Developer Insights #17 - Engines Archetypes

[Drakenred65]

Guys? Stop.

 

Yes you do have a voice in this. And you can easily use the use the forums as a soapbox for your point of view.
 

Unfortunately you  have a very limited megaphone. 

 

And your sitting next to players who collectively have a megaphone that’s literally a sports stadium sound system  compared to the Dixie cup you and I are using here.

 

they know how many players bought the game.

 

they know how many players played it just long enough to refund it.

 

they know how many people played in what mode. And for how long.

 

they know what planets you visited, and what you did there. 
 

all because if nothing else you scored achievements, and they can look at that and decide what needs work.

 

in fact I suspect when the game goes live they will have a display showing how many people did what and where and more or less updates in real time. It would be far from the first time game dev did that! It’s something the folks at EverQuest did ages ago. They. Even had “cameras” showing in game bosses in there lairs.
 

they will know what you do, now long it takes you to do things, and how long after you died or suffered from unplanned disassembly you went afk or quit, and how long it took you to log back on. Oh and if you have steam they will also know if you forum warriored or did some other thing. 

 

 

Edited December 17, 2022 by [email protected]

[Bej Kerman]

8 hours ago, Sidneyia said:

Hear me out: don't do this. Don't add these labels to the engine description.

First of all, I like the idea of moar realism, taking into account the nozzle sizes as well as retaining the old KSP vibes of not having super big engines to and on. Having said that, KSP is a game that is proud of teaching without lessoning. That is proud to say that you "learn by failing". Keep these 4 archetypes, but don't tell them to the player. Let the player discover it. Let them fail. Let them look at the Thrust and ISP values to figure it out. Otherwise you are taking out part of the fun. It's like playing a game and look for the "best build" or the "meta" on the internet. You just copy. You don't learn. And certainly, you will never reach that moment of "eureka! Now I understand!"

This is an over-reaction. If you really think labelling engines by their function is going too far, you could say the same thing about telling the player their thrust and efficiency and argue that players should only be allowed to know how powerful an engine is by testing it for themselves.

7 hours ago, Kerb24 said:

After reading this, the week KSP 2 is released I'll start trying to make a simple real fuels mod.

Care to elaborate?

[Yellowburn10]

At first I came from this read with mixed opinions about the whole methalox thing, but now that I've had some time to process, this probably was the best option in the end to do. If you are adding multiple fuel types to the game, but still want to keep some of the simplicity KSP1 had with it's fuels and engines, an all round fuel type for most legacy engines does seem like the best choice to go for. While it's not perfect, methalox does fit the best with what KSP1's liquid fuel can do, which, let's be honest, is essentially magic powder. What fuel in exsistence can power conventional rocket engines (some that don't even take the same fuel), jet engines, a nuclear powered engine, vernor engines, and could be found and extracted from any celestial body in the solar system? Not even methalox fits all these, but it's still the best fit for what they're looking for. And while it would have been nice to have a little more variety in fuels than just methalox and hydrolox, that's something that can easily be fixed by mods.

 

As for the change in the Mammoth engine, first of all RIP, but this change makes sense when you think about it. What is Mammoth 1 but 4 swivels taped together? That's not that hard to recreate on our own, especially if they give us some kind of adapter for it. Heck, this would be like if instead of having an adaptor tank for the Mastodons in the making history DLC, they had made something like Mammoth 1 and put all 5 Mastodon engines into one clustered engine. Then for KSP 2 they just replaced that with a single big engine and had the adapter for the 5 engines like we do now. Not really much different.

 

(Also, just would like to point out, a real life Mastodon is considered a smaller variant of a Mammoth, so having the Mastodon engine be the F-1 and the new Mammoth being the F-1B I think is a genius move on their part)

[Nertea]

Lots of opinions here to unpack! 

We have to walk a fairly fine tightrope when choosing to represent the complex reality of real rocketry. For a lot of historical space applications, a specific need was often defined (go to the moon), which drove the selection and development of all components of the spacecraft, including choice of fuel(s) and development of the engines (from scratch, from a study, or upgraded from a previous vehicle). With KSP, we're kinda working backwards - we get to make guesses like "here are the missions we think a player will want to do" and strive to provide a set of engine options that let them do that. That's a pretty big space - players want launch engines, space engines, efficient engines and such for their missions. Filling that need for even a single fuel type requires a lot of engine parts. There's 20 in KSP1 and there's sill frustrating gaps to me. I do like playing Engine Selection Simulator myself, but providing enough options for player flexiblity with several liquid fuel types causes the number of engines to go up fast. I should know, I made at least one KSP1 mod for that. 

