Realism in KSP - Various Ideas with Pros/ Cons

[Levelord]

Well, you did mention it as ONE possible explanation.

I wouldn't qualify that as 'dead on correct' though.

Personally though, if I were Harv, I would have not bothered responding at all and just thrown a corrector in to the next update. It would have taken less time, and given me an opening to make a snarky remark in the update notes.

I'd get to make a snarky remark, and there'd be a thrust corrector. How is that not win/win?

You're just cherry picking stuff now without even referring to my original earlier posts before everyone became dead set on disagreeing with me for the sake of disagreeing with me instead of looking at this objectively.

There will not be extra fuel in orbit, the delta-V of the craft will not change at all. Just because you (and others) don't consider this to be an important part of the simulation doesn't make it universally true. My feeling is that realism should be the starting point and should only be modified to make gameplay better or accomodate performance limitations. (And of course, to account for the incomplete development of the game.)

Judging from the current potato aerodynamics of KSP (which I actually want changed) you will likely end up with more fuel in orbit. I like realism in KSP, but this thrust variance, is not one that ranks up very high on the list of importance compared to other things that we could actually improve in the game. It was my main point all along, but I'm not sure people are understanding this and are getting a bit defensive.

It probably can be done, but the apparent 'advantage' it gives is really, really small. So small that I would regard it as a cosmetic change. My main beef is that some people assuming it's an easy fix, which is questionable at best and that if Isp scaling was one of SQUADs goals they would have implemented it a long time ago during their lunch breaks if it were so easy. So I'm under the impression that it's not as easy to implement as some people may have led you to believe and may involve more complex coding than is probably worth.

I'm on the boat that if all things are equally difficult to code, thrust scaling really should be way down on the priority list until we have a good aerodynamics model, re-entry physics, a basic life support and other things fleshed out.

Either way it's heading off topic now, so I don't want to derail it further, but I'm retiring from the thread while saying "I told you so".

Edited September 10, 2014 by Levelord

[m4v]

Not to be dismissive, but as someone who has flight experience, wouldn't you see any game that flaunts itself as a teaching tool where that's possible as a problem?

KSP doesn't flaunts itself as a teaching tool, educators started using it for teaching, you should ask those people why they're using a game with such a terrible aero model as a teaching tool, they will probably answer you something like "uh, I don't use it for teach aerodynamics". KSP is a game, you're misinformed if you refer it as a teaching tool.

MSFS was not unpopular because the aerodynamics were realistic, though. In combat flight sims, people want as much realism in performance/outcomes/scenery/damage models/etc as possible in my experience. They don;t want more complexity in UI, as they are limited to a keyboard and stick set, they are not in a real cockpit. Realistic outcomes, not realistic interfaces.

Because combat flight simulators are very successful these days, right? Microsoft had Combat Flight Simulator and died far more quicker than the civil version, also, the only combat flight simulator that I know is popular nowadays is WarThunder, and that one people only play arcade mode, y'know, the mode more colloquially known as "UFO flight model" mode.

[tater]

KSP doesn't flaunts itself as a teaching tool, educators started using it for teaching, you should ask those people why they're using a game with such a terrible aero model as a teaching tool, they will probably answer you something like "uh, I don't use it for teach aerodynamics". KSP is a game, you're misinformed if you refer it as a teaching tool.

Because combat flight simulators are very successful these days, right? Microsoft had Combat Flight Simulator and died far more quicker than the civil version, also, the only combat flight simulator that I know is popular nowadays is WarThunder, and that one people only play arcade mode, y'know, the mode more colloquially known as "UFO flight model" mode.

"Popular" is a relative term. More people played IL-2 (and its incarnations). LOMAC is another relatively modern one if jets are your thing. Flight sims are a niche.

Difficulty and complexity have exactly nothing to do with realism, though. If the player simply told the game to send the rocket to the Mun by clicking on it, and the game did n-body physics to model the mechanics, and did everything to excruciating accuracy, the game would still be ridiculously easy, though the outcomes would be very realistic. This keeps coming up, but it really deserves to be in an "Ideal Gameplay" thread.

[ZodiaK]

universe scale:

pros:

more realistic scale, takes more to orbit and game feels more authentic. acheivements (landing on mun, base on mars ect.) seem more rewarding

cons:

harder to do things, could try for months until you finally get out of kerbin's atmosphere, could put off new players.

[DaMichel]

Because combat flight simulators are very successful these days, right? Microsoft had Combat Flight Simulator and died far more quicker than the civil version, also, the only combat flight simulator that I know is popular nowadays is WarThunder, and that one people only play arcade mode, y'know, the mode more colloquially known as "UFO flight model" mode.

