MechJeb in Stock KSP2? [Split from another thread]

[SciMan]

I've been playing KSP a LOOONG time. Since 0.13.3 in fact, which is right after they added Minmus.

So for me, flying to orbit for the 1000th time on a vehicle I've designed 50 times before, can get a little tedious.

That's why I have MechJeb. Not to take the pilot out of the equation, but to ensure that I don't lose my mind from boredom. Or with low TWR craft, to ensure that I don't lose a mission because I took my attention off the game for 5 minutes to watch a video while my burn finishes.

Every time I come back to KSP, I make sure I can still pilot a craft to orbit, and to a Mun landing. I've never let MechJeb fully control the docking a single time (I don't trust it to not use all my monopropellant), instead I set the target docking port as target, set the control point to the docking port I want to use on what I'm flying, then tell MechJeb to hold those two docking ports aligned by using the SmartSAS "Par - " mode, which even lets me set what rotation I want between those two docking ports (if any) and then that frees me up to better control the translational RCS (which I still control by IJKLHN in "normal" mode, the "docking mode" controls confuse me).

In a game where you're going to be flying the same mission with different payloads but mostly the same delivery system a lot (because you're building a colony), the "supply route" system won't work for that.

That's where stock MechJeb comes in.

Besides, once you've launched a rocket twice (once with it's maximum payload and once with it empty), the design is known to work for payloads within a certain range of sizes and masses (depending on the fairing).

Babysitting a rocket all the way to orbit gets boring after a while. I don't play KSP because I want to be a rocket "driver". I play KSP because I want to be a rocket "builder" and "commander".

For reference, the "Driver" in a tank is responsible for not getting it stuck. The "Commander" is the one who's actually making the decisions about where to go and how to get there. When I'm using MechJeb to control a rocket I designed, I'm not a driver, I'm a commander.

 

Oh and MechJeb's landing autopilot is GREAT when it works. Sometimes it's actually a bad idea to just "set the base as target". Because if you're not careful, you'll land your new module RIGHT ON TOP of the existing base! It's that precise, assuming your landing systems have been designed well enough (it expects a lander TWR of minimum 1.5 roughly, or at least that's what seems to start working good for me). If it's not working right, chances are there's a bug in it or you didn't set something up right. It expects the control point to be pointed UP, not Horizontal, and the faster your craft can respond to steering inputs, the better, up to a point (beyond which it no longer makes any improvements, but doesn't cause issues).

[Bej Kerman]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

2) There are also some tasks like precision landing re-usable first stages and boosters back at KSC or on a drone ship that are legitimately effing difficult.

Same for anything else in KSP including orbital mechanics, difference is that people haven't been practising barge landings in KSP since 2011. If you practice as much as you do orbital manoeuvres, then it'll become easier. You could apply the 'it's effing difficult' argument to anything and claim that it should have an accompanying autopilot module, but that just culls away the challenge and fun of doing such things. You could theoretically argue that the entirety of MechJeb should be in KSP because everything is effing difficult. Overall, if you find barge landings difficult, good because you'll have a lot of fun landing boosters until you get really good at barge landings. It could be a part of the auto-milkrun system, but landing boosters is way more fun than shipping resources to a colony.

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

2) If you have to drive your rover for hours, maybe you should have figured out how to land it a little closer to its target!

This ties into MechJeb discouraging actually getting good at flying. The point of KSP is, as I've said may times over, to develop an intuition for spaceflight, and saying that MechJeb should be in the game because booster landings are difficult / driving rovers is boring / flying is boring and difficult is not a case of automation, it's a case of getting better at these things. Booster landings difficult? Practice. Good thing about KSP is that Kerbin has no laws so you could aim for a larger continent instead of aiming for a tiny barge - unless you like that challenge. Driving rovers is boring? Get better at precision landings. Flying boring and difficult? Set challenges for yourself and push the capabilities of your rockets. Full automation has become a go-to subject for those who are either getting bored of the core gameplay (in which case you're not doing enough exciting things, ), or frustrated with having to figure out their landing/maneuvering skills. The solution isn't MechJeb, it's what you do with the game. The only issue is repeated milk runs that subject you to the same thing over and over again, and that's been fixed leaving more time for fun and challenging things like booster landings and precision landings.

