1.0.5 Training Tutorials are bleeped!

[Derfel99]

Hi all,

This will bit a bit of a rant, the questions are at the end, fell free to scroll.

Newbie here, love the concept, would really like to get stuck in. Like any serious student I look for the textbook / manual, ok, no manual but a huge Wiki, Great! Most of the stuff only about older versions of the game, not so great, but hey... 

Right, how to proceed? Training missions obviously, the way to learn and get a feel.

So, I've gone through the training missions and... well, I promised myself no expletives... So, the first 2 work. The others don't. I won't say too much about the clipped instructions that leave out a solid third of the stuff you as a newbie need to know, let's just say that the scripts in those missions could be more informative and leave it at that for now.

The others are bleeped, probably because nobody bothered to look them over before releasing new versions, my guess of course, they might have been rubbish right from the get go.

So, as most people do, I assumed I was the idiot, this is space flight after all, not easy, physics,math and stuff. But I checked the Wiki/forums and found one solution that clearly showed there actually was a wrong setting in the training craft, that mission cannot be completed unless you do stuff (to the parachute in this case) not mentioned anywhere in the mission instruction.

It goes on, eventually I called the guy who recommended the game; engineer, smart guy, space nerd. Complained loudly. He laughs and says what I guess most of the folks on this here forum would say; "Training missions? Man, why are you messing with them?"

Because I want to learn, dammit, and these are supposed to help me do that, and it says "1.0.5" right at the bottom of the screen so this is the latest stuff, right?

Wrong. It seems.

So I ask my friend, to check out the scenarios. His reply; "Nothing wrong there, just had to tweak things a little, well one of the ships does actually have the wrong configuration, guess they missed that when they upgraded."

So I told him to go back and play the tutorials, by the book, just as a complete newbie would, no tweaks, no shortcuts.

He was a bit more subdued the next time. "They're unplayable, well, all but the first two."

So, questions:

1. Are we right? Are the Training Missions out of sync with the upgrades, if so that is really poor marketing. This thing sells on Steam now, tons of new users I would guess.

2. Has anybody of all you clever people out there run thru the Training Missions after 1.0.5? Would you do it? Just to see if my friend and I are right, and maybe at least post a list of stuff the the newbie user can do to struggle through?

Answers and comment would be much appriciated.

 

 

[Glaran K'erman]

I understand your frustration and hopefully I can help put things in a better perspective for you. Right now the community is desperately waiting for an update to the game that will vastly improve performance and therefore the lives of the people playing the game a great deal. This update has taken quite longer than expected (on the order of several months) and has plagued progress in other areas. This is ok because the end result will be an overall better game but in the meantime things like the Training missions cannot receive the attention they gravely need. A lot of things actually have had to been put on the back-burner and despite the delays they do promise to tend to things that got looked over or left to sit. The good things is so far nothing had proven that they won't keep their promise and I do believe one day the Training mission will get a good looking over. With the limited knowledge the general public has of spaceflight and it's related activities, the Training missions should be treated as a critical bridging tool for new users.

[Derfel99]

Thanks for answering! Much appreciated.

Yeah, I figured something of the sort, but to my mind having faulty training Scenarios is actually worse than having no Training Scenarios as the frustration might cause people to drop the game and possibly curse it a bit in various places (Steam review section for instance), which really would be a shame considering the awesomeness of the game.

Disabling the Training Missions and attaching a simple note that explain that they will be back once they are updated might well have been a better solution than just leaving them as is and allowing new users to give themselves brain hernias trying to complete them.

If you don't mind my asking, is this why a lot of the user-created stuff is also un-updated to 1.0.5? I noticed a huge fan effort have gone into creating everything from articles to mods, but relatively little is up to 1.0.5 standard.

Surely, with the enormous pool of talent out there, as evinced by the community created materials, a little project of creating a few alternative 1.0.5 Training Missions properly annotated would not be impossible?

