Is it true that most KSP players never go interplanetary?

[TGApples]

One of my issues is that I have an aversion to larger timewarps, especially with the current brokenness of the lab. I think the only think that would really cure me of this is some in-game penalty for "wasting" time. I don't really like playing heavily modded, but maybe I should make an exception here.

Even then, without Kerbal Alarm Clock (or some similar mod), getting the transfer windows correct is pretty tricky with huge delta-V wastage. Now, to be fair, you can build massive rockets with huge amounts of excess delta-V, so really it becomes a question of efficiency.

[ValCab33]

The furthest I went was Dres. Jool and all are far, and nukes are sooo slow...

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

I take advantage of every transfer window I get. And then dawdle in LKO construction most of the rest of the time.

trouble is: transfer windows are few and far between

and so many things in the game take zero gametime. VAB/SPH construction, endless testflights with revert to VAB. all keep zeroing the clock. (then SQUAD releases a new build, and you have to start over.)

So while I do spend a lot (too much) of my time around Kerbin, my goal is to make the Kerbals a truly interplanetary society. I want to colonize Duna, and Jool, and extract every drop of science from every biome there is. 

 

[TGApples]

1 hour ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

I take advantage of every transfer window I get. And then dawdle in LKO construction most of the rest of the time.

trouble is: transfer windows are few and far between

The thing is, they're really not. Just use max time warp and they come around very quickly. There seems to be a psychological barrier against using excessive time warp though. I have it too!

Edited May 18, 2016 by TGApples

[Terwin]

I am aware of the benefits of transfer windows, but attempting to figure them out  was always more effort than it was worth to me, I would just load up lots of dv and some ISRU, then so long as I could get to orbit from my target planetary body, I was generally in good shape.

(Moho is a bit of an issue as there is no light-weight moon to top off fuel on for the return trip, but you can always use fuel tankers to handle that)

Using Nuclear Age and Near Future Tech engines I have been to every planetary system and returned form every solid body except Lathe, Tylo, and Eve.

Using only engines from stock + tweakscale(to reduce part counts), I have been to Duna and back as well as a visit to Moho that was on it's way to rendezvous with my first attempted Eve return vehicle (I was also using USI-LS, which provided a lot of constraints to those missions), but 1.1 came out and I set that game aside...

Currently I have my first school-buses approaching Minmus and the Kerbol SOI in 1.1.2.

Will probably wait for USI logistics to be fully functional again before I go very far though(so much easier to refuel when it is automated)

 

Also, all of my docking to date has been with the klaw.

[Javster]

I've done one Duna landing with a probe, no return. One. In almost 600 hours. I'm not really sure why.

[Sereneti]

the most of the time, i used with KSP is to play with airplanes, or spaceplanes...

 

[V7 Aerospace]

2 years and nearly 500 hours racked up, still haven't left Kerbin's SOI... Still haven't docked either 

I guess I just have way too much fun going to Minmus, or making aircraft. I have 5 or 6 vehicles made in the VAB compared to 30+ in the SPH (I would have waay more, but i have lost a few save files in the time I have been playing)

 

Edited May 18, 2016 by V7 Aerospace
Whoops, its SPH not SHP

[TheSaint]

1 hour ago, V7 Aerospace said:

2 years and nearly 500 hours racked up, still haven't left Kerbin's SOI... Still haven't docked either 

I guess I just have way too much fun going to Minmus, or making aircraft. I have 5 or 6 vehicles made in the VAB compared to 30+ in the SHP (I would have waay more, but i have lost a few save files in the time I have been playing)

See, this is just bizarre to me. I look at this and think, "It's Kerbal Space Program, not Kerbal Airplane Program." In almost 2,000 hours of play I can count on one hand (without using my thumb) the number of aircraft or spaceplanes I've made in the SPH. When I use the SPH at all I use it for making rovers. I can rendezvous and dock in my sleep, but I can't land a plane to save my life. If I wanted to make planes then I would have bought X-Plane. 

