First ever shared craft! pictures added!!!

[mhoram]

21 minutes ago, nascarlaser1 said:

Edit:

Can you tell me how to not "beg for popularity"?

By not asking: "How do I increase my ships popularity?" ;-)

But seriously I can think of some other answers for this question:
- Create other ships that are impressive in some way
- Be creative
- You received already some advice from other forum members in the other thread. Incooperate that advice into the next version of your ship and publish that one:

Designing a good ship is an iterative process fueled by learning from mistakes in earlier versions and the wish to improve ones creations.

[Alshain]

Are you asking for reasons why it isn't being downloaded or are you asking for constructive criticism on the craft itself?

I'm going to assume the latter since everyone else is commenting on the former (and it's good advice there).

1. The space shuttle wings are extra mass that shouldn't be necessary for anything.  If you need stabilizing fins, you can go way smaller, but a craft like this probably does not.

2. If you are set on using the 4 radial liquid boosters, you should asparagus stage and get more bang for your buck.  Personally, I dislike asparagus staging as LFO radial stages are expensive and unnecessary but if it is what you prefer that of course is more important.

3. Your thrust to weight ratio is 2.48 on the launchpad.  That is a little high, it's going to make it hard to turn in the atmosphere.  Depending on your preference 1.2 to 2.0 is where you want to be (I like 1.5 personally).  If you are going without mods, get the TWR using the formula Total Thrust / (Total Mass * 9.81)  Your mass can be seen in the engineer report, your thrust in the part catalog for the engine (5 mainsails, so 5 * 1379)

4.  I don't really see anything that needs that much battery... or really any battery at all.  That's just extra mass you have to lift and land, given you aren't staging them away so it makes you require more parachute too.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Alshain

[GoSlash27]

15 minutes ago, mhoram said:

Designing a good ship is an iterative process fueled by learning from mistakes in earlier versions and the wish to improve ones creations.

^ What he said. And a merely "good" ship really isn't going to be good enough to generate downloads. It's pretty much got to be "revolutionary", perhaps even "astounding".

 

[nascarlaser1]

14 hours ago, Alshain said:

Are you asking for reasons why it isn't being downloaded or are you asking for constructive criticism on the craft itself?

 

I never knew there was a way of knowing if it was being downloaded. I'm just confused of why I have so few posts, and the ones I do have are all from the same group of people. I have plenty of criticism on my craft (thanks anyways ) I just cannot figure out how to get it advertised more (other then pictures, which are currently broken on my PC.)

14 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

 

*EDIT* Also... if MMCRP's pics are of your craft... I mean this in the nicest possible way... it's not a particularly outstanding craft. You'd have to make something way more amazing before you can expect people to get excited about it.

 

Yes, that pic is of my craft :P.

[Snark]

32 minutes ago, nascarlaser1 said:

I'm just confused of why I have so few posts, and the ones I do have are all from the same group of people.

Welcome to the statistics of the internet.    You'll see the same type of phenomenon in forum threads here.  More wordage below, but the TL;DR is this:  The number of comments you get, and the number of people making those comments, is not necessarily reflective of how many people are consuming your content.

Some things to bear in mind:

• There are lots of people out there.
• The overwhelming majority of them never post anything at all, even if they read stuff.
• There's a fairly small number of people (relative to the total game-playing population) who ever post anything.
• Of the people who do post... an even tinier subset are really enthusiastic and post scads and scads of messages.
• And an even tinier subset of people will actually notice your post (since there are a lot of posts out there, and it's not possible for anyone to notice everything).  But once someone does notice your thread... they're more likely to return to it for subsequent posts.

Threads that get huge numbers of posts aren't necessarily the ones that are "popular" per se-- more often they're the ones that are controversial, where people have strong and conflicting opinions and argue with each other, and lots of people care and want to jump onto the thread.

"Hey, look at the spacecraft I made" threads typically aren't controversial. 

Threads that there's not a lot of disagreement on tend to be fairly brief.  That's not a bad thing!  It's entirely possible that there could be plenty of people out there who see your ship, think "Oh, that looks interesting", and download it, and it works for them.  So they have no reason to post anything and you don't hear their voices.

To help put things in perspective:  I'm a mod author.  I happen to use SpaceDock as my hosting site, and one of the nice little features there is that I can see a download graph for my mod, showing day-by-day download counts, with separate lines for each version of my mod.  So when I release a new version of one of my mods, I can watch the graph and see how many people are getting it.

