extend the atmosphere + idea for upper atmospheric orbits

[boomerdog2000]

Or we are against the idea of having to boost the stations at any interval.

[lajoswinkler]

Or we are against the idea of having to boost the stations at any interval.

All you then have to do is exit the atmosphere completely.

I would be ok with 69km as a border, but if you're at 68.5km, the atmosphere is too thick to allow more than few orbits, at most. KSP simply doesn't have a region of atmosphere that will allow very slow, gradual orbital decay. The height is not important. 69 or 120km, doesn't matter.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I'm with lajoswinkler on this one. When I first came up with my idea, I was initially planning to present it with the same or similar top point, but with a thinner atmosphere in the upper regions. That can make planes unable to fly as high though. Overall, I think if this idea is implemented in any way, it should be implemented in such a way as to make the game feel more or less about the same for those who don't wish to adapt to it. As such, ideally planes should be able to fly just as high, and ships should be able to make medium-term orbits at around 70-80km.

[edit] this could be achieved by lowering the scale height of Kerbin's atmosphere to 4000km and increasing the intake on air engines by 25%.

Edited September 30, 2013 by thereaverofdarkness

[mrdest21]

I'm with 5thhorseman on this one. This level of tedium is rarely very appreciated, that's why driving games don't make you watch your guy filling up the gas tank and shooters don't make you clean your guns. Boosting a station to maintain orbit for realism's sake sounds fun but it'll get old really quickly. When you're on that Jool mission and you have to come back to launch your boost mission, you won't think it's that fun. It'll become a chore that takes you away from what you're doing. And sure, you can put your station above the cutoff but if 95% of people are gonna do it anyway, just leave it at 70km.

My analogy is this: when you're a kid and you see your dad mowing the lawn, it looks awesome. Pushing that loud thing, rotor-blade murdering the grass and doing adult stuff you can't do as a kid. Once you've mowed the lawn 5 times, you're pretty bored of it. You're sweaty, the grass gets stuck in the blades and you have to do it every week. I see this kind of realism as being exactly like that. Repetition is annoying.

As for making it an option, if you take every proposal in the suggestion forums that defends itself by saying '' we can make it an option in the menu'', you'll have at least 20 pages of checkboxes for a ton of pointless stuff that most people won't use.(no sound in space, really thin atmosphere at 120km, randomly generated planets, etc etc.) And those 20 pages of options will have added months on the release of the game because a dev has to make the game with and without every single option.

[allmappedout]

I'm with 5thhorseman on this one. This level of tedium is rarely very appreciated, that's why driving games don't make you watch your guy filling up the gas tank and shooters don't make you clean your guns. Boosting a station to maintain orbit for realism's sake sounds fun but it'll get old really quickly. When you're on that Jool mission and you have to come back to launch your boost mission, you won't think it's that fun. It'll become a chore that takes you away from what you're doing. And sure, you can put your station above the cutoff but if 95% of people are gonna do it anyway, just leave it at 70km.

My analogy is this: when you're a kid and you see your dad mowing the lawn, it looks awesome. Pushing that loud thing, rotor-blade murdering the grass and doing adult stuff you can't do as a kid. Once you've mowed the lawn 5 times, you're pretty bored of it. You're sweaty, the grass gets stuck in the blades and you have to do it every week. I see this kind of realism as being exactly like that. Repetition is annoying.

As for making it an option, if you take every proposal in the suggestion forums that defends itself by saying '' we can make it an option in the menu'', you'll have at least 20 pages of checkboxes for a ton of pointless stuff that most people won't use.(no sound in space, really thin atmosphere at 120km, randomly generated planets, etc etc.) And those 20 pages of options will have added months on the release of the game because a dev has to make the game with and without every single option.

Amen to that. The benefit of doing this is what? Added realism? It doesn't really add anything else to the game, perhaps maybe a science mission (but looking at how science works you would only need one orbit to do it anyway so the decay becomes irrelevant), vs the cost of having to remove focus from the primary part of the game, which is space flight? It'd be like having to re-align your solar panels - it'd be cool the first time you do it (YEAH! ADDED EFFICIENCY!), but the 5th or 6th time it just becomes tedious.

It's like spinning plates - the more you add that people MUST do, the less people CAN do.

[nuclearpower13]

Please dont. There is no benifit.

[lajoswinkler]

Amen to that. The benefit of doing this is what? Added realism? It doesn't really add anything else to the game, perhaps maybe a science mission (but looking at how science works you would only need one orbit to do it anyway so the decay becomes irrelevant), vs the cost of having to remove focus from the primary part of the game, which is space flight? It'd be like having to re-align your solar panels - it'd be cool the first time you do it (YEAH! ADDED EFFICIENCY!), but the 5th or 6th time it just becomes tedious.

