Better Than Starting Manned (Flower's WIP KSP mod )

[FlowerChild]

Holy crap...wasn't expecting this:

http://kerbaldevteam.tumblr.com/post/71 ... ing-manned

Gratz to you too Icy, I suspect that video is about to get a lot of views :)

[brab]

Regarding FAR: does it make the learning curve much steeper? In particular, is it possible to play BTSM + FAR without having played vanilla + FAR?

(While I'm at it: thanks a lot for BTSM. I had not played KSP for about a year, and BTSM has made it fun again!)

[Idrick]

Still time for feedback from people too tonight if anyone has any last minute input to add to the mix.

You had probably guessed, but I'm definitely liking what FAR brings to the table as far as game-play addition and aerodynamics.

An update on my progress: Finished doing gravitational scans of Kerbin, unlocked Electronics, and used the LV-T30 engine to send a probe to the moon and took high and low orbit temp and barometer readings as well as many gravitational readings. Been a long time since I did a orbital body transfer, had some hairy moments realizing my orbit was pointing right through the moon's core, took a bit to correct it ;) .Unlocked Landing and Advanced Flight control with the points from my first moon probe, and am now preparing more probes to send to the moon and minimus. Tech tree progression is making a lot of sense, slowly opening new opportunities.

My manned flight is at a standstill after unlocking the MK1 pod due to the MK16 parachute not being able to sustain it. Tried doing the workaround seen earlier in the thread of attaching boosters to allow for more parachutes, but the boosters have a tendency to burn up or cause me to come in at a bad angle due to CoM being off ;). Saw that the MK16-XL parachute was a little on the large side once I got it, so I'll probably have to wait on MK2 command or radial chutes to do manned travel.

[Stormweaver]

Holy crap...wasn't expecting this:

http://kerbaldevteam.tumblr.com/post/71 ... ing-manned

Gratz to you too Icy, I suspect that video is about to get a lot of views :)

inb4 thread is invaded by kerbalboos kerboos Jebboos? and icy wants BTSM in a mod pack.

[DaveYanakov]

Congrats on the recognition, FC. That seems like a pretty big deal and I am curious as to how it will affect the download numbers.

Regarding FAR: does it make the learning curve much steeper? In particular, is it possible to play BTSM + FAR without having played vanilla + FAR?

(While I'm at it: thanks a lot for BTSM. I had not played KSP for about a year, and BTSM has made it fun again!)

I had not made use of FAR until I installed it for this prerelease and I didn't have too much trouble figuring things out. It definitely steepens the learning curve but things do feel slightly more intuitive now.

[icynewyear]

Holy crap...wasn't expecting this:

http://kerbaldevteam.tumblr.com/post/71 ... ing-manned

Gratz to you too Icy, I suspect that video is about to get a lot of views :)

Grats man! Thats what? 2 for 2 on dev recognition of the Better Than series?

[kregoth]

Holy crap...wasn't expecting this:

http://kerbaldevteam.tumblr.com/post/71 ... ing-manned

Gratz to you too Icy, I suspect that video is about to get a lot of views :)

Damnit BTW getting finished is fucked now! haha, why did you have to go get all creative and crap with KSP? (not complaining, ok maybe a little :P) Glad to see you got kerballed! The mod is awesome, makes KSP feel like a game rather than a toy box.

I think BTW needs a Kerbal easter egg now :) be cool to easter egg all your mods with easter eggs of your mods :)

[Renegrade]

Otherwise, since I heard about it, I haven't been able to forget that the aircraft landing gear weigh half a ton each. It seems...rather heavy for landing gear for light aircraft. And the parachute/Mk-1 command pod issue is a pain, what with the detachment and exploding.

