Autostruts should feel more like a ship design decision

[Corona688]

Just now, swjr-swis said:

"This game-enhancing feature I rarely use must be invisible at all times to everyone because my playing style in particular demands it!" Reads the same to me.

How you got 'invisible at all times' from 'optional', I will never know.

[swjr-swis]

2 minutes ago, Avera9eJoe said:

What I actually wish for is the option to disable autostruts on wheels  - I miss the custom suspension everyone used to make.

Agreed. I don't understand why we are not allowed to control the wheel autostrutting the same way as the other parts. There's plenty of cases where 'heaviest' is really not the option you want. And of course the off option to make our own suspensions and constructs.

[Corona688]

Is this talking about 1.1 or 1.2 wheels?

[swjr-swis]

You know what, never mind. I said I didn't want to continue this.

Edited September 30, 2016 by swjr-swis
stop

[Corona688]

 

2 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

Being as it is one of the words I left unchanged in the quote of your own words... I don't know what to say.

Read again.  You missed the following sentence, where I suggested making it optionally enabled in the alt-F12 menu, instead of permanently enabled at all times.

[monstah]

(I wish the poll results were tracked as a function of time. Their evolution is amazing, like a horse track XD)

[Technical Ben]

3 hours ago, Corona688 said:

I don't entirely buy that.  Ships are organized as trees too, and are more solid than docking ports. 

It's been a long time, so I don't have the links, but it was originally mentioned that they coded docking ports the way they did because of the inability to merge part trees in the simulation.

Now we do have sub assemblies (and of cause surface mounting) while in the editor. But the sub-assemblies are newer additions and are not used in the physics engine, but in the fixed VAB/SPH.

However, IMO they could unload the vessel and reload it. This does not give them an "easy" solution though, so we would have to ask them if it would be possible.

[Justicier]

While the Unity engine does have shortcomings which give definite validity to the use of autostruts, in their current state I consider them "OP." I love the idea of autostruts being invisible structural reinforcement between parts, but I do think that the autostruts should add a little bit of weight to the craft, otherwise there is absolutely no reason at all NOT to add autostruts to a design as there are no drawbacks whatsoever. This weight should, in my mind, be relative to the parts being linked... this may be a tiny amount for interconnecting 0.625m parts, but scaling up to 3.75m will be noticeable. All that being said, the part that really bugs me about the current autostrut system is that you can toggle them on and off on the fly when currently in flight. For debugging or timewarping... not a bad idea, but for the typical career game it feels incredibly "cheaty" to me.

[Francois424]

2 hours ago, Justicier said:

While the Unity engine does have shortcomings which give definite validity to the use of autostruts, in their current state I consider them "OP." I love the idea of autostruts being invisible structural reinforcement between parts, but I do think that the autostruts should add a little bit of weight to the craft, otherwise there is absolutely no reason at all NOT to add autostruts to a design as there are no drawbacks whatsoever. This weight should, in my mind, be relative to the parts being linked... this may be a tiny amount for interconnecting 0.625m parts, but scaling up to 3.75m will be noticeable. All that being said, the part that really bugs me about the current autostrut system is that you can toggle them on and off on the fly when currently in flight. For debugging or timewarping... not a bad idea, but for the typical career game it feels incredibly "cheaty" to me.

I like it to strut a space station /Jool-Mothership together without KAS and other shenanigans. 

Before, once I finished assembling a Mothership around Kerbin I brought all the Kerbal home and deleted the assembled Mothership.  Then went to the VAB, loaded the already assembled one + struts and Hyper-edited the whole thing in orbit at the same height...  Repeat if I had the mischance of having struts required to clean wobbling on my payload/lander after say, the Tylo part of the Jool-5 trip.  I like having the choice open to me to save a couple of minutes of re-strutting each leg of the mission.

Cheaty it might be, but I call it convenience and curing frustration...

[Superfluous J]

18 minutes ago, Francois424 said:

I like it to strut a space station /Jool-Mothership together without KAS and other shenanigans. 

Before, once I finished assembling a Mothership around Kerbin I brought all the Kerbal home and deleted the assembled Mothership.  Then went to the VAB, loaded the already assembled one + struts and Hyper-edited the whole thing in orbit at the same height...  Repeat if I had the mischance of having struts required to clean wobbling on my payload/lander after say, the Tylo part of the Jool-5 trip.  I like having the choice open to me to save a couple of minutes of re-strutting each leg of the mission.

Cheaty it might be, but I call it convenience and curing frustration...

Amusingly that's even easier now, as in alt-f12 you can "rendezvous" with a ship. I've considered it as recently as today and - were it not for autostruts - I'd have gone with it with absolutely

[swjr-swis]

10 hours ago, Justicier said:

there is absolutely no reason at all NOT to add autostruts to a design as there are no drawbacks whatsoever.

