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What 1.0.x changes are catching out experienced players (aside from aero)?


katateochi

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Not sure when it got implemented, but I keep forgetting you can transfer between more than two tanks at a time now. Trying to balance two tanks is soooo much easier now (as long as you have a third tank to use as a measuring cup.)

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I think it would be nice if a 5 star engineer could manually retract those panels....

They'd still be more vulnerable to breaking, and have a lower heat tolerance.

Can't the 5-star engineer "retract" them by breaking them, then re-extend with repair? <.<

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The fact that hiring Kerbals costs megabucks.

This one surprised me too, at first, but honestly it's just meant that I don't hire Kerbals. I've got a fleet of 1-man recovery vessels (costs ~22k on the pad, almost half of which gets recovered on landing) designed to grab stranded kerbonauts from low orbit. Basically it's an old Mk1 cockpit (launched empty), a probe core and small battery, a couple solar panels, a 1.25m heat shield, a couple parachutes, and some legs. (Newer versions add some RCS jets and monoprop, but the original just used a small, detachable liquid stage for orbital maneuvers.) Mount it on top of some SRBs and you can get to orbit with more than enough delta-V to spare, while still keeping costs to a minimum. I put several of these up at a ~90km orbit, in varying locations around Kerbin. Accept the contract whenever one comes up (10k up front, 40-50k on completion), find the nearest recovery vessel to the stranded person, and voila, new kerbonaut AND some cash. I've now got 13 or 14 kerbonauts at the KSC, with a half-dozen waiting recovery vessels if I ever find I need more. Well, seven of them are currently on a trip to Duna and Ike, but they'll be back (I hope).

The thing that really screwed me up, as an experienced player, was the reorganized tech tree. I used to rely on ion engines for all of my interplanetary probes, but now those are an endgame technology. In ye olden days I'd lift a 2-ton ion probe inside my 10-ton RAPIER-equipped spaceplane for dirt cheap, and I could send it anywhere in the system even at the mid-tier techs. This really helped my finances, as those "science from X" missions were the best way to make money on Hard.

But honestly, I've loved the changes. Sure, the new aero model is taking a lot of getting used to, but I do like the concept of it better than the old souposphere.

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This one surprised me too, at first, but honestly it's just meant that I don't hire Kerbals

Which I think is a bad thing because it means you actually WANT your list of available contracts spammed up with rescue missions instead of something more worthwhile.

Seriously, everything about Kerbals needs considerable revision if not outright scrapping, but the new cost of recruiting utterly unskilled Kerbals of random classes is just fundamentally wrong. If I have to pay, then I want control over what type of volunteers can even apply.

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Gotta be the vacuum ISP nerf to LFO and Solid fuel engines.

Found myself one SRB or fuel tank short of success at least a handful of times, before I caught wise.

But seriously, why did they change that? New ATMOSPHERE physics means VACUUM performance of the rocket engines got worse? Either I'm missing something, or that decision doesn't make any logical sense.

And reducing vacuum specific impulse by 40s on the LFO engine with the highest vacuum ISP is not a small change.

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They appear to have rebalanced electrics, as I've discovered that the OX-STATs aren't nearly as competent as before at keeping my probe batteries topped off, so anything with lots of reaction wheels keeps finding itself dead and having to wait two or three whole orbits to recharge.

The 1.0.2 change to not allowing hypersonic flaming parachutes burns me pretty often, as even the new default setting (0.04) is too low and ends up making my parachutes get ripped off so my ship smacks into Kerbin like a fly on a windshield.

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Gotta be the vacuum ISP nerf to LFO and Solid fuel engines.

Found myself one SRB or fuel tank short of success at least a handful of times, before I caught wise.

But seriously, why did they change that? New ATMOSPHERE physics means VACUUM performance of the rocket engines got worse? Either I'm missing something, or that decision doesn't make any logical sense.

And reducing vacuum specific impulse by 40s on the LFO engine with the highest vacuum ISP is not a small change.

They reduced Isp across the board to make up for how much less delta-V it costs to get into Kerbin orbit now.

Before, it was typically 4500-4600 m/s to orbit, 4400 if you flew it perfectly. Now I typically budget for around 3500, but I think it's possible to go quite a bit more efficient than that.