Approachability in this space is a huge problem too. New players end up with a lot of confusion over parsing through even the basic set of engines. More engines that use different fuels create more approachability challenges, particularly when trying to match them with their fuels and understand when to and when not to use them. That's a teaching challenge we have to bite off with our later, fancier engines, but there we have the advantage of being able to use fairly unique models and well-defined, different performance envelopes to do that. 

All this is why we are effectively sticking with a single liquid bipropellant engine resource, at least at the beginning of Early Access. There's a long road ahead of us though, and room for a lot more things! Of course - like Nate indicated, you will see hydrogen for use in nuclear engines at EA launch as a new fuel as well as the old standards like Xenon. 

There's lots of good discussion about methane as a base fuel in this thread, with some strong pros and cons. I'm always encouraged to see that these matched our internal design debates and I believe that we've made the right choice. Think of it as Kerbals taking a slightly different technical path to rocketry than humans. To quickly reiterate, we're not rebalancing our engines to be considerably different just because they use methalox or anything - you'll see craft with the same engines behave more or less the same in KSP1. 

 

All the above being said I immediately expect modders to do what modders do, and show up very quickly with mods that add, for example, the 150-odd resources in the Community Resource Pack into KSP2. And mods that change the engines that look something like hydrolox engines to use hydrolox  . Modding is great!

 

[shdwlrd]

Thanks for explaining the thought process Nertea.  Hopefully that will quell some of the debate and bickering.

[Insomn]

We all know that Kerbals are highly combustible and I want a way to convert one into fuel if necessary in a pinch.

Edited December 17, 2022 by Insomn

[theJesuit]

1 hour ago, Nertea said:

single liquid bipropellant

I think this all is fantastic.  The naming thing bothers me a little.  I'll mod it into my KSP 1 game and get used to it. That'll solve any doubts.

Will you rename solid fuel to aluminium/ammonia perchlorate? This would add to consistency 

If i can have one humble request please.  Fix the ratios of methane /liquid oxidizer mix.  Instead of the .9:1.1 make it an easy round 1:3.  

The old SAFIRE mod had an excellent explanation which I adopted for Simplex Resources. 

Bring on Feb 24!

[Vl3d]

10 minutes ago, Laikanaut said:

RIP liquid fuel, I never thought I'd miss you until they poured liquid farts on your grave.

@Laikanaut, if you have such strong opinions, why not contribute some feedback to the KSP2 wishlist?

 

[Dragorans]

So they will solve the problem of Wolfhound making Poodle useless...

The last line calmed me down a lot lol. I really want to see kerbais diving into kerosene pools. 

Deep Space engine example:

nerv

 

 

[samhuk]

I find this discussion on KSP2 balancing X and balancing Y (e.g. realism, # of fuels, why methalox, etc.) a bit odd.

I mean, KSP1 already solved the issue of different player opinions, play-styles, wants, needs and all that stuff with ✨mods✨.  KSP1 architecture was made from the ground-up to be moddable (there was even a conference or two held something like 8 years ago by KSP1 devs about how they made the game so incredibly moddable), so that if you wanted larger planets, more realism, futuristic stuff, or whatever, you generally could install mods to achieve your desired gameplay.

I find the discussion about what KSP2 should or shouldn't do, respectfully, a bit pointless, because of this. If KSP2 matches or exceeds KSP1's moddability, then it's likely you or somebody else will mod the game to your desired gameplay, e.g. more or less realism, more or less "factorio" play, different aerodynamics/heating, more parts, more planets, etc.

Now the base game does need to be at least somewhat balanced and logical, for example there can't be entire swathes of parts that are made pointless by some god-parts, but debates about "keralox vs methalox" I believe are made pointless by mods at the end of the day. Just my 2 cents.

Edited December 17, 2022 by samhuk

[The Aziz]

Well we didn't have many deep space engines in KSP1, have we? Low thrust, high efficiency, not designed to used for landers thanks to long bell?

Problem with Wolfhound was, that Poodle then became too powerful for its own good. There was no need for higher thrust at the cost of other things, when probably the most frequent use case was low to mid gravity no atmo landers.

Also, regarding Nerv-US: wasn't there an afterburner mode for it, making it effectively work on hydrolox?

[intelliCom]

41 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

Problem with Wolfhound was, that Poodle then became too powerful for its own good. There was no need for higher thrust at the cost of other things, when probably the most frequent use case was low to mid gravity no atmo landers.

Considering its ridiculous efficiency and visual design being inspired by the Apollo CSM's engine, it's likely going to be a deep space engine.
We can only hope its thrust is piddly compared to KSP1. Maybe around 100-150 kN?

