My thoughts on the Mission Builder and Making History

[Kerbart]

9 minutes ago, schneida said:

In my opinion this would be the most important thing! Imagine the possibilities in carrer mode - doing a real historic progression, where there are certain missions that you can complete, where you have to use certain parts to build e.g. an Apollo Style mission - using Apollo like parts.

Well, Squad has honoured the KSP tradition of having a questionable tech-tree. Doing a Sputnik or Vostok mission will reauire you to unlock about 1/3 to 1/2 of the Tech Tree, so there’s that.

Personally I do intend to recreate all milestones of the early space age, in Sandbox mode, and perhaps post them on Youtube on a weekly basis.

A mix of career/mission would be interesting. A career mode with a customized tech tree, contracts provided through the mission interface where completing missions unlocks the tech tree (or yields science points). Interesting concept for a new expansion Pack...

[panarchist]

On 3/13/2018 at 9:09 PM, punchyfist said:

Oh, and one more thing, since they didn't have any kind of in-game way to do mission sharing (which I think was a huge miss), where did Squad think people were going to go to share missions? I cannot find anywhere in these forums or in the KSP subreddit anywhere where people are even talking about sharing missions... Just my few thoughts.

https://kerbal.curseforge.com/missions

[panarchist]

20 hours ago, Kerbart said:

• I always wondered about why early Russian capsules were spheres and it never really dawned on me until I read the wikipedia quote listed above: "Landing system: Sphere made ballistic reentry, with shield side seeking correct orientation by virtue of the center of gravity being aft of the center of the sphere" — it's actually a genius design. You don't have to worry about the capsule having two or more aerodynamic equilibria (anyone whose capsule decided to ride out reentry "pointy end first" knows the joy of that). No extensive wind tunnel testing needed, not depending on complex calculations or (in those days likely not existing) simulations.
• A self-righting design obviously has benefits but getting the aerodynamics right might be tricky. In the race to get into space first, the Soviets didn't have the luxury of going through an extensive process to get the best capsule possible. They just went straight for "we know this works."

I've always admired Soviet-style engineering designs. It might look primitive but it's amazingly effective. When Victor Belenko defected and landed his MiG 25 Foxbat in Japan, the jet was of course torn apart by Americans who were appalled over how primitive it was. From what I understood, after the collapse of the cold war, they found out that many of the "primitive" features were well thought out. Lots of stainless steel instead of exotic metals, it was apparently very heat resistant and easy to handle in the field. Radar electronics working with vacuum tubes had more to do with being EMP resistant than the state of Russian electronics, and so on. The Vostok design seems to fit right in.

Keep in mind that with all the real-world spherical capsules, if the capsule is perfectly balanced, the CoM is *automatically* aft of the center by virtue of having an occupant seated against the "back" wall. I'm not positive, but I don't believe stock KSP takes the occupant location into consideration when setting CoM.

[Delbrutis]

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Well, Squad has honoured the KSP tradition of having a questionable tech-tree. Doing a Sputnik or Vostok mission will reauire you to unlock about 1/3 to 1/2 of the Tech Tree, so there’s that.

Personally I do intend to recreate all milestones of the early space age, in Sandbox mode, and perhaps post them on Youtube on a weekly basis.

A mix of career/mission would be interesting. A career mode with a customized tech tree, contracts provided through the mission interface where completing missions unlocks the tech tree (or yields science points). Interesting concept for a new expansion Pack...

I was mostly hoping for a career update with this game and am pretty disappointed. I think Squad really missed out on a great opportunity with this DLC What I am really looking to see is if the mod community can hook into some of the new features in the game. With the new launch site feature I could see a career where at the start you pick your launch-site and "Associated Tree" so to speak and get a part and mission list depending on your choice.  Squad career balance is non existent anyway so blowing it up and starting from scratch would be acceptable. I think Squad really shorted  the Russian faction parts in this update but I think their are enough stock parts to work with. I would Slash the weight and cost on the stock mk1 lander can and give it to the Russian faction exclusive for example.         

