How do we land accurately

[pandaman]

The thing is, with getting to orbit, rendezvous and docking there is usually a large margin for error and/or time to 'finesse' the delicate bits.  If you get within a few Km of the target you can fiddle about for a while, getting in position to dock.

With landings you often don't have the luxury of being able to take your time fine tuning your approach.

[The Aziz]

14 minutes ago, pandaman said:

With landings you often don't have the luxury of being able to take your time fine tuning your approach.

If you are running on tight fuel budget, no. You can't fine tune a suicide burn, but if you're planning to land carefully, bring more fuel, use the engines to hover above the landing pad until you're exactly where you want to be. Make the time. Or you know, 5km above the ground you can still use the controls, main engines, rcs, to correct your approach.

[Pthigrivi]

22 hours ago, The Aziz said:

On the screen, two tools that helped me. Nothing else. I think if I wasn't coming too hot I'd probably hit the launchpad (should've used airbrakes).

And whether they implement some kind of autopilot or not I'd love to see trajectory information factoring drag and maneuver planning tools. I use the former all the time set my periapsis for aerobraking. 

[Guest]

Pinpoint landing is just like rendezvous and docking, but without the tools KSP has for those.

On one hand after a bit the skill kicks in and it becomes just as natural as doing a rendezvous, on the other we still don't have the landing equivalent of the maneuver tool.

Were rendezvous frustrating before the maneuver tool was introduced? Probably yes, but was the solution an autopilot? Nope, we got the right tool for the job and now the ability to manually perform a correct rendezvous has become one of the main skills of a good KSP player.

[Pthigrivi]

11 hours ago, Master39 said:

Pinpoint landing is just like rendezvous and docking, but without the tools KSP has for those.

On one hand after a bit the skill kicks in and it becomes just as natural as doing a rendezvous, on the other we still don't have the landing equivalent of the maneuver tool.

Were rendezvous frustrating before the maneuver tool was introduced? Probably yes, but was the solution an autopilot? Nope, we got the right tool for the job and now the ability to manually perform a correct rendezvous has become one of the main skills of a good KSP player.

I think thats true, and I've found both better burn time and Mech-Jeb's information readouts hugely valuable in the past. I don't think that absolutely solves the in-atmo landing issue, as even with tools doing basic stuff like stage recovery is still a problem. My personal opinion is that autopilot functions should be game rewards that are deliberately held back to encourage players to try doing some of these things manually first and reward players who can. That way its not just a watch-the-game-fly-for me experience and there's some relief on launch vehicle recovery and other repetitive tasks that get old over time. 

Edited September 3, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[magnemoe]

Mechjeb is very accurate in landing one the Mun and other airless bodies with higher and lower gravity like Moho or Ike. 
On low gravity worlds like Minmus and lower, it tend to do an powerful burn at the end of the killing velocity burn throwing off accuracy. My solution is to disable it and do the last 10 m/s manual and using this to aim at landing spot.
I might then telling mechjeb to land anyplace who is the selected landing spot. 

On Tylo both mechjeb and I have problems landing. Things happens to fast for me and Mechjeb got serious problems killing horizontal velocity without getting crazy trying to get out the last 0.1 m/s who is irrelevant. 

The landing indicator helps a lot even in atmosphere, its smart to aim past target as its pretty easy to kill horizontal velocity if you come in with engines first. 
Point is that getting close is often not much an issue in KSP1, on Kerbin couple of kilometres is good enough. On Duna I use rovers or have wheels on the base or the lander. Or you could simply come in on more of an Moho landing profile. 
On Laythe I use planes. 

So simply having wheels on the lander and drive it to the base solves the problem, yes this adds weight who you accept. 

[The Flying Kerbal]

I've been playing KSP since 1.2.2.  I've come back to Kerbin from the Mun, Minmus, other planets and their moons, and of course LKO times too numerous to count, and have always aimed to land at the KSC.  And yet, in all those tries, I've only ever managed to touchdown in the vicinity of the base exactly two times.

And remember, KSP2 won't just be for people who have played KSP1 for years, but for newbies too.  So unless there's an auto button to have the landing perform by computer control, I for one won't be landing on pads or platforms.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, The Flying Kerbal said:

And remember, KSP2 won't just be for people who have played KSP1 for years, but for newbies too.  So unless there's an auto button to have the landing perform by computer control, I for one won't be landing on pads or platforms.

