Realism in KSP - Various Ideas with Pros/ Cons

[I_Killed_Jeb]

In light of the death of the most recent realism thread, I thought I'd start a new one, one in which there will be a thorough and thoughtful categorization of various ideas/demands/requests. I'll put on this post the ideas brought up in this thread as well as salient arguments for and against, as a means to aggregate community opinion.

Aerodynamics

-Pros

-Cons

Universe Scale

-Pros

-Cons

Isp

-Pros

-Cons

Life Support

-Pros

-Cons

Re-entry Danger

-Pros

-Cons

Edited September 8, 2014 by I_Killed_Jeb

[Aethon]

In before the lock.

My grandpa always said ' you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar '.

[Stealth2668]

I'm against total realism, since it will complicate things too much. In order to add depth they should add new mechanics and things to do instead of making what we have more difficult to learn. I'm in full time studies and don't want to have to learn rocket science in order to play on top of my current homework :/

Edited September 9, 2014 by Stealth2668

[turkwinif]

Oh god, you've made a similar thread to the previous "Realism" thread that was locked shortly ago, there's no helping you now.

[Wanderfound]

You get that it was locked for a reason, right?

[I_Killed_Jeb]

the thread got locked because of people derailing it and sniping, not because of the ideas therein.

[Franklin]

I'm in full time studies and don't want to have to learn rocket science in order to play on top of my current homework :/

I'm not looking to bicker on this topic again, but the points above (excluding life support and re-entry danger), when well implemented, would go almost entirely unnoticed by most players. If anything they'd make the game mechanics easier to understand, and perhaps even help the game run smoother.

[Franklin]

But yeah sadly, I see this thread being closed. It doesn't really matter, the powers that be aren't within earshot. We're just bickering amongst ourselves. A pro-realism representative would do better with collecting signatures and petitioning the devs directly, through non-gated channels.

[Rowsdower]

This thread is cool. I'd actually been discussing it with someone else over PM. The older thread will remain locked. Consider this a clean slate. I implore you to keep from taking swipes at one another/staff, arguments and other general hotheaded behavior that caused mods to jump into the old thread at multiple points, leading to its eventual closure. The discussion in the old thread was generally alright and rather even keeled, so let's keep this one along those lines. I'd prefer not to have a repeat of what happened then. Thanks.

[Stealth2668]

I'm not looking to bicker on this topic again, but the points above (excluding life support and re-entry danger), when well implemented, would go almost entirely unnoticed by most players. If anything they'd make the game mechanics easier to understand, and perhaps even help the game run smoother.

Real rocket science doesn't make things easier. Those are the things I'm talking about.

[NathanKell]

1. ibtl (in before the lock), or talking about how this thread will be locked, is *not* a good thing to post. It only riles up tempers, it tempts fate, and it derails the thread. Please don't.

2. As a further request, I ask that everyone observe the terms of the OP and do not strawman either side. Note that "you don't care about physics at all" is no more of a strawman than "total realism is teh suxxorz!". Please don't caricature, please be friendly (and understand that everyone has a different playing style, but also that it might be nice if you try it before you knock it), and please post constructively in this thread. That is all.

Edited September 9, 2014 by NathanKell

[Alshain]

Alright well since Rowsdower gave it his (hopefully not temporary) blessing I'll start off. This is the only subject I feel qualified to mention myself as the others I've not taken interest in.

Aerodynamics

-Pros

Craft fly like you would expect them to, it's intuitive and therefore easier.

-Cons

Despite being easier, it has a larger initial learning curve.

Can't build completely off the wall crazy flying contraptions.

Causes current engines to be more powerful (but can be rebalanced negating this con)

[Aethon]

I say stuff like that to point out how ridiculous it is to reopen a thread that was locked by the management only moments ago. A thread which had many valid points on both sides of the issue and was doomed to obscurity by misdirected passion. My hope in the original post was ^^ this and to tell those who are passionate about an issue that you can win more adherents to your side if you act within the bounds of common human decency.

Thank you very much!

[tater]

How is an atmosphere that behaves in bizarre ways easier to understand, exactly? Not that allowing aerodynamic forces to break apart various craft is unrelated to how the atmosphere is actually modeled. You can have a proper atmosphere, and still have a toggle to allow it to disassemble aircraft when they depart from safe flight or not.

I'd argue that in most cases there are in fact no cons if you take one "con" off the table: "it's different than 0.24." If you disallow "not exactly the same as current" then most realism changes are simply different, not harder.

