Mk 1-2 Pod versus Mk3 Cockpit

[Sharpy]

On 20.08.2016 at 8:50 PM, foamyesque said:

 

and that the Mk3 cockpit is massively undermassed for its size and capabilities.

 

On 21.08.2016 at 5:31 AM, Xavven said:

But the mass shouldn't be based on the volume of the part... It should be based on the materials used and the complexity of the systems in it.

70 m/s impact durability.

You can pretty much land the MK3 cockpit on Kerbin on a drogue chute.

[Curveball Anders]

The Mk3 cockpit is intended for longer missions, it's mass is explained by the amounts of snacks stored in it.

[Alshain]

42 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

The Mk3 cockpit is intended for longer missions, it's mass is explained by the amounts of snacks stored in it.

But it has less mass.  That is the issue.

[Curveball Anders]

1 minute ago, Alshain said:

But it has less mass.  That is the issue.

Snacks are fluffy.

[Alshain]

Just now, Curveball Anders said:

Snacks are fluffy.

Fluffy doesn't mean they have negative mass.

[Sharpy]

6 hours ago, Alshain said:

Fluffy doesn't mean they have negative mass.

Why not? How do you think Kerbals can remain slim after eating nothing but snacks alone for decades?

[Alshain]

9 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

Why not? How do you think Kerbals can remain slim after eating nothing but snacks alone for decades?

Photosynthesis... though it's not light so... Snackosynthesis.  How do you think they keep from running out of air?

Edited August 23, 2016 by Alshain

[Sharpy]

3 minutes ago, Alshain said:

Photosynthesis

I'd agree except for light levels beyond Dres are insufficient for that.

[Alshain]

Just now, Sharpy said:

I'd agree except for light levels beyond Dres are insufficient for that.

You missed my edit

[passinglurker]

7 hours ago, Curveball Anders said:

Snacks are fluffy.

OMGDon'tYouStartWithTheLolKerbalzBS!... (deep breath) just please stop making excuses for squad this isn't early access anymore (or rather "former squad" since many have now left). This is a problem that could have been fixed with a simple config edit and some playtime (or at least mitigated if you skip the "playtime" step and guestimate a better number) yet despite all the other hotfixes and overhauls released since 1.0 it has not.

Don't joke around about poor balance the former dev's utter neglect of this is honestly my single giant gripe with this game since release and is why I model parts more than I play these days. because I just can't enjoy kerbal with these massively inconsistent numbers and stats from updates long past still flying around.

Edited August 23, 2016 by passinglurker

[Curveball Anders]

5 minutes ago, passinglurker said:

This is a problem that could have been fixed with a simple config edit

Sorry I haven't noticed it was a problem.

I'm having fun designing, launching, running (failing) my mission without having any issues with mass ratios of capsules.

And I've been diagnosed with OCD

 

 

Edited August 23, 2016 by Curveball Anders

[passinglurker]

6 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

Sorry I haven't noticed it was a problem

there is no need to be sorry some people were sold on the promise of sandbox like you and others were sold on the promise of career like me we clearly have different tastes thankfully part ballance is an issue where it's possible for squad to satisfy the needs of career players without it coming at the expense of the sandbox players experience.

I just wish they did it before overhauling the tutorials and balancing them around the old parts... we had consistent fuel:mass and fuel:volume ratios for like a day during the pre-release before they had to revert it cause it broke a stupid tutorial...

[Curveball Anders]

1 minute ago, passinglurker said:

some people were sold on the promise of sandbox like you and others were sold on the promise of career

I play career for most of the time, I slip over to sandbox to simulate (as in test) my designs, then I copy them over to my active career save and bite my nails when launching something that just shouldn't go wrong.

But I have to say that I've never noticed this mass issues with the capsules.

[passinglurker]

6 minutes ago, Curveball Anders said:

I play career for most of the time, I slip over to sandbox to simulate (as in test) my designs, then I copy them over to my active career save and bite my nails when launching something that just shouldn't go wrong.

But I have to say that I've never noticed this mass issues with the capsules.

ok then and what business have you in saying this then? do you wish to try to maintain the status quo by exclaiming you don't see the problem? if not then you seem content to play with just about anything so players seeking a long needed ballance pass shouldn't be any of your concern the game will be just as fun as it always had been to you regardless of if the pod is 2 tons or 5 tons.

Edited August 23, 2016 by passinglurker

[fourfa]

Modern cars are lighter, more powerful, safer, get better mileage, pollute less, and are more comfortable than old cars!  The only downside is they cost more!  New cars OP! Nerf!

(I also do not have a problem playing the game as is, but I play career and I don't find the progression over time to be unrealistic.  Just my opinion)

Edited August 23, 2016 by fourfa

[Xyphos]

I use the Mk2 cockpit alot because I use RasterPropMonitor. I just wish said mod would add support for the inline Mk2 Cockpit, there's a console screen in the rear seat that the co-pilot can actually use.

