New ideas.

[gregdeen19]

I've seen complaints about the trip planner not being accurate. First off that shouldn't be a freely given thing. That should be earned after a satellite is launched and scanning the solar system for information so you can use that to build your trip. That would be a fun mission and part of a pathway forward to the mun and other places. Keep the planner but only make it available if their is the satellite in orbit. Similar to the astroid scanner in ksp1. I would love to see a formal space x line up in the game such as starship and crew dragon like making history did for the saturn V. Make it DLC. So many ideas but understandably it takes work and time to include them in a game. I like the idea of placing a marker on a planet and being able to make a manuver to that point. 

Edited February 13 by gregdeen19

[Scarecrow71]

2 hours ago, gregdeen19 said:

I've seen complaints about the trip planner not being accurate. First off that shouldn't be a freely given thing. That should be earned after a satellite is launched and scanning the solar system for information so you can use that to build your trip. That would be a fun mission and part of a pathway forward to the mun and other places. Keep the planner but only make it available if their is the satellite in orbit. Similar to the astroid scanner in ksp1. I would love to see a formal space x line up in the game such as starship and crew dragon like making history did for the saturn V. Make it DLC. So many ideas but understandably it takes work and time to include them in a game. I like the idea of placing a marker on a planet and being able to make a manuver to that point. 

IRL we were able to determine:

• Planets
  • And mass
• Moons of said planets
  • And their mass
• Distances from our planet to said planets and moons
• Rotation times
• Orbit times
  • And speed
• Inclination
• Comets
  • And asteroids
  • And their orbital times, inclinations, and speed

Knowing what we know about thrust, weight, fuel, consumption, speed, etc., we were then able to calculate how much fuel would be needed to travel to a given object, and when said launch would need to take place.  Without having launched satellites first.  In fact, Luna II landed on the moon in 1959 after the Russians had never interacted with the moon previously (Luna I was intended to be a moon impactor, but a misfire during transfer pushed it out of Earth's SOI and into a heliocentric orbit).  We shouldn't need to launch a satellite into orbit, and then do science to determine if we can launch one to go towards the moon, then launch one to determine if we can orbit the moon, and so on.

Now, if you want to play like that, that's your call.  And I'm sure at some point someone will develop a mod that does this.  But stock functionality?  No.

With all that said, even if you were to remove the travel/trip planner until someone did science first, it's still broken and needs to be fixed anyhow.

[gregdeen19]

No you would launch one satellite. That one would act as a scanner and relay all thebothet planets and such back to you for more accurate trip planner. There is no telescope in KSP so launching a Hubble style satellite could act as a way to discover other planets. It is a game and making more mission and objectives to unlock new things is kinda the point. You wouldn't need multiple ones just one to scan. Then if you want a comms network you can launch more or one to survey a planet up close in that planet or moon orbit. Then have them break down and need to be repaired by an Engineer. So you would have to launch to that satellite and fix it or bring it back home for modifications Then relaunch it. Just would make for more fun and meaningful missions. 

[steveman0]

I think we need more reasons to launch satelites around other bodies, but I'd advise against anything that imposes a barrier to new players like this. Having the trip planner is a huge benefit to players who have never done this before. The game shouldn't leave it up to them to have to do the math for the first mission. It is bad enough the game doesn't give transfer windows yet. It needs to offer more, accurate guidance to players, not less if it is to continue to draw a wider audience of new players.

[Darta01]

14 hours ago, gregdeen19 said:

There is no telescope in KSP so launching a Hubble style satellite could act as a way to discover other planets.

You know the planets of our solar system weren't discovered with orbital telescopes, right? An orbital telescope in KSP would be ok (and cool!) for extra solar objects, when interstellar will be brought to the game. But it does not make sense for the known planets of Kerbol, because all the observation and math can be done from the ground.

In reality, interplanetary and lunar probes did indeed help to plan the next missions, but it was about improving the precision of transfers to an extent that is not achievable in KSP.

14 hours ago, gregdeen19 said:

It is a game and making more mission and objectives to unlock new things is kinda the point.

Sure KSP is a game, so it should be fun, but it is a simulation game and should stay coherent to the reality. And I wouldn't want more missions that just slow the game pace by adding barriers.