[m4v]

Aerodynamics

-Pros

Craft fly like you would expect them to, it's intuitive and therefore easier.

Unless you're a pilot or play flight simulators (few do), people wouldn't know what is intuitive about flying or designing a plane, except that "pointy" stuff should go faster. You don't need a realistic aero model for that.

[SkyHook]

My answer to the OP:

Aerodynamics

-Pros- Intuitive behavior, rewarding experience with planes.

-Cons- Whackjobbiness will be...punished lol.

Universe Scale

-Pros- Realism, other than that, none imo.

-Cons- Boredom, and a need to completely rebuild every craft you ever built.

Isp

-Pros- Possibly fun challenge.

-Cons- Relearning rocket engines may be too steep of a learning curve for some.

Life Support

-Pros- Again, a fun challenge that adds utility to Kerbals and increases their worth. Coupling this with ISRU would add more things to do on a body and force you to bring you Kerbals home for pete's sake! It would force a crucial Manned vs. Unmanned/ Risk vs. Reward decision for everything from science gain to ease of exploration (i.e. kerbals can right themselves if they fall over).

-Cons- Simple missions get a little less simple, and mission planning must be done so as not to spend extra time in space.

Re-entry Danger

-Pros- It would make taking care of your payloads more of a concern. Making it back safe from a long interplanetary mission would be even more rewarding!

-Cons- It would make taking care of your payloads more of a concern, and it would limit design options for atmospheric craft/payloads.

[Renegrade]

Isp

-Pros

Less CPU usage.

Fuel/burn time calculations are easier when done by hand.

Better educational value as it's like real engines.

Renegrade doesn't burn the building down.

Torches and pitchforks averted.

Half the plugin mods out there can remove their custom Isp code.

Atmospheric-rated engines like the Aerospike become better in the atmosphere.

-Cons

You need moar boosters. Well, an extra half-booster, maybe.

Existing rockets may need to have small edits done to them (including stock ones).

I'm not too sure if 'moar boosters' can ever be considered a 'con' though. The thrust corrector change isn't as scary as people think.

[paul23]

I'd love to see some extra realism money wise. When one overdesigns missions/contracts you should go bankrupt. Also a "single stage to orbit" return type vehicle should not be a good approach (it's the most simplistic design). This can be done easily by increasing the fuel costs - by say 10 times.

Also having to "hire" and "train" kerbals might be good for career mode: an extra kerman to do missions would cost at least 1M, + 1k daily. The start crew wouldn't be qualified to fly all craft from the start but need to be (costly) trained. This would actually make unmanned probes a good idea for long-time missions until you have a larger roster.

[magnemoe]

Well aerodynamic in stock is pretty bad and counter intuitive an better model who has somewhat realistic drag would be nice. No it don't have to be hyper realistic so biplane to Mun still work but it has to be somewhat streamlined.

Same with reentry heat, everybody know that things burn during reentry, Again it don't need to be to hard, however trying o aerobrake some grinder structure like IIS returning from Jool would not go well, the 6km/s retrograde Laythe aerobrake would require serious shielding.

Main issue with reentry heat is that we would need specialized heatshields. Its not very unrealistic to have an bottom heatshields on a duna or eve shuttle with an door over engine during arobrake like the space shuttle landing wheels, without this sort of parts reentry would not be an good idea, perhaps building shielding with structural panels like we build wings.

Scale, I don't really see the issue here, the small planets where you can see the mountain silhouettes from orbit match the cartoon style.

Isp is pretty realistic, weights and TWR is not, again I don't really see the problem, see previous point, same with 0.1-100% throttle this can be solved with better modeling so we can add extra engines who is used for low trust, this is not uncommon on boats

Life support, I use it however it might be hard for new players who don't understand that duna is year away. Can easily being explained with kerbals go into hibernation and their life support demand drop to 1% of default during long trips. Might have some requirements about living standards so you cant send them to Eeloo in a lawn chair or even a MK1 pod,

This however could be solved more humorist with an complain from the union and a fine.

[NovaSilisko]

Ah hell I'll throw my thoughts in here:

Aerodynamics

Definitely yes... having realistic aerodynamic function, in my opinion at least, makes building and flying aircraft vastly more intuitive, simply because they function like you would expect a plane to. No inexplicable flat spins, or backflips, or self-propelled hypersonic winglets. A requirement of fairings for rockets brings about a unique sort of finesse when constructing payloads, to squeeze in every last tidbit you can onto the vehicle in the available space. Requires a bit of a reset of the learning curve for how to fly into orbit efficiently. Old techniques will still work (kinda?) but it may be jarring for some players, though those who already fly tidy gravity turns will find it actually a bit easier to get into orbit.

