Fresh Blood

[SavageAngel]

Sometime, around a year ago browsing Steam I came across an interesting game called "Kerbal Space Program". I purchased and installed it immediately after reading the description and a few reviews. Relatively speaking I am brand new to this game, and never experienced a world before the 1.1 or 1.2 patch. Over the past year I have to admit I have fallen completely in love with this "game" or simulator or life experience. Honestly at this point I'm not sure what to call it. No matter what you call it this program has to be one of the best experiences I have ever had in front of a computer monitor. After watching several of Scott Manley's tutorials I started to get better at KSP (I killed way fewer kerbals) and after a few weeks I was able to land on several muns and a few planets. Looking back on the past 10-12 months playing KSP and reading a lot of the forums I developed an interesting question for those veteran players. What is something you think a player from 1.1+ should know about the early years of KSP?

[Streetwind]

53 minutes ago, SavageAngel said:

What is something you think a player from 1.1+ should know about the early years of KSP?

The big one:

Back in the days, the atmosphere model used to be much simpler. Each part had a "drag" value, and well, that was it. Didn't matter if it was behind some other part. It just gave your vessel that much drag. With the result that a thin, pointy rocket stack had exactly the same drag behavior as a broad pancake built out of the same parts. And nosecones made rockets perform worse, not better.

Drag was very high overall, too. Planes flew slower at all altitudes (but could reach higher altitudes). Rockets had to be manually throttled to roughly around a TWR of 2.0 across the first half of the ascent, or they would exceed terminal velocity and lose huge amounts of dV to drag. The standard launch trajectory was "straight up to 10 km then tilt over sharply" instead of a smooth gravity turn. Nowadays you can launch with a TWR of 4 and terminal velocity will still run away from you as the atmosphere gets thinner, and drag losses are barely 5% of dV costs even on an aggressive ascent.

Edited November 28, 2016 by Streetwind

[razark]

1 hour ago, SavageAngel said:

What is something you think a player ... should know about ... KSP?

The game is great right now, and there is a lot of promise for the future.  The next update will introduce new things that you think will break the game, and endless arguments will ensue.  Many suggestions will be made that make a lot of sense (some for the thousandth time), but will fall on deaf ears, since the Squad representatives will acknowledge everything except for the things you personally want to see implemented.  Eventually, the devs will do something out of left field that catches you completely unaware.  You'll soon see the value of it when a mod arises to completely change the new features into something you think is completely worthwhile.  Shortly afterwards, your hopes will be dashed when the mod developer simply disappears from the forums, and a new update turns out to be completely incompatible.

Occasionally, you'll be drawn into arguments about whether your favorite mod is considered cheating or not, but you'll be too busy arguing over whether the latest list of departures/hires among the devs spells the coming ultimate doom of KSP.

[Xavven]

Reentry Heating

Before version 1.0, there was no reentry heating. You could just take your whole Mun lander, engine and all, slap a parachute on it, and take it all the way back to Kerbin. This lead to many unrealistic mission profiles. Nowadays it's best to land in a Mk1 or Mk1-2 command pod, or a spaceplane.

Joint Strength

Joint strength was increased around version .24 or so (give or take -- I don't remember exactly). Before that, rockets were even more wobbly than they are today. Players invented many ingenious ways to overcome this problem using structural chassis that the tanks and engines would attach to. My favorite structural reinforcement method is "thrust plates," shown in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy-boob8xtc. You don't really need them as much these days, as both higher stock joint strength and the SLS parts make launching big things easier.

GP2

At one point, there were plans to add another gas giant, code-named "Gas Planet 2" or just "GP2." New players should join the old chorus in encouraging Squad to implement it.

Magic Boulder

Very early versions of KSP had an asteroid orbiting Ike that the community called "Magic Boulder." Because the game didn't have special code specifically for asteroids at the time, touching the magic boulder would, in most cases, cause immediate destruction of your spacecraft. It did not show up in the map view, so you had to spot it visually and rendezvous without any help from the computer.

 

[Gianni1122]

Haha it really is a great game isn't it? It's always nice to see newer players fall in love with the game like I did.

