Squadcast Summary (2015-01-31) - The 'Wait For It..' Edition

[TMS]

Wasn't there a huge kerfuffle over the fact the fairings were going to be procedural?

Pretty sure there was.

Looks like the odds were more likely.

I think SQUAD described the procedural fairings as being "out of necessity" which, to me, implies that they're not real keen on procedural elements.

It's a shame, as getting procedural wings and tanks would be such a bonus.

[Nachtwind]

I think SQUAD described the procedural fairings as being "out of necessity" which, to me, implies that they're not real keen on procedural elements.

It's a shame, as getting procedural wings and tanks would be such a bonus.

Well.. i think there are two kind of people in the community.. those who want/need procedural parts and those who dont want them.. Most people i know draw some interest from the simple situation that you dont have the parts that always fit your needs so you have to tinker a craft out of the stuff you have. Others just want to have the perfect rocket suited to their needs..

I would guess that the wast number of players is of the first group, but i may be wrong there.

[Wjolcz]

Well.. i think there are two kind of people in the community.. those who want/need procedural parts and those who dont want them.. Most people i know draw some interest from the simple situation that you dont have the parts that always fit your needs so you have to tinker a craft out of the stuff you have. Others just want to have the perfect rocket suited to their needs..

I would guess that the wast number of players is of the first group, but i may be wrong there.

Procedural fairings are okay as long as they don't get ridiculous like the pFairings mod with massive eggs on top of slim rockets. The rest of the parts should stay the way they are now IMO.

[CaptRobau]

Well.. i think there are two kind of people in the community.. those who want/need procedural parts and those who dont want them.. Most people i know draw some interest from the simple situation that you dont have the parts that always fit your needs so you have to tinker a craft out of the stuff you have. Others just want to have the perfect rocket suited to their needs..

I would guess that the wast number of players is of the first group, but i may be wrong there.

Seeing as the Procedural Fairings mod is the #15 viewed thread in Addon Releases with a million views for its forum thread (no download stats due to GitHub), I think it's safe to say it's not the vast majority. I can imagine that fixed fairings are more popular among veterans and seeing as they are often more active/vocal on the forums, I think that could skew your view. I think the vast majority hasn't even tried fairings or don't care between the two.

[Jouni]

Seeing as the Procedural Fairings mod is the #15 viewed thread in Addon Releases with a million views for its forum thread (no download stats due to GitHub), I think it's safe to say it's not the vast majority. I can imagine that fixed fairings are more popular among veterans and seeing as they are often more active/vocal on the forums, I think that could skew your view. I think the vast majority hasn't even tried fairings or don't care between the two.

Some people also use Procedural Fairings, because there are no real alternatives to it. As far as I know, there are no mods that contain only fixed fairings, without a huge pile of other parts I'm not interested in.

[Nachtwind]

Well, i was thinking more of Tanks, Wings etc.. fairings are something interestering when the new Aero comes into play.. but well, we shall see.

[PB666]

lol, but the 909 should be called the lap-dog due to its rather shackled performance. I've named my engine mods also

I have the:

Mustang, Schnauzer, Miniature schnauzer, Minotaur, Maxotaur, Nutwarmer Atomic Rocket (due to its tendency to leak massive amounts or radioactivity). The Mino and Maxo are rescaled and tweaked 48-7S.

Better back my gamedata and parts folder now.

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Well.. i think there are two kind of people in the community.. those who want/need procedural parts and those who dont want them.. Most people i know draw some interest from the simple situation that you dont have the parts that always fit your needs so you have to tinker a craft out of the stuff you have. Others just want to have the perfect rocket suited to their needs..

I would guess that the wast number of players is of the first group, but i may be wrong there.

Yep, but occasionally you need that specialized part otherwise your millennium falcon will end up looking like a piece of space pizza or as others say 'a dogs dinner'. Lately I have taken to modding the MK1 tank into various shapes because it has simple shape and texture, modding the other stock tanks often ends up not fitting right. MK1 style looks more realistic than the later version of the tanks. In this case simple is better. Before I started reshaping the MK1 tank I had alot of dog dinner stuff.

OTOH, the MK2 spaceplane parts are an excellent example of a specialty design that open up whole new avenues of creation, the mods I've made of this series are limited to resource replacement and attachment node rotations. The problem with SPP is that if you go about re-dimensioning the parts they will look funny and not fit right to anything, but......if they perform their function so well to begin this, then that really isn't an issue.

