Change speed measurement when landed on surface

[Stargate525]

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.

...You do realize that to have a speed in kph, you don't actually have to travel a kilometer, or an hour, right? Averaging has nothing to do with it.

The other guy is right; for normal driving conditions, you measure kilometers/miles and hours of travel. There could be an argument for minutes, but then you're probably going to be dealing in fractions and decimals, which is a pain. When you're planning a journey, do you really need the distance in meters, and then find out how many thousands of seconds it'll take you, then divide out the sixties to get to a useful measurement? As far as engineers... Yes, I'd rather they do the conversion than me, on the fly, at the wheel. m/s would only make sense if you're sampling manually, which is unnecessary if you're driving a legal car (I don't know of any country that doesn't mandate a working spedometer), and even then you're guessing the distance.

[Dunbaratu]

...You do realize that to have a speed in kph, you don't actually have to travel a kilometer, or an hour, right? Averaging has nothing to do with it.

The other guy is right; for normal driving conditions, you measure kilometers/miles and hours of travel. There could be an argument for minutes, but then you're probably going to be dealing in fractions and decimals, which is a pain. When you're planning a journey, do you really need the distance in meters, and then find out how many thousands of seconds it'll take you, then divide out the sixties to get to a useful measurement? As far as engineers... Yes, I'd rather they do the conversion than me, on the fly, at the wheel. m/s would only make sense if you're sampling manually, which is unnecessary if you're driving a legal car (I don't know of any country that doesn't mandate a working spedometer), and even then you're guessing the distance.

Your whole post was predicated upon the idea that "hours" is normal and everything else has to have the effort to convert into it. That makes the argument circular. I was speaking from the idea of what would work better if starting from a clean cultural slate without the contamination of past conventions.

For most of the things a rover driver is doing, what matters is what occurs over the next few seconds - how the speed looks *at the moment*, and how the terrain is passing by under your wheels *at the moment*. Using units in which that time span has to be expressed as a small fraction like 1/3600 isn't sensible *except* for the cultural baggage that has trained people to already think of that as normal.

[John FX]

There are ways of measuring speed that just make sense in my brain when I read them.

M/s is not one of them. Mph is, Kph is. Kps even is.

Not M/s. I can work with it and get the right speed but it is not intuitive.

On the ground for example I think in Mph.

Airspeed I think of in mph up to 1000 mph or so when I start thinking of it in Mach numbers. In space I think in terms of Km/s. Some things are moving at fractions of lightspeed but they aren`t relevent.

1000 miles per hour =447.04m/s

So when your rover is doing 20m/s it`s doing 44.7 mph. Without 3D vision or landmarks it`s really hard to judge speed.

45mph sounds a lot faster than 20m/s. I`d be much more careful at 45mph than at 20m/s...

Maybe that`s why I roll all my rovers?

I agree with the OP and there should be an option for showing speed in whatever units you want.

EDIT : It`s not possible to start from a clean cultural state unless you have the plane to wipe the slate clean of the culture which is not something I see happening for the benefit of the readout in KSP.

Edited April 12, 2014 by John FX

[John FX]

doublepost

[Stargate525]

Your whole post was predicated upon the idea that "hours" is normal and everything else has to have the effort to convert into it. That makes the argument circular. I was speaking from the idea of what would work better if starting from a clean cultural slate without the contamination of past conventions.

For most of the things a rover driver is doing, what matters is what occurs over the next few seconds - how the speed looks *at the moment*, and how the terrain is passing by under your wheels *at the moment*. Using units in which that time span has to be expressed as a small fraction like 1/3600 isn't sensible *except* for the cultural baggage that has trained people to already think of that as normal.

Yes, my post is predicated on the reality of the cultural slate. The argument is that the assumption is kph or mph. Your response is 'that's an illogical construct.' Fine. It is. But it still exists. Ignoring it won't make it go away, and not adopting to it in this instance will do nothing towards that end either.

[Dunbaratu]

Yes, my post is predicated on the reality of the cultural slate. The argument is that the assumption is kph or mph. Your response is 'that's an illogical construct.' Fine. It is. But it still exists. Ignoring it won't make it go away, and not adopting to it in this instance will do nothing towards that end either.