Anyho; I guess I'll park this on the shelf for a while and see if the new version appears and if it's more Newbie friendly.

Thanks again for your courteous answer.

[Glaran K'erman]

1 hour ago, Derfel99 said:

Thanks...

Not a problem, as it pertains to the number of mods updated to 1.0.5 it can be tricky to truly discern. Some mods remain functional and active well beyond their tagged version, others however do not fair as well. The mods that tend to migrate to the next version quickly are those that have extremely active followings or developers, many of these appeal to wide audiences and can broadly fill a gap that another outdated mod has left in it's wake after an update. As it stands today most of these "standard", and a large part of the popular "niche" mods, have indeed been updated already.

Edited December 23, 2015 by Glaran K'erman

[Wanderfound]

Another perspective: the tutorials have been missing or flawed for most of the history of KSP's development. Most of the players here got into the game without using them.

Yes, the tutorials should be fixed. Yes, they would be a good introduction for newbies. But...

A large part of the fun of KSP is based around trial-and-error discovery. Most of us here started launching rockets withut the faintest idea of how orbital mechanics work. But, after playing for a while, progress is still made, and the self-driven nature of the discoveries adds to their value.

There are little discoveries all along the way: "orbit means sideways, not up?" "lower is faster?" "ooh, that's why spin stabilising works..." etc. For a lot of us, those are the best parts of the game.

While I admit that the substandard tutorials are a flaw, I'd encourage you to have a bash without them. Discovery is a lot more fun than instruction, and you have a large supply of Kerbals to experiment with.

Edited December 23, 2015 by Wanderfound

[Derfel99]

6 hours ago, Wanderfound said:

Another perspective: the tutorials have been missing or flawed for most of th history of KSP's devlopment. Most of the players here got into the game without using them...

While I admit that the substandard tutorials are a flaw, I'd encourage you to have a bash without them. Discovery is a lot more fun than instruction, and you have a large supply of Kerbals to experiment with.

Thanks for the input!

I do know what you mean, the satisfaction of finding things out for yourself can be very... er... satisfying... That sort of "Oho, so THAT'S how the milk got into the coconut" moments are indeed much of the power of a good simulation of this type.

However, if the journey of exploration is not to find out how things work, and then apply that to the rest of the game, but to find out that they don't work with no way of knowing why or how to fix it. Then I would say you get much of the opposite effect. Which was really my point; unplayable Training Missions are worse than no Training Missions.

As for having another go before the updated version arrives, with. hopefully, updated training Missions. I probably will mess about a little, but it's daunting when you know that the support you will need, that I will need at least, is at best intended for version 1.0 and usually a lot more out of date than that. I don't mean the physics bit, I doubt the Celestial mechanics will change with version 2.0 (hmm... then again...) but all the stuff you really don't want to waste time on figuring out; I don't mind fussing with getting a capture orbit working, I do mind not knowing which of the ruddy little toggles in the maneuver node controls what or why the symbols suddenly change colour. (Just an example, I have figured out what most of those things do, thanks to the Training Missions that did work)

I suppose I could summarize my feelings by saying that I don't mind spending time figuring out how the universe works (well, the Kerbal universe anyway) but I do mind spending time figuring out how the basic functions of the UI work.

In any case I appreciate your encouragement, and I do live in the hope that one day I too will build a rocketship that will take those little guys to the edge of the system, and possibly myself to the edge of insanity.

[Plusck]

 

12 hours ago, Derfel99 said:

So, questions:

...

2. Has anybody of all you clever people out there run thru the Training Missions after 1.0.5? Would you do it? Just to see if my friend and I are right, and maybe at least post a list of stuff the the newbie user can do to struggle through?

Answers and comment would be much appriciated.

Well, for the docking one, you were told in "orbital 101" that changing plane closer to the planet is expensive... but the tutorial tells you to change plane at the worst possible time. Also, if you do change plane at the Descending Node, you will have put yourself too far ahead of the target craft to be able to reach it within the next orbit.

