CrazyJebGuy
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KSP2 Release Notes
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Posts posted by CrazyJebGuy
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9 minutes ago, Lisias said:
People had filled bug reports for years, with the same results.
People that didn't cared enough to keep trying just quit the game. It was probably a small loss for them, as probably most people had bought it on a sale. People that are still lingering around, on the other hand, are the ones that still care for the game and since they realised that complaining and filling bug reports never really worked for them, are now trying something different by downvoting the game in a last attempt to have the problems solved.
Everybody has that one game. I've played KSP and warthunder both since 2014. KSP updates annoy me when they make all the decouplers and parts look ugly (is there a cosmetic mod to return the old look? If just the decouplers, they all look the same so I can't tell the size from the icon) but they're mostly improvements, and I can disable some things like re-entry heating. Warthunder peaked about 8 years ago, gets worse almost every update. And it's an MMO, it's not like KSP where I can go back and play 0.90 if I want to. The core gameplay is excellent, but the company keeps shovelling excrements on top and these players linger on for years complaining, quitting, coming back and repeating.
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I feel blessed that I didn't even know there was a launcher until people ranted on the forum.
Hasn't it tanked the recent steam reviews by about 40% though? Truly it must be a terrible launcher.
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I've always thought the "Kerman" surname was everywhere in the game because it's to do with spaceflight, like how a lot of surnames come from people's jobs, even if we don't really use that anymore, there are still tons of people named 'Smith' or 'Miller'.
This doesn't really explain tourists though, so either they get "Kerman" as an honorary title while in the space centre, or there's a caste system, and among other castes, the 'Kerman' caste (probably the highest) is the only one rich enough to afford or participate in space travel, or maybe there are laws limiting the other castes from it. I like the first explanation a bit better, but both are plausible.
The 'seemingly inexhaustible' line seems like pretty weak evidence for cloning. Imagine earth, there are over 200 people born every minute (and I refuse to believe only one is a sucker), I don't think I could bomb through that many kerbals if I tried.
The lack of buildings? Not sure. I know one of the crew/eva reports (i think flying low in grasslands) says "I think I can see my house from here".
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Might it be possible to make the keys, by flying to those places and using science reports to tell what biome is what?
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7 hours ago, Firemetal said:
(Side note: How do I post images? When I frequented this forum a few years ago, we used imgur, but imgur does not allow posts without an account, and I do not wish to create one. What is the generally accepted way of image posting here?)
I use https://imgbb.com/ No account required, you can drag and drop photos right onto the homepage.
You can use any image uploader though I'm sure, just cope-paste the image link into the forum.
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Wow, just noticed. Click the little water thing:
And it switches from sea level to radar-altimeter mode.
I have played this game for 8 years, how didn't I learn this sooner? I thought you needed mods for radar-altitude, so I did all my Minmus/Mun landings by eye and looking at my shadow. (Certainly made darkside landings interesting)
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Mun's polar rescue mission went well. Had enough dV left over to swing by Minmus, but I couldn't get a transfer maneuver set up from polar orbit.
Gave up, then nailed it accidentally.
The lander works quite well, very stable the whole way down. Worth noting I play with re-entry heating at 10%, because I remember 0.90 too well.
Nice.
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11 hours ago, Fraktal said:
I use only a few equatorial sats.
'Few' as in, I used to go for three per body but got tired of orbital drift inevitably throwing their spacing off. So now I just use one sat in a medium-height orbit and learn to live with having a limited transmission window.
Goodness man, a limited transmission window? Why live with that? If you do not like the "right" and high precision approach, do what this thread is about, and set off a handgrenade of relays or something.
Although then again, if you're not playing with probe-control-requires-signal, why bother I guess?
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On 11/17/2022 at 3:05 AM, miklkit said:
Me neither. The rescue missions were epic!
Speaking of rescue missions...
I can still nail precision landings.
We brought friends to Val's rescue. (So that if this goes wrong, we need rescue nine kerbals!) Getting the XP on my inexperienced crews. The lander had to be wide, to deal well with angles, and this design turned out to work pretty well. The sideways-mounted fuel tanks are staged off when done. That whole top array thing has about 3,000 dV. Launched on a twin boar carried by twin Clydesdales (which fit neatly under the "wings") and it's actually quite a cost-effective passenger lander. ($84,000 & seats nine)
Also, I made sure to bring a couple of scientists because on the first trip I accidentally did a materials study in LKO, collected the data (0.1 science) and broke the experiment. Oops.
