Imagining Dragons

[Nate Simpson]

Good afternoon, Kerbonauts!

I’m back from Spring break and all charged up by the great feedback we’ve been getting since the release of Patch Two. Thanks to all who have taken the time to share their feedback about the update - as always, it’s been very helpful to know what’s gone well and what needs improvement.

By far the most controversial element of the patch has been a change made to maneuver nodes that prevents players from planning maneuvers beyond the fuel allotment currently aboard their vehicle. This change was made to prevent the maneuver node from lying to the player - because maneuver plans in KSP2 factor in the behavior of the vehicle under thrust (a necessity for planning future long-burn interstellar flights), and because this behavior is contingent on the changing mass of the vehicle as fuel is expended, any planning that takes place beyond what is achievable with the current fuel load must necessarily give an incorrect result. That said, there’s clearly a desire to be able to do aspirational maneuver planning beyond a vehicle’s current capacity, as was possible in KSP1. Our team is looking at our options now, and we’ll update you here when we have a good solution. Thanks again for highlighting this as a feature that could use some more time in the oven.

Right now, we’re full steam ahead on new feature development for the upcoming Science update (timing TBD), as well as continuing work on performance, stability, and thermal systems. We’re also working on a few new parts, which we expect to release prior to the Science update. Chris Adderley (AKA Nertea) has cooked up some lovely vacuum-optimized engines with extensible nozzles to help fill out the upper end of the methalox progression. Here’s a sneak peek at one of them, built by artist Pablo Ollervides:

On to business!

Yesterday morning, Shana Markham, our Design Director, did our second AMA and gave some very detailed answers to some challenging questions - and she did a much better job than I did of pulling those questions from lots of different sources, including this forum.

We’ve posted the audio from that AMA here, for those who missed it. This one is definitely worth a listen!

Lots of amazing creations on view in this week’s Community Highlights. While only a few images make the cut every week, be sure to check out the ksp2_bestof Discord for more amazing community creations! I’ve really been enjoying how we've all been channeling our Starship excitement into the game - check out this one from Sciencedude37:

Congratulations to SpaceX on flying Starship as far as they did, and breaking a whole lot of records (and one parked car) in the process. Fingers crossed for the next launch!

 

Finally, here’s the next Weekly Challenge: make a dragon! No, not the spacecraft. A literal dragon. Now get out there and creatively misuse those procedural wings!

[Clayel]

I can't wait to see a dragon-styled crew dragon

[Stone11]

New parts soon, let's goooooooooooo

[Dantheollie]

If you really think about it, a land-kraken is just a dragon    

[Little 908]

Nice to see a update on the science update, nice engines too

[Keko]

All that talk about Starship makes me wonder if we'll get procedural heatshields that match the shape of your craft one day.

[The Aziz]

22 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

That's just a slitherfang.

[Strawberry]

I do wonder when we get thermal systems, hope we get that before science, as thatll probably introduce a few bugs

[BowlerHatGuy3]

49 minutes ago, Nate Simpson said:

By far the most controversial element of the patch has been a change made to maneuver nodes that prevents players from planning maneuvers beyond the fuel allotment currently aboard their vehicle. This change was made to prevent the maneuver node from lying to the player - because maneuver plans in KSP2 factor in the behavior of the vehicle under thrust (a necessity for planning future long-burn interstellar flights), and because this behavior is contingent on the changing mass of the vehicle as fuel is expended, any planning that takes place beyond what is achievable with the current fuel load must necessarily give an incorrect result. That said, there’s clearly a desire to be able to do aspirational maneuver planning beyond a vehicle’s current capacity, as was possible in KSP1. Our team is looking at our options now, and we’ll update you here when we have a good solution.

When the maneuver is within your limits, the line is a normal color. Once you go past those DV limits, the line turns red and it gives you a warning in the little maneuver box.

[Little 908]

I honestly don’t think anyone wants to do this weekly challenge, including me. Soooo im going to just pretend that its still starship week 

 

 

 

 

that or im making a crew dragon

Edited April 21, 2023 by Little 908

[Juno_Atlas_Saturn]

A major use for the aspirational maneuvering is that we can use a vehicle we place in orbit to figure out timing and delta v requirements from LKO for various destinations and thus inform future mission design. 
 

The Delta V Map goes part of the way towards resolving this but it would be really neat to have tools that allow us to plan theoretical trajectories first and then build capable ships/time maneuvers after.
 

In essence, a mission planner.

[Topher420247]

Ok so approximately how long till we have base ksp1 in ksp2? Fuel creation is a much bigger part of my game than I thought it was lol 

[S_Coriolis]

Without the science update, Jeb is stuck with middle ages technology and couldn't slay the dragon

[The Aziz]

That's because he used a horse instead of a kapybara.

[Meecrob]

12 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

Finally, here’s the next Weekly Challenge: make a dragon! No, not the spacecraft. A literal dragon. Now get out there and creatively misuse those procedural wings!

Maybe I'm on the wrong forum or playing the wrong game, but could we have challenges that involve space? Like the second word of this game's title?

Edited April 22, 2023 by Meecrob

[i dont know how to forum]

3 hours ago, Nate Simpson said:

Right now, we’re full steam ahead on new feature development for the upcoming Science update (timing TBD), as well as continuing work on performance, stability, and thermal systems. We’re also working on a few new parts, which we expect to release prior to the Science update. Chris Adderley (AKA Nertea) has cooked up some lovely vacuum-optimized engines with extensible nozzles to help fill out the upper end of the methalox progression. Here’s a sneak peek at one of them, built by artist Pablo Ollervides:

Ooh, love the look of this one. Extendable nozzles should allow for some interesting designs, hopefully we can pack them into smaller cargo bays and shrouds.