But, on the other hand, I am the first guy to tell people to play the game they enjoy. So if you have fun making planes, then by all means, keep on making planes. 

[Curveball Anders]

1 minute ago, TheSaint said:

See, this is just bizarre to me. I look at this and think, "It's Kerbal Space Program, not Kerbal Airplane Program." In almost 2,000 hours of play I can count on one hand (without using my thumb) the number of aircraft or spaceplanes I've made in the SPH. When I use the SPH at all I use it for making rovers. I can rendezvous and dock in my sleep, but I can't land a plane to save my life. If I wanted to make planes then I would have bought X-Plane. 

But, on the other hand, I am the first guy to tell people to play the game they enjoy. So if you have fun making planes, then by all means, keep on making planes. 

This echoes my playing too.

I've built 1 aircraft, and I have actually landed 2 or 3 times, but that's it.

And, as above, when I want to fly planes I use X-Plane (or FSX).

But I can understand the why people are having fun building and flying (esp space-)planes.

[The_Rocketeer]

3 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

See, this is just bizarre to me. I look at this and think, "It's Kerbal Space Program, not Kerbal Airplane Program." In almost 2,000 hours of play I can count on one hand (without using my thumb) the number of aircraft or spaceplanes I've made in the SPH. When I use the SPH at all I use it for making rovers. I can rendezvous and dock in my sleep, but I can't land a plane to save my life. If I wanted to make planes then I would have bought X-Plane. 

But, on the other hand, I am the first guy to tell people to play the game they enjoy. So if you have fun making planes, then by all means, keep on making planes. 

I think you shouldn't underestimate the number of people who HAVE bought X-Plane, IL-2 Sturmovik, MFSX and other sims going right back to Flight Simulator 95 and before. One of the beautiful things about KSP is it appeals to my 70-year-old dad AND my 4-year-old nephew. My old man has been playing flight simulators at least as long as I have (early 90s and before), and before he retired he was an engineer for Rolls Royce, so this game appeals to him from an engineering-process and flight-simulator standpoint before it even gets to orbit. Meanwhile, my nephew is more interested in crashing rockets into the moon and blowing things up.

I had a serious point in there about how KSP isn't just a space sim, but I guess the TL:DR is, strokes for folks.

[Gojira1000]

Let's see. I've put  a Kerbal everywhere and gotten them home in stock. And out through Sarnus and its satellites in OPM (further planets strictly by probe). I haven't yet managed a there-and-back career trip to Mars in RSS, but that's a project for this summer.

All that being said, my first interplanetary jaunt was to Duna before I knew MechJeb or KER existed, in an ISRU-equipped thing that shouldn't have made the trip but did.

Despite that Duna trip, I doubt I would have followed up with the remaining planets if I hadn't discovered Kerbal Engineer Redux and MJ's dV window. It was nerve-wracking to guesstimate everything. I recall landing on Ike to refuel on the way back with under 60m/s of dV left in the tanks. That's cutting it a bit fine.

[The_Rocketeer]

8 minutes ago, Gojira1000 said:

I recall landing on Ike to refuel on the way back with under 60m/s of dV left in the tanks. That's cutting it a bit fine.

But didn't it make u feel super relieved and awesome to pull it off so close to the margin? For me that's the sweet-spot of gaming, triumph in the face of the chance of failure. Take it too far from the danger zone and it's about as much fun as typing out the alphabet.

[Gojira1000]

Just now, The_Rocketeer said:

But didn't it make u feel super relieved and awesome to pull it off so close to the margin? For me that's the sweet-spot of gaming, triumph in the face of the chance of failure. Take it too far from the danger zone and it's about as much fun as typing out the alphabet.

