Kerbal Space Oddities

https://aphyr.com/posts/345-kerbal-space-oddities

by ra7 • 9 years ago

208 89 9 years ago

thearn4• 9 years ago

i can't help but love KSP. But I wish it was easier to just design the craft and missions, and not have to do the manual control. I like flight sims, but KSP controls are a bit too wonky for my tastes.

jfim• 9 years ago

KSP controls are a bit too wonky

You can always use mechjeb for that.

Govindae• 9 years ago

My first interest in programing, outside of the simple office automation scripting I was doing, started when I built an orbital rendevous calculator in KSP (back before they had orbit planning built in).

I eventually merged my mod into mechjeb, adding a whole slew of orbital calculation functions, and many fun space times were had by all.

SAI_Peregrinus• 9 years ago

There are mods for that. MechJeb and kOS come to mind: MechJeb includes an autopilot, kOS lets you program your own. There's also kRPC which lets you control KSP craft via RPC, so you can use a language that you like such as Python or Node.

King-Aaron• 9 years ago

MechJeb is about the only mod that I use on a vanilla install of KSP. I honestly feel that it's something that should be part of the game (although I can understand the hesitation to include it).

Cthulhu_2• 9 years ago

MechJeb is awesome, but I only tend to use it once I got the launching manually thing down properly - MechJeb can compensate for some bad design decisions. Some, that is.

pc862• 9 years ago

Ah yes, because after a hard day of programming I want to come home and relax by programming.

Ph4nt0m• 9 years ago

You need to get used to kOS scripting language but it is extremely powerful. You can script your whole mission from launch to landing to return. So it can be used for autonomous probes simulations or to automate parts of the mission (Apollo style).

hcarvalhoalves• 9 years ago

Once you have a good design (with just enough control surfaces, good aerodynamics and appropriate thrust-to-weight ratio), you get to low orbit with almost zero input [1][2]. If it requires a lot of input after picking up some speed off the launchpad, it might be a bad design.

The controls feel "wonky" for the most part because, since it's a game more than a simulator, you tend to have way more control authority than is realistically possible, specially with reaction wheels. There are some mods to rebalance that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_turn

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q_8TO4Ag0E

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel

PS: For someone who always dreamt about working in aerospace, KSP is a blast!

dwringer• 9 years ago

A lot of the fun in KSP can be finding the line between bad design and good design, and then trying to pilot your way through it (IMHO). I will never forget my first Apollo-style mission and just how many dozens of struts it took to hold together (this was before they added the current largest-diameter tanks/engines), and how hair-raising the piloting of it all was. To me, no game has ever matched the intensity of that experience, before or since.

madaxe_again• 9 years ago

It sounds like you want MechJeb, which removes a lot of the manual guesswork - it'll do automated ascent, descent, docking, hohmann transfers, etc. - I played vanilla for years but would always get tired of the tedious guesswork and was dubious about MJ, thinking it'd be game-breaking - but rather it's made the game 30x more playable and enjoyable, and doesn't sap the challenge one bit.

Only yesterday I ended up doing a return from mun orbit with bingo fuel by spinning a craft up to crazy longitudinal rpm and decoupling the descent stage at just the right moment.

sdenton4• 9 years ago

Love the seed probes; not a strategy I've tried!

I think it's almost always true that your second trip to the mun in kerbal is a rescue mission...

Cthulhu_2• 9 years ago

They're really handy in the latest version which requires you to set up a sattelite network for communication with unmanned probes, you'd need at least three (ish) to be able to communicate with a probe on a planet, and you'll need several in various positions around the sun to make it work across the solar system (in career mode you only unlock the strongest transmitter late in the science tree, and even then you'll need several).

flashman• 9 years ago

Having played early in the beta, and then picked it up again this year, I discovered the new need for antennas when my unmanned craft couldn't receive the commands to complete its orbital insertion around Duna.

I was... not pleased.

and0• 9 years ago

That sounds exciting!

I always felt like there wasn't a need to "build" much past the first Mun mission, and grinding for science performing slight variations on the same task to get new parts was really boring.

My first thought was how I wished I had to set up satellites (or some sort of infrastructure like remote fuel depots) to reach farther planets. That would also take time but be much more interesting.

sp332• 9 years ago

For anyone wondering what "spiral staging" is: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Asparagus_staging

Zardoz84• 9 years ago

IE, the same thing that Falcon Heavy is triying to do on real world.

lightbyte• 9 years ago

I thought they scrapped the crossfeed fuel idea because it was too complicated?