Scott Manley actually had older tutorial videos using early versions of the game and you can see some differences there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puC-YV_h9Us&list=PLYu7z3I8tdEmqpOkQZCl5SZB5t0vXuxE0&index=1

Here http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Version_history is probably the most comprehensive list of differences from KSP then to KSP now. I also highly recommend browsing the wiki for tutorials and the like (as long as you don't mind reading) there is a plethora of useful information there. I learned basically everything I know from Scott and the wiki.

 

 

[IncongruousGoat]

Also, with respect to the old aero model: It used to not decrease engine thrust in atmosphere (what it did instead was decrease the specific impulse and increase fuel flow to maintain thrust). This meant you could build ion engine powered aircraft on Kerbin fairly easily. Not super important, but worth mentioning.

In the same category: Nuclear engines used to (pre 1.0) consume both LF and Oxidizer. So don't trust any old vessel designs that use nukes, because the wet mass-dry mass ratio and thus delta-V will definitely be off.

The hydrodynamics changed in 1.0.5, anything water-related from before then is definitely out of date. For example, radial intakes used to be really bouncy, leading to whole schools of boat design based on plating the bottom of your vessel with intakes.

[Red Iron Crown]

14 minutes ago, IncongruousGoat said:

In the same category: Nuclear engines used to (pre 1.0) consume both LF and Oxidizer.

Older still: Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer were combined into a single resource: Fuel

[DrunkenKerbalnaut]

21 minutes ago, Red Iron Crown said:

Fuel

I still hum this to myself when placing "fuel" tanks:

 

[Spacetraindriver]

I'm not that old but remember always remember that none of you have to deal with wiggle rockets. Or hours of reinforcing something with struts. Though I don't have 1.1 sooooooooooo. 

[katateochi]

The original Mk1 sized command pod used to hold 3 Kerbals, but then there was some union action about overly cramped conditions and it got overhauled to the single seater it is now.

You also could only load Kerbals into the root command pod, so if you wanted more Kerbals than you could put in the root pod you had to first launch a bunch of craft containing the extra crew and move them to one side, then put the rocket on the launch pad and one by one load each Kerbal into the craft. Resulted in some horrific design choices just to make it easier to load additional crew (then the crew manifest mod appeared to make that easier and then finally we were able to select crew before launch in the stock game).

And before that, Kerbals only existed as EVA portraits, they couldn't go EVA or be transferred between pods. 
 

46 minutes ago, Spacetraindriver said:

I'm not that old but remember always remember that none of you have to deal with wiggle rockets. Or hours of reinforcing something with struts.

Dark days, when KSP stood for the Kerbal Strut Program. 

 

On 28/11/2016 at 3:43 PM, Red Iron Crown said:

Older still: Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer were combined into a single resource: Fuel

omg I'd forgotten that!

[Allocthonous]

1 hour ago, katateochi said:

Dark days, when KSP stood for the Kerbal Strut Program.

Autostrut still feels like either magic or cheating to me, and I only started in 1.1. Anytime a rocket actually ends up needing manual struts now seems really weird.

[DrunkenKerbalnaut]

2 minutes ago, Allocthonous said:

Autostrut still feels like either magic or cheating to me, and I only started in 1.1. Anytime a rocket actually ends up needing manual struts now seems really weird.

I just made a jump from 1.1.3 to 1.2.1, and autostruts are hilarious.

You can place them mid-flight! Gone are the days of spin stabilization or it's uglier cousin, gantry-trusses! 

[Sharpy]

4 hours ago, DrunkenKerbalnaut said:

I just made a jump from 1.1.3 to 1.2.1, and autostruts are hilarious.

You can place them mid-flight! Gone are the days of spin stabilization or it's uglier cousin, gantry-trusses! 

There are still "contexts" where autostrut is insufficient. Especially if you like clipping parts.

[vsully]

On November 28, 2016 at 10:26 AM, IncongruousGoat said:

Also, with respect to the old aero model: It used to not decrease engine thrust in atmosphere (what it did instead was decrease the specific impulse and increase fuel flow to maintain thrust). This meant you could build ion engine powered aircraft on Kerbin fairly easily. Not super important, but worth mentioning.

