KSP Calculation Tools section on the wiki

[MechaLynx]

I've made a page on the wiki that lists all the calculation tools for KSP that I could find (might be missing some recent submissions - (authors, feel free to add them or edit the entries for your tools if there's wrong information - i mean, it's a ****ing wiki lol ). It's also linked on the main wiki page.

There's editing guidelines on the talk page for anyone interesting in editing the page. As a general rule of thumb, include only tools that help perform calculations (that can include calculations on what parts to use and fairing calculators etc.) but not utilities for savegame editing, .craft editors and stuff like that, as they aren't really "calculation" tools (although you might notice I probably haven't followed my own rules completely - it's a wiki anyway, it'll come down to community consensus eventually).

I hope it's actually useful (has been useful to me so far, especially the science calculators ) and have fun

[philotical]

Wow, that's both, a comprehensive list and some descent wiki formatting :-)

Thank's..

[Arrowstar]

Mecha, would you be able to update the KSP TOT entry on the page you've put together to reflect the new release? Excellent work, by the way!

[MechaLynx]

I've updated the KSP TOT entry, however, it's a wiki so, if you want the information on your tool to be up to date, you can simply do it yourself instead of waiting for me I don't mind doing it so much, but I made it on the wiki, rather than the forum (like the community addon list) because this way noone has to depend on anyone else to have their information up to date (and definitely not depend on me - i'm quite fickle with games, I spend a bunch of time on one, then abandon it for months or years )

I'll eventually do another forum sweep to update releases and all that, but it'll have to be in the future rather than now since I don't have enough time. When I finalized it I had done a full forum sweep (details in the talk page) so information on the wiki page (excluding KSP TOT as of now) was updated last on that day (17 Apr), so obviously anything that has changed since isn't included (nor are new tools after that date). If I do another forum sweep I'll add the date in the talk page or somewhere on the page itself to indicate when the latest forum sweep was done. In fact I've just added a section on the talk page for just this reason, so if anyone does such a sweep, please update that section as well (it'll be obvious how).

By the way, these external tools and calculators, unlike addons, don't really get the attention they deserve I feel (which is part of why I made the page) and judging from the little attention this part of the forum gets, including this thread, I fear that by the time people are aware that such a "registry" of sorts exists, it will have already fallen into disrepair and will be so out of date it will be useless. A wiki without people using it and editing it is a dead wiki and it's also a shame that people now have to dig through the forums or search google to find all this stuff. Thus, I'd ask players that use these tools and authors that develop them, to spread the word a bit wider so that at least people know that it's there. In the interest ofcourse of not replacing this forum section, I've added a link at the top of the page that points to this Tools subsection of the forum, to maintain it as the bleeding edge source of tools and updates.

Edited May 5, 2014 by MechaLynx

[Arrowstar]

Cool, thanks. Btw, any reason KSP TOT is listed under Deprecated Applications? . I guess I'll register and fix that...

[MechaLynx]

Cool, thanks. Btw, any reason KSP TOT is listed under Deprecated Applications? . I guess I'll register and fix that...

It isn't listed under deprecated lol, check the table.

edit - if you go by the table of contents it looks like everything is under deprecated, but the link points to the subsection of deprecated tools, which is a collapsed table, not the main table. this is because offline tools haven't been split into categories unlike the online ones. This is a side-effect of having less offline tools, so when I made the first entries I didn't add categories there so that we wouldn't have a section split into 3-4 tables with 1-2 entries each - categories are only needed for clarity anyway. I did think of splitting the offline tools into subsections eventually, but I didn't get around to it then and the only reason to do it really would be so that it doesn't look from the toc like there's only deprecated offline tools - but as it is clearly unlikely someone will just jump to that conclusion without even taking a look and casual inspection proves otherwise (not to mention that it would take some planning to decide how to split them up - it isn't as clear as with the online tools), so I left it as it was. I would be surprised if someone only clicked on "Deprecated" instead of "Offline Tools" if offline tools is what they're looking for. I'd advise against creating subsections for the offline tools as there aren't that many, but if you want to do the work go ahead. I really don't think it's a problem however.

Edited May 6, 2014 by MechaLynx
clarification

[Arrowstar]

Got it. Yep, that was my issue. Such is my reward for looking at the tables on a phone lol.

[MechaLynx]

Oh man I was actually quite worried that would happen with my ginormous tables sorry about that, I just don't have a better solution given the amount of information I consider necessary to make the tables work.

I just tested the page on my tablet (7 inch, 1280x600) and it looks ok in landscape, even the tables are readable (lol) - in portrait it sucks monkey**** however. My first attempt to navigate to the offline section landed me at the deprecated table lol xD

[Arrowstar]

Hey no worries! Thanks for the great page.