TeMPOraL5• 9 years ago

Known both in KSP and space industry as "asparagus staging", it's a pretty old idea. It's tough to implement in real life, though, because pumping fuel around adds a non-trivial amount of complexity to the rocket. FH might be the first ever production rocket to use it, actually.

EDIT nevermind, I didn't realize SpaceX scrapped the idea too.

cybersol• 9 years ago

Great article, but I am pretty sure Jebediah Kerman is NEVER shaken, even if he had to face off against Chuck Norris.

jonathankoren2• 9 years ago

I noticed that this write up is old (2014), so most of the designs shown won't work in the base game anymore. That's good, because why should you be able to launch what looks like a wedding cake?

I've been playing this game regularly for 3 years now. It has a vibrant modding community, and recently some of the more popular gameplay mods have made their way into the core game (mainly more realistic aerodynamics, resource mining, my favorite, "deadly reentry"). It's basically a SimCity game, but with rockets.

The one downside is that while it's a lot of fun at the beginning, it gets kind of monotonous at the end (if you can call it an end). Flying crew to and from Duna is hard. I've never done it. Even just sending a probe is hard to hit it.

LoSboccacc2• 9 years ago

It's mostly a question of dv. Getting the perfect transfer window is hard, but eyeballing a good enough one and doing some mid course correction is significantly easier.

If you put the sun at the center and kerbal at 3 o'clock, you get a good enough transfer window by waiting to having duna at 1 o'clock. You can then eject tangentially from kerbal sphere of influence and correct half way trough.

The only real plugin that I strongly suggest there is the aereobrake plugin, that'll show you the predictoion for aerobraking directly on the ksp map.

olex• 9 years ago

Back when KSP released their first version with other planets (2012 or so), I was a forum mod and tester for them, and I build a small website to simplify interplanetary transfers: http://ksp.olex.biz. It's still running and up-to-date, and apparently still used, despite there being a ton of other sites and ingame plugins that provide the same data in much better ways.

eterm• 9 years ago

I was amazed at how over-engineered their first rockets were. Having always played career mode I was 'forced' to do the minimum, getting to the Mun with only 2 or 3 engines total.

Flying to other planets is really difficult, something I still can't reliably do with hundreds of hours played. I've only sent probes to 3 of the other planets (Duna, Eve, Jool).

It can get monotonous, but when I play I am strongly motivated by trying to achieve something I never have before. (Or if I'm playing mods such as 'Real Solar System', but that's another step up again in difficulty).

omikun• 9 years ago

Knowing the transfer window is the key. Check out Launch Window Planner for KSP. It tells you when to start your transfer down to the second. If you're within a few minutes of that window, or even within a couple of days in that same section of the orbit, you'll get there fine with slight mid course correction.

Now that KSP lets you plan your intercepts several sphere of influences away also makes planning easier. Just adjust your maneuver nodes until you see an intercept, then follow them.

Fifer823• 9 years ago

I really love Kerbal Space Program but I stopped playing a couple of years back. Unity is really terrible. I remember landing 3 pieces of a moon base, and I was getting like 3fps... After another 3 weeks of making a space station, again was getting 5fps.

The funny thing was, I went out and splashed 1.5k on a new PC just for Kerbal, I loaded my save file of my moon base, and now I had 7fps....

Absolutely useless. KSP is like a Mr Universe Body Builder wearing a 3 year old girl's dress.

bagels• 9 years ago

They really improved performance drastically last year. It's totally playable on a Mac mini even.

cpv• 9 years ago

I understand what you are saying, but the latest version is a "big leap for kerbalkind". You should give it a try again. When I have time, I play it on a mid-range laptop.

golergka4• 9 years ago

Unity gets bad rep the same way FL studio (in 00s) or any other accessible creative tools do. Because they're the most accessible tools for beginners, they attract beginners and they use it to develop a lot of beginner-level products with all the downsides; however, these tools are quite capable of achieving AAA results in professional help.

Unity has nothing to do with KSP being laggy. KSP is a very ambitious game written by a beginner team; without Unity it couldn't have been made at all.

TeMPOraL5• 9 years ago

It's not really an argument against Unity per se, but low KSP performance had everything to do with that engine - because it ended up being CPU-bound through single-threaded physics. This problem is now solved, from what I remember.