In the same category: Nuclear engines used to (pre 1.0) consume both LF and Oxidizer. So don't trust any old vessel designs that use nukes, because the wet mass-dry mass ratio and thus delta-V will definitely be off.

The hydrodynamics changed in 1.0.5, anything water-related from before then is definitely out of date. For example, radial intakes used to be really bouncy, leading to whole schools of boat design based on plating the bottom of your vessel with intakes.

Ah yes, the Ion engines. Pity, really. I used to have some really fun ion mini-planes that I would fly around with Jeb. Unfortunately, the patch where I first started flying those was the one before they changed the aerodynamics... 

The hydrodynamics were practically non-existent. Water was like thick, soupy goop, and as Goat says the intakes were the ultimate jet-ski design. It was practically impossible to go underwater or sink. And ofc, in the VERY early days of KSP, touching water would destroy your craft, it was kind of like lava. 

[Tw1]

6 hours ago, Allocthonous said:

Autostrut still feels like either magic or cheating to me, and I only started in 1.1. Anytime a rocket actually ends up needing manual struts now seems really weird.

I still strut my stuff because it just feels right. 

 

[wumpus]

I would expect a lot of the "old knowledge" is either still present or in tutorials.  The stuff you don't see anymore is obsolete due to more accurate physics models.

Ignored stuff that still works:

Asparagus staging: While it is often more efficient to simply use a larger rocket, asparagus staging was used to build large, efficient rockets without massive parts.  The key thing to learn about this is that you need not always stage vertically, and that drop tanks still come in handy (our fuel tanks are considerably heavier when empty than in real life).  One reason asparagus staging was so popular was that due to a trick of the atmosphere, you wanted to keep your TWR=2.0 pretty much through your entire ascent.  Having equal sized asparagus staging made this work.  For multiple asparagus staging (i.e. more than two tanks+engines) it is almost certainly more efficient to at least double the number of fuel tanks on the stages dropped earlier.

- One useful trick in the early game that comes from this idea is to put a fuel tank (roughly twice the size of your "last stage" tank) on top of the capsule (via staging couplers).  As you burn the "last fuel" tank keep pumping fuel from the top tank [if you are in career mode you will need to have at least the science building upgraded, I'm less sure about the requirements each revision].  This basically gives you a "free staging" without the need to buy or carry an extra engine.

Solid rocket boosters [SRBs] still work.  In the current game, they seem to exist for the first two-three career mode launches, and are only seen again for efficient designs with the kickback boosters.  Nevertheless, they not only have cheap delta-v, they have even cheaper thrust when you need it.  In general, you will still fire all your SRBs on the pad (although missions that simply specify "escape Kerbin" might be ideal for a second [one size smaller] SRB stage).  In earlier editions it was possible to get to the Mun via multiple "layer cakes" of RT-10 "hammers" (the then smallest booster possible), but I doubt that it is possible to stabilize such a system now (although you wouldn't need nearly the struts).

Before career mode there were these suggestions for exploring KSP: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Campaigns  Many players have been frustrated by career mode and feel it was a bad move.  Being aware of the old campaigns gives you more options.

Note that since the whole point is to skip the bits in career you don't like, don't bother with docking if you really want to go to the Mun (although I strongly recommend going to Minmus first, once you adjust your angular inclination it is much easier to get to*, land [the purple bits are all flat: this is important], get off, and get home).

* technically it takes about 100m/s more delta-v to get to Minmus, but you save that in landing/relaunching issues.

One "lost art" is the munshot.  My guess is that it predates maneuver nodes, but I wasn't around for that.  Simply wait until the Mun appears on the horizon, and then keep burning towards it (like going to orbit and keep burning until you get an intercept).  Expect to stop and create a maneuver node correction once you get to space (you should be well on your way).  This is *slightly* more efficient than a parking orbit, but typically only used to get to the Mun since you can't create a maneuver node on the pad (a significant bug, but apparently baked deep in the code).  Don't sweat too much over it as you don't gain all that much by not using a parking orbit (NASA typically used it for probes, but I think stopped with New Horizons.  I wouldn't be surprised if NASA probes to Mars (and closer) still use parking orbits).