[AlamoVampire]

5 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

The best thing is that there's no autopilot; newbies can't sidestep having to develop an intuition for spaceflight in order to be good at flying. Mechjeb has no place in a game where to objective is to get good at flying through space without having to use training wheels

I strongly staunchly disagree. I am going to use myself as an example to demonstrate why its absolutely a must have mod for some and why it absolutely be made stock (also gonna say it now: kerbal engineer got partially made stock when some of what it offers became stock, so precedent and all). 
There are players who cannot learn how to do certain things like rendezvous and docking by reading a wiki article or a thread here or even watching countless youtube videos. I am one such player. I watched Scott Manley, Das Valdez and countless others do countless dockings. I read absolutely everything I could find. I considered myself educated enough to try. I failed. Over and over. Again and again. No matter how hard I tried I never could nail it. Id either come in way too hot and careen by or I would get painfully close and run out of monoprop. No matter what I did, no matter how many hours Id spend trying, Id fail. Know why? For all the text I could read or videos I could watch they all missed something so basic it was always ignored. How does MY ship perform! 
 

Mechjeb was an absolute godsend to me. I strapped that lil bugger onto my ship and let autopilot guide me. I would watch as it would take MY SHIP and show me how it flew. I watched and I learned as it made my ships waltz gracefully (usually lol) to each other. 
 

If not for mechjeb I would have quit KSP before the end of 2013. Do not, I beg you denigrate a mod that rightfully deserves to be stock simply because of your sentiments in the quoted portion above. 
 

I want to leave you now with a few lines from Star Trek The Next Generation, Season 2 Episode 9 The Measure of a Man. I leave you this quote as it frankly aptly puts my point into perspective.

“DATA: Reduced to the mere facts of the events. The substance, the flavour of the moment, could be lost. Take games of chance. 
MADDOX: Games of chance? 
DATA: Yes, I had read and absorbed every treatise and textbook on the subject, and felt myself well prepared for the experience. Yet, when I finally played poker, I discovered that the reality bore little resemblance to the rules.”

Commander Maddox wanted to try to duplicate Data and could not be certain the process would not harm Data. This exchange occurred in Datas quarters. I use this quote to say: the threads and videos on docking bore little resemblance to the reality of docking. It is not a matter of “get good.” 
 

Also, just because it needs be said: if kerbal engineer can be made stock (some of its functions are stock now) and there are players who hate the mod and think that it has no place in ksp (im in that camp but not so far as to try to decry it becoming stock) then why not mechjeb?

my opinion, heres a bowl of salt for disagreeing positions. 
 

160707292021

im not even going to touch on the benefits of automation

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fixed a word

Edited July 29, 2021 by AlamoVampire

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

So for me, flying to orbit for the 1000th time on a vehicle I've designed 50 times before, can get a little tedious.

That's why I have MechJeb. Not to take the pilot out of the equation, but to ensure that I don't lose my mind from boredom. Or with low TWR craft, to ensure that I don't lose a mission because I took my attention off the game for 5 minutes to watch a video while my burn finishes.

Some find that tedious, while others like me find it meditative, but either way  I don't think anybody here is disparaging the use of MechJeb by the former sort of player, especially by very experienced players operating beyond or outside of the scope of the normal career mode. If  OTOH you find yourself doing that type of repetitive grind as a highly experienced player just to get through career mode, then perhaps you have not played career  recently or else have suffered from a failure of imagination about how to make it more interesting for yourself. In the career game I'm just about done with now, my overarching goal was to do as many different exploration things as quickly as I could, and only to accept contracts that meshed readily with those goals, avoiding repetition as much as possible.  Even with "hard" rates of science/rep/money returns, there were only a handful of specific missions I felt I had to fly repeatedly, which were mostly Kerbal rescue contracts to get more crew.  I also did a number of passenger, repair, and ore contracts several times because they were so lucrative, but other than that I just explored away and took contracts only as they fit readily into that plan. In the process, I did a bunch of things I had never done before in sandbox, like redirect/mine asteroids, design a Grand Tour-capable ISRU platform, and create a prop-driven Eve lifter.  It was way more grindy than that back in  around 1.2x when I last played through career.

