Vehicle test facitility

[lazarus1024]

I think it would be cool if at some point if a vehicle test facility could be added. Either small scale or large scale.

One of the "frustrations" I have on occasion is attempting to design landers and stuff for other planets and Moons. Do I have enough thrust? Enough dV? Is it stable enough on landing? Etc.

I can do some testing on Kerbin and I have some vague rule of thumbs for some planets and moons about what it takes. However, sometimes it is just too hard to test. Does that little 20 thrust engine really provide enough for my capsule to get to orbit? I've got lots of thrust, but I can't even lift off the pad until I am down to 10% fuel remaining on Kerbin, but hey, the Mun has a lot lower gravity! But is it lower enough for that kind of thrust?

Sometimes it is just hope and pray.

It would be cool if you could have a test facitlity so that you could launch from any of the planets or moons, or at least SIMULATED that you were. For example, you select the test facility and then the craft you want to test. You then have your ship spawned (kind of like the hypereditor) at that location to test. You could choose, for example, orbital height (auto-spawns at a circular equitorial orbit at the proper velocity) from the body, or choose a ground launch, which would launch from the equator at some pre-determined by SQUAD test location. This test facility would be an "engineering simulator" for the kerbals. You would not be spawning within the context of your game and as soon as you "end flight" the instance is ended. No even sandbox playing in it.

If this is ever possible, I've gotta say, it would save me HUGE amounts of time and guess work to create proper landers without over engineering (or under).

[Joel Dryden]

That'd be cool, don't know how they'd implement it (You could just put those mods on). Unless in spite of the Oculus rift and what not (VR and AR devices) maybe the idea of KVR so you can "simulate" having something appear (Within 10m or something by mouse click of something that has already landed or is there, as a "probe" to know the area for said Kerbal Virtual Reality probably copyright by some scientist that got sick of Jeb destroying too many of the parts too quickly for the poor Kerbal engineers in an undisclosed area, probably slave labour underground or in the desert mountains) wherever you want, like a rover for testing on another surface, a self powered sat before launch and such, test planes, all that sort of stuff but where ever you want.

Would remove some of the tedium of getting everything everywhere, but that is also a lot of that fun, but I get what you mean, sometimes to test a rover on another planet or something of the sort, you don't want to have to every single time (unless maybe for the actual launch, when it will be there? Being why VR could be a fix for the in-between of actually doing it and just a "sandbox" testing feature?) launch, the payload, a tug, refuel everything, then launch, maybe refuel again for descent, etc, when you could just have your rover appear there to test it out, or whatever, sorry for using the rover as an example so much, I just like driving them everywhere.