innovine

The only thing difficult about KSP is the poor frame rate when docking complex vessels.

What if, when playing Career mode, the player gets an offer of corporate sponsorship, and in return for in-game Kerbal money, would place a corporate logo on the side of your spaceship? You don't get forced to do it, but it might be attractive money... In the meantime, the KSP game developers could perhaps generate a little extra real income by selling in-game advertising..

You should also be able to jump from airlock to airlock, for those times when you haven't got your helmet.

The IVA screens make me sad. After building a wonderful(!?) spacecraft, I want to fly it like I am on board. Sadly the internal views are a bit lacking. Stuff I'd like to see: Switches and buttons for the action groups, abort handles, alarms and tank fuel gauges, range to target, orbital params on some readout screen, etc. Analog gauges and numeric counters would be awesome, make the interior look like a submarine or something with plumbing and retro control panels. Furry dice. Windows to peak out of, nicer more detailed models and textures in general, toggleable cockpit lighting (backlit controls and shadows from the sun through the window), cockpit noises, etc. Ksp already makes me feel like a space engineer, thanks, but rarely like an astronaut.

I found the following article which basically pans the use of sextants as, at best, 'satisfactory'. Still though, I wonder if it wouldn't be fun to try use one? http://fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx/Space-sextants-FrankReed-oct-2010-g14170

I read that the Gemini missions used a space sextant to calculate their orbital parameters, and when doing rendezvous. Also, Apollo used it to confirm their orbital parameters too. Would this be a useful addition to the IVA view? I don't really know how the sextant works, and would welcome the learning challenge Would it be possible to take readings and calculate approximate orbital parameters based on how accurate you are? Perhaps a small control panel where you enter the angles and times you record and it displays orbital predictions? For those of us who like flying realistically, it might be pretty cool to only have an approximate orbit, and not really be certain of it, and to refine the predictions as you approach the Mun/space station or whatever... seeing where you are on the map is all very nice, but I'm guessing it's more exciting and challenging when you are taking readings and estimations only.. Suggestions welcome, please! Could this work in game and be fun and educational? If there are achievements added to KSP, manual navigation could count towards a few of them.

I understand and agree completely with what you say regarding a lever and a fulcrum, and that works fine if you are rotating a ball. but IJKL are translation controls. There is no rotation involved and the analogy does not hold.. One shuld just press left to go left, press Up to go up. Press forward to go forward. Straightforward and easy.

I loved Frontier back in the Amiga days. That had a whole galaxy on a floppy disk (1.4mb)

I think you are just used to it. Ok, the original problem is perhaps that rotate up is assigned to S(down), but since that's how all airplanes work I think it's safe to say it can remain so. However, when it comes to translations, there's no real reason to do two wrongs in attempting to make it right.

You can't do that, because that'll either let you rotate on all 3 axes, or translate, but not both. You could toggle between rotation and translation, but that's annoying as you sometimes need to do both at the same time. Using WSADQE and IJKLHN at the same time is an acceptable solution imho. But it should be consistent with the EVA controls.

It's not that. I understand that the camera's reference frame can be totally different to the vessels. I mean more that when I try and rotate around, it often goes in unpredictable ways or experiences gimbal locks. Having the cameras focus point fixed means it's very tricky to see parts of a large ship. afaicr the EVA views are really weird too. Can't be precise since I'm not at my gaming machine to test. Simply put, the whole view thing feels in need of a makeover.. Pretty much. Again, without testing, if memory serves me correctly and you are in Stage View with the camera mode set to Chase, and you position the camera behind the vessel looking forward past the part you chose as 'control from here', and treating IJKL as arrows, then J translates the craft left, but I translates the craft down. The wiki page confirms this too. I guess your chart is incorrect. I think that the horizontal arrows control the direction of the vessel, and the vertical arrows control the direction of the rcs exhaust. So it's inverted. Silly

Actually, my first (and only) Kerbal to Duna was not stranded, he made it safely back to Kerbin. I spend a lot of time testing, and then sending research probes, work out TWR and estimate fuel levels etc etc I basically fly my big missions a bit like NASA would, and can't see how budget restrictions would make it any more exciting or challenging. It'd just encourage me to take shortcuts and skip some of the test flights... I see your point regarding SimCity, but for me at least, KSP is all about designing my own missions, figuring out how to achieve a goal. That's not the same as avoiding the inbuilt problems. It's about creating my own restrictions, deciding on my own goals, and deciding on how to reach them. That's the game I want to see. Career could easily wait IMHO.