If you aren't going very far, then the combination of the aero changes and the Isp nerf have a net result of requiring less rocket. If you're doing a big interplanetary mission and reaching Kerbin orbit was less than half of your delta-V budget to begin with, then yeah the Isp nerf will give you problems.

Solids got hit even harder than liquids for some reason though, so IMO they don't have much use anymore

Edited by zarakon
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New ATMOSPHERE physics means VACUUM performance of the rocket engines got worse? Either I'm missing something, or that decision doesn't make any logical sense.

I answered that over here for you. Basically comes down to the fact that vacuum ISP is more important for more of the ascent than atmospheric ISP, in order to get the numbers to balance out nerfing just the atmospheric ISP, you'd have sub-100 s ISP even on lifting engines.

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They appear to have rebalanced electrics, as I've discovered that the OX-STATs aren't nearly as competent as before at keeping my probe batteries topped off, so anything with lots of reaction wheels keeps finding itself dead and having to wait two or three whole orbits to recharge.

They've rebalanced the electricity production, but I think it needs quite a bit of work. First, because of the new temperature dependence issues; an OX-STAT on Eve produces almost nothing, which has caused problems for the unmanned lander I put there. (Transmit one temperate report, and it takes hours to recharge off multiple panels.) Second, because the panels are so useless once you get out to Jool that you pretty much HAVE to use multiple RTGs to power any ions; I don't want the old distance scaling, but the base values might need a bit of tweaking upwards.

The 1.0.2 change to not allowing hypersonic flaming parachutes burns me pretty often, as even the new default setting (0.04) is too low and ends up making my parachutes get ripped off so my ship smacks into Kerbin like a fly on a windshield.

I haven't had a problem with this; you generally just let atmospheric braking slow your incoming design down until the shockwave effects go away (400-500m/s), and THEN pop the chutes. Assuming you have enough parachutes on your design for its mass, it'll be just fine; old designs that used the souposphere might have insufficient braking under the new model, so you might need to just add more. Of course, you could also try adding drogues, or changing the settings on your chutes, but I haven't seen much need for that sort of multi-phase braking.

Solids got hit even harder than liquids for some reason though, so IMO they don't have much use anymore

Their use is that they're dirt cheap. You might have a fully recoverable liquid fuel launcher that uses disposable SRBs; it won't cost you nearly as much as an all-liquid design would, despite being a bit heavier. Sure, a liquid engine has higher efficiencies, but the larger LFO engines get REALLY expensive.

Here's one of my own setups, to illustrate:

inkRfmj.png

That's a 7-man lander on top, designed to move people to Mun, Minmus, or for brief hops out of the SOI to get Sun credit. Great for training unskilled kerbonauts, and it also counts as a station/base since it has power, a docking port, etc. so I can get big money from those contracts. The booster is fully recoverable (probe core and all), but the SRBs get thrown away on the way up. The booster setup has enough delta-V to get into orbit with ~900m/s to spare, detach the payload, and safely return near the KSC. (The big black tanks are from KW Rocketry; they're just big LFO tanks that attach radially, nothing special.)

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I would say just keep rescuing them from space, it is a lot better to get paid to get a new recruit than it is to pay for one! :cool:

Same for me. First time I noticed the cost of hiring new Kerbals was the last time I ever hired one. Now I see each rescue mission as saving me enough on hiring to pay for a whole interplanetary mission. Makes them far more attractive. Last game, I got 3 at once in pretty much the same orbits. Got them all with one mission. :)

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Maybe it was always like this, but the unprotected panels now have the added fun of being breakable even before deploying. Thanks, fairing.

Yea... I now always quick save before deploying fairings.... I wish we could tweak the ejection force on the fairings...

I also hate the hiring cost...

350k for a Kerbal?

Lets see, I can make a Duna surface base + return mission... or hire this new Doofus Kerman, who has zero experience, and will need to go through multiple training missions before (s)he is usefull...

No thanks... I'll do another rescue mission...

Except for each rescue mission I do, the cost of hiring goes up. Now I'm at 16 kerbals, and I only have 2 scientists... 1 of which is Bob.