And you know what?  It'll often be the case that when I release a new version, and announce it in my mod thread, I'll get hundreds of downloads within a few hours, and thousands within a few days, so I know it's popular... and yet on the mod thread, there's nothing but crickets chirping.  People see the update, they like it, they download and use it, they don't feel compelled to post.  Maybe I'll get a few "likes" for the forum post where I announce the release.  If I couldn't actually watch the download graphs, I would have not the faintest clue whether ten people or ten thousand people were using my mod.

So don't let it get you down.  The previous posters on this thread, talking about how hard it is to get noticed around here, are right-- but even if you do get noticed, you won't necessarily be able to tell. 

The best advice I can give you:  just stop worrying about "popularity" at all.  Don't even think about it.  Just play KSP to have fun, design the ships you like, put 'em up to share so other people can get them if they're so inclined, but don't otherwise pay it much attention.  You'll have more fun that way, trust me!

[nascarlaser1]

1 minute ago, Snark said:

Welcome to the statistics of the internet.    You'll see the same type of phenomenon in forum threads here.  It boils down to this:

• There are lots of people out there.
• The overwhelming majority of them never post anything at all, even if they read stuff.
• There's a fairly small number of people (relative to the total game-playing population) who ever post anything.
• Of the people who do post... an even tinier subset are really enthusiastic and post scads and scads of messages.
• And an even tinier subset of people will actually notice your post (since there are a lot of posts out there, and it's not possible for anyone to notice everything).  But once someone does notice your thread... they're more likely to return to it for subsequent posts.

Threads that get huge numbers of posts aren't necessarily the ones that are "popular" per se-- more often they're the ones that are controversial, where people have strong and conflicting opinions and argue with each other, and lots of people care and want to jump onto the thread.

"Hey, look at the spacecraft I made" threads typically aren't controversial. 

Threads that there's not a lot of disagreement on tend to be fairly brief.  That's not a bad thing!  So don't let it get you down.

I am working on a second shuttle, would making a repository page with both shuttles (fi possible pictures, but 0 promises) count as controversial??

P.s. I hardly even now what the word means .

[Kerbart]

Hello @nascarlaser1, don't let the comments (honest, but sometimes a bit unpolished) discourage you. In line/on top of what others already said:

• People want to see pictures. “I can't post a picture right now” is not a good substitute; resolve the imgur situation or find another way to host pictures. Just don't expect people to give up their no pics no clickspolicy(which they have adopted for very, very good reasons) just because you and imgur can't go together through one door.
• You're asking people for a favor: try out my craft. The golden rule of asking favors from people: make it as effortless and riskless as possible. Aside from having no clue what is being downloaded (due to no picture), saying possibly the Mun's orbit (untested) does not encourage that. Why not take the effort and try it out yourself? I have successfully taken a crew of 7 Kerbals to low Mun orbit with this vessel, and back to the surface of Kerbin, all alive (except Joofnar but we TOLD him not to EVA during re-entry) advertises the capabilities of your vessel a lot more than Maybe the Mun, I dunno.
• Popularity is earned, not granted. Start by posting pictures of your vessels on the forum. People will notice if they stand out one way or another (style, efficiency, capabilities, etc). If your ships are special, people will come. If people don't come... the world is hard and brutal. Perhaps you need to work on making your ships a bit more special?

In short, be really critical of what you make. You only get one attempt to publish your design for the first time to the world; make it count. Test and optimize it, for hours. Playtest it. Make sure there is nothing you'd like to change at it. Post a picture of it, and see how people react. If they're asking for a craft file, then post it.

That was like the second iteration of my lunar shuttle. I'm now at version four and it's a lot better, but still not perfect—until then I'm not posting it. Be critical!

[nascarlaser1]

8 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

 

• People want to see pictures. “I can't post a picture right now” is not a good substitute; resolve the imgur situation or find another way to host pictures. Just don't expect people to give up their no pics no clickspolicy(which they have adopted for very, very good reasons) just because you and imgur can't go together through one door.

I am not expecting people to give up on their no pick no clicks way of life. I am just asking for some patients before I get a sea of messages saying "pics?"

I am struggling to get pictures working, hopefully if all goes well I will have them this weekend. I never ever asked them to lay down their no pics no clicks policy (and if I did can you tell me where so I can take it out and send it through my virtual shredder.)

