Worried about KSP magic tech, unrealistic orbital mechanics, and lol-explosions

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

This makes it unsuitable for mass-producing highly consumable items.  It's more for durable goods or things you don't need many of.

I thought it was self-evident that a space colony could not be based around a society of mass-production and consumption. It would have to be so frugal it would make a Zen monastery look like Club Hedonique. 

Your list had a lot of disposable stuff that simply would have to be replaced with durable counterparts. Straight razors and menstrual cups rather than razorblades and tampons, and those shared rather than personal.

Edited August 30, 2019 by Guest

[Xd the great]

3 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

Yeah, I thought about 3D printing and tried to list some essentials I doubt that can ever make.  But even if it can someday, the inputs to 3D printers are themselves the products of long, complex industrial processes, so 3D printing just slightly shifts the problem of needing a huge industrial base, it doesn't eliminate it.  Without that base, you'd still have to truck in resupplies of 3D printer ammo.  Plus, 3D printing is SLOW compared to conventional manufacturing techniques.  I think it's already about as fast as it can go, as the previous bit of material cools just enough to take the weight of the next bit without deforming.  This makes it unsuitable for mass-producing highly consumable items.  It's more for durable goods or things you don't need many of.

As to modifying ourselves, that's definitely going to go ahead full speed whether we like it or not.  Not just genes but implanted machinery of all sorts.  There are too many rich guys who want to live forever who will make this happen regardless of legality, and there are enough poor people who think it's cool to get the laws changed in hopes the tech trickles down to them eventually.  So eventually, we'll become the Borg.  Or even better, just pure machinery without all the messy organic luggage.  This whole thing would solve a lot of problems all along the way to completion so I see it as a desirable outcome in general.

I personally have no desire to live forever.  Or even more than my 3 score and 10, if that long.  I didn't ask to be here and in general, life sucks for the vast bulk of people the vast bulk of the time, so I see no reason to hang around any longer than necessary.  I've flatlined a few times and it's not so bad, so I don't fear the darkness.  But that's just me.   If somebody else wants to turn us into the Borg, and that ends up making things suck a lot less for a lot more people, go for it  

 

Yeah, this is something we need more info about.

My own thinking about the necessity of self-sufficiency for life support is that otherwise, it's micromanagement Hell.  There is no middle ground.  Either you don't have to worry about it at all (in which case, the whole system is pointless overhead), or you have to worry about it too much, at the expense of doing basically anything else.  That has always been my personal experience with using all the LS mods (except Kerbalism) for many years, which is why I've recently decided the whole thing is counterproductive and have stopped using LS.  I gave it a VERY good and thorough evaluation and I believe my conclusions are inescapable  

The only real variable that matters for a life support mechanic is how frequently you have to interact with it (by whatever means) to prevent disaster.  If disasters can't ever occur, then LS is a complete waste of time, effort, and CPU cycles.  Might as well not have it and get better FPS.  So, for this discussion, we assume Kerbals will die unless the player makes periodic inputs to the LS system.  But the more often the player has to make such inputs, the more the system is just annoying micromanagement, the less it's an interesting game mechanic, and the less other things the player can do in the limited interval of realtime the player has to indulge in KSP.  And no matter what timescale you set the periodic inputs on, it will ALWAYS be too often at some point in the game, and so infrequent at others as to be utterly pointless.

Consider this situation...  You have configured your LS system so it only needs input once per game year.  But you've got a ship that will be 20 years on passage to some distant location, and that's really all you care about right now.  No other pressing business, so you just want to warp ahead 20 years to play the arrival of this ship.  But you can't.  You can warp ahead no more than 1 year at a time, fiddle with LS somewhere, repeat.  20 times minimum during the passage.  More if you have several colonies/bases/long-term ships and their intervals of needing tweaking aren't in sync (which they probably won't be).  So maybe 50-60 such interruptions during the trip.  Each time you have to fiddle with LS, you have to go to 1:1 time, switch to the colony/base/ship that needs tweaking, and do what needs doing (which might involve flying a whole inter-moon trip to truck in some supplies from elsewhere).  So lots of real time goes by without much game time elapsing, meaning your 20-year ship makes very little progress.  This is similar to, but WAY worse, than having to deal with all the spam messages from deployed science in BG. 

