About Spacesuits

[Daveroski]

I have done a lot of EVA. Using mods I have built stations and ships in space and bases on the ground with a kerbal.

Many times have I travelled from one ship to another wearing nothing but a spacesuit and a smile.

There is no first person view from a spacesuit unlike ships in IVA.

There is an up and down in a spacesuit but not in a ship and of course there should be no up or down.

I suggest that the spacesuit be a command pod. A separate entity. Effectively make it a ship.

Then when we EVA everything can look the same as it does now except hanging in place on a ladder  or other graspable will probably be easier to script.

We could have a spacesuit IVA where our arms and hands are visible.

The IVA avatars would all wear the same kind of KSP IVA suit but their experience and role could be added so that when you looked at your crew you could see what roles they had at-a-glance.

Spacesuits could be colour coded to their roles pilot - engineer- science again making their roles instantly apparent.

It would open a huge door for the modding community.

To be fair, even in real life the spacesuit is basically a small space ship and I'm just suggesting that it be coded as such.

[nikokespprfan]

Wait... isn't that already a thing? Because kerbals are shown in the tracking station, and all over the game they seem to be treated like ships. And if so, why is this approach never used, as this seems (to me at least) as a watertight way of making first person EVA possible. Just add an IVA that looks like a helmet, and put your kerbal in there. 

Although that would mean a kerbal model would be visible in this IVA, just as with all the other IVA's, that could obstruct the view and maybe mess with the animation of the kerbal itself. But I don't have enough knowledge about this stuff to know for sure.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Several mods add the ability to first person EVA but I find it to be...unpleasant at best.

Simply slapping a camera onto the Kerbal's face amounts to a shuddering janky viewpoint that looks and feels very unfinished. (No offense to said mods, you do what you can, with what you got.)

Doing first person EVA right would require a lot of work I imagine. It's something I'd love to see but not at the cost of time/resources that could be spent on something more important.

Edited February 17, 2016 by Rocket In My Pocket

[Tex]

10 hours ago, Daveroski said:

There is an up and down in a spacesuit but not in a ship and of course there should be no up or down.

 

Wait, what? If you add RCS thrusters in all six directions on your ship then you should have up/down translation capability. Take a look at the thrusters on the EVA suit, I'm fairly certain they have a thruster block that shows the positioning.

[Daveroski]

1 hour ago, nikokespprfan said:

Wait... isn't that already a thing? Because kerbals are shown in the tracking station, and all over the game they seem to be treated like ships. And if so, why is this approach never used, as this seems (to me at least) as a watertight way of making first person EVA possible. Just add an IVA that looks like a helmet, and put your kerbal in there. 

Although that would mean a kerbal model would be visible in this IVA, just as with all the other IVA's, that could obstruct the view and maybe mess with the animation of the kerbal itself. But I don't have enough knowledge about this stuff to know for sure.

A kerbal model would only be visible while he was in a 'ship' not when he was wearing his suit The way it looks now needn't look any different it's the way it handles and the opportunities it would afford.

 

17 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

Several mods add the ability to first person EVA but I find it to be...unpleasant at best.

Simply slapping a camera onto the Kerbal's face amounts to a shuddering janky viewpoint that looks and feels very unfinished. (No offense to said mods, you do what you can, with what you got.)

Doing first person EVA right would require a lot of work I imagine. It's something I'd love to see but not at the cost of time/resources that could be spent on something more important.

It's not the First person EVA which is so important. It's the manoeuvrability. Being able to EVA from your ship in 3rd person and have him/her facing the same way when you turn on his jetpack instead of spinning like a mad thing to orient himself with the normal of the orbit.

Making it easier to gain access to a ship which has it's entrance on the anti-normal side.

Helping to stop sliding on ladders by using a soft docking technique. Then he becomes like Velcro

It would make it easier for modders to be able to add tools and equipment.

And they could be made to look amazing.

2 minutes ago, Maximus97 said:

Wait, what? If you add RCS thrusters in all six directions on your ship then you should have up/down translation capability. Take a look at the thrusters on the EVA suit, I'm fairly certain they have a thruster block that shows the positioning.

Can you make your ship point in any direction while in orbit? Yes of course you can.

Can you do the same with a kerbal on EVA? No you can not. A kerbal should have six directions of rotation too but he does not. He effectively has an up and down. (Normal and anti-normal) Your ship has no such limitation.

Ladders and hatches on the prograde/retrograde axis are difficult and often dangerous to use.

[Tex]

Oh true. Misread your post, my apologies. Though they can't move, they CAN however point in different directions if you use the mouse to sort of "drag" them into facing somewhere else.

[cubinator]

34 minutes ago, Maximus97 said:

Oh true. Misread your post, my apologies. Though they can't move, they CAN however point in different directions if you use the mouse to sort of "drag" them into facing somewhere else.

Yeah, that does exist, but it takes a long time to figure it out. There's nothing in-game that tells you that you can do that. I think there should be an EVA tutorial that tells you about what you can do.

[AbacusWizard]

I'd really prefer the EVA controls to be exactly the same as the ship RCS controls:
WASDQE to rotate; IJKLHN to move.

[KerikBalm]

same here, but i do appreciate spacebar being used to make the kerbal orient in the same direction that the camera is facing

[Jasper_f]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

same here, but i do appreciate spacebar being used to make the kerbal orient in the same direction that the camera is facing

... You are my new hero.

I have > 800 hours in KSP, but did not discover this EVA feature. Please have all my rep. for sharing this!

[Daveroski]

4 hours ago, AbacusWizard said:

I'd really prefer the EVA controls to be exactly the same as the ship RCS controls:
WASDQE to rotate; IJKLHN to move.

I changed my staging key to numpad-0 so that I would never accidentally stage. I changed the translating keys to be the same as the rover keys but with Shift for up and Ctrl for down. This just feels more intuitive for me.

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

same here, but i do appreciate spacebar being used to make the kerbal orient in the same direction that the camera is facing

True but you have to point the camera first and then point the kerbal. It would be nicer if you could face him in exactly the right direction like you would be able to if all you had to do was go IVA in the suit for a few seconds.

[Daveroski]

12 hours ago, Maximus97 said:

Oh true. Misread your post, my apologies. Though they can't move, they CAN however point in different directions if you use the mouse to sort of "drag" them into facing somewhere else.

That is ok. I am perhaps not a eloquent as I would like to be at times.

You do agree that they should have the same range of motion as a ship?

[KerikBalm]

14 minutes ago, Daveroski said:

True but you have to point the camera first and then point the kerbal. It would be nicer if you could face him in exactly the right direction like you would be able to if all you had to do was go IVA in the suit for a few seconds.

Yes, I agree, and it would also be nice if the camera didn't have gimbal lock, and we could rotate the plane of the camera too, as even with that camera orienting function, due to limitations of the camera, one still can't use it to really orient the kerbal how one wants to.