Same goes for rendezvous and docking, the point is that if you have that auto button you'll never learn that it only takes a few tries.

I've told this countless times, but I used to think that precise landing was a lost cause, especially on Eve, and when I decided to do a mission that required 5 different crafts (decent capsule, living hab, rover and 2 return vessels, one as backup) I decided that the mission had to have a 100km operational range and thus I designed the return craft (an electric plane with a rocket stage to get to orbit) to act as a long range transport.
After designing all the required crafts and testing them in Eve's atmosphere I was so used to the descent profile that I landed everything in a 15 km radius. 

If you add to the mix a landing spot indicator that shows you the immediate effect of the movements and maneuvers you do while descending, a little bit more delta V to account for some hovering and not just making a suicide burn then you'll see that landing close is not that difficult. 

After that nobody said that the recovery has to be exactly on the pad, having recovering costs that start with a 0% on the pad and goes up with distance (100% malus somewhere between 500m and 1km)  would be a way better option than just removing the challenge altogether and give a good incentive for the player to try perfecting this specific skill (especially if your landing precision is inherited by the automated supply lines system).

[Bej Kerman]

On 9/1/2021 at 4:35 PM, The Aziz said:

You guys really overestimate how difficult atmospheric landings are with little help. I am no expert in pinpoint landings, I don't really do it when I normally play. But, above was first, here's my second attempt at landing from orbit.

 

Bravo! I fail to see how one could not have fun gracefully guiding boosters through the atmosphere, even if repetitively. Trying to reuse the ascent stage was the focus of most of my spacecraft.

[Pthigrivi]

42 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Same goes for rendezvous and docking, the point is that if you have that auto button you'll never learn that it only takes a few tries.

I've told this countless times, but I used to think that precise landing was a lost cause, especially on Eve, and when I decided to do a mission that required 5 different crafts (decent capsule, living hab, rover and 2 return vessels, one as backup) I decided that the mission had to have a 100km operational range and thus I designed the return craft (an electric plane with a rocket stage to get to orbit) to act as a long range transport.
After designing all the required crafts and testing them in Eve's atmosphere I was so used to the descent profile that I landed everything in a 15 km radius. 

If you add to the mix a landing spot indicator that shows you the immediate effect of the movements and maneuvers you do while descending, a little bit more delta V to account for some hovering and not just making a suicide burn then you'll see that landing close is not that difficult. 

After that nobody said that the recovery has to be exactly on the pad, having recovering costs that start with a 0% on the pad and goes up with distance (100% malus somewhere between 500m and 1km)  would be a way better option than just removing the challenge altogether and give a good incentive for the player to try perfecting this specific skill (especially if your landing precision is inherited by the automated supply lines system).

But do you think there's a point in having landing pads at KSC and for colonies if only a very small percentage of players are able to use them? Wouldn't autopilot also be a useful tool for first stage recovery systems where you can't control more than one vessel at once? 

Edited September 3, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

But do you think there's a point in having landing pads at KSC and for colonies if only a very small percentage of players are able to use them?

Do you think there was a point in adding the docking ports back when the game had no maneuver tool and only a very small percentage of players could use them?

18 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Wouldn't autopilot also be a useful tool for first stage recovery systems where you can't control more than one vessel at once? 

Test flight => autopilot with the same precision as the test flight (no need to speculate the details and complexities of such a system a fully automated one would have to recognize what a recoverable stage is anyway), just like the other automated runs, I think the gameplay of having the ability to improve your routes and automated things by doing more test and certification flights is still an interesting loop. 

KSP2 isn't adding colonies or resources for the sake of being a colony management game, they were really clear on that, space cities skylines isn't a pillar of the game, it's just an excuse to offer you different and new challenges to overcome, and new places to design, launch and fly rockets to and from. 

In KSP1 is generally accepted that you have to aim for the pad (or the runway) to get 100% or your value back, yes, the scaling it's way more forgiving than the 500m to a km that I proposed, but the point in KSP1 isn't to land at a specific colony, just to do so in one piece. Even with a 10km range around the colony (maybe with 50% of the gain being in the last km and 10% for the pad) would make it possible for everyone to get the minimum amount of skill to at least make colonies work really fast while also reward you if you try to improve and refine your skills and also offering you a gameplay loop of optimizing and refining your automated routes.