[AtomicTech]

I'm really excited!

This is awesome work y'all!

[Pthigrivi]

15 hours ago, regex said:

Please tell me we're getting fuel switching tanks so I'm not locked into one "look" for my spaceships (not to mention scrolling for days through the list trying to figure out which tank is which)

Yeah I'd also be very interested in being able to put LH2 in sturdy looking tanks and Methalox in tanks with low dry mass as a vanilla option. There are a lot of applications like aerobraking an LH2 tanker or having an all-vac methalox tug or just unique vessel architectures where being able to take advantage of greater thermal performance or lesser dry mass would open up design space. I understand this would be a little more complicated for new players, but I'd think by the time they're unlocking Nerva's and H2 tanks they could handle that nuance. 

Also it looks like we'll probably have to wait a bit for 1.857 and 5m parts? I don't think I've seen any of those yet? 

As to the general simplification of bipropelants I think it makes a lot of sense, and Methalox is great because it's right there in the middle. I understand what folks are saying about historical replicas but they never really functioned exactly right in KSP1 because of the scale of the planet and different performance stats. They were always at best 'look alikes' rather than 'perform-alikes'. And maybe down the road they could still add some Hydrolox engines since those resources will already be deeply embedded in the game. Easy as cake for modders in the meantime. 

[Guest]

15 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Yeah I'd also be very interested in being able to put LH2 in sturdy looking tanks and Methalox in tanks with low dry mass as a vanilla option. There are a lot of applications like aerobraking an LH2 tanker or having an all-vac methalox tug or just unique vessel architectures where being able to take advantage of greater thermal performance or lesser dry mass would open up design space. I understand this would be a little more complicated for new players, but I'd think by the time they're unlocking Nerva's and H2 tanks they could handle that nuance.

I don't even care about any of that. What really matters to me is that when I build a spaceship with a nuclear engine I end up having to use aircraft parts because those are the only ones which efficiently hold only liquid fuel. And it's going to absolutely suck if I'm limited to five gold foil tanks for nuclear engines or two metallic hydrogen tanks for those engines in KSP2.

And once again, I can't stress enough just how cluttered and confusing the fuel tank tab in the VAB was coming back to KSP after a couple years. It's a mess.

E: A great solution to that would to just have one fuel tank for each type which can be stretched, bent, rounded, and pointed into whatever shapes you have unlocked. Imagine building an SRB in segments (or just stretching it out) and slapping a nozzle on the bottom (maybe one that gimbals for once).

15 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Also it looks like we'll probably have to wait a bit for 1.857 and 5m parts? I don't think I've seen any of those yet?

We might be getting procedural engine mounts on the engines themselves or mounting plates to solve that.

Edited December 17, 2022 by regex

[Strawberry]

I vaguely remember a dev saying they don't plan on having breaking ground parts? Won't be surprised if we get some (but probably not all) anyways. Also we've seen XL parts, we don't know the radius of those though (pictured below, the crew module is a large sized one). 

Even though I don't want multiple chemical engine types (like methalox or hydrolox), I do hope we get fuel switching for tanks because it just seems super nice for vehicle designing. One of the worst things about ksp1 is how you needed to use special fuel tanks if you wanted to make planes, fuel switching would eliminate the need for those parts. Also I want to have my interplanetary gas tankers use those big spherical fuel tanks. Though, even though they havent stated if they have implemented it or not, Im pretty optimistic they already have considering we have never seen an oxygen only tank, and NERVUS engine requires oxygen to run in its second mode. In case they havent implemented it however, please do itd be easy to do and itd add so much. 

[Dragorans]

1 hour ago, The Aziz said:

Also, regarding Nerv-US: wasn't there an afterburner mode for it, making it effectively work on hydrolox?

Probably. It also leads me to theorize that we will have pure oxygen tanks. But that's just for the "maybe". 

[Tangle]

15 hours ago, [email protected] said:

they know what planets you visited, and what you did there. 

How do I opt out of that?

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, Tangle said:

How do I opt out of that?

What happens on  Dres stays on Dres.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Man - the nerd-rage is insane! 

Gonna repost this - because I think too many people are forgetting the new player experience:

"I've kind of wrestled with this since the announcement.  Partly because of where I am now with my knowledge of rocketry from playing KSP and having swam in these forums for years gobbling up information that otherwise would not even be on my radar. 

Specifically I'm thinking of a couple of videos I've seen in the last year* that did deep dives into how rockets work, what the various fuel and pump configurations are and the history and development of several generations of rocket. 

Having years of playing time and enthusiast levels of knowledge already under my belt makes me appreciate why people want granularity in fuel types and engine configurations.  I kinda want it too. 