So basically, you either do as you're told and burn 400m/s to change plane, then wait an orbit or five and change orbit for about 300m/s.

Or, you change plane at the Ascending Note for 350m/s, then about a third of an orbit later do your orbital transfer for 300m/s. This is the simple solution that the tutorial should be telling you to do.

OR - smarter but NOT in the tutorial (and maybe a bit complicated for a beginner), you change orbit first at the Descending Node, then change plane when higher up. To do this you absolutely need to place two manouvre nodes at the same time. One at "DN" with a prograde burn, then at the higher "AN" to change plane to match the target. 

However, to get an intercept you actually need to burn a bit higher than the target orbit, because your first intercept (the only one marked for your transfer burn) will put you far ahead of the target. Since you are going higher, you will go slower than the target after that, and it'll catch up with you as you are on the way down AFTER the plane change. Once you've placed a manouvre node at the "AN" (now on the other side of the target orbit) and changed plane, you'll get a new intercept that should be a lot closer.

I guessed roughly and plotted a 295m/s transfer (prograde) burn, and after the plane change that gave a 72km intercept with the target ahead of me.

You need to bring that distance down. Since the target is ahead, I need to go faster, meaning I need to keep my orbit smaller, so my first transfer burn has to be less.

Dragging my retrograde marker at the first node down to 291.2m/s gives me an intercept at 4.8km. Yay!

However, doing that has necessarily changed the location of the plane change node, so I should really go back and fix it (even though it looks almost unchanged).

And after deleting the second node, placing it exactly on "AN" and bringing the orbital inclination down to 0.0° again - my intercept is 2.7km! Double yay!!

Total cost? 291m/s plus 199.8m/s . That means under 500m/s total instead of the 700m/s (and the long wait) that the tutorial proposed.

There is a problem with this method though, which is that the second node will not update automatically while you are making a burn. So say at the end of the burn, you have 1.0 m/s still to do but if you burn, it starts heading back up again: stop! Delete the first node and click on the second one so that it updates. See where the intercept is. Burn a very small amount and click again, and again (or turn on RCS and use "H" for prograde or "N" for retrograde for finer control, but turn RCS off again afterwards) until the intercept is good. Then warp to the second node and change plane.

Then you can delete the second node and click the next two "next" buttons in the tutorial.

The tutorial asks you to burn precisely down to 0.0m/s. Forget that: just create a node anywhere, giving 0.0m/s, and click next.

Now, you need to plan your intercept. Create a new manouvre node on the intercept point. Then pull on the radial out vector until your orbit is fully inside the target orbit, and the prograde to increase it until your orbits are virtually identical. It doesn't have to be deadly accurate, what you want is a ballpark figure for your change in velocity, and your burn time.

This should end up giving you about 360m/s to match the orbit of the target, and a burn time of about 30s.

Now - switch to your outside view and warp until you're about 2 minutes out. Go to target view like the tutorial says, and line up with the retrograde marker. If you properly set your manouvre node to match orbits, the blue marker should also be at almost exactly the same place. You'll also see the "anti-target" pink marker very close by - and hopefully getting closer.

Since you know that you need 30s to match speeds, you can wait until the target is much closer - at 40s it'll be about 16km away - before burning hard to bring relative speed down to under 50m/s. while burning, delete the manouvre node by clicking on the "x" next to the countdown bar, and concentrate instead on the target velocity.

When you're under 50m/s, the tutorial will let you click the "next" button. Your target ship will be anything from 5 to 12 km away (depending on how much nerve you had to wait before burning),

The tutorial's next suggestion is absolutely insane. You do not want to use RCS to bring your speed down from 50m/s to zero. That is just madness.

Also, you do not want to burn retrograde precisely because it'll just take years to manouvre close to your target.

