KSP Pet Peeves

[Merinsan]

How you tell your guy to hold, say, retrograde. He does so for you for a while and you hit "T" to turn off SAS for a while. You move the ship around, get it all situated, and hit T again to lock your heading.

...and your Kerbal dutifully starts aiming retrograde again.

I've had Jeb attempt suicide a number of time from this. I use the hold retrograde for landing, and after landing, re-launch and switch the Sas back on and Jeb goes to work. Takes me a while to work out why the controls are so unresponsive! Fortunately he is a little slow to react, so I've always got a good altitude to correct the problems.

[Thiagobs]

Not exactly a pet peeve, but...

It annoys me greatly how the TR-2V's arrows aren't aligned with everything else, as if the part was slightly rotated clockwise...

I know, its a minor thing, not actually a bug or problem, but I never seen this mentioned here on the forums, so I might as well mention it

[Superfluous J]

It annoys me greatly how the TR-2V's arrows aren't aligned with everything else, as if the part was slightly rotated clockwise...

You also can't rotate it to match, because the arrows aren't exactly 90 degrees from each other.

[rkman]

Automatic camera view mode switching. Please allow us to disable it.

[StormKat]

1. Build a rocket.

2. Launch rocket.

3. Press M for map mode.

4. Press Esc and click on either of the revert options.

5. Attempt to launch again.

Notice anything? Are you zoomed way out?

Press M for map mode. Press M again to return to normal mode and your view should return to normal.

- - - Updated - - -

How you tell your guy to hold, say, retrograde. He does so for you for a while and you hit "T" to turn off SAS for a while. You move the ship around, get it all situated, and hit T again to lock your heading.

...and your Kerbal dutifully starts aiming retrograde again.

Doh! That just happened to me recently. When SAS is turned off, the SAS mode should immediately switch to "stabilize".

[Exxmorphing]

The lack of detail in the contract descriptions. I mean, would it kill to say that you want new science around [insert celestial body's name]? I mean, there's only so much science I can gather with the stuff at hand, and now I've just wasted so much time and money...

Also, perhaps a small display of a map/globe within mission control would be good for some of the survey contracts:

*Goes to Mission Control, waits for it to load

Hey look, new survey contract! Well, I guess I'll just head over to the tracking station to see where it wants me to go...

*Goes to the tracking station, waits for it to load

Err, so I guess there's more than one contract for surveys available.

Hm...

Which one was it?

*Heads back to Mission Control, waits for it to load

Ah, so that's what it's called.

*Heads back to the tracking station, waits for it to load. Again.

Err, that one is a bit high in altitude and far to reach with my current funds and tech tree... How much money am I getting in advance?

*Heads back to Mission control, waits for it to load. Again.

Hm, it's nowhere near enough to make me comfortable about it. It's possible, but it may be worth my time to go with this one instead. Now, let's see it in the tracking station...

And so it goes on

I think a lot of these pet peeves could be legitimate suggestions.

[hazarada]

1. The ladders are too friggin short. I always have to build ridiculous support structures to make it possible to climb all the way down, just give me a longer ladder! Also, kerbals really suck at getting off ladders on the upper end, its like "Oh, its the end of the ladder. I could take a step forward or maybe I'll just let go, yeah lets just let go and see what happens!"

2. The large SAS module is empty on the inside, looks totally weird with something smaller attached on top. Also some other modules create air gaps when something smaller is attached on top, the largest fuel tanks for example.

3. I figured out the new orientation system when placing modules on the surface of another (not on nodes) but it still sucks. Takes much more effort to make curved structures than before.

4. I cant recover booster rockets even if I put parachutes and legs on them and they land perfectly (without directly controlling each of them individually).

5. The parachutes auto cut when vertical drop stops, that doesn't always mean the craft has landed so I want to control when they get cut.

6. The larger solar panels have no use. All they have is mass, fragility and annoyance (when you forget to hotkey their deployment or forget to deploy as the only source of energy and you run out of battery). Its always better to use either the smallest panel or the radioisotope since its easier, weighs less and nothing needs that much electricity anyways (aside from ion engine which is made useless by the mass of the big panels). Right now I only use them because they look fancy.

