Shadowlord

Did anyone in this thread try using six or eight fins instead of four? My initial 1.0.2 finless rockets were flipping on their own, even with SAS on, and adding just four fins was ineffective, but when I went up to six or eight, that was enough to hold them stable as long as I wasn't trying to tilt them in the atmosphere (much, anyways). Of course now I have a rocket which is cool with no fins, but it's an asparagus - so its center of mass doesn't migrate the way normal rockets' CoM's do.

I hyperedited a RAPIER&nuke plane (by which I mean something like 12 rapiers and pre-coolers) above it in sandbox and dropped it through the atmosphere because I was feeling particularly silly one day. Not that there's any oxygen on Eve. That plane made it through the atmosphere without chutes, and crash-landed on the planet surface. It broke into individual pieces when it hit the ground, but they stayed where they were. (I didn't take a screenshot because I ran KSP through CKAN instead of steam so my F12 wasn't working) Apparently a kerbal can survive falling thousands of meters through the air and hitting the ground on Eve. (He ran out of fuel trying to redirect his descent into the sea) Kerbals have perpetual temperature bars on Eve's surface, and in the sea, but did not seem to leak memory.

The peculiar thing is that so far I only seem to experience this on kerbin re-entry. I'm not experiencing it with the temperature bars turned on while flying a jet custom-designed to overheat, or a rocket designed to overheat, or dropping a plane through Eve's atmosphere (after hyperediting it into Eve orbit), or walking Kerbals around on Eve's surface with their temperature bars flashing, etc.

I ran into this myself today, and having read about this earlier, used F10 to stop it from growing out of control within a few seconds after the gauges appeared. While descending, I toggled F10 back on several times for a fraction of a second, to see if it was still eating more memory when I did so. It did, until: When my rocket had gotten down to (IIRC) about 13km, when I hit F10 that time, the memory leak didn't resume, the bars appeared to be grey, and the parts weren't flashing red anymore, either. It definitely wouldn't hurt to have more tests, since this particular result hasn't been reported before as far as I've read. Also of note, when I recovered the rocket after it landed, all the leaked memory appeared to get freed (it dropped back to ~1550 MB from ~1880). I still had the temperature gauges turned on at the time. For the record, I had 8 gauges on-screen when I turned it off initially, and they were from 6 of the micro-lander legs (the first ones you unlock in the tech tree), and two of the cheap radial battery packs. I only saw 300 MB of increased memory usage but I hit F10 within a few seconds of the gauges appearing. Nothing was destroyed in re-entry, but they all had flashing red outlines. [i'm on Windows 8.1 pro 64-bit, if it's relevant, but it probably isn't since someone mentioned it happens on linux too.]

I selected "Previous Stable Release" in Steam, expecting it to install 1.0. Steam installed the previous beta release (0.90) instead.

Basic fins are so magical that with 1.0.2 I've gone back to using the LV-T30 instead of the LV-T45 - I don't need the gimbal anymore, and I don't even have reaction wheels on my rockets, just the command pods.

Ah, thanks. I did indeed think that every fuel had 1 mass per unit, among other things that you pointed out.

Which old aero? In 1.0 I took a ~$35k rocket, shot straight up to 100 km and then turned 90 degrees before achieving orbit, and it was no huhu... In 1.0.2, that rocket mysteriously has a TWR of 0.62 in the second stage, and can't get past 16 or 17 km. But since no masses increased or thrusts decreased, as far as I can tell, and drag alone isn't capable of giving it <1 TWR, I can only conclude there was a mass-hiding exploit with the service bay (Eliminated all other possibilities), and that the utter lack of any informative statistics in the VAB enabled me to create a super-efficient rocket that abused it without even realizing that I had found and was using an exploit to enable it to be so efficient. Edit: Maybe heat shields are for returning from other planets. Who knows. My super-rocket upper stages that are still in space have had no trouble re-entering and landing (aside from having to hold the parachutes until 10km).

You know the shuttles were launched on giant orange booster rockets, right?

Apparently, according to KER, the TWR on my extremely-efficient-in-1.0 rocket's second stage is 0.66, and while switching to TWR tanks solves the drag problem for the most part, it doesn't fix the TWR (which causes the speed to drop and progress to slow until it burns half its fuel). Although I didn't have KER installed before now, I know it must've had a high TWR in 1.0, since it shot through the atmosphere like a bullet on speed and easily made it to 100km without slowing down, while flying straight up... ... Wait... Could it be the service bay? I have a materials bay (Science Jr) "inside" it, with other science instruments stapled to the materials bay, and the bottom of the rocket attached to the materials bay. (Because I tried to attach the science instruments to the inside of the service bay and was unable to do so properly so it didn't look like ...., and eventually gave up and just jammed the materials bay there instead on the assumption that it would magically remove the drag on & protect from re-entry the things stapled to it. The fact that I was attaching all the fuel tanks and engines to the materials bay didn't even occur to me. Hmm.)

So I figured out why my rockets were terrible in 1.0.2. Turns out that it was the rockomax fuel tanks, apparently. When I built a rocket with FLT tanks, it easily sailed through the atmosphere, but one with equal mass built with a rockomax tank couldn't make it at all. (Radial parachutes also appeared to contribute a little.) I don't know if the adapter parts would alleviate this - I haven't researched them, since in 1.0 they weren't needed (and switching from the FLT tanks to rockomax tanks in 1.0 resulted in a huge boost in the effectiveness of my rockets).

My most effective rocket doesn't even make it into space anymore - once in the second stage it behaves like it has a TWR below 1.0 and only makes it to 17 km before falling back down, burning 90-95% of its fuel before it stops falling. Nothing in the game gives any clues as to why it's happening. Masses and thrust on the parts all appear unchanged. In 1.0, it could easily fly straight up to 100 km and still have delta v left over in the second stage.

How do you end up with a mass flow rate for the LFO which is twice as high as the xenon? The fuel cell uses a tiny amount of LF and Ox per second, even when you calculate how much it would need for 8.74 ec/sec. When I did the math myself, and mind you, I'm by no means 100% confident that I did this correctly (I'm no rocket scientist), I got 0.50785 for the total mass flow rate (combining xenon, lf, and ox), and using that, 4019 for the Isp (2041.2 / 0.50785). My process was this: I re-calculated the ion engine's thrust first from its listed Isp and mass flow rate in vacuum to get 2041.2, since "2.0" was lacking in precision. (Possibly more accurate values are in data files somewhere?) I also converted the fuel cell's consumption values from per-hour into per-second and then compared them to the fuel cell array (and determined that they likely had the same per-ec consumption). That appeared to be 0.0011259259259 lf/sec/ec and 0.00137407407 ox/sec/ec, although those are really not as precise as the number of digits would indicate, since they were calculated from the fuel cell's listed stats by calculating 6.08 * 3600 / 1.5, and 7.42 * 3600 / 1.5. Then, multiplying the lf/sec/ec and ox/sec/ec by 8.74 each, the mass flow rate is 0.486 xenon/sec + 0.00984059259 lf/sec + 0.0120094074 ox/sec = 0.50785 total/sec. (If I went wrong somewhere, hopefully someone will point out where and how.)

Except drogue chutes are nowhere in the early part of the tech tree, as far as I've seen.