I would LOVE LOVE LOVE a better navball!!! It's my favorite feature!

The question that interests me is... Will career mode offer anything more besides being 'Sandbox with restrictions'? I already have plenty of restrictions, imposed by my imagination and knowledge of orbital mechanics.. adding arbitrary economic cost restrictions doesn't interest me compared to those. Also, right now, the most difficult area (by a LONG, LONG way) for me, is not orbital mechanics, it's not rendezvous or docking, it's not mission planning nor space plane design, its not the lack of science parts or re-entry. The thing making Kerbal Space Program difficult for me IS THE FRAME RATE LAG* when the part count goes over a couple of hundred. This is limiting my mission complexity more than anything else. The APPEAL of KSP imho is entirely in the freedom of the sandbox environment, and these forums are testament to the fact that is is already a very playable, fun game. Dumbing it down by adding unnecessary economic costs and whatnot does not really seem fun. What's next, simulating the political and propaganda value of a space race? That is, after all, the major driving economic force. Simulating the military influence on rocketry? That too is very important for economics. *I am not asking for miracles, but I think there is a LOT to optimize in relation to the physics. Why are all the physics calculations being run when I approach an inert space station, for example? I'm not imparting forces on it, some bounding box collision detection and rendering is all that's required, until I impact.

Can't say I've had any problems with the controls. I'm also surprised you didn't mention the horrible mouse view gimbal locks and focus. BTw up and down translate control are backwards. Press left to translate left, press up to translate, uh, down?

What a great idea

Hi, I find myself often zooming in and out a lot, first zooming in to tweak a maneuver node, and then zoom way out to see the target and intersections, then zoom all the way in again to adjust the node again. Especially annoying for the interplanetary courses. It doesn't help that the slightest misclick de-selects the node and so I need to zoom in to select it again... Would it be possible to add an extra, smallish window which shows the maneuver node close up (so i can easily re-select it and adjust the handles and it's position on the orbit), and have this window overlaid with the current view (which would show the big picture view of the whole maneuver and target)... Feel free to discuss any other possible solutions, if you, like me, find the maneuvering node to be annoyingly fiddly to use.

Doesn't Orbiter do this?

Unfortunately, what is fun on the ground makes moving in zero g really annoying. I'd like to go on EVA from my space station and float around it, and do transfers between vehicles and modules. It's far too overpowered for this kind of thing. Please give us an option to throttle it down a lot. Couldn't caps-lock introduce a low-power precision mode?

I haven't done any exact measurements, but it sure feels like the RCS used by the Kerbals when on an EVA is the most powerful engine in the game... one short press of a button and my Kerbal is zooming away from the ship at a small percent of lightspeed. Would it be possible to reduce the power of their RCS, maybe by a factor of TEN? Real astronauts maneuver around slowly. Whether the Kerbals EVA RCS is realistic or not, it certainly feels very overpowered to me...

