Is Squad planning to change campaign gameplay?

[Superfluous J]

17 minutes ago, Fraktal said:

There's the problem. I'm incapable of landing with anything less than ~160 m/s if I don't have airbrakes (and you don't get those until tech level 6). Wheel brakes are nowhere near enough and make me veer to the side and tip over, braking chutes are just plain insufficient.

I'm by no means a plane guy, but what keeps you from slowing down? If you glide across the ground slowly tilting your nose up to keep from dropping, your speed will continually decrease. I've never encountered a plane that lost the ability to do this in the triple digit m/s.

[Kryten 2X4B 523P]

28 minutes ago, Fraktal said:

There's the problem. I'm incapable of landing with anything less than ~160 m/s if I don't have airbrakes (and you don't get those until tech level 6). Wheel brakes are nowhere near enough and make me veer to the side and tip over, braking chutes are just plain insufficient.

It does take practice, just like docking.

Veering is caused by a combination of factors including braking too hard. Tipping usually means your landing gear are too close together (think wide triangle as ideal) or mass shifting from side to side on the landing gear suspension, especially over 4T for the LY gears. You can bleed speed off by cutting all thrust and circling the landing area or performing a series of banking turns to get to the desired airspeed before final approach - but that's where having the right amount of lift comes in. For a 4T plane, aim for at least 6 lift minimum from your wings, control surfaces and horizontal tail - 8 would be much better to practice with.

One final thing to watch for with the starter gears is that they are very sensitive to vertical speed, which we don't have a readout for, hence the need to be gentle on approach, low speed and a very light plane. Come down too hard and they snap like the twigs with wheels they are. 

It also doesn't help that the mass of the first cockpit is huge in comparison to the rest of the parts, which means unless designed well, early planes all have an overwhelming desire to lawndart.

Essentially, early planes in KSP tend to hit some of the same problems early flight pioneers had - fragile but heavy parts, low thrust and little margin for error resulting in heavy but delicate machines. In many ways planes are much, much harder than rocketry. I'm no means an expert, just someone who has played around with light aircraft in the game quite a bit. 

[AngrybobH]

4 hours ago, Fraktal said:

Wheel brakes are nowhere near enough and make me veer to the side and tip over

I override the friction and spring/dampers. I set the steering to 0.4 (keeps stress low on steering gear, prevents veering) and the non-steering wheels to 2.5, spring is, of course, variable depending on weight but, dampers I always set to 1.9 (2.0 seems to make them explode). I set the rear brakes to 200%. And, always remember that S-turns slow you down (as stated above). The art of landing is not so much flying as it is staying just below the speed you need to fly but above the speed that you have control. Landing is the hardest airplane skill to master.

Edit: If your center of lift is far outside the center of mass nose dives are the way you will land unless you go for the ground at flight speed. Which the early landing gear will not handle.

Edited May 13, 2019 by AngrybobH

[Fraktal]

10 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I'm by no means a plane guy, but what keeps you from slowing down?

The starter wings have such little lift compared to the weight of the aircraft that the plane stalls out before reaching safe landing speed. And once again, mounting more is a no-go due to part count limits. Drogue chutes are suboptimal for landing a plane because you can't toggle them off if you find you're slowing down too quickly and airbrakes are not available until much later.

I don't have any problems landing with the retractable landing gear, mind you (I crash with them far more often from tipping over than from the landing gear being destroyed). It's just the fixed, rigid ones that are giving me trouble, hence I only use them for takeoff and rely on parachutes to come back down. Hell, I would stage them off entirely after takeoff if I could.

[Freshmeat]

@Fraktal: Have you tried making a taildragger? I am a poor plane pilot be most standards, but I find the early planes being much easier to land with two wide wheels in front and a small wheel in the rear. The other difference is that I do not use multiple science containers, while you do not get every single point of science, it is often enough to have just one.

[cantab]

Unless you're using FAR or you've encountered a game bug, you really should be able to make a small plane with a sensible landing speed. 160 m/s is ridiculous. Out-landings can still be tricky even at sensible speeds, but that's true to life.

Back on the general topic, yeah, looks like any decent overhaul of career will be reserved for a DLC, with Breaking Ground expected to add some towards that.