To an extent - but I never leave a Kerbal behind, and the horrors (OK, the cost) of a career-game rescue mission are best avoided, for me. (When I want drama I fly interplanetary SSTOs, too. Plenty of "Uh-oh" moments, there)

[TheSaint]

4 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

I think you shouldn't underestimate the number of people who HAVE bought X-Plane, IL-2 Sturmovik, MFSX and other sims going right back to Flight Simulator 95 and before. One of the beautiful things about KSP is it appeals to my 70-year-old dad AND my 4-year-old nephew. My old man has been playing flight simulators at least as long as I have (early 90s and before), and before he retired he was an engineer for Rolls Royce, so this game appeals to him from an engineering-process and flight-simulator standpoint before it even gets to orbit. Meanwhile, my nephew is more interested in crashing rockets into the moon and blowing things up.

I had a serious point in there about how KSP isn't just a space sim, but I guess the TL:DR is, strokes for folks.

Not to thread-jack, but I've also played a lot of flight simulators. The first game I bought for my first computer was a flight simulator (F/A-18 Interceptor for the Commodore Amiga. How's that for dating myself. ) I just think that, as flight simulators go, you can do a lot better than KSP, even if you want to build your own aircraft. The advantage that KSP brings to the table is that you can build a spaceplane (or a rocket) and fly it to orbit, and then move on to other planets. So when I see people that don't take advantage of that, it just makes me go:

But, again, it's their money, their game, they can play it however they want.

Funny, my takeaway from this whole conversation is that maybe I should dust off the SPH and try spaceplanes again. If nothing else my kids will have a good laugh over my catastrophic failures. 

[Brainlord Mesomorph]

3 hours ago, TGApples said:

The thing is, they're really not. Just use max time warp and they come around very quickly. There seems to be a psychological barrier against using excessive time warp though. I have it too!

Its not a "psychological barrier" time is a precious resource.  Even you called it "excessive time warp"

If I have a year while that flight in en-route to Eve, or before my next departure, I have a year to work on the spaceplane project, or build out the Minmus Fuel Station. (of course, in my career, right now its Year 2 day 38, I have three munbases, I'm about to launch 2  interplanetary cruisers, I have 1.7 million funds, and a rep of 82%)

I have a problem with time passing too fast, I think time in the VAB should count.

In the Dev Forum, I  suggested R&D should take time. And about HALF the ppl in that thread said it wouldn't matter b/c "everyone will just time warp"  But, no. they wouldn't.   At least I wouldn't.

[obi_juan]

I play with Life Support... Make a interplanetary ship is a real challenge... Also I play with Community TechTree  to elevate the difficult to have the parts that I need...

Now In my career game with 1.1.2 I am making the initial bases in Minmus and Mun to construct the interplanetary ships... My difficult is to train the astronauts because every of my interplanetary ships have a crew of 16  and they need to return alive after a travel of several years. I need to say that until now I did not finish any of my colonization games (with a permanent base in every planet of Kerbol system...)  I have problems to make a good bases on Eve an Gilly... In Duna, Ike and Dress are easy.

[TGApples]

5 minutes ago, Brainlord Mesomorph said:

Its not a "psychological barrier" time is a precious resource.  Even you called it "excessive time warp"

It's not a resource. Once you're in a stable orbit, or landed, nothing changes. You can advance time 10 years and nothing has changed. The only reason you wouldn't is role-play, or because it feels wrong.

[stratvox]

I have sent some vessels in sandbox (mostly to check out how it works), but in career, not once... and I pretty much play career only. My problem is I keep running out of time when a new build drops and then have to restart the career game. This time, the update save file thing from 1.0.5 -> 1.1 totally worked for me, so I'm continuing my save. I'm expecting to get my first run at Moho (on it's second pass) in about another 40 days game time. I'll be sending probes and a live crew when the window comes around, and I'm hoping that it'll go gangbusters. Part of the plan is to get some 2nd/3rd level scientists out there with a lab and park it for a while to rack up the science points.

