Suggestions from the Reddit Post

[Alshain]

REMOVED Because this is not my thread, I did not create it and it is the result of moderator silliness. I do not intend to return to this thread. Nothing to see here.

Edited November 11, 2014 by Alshain

[Starwhip]

Yes, but in a different way. I'm looking forward to that too. However, what I'm referring to is if I suddenly decide I don't need as much fuel as I allocated, If it's a B9 part, rather than tweaking out the fuel which will make the fuel gauge look half empty, I can just change the part without removing it to be fuselage of the same shape. Even more important if you want to ADD something, like oxidizer because even tweakables can't help you there on stock parts if you used a jet fuel tank. With a stock craft, I would have to pull everything radially attached to that tank off before replacing it.

This would be nice. Especially the "adding of resources" bit.

Actually, I've always wondered why we couldn't put more of a resource in when we take a portion of the other one out, i.e. oxidizer and liquid fuel.

From a coding standpoint it's a little complex, but instead of 2 defined resources you could have something like this:

MODULE

{

name = ResourceContainer

capacity = 300

liquidFuel = 150

oxidizer = 150

xenonGas = 0

...

}

[r_rolo1]

Since I do not have a reddit account....

@HarvesteR

On the life support issue , you are being somewhat hypocritical. We already have a feature in game that we start with low non renewable supplies of and that the tech advancement gives first bigger supplies of and later generators of it : electricity. Unless you are planning to remove electricity of the game because it "would become a chore where you'd have to babysit all your ongoing crews as your newest mission speeds its way out to the outer solar system" to avoid depleted electrical charge issues, that excuse is not a excuse ( not saying that your point about feature creep is not right, though ... but this bit about life support is not supported by your own previous actions ). Oh and as we are speaking of electricity, how about a fuel cell part, that burns LF and O and produces electrical charge and zero thrust ?

On your point against randomness, well , I'm thorn. I do understand your argument and while i do not disagree with it completely, I do not see how balancing the issue of parts with different reliabilities is any different of choosing between a LV-909 and a 48-7S.: simple risk management, not different of any of the cost benefits analysis we already do in game, even if unconsciously. And beware : you are making a game that has a strong group of science educated players, that can easily understand that kind of argument against using randomness as you assuming they are so limited they can't stomach randomness. Believe me: I've seen other developers going that way and it is not a path you want to go ...

[Aethon]

electricity. Unless you are planning to remove electricity of the game because it "would become a chore where you'd have to babysit all your ongoing crews as your newest mission speeds its way out to the outer solar system" to avoid depleted electrical charge issues, that excuse is not a excuse

Electricity goes on rails when that ship is no longer the focused vessel.

[r_rolo1]

Electricity goes on rails when that ship is no longer the focused vessel.

True , but irrelevant to my point, since HarvesteR did not say anything about consumption of life support with the ship on rails. And in fact it is easier to rationalize no life support spent with a ship on rails ( hibernation/stasis/cryogenics ) than a ship that spends zero electricity and stays functional ...

[GluttonyReaper]

True , but irrelevant to my point, since HarvesteR did not say anything about consumption of life support with the ship on rails. And in fact it is easier to rationalize no life support spent with a ship on rails ( hibernation/stasis/cryogenics ) than a ship that spends zero electricity and stays functional ...

Mmm, I think HarvesteR's point was more along the lines that life support forces you to "juggle" missions, without really adding anything. For example, you might have a space station in Kerbin orbit, that needs supplies for life support every six months. If you then send a mission out to Jool, you then have to do 4 supply missions to that space station before you even arrive at Jool, let alone the journey back. Which if you're doing a Jool mission for the first time, isn't particularly fun. Expand to say, a Kerbin station and a Mun base, and suddenly you might doing 16 "routine" resupply missions while still trying to do a Jool mission, and the further you develop your infrastructure, the worse the problem becomes. Limiting a player's ability to do things like this isn't really fun either. Electricity is different - it rarely gets thought about after the craft is built. All you need to do is put enough solar panels on, and maybe about how the craft is rotated before you time warp. It doesn't require active "juggling", and you near enough forget about craft in terms of electricity while your flying other missions.

[r_rolo1]

@GluttonyReaper

You're not wrong, but that has much more to do with the fact that the devs took the conscious step of making atleast some electrical generation parts to be in the low part of the tech tree, while by some reason people always put the tech support as something esoteric that has to be in the top echelons of the tech tree ... and let's be honest, it doesn't have to be that way. While in RL life support in space is hard stuff, KSP devs already showed that they care very little for RL concerns about the tech tree placement ( otherwise the cubic strut would be in the same node than the small girder, just for a quick example ... ). There is no more reason to not have a low tech life support generator than reasons to have solar panels somewhere in the tech tree not above ladders

Let me give you a example from my current hard dif career game. Because hard dif is hard, I faced myself with a decision about getting the first solar panels tech vs getting the 48-7S. Because the 48-7S is that good IMHO, I decided to go for it and my first Mun and Minmus missions are being done with only the stock supply of electricity ( aided be some batteries, but they weren't 100% needed TBH ). So basically I'm in a exact analogue of your Jool mission example if we switch electricity for life supports ...and TBH I don't see any issue with that being in game. It might be risky to do bigger missions without further electricity stocks and in case of stupidity of my part, I might even need to send some electricity refueling ( when I have klaws ). And all of that is already in the stock game ...