Instead, look at where the "anti-target" pink marker is compared to retrograde. Then point to about the same distance away on the other side of retrograde, like this:

Spoiler

Now just use your engines, but gently. When you burn, the retrograde marker will shift away from where you're pointing, and move over the target marker. If you pointed the right way, the two markers will be more-or-less in the same place once you've lost half your speed relative to the target.

Spoiler

 

Now warp forward for a while. You'll notice that the two markers (retrograde and anti-target) start to separate. Point to the other side of retrograde and burn again to align them.

By now you should be going at around 10m/s towards the target, and it should be about 3 or 4 km way. NOW you do as the tutorial says. Point to retrograde, turn on RCS, use "H" to thrust, and get your speed down to 0.0 or 0.1m/s

Then turn off RCS, turn around, turn on RCS again and thrust "H" towards the target until you're up to a few m/s.

Of course, if you correctly followed all the instructions about pushing the retrograde marker directly onto the anti-target marker, then coming to a stop was a complete waste of time since you were heading directly to the target at about 10m/s anyway. But Gene Kerman insists and he's boss...

Warp forward a bit. You will notice that again, the markers start to diverge. Now is the time to learn to use RCS properly. While pointing directly at the target, use the IJKL keys to move the prograde (yes, we've turned around so it's prograde now) marker around. The slower you are going, the greater the effect. Bring the prograde marker back over the target. Warp some more, correct again.

You'll also notice that these corrections have slowed you down compared to the target. Yes - all of this is manouvering is hugely wasteful, but it can't be helped now. What we should have done at the outset was perfect our intercept, perfect our orbit-matching node, and burn when the target was much, much closer. Or not bother with an orbit-matching node and trust in our feeling about how much time we need, and match speeds in gentle stages by pushing retrograde over the anti-target marker and keeping it there until the target is right on us.

Finally, for docking the tutorial gives very little help. Don't bother with docking mode: use IJKL and HN instead.

Moving around a dead ship to get the docking ports aligned is a nightmare. Instead, switch to the other ship, right-click the docking port on it and choose "control from here". Then go to map view and click on the other ship and select it as target. Then move the ship until it is pointing the right way. Give a millisecond of warp to stop things from moving. Then switch back to your first ship and again, give a millisecond of warp. You should now have both docking ports pointing perfectly at each other and can use HN IJKL to move slowly up. Keep the prograde centred on the target marker.

As you approach, the target may drift away from your "pointing" chevron. Don't try to realign with WASD - instead push the prograde slightly to the other side of the target marker. The effect of this will be to push the target marker back over your crosshairs - without adding an angle betwee your two ships' docking ports.

 

So, yes, the docking tutorial doesn't really give the best instructions. If you follow them to the letter, you'll probably run out of fuel.

On the other hand, though, it has to be said that finding out what the tutorial is doing wrong is also a great way of learning

Edited December 23, 2015 by Plusck

[Plusck]

For the other tutorials:

- To the Mun Part 1: Fine - I deliberately played this approximately while following the instructions. That gets you to the Mun fine enough, though without enough fuel to land since I wasn't being particularly efficient.

- To the Mun Part 2: The instructions for leaving the Mun are a bit off - a 270° burn back to Kerbin SOI is really not the way to go, and the instructions afterwards to "ignore a Mun intercept" is poor: it should add "IF the intercept is after you pass Kerbin" because that 270° burn could easily put you ahead of the Mun rather than behind it, where you want to be. What you really should do is burn 90° (east) from the surface, get into a very low (9-10km) Mun orbit, then burn prograde as you start to approach that point of the orbit where you pass directly between the Mun and Kerbin. And the parachute is badly configured for 1.0.5 so you will die on splashdown: you need to raise the altitude to 1000 or 1500m

- Asteroid Redirect 1: The instructions are not great. At that kind of distance you simply cannot configure a manouevre that will accurately intercept right at the edge of Kerbin SOI. Or if you do, your burn will never, ever stay exactly true to it. Since there is a Mun intercept on the next orbit, it is extremely difficult to set manouvre nodes properly since the slightest change makes enormous changes to the subsequent orbit, and the game keeps oscillating between orbits as it calculates the intercepts.

