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Developer Insights #17 - Engines Archetypes
Nertea replied to Intercept Games's topic in Dev Diaries
Lots of opinions here to unpack! We have to walk a fairly fine tightrope when choosing to represent the complex reality of real rocketry. For a lot of historical space applications, a specific need was often defined (go to the moon), which drove the selection and development of all components of the spacecraft, including choice of fuel(s) and development of the engines (from scratch, from a study, or upgraded from a previous vehicle). With KSP, we're kinda working backwards - we get to make guesses like "here are the missions we think a player will want to do" and strive to provide a set of engine options that let them do that. That's a pretty big space - players want launch engines, space engines, efficient engines and such for their missions. Filling that need for even a single fuel type requires a lot of engine parts. There's 20 in KSP1 and there's sill frustrating gaps to me. I do like playing Engine Selection Simulator myself, but providing enough options for player flexiblity with several liquid fuel types causes the number of engines to go up fast. I should know, I made at least one KSP1 mod for that. Approachability in this space is a huge problem too. New players end up with a lot of confusion over parsing through even the basic set of engines. More engines that use different fuels create more approachability challenges, particularly when trying to match them with their fuels and understand when to and when not to use them. That's a teaching challenge we have to bite off with our later, fancier engines, but there we have the advantage of being able to use fairly unique models and well-defined, different performance envelopes to do that. All this is why we are effectively sticking with a single liquid bipropellant engine resource, at least at the beginning of Early Access. There's a long road ahead of us though, and room for a lot more things! Of course - like Nate indicated, you will see hydrogen for use in nuclear engines at EA launch as a new fuel as well as the old standards like Xenon. There's lots of good discussion about methane as a base fuel in this thread, with some strong pros and cons. I'm always encouraged to see that these matched our internal design debates and I believe that we've made the right choice. Think of it as Kerbals taking a slightly different technical path to rocketry than humans. To quickly reiterate, we're not rebalancing our engines to be considerably different just because they use methalox or anything - you'll see craft with the same engines behave more or less the same in KSP1. All the above being said I immediately expect modders to do what modders do, and show up very quickly with mods that add, for example, the 150-odd resources in the Community Resource Pack into KSP2. And mods that change the engines that look something like hydrolox engines to use hydrolox . Modding is great!- 214 replies
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totm sep 2021 [1.12] Stockalike Station Parts Redux (June 12, 2022)
Nertea replied to Nertea's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
I haven't changed that code in years, you'd have to ask the other poster and compare conditions. -
totm sep 2021 [1.12] Stockalike Station Parts Redux (June 12, 2022)
Nertea replied to Nertea's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
You can see what I'm doing here: https://github.com/post-kerbin-mining-corporation/StationPartsExpansionRedux/blob/f0c03675c817782d99c3e919c1e30d070f8a360b/Source/HabUtils/ModuleAdjustableLeg.cs#L156 It's not very groundbreaking and I'm honestly surprised it works as well as it does. -
[1.12.3] Restock - Revamping KSP's art (Feb 25)
Nertea replied to Nertea's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
Probably scatterer TAA. -
System Heat 0.6.0 Most UI fields now report in SI-prefixed units for flux (W, kW, MW, etc). This is not (yet) true for all modules though. Added new functionality to cool fuel tanks with radiators and the SH system Added optional patch to apply this to CryoTanks Added some guardrails around the handling of Kopernicus planets that might have inconsistently configured atmospheres Added ingame settings. The following things can be customized per game Boiloff: enabled and scale Nuclear fuel transfer: require engineers, what level Fission reactor damage: allowed, various tuning variables Fixed engine heat for VASIMR argon modes Support USI reactors Fixes to universal harvester patch
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[WIP] Nert's Dev Thread - Current: such nuke, wow
Nertea replied to Nertea's topic in KSP1 Mod Development
I managed to cook my modding computer but it's back now. Some pictures of the process for the 2.5m reactor. Looking at the old one, going to try to preserve some of the silhouette because it is dear to me Gotta keep the look unique compared to the 1.875m one. Components blocked out. Getting to a coherent external detail level. Rolling in the machinery and pipes, nice lineage with the 1.875m reactors, but showing off some size optimizations and more turbines. -
[Most 1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (August 26)
Nertea replied to Nertea's topic in KSP1 Mod Releases
This is an intentional 'bug'. You have command all the time because it is a probe core. Also because it's a probe core, it has to be powered. There are no radiators with NFE. Reactors are totally compatible with existing radiators out of the box, it won't even take a ton. They just will not be very efficient. Missing implies I ever did any. Never got around to it.