Had people been merely claiming that it's a good idea to have it because its what everyone is used to, I'd have agreed. But they claimed it was more intuitive, and that's false. It's not more intuitive - it's just that the effort to learn the non-intuitive system has already occurred in the past for most people. It's more akin to things like the meaning of traffic light colors, or thinking of traffic as always driving on the right (or left in some countries). These are not intuitive. They are learned. Just like kph or mph are learned. They are just conventions, NOT intuited things, but the effort to twist one's brain into thinking of them as normal has already happened, thus fooling people into thinking of them as intuitive.

[Stargate525]

Had people been merely claiming that it's a good idea to have it because its what everyone is used to, I'd have agreed. But they claimed it was more intuitive, and that's false. It's not more intuitive - it's just that the effort to learn the non-intuitive system has already occurred in the past for most people. It's more akin to things like the meaning of traffic light colors, or thinking of traffic as always driving on the right (or left in some countries). These are not intuitive. They are learned. Just like kph or mph are learned. They are just conventions, NOT intuited things, but the effort to twist one's brain into thinking of them as normal has already happened, thus fooling people into thinking of them as intuitive.

Things are not universally intuitive. For the vast majority of people 'used to' is pretty much synonymous with intuitive in general parlance. Both systems are arbitrary, and both require training.

And you can't honestly tell me that you're arguing against a feature implementation because some of the proponents misused a word, can you?

[John FX]

Things are not universally intuitive. For the vast majority of people 'used to' is pretty much synonymous with intuitive in general parlance. Both systems are arbitrary, and both require training.

And you can't honestly tell me that you're arguing against a feature implementation because some of the proponents misused a word, can you?

You know, I think he is...

[Dunbaratu]

Things are not universally intuitive. For the vast majority of people 'used to' is pretty much synonymous with intuitive in general parlance. Both systems are arbitrary, and both require training.

And you can't honestly tell me that you're arguing against a feature implementation because some of the proponents misused a word, can you?

Of course I'm not. I'm arguing against it because I find the way it works now to be more useful and it's a request to take that away and to CHANGE it to something less useful. All the talk about pretending it would be more intuitive to use the less useful time measurements on a per-hour basis rather than the useful per-second measure is tied to the proposal that the current method be changed. If nobody was trying to use that argument as a reason to destroy something I like about the game, then it wouldn't matter that they're misusing the word "intuitive". The misuse of that word is being done in service of an argument to get rid of a feature I want to see kept - the consistent speed measurement that stays with the proper MKS system regardless of whether you're landed or not.

Note the suggestion isn't to let you pick the method of showing the speed and just stick with what you picked. It's to CHANGE the speed measurement when on the ground - introducing an unnecessary difference between measurements used on the ground versus measurements used by vessels in flight. When a rover goes over a jump should it change to m/s while in air for a few seconds then shift back the km/h when it comes back down?

I'm not arguing against adding a feature to placate the people who can't think in m/s. I'm arguing against those who would try to REMOVE a feature for those of us who do think in m/s.

Edited April 16, 2014 by Steven Mading

[John FX]

Of course I'm not. I'm arguing against it because I find the way it works now to be more useful and it's a request to take that away and to CHANGE it to something less useful. All the talk about pretending it would be more intuitive to use the less useful time measurements on a per-hour basis rather than the useful per-second measure is tied to the proposal that the current method be changed. If nobody was trying to use that argument as a reason to destroy something I like about the game, then it wouldn't matter that they're misusing the word "intuitive". The misuse of that word is being done in service of an argument to get rid of a feature I want to see kept - the consistent speed measurement that stays with the proper MKS system regardless of whether you're landed or not.

Note the suggestion isn't to let you pick the method of showing the speed and just stick with what you picked. It's to CHANGE the speed measurement when on the ground - introducing an unnecessary difference between measurements used on the ground versus measurements used by vessels in flight. When a rover goes over a jump should it change to m/s while in air for a few seconds then shift back the km/h when it comes back down?

I'm not arguing against adding a feature to placate the people who can't think in m/s. I'm arguing against those who would try to REMOVE a feature for those of us who do think in m/s.

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.

No, you were arguing that society has manufactured `intuitive` and that we should reject our cultural baggage and nothing to do with the current way being useful.

Are you trolling the forum?

You admitted m/s does not feel intuitive which is the point the OP was trying to make.

I'm not arguing against adding a feature to placate the people who can't think in m/s. I'm arguing against those who would try to REMOVE a feature for those of us who do think in m/s.

Who suggested that? Most people are saying to have the units swap between m/s and kph automatically unless the user decides on a unit of measurement at which point the units are fixed until the switch is turned off.