What? I bet Eagle Dynamics seem to be doing well enough that their collaborators are pumping out new planes on a regular basis, so ...

KSP with FAR has a special appeal because it lets you mess with your own planes which act somewhat realistically. It is a very good thing that basically all the systems management is abstracted away. I absolutely don't want to manage every detail of navigation, engine, radio and what ever system you have to deal with in order to get airborne in MS FSX. FSX is IMO more for people who are interested in IRL flight procedures than in the physics of flight.

P.S. there are plenty of YT videos of people playing WT full sim mode out there. And even the arcade flight model makes more sense than stock aerodynamics ...

Edited September 10, 2014 by DaMichel

[rkman]

"KSP is a game" does not mean less realistic is better.

Besides, according to Squad KSP is "something in-between a game and a simulator".

[Red Iron Crown]

"Simulator" and "game" are not mutually exclusive. The simulator genre of games has been around since the '80s, if not longer.

[r4pt0r]

Its important to keep KSP sorta arcadey too guys. as I understand it, reaction wheels for example work very differently in real life.

[Kasuha]

KSP is kind of like an RPG game, but instead of leveling up your character, you level up yourself. And you cannot delevel or start from scratch. That's kind of a problem, actually.

Requests for realism in KSP are something like requests for adding more endgame content in any other game. Experienced players are becoming bored with the game or its individual aspects being already too easy for them and want some further challenge.

KSP as it is has rather steep learning curve compared to any other game. As it is, KSP is demanding but also rewarding and exciting since the wery beginning. I believe every experienced player can remember things in KSP that started as absolutely impossible, went through challenging, daily routine, and ended up too boring to do.

Increasing realism usually means making things harder. That will result in increasing perceived difficulty of the game. Overdo it, and it will be more demanding for everyone, but exciting and rewarding only for some. The rest will just find the game too hard, frustrating, and boring since the beginning.

My opinion is that probably best way to introduce realism into the game would be through "ascending" through different universes. You start in current Kerbal system with its current planets and its soupy atmospheres and once you finish the Career game in it, another universe (actually just a planetary system) opens for you with more realistic physics. Some things become perhaps easier, most things become slightly harder. Your designs from the old world will mostly not work because of differences but you'll still carry the experience with orbital physics and you'll be able to refine it in a world closer to reality. If you pass this, a real solar system (or something of its scale, just inhabited by Kerbals) opens for you. This way it keeps the simpleness and arcade-y feeling at the start but gives you the endgame thrill so many people are asking for.

[Wanderfound]

KSP is kind of like an RPG game, but instead of leveling up your character, you level up yourself. And you cannot delevel or start from scratch. That's kind of a problem, actually.

Nicely put.

This why I want all the difficulty options as options. We can't adjust the players, so adjust the game instead. Something suitable for a 12 year old building their first rocket just ain't gonna work for an adult science geek who's been doing it for years, and vice-versa.

[tater]

KSP is kind of like an RPG game, but instead of leveling up your character, you level up yourself. And you cannot delevel or start from scratch. That's kind of a problem, actually.

Requests for realism in KSP are something like requests for adding more endgame content in any other game. Experienced players are becoming bored with the game or its individual aspects being already too easy for them and want some further challenge.

KSP as it is has rather steep learning curve compared to any other game. As it is, KSP is demanding but also rewarding and exciting since the wery beginning. I believe every experienced player can remember things in KSP that started as absolutely impossible, went through challenging, daily routine, and ended up too boring to do.

Increasing realism usually means making things harder. That will result in increasing perceived difficulty of the game. Overdo it, and it will be more demanding for everyone, but exciting and rewarding only for some. The rest will just find the game too hard, frustrating, and boring since the beginning.

My opinion is that probably best way to introduce realism into the game would be through "ascending" through different universes. You start in current Kerbal system with its current planets and its soupy atmospheres and once you finish the Career game in it, another universe (actually just a planetary system) opens for you with more realistic physics. Some things become perhaps easier, most things become slightly harder. Your designs from the old world will mostly not work because of differences but you'll still carry the experience with orbital physics and you'll be able to refine it in a world closer to reality. If you pass this, a real solar system (or something of its scale, just inhabited by Kerbals) opens for you. This way it keeps the simpleness and arcade-y feeling at the start but gives you the endgame thrill so many people are asking for.

I'd agree, except I've been playing about 3 weeks, and I was chiming in on this sort of thread pretty much immediately.

Learning curve? The UI is good enough I have pretty much no learning curve. Increasing realism has exactly nothing to do with being harder. Nothing at all.

[lincourtl]

"Simulator" and "game" are not mutually exclusive. The simulator genre of games has been around since the '80s, if not longer.

