Active Vessels when not active?

[Bill nye the rocket guy]

This may be a crazy idea (or already suggested), but it would be nice to have vessels active and conrolled while not active. Bassically, if you want to send sattelites to orbit multiple times, it can get very tedious. However, if you can have active vessels while not on focus or in the physics range, and an autopilot to steer it, we can do multiple automated launches without spending ,much time.

However, this i likely to use ALOT of resources. Can you do something such as run the simulation in a texture-less, more basic simulation?

Remote tech sattelite launches can ge annoying when theres so much other awesome things you can do.

[Guest]

SQUAD dislike word "Automated".

[tater]

How about piloted? By our pilot astronauts.

[Tex_NL]

How about piloted? By our pilot astronauts.

Isn't that exactly the same?

If you want automated, hands-off launches get MechJeb or program them with KOS.

[tater]

Isn't that exactly the same?

If you want automated, hands-off launches get MechJeb or program them with KOS.

Not at all, "automated" would be a probe (which should also be a thing). We have astronauts, they are supposed to have various skill levels, and career is supposed to be a "tycoon" like game. In a railroad tycoon game, is the player required to use a rail yard engine to move all the rolling stock to various trains, then drive the trains (serially) across the country themselves? Didn't think so.

If you play Empire: Total War, must you load each musket yourself? If it was KSP you would. Hard to get a company of troops to fire a couple shots a minute if you had to even just click "reload" on each guy, much less the KSP equiv, which would be doing it as a sort of maneuver.

KSP has zero aspect of managing a space program if the player is forced to do every, single action in the game personally.

I've never used MJ, myself, but I'd be happy in the later game to have my cadre of astronauts do resupply missions to my orbital station, or transfer crews from Munbase, or whatever, while I do whatever it is I feel like doing at the moment.

"Managing a space program" and "no AI" are in fact mutually exclusive ideas. I'm fine with dumping career, maybe we'd get better stuff if they didn't bother wasting resources on "career" mode.

[Uzric]

There is a mod that addresses this issue in a very elegant way: you have to do it the first time, then you can save what you have done and it will be auto-schedule and done by itself. This is specially useful for, for example, refuelling stations: you manually refuel once using your ships, then the game refuels automatically on demand.

EDIT: Found the mod: link

Seems it only works in Kerbin SOI.

I wouldnt mind a similar system in stock.

Edited April 15, 2015 by Uzric

[Tex_NL]

... and career is supposed to be a "tycoon" like game. ...

The mere thought of this statement makes me queasy. If there is one thing KSP should NOT be it is a tycoon game.

[tater]

The mere thought of this statement makes me queasy. If there is one thing KSP should NOT be it is a tycoon game.

Then stop reading dev posts, that is Squad's vision of career, not mine.

I don't care about "tycoon" games specifically, but to the extent career is about a space program, and NOT about single, isolated flights, it REQUIRES some sort of AI.

I should be able to set a capsule on a suborbital trajectory and/or tell it to reenter, and not have to micromanage that choice. I should be able to have the fun of piloting back a booster stage (falcon9 style) while my fully capable 2d stage is piloted to orbit by Jeb, or whichever astronaut I assign. I should be able to set up cool EVA missions (like a munar scientific survey) and have the landing crew walk around doing them if I like (or drive a rover, or walk an astronaut several km from the lander, and be able to tell it to head back without me having to do it).

Nothing stopping a player from CHOOSING fun piloting activities, but the ability to do 2 things at once (like if 2 SoI encounters happen at the same time for some reason).

On topic, I would love the ability to have maneuver nodes have a toggle to complete them automatically by stealing a "background focus" when needed (maybe dropping time warp to 1:1 if required).

Early in the career game, it's not an issue, but I do not time warp gratuitously. I extra planetary probes early in the game as soon as I can (Eve, Duna, Jool). It takes a long time for them to arrive, and I go about my Kerbin SoI business (note I'm usually playing an RSS cfg of the Kerbol system, so it might take 10 years to get to Jool). By the time I'm getting near SoIs, I have stations, mun bases, craft in assembly in orbit for Duna (with life support). I have to do everything by hand. I have missed SoIs before (yeah, I should add KAC, but I haven't yet), or maneuver nodes. I have to resupply stations, etc. Many flights in space at once. If I'm the director of KSC, I am apparently hovering being everyone at their computers saying… "click that thing there!" They must hate me.

Edited April 15, 2015 by tater

[Dunbaratu]

The reason it's not possible is technical, not thematic.

The math gets imprecise when the floating point numbers get large (when the location of, say, your fuel tank is no longer the xyz coords (6.2352, 603.23523, 10.4525) but is now (589340403.13, 69492914.63, 5902958.4), those bigger numbers are less precise than the smaller ones, because precision in floating point computer numbers doesn't scale linearly.

That's where the space kraken comes from. Calculating the "forces" of parts interacting with each other gets screwy when the numbers keep getting rounded to the nearest possible value, and the nearest possible value is significantly different from the actual value it should be.

Any request to have two vessels both be active at the same time despite being millions of meters apart from each other has to address this problem, as it's the primary reason there is such a thing as 'loading distance' in KSP.

[Bill nye the rocket guy]

Ahh. is it like the far lands in minecraft (large floating point distances cause glitchy-ness)?

Also, what about like cause and affect flights

For example: i make a rocket to orbit via mechjeb. If it doesn't have enough power, the mission fails.

Would this feature be easier to use in space without re-entry effects or aerodynamics?

[Grumman]

I should be able to set a capsule on a suborbital trajectory and/or tell it to reenter, and not have to micromanage that choice. I should be able to have the fun of piloting back a booster stage (falcon9 style) while my fully capable 2d stage is piloted to orbit by Jeb, or whichever astronaut I assign.

I don't even want it to be controllable, I just want a booster, a probe or an escape module which already has sufficient parachutes deployed to not be instantly destroyed for no good reason. Even if it's just an approximation - "This booster rocket has around the right number of parachutes deployed, so let's just say it lands safely at this point."

[tater]

An interesting idea for reentry...

What if there was a way to test reentry for a given craft, or part of a craft (controllable). You'd place it in a suborbital trajectory, and click the "run test" button that would then appear. Reenter successfully (everything on the craft survives). Have the game remember the parameters to give a known envelope for successful reentry (say velocity upon hitting the atmosphere, with a requirement that once it enters the atmosphere, it must not leave or the test is invalidated).

You'd then do tests perhaps like the recent Orion flight. Then, later, you can simply place a capsule on a suborbital trajectory that is within what you have tested, and walk away, and it will do the rest for you.

[Fel]

The reason it's not possible is technical, not thematic.

The math gets imprecise when the floating point numbers get large (when the location of, say, your fuel tank is no longer the xyz coords (6.2352, 603.23523, 10.4525) but is now (589340403.13, 69492914.63, 5902958.4), those bigger numbers are less precise than the smaller ones, because precision in floating point computer numbers doesn't scale linearly.

That's where the space kraken comes from. Calculating the "forces" of parts interacting with each other gets screwy when the numbers keep getting rounded to the nearest possible value, and the nearest possible value is significantly different from the actual value it should be.

Any request to have two vessels both be active at the same time despite being millions of meters apart from each other has to address this problem, as it's the primary reason there is such a thing as 'loading distance' in KSP.

You could just move the universe to cover EVERY non-interacting point. The sameway they fixed the kraken in the first place. Hmm... technically, I would think they might already do this anyways... or logically should at least.

[Wjolcz]

I'd like to have the pilot skills active when not focused on the vessel. Would make flying in formation easier.