Is it true that most KSP players never go interplanetary?

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, The_Rocketeer said:

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?

If there is a perfect conjunction of planets 18 years from now and you're ready now to do it, and all you as the player want to do is that, then time isn't a resource. it's a hindrance. Waste, even. It serves no purpose except something to get through to achieve your goal, and the game-provided way to get through it is to hit ">" several times in the tracking station and wait a few minutes. If you are unwilling to do that for any reason, it is a psychological reason. You are uncomfortable doing what the game fully encourages the player to do.

I don't need to assume that Kerbals are immortal. I know they are. Put Jeb on the launch pad, time warp to the max, and go on vacation. When you come back he'll still happily be standing there.

Note: I don't actually know when time will stop counting correctly in 64 bit KSP. I know there was actually a pretty hard limit for 32 bit that was something like 70 years, and I know that the 64-bit limit is far, far greater. As in, billions of years. I don't know how long a vacation you can take and come back within that time. However, I am sure that so long as you don't hit it, Jeb will still be alive and smiling on the launch pad.

Edited May 18, 2016 by 5thHorseman

[Violent Jeb]

I just made it to duna and back with a 2 person craft in 1.1.2. Had enough fuel to hop to second biome, reach orbit, detour to ike, land, hop a second ike biome, return to orbit, then transfer back to kerbin. 5k science and 3 years later we are safe and sound.

Career grind typically keeps me from getting interplanetary for reasons i've discussed in other threads,

Quote

The writing is literally on the wall. You must get 1220 Science before you even have practical interplanetary capabilities. Emphasis in bold. Sure, you can stack 50 tiny fuel tanks on whatever engine you happen to have unlocked and send an ugly monstrosity to another planet, but you're just going to dispose of that craft and be forced to launch another a more competent craft to the same interplanetary location at a later time. This just adds more to the existing grind problem.

 I could play sandbox but i genuinely want this to be a management sim experience. For the singular reason of how prohibitive the career mode is, I believe that people aren't leaving the K_soi.

In order of significance, here are my list of probable reasons why

1. Career mode grind
2. Node difficulty. Using stock tools it is immensely challenging to get an encounter. Without the proper settings, you can be within 1% of an encounter and you won't even see it. That's very prohibitive. Even scrolling the man.node can't get you the precision you need. Its not fun to spend 10+ minutes setting up a maneuver node. The worst part is that the most efficient transfers and slingshots are even more complicated to set/determine your trajectory.
3. Time lapse. In most games I feel like i'm "wasting time" when going interplanetary, like i should be getting science from the moons or working on mining or station operations. Sometimes this results in a situation where you have a craft en route and you end up doing other things while you wait. Problem being that when you get back to your ship to come in for orbit, you have a bunch of new tech and your interplanetary craft is either not optimized or its missing something. From what i understand the game time can be exceptionally long now so i'm trying to work past this hang up by simply running the complete missions as they arise. Something about the window planners being 10yrs in advance that makes you feel like you're missing stuff if you don't do it all right away.
4. lack of dv indications with regards to craft or target. It kind of sucks not knowing if you're actually going to make it. On pure stock, getting to duna and not being able to land or return is an emotional event. You spend lots of time on designing a mission and it doesn't work bc of dv, it's discouraging.
5. complete lack of anything to do. If you could establish launch sites from other planets, or there was more flexibility to base building, it would give you something to do. Getting to a new body is immensely satisfying, but once you've landed, placed your flag, ran your science and played with the gravity, there is almost no reason to ever return there again.

[Aragosnat]

Sounds like 68 year is the limit before mission timer goes bonkers. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/48762-how-to-break-the-quot68-years-limitquotabout-231s/   I know it is old. But, still likely to be relivent. Still somewhere in the back of my mind. I read here. That the game lasts a around 220 years before kracken likes to visit a lot?

[The_Rocketeer]

28 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

If there is a perfect conjunction of planets 18 years from now and you're ready now to do it, and all you as the player want to do is that, then time isn't a resource. it's a hindrance. Waste, even. It serves no purpose except something to get through to achieve your goal, and the game-provided way to get through it is to hit ">" several times in the tracking station and wait a few minutes. If you are unwilling to do that for any reason, it is a psychological reason. You are uncomfortable doing what the game fully encourages the player to do.

I don't need to assume that Kerbals are immortal. I know they are. Put Jeb on the launch pad, time warp to the max, and go on vacation. When you come back he'll still happily be standing there.