Why would that be bad and how COULD it affect your gameplay?

Edited April 16, 2014 by John FX

[Dunbaratu]

Are you trolling the forum?

Of course not. Knock it off.

You admitted m/s does not feel intuitive

Nothing you quoted amounts to me saying that. Knock it off.

Most people are saying to have the units swap between m/s and kph automatically unless the user decides on a unit of measurement at which point the units are fixed until the switch is turned off.

This is not the suggestion given in the post. This was a correction to the suggestion to stop it from being a bad idea. And the realization of the need for that adjustment was why the argument we're having matters. As long as people are acting like that's no big deal, there remains the danger that the original suggestion gets implemented, which did not have the fix to stop the bad idea. that does affect my gameplay. The fix of allowing a user to, essentially, opt out of this, is not a minor extra suggestion as far as I'm concerned. It's 100% essential to preventing this from being a bad idea. Until the main suggestion gets edited to fix this bad idea, it's important to diffuse this bogus claim that flipping between m/s and km/h depending on whether or not you're landed is some how intuitive.

I'm reminded of how "target mode" works, where the game insists on flipping the navball mode from orbit to target when you get what *it* thinks is near enough that you want to use it that way, even if you're not planning on using it that way. And I have to continually remind myself to correct it's "helpful" behavior so I don't end up burning at the wrong "prograde" marker that it flipped on me. It would be more helpful for it to have never implemented that behavior in the first place and just let me pick it manually all the time.

There is only one way this idea would be remotely okay - and that's to drop all this talk of it automatically flipping modes based on being landed or not. Even for those of you who want to drive with per-hour units, as I've already alluded to, the game's idea of "landed" is such that if you hit a bump and go airborne for a moment then you're not "landed" for a second or two. It would be annoying for the measurement method to keep changing from one moment to the next as you drive across bumpy terrain.

What's wrong with just dropping the "auto" switching entirely? Why can't you deal with manual flipping the mode only? That's a much better suggestion than anything that's already been mentioned about having to flip a setting in order to get it to stop doing an annoying automated thing. Why not just NOT automate it at all? If you want kp/h, then put it in that mode and it stays there. If you want m/s, then put it in that mode and it stays there. If you want different modes depending on context, then just flip it yourself.

Edited April 17, 2014 by Steven Mading

[Stargate525]

This is not the suggestion given in the post. This was a correction to the suggestion to stop it from being a bad idea. And the realization of the need for that adjustment was why the argument we're having matters. As long as people are acting like that's no big deal, there remains the danger that the original suggestion gets implemented, which did not have the fix to stop the bad idea. that does affect my gameplay. The fix of allowing a user to, essentially, opt out of this, is not a minor extra suggestion as far as I'm concerned. It's 100% essential to preventing this from being a bad idea. Until the main suggestion gets edited to fix this bad idea, it's important to diffuse this bogus claim that flipping between m/s and km/h depending on whether or not you're landed is some how intuitive.

Re-read the first post. It specifies a manual switch back to m/s, and specifies a solution to the Dukes of Hazzard Conundrum. I still fail to see how adding an additional mode onto the navball is as horror-inducing as you claim.

Meters per second is perfectly intuitive. It only doesn't feel that way because...

This is your words. If it doesn't feel intuitive because of something, then IT DOESN'T FEEL INTUITIVE. Your hair splitting on this is as asinine as saying 'What he said wasn't offensive, you only felt offended because...' You are twisting the word to try and evade its own definition.

[TMS]

Converting units of speed based on situation is a bad idea. End of.

It's the kind of obnoxious, counter-intuitive challenge that could be introduced into the educational version.

I'm still waiting for the electricity consumption tooltips to be standardised to a single denominator, never mind having completely different scales.

[Scoundrel]

Erm, if I may interject, wouldn't the solution be to add a function in the user preferences that would allow the player the opportunity to select their preference for kmph vs m/s vs mph?

As I see it, arguing about conditioning vs. intuition - while an interesting topic in and of itself - isn't really relevant to the OP, as the OP indicates a cognitive difficulty in operating in particular units due to conditioning, and thus said argument offers nothing constructive since the support or opposition in and of itself is based on user preference. Since preference is bias, it will tend to naturally lead to entrenchment of position when that bias is called into question... hence the odd argument about conditioning vs. intuition which has cropped up to provide the rationale for said bias.

