The Kerbal Space Program (KSP) Thread

[Harrod]

what is the limiting hardware

Not really sure, I'm running it on the system in my sig. I ended up crashing something else into it and later deleting the save and starting over.

That ship probably had close to 1300 parts on it and anytime I got near it the game would slow down.

EDIT: It's a good deal at the price it's at right now. This is one of the few games that I'd say I am glad I bought, this is coming from someone with 257 games on steam.

 

[shortylickens]

multi threaded?

so should a 8350 run this game well?

Better than mine, but you have to remember the game is still in beta, and the engine was not really designed to handle thousands of moving parts simultaneously. Again, that will improve as they get closer to finish. Heck, they might even have PhysX support at some point. I dont know.

 

[Keeper]

Better than mine, but you have to remember the game is still in beta, and the engine was not really designed to handle thousands of moving parts simultaneously. Again, that will improve as they get closer to finish. Heck, they might even have PhysX support at some point. I dont know.

GOD I hope ONLY for eye candy and not actual PHYSICS. I suck at this game as is....

I can get into orbit sand box with MODERATE difficulty.
Career mode... MAN I suck. My craft just tumbles and turns and I hit that low point way too fast, thus miss the firing point cause I am trying to steer manually since I burnt up all my juice (electric) on the accent.
BUT LOVING IT.
And I was off by 2 weeks..... In an earlier post I stated anyone who wanted the game wait till after I bought it as odds are in will go on sale the following week..... CURSE YOU STEAM GODS!!!!!!!

 

[chihlidog]

GOD I hope ONLY for eye candy and not actual PHYSICS. I suck at this game as is....

I can get into orbit sand box with MODERATE difficulty.
Career mode... MAN I suck. My craft just tumbles and turns and I hit that low point way too fast, thus miss the firing point cause I am trying to steer manually since I burnt up all my juice (electric) on the accent.
BUT LOVING IT.
And I was off by 2 weeks..... In an earlier post I stated anyone who wanted the game wait till after I bought it as odds are in will go on sale the following week..... CURSE YOU STEAM GODS!!!!!!!

I feel like I suck at the game still, too.....but you cant even get into orbit in sandbox? Dude....orbit is EASY. Hitting a precise orbit or repeating a consistent orbit is tough, but simply getting a craft into orbit shouldnt trouble you much at all.

Remember to conserve fuel in the lower atmosphere. Dont try and go too fast through it by burning your engines 100%. keep it steady and moving, but the rule of thumb I use is not to exceed 120m/s until I hit the thinner stage of atmosphere. Engines burn longer like this. Once I burn the first stage and am through the thicker atmosphere, I begin my turn towards 90 degrees.

Are you starting out with parts that are simply too heavy? The big command pod perhaps? Getting the big, heavy craft into orbit is significantly tougher of course.

I'm curious to see some of your designs that have given you trouble with orbit.


(And this is why I LOVE this game....endless variety. Utterly fascinating).

 

[shortylickens]

if you are having trouble, watch youtube videos. Theres probably more helpful stuff for Kerbal Space Program than any other video game.

 

[Tifosi248F1]

if you are having trouble, watch youtube videos. Theres probably more helpful stuff for Kerbal Space Program than any other video game.

Indeed. Scott Manley's videos are very helpful for beginners and advanced alike. He has quite a few videos aimed at building a basic rocket to orbit Kerbin, as well as how to control them during ascent and when to start maneuvering to achieve a good orbit without wasting loads of fuel. Once you get basic orbits down, you can move on to his videos about landing on other celestial bodies.

I'm sure there are other great videos from other player, but Scott's are very easy to understand and follow. Plus I believe he is one of Squad's external media partners, meaning he gets advanced access to updates to help show off what is new...so he's trusted by the devs.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

multi threaded?

so should a 8350 run this game well?

technically, ksp is multithreaded but the physics is not. physics will choke 1 core while the non-physics cpu load is barely worth mentioning.

 

[Keeper]

I feel like I suck at the game still, too.....but you cant even get into orbit in sandbox? Dude....orbit is EASY. Hitting a precise orbit or repeating a consistent orbit is tough, but simply getting a craft into orbit shouldnt trouble you much at all.

Remember to conserve fuel in the lower atmosphere. Dont try and go too fast through it by burning your engines 100%. keep it steady and moving, but the rule of thumb I use is not to exceed 120m/s until I hit the thinner stage of atmosphere. Engines burn longer like this. Once I burn the first stage and am through the thicker atmosphere, I begin my turn towards 90 degrees.

