How Are Using KerbNet?

[Wcmille]

I'd be interested to hear how you are using KerbNet.

Do you use the altitude screen?

What kinds of displays would be useful?

[peteletroll]

Never used altitude screen for altitude, just to look for anomalies. On the other hand, I use it a lot to find biomes and ore.

[Atkara]

For the most part, I've been using Kerbnet to identify biomes, anomalies and ore concentrations. Hadn't looked at the terrain map, until I started looking for a way to get an estimate of the average slope in the area I plan to deploy surface installations on.

[Alpha 360]

I haven't unlocked the big scanners yet in my career mode, but I have been using the altitude scanner a lot. I find that not extremely useful because I have Kerbal Engineer giving me the same read-outs. Hopefully, though, I will be using Kerbnet to find those anomalies. Still haven't found one, excluding the one by the KSC.  

Happy Explosions

Edited January 30, 2018 by Alpha 360

[Wcmille]

7 hours ago, peteletroll said:

Never used altitude screen for altitude, just to look for anomalies. On the other hand, I use it a lot to find biomes and ore.

What other information could be useful to know?

[peteletroll]

24 minutes ago, Wcmille said:

What other information could be useful to know?

I'd say altitude, biomes, ore and anomalies are all you can get.

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/KerbNet

[Wcmille]

That’s true. If KerbNet could do other things, what else would you want to look at? For example, I don’t really look at altitude much, I find that I really want to look at slope, to find a good landing spot.

[NSEP]

I use it to mark waypoints for my future missions.

Nothing special.

[Jimmidii]

One of the most useful things I've done with it right at the start is stick a waypoint on KSC.

Trying to find the damn thing at night on the map view used to be an absolute nightmare for me.

[Wcmille]

6 minutes ago, NSEP said:

I use it to mark waypoints for my future missions.

Nothing special.

Are you only using the biome map for that?

[NSEP]

2 minutes ago, Wcmille said:

Are you only using the biome map for that?

Yes, i didn't even know it had other maps actually.

[sardia]

2 hours ago, Jimmidii said:

One of the most useful things I've done with it right at the start is stick a waypoint on KSC.

Trying to find the damn thing at night on the map view used to be an absolute nightmare for me.

Why don't you just fly a plane/ Rover to the end of the runway and then plant a flag? If you put it far enough out, it'll stick just fine. 

[Geschosskopf]

I never use KerbNet at all.  I find it incredibly clunky.

[Wcmille]

5 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

I never use KerbNet at all.  I find it incredibly clunky.

What do you think is clunky about it? What do you use instead?

[Atkara]

ScanSAT propably.

[Aegolius13]

7 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

I never use KerbNet at all.  I find it incredibly clunky.

Agreed - very clunky.  I occasionally use the narrow band scanner to look for ore, but never use KerbNet per se.  

Confession time: when I want to see where a biome boundary is, I pull up the cheat menu and enable the biome coloring.  Honestly, after putting a survey scanner in orbit, I think it's reasonable to have that kind of information in the regular interface.  

I understand ScanSat allows stuff like this, but have never tried it.  

[Superfluous J]

I've only ever used it for biomes and anomalies. And ore, if that counts. I've used it for waypoints but prefer the Waypoint Manager mod for that.

I also find it clunky. I'd prefer the display overlaid over the planet itself, than in its own window.

[Wcmille]

Does ScanSat overlay the info on the planet, or also in its own window?

[Geschosskopf]

21 minutes ago, Wcmille said:

Does ScanSat overlay the info on the planet, or also in its own window?

In its own window, which also shows ship positions and their orbits, plus anomalies.  The SCANsat map, which shows the whole planet, can be displayed in 3 different projections, display altitudes, biomes, or slopes, overlaid with any resource  you want (or not) and the day-night terminator.  No matter where your active ship is, you can pull up the map of any planet you've already scanned.  And you can save these maps as separate files to look outside the game, too.

[Whisky Tango Foxtrot]

I mainly use it to mark the points where my SSTOs should perform their re-entry burns in order to land at the KSC. I'd probably use it more if you could save a map of all the places a craft had flown over instead of only having access to whatever's directly below the craft ant any given time.

[Rocket In My Pocket]

Finding Easter Eggs/Monoliths is about it's only real use.

As said above; if you could "map" a planet and refer to that map whenever it might see more use. Also as said above the debug menu's "biome coloring" is way better, clearer, and more useful; not to mention it shows the whole planet at once. (Why Squad didn't just make this functionality part of Kerbnet is beyond me. I mean it's already in the game, working! Why do extra work and development time to make something that is less useful and just worse in every way?)

Having Kerbnet tell me that there is a giant crater biome right below me isn't terribly helpful when I can clearly see said crater with my eyes...because it's y'know; right below me.

[DMagic]

10 hours ago, Wcmille said:

Does ScanSat overlay the info on the planet, or also in its own window?

SCANsat can do both. It has a window that can control resource, biome, and altimetry (but not slope, which is something I should revisit) map overlays for the planet. It also has several options for map windows, either the full planet or zoomed in to a specific location.

[Geschosskopf]

50 minutes ago, Rocket In My Pocket said:

(Why Squad didn't just make this functionality part of Kerbnet is beyond me. I mean it's already in the game, working! Why do extra work and development time to make something that is less useful and just worse in every way?)

I think I can answer this....

KSP was never intended to what it has become.  It was only supposed to replicate Felipe's childhood pastime of taping toy soldiers to bottle rockets.  Thus, just getting to orbit, let alone Mun, was supposed to be a silly, explosion-filled trial-and-error process.,  It wasn't to be taken seriously, and nobody was expected to spend thousands of hours playing it.  Hence, KSP's utter lack of in-game instrumentation and a maneuver node system optimized to work no further away than Mun.

Of course, KSP attracted many who take it very seriously indeed, wanting to use the Lego system to conquer the entire solar system.  And at first, Squad appeared to want to go along with this.  New planets began appearing, there was a storyline about the anomalies in-work, and all that.  There was hope that an improved, more instrumented interface, with maneuver nodes that were easier to manipulate at vast interplanetary distances, would soon follow.  But then this process stopped in its tracks.  The only concession Squad has really made to leaving Kerbin's SOI, other than tossing a few more planets out there, was back in 0.23.5 when they added mouse wheel tweaking to maneuver nodes to facilitate rendezvousing with NKOs in solar orbit not far from Kerbin.  And many wonder why.

I believe the answer is simple:  consoles.  For at least the last 20 years, the real money in the video game industry has been in consoles, so naturally Squad wanted to go that way.  But due to the damnable limitations of consoles, the game's potential had to be trimmed down to fit.  So rather than have essentially 2 completely separate games to develop and support, a limited one for consoles and a full-featured one for PCs, Squad made it 1-size-fits-all.

Of course, that was back in the day when Squad was a small, rogue splinter group of a company that otherwise had nothing to do with gaming.  it simply had no other choice.  But now that Squad is owned by a large gaming house, perhaps this situation might improve.  Maybe someday we'll have a KSP 2 for PC-only that's optimized for interplanetary, perhaps even interstellar, operations on a vast scale, with instrumentation worthy of the name, while consoles are stuck with the original, dumbed-down version.

But in the meantime, we can mod the KSP we have to get around the limitations of consoles.  Still, it's good to remember where KSP came from.  It explains why things are as they are.