Change speed measurement when landed on surface

[BudgetHedgehog]

2 things:

1, The game can already tell when you've landed on a surface.

2, Metres per second, while fine for space flight, is not a very intuitive measurement for moving on land, for instance with rovers (with what little use they have, but that's a different issue entirely...)

How about, when on a surface, the speed, via a user-inputted button press, changes from m/s to either kilometres or miles per hour (or a choice of either?). Maybe a button next to the speed on the navball, similar to how we can cycle through orbital, target and surface speed. Or even have the left hand side of the speed display (where it shows numbers) cycle through orbit/surface/target and the right hand side (where it shows the units) between m/s, kph and mph. I think this would be most intuitive, actually. I can't remember if the tutorials explain that, but it's easy enough to add that info in there.

I find it hard to gauge speed on a celestial body's surface thanks to a relatively non-bumpy and sparse (even with ground scatter) landscape so 20 m/s doesn't seem that fast when it's actually 44 mph. As for the little hops you do when you go slightly too fast over a ridge, obviously this wouldn't be an issue because everything would be switched manually of course. In flight, orbiting, travelling on surface, whatever - no automatic switching at all. That's a silly suggestion, why are you even thinking that?

Anyway, I know I ramble and repeat myself so I'll stop there and ask: any questions? Thoughts?

EDIT: of course, as soon as I click 'post', I realise it should say 'change speed measurement units' in the title.

Edited April 18, 2014 by ObsessedWithKSP
Reworded so Steven Mading can stop getting so stressed out about my small suggestion as it apparently affected him quite a bi

[Skyrunner27]

Or you know you could just have it so a user could switch between M/S and Km/h and maybe MPH

[Sirrobert]

How does 20m/s not seem fast?

You are moving 20 meters. Every second

[BudgetHedgehog]

How does 20m/s not seem fast?

You are moving 20 meters. Every second

Yes, when you think about it and track a distance of 20m in front of you with your eyes, it is pretty fast. My point is that it's not really useful for ground movement, which is measured (probably) all over the world in mph or kph. I say probably because there may be somewhere that doesn't, but for all intents and purposes, m/s is not a widely used unit of velocity on the ground (especially when driving a vehicle) at all. When I glance at my cars speedo, I see 50 - that's the important bit. When I glance at the speedo in KSP, I shouldn't have to sit and think about it and say 'huh, that is actually pretty fast' because in those situations, I wanted to know the speed at a glance in order to avoid the big cliff I'm now tumbling off.

Skyrunner, that is exactly what I'm suggesting.. is there a way to do it in the game already that I've missed? If so, it'd make roving much easier.

Edited March 23, 2014 by ObsessedWithKSP

[Kasuha]

My rovers leave the ground rather frequently and they count as in orbit when not touching the ground. So I don't like the idea of any automatic switching.

It could be there as an option to switch manually, though.

[BudgetHedgehog]

My rovers leave the ground rather frequently and they count as in orbit when not touching the ground. So I don't like the idea of any automatic switching.

It could be there as an option to switch manually, though.

As I mentioned in the OP, maybe once a vessel is landed and has wheels/is classified as a rover, then it stays as such (i.e. no automatic switching) until the user manually switches.

[Anton P. Nym]

I don't support this; the problems I have with KSP come from inconsistencies between modes, and I really don't want to add new ones. If you really want a ballpark figure in km/h to get a feel for how fast a rover is going, triple the displayed m/s speed. (For an exact figure, multiply by 3.6: 60s/min * 60min/h / 1000m/km)

-- Steve

[Kasuha]

As I mentioned in the OP, maybe once a vessel is landed and has wheels/is classified as a rover, then it stays as such (i.e. no automatic switching) until the user manually switches.

Well there are also spaceplanes, planes, planes using rover wheels, VTOLs using rover wheels, and all kinds of other hybrids. I am not fan of the game automatically switching the displayed mode to something else and then requiring me to manually switch it back. As I wrote before, I wouldn't mind if there was a manual switch to change the display to km/h mode and back. I would probably mind if it was miles per hour because it does not fit with general units of measure used within the game (yes there are some strange ones but even these are metric or close to them, not imperial).

Edited March 23, 2014 by Kasuha

[BudgetHedgehog]

Hmm.. That brings to mind other suggestions I've read where people have expressed need for more vessel types, including planes.

If that's what the majority of people want (manual switching to kph) then I'm more than happy with that. I only suggested mph because I'm more used to it, but I'm fine with kph as well. The idea is to use something other than m/s for ground movement.

[Sirrobert]

Yes, when you think about it and track a distance of 20m in front of you with your eyes, it is pretty fast. My point is that it's not really useful for ground movement, which is measured (probably) all over the world in mph or kph. I say probably because there may be somewhere that doesn't, but for all intents and purposes, m/s is not a widely used unit of velocity on the ground (especially when driving a vehicle) at all. When I glance at my cars speedo, I see 50 - that's the important bit. When I glance at the speedo in KSP, I shouldn't have to sit and think about it and say 'huh, that is actually pretty fast' because in those situations, I wanted to know the speed at a glance in order to avoid the big cliff I'm now tumbling off.

