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Content Request: Originally this was going to be a singular request as follows: A "red" fuel line that would balance tanks. Simply change the color of the existing FXT-2 External fuel duct to red (White arrows would be nice) . . .and this would represent a fuel flow to balance the two(or more connected) tanks based upon remaining fuel. The two following ideas came to mind, and closely related enough to include here: Another balance format may be better to represent with another color (say green), that would balance based upon the size of the tank (or pressure related). I'm going to simplify the numbers on the FLT-400 and FLT-800 for illustration purposes of how this would work. Adding both the Liquid fuel & oxidizer you have a total volume of 400 and 800 respectively. Say you've connected these two tanks with a pressure fuel duct . . . and used 1/2 of your fuel (600 remaining) instead of balancing the tanks at 300 & 300, the remaining fuel would balance at 200 and 400. This brings up a "Fuel control unit" that would be nice to link two tanks with an action group, and upon activating, would transfer "out or in" the remaining fuel. In my mind, I picture this as a dark blue fuel line with yellow arrows, and having a white 'hexagon' that sits in the middle of the fuel path. This hexagon, slightly thicker than the fuel duct, would be selectable when entering the Actions menu, and could be set with action groups of "transfer out" or "transfer in".

Astronauts, lace your boots before flight ! Seriously, since cargo bays occlude radially mounted engines and air intakes so regularly, i thought i'd try get this working in our favour for once. Offset those wings inside the cargo bay and run a few fuel ducts between them. Blast off the pad with not much fuel and a stupidly OP engine, see how high we get before falling back. Do the same with the ducts removed. After all, both ends of the duct are inside the cargo bay so there should be no drag, right? With Ducts - max altitude 44,058. Without ducts - max altiude 67,486 It's an issue because ok, nobody really needs this many ducts. But I'm trying to build the most efficient stock SSTO I can, and there's a few factors i'd like to combine to make something great - *big S delta wings, since their mass:lift rating ratio is the same as all the other wing parts. And they hold LF too, as fuel tanks they have the same fuel mass:dry mass ratio as any other tank *generous wing area, for low angle of attack at 25km + altitude, therefore low drag in the closed cycle part of the ascent *... due to the low drag and wing supported flight, low twr, high ISP NERV engines can be used, leveraging the LF capacity of the wings. Little or no oxidizer to be used. *generous wing area leading to low landing speeds offworld - when refuelled this SSTO can go to Duna and Laythe safely What messes all this up is the fact that NERV (all rocket engines for that matter) will not pull any fuel from wing tanks without ducts. In fact even if you just use dry wings and a stack of fuel containers above each engine, you're going to have horrible CG issues because the rockets empty the tanks front to back. It looks like you're just meant to attach one large tank to each engine and discard both when empty. Also, if your wings aren't doing any thing for you fuel wise, they become dead weight, which is i guess why people fly to orbit with tiny stub wings that can barely take off given the entire length of the runway. Like I said, I prefer larger wings that enable better STOL performance in my SSTOs.. What's the answer , if you 're trying to be 100% stock? Transferring fuel manually is out of the question, the average user has their hands full with the flight controls, trying to maintain a good ascent profile (myself included). Fuel tanks can't be bound to action groups so you can't lock stuff off to eg. force the jet engines to use the wing tanks during air breathing phase. You could build small like this (two of the biggest wings, one engine, so we need only two ducts). But that wing has lower heat tolerance, which i can work around, but isn't going to be easy to fly for most people. Also it's not going to be a big enough craft to put the sort of loads most people want up there. So, all I have left are mods that'd disqualify me from any K prize or that might put off new users downloading the craft from KerbalX. eg. tweakscale, so i only need one pair of wings and 2 fuel ducts eg. auto fuel balancer like GPOSpeedPump A WIP SSTO. I've noticed that if I set prograde assist and drop my AoA to zero, it has no effect on the drag from fuel ducts - unlike drag from fuselage parts. The fuel ducts of this design cost about 6% more total drag here.