That 1/2 ton nonsense pissed me off so much I cobbled together a part file that adds "light small gear bay", weighing only fifty kilograms each, using Squad's assets (I add it to the Aero tab, as BTSM tabs > vanilla tabs)

In vanilla, the heavy gear pull the center-of-mass way below the thrust line, creating a torque that pushes the plane nose towards the runway :C Counteracting three gear bays pretty much involves putting an extra jet fuel tank above the fuselage. Plus in stock, well, that's 1.5 tons of extra drag-mass.

I have no idea why they're so heavy in stock, and also.. where is the "large gear bay"?

Anyways, I don't have any "NUUUUU" about FAR. It has advantages and drawbacks, leaving me kinda neutral, but that just means that I'm good either way. ;)

Also grats to FC & Icy on the Dev Blog entry!

[FlowerChild]

Well, after sleeping on the FAR thing, I think I've reached the conclusion I should not yet reach any conclusions :)

I did however nail down what I think is my hesitation here:

What I am finding is that the FAR integrated version does not "feel" like stock KSP. Much like it is with BTW, retaining the original feel of the game while expanding upon it and refining it is rather important to me. In this case, I feel like the FAR version winds up feeling like a different game. A good one, with its own merits, but a different game none the less.

I think the mod spotlight from Squad and the associated description served to remind me of that, and thus my hesitation has returned. I do not feel that if Squad implemented (and I really wish I knew for certain whether they intended to) a new aerodynamics model for KSP, this is how it would wind up playing. I suspect it would rest somewhere in between this and where KSP is now, which would fit in much more seamlessly with everything else.

I also do not feel when so much attention is on the mod as a result of that spotlight that it would be wise to diverge so radically from the gameplay already present.

So...I'm going to put this decision off once again and keep developing the stock aero version for the time being. Sorry for the false alarm guys. I think many of you know how much thought I put into these kinds of design decisions, and with me still not feeling any strong inclination one way or another, I think it would be a mistake to force the issue at present and potentially commit to something I may wind up regretting later.

[Stormweaver]

Yay

Spoiler

Show

This was my first real experience with a non-kerban atmosphere, and...a lot happened.

To begin with, I needed to design a landing module with >4500 electrical charge. This was...rather difficult - since a lot of the structural pieces have a rather high amount of lift/drag/whatever, making something that could actually hold that much charge tended to have a rather hefty lift rating - hefty enough that it made it's launcher almost impossible to fly up. But since fairings weren't an option, I had to build my rocket in such a way that all the individual stages other than the interplanetary poodle had a bunch of drag.

Worthy of note here; The rockomax brand adapters have a lot of drag, and this is what caused the problems. I solved the problem by...well, using a pair of strutted rockomax adapters between the mainsails and the fuel tanks. Which just about brought the lift down below the center of mass of each stage.

The problem with having a lot of drag is it doesn't make things fly particularly efficiently; which I discovered *just* as I'd managed to get a 20000km periapsis above eve. And since my RCS thrusters weren't particularly well balanced for an empty fuel tank....it took a while to get that down to an atmospheric level. Of course, KSP being KSP, the moment I entered eve's sphere of influence, my periapsis decided to drop below the bloody planet's surface. so, another minute or so of RCS burns later, I had a nice comfortable 30km periapsis.

Re-entry was terrifying; the ship had 8 solar panels to guarantee a full set of batteries when I got there and it sounded awesome. the interplanetary stage slowly crumbled to nothing and my heatshield dropped to about half ablative shielding before I slowed down enough to actually be safe.

and then...I went down. Really, really slowly. when I actually bothered deploying my parachutes at 1km, I was dropping at a nice sedate 25m/s and somewhat tempted to just let the atmosphere cushion me :3 but I open just the two of them and landed without incident. And by my guess, about 500m from a rather big lake.

So yeah, science was gained. And now I finally have solar panels that will work out at duna without having to abuse really high drag parts to get out of kerbin's atmosphere. yay!
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

On the FAR thing; That makes a lot of sense. Not much more to say really :p

Edit; fixed image

[FlowerChild]

On the FAR thing; That makes a lot of sense. Not much more to say really :p

Yeah, that's fair enough man. With few exceptions, I don't think this has been a clear cut thing for anyone, which echoes my own feelings on it.

