There needs to be a mid thrust 1.25m engine between the LV-T45 and the Vector

[SlabGizor117]

The T45 just doesn't cover it on bigger 1.25m rockets, if there was an engine with about 275 to 400 thrust that would be awesome.

[Capt. Hunt]

that's what the LV-T30 is for.

[qzgy]

Its not much more thrust....

[MinimalMinmus]

Not only that, but the T30 sucks because he lacks gimbals. So yep, we need something like the SpaceY engine: they aren't stockalike, but they fill most niches, including this one.

[sal_vager]

What about double mounted engines?

[SlabGizor117]

6 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

What about double mounted engines?

Mounting two 1.25m engines on a 1.25m stack looks horrible, we just need a bigger 1.25m engine with gimbal.

[sal_vager]

Just now, SlabGizor117 said:

Mounting two 1.25m engines on a 1.25m stack looks horrible, we just need a bigger 1.25m engine with gimbal.

I use either multiple Thuds with a reversed nosecone or White Owl tails clipped into the stack, makes it all a lot tidier.

[GluttonyReaper]

Rockomax adapter + Skipper works pretty well as a mid range, or if you want to keep the form factor, double triple Thuds. Shame the rocket revamp isn't a thing any more, it would have made clustering to fill these gaps easier  

Edited March 26, 2017 by GluttonyReaper

[SlabGizor117]

4 hours ago, sal_vager said:

I use either multiple Thuds with a reversed nosecone or White Owl tails clipped into the stack, makes it all a lot tidier.

I don't really like thuds, sorry.

[Waxing_Kibbous]

Good ole @Snark made a simple solution that you may find to be acceptable

 

[Silavite]

I proposed something like this a while back.

In the meantime, using a Kickback with the thrust limited works pretty well as a first stage.

[Snark]

Actually, this issue generally doesn't bite me much, because I tend to design all of my rockets to lift off on SRBs alone. By the time the SRBs have burned out, the rocket has gotten to the point in its trajectory where TWR isn't as vital as it is for that first brutal shove off the pad, and I can generally make do with a Swivel (or Skipper, or Mainsail, depending on vessel size).

This leaves me with zero use for the Reliant, which ends up being completely neglected. I don't think I've put even a single Reliant on anything since 1.0.  My stock workhorses are Swivel, Skipper, and Mainsail for launch from Kerbin, and Terrier (occasionally Poodle) for orbital stuff. Spark for really small craft.  LV-N for interplanetary.

[Capt. Hunt]

TBH, Gimbal isn't really important to me unless I'm building something asymmetrical.  In most cases, on smaller rockets the T-30 works fine when paired with sufficient verniers or tail fins.

[KerikBalm]

*sigh* mid thrust is now more power than all the old 1.25m engines. The Vector is an extreme outlier, and was criticized as OP because of it. If you're playing with RSS or scaled up solar systems, then yes, one needs more thrust per unit cross section: but I don't see any need for such an engine in the stock game.

[passinglurker]

7 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

*sigh* mid thrust is now more power than all the old 1.25m engines. The Vector is an extreme outlier, and was criticized as OP because of it. If you're playing with RSS or scaled up solar systems, then yes, one needs more thrust per unit cross section: but I don't see any need for such an engine in the stock game.

Actually it's not the vector is just the 1.25m equivalent to the mammoth and the main sail with the price and tech tree placement to match. All of the other 1.25 engines besides the dart are just under powered by compassion scewing your judgment.

That being said something that is early game has thrust vectoring and isn't made out of pig iron would be appreciated. Maybe give srb's 1 degree of gimbal? Real srb's gimbal after all just say it's liquid injection thrust vectoring if you don't want to animate the nozzles

[MaxL_1023]

In stock scale solar systems I rarely have a problem - I usually use a 2.5m stack for a 1.25m payload, giving me room for a decent fairing or to have little science/equipment bits sticking out the side of the 1.25m core. 

Try designing your first stage as a sustainer (TWR of 0.8 or so on the pad) and use a couple radial SRBs for liftoff thrust. With the sustainer firing, you can thrust-limit the SRBs down to about 50% thrust, giving you maybe 1.4 TWR on the pad and 1.2 or so after SRB burnout. The Space shuttle used this configuration, just with huge solids so the TWR of the sustainers alone was more like 0.3 and 0.8-0.9 at SRB burnout. You can get away with that in RSS/RO where solids last 2 minutes or more and get you to 40KM, but not in stock. 