[Superfluous J]

On 5/7/2019 at 4:04 AM, Streetwind said:

Well, at least there's a mod for that, in the absence of stock changes

I know it's been like a week and a half (actually, almost exactly a week and a half. Within 2 hours. Anyway...) but this is not strictly true. Custom Barn Kit (assuming that's the mod you're referring to) does allow you to fiddle with what does what, but it can't change that craft size is dependent on the launch pad. I'd much prefer it depend on the VAB.

[Nich]

I have always enjoyed the career mode but it wouldn't hurt to see it improved.

My big problem is the difficulty selector.  Hard is not hard as much as it is grindy.  Hard should reduce upgrade costs of upgrades and make it difficult to make a profit on a mission.  I normally make 100-150% profit on each mission, I want 5-10% profit.  If I can hit that 10% profit I should be able to upgrade something in 2-3 missions.

Science has always been grindy.  Just let me automatically collect science over anything I fly over.  At the end of the mission I can transmit all or recover all.

Complete revamp of science tree.  No idea how to fix this as all parts are interconnected.  Perhaps give a launch engine with corresponding tanks and adapters.  Then next node gives sustainer with adaperters and next node is transfer engine with addapters. I do like how rocket, science, communications, and power are separate.  1 node should unlock all the docking ports.  I hate designing a station that gets scrapped every time I get a new docking standard.

I have also never liked how heavy fuel tanks are.  They undermine the importance of low TWR manouvors.  I have always felt engines should have been made unnaturally heavy so you can stack more fuel for better performance while keeping deltv limits playable

Edited May 17, 2019 by Nich

[Streetwind]

13 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I know it's been like a week and a half (actually, almost exactly a week and a half. Within 2 hours. Anyway...) but this is not strictly true. Custom Barn Kit (assuming that's the mod you're referring to) does allow you to fiddle with what does what, but it can't change that craft size is dependent on the launch pad. I'd much prefer it depend on the VAB.

Ah, then I misremembered. Sorry about that.

[Superfluous J]

3 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Ah, then I misremembered. Sorry about that.

No worries. The whole line of reasoning re-introduced me to a fun mod.

[Pthigrivi]

17 hours ago, Nich said:

My big problem is the difficulty selector.  Hard is not hard as much as it is grindy. 

I don’t disagree with you on this larger point, but you can reduce funds rewards and upgrade costs in custom settings. For myself I usually turn funds rewards down by 30% and funds penalties as low as they’ll go. I leave rep and science where they are cause I usually want more advanced missions and don’t mind maxing the tech tree before I send my first crewed mission to Duna. 

[kirmie44]

This is a copied and pasted post I put in a discussion of a similar topic in the development

Problems with science:

     In real life, there isn't the direct correlation seen in ksp between science as we see it in the game and the advancements made in technology. The relationship in real life is 90% of the time closer to finding new problems we have to solve. This is never a problem in ksp because we are given all the information about all the star, all the planets and everything in between. what is the point of bringing a barometer to a planet where you already know everything about its atmosphere? In the real world, we had tests to see if space was a vacuum, we had to run many tests to see if we could pressurize a capsule, and we had little idea about any of the stuff we know until we sent something there to test it (Think about our recent visit of Pluto).

Problems with technological advancements:

    The other problem with how career mode/science mode was made was almost systemic. I feel like what was implemented wasn't there original gameplan. I've come to this conclusion because of how little their parts actually fit into the tec tree idea they have implemented. The tec in the game was not designed to go into a tec tree. For the most part, the "tec level" is based on the size of a part and not actually how much knowledge was needed to build it. What I want to see is the implementation of iterative designs.

My solution:

     Basically, you start out with a lot of junk parts. These parts look bad, don't work well, probably fail in environments outside of Kerbin sea level, and for good measure, have a base fail chance. Along with taking missions to study your solar system (of which you know nothing about), you would also take missions from your science team to help them improve your parts. unlike the test missions given off now. These missions would give you credits towards upgrading our parts. Along with these missions to give you credits. there would be general things like allowing engines to work in a vacuum, water, restart, throttle, etc. (All things we had to learn, and are still learning, in the field). This science would be collected by doing things like the barometric test and temperature tests we see in KSP today.

A good way to think of this is the first capsule ou send to space should always be empty. It needs to be tested first. Without things like this, this game is missing out on some of the best parts of our job in exploring the world and beyond!