[MaltYebisu]

On 3/14/2018 at 1:55 AM, GregroxMun said:

Why partition it off from sandbox and career mode? It would be amazing to have missions come in through the mission control center that you would get funds and reputation for. Or even as a way of planning out missions in sandbox and career. You could add a setting to the mission builder that disables universe-scale changes like funds, universal time, etc and marks it as a "Career Mode Mission." 

 

Yeah, I also bought Making History believing it to implement in the core game, i.e. the way most players play the game; selecting  Start Game,  clicking Start New, and then choosing the type of game you wish to play. The Making History missions live within their unique environment, akin to the way the Training and Scenarios works. I expected it to work with the core game, perhaps through an added tab in the difficulty options to set whether or not to use custom missions, and how these missions would implement into the game. I didn't investigate before purchasing and would have bought it nevertheless because I want to support this great game anyway I can. 

My dream was to play this DLC combined with the RO/RP-0 suite of mods. Just imagine playing an Apollo 13 type mission with the failure of the Service Module programmed into it. Or imagine having a mission trigger on May the 25th, 1961 commanding you to land on the moon before the end of the decade.  You could have the mission builder spawn satellites and spacecrafts from a competing space program at appropriate dates, or make it produce messages to inform you of the progress of your rival. Perhaps The Mission Builder could create individual contracts you would accept in Mission Control, with built-in side-missions and unforeseen failure of parts.

I understand that adequately implementing Making History with the different play modes would require a lot of work and introduce a lot of new problems. The developers would have to find a way for the missions to trigger on a variety of factors like science nodes unlocked, building levels, contracts completed, accepted or offered, purchased parts, and many more. They would have to make it possible to have multiple missions run at the same time and an intuitive way to manage different missions in the game. I'm not even scratching the surface of work needed to make this DLC work with the different game modes. Just imagine the difficulty of troubleshooting a game that arises from a situation where a user could have several missions running at the same time with conflicts and added complexity. Because it is official DLC, they can't very well tell users not to use the different user-created missions.

Even though getting Making History to work with the core game would be incredibly tricky and introduce uncountable problems, I think it would be worth the effort and would increase the value of KSP a lot. It would be like an entirely new game, instead of just an exciting way to do complex challenges that can be scored.

I hope the hardworking developers will find a way to implement Making History or a similar DLC in the core game. It has the potential of giving this old game a fantastic future!

[Klapaucius]

I'm just having fun trying to launch from oddball places. With the Mission Builder you can place a launch pad anywhere. So I have spent the last few hours trying to get a really big rocket into orbit from Eve. I failed .

The bug I have found is several times testing the scenario, on the first test the rocket blows up for no reason. I just reset the test and it works fine the second time around without changing anything.  This happens everytime I change the location in the node editor.

[Temeter]

On 14.3.2018 at 9:56 PM, Kerbart said:

I've always admired Soviet-style engineering designs. It might look primitive but it's amazingly effective. When Victor Belenko defected and landed his MiG 25 Foxbat in Japan, the jet was of course torn apart by Americans who were appalled over how primitive it was. From what I understood, after the collapse of the cold war, they found out that many of the "primitive" features were well thought out. Lots of stainless steel instead of exotic metals, it was apparently very heat resistant and easy to handle in the field. Radar electronics working with vacuum tubes had more to do with being EMP resistant than the state of Russian electronics, and so on. The Vostok design seems to fit right in.

I imagine the Migs were partially built that way because the Warsaw Pact countries didn't have the industrial capacity. It needed to be simple and straightforward.

The soviets did have high tech materials, though; for example the N-1 rockets lower stage engines were still relying on RP-1/Kerosene, but they had pretty advanced staged combustion systems and a very high thrust to weight ratio. The RD-170/180 engines were even more advanced, and in some regards beyond everything the americans would have in the next ten years. Or, despite the reliability issues, the Proton engines are pretty damn impressive pieces of work, the lower stage engines having one of the best thrust to weight ratios of all engines, and the mid stage managing >320 ISP with hypergolic fuels, which was at that point unbelievably efficient for a lifter engine. And the Proton is from 1965!

Edited March 16, 2018 by Temeter

[KerikBalm]

6 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

I'm just having fun trying to launch from oddball places. With the Mission Builder you can place a launch pad anywhere. So I have spent the last few hours trying to get a really big rocket into orbit from Eve. I failed .