Therefore the solution would be to accommodate as broad a user base as practically possible, would it not? Can anyone demonstrate how a section in the the settings menu dedicated to units of measurement that the user can configure to suit their preferences would negatively affect gameplay? Or the option to set a preference that allows a player switch between units of measurement while on the surface or in any other situation?

I personally can't... but then again I'm not the brightest lightbulb in the knife drawer.

[UberFuber]

Re-read the first post. It specifies a manual switch back to m/s, and specifies a solution to the Dukes of Hazzard Conundrum. I still fail to see how adding an additional mode onto the navball is as horror-inducing as you claim.

I would argue that m/s be the default, with a manual switch to alternative units.

[Dunbaratu]

Re-read the first post. It specifies a manual switch back to m/s

As opposed to the sane idea of it not needing to switch "back" because it never auto-switched in the first place and instead just stuck with whatever you picked.

You are twisting the word to try and evade its own definition.

You are perfectly aware that this is incorrect. Stop trolling.

[Dunbaratu]

I would argue that m/s be the default, with a manual switch to alternative units.

And so would I. Any talk of having to mess about to outsmart the games automatic behavior is a bad design. It shouldn't be automatically altering the setting at all, period. What makes this a bad suggestion is that. If all talk of ANY automated switching was dropped, then and only then would the user interface for the idea have a chance of being intuitive. Auto-switching without being told to is not intuitve. The user does not expect control over a setting to be taken away like that.

[BudgetHedgehog]

And so would I. Any talk of having to mess about to outsmart the games automatic behavior is a bad design. It shouldn't be automatically altering the setting at all, period. What makes this a bad suggestion is that. If all talk of ANY automated switching was dropped, then and only then would the user interface for the idea have a chance of being intuitive. Auto-switching without being told to is not intuitve. The user does not expect control over a setting to be taken away like that.

Would it make you happy if I edited the OP to specifically say 'manual switching'? I honestly don't care if it's automatic or manual or whatever, I just wanted the option to look at something that felt more natural to me while driving a four (or whatever) wheeled vehicle on the ground.

[Dunbaratu]

Can anyone demonstrate how a section in the the settings menu dedicated to units of measurement that the user can configure to suit their preferences would negatively affect gameplay? Or the option to set a preference that allows a player switch between units of measurement while on the surface or in any other situation?

That is a good suggestion but is NOT the suggestion this thread gave because the suggestion in the thread is to automate it by default and make people have to override that behavior manually to get it to flip back to the correct units.

If people drop the idiotic notion that the units should flip automatically, and instead just let the player pick and the game sticks with what the player picks until the player chooses to change it, then it wouldn't matter to me if this is implemented or not.

[Dunbaratu]

Would it make you happy if I edited the OP to specifically say 'manual switching'? I honestly don't care if it's automatic or manual or whatever, I just wanted the option to look at something that felt more natural to me while driving a four (or whatever) wheeled vehicle on the ground.

Drop all talk of doing it automatically based on being landed or not and I drop all objection. Manually switching the mode shouldn't be an afterthought or a band-aid add-on. It should be the primary method of picking the mode - the game does exactly what the player TOLD it to. Automation is what makes it matter to me because that's what makes other people's preferences affect my gameplay.

[BudgetHedgehog]

It's like one mouse click when you land with a rover to bring you back to m/s.. I get that it could irritate you quite a bit (and clearly has), but it can't affect your gameplay THAT much, can it? Either way, you can consider my suggestion withdrawn fully, as there is now a mod for exactly what I want (speed changing) and you want (it's not automatic).

[Red Iron Crown]

And so would I. Any talk of having to mess about to outsmart the games automatic behavior is a bad design. It shouldn't be automatically altering the setting at all, period. What makes this a bad suggestion is that. If all talk of ANY automated switching was dropped, then and only then would the user interface for the idea have a chance of being intuitive. Auto-switching without being told to is not intuitve. The user does not expect control over a setting to be taken away like that.

Do you think the automatic switching of altimeter units is a good thing or bad?

[John FX]

Now I have had time to think I`ve realised I actually like the idea of automatic switching myself. I would prefer mph on the ground and kps in space over 1000m/s and I don`t want to have to toggle a switch every time it`s needed. To do so would negatively affect my gameplay if the unit changing becomes a feature (extra button to click during landing anyone?). I would find it about as annoying to have to click it every time as it seems others would find the reciprocal arrangement.

This seems very pertinent.

Edited April 20, 2014 by John FX