It's probably one of the toughest design decisions I've had to make over the past few years of modding due to the ambiguity of it :)

Congrats on the Eve mission man! BTW: I'm considering porting over the thrust corrector code from the FAR branch to the stock aero one because of the impact it'll have on increasing the value of stuff like the aerospike engine in thick atmospheres (without the dramatic ISP adjustments mind you). Given your experience with the above, how does that sound to you?

Personally I think increased fuel consumption, the way stock ISP works, isn't particularly noticeable for the most part, whereas thrust adjustments will make different planets "feel" very different and thus require different rocket design strategies.

[Stormweaver]

On the FAR thing; That makes a lot of sense. Not much more to say really :p

Yeah, that's fair enough man. With few exceptions, I don't think this has been a clear cut thing for anyone, which echoes my own feelings on it.

It's probably one of the toughest design decisions I've had to make over the past few years of modding due to the ambiguity of it :)

Congrats on the Eve mission man! BTW: I'm considering porting over the thrust corrector code from the FAR branch to the stock aero one because of the impact it'll have on increasing the value of stuff like the aerospike engine in thick atmospheres (without the dramatic ISP adjustments mind you). Given your experience with the above, how does that sound to you?

Personally I think increased fuel consumption, the way stock ISP works, isn't particularly noticeable for the most part, whereas thrust adjustments will make different planets "feel" very different and thus require different rocket design strategies.

It's definitely one of the things I like about so yeah; awesome man.

Despite it being put on hiatus for now I'm going to keep playing this version through so I've got something to compare it with later on; as I can definitely see an aerospike enabling an escape from Eve's atmosphere with FAR for example, but the same project in vKSP aerodynamics....yeah. End game content right there.

[FlowerChild]

Despite it being put on hiatus for now I'm going to keep playing this version through so I've got something to compare it with later on; as I can definitely see an aerospike enabling an escape from Eve's atmosphere with FAR for example, but the same project in vKSP aerodynamics....yeah. End game content right there.

Yeah, that's fair. What I might do though is put out one more prerelease of this version with the life support changes I'm working on now so you'll have something more closely resembling the stock version to play around with (and which I can playtest as well).

Otherwise, there's going to be some pretty major improvements in this next "official" release that you're going to be missing out on, which may tend to skew perceptions.

And yeah, I think I'll go with the thrust corrector in the stock version. It's definitely something I like as well, and that part doesn't suffer from the same ambiguity. I'll also likely be integrating the science cost modifications for the various nodes into the stock version with this next release, as I think that's something else that really benefits the late game and helps make node purchases more meaningful in making it a tougher choice if you're thinking about buying ahead of your current tech level.

So yeah, I guess this next one will be my big "not backwards compatible" release given how big even the life support changes alone will be. I'll take this opportunity then to integrate the more save-breaking aspects of the FAR version.

[DaveYanakov]

I managed to get another hour with the FAR integration and I really do like it but it very strongly feels like a very low bang for the buck compared to your usual preferred ratios. The drag part seems to have fixed the major issue of probes without SAS flipping on re-entry and while it does feel like a better experience to someone who never really played stock KSP, I can see a lot of people being annoyed by the steeper early game curve.

Having rockets that tend to fly very straight on their own is nice, I just don't see it as being worth the budget compared to the other issues in your list. I will keep the FAR version on hand to play around with to see how things develop past the Mun probing phase and get back to you when I can steal some more time.

[FlowerChild]

I managed to get another hour with the FAR integration and I really do like it but it very strongly feels like a very low bang for the buck compared to your usual preferred ratios. The drag part seems to have fixed the major issue of probes without SAS flipping on re-entry and while it does feel like a better experience to someone who never really played stock KSP, I can see a lot of people being annoyed by the steeper early game curve.