The de-orbit maneuver node also went crazy after I landed, blew itself up to 4,000 dV and was coming back down when I screenshotted.
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9 hours ago, Gurkonier said:
I used to put three even spaced in an orbit. But more recently i built a satellite centrifuge, where i put a bunch of relay satellites on, rotate it fast enough and decouple them.
The chaos does the rest. You only need enough satellites, so the chance is high enough, that there will always be a relay in sight.
Doing this with a resonant orbit is much more time consuming. (at least for me, because i can't sleep well, if the orbits are not within a tolerance of 10m)Edit: Then, in the most cases the spent stages with relay antennas thing is enough for moons.
I like the idea of spinning a ship quickly to fling the relays outwards. And yeah: the basic prinicple of chaotic netowrks is fling enough relays at the problem, chances are that at least one will be in the right position; precision is irrelevant. And that chance gets exponentially better with more satellites. If each relay has a 1/2 chance of covering a point on the planet, then the chance of having coverage is 1 - 0.5^n. If I fling ten satellites out, that's 99.9% coverage. And 1/2 is a bit of an underestimate generally, or rather it is the worst case for when you are operating right on the surface of a moon/planet. Further out, the orbits are relatively larger compared to the body so each relay's chance might be more like 3/4 or 4/5.
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Didn't think the Mun's north pole would be so hilly.
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I found out my launch profiles were wayyy too steep. Held the old habit over of "start turning at 10km" but also got a bit lax over time about actually turning, so oftentimes I'd be at maybe 10 degrees before 15-20km, and come out of the atmosphere at 30-35 from vertical, so it was steep even for the old steep approaches. Did some testing with a Kerbal X, comparing to some competition thread I found. My normal profile got to orbit with 3780 dV and 3719 dV (two tries). I tried one that I wrote was "wildly shallow": 40 degrees (from vertical) by 9.5k, it took 3462. My best run, when I read the best modern profile, got down to 3351 dV by turning 45 degrees at 8km.
The worst run was when I did the L-approach of burning upward, to space, then sideways, to orbit, ("L" for the shape, and "loser") but also restricting the throttle so the apoapsis was never more than 50s away. 4398 m/s of dV. When I repeated the run, but full-throttled it all the way to 80km apoapsis, I got 3989 dV, which is bad but not too bad. Oddly, this was tied for being the fastest way to orbit.
TL;DR: Learnt I've been doing it wrong since 2015.
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10 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:
Aw.
But yes though, Tedvey did get rescued from orbit of Minmus, he's back on Kerbin.
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33 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:
Did he/she make it home?
Tedvey is still out there, on what is basically a chair with 2,500m/s of dV. I have launched a rocket to Minmus, which I had to do anyway for another contract, and I've given it an empty command pod for him. The pan is to land it on Minmus, mine some ore (the other contract), and precision-land him beside it for the trip back home. I trust my ability to land precisely on Minmus, so it will be fine. Currently he's in low Minmus orbit waiting for the rescue-rescue, currently transferring to Minmus.
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I did my first rendezvous and rescue mission. Played a long time without learning docking well, but it went pretty smoothly. Hooked up an old relay-satellite design with a command seat, and Tedvey was happy when we got to him.
If only I'd remembered to bring the parachute BEFORE I met Tedvey in Minmus's orbit.
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Was doing a challenge of making KSP airliners, and among different categories of airliner to build, we also experimented with some odder things. This one is a mobile staircase.
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I ask because I've always liked the chaotic style of antennas absolutely anywhere, but clearly it's a bit unpopular, at least from what I see online.
A lot of my relays around Kerbin are spent spages with antennas. When I do send out purpose built relays, I just fling them anywhere. Sometimes I attach them to SRBs and hope for the best. The only real organisation is naming them. Eg. "LKRS XXV-SP Gregory II", low kerkin (orbit) relay satellite, number 25, SP (spent stage), from the mission Gregory II.
My relay network, looks like this.
