How should rockets flex?

[RocketRockington]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

Yes. My game, my rules. I don't try to tell you how you play your game,  I don't see why I should let you tell me how to play mine

Seems you and IG have similar design philosophies, at least until massive backlash forced IG to reevaluate(somewhat)  - since they want money.  

[Alexoff]

39 minutes ago, Lisias said:

The Kerbal's "goofiness" is what makes the harsh path to the success palatable for me.

This part of the game allowed a lot of forgiveness. I remember how in 0.90 my craft on Duna had a bug and it was possible to constantly release a kerbal from it, although there was only one inside. Moreover, there was even a reactive effect if you "shoot" them often. It was incredibly stupid and funny! Then I just reloaded and continued the mission. But for some reason, with KSP2, such a trick no longer works. I don't know, the magic has gone somewhere. Something similar happened with cyberpunk. There were so many jokes and references in The Witcher 3 and it was very difficult to criticize the stupidity of the plot, which was actually at the end of the game. It's just that no one paid any attention to it. In cyberpunk, the plot was very serious and for some reason the stupidity of the plot was very striking.

46 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And how you suggest the game should support the user's diagnosing for such problems, once they happen?

I like how it happens in real life - the crack of the skin in a weakened place, then a flame escapes from there, and then a deafening explosion. Maybe in slo-mo. If there are no fuel tanks nearby, then the craft just falls apart.

[mcwaffles2003]

I saw this video and felt as though my personal views were being confirmed.

On the issue of rocket wobble as a whole, I still believe that it should exist in the game, though it current implementation is over the top and serves nothing beyond a 10 minute build and laugh, it definitely isn't conducive, in my opinion, to long term play though. Not to mention, the exaggerated wobble is killing framerates in a game already massively underperforming its predecessor. On the other hand, having perfectly rigid rockets isn't good either, but if I had to pick between spaghetti and diamond rockets I'd take the diamond, so long as aerodynamic induced failure and RUD isn't removed as well. Most preferable to me would be some flex though, since rockets are not perfectly rigid either and having each piece being made of a deformable mesh isn't a realistic option. 

 

[Kurobara9001]

Wobbly rockets ARE NOT "fun"

Wobbly rockets are "funny"

For about two seconds.  And then the longer it occurs, the more you want to break your computer in half.

I bought the game on launch because of how excited for it I was and I wanted to support the devs as they finished their work.  I haven't played at any length since the first week because the game is still too broken even with the patches (I tried after each patch, but still could not play the game); and structure rigidity is the primary complaint.  Second was releasing without any Science to do.  Lacking both, it's just a poor flight simulator that fails at even that.

 

Devs, I speak to you: fix this.  or KSP will go the way of SimCity and be replaced by something better.

 

(EDIT: 12/29/23. Since the For Science! 0.2 release, many small bugs remain, but Devs, thank you for sticking to it and fixing the biggest problems.  Wobbly rockets are fixed!  I am glad we all stuck with it and I greatly look forward to colonies and interstellar!)

Edited December 29, 2023 by Kurobara9001
Adding an update sentence re: For Science!

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, RocketRockington said:

Seems you and IG have similar design philosophies, at least until massive backlash forced IG to reevaluate(somewhat)  - since they want money.  

I'm a player, not a game publisher or designer. I think you completely misunderstood the meaning of the post.

But since we are here, there's this little nice game where rockets never wobble. It's called Juno: Origins.

So we have a game where there's wobble, another where wobble is still in heavy need of work, and a third where there's no wobble.

What games are making more money to their publishers is left as an exercise to the reader.  

 

1 hour ago, Alexoff said:

I like how it happens in real life - the crack of the skin in a weakened place, then a flame escapes from there, and then a deafening explosion. Maybe in slo-mo. If there are no fuel tanks nearby, then the craft just falls apart.

I like the idea, but on the other hand I think they need to carefully weight how much reality they want on such crashes, otherwise they would risk a PEGI 7 or 12 (worst case scenario, PEGI 16 but I think I'm pushing it a bit too much).

