Acceleration Overhaul

[Duxwing]

Kerbanauts should experience accelerations' effects to increase player immersion and create interesting challenges.

1. Circulatory Effects - Acceleration should affect Kerbals' circulation. Upward acceleration should drain blood from their heads, causing an inward-creeping blackness on crewed vessels lacking probe cores. Downward acceleration should pool blood in their heads, causing an inward-creeping redness on crewed vessels lacking probe cores. Sufficient upward or downward acceleration should render them unconscious until relieved; sustaining acceleration beyond some further bound should kill them.
   
2. Camera Effects - The external camera should not track the CoM but where the CoM has been as a function of acceleration, asymptotally approaching the CoM. The internal camera should slightly translate with acceleration, reflecting the Kerbals' movement. Blur moving objects.
   
3. Kerbal Reactions - Kerbals' heads like crude accelerometers should point from the direction of acceleration, Kerbanauts should grunt and breathe through gritted teeth with effort when resisting g-lock, and a loud heartbeat should pound during negative-g maneuvers. These details would greatly increase immersion when viewing Kerbals' cameras and seeing them in IVA.
   
4. Part Reactions - Lesser sounds of acceleration and jerk should precede those indicating impending doom. Parts bearing great loads should shake, shudder, grind, and groan. A g-overload warning should whoop and wail.
   

-Duxwing

[MKI]

80

I would agree on making acceleration affect kerbals more a priority for the stock game. Since they are basically invincible to what goes on around them once they are back in the seat. Manned missions should have the disadvantage of having (ker)MEN on them lol.

Certain things like part reactions, camera effects and overall real time physics tracking screams more lag. Motion blur and general immersion is pretty interesting but ksp was never a very immersive or pretty game. The affect of directional G effects (kerbals can't take movement one way as well as another) would actually limit some awesome and interesting ship designs. Where Kerbals aren't exactly facing the correct way and would succumb to G effects faster than if they were facing the "right" way.

[Kegereneku]

There's interesting ideas here...

Camera vibration and various effect on the player's interface based on the acceleration and some criteria.

For example :

With an acceleration of 5G, the interface would shake or not depending of what part is controlling the ship (probes don't suffer of acceleration but Kerbal do)

Later you could mix that with "upgrade" for Kerbal that reduce the acceleration effect on various capsule. (this way I expect amusing tales of Old-as-hell spaceship still in service late in the game)

[Javster]

Like in the video for 0.21?

[allmappedout]

When I saw the title of this thread, I was going to make a joke about how you might want to check with Isaac Newton first...

[Hyomoto]

I like some of these ideas, namely the part stresses and I certainly wouldn't be upset to see the Kerbals respond visually to additional input. There has been other discussions about affecting player control, so appreciate you didn't go there, but I think camera effects should be relegated to IVA if done at all, since witnessing your craft from the third-person would be a bit silly. Not to mention what about multiple Kerbals?

[Capt Snuggler]

Would love to see this (and have suggested it before) specifically like the Kerbals blacking/redding out. ie G-LOC

it wouldn't effect creativity or wacky designs. it just means you MAY need to send soft fragile Kerbals up in a crew transfer vehicle. something low G. SSTO space planes are perfect and therefor would become much more relevant.

I'm in!

[BudgetHedgehog]

Hmm, not really convinced by this. If I wanted Kerbals to suffer high G effects, I'd download Deadly Re-Rentry (and in fact, will, come 0.24). As much as I like killing the guys, I don't want to watch and hear them "grunt and breathe through gritted teeth with effort when resisting g-lock", to me personally, that's a bit creepy. The motion blur and other effects I think would push an already stressed system to un-usability. The part reactions to me sounds a bit useless - if it's going to break, it'll break. If it's not going to break, it won't. If it creaks and groans and everything but doesn't break, what does that achieve? I'm still in orbit/landing/whatever with nothing broken and that's exactly what happens if I don't have any audible effects.

I do like the camera shake though, but it would have to be IVA only. I will admit to thinking 'is that it? Am I going up?' when I launch from IVA and I can't see out and the only info I get is from my RPM screens.

[r4pt0r]

do kerbals have blood? or just green dust spores in them?

[Nuke]

i actually like this idea. especially #4. i want to see what areas of the design i need to improve to maintain structural integrity.

[ialdabaoth]

Most of this is included in Deadly Reentry, incidentally.

[Scoundrel]

Personally I don't think G-LOC (not g-lock... that's a firearms manufacturer with a speech impediment ) is worth modelling since its effects can be mitigated by adding a probe core to a ship design. Despite the fact that I'm sort of indifferent to the other suggestions, one thing I would like to see is something like this:

Now THAT is something I could get behind.