CommNet Range/Tech and Game Play

[Magzimum]

1 hour ago, tater said:

The new relay antennas are grossly overweight, for example. 600kg for the big one? It's basically the Voyager antenna (not even scaled down), and the entire radio suite on Voyager, with all the structure to support the dish included I think is 50kg (I posted it during the pre-release and don't remember other than it not being close to 600 since the entire spacecraft massed 800kg at launch (including propellants). So make them all available, and perhaps drop the mass and increase the capability via "upgrades" so that the RA-100 can eventually mass what it should, maybe 0.05 or 0.1, instead of 0.6).

Off the top of my head, Voyager is not a relay and is not designed to communicate with any other satellites or ships. I think you should compare the Voyager antenna to the Communotron 88-88, which is 100 kg.

I am not a communications expert, but the game suggests that the relays are heavier. Maybe the mass of the dish is higher, because we don't have to add some complex electronic infrastructure inside? 

 

 

[tater]

3 minutes ago, Magzimum said:

Off the top of my head, Voyager is not a relay and is not designed to communicate with any other satellites or ships. I think you should compare the Voyager antenna to the Communotron 88-88, which is 100 kg.

I am not a communications expert, but the game suggests that the relays are heavier. Maybe the mass of the dish is higher, because we don't have to add some complex electronic infrastructure inside? 

Voyager has more than one antenna. All a relay is is a small board, and usually 2 antennas. In RL, the second antenna is a UHF used for comms with stuff like Curiosity, then a HGA pointed at DSN. The added mass to make something a relay is measured not in kg, but grams.

The mass of the relay antennas is for the same reason the ladder is something to be invented on the tech tree.

Edited November 29, 2016 by tater

[OrbitalBuzzsaw]

33 minutes ago, tater said:

Voyager has more than one antenna. All a relay is is a small board, and usually 2 antennas. In RL, the second antenna is a UHF used for comms with stuff like Curiosity, then a HGA pointed at DSN. The added mass to make something a relay is measured not in kg, but grams.

The mass of the relay antennas is for the same reason the ladder is something to be invented on the tech tree.

That reason being...?

[Wjolcz]

39 minutes ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

That reason being...?

Poor game design.

[KSK]

3 hours ago, tater said:

It's not easy to get right, frankly, but the current tree is very, very wrong. Just look at having to even have a tech tree node for LADDERS...

Quoting this for truth. Good game design is hard. Good game design when you're essentially kicking off a new genre (and therefore don't have much else to draw inspiration from) is harder. Good open world game design on top of that (as opposed to Assassins Creed 'looky here I can collect all of these McGuffins or all of these other McGuffins' style of open world play) is harder still.

KSP was an enormously ambitious concept that grew organically from a rather small game and started out as HarvesterR's hobby project. It's not surprising that we can find points to pick on - the amazing thing is that so much of KSP is done right. With that said - in my opinion -  it is a pity that Career mode hasn't lived up to the promise of Sandbox mode.

But to end on a positive note, sometimes it's the small things that make all the difference. For example, I'm not sure whether this was new to 1.2 or whether I'd just never spotted it before but thank you whoever decided to make kerbal experience a thing in Science mode. That made me a real happy camper. Now if some clever modder could figure out a way of automatically upgrading the space centre buildings as I work through the tech tree in Science mode, that would be perfect. At that point, I could install KCT and call it done. For my style of play, that would let me side-step most of the niggles that we've been talking about.

You see - I've always liked progression in KSP. Even before Career mode was a thing, I would build infrastructure, put (then entirely pointless) satellites up because hey - a space program needs comm-sats right? It's why (and I can hear @tater rolling his eyes from here  ) I was a fan of the Barn. I love the idea of a bunch of amateur rocketeers starting off in a barn and eventually building the kind of grandiose space program that Von Braun had in mind with his Integrated Plan.

Ahh well. Imagination and the odd mod can fill in enough of the gaps.

 

[panzer1b]

This is one of the many reasons i dont really play anything but sandbox (im not gonan get into the unrelated ones as itd take half a page).  There way the stock tech tree is done is pretty much forcing you to go down a very specific path and severely limiting your freedoms.  The other option is to farm the crap out of the kerbin system, but frankly farming in any game is nothing more then booring (at least for me) so i choose to avoid it, and thus, you are fairly limited in what you can actually do as you progress because the tree is designed around a very limited progression.  Now with mods, ill say career is better, still not my thing but at least its not mind numbingly boring like stock farm it or progress down a fairly specific path until you get to the late game which is nothing more then sandbox with contracts (might as well make up my own imagined contracts at that point and play actual sandbox mode in whatever way i choose to).