I'd say Spacewar back in 1962 counts as the first sim game since it employed single-body gravity. In fact, you might say Spacewar is KSP's great-great grandfather, followed by Lunar Lander in 1969.

The basic gameplay of Spacewar involves two armed spaceships called "the needle" and "the wedge" attempting to shoot one another while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. The ships fire missiles that are unaffected by gravity (due to a lack of processing time). Each ship has a limited number of missiles and a limited supply of fuel. Each player controls one of the ships, and must attempt to simultaneously shoot at the other ship and avoid colliding with the star. The hyperspace feature can be used as a last-ditch means to evade enemy missiles, but the reentry from hyperspace would occur at a random location and there is an increasing probability of the ship exploding with each use.

Edited September 10, 2014 by lincourtl

[Red Iron Crown]

That's old school, lincourtl. I hadn't heard of Spacewar, but I played a ton of Lunar Lander on my old Commodore 64 as a kid.

[I_Killed_Jeb]

wow bunch of people making great points in this thread, i'll try to aggregate as best as possible soon in the OP

I'd say Spacewar back in 1962 counts as the first sim game since it employed single-body gravity. In fact, you might say Spacewar is KSP's great-great grandfather, followed by Lunar Lander in 1969.

I'm convinced lunar lander is the reason I was able to nail non-atmo landing in KSP from the get-go

[tater]

wow bunch of people making great points in this thread, i'll try to aggregate as best as possible soon in the OP

I'm convinced lunar lander is the reason I was able to nail non-atmo landing in KSP from the get-go

Yeah, I logged some time on that.

[Guest]

Something suitable for a 12 year old building their first rocket just ain't gonna work for an adult science geek who's been doing it for years, and vice-versa.

Straight up, my daughter will never touch this game without FAR, DRE, and KIDS (for thrust correction) installed at a minimum. There is no way I am letting her learn bad habits or build flying brick walls that don't look anything like the airplanes she's so excited about (or build said airplanes and be disappointed that they don't fly only because the aero model is so bad...)

This game is as easy to learn as the user is willing to learn. A newbie coming into the game with no prior experience will likely have the same learning curve under realistic elements as under KSP's current system because they will learn under the given system. Aside from realistic scaling, which I'm not entirely convinced increases difficulty in the slightest if the game is balanced for it (reference Realism Overhaul), none of the realism elements advocated for recently will affect a total newbie's experience in the slightest; they will simply be learning a different system. The only people these realism elements really affect are veterans of the game.

Edited September 10, 2014 by regex

[Wanderfound]

Atari 2600, Space Invaders, when it was shiny and new.

I don't think that it taught me a lot about physics, though.

[Corw]

Straight up, my daughter will never touch this game without FAR, DRE, and KIDS (for thrust correction) installed at a minimum. There is no way I am letting her learn bad habits or build flying brick walls that don't look anything like the airplanes she's so excited about (or build said airplanes and be disappointed that they don't fly only because the aero model is so bad...)

This game is as easy to learn as the user is willing to learn. A newbie coming into the game with no prior experience will likely have the same learning curve under realistic elements as under KSP's current system because they will learn under the given system. Aside from realistic scaling, which I'm not entirely convinced increases difficulty in the slightest if the game is balanced for it (reference Realism Overhaul), none of the realism elements advocated for recently will affect a total newbie's experience in the slightest; they will simply be learning a different system. The only people these realism elements really affect are veterans of the game.

Increase in size does not increase difficulty. It just increases the waiting times. That is why Kerbin was scaled down in the first place and in my humble opinion it was the right call. I wouldn't mind moderate increase in size for balancing reasons and such, but from the gameplay perspective it is just adding more of empty space. Increasing warp speeds just to make it more bearable does not make much sense (again, from my point of view). Remember that time warp is basically skipping time frames and making funny things happen with physics, the problems we had with warp related bugs, including spontaneous disassembly or completely missing the atmosphere between 2 skips, etc... It looks like a lot of work and risk for dubious gain.

[Red Iron Crown]

The rescale is more about maintaining dV requirements to orbit if better aero reduces them as in FAR/NEAR. Cutting 1000m/s from ascent requirements makes staged rockets almost worthless. If the surface gravity is to remain at 1g and the 4500m/s to orbit is desired, radius must increase.

[Franklin]

The Polygon article that was linked in the dev notes yesterday is worth a read from this request-for-realism angle.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/9/6123601/kerbal-space-program-exploit-creates-a-new-kind-of-space-race

The lead-in excerpt:

What keeps many players coming back to Kerbal Space Program is the complexity of the game. The space program simulator has an incredible physics model, one that lets you travel a solar system, dock in orbit, and create multi-staged rockets that can kill their pilots in incredibly authentic ways.