Can you launch from the "surface" of Jool?

[klesh]

19 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Can you launch from the "surface" of Jool?

 

No, Jool is not listed on the pulldown of available planets to spawn a launchpad; nor is the Sun.

[Klapaucius]

What you can do is select any location on the planet. As the above photo shows, you can even launch from the side of a mountain.

I also discovered you can put a platform on the water. I could not figure out why the light was so odd until I realized I was on the BOTTOM of the ocean. I was able to fly up and out like a sub-based missile.  Here is the stock Slim Shuttle launching from a lake on the edge of the polar ice sheet.

 

 

I think I may just start a thread on this 

 

 

Edited March 21, 2018 by Klapaucius
typo

[Enceos]

I thinks this is a suitable thread to add my thoughts on the Mission Editor:

1) Can't navigate between nodes using keyboard

          - Currently navigation is done solely by mouse dragging and zooming. I wish I could use keyboard arrow keys to jump between nodes. Plus for large missions it would be nice to have an table of contents of some sort with chapter names we define.

2) Can't merge two missions together into one campaign.

          - For example someone has made a terrific mission which I'd like to include into my story, but I have to manually recreate all the nodes and tweak them to make that happen... no way to import. The Mission Editor is built with a narrow picture of making challenges in mind. It is nearly impossible to build a long story campaign in the editor (which I wanted to do that's why I'm disappointed).

[Bluer22]

On 15/3/2018 at 5:33 PM, schneida said:

In my opinion this would be the most important thing! Imagine the possibilities in carrer mode - doing a real historic progression, where there are certain missions that you can complete, where you have to use certain parts to build e.g. an Apollo Style mission - using Apollo like parts.

Actually - that's what I expected when I read about the DLC for the first time, and kind of what I was still hoping for when I bought it...

I agree! I was expecting the same.

[Northstar1989]

On 3/16/2018 at 5:05 PM, Klapaucius said:

What you can do is select any location on the planet. As the above photo shows, you can even launch from the side of a mountain.

I also discovered you can put a platform on the water. I could not figure out why the light was so odd until I realized I was on the BOTTOM of the ocean. I was able to fly up and out like a sub-based missile.  Here is the stock Slim Shuttle launching from a lake on the edge of the polar ice sheet.

 

 

I think I may just start a thread on this 

 

 

Please do.

The ability to place custom/alternate launchpads is what had me the most excited.  However I don't see why they couldn't have also thrown in custom/alternate runways as well...

And, of course, the whole thing really needs Career Mode integration.  What I really want to do is play Career Mode with a mountaintop launchpad (probably in the mountains west of the KSC) available for an alternate launch location.  Or, extra landing-pads for precision-landings, SpaceX style (yes, I've managed to return launch stages to the KSC pad, and once even to a floating barge before.  It's incredibly difficult, though...)

In one previous save I literally went so far as to *FLY* an Extraplanetary Launchpads pad (as well as several storage tanks for RocketParts and fuel) out to those mountains with a giant nuclear-electric helicopter I built for a challenge.  I then used Fuel Balancer mod to edit in full loads of RocketParts and fuel after each launch... (rather than waste time flying resupply missions)

I would much rather have worked with a Stock alternative launchpad feature.  It took me *hours* to fly the pad out (less time for the fuel tanks, once I figured out how to better sling payloads beneath the chopper using multiple KAS winches with different attachment points and levels of tension in the lines so I could fly at a greater Angle of Attack for the chopper blades- made me really wish I had gotten to attend Army Air Assault School back in my ROTC days, since one of the many lessons learned there is how to sling payloads beneath a Chinook...)

 

Edited April 5, 2018 by Northstar1989

[Klapaucius]

11 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

Please do.

The ability to place custom/alternate launchpads is what had me the most excited.  However I don't see why they couldn't have also thrown in custom/alternate runways as well...

 

Here is what I started. Just pics, really, but perhaps it can turn into a discussion on this.

https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/172489-slim-shuttle-on-pol-underwater-launches-and-other-silliness-with-the-new-mission-builder/&tab=comments#comment-3324512