About the Tech tree

[The Jedi Master]

As for the money, you are correct. A budget implementation is something we're only planning for later, so it's not going to be on this update. But in keeping with our ways of always keeping the game at a playable state, the R&D system is able to function without it, as a standalone mechanic. Hence the whole science thing.

Isn't a tech tree pretty useless in a sandbox?

[LameLefty]

I would love a landing radar that told you the incline of the surface below the spacecraft. That's more of a piloting thing, but it sure would be handy. Maybe it could also allow topographic map construction if it's in orbit or something.

THIS.

A thousand times, THIS.

(... he writes, having spent 3 hours last night - and at least ten spectacular failures; thank you F9! - trying to make a precision landing at a very particular spot on the Mün that happens to coincide just between two nearly-overlapping craters. I finally did it, but I'm seriously worried that going out on EVA tonight will tip over my lander! )

[leax256]

Can we have a way to manually transfer data between ships?

Let's say i have a permanent satellite gathering data, can I have a lander hand-deliver it to Kerbin?

Or, a better example would be if i make a lander / reentry vehicle can I send it to Duna, get it back to orbit, then give it's science to an interplanetary shuttle to Duna?

why not just use whatever is used to comunicate in space?

[SteevyT]

What about probes we send out on escape trajectories from the sun? Will there be different science bonuses at distances from the sun if instruments are active, or will it just be a single sum for having a probe on an escape trajectory?

Also, what happens if you have multiples of the same instrument on your ship, will each one sent back a diminishing value as if they were on different missions, or will it still just be a value for a single mission?

[thorfinn]

These time constraints usually only work for real-time games, where time management is big.

A question: eventually, in the complete game, will the rockets still be assembled instantaneously and just appear on the pad ready for launch, or will the assembly require time and space like in BARiS?

Personally I think that having a timetable to manage could be fun if it's not too hard - also, it would be a powerful incentive to getting right spaceplane SSTOs that would have extremely low turnaround times.

[Eric S]

Isn't a tech tree pretty useless in a sandbox?

Yes, and they've stated that the tech tree is career mode only. If you're saying that we need the money part for career mode, yes, eventually, but if 0.22 comes out with career mode that differs from sandbox mode only in that it uses the tech tree, it's still a step forward.

[The Jedi Master]

Yes, and they've stated that the tech tree is career mode only. If you're saying that we need the money part for career mode, yes, eventually, but if 0.22 comes out with career mode that differs from sandbox mode only in that it uses the tech tree, it's still a step forward.

Good point.

[regex]

I'd love to see MechJeb integrated into the tech tree in a sensible fashion.. perhaps at the start you only get the instrumentation (delta-V in the VAB, vessel, orbit and surface info during flight) and as you fly more and more missions you slowly open up the various autopilots- Smart A.S.S. first of course, then perhaps maneuver planner, ascent, rendezvous/docking, landing.

I posted about this earlier. MechJeb allows you to blacklist modules on a per-part basis, so there's no reason you couldn't create a logical progression of parts/features that would unlock at certain points in the tree.

[lazarus1024]

A question: eventually, in the complete game, will the rockets still be assembled instantaneously and just appear on the pad ready for launch, or will the assembly require time and space like in BARiS?

Personally I think that having a timetable to manage could be fun if it's not too hard - also, it would be a powerful incentive to getting right spaceplane SSTOs that would have extremely low turnaround times.

Meh, you could always time warp. I think anything with a time mechanic is pre-dilluted. I think it is better to be objective driven rather than time driven.

[curiousepic]

If part cost is not worked into this build, then I anticipate being able to cram every scientific tool/experiment onto a very capable craft, do a grand tour, and do All The Science. I expect the way it's meant to be balanced is by having each experiment have a high money cost.

[EDIT] Of course I realize my mistake - most of those parts will be locked in the tree and prevent this. Nevermind

Edited August 16, 2013 by curiousepic

[LameLefty]

If part cost is not worked into this build, then I anticipate being able to cram every scientific tool/experiment onto a very capable craft, do a grand tour, and do All The Science. I expect the way it's meant to be balanced is by having each experiment have a high money cost.

Well, there's cost in money, and there will be correspondingly high costs for that hypothetical very capable craft (bigger tanks, more fuel, larger engines, larger power supply, etc.). All that stuff will have to play into it to make the tech progressions up and along each branch be meaningful.