Point is, it hasn't to be "autopilot" VS "if you don't manually land in IVA with the GUI turned off you may as well avoid trying colonies" quite the opposite, if you avoid both ends there's an amazing amount of room for a lot of gameplay, you could make your own "Starbase" on the Mun and make the test flights of your Mun fully reusable SSTO heavy lift rocket actually meaningful for the gameplay instead of some random contract or self-imposed challenge (if you can create your narrative and lore that's good, if the gameplay actually support that narrative and helps you develop it it's even better).

[Pthigrivi]

28 minutes ago, Master39 said:

In KSP1 is generally accepted that you have to aim for the pad (or the runway) to get 100% or your value back, yes, the scaling it's way more forgiving than the 500m to a km that I proposed, but the point in KSP1 isn't to land at a specific colony, just to do so in one piece. Even with a 10km range around the colony (maybe with 50% of the gain being in the last km and 10% for the pad) would make it possible for everyone to get the minimum amount of skill to at least make colonies work really fast while also reward you if you try to improve and refine your skills and also offering you a gameplay loop of optimizing and refining your automated routes.

Point is, it hasn't to be "autopilot" VS "if you don't manually land in IVA with the GUI turned off you may as well avoid trying colonies" quite the opposite, if you avoid both ends there's an amazing amount of room for a lot of gameplay, you could make your own "Starbase" on the Mun and make the test flights of your Mun fully reusable SSTO heavy lift rocket actually meaningful for the gameplay instead of some random contract or self-imposed challenge (if you can create your narrative and lore that's good, if the gameplay actually support that narrative and helps you develop it it's even better).

I quite agree, and I think in the early stages there's going to have to be some forgivable range from a starter-colony for new modules and supplies to land somewhat close. The best place to learn this kind of close-enough landing is in the early-mid game as you're developing colonies on the Mun and/or minmus. But as you've agreed landing within a kilometer or so in atmosphere is pretty difficult, let alone on a 30 meter pad. This isn't just a matter of tools. Even with these tools very few players can land so precisely in atmosphere. It seems to me as though phasing in the opportunity for autopilot functions at this stage of the game would benefit almost everyone without taking away the need to learn early in the progression. You could even stipulate that autolanding only works at a pre-placed beacon so players still had to get down there manually at least once. As a person who's played several play-throughs to the point where I have bases and fuel delivery operations around Kerbin, Duna, and Jool I can say the tasks that get old the fastest are science collection, leveling kerbals, fuel deliveries, and landing shuttles and lifters on Kerbin. I have pretty strong hopes the first 3 can be solved. The last one really begs for autopilot. Its fine after the 5th and even the 10th time, but after the 50th you're ready to fast forward through it. 

I'm not sure we know enough yet about the nitty-gritty to guess how that could work for things like reusable boosters. Probably possible to set landing locations for different subassemblies using the trip planner? 

Edited September 3, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

But as you've agreed landing within a kilometer or so in atmosphere is pretty difficult, let alone on a 30 meter pad. This isn't just a matter of tools. Even with these tools very few players can land so precisely in atmosphere.

I think it's mainly a matter of technique, not tools, if you expect to just pop the chutes after reentry and then choose were to land you're set to fail (this is just a dumb and obvious example), but the tools are indispensable to make you understand what you're doing wrong.

Having a big red target updating with every move you make as you descend isn't just a tool, it helps you visualize how your control is affecting the trajectory and it helps you getting that intuitive feel that most players already have for rendezvous and docking, I was recently trying to design a fully reusable SSTO rocket (Test 1  Test 2) and I had serious difficulties in understanding the effects my control surfaces had on my descent with a more visual indicator the challenge would istantly go from "maybe I can target the KSC plateau" to "maybe I can target the 1KM from the pad mark" and do so in 1/10 of the flights.

 

14 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

As a person who's played several play-throughs to the point where I have bases and fuel delivery operations around Kerbin, Duna, and Jool I can say the tasks that get old the fastest are science collection, leveling kerbals, fuel deliveries, and landing shuttles and lifters on Kerbin. I have pretty strong hopes the first 3 can be solved. The last one really begs for autopilot. Its fine after the 5th and even the 10th time, but after the 50th you're ready to fast forward through it. 

