Why I think KSP is (not) hard and what I hope KSP 2 will do better

[lBoBl]

This is a very random post. It is kind of vague you might agree or disagree and no one might be interested at all. However if you're trying to introduce friends to KSP but they're a bit reticent, or are a KSP 2 developer who's wondering how to reach a wider audience, this could be food for thought.

It's about KSP being widely regarded as a difficult game. When I talk to people about KSP I often hear things such as "Oh KSP looks fun but I don't have a big enough brain to play that game / it's too complicated for me / wow you play that game you're a living god you must be so intelligent".  And while it is true that my quasi-divine intelligence is definitely something to gawk at, I think that everyone who's ever told me something like that could actually become "good" at KSP with not too much effort.

Because most of these people erroneously think that playing KSP with any kind of success is like getting a degree in engineering, you need to be good at maths, understand everything about fluid dynamics,  you need to have a very "scientific" mind whatever that means and be good at STEM in general. And well I think everyone lurking on this forum knows this isn't true. You don't have to do any maths when playing KSP.  Most of the complicated stuff like your trajectory, your center of mass, center of drag, are already calculated for you. You can use some kind of spreadsheet to very precisely budget your Delta-V if you really want to but in 99% of cases that's pretty much all the maths you'll ever be doing in KSP, and if you'd rather not do this you can always over-engineer everything and have some dV to spare.

So why is KSP hard then? Is it really hard?

I think you could argue that it is both really easy and kind of hard at the same time, in the exact same way and for the exact same reason why you could argue that riding a bicycle is easy or hard. And the reason is that both bicycle physics and orbital physics are outside of our regular experience, but the human brain is also very good at adapting and learning how to do new things instinctively. If you went somewhere on Earth where bikes don't exist and tried to teach someone verbally how to ride, or even to show them, that someone likely wouldn't succeed at first. They'd have to try slowly, have someone to hold them on their first rides so they don't fall, and get a feel for how things work when you're on a bike. But in the end they'd very likely succeed and find it super easy and never loose that skill for the rest of their life. This is called cerebral plasticity, and this is what makes us awesome. And just like riding a bike is outside of our normal experience of physics when we first learn to ride, orbital mechanics are also very much outside of our regular day to day experience of physics, and as for aerodynamics,  the only thing we commonly experience is that pointy things go faster.  

Now I'll admit, maybe, that KSP is perhaps a little bit more scientific than just riding a bicycle. But just a little. When you go to the University to have someone teach you Physics, your professor will teach you about scientific rigor, precision, a bunch of facts that you'll have to memorize, and a bunch of equations that you'll have to know how to solve. All very rigorous, not much seat of your pants feeling about how things are going to behave. (Of course if you later do actual engineering in your life you'll use a lot of that seat of the pants feeling because you'll know what you're doing by then, you'll have graduated.) KSP is all about getting that instinctive feeling for how things are going to behave, it's about instinctively raising the nose of your ship once you've passed Apoapsis and failed to circularize by that point, you just know that you're going to dip back into the atmosphere if you don't burn a bit upwards, but that you'll waste fuel if you do it too much. So how do you get someone from a state where their brain can't compute anything about orbital mechanics to that stage where they instinctively know what to do without having to formulate the thought?

Quite obviously, the main hurdle is frustration. I think most if not all KSP players are very patient, and if you read through all this you definitely are, thank you, we're nearly there I promise. I think KSP 1 is quite bad at helping players overcome their frustration, on various different levels. The UI is not simple enough for new players and doesn't have enough information for psychos like me who want to get their geostationary orbit precise to a hundredth of a second. The in game tutorials have pages of text that you must read while the game is paused (or sometimes when your rocket is flying, good luck with those), and this is where KSP 2 comes in. Honestly from what little I saw of the animations they may or may not be better. They're (slightly) trying to be funny which is good, because keeping people entertained is a good way to make them learn. But it does not help that much which the average impatient gamer who's just bought a brand new game and wants to try it. No one wants to read pages of texts or watch lengthy videos explanations about how the game works (and if they do they can just go on YouTube like people did with KSP 1), most gamers just want to game. I think the in game tutorials should be in-game at least 99.99% of the time. They need to be that friendly person that holds your back and keep you from falling while you take your feet of the grounds to put them on the bike's pedals. It's about getting that first experience, about showing your brain how things work without getting hurt. I never recommend MechJeb to new players because by only using the autopilot some players end up never learning how to fly the rocket and how orbital mechanics work, because MechJeb can literally do anything for you except design the rocket. But I must also acknowledge that for a lot of people MechJeb has been the thing that allowed them to play the game at all, because just trying something over and over without any guidance on what to do or how to do it is very frustrating, and if you don't have the patience to sit through lengthy in game tutorials or go watch Scott Manley's tutorials you'll likely just give up. Mechjeb offers that guidance, that helping hand, but without explaining what it does or teaching you, which is kind of a shame. I think KSP 2 tutorials should be in game, and they should be helping, forgiving, and encouraging. They need to tell the player he's doing great, that it's not that hard, it's just like driving a car, anyone can do it. It's all about getting players past these first moments when their brain doesn't understand the first thing about orbital mechanics, and letting the experience teach them.

I don't know if others are more convinced than I am by what we saw of KSP 2's planned tutorials, and if you'd agree that (not to brag, honestly) KSP is objectively not that hard as long as you're patient and ready to make a lot of very frustrating mistakes. And honestly I don't know if it's even possible for KSP 2 to reach a much wider audience if I'm  right and the main quality required to succeed at KSP really is patience. But given my mitigated results when it comes to introducing some of my friends to KSP, I might be wrong about everything I just said...

Edited May 15, 2022 by lBoBl

[jimmymcgoochie]

KSP is hard- it’s literally rocket science! With no prior background in physics or anything particularly space-y, trying to fly a rocket into space is a daunting challenge: getting the right combination of thrust, fuel, aerodynamics, flight profile etc. to make it to space (rather than a smoking crater where the VAB used to be) isn’t something you’ll get right on the first attempt, or even a few after that. The rocket equation isn’t immediately intuitive, has some strange units in it and requires some information that you won’t find easily in stock KSP, while the concept of velocity as a measure of range is totally unlike any other activity, such as driving, that people might be familiar with.

History is full of situations where space didn’t work they way people thought: a real-life Gemini mission that attempted an orbital rendezvous eventually gave up and went home because they kept trying to fly towards the target but ended up further away instead; it took a great deal of work by some very clever people to figure out why, so it’s hardly surprising that people (including me!) had similar problems in KSP even with the tutorials doing their best to explain how to do it.

KSP itself can make some problems worse: the tutorials are old and sometimes broken; information can be both overwhelming and inadequate at the same time; and the tools for more advanced flight planning are either limited or non-existent. Mods can fix these problems, but bring their own.

KSP2 aims to flatten the learning cliff curve with a greatly improved tutorial system, explaining all the concepts you need to know in a more understandable way so that new players have a fighting chance of making it to orbit before quitting in frustration, and from there to more interesting destinations- just getting to the Mun is a challenge too far for many new players, let alone going interplanetary and forget all that interstellar stuff. However, there’s only so much that can be done to make the game more accessible to new players as at the end of the day it’s still a realistic physics simulation and has to be treated as such.