In other words: IMHO the only difference between electricity and life support as people tend to imagine it is simply where in the tech tree you see the stocking of the feature and the generators of it. Hence HarvesteR posted reasoning is contradicted by his own work ...

[LethalDose]

Since I do not have a reddit account....

@HarvesteR

On the life support issue , you are being somewhat hypocritical. We already have a feature in game that we start with low non renewable supplies of and that the tech advancement gives first bigger supplies of and later generators of it : electricity. Unless you are planning to remove electricity of the game because it "would become a chore where you'd have to babysit all your ongoing crews as your newest mission speeds its way out to the outer solar system" to avoid depleted electrical charge issues, that excuse is not a excuse ( not saying that your point about feature creep is not right, though ... but this bit about life support is not supported by your own previous actions ). Oh and as we are speaking of electricity, how about a fuel cell part, that burns LF and O and produces electrical charge and zero thrust ?

On your point against randomness, well , I'm thorn. I do understand your argument and while i do not disagree with it completely, I do not see how balancing the issue of parts with different reliabilities is any different of choosing between a LV-909 and a 48-7S.: simple risk management, not different of any of the cost benefits analysis we already do in game, even if unconsciously. And beware : you are making a game that has a strong group of science educated players, that can easily understand that kind of argument against using randomness as you assuming they are so limited they can't stomach randomness. Believe me: I've seen other developers going that way and it is not a path you want to go ...

I do have a reddit account and I brought up this exact point. He side-stepped and instead argued that resource consumption isn't really a time-dependent mechanic (), and what he was really talking about was research times.

Which still a crap argument.

But the devs really don't care.

On Life Support:

Mmm, I think HarvesteR's point was more along the lines that life support forces you to "juggle" missions, without really adding anything. For example, you might have a space station in Kerbin orbit, that needs supplies for life support every six months. If you then send a mission out to Jool, you then have to do 4 supply missions to that space station before you even arrive at Jool, let alone the journey back. Which if you're doing a Jool mission for the first time, isn't particularly fun. Expand to say, a Kerbin station and a Mun base, and suddenly you might doing 16 "routine" resupply missions while still trying to do a Jool mission, and the further you develop your infrastructure, the worse the problem becomes. Limiting a player's ability to do things like this isn't really fun either. Electricity is different - it rarely gets thought about after the craft is built. All you need to do is put enough solar panels on, and maybe about how the craft is rotated before you time warp. It doesn't require active "juggling", and you near enough forget about craft in terms of electricity while your flying other missions.

This is closer to what Harv said, but a solution is just to make it a togglable option (Y/N Life support) in the difficulty menu, so players can choose which they prefer.

Edited November 11, 2014 by LethalDose
This isn't a suggestion, it's a comment on what was said in another location...

[Aethon]

True , but irrelevant to my point, since HarvesteR did not say anything about consumption of life support with the ship on rails. And in fact it is easier to rationalize no life support spent with a ship on rails ( hibernation/stasis/cryogenics ) than a ship that spends zero electricity and stays functional ...

Well one of us isn't understanding the other and it may be me.

The amount of life support remaining to support life must decrease over the mission elapsed time, and kerbals will die when that amount is exhausted, regardless of which ship is in focus. Other wise it's not life support. You would have to call it something like 'look rocks' that only deplete when a ship is in focus view, defeating the purpose of life support.

[r_rolo1]

Well one of us isn't understanding the other and it may be me.

The amount of life support remaining to support life must decrease over the mission elapsed time, and kerbals will die when that amount is exhausted, regardless of which ship is in focus. Other wise it's not life support. You would have to call it something like 'look rocks' that only deplete when a ship is in focus view, defeating the purpose of life support.

I'm understanding you perfectly. The issue is that you could say the exact same words about the in-game electricity, since it surely isn't a exact analogue of the RL thing ( batteries self discharge in RL, just for starters, and this not mentioning the baseline spending a ship needs to have to keep itself functional ): You could call it glow juice, since it only depletes when you are in focus view if your ship is manned, and that can easily be seen as defeating the propose of actually having electricity in game vs what we had in the olden days ( assumed infinite glow juice for your ships )

[GluttonyReaper]

In other words: IMHO the only difference between electricity and life support as people tend to imagine it is simply where in the tech tree you see the stocking of the feature and the generators of it. Hence HarvesteR posted reasoning is contradicted by his own work ...

