2.5 M Liquid Fuel Tanks

[Paperback Writer]

Hey could you guys just throw in a 2.5 m Liquid fuel tank. Nuclear engines running only on liquid fuel messed up the usefulness of a lot of my interplanetary mother-ships. I would just like to see a 2.5 m liquid fuel tank or the ability to fill up the oxidizer space with more liquid fuel in the existing parts. Thank you. -PBW

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah I go back and forth on this one. I think what I'd really like to see are some low dry-weight spherical tanks with low heat and crash tolerance for vacuum vessels and tweakable tanks that can be set to LF, O, or both. If they did that a bunch of redundant parts could be merged, with simple decal expressions so you could see what was what. 

[rocketbuilder]

Use porkjets stock fuel switch mod that lets you chose if you want LFO, LF, or just O.

Edited December 2, 2015 by rocketbuilder

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah this is more of a comprehensive request. If half the MK2 and MK3 tanks were merged it would do a lot to de-clutter the parts list, and it would open a lot of design flexibility. 

[AlphaMensae]

I support this too, and this is one of the few things I use Tweakscale for.  I too am currently setting up a nuclear-engined interplanetary ship (with a nuclear-engined lander carrying a large re-dockable rover), and my first draft used the standard LFO tanks.  Then I thought "there has to be a better way" and decided to get Tweakscale.  It works great with the LV-N engines too, my current "final" design has a main 5m LF tank (over 28,000 LF)) with 3 3.75m LV-N engines attached with modular girder segments.  The fully-loaded ship+lander has a DV of over 7,000 and an intitial TWR of .53.

[MircoMars]

+1 

I built some interplanetary tugs and there clearly is a gap in the LF tanks. I think fuel switching is the best solution, it saves parts and is easy to use. perhaps a special texture for each, so you can see what's in them.

[Paperback Writer]

8 hours ago, rocketbuilder said:

Use porkjets stock fuel switch mod that lets you chose if you want LFO, LF, or just O.

Thank you, I won't even need to redo my designs with this. I think this will work very well in the meantime. (I probably could make them better anyway though.)

Edited December 3, 2015 by Paperback Writer

[Alshain]

48 minutes ago, Paperback Writer said:

Thank you, I won't even need to redo my designs with this. I think this will work very well in the meantime. (I probably could make them better anyway though.)

Don't use Stock Fuel Switch.  It's based on Firespitter FSFuelSwitch which is broken.  It won't keep your settings for the tanks.

[Paperback Writer]

28 minutes ago, Alshain said:

Don't use Stock Fuel Switch.  It's based on Firespitter FSFuelSwitch which is broken.  It won't keep your settings for the tanks.

Hmm. That sucks. Thanks for letting me know.

[rocketbuilder]

It works for me.

But then there's modular fuel tanks...

Yeah, a 2.5 m LF tank should be added.

[TMS]

Stock procedural tanks or nothing.

(cue: waaaah, creativity, lego...)

Edited December 3, 2015 by TMS

[Wjolcz]

Fuel switch would be better

[panzer1b]

I just do it the following method:

Add any part for the root, then add fuel tank you wish to have in LF only option.

Open craft file, set the fuel tank's oxidizer amount to 0, and add the amount of oxy you removed to the liquidfuel level (so a FLT-800 would have originally 360 LF, and 440 OX, should then read 800 LF, 0 OX).

Then just save that fuel tank as a subassembly for future use. 

 

If you really want to, you can even "cheat" by adding more fuel then there was originally, but myself i dont like that so i make sure to keep the same mass fraction of every tank.  You can even do this to other tanks, such as set a xenon tank to have LFO or whatnot.  Myself, ive started using the lerge xenon tank, and keeping the same fuel dry mass ratio, i calculated that it can fit 660 units of LF or O total for its dry mass.  Makes a nice alternative to clipping 30 or so FLT-100s inside each other for those super compact interplanetary SSTO starfighters with 8000dV in LKO i like to make.  Technically this is "cheating", but since i design for looks, and shove whatever i need the craft to accomplish the task internally, ive stopped caring about part clipping, even fuel tank clipping, hell, its sci-fi, i just make stuff have good armor and good firepower and minimize part counts all in a design that i feel looks cool.

Edited December 3, 2015 by panzer1b

[eddiew]

Modular fuel tanks would get my vote for solving this problem - in fact, I'd rather see THAT as being stock, since it lets you put any fuel type in any tank. No more need to differentiate the rocket/plane parts  

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/58235-105-modular-fuel-tanks-v561/

[KerBlammo]

Another vote for stock fuel switching.