For the sake of comparison Bean NG.drive, where very realistic vehicles crashes in a very impressively realistic way, use Crash Test Dummies instead of "living" characters, and yet it got a PEGI 16 classification. No kidding, the rationale appears to be the abuse of real life vehicles in a realistic way.

KSP¹ is PEGI 3 and IMHO IG should do whatever they can to keep such classification on KSP 2, or at very worst a PEGI 7 - and, so, they need to avoid too much realism on how the vehicles are R.U.D.ed.

So, too much realistic crashes should be out of the menu - not to mention the Kerbal's fate: on KSP¹, they don't "die", they "poof", got a Missed in Action on the Hoster and two hours later they "respawn" as "Available".

That said, there's nothing preventing them to sell a DLC with realistic crashes, implemeting what you are asking. The game itself keeps a PEGI 3 or 7, and people old enough buy the DLC. The best of both Worlds.

[Kerbart]

Matt Lowne: "My well engineered rockets shouldn't wobble"

Me & others: "Your rockets are clearly not as well-engineered as you think they are"

I never used autostruts and I don't have wobbly rockets. I applaud Matt's daring designs,  but the monstrosities he tends to launch have little to do with engineering.

[Alexoff]

34 minutes ago, Lisias said:

KSP¹ is PEGI 3 and IMHO IG should do whatever they can to keep such classification on KSP 2, or at very worst a PEGI 7 - and, so, they need to avoid too much realism on how the vehicles are R.U.D.ed.

So, too much realistic crashes should be out of the menu - not to mention the Kerbal's fate: on KSP¹, they don't "die", they "poof", got a Missed in Action on the Hoster and two hours later they "respawn" as "Available".

That said, there's nothing preventing them to sell a DLC with realistic crashes, implemeting what you are asking. The game itself keeps a PEGI 3 or 7, and people old enough buy the DLC. The best of both Worlds

In KSP2, rockets explode quite brightly with a rating of 3+. It seems to me that a very small number of children play KSP1/2. In addition, these ratings are unlikely to stop anyone. I just checked one indie game with a rating of +18 on steam, in its official group 40% of subscribers are under 18 years old.

5 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I never used autostruts and I don't have wobbly rockets. I applaud Matt's daring designs,  but the monstrosities he tends to launch have little to do with engineering.

But in his video, he launched a completely ordinary SLS and it wobble a lot. It is almost impossible to launch something monstrous into orbit in KSP2. The point is that if you reproduce a common mission, for example, Apollo 11, then without a huge amount of strings, the rocket will behave like a sausage.

[RocketRockington]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

What games are making more money to their publishers is left as an exercise to the reader.  

Ever heard of 'first mover advantage'?  Or does it not occur to you that KSP2 is partially failing to attract player counts despite it's license strength and massive budget behind it because it has a prior competitor and isn't doing anything to outdo it - an issue that Juno suffers from as well as having no IP to bring people in and no marketting budget . 

Your argument here is [snip] assuming that wobble is the only thing that distinguishes them. 

It's like saying 'why doesn't this generic cola make the profits of Coke, they're both carbonated!'. 

Edited July 2, 2023 by Snark
Redacted by moderator

[mrjsonkerbal]

46 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

Matt Lowne: "My well engineered rockets shouldn't wobble"

Me & others: "Your rockets are clearly not as well-engineered as you think they are"

I never used autostruts and I don't have wobbly rockets. I applaud Matt's daring designs,  but the monstrosities he tends to launch have little to do with engineering.

Nice. Would love some detail / pointers on e.g. getting a craft to eve orbit with a detachable lander capable of landing and returning to orbit. I can get to duna well, but the size of craft required for e.g. eve always means I struggle to get a reasonable craft into orbit without wobbling to unplanned disassembly.  I clearly don't understand some building fundamentals if it's possible without covering things in struts, and even then, it feels super wrong and fails too many times.

[regex]

54 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

Me & others: "Your rockets are clearly not as well-engineered as you think they are"

I actually completely agree. If we were talking something like RO I'd be all in favor of autostrut or rigid joints because I have other constraints on design to contend with. With stock KSP1 and autostrut there is very little engineering challenge, it's way too simplistic and trivial a game with it, especially for experienced users.