I'm with the folks who talk about how it goes during the transfers to other planets; I tend to keep busy in the meantime. However, on this save I'm expecting to finish out the tech tree quite soon, at which point I'm going to upgrade the admin building, turn 100% of science into dough, and start putting out scilabs to gather research science and turn it into moolah, as well as continue to run missions to make money. Not having made it this far into a career yet, I'm expecting that over the coming time I'll end up doing more high timewarps while running interplanetary missions, with pauses (using KAC to kill warp from time to time) to go hit the scilabs and transmit the science back to KSC to help keep the funds coming in to build more ships.

I'm really looking forward to finally getting to this stage of the career game and start really moving stuff around. If I get that really happening and get to the point where I've hit all the stuff, I'm figuring on installing the antennae mod, a life support mod, and a colonisation mod, and maybe K(I|A)S (for orbital construction considerations) and then firing up a new game to see how all that works out. Should be fun, and given that playing career games take months of meatspace time, should run me out until the end of next year. If a major upgrade drops in the meantime, I'll do what I've always done; copy the working game into another place on the HD, install the new one, and start the futzing to get it tuned up (waiting for mods, any graphics crap I need to do... though that was only really required for me from 1.0->1.1 as I'm on linux) and once I can get the old game into the new version successfully I'll move to the new version.

As much as I'd like to be able to put more time into the game, I've got this whole life thing that eats up a lot of time that I could spend doing KSP. It's a fun and grey-matter enhancing diversion... I expect I'm going to be playing this game for a while yet.

[Van Disaster]

I just install the new version into a new place & keep playing the old ones - I spent some time in 0.90 earlier today because I've still not finished what I was doing there.

[The_Rocketeer]

13 minutes ago, TGApples said:

It's not a resource. Once you're in a stable orbit, or landed, nothing changes. You can advance time 10 years and nothing has changed. The only reason you wouldn't is role-play, or because it feels wrong.

Time is absolutely a resource... if you're looking for the most efficient ways to get interplanetary. Planetary conjunctions are the ultra-rare versions of transfer windows that mean that at the exact moment you encounter your first planet, u have an immediate transfer to the next one. This is how Cassini and Voyager got out to the distant planets without being prohibitively expensive.

Everything changes with time. With enough time, eventually it could change back, but there is a strong argument for a certain level of realism. I mean, are we to assume that Kerbals are immortal?

[martinezfg11]

1400 some hours, never left Kerbin SOI. Haven't gone farther than LKO in months...

I only play now to test and balance mods, sometimes I forget it's a game.

[DChurchill]

2 hours ago, Curveball Anders said:

This echoes my playing too.

I've built 1 aircraft, and I have actually landed 2 or 3 times, but that's it.

And, as above, when I want to fly planes I use X-Plane (or FSX).

But I can understand the why people are having fun building and flying (esp space-)planes.

Yeah I mainly feel the same way about planes. Probably because I haven't have much success with spaceplanes. I'm determined to try to get the hang of them, though. I've made it to VERY low orbit a couple times, back in .21 or .22. But making it out of LKO hasn't happened with a spaceplane for me.

[tater]

I've sent probes everywhere (and returned from most), though I usually bail on stock before going past Duna with crew, then start up in a scaled system (usually 6.4X distances) with life support. At 6.4X Minmus is about a 90 day round trip. Been everywhere there, too, with probes. Crewed missions are rather trickier in that scale with LS.

I never build planes. I think I did when I first got the game around 0.24. I only unlock aircraft tech nodes in career if they have rocket parts in them, and never upgrade the hanger or runway---not true, I upgrade the hanger 1 notch to make some rovers for testing.

Edited May 18, 2016 by tater

[V7 Aerospace]

it seems as if my first post might have conveyed the wrong message. I have a lot of interest in going interplanetary (I'm wanting to go to Duna this summer), but as I said, I have been so busy making bases and sending missions to Minmus, that I've forgot there is a whole system to explore.