The only way to avoid this problem is to increase the LS tweaking interval to the point that it never interrupts anything, which is the same as saying everything is self-sufficient, which makes the whole LS system a total waste.  Which is why life support SHOULD NEVER BE STOCK (although it appears I've lost that argument).

So getting back to orbital shipyards.....

Obviously, something in orbit can't sponge up any resource other than sunlight.  Everything else it needs has to trucked in.  But (in most mods where you have more resources than just Ore), the same also goes for surface bases/colonies.  You NEVER have all the resources you need right under the colony so you ALWAYS have to truck in the rest from elsewhere.  Unless this process is automated (some mods support this to varying degrees), you have to take time out from your warping to do this trucking.

So it seems to me that the least detrimentally impactful way to do any of this is to automate it all.  Making a colony self-sufficient for LS means putting it where it can get all the resources it needs.  If not all those resources are available on-site, add modules to the colony that automate harvesting and transporting the remaining resources.  If you have that sort of system, then it should be no problem extending it to orbital colonies.  They just need more resource-acquisition modules, or be near a surface colony that has such modules, plus another to export resources to the orbital station.

1 way might be to add the ability to make kerbals go into cryo sleep automatically if they run out of Snacks. So, your robots work, you can still switch there and gather resources. But if you want them to work on a new colonizer craft, you need to wake them up with Snacks (like me), this way, your kerbals essentially become useless without essential Snacks,but they won't need micromanagement. 

[KerikBalm]

Regarding 3d printing, it will never be able to make things like high performance turbine blades that need to be *single crystal*.

It could make Ikea furniture, but not superconducting coils for a fusion reactor, of lenses for a laser like in an ICF drive, etc.

But the colony operation falls under speculative engineering, not science, I'm much less perturbed by that... plus I can ignore colonies except for fuel production (ok I'll use 1 vehicle producing colony per star system, once I've gone interstellar)

[nikokespprfan]

22 hours ago, nejc said:

That just replaces one unobtainium - low pressure metallic hydrogen - with another - some material that can support planetary scale pressure whilst being lightweight. So still speculative science.

16 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

--Pressure calculations --

11 hours ago, sh1pman said:

It’s clearly more realistic than, say, Mystery Goo, and I’ve never seen anyone having problems with that substance being in KSP. 

Aha, Eureka!

The walls of the metallic hydrogen tanks are made of frozen Mystery Goo, the only unobtainium in known to be in game.

_____

In all seriousness, when talking in principles, saying speculative engineering not speculative science is kinda already rooted in the goal of KSP: a game in which you fly absurd creations under realistic physics. This makes it pretty convincing as a good judgement for any nearfuture drives/tech. I also feel kinda convinced by @Dragon01s' argument that KSP should avoid spreading misconceptions. However I'm at that nasty stage where I don't want to let go of my ambivalence towards metallic hydrogen rockets just yet. (That is, you won, but I feel resistant). Mainly this is because there is the principle of this criterion, and then there is the theory of game development (in which gateway tech might be necessary), and the then there is the practice of actually experiencing the tech progression as a player. So really what would be a constructive thing here is: are there other "speculative engineering but sound science"-drives that we can think of that could take its place. Given all the reasons why a metH-drive might be convenient for the dev's, what would be the more scientifically-sound, better researched alternative.

It is a running theme of KSP to find the balance between teaching science and keeping the ultra-complexities out of it. I don't fundamentally think that it's wrong to take some liberties on either side of that tightrope sometimes..... although the above principle is a very useful one.

______

11 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

So, for this discussion, we assume Kerbals will die unless the player makes periodic inputs to the LS system.

Now that the rammifications of this assumption are well understood, I'm going to do the very mathematical leap of trowing away this assumption, and changing perspective/context of the discussion. My preferred design of life support (no played experience though) thinks about the player not in terms of periodic imputs that the player has to do to every craft with kerbals, which indeed becomes a logistic nightmare that no-one wants to play when you even think about it. But rather it sees it as a part of the game loop, a part of the challenge of getting something done.

