[1.0.2] NovaPunch 2.09. - May 6th - 1.0 Compatibility Update

[sirscott]

Keep up the good work Tiberion. I support you in your endeavours.

[Tiberion]

Didn\'t get much done today, but I did finish a new engine model (remixed from the 1meter quad)

Can\'t decide if I wanna replace the quad or not. Might be nice to have a lower profile, non-lander engine for the 1m stuff (like the proton mounts)

[SmiteZero]

nohomo bro

As Owl said, I\'m sure we all artists share the same shames. It was a good pack, dude.

[thorfinn]

edit: also the larger fuel tanks need toning down a bit, I just managed to get a rocket to do a TLI from the ground in a single stage. Which is fairly overpowered considering I now have the remaining three stages to land and get home :v

That\'s a big, big problem with balancing that isn\'t going to go away soon.

I don\'t have easy solutions for it: if people use remotely realistic numbers, physics is going to show you that going to space from a body like Kerbin IS easy. If we are tantalizingly close to reaching SSTO capability on a planet with 8 km/s orbital velocity, it\'s not strange that doing it on a 2,3 km/s one is banal. The only thing that\'s really limiting us here is the extremely heavy engines, which by the way push us towards 2,5-stage designs at most (for lunar missions) because carrying unused engines for most of the flight is too much of a penalty.

If we use numbers that force us to have three stages to orbit, like Earth rockets do, burn times are going to become VERY brief, so brief that they would probably feel off (exactly like SRBs feel to me now. The stock ones and most of the modded ones are practically useless.)

I don\'t know what to do. 'Nerfing' stuff for the sake of game aesthetical variability doesn\'t appeal to me, since having simple but real physics is what makes this game unique and attractive in the first place. The best thing to do would probably be just making Kerbin a lot bigger, since we now have timewarp and don\'t really need a real-time orbit to be bearable... but we are probably too late for such a revolution. I don\'t know, really.

[Killerhurtz]

Remember guys, it\'s also been quite a while we\'ve been playing - whether we like it or not, we\'ve become MUCH better. A newbie might not have the ease that we do. That\'s actually why, so far, things are like they are - they are meant to be intuitive and newbie-friendly, so that the new players don\'t ragequit because a task is nigh impossible (which would be just somewhat hard for us older players). Just look at the frequency we had people asking how to get in orbit or to the moon. Yet I\'m sure for a lot of people in this thread (myself included), it\'s an easy task. We have to take that into account. And in my mind, that\'s exactly what Silisko Edition is doing: giving us, older player, an occasion to step up the difficulty (but then again, looking at it, it\'s only temporarily - people already get to the moon somewhat easily with Silisko\'s new pack...)

I think that\'s one of the largest difficulties we\'re having here, even. Thinking why things are so.

Throwing in my two pennies: I agree for the balance - setting the efficiency the same as the stock parts isn\'t exactly the best way, it greatly limits our options (and the usefulness of different parts for different roles). I would rather say that the 'theoretical cost' should be our bar: there should be an agreed 'cost', which would be the drive for an equation agreed on which encompass many more stats. While more complicated, it also brings more possibilities: heavier engines with a small thrust but pretty small fuel consumption could be possible, which I find well-suited for lander engines, all while being balanced against a much more powerful engine that could be slightly lighter but gobbles more fuel for main stages. Of course, the costs would be different for every category of part (perhaps fitting to the original component of each category?) (I very well acknowledge the fact that this would be much more complicated, and thus much less fun to do, though)

Although take it with a grain of salt: I was just giving ideas. This pack is already pretty good.

[thorfinn]

[...] in my mind, that\'s exactly what Silisko Edition is doing: giving us, older player, an occasion to step up the difficulty (but then again, looking at it, it\'s only temporarily - people already get to the moon somewhat easily with Silisko\'s new pack...)

