allmhuran

Per my original post, I am not asking if it is planned. I even stated that I had heard lever arm compensation was returning. I do not know how that was not obvious. The question, or suggestion, is regarding the specific implementation details.

A perfect implementation would be more complex than my contrived example: it would actually need to normalize for each axis based on the orthogonal distance of the active RCS units from the axis passing through the CoM. Taking my contrived picture, again, both units are actually equidistant from the long axis through the ship, which is the axis we care about if we wanted to impart a roll, for example. However, I'm not sure going that far is necessary. Using a simpler, absolute distance from CoM irrespective of the direction of thrust imparted is probably still going to be of assistance, and leaves the player with some design challenges (a good thing IMO).

Yeah, sorry, it's a bit hard to explain. RCS can create unbalanced forces depending on how you position the units. Here is a contrived example: I have marked the RCS units A and B. The distance from the CoM to A is, say, x. The distance from the CoM to B is 3x. If you are flying this vessel and try to translate to the right, both A and B will fire. But since B is much further from the CoM than A, this will introduce a torque that will cause the ship to yaw to the left while translating right. It won't hold orientation. In an earlier version of KSP the force imparted by RCS units was subject to a divisor that was dependent on how far they were from the CoM, a technique dubbed "lever arm compensation". The idea behind this was that you did not need to perfectly balance your RCS units to get balanced forces. The implementation created a problem, though: if you put your RCS units very, very close to the CoM, then the divisor would be less than 1. As a result, the RCS unit force would be multiplied. An RCS unit that was 0.1 units of distance away from the CoM would put out a force equal to 100% / 0.1, or 1000% RCS force. You could actually make rockets with ridiculous thrust simply by getting your RCS units closer and closer to the CoM. There is talk of bringing back lever arm compensation, which I think is a good idea. However, I'm not sure how it is going to be implemented. I heard, for example, that it would only be enabled in docking mode or some such. Rather than put on such limitations (heck, I never use docking mode and don't really see the point of it), I propose that a better solution to the RCS overthrust bug would be to normalize RCS units based on whichever one is closest to the CoM. Taking that picture again, let's say that RCS unit "A" is (say) 0.5 units from the CoM. Since it is the closest unit to the CoM, it gets 100% thrust. Any other units are then normalized against this one. So since RCS unit B is 1.5 units from the CoM, it should output 1/3rd as much thrust as RCS unit A. With this implementation, the further away your closest RCS port to the CoM is, the better. A such there are still design considerations to be made. This method would retain the efficiency gains that clever designs can have when RCS units are placed far from the CoM without re-introducing the RCS overthrust problem. The fix is to base lever arm compensation on distance relative to the closest-to-CoM RCS unit instead of basing the compensation on the absolute value of the distance to the CoM.

Not sure if this is, in fact, how RCS will be handled in 0.21, I heard that they are bringing back lever arm compensation. I was just thinking that if *all* RCS thrusters are lever-arm compensated (by simply scaling them based on distance from CoM) then there would be no advantage to placing your RCS ports away from the centre of mass for additional torque. This would be a problem for larger ships. So the solution, it seems, would be to have it so that the RCS unit *closest to the center of mass gets 100% thrust*, and then the rest are scaled down the further from the CoM they are compared to that RCS unit. This would mean that if you did the "right thing" for big ships and placed *all* your RCS thrusters far from the CoM you would still get the benefit of additional lever-arm torque (since they will all be putting out close to 100% thrust), but lever arm compensation would still mean you would not get unbalanced RCS forces. Anyone know if this is, in fact, what is going to be coming?

I never did much with "intake abuse" because I didn't like simply hiding them inside wings etc. However, I have recently decided on a technique which actually produces something that I think looks good, namely, like so: The intakes are stacked front to rear to form a long, black, angular cylinder in front of each engine, and I actually think it looks pretty neat. It's a way of extending the black engine aesthetic with the added benefit of giving you super intake capacity. The pictured plane gets into orbit with both of those orange tanks pretty much full. Closeup of the engines. If you fiddle around you can fill that little gap at the back by sticking a disc shaped battery in there, which also looks pretty good. Here's a more extreme version, this gets into space faster than most of my rockets...

Whether it's resources, experiments, or something else, what the game desperately needs right now is a set of goals. When I first saw the demo for this game I bought it within five minutes. I raved about it at work, "best game ever", etc etc. I've built everything, from high performance aircraft (back before intakes were a thing), to absolute gargantuans and grand tour ships. I have spent hours and hours making and editing despite being utterly unknown and getting virtually no views. I spent a week building as near a perfect replica of a tie fighter as I think is possibleBut I have not played the game in several months, because I have nothing left to accomplish. I need goals. I need a reason to use a SSTO spaceplane that can lift two orange tanks into orbit (yes I have one). I need a reason to build more gargantuans. I need something to do other than simply go to other celestial bodies, because I've already been to all of them several times over.