Public Service Announcement regarding Aero

[klgraham1013]

You already change your resolution settings

I'm quite happily playing 1.0.2 with 1.0.0 settings, try it, you might like it.

...*sigh*...

Me too, Frybert. Me too.

[Linear]

You already change your resolution settings

I'm quite happily playing 1.0.2 with 1.0.0 settings, try it, you might like it.

You already change your resolution, so why worry about changing aerodynamic coefficients!

Next week on this is a finished game

[r4pt0r]

You already change your resolution settings

I'm quite happily playing 1.0.2 with 1.0.0 settings, try it, you might like it.

This is a poor argument as the stock experience needs to be standardized for anyone who shares craft files

[allmhuran]

Yeah, this is not good advice.

It make it more difficult to share craft, but there's more... much more

- You don't have a level playing field for challenges

- Similarly, "accomplishments" can't really be judged. Did you do something amazing, or is your personal physics enviornment just way easier than mine?

- If you have any questions, there's no way of knowing whether any particular answer will be relevant to "your version" of the game

- In corollary with 3, if you provide any answers to questions, there's no way of knowing whether your answer is relevant to the person asking the question.

- Multiplayer becomes extremely problematic

Edited May 4, 2015 by allmhuran

[Laie]

Next week on this is a finished game

I don't know why Squad was so hell-bent on calling this the "release" version, but everyone has known from the start that it couldn't possibly be finished. I've been quite miffed myself, but have come over it by now. There will be a next release to fix and refine things, and probably a few more. (And maybe, for once, a release that concentrates on fixing and refining rather than introducing new stuff -- one can hope). Until then, 1.0.2 will be good enough for me. It's certainly the best KSP we ever had.

Which doesn't mean we should remain totally silent. But the point about atmo has been taken, time to move on.

[m4v]

Let's ask squad to remove all the configurable options the community pre-1.0 asked i guess

[regex]

Let's ask squad to remove all the configurable options the community pre-1.0 asked i guess

~difficulty sliders~ are so yesterday...

[allmhuran]

Let's ask squad to remove all the configurable options the community pre-1.0 asked i guess

Strawman. Nobody is saying this.

Go ahead and have a difficulty slider for starting funds, income, science, etc. Sure, you'll get slight variations on the optimum way to unlock the tech tree, but honestly, how many conversations do you see here or on reddit about "career mode optimization"? I'm not sure I've ever seen a single one. They're always about the physics, not the economics.

I'd even say, go ahead and let re-entry heating be entirely optional - either on or off. That keeps things nice and simple.

All of the challenges, all of the questions, all of the accomplishments, are bound to the fundamental physics of the game. The game is fundamentally a physics playground, so If everyone is fiddling with *that*, then everyone is playing a different game.

[Linear]

Let's ask squad to remove all the configurable options the community pre-1.0 asked i guess

Sure, as long as they configure the default to work properly.

[Tarheel1999]

Regex - Don't you think those values will make interplanetary returns rather difficult? Even if re-entry takes multiple orbits to minimize heat you will have probably used up your heatshield after one or two orbits and have nothing left for the actual re-entry.

Edited May 4, 2015 by Tarheel1999

[regex]

Regex - Don't you think those values will make interplanetary returns rather difficult. Even if re-entry takes multiple orbits to minimize heat you will have probably used up your heatshield after one or two orbits and have nothing left for the actual re-entry.

Do you know why aerocapture relies on everything being inside of an aerodynamic shell in the Real World? Because it causes a lot of stress to the vehicle. You don't slow down your interplanetary mothership by sending it into an atmosphere, you slow it down using engines or gravity (hard to do in KSP because everything's so ~tiny~). Since I personally would never risk a massive transfer tug and its delicate systems by sending it into a planet's atmosphere, I have no real problem playing on increased heat settings.

E: Yes, I realize certain novelists have written this and I don't think it's impossible IRL, but it also relies on bare skimming of the atmosphere and using the gravity of the planet as opposed to the aerobraking we do in KSP, which dives ridiculously deep into an atmosphere (because everything is so ~tiny~).

Edited May 4, 2015 by regex

[Mister Dilsby]

One of the great things about KSP is being a member of a community--Being able to share crafts, diagnose each other's problems, etc. If everyone is operating in universes with slightly different physical constants, the community gets fragmented. It was manageable when we only had Stock vs. FAR, but further fragmentation is, as you said, is a bad precedent.