Edited August 19, 2016 by nascarlaser1

[Snark]

On 8/19/2016 at 11:28 AM, nascarlaser1 said:

I am working on a second shuttle, would making a repository page with both shuttles (fi possible pictures, but 0 promises) count as controversial??

P.s. I hardly even now what the word means .

Wow, that was a fast response.  Looks like you probably responded to the initial version of my post, before I had a few additional thoughts and updated my post just now.  I suggest going back and looking at what I wrote in my post about being a mod author.  If you're sharing spaceships and hoping for people to use them, you're essentially in the same position as a mod author who's written a mod and hopes people will download it.  So take a look at what I wrote-- you may find it useful.

By "controversial" I mean a topic that people have strong opinions about, and/or defend their opinions passionately, and get angry or indignant when they see someone posting an opposing point of view.  It happens all the time, not just in the KSP forums but on the internet in general.  People feel strongly about this stuff.  I could mention lots of specific KSP controversies that have cropped up, but I'm not going to do that here, because as sure as "the sun will rise", if I did that someone would feel compelled to jump on whatever actual controversy I mention and would derail your thread.  So I won't. 

But I can give an analogy, though.  Imagine that this were a forum, not about a spaceship game, but about ice cream.  User A posts a topic:  "Chocolate ice cream is best!" and proceeds to talk smack about how it's so much better than vanilla, which is a dumb flavor that only people who don't really understand ice cream would like.  And of course User B, who's a vanilla guy, gets all irate and posts about how "no, clearly vanilla's the best, because <reasons>, but I wouldn't expect a chocoholic to understand that."  And then User C pipes up about strawberry just before User A comes back and blasts User B with more arguments, and pretty soon it's a free-for-all with hundreds of messages in the thread, with lots of different users chiming in with their various favorite flavors, interspersed with a running flame-war between the Chocolate and Vanilla camps.

That's the kind of situation that leads to lots of posts.  It's not necessarily a good thing.  Certainly I would have very little interest in reading such a thread, for example.

"Here's a thing I made" is just not going to make people angry or argumentative.  (And that's fine!)

• If the thing you made is stupendously amazingly wonderful, maybe you'll get a few "wow, that's cool" posts... but only a few.
• If it's badly broken, maybe you'll get a few "that looks like it has some issues, here are some suggestions" posts... but only a few.
• If it's merely "pretty good, and useful" ... then it may be that lots of people will download it, but likely won't post anything at all, because why would they?

To help put things in perspective:  My most popular mod, BetterBurnTime, has had over 70,000 downloads on SpaceDock, with 423 followers (you can see the numbers on the download page).  It had another roughly 20,000 downloads on SpaceDock's predecessor site, before that site went down.  So that's around 90,000 downloads, over the roughly 3/4 of a year since I produced it, i.e. averaging well over 300 downloads per day for the better part of a year.  Yet if you look at its forum thread, there have been only 248 posts total.  And of those, I'd guess that around 40% are my own posts, and the remaining 150ish posts are mostly from a fairly small handful of maybe a couple of dozen users.  (Those numbers are rough guesses; I don't have the patience to go through and count up everything in the thread.)

So... 90,000 downloads, but only around 150 thread comments, and those are from only a couple of dozen users.  Roughly one thread comment for every 600 downloads.  Roughly one commenting user for every 3,000 to 4,000 downloads.  Funky math, huh? 

Moral of the story, #1:  don't judge your popularity by how many comments you get in your thread.

Moral of the story #2:  don't care about your popularity.  Just have fun and share stuff and don't worry about who does (or doesn't) use it.

[Snark]

19 minutes ago, nascarlaser1 said:

I am not expecting people to give up on their no pick no clicks way of life. I am just asking for some patients before I get a sea of messages saying "pics?"

I am struggling to get pictures working, hopefully if all goes well I will have them this weekend. I never ever asked them to lay down their no pics no clicks policy (and if I did can you tell me where so I can take it out and send it through my virtual shredder.)

You didn't explicitly ask them to do so.  But in effect, you implicitly did so by posting a thing without pictures.  Don't ask for patience... because Random Internet People who don't know you at all have no particular reason to be patient with you.

Most of them will have no patience at all and will just skip over your post without saying anything.  The ones who do say "pics please?" are actually the extra-patient ones, because they're taking the time and trouble to indicate their interest to you, and to try to help you by showing you what you need to do.

If you don't want to get an ocean of "pics please?" responses... then you have a simple solution:  Don't post yet.  Posting without pictures is basically just wasting people's time (at least, an awful lot of people will view it that way).

