design, so you don't need to re-pay the price. Yes, you could design a custom fairing for a hundred million euros. However, no one is suggesting procedural fairings be the single most expensive thing on your KSP rocket; if you're going with "it's done one-off in real life," you should realize that it's not, and if it were it would in fact *be* the single most expensive part of the launch. To people talking about pricing for them being too wide: While that does help discourage over-wide fairings, and makes sense for gameplay, if you're talking real costs the most expensive part by far is the development, not the fabrication. Your second paragraph is the sort of thing that's actually a decent argument for procedural fairings. Real space agencies tend to launch very similar missions many, many times; most space launches are boring "Someone wants a satellite and will pay to launch it" missions, and crew-carrying designs change very rarely. In KSP, if your rockets are less standardized, it makes more sense to be able to custom-do fairings.

The realism thing I readily concede - I think p-fairings should scale cost/mass with diameter in a nonlinear way (it's hard to *build* stable fairings that are mushroom-shaped), but making it not work is the job of the aero system. For restriction, the point is that a *fixed* size imposes different constraints than "be realistic". Being realistic doesn't require you to redesign to get that extra .1 (or, for that matter, .5) meters off the width. That could easily be solved by showing fairing width if you right click, which *would* let you say "3 m, no more" (for instance).

Who in this thread is restricting anyone? None of us have the slightest bit of control over what Squad does; the point of this thread is to discuss what would be better. The only people who *could* restrict anyone are Squad, who can only restrict stock KSP players, which they absolutely have the right to do (and which they do do, routinely). If people can approach this without trying to assume that their own preferred playstyle is the only legitimate one to be encouraged by stock KSP, and that anyone who prefers a different playstyle should have to deal with it themselves, this thread would be much nicer. As it is, some people are acting as if "yes, restrictions can make a game more fun" is somehow an illegitimate viewpoint. No one in this thread is going to restrict your gameplay. Saying things like "oh, I guess we should all play the way cpast thinks is good" or "people think they have a right to restrict others" is not useful, because no one here is saying anything other than "Here's ways why procedural fairings can be better" or "here's ways fixed-size fairings can be better." As a side note, I actually *do* think procedural fairings make a lot of sense, and are probably, on balance, a better solution. But many of you guys are making really bad arguments for them.

Strange issue: When building my regular KSO, the nose gear's animation state doesn't seem to match where it actually is. The gear is in fact raised, but it looks lowered. When I manually hit "raise gear," it animates raising the gear, but when I go to launch it's lowered again. If I raise gear and then lower gear it instantly snaps to the gear being lowered as far as animation goes (the collider does not snap to "gear down", though). It's really annoying; any clue what the issue is?

I thought Squad spun off their marketing side? Or did they un-spin them off? Regardless, IIRC, KSP exists because HarvesteR was about to quit Squad because he was so frustrated with their marketing work (it involved lots of field work, which he hadn't expected). I don't think he's eager to get back to that.

Er, the phrase "X does not a Y make" is idiomatic English. It's equivalent to "X does not make a Y," but adds a bit of a flourish. It predates George Lucas by at least hundreds of years. You do realize that in general, what makes a game a game is the restrictions, right? It's the fact that you're given some set of things and told to have fun within those rules; if you have lots of self-control, you can self-impose restrictions (e.g. I'm in no danger of launching ridiculous rockets, because I have a rule that my rockets must *look* like rockets), but let's not pretend that "no restrictions" has anything to do with a game.

This is one of the reasons I routinely shut down my engines when not actively thrusting.

I really don't see how any of that is Lego-like. Lego-like, as I understand it, means that components are taken as given. You have no ability to make tweaks to parts; you have what's in the box and that's it. Your task is to use fixed parts in creative ways. You combine parts very simply; you don't have to do anything complicated to attach things, you just stick them together (provided that they're designed to be attached in the manner you're attaching them). The amazing thing is how much can be accomplished without any customization of the blocks in any way; standard 2x4 blocks can produce amazing things, and you don't have to let people design their parts to have them do whatever sorts of stuff they want.

Because Lego is about snapping together multiple fixed-size parts; you have a fixed group of blocks, at fixed dimensions and fixed shapes, and do not get to do things like make a tall 2x4 of just the right height because you don't want to stack short 2x4s. If you consider making custom parts to be legolike, you and I played with very different Lego sets growing up.