Agreed. I like the gameplay very much, and appreciate being able to tune atmosphere to what feels right to me--but this is the death of challenges. How are we supposed to evaluate each others' craft and performances if it's not only easy, but expected, to change basic parameters?

[AmpsterMan]

Eh, i think terms like "death of challenges" are a bit extreme. Let's wait to see these things actually take place before we jump to conclusions. I'm sure "infinite fuel" "part clipping" or a host of other tweakables in the debug menu could have been causing issues there too.

Tweakables included in the debug menu because it makes it very easy to debug or test the balance of the game. Many, many games have such menus and their challenges are intact. Ex Sims. Sims has a huge access to modifying game behaviour in game, and yet Sims challenges are alive and well. Challenges here will be fine too.

Three weeks from now this will all blow pver and the community will go back to being divided over MechJeb, FAR, and Female Kerbals (Like the good old days )

[Oksbad]

Disclaimer: Please don't take this as a comment about your PSA. It has valuable information that could help many.

Every time somebody points out complaints tangentially related to realism, somebody points out "It's a game, not a sim!", as if that invalidates the complaint. Just like realism isn't inherently good for the game, unrealism isn't inherently good either. What if you believe that KSP would be a better and funner game if the aerodynamic models were more along the lines of FAR? Is that an absurd position to take?

[Sochin]

To the OP most of us like what has been changed, what we dont like is not having much information about it. That alone is a massive.

[regex]

What if you believe that KSP would be a better and funner game if the aerodynamic models were more along the lines of FAR? Is that an absurd position to take?

Not at all. Some people believe KSP would be a massively better game if it had a realistic solar system with realistic rockets. Unfortunately there are people on the other side of that argument, not to mention the dev's "vision" of the game.

[allmhuran]

Eh, i think terms like "death of challenges" are a bit extreme. Let's wait to see these things actually take place before we jump to conclusions. I'm sure "infinite fuel" "part clipping" or a host of other tweakables in the debug menu could have been causing issues there too.

Tweakables included in the debug menu because it makes it very easy to debug or test the balance of the game. Many, many games have such menus and their challenges are intact. Ex Sims. Sims has a huge access to modifying game behaviour in game, and yet Sims challenges are alive and well. Challenges here will be fine too.

Three weeks from now this will all blow pver and the community will go back to being divided over MechJeb, FAR, and Female Kerbals (Like the good old days )

Yeah, but those kinds of things are generally obvious. You could make the same claim about mods, but... "oh, you used a modded fuel tank that has 10x the capacity of any single stock part, with an engine to match. And you made it to Jool? Whoop-de-doo".

Yeah, you'll get the occasional dirty cheating alpaca who tries to hide their use of fully clipped tanks, edited part configs, infinite fuel, etc. But when that happened we all called them dirty cheating alpacas.. We didn't say "oh, sure, your own personal version of the game is just as legit as everyone else's". It'd be like us having a game of chess, but I get to move my pawns backwards, because I'm not playing the same game as you.

And that's just challenges. It still doesn't address the "you can't ask/answer questions anymore", or multiplayer problems.

Edited May 4, 2015 by allmhuran

[Caelib]

I think a lot of people are quick to complain if something is hard, rather than spending the proper amount of time learning it. I am guilty of this ... rendezvous and docking made me furious until I dedicated the proper amount of time to learn it ... now it's an extremely trivial task.

[MechaLynx]

Game or sim? Word of the law or spirit of the law? Let's see:

1. "The Vehicle Assembly Building and the Space Plane Hangar allows players to build spacecraft out of any imaginable combination of parts."

Not really since there are quite a few combinations of parts imaginable that will never work in game. I'm sure most any experienced player can think of a few so this is, going by the interpretation of those complaining, false advertising.

2. "Fully-fledged, Physics-based Flight Simulation ensures everything will fly (and crash) as it should."

Wasn't true in the beginning, isn't true now, won't ever be true - if you take it 100% literally. One could easily point to this line and argue it isn't true even if KSP was the most accurate simulator in the history of man-kind, since even then, it would not be a perfect model of reality since such a thing is impossible. So is KSP realistic enough or not? Up to interpretation to be sure, but I would argue this: what kept all the people complaining it isn't good enough of a simulation playing all this time? Hope? False hope? Expectations for something they were never promised?