Skyrunner, that is exactly what I'm suggesting.. is there a way to do it in the game already that I've missed? If so, it'd make roving much easier.

The world uses Km/h because we drive kilometers at a time.

A rover does not drive multiple kilometers in 1 trip. Unless you are masochistic and want to circumnavigate the planet

[BudgetHedgehog]

The world uses Km/h because we drive kilometers at a time.

A rover does not drive multiple kilometers in 1 trip.

I don't see the relationship between distance driven and appropriate units. In game, spacecraft travel between planets, but use m/s to measure it. In game, rovers travel (depending on your patience) up to a couple of kilometres but also use m/s. One of these is not appropriate. Considering I drive cars more often than I fly spaceships, when I'm operating a machine with wheels at each corner and that moves forward and backward, I'm more used to working in mph or kph than m/s, which to my mind is 'what a thing capable of fast movement like a spaceship uses'.

Unless you mean like 'that base is 600m away so at 10 m/s (ignoring accelerating), it'll take me a minute to reach' which to my mind is unnecessary. I find that easier when I know how fast I'm going in a recognisable format, one that I, and I'm sure you, have grown up with.

[Skyrunner27]

I was suggesting an on the fly option so if someone might want to see it in space or flying.

[Dunbaratu]

The notion that speed is easier to intuit in units "per hour" than "per second" is pure cultural baggage. It's that way only because vehicles were slower in the olden days, and speed varied by terrain, so to get any accuracy you had to sample the distance traveled over a long period of time and average it out. Today that's not true anymore and the only reason we stick with "per hour" measurements is historical cultural inertia, not because it would naturally be easier to intuit for a person with a blank slate of a mind and no cultural contamination in his thinking.

Meters per second is perfectly intuitive. It only doesn't feel that way because we have already spent the effort it takes to learn how to feel speed in units per hour.

If the attitude that a practice should be continued long after it doesn't make sense anymore just because it's "intuitive" (when what they really mean is not naturally intuitive, but rather that the effort to learn it has already occurred in the past), then today we'd all be steering our cars using reins rather than a steering wheel.

[Red Iron Crown]

While we're changing units, how about having fuel/oxidizer and monopropellant in Kg instead of 5Kg and 4Kg units?

[Kasuha]

The notion that speed is easier to intuit in units "per hour" than "per second" is pure cultural baggage. It's that way only because vehicles were slower in the olden days, and speed varied by terrain, so to get any accuracy you had to sample the distance traveled over a long period of time and average it out. Today that's not true anymore and the only reason we stick with "per hour" measurements is historical cultural inertia, not because it would naturally be easier to intuit for a person with a blank slate of a mind and no cultural contamination in his thinking.

Even today, measuring speed in km/h for cars is convenient. If you know your target is 300 km away and you will go, say, 100 km/h, it's easy to estimate it will take you about 3 hours. Meter is just too short distance to be useful for car travels, and second is too short time interval for usual travels.

With that said, I don't think KSP players are spending enough time driving rovers for such units to be really useful for them. Usual rover rides do not range in hours, rather minutes. So technically, speed in meters per minute would be more useful for average player than m/s or km/h.

And I can repeat that I have no problems with such alternate units being added to the game as long as it does not throw them at me against my will.

[BudgetHedgehog]

Well, maybe when they add in a use for rovers (such as biomes on high-gravity worlds and/or boost transmission rates for tiny sensors like Science Revisited does), they can add in a different way of measuring speed for them. Maybe automatically forcing players to use it would be a bad idea, I'd be perfectly happy if I had the choice though.

[Dunbaratu]

Even today, measuring speed in km/h for cars is convenient. If you know your target is 300 km away and you will go, say, 100 km/h, it's easy to estimate it will take you about 3 hours. Meter is just too short distance to be useful for car travels, and second is too short time interval for usual travels.

Depends on your goal - estimate the time it takes to finish a long journey or get an intuitive feel for how fast you're moving past obstacles *at the moment*. For deciding "am I going fast enough to make that jump?" or "will I bounce too much on this lumpy surface?" or "how tightly can I turn the steering without flipping?" meters per second makes a lot more sense because those are all small scale scenarios where what matters is how fast you cover the local ground a few seconds, not how far you'd get in an hour of straight constant travel. If you travel very fast for a minute, and then rest and don't move for 59 more minutes, you have a very slow "per hour" rate of speed when you average it all out. For this type of driving, it's what you were doing during that minute that mattered.