That means of 12 rescued Kerbals, I only managed to rescue 1 scientist.

I've got engineers out the wazoo though... all 1 star (Trying to train some to 2 stars before the duna mission).

.... great...

Now I'm looking at hiring scientists for MPLs and landers... but they are so darn expensive, I can just send two missions instead of including a scientist to reset goo and mat bays

Edited by KerikBalm
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I would say just keep rescuing them from space, it is a lot better to get paid to get a new recruit than it is to pay for one! :cool:

Yeah I do the same, so far I've only hired 1 Kerbal and that was entirely because of his name, Mr FroBald just had to be hired!

I've used rescue missions as my source of Kerbals for a while now, so I actually didn't notice the cost of hiring at first.

The change that caught me out most was liquid fuel flowing like monoprop for airbreathing engines, easy to accidentally drain fuel from a payload when the flow logic thinks it's a drop tank. Or drain from the core stage when using jet boosters.

Oh, yeah! that's caught me out a number of times. Not 100% sure how I feel about this change, it wasn't exactly hard to run fuel lines for the liquid engines and that seemed intuitive. This way you save on part count (a little bit) but you've now got to remember to ensure the payload doesn't get consumed. Plus with most of my SSTO designs I still need to run fuel lines to provide oxidizer, so it doesn't really help with fuel flow or part count, it just adds another annoying step; I tend to just lock the fuel on the payload tanks, but if the payload has lots of tanks or tanks in tricky to get at places then that's a pain.

A similar thing to this; docking ports with cross-flow enabled as default, results in the same issues of payload fuel getting consumed (I often use docking ports inside cargo bays to hold payloads). I like the option to have cross-flow across docking ports, but I think it should be disabled by default.

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Oh, yeah! that's caught me out a number of times. Not 100% sure how I feel about this change, it wasn't exactly hard to run fuel lines for the liquid engines and that seemed intuitive. This way you save on part count (a little bit) but you've now got to remember to ensure the payload doesn't get consumed. Plus with most of my SSTO designs I still need to run fuel lines to provide oxidizer, so it doesn't really help with fuel flow or part count, it just adds another annoying step; I tend to just lock the fuel on the payload tanks, but if the payload has lots of tanks or tanks in tricky to get at places then that's a pain.

In fairness, the change does more than replace fuel lines, it lets airbreathers drain from all tanks in a stage simultaneously which is difficult and sometimes impossible to set up with fuel lines. I have mixed feelings on it, it's good for planes but can cause trouble in other designs. For example, I had a heck of a time getting fuel flow working properly for this design, the jet boosters needed doubled decouplers and I still had to watch the tanks drain to make sure they didn't draw from the next stage.

A simple workaround for planes is to reroot the craft to a part in the payload, that way the payload will be drained last (it thinks the whole plane is a drop tank then).

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In fairness, the change does more than replace fuel lines, it lets airbreathers drain from all tanks in a stage simultaneously which is difficult and sometimes impossible to set up with fuel lines

Ah, good point!

I have mixed feelings on it, it's good for planes but can cause trouble in other designs. For example, I had a heck of a time getting fuel flow working properly for this design, the jet boosters needed doubled decouplers and I still had to watch the tanks drain to make sure they didn't draw from the next stage.

A simple workaround for planes is to reroot the craft to a part in the payload, that way the payload will be drained last (it thinks the whole plane is a drop tank then).

That's a neat trick! nice 1.

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Landed on Duna. Repacked Chutes. Took off. Hit space to drop my first tanks. Chutes (which before 1.0 have - in my experience at least - never ever restaged) all went off.

I missed orbit by (probably, I didn't check) a couple hundred m/s. If I had cut them a LITTLE faster I may have made it.

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A simple workaround for planes is to reroot the craft to a part in the payload, that way the payload will be drained last (it thinks the whole plane is a drop tank then).

If your craft is a spaceplane, and you're talking about a payload to be deployed in orbit, the much easier solution is to disable the payload's tanks (right click on the part, click on the little green icon next to the LiquidFuel readout to change it to red) so that the craft doesn't consume it at all. Once you've deployed, reverse the process.

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