Allow surface attachment for all parts

[Stoney3K]

I am perfectly aware that EER does the thing you want to do. I'm just trying to make a point that the limitation of a certain part A allowing surface attachment and part B not allowing surface attachment, in the current configuration, serves no purpose. You can just stick a part in between which has almost no mass penalty and accomplish the same thing you wanted in the first place, which only increases part count and therefore causes a performance hit and increases the chances of odd bugs because you are clipping parts.

Randomly dropping mod links here saying "Here's a mod that does that!", is beside the point. I can just as easily hack up a ModuleManager patch that enables all parts to be surface attached. But I am trying to question why some parts are surface attachable where others are not in the first place.

Some parts being surface attachable with others *not* being surface attachable is a perfectly valid gameplay element, but there has to be some logic to it.

[Red Iron Crown]

@Bomoo I think the objection here is not so much that a mod was recommended, but that it was recommended repeatedly. No one posted any critique of your first mention of EER.

I consider it helpful to mention in passing mods that implement similar features when discussing a suggestion for the stock game (even if the OP doesn't use mods other people reading the thread might and benefit from it). But there's no need to post repeatedly about it.

[The_Rocketeer]

@regexI think I see the reason I assumed misunderstanding. The act of using parts as attachment points is an innovation itself. Making the craft look like you imagined when the game doesn't allow those parts to stick together in that way is the essence of what I'm talking about. Of course it's possible that some players only imagine craft that fit together 'as intended' without any ingenuity of design at all - but that's another problem

Edit: FWIW I'm in the happy middle-ground between loving the engineering challenges of the editor and also loving the space-sim exploration. Actually, I guess most players would probably say they fall into that bracket.

Edited August 17, 2016 by The_Rocketeer

[tater]

Treating oversights on the part of the game designer as places to facilitate innovation on the part of the player makes little sense. You can stick an I-beam radially out of a fragile fuel tank (how many times have you seen this particular construction in the real world?), but you cannot have 2 or 4 rocket engines radially arranged on the bottom of the same tank, something you see literally all the time in the real world.

 

[Red Iron Crown]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

You can stick an I-beam radially out of a fragile fuel tank...

...but can't attach some fuel tanks to the I-beam in exactly the same arrangement. Design constraints are one thing, making the user work around inconsistencies in the editor is another altogether.

[Randazzo]

The functionality could be achieved with literally minimal effort (changing a single digit in each engine config), but then there's the tankbutts to consider. Perhaps switchable ones, like switchable shrouds, only more permanent.

Of course there would need to be some way to attach a stage beneath these set-ups, so there'd need to be an adapter of some kind. Perhaps something like a stock fairing with an upper attachment point and decoupling ability, allowing one to "draw" their own engine shrouds.

Doesn't seem like too monumental a task, but would it be "wacky contraption" enough for KSP?

 

[Bomoo]

7 hours ago, Stoney3K said:

I am perfectly aware that EER does the thing you want to do. I'm just trying to make a point that the limitation of a certain part A allowing surface attachment and part B not allowing surface attachment, in the current configuration, serves no purpose. You can just stick a part in between which has almost no mass penalty and accomplish the same thing you wanted in the first place, which only increases part count and therefore causes a performance hit and increases the chances of odd bugs because you are clipping parts.

Randomly dropping mod links here saying "Here's a mod that does that!", is beside the point. I can just as easily hack up a ModuleManager patch that enables all parts to be surface attached. But I am trying to question why some parts are surface attachable where others are not in the first place.

Some parts being surface attachable with others *not* being surface attachable is a perfectly valid gameplay element, but there has to be some logic to it.

Alright, fair enough.

3 hours ago, Red Iron Crown said:

@Bomoo I think the objection here is not so much that a mod was recommended, but that it was recommended repeatedly. No one posted any critique of your first mention of EER.

I consider it helpful to mention in passing mods that implement similar features when discussing a suggestion for the stock game (even if the OP doesn't use mods other people reading the thread might and benefit from it). But there's no need to post repeatedly about it.

Well, the first time I merely mentioned it, and the second time I posted a link for people to follow if they didn't want to look it up themselves. Since the thread had moved on since my first post, I didn't feel editing my first post with the link was going to be terribly helpful anymore. In principle, though, I do agree that spamming a thread with the same information repeatedly is uncalled for.

Edited August 17, 2016 by Bomoo

[r4pt0r]

3 minutes ago, Bomoo said:

Alright, fair enough.

Well, the first time I merely mentioned it, and the second time I posted a link for people to follow if they didn't want to look it up themselves. Since the thread had moved on since my first post, I didn't feel editing my first post with the link was going to be terribly helpful anymore. In principle, though, I do agree that spamming a thread with the same information repeatedly is uncalled for.

