Incarnation of Chaos

Everyone seems to be forgetting the Tegra chips CPU's in the switch are not X86; it's ARM. You would need to recompile the source for the new architecture; along with ensuring the proper instructions are there. Is it impossible? Not by a long shot. But would it be in the best interests of Squad to hire on an entire team of ARM developers to develop a port of a niche game for a niche system that won't ever manage to equal the experience available on even the slowest PC ? I can't speak for their financial department; however , common sense says no.

I enjoy a "Barbell" configuration with 2 MK3 pods connected to a 1.25m service bay and one end with a 2.5m docking port; throw some science and/or a probe core in it and now you have 6 crew+ science+ docking. Apply parachutes and a heatshield for easy reentry; simmer at around 2000m/s at ~50,000 km. Best served with a recovery crew with thermal blankets, water and stretchers to get your brave explorers out of the miserable can safely back to KSC.

Considering i'm a massive aircraft nerd (Especially military) the fact that my process looks like this is not surprising in the slightest; even though i didn't intentionally base it off that model xD

a MK3 command pod with a docking port and enough fuel can get you > 3K Delta-V; then you can just make multiple trips with a nice compact lander. The only issue becomes getting all 6 back down to kerbin; you have to choose between making the "Tug" heavier with more space for tourists. Or docking a return module after entering LKO.

#1- Why does your lander have 4 engines in the first place? You apperently have the ability to dock and NERVA engines. So make yourself a Space Tug, shoot it up into LKO and rendevous it with the "Lander" for your contracts. This saves you money on the transfer stage (Your only cost is fueling it now) and makes the lander the only stage you need to recover and it goes from needing to carry enough fuel to go from LKO>Mun>Insertion burn> Circularize>Land>Ascend>Escape>LKO>Decend>Land. To only needing enough fuel to Land>Ascend>Rendevous>Decend; which can also be done with much more efficient engines now with much less weight. And you still recover the lander! #2- Honestly i hate to say this but your solution is not really in the stock game; there's plenty of mods that add reaction wheels for 2.5M parts and beyond which make this a cakewalk. But assuming the stock game is your only option; don't fuss around with RCS and just make sure you have enough reaction wheels to keep these parts stable at the very least; then left-click your engines and find the "Thrust Limiter" and set it at about 10-20. Then target your docking ports and do the dance; and save often so when you muck it up it's not a complete waste of time. But tbh i think you're building wayyy too big and the mass is just running away from you; meaning more fuel and more engnes which means more mass AHHHHHHAAAAHHH. Like i haven't seen contracts in the stock game where the number of tourists is over 4; which means that even if your lander parts don't have the capacity making multiple trips with the lander is an option.

I always forget about KSP's weird stock drag modeling; personally i think the mastadon would be fine as is because having a cheap 2.5m engine with decent thrust enables plenty of missions that throwing Mainsails away would make too expensive. Just give the Mainsail more thrust and a bigger/longer bell while keeping to 2.5m; as far as everything else i'm agreed. I use a mod called "SpaceY" and it adds a 1.25m engine with 440kn of thrust with pretty reasonable efficiency; which i find to be a very nice mid-game engine. Great for landers or massive bundles of asparagus that tempt interplanetary space; something like that is desperately needed in stock. Just not unlocked too quickly because it breaks early progression badly; i feel it should be unlocked with 1.875m parts.

After the price of the mastadon was reduced to 8K i haven't used the Mainsail at all; i can get 2X Mastadon for a similar price and i'm not shy about using massive clusters of engines. So the Mainsail is in a desperate need of a rebalance since it has no real use currently; as far as 1.25m engines go it's pretty slim pickings as well. However most stock engines actually fit perfectly fine on a 1.25m body bare; so a quick and dirty option is just allowing most 1.875 and 2.5m parts to be used "Bare" in stock. But i agree; even after only a few nodes 1.25m engines basically end up becoming an option between "Old and reliable" and "Hilariously OP" with nothing in between. I would also say there's almost a similar lack of engines for 1.875m parts; which you get well before engine plates and basically end up discarding because there's no real engines you can mount to them. And by the time you get plates; you're launching 2.5m stacks anyway.

There's no real reason that the points system can't be there in addition to a more complex system; then just have toggles to ramp it up/down.