3. "Take your Kerbal crew on expeditions out of the ship with Extra Vehicular Activities gathering data and precious minerals."

Kerbals can't gather rocks on EVA can they? Or does getting a surface sample count? Another line that anyone could argue is true or untrue to their heart's content. Argue that they shouldn't be advertising it this way and someone is certain to come along and point out a bunch of good marketing reasons. Propose a better way to state what you can do and someone else will come along to give you another bunch of evidence demonstrating how difficult it is to do this kind of promotion, how expectations operate in marketing yada yada, etc. etc.

When you take things literally like this, all that's left is circular logic and infinite strings of nonsense.

4. "Procedural Terrain delivers detailed terrain at a vast scale. The Kerbal Planet is 600km in radius."

Not very detailed. Vastness means nothing these days - the Minecraft engine delivers more detail per square unit of surface if one wanted to compare.

I could go on from here, but I think it's pretty clear that if we were to take any of this literally enough, then we can go on complaining ad infinitum that we're not getting our money's worth (the most disgusting of arguments ever conceived).

If you want an accurate simulator, KSP, or any game, will never be enough. Ever. I don't think people realize that accurate simulation software tends to operate very very far from real-time and still has massive inaccuracies when the algorithm used is applied to situations it isn't accurate for. Take a look at various orbital simulations and what algorithms they use and what criticism they come with. Materials, statics, thermodynamics, chemistry etc. we could go on forever and slap in the most insane simulation libraries to get an incredibly accurate game but it would require a few supercomputers to run at 30fps and people would still come up with reasons why it's unsatisfactory and you know it.

In the end, when you buy KSP, are you really, really under the impression you're buying a simulator? It's on Steam and has little green men for crying out loud.

Also, these complaints make so little sense when the same players have accepted a solar system as small as the game's but with a lot of real values turning everything extremely dense, when we are still working with SOI-based gravity (not even N-body, which is quite basic in orbital simulators), when there are no robotic parts, no sloshing of fuel, we get science from being landed on the launch pad, no life support systems, no telescope science, no comms delay, no preprogrammed probes and very little automation etc. etc.

I saw someone argue on another thread that they have to learn a new physics system every few weeks, which is a ridiculous statement, but it shows very well what the kind of mentality that goes with these complaints is. In all, the game is the same it always was but better - if you ever had a reason to play it, now you have more. If it was unsatisfactory before, due to physics inaccuracy, it will always be. There's a difference between constructive criticism and suggestions, versus this mindless whining about "Squad should never have released an unfinished game" and "I was promised a simulator".

Can anyone, truly and honestly raise their hand and claim they feel cheated out of their money for KSP as of 1.02? Can anyone claim the game is getting progressively worse?

[Kuu Lightwing]

Do you know why aerocapture relies on everything being inside of an aerodynamic shell in the Real World?

Is there even real world examples of aerocapture? Aerobraking is a different beast, though. As for delicate systems MRO did aerobrake on Mars using his solar panels

[monstah]

Picture of alt+f12 aero debug menu - change your physics values in-game until they're just right! Credit : sal_vager/

http://imgur.com/a/0zbe8

I didn't know what that was and I thought it was pretty and I messed with it and now it's broken and I cry.

[regex]

Is there even real world examples of aerocapture? Aerobraking is a different beast, though. As for delicate systems MRO did aerobrake on Mars using his solar panels

According to Wikipedia~ aerocapture has never been tried.

MRO never dipped below 97km and the aerobraking comprised what looks like no more than 90m/s of maneuver, periapsis raising included. That is a much more delicate procedure than blasting into Duna's atmosphere at 15km to scrub off hundreds of m/s.

Edited May 4, 2015 by regex
That first sentence looked terrible, sorry...

[monstah]

Lemme just make sure I understand the difference. Aerocapture = using atmosphere to go from escape trajectory to bound orbit, Aerobrake = using atmosphere to lower Ap?

[regex]

Lemme just make sure I understand the difference. Aerocapture = using atmosphere to go from escape trajectory to bound orbit, Aerobrake = using atmosphere to lower Ap?

As I understand it from Wikipedia~, yes.

[RocketPilot573]

Lemme just make sure I understand the difference. Aerocapture = using atmosphere to go from escape trajectory to bound orbit, Aerobrake = using atmosphere to lower Ap?

Pretty much.