I think that "once for every new craft" it's already quite a change from KSP1 lack of any option (the supply route system), especially since it's not going to be Kerbin all the time, it's not even going to be an atmospheric planet most of the time, on the contrary, given the open ended nature of the game you're going to need to do constant landings in an atmosphere only if you want to do so, even in the scenario in which not every resource is on every planet or moon I think it's a trivial design decision to at least give an option without an atmosphere for all resources.

All in all when you'll be building fuel delivery infrastructure around Duna and Jool Kerbal will be mostly a tourist attraction at that point, maybe used for exporting some unique resource, but you will probably have set up your main hubs elsewhere. 

[shdwlrd]

Everyone here keeps saying landing is easy. It's not. Whether it's in real life, simulator training, or a game, landing is difficult. You may get used to doing it, but that is muscle memory. It's a skill that you may learn, but it doesn't get any easier. (How else do you explain profesional pilots with hundreds of landings under their belt do hard landing every now and again?)

How to you learn such a critical skill when there's nothing telling you what you're doing wrong before it's too late? How do you get better without critical information being displayed to you? 

Some people can learn a skill by trial and error, some can't. Some people can tell where they are in a virtual 3d space, some can't. Some people can figure out what is happening by just seeing it, other people need to feel it too. 

There needs to be more than a simple "X" to help you land. There should to be a marked path to follow.

There needs to be more than a simple nondescript timer reaching zero to know when to burn. There should be a large visual indicator to know when to burn.

The only automated part of all of this should be calculating the landing deorbit burn. As I mentioned earlier in the tread, there are a bunch of variables that you have to account for to land precisely where you want to.

Oh, and all these tools should be available from your very 1st mission. There's no instructor to help you, so the earning the right to use a tool is a BS mechanic that will limit the usability, the learning potential, and enjoyment by the player.

[Pthigrivi]

55 minutes ago, Master39 said:

Having a big red target updating with every move you make as you descend isn't just a tool, it helps you visualize how your control is affecting the trajectory and it helps you getting that intuitive feel that most players already have for rendezvous and docking, I was recently trying to design a fully reusable SSTO rocket (Test 1  Test 2) and I had serious difficulties in understanding the effects my control surfaces had on my descent with a more visual indicator the challenge would istantly go from "maybe I can target the KSC plateau" to "maybe I can target the 1KM from the pad mark" and do so in 1/10 of the flights.

Again though, 1km from target 1/10 of the time is not the same as a 30-40m landing pad. Do these pads have any real function for 99% of players? 
 

55 minutes ago, Master39 said:

All in all when you'll be building fuel delivery infrastructure around Duna and Jool Kerbal will be mostly a tourist attraction at that point, maybe used for exporting some unique resource, but you will probably have set up your main hubs elsewhere. 

I don't think we know enough to be sure but I suspect these kinds of precision landings will be much more frequent than in any save I've ever done simply because establishing the kinds of colonies they've shown will be much more involved. Even if its a few to several landings in the initial set up phase plus proof of concept landings for any automated supply runs its probably dozens. It seems nuts to rule this out for atmospheric worlds. And I fully agree it would be great to push players to learn how and give them the tools to get as close as they can, even build in rewards for it. In fact i think if some kind of anomaly discovery system were part of exploration we could encourage even more of it. I'm not saying autopilot is 100% necessary to make KSP2 successful. I just don't see a compelling reason to rule it out. A huge number of players want it and those that don't can ignore it. And its about the only way to make space-x style booster landings and off-world landing pads useful for everyone. 

Edited September 3, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[Bej Kerman]

On 8/31/2021 at 7:06 PM, shdwlrd said:

@Bej Kermando you land at your target first try every time? Eventhough I've been playing since KSP was released on Steam, it still takes me a few reloads to manually land a rocket where I want it. Even the streamers admit it can take them multiple reloads to land where they want. So no, landing isn't easy nor as intuitive as getting to orbit.

No, it's just as easy and intuitive as getting into orbit I.E. you'll find it as difficult to land a booster as you 10 years ago found it difficult to achieve orbit. You're gonna need to practice, you won't be good at it immediately.

48 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

Everyone here keeps saying landing is easy. It's not. Whether it's in real life, simulator training, or a game, landing is difficult. You may get used to doing it, but that is muscle memory. It's a skill that you may learn, but it doesn't get any easier. (How else do you explain profesional pilots with hundreds of landings under their belt do hard landing every now and again?)