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

Every time I come back to KSP, I make sure I can still pilot a craft to orbit, and to a Mun landing. I've never let MechJeb fully control the docking a single time (I don't trust it to not use all my monopropellant), instead I set the target docking port as target, set the control point to the docking port I want to use on what I'm flying, then tell MechJeb to hold those two docking ports aligned by using the SmartSAS "Par - " mode, which even lets me set what rotation I want between those two docking ports (if any) and then that frees me up to better control the translational RCS (which I still control by IJKLHN in "normal" mode, the "docking mode" controls confuse me).

"Docking mode" is perhaps the most useless feature in the entire game, but TBH from your description I think I'd find setting up a docking in MechJeb more tedious than just doing it manually. All you need to do once you're within a couple hundred meters is target/point the two ships at each other and then use the RCS controls on one of them to keep the target and prograde markers aligned and make sure the closing speed isn't too fast at the end. I generally use time warp during that process as well, so that the whole thing from 300m out to docked takes me perhaps 2 minutes on a bad day. I really don't see what's particularly tedious about that.

1 hour ago, SciMan said:

In a game where you're going to be flying the same mission with different payloads but mostly the same delivery system a lot (because you're building a colony), the "supply route" system won't work for that.

That's where stock MechJeb comes in.

Besides, once you've launched a rocket twice (once with it's maximum payload and once with it empty), the design is known to work for payloads within a certain range of sizes and masses (depending on the fairing).

Babysitting a rocket all the way to orbit gets boring after a while. I don't play KSP because I want to be a rocket "driver". I play KSP because I want to be a rocket "builder" and "commander".

For reference, the "Driver" in a tank is responsible for not getting it stuck. The "Commander" is the one who's actually making the decisions about where to go and how to get there. When I'm using MechJeb to control a rocket I designed, I'm not a driver, I'm a commander.

With due respect, the first step to becoming a tank commander IRL is learning how to drive a tank.

 

 

31 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

I strongly staunchly disagree. I am going to use myself as an example to demonstrate why its absolutely a must have mod for some and why it absolutely be made stock (also gonna say it now: kerbal engineer got partially made stock when some of what it offers became stock, so precedent and all). 
There are players who cannot learn how to do certain things like rendezvous and docking by reading a wiki article or a thread here or even watching countless youtube videos. I am one such player. I watched Scott Manley, Das Valdez and countless others do countless dockings. I read absolutely everything I could find. I considered myself educated enough to try. I failed. Over and over. Again and again. No matter how hard I tried I never could nail it. Id either come in way too hot and careen by or I would get painfully close and run out of monoprop. No matter what I did, no matter how many hours Id spend trying, Id fail. Know why? For all the text I could read or videos I could watch they all missed something so basic it was always ignored. How does MY ship perform! 
 

Mechjeb was an absolute godsend to me. I strapped that lil bugger onto my ship and let autopilot guide me. I would watch as it would take MY SHIP and show me how it flew. I watched and I learned as it made my ships waltz gracefully (usually lol) to each other. 
 

If not for mechjeb I would have quit KSP before the end of 2013. Do not, I beg you denigrate a mod that rightfully deserves to be stock simply because of your sentiments in the quoted portion above. 
 

I don't have a problem with it if they create a "training wheels"  difficulty mode for people like you to get through career.  However  what I don't want  is for them to nerf the difficulty of the whole game  just to accommodate you, because then I would find it boring.