How is the swivel out of date? It still works perfectly for 1.25m rockets as intended. It's cheap and relatively efficient for what it does. And by the time you need more power 1.85 and 2.5 m parts become available. And if you want; you can use engine plates in MH to cluster them. I've actually done this with 2.5m tankage for larger landers that need high TWR but no suitable engines exist. All that said I don't actually disagree with the overall point of your argument. IRL we didn't grind science and then magically have the F-1 engine poof into existence; we had a mission which had a series of specifications that any potential engine would have to meet. Then designs were submitted and built; I would like to see a similar feature in KSP. Where you can define a set of specifications (That actually make sense physically) and R&D chugs away and as you continue through your program are notified that potential designs are ready. You then pay a sum to fly them and after several tests are cleared for regular use. This would stand alongside the tech tree in career; where additional technology will increase the speed of development, types of engines and the range of values that can be tweaked. Ps. Sorry for the wall o text

Alright; tested all of this last night. And literally saved thousands of delta v performing plane changes around duna. Thanks for all the input; and the humility of realizing I don't know jack after hundreds of hours in ksp xD

Then it's not even the engine or physics at fault; it's the implmentation of the physics in game. Also i only mentioned CUDA because i didn't want to catch too much flak; OpenGL or some other platform agnostic solution would be the "Best" in terms of compatiblity. Still would be a major pain to code though; as with any of this.

Ah i see; you burn prograde/retro at apo/peri until the node aligns and then perform the inclination change desired?

in KSP how would you align the nodes then? Radial out or in?

I don't but i'm actually going to end up sending that probe again so gimme a few days and i'll get it; it was pretty hilarious since the AN was several million KM higher but the DN ended up being the most efficient. And i'm well aware the positions of them are arbitary; but that's just what iv'e gathered from my experience+ online materials. But KSP was acting very strange that day since it had been up for ~3 days in a row; so it may very well have been a glitch.

Really? I just had a Eve probe that needed 400m/s less delta-v to perform the same inclination change at the decending node (Which was also CLOSER to Eve). Also aligning the nodes requires more dv; and does not make that statement false. Because most times the nodes won't be aligned with apogee or perigee; they're going to be somewhere inbetween.

You change inclination at your ascending or decending nodes; decending node is most efficient. Changing at apogee or perigee is wildly inefficent and likely won't change the inclination as much as you want; also the cost for a plane change is mostly based on the degree of inclination you wish to change. Going from 120 Degree inclination to 0.0 is gonna hurt; even if you're doing it "Efficiently". Always try to launch into the inclination desired; or carry the extra delta-v to achieve the desired inclination.

Everyone keeps asking for KSP to move to another engine; and i would urge these people to look at the other options available and see how they handle complex physics simulations. Because the majority don't do much better; games fake a lot of "Realistic" physics events using baked explosions/sprites, less particle effects and hard-coded flight models precisely because actually doing an accurate physics simulation crushes CPU cycles. Now there are multithreaded physics approaches; but they're difficult to intergrate into an existing program and result in major bugs that are a headache to chase down and squash. DX 12,11,10 won't make a difference; DX is just a graphics API. And KSP is not graphically that intensive; the majority of slowdown is from physics which DX won't be involved in. There are likely ways to do general physics on GPU's; but that's the realm of CUDA/Open GL and i doubt there's many people who would code a realistic physics sim for a game. And even if they did; you just move the bottleneck somewhere else. You would end up needing multiple GPU's for the best performance.; personally i don't mind that since i'm using 2X Vega 56. And people on lower-spec machines could use an IGPU as a "Physics Accelerator" with something else rendering graphics; but all of this is very easy to say. The difficulty in coding it and balancing performance vs an accurate simulation would be massive; which is the same situation we're in now. So i'm not against a KSP 2.0; but the idea that Unity is the primary issue is a red herring. Unreal, Crytek, Lumberyard or an in-house engine would not handle it much better; the only realistic way to speed physics up signifigantly would be using CUDA/OpenGL plugins to make the GPU handle it. Which would need to be basically custom code; also all other major engines have their own jank and bugs; you won't see many existing bugs go away with another engine.

