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Previously I had expressed some grievances regarding the way that KSP handles signal strength and data transmission. After some time with my nose buried in information theory books and 30 year old PDFs about the DSN, I propose an improved system that is a little more realistic, but not too technically challenging. First, the concept of bands. The DSN is capable of operating in several bands, and these are; L-band (1-2 GHz) S-band (2-4 GHz) X-band (7-11 GHz) and more recently Ka-band (26-40 GHz) Lower power bands are available earlier in career mode, and the Tracking Station is capable of operating on higher energy bands with upgrades. Also included with the L3 station would be the ability to use a 500 GHz infrared laser communicator (with a new part or 2), which would provide a wide-band long-range communication link with properly equipped vessels. Higher power bands provide more bandwidth and less distance attenuation, but have higher energy costs per mit. Early antennae would only be able to utilize the L-band, but with the as-yet unimplemented part upgrade system they would be available to use a higher power band with the proper tech (eg, the Communotron 16 family would be L-band only at unlock, but could be upgraded to use the S-band later on). The late-game antennae would be capable of utilizing all bands, but only one at a time. This would be selected during vessel construction via the context menu, and would be fixed at launch. Each antenna also has 2 qualities (for determining signal) for each band. The first is the transmitter power measured in decibel-milliwatts (dBm), and the second is the antenna gain (also in dBm). The antenna also has a noise power, but this is independent of the band used. The tracking station also has these qualities for each band as well as a 'nominal bandwidth' value (~1-10Hz, except for the laser communicator which would be in the high kHz range), and upgrades will adjust the values to optimize for increased communication bandwidth and longer-distance communication (ie, higher power, higher gain, less noise power). Working with real-world values is difficult in KSP because of the reduced system size, but I have here a worked example with some conceptualized values. Before we get started, here is a quick unit conversion: dBm = [10 * log(W)] + 30 (watts to decibel-milliwatts) W = 10 ^ ([dBm + 30] / 10) (decibel-milliwatts to watts) Tracking Station: Level 1 L-band transmit/receive Gain: +50 dBm gain is directly proportional to the square of the antenna diameter and inversely proportional to the square of the wavelength Power: 30 kW = +44.8 dBm power is simply the transmitter power, a 'chosen' value Noise Power: 4.00e-20 W or -173.9 dBm thermal interference on the receiving end. directly proportional to bandwidth and dependent on the boltzmann constant Bandwidth: 10 Hz Bandwidth choice is arbitrary (read: defined by the hardware), but is usually higher on manned missions in cis-munar to allow for direct voice transmission. Unfortunately, this isn't a modelable feature so the bandwidth should stay low to keep the noise power down. Communotron-16 in Mun orbit, L-band transmit/receive Gain: +3 dBm Power 0.1W = -10 dBm Noise Power: 1.38e-20 W or -176.8 dBm Munar orbit is ~11.5x10^6 m from kerbin (give or take), so distance attenuation is calculated by: l^2 / (4*pi*r)^2 Where l is the wavelength and r the distance (units of meters, result is in watts). L-band has a wavelength of ~20cm (0.2m), so this equation evaluates to ~2.7e-10 W or -95.6 dBm To calculate received power, simply add the transmit power, the gains of the transmitter and receiver, and the distance losses. Uplink Signal: 50 dBm (station) + 3 dBm (probe) + 44.8 dBm (station power) -95.6 dBm (distance loss) = 6.5 dBm or 4.6 Watts received at Mun Downlink Signal: 50 dBm (station) + 3 dBm (probe) -10 dBm (probe power) -95.6 dBm (distance loss) = -48 dBm or 0.000015 Watts received at KSC Now, we can calculate the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the uplink and downlink, and this is done by dividing the signal by the noise power of the receiver. Note that this has to be done in Watts because of the logarithmic nature of the decibel system. Uplink SNR = 4.6 W / 1.38x10^-20 W = 3.33e20 Downlink SNR = 1.5x10^-5 W / 4x10^-20 W = 3.75e14 