Edited July 29, 2021 by herbal space program

[AlamoVampire]

29 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

I don't have a problem with it if they create a "training wheels"  difficulty mode for people like you to get through career.  However  I don't want them nerfing the difficulty of the whole game either just to accommodate you, because then I would find it boring.

Disagree. Full stop. I dont want mechjeb nerfed because you think it should be because anything beyond that bores you. (Just turning your sentiment on its head to set up a point, but my real thought is less severe, clip out the snarky way i wrote it as a set up and my view is: i dont want it nerfed because some find Mechjeb useless. The snarky version is for setup purposes only) Our points of view of I want it/I dont want it (you fall more into not wanting it imho) can all too quickly get flash boiled into over heated. I disagree with the anti mechjeb camp. I find it vital, they and by extension you do not. All any of these conversations end up doing is going in circles and no one walks away happy. Mechjeb is something we never will as a playerbase will reach a 100% agreement. So I offer this: KSP2 gets full on mechjeb or its functions as stock. It like commnet gets a toggle. Everyone wins.

164407292021

I do not play career as it fails to give me a reason to invest in it. Maybe career in ksp2 will.

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Edited July 29, 2021 by AlamoVampire

[herbal space program]

4 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

Disagree. Full stop. I dont want mechjeb nerfed because you think it should be because anything beyond that bores you. (Just turning your sentiment on its head to set up a point, but my real thought is less severe, clip out the snarky way i wrote it as a set up and my view is: i dont want it nerfed because some find Mechjeb useless. The snarky version is for setup purposes only) Our points of view of I want it/I dont want it (you fall more into not wanting it imho) can all too quickly get flash boiled into over heated. I disagree with the anti mechjeb camp. I find it vital, they and by extension you do not. All any of these conversations end up doing is going in circles and no one walks away happy. Mechjeb is something we never will as a playerbase will reach a 100% agreement. So I offer this: KSP2 gets full on mechjeb or its functions as stock. It like commnet gets a toggle. Everyone wins.

164407292021

In sandbox, it can be whatever you want.  In career however, it has to be part of some kind of "extra easy" difficulty mode if you want everything enabled immediately.  If you can't or won't learn some of the core skills of the game, then you have to pay some kind of prestige penalty for that.

Edited July 29, 2021 by herbal space program

[shdwlrd]

@Bej Kerman how come you always claim that MJ doesn't encourage someone to learn eventhough there are players who learned to play KSP because of MJ? Why do you consistently ignore that fact? I learned the basics of orbital mechanics because of MJ. I learned the proper way to do gravity turns because of MJ. I learned how TWR, DV, and mass are related because of MJ. I learned how to build rockets properly because of MJ.

You keep suggesting that MJ is worthless and never should be used. But there are long-term players that swear by MJ. You seem to think because someone uses MJ regularly means that they don't know what they are doing. I personally can tell you how wrong you are. You believe that a player should never walk away while playing KSP or take their hands off the keyboard or controller. I believe that it's the players game and they can do whatever they want. 

[Stratennotblitz]

4 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Without backseat moderating I'd just like to say I think we can all express our opinions without being rude or disparaging others' playstyles. We're all just here to have fun. 

I still use Mech Jeb but I use it almost entirely for information purposes. There are some really great tools around landing and aerobrake prediction like trajectory factoring drag and estimated landing distance to target that I find absolutely vital. Better Burn Time also has some really important tools for docking approaches and managing suicide burns that I desperately hope make it into KSP2. These kind of things as well as the basic stock piloting and maneuver node abilities in KSP1 should really be available to the player from the first launch. 

Now, while I don't use autoland or maneuver execution or any of that because I personally like doing them manually I do recognize the value for a couple of reasons:

1) KSP2 promises to be a lot more expansive and much more demanding in terms of logistics, deliveries, and infrastructure building, and for anyone who's spent time delivering a starter base to Minmus or Duna you know just how much time it takes. Intercept has already suggested that there will be automated milk-runs, which is nice, but I doubt they're going to let you auto-deliver your first several modules when you're getting set up. I actually agree with the 'purists' that precision landing like this is an important skill that players should learn manually, but after the 10th, 20th, and 30th module drop I wouldn't blame players for wanting to have an option to let Jeb take the wheel to speed things up.