For my part, I was fairly aggressive as well. All good mate.

[Bomoo]

56 minutes ago, tater said:

Treating oversights on the part of the game designer as places to facilitate innovation on the part of the player makes little sense. You can stick an I-beam radially out of a fragile fuel tank (how many times have you seen this particular construction in the real world?), but you cannot have 2 or 4 rocket engines radially arranged on the bottom of the same tank, something you see literally all the time in the real world.

 

Trouble is that the stock tankbutted engine pieces aren't intended to be placed like that. If they were, what you'd have is a shroud piece, maybe some kind of structural bracket with a vertically offset centreline attachment node, and stripped down engine + plumbing pieces. As it is the game design, the inability to fit engines radially within the stock game aside, really doesn't allow for any kind of elegant multi-engine arrangements like the ones you give examples of. Don't I wish things were different.

5 minutes ago, r4pt0r said:

For my part, I was fairly aggressive as well. All good mate.

No harm done. Who doesn't hate spammers?

Edited August 17, 2016 by Bomoo

[tater]

@Bomoo, that's just another game design flaw. Every rocket part in the game looks terrible. Even if they would look wrong, the functionality is needed (for example tanks becoming available in the tech tree with no appropriate engines, and the fact that any stage separator (also ugly) places fairings to the engine, and not the tanks it separates.

[The_Rocketeer]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Treating oversights on the part of the game designer as places to facilitate innovation on the part of the player makes little sense.

Unless you're already playing the game and frankly have 0 choice about it one way or the other. Then it makes perfect sense to make the best out of it, and u know what, u sometimes even find you enjoyed solving a problem for yourself.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, The_Rocketeer said:

@regexI think I see the reason I assumed misunderstanding. The act of using parts as attachment points is an innovation itself.

Until you've been doing it for years, then it's just annoying.  Actually it was annoying the first time I had to "innovate".

1 hour ago, tater said:

but you cannot have 2 or 4 rocket engines radially arranged on the bottom of the same tank, something you see literally all the time in the real world.

Purely academic, but the R-7 uses five engines that each have four combustion chambers plus two (RD-107) or four (RD-108) vernier chambers with common machinery.  The Titan could arguably have two separate engines with separate machinery but they're considered a single unit.

Regardless, duplicating a setup like that shouldn't require double the amount of parts to radially attach the engines.

[tater]

22 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

Unless you're already playing the game and frankly have 0 choice about it one way or the other. Then it makes perfect sense to make the best out of it, and u know what, u sometimes even find you enjoyed solving a problem for yourself.

I make the best out of it by not using hardly any stock parts any more.

 

7 minutes ago, regex said:

Purely academic, but the R-7 uses five engines that each have four combustion chambers plus two (RD-107) or four (RD-108) vernier chambers with common machinery.  The Titan could arguably have two separate engines with separate machinery but they're considered a single unit.

Regardless, duplicating a setup like that shouldn't require double the amount of parts to radially attach the engines.

Yeah, that was the first image that wasn't huge that I saw with multiple engine bells that were even in number. I could have used 5 F1s or J2s, instead, I suppose one on the node, and 4 radially, I was thinking in terms of 1 part with radial symmetry turned on though, so I looked for even numbers  .

Edited August 17, 2016 by tater

[Red Iron Crown]

Judging by the pic it's not an RD-107 or RD-108 anyway, but pieces of paper or plastic painted to look like them.  

[tater]

Just now, Red Iron Crown said:

Judging by the pic it's not an RD-107 or RD-108 anyway, but peices of paper or plastic painted to look like them.  

Yeah, like I said, I was looking for a small image to show the idea, did;t want to spam a huge image, so I took the first one I found that was : 1. small, 2. had an even number of engines depicted. 

[The_Rocketeer]

@regex @tater I feel sorry for u that this apparently bothers u so much, but I still think it's great as it is. Perhaps modpacks really are the answer for you.

[tater]

Bad design is bad design. This is a thread in suggestion for the stock game, the "use mods" answer is not appropriate, @regex actually makes mods, so telling him about them is pretty funny, he knows. I use mods already, and in fact for the engine clusters I have abandoned stock engines altogether in favor of a mod that clusters engines as a single part (and I can cluster them in number, arrangement, and mount type at will (entirely addressing regex's concerns with my image post in his post above)).

The point of the thread is that the choices of which parts can attach radially is not some master plan to encourage innovation, it's arbitrary, and often nonsensical and counterintuitive. 

