Aralonia

Now, someone needs to make the N1!

I have improved it. I am going to update the top post in several minutes. But enjoy this screenshot.

Bad ideas happen at 5 AM

The first public release rocket by the Royal Aralonian Rocketry Corps: We care, so you don't have to. Required Sunday Punch's Wobbly Rockets, Eighth Release Now Requires NovaSilisko's Silisko Industries Doughnut Research & Spacecraft Development, 1.0 Release It is the fastest rocket to surpass the altitude of 1 kilometer. In fact, it is physically impossible to be any faster. You'll see why. It is also, for about eight seconds after it spawns, the tallest object on Kerbin (or whatever you're naming it today) as well as being taller than any man-made structure that humans have ever created. 'But wait,' you may ask, 'where can we download this ship?' Well, I'll tell you that this ship is shippily attached to the bottom of this post. It's a fine piece of ship, if I do say so myself, and I suppose your Kerbal astronauts are going to have a really shippy time on this rocket. OUTDATED I can't exactly take a screenshot of it because, well, it crashes my computer, but I have some screenshots of its effects:

Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz, 4GB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 4350 HD (good for 256MB VRAM and some shared). The stock parts run just fine, but SP's NERVA engines (in a similar configuration) cause framerate to say goodnight, Gracie.

Wait really? o_O That's rather surprising. How many polys are on your NERVA engine? That's one of the main culprits of SCREW YOU MY GRAPHICS CARD.

1.5k polys on parts could get really dicey, really quickly. I personally would prefer under 1k polys, if it were possible, and even then in dire circumstances.

I know that most gamers have amazing computers with good graphics cards, sufficient amounts of RAM, high-rotation hard drives, and impressively fast multi-core processors. Not all gamers do, though. Like, uh, like me. And maybe a few other people here. I dunno. This is a request from me and maybe a few other people: Please create parts with lower poly counts. I don't like it when my framerate drops to 3 per second every time I look towards Kerbin just because there are some bits floating around it in a highly elongated ballistic path (jettisoned stages). Now, I'm not saying you should make exclusively crap blocks for me to look at - I'm saying that maybe a bit of optimisation could be done? Maybe something that would qualify as LOD1 or LOD2, maybe even LOD3 in any other game, as an optional replacement for Those With Worse Computers. Thanks for reading.

This is, so far, the greatest flight performed. Well done. I like it.

Suggestion: Maybe if you make it a bit less blocky and give it a cylinder shape like the rest of the parts in the game, it may fit with the aesthetic more, as well as fit underneath other parts better. (Maybe.) For balancing sake, though, fuel consumption to power isn't a linear rise. I might give it a smidge more fuel consumption (maybe 18 units) if you're going to give it 400 thrust. Let people do what they want. If people look at the works of others and say 'oh welp guess I'll just drop my project completely and join theirs,' the spirit of competition dies out.

DECOUPLER WITH SHROUD IS AN AMAZING

I'd post screenshots if I were at home right now (currently being a bum at an Apple store), but my computer is currently simulating probably the 17th hour of an orbital hold between 923 and 925 kilometers. Circularity was 99.91% last I checked. It was stable at hour 13, at least. I've also gotten stable orbits at 189-190km (99.81% or something) and something in the 490s, I forget which. Circles are fun.

MATHS TIME The surface area of a cylinder 2 meters tall and 1 meter in diameter (about the same dimensions as the liquid fuel tank) is 7.854 square meters. This means that the material mass of the fuel tank itself is (about) 0.038 mass units per square meter. The large fuel tank appears to be 5 to 6 meters tall (let's go with 5.5, I'm eyeballing it anyway, what the hell) and has been labeled as 3 meters in diameter. This gives a surface area of 66 square meters. Multiplied by the mass per square meter, we have... 2.508 mass units. Crap. BUT WAIT LET'S COMPARE VOLUMES! The volume of a cylinder 1 meter in diameter and 2 meters tall is 1.571 cubic meters, giving us that much volume for 500 liquid units of fuel. (I know the fuel tank doesn't take up the entire inside volume of the visible cylinder, but I'm going with what I can work with.) Also, the volume of a cylinder 3 meters in diameter and 5.5 meters tall is 38.9 cubic meters. Not bad! That means that we can fit about 24.76 times more fuel in the big tank, which gives us... 12380 liquid units of fuel, for 54.472 units of mass. So, if we were going with physical size, this fuel tank should weigh something like 57 mass units. But really, a simpler option is to just scale the objects appropriately by performance (change mass to 7.6 mass units, due to fuel being 2.2 mass units per 500 volume units) as opposed to physical size. Visual sometimes > gameplay, but in the interest of fairness, gameplay counts too. oh no am I going to end up making a post for density of substances and scaling? eventually EDIT: I would also like to note that I would totally not hate a far larger single nozzle (1 meter/standard width) with logical thrust and fuel consumption for use as a first-stage engine. Or maybe a cluster, Falcon style! Anything goes, I just need something visually different to be big and intimidating.

Density remains constant as volume increases. I suppose I should be more looking at the fuel fraction as opposed to total mass, let's see... 1500 units of fuel for 5 units of mass for the large fuel tank versus 500 units of fuel for 2.2 units of mass. Correctly scaled, this means that the mass of the large fuel tank should be 7.6 units (as it weighs 1 unit of mass, dry). [13:51] Number_Muncher: 'but somehow I feel giving the escape tower like 1.4x the thrust of the solid rocket booster seems excessive.' <= the Orion escape tower (which this should be based off, since we use SRBs as primary stages), did a 15G escape burn with the capsule [13:51] Number_Muncher: this was because the Ares was an SRB, so you couldn't turn it off [13:51] Aralonia: okay, 15G = 147 m/s^2 [13:52] Number_Muncher: meaning that the thrust divided by the mass of the capsule should be that [13:52] Aralonia: command pod: 0.4 mass units; parachute: 0.3 mass units; escape tower = 0.05 mass units [13:53] Aralonia: total mass: 0.75 mass units [13:53] Aralonia: 147 = thrust / 0.75 -> 147 * 0.75 = thrust = 110.25

Minor suggestions: You have 4x the fuel capacity of the normal solid in your larger solid boosters, for 2x the mass. Something's gotta give there. At the same time, you have 3x the fuel capacity of the normal liquid tank in your super large size tank for 2.4x the mass. Also, is there any way you could reduce the thrust of the escape tower stage while retaining its effectiveness? I understand that you're going to need a lot of thrust for at least a decent amount of time to get the capsule out of the way before it gets caught in an explosion, but somehow I feel giving the escape tower like 1.4x the thrust of the solid rocket booster seems excessive. The 4x liquid thruster could also do with additional mass; while you have 3.3x the thrust, you have 2x the mass. I like balance! Your parts look good, but somehow I feel that, compared with what we're given at base, they should fly about the same, too.