2) There are also some tasks like precision landing re-usable first stages and boosters back at KSC or on a drone ship that are legitimately effing difficult. People can do it, but it took me years to get good at landing within 1km of KSC let alone on a floating barge. Because space-x style reusability is such a big part of modern day spaceflight economics I think it would be a shame to only enable that for master pilots. Even space-x would never have someone land those things manually. Not to mention when you have multiple boosters or a second stage moving to orbit while your first stage lands you can't be two places at once. 

Based on this my personal feeling is some of these automation tools and also things like rover-automation, hold altitude and heading for planes, and hover and translate for landers would be great additions to KSP2. One nice way to handle it would be to make the informational assets there from the beginning but hold back some of the real autopilot and auto-land/auto-ascend tools as progression rewards. If they only unlocked after you'd say landed on Duna or reached a certain off-world population you'd still be encouraging players to learn these skills manually while giving a break later as things like precision landing became old-hat and tedious. 

absolutely, thanks for intervening lol

17 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

@Bej Kerman how come you always claim that MJ doesn't encourage someone to learn eventhough there are players who learned to play KSP because of MJ? Why do you consistently ignore that fact? I learned the basics of orbital mechanics because of MJ. I learned the proper way to do gravity turns because of MJ. I learned how TWR, DV, and mass are related because of MJ. I learned how to build rockets properly because of MJ.

You keep suggesting that MJ is worthless and never should be used. But there are long-term players that swear by MJ. You seem to think because someone uses MJ regularly means that they don't know what they are doing. I personally can tell you how wrong you are. You believe that a player should never walk away while playing KSP or take their hands off the keyboard or controller. I believe that it's the players game and they can do whatever they want. 

me too 

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

"Docking mode" is perhaps the most useless feature in the entire game, but TBH from your description I think I'd find setting up a docking in MechJeb more tedious than just doing it manually. All you need to do once you're within a couple hundred meters is target/point the two ships at each other and then use the RCS controls on one of them to keep the target and prograde markers aligned and make sure the closing speed isn't too fast at the end. I generally use time warp during that process as well, so that the whole thing from 300m out to docked takes me perhaps 2 minutes on a bad day. I really don't see what's particularly tedious about that.

Ive docked so many times Im coming in at 30m/s and pulling one of these now. Meanwhile Im guaranteed to biff and reload a spaceplane 3 times before I stumble onto the runway safely. I think everyone has their own set of challenges. 
 

[herbal space program]

25 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Ive docked so many times Im coming in at 30m/s and pulling one of these now. Meanwhile Im guaranteed to biff and reload a spaceplane 3 times before I stumble onto the runway safely. I think everyone has their own set of challenges. 
 

Agreed, but I also think the latter of those two things is  quite a bit harder than the former. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've made a perfect runway landing from space on the first try, and I've flown a lot of space planes. I'm sure I could get the hang of it eventually though, and I'll happily afford an extra measure of prestige to those who can. I even think there should be in-game badges for such achievements.

Edited July 29, 2021 by herbal space program

[Stratennotblitz]

16 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

Agreed, but I also think the latter of those two things is  quite a bit harder than the former. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've made a perfect runway landing from space on the first try, and I've flown a lot of space planes. I'm sure I could get the hang of it eventually though, and I'll happily afford an extra measure of prestige to those who can. I even think there should be in-game badges for such achievements.

so you're willingly brigading lmao

[shdwlrd]

43 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Ive docked so many times Im coming in at 30m/s and pulling one of these now. Meanwhile Im guaranteed to biff and reload a spaceplane 3 times before I stumble onto the runway safely. I think everyone has their own set of challenges. 
 

Lol... not doing that with docking, but it does take me a little time to do so. 

23 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've made a perfect runway landing from space on the first try,

You actually hit the runway from space?! I'm lucky if I can get within 50km of the KSC if I don't have atmo engines on my plane. 

