pina_coladas

I'm using Nathan's patch. My experience has been that it does make stretchy tanks work with MFS, but the MFS dry mass and fuel density values are sort of tacked-on and constantly being overwritten by the default stretchy tanks values. So every time I re-size a tank its values are recalculated with the "stock" ratios. That's not too terrible, but the MFS values also seem to get overwritten whenever I grab and move a tank, and whenever I load a craft in the VAB. So every time I revert to the VAB or load the craft in the VAB I have to go through each tank in the MFS menu to get the values right and then try not to touch anything before I hit launch. Am I an idiot who installed something wrong? I assumed the lack of support from the stretchy tanks author made it difficult to add MFS compatibility and it was this way for everyone. It really takes the joy and wonder out of making Saturn V replicas unfortunately.

Just change the tank texture to something orange on the fly when using LH2! Stretchy tanks allows that kind of texture swapping already. It's too bad that the current version of stretchy tanks is so finnicky to use with modular fuels though... Is a fork possible?

Thanks but I was referring to the actual Mechjeb part sliding around violently on the surface it's attached to! Didn't seem to cause any issues but it made me nervous.

Rescaling Kerbals is the logical end-point of all of this I think... Except they are proportionally very weird. How big would the helmet of a human-sized Kerbal be?

Bug report: mechjeb case wobbles around like crazy (at least when stuck to the side of the 3-man pod) Other than that it's been amazing. My computer might be able to handle an Apollo mission now!

Yeah of course I know that, and I did make my own preset. I'm just saying that preset should be in by default now.

I like how technical this is all getting. Mimicking the optimized ascent profiles of real life rockets will be pretty damn hard, but by not simulating things like unburned propellants and pre-liftoff throttle-up we can leave a little leeway for pilot error and hopefully still make it to orbit. And I agree with Dragon about the need for a new preset in KIDS. Even before Kerbin was re-sized all I wanted KIDS to do was to make thrust scale with ISP (and re-rate different engines as sea level or vacuum) without all the weird shenanigans to increase dV costs. With Earth-sized Kerbin that's definitely all you would want KIDS to do. I could see people getting pretty confused if they didn't already know what they were doing when setting these things up.

It's what mechjeb's PID controller does when you have a very large rocket. It's caused by the flexing and wobbling of the joints in the rocket, which makes the command pod sway relative to the engines. Mechjeb gets confused and over-corrects. There may be more to it than that but its the wobbly-rocket-syndrome that causes the most grief. e: so use lots of struts and pray

The re-entry effects aren't at all realistic I think... They're tuned to kick in during reentry on stock Kerbin, where orbital speed is a fraction of RealKerbin. Good question about drag losses on ascent though.

Oh stupid me the cfg went into the modular fuels folder. Reloading everything in the debug menu didn't work so I had to restart KSP (this confused me a bit). I really should have posted this in the modular fuel continued thread I guess... How about including the stretchy tanks config in the official release of modular fuels Nathan?

Stupid question: how do I get stretchy tanks to play nicely with MFS? I installed stretchy tanks and then installed the patch in your signature. Is that the link for your MFS fixes or is it just textures and the SRB? Stretchy tanks have the bad default behaviour right now and I don't get the MFS dialogue for them. e: ok I found a "StretchyTanks_modularFuelTanks.cfg" hidden in the stretchytanks zip file, but I have no idea where to put it or what to do with it... I dropped it into the parts folder where the other CFGs are and to no effect. Do I have to change some filenames or delete other cfg files? Somebody who knows really has to do a writeup on this.

All I ask is that you leave the option of having KSC at the equator. Extra plane change fiddling is one extra detail that people might not feel like dealing with when adjusting to the new mechanics. Having the choice between equator, real KSC and Baikonur latitudes would be great. Maybe there could be a configuration where the Mun has 0 inclination too, for old time's sake...

I have done it by messing with CFG files to turn other parts into reactors. Also I could have just used editor extensions to turn on surface attachment on the turbojets to put more than one on a regular reactor. It would be nice if the thermal power of the reactor was split between any engines attached, sort of like how megajoules are split between all plasma engines. The way it works now is that each thermal turbojet tries to draw power as if it was the only one attached and the reactor runs out of thermal energy, making the jets flame out. Keeping the throttle to 1/4 (with 4 engines) fixes this but then you miss out of the really nice animations on the turbojets. Yeah, I know. Sorry for being a pain, fractal!

So if I do something crazy like stick 4 thermal turbojets to the back of a reactor, will they still draw 4x more thermal power than they should and flame out?