And of course, signs you are watching an obsolete tutorial:

• Player flies straight up for at least 5000m to get to orbit (sometimes much, much, worse.  But there may have been reasons to go even 15,000m before .90).
• Rocket is covered with struts, or built like a flying pancake.
• Player throttles down the engine.  This is somewhat controversial as some data shows that launchpad TWR should be roughly 1.3.  But typically if you are paying for the weight of a more powerful engine, you need to get all the thrust out of it.  Throttling the engine was crititcal in <.90 play as you wanted to maintain the "ideal TWR=2.0" through the atmosphere.  Don't do that now.
• Player simply smacks into the atmosphere without carefully lowering PE to some reasonably value (I like 30,000m).  Before .90, you could simply set up a return from the Mun that was a collision course and the souposphere would slow you down enough to stop you.
• Player hits the parachutes at the last second, slowing from ~2000m/s to 5 m/s in a second.  Sometime after 1.0 [main] parachutes are destroyed if deployed faster than ~250m/s (drogues can be deployed much faster, and quickly take you down to safe parachute speeds).

Edited November 30, 2016 by wumpus
remembered the munshot

[IncongruousGoat]

49 minutes ago, wumpus said:

Player simply smacks into the atmosphere without carefully lowering PE to some reasonably value (I like 30,000m).  Before .90, you could simply set up a return from the Mun that was a collision course and the souposphere would slow you down enough to stop you.

Well... This isn't strictly true. I can speak from experience that command pods can, in fact, safely directly drop from the Mun to Kerbin and survive all the way to the surface. It just requires that your vessel be very blunt and aerodynamically stable in the blunt direction (like a command pod).

[Snark]

On 11/28/2016 at 7:26 AM, IncongruousGoat said:

It used to not decrease engine thrust in atmosphere (what it did instead was decrease the specific impulse and increase fuel flow to maintain thrust). This meant you could build ion engine powered aircraft on Kerbin fairly easily.

You're correct that the Isp model used to be wrong in atmosphere (i.e. it used to boost fuel consumption rather than lowering thrust), but that's not the reason why you could have ion-powed airplanes.

The reason why you could have ion-powered airplanes back then was that they had the same Isp in atmsophere as in vacuum.  Take a look at the old ion config file from 0.90:  the atmosphereCurve has only one entry.  It just happens to be the case that the same version in which they changed the atmospheric Isp effect is also the version where they severely nerfed the Isp of ions in atmosphere.

 

...Apropos of which, another change was that in 1.0, they added this distinction between "vacuum engines" and "atmospheric engines".  You know how there are some engines that do great in vacuum, but which are absolutely horrible in atmosphere because their Isp goes through the floor?  Terrier, Poodle, Rhino.  Well, before 1.0, that wasn't the case.  Pretty much all the engines had an atmospheric Isp that was only slightly worse than their vacuum Isp, and the delta was more or less even for all of them.  So it used to be that the Terrier was a great engine for lifting small rockets right off the pad.

[Archgeek]

Back in the days when the Mainsail was the mightiest engine, it had a nasty habit of overheating and exploding if placed directly under an orange tank.  A trick for this was to put the smallest size 2 "Rockomax" tank between them, and then stitch the tanks together with struts 'lest a lack of joint strength cause a violent gimbal dance with SAS.

Aerospikes also got very hot, and would explode if placed together on a coupler (all engines' heat would be funneled right into the same part), so Eve landers would need to either use mainsails or buffer their quadcouplers from their aerospikes with small fuel tanks.

[monstah]

Oh, a lot has changed, but the tips here are still good:

 

just take anything specifically said about KSP's implementation of aerodynamics with a grain of salt

[DocMoriarty]

To OT

You could create really crazy airplanes like the ones mentioned in my documention in my signature. Didn't try with the latest versions of KSP but the RAPIER's aren't as powerful anymore as they used to be. On a plus side you need less wings for things to fly in a somewhat civilized manner.

