Unpopular KSP opinions!

[yoarebignoob]

8 hours ago, QF9E said:

Agreed. The only mission where Rapiers are actually useful is a Laythe landing. Everywhere else the Rapier is just so much dead weight. SSTOs are cool and challenging to build but they are by no means practical.

Non on the topic but the amount of badges you have makes you look like that one soviet solider who had hella alot of medals

KSP way too brutal man

[LHACK4142]

Minmus sucks. It's small, the ground is ugly and doesn't look like anything, and the terrain is boring.

[MythicalHeFF]

10 minutes ago, LHACK4142 said:

Minmus sucks. It's small, the ground is ugly and doesn't look like anything, and the terrain is boring.

It also makes unlocking the whole tech tree way too easy.

Edited June 6, 2022 by Jack Joseph Kerman

[Vanamonde]

This thread has been moved to the Games subforum. 

[Starhawk]

After some deliberation this thread has been returned to KSP Discussion from Forum Games.

KSP Forum Moderation Team

[miklkit]

Unpopular opinions?  KSP is not perfect but does indeed have bugs.

[Maria Sirona]

3 minutes ago, miklkit said:

Unpopular opinions?  KSP is not perfect but does indeed have bugs.

Doesn't everybody know that

[Madrocketman]

Unpopular opinion:

EVA assembly is overrated. Unless you want to break the game...

[miklkit]

No, I get attacked almost every time I mention it.

[Fraktal]

On 6/1/2022 at 7:31 PM, Maria Sirona said:

Clipping fuel tanks is not cheating

Clipping is not cheating as long as it's aesthetically pleasing. I always clip my parachutes and OX-STATs halfway in for that reason.

On 6/6/2022 at 8:09 PM, Jack Joseph Kerman said:

It also makes unlocking the whole tech tree way too easy.

Which is why you should play with 10% science income. You'll love Minmus a whole LOT more than the Mun because it changes the game completely by raising the level of challenge. You can and will softlock yourself from even reaching the Mun if you pick the wrong tech nodes in the early game and you can just plain forget about using NERVs for your first Duna mission if you aren't using a science lab (and if you are, you'll likely miss the first transfer window if you wait for enough science points to come in).

Edited June 11, 2022 by Fraktal

[DunaManiac]

Kerbal Construction Time actually adds a new dimension to the game. This seems counter-intuitive, how could adding time constraints possibly add anything to the game aside from realism? I've found that it fundamentally changes the way that you play the game, especially when combined with life-support mods.

For one thing, it forces you to plan your missions, rather than launching willy-nilly as you would in stock, you design and launch in a much more methodical method. It makes you ask questions like, which launches should go where at what time? What launches can you fill in the meantime? It also means that your launches are more spaced-out, so you don't have to launch rockets one after another all the time, or wait long-stretches between windows.

Secondly, I've found that it gives spaceplanes a new meaning in sandbox mode. The way that Kerbal Construction Time works, is that reusable vessels are stored, so they can be relaunched much faster than constructing a rocket. So, by constructing spaceplanes, you can have them shoulder the burden of resupply missions rather than diverting time from your main missions. You can also use them to peruse side projects independently of your main build queue.

[securityinstruts]

The current max time warp is perfectly fast enough when deploying relay constellations above Dres Kerbol orbit

[Xavven]

Air intake "spamming" isn't cheesy. It's an appropriate and logical solution to flying at high altitude with low air pressure.

[Bej Kerman]

23 minutes ago, Xavven said:

Air intake "spamming" isn't cheesy. It's an appropriate and logical solution to flying at high altitude with low air pressure.

Intake spamming was fixed almost a yonk ago, not really relevant now is it?

[Xavven]

54 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

Intake spamming was fixed almost a yonk ago, not really relevant now is it?

Oh, I haven't made a SSTO since beta. What's fixed about it?

[king of nowhere]

On 6/11/2022 at 7:22 PM, Fraktal said:

Which is why you should play with 10% science income. You'll love Minmus a whole LOT more than the Mun because it changes the game completely by raising the level of challenge. You can and will softlock yourself from even reaching the Mun if you pick the wrong tech nodes in the early game and you can just plain forget about using NERVs for your first Duna mission if you aren't using a science lab (and if you are, you'll likely miss the first transfer window if you wait for enough science points to come in).

nah, it doesn't change anything except making the game more annoying. you can still get tons of science from mun, you just need more mission. and who the hell needs a nerv for a duna mission?

so, my unpopular opinion is that once you get past the basics, career mode is pointless. there's really nothing in there that's not trivial, and no amount of making it more difficult will change this fact. it will just make the career trivial AND needlessly long.

the only way i ever found to make a career challenging was the no contract career challenge. not even caveman nanodiamond was really challenging past the beginning. I just knew that no matter what, i could not ever lose. i just had to spend inordinate amounts of time clicking on contracts.

