Bumpier surroundings of KSC

[Hupf]

The ultra-flat grassland around the runway has to go away! People should be happy about the tier-0 runway they are given and actually try to stay on it during launch. Maybe it would be sufficient to just add some dam/barriers around the runway (so as to "shield the environment from explosions noise")?

[r4pt0r]

I also roll off the tier 0 runway for better takeoffs. I think a bumpier surounding area might be nice, would be a good rover testing area as well.

[Wjolcz]

I remember seeing someone complaining about tier-0 runway and thought "It can't be that bad".

Then tried it once and never used it again.

[regex]

Rather than mess up the surroundings why not argue that the runway should be flattened up?  There's no reason to have the runway if the surroundings are flatter...  Despite the runway being perfectly usable, even with the terrible wheels we have right now, there's no reason it should be that bumpy if Kerbals can manage to pave and flatten around the other buildings.  Someone lose the bulldozer?

[foamyesque]

3 minutes ago, regex said:

Rather than mess up the surroundings why not argue that the runway should be flattened up?  There's no reason to have the runway if the surroundings are flatter...  Despite the runway being perfectly usable, even with the terrible wheels we have right now, there's no reason it should be that bumpy if Kerbals can manage to pave and flatten around the other buildings.  Someone lose the bulldozer?

 

Why not both?

[regex]

Just now, foamyesque said:

 

Why not both?

Why?  Kerbals can clearly pave and flatten quite well, no need to make the surroundings bumpier since PQS resolution isn't super high to begin with.

[RocketSquid]

I agree with regex-just make the runway smoother.

[pandaman]

Yes, the whole point of a runway is to give an identifiable, safe landing area, the tier one runway is at least identifiable.  It should, at worst, be as smooth as the ground it's built on (before damage obviously), 

[ZooNamedGames]

Or add a physics medium to the KSC peninsula, so that landing on it creates additional traction and therefore a faster more potentially damaging stop. The idea being to stop players from rolling off the runway or not landing back on it yet let it be usable. 

Admittedly this idea stems from the SNES game PilotWings; land anywhere other than the runway (or unfortunately roll off) and your planes ruined. If we're lenient, we can be more realistic and therefore kind for smaller errors (this isn't 16bit anymore we can handle bigger numbers now). Whilst still keeping the issue.

Just my thoughts. Something doable, whilst achieving what the OP wants. One last thing I should say is that the KSC runway is normal as per the rest of Kerbin. The OP is right, the peninsula should change as it's perfectly flat. Only in like 2 other special areas does this happen, and not naturally. 

Feel free to disagree.

[Alshain]

Traction in itself should be material dependent IMO, they should use biome mapping to apply a traction coefficient based on what you would be landing on if it weren't digital pixels on a screen.  Grass is slick, so less traction.  Sand/dirt has more traction, cement and asphalt even more still.  There there is regolith which would behave closer to sand/dirt.  I would think if VPP takes traction from the game (which it should since we have sliders to adjust it for some reason) and since biomes are already fully defined and detectable, then you should be able to do this relatively easily (of course the runway would require tier detection as well).  I would think that even mod could do this relatively easily, though I wouldn't want to start on it until 1.2.  Of course other factors make up the full traction effect, like the mass, and the wheels.

If they did that, there would be no reason to have an artifically bumpy runway.  Real dirt (or grass) runways aren't near as bumpy as the Tier 1 runway.  Even dirt can be flattened pretty smooth.

Edited August 20, 2016 by Alshain

[Van Disaster]

It's surprising what you can land in a field. Breaking the surface of unpaved ground is a bit of a problem, but you could get round that by spamming wheels ( which is more or less what we do IRL ).

The stupid part is not only is the strip rougher than the nearby grass, there are perfectly smooth paved areas around the unupgraded KSC and inside the SPH. The initial runway doesn't make any sense from *any* point of view.

Edited August 21, 2016 by Van Disaster

[Codraroll]

The Tier 0 runway is actually kind of amazing. It has bumps and ridges on a far smaller scale than the terrain model allows. In other words, the strip of land the Kerbals initially prepared for their aircraft take-offs and landings is the roughest land surface in the solar system.

[GoSlash27]

I concur with most of the above suggestions. While I am able to use the lumpy runway without any problems, it's silly to have a lumpy runway. Flatten it and make everything around it lumpy!