Most issues of wobbly rockets in the current build can be fixed with sparing and intelligent use of struts. I am not at all opposed to reducing the wobble but KSP1 level autoatrut is, quite frankly, baby mode KSP.

Edited July 2, 2023 by regex

[PDCWolf]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

Suggestions are welcome. How about something like this?

I'll once again remit myself to the flexibility the dev expects the user to extract from parts: Users are, for example encouraged to use fuel tanks as station parts, aircraft fuselages, and even rover bodies. From this, I can tell you that whatever system takes the place of wobble, would have to be able to distinguish what's a rocket, from what's a ground base, a rover, a space/airplane, and so on, otherwise you'll always end up with wobble where it shouldn't be, and never in the right amount, which is what happens now (wing flex looks great, but that flex also happens on rockets where it shouldn't). So the solution requires the game to be able to differentiate vessels, by a way other than their classification on the tracking station, as that opens itself to obvious exploits (i.e. classify your rocket as a space station to dispel wobble). It'd need to be integrated on the VAB, be diagnosable pre-flight, solvable without sacrificing the part budget, be intuitive and consistent in how it manifest without looking like "random failures" aaaaaand be "realistic". I think this is pretty impossible without going magnitudes deeper into simulation than what KSP intends.

Like sure, I'd love to have an interface to test, for example, the structural strain caused by MaxQ to see if my rocket is gonna snap, or even just flip when ascending, but that'd alienate so many people and fall so far from the intended gamepaly loop that stuff like that is reserved for mods like FAR. Why should we go so deep to try and fix a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place, and that getting the proper tools to work with means making a completely different game?

One more time, I arrive at the same conclusion: Wobble introduces a number of problems infinitely superior to whatever worth it might have as a "feature".

 

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

the Elephant in the Room I mentioned above.

I don't think about it that way.  At this point, it is just the community creating a self fulfilling prophecy that they need the "unsafe jank culture" to feel validated in their fun. When you decide to go serious, you can do that both in KSP and Juno, and when you decide to go silly, you can still do that on both, or literally any game for that matter. I know and have seen people try the game (streamers, the people I gifted KSP1 to, etc) and have a blast laughing at their failures without knowing the first thing about lore, world-building, or jank culture. It is really an unneeded element, you totally can have all the fun in the world without the lore and world-building having to validate you. Going to the opposite end of the spectrum, I tend to play super seriously, and I know Kerbals don't exactly do things like me, do you think that stops me? do you think I feel attacked because my seriousness isn't validated with super scientific part descriptions and little dudes drifting in the VAB? Not at all.

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

What games are making more money to their publishers is left as an exercise to the reader.

On this one I'll call foul play. Juno is an emergent competitor that didn't get a quarter of the media attention, streamer hours or ad campaigns that Kerbal did. I think this comparison and the conclusion you draw from it is apples to oranges.

50 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

Me & others: "Your rockets are clearly not as well-engineered as you think they are"

What about the examples he shows in the video? 0:30, 1:18, and so on, which are probably the simplest stuff you can make. How would a user detect that such a design is going to wobble? how is a user expected to "well-engineer" a literal vertical stack of 3 tanks?

[Royalswissarmyknife]

6 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Kerbals, through their buildings and parts, exhibit technology that requires much more intellect than humans.

I personally think that they possess around the same intelligence as humans but are different as all of them seem to have no care whatsoever for safety and budgets and lack of care for those things lets them build technology a lot faster then humans who have to care about pleasing somebody or not going broke over something that isn't beneficial for the short term.

Short Form: they have the same Intellect but a different mindset.

1 hour ago, Kerbart said:

  but the monstrosities he tends to launch have little to do with engineering.

Matt is not my favorite mainly when he recreates missions.

Spoiler

Space Race Speedrun is not my favorite glad no more episodes are coming out of it

 

[Royalswissarmyknife]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

But since we are here, there's this little nice game where rockets never wobble. It's called Juno: Origins.

So we have a game where there's wobble, another where wobble is still in heavy need of work, and a third where there's no wobble.