7. No temperature measurements outside atmosphere. Even though space has very little particles and is cold, it still has a measurable temperature.

8. Smaller lander legs and sometimes the big ones too fall through the ground.

9. Rover wheels have too low max speed. Its completely pointless to go anywhere with a rover if you want to do anything else that week. I get it that the current max speed is like 216 km/h which is silly fast for a rover in realistic terms but this is a game, they need to be balanced in relation to other options.

10. Parts with alterable state (like ladder extend/retract) get stuck in that state after a test launch and you need to delete the part and get a new one to change the state.

Edited January 5, 2015 by hazarada

[skyfire322]

-Maneuver nodes/orbits that go crazy.

-Surprised that there still hasn't been a search bar function added to the game.

-The new SAS system.

[vetrox]

I'm a pretty easy going guy. However, the lack of axial tilt gets on my tits for some reason.

Also, does the thermometer read temperatures correctly yet?

[LadyAthena]

That the Toggle Gear wants to go up first all the time. Sometimes I like to put green lights just above my landing legs on my landers, to show they are "good". But whenever I trigger the Landing gear it does nothing first (cuz it wants to go up first), and the lights come on, It's annoying.

- - - Updated - - -

The lack of detail in the contract descriptions. I mean, would it kill to say that you want new science around [insert celestial body's name]? I mean, there's only so much science I can gather with the stuff at hand, and now I've just wasted so much time and money...

Also, perhaps a small display of a map/globe within mission control would be good for some of the survey contracts:

*Goes to Mission Control, waits for it to load

Hey look, new survey contract! Well, I guess I'll just head over to the tracking station to see where it wants me to go...

*Goes to the tracking station, waits for it to load

Err, so I guess there's more than one contract for surveys available.

Hm...

Which one was it?

*Heads back to Mission Control, waits for it to load

Ah, so that's what it's called.

*Heads back to the tracking station, waits for it to load. Again.

Err, that one is a bit high in altitude and far to reach with my current funds and tech tree... How much money am I getting in advance?

*Heads back to Mission control, waits for it to load. Again.

Hm, it's nowhere near enough to make me comfortable about it. It's possible, but it may be worth my time to go with this one instead. Now, let's see it in the tracking station...

And so it goes on

I think a lot of these pet peeves could be legitimate suggestions.

lol, I can't stop laughing because its SOO TRUE We've all done this.. about 100 times in our first play through...

Also the ability to TURN OFF those blasted area's on the globe map... So hard to figure out where the crap anything is, if you're not careful you can easily go to the wrong orbit, since you have 5 others around, some the same color, and damn near the same rotation/height/etc.

[Dr-Drunk]

1. The fact that there's no way to tell in the VAB wich way your rocket is pointed. An indicator for this would be nice.

2. The fact that contracts aren't as fleshed out as I'd like or make you do stupid things. (You'd end up with 120 stations around the mun before the year ends ... and don't get me started on the contract to test Launch Clamps in orbit around Minmus....)

3. The fact that Kerbals apparently pay their multi billion dollar space program a few thousand bucks to deploy satellites for them. I'd imagine NASA's margins are a fair bit bigger. (I know this is tweakable but if Normal difficulty is play as intended like it usually is the numbers are way off)

4. The fact the techtree becomes exhausted rather quickly, with nothing more to spend science on. My current carreer save has 5000 leftover science now and there's nothing I can do with that.

But all things considdered I love KSP! I mean it's really just small quality of life things that bug me and most of those can be fixed with mods anyway.

[Ph34rb0t]

Waiting for updated/compatible mods after every new release and losing a good one in the process.

[MacroNova]

It bugs me that multiple parachutes clip through each other.