So what tends to be the game loop for a given mission: build a rocket, test the rocket, fly the rocket, accomplish your goal. You could make it so that part of the game loop of establishing a colony is to make it self sufficient, and then once it is it never needs player input anymore. The player has now completed its objective to establish a colony, and it can go about it's business.

An analogy is this. Say, in KSP2, you could have airship colonies or bases on gas giants, or on venus/eve-like planets. While you are setting up the base, you would require the player to make the base floatable. If the player cannot do that, he will fail, that's just part of the challenge. However, if the player succeeds, would you want to simulate the floating stability of that colony for the rest of game time, and require the player to keep fixing any issues that might pop up? NO, just NO. You'd want to accept it was stable, flag something in the code, and tell the player he was ready to move on. Anytime the player comes back, the colony will be there, unadorned, hanging in the sky. No periodic input, but useful as part of the game loop of establishing an air colony.

Another anology could potentially be made to leaving space stations be when they are in a suborbital trajectory. I mean, that will fail, you have to get it into a stable orbit before you can look away, that is just part of the challenge. But once you do, the game will not simulate all the microforces that real spacecraft experience, that tug them out of orbit (n-body rammifications, atmo-drag well "out" of the atmosphere, etc.). Those phenomena are approximated away. You space station will now be in a stable orbit forever. (Now, all that's barring the obvious differences that orbital mechanics is more important to the essence of KSP than LS, and that this way of stabilising craft forever was not intentionally for this but instead a result of just using simplified orbital mechanics, however the way the gameplay works out is what I want to demonstrate here)

Now I know your opinion on colonies when it comes to self-sufficiently (which is vital to the difference between our assumptions), but colonies have much lower burden of being utterly realistic when compared to, say, near-future engines. You have some liberty, especially after the 3D printing part of the discussion. Besides, when it comes to the "you never have all things you need", I would be very much in favor of the kind automation you mention. Have the player fly a transport mission from a colony to another once, and have the ability to setup automated repetitions of that mission. That would be a very factorio-style automation that makes you (have the ability to) play on a very different scale once you get to a certain point. These transport missions could then be a part of your goal as player to stabilise a colony before absolutely neglecting them for gameplay reasons.
 

Edited August 30, 2019 by nikokespprfan

[Guest]

As far as gateway tech goes, they should just expand the NTR lineup. The stock NERVA is 60s tech, even back then, more efficient proposals such as DUMBO were made, but ended up dismissed for budget reasons (basically, DUMBO couldn't use NERVA nozzle, and they wanted to reuse hardware really badly). Nertea's Kerbal Atomics does that very nicely. You get a number of realistic, high performance nuclear engines, which do not require magic tech at all (even the gas cores are real science, the USSR did a lot of research on them).

Also, this would tie into the educational role. Anything that puts a stake into the "nuclear=bad" myth is a good idea. If people get used to NTRs being a vital part of KSP gameplay, they might warm up to them flying IRL.

[KerikBalm]

Yea, Metallic hydrogen engine cooled by LH2 ~ project timberwind NTR/pebble bed NTR

Metallic hydrogen engine cooled with water ~ LOX augmented LANTR NTR

There are other options for engines that perform like that...

[Geschosskopf]

10 hours ago, Xd the great said:

1 way might be to add the ability to make kerbals go into cryo sleep automatically if they run out of Snacks. So, your robots work, you can still switch there and gather resources. But if you want them to work on a new colonizer craft, you need to wake them up with Snacks (like me), this way, your kerbals essentially become useless without essential Snacks,but they won't need micromanagement. 

But this removes the consequences.  If there are no consequences, there's no point in having the system.  Really, there is no function difference in your method here and not having LS at all.  You could fake this same system by flying an empty ship to the station, for all the impact it has on the player.