Note: I don't actually know when time will stop counting correctly in 64 bit KSP. I know there was actually a pretty hard limit for 32 bit that was something like 70 years, and I know that the 64-bit limit is far, far greater. As in, billions of years. I don't know how long a vacation you can take and come back within that time. However, I am sure that so long as you don't hit it, Jeb will still be alive and smiling on the launch pad.

It's still not really a It might be a hindrance, [but] it's [still] a resource that you have a surplus of. The alternative to waiting that long is to make a less efficient transfer, use more fuel, plan an ISRU-based refuelling pitstop somewhere, etc. If you can't wait, you don't have to, but if you miss the ideal opportunity because you were timewarping for something else, that could be something u'd kick yourself for later.

I know what you mean regarding immortality, but I personally think that sort of attitude undermines the escapism of the game. I like to think of their 'lives' are as precious and delicate and transigent as our own, not just because that makes me a better mission controller (since I have to plan how to keep them alive in case of accident, e.g. launch escape tower etc), but because it means I feel better about saving them from death or recovering them to Kerbin a year sooner by not missing a transfer deadline. I'm not a hardcore RPer (in KSP at least), but there's a bit more magic in a game like this when you anthropomorphise beyond the clinical facts.

Edited May 18, 2016 by The_Rocketeer

[Superfluous J]

18 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

I know what you mean regarding immortality, but I personally think that sort of attitude undermines the escapism of the game. I like to think of their 'lives' are as precious and delicate and transigent as our own, not just because that makes me a better mission controller (since I have to plan how to keep them alive in case of accident, e.g. launch escape tower etc), but because it means I feel better about saving them from death or recovering them to Kerbin a year sooner by not missing a transfer deadline. I'm not a hardcore RPer (in KSP at least), but there's a bit more magic in a game like this when you anthropomorphise beyond the clinical facts.

Which is totally, completely, 100% psychological

I am in no way saying that's a bad thing. I do it too. However, it's something very real that (the argument goes. I'm not nearly qualified actually have a valid opinion here) can keep someone from going Interplanetary.

I specifically did my Kerpollo series to break myself of that habit, by the way. I sat down and said "Okay. For this save I don't give a lick about time warp or mission duration. I'm just going to go out there and actually SEE THIS GAME'S FRICKIN' DESTINATIONS ALREADY."

Edited May 18, 2016 by 5thHorseman

[The_Rocketeer]

1 hour ago, 5thHorseman said:

I specifically did my Kerpollo series to break myself of that habit, by the way. I sat down and said "Okay. For this save I don't give a lick about time warp or mission duration. I'm just going to go out there and actually SEE THIS GAME'S FRICKIN' DESTINATIONS ALREADY."

I see now I missed part of your point from the post I replied to last time. Yes, it is psychological, but I think it's a saloon door (it swings both ways) whether the game does or doesn't encourage you to use timewarp. If the game is entertaining enough without using timewarp to excess, you could view that as inbuilt discouragement - even if part of that entertainment arises from my own sense of satisfaction from not exceeding unrealistic lifespans or mission durations, it's still entertainment derived from the game itself without using what you've just said the game encourages us to use.

I think there's still something noteworthy in what I was saying about time as a resource, though (if arguably not quite on-topic). Basically, the instant or period when something happens (an eclipse, a transfer window, a conjunction etc) is fixed. Once it's happened, those exact circumstances won't happen again in that savegame, at least not for a really, really long time. Up until it happens, time is a resource you have to spend on testing your crafts, training your kerbals and unlocking your science nodes. IRL, this is when careers are made or broken, because if an interplanetary opportunity is missed it probably won't come around again within a person's lifetime. Even if you do look on Kerbals as lifeless/immortal, the time up until this point is still a resource, it's just a resource that counts down until it reaches 0 and then resets to some humungous long interval. But there isn't just one event that will happen in the game, there are thousands and thousands of alignments of various kinds that you can witness or 'study' from various places as unique experiences to be had in the game. If you're only focused on one particular goal, you'll blow right past all of these by pouring the resource of time down the drain of timewarp. I don't particularly look on that as an encouragement to use it either.

EDIT: On reading over my own words, it also seems to me that if you're blowing past so many unique mission opportunities, you're probably focusing on a goal that can wait.