Not true: If your ship/station is under some torque due to flight stresses or flexing/moving, and you perform a staging or a docking, or a part explodes somewhere on the craft - in short, any event that makes the part tree redo itself- the autostruts will at times manage to relock your craft with parts in am exageratedly flexed or dislodged position. This problem becomes worse as you add more autostruts. Also, the setting of where they attach to can worsen a construct, if one picks poorly. Using them more than sparingly and without thought is a sure recipe for trouble.

[Chris_2]

Autostruts are dumb. They should not be there, but instead the problems that the autostruts 'solve' should be fixed on another more elegant way. Autostruts are only fixing the symptoms of more fundamental problems.

Using EVA to place struts might be cool. Orbital assembly!

Edited October 1, 2016 by Chris_2

[Red Iron Crown]

4 minutes ago, Chris_2 said:

Autostruts are dumb. They should not be there, but instead the problems that the autostruts 'solve' should be fixed on another more elegant way. Autostruts are only fixing the symptoms of more fundamental problems.

Which more elegant way would you suggest?

[Justicier]

1 hour ago, swjr-swis said:

Not true: If your ship/station is under some torque due to flight stresses or flexing/moving, and you perform a staging or a docking, or a part explodes somewhere on the craft - in short, any event that makes the part tree redo itself- the autostruts will at times manage to relock your craft with parts in am exageratedly flexed or dislodged position. This problem becomes worse as you add more autostruts. Also, the setting of where they attach to can worsen a construct, if one picks poorly. Using them more than sparingly and without thought is a sure recipe for trouble.

Strange, I have not encountered this yet... my testing skills appear to be waning a bit. I'll have to see if I can induce some failures after I get home from work today

Edited October 1, 2016 by Justicier

[Chris_2]

Just now, Red Iron Crown said:

Which more elegant way would you suggest?

A - Using EVA to place struts might be cool. Orbital assembly!

B - The wobbliness is cool (it's very Kerbal), so there is no 'need' for additional strutting. Except that the wobbliness causes problems in all other parts of the game / engine  (SAS, wheels (phantom forces, ugh)). These things should be fixed, so that the wobbliness is no problem and there is no -need- for autostrutting.

C - This is my biggest requst / feature of all time  - ::  Find some way to enable internal colliders!. I know this is a huge task, especially to allow part clipping while also having internal colliders, but I feel this solves many things that 'struts' fix, for example cargo 'bending' through cargobays. Now I need to strut them, and when I decouple the cargo, and 'redock' it in the cargobay, I can't 'restrut' the cargo currently so the cargo will clip through the cargobay during reentry for example. They could devote a whole half year and update (1.3) to fixing this, but this would add a huge immersion to the game!

 

[basic.syntax]

16 minutes ago, Chris_2 said:

...for example cargo 'bending' through cargobays...

As I understand it, the autostruts idea was implemented to prevent cargoes from wobbling inside a fairing, and so it would "seem" relatively straightforward to expand its use to cargo bays. (As a default, separate from enabling autostruts craft-wide)

[Chris_2]

1 minute ago, basic.syntax said:

As I understand it, the autostruts idea was implemented to prevent cargoes from wobbling inside a fairing, and so it would "seem" relatively straightforward to expand its use to cargo bays. (As a default, separate from enabling autostruts craft-wide)

I understand. But that's the whole point. That problem should be fixed by the colliders instead of a dirty fix called 'autostruts'. If fairings are actually solid than you can strut to that. If fairings are solid and have internal colliders, than it is impossible for the cargo to 'clip' through the fairings.

[basic.syntax]

10 minutes ago, Chris_2 said:

... If fairings are actually solid than you can strut to that. If fairings are solid and have internal colliders ...

I strut cargo to the inside sides (not the doors) of cargo bays, all the time. Starting at the part, ending at an inside wall.

Before fairing autostruts, I followed a fiddly suggestion that involved using a temporary length of girders around the fairing: connecting a strut from the fairing cargo, out through the fairing panels, TO the girder outside. After deleting the girder assembly, the strut ends would connect instead along the same path, to the inside of the fairing.

[swjr-swis]

1 hour ago, Justicier said:

Strange, I have not encountered this yet... my testing skills appear to be waning a bit. I'll have to see if I can induce some failures after I get home from work today

As a quick illustration: take the Wobbly Strutter test craft I posted earlier in this thread and get it into its maximum wobble by releasing the center docking port autostruts, and waiting a bit. Then while swinging, autostrut the center docking ports to 'root'.

Unless you are extremely lucky, you will notice they end up frozen/locked at some distorted angle, wherever the ore modules were in their swing as the autostrut code engaged. This same thing happens, in less but sometimes more exagerated ways whenever a docking/staging/part explosion event happens, as the autostruts are all reconnected at such moments.