Seriously though, landing a plane in KSP is a lot harder than it should be. In any other flight sim, I can land a plane in without a much of a problem. In KSP, I'm lucky if I don't crash.

[herbal space program]

11 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

Lol... not doing that with docking, but it does take me a little time to do so. 

You actually hit the runway from space?! I'm lucky if I can get within 50km of the KSC if I don't have atmo engines on my plane. 

Seriously though, landing a plane in KSP is a lot harder than it should be. In any other flight sim, I can land a plane in without a much of a problem. In KSP, I'm lucky if I don't crash.

I never said I did it deadstick!  Although a couple of times I did hit it so close it only required a tiny bit of thrust from my jet engines to put it on the runway, and more often I've either had to fly under power for a few minutes to reach the KSC or alternately do some sort of a go-around.  Even in those cases however, I rarely manage to both touch down and stop on the runway on the first try.  And TBH if I end up in one piece anywhere near the KSC, I'll generally call it a day!

Edited July 29, 2021 by herbal space program

[Stratennotblitz]

14 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

Lol... not doing that with docking, but it does take me a little time to do so. 

You actually hit the runway from space?! I'm lucky if I can get within 50km of the KSC if I don't have atmo engines on my plane. 

Seriously though, landing a plane in KSP is a lot harder than it should be. In any other flight sim, I can land a plane in without a much of a problem. In KSP, I'm lucky if I don't crash.

I play on flight sims can confirm ksp is harder

[herbal space program]

36 minutes ago, Stratennotblitz said:

so you're willingly brigading lmao

I don't even know what you mean by that. What is so reprehensible about awarding achievement badges for feats of flying in a game that is at least in large measure about flying spaceships?

5 minutes ago, Stratennotblitz said:

I play on flight sims can confirm ksp is harder

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

Edited July 29, 2021 by herbal space program

[Pthigrivi]

39 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

You actually hit the runway from space?! I'm lucky if I can get within 50km of the KSC if I don't have atmo engines on my plane. 

Oh good I thought it was just me haha. I've gotten pretty good at carefully managing my glide to burn off speed and come down facing the runway, its literally just putting it on the ground without bouncing off into the SPH that gets me. Thank Xenu for quicksave. After doing this for a while I moved to belly-flop tailsitters with chutes cause its faster and I just try to get within a few km of KSC. 

This does all go to my point though a bit. Most of us posting here are long-time veterans and we all still struggle with this stuff. Seems like some accommodation could be made to let more players take advantage of recoverable/reusable vessel profiles. 

Edited July 30, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[herbal space program]

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

Seriously though, landing a plane in KSP is a lot harder than it should be. In any other flight sim, I can land a plane in without a much of a problem. In KSP, I'm lucky if I don't crash.

I honestly don't think that landing a well-designed plane is so hard. There are just 1,000 ways of making a really lousy plane, and flight sims generally take that design process out of the equation.  If you have a plane that is sturdily built, with sufficient landing gear, good ground clearance, a stall speed of < 50m/s,  and good aerodynamic trim, landing it pretty much anywhere on Kerbin is not going to be particularly hard. 

 

(edit) ...And as I think about it, that is actually one of my biggest issues with all those MechJeb features being available in Stock. It encourages the design of lousy ships that only the computer can fly. A good plane or spaceship should be easy to fly. Realistic designs moreover need to include some margin of error, like Neil Armstrong had with the LEM to choose an alternative landing site at the last second.  Papering over all that with MechJeb takes away from that whole aspect too.

Edited July 30, 2021 by herbal space program

[mattinoz]

As a gut reaction I'd agree to me MechJeb is the wrong fit for the base game. I think there is a call for some automation of MechJeb and similar. Lots more good information in the UI turnable to the situation.  MechJeb just seems like a glory box of everything automated but also a bit of a black box that doesn't encourage exploration.