Edited May 18, 2016 by The_Rocketeer

[Slam_Jones]

Personally I am operating outside of Kerbin's SOI maybe 5% of the time.  This was because of the lag my machine would get with high-part-count ships, and also partly because of the tediousness of getting an encounter, rendezvous, etc. etc.

I've hopped on KSP several time saying something like "okay, today I'm gonna do a round-trip to Duna," but then ended up never even launching the ship.  Often because I've run out of time due to having too much fun putting the ship together, but also often because I realize that I have no idea how much dV is needed to get there, let alone land, take off again, and get back to Kerbin.  Also I've had too many times where I'll do nearly the entire mission, just to have it fail at the last second, losing several hours of work in the process  (maybe I didn't pack enough electricity, or fuel, or activated the chutes at the wrong time, etc etc etc).  At which point I usually decide that that's enough KSP for today...

Edited May 18, 2016 by Slam_Jones

[tater]

I played for a while without KER, so I was pretty adept at the KSP standard "winging it" approach, at least as far as Duna returns, and certainly probes. I am risk-averse in terms of kerbal lives, I rarely lose any, actually, but I also send probes. I've even sent "all up" crewed missions minus the crew (with a probe core added) to see if the thing will work.

KSP being what it is minus KER, I then tend to send a series of craft to any target. One with the crew, and the rest are tankers. Very inefficient.

Once you have the dv information, then you can plan much more aggressive missions, since you actually know what it will take. 

I honestly think this is part of the reason Squad claims to like the "shared experience" of not having randomized solar system seeds (which would help replay, IMHO). Since they don't give the player critical information (dv budget, and dv of craft), you really need many, many trials and errors to get the craft the right size.

[Red Iron Crown]

5 hours ago, The_Rocketeer said:

 I mean, are we to assume that Kerbals are immortal?

Over the years I have amassed an absolute mountain of empirical evidence that suggests that kerbals are not immortal. Not even close.

[adsii1970]

Here's my two cents in... At one time I was all about the interplanetary missions and exploring the system until 1.0 has been released. Now it is hard mentally when I am not sure what the next bug patch is going to do to the game (such as wheels, landing legs, etc) and if something will happen to wipe out an entire crew of a ship while in flight.

It's funny, but I take it hard when I do something stupid that either strands a Kerbal or even causes a fatality. I have two vessels in my VAB roster whose sole purpose is to rescue stranded Kerbal crews. Both have a probe core (as to not endanger another crew), excessive amounts of fuel and mono propellant (for those tricky rendezvous and docking), and even a tow cable to tow the crippled vessel back into Kerbin orbit so it can be properly inspected and salvaged, if needed. I have a simple motto - no one gets left behind - and I take it very seriously.

Maybe once 1.2 is out and the game is more stable and key bugs are addressed I'll go interplanetary and even use the OPM... but until then...

Edited May 19, 2016 by adsii1970

[Superfluous J]

20 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Over the years I have amassed an absolute mountain of empirical evidence that suggests that kerbals are not immortal. Not even close.

I have a similar amount of evidence that says they're at least biologically immortal, and in some universes capable of reincarnation.

[Belerafon]

16 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

So... mods, mods, mods, download someone elses craft, google, or repeatedly bang head against wall (revert, and start a long mission all over)

Pretty much everything you said above requires looking for something outside the stock game.

Sure, there's a lot of mods, but the stock game is awful when it comes to fun.

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, tater said:

KSP being what it is minus KER, I then tend to send a series of craft to any target. One with the crew, and the rest are tankers. Very inefficient.

Once you have the dv information, then you can plan much more aggressive missions, since you actually know what it will take. 

I must say that I never found not knowing the exact dV of a ship or the dV requirements of a mission to be much of an impediment in visiting other bodies. If you set a big bundle of nuclear asparagus spears on top of a gigantic booster stack, you can easily make a ship with 10 or more km/s left when it gets to LKO. With that, you can bumble your way almost anywhere and back (except maybe Moho ). I always did orbital rendezvous landing missions as well, which meant that for the price of learning how to dock in orbit getting everybody home was never that near of a thing. By the time we got to 0.95, I also had several big stations in Kerbin and Munar orbit, at which there were massive depots of fuel and a fleet of tankers, tugs, etc. docked, so I could always leave Kerbin's SOI with a full tank. In 0.95, I did the whole Jool5 mission, succeeding with the first ship I launched, without exactly calculating the dV of anything involved, including the Tylo lander. I only actually got interested in exactly how much dV my craft had left when that itself became  a matter of interest, like when I got involved in challenges about long-range SSTOs and low dV routes to different places.  Since we now have tweakable tanks and the Engineer's Report, getting that info did not require KER, but simply that I learn how to enter the formula "=LN(A1/B1)*C1*9.8" into an Excel spreadsheet, then put the wet weight, dry weight, and engine ISP values into cells A1, B1, and C1. I'm sure KER makes that easier, but compared to the endless hours I've spent actually building and flying my ships, that effort is peanuts IMO.