Universe scale

I am neutral on this point. I think KSP's scale has a certain appeal to it, but also enjoy the extra challenge of full-scale celestial mechanics. I think it works best in its current form really - as a mod. It's too integral to the basic function of the game to be as simple as a difficulty option on creating a new game.

Realistic specific impulse functionality

Thrust shifting with atmospheric pressure as opposed to fuel flow is how real rocket engines function, and I think that having KSP operate in that same way is a good idea just on the principle of helping more people understand how the real thing works. On a related note, expansion of exhaust in vacuum is one of the prettier things in rocketry, and something that sadly goes unshown in nearly all media sources (props to Gravity for having a nice representation of it for once!). Having something like that in KSP would be great, just not sure how well Unity's particle system can handle such things.

edit: Also, when going into thicker atmosphere than Kerbin, Isp/thrust should go down even farther. HAVE FUN GETTING OFF OF EVE NOW HA HA

edit2: Kerbal jetpacks should use the same specific impulse calculations as normal engines, so they can have a more reasonable about of delta-v. Something like 50 m/s would be plenty. Downside to this of course is no more EVA-only landings on small moons. On the bright side, it would provide more reason to construct tiny adorable single-crew rocket hopper vehicles for long-distance travel.

Life support

Essential, I feel. Long-duration survival in space is a challenge that space agencies even today are still having a bit of trouble with. I don't think KSP should be an exception - it adds a lot of depth to the game,and makes manned interplanetary travel much more of an achievement. It also inherently gives unmanned missions more of a purpose, as robots are much quieter than the annoying Kerbals demanding snacks/water/personal space all the time. I feel this would work as a difficulty option for when you start a new game though - I understand the opinion of simply not wanting to deal with it.

Reentry damage

Similar points to life support. Adds a greater challenge to maneuvers such as aerocapture, right now it's almost trivially easy to enter orbit around a planet with atmosphere since only with absurd trajectories do you risk damage to your ship (usually from twirling around as the atmosphere hits your ship). Having to bring along heat shields and backshells and the like also has the bonus of making EDL sequences a hundred times cooler as you jettison away all of the used equipment. However, I think this should also be a new game option, like life support, for the same reasons.

Edited September 9, 2014 by NovaSilisko

[Renegrade]

Isp is pretty realistic, weights and TWR is not, again I don't really see the problem, see previous point, same with 0.1-100% throttle this can be solved with better modeling so we can add extra engines who is used for low trust, this is not uncommon on boats

Well the issue with "Isp" re: realism isn't the values (although I would dearly like to see them buffed on the MK55/24-77 radial engines, but that's a discussion for another thread), but rather that when you're using atmospheric Isp, fuel consumption goes up and thrust remains the same, instead of having constant consumption with less thrust (as is the case in reality for rocket engines).

[lincourtl]

I'm against total realism, since it will complicate things too much. In order to add depth they should add new mechanics and things to do instead of making what we have more difficult to learn. I'm in full time studies and don't want to have to learn rocket science in order to play on top of my current homework :/

I'm not aware of anyone who wants KSP to fully realistic.

Apart from the aerodynamics and scale issues though, there are a couple of areas in which KSP attempts yet botches realism in ways which are unintuitive, and it would be nice if they were corrected. Correcting those areas would be relatively minor, and have minimal impact on gameplay.

Correcting the aerodynamics and scale would be a bigger job, and have a major impact on gameplay for most experienced players, however for new players it would just be the way things are. It might, in fact, make the game easier to pick up for new players because it would preference rockets which look like rockets they have experience with in real life.

Adding reentry heating and failure modes would also be a big job, and have a major impact on gameplay for experienced players. Yet again, for new players it would just be the way things are, and it would add excitement to the game.

Nothing the pro-realism proponents have recommended, including more realistic aerodynamics and a slightly increased scale for planets and moons, would change the fun factor or result in an undergraduate physics or engineering degree being added to the game requirements. Nothing would change the wonderfully cartoony aesthetic developed by HarvesteR and the rest of the gang at Squad. Nothing would turn KSP into Orbiter.

For me personally, the great genius of what HarvesteR and Squad have created is that they have made a game which is enormously fun, yet is realistic enough to also be enormously educational regardless of whatever Teachergaming has planned for KerbalEdu. Furthermore, 99% of the educational value of KSP lies in the experimentation and intuitive feel players develop for the physics.