Using the Shannon-Hartley theorem, we the calculate the maximum bitrate at which information can be exchanged across the link. This bitrate is used for determining probe control on the uplink side, and for determining data TX rate on the downlink side. C = B * log(1+SNR)/log(2) where C is the bitrate, B the available bandwidth, and log the logarithm base 10. This equation can be simplified by taking the numerator and using a logarithm base 2 without the denominator, but I figured I'd put it in calculator-friendly mode for those of you who don't know how to do change of base. Using this, we calculate our max bitrate in each direction: Uplink bitrate = 10Hz * log(1+3.33e20) / log(2) = 681 bits/s Downlink bitrate = 10Hz * log(1+3.75e14) / log(2) = 484 bits/s As you can see, these numbers are pretty small compared to modern communication standards, but they are probably within an order of magnitude or two of the balanced values. According to wikipedia (nb: not-necessarily reputable source) the 20W transmitter on the Apollo LM could support a 56 kbit telemetry link or a 1.6kbit backup link, ergo the base values for power, noise, and gain require a bit of tweaking (especially for the higher power bands). As mentioned above, the downlink bitrate determines the rate at which science can be transmitted. This requires a re-scaling of the 'mit', as these rates could transmit any experiment in less than a tenth of a second, however the 'mit' system seems to be arbitrary right now so this isn't a huge deal. The uplink bitrate would determine whether a probe was controllable or not - too low of a bitrate (set arbitrary value here) and the probe can't effectively receive commands from ground. Alternatively, a minimum receive power could be used as the limiter rather than bitrate - this would allow the player to calculate probe controllability a little easier. The actual transmission system works like so: Antenna also have a 'power per mit' value, which depends on the band being utilized. Higher power bands require more EC/mit, but due to the difficult task of converting EC to Joules (EC/s to Watts) I haven't run any numbers here. The rough estimate I've seen is 1EC = 1kJ (1EC/s = 1kW) but I'm not sure how well this is balanced. The transmit bitrate for an antenna would be tweakable by a percentage slider; this allows the player to continuously transmit data at a slower rate than maximum which may be necessary do to electrical constraints. For use with relays, each link would have a bitrate calculated, and the lowest bitrate would be the bitrate for the channel. When a probe desires to transmit data to KSC, the downlink bitrate is calculated and a 'long action' similar to how the MPL works begins. The antenna begins transmitting data at the calculated downlink bitrate times the percentage slider (and consuming EC at a proper rate), and science will either 1) begin to accumulate at KSC until all the data goes through OR 2) build up in the antenna until it has all been 'transmitted', from which another action made on the antenna will 'commit' the science to KSC. The former would be ideal, but I'm not sure how KSP would take to incrementing the science over time, especially through warp. On the player end, they would require a signal distance attenuation table for each band, and the would simply sum the tracking station gain, probe gain, the loss in the table, and the transmitter power to get a received power. The bitrates would be calculated under the hood, and be displayed on the probe antenna's context menu. Send and receive power would be displayed in the current signal strength bar next to the chronometer. The purpose of this redesign is simple: to increase realism in the science process. Yes, the 'unlock points' system has its flaws, but that doesn't mean the transmission system has to be garbage as well. The New Horizons probe took over a year to broadcast all of the data it collected at Pluto, and the Voyager probes still have a non-zero downlink bitrate (~200 bits/s IIRC). Why can I send back all my data from Jool at lightning-speed? Separating the uplink and downlink signals also allows us to create one-way links, for what that's worth - another realistic scenario that the current system cannot simulate. tl;dr: The CommNet mechanics are trash and it wouldn't take much effort to make it better.