[Jaypeg]

31 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

Maybe I'm on the wrong forum or playing the wrong game, but could we have challenges that involve space? Like the second word of this games title?

Really?

[Little 908]

34 minutes ago, Meecrob said:

Maybe I'm on the wrong forum or playing the wrong game, but could we have challenges that involve space? Like the second word of this games title?

Yeah i agree, theres a lot of historical rockets they could make us build, but they just want the kraken to bite us while making capybaras and dragons.

Edited April 22, 2023 by Little 908

[Scarecrow71]

On the topic of maneuver nodes, why was the decision made to not allow creation or editing of maneuver nodes while paused?  This forces new players to think quickly and do something during ascent that they may not know how to do right at first.  Please being this functionality back.

[heavylifter]

W.r.t. maneuver planning. I think we need an option to change the color or something instead of preventing the planning. Preventing the planning will be wrong in so many cases (I may rendez-vous and refuel. I may transfer fuel from other tanks. I may process ore and make fuel).

Also, w.r.t. maneuver planning-- I'd love to have a mode of maneuver planning where I could fast-forward the universe/target (i.e. planets etc. twirl and orbit to their positions at the time of the maneuver node) and have the ghost be "there" with the planet/target.
It'd make things so much more usable/obvious.

 

[Katniss218]

Your nozzle extension is contoured incorrectly (outside angle between fixed and extension is < 180), and is also awfully thick 

[Streetwind]

9 hours ago, BowlerHatGuy3 said:

When the maneuver is within your limits, the line is a normal color. Once you go past those DV limits, the line turns red and it gives you a warning in the little maneuver box.

This, unfortunately, runs straight into the problem described in the very section you quoted:

The maneuver planner factors in the changing mass of the vehicle as fuel is expended. If you simulate expending more fuel than there is available on the vessel, you get a mathematically bogus result. Even if you draw that line for the player, and clearly mark it as being beyond the vehicle's capabilities, the problem is that the line that is drawn will be wrong. It is a false result. Any trajectory you plan with that cannot be flown. Any encounter you set up will be missed. Not just because you don't have the fuel - no, it will even be wrong if you turn on an infinite fuel cheat. Even then the result will be wrong, because you're simulating the vessel expending its own dry mass, which it can never do, even with cheats. If you push it too far, this can result in the vessel's mass becoming negative in the simulation, and then things really break.

Therefore, drawing this line is of no use to the player, and I completely agree with not even bothering to draw it.

However, I too would like some sort of means to plan flight paths independently of fuel load.

One obvious solution would be to offer the player a toggle, which switches the way the maneuver planner works back to the way it used to work in KSP1: an instantaneous impulse maneuver. KSP1 never had the issue of needing to factor in a vehicle's changing mass, because all that mass change would happen in an infinitessimal instant, and thus, have no bearing whatsoever on the trajectory. That is why KSP1 happily let you make flight plans well beyond the capabilities of the active vessel, and those flight plans would still be mathematically valid and could be correctly flown with infinite fuel enabled.

There were obvious downsides, of course - chiefly the fact that planning trajectories like this introduced an error that grew larger the lower the vessel's TWR was. Players learned to work around this by splitting burns, which then introduced its own problems for interplanetary transfers, such as there being no way except manual guesstimation to time your final ejection to coincide with the transfer window, or even to figure out in which direction to start raising your apoapsis so that it would line up with the ejection angle after Kerbin traveled some distance around the sun. And it completely failed at modeling constant thrust trajectories, because its very nature was that of instant thrust.

But if we had a toggle, we could have the best of both worlds - we could switch between simulating long flight plans independent of our vessel's capabilities in instantaneous impulse mode, and planning actual burns in simulation mode.

Not saying that this is necessarily the best solution, but it is one solution. There may be others.

[Periple]

2 minutes ago, Streetwind said:

But if we had a toggle, we could have the best of both worlds - we could switch between simulating long flight plans independent of our vessel's capabilities in instantaneous impulse mode, and planning actual burns in simulation mode.

Yes!

I think the game needs a much better mission planner than it has now, especially if things like life support are going to be considered so you have to take into account mission time. So I would take this one step further: not just a mode change to the maneuver planner, but a whole new mission planner tool.

You could use the mission planner anywhere and it would be totally decoupled from the vessel. All maneuver nodes would in instantaneous impulse. The tool would also offer porkchop plots for intercepts, and would give you detailed info about dV requirements. It would also let you plan landings and take-offs with options that let you adjust them e.g. for aerocapture and aerodynamic landings for bodies with atmospheres. You'd see estimated dV budget, total mission time, time between each maneuver, and required TWR for all landings and take-offs. It would also need to be integrated with an alarm clock. 

You could then apply this mission plan to your selected vessel. At that point the game would convert the instantaneous-impulse maneuvers to actual burns, and raise big warnings if it wasn't able to do so. 

When you're actually flying the mission, you would be able to see your actual projected trajectory and times superimposed on the plan, and be able to adjust the plan or the actual burns as required. 

Making the mission plan and the vessel two separate things would also avoid a lot of repetitive work -- you could keep the plan and apply it to different designs as you're trying out and adjusting designs for the mission.

Doing something like this would be a quite a bit of work but I think it would make interplanetary and eventually interstellar missions much more accessible and intuitive without dumbing them down.

[Streetwind]

Oof, yeah, that would probably take a year's worth of dev time for a dedicated sprint team just for the planner, with additional work required across teams from all areas of the game The handling of potential edge cases alone makes my head hurt.

But it would be cool. No question there.

 

Edited April 22, 2023 by Streetwind

[Meecrob]

9 hours ago, Jaypeg said:

Really?

I'm just saying its lame. I thought challenges would be something applicable to y'know? Space?

 

Edited April 22, 2023 by Meecrob