The purple target icon could easily have a little stick on it, indicating the roll of the target. The purple target icon could also expand or contract to indicate distance, but I'd prefer a little range-to-target numeric display off to one side. This might confuse things more than it helps, but what if the brown/blue equator on the navball could be set to lie in the orbital plane, wouldn't there be enough info in the current system to then dock (besides roll, which is not essential)..? ie if I know my target port is pointing straight up (orbit normal) and I'm pointing straight down, the offset of the pink marker tells me how to translate to get aligned, right? Works already like this in equatorial orbit, the problem to me seems like it's the more general case of inclined orbits causing the confusion (thanks Yourself for the long and enlightening post)

Here's my recipe for rendezvous and docking. Start with ship A, the destination/target, and launch it along the 90 line into an equatorial orbit. make the orbit circular at 100km. These instructions also work for other orbits but a few more steps might be needed somewhere. Mostly with in- and outwards burns. Wait with ship B until A passes directly overhead. By the time you get to orbit, A will have moved ahead of you by 30-45 degrees. The goal here will be to maintain a smaller, faster orbit for a few orbits, and close that distance. If you end up ahead of the target, the opposite applies, ou make your orbit a little bigger, so you are slower and orbit in a longer time, then on each orbit the faster target is allowed to catch up with you. After launching ship B, fly as usual until your Ap just goes a few km above 100km. Turn off the engine. When you get to Ap, raise your Pe to about 75-80km. You are now in a smaller, faster orbit, so will start to catch up. Set ship A as your target. You'll see two nodes appear, An and Dn (ascending and descending). These indicate where the planes of your orbits cross. Right click on the one ahead of you and add a little of the purple direction so you'll end up in the same plane as the target. Precision counts, so try get it neat as you can. Do the burn when you get to the node. Now, as your Ap is a little higher, you'll see an intersection with ship A's orbit on either side of the intersection (one as your altitude goes up over 100 and one when it goes back down). If your Ap is close to 100, the intersection will be close to your Ap. So if you are at Ap and make your orbit circular, you wont change distance from the target any more... Mouse over the intersect points and watch the separation... as you complete an orbit, the separation will decrease on the next intersect. This is because you are orbiting faster (due to the lower Pe), and so each orbit you'll catch up by a few degrees. If you burn prograde at Ap (make sure to select Orbit on the navball so you get your orbit prograde marker, not the velocity vector to the target) to raise the Pe, your orbits become more like each other, and so you'll catch up by a smaller amount. When you reach the next intersection point, you'll just be a short distance from the target and now ideally want to burn to make your orbits identical. You can do this with a maneuvering node (you can use a bit of inwards or outwards burn too) or simply select Target on the navball, point towards the target and burn... Depending on your relative speed to the target, you either burn towards or away from it. Switch the navball to Target (you can forget all about your orbit from here on). Rotate so you find your relative velocity prograde marker on the navball, and also locate the target, and burn so that the velocity prograde moves to the target. It'll drift off slowly, so do a correction now and then (this is making your orbits identical). If you are closing too fast, turn the ship around and burn the opposite way. Position your nose so your retrograde marker is between the nose and the target retrograde marker and burn, you'll 'push' the velocity marker onto the target, aligning the orbits and decreasing your relative speed at the same time. Eventually you'll just drift on up to the target at a few m/s and can easily stop and start to float around it. Note that it'll make docking much easier if the port you want to dock to is pointing north (the orbit normal, perpendicular to the orbital plane). If you approach from the orbit normal direction, the target will tend to rotate around the docking port, but the docking port will stay facing you. If you approach it from some other angle, the docking port will appear to rotate away from you all the time, so you'll need to translate and roll continuously to keep up with it.

I'd like to see better cockpits, so I can approach and dock via instrumentation. I can't help it, I love switches and levers loved orbiter for that reason but left for ksp to get the navball.

I like to take note of where my boosters and fuel tanks impact Kerbin. I try and have each stage's discarded parts splash down at sea. If you are not already doing it, you might plan and attempt the return journey for every mission. Don't send anyone on a known one-way-trip. (my first kerbal on duna also made it back, barely) To improve realism a bit, you might want to place orbital communication relay satellites in various places, and make sure your landing has line-of-sight between them, all the way back to ksc. Also, land in daylight. This will provide for best TV coverage

I get a nasty freeze when entering mun's SOI, and the loading was supposed to be much faster, but is actually slower. I also got some crashes, mostly when quitting the game, so I'd expect another patch..