Edited October 1, 2016 by swjr-swis
link

[Corona688]

3 hours ago, Chris_2 said:

A - Using EVA to place struts might be cool. Orbital assembly!

B - The wobbliness is cool (it's very Kerbal), so there is no 'need' for additional strutting. Except that the wobbliness causes problems in all other parts of the game / engine  (SAS, wheels (phantom forces, ugh)). These things should be fixed, so that the wobbliness is no problem and there is no -need- for autostrutting.

The SAS is intentional I think - the control PoV of the SAS moving causes its control PoV to move, simple as that.  Put it in the center of mass and it'll have less trouble, which I think is the real reason for all the uselessly huge probe cores -- you can put them in a 1.25 or 2.5m stack without having to put a fairing around them.

Phantom forces are caused by internal colliders, which I think are banished in 1.2.  So this request:

3 hours ago, Chris_2 said:

C - This is my biggest requst / feature of all time  - ::  Find some way to enable internal colliders!

...is kind of a catch-22, you don't really get both.

[OHara]

14 hours ago, Francois424 said:

Before, once I finished assembling a Mothership around Kerbin I brought all the Kerbal home and deleted the assembled Mothership.  Then went to the VAB, loaded the already assembled one + struts and Hyper-edited the whole thing in orbit at the same height... 

When I first pre-assembled a station in the VAB, I noticed when I delete or move parts connected by EAS-4 struts, the struts remain with the part from which they start, and re-attach to any later-added part along their original direction.

I through that was a very clever way to let us add struts in space: build the mounting points and telescoping tubes on one part, then have them extend straight out and clamp to any part they meet on a joined craft, once the docking port has roughly stabilized the motion.

It works nicely in the VAB -- if I save the station modules as separate files and use the 'Merge' button to load them and assemble in the VAB the struts connect the modules -- but does not work outside when assembling by docking.

[panzer1b]

1. Should they appear visually as normal struts?

I would have to say no for two reasons.  First of all, while the performance aspect may be less then adding more parts, anything that has to be rendered in game will decrease performance (probably wont be a big deal with just a few struts but many mods that feature insane polycount do slow it down).  Second, it will ruin alot of purely aesthetic designs which benefit considerably from the new autostruts in that they nolonger need to have visible struts anywhere which may or may not completely ruin the looks.  Now i would welcome an option which enables a visual strut (there are plenty of ships where having it visible would improve the looks), but this option (if it is ever implemented) should be completely optional and not forced because it would make designs that shouldnt have visible struts unbuildable (lets just say almost all of my sci-fi replicas went from so-so to much prettier with this update because i could ditch the external strutting for those that shouldnt have any).

2. Should they add mass to the ships?

Given they are there mostly there as a utility feature, i see no reason they should add mass to ships.  People that insist upon absolute realism (not that thats even possible in a videogame), are welcome to use the normal struts and arent forced to use autostruts for anything.  That and given that autostruts are quite limited in their usefulness, and (at least imo) are not a replacement for regular struts since they are far more limited, i see no reason to limit their use.  I'd only support this if the autostruts feature allows picking the part it struts to manually (instead of the heaviest, root, grandparent modes), then it would be essentially a regular strut replacement and should come with teh same advantages and disadvantages of regular struts.

3. Should they be limited to the VAB/SPH?

Defentely NOT!  The biggest reason i am against this is that the autostruts allow you to say dock something to a ship and then strut it correctly afterwards.  Normally i'd use KIS/KAS to add struts after the fact, but i think its much better to give people a stock option for making space stations, large motherships with lots of stuff docked to em, carriers, ect.  Ofc i would really prefer KIS to become stock (so we can finally dissasemble and reassemble ships in the field), but until then i think the new struts are a reasonable alternative that also doesnt affect performance.  I would be fine with this if and only if KIS/KAS (or at least the ability to attach struts in the field) becomes a stock feature, then we can use normal struts in the field when docking together massive stuff that wobbles and is unstableish.

All in all, i think we should leave the things as they are.  I know i may not speak for everyone, but my biggest limitation when it comes to enjoying this game is the part count issue, and anything that can be done to limit that problem is good in my eyes, even if it makes the game a little easier and or less realistic.  Autostruts allow you to cut down on quite a few parts (when your ship is already 1000 or so parts), dont add to lag by any measurable amount, and well, arent exactly unfair or OP in any way since they dont really replace the regular struts but add a new mechanic.  That and its a bandaid fix for the wobble kraken (the one where ships start wobbling around until they tear themselves apart).  For those that feel its unfair (and dont insist on building or using 1000+ part vessels), there is nothing forcing you to use them (either stay away from them or if you prefer disable adv tweakables and not be given the option), everyone is happy that way...