Best,
-Slashy

[Hodari]

3 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

I concur with most of the above suggestions. While I am able to use the lumpy runway without any problems, it's silly to have a lumpy runway. Flatten it and make everything around it lumpy!

Best,
-Slashy

This.  I'd say basically, assume that whoever built the KSC chose that location precisely because it was particularly flat.  Therefore, you can make the surrounding areas as flat as possible for a realistic NATURAL environment, but not absolutely perfect.  The level 1 runway should represent a dirt runway and even it should clearly be better to land on than the surrounding areas.  Rely on size/weight limitations and the size of the runway itself to give us a reason to upgrade it ir maybe even add in something like ILS for the level 3 runway.

[KSK]

6 hours ago, Codraroll said:

The Tier 0 runway is actually kind of amazing. It has bumps and ridges on a far smaller scale than the terrain model allows. In other words, the strip of land the Kerbals initially prepared for their aircraft take-offs and landings is the roughest land surface in the solar system.

"We choose to land in this place. We hope to land in this decade without exploding, not because that is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal is a waste of our energies and skills, because that runway is one that we can't be bothered to fix, one we are willing to postpone, and one which we intend to ignore..."

Edit: Back on topic, I don't really see any reason for this suggestion other than to add a bit of Nintendo difficulty to the game. Feel free to use the runway as you see fit but does it really matter that much if other players don't play by your exact rules?

Edited August 21, 2016 by KSK

[Wyzard]

I don't have trouble staying on the runway during takeoff, but I'm not great at lining up my approach just right to touch down on it.  I usually end up landing somewhere in the grassy area to the north, then taxiing onto the runway to get 100% recovery credit.  If landing on the grass is to be discouraged, then the runway ought to have approach guides extending miles to the west, like real airports have — either as physical poles sticking up from the ground, or virtual markers on the aircraft's HUD.

That being said, landing in grasslands or deserts elsewhere on Kerbin is pretty easy too.  I don't see why the area around the runway should be different.

[Wjolcz]

6 hours ago, KSK said:

We choose to land in this place. We hope to land in this decade without exploding, not because that is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal is a waste of our energies and skills, because that runway is one that we can't be bothered to fix, one we are willing to postpone, and one which we intend to ignore..."

"Appreciate that runway, because it's the only one we have! Poor children could have eaten it!"

[RocketSquid]

At this point I feel like the tier one runway was based on an earlier, failed theory of aircraft takeoff and landing.

[Alshain]

19 hours ago, Van Disaster said:

It's surprising what you can land in a field. Breaking the surface of unpaved ground is a bit of a problem, but you could get round that by spamming wheels ( which is more or less what we do IRL ).

The stupid part is not only is the strip rougher than the nearby grass, there are perfectly smooth paved areas around the unupgraded KSC and inside the SPH. The initial runway doesn't make any sense from *any* point of view.

It does make sense from one point of view... the barn!  If the tier 0 runway had been part of the barn, it would have been a perfect fit.

[Van Disaster]

3 hours ago, Alshain said:

It does make sense from one point of view... the barn!  If the tier 0 runway had been part of the barn, it would have been a perfect fit.

Maybe if KSC was built on a swamp...

That German land-in-a-field effort was amusingly Kerbal

Edited August 22, 2016 by Van Disaster

[magnemoe]

23 hours ago, Van Disaster said:

It's surprising what you can land in a field. Breaking the surface of unpaved ground is a bit of a problem, but you could get round that by spamming wheels ( which is more or less what we do IRL ).

The stupid part is not only is the strip rougher than the nearby grass, there are perfectly smooth paved areas around the unupgraded KSC and inside the SPH. The initial runway doesn't make any sense from *any* point of view.

This, main issue is that heavy or high performance planes tend to have high ground pressure or weight / ground contact area. it the wheels dig in they can get to much load and break. 
Military transports tend to use the wheel spam method. 

What is the video? does not look like an emergency landing. Why all the dust after landing, my guess is dirt thrown up because of trust reverse. 

[Van Disaster]

9 hours ago, magnemoe said:

What is the video? does not look like an emergency landing. Why all the dust after landing, my guess is dirt thrown up because of trust reverse. 

It's an ex-Interflug IL-62 being landed to be part of a museum at the place Otto Lilienthal did his flights at ( they claim "world's oldest aerodrome" ). All the crud is from the reversers yeah, it wasn't like that plane ever had to take off again :). Pretty much out of airfield at that point.