Fifer823• 9 years ago

I have not yet played a Unity game which doesn't have the "unity look and feel". I don't think anyone is going to be able to convince me otherwise. I am happy to purchase a modern (in the last 3 months) popular unity game tonight. If you can think of one that doesn't run like a Flash SWF, I will buy it.

Mithaldu• 9 years ago

KSP is laggy because it's a ridiculously detailed physics simulation. This has nothing to do with Unity.

(And i say this as someone who hates Unity for the actual graphics handling bugs it has.)

robbyt• 9 years ago

Maybe it's laggy because apps in Unity are written in c# instead of c+?

TeMPOraL5• 9 years ago

It has absolutely everything to do with Unity - or at least it had, when Unity 4 single-threaded physics engine was used. AFAIK KSP now has a properly multi-threaded physics engine, and works much faster.

atomlib• 9 years ago

What are your system specs?

pc862• 9 years ago

I have a ~5-year old PC that was around $1,250 new. KSP still runs without issues. I don't know the frame rate but it's not low enough to affect performance in any meaningful way.

More importantly, as others have stated, the performance has really improved over the last 12-18 months. Give it a shot again and you might be surprised.

TeMPOraL5• 9 years ago

That was when the game used Unity 4? KSP used to have a single-threaded physics engine. AFAIR they replaced it now, so it should handle much more complex objects without destroying the framerate.

davidandgoliath• 9 years ago

About a year ago they updated to unity5 and framerates are wonderful now, just for ref.

munchbunny2• 9 years ago

Are you sure there isn't something else going on?

I played KSP all the way up until 1.0 on a $900 Thinkpad x220, and I was usually getting 15-20 FPS. My old $1.5k-ish gaming PC was getting a nice solid 60fps until I started making launchpad monstrosities. So I find it hard to believe that your new $1.5k PC is actually struggling with KSP under "typical usage," as opposed to some weird corner case in your save or just a really huge moon base.

monochromatic• 9 years ago

This game looks fun, but I couldn't figure out what I was doing when I tried it a couple years ago. I gave up too quickly probably.

Is there a good tutorial that y'all used to learn how the game works?

JoeDaDude• 9 years ago

I recommend Scott Manley's tutorials on youtube. Even though many of them are for older versions of KSP, they are still great to get you started. If you are willing to spend a bit, there is a great book that covers a lot of ground in KSP:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035138.do

Malic• 9 years ago

I'll second that. Scott Manley is THE source KSP tutorials and just plain absurd fun-with-KSP-plugins. You'll get a lot more out of KSP if you watch/follow his videos.

pavel_lishin2• 9 years ago

Seconding Scott Manley's videos.

The game is fun, and I definitely recommend putting in the time to figure it out. There will come points where things just click, and suddenly getting to orbit becomes easy, then orbital rendezvous, then Mun and Minmus landings, etc., etc.

bkanber• 9 years ago

For me the struggle of figuring it out from the very basics was the best part. It's ok to have 10 or 20 or 50 failed launch attempts in the beginning. You're learning how to go to space!

CrowCrowCrow• 9 years ago

Quill18 has some good Let's Plays - I picked up a lot from him https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs3acGYgI1-tflJyPE7go...

n17r4m• 9 years ago

Not a tutorial per-se, but rather a series of KSP youtube shows, https://www.youtube.com/user/BeazaYT has done some amazing story telling, and a lot can be learned by watching his build teardowns.

drewg1232• 9 years ago

Whatever you do, avoid the console version at all costs.

A friend told me about this game, and I thought it would be perfect for my (then) 10 year old. We got it for the PS4, and it was nothing but frustration. The biggest controls were complex and confusing when mapped to the PS4 controller, you couldn't install mods, and the game was buggy, frequently crashing and corrupting saves.

We finally got the PC version (which I run under Wine on FreeBSD), and it works much, much, much better.

swiley• 9 years ago

I don't understand console games now.

I used to buy them because they worked without an internet connection, and the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games tended to be the norm.

Now everyone just writes things in unity and the DRM forces you to have a reliable broadband connection, I don't see the point anymore.

Rudism• 9 years ago

My only computer is a Macbook Pro running Arch Linux (which is my ideal setup for getting work done). In general it struggles to achieve unplayably low framerates in the small selection of games that even run on Linux.

