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Why isn't delta-v exposed in Stock (yet)?

eightiesboi

By eightiesboi
in KSP1 Discussion

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Posted
Posted
17 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

Try to play a multi mission career without KAC...

check

17 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

Try to build a mission to Jool without KER

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17 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

Try to go to any other planet without some kind of transfer window tool (external or mod)

check 

17 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

Try to play a long time career without some search/hide ship feature mod (like haystack)

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17 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

Try to land (as a beginner) without altitude display or time to impact.

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18 minutes ago, Warzouz said:

It's like driving a car without tires or with an opaque wind shield...

Exactly.

I can unequivocally and without hesitation state that my early KSP experience would have been much better had there been a dV indicator in the game. I'm constitutionally suspicious of mods, especially ones that change gameplay, and it took me much too long to discover the wonderland that is modded KSP. I'm quite sure there are many more like me out there.

Of these features, the only one that I still feel is genuinely indispensable is dV display. It's definitely tons easier to plan suicide burns with KER, but it's not that hard to eyeball reasonably efficient landings if you have reasonable TWR. It's not that hard to get to Duna or Eve by eyeballing the phase angle. It's not hard -- although tedious! -- to manage multiple missions by warping manually and keeping an eye on the time-to-manoeuvre display in the tracking station. It's not that hard to find ships even if there are a lot of them (although it too gets tedious). 

But srsly SQUAD, dV.  Not having it may have made a kind of sense when KSP was just about getting to the Mun. But with everything from Moho to Eeloo on the menu, the game needs it.

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GoSlash27

GoSlash27

Posted
Posted
4 hours ago, _stilgar_ said:

I can calculate the delta-v by hand, but I wish the game would just tell me the dry weight of my rocket. Right now, I have to write down the full weight, drain all the tanks, write down empty weight, calculate delta-v, refill the tanks... and then, during Mun landing, notice that the lander has no fuel because I forgot to refill that one tank... 

stilgar,

 You don't have to drain the tanks to calculate that. Just add the units of fuel and oxidizer and divide the sum by 200. This gives propellant mass in tonnes. Subtract this from your ship mass to get dry mass.

Best,
-Slashy

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GoSlash27

GoSlash27

Posted
Posted

stilgar,
 Same principle, but different conversion factor.

Liquid fuel and oxidizer 200
Monoprop                        250
xenon                                10000
Solid fuel                           133.3

Best,
-Slashy

 

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klgraham1013

klgraham1013

Posted
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12 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

stilgar,
 Same principle, but different conversion factor.

Liquid fuel and oxidizer 200
Monoprop                        250
xenon                                10000
Solid fuel                           133.3

Best,
-Slashy

 

Although I wouldn't do it, I really appreciate your enthusiasm for spreadsheets.

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Renegrade

Renegrade

Posted
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8 minutes ago, _stilgar_ said:

Thanks! 

By the way, an alternative to @GoSlash27's system for LF/O tanks is to add up JUST the liquid fuel portion and divide by 90 for tons of LF/O.  That'll getcha your total fuel mass as well, assuming you have the normal 9:11 ratio of LF:O.

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Posted
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I wonder why they went with such odd units? Wouldn't it have been simpler to list any of them in kg? 

(Or if they want to get really weird, some entirely different units. Anyone up for a hogshead of Ox?)

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klgraham1013

klgraham1013

Posted
Posted (edited)
35 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

I wonder why they went with such odd units?

Could be because they weren't game designers at the start.  Actually, I think there's a lot of legacy quirks that are because of that.

Edited by klgraham1013
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dlrk

dlrk

Posted
Posted
6 hours ago, MR L A said:

DV read out is the one on that list I'd consider anything like essential. 

Realistic aerodynamics just takes ages to code, uses up valuable cpu time (results in lower part count), frustrates a lot of players, and only really allows for things like ground effects - as cool as that is, I'd sooner they leave aero alone and fix/build other things.

Trajectory... I've only played one playthrough with this. Useful for other planet missions but even the modded version isn't all that accurate and I can certainly live without it.

NEVER used procedural parts. 

Uh, if a modder can implement realistic aerodynamics, Squad can too. Have you used FAR? It works great, without performance issues.

Trajectories is pretty damn accurate, even with some of the bugs it still has, I can get from Munar orbit to the KSC runway 09 on the numbers.

Procedural parts is awesome, I recommend you try it.

Squad can implement these things without a sacrifice in performance. They choose not to, for some unfathomable reason.