Whenever people do engineering calculations on things like how tight a road can be curved, how much stopping distance it takes if it's raining, and the like, they end up having to convert from miles or kilometers per hour down into a more useful per-second scale before they can usefully use the information, and then convert the answer back up into a 'per hour' measure for the communicating to the general public. I'd find it much simpler to just have an educated public so that conversion is unnecessary.

Edited March 24, 2014 by Steven Mading

[Zzabur]

The notion that speed is easier to intuit in units "per hour" than "per second" is pure cultural baggage. It's that way only because vehicles were slower in the olden days, and speed varied by terrain, so to get any accuracy you had to sample the distance traveled over a long period of time and average it out. Today that's not true anymore and the only reason we stick with "per hour" measurements is historical cultural inertia, not because it would naturally be easier to intuit for a person with a blank slate of a mind and no cultural contamination in his thinking.

Meters per second is perfectly intuitive. It only doesn't feel that way because we have already spent the effort it takes to learn how to feel speed in units per hour.

If the attitude that a practice should be continued long after it doesn't make sense anymore just because it's "intuitive" (when what they really mean is not naturally intuitive, but rather that the effort to learn it has already occurred in the past), then today we'd all be steering our cars using reins rather than a steering wheel.

Whenever people do engineering calculations on things like how tight a road can be curved, how much stopping distance it takes if it's raining, and the like, they end up having to convert from miles or kilometers per hour down into a more useful per-second scale before they can usefully use the information, and then convert the answer back up into a 'per hour' measure for the communicating to the general public. I'd find it much simpler to just have an educated public so that conversion is unnecessary.

I wouldn't have said that better (perhaps because english is not my native language ^^), m.s^-1 is the international unit for speed measurements, every other units come from this one. In my country, cars give speed in km/h, but i know in USA it's mph, so which one to choose? Moreover, most aircrafts give speed in m.s^-1, space is m.s^-1, percent of c or eV/m (i think the last one is not international system, but used for particle speed). Speed of boats is given in knots(? not sure about the word ), another unit.

So why stick on cars? It's not Kerbal Race Program, but space. If you ask an aeronautic engineer to change speed units on-the-fly, i guess he will reply that you will get a lot of errors, because it's more difficult to think in different units quickly. The main error you'll get is believing you're slow at 20km/h, but the ship is falling 20 m/s, when a device gives you this kind of information, you need to know exactly what it means, despite the units, or you will forget to look units. I am not involved in aeronautics, but in anaesthesia, our protocoles are stolen from aeronautic, because they know how to lower human errors rate. You can change units, but you never do it. EtCO2 is given in standard mmHg, but you can use cmH2O or even % of total gas. You have to know how to convert exactly, but you only use one unit, and everyone use the same so you won't make a mistake if you need to take control over someone else working with you.

And seeing how much car crashes vs plane crashes, sorry, but i believe more aeronautics engineers than anyone who got a driving license....

[Kasuha]

...or get an intuitive feel for how fast you're moving past obstacles *at the moment*. For deciding "am I going fast enough to make that jump?" or "will I bounce too much on this lumpy surface?" or "how tightly can I turn the steering without flipping?" meters per second makes a lot more sense because those are all small scale scenarios

I'm not a racer or a stunt driver but when driving, I am not measuring things or converting any units. My experience tells me whether I will get through the next turn at my current speed - the perceived speed, not any numeric expression of it - or if I need to slow down. I don't think normal people driving daily to or from work ever need to convert their speed to meters per second.

Racers and stunt drivers work differently, they have lots of time to measure and calculate everything in advance and most importantly convert all units to whatever suits their needs.

If your comment is about rovers, then notice that I am not suggesting the m/s unit should be removed. The point of my post was that if a new additional speed unit for rovers should be introduced, it should be meters per minute.

Edited March 24, 2014 by Kasuha

[Hodo]

How does 20m/s not seem fast?

You are moving 20 meters. Every second

It doesn't, until you think about it.

When I played football and was in peak shape in school I ran my 40yd dash in 4.65s. So I was covering 10m every 1.2s roughly. ((thats if my conversion from yards to meters is right, and it probably isn't.))

[lttito]

I'm doing a little plugin to show your current speed in different units. As soon as I integrate it with Toolbar, i think I'll release it.

[BudgetHedgehog]

Awesome, would love something like that.

[goldenpeach]

Me too!

Also, to stay on the topic:

what would be cool is to have something aimilar to the point of view: you can either choose to let the game select the unit for view or "tell" the game to stick to a particular unit.

[Terran]

It doesn't, until you think about it.

When I played football and was in peak shape in school I ran my 40yd dash in 4.65s. So I was covering 10m every 1.2s roughly. ((thats if my conversion from yards to meters is right, and it probably isn't.))

Close. 7.87 m/s, based on the conversion rates I found via googlefu and some quick calculation. 1 meter = 1.09 yards, rounded off.

In kph, that's 28.3, which translates to an mph speed of 17.6.

[lttito]

Sorry for the spam, but I managed to make the plugin.

You can grab it from here