[Wanderfound]

If your ship's orientation changes its drag, then calculating an aerobraking altitude is going to depend on your orientation.

How do people using FAR handle aerobraking?

With piloting and design skill.

Spaceplanes can control altitude aerodynamically, adjusting the length and intensity of the aerobrake as it goes. Capsule style things can be designed to be aerodynamically stable in the desired orientation.

[Yellowburn10]

If they don't call the atomic engines "nukes" they are missing an opportunity here.

I'm interested to see what parts they will add heat shields to. Like, if they put them on command pods but leave them off fuel tanks and engines, that means less recoverability of those parts.

[Renegrade]

This is good to know. Thank you.

Do you have pictures of your Tylo lander that you could post?

Absolutely. I have a mini journal here for the original 0.24.2 lander, and I've added two variants to the end. Unfortunately my original mockup was just a slapped together lander made by looking at this album, and I forgot to add the science modules. Revised tonnage is now 20.4t for a lighter edition (original lander has almost 50% extra delta-v and returned to orbit with a >500 surplus despite two serious mistakes), and 22.65t for the heavy lander that has a similar massively overbuilt margin.

A bit heavier than before, but still a doable thing.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

(Interesting to note that the science package weighs more than the lander can. I removed the batteries and panels from the new versions as those now have mass in Horrible Nerf. My calculated vis viva figures for a landing on Tylo is 4478-ish round trip starting/ending at 40km. A stop-drop landing would add a minimum of an extra 800 dv.)

Disclaimer: Heavy nerfing to the 48-7S is going to invalidate the old and new designs. Might have to build a new design around a T30 or something

Spaceplanes can control altitude aerodynamically, adjusting the length and intensity of the aerobrake as it goes. Capsule style things can be designed to be aerodynamically stable in the desired orientation.

Capsules can also control their altitude aerodynamically in FAR too (as the Apollo capsule did), just not as well as a winged design.

Edited February 1, 2015 by Renegrade

[regex]

Some people also use Procedural Fairings, because there are no real alternatives to it. As far as I know, there are no mods that contain only fixed fairings, without a huge pile of other parts I'm not interested in.

There's at least one. Also, pruning a directory tree isn't exactly hard. KW, for instance, is very easy to pare down to just the fairings.

Better back my gamedata and parts folder now.

Get ModuleManager and write a rename config. Edited February 1, 2015 by regex

[Jouni]

There's at least one. Also, pruning a directory tree isn't exactly hard. KW, for instance, is very easy to pare down to just the fairings.

I wasn't aware of that mod. I'll give it a try soon.

Pruning a directory tree isn't hard, but I'm lazy enough that I don't want to do it every year. Keeping the mods up-to-date on two computers, when KSP patches routinely break old versions of mods, takes so much effort that I avoid trying new mods and quickly uninstall all nonessential ones.

[basic.syntax]

You can also make a complete separate copy of the KSP folder tree, Steam only updates what it finds under ..\steamapps\common.

[Brotoro]

Absolutely. I have a mini journal here for the original 0.24.2 lander, and I've added two variants to the end...

OK. That looks similar to my most recent Tylo lander, except that I used two crew cabins and landed all the science equipment separately with a surface habitat. Good to see that it's doable with a 20% nerf. But I'll need something different when the 48-7s gets pounded.

[Ippo]

What do you mean artificial difficulty? Isn't everything in a game technically artificial difficulty? ~4500 m/s is the number they seem to have baselined for reaching orbit on Kerbin, so they have to make some changes to reach that number. I think revising engine Isp down is an elegant way of doing that. Compare the Mainsail (320SL/360Vac) to the F1 engine (263SL/304Vac). As long as they're not making the engines super inefficient, I think it's a good change.

It's an artificial difficulty in the sense that it's caused by improper physics. There's 1 extra km/s of dV to orbit because of the current aero model: with proper physics, the dV to orbit for Kerbin is ~3500 m/s, period.

It's not a value that should be "decided", as it's dictated by physics. So far, by questionable physics. Now, we are going to balance everything else in order to keep this value, which wasn't the right one in the first place.

