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[1.4.x] TweakScale v2.3.12(Apr-16)


pellinor

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I'm curious about the balance of tweakscale in career mode currently. Specifically in the area of scaling engines.

Stock game seems to me (a relatively new player) to have a pretty decent balance of engines. Pretty much everything has a niche, a compelling reason you'd want to use that engine over anything else depending on the demands of the craft's situation. I've experimented with tweakscale, so far just briefly - because I've seen it's required for a lot of other mods that interest me. My impression is, with tweakscale the only engine stats that matter are ISP and whether it has the TWR to get you off kerbin, and the latter only applies briefly. For example...

In my current career mode, I'm using the Rockomax Spark on a lot of my probes because of its size. It is surpassed by a scaled-down Terrier, which was available earlier. Terriers, which I used over Poodles in favor of their low mass, are no match for a Poodle scaled to 1.25. Ants are AWFUL, scale down almost anything to replace it - where previously it had the great advantage of being incredibly light, now almost anything can be better. A Twinboar has the same stats as a scaled-up Reliant, just has some fuel too. Scaled-down Mainsails have ridiculous TWR for teeny little things they are. Basically, once off Kerbin and toodling around space, why would you use anything other than a Poodle (or Terrier until it's unlocked) scaled to your needs, ever? Seems like it makes things too easy and eliminates the niche engines' usefulness.

(EDIT: LV-N's, to answer my own dumb noob question. But there again, you can scale down an LV-N and mitigate their biggest drawback - weight - trading waiting through longer burn times for greater efficiency than is possible in stock game.)

Don't get me wrong, it's great for aesthetic, and I love the concept of this mod, though right now I'm looking for a mostly stock experience. Has anyone played with Tweakscale in career mode who could perhaps bring a different perspective?

Further edit / maybe a bug: How come the Oscar B scaled up to 1.25 has 144 units of liquid fuel and proportionate oxydizer, while being the same size as the T100 which only holds 45? It has 0.2 dry mass at that size, the T100 is 0.063, but the physical size difference is nowhere near that ratio.

Edited by Kyrt Malthorn
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I've been getting an issue with tweakscale and Infernal robotics, not sure what's causing it so I wasn't sure where to post it.

anyway I use infernal robotics parts on satellites and when changing craft and going back later sometimes the parts are moved, sometimes to the center of the craft or sometimes offset completely and floating a meter or so from the satellite.

Has anyone come across this or know of a fix?

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I'm curious about the balance of tweakscale in career mode currently. Specifically in the area of scaling engines.

...

As you've noticed, engines don't really scale in a balanced way. This has more to do with Squad's engine balancing than it does tweakscale, however. If you calculate some stats like thrust to weight and compare that and ISP, you'll notice that larger Squad engines are almost universally better than smaller ones. As a result, I generally play with the house rule that I can only scale engines up, not down. Sometimes I just play as though the larger engines are just upgrades, however,

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The engines are balanced for the tree. Engines you unlock at the end of the tree are going to be better than your starting engines, else what's the point of the tree? It'd really suck if the Space Shuttle Main Engine were no higher efficiency than a V-2 engine. :P

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On the whole "unbalanced career mode" dilemma perhaps the mod creator could implement a similar dynamic of that which procedural fairings does. In PF certain sizes are locked until completion of a node on the tech tree where a "part" must be bought that unlocks a different scaling size (such as 3.75m). I think if this was added to the mod it would increase its career playablility and also have players unlock techs they normally wouldn't like "metamaterials".

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delete the "patches" folder in the TweakScale folder. IR has its own TweakScale config included

That's the easy but dirty solution, and you have to do it for every other mod that includes Tweakscale configs. And redo it again every time you update Tweakscale or any other mod.

Any idea how to disable these patches with Module Manager?

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Something like

@PART[!HAS[#name[*IR*]]]:Final
{
-MODULE{TweakScale}
}

Or something, I really don't know the syntax. Basically, "for every part that isn't called IR something, remove the TweakScale module. Also, run on Final". Check the MM thread for proper syntax, what I wrote will almost definitely not work.