I wonder if KOS would be a better starting point for a KSP2 automation system. Nothing in that would stop players sharing scripts building out basically a full mechJeb if they see the need or even shipping a mod. To me the advantages are it would allow some beautifully complex interesting and expressive automations of the game for those inclined. 

Players get a journey that could grab a bunch of magic button scripts that do things for them but if interest takes them break them open see how they work. Change them to suit something they want to do different. Then share that.

[AlamoVampire]

Mechjeb > kos.  Thats my 0.02

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[shdwlrd]

2 hours ago, herbal space program said:

I honestly don't think that landing a well-designed plane is so hard. There are just 1,000 ways of making a really lousy plane, and flight sims generally take that design process out of the equation.  If you have a plane that is sturdily built, with sufficient landing gear, good ground clearance, a stall speed of < 50m/s,  and good aerodynamic trim, landing it pretty much anywhere on Kerbin is not going to be particularly hard. 

It has to do with how planes behave. I've noticed that planes don't like to decend while flaring. They have a tendency to float. You only have either air brakes or reverse thrust to force it to the ground, which in turn can force a bounce and your gear explode. The other issue is that the yaw, roll, and pitch controls are on top of each other when using a keyboard. It makes it very difficult to use yaw and control your roll while lining up to the runway. And God forbid that you need to start your flare too.

All the planes I use have stall speeds between 30-40 m/s, and mimic real aircraft designs. 

[shdwlrd]

1 hour ago, mattinoz said:

As a gut reaction I'd agree to me MechJeb is the wrong fit for the base game. I think there is a call for some automation of MechJeb and similar. Lots more good information in the UI turnable to the situation.  MechJeb just seems like a glory box of everything automated but also a bit of a black box that doesn't encourage exploration.

I wonder if KOS would be a better starting point for a KSP2 automation system. Nothing in that would stop players sharing scripts building out basically a full mechJeb if they see the need or even shipping a mod. To me the advantages are it would allow some beautifully complex interesting and expressive automations of the game for those inclined. 

Players get a journey that could grab a bunch of magic button scripts that do things for them but if interest takes them break them open see how they work. Change them to suit something they want to do different. Then share that.

Outside of I wouldn't want to code MJ for KOS. The problem with KOS is the rate in which it processes the code. With DLL's, the processing rate is similar to the base game. KOS as current, processes the code about 1/3 slower. That leads to very twitchy flight performance.

I can see KOS being used to setup and controlling the background resource transfers where the twitchyness isn't noticeable. But for a flight I'm controlling, I would prefer a dedicated autopilot.

[herbal space program]

34 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

It has to do with how planes behave. I've noticed that planes don't like to decend while flaring. They have a tendency to float. You only have either air brakes or reverse thrust to force it to the ground, which in turn can force a bounce and your gear explode. The other issue is that the yaw, roll, and pitch controls are on top of each other when using a keyboard. It makes it very difficult to use yaw and control your roll while lining up to the runway. And God forbid that you need to start your flare too.

All the planes I use have stall speeds between 30-40 m/s, and mimic real aircraft designs. 

I can't even imagine flying  in KSP with just the keyboard anymore . I always use a generic Nintendo-style game controller, with pitch/yaw  under my left thumb, roll under my right thumb,  and throttle controlled by my left index and middle fingers (I'm left-handed). If the plane is well-balanced, I generally feel very much in control that way.  And if your plane is tending to float back up while flaring, then I would suggest that you just haven't bled off enough airspeed before initiating it.  The point is to hit your stall speed, whatever that may be, right above the ground. Try a slightly higher pitch angle on your pre-flare glide slope next time.

Edited July 30, 2021 by herbal space program

[Stratennotblitz]

37 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

It has to do with how planes behave. I've noticed that planes don't like to decend while flaring. They have a tendency to float. You only have either air brakes or reverse thrust to force it to the ground, which in turn can force a bounce and your gear explode. The other issue is that the yaw, roll, and pitch controls are on top of each other when using a keyboard. It makes it very difficult to use yaw and control your roll while lining up to the runway. And God forbid that you need to start your flare too.