And now everyone please feel free to start with the totally obvious stream of "ksp is not a simulator", "far is not a perfect model", and similar gibberish I won't care to respond since it's been hashed to death already.

[NFUN]

It's an artificial difficulty in the sense that it's caused by improper physics. There's 1 extra km/s of dV to orbit because of the current aero model: with proper physics, the dV to orbit for Kerbin is ~3500 m/s, period.

It's not a value that should be "decided", as it's dictated by physics. So far, by questionable physics. Now, we are going to balance everything else in order to keep this value, which wasn't the right one in the first place.

And now everyone please feel free to start with the totally obvious stream of "ksp is not a simulator", "far is not a perfect model", and similar gibberish I won't care to respond since it's been hashed to death already.

Whether or not the original difficulty was artificial or not doesn't matter in this case. The solar system and parts were balanced with the old aerodynamics in mind, and to save 1000 Dv per launch would quite significantly lower the difficulty. As the old requirement of 4.5k Dv to orbit was deemed acceptable and balanced, it would make the most sense to keep the challenge of reaching orbit the same.

[tater]

Increase the size of kerbin slightly, which fixes the problem.

[Ippo]

...and if you nerf the engines to keep the dV to LKO, you also make everything else more difficult, therefore not keeping the balance at all.

if you have less efficient engines, your mum landing becomes harder regardless of the aero model.

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Oh god my phone autocorrected mun with mum O.O

[regex]

Increase the size of kerbin slightly, which fixes the problem.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No, seriously...

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(this post made entirely in jest, no offense intended to anyone but Squad)

[BudgetHedgehog]

Personally, I'd have preferred them to scale up the system to keep the 4.4km/s number rather than nerf the engines. Or hell, just pick another number and stick with it. Or don't pick any number - 3.5km/s isn't 'cheating', it's what happens when the air acts like air rather than soup. Have X.Xm/s as the ÃŽâ€V to orbit and concentrate on making sure the engines are balanced against each other than against an arbitrary 4.4km/s. Not only because it's easier, but it means vaccum operations isn't as affected. Whatever the final ÃŽâ€V to orbit is can and will change and is irrelevant. What matters is that no engine is OP or useless and making sure that they meet that arbitrary 4.4km/s value means you're going to end up with unrealistically nerfed engines because the scale isn't right (see first sentence).

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As the old requirement of 4.5k Dv to orbit was deemed acceptable and balanced, it would make the most sense to keep the challenge of reaching orbit the same.

I don't see how getting an extra 1km/s ÃŽâ€V is harder - it's easily achieved by linking side boosters to the core, for example. Asparagus staging, onion staging, whatever. It's just a case of adding more fuel and putting an engine powerful enough to lift that extra fuel effectively. It's not difficult by any means. Granted, it might be for a new person, but you can blame that on the lack of rocket info (dV, TWR etc). Reaching orbit with a more realistic atmosphere will be harder anyway (no more '45 at 10k' or asparagus pancakes, for example) so having new players have to cope with realistic actual gravity turns rather than pitch programs while STILL requiring 4.4km/s.. well, let's just keep in mind Squad made 50% throttle the default "to help newbies, you know?".

[Pthigrivi]

Am I the only one who wouldn't mind an atmospheric across the board buff to everything? Just tighten the specialization on the Turbojet and things are pretty okay. Simplification of reaching orbit just means we have more time to devote to the real business of planetary exploration.

[tater]

Hehehe.

I can dream, right?

[regex]

Hehehe.

I can dream, right?

Yeah, still to much to hope that they'll come to their senses.

[Renegrade]

OK. That looks similar to my most recent Tylo lander, except that I used two crew cabins and landed all the science equipment separately with a surface habitat. Good to see that it's doable with a 20% nerf. But I'll need something different when the 48-7s gets pounded.

Yeah, the engine changes will definitely involve different solutions. Note that other engines may be changed too, so the final engine choice for the rocket is totally up in the air at this point. If others don't change too much though, might see T30 or Skipper-based designs.

(By the way, I'm actually personally okay with the 3500m/sec delta-v requirements; it's just that there seems to be a lot of concern over it, so I've been exploring various alternatives for some time as preparation for any changes that might be implemented)

[Superfluous J]

I think 1.2km/s less dV is well balanced by not being able to tack 45 degrees into the wind at 250m/s.