[pandaman]

Given that IRL the most basic permanent runways are grass, and therefore far from smooth, a degree of bumpiness on the tier 1 runway is not out of place, but it should still be noticeably safer to use than the surrounding unprepared/uncompacted grass.

Maybe what's needed, rather than a massive improvement to the tier 1, is to smooth the runway a bit to make it a bit more friendly and then tweak some settings for ANY unprepared ground (wherever it may be).  So, rather than mess with the terrain model and detail itself add a 'risk factor' for any given surface (could possibly done by biome for simplicity) which would give a random increase in wheel stress, multiplied by speed.  This would simulate that landing on unprepared surfaces is inherently risky as you simply don't know if there is a rock or hole in just the wrong place.

Landing on the flat grasslands rather than the runway wouldn't be too much different to the runway if you came in sensibly slowly, but a bit too quick and the risks increase proportionally.   Likewise tundra, say, would have a higher 'risk factor' due to it being a naturally more uneven surface, and the desert or areas of the Mun or Duna could be even riskier because of digging in to patches of very soft sand and hitting rocks etc.   No change to the game graphics, but an extra incentive to design for landings on difficult terrain and to be cautious when doing so.

I know this is starting to enter the realms of 'random failure' which I am against, but this is more on the lines of risk management.  Players will know that landing on the grass is less tolerant and more unpredictable than the runway, so land on the runway or take the chance. 

Also, as a bonus, this could a way to help create buildable runways too. Once built the runway surface has the 'risk factor' switched off and adopts the properties of whichever one of the runway tiers the player chooses when building. 

[TheDestroyer111]

On 8/20/2016 at 6:00 AM, ZooNamedGames said:

Spoiler

 

Or add a physics medium to the KSC peninsula, so that landing on it creates additional traction and therefore a faster more potentially damaging stop. The idea being to stop players from rolling off the runway or not landing back on it yet let it be usable. 

Admittedly this idea stems from the SNES game PilotWings; land anywhere other than the runway (or unfortunately roll off) and your planes ruined. If we're lenient, we can be more realistic and therefore kind for smaller errors (this isn't 16bit anymore we can handle bigger numbers now). Whilst still keeping the issue.

Just my thoughts. Something doable, whilst achieving what the OP wants. One last thing I should say is that the KSC runway is normal as per the rest of Kerbin. The OP is right, the peninsula should change as it's perfectly flat. Only in like 2 other special areas does this happen, and not naturally. 

Feel free to disagree.

 

 

Both this and the OP are bad ideas. OP is bad as AFAIK most new players land on the area near KSC before getting the precision required for runway landing, and thus messing with the terrain near KSC would effectively prevent most players from learning how to land airplanes. The quoted idea is bad because then, it would be much harder to fly planes from places other than KSC. And this would cause trouble for people trying to for example have bases in remote locations on Kerbin. And... There must be a reason why the KSC was built on a relatively flat area

//EDIT: @pandaman below me Yeah. I don't think this is entirely impossible, especially with your version. But what about rovers? This would require another remake on the rover wheels, this time giving them some proper, sense-making and reasonably realistic physics.

Edited August 22, 2016 by TheDestroyer111

[pandaman]

14 minutes ago, TheDestroyer111 said:

Both this and the OP are bad ideas. OP is bad as AFAIK most new players land on the area near KSC before getting the precision required for runway landing, and thus messing with the terrain near KSC would effectively prevent most players from learning how to land airplanes. The quoted idea is bad because then, it would be much harder to fly planes from places other than KSC. And this would cause trouble for people trying to for example have bases in remote locations on Kerbin. And... There must be a reason why the KSC was built on a relatively flat area

Planes fly from prepared runways for a reason, only those designed to operate in rugged or otherwise unusual environments land away from them in normal operation, and planes often have suitable undercarriage for the surfaces they operate from.  Making the runways the best and safest places to land is sensible, and what I imagine most players would expect.  By making it more risky to land elsewhere does not prevent players from doing it, it just makes sense.  If you want to land a plane on an unprepared surface then you need to be more careful and ideally have an aircraft designed or equipped to deal with it.

There is a real danger of making it too difficult I agree, but that is a balance issue rather than a concept problem.