[Nemoricus]

If you mean a time component referring to requiring some time to elapse to research a new tech node, then no, that's something you can work around by simply having a ship at the pad to wait it out. These time constraints usually only work for real-time games, where time management is big.

I'm just going to float the idea that time can be a very valuable resource in the game, perhaps by linking some forms of income to it. Sure, you might be able to time warp for so many days to finish a research item, but if you don't keep performing missions, your superiors will slash your budget.

However, this may only be appropriate for higher difficulty versions of career mode.

[Superfluous J]

Next time you do it, maybe you only get 7 gravity research points since you already conducted the experiment, and so on.

Actually what I'm hoping for is that, say, for your first Mun mission you can land anywhere and get your 10 "mun science" points (so long as you come back/com back/whatever. What you detailed is a nice compromise). Then, based on the geography (munography, whatever) of Mun and where you landed, the Kerbal scientists (ie, the guys who don't risk their necks in the ships) decide on areas that are going to give more science, and areas that are going to give less science. Your next mission, then, can't just land anywhere; you want to land smack-dab in the middle of that crater, or on that ridge, or wherever the "moar science" graph told you to land. Every time you do that, the scientists come up with new and different areas that are important, and other areas become less important.

You could tie this in with the anomalies and have the scientists encourage you to land near some of them. Also, you could land in between 3 "science-rich areas" and rover to all 3 to get bonuses, perhaps 1/x the science they would have given you. So the first one gives you 10 points, the second 5, the third 3, etc.

Isn't a tech tree pretty useless in a sandbox?

Most things are useless in an alpha game, taken by themselves. You can't judge the usefulness of career mode based on the sandbox nature of the current iteration of the game.

Edited August 16, 2013 by 5thHorseman

[Alguien]

I would love a landing radar that told you the incline of the surface below the spacecraft. That's more of a piloting thing, but it sure would be handy. Maybe it could also allow topographic map construction if it's in orbit or something.

Maybe as we progress in the techtree the IVA gets more panels and instruments

[thorfinn]

Meh, you could always time warp.

Oh, but we will have to timewarp anyway. There will be those weeks where nothing of consequence happens but waiting for a launch window.

Also, I was thinking more about the mid and late game phases, where we will always be doing seven different things at once.

When your space center gets too busy to keep up, you should always have the two options of brute force (build moar pads!) and doing something about turnaround times. Both would be legitimate choices.

[EleSigma]

Maybe as we progress in the techtree the IVA gets more panels and instruments

This. Have a small tech advance that updates your UI from gauges and dials to digital number displays and MFD glass cockpit. But since this would be more fluff than function then it would probably be added later on after all the more urgent stuff is implemented and out of the way though.

[lazarus1024]

Actually what I'm hoping for is that, say, for your first Mun mission you can land anywhere and get your 10 "mun science" points (so long as you come back/com back/whatever. What you detailed is a nice compromise). Then, based on the geography (munography, whatever) of Mun and where you landed, the Kerbal scientists (ie, the guys who don't risk their necks in the ships) decide on areas that are going to give more science, and areas that are going to give less science. Your next mission, then, can't just land anywhere; you want to land smack-dab in the middle of that crater, or on that ridge, or wherever the "moar science" graph told you to land. Every time you do that, the scientists come up with new and different areas that are important, and other areas become less important.

You could tie this in with the anomalies and have the scientists encourage you to land near some of them. Also, you could land in between 3 "science-rich areas" and rover to all 3 to get bonuses, perhaps 1/x the science they would have given you. So the first one gives you 10 points, the second 5, the third 3, etc.

Most things are useless in an alpha game, taken by themselves. You can't judge the usefulness of career mode based on the sandbox nature of the current iteration of the game.

Sounds like a pretty neat future enhancement to research.The big limitation I can see is some way to convey to the player where different areas of interest are for research.

[SteevyT]

Sounds like a pretty neat future enhancement to research.The big limitation I can see is some way to convey to the player where different areas of interest are for research.

Have a multicolor overlay that can be toggled? Kind of like the different views in Sim City? Seems like the simplest one to me.

[Seret]

How will kerbaled vs probe missions factor into that? Not that it has to, but one of the reasons to do manned missions is that an astronaut can collect more scientific data in an afternoon than a probe can in a week or two. I agree that we don't want to have time spent playing a strong factor, but I think a manned mission should have a better scientific data return than a probe mission.