Are you starting out with parts that are simply too heavy? The big command pod perhaps? Getting the big, heavy craft into orbit is significantly tougher of course.

I'm curious to see some of your designs that have given you trouble with orbit.


(And this is why I LOVE this game....endless variety. Utterly fascinating).

PSSST I wrote I can with moderate difficulty..... Probably cause I am trying to do it with minimal parts.... Cause on career... ITS HARD LOL.. So I am trying to it seeing what do I need to get into orbit in the science tree.
Dunno.... Maybe I am just not a rocket scientist. PUN INTENDED LOL

Yeah, I love this game too.

 

[norseamd]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBQkdsajVE

 

[QuantumPion]

Yes it can be tricky to get into orbit in the first mission of career mode. The way to do it is to stack solid rocket boosters and staging them in such a way so as the next stage overheats and explodes the current stage. Getting the timing right is important as the thrust from the next stage will be zero until the current stage explodes.

 

[pontifex]

Any chance of this going on sale before the Steam summer sale? I played the demo awhile back and while it was a bit fun to build stuff, it seemed very limited. It looks like they came a long way since then (been watching Robbaz's videos) and it looks fun. I just don't want to pay full price now and end up not liking it.

 

[Revolution 11]

Any chance of this going on sale before the Steam summer sale? I played the demo awhile back and while it was a bit fun to build stuff, it seemed very limited. It looks like they came a long way since then (been watching Robbaz's videos) and it looks fun. I just don't want to pay full price now and end up not liking it.

There is a updated demo you can try out. It won't have all the updated features, ship parts, and polish but it has all the basic gameplay right there. And you can play it over and over again.

I don't know what the price is now but I bought it at version 17 for $23 and it was worth it. There might be a summer sale on this so you should wait for that if you like the demo.

 

[_Rick_]

I hope they get around to introducing a usable aerodynamic model into the game pretty soon.
Right now aircraft are pretty much broken (most of the time they act more like rockets), and rocket design with no regard for aero is also a bit of a joke. Even a static air resistance matrix, calculated for each craft would be much better than the current model, where off-center drag has no influence, but off-center weight will make things tip over.

And there's still no built-in way to get per-stage delta-v, mass or anything that helps in mission planning. Sure, with quicksave/load and trial and error, you can kind of pull it off, but still, calculating a launch window is pretty much impossible.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

PROBABLY CPU, as each and every part needs its physics constantly calculated and once you get massive rockets or stations with loads of individual items, it gets complicated.

Just for laughs I made a long skinny vessel with a buttload of struts. They too have tension and stress and pressure which must be calculated. Get enough of them, the game slows down.

I thought it used PhysX for most of that?

 

[shortylickens]

I thought it used PhysX for most of that?

PhysX is mostly for assloads of particles that have no purpose. Those trajectories actually matter, they need to be constantly recalculated as theres loads of forces working on each other all the time.

 

[QuantumPion]

I hope they get around to introducing a usable aerodynamic model into the game pretty soon.
Right now aircraft are pretty much broken (most of the time they act more like rockets), and rocket design with no regard for aero is also a bit of a joke. Even a static air resistance matrix, calculated for each craft would be much better than the current model, where off-center drag has no influence, but off-center weight will make things tip over.

There is mod called Ferram Aerospace Research which adds a realistic aerodynamic model which does all of this.

And there's still no built-in way to get per-stage delta-v, mass or anything that helps in mission planning. Sure, with quicksave/load and trial and error, you can kind of pull it off, but still, calculating a launch window is pretty much impossible.

There is a mod called Kerbal Engineer Redux which does all of this.

 

[JamesV]

I use Kerbal Engineer, but it doesn't work well at all for complicated rockets.

For career, I had a pod with all the science things attached, that would separate from it's fuel tanks and engines for the return trip (after landing on the Mun, and redocking). No need to carry that engine or fuel tank back. Kerbal Engineer uses decouplers to determine stages, and in cases like this, it just doesn't work.

Hoping this much needed info is built into the game at some point.

 

[QuantumPion]

I use Kerbal Engineer, but it doesn't work well at all for complicated rockets.

For career, I had a pod with all the science things attached, that would separate from it's fuel tanks and engines for the return trip (after landing on the Mun, and redocking). No need to carry that engine or fuel tank back. Kerbal Engineer uses decouplers to determine stages, and in cases like this, it just doesn't work.