Please don't take it personally.  Try to put yourself in the position of the people who are downloading ships.  "I'm a KSP player.  I want cool ships to download.  I go to a place where the ships are... Oh look, there are hundreds of them.  That one looks interesting... oh, cool, look at that one over there!  Hm, here's one from nascarlaser1, I wonder if-- oh, look, no pictures.  Okay, here's a cool-looking ship over there..."  Honestly, what reason would such a person have for diving into your design-- who doesn't know you at all and has no reason to want to look at your stuff?  He's browsing hundreds of ships, he doesn't have time to download and try every one, so he's just looking at pictures.   Posting without pictures means that he's not going to look at your thing, and he's probably going to view as "wasted time" the couple of seconds his eyeballs spent in skimming over your post.  Because he doesn't know you.

Wait until you have pictures.  Then post, with pictures.

[JadeOfMaar]

Hello there. You're not going to want a Mk3 RCS tank on your taxi. Given this design, that part is way too heavy. Add at most two FL-R25 inline RCS tanks, or half-empty the Mk3 part. Once you've practiced enough with docking and placing RCS blocks well, you'll be amazed at how small an RCS tank you can get away with.

[Kerbart]

3 hours ago, nascarlaser1 said:

I am not expecting people to give up on their no pick no clicks way of life. I am just asking for some patients before I get a sea of messages saying "pics?"

I am struggling to get pictures working, hopefully if all goes well I will have them this weekend. I never ever asked them to lay down their no pics no clicks policy (and if I did can you tell me where so I can take it out and send it through my virtual shredder.)

The world is unfair, and harsh, and brutal. With the risk of repeating what @Snark said, the better solution is to be patient, get the imgur issue resolved, and then post. 

Asking for patience until the Imgur issue is resolved is moving the burden onto your audience. And they don't care, they don't have a stake in raising your popularity. They'll just look somewhere else. You do have a stake in your popularity; so be patient and post your ships when you can show the images with them as well.

[Snark]

Incidentally, one thing I meant to ask:

4 hours ago, nascarlaser1 said:

I am struggling to get pictures working

What exactly do you mean by that?  Maybe we can help you.

Making pictures appear in a forum post requires doing the following steps:

1. Take a screenshot on your local computer.
2. Upload the screenshot to some image-hosting site, such as imgur.
3. Get the appropriate URL and paste it into your forum post.

Which of the above steps is giving you difficulty, and exactly how is it a problem for you?

[nascarlaser1]

15 minutes ago, Snark said:

Incidentally, one thing I meant to ask:

What exactly do you mean by that?  Maybe we can help you.

Making pictures appear in a forum post requires doing the following steps:

1. Take a screenshot on your local computer.
2. Upload the screenshot to some image-hosting site, such as imgur.
3. Get the appropriate URL and paste it into your forum post.

Which of the above steps is giving you difficulty, and exactly how is it a problem for you?

2.

my slow computer makes uploading impossible. Always gets stuck at halfway. I will try on different PC this weekend.

[GoSlash27]

6 hours ago, Snark said:

Moral of the story, #1:  don't judge your popularity by how many comments you get in your thread.

Moral of the story #2:  don't care about your popularity.  Just have fun and share stuff and don't worry about who does (or doesn't) use it.

^ Reposted for truthiness.

 I should also add that very few people in this community are interested in being handed a fish. They want to know how to become more successful fishermen (if you catch my drift). What people really take and run with around here is knowledge and insight. If you have (or develop) something along these lines that's new and effective, they will beat a path to your door.

 But again, the object isn't and should never be "popularity", but rather advancing understanding for its own sake.
 

Best,
-Slashy

[Reactordrone]

4 hours ago, nascarlaser1 said:

2.

my slow computer makes uploading impossible. Always gets stuck at halfway. I will try on different PC this weekend.

If you've got any image processing software save the image as a jpeg and increase compression before uploading. Aim for about 200-300kB per image.

[Vanamonde]

Two threads about the same ship have been merged. 

nascarlaser1, most ships don't get much of a reaction. Don't take it personally. And even though I understand it's difficult for you currently, pictures are necessary to get player's attention. I took some pictures of your ship for you and edited them into your post, as an example, but those will go away the next time I clean out my Imgur storage. 

And having flown it, I have some advice for you. Reduce the thrust, add an SAS module or two, and replace those fins with MUCH smaller ones.  