[Bej Kerman]

38 minutes ago, Xavven said:

1 hour ago, Bej Kerman said:

Intake spamming was fixed almost a yonk ago, not really relevant now is it?

Oh, I haven't made a SSTO since beta. What's fixed about it?

I'm not sure what specifically changed about it, or if it was fixed before 1.0's aero overhaul, I just know it doesn't work nowadays.

[cosekantphi]

The developers of KSP really, really should have added clouds.

Maybe this isn't unpopular among all KSP players, but whenever this topic has come up over the past decade, the majority opinion on this forum at least has seemingly been that clouds are merely an aesthetics concern and thus a waste of developer time to add when there are always more important priorities. But I vehemently disagree with that. Clouds aren't just an aesthetic feature in flight sims and games adjacent to flight sims like KSP. They are an important component of situational awareness and context for the environment you're in. At a glance you can use clouds to estimate your altitude by how far above them you are compared to how high they look above the ground. Or by how far below them you are. You can use them to estimate your speed as they'll often be the only near enough objects that you can watch zoom past you. That and they provide the gameplay challenges of having to attempt targeted landings without being able to see your landing site or runway on a cloudy day, making situational awareness more challenging in those specific situations. They can also obscure mountain tops, making it necessary to be careful when flying over unfamiliar terrain lest you end up smeared all over the peak of K2.

Not to mention of all of the spinoff gameplay mechanics that could have come of clouds. Weather satellites are a pretty common payload sent into orbit in real life, but obviously unnecessary in KSP. But if we had clouds we could have features where we launch satellites to take weather data that would then give us predictions for where and when we'd have dense cloud cover. That's assuming that the clouds wouldn't just be a single texture rotating about the planet, though.

But they are indeed also an important aesthetic feature for maintaining immersion. For example, flying planes without clouds or any degree of atmospheric scattering just feels like you're in a giant void of still, unperturbed air.  It just doesn't look anything like being in a real plane. As for space flight, they are a very important visual indicator for the presence of an atmosphere. From higher orbits you have no real indication of Kerbin's atmosphere other than the presence of the oceans without clouds or atmospheric scattering. And don't get me started on Eve (the planet, not the mod). What, it has that extremely thick, dense atmosphere and yet you can still see all the way to the surface like it isn't even there at all? Seeing that really does a number on my suspension of disbelief.

The developers themselves understood this was a huge problem. You know how I can tell? If I recall correctly literally every single picture of a planet with an atmosphere in the loading screen contains clouds, either in the fan art images or the gameplay images that have the "This image contains mods" disclaimers. They had to believe clouds were an important visual feature in choosing those images.

I know, I know, our wonderful modders in this community have taken it upon themselves to add clouds to the game free of charge. And for that I am grateful to no end, I can't even play this game at all without clouds. But I get the feeling that if the KSP devs themselves had added clouds they would have been able to do it in a more optimized manner. With EVE installed using SVE templates I max out at 35 fps flying about Kerbin with the lowest graphics settings and a craft with 75 to 100 parts. And that's with volumetric clouds disabled. And I can just completely forget about using Scatterer, it brings me down to around 20 fps even with single part crafts. Please, anyone with experience modding KSP let me know if I'm wrong about hypothetical stock clouds having better optimization potential. I'm not a programmer and I have no real idea if that's truly the case. That's just always been my assumption since the KSP devs would have access to the source code.

All of that said, it also majorly sucks for console players that they'll never get clouds in KSP1 at all.

From what we've seen, it looks like KSP2 is going to right this wrong with its inclusion of clouds. Thank god. I can't wait until the 2040s when I'll finally be able to afford a good enough PC to run KSP2 on max settings with at least 60fps and maybe even a couple of mods installed! Unrelated, but maybe around that time period I'll also pick up MSFS 2020. I've heard some great things about it, including its lovely, fluffy clouds!

[Maria Sirona]

9 hours ago, cosekantphi said:

The developers of KSP really, really should have added clouds.