Same can be said about just getting into orbit - as I've said, you can't remember how difficult it was getting into orbit. You've (probably) got lots of skill now, and you wouldn't say getting to orbit is difficult, which would invalidate the whole 'it doesn't get any easier' thing you said.

23 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

And its about the only way to make space-x style booster landings and off-world landing pads useful for everyone. 

Or, maybe, practice? It won't be easy immediately, but that's not the point. Just about everything you do in KSP looked impossible at one point.

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Again though, 1km from target 1/10 of the time is not the same as a 30-40m landing pad. Do these pads have any real function for 99% of players? 

What I was saying is that with proper tool it would take 1/10 of the time it takes now to learn how to aim for the plateau to learn how to land within a 1 km target radius, not that 1 in 10 launches will end a km away. 

The pad would serve the same goal the runway does now, land on it and you don't have the recovery fee, it's not even an absolute like with rendezvous, there you don't have the luxury of missing the target by 10 km and just paying a docking fee.

30 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I don't think we know enough to be sure but I suspect these kinds of precision landings will be much more frequent than in any save I've ever done simply because establishing the kinds of colonies they've shown will be much more involved. Even if its a few to several landings in the initial set up phase plus proof of concept landings for any automated supply runs its probably dozens. It seems nuts to rule this out for atmospheric worlds.

It's not pushing out, you just don't get to have 100% of the value back, it's already a stock feature in KSP1, one that nobody complains about, it's not difficult to land within some km of the colony, and if you can't be more precise then you'll design around it. The forums are full of people making treks to get to their not-so-precise rescue landers.

Again, with rendezvous and docking, you don't get the luxury of being less than 100% precise and if you try to remember the time before that became a natural KSP skill for you, you'll realize that it's an objectively more difficult and less intuitive set of skills to obtain, and this time around you get to learn it with actual tutorials, not by searching on YT and hoping to find something.

42 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I just don't see a compelling reason to rule it out. A huge number of players want it and those that don't can ignore it. And its about the only way to make space-x style booster landings and off-world landing pads useful for everyone. 

My reason is that it's implementation would mine one of the main design pillars of  the game. Landing on Eve and coming back is a challenge, not a bug to fix.

If you want to land a space-x style booster you have to experience your own personal version of this: 

 

[The Aziz]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

anding within a kilometer or so in atmosphere is pretty difficult, let alone on a 30 meter pad. This isn't just a matter of tools. Even with these tools very few players can land so precisely in atmosphere.

Um. (Trajectories) You have a tool that predicts the trajectory for current ship stage in an atmosphere or not, shows (in map or in flight camera) how far you'll hit the ground from the target down to 0.01km precision. (Mechjeb) does deorbit burn for you. All you do manually is correcting course as you get closer to the ground. Plenty of time to do so, if you don't do suicide burn (why would you, you'd risk the whole mission by attempting a landing with 50% chance of successful final moment?)

No seriously, whoever says that it's so hard, I recommend copying a fresh install, getting these two mods (which should be an integral part of the new game up to some point) and trying.

By the time you have a landing pad on a colony, you should be able to land with ease no further than a 100 meters from the target, in atmo or not. And nothing stops you from building a 100m wide landing zone.

You're saying very few players can, but how many of them actually tried these tools? I did and I know it's possible. It's not docking difficulty level, but it's not Eve return difficulty either. It's like docking while other ship pulls you in using tractor beam and you're not in position for docking, but you have enough power in your engines to escape from the beam for a short time.

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

How else do you explain profesional pilots with hundreds of landings under their belt do hard landing every now and again?

External factors? Strong winds, aircraft malfunctions, simple human errors... This can apply to anything and everything. I don't always stick parking my car first try despite doing so a dozen times a day for several years now. It's something you can learn but that does not mean it's gonna work perfectly every time.

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

There needs to be more than a simple "X" to help you land. There should to be a marked path to follow.

It's exactly what the tool I described a bunch of times in this thread does.

No. Guys, seriously, instead of saying how difficult it is again and again, go ahead and try. Yes it's very hard in stock KSP, I'm not saying it isn't, because the game lacks any precise indicators for near- surface activities. But yes it's doable with only two simple mods. Could be doable with one actually but then I don't like performing maneuvers by hand.