What games are making more money to their publishers is left as an exercise to the reader.  

Taken WAY too out of context the real reason i would say is the procedural parts that make it near impossible to make anything good.

also not too beginner friendly.

the control system is janky and gets in the way.

also the career mode is take ksp-1 contracts and make that the entire thing. doesn't take a genius to figure out how that isn't the most fun.

all I can say the lack of wobble is the LAST thing that drove me away from it. theres just too many other issues with it that makes it less fun then Ksp.

the only reason Ksp-2 is more popular is the Lego rocket system and the name attached.

look at what games have a non overwhelming amount of wobble and how much more money they are making is left as an exercise to the reader.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Royalswissarmyknife
Minro Splleing Misteka

[Lisias]

These bits a bit out of scope, so goes on a spolier

Spoiler

That caught with my pants down… You are criticizing the parts of the game I liked!!!

1 hour ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

Taken WAY too out of context the real reason i would say is the procedural parts that make it near impossible to make anything good.

Perhaps Modelling Dough is not your cup of tea… I had seen some really impressive works on Juno, replicas that are really near the real thing.

So I don't agree on you on this one - IMHO, that procedural parts allows me to do anything I want without compromising with physics.

 

1 hour ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

also not too beginner friendly.

The tutorials were handy to me, they even taught me a detail or two that KSP let passed trough. I find the Engine tutorials specially instructive - we don't need an excuse to understand how rocket engines really works on KSP because we barely need 2 stages to reach Orbit, and so we really only need some for atmosphere, and some for vacuum.

Trimming engines to get the best for a given regime is something that I really learnt on Juno. I guess RO would had forced me to learn this on KSP, however.

 

1 hour ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

the control system is janky and gets in the way

This one I really hated too.  

 

1 hour ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

also the career mode is take ksp-1 contracts and make that the entire thing. doesn't take a genius to figure out how that isn't the most fun.

Weird. I liked them. But since I like KSP-1 Contracts too, it's not a surprise.

It can be improved? Yep. But I don't think they are bad, and I had enjoyed pursuing that contracts the same way I do on KSP.

 

1 hour ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

all I can say the lack of wobble is the LAST thing that drove me away from it. theres just too many other issues with it that makes it less fun then Ksp.

I like to do planes. And I like my plane's wings to flex in the same way they do on R.L.™, because this tells me about the limits I'm going to break on the manoeuvres.

Besides the cranky controls, it's exactly the excess of rigidity that drove me away from the game.

1 hour ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

look at what games have a non overwhelming amount of wobble and how much more money they are making is left as an exercise to the reader.

live by the sword, die by the sword…  

Anyway, I think we can conclude that both extremes are bad.  

 

2 hours ago, Kerbart said:

I never used autostruts and I don't have wobbly rockets. 

Autostruts can be useful, I wish they weren't dirty cheap - I pay nothing by using them, neither the craft gets heavier neither. And I think they should cost Funds and they should cause penalty to the vehicle's mass. It's what we get when we reinforce real life structures.

I remember once using AutoStruts on the Struts in order to get the result I wanted - simulating spars, stringers, spines… You name it. But then they removed the Autostruts from the Struts and some of my crafts never left 1.4.5. (sigh).

Even KJR I find useful (to make that monstrously heavy ships from the SMCE add'ons), but I wish I could selectively use them on some crafts and not on others. It's the only complain I have from it.

Whatever they do on KSP2, I hope they allow us to selectively use it or not on a craft by craft basis.

 

1 hour ago, Royalswissarmyknife said:

Short Form: they have the same Intellect but a different mindset.

You see, even us, humans, behave like "Kerbals". You need to read some histories from the WW2 era about how military used to have fun, all of them - from army to navy, including airforce.

Some Navy dudes, on Vietnam, once decided to bomb someone using a toilet. No kidding!