Absolutely temporary, like Foamy explained. It\'s not Nova\'s fault or anything: you can\'t make it really hard unless you 'cheat'. I don\'t suggest that you SHOULD make it hard, even: it\'s an aesthetic thing for me too, I\'d like to make the usual three or four stage rockets that we Earthmen use (Apollo-Saturn was six stages, in a sense) and as things are now that is just shooting yourself in the foot, but I am all for having a set of basic parts that allow the player to build a basic launcher very easily in the beginning, if he knows a bit of what he\'s doing. And if he doesn\'t, well, a good and brief tutorial will take care of that

As for hard stuff, there is ONE thing that will be harder in the Kerbol system than on Earth: wait until multiple spacecraft support gets in, then we\'ll all experience the joypain of trying to make a manual rendezvous in such a steep gravity gradient... ^^

[Tiberion]

I\'d like to hear from more people about how they\'d like the pack to 'play'

Some choices are:

-Super challenging, Silisko Edition style

-Who cares, I want to throw things into space

-Tuned for 'realistic' rockets (multi-stage, tier stages)

-Other choices, fill yours in

Its closer to 'who cares' than I personally like right now, the long tanks just seem to get you too far, but there is something to be said substituting one long tank for like 10 stock tanks and having fun. There is also compatibility to consider - K&W and Down Under have similar packs, and they feel a little better tuned than what we have now. Do we want to fill a different 'space' than they do, or strive too work with them?

So.. more feedback!

Got the engine finished today, and I fixed the texture on the SRB, so it doesn\'t look like junk anymore. Gonna try to get something else done before I push another version.

[Nibb31]

Do you folks really find the Silisko Edition hard to play ? I landed on the Moon on my second try with it.

I actually find it has a much better balance. It\'s not hard, just different.

[your mom]

I would like it tuned for 'realistic' rockets (multi-stage, tier stages) because i always love realistic rockets. :-*

[sirscott]

My 5 cents is for semi-realistic , but I dont find the current versions too far off my idea of happiness

[Omnivore]

I\'ve been bouncing this around in my head lately, thought I\'d share a few factoids I ran across:

• 
  [li]Stock engines are in the ballpark of realism where thrust to weight ratio is concerned (close to Saturn\'s F1).[/li]
  [li]Stock engines have a thrust to mass ratio of roughly 1/10th that of real rocket engines such as Saturn\'s F1.[/li]
  [li]Stock engines are about 5 to 7 3.6 times heavier by volume than real LFE\'s like the F1.[/li]
  [li]Kerbin fuel is miraculously powerful, yielding roughly 8.5 times the energy of LOX/RP1 fuel mix by weight.[/li]
  [li]Kerbin fuel is a bit weak, being 15% less powerful by weight than LOX/RP1 fuel mix in the F1 ratio.[/li]
  [li]Kerbin fuel is around 40% heavier by volume than LOX/RP1 in the F1 ratio.[/li]
  [li]The Saturn\'s F1 engine consumed roughly 30% of its own weight in fuel per second.[/li]
  

Balanced against this is that the game seems to run into some real problems with heavy rockets, they become very fragile, wobbly, and rubbery.

EDIT/UPDATE:

My original analysis was off due to thinking thrust units == mass units... they aren\'t - more like 1:10 ratio.

[DELETED EMBARRASSINGLY WRONG PARAGRAPHS]

[Tiberion]

The 25% might not work for the stock tanks since they\'re tiny.. it does sound like it might be feasible for the big modded tanks though, and might be the solution to their uberness. I\'ll crunch some numbers in the spreadsheet later and maybe run some tests.

[Omnivore]

The 25% might not work for the stock tanks since they\'re tiny..

Yeah, even though I used the stock LFE and SRB as an example, I\'d not mod them - no need to make yet another \'total conversion\' especially since the goal sounds like compatibility *and* more realism. For the users of the mod the stock tanks would probably become useful for upper stage - pretty much as they are now with most users of common mods, and, of course, the stock engines just wouldn\'t be used by the player looking for the increased realism/challenge.

UPDATE: GAH!!! Thought thrust units were equivalent to mass units... they\'re not.. closer to 1:9.81 if not exactly.

Ok, with the updated information, scaling by the F1, the stock LV-T30 should mass 0.556, produce thrust = 424, and have a fuel consumption of 38 (approximation based on derived density and thrust to mass ratios of F1 engine).