Here is an example of one of my typical transport space planes:

You needed stacks of wings to make them fly and stacks of other stuff and moar struts but it worked ... somehow.

Note: the rules for correct alignments and stuff in the doc are still valid.

 

Edited December 2, 2016 by DocMoriarty

[wumpus]

I can't believe I left out the most kerbal thing ever!

Explosive Staging!

Explosive staging is when you put a solid rocket booster (almost always a RT-10 hammer, but presumably nowadays you would use an RT-5 flea) under another rocket without a decoupler, and light the above engine in such a way that the SRB exploded to remove its own mass (and anything connected to it).  The two motivations to this concept was that you don't get decouplers when you start the game (and "career mode" then was what we now call "science mode".  No limitations on parts or mass (which might exist in science mode for all I know)), the other was that a RT-10 hammer was pretty useful, but costs 400 funds (may have been cheaper) while the decoupler also costs 400 funds, often instantly obsoleting the RT-10.  On the other hand, if build a final liquid stage, a RT-10 under that, and three RT-10s under that (all with no decouplers), you could go into orbit with the first mission, merely by exploding each stage as needed [that design is from very poor memory, and I'm not even sure where the old rockets are saved.  But I launched plenty of those rockets into orbit, both to refine the design and to determine which kerbals had the "bada55" tag (Jeb loves the flight, Bill and Bob not so much).

This was taken to extreme lengths, most famously Scott Manley's videos on unlocking the entire science tree with two missions (the first landed on the Mun with beefed up rocket like above.  Of course it did involve things like landing a rocket with 4 fuel tanks, an LV-T30 engine, and no landing legs.  I suspect that Abysall Lurker did it first, although everybody remembers seeing the Scott Manley video

https://www.youtube.com/user/ablu444  (Extreme KSP on old versions).

I'll have to go back and look at the old RT-10, it looks like they nerfed the thumper down to the point that RT-10s might even work.  But most of the reasons for it are gone, and  I'd look more toward all the many things you can do with kickbacks for your SRB needs.  Don't expect much from the fleas, but that's all you have for mission 1.

[update]

I've tested in sandbox mode that you can get into space with nothing but fleas.  My "success" so far:

Managed to get into space.  Could not survive return (capsule only stable upside down.  Destroyed parachute and like never came down slower than 300m/s).

Managed to get into space and return.  Vessel upwards of 40 tons (limit 18T), ~50 parts (limit 30) and probably too tall.  23 fleas arranged in layers of 1,1,1,1,5,5,9.  The key to survival was flying with the capsule upside down (so it would be stable coming down right side up, and survive), and attaching to parachutes via modular girders to the sides.  Unfortunately this is not terribly aerodynamic going up and requires so many boosters, as well as far too many simple fins so that you can't do it with a first mission.

Gave up trying to get to orbit.  The catch is that you have to burn a significant amount of delta-v above 70,000m.  Lowering the thrust from boosters only helps so much.  My old trick of turning the last booster upside down (so it can be fired after waiting for AP) appears to cause too much drag (I *did* manage [please ignore the cheating launch towers holding it to an angle: if that worked, I'm sure I could finagle the means to emulate it legally] to escape the atmosphere with an inverted flea, but it doesn't have the delta-v it needs.  Two might work, but that's a lot of fleas to add to the lower stages (curse you, tyrannical rocket equation).

Edited December 3, 2016 by wumpus
update with modern data

[Nansuchao]

Someone forgot about the infini-glider. It was possible, before 1.0, to have engine-less plane capable of flying as much as you want just moving your surface controls up and down.

[SavageAngel]

Wow, after reading through all these post I have learned a lot. Some of these things I already new about the origins of KSP but most I did not. The KSP of today vs. some of the early days must feel like a completely different experience to those of you who have been around since the beginning.

Edited December 2, 2016 by SavageAngel

[SavageAngel]

So what your saying is these guys were just early KSP engineers.

Edited December 2, 2016 by SavageAngel