[0.23.5] Realism Overhaul: ROv5.2 + Modlist for RSS 6/30/14

[ThorBeorn]

Does anyone else get low FPS/lag with RO? I didn't experience FPS issues at all with regular KSP + 20 mods. With RO installed my FPS drops and the timer turns yellow when the vessel physics loads and during launch. FPS/game speed then increases with every stage. RAM usage is around 2,5 gb. Part count is low, most launches so far has been around 60-70. My specs are Intel i5 750 @ 3,8 Ghz, Radeon 7970 and 8 Gb of RAM.

I'm really enjoying these mods otherwise.

[Stir_Fry_Beans]

I installed all of the essential and some of the suggested mods and now my fuel tanks don't contain any fuel... Can someone help me out?

[brooklyn666]

you have to right click on the fuel tank in the actions group tab. Then you can select your fuel.

[Stir_Fry_Beans]

Ah thanks I figured it was something like that. I just kept trying like it was a tweakable.

[Fleet]

So, i am having an odd issue i was hoping someone might help me out on. For some reason when i hit the roll keys my engines gimbal in a way that causes my craft to pitch over instead of rolling, even with single nozzle engines.

I have RO and the rfts engines config and all the up to date dlls (EE, km_gimbal_2.0) and have also tried the other 2 recommended engine configs with the same results.

Is there something i am missing or did i mess something up?

[Pireax]

I think that's supposed tot happen, in real life engine gimbal cant make the craft roll either.

[Traches]

Fleet - if you right click on the engine there's an option to disable roll gimbaling.

It can work to control roll, if you have more than one engine in a stage (engine clusters that are placed as a single part don't work.)

[Hodo]

I am having an odd problem with my RO and stretchy tanks v9.

I am also using the realistic progression tech tree cfg found I think in this thread, (not on home computer cant check), but for some reason my stretch tanks will not expand they are limited to .625m width. That is a serrious issue for me, mainly do to the fact I got rid of all extra tanks provided by KW, because I don't need them with stretch tanks.

[Pireax]

You can try my files on page 111, see if it works!

[Hodo]

You can try my files on page 111, see if it works!

Does that fix the width issue? I have no issues with the fuel types or amount just the actual size. They wont get any wider than .625m.

[Fleet]

Does that fix the width issue? I have no issues with the fuel types or amount just the actual size. They wont get any wider than .625m.

I have found that if you go into stretchytanks/parts and change the tech.cfg to say start=1000 (instead of 0.1 or something) you get all the sizes right away.

[Fleet]

Fleet - if you right click on the engine there's an option to disable roll gimbaling.

It can work to control roll, if you have more than one engine in a stage (engine clusters that are placed as a single part don't work.)

It seems the only engines that have the option to disable roll gimbaling are the KM shuttle engines, all other engines i just have the option to lock gimbal entirely. This is strange.

[NathanKell]

Blipser: open the main settings tcfg file in ATM (KSP_win\GameData\BoulderCo\textureCompressorConfigs\TextureCompressor.tcfg) and find the scale= line. It will tell you how to do it. (Use a text editor like notepad to open it).

Pireax: Uh, tanks don't have tech levels...do you mean what node they're assigned to?

ThorBeorn: Things are slower because (I think) Kerbin, if you leave the terrain settings as they are, will still have much more terrain to calculate.

Fleet: That's weird. I've never noticed that myself. Make sure you only have one Exsurgent Engineering DLL? If it persists, give careo a holler?

Hodo: as Fleet mentions, since RPL hasn't been updated to deal with Stretchy's tech-limited diameters, you'll need to override it by making the initial max diameter quite large (1000 works fine).

[Fleet]

Interesting.

I have no duplicates of anything from what i can tell so i tried messing around with some gimbal control mods. I used TweakableGimbal and the tweakable menu would come up but none of the sliders seemed to do anything on the engines and they continued to pitch with roll commands. However the engines using the KM_Gimbal module worked fine. I then removed the rftsengines that i was using and replaced with the stockengines config and now they perform as expected. It is kind of a shame though because i like the added realism of the rfts engines but it is impossible to fly when you just want to roll a bit and your rocket pitches.

Is there a work around for this or is this just a one off problem caused by my incredibly bad luck?

[Pireax]

Yes the node which they are assigned to ,if i change that in the cfg's the MFT stretchytanks dont change to the appropriate node. All other tanks do chance when changing it in the cfg.

[NathanKell]

Fleet: remove tweakable gimbal and try EE qmd RftS Engines again. That would be the problem I think.

Pireax: because RPL is a custom tech tree, its node settings override what's in the files. But only for parts whose names it knows.

[Fleet]

Alright i tried that but no cigar.

Question - is the module "Smarter Gimbal" part of EE? the problem seems to be isolated to engines using that but i have no idea where that came from.

I am about to just nuke my install and start over but if anyone has any ideas that would be great. Thanks for the help though!

[horndgmium]

So uhh.. reporting in on a bug maybe? I made a stock plane real quick and a mod plane as well and this happened:

But then I loaded a stock FAR plane and it flew okay.

And then I downloaded KJR and it started floating:

[NathanKell]

Fleet: Yes, that's the EE gimbal. And yeah, really don't know what to say. Do they still perform strangely if you surface-attach two engines, and try to roll?

horndgmium: what version of KSP? What mods? Output log? Why are you thinking RO (which only changes part stats, it doesn't even have any code itself!) is doing this?

