saabstory88

Hey Kart! I wanted to ask about a possible texturing addition. Now that KSP supports "used" heat sheild textures, have you thought about adding this to the F9? Especially now that we have high res pictures of a toasty first stage. Disclaimer! I understand that the blackening of the stage comes from engine soot, but this would still be a nice addition, especially if the heat sheild module can handle the texture.

If you think that SpaceX's mission is to just be a trucking service, you mis-understand both why the company was started, and how they operate. The currently operate the most profitable (by percentage, per launch) launch service you can get. Even with overhead, and zero reusability, they are cranking out boosters for $16 million a piece, and charging $60+ Million (usually more, per requirements) per launch. Do they take this profit and try to go public? No. They double down on staying privately held, and this is no mistake. Listen to the words which come out of their investors mouths: “by the way, none of this money is coming back until we are on Mars. “ - Investor Richard Garriot. Mars isn't a side project, it's the main focus. The Falcon vehicles exists to make money, not to enrich the owners, but to put in the bank for the massive expenditures which lie ahead. If you think Musk won't sink every last cent of his $12-13 Billion into making it work, you are mistaken, because it would not be the first time. This is not said as a Fan-Boy, I'm rooting for everyone, but you have to look at the players involved. NASA: They have done this sort of thing before, but with much different circumstances. In this new environment, an agency which can't even commit to a project like the Exploration Upper Stage, of which every major component was developed 20 years ago, is not going to be actually building hardware in a timeframe where they can reasonably expect to be first. Whole new vehicles are going to be needed for a Mars mission, which have no previous analogue. Unless there is an unforeseen shift in the major political structure in the US, from pleasing constituents to actually accomplishing something, you are not going to see NASA there first. Nothing you will see on the SLS is new, not that this is a bad thing, but if you follow this program closely, you can see that the amount of inflexibility now present, would have doomed something like Apollo. Think about this as well, some good estimates of NASA's minimum number of SLS launches per mission is greater than 10, at a congressionally throttled flight rate of no more than 3 per year, which in reality will probably be closer to two. ESA: They probably have a better chance of accomplishing this than NASA, due to the distributed, cooperative nature of the program. At least from the outside, they appear to have a much more productive space program for the money. They have been innovating in a lot of areas recently, especially in the realms of reusability and entry vehicles. And as a bonus, one countries shifting political landscape doesn't mean an end to a large overall goal, although procurement adjustments may have to be made. I'll give better odds to the organization which is actually trying to do things like establish a lunar research station. Their plans are flexible enough to allow for US, Russian, Private involvement, or any combination there of. They also have the advantage of their flexible range of launch service providers, both internal, and external, without congressional mandates to use certain hardware. ROSCOSMOS: The only way a Russian flag is going to be planted on Mars, is next to a European flag. They don't have the cashflow, and are much happier to piggyback on ESA lead projects. Take a look at their 2020 lunar exploration craft, it was only really given the go ahead after an ESA partnership. Russia benefits from ESA partnership by getting funding, and ESA benefits by their experience building all manner of practical space hardware, which they can adapt, and actually deliver. It might take a small shift in leadership within ESA, but a joint Russian/ESA mission to the red planet actually makes sense, even if their timeline is not significantly different than NASA's. SpaceX: A company who's founding reason was to transport things and people to the surface of Mars, with a founder who has proven he will sink every last dollar of his fortune, even when the odds look grim. Even if they are not the first to succeed in landing a human, and returning them to Earth, they will almost certainly be the ones who try first, and with vigor. Musk has no illusions he isn't going to have to sink Billions of his own money to trying to achieve this goal. He has gone from begging old Russian generals for refurbished missiles, to building the worlds most advanced space launch system from scratch in 15 years. To put this in perspective, Youtube is twice as old as the Falcon 9. In his first interview after they landed the worlds first useful flyback booster, for a paying customer, he reiterated that this puts them closer to Mars, and that is the primary purpose of SpaceX. Sorry to get so into the weeds. I'm not saying SpaceX will be the first to plant the flag (which will be American, see "USA! USA!" chants post RTLS), but they will be the first to try in earnest, and that is, without a doubt, the reason why the company exists. Edit: If you want more proof, follow their hiring page, because you will see jobs pop up there from time to time which indicate something much bigger than just developing commercial launch vehicles...

Keep in mind guys, when talking about the Falcon 9 payload, which flight mode you are talking about. The Falcon 9 1.1-FT has three distinct flight modes, which are chosen by SpaceX based on the client mission requirements. Fully expendable: Given acceleration and burn time data, the vehicle can likely launch somewhere in the region of 20,000kg to LEO. We will likely not see this mode used on the F9 ever again for two reasons. 1. There are no customers which require this flight profile. The DOD/NRO is the only customer which buys flights in this lift category. SpaceX has opted to make the Falcon Heavy the vehicle which they are offering to this customer, not the F9. 2. Customers have to bring their own multiple deployment adapters. Because the launch cost is so inexpensive, it is more economical for the customer to buy two flights, rather than pay a third party integrator for a stack. SpaceX does not offer this as a standard service, and in their documentation, they spell out that you must bring your own. Further to this point, they charge you extra for flights over the 13,500kg capacity, as a custom, strengthened, payload adapter is needed. ASDS: A barge landing. The two barge landings we have seen so far were likely not the profile that they will use after reusability is a standard and known item. They were positioned in such a way as to test the boost back feature of the F9 booster, which isn't something you would actually want to use if you were doing this "for real". The most efficient trajectory would see no boost-back burn occur, and the barge be positioned at the end of the ballistic arc that the booster takes post separation. We will likely see this profile used in both high capacity GTO missions, as well as every Falcon Heavy flight for the center core booster. The middle of the flight path drone ship positioning seen on previous landing attempts is likely a test mode only. RTLS: This will be used for most LEO, and some low capacity GTO missions, as the boost-back burn uses about 6% of the vehicles fuel. This is the mode we witnessed on 12/21. This may be the standard procedure for CRS flights, as we have already seen that they can accomplish the mission with a boost-back as part of the flight profile. I would expect that we will only see this profile about 50% of the time +/- 10%. As they eat up more of the GTO market, expect to see less of these on the standard F9. As far as the Falcon Heavy is concerned. expect to see a drone ship on station for every flight, without exception. Despite their PR departments animation, having a center core RTLS would negate a lot of the benefit of even having a "Heavy" version of the launch vehicle. Even if barge landings prove difficult, it is still a savings to get back more than half of the value of the rocket in the two side boosters, which will almost certainly RTLS on all but the most demanding missions. That is all...