However, orbital telescopes to discover the usual planets is typically a good idea for a mod. It already exists for KSP 1, it works great with modded solar system!

[Darta01]

I haven't seen comments about the trip planner, and I almost never use it. What is the problem with it? Are the dv numbers wrong?

[Scarecrow71]

19 hours ago, gregdeen19 said:

No you would launch one satellite. That one would act as a scanner and relay all thebothet planets and such back to you for more accurate trip planner. There is no telescope in KSP so launching a Hubble style satellite could act as a way to discover other planets. It is a game and making more mission and objectives to unlock new things is kinda the point. You wouldn't need multiple ones just one to scan. Then if you want a comms network you can launch more or one to survey a planet up close in that planet or moon orbit. Then have them break down and need to be repaired by an Engineer. So you would have to launch to that satellite and fix it or bring it back home for modifications Then relaunch it. Just would make for more fun and meaningful missions. 

As I pointed out in my post, IRL we didn't need to do this.  Well before there were any space programs, engineers, or astrophysicists, scientists and mathematicians had figured out all of the solar objects, their masses, orbital periods, distances, etc.  None of that was done with satellites or orbital telescopes.  And as we are all aware, ground-based telescopes are not a thing in this game, so it can be assumed that all that math was done prior to the start of any new campaign that takes place.

Continuing to say we need to launch at least 1 satellite to get information that has been proven in the real world to be able to be done without doing so is simply placing a limitation on a game where no limitation needs to exist.

Edited February 16 by Scarecrow71

[dmsilev]

Also worth noting that in IRL, serious astronomical instruments didn't get launched into space until well after we were  sending probes to other planets. For the visible-light band, Hubble was just the second astronomical telescope and wasn't launched until 1990 (there were of course some serious telescopes in orbit that were pointed down towards Earth much earlier....). Frequency bands that can't be seen from the ground, x-rays and gammas and so forth, saw much earlier space-based instruments (late 60s or thereabouts), but nobody was looking for moons around Neptune with an X-ray detector. 

Moving from IRL to the game perspective, it might be reasonable to reduce the visible detail of  topography of a given planet until the player sends a probe into the SOI or to orbit (or something more in-depth like ScanSAT in KSP1 and Orbital Survey in KSP2). But that's a far cry from saying that the orbital parameters can't be determined from the ground. 

(Wikipedia has a nice list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes . Short version: First gamma detector was 1965, X-ray 1970,  UV 1969, visible 1989, IR 1983, Microwave 1993. Of those, UV, visible, and IR would be potentially useful for studying in-system bodies)

[gregdeen19]

You do know there are people who think the moon landing was fake. That the earth is flat. Especially if your doing intersteller travel you need something other than a telescope tondiscover planets. We used satellites like hubble and such. Just adding something to career mode.because once you orbit the plant and do your experinments you don't need. Fancy satellite for anything other than relay. That's kinda boring. You could even have a mission tonfind rare material onnother planets to use to research and build a war drive or  device for intersteller travel through wormholes. 

Edited February 25 by gregdeen19

[dmsilev]

Again I would urge you to do some background reading on the IRL history of astronomy. The first exoplanet to be discovered orbiting a main sequence star was 51 Pegasi b, which was found by a ground-based observatory. Quoting from that Wiki page,

Quote

The exoplanet's discovery was announced on October 6, 1995, by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva in the journal Nature.[11] They used the radial velocity method with the ELODIE spectrograph on the Observatoire de Haute-Provencetelescope in France and made world headlines with their announcement. For this discovery, they were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics.[5]

The planet was discovered using a sensitive spectroscope that could detect the slight and regular velocity changes in the star's spectral lines of around 70 metres per second. These changes are caused by the planet's gravitational effects from just 7 million kilometres' distance from the star.

Within a week of the announcement, the planet was confirmed by another team using the Lick Observatory in California.[12]

That’s just one example; there are a plethora of others. Yes, in many ways it’s better to use space-based platforms to search for and study exoplanets (see, for instance, the Kepler mission), but it’s absolutely incorrect to say that it can’t be done from the ground.

Also, it should be noted that the devs have said no warp drives, wormholes, or similar will be in the stock game.