[Sharpy]

8 hours ago, passinglurker said:

Don't joke around about poor balance the former dev's utter neglect of this is honestly my single giant gripe with this game since release and is why I model parts more than I play these days. because I just can't enjoy kerbal with these massively inconsistent numbers and stats from updates long past still flying around.

 

They need to weigh game balance and realism.

We've already agreed, that MK1 and MK1-2 masses are pretty much realistic. (sure the original upon which MK1 is based doesn't have that much life support, but kerbals).

MK1-2 is less liked due to the extra mass - seemingly a little bit of game balance was sacrificed for realism.

Then we agreed MK3 (which already gets little love for its mass) is definitely, unrealistically light.

What would you have Squad do? Increase MK3 weight so that it's realistic and nobody ever uses it, except for submarines? Or decrease it, to match four MK1 pods, and making it even more unrealistically light, also making the pods absolutely useless in later game?

You're forgetting two important factors: aesthetics, and compactness. They are benefits hard to quantify, but it seems Squad managed to adjust the penalty of mass well enough, that all parts are still in use - the old MK1 doesn't become obsolete even in endgame; all parts see semi-common use - and while three MK1 pods on a tricoupler may seem lighter than an MK1-2 pod, tell me, would you rather make your Duna mission around the tricoupler-pod thing, or would you accept the extra mass and go with the pod?.

[Warzouz]

On 22/8/2016 at 11:50 AM, RocketBlam said:

As things get bigger and hold more people, they tend to get lighter per person, not heavier.

That's why big planes are more profitable than smaller planes. 

I agree. Even, it's not realistic (?), it's more logical to use a 3 seats pods than a stack of 3 one seat pods. That's ridiculous, but we are compelled to do that to save payload mass.

For now, with the level of simulation in KSP, and the current gameplay, the mass of the mk1-2 pod is not justified. Even the torque is usually too powerful (I hope the next patch will deal with that...).

Edit. But there are many other parts that are severely over or under weight. Many beams and structural parts are too heavy. Struts too. On the other hand, the cubic octogonal strut is only 1kg (lol) and the structural fuselage is only 100Kg. You can redo the 6 side node for space station (1.5Tons) with a structural fuselage, and 4 radial attachments nodes : total 300Kg from memory).

In the end, we all know all those parts : it's the one we don't use.

I remember a miniature wargame. It wasn't unbalanced army against army, but units inside armies were. In the end, all games would involved the same units. Many units were so unbalanced than they would never used them. Tos units were poorly sold and games were more boring than it should be (always the same units played).

Part balancing must be thought with gameplay in mind. When you go for a stack of 3 MK1 command pod for a 3 seat ship, something is wrong.

Edited August 23, 2016 by Warzouz

[septemberWaves]

I personally have never really found a problem with the mass 2.5m pod. This is probably because instead of looking at the mass of particular parts, I will usually just build a payload and then figure out which of my standardised launchers can launch it for the most efficient cost (I look more closely at mass on station modules, but that's only because stations also usually require a propulsion module).

The problem that I usually have with the Mk 1-2 crew pod is that the placement of the crew hatch means that I generally have to rotate everything beneath the pod by 30^o. But I tend to play with mods anyway, and so I have pods available with much more useful hatch placement.

Edited August 23, 2016 by eloquentJane

[Sharpy]

56 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

Part balancing must be thought with gameplay in mind. When you go for a stack of 3 MK1 command pod for a 3 seat ship, something is wrong.

Do you?

I don't.

Compactness, functionality, ease of use, nodes and surfaces, resources, torque, crash resistance, thermal resistance, aesthetics, price, aerodynamics, this all must be factored in. In my opinion, the extra ton of mass is often worth the price.

[passinglurker]

@Sharpy to the krakens gaping maw with "realism" I want consistency whether that is mass by seat or mass by volume I don't really care as long as it's not "the  arbitrary relative mass gap between the mercury and Apollo pods even though we don't use life support"-excuse-BS. The balance of realism and game play in stock should be "only when it adds to the fun and not when it takes away" right now it takes away because there is no reason to use the mk1-2 pod other than stuborness.

Meanwhile in regard to consistency the mk1 and mk2 space plane parts are relatively on the right track. two crewed fusalages of similar volume mass about the same regardless of whether they are cockpits or cabins, and their capacity is governed by how many seats, control panels, crew walkways, and forward visibility windows they could fit into the internal model. While probably not perfect it's an intuitive and consistent pattern that treats all parts relatively fairly and gives them all a fair amount of niches and usage cases while encouraging the player to make craft that look like space ships and not like whackjob kraken spawn. (three pods on a tri coupler? Seriously? No just no that is bad design and you should feel bad for suggesting that it's an intelligent design choice and using that as a defence.)