Edited May 19, 2016 by herbal space program

[JPLRepo]

3 hours ago, Aragosnat said:

Sounds like 68 year is the limit before mission timer goes bonkers. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/48762-how-to-break-the-quot68-years-limitquotabout-231s/   I know it is old. But, still likely to be relivent. Still somewhere in the back of my mind. I read here. That the game lasts a around 220 years before kracken likes to visit a lot?

Believe that was fixed in 1.1 (see change log):
Long saves (> 68 Earth years, 233 Kerbin years) no longer cause negative dates. The date is good for over 140Gyr (though other problems will manifest)

As for the actual topic. I wish I had time to actually play KSP 1.1+. Since it came out all my spare time has been dedicated to updating and fixing my mods and actual KSP started up/play has all been about just testing my mods. I think I spent about 15 minutes during the pre-release just playing around with the game.

[BeeGeenie]

It's been a while since I went further than Duna, but I've had Kerbals on Moho, Dres, and in orbit of Eve (still trying to talk myself into a Kerbaled Eve surface mission). I've never sent Kerbaled missions to the Jool 5, or Eeloo though.

My Dres and Moho missions came very close to failure... so I need to "git gud" before I make more attempts.

and I tend to restart career mode after every update... although 1.2 seems like a pretty solid "final" version.

and I feel bad about the idea of leaving my Kerbals drifting alone in space for decades at a time... So... now I'm just making excuses.

[Kertech]

A new save for me and this time I'm going interplanetary on the 6th planned launch (well 5th and 6th, it's going to be assembled in orbit with a crew module and drive section)

[Wallygator]

I don't go interplanetary, but have been known to go ballistic in a few client meetings. 

Badum tish!

seriously though and on topic... Although having conducted stock missions err... Ok with KER that is, to all the destinations usually via probes etc., frankly, since there is little to do out there, I spend most of my time in the VAB and reverting my launches just tinkering with my designs. 

My RSS/RO save is a completely different matter. 

[Starhawk]

It seems to me that there are a couple of significant psychological barriers to interplanetary travel as well as one other big impediment.

The first is space.  Even the KSP solar system is very large compared to Kerbin's SOI.  The feeling of foreboding at facing the great empty is certainly a barrier for some.

The second is time.  Surprisingly to me, many players have a strong sense that time passing without doing anything is bad.  This seems to be a particularly powerful barrier for many.

The other barrier I see is technical.  It's sometimes easy to get into the mental trap of seeing a particular way of accomplishing a task as 'the right way' and to ignore other ways.

For instance, it's easy to think that the only way to go interplanetary is to use external tools and create an efficient Hohmann transfer.  But the stock game offers a perfectly simple and absolutely dependable way to go interplanetary without any external tools.  By forgoing the Oberth effect and inserting your craft into a solar orbit you can create a maneuver node anywhere on your solar orbit and easily match planes and get an encounter with any planet.  You have to pack a bunch more fuel, but you can get anywhere you want using this method,

This was touched on in previous posts.

If you don't want to be inefficient, there is still a stock game solution as long as you have something in LKO.  Click on anything in LKO.  Make a maneuver node with just enough magnitude to escape Kerbin.  Zoom out.  Click on your projected solar orbit line and make a maneuver node there.  You can set up one or more maneuvers to match planes and get an encounter quite easily.  Then you can use the timing of the maneuver which creates the encounter to do your burn from LKO efficiently.

Alternatively, you can place a probe into a solar orbit matching Kerbin's but just outside Kerbin's SOI and you can place maneuver nodes on that orbit line to find the correct timing to leave for your target planet.

There's more than one way to remove the epidermis of a feline.

Happy landings!