The best way of doing Asteroid Redirect 1 therefore seems to be: get a very approximate intercept, warp about halfway and try to place a new manouvre node to improve the intercept. While setting the node, if the intercept starts getting close before disappearing, then go back to the point before it disappears, burn that node then delete the node and continue burning a touch more to get your path approximately to where it should have been if the intercept hadn't disappeared. Warp halfway again, rinse and repeat.

The tutorial tells you much later to deploy your solar panels. You absolutely have to do this before leaving LKO because the ship steers like a cow with electricity, and like a dead cow without. If you use RCS to turn your ship anywhere near LKO, you'll completely change your trajectory, making all of your fine planning pointless.

 

- Asteroid redirect 2: haven't tried it yet. The tutorial instructions in Asteroid Redirect 1 crashed as soon as I latched on to the asteroid, so I gave up.

Edited December 23, 2015 by Plusck

[Snark]

Back to the theme of "they're spending effort on 1.1 instead of the tutorials":

The other ingredient in the equation is this forum itself.  It's well-populated by knowledgeable, helpful, friendly people, and is an excellent source of answers.  Any newbie who comes to the forum with "here's a specific problem I'm having, here's what I've tried, what am I doing wrong?" generally gets a helpful, prompt answer to get them sorted out.  And Squad knows this.  And it leverages the community without requiring Squad's spending a lot of time on it.

And I really don't think that's a cop-out on Squad's part.  It's a tiny indie company with just a few developers, and there are so many things that urgently need doing (and always have been) that they have to triage relentlessly when deciding what to implement first.  By and large, I think they've done a pretty good job of picking where to put their effort.  It's such a small company that there are going to be holes, so IMHO we shouldn't fault them for the existence of holes.  We should only fault them if it has the wrong holes.    And I think they've made pretty good choices, for the most part.

P.S. regarding docking:  If you've gotten to the point where you can intercept the target craft within a kilometer or two, and need help from there, here's an illustrated docking guide I put together that may be helpful.

[Mattasmack]

Hi Derfel,

You are right.  The tutorials are borked.  They've been borked for at least a few versions now, and I'm not surprised to hear they're borked worse now.  And yes, it's very frustrating.

My Dad has tried to get into this game a couple of times; it's just the sort of thing he should like.  But he did the same thing as you -- he tried to work through the tutorials and training missions first to understand how to play, and of course got increasingly confused and eventually got frustrated enough to give up.  (It didn't help either that on his first attempt he used the 64-bit version from Steam -- because that's the logical version to choose for a 64-bit computer with a 64-bit OS -- which crashed constantly for him.)

In my opinion, currently the best way to get started in KSP is to watch Scott Manley's tutorial video on getting started in career mode.  Unfortunately the video is out of date in many ways, having been made for version 0.90 about a year ago, but they key things to learn from it are about science points and how to collect them in flight and that's still mostly current.  Then, start a new career or science mode game on an easy difficulty level and start flying rockets and experimenting.  Starting with only a few parts available keeps things from being overwhelming at first. (No need to know how to capture an asteroid or make a rendezvous in orbit; you can't even get to orbit at first!)  Unlocking parts gradually takes away the training wheels gradually.  There's no need to complete this initial career or science mode game either; it's just a way to get started without dealing with the flawed scenarios and vehicles in the training missions or getting thrown into the big and confusing parts list of sandbox mode.

[Derfel99]

Hi, again.

Thanks to you all for answering, it warms cuckolds of the heart... whatever a cuckold is..

Plusck, you're a true sport, thanks a million for your effort, I feel a lot better knowing that it really isn't me... well, at least not just me...