@*Aqua* This:

It would be nice to have a way to edit PART files much in the same way that you can edit plists is XCODE. Having the ability to quickly run though the creation of part files is really what would be nice to have. Imagine a big list of Part Modules, where you can go down and check off which ones you want to apply to the part, both from stock sources, and from mods. Then you can go down and either use checkboxes, dropdowns, or fill in forms to define the part parameters. Then an export function to either create a base part config, or convert those data to be a MM patch. That's the holy grail right there.

No, thank you! I love this pack!

Great! Also, there is a GSE interface on both sides of the Octoweb. They are on directly opposite sides.

What I meant by current model is Kart's current KSP model. Falcon 9 1.0 had 12, Falcon 9 1.1 and 1.1-FT have three. Kart has 4 in his KSP model.

Hey, not sure if anyone else caught this. F9 1.1 and 1.1-FT only have three second stage attachment points on the interstage, not 4 as in in the current model.

What's the status of this config?

As you may have seen, Nathan Kell has taken over the future of FASA. There is a possibility that a refined version of these parts will find their way into that pack. Nothing is set in stone, but this project will continue in one form or another. Full steam development is not likely until the Unity 5 update, due to technical uncertainty. In the mean time, I have been working on rebuilding all of the Titan assets. Only modelling until 1.1, but it is not at all dead. Here is a teaser of the new LR-87-7 I have been working on.

Looks great! Radiators could be matte, however.

DarthVader: A couple of things to keep in mind when using RO/RSS on an OSX system (learn from my struggles). 1. Installing Mono and using CKAN is 100% worth it. Because of the various files which need to be copied, and because OSX sometimes has different copy behavior than Windows based systems, you really, really, really, want it to do it for you. 2. You will likely need to run at the lowest RSS texture settings (2048), depending on what version of OSX you are running. Even loading up RSS and NOTHING ELSE, will sometimes cause malloc errors with even 4096 textures, especially on OS 10.10. It's not a matter of the amount of RAM used, it's just a stability thing on certain systems. You can still crash with 2.0gb used. 3. You will need to go through and manually delete a lot of unnecessary parts. Remember, OSX Unity has a higher base overhead than other OS's. Hope this helps.

I have already messaged Budgie. I'm on board, let's do this.

Are these the latest version of the mods? Looks like something with the reflection plugin perhaps. Can you provide more information?

https://www.reddit.com/r/ksptomars/

Hey, E of Pi and I discussed some corrections to the sizes and layout of the tanks. I started working on this, but have been busy with KSP to Mars so haven'y been making much progress. I would be glad to give you the models I have made thus far, and all of my calculation work. See: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/124827-RO-Saab-s-Alternate-History-DEV-home-of-ALT-STS-and-ETS I will would be willing to stand-down my independent efforts to help with this. Let me know.

Librazy, Please see my fork of your ModularEngines fork. Specifically https://github.com/Saabstory88/ModularFuelSystem/blob/master/Source/Engines/MagicSolver.cs I know I need to clean up the code executing a lot, but this is a similar implementation to your own. I am getting the combustion params from some equations I put together which describe the relationship between Molar mass / mix ratio / chamber pressure / flame temp. After plugging in some real engines, they seem to be a good enough approximation. Anyway, have a look, some of these methods may be more simple.

Yes. And updates will continue after the conclusion of KSP to Mars, which has taken all of my time.

Greetings, I am having trouble finding the answer to this. I am working in a Realism Overhaul environment, and do not care to be bothered by disk mass, which is becoming an issue. Is this baked into the code, or is it configurable? If it is baked, how hard would it be to recompile without disk mass? Answer: Hard, but I got it done

So just to be clear, the problem was... not enough struts? I understand that there are actual engineering/qc issues at work here. But some one had to say it

S-IF, leaps and bounds better than the textures in my previous attempt. This keeps the overall look and feel of the models shown on the wiki. Cable trunk rotated 45 degrees to deal with booster attach points.

Redesigned Saturn IE tank based on real construction considerations. As E of Pi had mentioned, they didn't go into how the actual tank construction may impact the appearance of the tank. Based on the stated fuel mass capacity, and the height of the stage, a non-common bulkhead seemed to be the baseline calculation. So while it doesn't look identical to some of the diagrams on the wiki, it should now be construction accurate.

STS Series Tank, revised with internal structure considered.