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Is Tweakscale scaling up the effects of parachutes properly when they are resized? I thought I would try this as a way to produce some larger parachutes to save on spamming dozens of small chutes on stages I am trying to recover after launch. I was using stage recovery for that, so at first I thought it might be that stage recovery was not accounting for the new parachute size. So I put a regular 2R parachute onto a fuel tank, put a 2R parachute resized to 200% onto a second tank that was 4x as heavy as the first, and with the aid of a few decouplers and a booster fired them a few hundred metres up, decoupled the two tanks and popped chutes. By my calculation, a 200% resized chute should have 400% greater open chute surface area and drag, so I would think the two tanks would descend at the same rate. But for whatever reason, the resized chute and larger tank fall at just under double the speed of the normal chute and smaller tank. Any thoughts / suggestions?

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Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but I seem to be getting a bug when a rescaled part is selected as the root of a vessel. When you quicksave, then reload, the part scales down to its original size. Changing the root part of my vessel fixed the issue but it might be a small thing to fix at some point.

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Regarding balance: with the exponent system it's not possible to prevent players from getting higher T/W than stock unless the mass and thrust exponents are exactly the same. If the mass exponent is larger than the thrust exponent, then downscaling will increase the T/W ratio (as now). If the reverse is true, upscaling will increase the T/W ratio. Therefore, I suggest using a mass exponent of 2 for engines if the thrust exponent is 2.

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Pellinor I am posting this here because I don't know how often you check github and want to make sure you see it. I found some aero parts and a fuel tank that was missing and added them in this pull request. I was not sure of where exactly each part should go in the file so i tried to guess the general area. The three parts on the bottom of the file were missed when the other versions of themselves were added in the spaceplane plus config. https://github.com/pellinor0/TweakScale/pull/10

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I've got an issue with rescaling RCS thrusters and KW ullage motors.

When I rescale any of those said above, initially it is ok but once I try to move the part in the editor the game freezes and occasionally crashes. Also the game crashes if you try to load a craft with those rescaled parts attached.

EDIT: I've confirmed the crash happens also when you scale engines of any sort. Below is what it said in the last lines of the output log.

(Filename: C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 56)

*U* Ullage constructor called on KW2mengineSPS

(Filename: C:/buildslave/unity/build/artifacts/StandalonePlayerGenerated/UnityEngineDebug.cpp Line: 56)

Crash!!!

Edited by ebigunso
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Hi Pellinor

I wrote some Tweakscale cfg files for some mods i was interested in and that are not in the Tweakscale release:

AtomicAge

MarkIVSystem

MK2Expansion

MK3HypersonicSystems

OPT

I only included the items i as interested in.

So far, they are working for me on 1.0.4 and it's great!

Are you interested I send it to you by mail so that you can check it and make a complete release?

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Potential severe bug encountered rescaling and attempting to use an LV-909 'Terrier' Liquid Fuel engine. It may be this, or it may be Real Fuels, data below. This will be posted in both threads.

Scaling an LV-909 'Terrier' Liquid Engine down to fit on a .675 meter size object results in the following CTD instances.

- Changing to 'In Flight' scene for launch

- Loading the ship back up into the VAB after restarting KSP

Crashes randomly either CTD completely, or manage to generate an error report that flags mono.dll.

Important Mod Environment Points:

- Real Fuels in use w/t stockalike cfgs

- FAR in use

Pertinent Additional observations:

- Crash is semi-consistent (I produced it multiple times initially with the desired part, and then stripped the components down to near nothing and started getting all the way to 'in flight' scenes)

- Events of non-crash and returning to VAB show loss of Real Fuels GUI values (blank RF GUI when it is opened for the engine) [which indicate something got wrecked in the game engine in the scene switches]

- Engine 'gui' data loss was consistent after leaving VAB and returning, clearing the part, and grabbing it again.

- GUI recovers after program restart on new part selection, however, saved vessel design with glitched part instantly CTDs.

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