[KSK]

On 26/03/2017 at 1:12 PM, SlabGizor117 said:

Mounting two 1.25m engines on a 1.25m stack looks horrible, we just need a bigger 1.25m engine with gimbal.

 

On 26/03/2017 at 6:06 PM, SlabGizor117 said:

I don't really like thuds, sorry.

So you've rejected two perfectly good options simply for aesthetic reasons. Time to go find a mod. 

[KerikBalm]

4 hours ago, passinglurker said:

Actually it's not the vector is just the 1.25m equivalent to the mammoth and the main sail with the price and tech tree placement to match. All of the other 1.25 engines besides the dart are just under powered by compassion scewing your judgment.

Well, now you're comparing 3.75m size engines to 1.25m engines. For a cross sectional area of 1/9th the mammoth, you get ~ 1/4th the thrust.

Also, for whatever reason, they made the 3.75m engines much better than the 1.25m engines... the 2.5m engines are generally superior to similar 1.25m engines as well (excluding "specialty" engines like the aerospike or LV-N). The vector is a 1.25m engine with the TWR and Isp of a 3.75m engine, and with an absolutely unamtched thrust to cross section ratio.

I get that its supposed to be 1 of the 4 units on theMammoth, but the mammoth has some bulk where we can imagine turbopumps and such are located, but the vector is just a nozzle with seemingly no turbopump machinery or evne a combustion chamber.

Maybe the 3.75m engines are OP'd, maybe the 1.25m engines are generally underpowered... but the vector's stats group with the 3.75m engines... and we don't need the "power creep" that seems to have come with the larger size engines followed by the vector. The KSP toy system is already quite easy to navigate.

[MinimalMinmus]

To me the problem is not really "The vector is way too good compared to the other small size, but rather "The 1.25 m non-special engines are mostly pretty bad":

We have:

-Reliant: No gimbal, and not very powerful

-Swivel: Weak gimbal, and bad TWR

-Terrier: Actually pretty good, but no alternator hurts.

[passinglurker]

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

Well, now you're comparing 3.75m size engines to 1.25m engines.

Size doesn't matter to twr and isp only raw thrust is constrained

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

For a cross sectional area of 1/9th the mammoth, you get ~ 1/4th the thrust.

The mammoth also has integrated fuel tankage and for all we know some of it's bulk is purely aerodynamic so again size doesn't mean the vector can't be powerful

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

Also, for whatever reason, they made the 3.75m engines much better than the 1.25m engines... the 2.5m engines are generally superior to similar 1.25m engines as well

I can tell you the reason. SQUAD CAN'T BALANCE. Career mode is sloppy they've been too busy tacking on new features and fixing all the bugs that makes they've never stopped to polish what they have. Any way SQUAD balance isn't worth putting on a podium. So you can't say SQUAD knew what they were doing when they made the 1.25m engines krap and that we all have to roll with that. 

Personally I think 1.25m (besides vector nerv and dart) should be put about on par with 2.5m (3.75m can remain awesome cause it's endgame content)

As it stands now early game is a royal pain having to stack pancake tanks and bad gimbaless engines to the limit your control wheel can handle because they won't give us any other means of flight control.

[Snark]

6 hours ago, passinglurker said:

Actually it's not the vector is just the 1.25m equivalent to the mammoth and the main sail with the price and tech tree placement to match.

I'd respectfully disagree with the above; the Vector is an outlier, in terms of behavior, cost, and power for its size.  Rationale for this assertion here.

6 hours ago, passinglurker said:

That being said something that is early game has thrust vectoring and isn't made out of pig iron would be appreciated.

I dunno, the Swivel has vectoring and does a fine job of launching small vessels to Kerbin orbit.  Works pretty well for me.  I think it's well-balanced and fits appropriately with the other engines.

6 hours ago, passinglurker said:

Maybe give srb's 1 degree of gimbal?

Side note, if you like gimbaling SRBs and don't mind using mods, SpaceY has a nice selection of all kinds of SRBs, from 0.625m size up to 3.75m size.  And they gimbal. 