Besides, it requires slavery.  Nobody's going to volunteer for a job where you're away from home for decades, most of which you spend starved into a coma , and you only get paid for the brief intervals you're awake  

 

7 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

But the colony operation falls under speculative engineering, not science, I'm much less perturbed by that... plus I can ignore colonies except for fuel production (ok I'll use 1 vehicle producing colony per star system, once I've gone interstellar)

Just to be devil's advocate, orbital mechanics rely on gravity.  But technically, gravity is speculative science because we really don't know how it works.  We have several ideas. from relativity to dark matter to MoND but can't prove any of them, or explain why one's a better fit in than the other in some situations, but vice versa in others.  Thus, every time you fly a conventional rocket, you're dabbling in speculative science  

 

5 hours ago, nikokespprfan said:

Now that the rammifications of this assumption are well understood, I'm going to do the very mathematical leap of trowing away this assumption, and changing perspective/context of the discussion. My preferred design of life support (no played experience though) thinks about the player not in terms of periodic imputs that the player has to do to every craft with kerbals, which indeed becomes a logistic nightmare that no-one wants to play when you even think about it. But rather it sees it as a part of the game loop, a part of the challenge of getting something done.

This is the only way I can see to make it work.  To accomplish a certain task, you have to satisfy a certain set of requirements.  Once those conditions are met, the job is complete and stays that way, no further attention required.

In the context of setting up a colony, I can imagine the requirements being some combination of modules that provide for the colonists needs.  The exact combination depends on where you put the colony, which determines the local gravity, atmosphere, and available resources.  The less hospitable the location, the more modules you need to maintain the environment and gather needed resources.  Each module requires crew, which add to the resource demands, etc., just to keep everybody alive, let alone have surplus to build ships or even just produce fuel.  Thus, some places will just be too hostile, at least initially.  But I expect modules to improve with your tech so eventually you might be able to colonize that location.

But anyway, you design all this (probably needing a spreadsheet) and decide what modules you need.  Then you send them there.  Once all are in place, boom, it's a done deal requiring no micromanagment.  The Kerbals have all they need and are employed in public works growing the food, recycling the sewage, patching leaking domes, mining and trucking resources, etc.  You don't have to personally control anybody to make things happen.  But if you picked a good location, the population can grow, which will throw things out of balance until you increase your infrastructure (add more modules).

 

5 hours ago, nikokespprfan said:

Now I know your opinion on colonies when it comes to self-sufficiently....

I'm totally willing to accept self-sufficient colonies in the game.  I WANT IT because it's fun to build space empires, even though I know it's never going to happen in real life.  I only mentioned the lack of realism inherent in self-sufficient colonies as a counterpoint to the folks worried about fancy-shmancy spce drives.  If you accept the colonies (which I do, PROVIDED there's no micromanagement of LS), then you also have to accept whatever magic carpet got all that stuff out there.  Because I want the colonies, I'm not at all worried about space drives  

[Guest]

You know my stance on the announced engines.

I will qualify it with this: if it does turn out that they’re as unbalancing as the OP fears, then I will be disappointed. However this isn’t Star Theory’s first rodeo, so until shown otherwise I’m proceeding from the assumption that they know what they’re doing and will be able to avoid that pitfall.

[chaos_forge]

Another option for an even more advanced alternative to metallic hydrogen is antimatter rockets. At least we know for sure that antimatter exists.

15 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

My own thinking about the necessity of self-sufficiency for life support is that otherwise, it's micromanagement Hell.  There is no middle ground.  Either you don't have to worry about it at all (in which case, the whole system is pointless overhead), or you have to worry about it too much, at the expense of doing basically anything else.  That has always been my personal experience with using all the LS mods (except Kerbalism) for many years, which is why I've recently decided the whole thing is counterproductive and have stopped using LS.  I gave it a VERY good and thorough evaluation and I believe my conclusions are inescapable

So in my opinion, the purpose of life support as a mechanic is twofold:

1) Adding engineering complexity to ships. You can't just slap a crew capsule on top of your 20-year-trip ship, you have to add enough crew modules to support the crew for that amount of time.

2) Adding additional risk/adding urgency to rescue missions. If the Mun lander you designed only has supplies for a few days, that means if you get stranded, you can't just leave the kerbals there and say "I'll go rescue them eventually," you have to rescue them NOW.