Well, the flipping issue I actually corrected with the last release of stock-aero BTSM, so that isn't as big a deal anymore. My solution was rather "gamey" so I'm not entirely happy with it, but at least it's something players can now resolve in game without punching any monitors :)

So, what we're largely coming down to in what I feel it really brings to gameplay is the value of nosecones and other aero parts, which I think does great things for balancing the value of various branches in the tech tree, making for more interesting node purchase choices. The addition of fairings would also amplify that, although would likely involve a lot more work on my part to get the kind of fairings I want, as I outlined earlier in the thread.

Beyond that, it also reduces the effectiveness of exploity horizontal rocket designs greatly, and thus makes rocket design more interesting overall.

Now, if I could get the above with a reasonable amount of effort, without so radically departing from the stock KSP feel, I would be a very happy camper indeed. Right now though, I view that departure in terms of feel as being the negative here that is offsetting the positive and making this change feel rather low impact overall.

[Stormweaver]

So, what we're largely coming down to in what I feel it really brings to gameplay is the value of nosecones and other aero parts, which I think does great things for balancing the value of various branches in the tech tree, making for more interesting node purchase choices. The addition of fairings would also amplify that, although would likely involve a lot more work on my part to get the kind of fairings I want, as I outlined earlier in the thread.

Yeah, having those central nodes be 'Heatshields and junk' does kinda feel odd in the non-FAR version. With FAR, they were often the first node I purchased :3

Speaking of nosecones; You probably already have a list of ideas about them, but would it be possible to do to them what vKSP did to the RCS thrusters and parachutes, and give them magical anti-drag? I mean it probably wouldn't do all that much what with them having to compete with dragmass from everything else, but if the reduced thrust from ISP is being implemented then it'd at least give them a little bit of purpose in the atmosphere. Kinda.

[FlowerChild]

Speaking of nosecones; You probably already have a list of ideas about them, but would it be possible to do to them what vKSP did to the RCS thrusters and parachutes, and give them magical anti-drag? I mean it probably wouldn't do all that much what with them having to compete with dragmass from everything else, but if the reduced thrust from ISP is being implemented then it'd at least give them a little bit of purpose in the atmosphere. Kinda.

They already do actually :)

I think that was actually the change mentioned in .22 or something about "nose cones now help stability" which no one could figure out, as they too have the magical anti-drag.

It's not as pronounced as on RCS thrusters mind you, which is what made those things particularly bad. I still can't figure out a valid reason as to why they were set that way.

[Stormweaver]

They already do actually :)

I'm not sure if I should be happy that my idea was so good it was already part of the game, or sad that it doesn't really help and the difference isn't actually noticeable.

[FlowerChild]

I'm not sure if I should be happy that my idea was so good it was already part of the game, or sad that it doesn't really help and the difference isn't actually noticeable.

I'd say best bet is to be sad they didn't revamp the aero model instead of trying to put bandaids like this on it ;)

It's one of the things that makes it ambiguous to me as to whether they ever intend to do anything about it, as if they were, there would be no reason to invest time trying to "fix" the old one. I guess we could hope though that the irrelevance of such a change will convince them something more needs to be done.

[FlowerChild]

Oh, one thing worth mentioning about "negative drag" on nose cones, is that it doesn't really work very well in the first place :)

If you're using them only as actual nose-cones all is good, as it will tend to orient the ship towards the direction of travel.

However, if you also use them, which I think would be a fairly common thing to do, to say for example cap a bunch of short boosters at the bottom of your rocket, what that will serve to do if I am understanding the system correctly (which isn't a given considering how messed up it is), is to destabilize your craft by creating these "negative drag" zones towards the bottom. Considering you probably have more such caps than the single nose cone you have up top, net effect would be destabilization, thus causing it to have the opposite result as one would expect.