One last final edit (I promise!!): Since some other parts (eg: couplers/decouplers) are quite likely overly massive, the fuel consumption given above could be reduced a bit to compensate. A \'halfway\' solution between vanilla and as real as we can get, would give us a stock LV-T30 of say mass = 1.0, thrust = 300, fuel consumption = 16. Not sure where the best point would be and haven\'t considered SRBs in this at all.

[Andras]

I\'m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing, but one double length 1.75m tank and two 1.75m SRBs put my upper stage and lander in Munar orbit with fuel to spare. I kicked off both the 1.75m core stage and the 1m upper stage with fuel remaining. Two of the mini tanks and the orbital maneuvering unit gave me plenty of fuel for descent and the Kerbin return.

[Commander Zoom]

As it\'s my understanding that these parts are at least in the ballpark of scaled stock parts, I wonder if the 'too good' performance issues that we\'re seeing (and Silisko was complaining about in his own thread, with people putting 'too much' stuff in orbit) go all the way back to those stock parts, and HarvesteR picking numbers that 'seemed good at the time', but now...

[Drone]

I think havester just picked arbitary values so when the game engine is done and everything is implemented he can add all the new parts and balance them then. it doesn\'t make sense to balance it now when gravity values and drag and suchlike might change.

[Man of Stijl]

While this is true, it\'s a good idea to play around with different kinds of balancing now in in Alpha so by the time campaign mode is implemented we\'ll have a good idea of what\'s balanced and what\'s exploitable.

[Omnivore]

For arbitrary values, the fuel density isn\'t too far off (1.4 vs ~1 LOX/RP1) giving each unit of fuel a mass of 4.4kg. It\'s the engines that are off by a good measure, they mass far too much for their thrust output as well as for their volume and consume roughly half the amount of fuel they should for a given thrust output. It bears repeating though that this is a game simulation not a hard core realism simulation. Realistic values might take a good bit of the fun out of the game.

Alpha is just a good a time as any to start looking at where improved realism impacts the challenge vs fun curve. To not experiment now is to basically give no input at all to HarvesteR & co... during alpha, when there might be a chance for the outcome of the experiments to influence future game direction. By identifying the areas of greatest departure from reality, there is some hope that they might either be addressed directly (by changes in vanilla) or be adjustable through being included into the game\'s difficulty settings.

[trvtannenberg]

I think a shorter 1,75m decoupler (like short 2m from sunday punch) will be useful (i tried to do one, but i failed).

[Tiberion]

Sorry I haven\'t posted an update in a day or so, once I got a handle on Blender, I got some ideas in my head and I am having trouble working around them.

I won\'t have much time over the weekend due to family stuff and a certain open beta that I am playing with some friends, but I plan on releasing the next version with a few fixes and hopefully a first pass on balance adjustments on Tuesday.

I\'d still love someone who can texture properly to join the project (anyone is still welcome to contribute changes for our communal consideration as well)

[Zephyr]

Define 'texture properly'. I can probably do kerbal level textures from scratch. Do you need UV mapping, making the textures or both? And what do you need done?

I can probably contribute, but not necessarily a consistent amount of time (Degree comes first ) I have a bit of time on my hands at the moment, but things will soon start racking up for exams.

[Tiberion]

Well right now the main job is the tank textures - I did a 'new' set of Saturn-V-like but they\'re not great (to me anyway) as I was sort of re-learning as I went.

I would like an 'Ares Family' set as well (which can be swapped with a simple folder copy/paste) since some of the original parts were textures after that rocket as well.

The three on the right are Ares rockets - they don\'t have to be exactly replicas, but the long tanks would be in the orange colors, the shorter tanks in the white/checkered or whatever.

The existing UVMaps are fine, shouldn\'t need redone.

And then some tweaks to the adapter and decoupler shroud textures so they match the tank colors, they look out of place between tanks currently.

The rough texture I did for the Command/Service module parts isn\'t great either.

Something big, something small, whatever fits your schedule. I can give you a separate zip set up with just the tanks if you want to do that

[venku122]

I\'ll wait until this pack is finalized to download. I like all my nova and sunday punch parts and you guys just don\'t have all them done yet

[Zephyr]

Ok, a zip with the parts you want modified would be great.

[rdfox]

Perhaps you could also release a pack with the updated textures, but the original .cfg files, for those of us who were designing ships to use the original performance figures?