So; we've established

a/ the Training Missions supplied with the game are bleeped and probably won't get un-bleeped for a long time.
Believe me, I understand this completely, this aint my first rodeo with this here Computer Gaming stuff, in fact I'm an old fart who started playing games on the Amiga (Google it, youngster) about... oh... a million years ago. I even got involved in computer game design before I decided that there were better and more lucrative ways to give myself a brain haemorrhage. So, I totally understand the dilemma of the small, indie developer. You can't do everything, in fact generally you can at best do is 10% of the things you want to do.

But; there are do's and don'ts even for small developers. One of the dont's is Do Not Publish Anything That You Know Is Fatally Flawed. I'm not talking about bugs, all systems have bugs, you can't squash them all. No, in this case it's a matter of removing something fairly unessential to improve the customers experience or at least reduce their frustration levels.

Again; IMHO NO Training Missions are better than Bleeped Training Missions.

b/ There is a large, highly competent user group out there that could probably with very little effort create a few up to date training scenarios in place of the existing ones .A link in the main menu that to-day point to the Training Missions would be all that's needed after that.  Alternatively as Mattasmack suggest, you point the eager Newbie to a video (in the best of all worlds an updated one) and then on to a "Training Career".

So, will anything get done?
Well, I find myself intrigued by all this. Maybe, as I slowly pick up the basics I could create something really, really simple and easy for incoming Newcomers to cling on to instead of the Bleeping Training Missions. Perhaps by shamelessly raiding the materials that already exist, updating and if possible expand on them.

Who knows, it is after all, the season of miracles...

Snark, you were absolutely right about the forum and the people on it. Helpful and kind to the newbie indeed.

As it happens my part of the world is just now minutes away from Christmas Eve so I'll end by wishing each and every one of you happy holidays and safe landings.

 

[Mattasmack]

Psst, Derfel,

Spoiler

(It's cockles of the heart!  Cuckold means something very different.  If you google it, you might want to turn 'safe search' on first.)

 

And to get on-topic: I don't expect Squad to do anything with the training missions in the next version.  Their general pattern, as I've seen it, is to first introduce features in the game in a bare minimum, just-get-it-working way, and then leave them alone until they're ready to come back and completely rework the feature to be just the way they want.  They tend to not make half-way changes.  If the pattern holds, they'll eventually come back and completely redo the tutorials, possibly to some whole new system.  But that will be a major effort, so we'll hear about it in the dev notes when it happens, and if they haven't said anything yet it's not going to be in version 1.1.

In my ideal KSP, the training scenarios would include video content to illustrate some concepts as well as building and flying activities.  (For example, you can't adequately explain how to use a maneuver node to a new player using only a few words in a text box.)  More attention would be paid to basic how-to's, like how to interpret the symbols on the screen in flight, or how to navigate the scenes in the space center.  And the scenarios wouldn't be flat-out broken, of course.  They would also be accessed from within a save game rather than main menu and would unlock progressively, at least in career and science mode games.  You don't need to see the tutorial on docking until you've unlocked docking ports, or anything about asteroid intercept until you've upgraded the tracking station enough to see them, etc.

Edited December 24, 2015 by Mattasmack

[Plusck]

6 hours ago, Derfel99 said:

...

But; there are do's and don'ts even for small developers. One of the dont's is Do Not Publish Anything That You Know Is Fatally Flawed. I'm not talking about bugs, all systems have bugs, you can't squash them all. No, in this case it's a matter of removing something fairly unessential to improve the customers experience or at least reduce their frustration levels.

Again; IMHO NO Training Missions are better than Bleeped Training Missions.

...

 

I can't really agree with that, because I still found that the training missions taught me new things about the game, gave some pointers to ship design, and put me in a situation which I would have been incredibly frustrated with if I'd had to go through all the trouble of putting a ship up there to start with to try these skills out.