When the information panel is displayed for a docked docking port, include a readout of the current angle of the face of the docking port relative to its partner. Include + and - buttons to rotate the partner docking port (and attached structure) without undocking. This would allow a much greater degree of precision in the construction of structures and vehicles in-situ. For example, two short 2.5m vehicles with two Rovemax XL3 wheels each in mirror attachment could dock with Clamp-O-Tron Sr. ports to form a large rover. It would be much easier to ensure that the wheels are all facing in the same direction with this method, rather than undocking and rotating a potentially unbalanced structure. Something like this:

In the current system, any science transmissions are multiplied by your signal strength, reducing the science return for your experiments. Before 1.2, transmitting science only incurred a proportional penalty for transmission versus recovery, but now this proportional penalty is again divided by signal strength. This seems non-intuitive - If I collect n bits for return, I should be able to return all of n of those bits, and a weaker signal just means that the transmission will have to have more redundancy to prevent data loss. It seems silly that my data is just lost to the ether because of a poor signal-to-noise ratio, when I should be able to constantly re-broadcast the data until I have 100% of it accumulated on Kerbin. The Shannon-Hartley theorem seems to verify this, but I also don't know much about information theory and this could have exactly 0 bearing on the situation that I'm discussing. I propose that instead of a proportional science penalty, there would be a proportional time penalty, incurred by requiring more bits to be transmitted as a function of signal strength. At full strength the required bits to transmit would be that listed for the experiment, and with decreasing signal strength, a logarithmic or pseudo-logarithmic function to determine how many redundant bits should be transmitted. If the Shannon-Hartley theorem is valid here, the S/N term would be a function of signal strength, and the bandwidth the advertised bandwidth of the antenna doing the transmitting. This would require some interaction between the science dialogue window and the antenna system, as the dialogue window would require knowledge of the primary antenna onboard the spacecraft. I do realize that this would greatly reduce the penalty for having poor probe connections, however if the signal strength to S/N conversion function were curved steeply enough, it could offset this by requiring an extreme amount of time and EC to transmit data. Something that could be useful here would be a manual bandwidth limiter to ensure the probe didn't deplete its batteries right away in the event of an hours or days long transmission. At this point I'm just spitballing, but let me know what you think of this idea. EDIT: whoops, wrong forum. I need to not make posts when I'm tired.

I think this is a well-known problem throughout many versions of ksp, but (I believe) because the Mk2 cockpit is a single all-in-one nosecone, it generates a monstrous amount of re-entry heat. I have trouble not exploding the thing on relatively gentle reentry angles (40km periapsis) just returning from 450k orbits (still true in 1.2 despite pointy-object aerodynamic changes). The inline Mk2 and Mk3 cockpits have separate parts as noses (like a shielded docking port) which seems to disperse the heat better and solve the issue. Just about any re-entry is quite harrowing with the Mk2. Is this the intended (rather than simply emergent) behavior of the Mk2 cockpit? I wish there was a way to add more ablative coating at the cost of increased weight, but that is perhaps getting into modding territory. It does look pretty damn good imo though, so I'd hate to have to switch to the inline Mk2.

Here's what I'm thinking: If realistic water buoyancy can be implemented, why not ground effect? It would open up a whole new avenue of designs, like ground effect vehicles. It would also make takeoff and landing in spaceplanes and aircraft easier, as the amount of lift is increased as you approach the ground. However, that could be balanced out by reducing the effectiveness of control surfaces. It should also be easy to implement as the effect kicks in at or below the length of an aircraft's wingspan; This data is easily obtained, as it is already in the engineer's report. Please feel free to give your thoughts, whether for or against this. Thanks!

When assigning Action Groups, it would be very useful if we could use a Delay within the group so we could program a series of events just with 1 button press. We could get some really neat and creative things going on with just adding this one thing. I'm sure there are countless things we can come up with, but the great thing about it is it would add so much play value to the game, for such an easy thing to insert. You'd probably want to be able to assign a value to the Delay, and all the actions would need to flow top down for it to work. Just an idea.