Given that I want to play games, my options are to spend a bunch of time and energy researching, price-shopping for parts, and building out what would likely be a $1000+ dedicated gaming Windows PC, continuing to funnel time and money into upgrades as games demand more and more horsepower; or pick up a $250 current-gen console at Walmart, knowing that it'll be able to handle anything I throw at it, and only worry about upgrading several years from now when some game I really want comes out on a future generation console.

As someone with a limited entertainment budget, the latter option is by far the more attractive option.

simias3• 9 years ago

I think the only point is that console hardware tends to be cheaper than a PC with similar performance due to the mass manufacturing. Also the games only target one platform so you don't have to mess with the settings to get decent performance (if the devs do their job correctly, that is).

I agree that console gaming is not really attractive nowadays if you're not on a budget and don't mind missing a few exclusives.

the devkits usually provided their own (well written) primitives and game engines so bug-free (or seemingly bug-free) games

I don't think that's quite right, I think the main reason games seem buggier nowadays are because:

- Nostalgia goggles, some games were utterly broken even back in the day, we just don't remember those.

- Games are a lot more complicated these days, it's easier to test Pacman than GTAV.

- You can now patch games so "going gold" is not that much of a deal anymore. Back then if your Nintendo 64 cartridge shipped with a game-breaking bug you were screwed.

- Even though the games themselves are overall more complex, gamedev is also more accessible thanks to Unity and other frameworks. That lowered the bar for game devs and as a result the average skill level is probably lower than it used to be.

In my experience the "well written primitives" is a myth. Older console (anything up to the 16bit era) hardly had any primitives to speak of, you just wrote assembly and talked to the hardware directly.

Later consoles had a kernel or "BIOS" but it's really not as good as you could imagine. To take the PlayStation for instance, the BIOS is a piece of crap with poorly optimized code and buggy functions. Just read a bit trough http://problemkaputt.de/psx-spx.htm#kernelbios to get a taste.

FileSeek: Movement from the eof is incorrect. Also, movement beyond the end of the file is not checked.

FileGetc: For some strange reason, the returned character is sign-expanded; so, a return value of FFFFFFFFh could mean either character FFh, or error.

strstr: After rejecting incomplete matches, the function doesn't fallback to the old str address plus 1, but does rather continue at the current str address

Since the PlayStation doesn't have a MMU many games actually hotpatched the BIOS to fix some of these issues or add functionality.

goldfire• 9 years ago

Console dev kits for major platforms never included game engines, and the primitives included with older console dev kits, if any, were often ignored because more custom versions were required to get the desired performance.

What's happened to the console ecosystem is a whole bunch of different things. More accessible tools (e.g. Unity) and platform holder development programs have gotten more developers who are less experienced and not as well funded onto the console platforms. Availability of easy online patching has lead to physical releases, which have to be finalized months before the actual release date, being intentionally left incomplete, with gaps to be filled in by a release day patch. Changing technology cycles have made console generations blurrier. And yes, online DRM has become a thing, although I'm not sure that's quite as onerous in practice as you suggest; it's not like current consoles just refuse to run any games while offline.

That's not an exhaustive list. The appeal of consoles is what it has always been, they're still the easiest and cheapest way into modern video games. But it's true that some of the advantages over the PC platform have begun to erode.

setr• 9 years ago

I used to buy them because local multiplayer

Now we have the controllers, but no games

The whole thing is just dumb

Sir_Cmpwn• 9 years ago

which I run under Wine on FreeBSD

No luck with linuxemu?

tomswartz073• 9 years ago

They have a native Linux version? Why running it under Wine?

marcosdumay2• 9 years ago

Probably, FreeBSD.

Besides, last time I looked the native Linux version was still 32 bits only. KSP has many problems with 32 bits platforms.

drewg1232• 9 years ago

The last I tried, it did not run on FreeBSD.

The 32-bit version crashes immediately after a failed mmap()

The 64-bit version has issues with nvidia GL libs that I didn't try to get past.

Wine just worked.

There has been some work recently with mmap and linux compat, so I will retry again when I have the chance..

jacquesm• 9 years ago

Nice Bowie reference.

ateesdalejr• 9 years ago

Why does it seem that every rocket he designs gets more and more thrusters exponentially?

jungletek• 9 years ago

Because to a certain extent, it's "the Kerbal way".

That said, using more efficient staging designs is usually superior to the naive "moar boosters!" philosophy that new KSP players typically start with.

Kerbal Space Oddities

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