So of course they will be offputting for some people, but not for me. They are flawed but with the exception of the parachute (which really should have been on a checklist of parts to scan for and update with the atmosphere changes) the flaws are things that you can work around without having to head for the wiki.

For my part, I'm glad they are there and weren't just scrubbed while awaiting a fix.

[NathanKell]

Man, it'd be nice if people read the Dev Notes.

[Mattasmack]

5 minutes ago, NathanKell said:

Man, it'd be nice if people read the Dev Notes.

Mea culpa, it's been a heck of a month.  I had read those Dev Notes and I missed the bit about the tutorials.  I had to ctrl+f 'tutorial' to find what you were referring to.  The dev notes seem to say that you're fixing 'bugs' in the tutorials -- that sounds like things like updating craft for the new physics, fixing older design errors in ships, etc.  I hope you're doing more than that.  There are good comments in this thread and elsewhere about the sort of basic information that's missing.  Similar to many of the comments in the reddit topic that Maxmap made almost a year ago about a tutorial revamp, which are probably still worth reading even though they were about version 0.90.  (If you were already aware of the reddit thread, never mind.)

[NathanKell]

I read that thread at the time but I did indeed forget about it since, thanks for the link.

[Stone Blue]

On 12/24/2015 at 0:43 AM, NathanKell said:

Man, it'd be nice if people read the Dev Notes.

Dev notes, shmev notes.... Boy, I would hate to be the poor sucker that has to FIX the tutorials...

[Derfel99]

Fellow Carbon-Based Beings,

Thank you for info, comments and encouragement, greatly appreciated. 

On 2015-12-24 at 6:31 AM, Plusck said:

I can't really agree with that, because I still found that the training missions taught me new things about the game, gave some pointers to ship design, and put me in a situation which I would have been incredibly frustrated with if I'd had to go through all the trouble of putting a ship up there to start with to try these skills out.

For my part, I'm glad they are there and weren't just scrubbed while awaiting a fix.

Totally get that, different folks and all that. Just goes to show you're a more persistent sort of person than I am.

 

On 2015-12-24 at 6:43 AM, NathanKell said:

Man, it'd be nice if people read the Dev Notes.

Hey, I didn't even know there was an update in the works, let a lone dev notes. I just a newbie whining about the training missions.

 

On 2015-12-26 at 10:20 PM, Stone Blue said:

Dev notes, shmev notes.... Boy, I would hate to be the poor sucker that has to FIX the tutorials...

 

Agreed, not easy. In my experience that sort of job need a lot of input from a bunch of people because an explanation / demonstration that is blindingly obvious to one person can be completely bewildering to another.. It will be interesting to see if the Devs have the time and energy to completely overhaul them or just spot-fix the broken bits.

As I mentioned above, I might try my hand at creating something really simple for fellow Newbies to get started, I have approached my engineer friend and threatened...er.. persuaded him to assist me (in fact he describes his role as "Cowpilot and technical insultant") so something might emerge during January or February.

 

And Finally;

Mattasmack

Yeah, I do know what a Cuckold is, I watch Game of Thrones. I was just trying (and failing) to be funny. Incidentally; in my native language if your Cockle is anywhere near your heart, you have a serious deformity.

Happy New Year to You All!

[Snark]

On 12/24/2015 at 9:43 PM, NathanKell said:

Man, it'd be nice if people read the Dev Notes.

 

On 12/26/2015 at 1:20 PM, Stone Blue said:

Dev notes, shmev notes.... Boy, I would hate to be the poor sucker that has to FIX the tutorials...

 

2 hours ago, Derfel99 said:

Agreed, not easy. In my experience that sort of job need a lot of input from a bunch of people because an explanation / demonstration that is blindingly obvious to one person can be completely bewildering to another.. It will be interesting to see if the Devs have the time and energy to completely overhaul them or just spot-fix the broken bits.

@Derfel99:  just a side note, Stone Blue's kidding response to NathanKell was because NathanKell's the guy who will be doing the fixing.