What if - Part 2 I was Just drinking my coffee on my monitor, while watching the Orion Rocket Getting ready for launch to duna, when this came up to my mind. -Gene Kerman- Suggestion 3 What if.. There Was Baby Kerbals?.. I know this might seem crazy Baby kerbals going to space... but it would be actually funny to see that i never saw any mod maker or person do that . so Squad if your intreseted this idea is for you Suggestion 4 What if There was a Astroied Belt in Outermost Kerbol system? that would be a pretty intresting place to go , if your reading this and your a modmaker , this is a idea because i dont think squad is going to do it Suggestion 5 What if there was a Space Elevator in the KSC in only Sandbox mode that you can put your spacecraft into and then go to space to test them? i Personally think this idea has the worst chances of getting into the game but thats just a dream, If your a modmaker , Well you guessed it , another idea Please Vote on the poll on what idea you think is the best

Picture poor Jebediah sitting inside a MK1 capsule atop an overly complex rocket (aren`t they always?) waiting on the launchpad. He is smiling despite knowing that he is being sent to Duna on a one way mission (or at least until the Space Program decides to send another vessel to collect him) all on his own, within a space suit, within a tiny capsule and with no other entertainment than a minute window that will show nothing but cold cold space for the whole 200+ days of journey. Once within Duna`s sphere of influence Jebediah can look forward to a couple of days of achieving orbit, landing and performing a couple of experiments on the surface. After that, nothingness... nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to speak to... alone in the planet, the omega kerbal. So, you guys get what is bugging me: we have great mods to deal with the lack of life support gameplay, great mods to give us more realistic aerodynamics and soon communications networks in 1.2 all fine and dandy... Kerbals however seem to have 0 mental health needs, they will happily be put into a capsule for months on end... You might say it is an acceptable break from reality, but I for one make sure that any mission that is going to go longer than 1 month HAS to have at least two kerbals in it and a some kind of crew cabin (usually the hitchikers storage container). It is not neccesary for the game mechanics, but it makes me feel like I am at least giving my little kerbalnauts the chance of leaving the cockpit and taking a shower, sitting down, just plain go somewhere else. Still, even that might be "less than enough" for missions that count their duration in years instead of months... what to do then? Well, send a robot instead! And I am not talking about those crude drone core`s than can pilot a ship and even land it, I´m talking about humanoid robots that can do everything (well, almost) a Kerbal can do without the mental breakdown that should come from being in an enclosed capsule with no company or entertainment for years. Hell, you can even send them to distant planets to set up surface bases, get them going, and then send the actual kerbals. Robots would not consume life support (great advantage) but would have no specialisation or leveling in career (big disadvantage), they wouldn´t be able to send crew or EVA reports, but they would be able to take surface samples and take experiment results from sensors just fine. They would be unlocked in career mode with one of the later drone techs. I would love to build a mod that offers precisely that as I think it would add an interesting role-playing edge to the game that, as of now, is lacking. I worked as a 3D designer for a few years so I offer myself to build the models (the idea is to use the current mesh, textures and animations from Kerbals and make some changes to make robots out of them, piece of cake!), I am however painfully ignorant when it comes to building mods and what it entails, I would need help (plenty of it) in that department. Any takers?

Hi, we all know music is one of the worst features of the game. In fact, many players (including me sometimes) play without any music neither sound. But more flavor would be added to the game if each celestial body had its own music,..

Hi KSP! I wanted to say that the aerodynamics are quite advanced, very beautifully and awesomely made! but I can't support it none the less. for two reasons: 1. "Monoplanes produce more lift than for example triplanes, having less wing bodies. that is because triplanes have wings that are so close together that their aerodynamics mix (don't have enough space)" (That is what they thought me on school) So the problem here is: In Kerbal Space Program you can cheat by putting wing(s) in each other and producing more lift, for example. You see that often in large or unrealistic crafts. If this isn't the case anymore (in 1.2) I will be very happy! And I wonder if I ask something very complicated. But for me it ruined my motivation to make aircrafts in KSP. 2. There are no proceduraly generated wings, if not using mods. This limits imagination and options drastically. PS. I really love KSP! I want to thank everyone very much for making such an awesome game!! PPS. You could check the "Gabe Flags" I made ...