I do agree that not having self-sufficient colonies would be a management nightmare, but I think life support makes sense as a game mechanic for ships.

[dave1904]

I get where you are coming and for me personally I do not care how the game is balanced as long as its better performing and more modifiable. Stock KSP1 is just as much fiction as star wars. Lets wait and see anyway. Nothing a mod cannot "fix"

[linuxgurugamer]

5 hours ago, chaos_forge said:

Another option for an even more advanced alternative to metallic hydrogen is antimatter rockets. At least we know for sure that antimatter exist

We do know that metallic hydrogen exists, but its (so far) been made with supercooled,high pressure tools, and melts at very low temperatures

[Incarnation of Chaos]

2 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

We do know that metallic hydrogen exists, but its (so far) been made with supercooled,high pressure tools, and melts at very low temperatures

The biggest issue is what we don't know; all experiments so far that are thought to have produced Metallic Hydrogen (Some may not have) did not produce metastable Metallic Hydrogen as you would need for a rocket engine. That's the issue; we know Metallic Hydrogen is a real thing but the metastable form hasn't been proven.

[linuxgurugamer]

1 minute ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

The biggest issue is what we don't know; all experiments so far that are thought to have produced Metallic Hydrogen (Some may not have) did not produce metastable Metallic Hydrogen as you would need for a rocket engine. That's the issue; we know Metallic Hydrogen is a real thing but the metastable form hasn't been proven.

Well, it IS a game, and while we may not have it right now (we also don't have antimatter), it is entirely probable that we will have it in the next 50 years or so

[chaos_forge]

5 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

We do know that metallic hydrogen exists, but its (so far) been made with supercooled,high pressure tools, and melts at very low temperatures

We know it exists, but we don't know if it's metastable at low pressures, which is the important part for rocketry. So what I meant is we don't know for sure that metastable metallic hydrogen exists. And given how vanishingly rare it is for states of matter that have a significantly higher binding energy than the ground state to be metastable, the default assumption should be that it is not. Which means until we have conclusive proof that metallic hydrogen is metastable, we should assume it is not.

Edited August 31, 2019 by chaos_forge

[linuxgurugamer]

54 minutes ago, chaos_forge said:

We know it exists, but we don't know if it's metastable at low pressures, which is the important part for rocketry. So what I meant is we don't know for sure that metastable metallic hydrogen exists. And given how vanishingly rare it is for states of matter that have a significantly higher binding energy than the ground state to be metastable, the default assumption should be that it is not. Which means until we have conclusive proof that metallic hydrogen is metastable, we should assume it is not.

It's a game, not reality.  Not everything is perfect, and frankly, rockets are not build and launched in a day.  If you are concerned about reality, then KSP is not the game for you.  If they use a new technology which may or may not exist in real life, then that's the handwaving which every game has.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

4 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Well, it IS a game, and while we may not have it right now (we also don't have antimatter), it is entirely probable that we will have it in the next 50 years or so

But that's the thing; we have created antimatter and examined it's properties. We know that charged forms of antimatter could be stored using magnetic confinement; we know how much energy it releases etc. We've only recently created Metallic Hydrogen; even these experiments are disputed though. And even with these experiments; metastable forms weren't formed. So while Metallic Hydrogen exists; the ironic part is that we have a far better idea of how to use Antimatter than it.

Which is why i'm really curious why it was implemented; KSP has never been about hard realism for sure but it's always had accurate underpinnings when it came down to the basic physics. Metallic Hydrogen isn't something that really falls within that sphere; we haven't found enough data to really explain it accurately.

[chaos_forge]

1 hour ago, linuxgurugamer said:

It's a game, not reality.  Not everything is perfect, and frankly, rockets are not build and launched in a day.  If you are concerned about reality, then KSP is not the game for you.  If they use a new technology which may or may not exist in real life, then that's the handwaving which every game has.

I find "it's a game" to be a pretty weak excuse, honestly. Yes, no game is 100% realistic. But at the same time, no game is 100% detached from reality either (otherwise you would just have stuff randomly happening for no reason). Realism isn't a yes/no binary, but a spectrum, or a sliding scale. So the question isn't "is it realistic?," but "where do you draw the line?" And as has been stated earlier in this thread, many of us find "speculative engineering, but no speculative science" to be a reasonable place to draw the line.