So yeah, not only is it a hardly noticeable effect, the intended result is essentially broken and producing the opposite effect on many designs :P

[Psion]

...damnit. that explains why my big rockets always fell apart with nosecones. I always capped all the rockets, including the ones on the bottom stages. It always caused them to shake apart to the point i just avoided using nosecones at all...

[FlowerChild]

...damnit. that explains why my big rockets always fell apart with nosecones. I always capped all the rockets, including the ones on the bottom stages. It always caused them to shake apart to the point i just avoided using nosecones at all...

There you go.

And there I go again unraveling the mysteries of stock aero at the cost of a great number of my own sanity points :)

Even worse though, RCS thrusters were probably having a much more pronounced effect of this nature before I corrected the values, and given people tend to place them at either end of their ships, which would make both ends effectively want to orient towards the direction of travel...yeah.

[brab]

However, if you also use them, which I think would be a fairly common thing to do, to say for example cap a bunch of short boosters at the bottom of your rocket, what that will serve to do if I am understanding the system correctly (which isn't a given considering how messed up it is), is to destabilize your craft by creating these "negative drag" zones towards the bottom. Considering you probably have more such caps than the single nose cone you have up top, net effect would be destabilization, thus causing it to have the opposite result as one would expect.

Thank you so much for this explanation! I was always putting them on my boosters, thinking it would make the rocket more stable, but could not understand why it was harder to keep straight. It makes sense now.

[Renegrade]

However, if you also use them, which I think would be a fairly common thing to do, to say for example cap a bunch of short boosters at the bottom of your rocket, what that will serve to do if I am understanding the system correctly (which isn't a given considering how messed up it is), is to destabilize your craft by creating these "negative drag" zones towards the bottom. Considering you probably have more such caps than the single nose cone you have up top, net effect would be destabilization, thus causing it to have the opposite result as one would expect.

That sounds about right to me too. There's a post out there by HarvestR that specifically states that it's supposed to pull the nose of the rocket upwards during ascent .. so if it's not on the nose.. d'oh!

So yeah, not only is it a hardly noticeable effect, the intended result is essentially broken and producing the opposite effect on many designs :P

Yep! The only thing they're good for on SRBs is to help keep them from overheating. And slow your rocket down a tiny bit. At the cost of stability :S And control surfaces can do all of the above too, but without the stability penalty.

If I were Squad, I would have made them zero mass (and therefore zero drag), but also reduce the overall drag of the whole ship by a small (and capped) percentage. Or at least just zero mass/drag, so a rocket can look cool without being slow. Ugh.

(I'd hate to think of the horrible exploits that would have happened if they'd made it actually a negative drag or negative mass.. anti-grav cones?)

[FlowerChild]

If I were Squad, I would have made them zero mass (and therefore zero drag), but also reduce the overall drag of the whole ship by a small (and capped) percentage. Or at least just zero mass/drag, so a rocket can look cool without being slow. Ugh.

Man, honestly I think it's just time for a new aero model :)

I think bandaids like the above are inevitably going to have problems like I described where they may work well in some circumstances but will behave in a counter intuitive fashion in others. I think inevitably the more time they spend futzing around with trying to make the old system behave in a reasonable manner will ultimately be wasted when they realize they just need a new system.

I don't think they need to go full-blown realism/simulator on this, or even that they should, but I do think that they need an aero model that's somewhat based on how these things really work so that it will behave as most people would expect it to.

Right now they have a game which is largely based on rocket design and flight, and the first thing people encounter in that in every single mission is in atmosphere flight where things aren't behaving the way you'd expect, and even basic gut-level rocket design principles like "put a nosecone on it to make it go fasta!" are having the opposite effect in many circumstances than you'd expect. I thus think it's a problem that simply needs to be addressed. Maybe set aside an entire release to revamp the aero model and rebalance the game to fit it, but yeah, I think the longer they put this off, the bigger a problem it's going to become.

Reserving a release for just that might not be a popular move in the community's eyes, but I think it's a very necessary one.