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Warzouz

Warzouz

Posted
Posted

For KAC, I remember playing and 12 rockets space station building around Laythe, back in 0.9. At this time we could aero-capture at Jool, so it was quite easy. Even though all 12 rockets had between 12 and 14 manoeuvres to perform. That would have been a nightmare. The current feature for next Node is very pitiful, especially if you have dozens of ships in a career. They aren't even sorted by time... And i you filter the ship list by ship type, you don't see the next nodes any more (you can't filter by ships that have next nodes)...

For DeltaV display, sure you learn the math. But that's a ludicrous argument... Why not playing without keyboard for us to learn about USB protocol using needles on the USB port...

99% of us are experienced players many of us could be qualified as experts, we don't think as new players any more. I remember orbiting around Mun after watching a tutorial, and having no clue how to get back to Kerbin.

I'm would very much like to know the average time KSP is played on console. The few players I know dumped the game quite quickly (their loss, but Squad loss too : they won't buy any expansion). I remember that Squad said that most player never go beyond Kerbin SOI : is it a real surprise ? That was their main argument for not having more planets in Stock KSP, iirc.

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dlrk

dlrk

Posted
Posted
6 hours ago, Laie said:

This topic isn't new... the last time I recall where someone from Squad bothered to step in and give a reply, it was that they were afraid of sometimes getting it wrong.

Keep in mind that vessels are not always strightforward 1st, 2nd, nth stage as with a Saturn-V. KSP gives the player a lot of freedom to come up with the most outrageous contraptions, and even more freedom in how to use them.

  • A simple issue is "stage 2 is lit, next item is to jettison the fairings" -- will they be jettisoned ASAP, or only after stage2 is done, or (quite likely) sometime in-between?
  • Slightly more complicated, you have Skipper flanked by two SRBs and throttle down the skipper to 50% shortly after takeoff.
  • And then there's the wholly weird vessel with crossfeed and fuel lines where the dV algorithm just cannot follow. I don't have an example handy, but the peeps at Squad assumed that it wouldn't take long for some player to come up with a vessel that overtaxes their dV thingy.

The reasoning was that a mod can afford to be wrong some of the time, while the expectation for a a stock dV meter would be to get it right every.single.time, no matter what the player throws at it, under penalty of causing a major excrementsstorm.


Well, if you can't be perfect, you might as well not try. That's a good atittude, right?

Mechjeb handles this fine."It can't be done/it's too hard" is not a good excuse if someone else already did it.

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linuxgurugamer

linuxgurugamer

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, dlrk said:


Well, if you can't be perfect, you might as well not try. That's a good atittude, right?

Mechjeb handles this fine."It can't be done/it's too hard" is not a good excuse if someone else already did it.

Well, even Mechjeb gets it wrong sometimes.  It's ok for a mod to be wrong some of the time, people understand.  But they will screen bloody murder if the game makes a mistake.  It's not a "it can't be done", it's "it can't be done PERFECTLY" 

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wumpus

wumpus

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, klgraham1013 said:

Although I wouldn't do it, I really appreciate your enthusiasm for spreadsheets.

While spreadsheets certainly work (and are feasible for players with wimpy notebooks they can move near consoles), I really like my solid boosters.  I really question my ability to compute delta-v while solid and liquid rockets are simultaneously firing (I know, the answer is putting drop tanks on top of your SRBs.  More efficient and easier to calculate).

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GoSlash27

GoSlash27

Posted
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20 minutes ago, wumpus said:

While spreadsheets certainly work (and are feasible for players with wimpy notebooks they can move near consoles), I really like my solid boosters.  I really question my ability to compute delta-v while solid and liquid rockets are simultaneously firing (I know, the answer is putting drop tanks on top of your SRBs.  More efficient and easier to calculate).

 

wumpus,

 The math gets a little more complicated, but not terribly so. spreadsheets work for parallel staging schemes just as well as asparagus or series.

Best,
-Slashy

 

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Tyko

Tyko

Posted
Posted
13 hours ago, mattinoz said:

Subway map is only for ideal transfers which still leaves lot of room for error if you don't understand.

Actually the subway map doesn't provide ideal / perfect maneuvers. there's a bit of margin built into them.

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GoSlash27

GoSlash27

Posted
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34 minutes ago, Tyko said:

Actually the subway map doesn't provide ideal / perfect maneuvers. there's a bit of margin built into them.

True. They're calculated assuming mean (circular) orbits and round up to the nearest 10 m/ sec. They also assume real world physics instead of patched conics, so the estimates are a little high.

Best,

-Slashy

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