KSP2 EA: Where is the Journey / Mission planner?

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, t_v said:

I think that Pthigrivi’s idea of mission planning is much more feasible- we already have good delta-v readouts on ships, at least for 99% of cases, and doing things like pork chop plots is a problem that has been solved. 

Thanks!
 

5 hours ago, t_v said:

It might work for basic missions, but will pose a serious problem for more complex ones. Take a mothership headed to Eve with a deployable rover and plane. The rover is attached to the top of the rocket upside-down in a fairing and the plane is on a docking port on the side of the mothership. Because the rover is the final stage, the visualizer takes that as the control point and the rocket appears upside-down on the launchpad. The booster uses a strange form of onion staging, and the delta-v readouts make the visualizer believe that all of the side boosters detach at the same time in the lower atmosphere and the transfer stage starts burning in the upper atmosphere. Assuming that the messed up dV doesn’t stop the mission from arriving at Eve, the visualizer sees the parachutes on the plane, and the plane isn’t staged to decouple because it is attached with a docking port, so the whole mothership takes a plunge. Clearly this doesn’t work in the actual game, but the visualizer has no problem with letting a space station touch down hanging from a plane by one docking port. Finally, the rover decouples from the ship in the low Eve atmosphere and touches down, heat shield and all, ignoring the “jettison heat shield” feature. All throughout, the entire ship is rendered upside-down because the rover is upside-down. 

I think this is a good test and illustrates that at some point players are going to have to do some thinking of their own. The main purpose of a flight planner would be to give good estimates for dV and flight duration.  To know the required dV from KSC to Laythe Orbit or Laythe orbit to the surface doesn't require you to know anything about the vessel. It's up to you as the player to build modules and subassemblies that meet those targets. Like I said it might be handy to be able to attach the estimate directly to the relevant subassembly just to keep track of everything, but in that case you can just have a little pictogram and custom name "Laythe Rover"  in the corner like you see on the load vessel screen. You don't need a whole exploded diagram of everything, just each piece of the puzzle. 

 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[Vanamonde]

Some comments removed. Keep it on-topic, please. 

[mcwaffles2003]

20 hours ago, t_v said:

Okay, let me restate: this is a relatively simple mission for me. It is just one step up from an Apollo-style mission (2 detachables instead of one) and is honestly much less in-depth than a mission I would normally  use for a single-launch Eve colonization. I dislike that you think I am making false embellishments when I was just trying to point out some technical difficulties with this kind of system to the best of my knowledge. 

Well then I'm sorry if I misread you.

20 hours ago, t_v said:

Okay, there’s one fix. Have the starting image be the same orientation as the rocket in the VAB. When does it flip? Because if you have a mission that makes a burn in the upside-down direction (e.g. you have an ion engine on the front of the ship), you would want to flip that again. So do you calculate thrust direction for each stage and orient the craft based on that. What about maneuvers using RCS engines then? This problem is already pretty complex, and needs to be solved for a visualizer to work. 

 

I think there's a miscommunication going on. When I said:

21 hours ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

I don't think  a full scale simulation of the planned flight is practical, you can simply subtract everything that's not attached to the root part after each stage though and show how the created vessel transforms to assist mission planning. For instance, once the root vessel stages away from the plane, just show the root vessel without a plane. So on and so forth.

The mechanism I explain isn't as intricate as what @Vl3d describes. I'm talking about something much simpler that can run the ship through all of its staging events to make "check your staging" much easier as it can get pretty difficult to make sure everything is in order when you have 30+ engines and 20 staging events. As far as how the devs intend to make a full mission planner, I think we all need more info on how it works before we can really talk about expanding its capabilities. I really wonder how they will compensate for things like launch timing, atmospheric effects, etc in the planning stages. If ships begin their journey from orbit though, all of this could be made much simpler.

21 hours ago, t_v said:

As I said before, the plane is attached via a docking port, so that it can re-dock to the station.  There’s nothing in the staging that suggests if or when the plane detaches from the mothership. So the assumption is that it stays attached and the two land together. The alternative is that another mission with a drone that is meant to stay attached and parachute a base down decouples and suddenly a surface base is left in orbit. 

Just want to say I find it weird we cant make dock decoupling a staged event in KSP.

21 hours ago, t_v said:

You are getting the wrong vibe. I would really, really like for this to be in the game. It would make for such a special experience to see your own rocket represented in the same professional style as rockets that have millions of real-life bills invested in them. If this could possibly work, I would strongly advocate for it. But just like planetary collisions, there is no way that you can program a tool to take all the possibilities and represent them well in the scope of KSP 2. The sheer amount of craft that people can design means that any system you create, no matter how well developed, will break when someone tries creating something new like a stack separator loop. 
 