All the planes I use have stall speeds between 30-40 m/s, and mimic real aircraft designs. 

so basically planes in ksp suck

38 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

It has to do with how planes behave. I've noticed that planes don't like to decend while flaring. They have a tendency to float. You only have either air brakes or reverse thrust to force it to the ground, which in turn can force a bounce and your gear explode. The other issue is that the yaw, roll, and pitch controls are on top of each other when using a keyboard. It makes it very difficult to use yaw and control your roll while lining up to the runway. And God forbid that you need to start your flare too.

All the planes I use have stall speeds between 30-40 m/s, and mimic real aircraft designs. 

the issue with kerbin is it's low gravity, in reality when you touch the ground you will bounce but not as hard as the game wants you to think, hopefully the base game will add some sort of suction when landing just like docking

4 hours ago, herbal space program said:

I don't even know what you mean by that. What is so reprehensible about awarding achievement badges for feats of flying in a game that is at least in large measure about flying spaceships?

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

why  would I spend hours reloading a save when I can have a computer do it for me? It's not like I need to prove myself, I fly. on way more difficult sims (dcx, mfs etc)

 

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

no I'm really good at building planes it turns out, my landings however

 

6 minutes ago, Stratennotblitz said:

so basically planes in ksp suck

the issue with kerbin is it's low gravity, in reality when you touch the ground you will bounce but not as hard as the game wants you to think, hopefully the base game will add some sort of suction when landing just like docking

why  would I spend hours reloading a save when I can have a computer do it for me? It's not like I need to prove myself, I fly. on way more difficult sims (dcx, mfs etc)

 

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

no I'm really good at building planes it turns out, my landings however

 

the issue with the game is the lack of air brake, per example in real life you can have different modes on your elevators, combat, which makes it more manoeuvrable, landing which uses the air resistance on them to slow down and align the gliding slope, and take off to make it stable

ksp doesn't have those

[herbal space program]

16 minutes ago, Stratennotblitz said:

so basically planes in ksp suck

the issue with kerbin is it's low gravity, in reality when you touch the ground you will bounce but not as hard as the game wants you to think, hopefully the base game will add some sort of suction when landing just like docking

why  would I spend hours reloading a save when I can have a computer do it for me? It's not like I need to prove myself, I fly. on way more difficult sims (dcx, mfs etc)

 

Maybe you just haven't figured out how to build a good plane yet. That's actually not so easy.

no I'm really good at building planes it turns out, my landings however

 

the issue with the game is the lack of air brake, per example in real life you can have different modes on your elevators, combat, which makes it more manoeuvrable, landing which uses the air resistance on them to slow down and align the gliding slope, and take off to make it stable

ksp doesn't have those

I have no trouble at all building planes in KSP that can take off and land just fine, on Kerbin or any other body I'm designing for. You just don't know how to do that yet and want to blame anyone/anything besides yourself for that.

[shdwlrd]

11 minutes ago, herbal space program said:

I can't even imagine flying  in KSP with just the keyboard anymore . I always use a generic Nintendo-style game controller, with pitch/yaw  under my left thumb, roll under my right thumb,  and throttle controlled by my left index and middle fingers (I'm left-handed). If the plane is well-balanced, I generally feel very much in control that way.  And if your plane is tending to float back up while flaring, then I would suggest that you just haven't bled off enough airspeed before initiating it.  The point is to hit your stall speed, whatever that may be, right above the ground. Try a slightly higher pitch angle on your pre-flare glide slope next time.

I've tried being fancy and use my X52 hotas. That was a disaster. I tried setting up my Xbox controller, that didn't work either. (Admittedly, this was pre 1.0.) Since all my planes mimic real world designs and have very low stall speeds. I can't pitch up more than 10 degrees without a tail strike. That causes a subdued version of the infinite glide bug to come out.

13 minutes ago, Stratennotblitz said:

so basically planes in ksp suck

No, it has to do with how KSP's aerodynamic model works. But that is for another thread.