The simply way to deal with that is to make a kerbal count as a science package. So you could send a probe with an instrument to a location, or you could send a can full of kerbals, and either would earn you science.

[LameLefty]

The simply way to deal with that is to make a kerbal count as a science package. So you could send a probe with an instrument to a location, or you could send a can full of kerbals, and either would earn you science.

I would suggest that a can with kerbals (perhaps combined with EVA) would earn more science than a probe.

Real life analogue being the fact that the ONE Apollo mission with Jack Schmitt (a trained geologist - he was actually the astronauts' science instructor before being selected as a NASA scientist-astronaut himself) arguably performed more good basic geological research on Apollo 17 than 11, 12, 14, 15 and 16 combined.

[Captain_Doug]

So, I've been thinking long and hard here about how we're going to do the 'earning science' bit. It's a good idea, but putting it in practice poses a few challenges.

How do we rate the science value of your missions? What even defines a mission in the first place? These things are actually pretty hazy in terms of how the game deals with them, so coming up with a nice, solid way of doing science is a deceptively tough task.

I do believe I've worked out a good solution now:

The game won't award you any science automatically. That would be artificial and generally meaningless, but worse still, it would require us to make arbitrary decisions about the science value of this or that action. That's a bad road to go down. Instead, we can let you 'do science' as part of your missions, and get your science points for yourself. Here's how:

We already have a few science sensor parts, which apart from a context menu readout, are largely decorative. We can put those to some use now, along with a couple other scientific parts we're going to add.

The idea is that science parts work as one-shot experiments. That is, they're activated by action group or as part of the staging sequence, and once deployed, they to their thing. This is essentially deploying the experiment to gather data. This data isn't science yet though, because you need to get it to your resident experts over at R&D to crunch the numbers and make some sense out of it.

To do that, you can recover the experiments (or whatever is left of them). That will convert the data you gathered into scientific knowledge, provided you don't already have it. This is done by us storing where each experiment was run and what it was, and using that 'source' as a key to a multiplier value, which starts at 100% and gets progressively lower the more data on the same subject you gather. The more you spam the same type of experiment in the same place, the less science you'll get for the data it generates.

Now, if we've learned anything this far, it's that recovery is by no means guaranteed. So here's where the antennas and comm dishes finally get a purpose. Once available, you can use comms equipment to transmit science data back down and gain science immediately. Of course, you can't expect to get as much knowledge for the same experiment data if you beam it back as if you had recovered it hands-on. How efficient the data-for-science rate is depends largely on the quality of the antenna being used, as does its power requirements.

The possibilities for what the science-gathering parts can be then are pretty huge. They could be anything from experiment canisters filled with some mystery goo, a camera array, a mass spectrometer, anything really. Functionally it all works the same way, and better yet, it works with the game rather than over it.

That's about it in a very tightly packed nutshell. I'm pretty happy with this idea now, it should fit any style of playing. You could focus on running as many different experiments as possible in Kerbin's lower atmosphere, or rush into discovering the different properties of Mystery Gooâ„¢ across the farthest reaches of the solar system, and hopefully any point in between as well.

Disclaimer: Mystery Gooâ„¢ is not really a planned feature (yet).

Cheers

I just have one question Harv. Before we get comms antenna's would we have to physically go and get it? For instance if we landed a probe/rover on the moon or say the North Pole would we have to send a misson to recieve the data that it has collected, because if we do that would be one of the biggest reasons to send missions to Duna or Eeloo. (Apart from having fun)

EDIT: Would we have to research flags?

Edited August 16, 2013 by Captain_Doug
Asking about flags

[Eric S]

why not just use whatever is used to comunicate in space?

It depends on how intricate the communication setup we get is. Picture a lander probe on the back side of the Mun. It has data to send back. If they enforce line of sight on radio communications, then that lander can't directly send back the data (or maybe they even go so far as to enforce short range vs long range communications). But you've got a comms satellite in low Munar orbit. When the probe establishes communication with the satellite, the satellite is also on the back side of the moon (a satellite in a higher orbit wouldn't have this issue) so the data can't be transferred in one pass that way. One solution would be to relay the probe's data to the satellite and then have the satellite transmit the data to Kerbin (or to a satellite in kerbin orbit, but this would require the requested ability to basically store the data in craft other than the one that gathered the data.