Furthermore, I would claim this is where the KSP and KSP2 devs themselves are attempting to draw the line. The devs are comfortable abstracting away the finnicky engineering concerns that the average player would not want to deal with, such as tank ullage, engine ignition, or throttle depth, but the engines are still based on well-understood scientific principles and concepts. Additionally, the speculative engines shown in the trailer (with the obvious exception of metallic hydrogen, of course), such as MPD thrusters, Orion drives, or ICF drives are all based on well-established scientific principles. These are all engines that we know for sure can be built in real life. They may not operate as efficiently as they do in the game, or they may have engineering challenges that make them not worth actually using, but they can be built, and would operate according to scientific principles that we already understand today.

I also think it's worth pointing out that the KSP2 dev who's been doing interviews said in at least one of the interviews something along the lines of "oh, we read a paper saying metallic hydrogen exists, so we feel confident including it in the game." This, combined with other instances of devs failing to understand the science (such as not knowing that binary systems can't be modeled accurately by the SOI approximation), leads me to believe that their decision to include metallic hydrogen engines does not stem from a conscious choice to handwave the science in favor of gameplay, but rather from a misunderstanding of the science itself. And that is, ultimately, the most concerning aspect. I honestly would be much more okay with it if the devs understood the science and were choosing to ignore it than the current situation, in which it seems the devs do not actually understand the science.

Edited August 31, 2019 by chaos_forge

[Guest]

1 hour ago, chaos_forge said:

I honestly would be much more okay with it if the devs understood the science and were choosing to ignore it than the current situation, in which it seems the devs do not actually understand the science.

Why is it so concerning that the devs don't actually understand the science? 

[Incarnation of Chaos]

50 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:

Why is it so concerning that the devs don't actually understand the science? 

Aside from the fact KSP is a game where the core gameplay literally is science (Orbits, Delta-V, etc.); it would also heavily imply they added it because of "Cool factor" rather than a decent evaulation of what it would mean for gameplay/balance etc. Which means that the rest of development may fall prey to feature creep; since there's always going to be some ultra-cool tech on the horizon.

[KerikBalm]

1 hour ago, Brikoleur said:

Why is it so concerning that the devs don't actually understand the science? 

Because we aren't here to play EVE online/Elite/No mans sky etc

[Guest]

38 minutes ago, Incarnation of Chaos said:

Which means that the rest of development may fall prey to feature creep; since there's always going to be some ultra-cool tech on the horizon.

This has nothing to do with understanding science, what you are describing here is bad game design and one thing that we know for sure is that ST has a lot of experience in game design not being this their first game.

 

On the topic I find that "metallic hydrogen is metastable at low pressure in the Kerbal universe" is by far the smallest suspension of disbelief in KSP, also as Nate Simpson pointed out in the Gamescom interview this is not an educational software, the whole "learning orbital mechanics and history of rocket science" part of it is a byproduct of the game being a good one.

 

[KerikBalm]

7 minutes ago, Master39 said:

On the topic I find that "metallic hydrogen is metastable at low pressure in the Kerbal universe" is by far the smallest suspension of disbelief in KSP

What are the largest ones then for KSP? Particularly with respect to the space flight (not counting Kerbal society and biology)... the small scale?

The reliability and restartability of engines?

These don't seem worse than an engine that runs on unobtanium.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

These don't seem worse than an engine that runs on unobtanium.

The fact that you can go in a 50+ years mission on a space chair is way worse to me.

The small scale is another one.

I understand point but the small text in the description of a family of engines is not at all a big problem, the engine's performance and balance and how it affect the gameplay could probably be.

[Superfluous J]

This entire conversation is why KSP(1) only had liquid fuel and oxidizer.

If they just called it Liquid Kerbolide no one would have an issue with its properties.

Edited September 2, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[KerikBalm]

I would....

We know what every other engine is supposed to be, but not that.

Maybe I'll just pretend its a pebble bed NTR...