27 minutes ago, passinglurker said:

The mammoth also has integrated fuel tankage

How's that?  Not last time I checked.

28 minutes ago, passinglurker said:

I can tell you the reason. SQUAD CAN'T BALANCE.

If by that you mean "They can't balance in a way that will satisfy everyone," then of course you're right, because that would be physically impossible. 

However, if you mean balance in general?  I'd have to disagree on that.  I think they've done a pretty reasonable job of balancing most engines, with the Vector being (IMHO) a notable exception.

[regex]

3 minutes ago, Snark said:

I'd respectfully disagree with the above; the Vector is an outlier, in terms of behavior, cost, and power for its size.  Rationale for this assertion here.

It's not an outlier if you ignore the (utterly silly) concept of engine form factor. It's just another engine, then. I should be able to put a Skipper, or even a Mainsail, on the bottom of a 1.25m stack but for some reason what looks like the bottom of a fuel tank (and some sort of nth dimensional space to contain the engine hardware) passes for a thrust structure.

In the case where all engines have reasonable thrust structures without silly "tankbuttes" getting in the way the Skipper should fill the void OP talks about.

[Snark]

28 minutes ago, regex said:

It's not an outlier if you ignore the (utterly silly) concept of engine form factor.

Sure, it's not an outlier if you ignore the way all the KSP stock engines are, in fact, modeled.

But given that they are modeled the way they are, it is, in fact, an outlier.

"Should people be able to slap any size engine on any craft" is a topic one could debate.  So is "are the engines, overall, well-balanced to provide an appropriate amount of thrust given their weight and size."  Reasonable people can disagree on both of those topics.

However, I'm not addressing either of those points here.  Simply that, given the way the stock game is modeled and balanced at the moment, the Vector is an extreme outlier compared with all the other engines.  Which it is.  By a lot.  It doesn't "fit".

In my case, I happen to like the way that all the other engines are balanced, so when I tweak the Vector, I reduce its cost, weight, and thrust.  When I'm done, it has a similar TWR to the Mammoth, and also a similar thrust-per-cross-sectional-area, and a cost that's pricier per thrust than the Swivel, but not as insanely expensive as the unmodded Vector.

Other folks, who have different tastes than mine, might choose to just leave the Vector as-is.  Or they might decide to buff all the other engines instead of nerfing the Vector.  Or use modded versions of all the engine models to get rid of tank-butts as a thing, if that bugs them too much.

[regex]

Just now, Snark said:

Sure, it's not an outlier if you ignore the way all the KSP stock engines are, in fact, modeled.

But given that they are modeled the way they are, it is, in fact, an outlier.

Looking at Porkjet's future plans one could assume that, had he stayed with the company, form factor was going to mean a much different thing. Since that's on hold and we're still playing with what are presumably placeholder parts (given the fact that Squad obviously wanted to revamp them) one can safely assume that they are modeled wrong at this time. So really, the Vector is not an outlier, it's the way engines should be modeled.

Just now, Snark said:

  So is "are the engines, overall, well-balanced to provide an appropriate amount of thrust given their weight and size."

That's definitely up for debate, but basing stats on form factor is purely silly. Let's face it, not every engine can fill a full niche. Oftentimes you're going to have engines that are useless in some respect, or serve as overlap, or are there for purely aesthetic reasons. Removing form factor helps engine variety and removes rigid use cases; we end up with far fewer niches and more choices.

Once that's addressed, the Skipper might end up being the engine that OP desires. Right now it (and most other engines) has an enormous problem in the art department.

[passinglurker]

53 minutes ago, Snark said:

If by that you mean "They can't balance in a way that will satisfy everyone," then of course you're right, because that would be physically impossible. 

Regex already covered most of what I would have said for a rebuttal but as for this comment here I will say I'm not expecting perfect or even my own preferences honestly, but trying to make sence of the inconsistencies in stock balance makes it clear stock balance is terribly half baked. You can't honestly crack the config files open and try to connect the dots and not see this.

 

I may have my own ideas on how to fix this but at the end of the day I just want to see SQUAD put some damn effort into the actual core game play instead of always just trying to broaden their market of non-discerning customers with ports and localizations.