Spoiler

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/vietnam-war/its-true-a-toilet-was-used-as-an-aerial-bomb-during-the-vietnam-war.html?Exc_D_LessThanPoint002_p1=1

The History of Human Inventions are littered with "Kerbal" designs, both the stupidly awesome as well the awesomely stupid ones! For every thing someone ever did on KSP, someone on Real Life™ has already designed, tried or at least thought about - my aircrafts are interestingly pretty similar to the soviet ones, by the way (both the good as the bad).

 

2 hours ago, Alexoff said:

In KSP2, rockets explode quite brightly with a rating of 3+. It seems to me that a very small number of children play KSP1/2. In addition, these ratings are unlikely to stop anyone. I just checked one indie game with a rating of +18 on steam, in its official group 40% of subscribers are under 18 years old.

You are wrong. There're parents doing real parenting in the World, not to mention secondary damages, as losing partnership opportunities (as was done with Kerbal Edu - no Educational Institution will deal with PEGI 18+ titles). You also can't advertise PEGI 18+ games on medias intended for kids and teenagers, and so on.

Unless you are really targeting PEGI 16 and up, it's really a bad move doing anything that makes you get such classification.

 

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

On this one I'll call foul play. Juno is an emergent competitor that didn't get a quarter of the media attention, streamer hours or ad campaigns that Kerbal did. I think this comparison and the conclusion you draw from it is apples to oranges.

I, obviously, disagree. The argument in dispute was about wobbliness and how it would "kill the game". I had shown you two games with wobbliness and one without, and that and only that was my argument.

Lack of wobbliness didn't made Juno get an edge on KSP (both on them), and the wobbliness didn't plummeted KSP¹ user base once Simple Planes and now Juno happened.

Additionally, it worths to mention that Juno recently published an update made in collaboration with ESA, something similar to what was done in the past to KSP with NASA and ESA. These games have more similarity than you are implying.

 

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

What about the examples he shows in the video? 0:30, 1:18, and so on, which are probably the simplest stuff you can make. How would a user detect that such a design is going to wobble? how is a user expected to "well-engineer" a literal vertical stack of 3 tanks?

We are not telling there's no problems on KSP2's wobbliness. We are telling that completely removing wobbliness is a bad move, at least without a proper substitute. Two completely different things.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Lisias
Tyop! Surprised?

[PDCWolf]

7 minutes ago, Lisias said:

We are not telling there's no problems on KSP2's wobbliness. We are telling that completely removing wobbliness is a bad move, at least without a proper substitute. Two completely different things.

Considering this reply omits 90% of my post, which is an argument about substitutes... this does not make a good case for wobble being anything more than a "want".

A lot of people also seem interested, for no apparent reason other than perceived superiority, in punishing the player for what's literally a glorified bug that is never presented properly to the player, or given tools to diagnose and combat.

[TheOtherDave]

56 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Autostruts can be useful, I wish they weren't dirty cheap - I pay nothing by using them, neither the craft gets heavier neither. And I think they should cost Funds and they should cause penalty to the vehicle's mass. It's what we get when we reinforce real life structures.

You can’t reinforce something that was never “inforced“ in the first place.

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, PDCWolf said:

Considering this reply omits 90% of my post, which is an argument about substitutes... this does not make a good case for wobble being anything more than a "want".

Would you be paying a bit more of attention on what me and other people are posting, you would conclude that I didn't quoted 90% of your post because I didn't had anything to add to it.

From my very first post on this thread:

9 hours ago, Lisias said:

The problem we are facing here is that "wobbliness" happens when we abuse the part's strength. I don't mind replacing wobbliness with something else, as long the limits and constrains are there, forcing me to rethink the designs to cope with them.

But what would be a good substitute for it?

And such you did it. I only quoted the part of the post in which I had something to reply to.

Lower your guns, please.

 

49 minutes ago, TheOtherDave said:

You can’t reinforce something that was never “inforced“ in the first place.

I beg your pardon?

Spoiler

 

Edited July 2, 2023 by Lisias
Grammars. Don't you hate this thing?

[Alexoff]

6 hours ago, Lisias said:

You are wrong. There're parents doing real parenting in the World, not to mention secondary damages, as losing partnership opportunities (as was done with Kerbal Edu - no Educational Institution will deal with PEGI 18+ titles). You also can't advertise PEGI 18+ games on medias intended for kids and teenagers, and so on.