You can get fuel information in map view: just click the resource pane button, and click "Stage Only" to just get the fuel in the current stage. The three things you can't do are look at the rocket/terrain (which I find to be nice for basic spatial orientation; it's much harder for me to fly just by navball, and obviously landing by navball without a radar altimeter is a bad idea); easily check altitude (you have to hover over the craft, you don't have the nice display); and actually stage or otherwise activate/deactivate stuff.

Ah. No, you don't show up *unannounced*. For many missions, it still might not be a problem fitting in the fairing (AFAIK, many missions aren't built out to the width of the fairing), but there would be plenty of planning and integration work to do, and any fairing issues would also be addressed at that time. However, there's a big, big difference between KSP and real national programs: In real life, different programs have free reign to do whatever they like. In KSP, we all have parts of the same width. A Russian capsule might be a different width than an American one, but every KSP program has the same stock capsule widths, and mod capsules generally stick to those widths. (as a side note: while looking up real fairing widths, it turns out that real fairings absolutely *aren't* custom-made; they have standard prefab fairings whose specifications are something you design to when building a payload) Edit: To address "player sets the standards:" Not quite. Standard widths are largely a consequence of part size; the player does *not* set how wide their parts are.

Rockets are almost *never* custom-designed for one payload, because designing a rocket is really, really, really expensive and building a one-off rocket is also really, really, really expensive. Rockets are fairly standardized. They have actual catalogs which show you basic launch options and platforms; while there's more to it than just that (e.g. what orbit you want, insurance, if other peoples' stuff is on the same rocket, that sort of thing), you don't custom-design the rocket for the payload. Yes. It happens all the time; NASA has launched *commercial* satellites, let alone other space agencies' stuff. Russia launches other countries' astronauts. NASA has launched ESA stuff, often for payment in kind (i.e. ESA didn't even pay for the launch, they instead did something for NASA in exchange for NASA launching their stuff). That said, while I like the idea of restricted space, I do think people pointing out that we don't have the necessary space-saving parts (e.g. hinges) have a good point. Mushroom fairings definitely shouldn't just be linearly scaled in cost and mass; the wider the fairing, the harder it is to build, so some sort of nonlinear cost/mass scaling with width would make sense. But a proper aero system should make mushroom fairings give limited benefit in terms of reducing drag; they'd keep stuff from falling apart, but it'd be hard to launch them.

KW does it in 18, AFAIK (sizes 1.25, 2.5, 3.75, both wide and normal; can't remember if they have 0.625, but don't think so and it's not needed in stock since you don't really launch 0.625-wide stacks). Note that 6 of these are literally just sectors of a cylinder, and 6 are tops to a cylinder. Those 12 could really be done as 2, just with the part scaled. The remaining 6 have 2 formats (wider than stack and same width as stack), and could probably also be done as 2 with model scaling (just would be a bit iffier, because that has more than zero detail required).

No one holds the rights to the story. It entered the public domain well over a hundred years ago.

The Science and Funds displays are nice and convenient numeric quantities. In contrast, Reputation shows as a bar going from "bad" to "good." This bar has a couple numbers on it; as far as I can tell, the numbers have nothing whatsoever to do with your actual numeric reputation. This is fine if all you care about is if you have a little reputation or a lot of reputation. However, there *is* a number associated with reputation, and this number isn't hidden from the player -- all contracts and the Admin Building talk in terms of that number. This means that if cancelling a contract or adopting a strategy, we pay a reputation cost that is presented to us numerically, with absolutely no idea how much or how little reputation we're spending or how much we have to spend. These are both permanent actions, as far as I know; the only way to see the actual effect on reputation is to quicksave, cancel the contract or adopt the strategy, see the new reputation, and reload from save if we don't like it. This really doesn't make much sense. If you want numeric reputation to be behind the scenes, so players don't have to worry about "is that a lot or a little" and to implement some sort of diminishing returns, then don't treat reputation like a currency when adding or subtracting it -- say how it changes our reputation in a way that makes sense to someone looking at the bar. If you want to treat it like a currency, then either drop the bar, or add a numeric display for the actual value of our rep.