Starting off i want to say this; all of these are perfectly valid reasons for playing stock. And i have completed the vast majority of the base game well before modding it (I never unlocked the biggest wheels because i didn't want to grind another 500 science for that node) So why do i play modded? I think the biggest reason is because iv'e always modded games; i was like 8-9 when i first started modding C&C Generals, Zero Hour and moved on to Spore, Civ III and SWEAW. And if i reflect on the reasons i decided to mod those games it's pretty simple; there's always something lacking. In Generals for instance there were hidden factions that could be restored with a few lines of code, vehicle niches that were not filled in specific factions; Spore i decided to mod because i was playing heavily around the time the Kepler Space Telescope went up and started discovering large amounts of potentially habitable worlds around red dwarfs. Which spore heavily weighted toward not hosting worlds, let alone habitable ones. So i got a mod and tweaked it to represent what the data was saying (Worlds, mostly barren because dwarfs are flaring stars but the occasional habitable one.). Civ III just had awesome mods; ditto for Civ IV. And SWEAW only covered a small fraction of the extended universe content. Tl;dr It's for one of three reasons; Realism, Content, Exploration. Now i actually want to go over your points; because i find some of them interesting. 1-4 i totally understand; using a modded save is like having a project car always in the shop. This can be somewhat reduced by just having a standalone copy of KSP you use exclusively for modded content; but you still run into 1-3. But 5 is mostly a wash for me; i always ask myself if a mod adds something completely gamebreaking and rarely run into this. 6 is completely moot by having a seperate standalone modded folder. But the one i find most interesting is 7; because iv'e never seen it put like this. When i use mods i feel the exploration factor increases by a factor of 10; because now i'm not only exploring squad's game and seeing all the clever tricks and solutions they used to put something like KSP togther. I'm now exploring each ship; finding and appriceating the work of the modders who made my parts with each trip to the VAB. And since the majority of my mods actually increase the number of hurdles and challenges in game; i don't feel like it's detracting from the experience at all. It really comes down to how you like playing games i guess; along with your outlook and mental framing of mods in the first place.

Awesome; thx for answering my dumb question xD.

So iv'e had this question for a while but only recently have really been working with planes enough for it to really nag me; when you're using procedural wings there's a slider to increase "Mass-Strength Ratio" which i tend to set at 2 to prevent hypersonic shock from tearing them into pieces. But it's had me wondering; how realistic is this? Are there materials that exist now with such ratios? Are there any in common use with higher ratios? Are they metallic or composite?

The worst thing that can happen is a clipped tank shimmies loose and then becomes a projectile at orbital velocity that wrecks the rest of your stack; however, this is a structural problem and could happen with non clipped tanks. Autostrut also invites the kracken and autostrutting clipped parts can really lead to fun things when doing large timewarps; but again these are all stock issues. So in my opinion if your craft is failing because of clipped parts; generally it would have failed otherwise and you need to look at the overall design. So part clipping won't cause failures you would otherwise not have; this means on a purely mechanical level that part-clipping is not "Bad" or "Good". It's just another tool in the toolbox; i tend not to use large amounts of clipped parts or only partially clip them mainly due to Z-fighting making the spacecraft go partymode. But i personally don't mind it when i need to squeeze out every bit of performance from a lander/second stage; or i'm using large-volume propellents like LH2 that would otherwise occupy much more space. So i basically have my own internal "Ruleset" when it comes to clipping; you will find plenty of others that are similar or just don't do it at all. And that's the awesome thing about KSP; you can do whatever seems most realistic/immersive/useful for you and rock on.

Wow..... I can't believe i didn't realize that before; thanks for being patient with my derpyness. xD

Alright; new issue. The patch works to add the top and bottom nodes; and i'm able to tweak the offsets to position them where i want. However when i attach a tank or any other part; the node that should still be exposed on the attached part vanishes. I was holding down the mod key so i don't think it's due to surface attachment ; and the attachment rules look alright. Just for good measure here's my slightly edited patch (Basically CTRL+V'd from yours)

Hmm; interesting. And i don't use stock aero (FAR was one of the first mods i installed lul) so i'm pretty sure it won't be an issue for me unless i'm mistaken on how FAR handles it's drag calculations.

2.5 seems to work the best; 3.75 is a bit snug lul. Also i will; should be a fun little experiment.