I agree that antennas should be fairly easy to unlock, since they are relatively low tech anyways and all larger antennas do is cut down the part count (trust me, its not exactly fun or realistic to have 10+ small antennas when trying to go to anywhere in early career).  I really think itd make more sense to just restrict the relays themselves so people have an incentive to use the concept of a droid control ship (although that would requyire unlocking the 2 probe cores that even support that feature earlier).  Not only that but i really think that unmanned travel should be much earlier in teh tech tree then manned since logically you would send probes before you start sending out suicidal volunteers.  Makes sense from both a realism aspect as well as a gameplay aspect so why not make probes and such more attractive and useable early on?

A bit off topic, but i think it would be much better to have probes be less limited so that they can at a bare minimum respond to WSADQE controls.  In reality you can program any routine into a spacecraft and have it execute that routine (barring some sort of program error or exploding engine, not that we'd want that modeled in KSP anyway) nomatter where it is located and regardless of whether it has a signal or not between home base and itself.  I never understood why block WSADQE, at that point you might as well make it impossible to control at all.  Always thought that it would be the best system to have out of signal probes loose everything but basic SAS, basic throttle on/off (i like what they did with the 100 or 0% actually), and WSADQE controls (essentially a slightly limited version of what we had in the past for controls).  Until then, i think ill stick to disabled comms systems, all it does is annoy me and make probes useless.  Allsoing this level fo control would simulate the ability to have a sort of pre-programmed routine but manually executed by the user, at least until we get actual programming capabilities in the stock game...

[tater]

1 hour ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

That reason being...?

#lolzkebals

Actually, I assume it is a bad idea at balance. They want to make them have some sort of trade off, when in fact there is no real downside. It's also because the relay concept is exactly backwards. Spacecraft have a HGA to talk to DSN, then they generally have a wide angle (or omni, even) secondary antenna that relays information from another craft. You do not relay HGA signals. Think about it, to use a relay from one HGA to another you are not pointing at at a planet, but at a specific, moving spacecraft. Imagine a relay with a HGA on Mars talking to an orbiter----the HGA would need to track, and FAST.

The problem is that as much as we like "sandbox" play, we already have Sandbox. Career needs to have a narrative to be meaningful. That doesn't mean always the same, in fact the opposite. But it needs to RESULT in a narrative that the player tells himself. The progression needs to make sense---not in a realism sense (though that helps, see below*), but as a story. The history of Jeb's Space Center (or whatever you call yours).

 

*realism matters because when things are pegged to something vaguely realistic, we know for certain that they are automatically "balanced" vs other reality. The choices that result will make sense.

[sdrevik]

On 11/28/2016 at 4:53 AM, Veeltch said:

53 minutes ago, panzer1b said:

A bit off topic, but i think it would be much better to have probes be less limited so that they can at a bare minimum respond to WSADQE controls.  In reality you can program any routine into a spacecraft and have it execute that routine (barring some sort of program error or exploding engine, not that we'd want that modeled in KSP anyway) nomatter where it is located and regardless of whether it has a signal or not between home base and itself.  I never understood why block WSADQE, at that point you might as well make it impossible to control at all.  Always thought that it would be the best system to have out of signal probes loose everything but basic SAS, basic throttle on/off (i like what they did with the 100 or 0% actually), and WSADQE controls (essentially a slightly limited version of what we had in the past for controls).  Until then, i think ill stick to disabled comms systems, all it does is annoy me and make probes useless.  Allsoing this level fo control would simulate the ability to have a sort of pre-programmed routine but manually executed by the user, at least until we get actual programming capabilities in the stock game...

Agreed, I didn't understand the logic of even having the Stayputnik, or why even nominal probes are farther along the tree as well.

 

If it were me and I were the game-balance-god, I'd downgrade the requirements for probes and antennas, and create a mechanic in the tech tree where you would need to research 'Kerbal endurance' components (space food, space diapers, space toilets, water reclamation systems, etc), and each one would allow a maximum mission time for the Kerbal, beyond which the Kerbal dies.   Initially you'd have an endurance of a few hours, research level 1 to get a few days, level 2 to get a few weeks, level 3 nearly a year, level 4 pretty much unlimited (recycling).  It would also make mission planning more important, as you couldn't cover up mistakes with "oh, it's OK, we'll just make another two or three revolutions around Kerbol until we find another window."   That is, until you hit level 4.    But that's another thread...