I like it, but just ask this because when I shared a savegame with a friend, this messy style bothered him so much he deleted it and made his own, it was 6 or 10 relays in perfectly circular, polar orbits around Kerbin, perfectly spaced. It seemed way too artificial to me, but he likes it. All the tutorials and questions are "hey how do I set up my satellites to be in perfect geosynchronous orbit" and the like. Functionally, both kinds of network work. My system simply relies on there be enough crap that something can always connect, and it has been very reliable. I think it's fun to just launch stuff whereever. I saw someone say to build a triangular, geosynchronous relay orbit around Minmus with one rocket, then crash the delivery rocket back to deorbit it. I thought he was crazy. De-orbit to clear it? Why? Attach another antenna and you've got an extra relay for free.
Now that I think about it, I totally have to send a relay mission to Duna, and I will surround the transfer stage with relays, then blow it up, like a hand grenade.
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"Non-relativistic" as in this hypothetical assumes no relativistic effects. (e.g. relativity is wrong, or it's a fictional setting without it.) It's just Newtonian physics here. So, what challenges are there in going faster than light, even with relativity's absolute ligh-speed limit removed? Want to hear thoughts/problems with this. Here's the one I thought of:
HEAT PRODUCTION
Space, even interstellar space, still has stuff. One hydrogen atom per cubic centimetre is the usual figure I've heard. But when you're going at light speed, that creates issues with cooling. For one square meter of cross-sectional area facing forward, it will get hit by v*106 atoms per second. In weight, 1.7e-18 grams of matter per second. The kinetic energy of stuff hitting it will be 0.5mv2, and putting the mass/s in, we get a kinetic energy absorption = 8.5e-19v3. Assuming velocity is c = 3x108, energy per second is (27*8.5)*105 = 2.3x107 watts. Presumably, most of this is going into heat, so let's assume the wall on this spacecraft is 5 inches of steel. Steel is about 8 tonnes/m^3, so this square metre space-ship front weighs near enough 1000kg. Steel melts at 1510c, and let's assume it's 0c. How long could we travel at light-speed before it reaches 1000c? Specific heat capacity of 452 J/kg, so 452,000 J to heat the ton one degree, and 4.52x108 to heat it to 1000 degrees. We have 2.3x10^7 watts of heat, so it will last about 20 seconds.
That's a bit of a problem if we want to go interstellar, or even to Mars. The sun is 8 minutes away, so anything further than the moon is more or less out of the picture.
I want some input on these next things: what effect would angling the plate have? Currently we've assumed 100% of the collisions' energy goes into heat. But if we angle the plate, wouldn't the incoming atoms bounce off, potentially sparing a lot of the heat? I don't know how to calculate this, but what fraction of heating might be avoided if the plate were angled away by 60, 70 or 80 degrees?
Also, what cooling might there be? We're assuming really advanced propulsion, but for fun, how much heat can KSP tech radiate? The wiki says the radiator panel (large) can dissipate a max of 3.64 MW. Since 1c generates 23 MW, we would need 6.4 for every square metre facing frontally, just for 1c. That sounds pretty managable, though I don't have KSP installed right now and I can't check how big the panels are. Still, it will place a heavy restriction on any potential spaceship's design, because it will need a lot of sideways/rear surface area per frontal surface area, and it means the spaceship must face the direction of travel.
What if we wanted to go faster than 1c? The formula I got for kinetic energy absorption goes up with v cubed, so 2c has 8x the heat, 4c has 64 times, and we're still looking at over a year to get to Alpha Centauri. We'd need about 420 large radiators for each frontal square metre, and that's beginning to get absurd.
Aside from other issues/thoughts, any solutions to the heating problem at over about 2-3c?
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I was flying manually, and without fussing over getting the absolute best performance out of the plane at any cost, because we needed a margin for error, and because it rewards stable/easy to fly designs, and it saves a lot of time. Even so, a few planes are pigs to get up and flying right (particularly supersonics) and took ages. Generally my not hyper-careful methods of flying meant that when I submitted a plane the range I advertised was usually slightly less than what it would be officially. Not by much, but I noticed it.
Most annoying bit would be testing at multiple altitudes or engine modes or something.
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27 minutes ago, life_on_venus said:
Yes, that sounds really good actually.
What are your thoughts regarding the categories in the current challenge?
I know in the reboot they added 3 categories (S/M/L hopper), but I'm wondering if some categories should be added or removed for the reboot.
Large hopper, for example, doesn't make much sense because in real life these small city airports only operate smaller planes.
Equally, I think turboprop and seaplane could be turned into S/M regional prop, with extra points for operating on water, snow, gravel, etc.