Unless you are really targeting PEGI 16 and up, it's really a bad move doing anything that makes you get such classification.

Anyway, I do not understand why if a badly made rocket does not bend like a sausage, fall to the ground and explode, but explode immediately upon deformation, then the game will immediately become +18. So that the children do not get upset, devs can make sure that the kerbals always appear in a couple of weeks alive and healthy in the space center.  Like in the old animated series about Hulk, where he constantly shot down helicopters and broke tanks, but we were always shown that the crew escaped by parachute or on foot.

[Lisias]

18 minutes ago, Alexoff said:

Anyway, I do not understand why if a badly made rocket does not bend like a sausage, fall to the ground and explode, but explode immediately upon deformation, then the game will immediately become +18.

PEGI 16, more likely. And you will need to ask PEGI for your answer,  as I'm only the messenger.

But at least their rationale can be easily found:

This rating is applied once the depiction of violence (or sexual activity) reaches a stage that looks the same as would be expected in real life

https://pegi.info/what-do-the-labels-mean

[jacksawild]

All of the effort they go to in developing sensible wobble will just be totally undercut by someone who will mod in an autostrut band-aid, which is what the community really want anyway. There are better things to be spending dev resources on.

[Alexoff]

16 minutes ago, Lisias said:

PEGI 16, more likely. And you will need to ask PEGI for your answer,  as I'm only the messenger.

But at least their rationale can be easily found:

This rating is applied once the depiction of violence (or sexual activity) reaches a stage that looks the same as would be expected in real life

https://pegi.info/what-do-the-labels-mean

Well, if the experts believe that the exploding rocket is violence, then I could suggest that the developers add child censorship to the game. For fireworks and flowers to fly out of the rocket
 

Spoiler

Like this

 

[Rosten]

2 hours ago, Alexoff said:

So that the children do not get upset, devs can make sure that the kerbals always appear in a couple of weeks alive and healthy in the space center.

PEGI is an absurd system where you can get PEGI 16 for killing a NPC but PEGI 18+ if the NPC is knocked out.  It's more child-friendly to have the Kerbals die according to PEGI.

[Scarecrow71]

If wobbliness is supposed to be part of the game - and, as Nate is on record as saying, part of the "charm" of the game - why isn't it addressed in the tutorials?  The tutorials literally help people get up to speed on building rockets, but they do nothing to address what is supposed to be a key issue.  Why don't the tutorials have something on wobble, and how it happens, and what to do about it?  I mean, the game (and, by extension, the devs) are making the assumption that players new and old alike are all familiar with and understand the concept of struts and what they are used for without ever diving into why they are needed or when.

[Alexoff]

22 minutes ago, Rosten said:

PEGI is an absurd system where you can get PEGI 16 for killing a NPC but PEGI 18+ if the NPC is knocked out.  It's more child-friendly to have the Kerbals die according to PEGI.

But now kerbals are dying in pods in both KSP1 and KSP2. If a kerbal falls off a cliff, he/she will burst like a balloon. Apparently PEGI doesn't care that kids get traumatized for life (sarcasm)

[LoSBoL]

18 minutes ago, Scarecrow71 said:

If wobbliness is supposed to be part of the game - and, as Nate is on record as saying, part of the "charm" of the game - why isn't it addressed in the tutorials?  The tutorials literally help people get up to speed on building rockets, but they do nothing to address what is supposed to be a key issue.  Why don't the tutorials have something on wobble, and how it happens, and what to do about it?  I mean, the game (and, by extension, the devs) are making the assumption that players new and old alike are all familiar with and understand the concept of struts and what they are used for without ever diving into why they are needed or when.

Like 'do not put your cat in the microwave' ?

Doesn't a wobbly rocket spell out 'try and ride it out or re-engineer your rocket'?

Besides tooltips, manuals or even tutorials aren't read or seen thoroughly by many. How many times I see people asking questions that the tooltips or 'the first start experience' handled competently, heck, I've even experienced it my self in a couple of cases in KSP2 that the info was shared but just skipped.