I think that Pthigrivi’s idea of mission planning is much more feasible- we already have good delta-v readouts on ships, at least for 99% of cases, and doing things like pork chop plots is a problem that has been solved. Full-trip visualizers are not going to happen, only numerical trip planning and maybe some partial, restricted visualizers. 

I think @Pthigrivi's suggestions seem very feasible as well but do you believe we may see full on maneuver node planning from start to finish from the VAB?

[t_v]

4 minutes ago, mcwaffles2003 said:

The mechanism I explain isn't as intricate as what @Vl3d describes. I'm talking about something much simpler that can run the ship through all of its staging events to make "check your staging" much easier as it can get pretty difficult to make sure everything is in order when you have 30+ engines and 20 staging events.

Thank you for the clarification and I apologize for the misunderstanding. Visualizing staging can still be a very difficult thing to get right with the extreme freedom that KSP gives players, but I think that it is much less difficult than a full trip visualizer. 
 

As for maneuver planning, I think that a tool tool that plans your maneuvers at the start would be feasible, but not worthwhile because I don’t think anybody can make their launches consistent enough for the maneuvers to work. However, planning out a high-dV burn in the editor might be helpful so you know that your ship can actually do the mission before you are in orbit and realize you are 10 km/s short.

 

[mcwaffles2003]

12 minutes ago, t_v said:

Thank you for the clarification and I apologize for the misunderstanding.

All good man, in my interactions with you so far you've seemed like a reasonable person and I'm happy that assumption seems correct. Sorry if I seemed to be short with you as well

9 minutes ago, t_v said:

As for maneuver planning, I think that a tool tool that plans your maneuvers at the start would be feasible, but not worthwhile because I don’t think anybody can make their launches consistent enough for the maneuvers to work. However, planning out a high-dV burn in the editor might be helpful so you know that your ship can actually do the mission before you are in orbit and realize you are 10 km/s short.

 

I think if you plan ahead with correction burns in mind so each event doesnt happen back to back it would be a fairly feasible thing. To follow with the plan players would just need to plan responsibly keeping errors in mind. Also orbits could simply be seen as stationary rings like are currently shown in missions that ask the player to put satellites in specific orbits and transfers would just show escapes and entries to those rings

[Pthigrivi]

Also important is that every mission is going to experience some improvisation, whether minor or major. In fact it would be a very dull game if that wasn't part of it. Some of the most fun I have is when I manage a really efficient, on-the-fly set of gravity assists around jool and realize "Oh this orbital scanner has enough fuel left to visit 2 more moons!" So long as the planner can help players put together a decently conservative sketch of the mission they shouldn't find themselves too badly burned if they go off script. 

[Superfluous J]

On 11/3/2022 at 5:55 AM, OHara said:

 

Proof I've forgotten more about this game than I remember.

[Datau03]

I think some kind of Delta-V map in game that would somehow be tied to science and discovery would be a great idea. For example you have to observe a planet with a telescope to get more and more accurate Delta-V esimations on how to get there. There are propably a lot more ways how this could be done as a feature.

[Vl3d]

And we have a.. trip planner. Which is actually a Delta-V map. I was expecting... more.

• proper launch windows for all destinations (so we can launch directly to target instead of wasting time in orbit)
• the TWR you need to land
• atmospheric entry altitude / angle
• the correct altitude to deploy parachutes etc.

And there doesn't seem to be any integration with other game systems. Maybe it will get populated progressively with more info when Science Mode is released and we're able to gather info through experiments.

Spoiler

 

Edited February 20, 2023 by Vl3d

[The Aziz]

24 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

proper launch windows for all destinations (so we can launch directly to target instead of wasting time in orbit)

agreed.

24 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

the TWR you need to land

we're not getting any TWR readings, at least in the preview, but they say it's being worked on. Planetary switch like in KSP1 would give a good look at it.

26 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

atmospheric entry altitude / angle

you can get that from map view/tracking station. is it really that needed in VAB? Not like you can do much about it sitting in a building.

27 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

the correct altitude to deploy parachutes etc.

again, not needed in VAB, and it shows red/yellow/green while you're falling.

[Guest]

14 hours ago, Vl3d said:

And we have a.. trip planner. Which is actually a Delta-V map. I was expecting... more.

• proper launch windows for all destinations (so we can launch directly to target instead of wasting time in orbit)

I agree with the fact that we absolutely need a transfer window calculator, and I know, based on the previous pages of discussion that you expected something more visually extended like the typical "metro map" view we all probably have propped up near our PCs.

BUT

I think the simple list of maneuvers and their DV requirements is a way simpler interface to read than any graphical DV map. Especially given the fact that, when you choose your destination, the DV map basically becomes a single list of DV requirements.

[jacksawild]

labelling stages or parts would go a long way to providing this. We've all hunted for the correct hidden decoupler to release our landers from inside the insterstage fairing, imagine if we could just name it "release lander".