But KSP has a few holes in its systems as well, and sometimes that's where the fun lives.

One of those holes includes a fairly serious hazard of space travel, namely atmospheric physics as they apply to re-entry. When real spacecraft return to our Earth they have to be very careful to approach at the correct angle and the proper speed. If they don't they'll burn up. But in KSP there are no such limitations.

The lack of a proper atmospheric re-entry model has enabled the latest KSP challenge  speedruns to the edge of space.

...

It's pretty impressive, and also completely impossible if there had been an atmosphere to contend with.

...

The folks at KSP also told Polygon that modeling the atmosphere during re-entry is something they are considering for the future, but they can't make any promises.

Of course Bob in the dev notes words the 'can't make any promises' a bit differently in that it's just a topic that hasn't been broached yet, so he doesn't know, but it's amusing to see the juxtaposition between what your average person expects from a space simulator (re-entry danger) and the fun that can be had without it (speed runs).

Note that it was referred to as an exploited hole in a simulator, instead of a feature as well. Not that Charlie Hall here is the last word on what KSP is seen as, but it's interesting to see someone outside this community (and this thread, specifically) try to classify the game.

Edited September 10, 2014 by Franklin

[Renegrade]

You're just cherry picking stuff now without even referring to my original earlier posts before everyone became dead set on disagreeing with me for the sake of disagreeing with me instead of looking at this objectively.

Woah, that came off as way harsher than I intended. Was just tryin' to give you a little poke there, not rake you over the coals. I apologize!

I'd say Spacewar back in 1962 counts as the first sim game since it employed single-body gravity. In fact, you might say Spacewar is KSP's great-great grandfather, followed by Lunar Lander in 1969.

Nice! I never got to play the original Spacewar, although there were a lot of direct clones on home computers (including a CGA version for IBM-PC). I did get to play a version of Lunar Lander at the Ontario Science Center though hehe.

Frontier: Elite II and Frontier: First Encounters could also be considered to be in KSP's lineage...although they're at RSS scale~

The rescale is more about maintaining dV requirements to orbit if better aero reduces them as in FAR/NEAR. Cutting 1000m/s from ascent requirements makes staged rockets almost worthless. If the surface gravity is to remain at 1g and the 4500m/s to orbit is desired, radius must increase.

Eh? I play a lot of stock FAR, and I mean a lot, and I generally find I use two stage rockets, with some three stagers put in for larger payloads. 3200-3500dv requires about half of the theoretical maximum that a 370 isp stage can provide (~7500), which is pretty much on the same scale as 4500. We're talking like 45% and 55% here..

That being said, I found regex's 1.5x RSS test to be very playable (and I generally detest RSS scale in KSP... day 1539.. still on re-entry from that sub-orbital hop... snacks ran out years ago .. so bored..), which brought launch requirements close to old stock. It also brought out the 'authenticity' that HarvesteR mentioned, in that it brings out more of the 'horizontalness' of orbit. So I wouldn't be opposed to small rescales...I just don't think it's absolutely necessary.

[haltux]

In real world no 'converter' would be 100% efficient , but the principle of recreate burnable material from the burned endproducts while consuming energy is nowhere near 'silly' !

Silly was probably not the best word, what I wanted to say is probably more something like "crazy". And I did not realize it was offensive, sorry.

My point was that it is not nonsensical, I agree that "nothing is lost, everything is transformed", so theoretically you should be able to generate snacks with energy + various things rejected by astronauts. But to me it sounds convoluted and would most likely required very advanced technology, extremely complex and heavy equipment, and seems to be hypothetically doable only with a technology much more advanced that human or kerbal technology.

[NathanKell]

Man, I loved FE2 and FFE, although I've only ever played them in DOSBox. Did play this as a kid on a Mac SE though.

[undercoveryankee]

The rescale is more about maintaining dV requirements to orbit if better aero reduces them as in FAR/NEAR. Cutting 1000m/s from ascent requirements makes staged rockets almost worthless. If the surface gravity is to remain at 1g and the 4500m/s to orbit is desired, radius must increase.

Most of my small FAR stuff has come out with 3000 to 3200 m/s in the first stage. That occasionally makes orbit if I'm using kOS, but more often leaves the payload to circularize with its own engines. Big loads (maybe 25 tons payload and up) I tend to stage after 1500 to 2000.

[Wanderfound]

"The lack of a proper atmospheric re-entry model has enabled the latest KSP challenge  speedruns to the edge of space."

Pfft. Burning off a few canards on the way up is half the fun of a speed run. I may not get both up and down in two minutes, but I could certainly do runway-to-circular-orbit in that time.

Edited September 10, 2014 by Wanderfound