Hi, I'm playing on Kerbal space program since 0.9 version, I was wondering about the futur of KSP, and I was wondering, why don't you port it into the game? I think it would be an amazing featur to add, to be able to literaly create your own part in game, thanks to some tools, with a new building. Starting with something like real fuels did in his mod. Be able to select the size and the shape of your fuel tanks. And it would be limited by the techTree, and the type of engine you are able to take. This way you would be able to implement more and more featurs without much work on part creation. Of course you would have much more work somewhere Else, but it will increase the amount of possibility. At the start you would be able to change tanks, or engines power, size, shape but at the end you could creat your own pod, the materials you want to use on such part etc. For the ones who don't want to spend so much time on it you can give basic parts. But you can change the way they work (adding parachute in the hull of your pod, adding detechable parts etc...). Something you could add is the type of material used for each parts etc.. At the end you would be able to creat a custom station with custom parts inside, science experiments etc. Create rockets the shape you want with any materials like Iron, wood whatever with there own caracteristic. Even Create your own cockpit for planes or capsuls. (with IVA mod it would be great. Thanks for reading

Sorry if this is on a no-suggest list or has been discussed to an end already, so far I've only found really old threads that got no actual answer, so I decided to try my own luck: Alright, so I just discovered NVIDIA Surround and was trying different applications with it... And who would have thought, but KSP actually works! The only "problem" I'm facing is that the UI spans over all screens, which, for my setup at least, looks really weird (having to move the mouse across two and a half screens just to exit the VAB after part selection... yeah). Is there a way to fix it? Like, have one "main" monitor and the others just for extended FOV. Native support would be great ofc, but a mod would also be cool. I do call myself a programmer, so I guess I could try hacking something together if anyone cood tell me where to start... I have never developed a mod for KSP though, and generally don't know the games code. And I suspect for something like that you would need to know at least some things about it...

I would like to have end-caps for all the sizes of fuel tank. They would not have to match the colour of the tanks. The end-caps would have an airlock with a top/bottom indicator or perhaps a built in ladder. These airlocks would not be able to hold a crewman for flight but would facilitate the logistics of the crew. By right clicking the airlock I could EVA any crew-member in the vessel. By telling a kerbal to board at the airlock, the available sections for crew would be highlighted and I could select which compartment to board. In much the same manner as transferring a crew member can be done now. The end-caps would be surface mountable so That I can place a 1.5 end-cap anywhere to use as a regular airlock. I would like this added to 1.2 so please get cracking at your earliest convenience. ( Too far?)

Hello, I was trying to get into KSP in a less freestyle way, that is, throwing stuff into the air and see if it lands in a not fireball form. So I decided to try the tutorial and it is hard to follow, the text constantly jumps to the right side of the screen, the text itself is tiny and it is written in large blobs of text. All those together makes the tutorial really hard to go through. And I have a feeling it can be fixed easily by having the tutorial voiced, have somebody that is clearly and well spoken to voice act the text. Have the tutorial pause by itself whenever it teaches something mid flight and make sure this whole thing can be turned off as an option before starting a tutorial. Have a nice day!

Can you add boat parts and make that World War 2 engines used in planes like P51-Mustang or Yakolev Yak-3?

It would be really cool to be able to sort our contracts by expiration date. That way, I don't have to check every contract before a long flight. I could just look at the closest one. Right now, the list seems completely random, and far off contracts muddle up the list for more immediate things.

I know this has been suggested but my search fu is weak. Can we get the ability to move. All UI elements around the screen? Especially the ones that once were horizontal and now are vertical?

Not a big one at least, I can be small. You see some mods think the whole "battle" between the "krakenist's"(see the " ?) and dres lovers is a massive set up for role playing, but in actuality it's a forum war. You may think "but role playing gets too aggressive." Actually... No, role playing may be a tiny bit aggressive, but that aggression is quickly resolved. So please, KSP forum staff. Add a role playing forum so those who want roleplaying can get it, and they will leave the rest of the forums 99.9% untouched. Please...