It's like spinning plates - the more you add that people MUST do, the less people CAN do.

If you don't want to boost your station(s), you can place them above the trace atmosphere region. So where's the problem? You don't lose anything, others gain something.

[allmappedout]

If you don't want to boost your station(s), you can place them above the trace atmosphere region. So where's the problem? You don't lose anything, others gain something.

My point is that all you're doing is adding in a game mechanic which doesn't improve the game mechanics and, as others have pointed out, raises the entry bar for newbies as you then require more dV to get to a higher orbit. As much fun as you think it may be doing station keeping, after the nth time of doing it, it will not be. Regardless of the added realism of decaying orbits, it doesn't add to the core game mechanic, would require a huge overhaul in the way the physics engine deals with on-rails orbits, and adds an element of reptitiveness into the game. As others have pointed out, the requirement for maintenance is only fun to a point; if a solar panel breaks because you crash, sending a rescue team to fix it is fun, but if that solar panel just gets dusty and so loses efficiency, you don't want to have to fly a rescue mission just to dust off a probe (however realistic it might be, such as the mars rovers, for example).

I'm not against the idea in theory, in that I like realism, but what I don't like and what puts me off this being in the game is that it adds repetition and doesn't add fun.

[BubbaWilkins]

You want realism? Lets get all the planetary orbits out of the same plane. Now there's a challenging mechanic that actually adds something. Course, that means you might have to wait 10 years for an optimal intercept, but hey....itaddsrealismamiright!

This adds nothing but tedium and has already been discussed as NOT BEING POSSIBLE. The discussion should be dead at this point.

[BostLabs]

I'm happy to see that this topic is experiencing so much healthy debate. I'd like to clarify a few things:

I know this could require some extra programming and I don't know how much. Maybe it's actually really easy, maybe it's super hard. I'm just brainstorming ideas to help the developers understand what we want. I'll leave it up to them to gauge feasibility versus popularity.

I'm leaning on the hard code change part. And who is this We you are talking about? You are certainly not speaking for me.

[Eric S]

If you don't want to boost your station(s), you can place them above the trace atmosphere region. So where's the problem? You don't lose anything, others gain something.

Not true, those that don't gain from what you're proposing lose developer time that could be spent on something that could potentially be of interest to more people. As I said above, this would require code changes, and probably not simple ones. In order for this to work the way you want it to, the very foundation of "on rails" craft would have to change, because "on rails" implies a fixed orbit baring SoI transitions, collisions with planets/moons, or craft deletion from being too low in an atmosphere while on rails.

That's what it comes down to really. I don't see this being of enough interest to enough people to be worth the developer time necessary to make it work.

This isn't "I don't want to have to correct orbits all the time" or "I don't want to have to lift my satellites higher so that orbits don't degrade" though I'm not going to dismiss those as valid issues either.

[Galane]

Currently I have 17 pieces of debris in orbits that mostly don't reach 70K altitude. I wish they would decay and crash. I'm leaving them alone since they're not bothering anything, just to see how long the game will hang onto them. There were more pieces of debris but their periapses were much lower in the atmo or below ground level and they duly crashed.

One way to make such orbits "self cleaning" would be to use a simple counter. After x number of times around in such a too low orbit, delete it because if the player was "flying" that piece of debris constantly it would come down.

[allmappedout]

Currently I have 17 pieces of debris in orbits that mostly don't reach 70K altitude. I wish they would decay and crash. I'm leaving them alone since they're not bothering anything, just to see how long the game will hang onto them. There were more pieces of debris but their periapses were much lower in the atmo or below ground level and they duly crashed.

One way to make such orbits "self cleaning" would be to use a simple counter. After x number of times around in such a too low orbit, delete it because if the player was "flying" that piece of debris constantly it would come down.

Whilst I agree with the idea, I am certain people will argue that it will lose them missions - imagine an SSTO which doesn't quite get to orbit, but establishes an Ap over 70km, and an Pe above 25km; you build a quick refuelling rocket to fly up at Ap and dock and give it a quick gas and go to finish the circularisation burn, but when you launch it, and you're burning in order to rendezvous, all of a sudden your target ship just disappears after a whirl around the planet?

Cue a list of angry folk who hadn't heard of this feature before.

[John FX]

Currently I have 17 pieces of debris in orbits that mostly don't reach 70K altitude. I wish they would decay and crash. I'm leaving them alone since they're not bothering anything, just to see how long the game will hang onto them. There were more pieces of debris but their periapses were much lower in the atmo or below ground level and they duly crashed.

