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Can anyone explain why this is a problem? It wouldn't surprise me that it causes issues, but I haven't observed any. Edit: @CobaltWolf stackSymmetry = 7 in the S1 engine mount and stackSymmetry = 5 in the SIV engine mount will have the desired effect.

@CobaltWolf this is really nice work! I have to admit I was dreading what these Saturns were going to look like on Kerbin but I think this is going to work out. Those Atlas engines are RS-56's so it's a little too much thrust and Isp but it's close enough to play with. The RL10's are the newer A4's so they've got about 50% more thrust than these should. I can confirm what @Sgt.Shutesie said, it will put 19 tons in orbit with quite a bit of dv left. Much more weight than that and the S-IV won't be lifted high enough to finish the job. It's definitely op but that's to be expected with a cryogenic stage running LFO. If you drop most of the S-IV's fuel to bring it's mass down to a more believable 14 tons it will put 10 tons (the real one is 9 tons) in orbit with a little under 700 dv left, which is about par for the rockets at this scale on Kerbin. That's with only 4 RL10's to put the thrust where it should be. I didn't do any lofting, just a nice straight-forward ascent.

Sounds about right. That's a cryogenic stage. Fill it with LF/Ox and you get heavy with extra dv.

@Beale or @CobaltWolf is it possible the collider or whatever can be adjusted so I can click on my luggage stuffed in the back of the service module? Instead of deorbiting directly from 250 km (where my Agena is) to a 30 km periapsis, I tried deorbiting from 100 km with a 40 km periapsis and the main chute did not rip the craft apart.

Squad has 200 ablator on a 1.25 heat shield. Hermes only has 100.

I've had one good landing out of three, and on the one survivable the whole thing stretched apart about 10 meters before snapping back together.

Speaking of the Vinci/Gemini, is anybody else having trouble with that ripping apart when the main chute deploys, or am I just really bad at reentry? Is there any reason to keep the 1.25 Hermes heatshield since it's integrated in the pod now? Maybe a better question would be is putting the ablator on the pod a good idea / future heat model proof.

A retractable KD2! Finally :-)

Took the KLIR on a trip to Duna. Very nice. I really like that Barquetta probe core. You should probably put a note in the description on the parts that require DMagic. They give the impression of being broken.

BDB uses 87% utilization by volume, 5 liters per fuel unit, and dry mass 1/8 of fuel mass. That balances well with stock. Calculate the volume of your tank in cubic meters. Take 87% of that and multiply by 1000 for liters. Divide that by 5 for total fuel units. Simplified it's Fuel Units = volume * 0.87 * 1000 / 5 = volume * 174. Round the fuel units down to the nearest 20, or nearest 100 in bigger tanks to get round numbers when you do the 0.9/1.1 LF/OX split. Liquid Fuel is Fuel Units / 2 * 0.9 Oxidizer is Fuel Units / 2 * 1.1 Liquid fuel and oxidizer both weigh 0.005 tons per unit, so the fuel mass is Fuel Units * 0.005. Set the mass of the tank to 1/8 of that. The cost of the tank should include the cost of the fuel. $0.80 per unit for Liquid fuel and $0.18 for Oxidizer. Plus a base cost of around $1000 per dry ton will put you in the right neighborhood.

We're using 23% dry mass for all srbs, solid fuel weighs 0.0075 per unit. So mass = Fuel Units * 0.0075 * 0.23. Round that to 4 digits precision. For the Wally with 1 fuel unit it's: 1 * 0.0075 = 0.0075 fuel mass. 0.0075 * 0.23 = 0.001725 dry mass, rounded = 0.0017. In the config: mass = 0.0017 Fueled weight will be 0.0017 + 1 fuel unit at 0.0075 = 0.0092 tons or 9.2 kg. That gives the Pioneer probe about 350 deltav, enough to capture at the Mun. A Star 37 can get you there, or maybe 2 star 20's. You can fit all that on a Vanguard/Able. The Sargent 1x/3x/11x contraption weighs about 2 tons now. It's crazy heavy so don't pay attention to that. Once we settle on what a 1x Sargent looks like, the 3x and 11x will weigh 3x and 11x respectively.

