Mission Difficulty Ratings

[TheTennesseeFireman]

So I've been introducing a few people to KSP, and they all seem to be having the same early frustration. Once they can consistently build rockets that get into orbit, their first mission to another planet is always the Mun, and they take forever to build something that can slow them down fast enough to land. After completing this and steeling themselves for Minmus, they are annoyed to find that they completely overengineered their rocket and could have gotten there with little trouble. The fact that the Mun is physically closer threw them off.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that it's really not intuitive to newer players how difficult certain planets are to reach, land on, and escape from, so the difficulty curve of their mission choices spike all over the place.

I propose something like this on the map view for each planet:

Eve Difficulty

To Reach- 4/10

To Land- 2/10 (parachutes), 8/10 (powered)

To Escape- 10/10

Those numbers are fairly arbitrary (and I have no idea how accurate they are), but it should at least give players a sense of how to engineer for each mission rather than having to go by trial and error.

[Serratus]

Why? Trial and error is the point of KSP. And as You say, the numbers You give are arbitrary - but so would be any numbers given by SQUAD. Difficulty of the mission is really set by this community on grassroots level*. No number can describe anything here. Plus, it's a very subjective matter - for example I find going to Moho much harder then taking of from Eve, but I'm in moderate minority. How do You account for that with a number?

TBH being able to display a ribbon in my signature here on the forum is worth more to me than any prize in-game...

EDIT*:

1 newbie group)-Guys, after 3000 tries I've landed on Duna! :DDDD

-lol congratzzzz!

2 old guys)-Guys I've just flown a SSTO plane in suns atmosphere and returned

- Bah! I did that in 0.6! In my days....

Subjective, see?

Edited February 12, 2014 by Serratus

[TheTennesseeFireman]

Subjective indeed, but the ratings would simply be comparable to landing on the other planets. The Mun and Minmus may be difficult for many beginners to reach, but it would still be the lowest rated simply compared to delta v hogs like the Joolean moons.

I don't mean this as a way to take away the exploration factor, but merely show that just because a planet or moon is closer doesn't necessarily make it easy to land on or escape from... it would be an introduction of sorts to the concept of delta v, which eludes a lot of newer players.

[Nemrav]

I personally like how minmus is so much easier than the mun... It means I could actually get bases going..

Just tell them about the oberth effect, and that it only really makes a difference in transfer orbit beyond the mun (ie minmus only takes a tiny bit more delta V to reach than mun, rest is 100% easier)

[regex]

There's an information screen available in the map view for the focused item, it's available through a little button on the right-hand side of the screen. So a player could, theoretically, double click on Minmus, open the information screen, and see that its gravity is less than that of the Mun, and significantly less than Kerbin. Using that information, an astute player could infer that landing on Minmus would be much easier than landing on the Mun. They could even learn something about gravity in the process.

The same applies for Eve; the player could learn that Eve has an atmosphere (and maybe could try using parachutes) and that its gravity is higher than that of Kerbin (which means taking off will be much harder).

Perhaps the information could be presented in a better way, but "difficulty ratings" are not really a good solution because they impose an artificial barrier on doing something.

[Tery215]

Placing hints in the loading screen that atmospheres make landing with parachutes easy and that high gravities are difficult to land on would save a lot of fuss over difficulty ratings.

It's not like there's anything good there right now.