One way to make such orbits "self cleaning" would be to use a simple counter. After x number of times around in such a too low orbit, delete it because if the player was "flying" that piece of debris constantly it would come down.

If this only applied to debris I would be ok with that. Have a set amount of Dv to degrade the orbit by for a set Pe and it would be close enough to realistic for debris and fast to calculate without disturbing major parts of the code. Then to clean space you just need to get debris clipping the atmo at <70Km but ships carry on as normal down to 20Km or so when on rails.

Win - Win

[thereaverofdarkness]

Whilst I agree with the idea, I am certain people will argue that it will lose them missions - imagine an SSTO which doesn't quite get to orbit, but establishes an Ap over 70km, and an Pe above 25km; you build a quick refuelling rocket to fly up at Ap and dock and give it a quick gas and go to finish the circularisation burn, but when you launch it, and you're burning in order to rendezvous, all of a sudden your target ship just disappears after a whirl around the planet?

Cue a list of angry folk who hadn't heard of this feature before.

That's already relying on an unintended consequence of the programming to do something that the developers believe should not be possible. It is an exploit, and if it was made impossible to do, that would improve the game.

If, however, you got your apoapsis to 75km and your periapsis to 50km, then you should make it around the planet about once.

[Lazro]

Not really digging this idea. It's reminding me of "Press space (or in this case shift) to win" games. Repetitiveness can really kill fun.

[thereaverofdarkness]

repetitiveness seems to be the only gripe people have about this idea, and as stated several times already, that can be eliminated by teaching your Kerbals to take care of it for you, as teaching kerbals is already intended to be a feature of the game.

[sumghai]

repetitiveness seems to be the only gripe people have about this idea

Incorrect. There is also the issue of the game treating non-active vessel as "on-rails", which means KSP only tracks their orbits/trajectory, and cannot modify them in the manner required for atmospheric decay.

Tedium annoys me greatly at most, but what you're suggesting would require a fundamental change to how KSP treats active/non-active vessels, which isn't really the dev's focus right now or in the forseeable future.

[Gobbles Gusto]

I don't know if this has been mentioned but this would play a bigger role if radiation effects are added. Kerbals would be more protected in this upper atmosphere than on some crazy halfway to the moon stationary orbit space station. I like the idea, it would be more realistic, and add even more science to do.

[Legendary Emu]

...raises the entry bar for newbies as you then require more dV to get to a higher orbit.fun.

Because KSP is a very forgiving game.

On another note, I like thereavers engineer idea on this.

[NERVAfan]

I WOULD like to have some actually really thin atmosphere, somewhere (whether below or above 70km).

The scaling is a bit odd.

Kerbin is 600km radius, and scaling based on the same Kerbin:Earth ratio, you'd get -

tropopause ~1 - 1.5 km (9-17 km on Earth per Wikipedia)

stratopause ~5km (~50km on Earth)

mesopause ~8-10 km (~80-100 km on Earth)

thermopause/exobase ~50-100 km (~500-1000 km on Earth)

So 70km is actually pretty reasonable for a "negligible atmosphere" height, by this scaling; but by that same scaling, the scale height of Kerbin's atmosphere would be about 800 meters!

Which would make ascent WAY too easy (basically no drag), so I am NOT suggesting this.

[Kerbart]

Step 2.) Incorporate a special physics warp that checks only the mass and overall drag of a ship, treating it as a single solid object, and make all ships within current sphere of influence that are in atmosphere use this physics warp at low warp settings - perhaps something that can be toggled in the menu. I don't think this will blow up computers but I can't say I know for sure. This physics warp would take over the normal time warp options where applicable, and would only apply to bodies in atmosphere, the rest would stay on rails

A deterministic physics model is like being pregnant: there's not such thing as “just doing it a little bit.†Once you decide to switch over to an incremental model (with all the joys of compounding errors) then you have left the rails and you're in calculation hell. There's a lot of other discussions on similar subjects: they all look great on paper. And they look significantly less appealing in code.

[allmappedout]

Because KSP is a very forgiving game.

On another note, I like thereavers engineer idea on this.

of course it's not, but at the same time making it even less forgiving may put a significant audience off. Also, given that the main thrust of the argument is surrounding the technical impracticality of implementing this (as Kerbart says - it's not a partial opt-in), as well as a very divisive thing which a lot of people have a lack of appetite for, and it seems to be this is a non-starter.

[Mr Shifty]

If you want a thin wispy atmosphere that will degrade your orbits over time, you can have it right now, without having to wait for the KSP devs to never do it. Just go over to http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/download.html and download Orbiter, the current version has full exosphere modelling out to 2500km, taking into account diurnal temperature variations, solar declination, and geomagnetic activity. (See here and here.)