[Deadpangod3]

alot of complaints i see in here are unfixable/ not ksp's fault

jittering orbits:

computers can only simulate physics so far, when you get to a point of smallness and accuracy theres going to be errors, hence why its called "floating point errors"

you pack a supercomputer into a tiny home computer and then come back, even then it might not be completely solved, remember, NASA landed on the Moon with a supercomputer of the time that has less processing power then your iphone, we've come a long way, but we still have a ways to go before we can simulate physics on a home computer perfectly.

no axial tilt:

limitation of Unity, talk to them and stop whining here.

rocket orientation:

the way it is in the VAB is how it will be on the launchpad, if thats not good enough, look out the open VAB door and picture your rocket on the launchpad out there in its current orientation.

[MacroNova]

rocket orientation:

the way it is in the VAB is how it will be on the launchpad, if thats not good enough, look out the open VAB door and picture your rocket on the launchpad out there in its current orientation.

Are you sure? I feel like that's not always the case. Sometimes the rocket seems surprisingly rotated from what I expected.

[neamerjell]

Where is that dead 64 bit horse? I wanna beat it some more...

My major pet peeves are:

- out of memory crashes even though I have 8 GB

- I love the new filter organization system in 0.90, but I still can't easily find what I want! I'm gonna try a filter extension mod I found see if that helps

- having to exit the game and copy files to load a craft in career mode that I made in sandbox -hey dev's you listening!? This one is a biggie for me! If you make a way to do this in-game, you will have my undying gratitude!

- Just when I get all the mods I like updated and installed, steam updates KSP to a new version and breaks them! I know, they're still working on it, and I appreciate the work, but it still bugs me when that happens...

[airelibre]

I agree with almost everything here already. My one to add would be when you literally can't create a maneuver node, and you have to go to the tracking centre and reopen the flight for it to be possible to create them.

Also, it would be good if when you create a node very close to either the periapsis or apoapsis, it locks on to them. I often create a circularising node when I'm trying to achieve orbit, and then have to zoom all the way in and move the node closer to the apoapsis so that the resulting orbit isn't massively eccentric.

[Deadpangod3]

Are you sure? I feel like that's not always the case. Sometimes the rocket seems surprisingly rotated from what I expected.

i heard this from, i think it was Kasper, i just know i asked why my rockets were rotated in the VAB in twitch chat while ksptv was streaming and someone from squad told me it was rotated to be aligned with the launchpad, im pretty sure someone from squad can verify-deny it.

[tetryds]

i heard this from, i think it was Kasper, i just know i asked why my rockets were rotated in the VAB in twitch chat while ksptv was streaming and someone from squad told me it was rotated to be aligned with the launchpad, im pretty sure someone from squad can verify-deny it.

I am not a dev, but I can confirm this.

The ship used to be turned sideways relative to the launchpad on the background, then it was changed to match what it will actually be like when it's on the launchpad.

This changed on 0.24 I think.

[klesh]

I dislike how the next and previous arrow buttons in the SPH/VAB are at the bottom, when I have to be at the top to select a tab of parts:

Where was that again? Oh, right, Aerodynamics (top click)... hmm, maybe page 2 (bottom click), oh wait, its in structural (top click), oh, page 2 (bottom click).

[Derfel]

To be honest, my pet peeve is KSP itself. I found the game about 7 months ago and found it very difficult at first, with tutorials I slowly learnt how to build and maneuver my crafts and I was very pleased with myself when I managed to finally land on the Mun. The game frequently crashed, but it was an EA game so I wasn't surprised. After a week or so of playing I started to install mods and spend more and more time playing KSP. The game was still crashing a lot but I assumed the bugs would be fixed with each update.

There were many little bugs, but I bore through them and played the game. With each update the game didn't get any better and seemed to develop more and more bugs, it seemed that every bug that was fixed brought out 10 more bugs. Buy 0.24 I finally had a somewhat stable game running in x32 with about 25 mods running with it. I managed tom stop Steam from updating the game automatically and I really enjoyed playing the game, not because of the core game itself but because of the hours of fun added by the mods I installed.

Two weeks ago Steam for some reason updated me to 0.90 and I spent another hour fixing and updating all my mods so that I could play the game. It seems that there are now more bugs and there don't seem to be any new features. I've removed the game out of frustration many times because it's so unstable.