Ooh, there's another handoff that will need to be done for science, though I think someone else mentioned it here as well. Apollo style mission. LEM goes down, gathers physical science data, links up with the orbiter. We need some way for the orbiter to now have credit for the physical results, because the LEM isn't going to be landing back on Kerbin. I'm not sure it matters if the credit is copied or transfered, as long as we can't turn in the same results twice.

[Rosarium]

So, I've been thinking long and hard here about how we're going to do the 'earning science' bit. It's a good idea, but putting it in practice poses a few challenges.

How do we rate the science value of your missions? What even defines a mission in the first place? These things are actually pretty hazy in terms of how the game deals with them, so coming up with a nice, solid way of doing science is a deceptively tough task.

I do believe I've worked out a good solution now:

The game won't award you any science automatically. That would be artificial and generally meaningless, but worse still, it would require us to make arbitrary decisions about the science value of this or that action. That's a bad road to go down. Instead, we can let you 'do science' as part of your missions, and get your science points for yourself. Here's how:

We already have a few science sensor parts, which apart from a context menu readout, are largely decorative. We can put those to some use now, along with a couple other scientific parts we're going to add.

The idea is that science parts work as one-shot experiments. That is, they're activated by action group or as part of the staging sequence, and once deployed, they to their thing. This is essentially deploying the experiment to gather data. This data isn't science yet though, because you need to get it to your resident experts over at R&D to crunch the numbers and make some sense out of it.

To do that, you can recover the experiments (or whatever is left of them). That will convert the data you gathered into scientific knowledge, provided you don't already have it. This is done by us storing where each experiment was run and what it was, and using that 'source' as a key to a multiplier value, which starts at 100% and gets progressively lower the more data on the same subject you gather. The more you spam the same type of experiment in the same place, the less science you'll get for the data it generates.

Now, if we've learned anything this far, it's that recovery is by no means guaranteed. So here's where the antennas and comm dishes finally get a purpose. Once available, you can use comms equipment to transmit science data back down and gain science immediately. Of course, you can't expect to get as much knowledge for the same experiment data if you beam it back as if you had recovered it hands-on. How efficient the data-for-science rate is depends largely on the quality of the antenna being used, as does its power requirements.

The possibilities for what the science-gathering parts can be then are pretty huge. They could be anything from experiment canisters filled with some mystery goo, a camera array, a mass spectrometer, anything really. Functionally it all works the same way, and better yet, it works with the game rather than over it.

That's about it in a very tightly packed nutshell. I'm pretty happy with this idea now, it should fit any style of playing. You could focus on running as many different experiments as possible in Kerbin's lower atmosphere, or rush into discovering the different properties of Mystery Gooâ„¢ across the farthest reaches of the solar system, and hopefully any point in between as well.

Disclaimer: Mystery Gooâ„¢ is not really a planned feature (yet).

Cheers

this is the real solution and a really cool upgrade to the KSP system. i have just 1 little doubt: taking certain that science will be gained like this (seems like the best way and the coolest one) will be, i won't to say "easy" but more like unfair for the constructors. I want to explain it better with an easy solution to the problem without many words: science parts are too light, like this will be possible with just one launch to have 20 ionic science satellite ready to infest and gain points from everywhere, so if the science parts will have more weight ( and maybe some other cool add as you said like cameras and ground rocks analyzers to make harder ) will be a better challenge. Another way could be implement the radio transmissions ( occluded by planets ) to keep the datas active and effective, forcing a interplanetary net with small satellites or stations or spacecrafts bouncing signals.

So in conclusion i think a really good science vessel should weight at minimum 2-3 tons not considering the propulsion.

As said adding scanner and mining parts will be as closing the science circle.

p.s.

antennas with limited range, adding bigger and more powerful antennas ( with and adequate electricity consume ) antennas which can only send signals and antennas that can only receive something like this. would be really cool be able to control satellites (unmanned) only in signal range.

Edited August 16, 2013 by Rosarium

[ddavis425]

The possibilities for what the science-gathering parts can be then are pretty huge. They could be anything from experiment canisters filled with some mystery goo, a camera array, a mass spectrometer, anything really. Functionally it all works the same way, and better yet, it works with the game rather than over it.

If camera arrays get added to the game it would be great to have some missions to take pictures of things like in Take on Mars.

[Beeman]

I'd love to see telescopes, probe/rover cameras and other such things in KSP. I'm getting really pumped for the new update, even if they don't add many new science parts just yet XD