Bug report: EVA on mun is slippery and you sink into the ground a little when not moving and you can't plant flags. Hope this helps somehow. It's going to be REALLY hard to make a realistic Apollo-style landing now... finally a real reason to make a two-stage mun lander! Also, it really threw me off seeing the mun in an inclined orbit, now I have to think a little bit about launch windows. Getting off RealEve is going to be be pretty ridiculous and going to the outer planets is going to take a very long time on max time acceleration...

Modular Fuel Systems: a solution to a problem that we didn't think could be created

So I pretty much ignored this thread at first because I'm not that interested in people playing with lowering ISPs and things like that to try to make dV to orbit more "realistic" on toy-sized planets, but I looked again and suddenly this is the best thread on the forums! I had to lol a bit at the blurry orbiter-like kerbin textures (it's beautiful). I hope you guys can get the kinks worked out and that you don't run into memory limits! Godspeed.

Oh hey you're back! What do you think about my suggestions for making the graph bigger, showing more detail on the graph mouseover tooltip (flight time?), and displaying delta v stats as selectable text instead of tooltips? Those few things would be a big improvement on an already very useful tool.

That was me, I just modified a shiny B9 part with 4 attach nodes into a reactor. And yes, you do get full thrust from a given engine if the others are disabled. You also get full thrust on all of them at once until they spazz out and shut themselves down one at a time, sending your jet into a spin so violent that parts fly off in all directions. I only did it because the thermal turbojets are so tiny...

Ok I figured out the intakes but I'm pretty sure that running out of thermal power is a bug. 4 thermal turbojet engines attached to a 9GW reactor will ramp up to absurd levels of thrust but will drain the stored "thermalpower" in fractions of a second and start shutting down. Maybe you aren't supposed to have more than one engine per reactor but it looks cool dammit

Yeah I get how thermal power works and it makes sense to me when I make thermal rockets. But something seems weird with the turbojets. For example, I get significantly less thrust in LFO mode than I do in pure atmospheric intake mode, which goes opposite to my understanding. Also, when I attach 4 turbojets to one reactor (a modified part, maybe the problem is there) it's actually possible to "run out" out thermal power, shutting down the turbojets. I thought the thrust would just scale with the thermal power that was available, but it seems like the turbojets have some kind of minimum requirement. This is 4 of them drawing from one 500MW reactor and that particular problem goes away when I upgrade to 1.5GW. I expected the performance to be bad with 500MW but not for it to be non-functional. My other problems have to do with my not understanding what the numbers mean in air intake CFGs I think... Say I wanted one large part to have the power of several of your provided intakes (maybe with a power requirement too), which numbers do I worry about? Is there something weird KSP does with the mass of intake parts too?

So what's the deal with the thermal turbojet? It's weak and it sucks intakeair/intakeatm super fast. Is that how it's supposed to be? I love the animation and the concept but it doesn't seem worth using. Also, I tried plugging in some modules into b9 parts to make a sleek looking nuclear turbojet and it did not work well at all. I modified that big honking fuselage air intake piece, turned a large quad-engine adapter piece into a 2.5m nuclear reactor and made another piece into a generator. The results were not good, partially because I don't understand how KSP air intakes work at all. Has anyone else done this?

You should check out the modular fuel system thread! ZRM has talked about it quite a bit. It's pretty much required to make an actually realistic space shuttle, since it allows you to use different fuel types like in real life. So hydrogen-oxygen in the giant external tank (low-density, high ISP) and some sort of hypergolic in the orbiter itself (high-density, low isp, for the volume-limited shuttle. Could be standard ksp fuel or something "realistic") If you used stock fuels only you would have to shrink the external tank by a lot or else it would have a ridiculous amount of fuel and be extremely heavy. So I think ZRM is right to be talking about the modular fuel system for the shuttle in its current form. Anyway the project is great and I'm sure it will all work out eventually. Any semi-realistic space shuttle is going to be a little bit complicated and I like that. Advanced gimballing plugins, multiple fuel types, it's all cool.

So does this totally throw off thrust to weight calculations in kerbal engineer and mechjeb? I feel sure that it does, which is the only thing stopping me from grabbing this badly-needed fix.

Thanks for the detailed reply! I had a feeling I was missing a few things. But I still think something is wrong with the Moho transfer I showed. When I tried to perform it, my closest approach was on the opposite side of the sun as Moho. And I should have been more clear about the image: I know the red dot show's Moho's current position at the time of departure, I just think it looks like it's in totally the wrong position. For the record, I had even less success using alexmun's tool to get to Moho. Has anyone been able to plot a good Moho transfer?