One of the neat things about KSP is that Squad really does care about the user community.  I love that the devs actually read the forums and respond directly to comments here.  Try getting that from EA!

Edited December 30, 2015 by Snark

[Batmanpuncher]

On December 23, 2015 at 6:48 PM, Derfel99 said:

Thanks for answering! Much appreciated.

Yeah, I figured something of the sort, but to my mind having faulty training Scenarios is actually worse than having no Training Scenarios as the frustration might cause people to drop the game and possibly curse it a bit in various places (Steam review section for instance), which really would be a shame considering the awesomeness of the game.

Disabling the Training Missions and attaching a simple note that explain that they will be back once they are updated might well have been a better solution than just leaving them as is and allowing new users to give themselves brain hernias trying to complete them.

If you don't mind my asking, is this why a lot of the user-created stuff is also un-updated to 1.0.5? I noticed a huge fan effort have gone into creating everything from articles to mods, but relatively little is up to 1.0.5 standard.

Surely, with the enormous pool of talent out there, as evinced by the community created materials, a little project of creating a few alternative 1.0.5 Training Missions properly annotated would not be impossible?

Anyho; I guess I'll park this on the shelf for a while and see if the new version appears and if it's more Newbie friendly.

Thanks again for your courteous answer.

Don't review the game badly on steam just because you can't follow simple instructions. That's your fault no the developers'. 

[Derfel99]

6 hours ago, Batmanpuncher said:

Don't review the game badly on steam just because you can't follow simple instructions. That's your fault no the developers'. 

Uh... say what?

1- I never said I would review the game, I said that that bleeped tutorials might lead to bad reviews.

2. Simple instructions? What the bleep is that supposed to mean? The tutorials are wrong, do not function, they are as dead as the proverbial parrot. If I or anybody else follow the instructions the mission will fail, so who's "fault" is that, the user or the writer? Incidentally if you read the thread you'll see that my impression of the tutorials are confirmed by veterans of the game so it's not a question of my impressions, in fact the developers themselves admit that the tutorial need an overhaul (see NathanKells Dev Notes).

3. In conclusion; feel free to expire.

[Vanamonde]

Watch the tempers please, guys. No need to attack your fellow players. 

[sealcove]

I just came back to Kerbal after a couple of years, and with the tutorials and info other info i am finding, it is mostly unplayable.  I used to enjoy successful trips to the Mun and Minmus, and now after 8hrs with a current version, I can't successfully even orbit Kebin and return safely. I appreciate the physics upgrades, but with little info to go on and such tight tolerances, I am no longer finding Kerbal to be fun.  I will check back in a year to see if has been refined to include a more casual mode and useful instructions.

 

 

[Snark]

2 hours ago, sealcove said:

I just came back to Kerbal after a couple of years, and with the tutorials and info other info i am finding, it is mostly unplayable.  I used to enjoy successful trips to the Mun and Minmus, and now after 8hrs with a current version, I can't successfully even orbit Kebin and return safely. I appreciate the physics upgrades, but with little info to go on and such tight tolerances, I am no longer finding Kerbal to be fun.  I will check back in a year to see if has been refined to include a more casual mode and useful instructions.

Well, "overhauling the tutorials" is one of the things they've mentioned as being in the 1.1 update that's coming out Real Soon Now, so you may not need to wait a year.  Check back in a few weeks.

In the meantime, there's a tutorials forum that has a lot of handy stuff you may find useful.  It's user-maintained, so it's not dependent on waiting for Squad to update things.

[Mahnarch]

There's tutorials?

 

 

 

 

Actually, I knew about them, but never used them.

I did all my learning via here and the Youtubes - and then just strapped in.

 

It helped that I learned here that fire and destruction are part of the fun. Otherwise I would have given up pretty quick.

Instead of hair pulling I was laughing (and still do) when things go 'BOOM!'.