I had a chance to look around. The Wally/Pioneer and Sargent you're looking at are extremely heavy for their size and need to be scaled down. The full size Sargent that this is modeled after would only hold 2.8 units of fuel. The Wally weighs more than that FLT-100 tank in the picture (without fuel). Just eyeballing it the Wally would generously be 0.25 to 0.5 units. These things are very small. Since that probably won't fly, how about we upscale the Pioneer, Sargent, Star 10 and Star 20 a bit. I included a Septatron for scale, but I don't believe we should balance against that. Separatron's seem to exist in some alternate space time dimension. With the dry masses corrected the Wally goes from the 100 kg it is now to 9 kg. Mass is what I'm looking at.

I missed the wally then. I skipped it when we were filling fuel visual size because of its odd shape.

What's a "Wally" srm? They were initially balanced by their measurements in game like the fuel tanks are but that didn't work out so well. There was some significant deviation both up and down from the real srb's they are modeled on. Now they are straight mass rescales of about 20% of real which looks much better to me so far. The exception is the Sargent which is 100% scale right now. I'm not sure what we're going to do with that yet - @CobaltWolf prefers the 60 second burn model, I'm waiting for him to come to his senses and start liking the 6 second burn version. No opinion whatsoever went into there so nit-pick away, you won't hurt anyone's feelings, and we can tweak them if needed. But please try them first. The Star-10 is really really small. Pretty much a minimal mass satellite kick motor. I played with the thrust curves a bit. It's works nice. Hopefully I'll have something to play with soon. Going to try the GEM 40's and Castor 120/30 for Athena first. Athena would really benefit from a thrust curve.

Same, but with EVE/SVE. I ended up turning off lens flare in scatterer, too distracting. Trying out Rareden's Skybox. And hi-res texture on everything. 64-bit is nice finally.

Well... the curves are time/thrust. We need fuel % / thrust so there will be some figuring involved. I'm a little distracted at the moment - my new computer arrived. Haven't seen my jaw since it fell on the floor.

Worth exploring. Likely would be cool on the boosters. Less so on the SafeSolid stuff.

I'm not sure what you're planning now. I thought you were going to slap some rcs thrusters on the centaur interstage. I'm pretty sure uncommanded gimbling of the boosters was the cause of a few failures.

I keep forgetting that some people shut the engines down and restart after a coast. If your doing that this might be useful. Without the Vernors you have three axis control until the boosters separate, and then pitch/yaw with just the sustainer. The little torque in the Agena probe core has been adequate for roll stabilization. The real one probably does not use the booster gimbles for roll control, and I believe we can limit the axis now to simulate that, but I think that would be going too far. That's an RO thing. I don't know what RCS improvements have been made. Waiting for a new computer, I'm down to 1 fps in 1.1 with nothing more than realplume.

That little bump on the fairing looks like it. I've had very intermittent success using rcs for roll control on boosters and I just use reaction wheels for that anymore. On those occasions I do use it I forget to turn on rcs at launch about 93% of the time anyway. I haven't observed any unwanted rolling on the Atlas II. You don't lose roll authority until after jettisoning the boosters, and at that point you should be oriented and the minimal reaction wheel control in the payload can keep you from spinning.

Aren't those stock now?

I propose we convert everything to inches to avoid further confusion.

Typo, nice catch. https://www.dropbox.com/s/p6dh50acv3ouq0c/Atlas II.craft?dl=0 I rarely fly manually. The Atlas booster and RS27 got gimble upgrades. It's perfectly stable, not even a wiggle.

I don't have time to look at you craft file right now, but check your thrust. Atlas uses one set of engines for the entire family and you need to dial it back for the earlier rockets.

Hopefully the net effect is no huge change, other than a few rockets that were way OP like Titan 1. Solids have a formula now rather than Cobalt's usually pretty good guesses. Boosters got generally heavier, longer burning and higher thrust. Kick motors were all over the place. Isps on LFO engines were corrected in the one's that still have major deviations from reality. Thrusts and masses were adjusted in first stage engines to compensate for all of the above, give a realistic twr in the heaviest possible configuration, and balance them relative to each other. Delta II, Atlas, and Titan IV are if anything, buffed. Atlas V's main engine got a big nerf at the last minute. As promised I made a miscalculation. If figured the atlas sustainer's SL thrust using the booster's Isp. For now I'm going to leave it, Atlas II/Centaur is an extreme configuration for these engines. Just build it with the Centaur using only the 1100 tank full of fuel and it's fine. I made orbit with 3.3 tons payload and 1500 dv left. The new tags are great. Makes finding things a lot easier.