[Sharpy]

@passinglurker: I wrote there's a plenty of reason to use it. It being heavier is a very minor factor.

If the game is to remain balanced - encouraging use of all parts - it needs some mechanism to control their 'desirability'.

A bigger pod is usually - in a definite majority of cases of later game - more desirable than a smaller pod. There are lots of factors that cause this. That would render MK1 entirely obsolete. This already happens with some engines - tell me, how often do you use Reliant or Flea?

The "penalty" of mass makes MK1-2 less desirable. It IS a gameplay balance issue - it assures even if you complete the tech tree, you will still reach for MK1 on semi-regular basis. And looking at the hundreds of screenshots around the site, I see people still use MK1-2 aplenty - I don't see any sick hybrids that would put three MK1s on a tricoupler instead, or at least I see much fewer of them than I see of MK1-2. Yes, it feels grating, that you pay the science cost, you pay the money, and get a "worse" part - one that isn't a direct triplet of MK1, but provides about 3x the benefits at 4x the costs. But you fail to notice the hidden benefits. All the little things I wrote about, the fact you get one sturdy part instead of three pieces which you can't even attach in any reasonable way, or if you stack them they will swing and bend, or that your lean white marvel of a rocket gets three ugly black blobs that don't even align with the surface neatly, or that you must only worry about providing access to one hatch instead of granting clearance to three, or juggling kerbals through EVA and spare pods to get that one engineer to the one unobstructed hatch. These are all small things that make MK1-2 better than MK1, and would make MK1 an obscure, forgotten piece later in the game, if MK1 did that all.

Thanks to the mass penalty, the game is balanced - MK1-2 is about as good as MK1; you use it when it fits its purpose better, and you use MK1 when it fits better. You may have a negative feeling towards that one part, but thanks to that the game overall is richer.

[Snark]

27 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

The "penalty" of mass makes MK1-2 less desirable. It IS a gameplay balance issue - it assures even if you complete the tech tree, you will still reach for MK1 on semi-regular basis.

For some players, perhaps.  For me, it assures that I will never, ever, under any circumstances, use the part.

No, I never launch any hideous pods-on-a-tricoupler monstrosity.  But I do launch a Mk1 command pod sitting on top of a Mk1 crew cabin.  Carries the same number of kerbals, for less than half the mass, at a lower tech level.

Using the Mk1-2 pod unmodded grates on me, because it completely flies in the face of everything that I love about this game.  KSP, to me, is an engineering game, and the challenge it poses me is one of optimization.  Using the Mk1-2 pod unmodded is simply a non-starter for me, because using a part that's twice as massive as an acceptable substitute feels like a deliberately poor engineering choice-- as if I were building a car and deliberately made it consume twice as much gasoline as it needs to.  It's just wrong to me, and would make me feel bad about my designs if I used it.

Modding it down so that its weight-per-kerbal is at least vaguely sane means that I use it.  I mod it down to 2.7 tons, myself.  That's still heavier than the 1.8 tons that a Mk1 pod plus a Mk1 cabin would be... but it's not so insanely heavier that I'd feel like a schmuck for using it.  And with it at that level... I find that I use it all the time, now, as my go-to three-kerbal solution.  And I still use the Mk1 pod a lot, since it's useful in a variety of situations where I need a smaller craft and don't need more than one kerbal.

Sure, there are plenty of folks who use the Mk1-2 pod at its current weight, and of course I'm not saying they're wrong.  Different players have different priorities and play styles, so if it works for them in its current incarnation, good for them!  But it doesn't work for me.

Personally, I think that the stock game should mod the weight of the Mk1-2 pod down by a lot, e.g. to 2.4 tons or 2.7 tons, something in that range.  The people who are currently using it already won't be "broken" by that.  The people such as myself (I'm guessing there are more than a few) who currently never use it because they just can't bring themselves to saddle their spacecraft with such an inefficient, overweight part, will get a new spacecraft part to use that will open up game options for them.  The people who are using the Mk1 craft in the endgame for small single-kerbal craft will continue to do so, because it's still a great candidate for that.  Heck, even the people who are building Mk1 pod + Mk1 cabin in order to save every last kilogram can still continue to do so, because it'll still be lighter than the Mk1-2 pod.

It just seems like a win to me, with no downside for anyone that I can see, which is why I think Squad ought to balance the weight down.

In the meantime... it's no skin off my nose, I just use a bit of MM config to make the mass what I think it ought to be, and I can play the game the way I want to play it. 