[nascarlaser1]

On ‎8‎/‎19‎/‎2016 at 11:40 PM, Vanamonde said:

Two threads about the same ship have been merged. 

nascarlaser1, most ships don't get much of a reaction. Don't take it personally. And even though I understand it's difficult for you currently, pictures are necessary to get player's attention. I took some pictures of your ship for you and edited them into your post, as an example, but those will go away the next time I clean out my Imgur storage. 

And having flown it, I have some advice for you. Reduce the thrust, add an SAS module or two, and replace those fins with MUCH smaller ones.  

Thank you thank you thank you!!!!!! You are a life saver!

I will try to get my own pics up and running today, if not with  this ship then with the next version I am making .

[nascarlaser1]

a new picture has been added to the OP! yay! imgur is happy with me again!!

[Mycroft]

@nascarlaser1, so I took a look at your craft (I didn't have time to download it), but from what I've seen from the posts, the craft looks a tad funny (no offense) and is overall pretty average in the way it works. Now I'm no expert, but from my experience so far with uploading craft to KerbalX, I found that the most overwhelmingly popular craft are the ones that look stunning, or are powerful, or big, or something like that. There is an absolute sea of perfectly ordinary, functional craft out there, and I think that's why craft like yours are not popular, since the attention given to the ordinary craft is spread out over a huge base. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. The ordinary craft have an enormous supply that is more than equal to the demand for such craft, while there is a high demand for craft that look cool, or in general impress the hell out of people. I happen to own the three most massive craft on KerbalX right now, and a stock space destroyer (soon to be two) and it is those craft that get snapped up, not the ordinary craft I post. Also, something that might help is that if you put a lot of care into your craft and profile pages. People appreciate effort, not just any effort, but effort that is above average, especially if the end result looks good. Don't be afraid to shamelessly pander to what people want. I don't have that much experience, but I have learned a ton. But a word of caution: Pander all you want, but if KSP starts to feel like a second job, you might want to back off a touch, cause that just sucks the fun right out of it. Part of the reason people hammer you on pictures (which is no fun) is because a lack thereof silently says: "I don't care much what your opinion of my craft is, and I don't want to go to the effort to provide a good experience for you" whether or not you mean to say that. People want to know that you care, and anything that can be interpreted otherwise will be, leading people to return the favor.

Hope this helps. 

Respectfully, Mycroft

[Majorjim!]

On 08/19/2016 at 6:01 PM, Snark said:

don't judge your popularity by how many comments you get in your thread.

True words!

 If you are posting for popularity you won't have fun here. Build, build, build. That is the only way to get better at craft design in KSP. Post craft you are proud of or think are cool but never, ever expect any kind of response at all. I never have and I am constantly surprised and delighted because of that. I build for myself first and foremost.

Edited August 22, 2016 by Majorjim!

[katateochi]

56 minutes ago, Majorjim! said:

I build for myself first and foremost

This is the way to Kerbal!

@nascarlaser1 I see you've got a link to an imgur album on the OP now, but there's a problem with embedding imgur albums on the forum at present so you're best off just adding a single image which you can do by just pasting the image url >> http://i.imgur.com/hzniWt2.png

On KerbalX craft really need pics if you want to get views/downloads from people casually browsing the site. Craft without pics are not shown on the main craft page unless the person browsing has opted to show craft without pics. So I'd suggest adding that pic to your craft (imgur albums still work on KX but i'd recommend just adding the pic) and definitely post pics with your next upload. 
And don't pay any attention to a lack of upvotes on KerbalX, it seems people are very reserved about handing out upvotes there (which surprises me).

 

[Mycroft]

2 hours ago, katateochi said:

And don't pay any attention to a lack of upvotes on KerbalX, it seems people are very reserved about handing out upvotes there (which surprises me).

I think it's more that people forget to hand out upvotes. I've often seen great craft, and had every intention of up voting them, then forgotten. Kinda sad, but I think it's the case.

[nascarlaser1]

10 hours ago, Majorjim! said:

True words!

 If you are posting for popularity you won't have fun here. Build, build, build. That is the only way to get better at craft design in KSP. Post craft you are proud of or think are cool but never, ever expect any kind of response at all. I never have and I am constantly surprised and delighted because of that. I build for myself first and foremost.

ok I understand. thank you

[Mycroft]

I would also look into getting mods after, say, you've unlocked the tech tree, and have a good solid grasp on the gameplay and orbital mechanics.