There just happens to be a handful of areas where I feel they've erred on the fun side to the detriment of KSP's educational value. It would be really nice to see those features improved. That's all. Some people are frustrated at what they see as Squad being dismissive of their concerns, but above all, nobody on the pro-realism side is going to storm off in a hissy fit if that never happens.

[Stealth2668]

I'm not aware of anyone who wants KSP to fully realistic.

Apart from the aerodynamics and scale issues though, there are a couple of areas in which KSP attempts yet botches realism in ways which are unintuitive, and it would be nice if they were corrected. Correcting those areas would be relatively minor, and have minimal impact on gameplay.

Correcting the aerodynamics and scale would be a bigger job, and have a major impact on gameplay for most experienced players, however for new players it would just be the way things are. It might, in fact, make the game easier to pick up for new players because it would preference rockets which look like rockets they have experience with in real life.

Adding reentry heating and failure modes would also be a big job, and have a major impact on gameplay for experienced players. Yet again, for new players it would just be the way things are, and it would add excitement to the game.

Nothing the pro-realism proponents have recommended, including more realistic aerodynamics and a slightly increased scale for planets and moons, would change the fun factor or result in an undergraduate physics or engineering degree being added to the game requirements. Nothing would change the wonderfully cartoony aesthetic developed by HarvesteR and the rest of the gang at Squad. Nothing would turn KSP into Orbiter.

For me personally, the great genius of what HarvesteR and Squad have created is that they have made a game which is enormously fun, yet is realistic enough to also be enormously educational regardless of whatever Teachergaming has planned for KerbalEdu. Furthermore, 99% of the educational value of KSP lies in the experimentation and intuitive feel players develop for the physics.

There just happens to be a handful of areas where I feel they've erred on the fun side to the detriment of KSP's educational value. It would be really nice to see those features improved. That's all. Some people are frustrated at what they see as Squad being dismissive of their concerns, but above all, nobody on the pro-realism side is going to storm off in a hissy fit if that never happens.

I'm sure there are some that want a full real life simulator even though we aren't talking about humans;

I'm for:

-realistic atmospheres

-life support

-entry damage

-realistic engine performance

I'm against:

-real life sized solar system, since it just means longer burns and longer ascents to space

-other mechanics that will make gameplay tedious rather than challenging.

[NathanKell]

<this time, not speaking as a moderator>

There just happens to be a handful of areas where I feel they've erred on the fun side to the detriment of KSP's educational value. It would be really nice to see those features improved. That's all. Some people are frustrated at what they see as Squad being dismissive of their concerns, but above all, nobody on the pro-realism side is going to storm off in a hissy fit if that never happens.

I'm not even sure it's the side of fun, really. Perhaps better, on the side of simplification (and, let's note, by and large simplification of programming, not necessarily simplification of gameplay; aerodynamics is a case in point because while stock aero is a simple *model* it leads to some decidedly non-simple effects).

Even if it is simplification in terms of gameplay...who's to say that's "fun"? Tastes differ, or Paradox Games would not have the success it does. And certainly no one can claim that orbital mechanics (wait, you thrust forward to make your altitude on the other side of the planet higher? And you speed up to escape velocity of the Mun in such a way that your Kerbin orbit is lowered?) are very simple, and yet who would want to play a KSP with simplified orbital mechanics?

There's a lot of complex stuff that KSP makes fun--and part of why it's fun, IMO, is that it's complex...which is very, very different from many games today. In this way, KSP is almost like a throwback to an earlier age of game, lacking quicktime events, minigames, and the like. But now I'm getting off topic...

EDIT:

Stealth2668: People keep saying that, but I have yet to hear someone named who does. I mean, I'm the likeliest, after all I've stated my aim to replace Kerbals with Humans. And yet I wouldn't for a second argue *that* should be stock.

[lincourtl]

I'm sure there are some that want a full real life simulator even though we aren't talking about humans;

I'm for:

-realistic atmospheres

-life support

-entry damage

-realistic engine performance

I'm against:

-real life sized solar system, since it just means longer burns and longer ascents to space

-other mechanics that will make gameplay tedious rather than challenging.

I'm against a full sized solar system too, but slightly larger would be nice. Otherwise I totally agree. I'd also like to see axial tilt, but it pales next to my desire for realistic aerodynamics, reeentry heating, and more realistic engine performance.