But if I'm honest with myself - back when I was a new player just trying to figure out how to play the game, accomplish missions, get a rocket to orbit and land / return from a moon... Knowing that there were different fuel types besides SRB and LF+O would not have been relevant.  Like - there was already a ton of stuff to learn - and just knowing that SRB was on/off and lots of power vs LF+O allowed me to throttle was enough.  It would not have added anything to the new player experience to have to figure out whether it made sense for a particular mission to use a keralox or a methalox engine, and if deciding among unlocks?  Too much, too fast. 

The only thing that kind of confuses me is why they decided to go 'methalox' and not just stick with LF+O.  That worked for KSP... So I'm guessing that having this slight level of specificity is because they will have parts (later) that carry liquid fuel but don't work with keralox engines. Kind of like a xenon tank or a monopropellant tank. 

And maybe - just maybe - that methalox is the LF that's available during EA and that possibly on Release they may add back in Keralox and other fuels if their data shows people actually want that level of granularity and it doesn't adversely affect new players' experience. 

 

 

 

*(thinking Everyday Astronaut - but they could be from several sources) "

 

 

1 hour ago, Strawberry said:

vaguely remember a dev saying they don't plan on having breaking ground parts

IIRC - they're not having robotics in EA.  They are letting us access a bunch of of core features to playtest the most important parts of the game in a sandbox environment that should help make sure the game works as intended. 

The Science / progression step of the road map likely dumps more parts - but they haven't said which, yet. 

By the time Release hits I'm betting we have everything (official) from KSP that makes sense to have in the game plus some new stuff unique to KSP2 

Edited December 17, 2022 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[Vl3d]

5 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The only thing that kind of confuses me is why they decided to go 'methalox' and not just stick with LF+O. 

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

10 hours ago, Nertea said:

Approachability in this space is a huge problem too. New players end up with a lot of confusion over parsing through even the basic set of engines. More engines that use different fuels create more approachability challenges

You guys should stick to your guns on this. 

[desert]

3 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

But if I'm honest with myself - back when I was a new player just trying to figure out how to play the game, accomplish missions, get a rocket to orbit and land / return from a moon... Knowing that there were different fuel types besides SRB and LF+O would not have been relevant.

If there were kerolox engines at the start of tech tree and hydrolox engines much later, somewhere around nuclear engines, there won't be a problem of overwhelming a new player. The player would learn how to build and fly simple kerolox rockets and only then will meet new fuel type

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Just now, desert said:

If there were kerolox engines at the start of tech tree and hydrolox engines much later, somewhere around nuclear engines, there won't be a problem of overwhelming a new player. The player would learn how to build and fly simple kerolox rockets and only then will meet new fuel type

Like I wrote - I wrestled with this after the announcement... And I'm not sure about that.  It really runs the risk of 'too much too fast' for players who are new to the whole thing.  And I'm not sure that level of granularity adds anything to the experience for new to casual players. 

 

The fact that it can be added in later - or, as suggested, modded in for the enthusiasts - is an okay solution. 

I'm coming at this from the standpoint of KSP2 being introduced to a whole new generation of gamers - and not being produced only as a sequel for the few of us who've stuck around the whole time.  Point of fact:  I have a Highschooler and a Middleschooler who I can only hope will be 'bitten by the bug' with KSP2 (KSP is just too 'old and nerdy' to capture their imagination).  If the devs succeed in gaining the imagination of a whole new generation... Those of us who are enthusiastic should get another 10 years of fantastic game experience.   We want new people to find the joy we did - and shouldn't risk losing them because we want MOAR!!! 

[Drakenred65]

Depending on system ( steam Xbox and PlayStation) you probably can’t. Night now KSP does not have achivents on steam, but I believe it does on console). I know on Xbox they share information back with the devs, including system crashes, but strip I.d. Information beyond which region it was played in and which version of console on anyone not in early access or beta, or basic hardware information. 
 

but I know that anyone in the Xbox Beta program, or Beta Xcloud, or any early access games they include user ID and platform info ( Xbox cloud Beta for example, I found out I from them that I was one of the few people who tried playing Halo on my phone at that time) along with performance data, game progress, crash reports and with Xcloud bit and lag.

 

now I believe you  can set things to private, on non beta and non pre release games, and can opt out of sharing your info with developers on full release games, but if you allow anyone and everyone to see your achievements… well devs are part of everyone.

 

and no, Xcloud can’t see me using my Popeyes app to see me order 2 Blackened chicken sandwiches, 1 Large Red beans and rice one large slaw a large Dr Pepper  tea and biskets 

 

what we were hungry.