[passinglurker]

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

tell me, how often do you use Reliant or Flea?

these are underpowered parts that need to be fixed as well I've already replaced the need for the reliant in my own mod the flea is on the todo list

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

It being heavier is a very minor factor.

mass is everything in space if you think it a minor factor then you don't have sufficient grasp on this "realism" you preach of

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

The "penalty" of mass makes MK1-2 less desirable. It IS a gameplay balance issue - it assures even if you complete the tech tree, you will still reach for MK1 on semi-regular basis.

every part has its place a one man shot to deep space or a milk run to a space station to bring home some science data sure, but I shouldn't be encouraged to carry a bundle of mk1 pods on a 3 man direct ascent style mission to the mun.

1 man pods are for 1 man missions not for clustering if people want to cause "lolzkerbalz" then fine but it shouldn't be something the balance encourages

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

I see people still use MK1-2 aplenty - I don't see any sick hybrids that would put three MK1s on a tricoupler instead, or at least I see much fewer of them than I see of MK1-2.

It's thier choice not to care, they are clearly more easily entertained, but since they don't care then they won't have any problem if this was eventually corrected.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

Yes, it feels grating, that you pay the science cost, you pay the money, and get a "worse" part - one that isn't a direct triplet of MK1, but provides about 3x the benefits at 4x the costs. But you fail to notice the hidden benefits. All the little things I wrote about, the fact you get one sturdy part instead of three pieces which you can't even attach in any reasonable way, or if you stack them they will swing and bend, or that your lean white marvel of a rocket gets three ugly black blobs that don't even align with the surface neatly, or that you must only worry about providing access to one hatch instead of granting clearance to three, or juggling kerbals through EVA and spare pods to get that one engineer to the one unobstructed hatch. These are all small things that make MK1-2 better than MK1, and would make MK1 an obscure, forgotten piece later in the game, if MK1 did that all.

never said it needed to be a direct triplet I just want some rhyme or reason to the stats that doesn't need a history book to prove, as for not seeing hidden benefits you are the blind one if you can't imagine a 1 man launch you'd perform in the late game it's your choice/problem if you choose to forget the smaller of two parts when those two parts are balanced as equals.

As for your quality of life arguments again I say the balance should encourage ships that look like ships not penalize you for it, but in the case of "quality of life" it's possible to have it both ways. Mk1 cabins have no hatch or control as a penalty for thier superior seat to mass ratio, inline cockpits come after nose cockpits as a penalty for thier placement convenience, etc... quality of life penalties are all well and good when balanced between two different types of parts but the mk1 and mk1- 2 pods are birds of the same feather they need to be balanced along relativly the same pattern just like how the cockpits are balanced along a pattern as they scale up.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

Thanks to the mass penalty, the game is balanced - MK1-2 is about as good as MK1;

this is completely wrong.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

you use it when it fits its purpose better, and you use MK1 when it fits better. You may have a negative feeling towards that one part, but thanks to that the game overall is richer.

you forget that the mk1 pod is a 1 man part for 1 man missions for it to be appealing outside this niche would be unbalancing as it forces out multi-crew parts reducing the number of viable parts for the engineering style players and making the game shallower as the optimal solution is to almost always use the part you got at the start of the game over the the larger scale parts even for larger scale missions thereby defeating the purpose of progressing.

Edited August 23, 2016 by passinglurker

[Sharpy]

14 minutes ago, Snark said:

For some players, perhaps.  For me, it assures that I will never, ever, under any circumstances, use the part.

No, I never launch any hideous pods-on-a-tricoupler monstrosity.  But I do launch a Mk1 command pod sitting on top of a Mk1 crew cabin.  Carries the same number of kerbals, for less than half the mass, at a lower tech level.

 

I did somehing similar, on my mission to Duna. MK1 cockpit plus the cabin.

NEVER AGAIN.

Just entering Duna's SOI.

Pilot: EVA. Let go. RCS, move away from the hatch, stop.

Switch vessel to craft. Rightclick cabin. Transfer crew. Bill or Bob? Oh, okay, Bob. Click cockpit. Click EVA. Let go. RCS. Go collect science, reset experiments. By that time, without pilot, the craft turned 90 degrees. The hatch is on the bottom. Try to catch it. Get shot into space. Recover control, approach again. By the time, the hatch is facing the opposite direction. Grab, Board. Rightclick, transfer crew, Bob to Cabin. Switch vessels. excrements, where is the craft? Panically look around through the void of space. Switch craft. Lights on. Switch craft. Keep looking. Oh, here it is. Way, way away. Fly, fly, approach. By that time the hatch is facing downwards again. Wait patiently until it turns the right way. Grab Board.

Time x4, approaching Duna periapsis. Repeat the whole show for "In space Low". Except this time it's pilot exit, switch, scientist move, scientist exits, switch, switch, pilot boards, switch, scientist collects, switch, pilot exits, switch switch, scientist boards, crew transwer, switch, pilot boards.

And then I need to dock, and I realize my docking port is in inventory slot 1. Cue the show again, with the engineer this time.

I think I repeated this at least 7 times over the course of the mission.

MK1 cabin is good for tourists.