Hoping this much needed info is built into the game at some point.

There is a way to do this iteratively. First build the craft with the probe attached. Next, using the tweakables menu, reduce the fuel until you have subtracted the delta-V necessary to get to the Mun. Then, remove the probe to see how much delta-V you have remaining. If you need more, add more and repeat the procedure.

 

[shortylickens]

God damn!
Am I the only person not using external mods to travel around?

 

[_Rick_]

There is mod called Ferram Aerospace Research which adds a realistic aerodynamic model which does all of this.



There is a mod called Kerbal Engineer Redux which does all of this.

Yeah, there's plenty of mods, but these should be core functionalities, and that's what I judge this game by.
They should use their early access millions to pay a few of these modders and get them commit access, or buy out their mods, or something.

 

[norseamd]

so i have all the 45 point technologies and i can get into orbit fairly easy

everything else seems like a big step up in the amount of work it is going to take to get there

 

[_Rick_]

so i have all the 45 point technologies and i can get into orbit fairly easy

everything else seems like a big step up in the amount of work it is going to take to get there

Not really.
Once you've covered all the biomes on Kerbin with all available experiments, you can go to Minmus from orbit with relatively little delta-V. I think a return trip is around 500-800, depending on how well you do your orbit transfer.
Given the tech you have, you can get a lander with materials lab there using a relatively simple 4-stage rocket. Lift stage (bunch of boosters will do), orbit stage (biggest liquid engine you have, ideally the central one from your lift stage), intercept and brake stage to get you ready for a landing, small engine, reasonably big tank, and finally a small tank and small engine on the lander, which you then lift off from Minmus on an equatorial orbit, and do an escape/insert burn into a highly elliptical Kerbin orbit, which usually only need another 30-50 delta-V to become sufficiently steep to allow you to aerobrake to landing.

If you have some spare fuel, bounce around on Minmus some, to get additional EVA reports and soil samples. Should give you around 500 science all-in-all.

Lost a Mun-lab on landing today, because for some reason the controls messed up. Ship behaved as though q and a were being pressed permanently. This persisted over the next launch, so I expect there's some kind of bug there. Oh well, it wasn't a very difficult mission anyway, just the Kerbin orbit is always a bit exciting, when lifting such heavy mass.

 

[shortylickens]

Yeah theres a crapload of Mun biomes and all of them need Temp, gravity, acceleration, EVA, surface, and crew report. Thats like 2000 points right there.

Oh, and low orbit over each biome.

GET BUSY!

 

[Tifosi248F1]

Yeah, there's plenty of mods, but these should be core functionalities, and that's what I judge this game by.
They should use their early access millions to pay a few of these modders and get them commit access, or buy out their mods, or something.

Says who? You? Certainly not the devs. The game isn't meant to be easy and hold your hand. They're not going to add in the things that Kerbal Engineer Redux does unless they deem it absolutely necessary. They've already stated as much in their dev reports and on the forums.

 

[_Rick_]

Says who? You? Certainly not the devs.

Usually the point of asking people for their money before the product is ready is to get their feedback on what features they want to see and implement them.
That's what early access is supposed to be about.
If people go ahead and make useful mods for a game before release, maybe that should indicate that the features added are highly desirable.

Also, working aerodynamics don't make the game "easier". Neither does the ability to plan missions from the ground instead of from orbit. It only means you don't have to frustratingly launch different payloads again and again into orbit, then use a calculator to figure out whether the upper stages delta-V is sufficient to perform the set of maneuver nodes you construct.

There is a difference between easiness, and ease of use. I'm not going to recommend the game as a full price purchase until those two things are done properly, as until then the game does not reward realistic design, nor does it pass beyond a trial-and-error spamming orgy.

My first Mün mission for example felt like a complete joke, I dumped fuel on approach, on starting back up, and on arriving back at Kerbin. I could've designed something more economical, and I suspect in the future there will be incentive for that, but I can never know ahead of launching if my craft will theoretically fit the mission profile.

Now, I love some experimentation, but then the same approach to penalizing wasteful missions will also penalize unsuccessful missions. Since reverting missions is one of the key mechanics, this has no real impact on anything, except mindless trial and error.

For this game to be good, yes it has to be challenging. But the player needs the data to face this challenge, and manually adding weights, calculating differential equations to determine true maneuvers from maneuver nodes and obtaining the resulting fuel consumption is not really fun. But of course, you're free to disagree. The devs aren't, as they want to sell a game that is fun to as many people as possible.