Finally, we've seen most passenger 747s retire and A380s are going the same way. Since jumbo jets are becoming obsolete, what about replacing it with an Ultra Long Haul category, where you can enter either a traditional jumbo or newer widebody aircraft and compete over cost per passenger mile (with hard minimums for range and speed)?
Edit: To clarify, a system of:
S Helicopters
S/M regional prop
S/M hopper
S/M/L regional jet
M/L Ultra Long Haul
The categories became a bit of a blur in the last one, but other than adding a few tiers of jumbo (because a 152 seater should not at all be put in the same category as some of the hulking behemoths that we posted up before)
I don't really see the point in the ultra-long haulers. They've always found their places in with the other planes, just with a bonus of a 6 or 8000 km range. Hoppers, I don't think anybody actually submitted any, and they were pretty niche to begin with. Maybe they get one category, maybe they get lumped in with 'other'. I don't want to touch helicopters myself. I also think jumbos are pretty good, (and designing stupidly big ones was a lot of fun) so I won't remove them at all. Supersonics should have their own categories, and maybe not any with under 60 passengers, ( + hard range requirements, maybe 3400km minimum?) because they don't make sense for short trips. I think they should cost more to maintain and design than subsonic planes of similar sizes.
I think seaplanes should be kept as a small category to themselves, (though any plane can be a seaplane) running just 'area' routes, maybe not going from city to city (there probably won't be many unless I can get a good spreadsheet going, because each city makes it more complicated than the one before. I'm worried that it's just going to be too complex, but spreadsheets might save me.) but servicing just an area, going from small town to small town, landing in lakes and rivers and fields and wherever else is practical.
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10 minutes ago, life_on_venus said:
What about a tiered system?
A design company starts at tier 1, where they can submit 1 plane at a time. As more of their planes sell they get the ability to submit more designs, and larger ones such as jumbo jets
It's already there, kind of. Each company starts with a set amount of money (10 million, it doesn't matter what exactly) and designing a plane costs money, and bigger, more complicated planes will cost more. (Each type of plane will have a base cost, say 400k for a turboprop, plus maybe 12k per passenger and 5k per part count, so a typical turbo prop might be 800k-ish to design, a Smallie might be 1.1 mill and it goes up as the planes get bigger)
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1 minute ago, panzerknoef said:
Honestly we could probably use the money to at least stop useless designs from being spammed. Like a good plane would be bought in numbers so a lot of profit and a lot of options to start designing new planes. However if you design poor planes, they'll be bought in smaller numbers or even not at all. That results in less funds for the builder which means they won't be able to design as many planes afterwards since they just won't have the budget. Hopefully that will push the designers to spend more time and effort on their planes and it would save the judges the pain of flying something that's basically a waste of their time. I think that might be a more effective consequence for bad design than just to bad review they get now, along with it giving an actual purpose to the "planes bought" part at the end of each review.
However, I do want a rule where a reviewer can say that the RnD cost nothing, because clearly none was done. I want this so that you can invoke in on the designs that are so bad that they're great fun to review. There's been a few bombshells of planes like that, and I like them. (Though I want it to be rare)
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1 minute ago, GDJ said:
That's why I picked 10. It's not too much, not too little, and if somebody's plane/craft is not on the current review list, they can either wait or withdraw their submission.
And we list which craft we review for the week. More communication to the submitters, the better.10 is reasonable. Perhaps a little high, but reasonable. Remember that's per person, so it could still multiply out to large numbers.
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54 minutes ago, GDJ said:
I like a restart, but we really gotta set a limit on how many planes get submitted. From what I've read the submissions were over 100.
Knock it down to 10 at a time, then take in another 10, and so on. Do it in smaller steps.
Yeah, I'll test a few myself. No problem.That's where another bit of my business sort of idea comes in. It will cost your simulated company money to design a plane, (though you can get more money if people buy it) which will keep it down a bit. On top of that, maybe a hard limit that you can have no more than 6 unreviewed planes submitted at any one time or something.
Your Take on KSP Lore?
in KSP1 Discussion
Posted
I think they all have the last name "Kerman" because it's not a last name like we use it now, but like a medieval one describing your job (hence names like Taylor, Smith, Miller), or maybe it's a title, for astronauts/rocketry/space things. Kerbals that don't have anything to do with spaceflight aren't in the game (I think). "Werner von Kerman" is kinda weird for having a 'von' though. Maybe he has a regular last name but somebody screwed up his paperwork or something for the KSC.