Wondering Out Loud: Seven questions

[90VG]

Here is 10 FL800's and a mainsail.

https://youtu.be/EvBYkHPE5ow

No problem getting way into orbit with that, although I wasn't using the throttle on J/S so it was a little wild.

[Nicias]

On 4/25/2018 at 12:52 PM, Corona688 said:

Either lash on your solids with a strut at the top, or enable autostrutting in the right click menu.  And make sure the decoupler grabs them in the middle, so they're shoved straight away | not pushed on-end / .  You can also use seprotrons to get them away from the main rocket more quickly.  And always point prograde when discarding empty-solids!

I like to fire as many stages simultaneously as I can.  Crossfeed is enabled in decouplers and fuel priority is set so all fuel comes from bottom-most stages until depleted.  This reduces the amount of dead weight you carry in the form of noncontributing engines and empty fuel tanks.  They call this kind of asparagus twisted-candle, because it actually looks like asparagus.

Tricky part is, engines won't die when they should, you have to watch tank levels.  I wish they'd let you set a minimum fuel priority for engines.

If you turn off crossed on the decouplers and use fuel ducts going up then you might get the behavior your want.

[Corona688]

19 hours ago, Nicias said:

If you turn off crossed on the decouplers and use fuel ducts going up then you might get the behavior your want.

Very difficult to do built vertically.  You need girders and it ruins your aerodynamics.

[Snark]

On 4/25/2018 at 9:52 AM, Corona688 said:

Tricky part is, engines won't die when they should, you have to watch tank levels.  I wish they'd let you set a minimum fuel priority for engines.

Now there is a brilliant idea.  Simple and effective.  You should post that in the "Suggestions" sub-forum.

Additional thoughts in spoiler section, since this is getting kinda off-topic for the thread.
 

Spoiler

When I saw your idea, I initially thought "oh man, that would be awesome!  I should write a mod to do that!" ....except having spent a little time digging into it just now, looks like it would actually be pretty hard.  It would require modding resource flow itself... and that's not designed in a way that's very moddable.  Could it be done?  Probably.  But it would be a big huge chunk of work that would essentially require rewriting the entire fuel-flow functionality of the game, which would be an awfully tall order.  I'd hoped that I could nip in there with a little surgical tweak, so that it would be a small and simple mod to write.  But, alas, not so much.

I think this is the kind of suggestion that wouldn't be too hard for Squad to implement... but is very hard for a modder to implement.  (I could be wrong about either or both of those assertions, but that's the impression I get from some initial poking ar it.)  So... a nice suggestion for Squad, I think.