Squad have given us a x64 version that doesn't work and a x32 version that crashes if you so much as install a couple of mods due to the high memory usage of the game. I can't create crafts any more due to the numerous bugs in the hangers and launching has become nigh on impossible due to the new clipping bugs. Squad haven't even added anything new as the new "levelling up bases" is just another way to add a few hours of grinding to the grind that is career mode and all the other "new" features have been stolen from previous mod.

KSP is my pet peeve because it started off a great game, but it's gone the way that close to every EA game has gone. The developer has earned some money and rather than complete the game or fix, they're content to sit back, not fix anything and continue to steal mods to release as "new features".

[Superfluous J]

alot of complaints

These aren't complaints, they're pet peeves. Very similar but we acknolwedge that most won't share our feelings. The fact that many do share some actually makes them far less "pet"

no axial tilt:

limitation of Unity, talk to them and stop whining here.

Actually the math to rotate a sphere is pretty simple. It'd add to some of the overhead in the game but there's no reason they can't, as you cross from one SOI to another, apply a rotation to your ship. I don't know enough about unity to know if they can also DISPLAY these rotations in other SOIs. But they could at LEAST rotate where planets are in relation to you.

rocket orientation:

the way it is in the VAB is how it will be on the launchpad, if thats not good enough, look out the open VAB door and picture your rocket on the launchpad out there in its current orientation.

Are you sure? I feel like that's not always the case. Sometimes the rocket seems surprisingly rotated from what I expected.

I've never seen it any other way. Though in past versions it was 90 degrees rotated which always annoyed me (It used to be a pet peeve). I'm happy they fixed it.

[cantab]

The fact that Kerbals apparently pay their multi billion dollar space program a few thousand bucks to deploy satellites for them.

Nowhere is it said or implied that one fund is remotely near one US dollar in value.

jittering orbits:

computers can only simulate physics so far, when you get to a point of smallness and accuracy theres going to be errors, hence why its called "floating point errors"

When a rocket is not thrusting from any part its centre of mass is not accelerating. This could be coded into the physics engine.

no axial tilt:

limitation of Unity, talk to them and stop whining here.

I don't buy this. By all accounts Unity makes giving the celestials differing axial orientations difficult, but it made maintaining stable physics over interplanetary physics difficult too. The latter was solved (krakensbane), axial tilt could be resolved too if Squad wanted to put the effort in. At the moment of course they are focussed on more visible features - until we get a Uranus analogue axial tilt isn't really apparent.

On rocket orientation:

The current behaviour is that the VAB door faces east. Rocket parts default to their ventral (down) side north.

The old behaviour was that the VAB door faced north, or at least the editor acted that way, and rocket parts defaulted as today to their ventral side north.

Incidentally this qualifies as one of my peeves. I think the behaviour should be that the VAB door faces east and rocket parts default to their ventral side east. That way you do an eastwards pitchover rather than a yawover.

Where problems tend to arise is if you rotate the whole rocket then remove part of it, the removed part goes back to its original orientation. For example:

Start with a command pod.

Add another command pod below it. The two will line up.

Rotate the whole rocket around the vertical axis.

Remove and replace the lower command pod. It will revert to its default orientation and thus be misaligned with the upper pod.

[Master Tao]

@Derfel:

It sounds like you're saying that SQUAD (the developers of KSP) is affiliated with EA. AFAIK, they have nothing to do with each other.

Steam does automatically update your games by default, but you can disable that. You can also revert to the most recent version of KSP by reverting to the "most recent beta."

As for the new features in 0.90, I'll just refer you to the FAQ.

If you're encountering reproducible bugs, I'd ask you to post them in the Support (unmodded installs) or Support (modded installs) forums to help SQUAD track them down or find workarounds and fixes. Be sure to read the stickied threads in each forum.

[Superfluous J]

With the Elon Musk thing fresh, I was reminded of one of my peeves.

People calling it "Kerbal" instead of "KSP." I don't know why, but that annoys me more than when people pronounced Mun "muhn."