[shdwlrd]

25 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Same can be said about just getting into orbit - as I've said, you can't remember how difficult it was getting into orbit. You've (probably) got lots of skill now, and you wouldn't say getting to orbit is difficult, which would invalidate the whole 'it doesn't get any easier' thing you said.

But I get into orbit 99% of the time on my first attempt. I crash while landing 90% of the time on my first attempt. It usually takes me at least 3 attempts to land. To quote myself...

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

Some people can learn a skill by trial and error, some can't. Some people can tell where they are in a virtual 3d space, some can't. Some people can figure out what is happening by just seeing it, other people need to feel it too.

These are my reasons why I can't master this skill in KSP. 

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

There needs to be more than a simple "X" to help you land. There should to be a marked path to follow.

There needs to be more than a simple nondescript timer reaching zero to know when to burn. There should be a large visual indicator to know when to burn.

And these are the solutions that helped me in other games. Why are these not considered valid solutions in KSP?

[Bej Kerman]

15 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

54 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Same can be said about just getting into orbit - as I've said, you can't remember how difficult it was getting into orbit. You've (probably) got lots of skill now, and you wouldn't say getting to orbit is difficult, which would invalidate the whole 'it doesn't get any easier' thing you said.

But I get into orbit 99% of the time on my first attempt. I crash while landing 90% of the time on my first attempt. It usually takes me at least 3 attempts to land. To quote myself...

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

Some people can learn a skill by trial and error, some can't. Some people can tell where they are in a virtual 3d space, some can't. Some people can figure out what is happening by just seeing it, other people need to feel it too.

These are my reasons why I can't master this skill in KSP. 

Only except you could get your landing rates to 99% if you tried as hard as you did when you were learning to get into orbit. Might I say? You're not gonna be good at it within your first 5 attempts. Even if you do find it too hard, there's literally nothing stopping you from using parachutes for assistance

19 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

1 hour ago, shdwlrd said:

There needs to be more than a simple "X" to help you land. There should to be a marked path to follow.

There needs to be more than a simple nondescript timer reaching zero to know when to burn. There should be a large visual indicator to know when to burn.

And these are the solutions that helped me in other games. Why are these not considered valid solutions in KSP?

Not sure who said that these aren't valid solutions - I myself would like having an accurate suicide burn timer to save myself from stopping 2 meters short of the ground and hovering the rest of the way down.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

What I was saying is that with proper tool it would take 1/10 of the time it takes now to learn how to aim for the plateau to learn how to land within a 1 km target radius, not that 1 in 10 launches will end a km away. 

Gotcha. That makes sense too. I heard it that way cause 1/10 to 1km is about my success rate even with these tools haha
 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

The pad would serve the same goal the runway does now, land on it and you don't have the recovery fee, it's not even an absolute like with rendezvous, there you don't have the luxury of missing the target by 10 km and just paying a docking fee.

It's not pushing out, you just don't get to have 100% of the value back, it's already a stock feature in KSP1, one that nobody complains about, it's not difficult to land within some km of the colony, and if you can't be more precise then you'll design around it. The forums are full of people making treks to get to their not-so-precise rescue landers.

These are great points. It is a bit different when you can use a colony as a recovery site and assess a recovery fee of some kind as measured from this point. On Duna I'm used to having to drive a tanker truck from my bases out to refuel and re-crew shuttles. The question remains though... if there was a mid-game reward that enabled autopiloting to a colony's landing pad for reliable 100% recovery, would that break the game?
 

1 hour ago, Master39 said:

Again, with rendezvous and docking, you don't get the luxury of being less than 100% precise and if you try to remember the time before that became a natural KSP skill for you, you'll realize that it's an objectively more difficult and less intuitive set of skills to obtain, and this time around you get to learn it with actual tutorials, not by searching on YT and hoping to find something.
...

My reason is that it's implementation would mine one of the main design pillars of  the game. Landing on Eve and coming back is a challenge, not a bug to fix.
...

If you want to land a space-x style booster you have to experience your own personal version of this: 

 

51 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

You're saying very few players can, but how many of them actually tried these tools? I did and I know it's possible. It's not docking difficulty level, but it's not Eve return difficulty either. It's like docking while other ship pulls you in using tractor beam and you're not in position for docking, but you have enough power in your engines to escape from the beam for a short time.