Edited August 17, 2016 by tater

[The_Rocketeer]

47 minutes ago, tater said:

This is a thread in suggestion for the stock game, the "use mods" answer is not appropriate

 

I know it's a suggestion for the stock game. I don't agree that it's a good suggestion, as I like the game the way it is now. If you want the game to be different, I suggest you use mods. That's MY suggestion to solve YOUR problem.

The fact that the current system breeds innovation doesn't need to be part of a master-plan - in fact I'm pretty sure it isn't. The parts list isn't uniform, it's a hotch-potch of bits and pieces from different stages of the game's development. So what? I like it. Leave it alone, say I.

Edited August 17, 2016 by The_Rocketeer

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

I know it's a suggestion for the stock game. I don't agree that it's a good suggestion, as I like the game the way it is now. If you want the game to be different, I suggest you use mods. That's MY suggestion to solve YOUR problem.

Nah, it really should be changed in the base game. Having to use cubic struts to cluster engines (or hell, even having defined engine sizes with tank buttes, but that's another discussion) is pretty bad.

That's probably my biggest beef with the system as it stands, I have to use an extra part to surface-attach an engine, there's no engineering challenge to solve, just an extra part. Curious, do you think "innovation" will suffer if engines are surface-attachable as opposed to needing an extra part to do it? If so, why?

Edited August 17, 2016 by regex

[The_Rocketeer]

@regex I'm not championing innovation at all costs - people seem to have gotten some weird idea that that's my point. What I'm saying is the current system has advantages that make it interesting. Finding an impossible combination isn't a design-defeating problem, it's an opportunity to find a clever solution. Innovation in a game like this is always inevitable, but specifically the potential for innovation to solve unanticipated design challenges is diminished by having all those challenges resolved by absolute conformity to attachment choices. Nonconformity rocks.

What I'm talking about is really about structural design rather than specific applications like engine clusters, but then the game wasn't really designed with engine-clusters in mind. They're an element of the game that has only come to light because of the freedoms the editor already affords. Demanding more freedoms to make existing functionality easier and cheaper to accomplish seems petty-minded to me, and ultimately will just result in more demands for more freedoms for more functionality for other things that then become possible as a result. Where does it end?

[adsii1970]

6 minutes ago, regex said:

Nah, it really should be changed in the base game. Having to use cubic struts to cluster engines (or hell, even having defined engine sizes with tank buttes, but that's another discussion) is pretty bad.

That's probably my biggest beef with the system as it stands, I have to use an extra part to surface-attach an engine, there's no engineering challenge to solve, just an extra part. Curious, do you think "innovation" will suffer if engines are surface-attachable as opposed to needing an extra part to do it? If so, why?

I agree. I hate having to embed parts to the last attachment node and then add another part to that just to be able to attach engines, copulas, or whatever to parts without nodes. Hidden parts still change the physics, add to the part count, and other than just being there to hold parts, don't have any real contribution to the craft.

There are those that will argue, "but that's the way it is done in real life...get over it..." yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. But this isn't real life.

 

[tater]

@The_Rocketeer, there are really no impossible combinations. We can do everything radially right now, it just adds a part. There is no innovation bread. Slap on radial attachment point, add non-radial part. There is no there there, just an extra part. In stock KSP mass is pretty meaningless, demonstrated by how trivial it is to create SSTOs, so the extra parts are not a mass constraint, just a part count constraint---this on top of a stock game purpose-designed for wobbly rockets that require numerous ugly struts.

Edited August 17, 2016 by tater

[The_Rocketeer]

1 minute ago, tater said:

there are really no impossible combinations. We can do everything radially right now, it just adds a part.

You have a very narrow vision of what's being discussed here.

[tater]

Just now, The_Rocketeer said:

You have a very narrow vision of what's being discussed here.

@adsii1970No, actually I don't. My view is the distillation of what is being discussed. Every single part in KSP can already be radially attached by 2 mechanisms. You can slap on the radial attachment part, or you can use the entirely stock offset and rotation tools.

The former needlessly adds to the part count for virtually zero reason (do what OP suggests, and those parts are entirely unneeded). The latter has many other complications as anyone who has used those tools knows when you then move a part by mistake (or intent) and it goes wonky.

 

[Red Iron Crown]

4 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

What I'm talking about is really about structural design rather than specific applications like engine clusters, but then the game wasn't really designed with engine-clusters in mind.

Nonsense. Aside from the engines that do surface attach, we also have the multicouplers and radial attachment points.

4 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

They're an element of the game that has only come to light because of the freedoms the editor already affords. Demanding more freedoms to make existing functionality easier and cheaper to accomplish seems petty-minded to me, and ultimately will just result in more demands for more freedoms for more functionality for other things that then become possible as a result. Where does it end?

Oh look, a slippery slope fallacy. I think people are just looking for consistency in how engines and fuel tanks attach to other parts.