Hi, i have multiple playback devices i use. Headphones, speakers in my monitor and a hifi-system. To change the playback device, i use a tool named SSD (SetSoundDevice) wich is doing nothing else as changing the preferred playback device. Most games can handle this and allow to change the output device while the game is running. But with KSP, i have to exit the game, change the device and restart the game each time i want to swap from speakers to headphones for instance. Would it be possible to change this behaviour in a future release ? Thx & greetz, ezfox

This suggestion is for a new item in The Daily Kerbal, Spacecraft Saturday. It would showcase stuff from the Spacecraft Exchange, there's some really cool *cough*This*cough* stuff there.

The recent releases of 1.1 to 1.1.2 have created a lot of problems for some people, including crashes, bugs, etc. Many mods are, obviously, incompatible for now, and many others are themselves coming up with new bugs and problems. There's been some complaining on these forums and other KSP related forums because of this. Would it be possible for Squad to make old versions of KSP still available so that Steam customers could choose when to to upgrade to a new version? Europa Universalis does this by making old versions available on Steam via the beta menu options. Such a system would allow players to hold off on updating until they felt it was stable enough, or until their favourite mods were compatible, etc. It would also greatly reduce negative posts from people in the immediate aftermath of new releases and hopefully spare the developers from what I imagine can be very disheartening feedback right after they've worked really hard to get a release out of the door.

Perhaps the game needs some new wheels! Roller wheels! You know! They could help out with tons of stuff! They would look like such: Shorter than the ones on the U2, no need for that extension, but they should serve a similar purpose. More like this, but aircraft quality, not shopping cart quality. Something like this to assist craft as they land, or to help people making turboprops and such!

At the moment, players can take contracts to get satellites etc into exacting orbits/inclinations, and this creates (in the map view) a visible orbital reference with tolerances for AP, PE and inclination And it would be useful if players could use the mission control at KSC to plan missions similarly utilising the same system, being able to create an orbital target like the current contracts provide to get spacing, altitude, inclinations etc spot on

A plugin that maybe uses Hypedit functionality to prevent satellite networks from drifting without having to constantly go back and fix them. It's impossible to get orbits truly close without a lot of luck, since KSP doesn't have the most stable trajectories... So frustrating to see my AP/PE bouncing about 50-100 meters while my satellite is just sitting there. It would need to have a single satellite selected, and match all other satellites in its network to its orbital period/inclination/ what have you. It would need some kind of limitation, such as the AP/PE being within 500 meters of the main satellite, and its inclination suitably close. Maybe require RCS ports on the satellite, and consume very small amounts of monoprop for adjustments. I wouldn't mind having to refuel satellites every ~6 years, it would feel very nice. I have no words for the amount of tears that have been shed as I watch my 10 satellite network ever so slowly drift into chaos as I await transfer windows for years

I checked the forum and a first-pass search didn't bring up anything except this: Unnecessary Warning Given to Scientist That topic asks the game to detect whether the Kerbal grabbing the data is a scientist, and skip the warning if true. What I'm requesting is a bit different: I would like the ability to shut off the warning entirely via a 'Don't Show This Again' option, much like the one that appears the first time you use physical time warp. It seems odd to me that a game with such a steep learning curve and so little forgiveness for blowing things up would see fit to let you choose to ignore the risk of rattling your ship apart with time warp but refuse to let you ignore the fact that only a scientist can reset a Goo canister in flight. I've already run the experiment at this point: that's a good thing. I've got the science. Warning me that I might not be able to get another experiment result is like warning me that I might not be able to have a second dessert after supper: it may be nice to know, but it's not necessary. When compared to the fact that I don't even get a warning that only an engineer can fix wheels or that only a pilot can operate SAS in the absence of a probe core, it's a bit out of place. Also annoying. It's very, very annoying, especially when I'm trying to get some extended use out of a single Goo canister (KSC microbiomes, for example)--to the point that I'd rather mod the thing to be rerunnable rather than put up with the clickfest.