[Mister Dilsby]

11 minutes ago, Starhawk said:

For instance, it's easy to think that the only way to go interplanetary is to use external tools and create an efficient Hohmann transfer.  But the stock game offers a perfectly simple and absolutely dependable way to go interplanetary without any external tools.  By forgoing the Oberth effect and inserting your craft into a solar orbit you can create a maneuver node anywhere on your solar orbit and easily match planes and get an encounter with any planet.  You have to pack a bunch more fuel, but you can get anywhere you want using this method,

Absolutely! I do a proper interplanetary Hohmann about half the time, or less. The thing to remember is that there always exists a perfect Hohmann transfer to your target world, at all times, from some point in solar orbit. The only trick is getting your ship to the correct point at the time it becomes the correct point.

Or, as Kerbfleet navigators are fond of saying, "Why wait for a window when you have enough delta vee to kick down the door?"  

[Commander Zoom]

As I've said before, a few times: while I've been playing since 2011 - since before there were moons, let alone planets, to go to - it wasn't until 2013 that I finally did more than orbital flights and short visits to Mun and Minmus.  That includes putting up satellites and space stations as well as venturing beyond Kerbin's SOI.  Some of that was being distracted by other games and personal matters, and some was waiting for certain features (like docking!) to become stock. There was also the much greater investment in time and planning required for such missions, as others in this thread have noted.

[storm6436]

Well, if my experience is at all representative...  I've been playing since the original barn was the best thing going and the only two other planets I've been to have been Eve and Duna, and only orbital visits.   Multiple probes, but only one manned mission. 

 

 This is mostly a direct result of how I play though.   I've stuck to career set to medium difficulty and use mods like KCT.   Between that and life being real busy,  I don't move through stuff rapidly...  Usually by the time I'm lobbing probes at Duna and Eve the next patch rolls around and I start over.

 That might sound frustrating, and to  a degree it is...  But I've steadily expanded and refined my skillset for launch and maneuver... And thanks to 64-bit, I've got new shortcuts as well.   Extraplanetary launchpads means I'm not doing 4-launch mega-assembly anymore,  just lugging rocket parts.

So yeah, limited interplanetary, but primarily due to timing,  not lack of desire. 

 

[TonyC]

Without MechJeb 2, i would have probably never gotten into interplanetary. Its data crunching and automatic node creation for interplanetary transfers are invaluable..

[wumpus]

Is this where we ponder if the console KSP ports allow mods?  Launch windows and delta-v requirements aren't such a big deal since they can be accessed over the internet (they don't need any of your data).  Things like kerbal engineer (for everything) and mechjeb (especially for docking) are likely make or break for console players wanting to land on Duna and beyond.

For the PC master race, the answer is clear.  Ditch career, add a few critical mods and go!  I seriously hope that consoles either have the option of adding KE or at least will give some idea of delta-v (you can tell I'm a SRB junkie who can't get his delta-v out of a calculator all the time).

[Jarin]

5 hours ago, Kuzzter said:

Or, as Kerbfleet navigators are fond of saying, "Why wait for a window when you have enough delta vee to kick down the door?"  

This is my new favorite KSP quote.

 

It's entirely the time barrier for me. I am fully capable of just letting the timer run, but I don't like doing that, especially for more than a few days. Heck, I'll even run inefficient 3 or 4 day transfers to Minmus. This is compounded by life-support mods, of course. Even if I don't have one currently, I often have in the past.

[something]

Given a constant learning curve of a game and a static level of skill of the players the number of players achieving a certain goal will exponentially decay with the difficulty of that goal. That's plain statistics. It's the same thing in every game. Now in most games the skill level is adaptive and the learning curve is not constant but monotonous - so we might see something different than an exponential decay, but it is a nice approximation anyways.

Orbiting is hard enough for most users - I had my fair share of struggle with it.

Landing on the Mun? Dude, there are entire topics where users tell exactly how they failed their first Mun landings.

Minmus? Seems as if inclination wasn't everybody's friend.

Docking/Rendez-vous. Hard for many users...

Going interplanetary? Just when you learned how to handle maneuver nodes and how to get to Minmus, everything is screwed once more as you now have to learn about transfer windows...

Landing on Duna - erm yes, my first probe lost its engine due to the state of the atmosphere, the number of chutes and the fact that it was lacking some 20m/s dV...

 

So, to be honest, I am not that surprised, that many users never go interplanetary - it is hard. Very hard.

Edited May 19, 2016 by something