Maybe this isn't unpopular among all KSP players, but whenever this topic has come up over the past decade, the majority opinion on this forum at least has seemingly been that clouds are merely an aesthetics concern and thus a waste of developer time to add when there are always more important priorities. But I vehemently disagree with that. Clouds aren't just an aesthetic feature in flight sims and games adjacent to flight sims like KSP. They are an important component of situational awareness and context for the environment you're in. At a glance you can use clouds to estimate your altitude by how far above them you are compared to how high they look above the ground. Or by how far below them you are. You can use them to estimate your speed as they'll often be the only near enough objects that you can watch zoom past you. That and they provide the gameplay challenges of having to attempt targeted landings without being able to see your landing site or runway on a cloudy day, making situational awareness more challenging in those specific situations. They can also obscure mountain tops, making it necessary to be careful when flying over unfamiliar terrain lest you end up smeared all over the peak of K2.

Not to mention of all of the spinoff gameplay mechanics that could have come of clouds. Weather satellites are a pretty common payload sent into orbit in real life, but obviously unnecessary in KSP. But if we had clouds we could have features where we launch satellites to take weather data that would then give us predictions for where and when we'd have dense cloud cover. That's assuming that the clouds wouldn't just be a single texture rotating about the planet, though.

But they are indeed also an important aesthetic feature for maintaining immersion. For example, flying planes without clouds or any degree of atmospheric scattering just feels like you're in a giant void of still, unperturbed air.  It just doesn't look anything like being in a real plane. As for space flight, they are a very important visual indicator for the presence of an atmosphere. From higher orbits you have no real indication of Kerbin's atmosphere other than the presence of the oceans without clouds or atmospheric scattering. And don't get me started on Eve (the planet, not the mod). What, it has that extremely thick, dense atmosphere and yet you can still see all the way to the surface like it isn't even there at all? Seeing that really does a number on my suspension of disbelief.

The developers themselves understood this was a huge problem. You know how I can tell? If I recall correctly literally every single picture of a planet with an atmosphere in the loading screen contains clouds, either in the fan art images or the gameplay images that have the "This image contains mods" disclaimers. They had to believe clouds were an important visual feature in choosing those images.

I know, I know, our wonderful modders in this community have taken it upon themselves to add clouds to the game free of charge. And for that I am grateful to no end, I can't even play this game at all without clouds. But I get the feeling that if the KSP devs themselves had added clouds they would have been able to do it in a more optimized manner. With EVE installed using SVE templates I max out at 35 fps flying about Kerbin with the lowest graphics settings and a craft with 75 to 100 parts. And that's with volumetric clouds disabled. And I can just completely forget about using Scatterer, it brings me down to around 20 fps even with single part crafts. Please, anyone with experience modding KSP let me know if I'm wrong about hypothetical stock clouds having better optimization potential. I'm not a programmer and I have no real idea if that's truly the case. That's just always been my assumption since the KSP devs would have access to the source code.

All of that said, it also majorly sucks for console players that they'll never get clouds in KSP1 at all.

From what we've seen, it looks like KSP2 is going to right this wrong with its inclusion of clouds. Thank god. I can't wait until the 2040s when I'll finally be able to afford a good enough PC to run KSP2 on max settings with at least 60fps and maybe even a couple of mods installed! Unrelated, but maybe around that time period I'll also pick up MSFS 2020. I've heard some great things about it, including its lovely, fluffy clouds!

Agre

[jimmymcgoochie]

The Kerbol system is too similar to Sol system, as are a significant number of planet pack mods. Most exoplanetary systems found so far look nothing like our solar system, yet the pattern of small to medium rocky planets near the star, gas giants further out and some random icy lumps at the outer edge is almost ubiquitous in KSP. In trying to make the Kerbol system more like Sol system for familiarity’s sake, I think a great opportunity was lost to make it something more unique and interesting.

[Blaarkies]

Moar boosters is not always the right way to go
... * blocks flying debris with arms *
...nothing?  phew, I thought that was taking this too far

More often than not, it helps to simply delete the lower section that "needs boosters", and rebuilding that with bigger/wider LOX tanks. Big enough so that this section alone is heavier than the entire rocket above it

[Maria Sirona]

Seriously speaking @Blaarkies, "moar boosters" is mostly a memy thing

[Curveball Anders]

47 minutes ago, Maria Sirona said:

Seriously speaking @Blaarkies, "moar boosters" is mostly a memy thing

indeed, the correct answer is always moar struts!

 

[Kerb24]

Spaceplanes are overrated.

[Rutabaga22]

5 hours ago, jimmymcgoochie said:

Kerbol system more like Sol system for familiarity’s sake

I think that is a good decision, you don't wan't to give players insane new planets. I think most people who bought ksp wanted to do some real life missions, so having familia planets was a good idea.