Okay, I see what you mean by a contradiction now. I think, as Aethon said, we're operating under different definitions of life support here. I suspect HarvesteR is viewing life support as a resource that (mostly) cannot be generated. As in, not able to be generated until the very late stages of the tech tree, and even then not self-sufficiently. The type you are proposing (which can be generated entirely at an early stage, if I understand you correctly) seems illogical to implement - it's basically just another form of electric charge, you could just make all command pods drain electric charge as "life support", and get the same result.

[r_rolo1]

Guess what, so is life support: create a method to allow resources to be generated or consumed while a ship is on rails so I don't have to sit and wait for fuel to be generated in your "deep space refueling feature". Apply that to life support. The end.

And as we are there, that would actually be a nice feature for electricity as well

Talking about your post in the previous page, I am confused with the HarvesteR response about research times regarding life support. I assume he meant that in his view , life support has to be in a high level tech ( probably higher than the current ones in game ) and that the high costs of those techs would make it prohibitive to make your first Jool and beyond missions in terms of the needed life support ( that or he simply dislikes the idea and is scrapping for excuses ). My previous posts already said my position on that: it only has to be that way if HarvesteR wants to be that way, so that surely is not a good reason :/

[SkyRender]

Seeing what's not there, there's other terms for that

I'm partial to the term "apophenia" myself.

It would be cool if at some point in the future some form of procedural parts do find their way into the stock game. It would open up a whole new range of potential parts to add, including fairings (admittedly a beauty feature in stock at this point, but any sort of change to the drag model on stock aerodynamics is going to change that fast!) and scalability on parts like rover wheels. HarvesteR is correct in his summation of what a pain it would be to implement such a feature, however, as procedural sizing options would have to be considered for almost all of the existing parts.

[r_rolo1]

Okay, I see what you mean by a contradiction now. I think, as Aethon said, we're operating under different definitions of life support here. I suspect HarvesteR is viewing life support as a resource that (mostly) cannot be generated. As in, not able to be generated until the very late stages of the tech tree, and even then not self-sufficiently. The type you are proposing (which can be generated entirely at an early stage, if I understand you correctly) seems illogical to implement - it's basically just another form of electric charge, you could just make all command pods drain electric charge as "life support", and get the same result.

That is pretty much my point, but I stress: electricity as it in game is also under a heavy idealization and if it was implemented in a minimally realistic way it would suffer the exact same issues you are pointing out about a realistic life support: batteries self discharge, ships have baseline consumptions, solar panels degrade, radioactive decay generators lose efficiency and the task of replacing any of those components in situ is in the same order of magnitude of difficulty than reliable life support in far away places ( in other words, we have neither in RL ) and it is actually harder to make batteries and solar panels than ladders in RL In spite of that, we have the electricity we have in game ... So, why does this kind of argument is being thrown against life support ?

If HarvesteR wants to say that he doesn't want to have a second ATM electricty feature, that is fine. if he wants to say that he believes that his vision about life support does not fit the game he wants, that is also fine. Saying what he said ... well, it doesn't make sense. And that is what I was pointing out ...

Edited November 11, 2014 by r_rolo1

[technicalfool]

A whole lot of suggestions and development discussion from this thread moved to Suggestions and Development Discussion.

Carry on!

[CaptainKipard]

The tech tree pleeeeease! Make it an actual TECH tree already, not a progression tree. Pods and probes in one branch, tanks in another branch, engines in another branch, electrics in another branch, etc, etc. Why is this still not a thing? It's as if Squad do not trust players to make their own decisions. I thought KSP was meant to be an open experience. Make the tree an open experience.

I haven't completed the tree even once since it was implemented. There's nothing fun about it. I always feel led through it, because I have to unlock the same nodes in virtually the same order to actually do anything useful. I'd love to have a purely robotic play through at least once, or a playthrough with just space planes.

And make it actually branching. It's a web right now, not a tree, precisely as a result of the gamey progression.

Edited November 12, 2014 by Cpt. Kipard

[magico13]

And make it actually branching. It's a web right now, not a tree, precisely as a result of the gamey progression.

I'd say it's actually a tree right now since it has a single root and branches outward from there (turn it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, it's definitely a tree). It should be a web with a single starting point that goes every direction outward from there.

I whole heartedly agree with this post. Have a single starting node and several different directions you can go with it. If I only want to play with planes, I should be able to do that from the beginning. Probes, manned rockets, rovers, planes, random structural pieces, etc should each have their own track (or diverge soon after some initial ones). This is the sort of thing I plan on doing for KCT's upgrades in the future.

[CaptainKipard]

I don't know the technical terms, but a tree has branches that rarely meet again. A web or a net is interconnected at multiple points like the current techtree.