 

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

No, it's just as easy and intuitive as getting into orbit I.E. you'll find it as difficult to land a booster as you 10 years ago found it difficult to achieve orbit. You're gonna need to practice, you won't be good at it immediately.

Same can be said about just getting into orbit - as I've said, you can't remember how difficult it was getting into orbit. You've (probably) got lots of skill now, and you wouldn't say getting to orbit is difficult, which would invalidate the whole 'it doesn't get any easier' thing you said.

Or, maybe, practice? It won't be easy immediately, but that's not the point. Just about everything you do in KSP looked impossible at one point.

Im going to answer all three of these at once because I think they're related. My feeling is there are actual qualitative differences between getting to orbit, docking, precision landing in vacuum, and precision landing in atmo--even with all the data tools imaginable--that make some tasks genuinely more difficult and more time-consuming to achieve than others. No one would deny that landing on a moving target that's 20m across is harder than landing on a stationary target thats 1km across. They both require practice, but one requires much more practice than the other. Getting to orbit isn't easy, but it has the advantage that you can overbuild and loosely approximate a gravity turn and you'll get there. Docking is definitely harder, even with tools, but it has the advantage that there's no hard clock ticking. You're not burning away dV every millisecond as you adjust. You can take your time and approach slowly. Similarly landing within half a km of your target on Minmus takes a little practice, the Mun takes a little more, and Tylo takes much more. And of course, with enough practice and with all the necessary tools I completely agree everyone could land on a drone ship off KSC. The question is HOW much practice, and how likely is it that 50% of players are willing to invest that kind of time mastering an incredibly fine-tuned skill that even with all the mods in the world even we--a razor thin set of veteran players who have played KSP obsessively for many years--find pretty effing hard? I suspect it is not likely at all. I think it is very easy to say "I did it, everyone can." And you're right! But you may be expecting a much higher level of patience and and time than most people are willing to invest. And those people also aren't wrong. They're players too, and we all deserve a chance to play this game and learn and have fun. So, by all means, reward players for landing hyper-precisely! But don't make building colonies and recovering boosters dependent on a skill most players won't achieve, and don't waste player time on something that might be better spent on building cool colonies, going interstellar, and all of the other fun things KSP could deliver. 

btw I love yall and this is one of my favorite debates so don't take any of this as disparagement. Its a really important topic and you've all made excellent points. 

Edited September 3, 2021 by Pthigrivi

[shdwlrd]

45 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Only except you could get your landing rates to 99% if you tried as hard as you did when you were learning to get into orbit. Might I say? You're not gonna be good at it within your first 5 attempts. Even if you do find it too hard, there's literally nothing stopping you from using parachutes for assistance

Look man, you keep saying it just takes practice. I've spent almost very weekend and days off from 2016-2019 using different mods to build bases. Every time I had to land a component, it would take me 3-7 tries to land successful. And I don't mean on target, I mean just getting to the ground without crashing. It wasn't until Angel-125 released KFS I started to be able to land reliably and on target.

Why did KFS help you may ask? The reasons are that I could slow down my decent to a pace where I could figure out what was happening and correct any mistakes without worrying about dv, I could automatically hover and cancel any horizontal motion.

So no, this isn't a skill I'm going to just get good at with practice. This skill I need actual instruction or something to tell me what I need to do and when to do it.

[Hyperspace Industries]

I think the solution is adding a version  of the Trajectories mod, it gives you the aerobraking trajectory, and also a precise bullseye landing site, you can easily see where you are going to land, and where your correction burns put your landing, but it doesn't fly for you, it keeps the challenge, without making it too hard to learn. 

[Bej Kerman]

19 hours ago, shdwlrd said:

Why did KFS help you may ask? The reasons are that I could slow down my decent to a pace where I could figure out what was happening and correct any mistakes without worrying about dv, I could automatically hover and cancel any horizontal motion.

Sounds like you might have previously been overestimating how much dV you have - helps to always pack a lot of fuel. IDK about you, but sometimes I find myself landing my landers with the transfer stage of my rocket.

[Hyperspace Industries]

Where did you find a clip of anything landing on a pad in game, I only know of it being done in the trailer, which is obviously an exaggeration. There are a lot of launches from those pads, but remember, those rockets were built there, and if there is a gameplay version, there is nothing saying the lander didn't make a gazillion correction burns, is there? 

Edited September 4, 2021 by Hyperspace Industries