[Phredward]

Is this the right place to talk about correct mass for parts?

I've recently been building larger rockets in RSS and have noticed that procedural interstage fairings are REALLY heavy, especially at any substantial size. This web page says that a real life 3m interstage is 250kg - 1 ton. Here are in-VAB mechjeb-reported masses for different diameter interstage bases:

2m - 0.3t

4m - 2.1t

6m - 7.2t

8m - 16.5t

10m - 33.4t

12m - 56.6t

14m - 89.8t

As a result, I noticed that in a large rocket, a substantial percent of the LEO payload might be interstage! Not ideal. I accept that larger bases will need to support more mass above, and probably more thrust from below, and so besides being larger, will likely also need to be sturdier as well. And I readily accept that sturdier and larger means heavier. Nevertheless, I feel like 90 tons for a 14m interstage base is off by at least a factor of 10.

I looked through the Realism Overhaul configs override, and saw that it kept the same value for specificMass (0.263). I tried changing it to 0.063, and also 0.030. 0.030 looks close-ish, and I want to run these numbers by people. Personally, I think that although things are less massive, I believe a tweak to the mass algorithm may still in order, but would love to get some feedback from someone who knows more about this before suggesting any changes to e-dog, the procedural fairings maintainer.

specificMass=0.063

2m - 0.1t

4m - 0.5t

6m -1.7t

8m - 3.9t

10m -7.9t

12m - 13.6t

14m - 21.5t

specificMass=0.030

2m - 0.1t

4m - 0.2t

6m - 0.8t

8m - 1.9t

10m - 3.8t

12m - 6.5t

14m - 10.2t

I would love to see interstage adapters follow a curve that starts at roughly 100kg for a 1m adapter, 1t for a 3-6m, and 6-12t for 14m. Those are just my suggestions. If someone else with more actual real-life rocketry experience (or internet sources) wants to claim something else, I'd love to hear it. The 0.030 value seems pretty close to that, so I suggest using it as the new value for the specificMass value in GameData/RealismOverhaul/Parts/ProcFairings/adapter2.cfg. It makes small interstage adapters a little bit light, but brings larger adapters more into the realm of (I believe) realism.

Here's an album of the ship used to take those measurements

Thoughts?

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

Is it possible to make RCS use bipropellants (as most real RCS systems seem to do)? I'd like to give mine an option for AZ50/N2O4 (my standard hypergolic bipropellant).

[NathanKell]

Phredward: in v4, sitting patiently on my disk and in github, I've set specificMass to 0.100, seems ok. If you look at the KW fairings, that has my best estimates on masses, which I haven't ported over to pfairings yet. In the Calcs.xls sheet (available from post 2 of RF), on the Misc page, you can see my calculations, based on fairing diam and height. Base is what the fairing base or interstage adapter should mass, IMO. (I have not yet backported those calcs into specificMass, which will prove difficult since IIRC my figues go up by the 2.5 power or so, and e-dog's go up by the cube).

Armchair Rocket Scientist: Alas no. Someone needs to write a ModuleRCS replacement that accepts more than one resource.

[Phredward]

Thanks for the quick answer! Yeah. I felt like cube probably wasn't exactly right since not all of the base needs to be solid. I think it might be worth asking e-dog to make growth factor for procedural fairings also be configable.

I've got some other parts that I was interested in proposing as well (larger heat shields, larger slim docking ports, the

). Should I post .cfg files for those?

[NathanKell]

Sure! Please do.

[Phredward]

Ok, so here's links to: 4m thin docking port, 10m heat shield, a small python script I used to generate heat shields of size 7-20m (feel free to use / modify it to your needs), and the CECE engine config file. Because I was reusing another model, I couldn't figure out how to put it in the existing realengines config.

Larger Docking Ports

I want this because I would like to launch a large orbital vehicle to explore jovian moons. The thing is probably too large to launch all at once, and having the additional stability of larger docking ports is called for. I'm not sure that any real-life docking ports are this large but I think it's pretty reasonable to stick a big plate around a smaller docking port for increased stability, which any larger docking port could be said to be modeling.

Larger Heat Shields

I want this to reduce my ballistic coefficient so I can land heavy things on Mars. Ironically, I want a not-very-heat-shieldy shield for this purpose (ie lighter but still wide), but that's neither hear nor there. The script ups the mass, amount of ablation material, and how fast it ablates, but none of these things have been calibrated against real-world counterparts.

The Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine

This thing is, I hope, the future of actual, real life, manned lunar exploration. It's already in advanced testing stages, and has a super cool youtube video of it forming icicles (with actual water ice since it's a hydrolox engine) at low thrusts. It's based off of the RL-10 engine, but now features multiple restarts and deep-throttling (down to < 10%). There's currently only one deeply throttleable engine in RealEngines, the LM Descent engine, and man do I want more! (viking lander engine?). Given how far along it is in testing, I think it's reasonable to include this engine.

More Engine Nerd Out on the CECE:

Engine stats and alternative configurations (Isp, thrust, and CH4 usage).

PDF of possible descent configurations using this engine and techniques for minimizing liquid hydrogen boiloff while on the moon for extended periods of time. Check out page 6 for some great potential lander pictures.

PDF of tech details and test firing success and failures.

Test Fire

(w/ icicles).

Album of using that engine to go to the moon in KSP.

I hope that was interesting / useful! I'd love to see RSS expanded with more options for rocket building while keeping things as realistic as possible, and hope the above help move things in that direction.