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Tweakable fuel tanks


LethalDose

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Why would u need 400 units of each? you will run out of oxidiser too soon :P

Exactly.

Obviously rocket fuel and oxidiser have different densities and thus volumes. You wouldn't be able to simply replace the mass of one with the other in the same space.

And it would be pointless anyway. If you don't get the ratios right, then you run out of one before the other.

There are no possible circumstances where it could ever be advantageous by any means to have more of one than the other.

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There are no possible circumstances where it could ever be advantageous by any means to have more of one than the other.

AS was demonstrated in the rapier vid theres the very niche occasion that you might need more liquid than oxidiser. you will need a bit of bonus liquid fuel but you dont want the added weight of a whole jet fuel tank so just reduce the amount of oxidiser? Obv the tradeoff is less dv once in space...or is it because you're not lugging around an empty jet fuel tank?!? MY BRAIN!

This seems to be the only time u need to tweek fuel amounts. other than that reducing both fuels to get the weight "you want" for your craft is kinda usefull. It adds an extra "precision" mechanic. IE achieve x by x orbit without any uneeded fuel etc.

Personally i'm quite happy with the way tweakables will work. The game does just fine without the fuel tweak but having the ability to reduce my mass by 0.05 of a ton to net my launch and extra 0.01 TWR...i dunno...it kinda floats my boat having that extra precision.

EDIT: I've just thought. Does this extra slidebar affect how we transfer fuel between vehicles? IE just slide the bar instead of waiting ages for the fuel to transfer

EDIT 2: minor spelling errors

Edited by vetrox
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There are no possible circumstances where it could ever be advantageous by any means to have more of one than the other.

No advantage at all, we should be happy that we will not get unwated "feature".

Edited by Vanamonde
Please avoid dicussions of religion, even in jest.
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...incentive to use different parts.

That seems to work backwards. Say I need a tank full of liquid fuel for an airplane. That leaves me with only the pure liquid-fuel tanks to really choose from. Sure, I could remove the oxidizer from a bipropellant tank but that leaves me with a rather lot of dry weight compared to the amount of fuel I'm bringing. If I want to build an oxidizer tanker where SSTOs can top off for interplanetary flights, same problem. Allowing full customization of a tank's contents would allow me to use any tank for any purpose. Volume and shape would then become the deciding factor, rather than pre-programmed compartments.

In terms of coding and user-friendliness the main stumbling block would likely be the odd ratio of liquid fuel and oxidizer that's used by rocket engines. The simplest fix for that is to change the LF/OX consumption ratio to 1:1. That, of course, would take some elbow grease in reconfiguring all rocket engines and fuel tanks, but in the end it would greatly simplify fuel tank logic: Tank holds up to X units of resources, fill as you please. For realism's sake, an individual tank's max values per resource could be set once the craft is moved to the launchpad/runway: no re-compartmentalization on the fly.

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I don't get the problem. Why am I supposed to be able to fit 400 fuel into a tank meant to only hold 360 by sacrificing a little oxidizer?

I mean I will admit that this isn't exactly what I expected with tweakables but I don't see the big issue here.

Another way to approach this would be to allow separate tanks for fuel and oxidizer and release them in pairs sized in appropriate ratios. Want to build a standard rocket? Instead of the current orange tank, use the orange fuel tank plus the orange oxidizer tank. Building a spaceplane? Add more fuel tanks than oxidizer to cover the air-breathing portion of the flight. Have a refueling station in orbit that only needs fuel, not oxidizer? Make your payload a fuel-only tank. Both types of tanks could tweakable, and only require one slider each.

I did something somewhat like this. I took some of the radial mono tanks and changed them from monopropellant to oxidizer so I could add them to spaceplanes allowing my rocket engines to burn the jet fuel.

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I don't get the problem. Why am I supposed to be able to fit 400 fuel into a tank meant to only hold 360 by sacrificing a little oxidizer?

I mean I will admit that this isn't exactly what I expected with tweakables but I don't see the big issue here.

I don't see a big issue either, to be honest. I think that it's looking like tweakables will deliver useful new functionality, and more importantly a solid framework for future similar functionality. They are a positive step forwards, with no obvious downside. The disappointment for some comes from unrealistic hype/expectations created by (some of?) the community through an excess of enthusiasm. I also expect that future releases will probably refine / improve tweakables.

In the meantime, it's not too difficult to create suitable mod tanks to provide near enough exactly what you want in terms of fuel load, with a minimum of excess dry weight.

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That seems to work backwards. Say I need a tank full of liquid fuel for an airplane. That leaves me with only the pure liquid-fuel tanks to really choose from. Sure, I could remove the oxidizer from a bipropellant tank but that leaves me with a rather lot of dry weight compared to the amount of fuel I'm bringing. If I want to build an oxidizer tanker where SSTOs can top off for interplanetary flights, same problem. Allowing full customization of a tank's contents would allow me to use any tank for any purpose. Volume and shape would then become the deciding factor, rather than pre-programmed compartments.

Well, in that case why not push for a fully procedural fuel tank system? I don't really think SQUAD wants to move in that direction, though. I imagine we'll see some other shapes and sizes of fuel tanks show up later in the game, especially when the aerospace parts get revamped, so I'm inclined to wait. We might also see this sort of feature a version or two down the line when/if they move nuclear engines over to monopropellant.

In terms of coding and user-friendliness the main stumbling block would likely be the odd ratio of liquid fuel and oxidizer that's used by rocket engines.

That's not exactly a problem in terms of coding, but having it work in a fairly intuitive way might take some thought, especially if you want to keep screen real-estate usage to a minimum. Then again, it might not.

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That seems to work backwards. Say I need a tank full of liquid fuel for an airplane. That leaves me with only the pure liquid-fuel tanks to really choose from. Sure, I could remove the oxidizer from a bipropellant tank but that leaves me with a rather lot of dry weight compared to the amount of fuel I'm bringing.

Not always. For example, an FL-T400 holds more fuel than them MK1 tank, and has lower dry weight. Remove the oxidizer and it's a better choice.

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Part of the issue with allowing LF/LOX sliders to go all the way up to the tank's capacity is that increasing one would mean that the other slider's top limit would need to be adjusted, which may not be easy in the current setup. If this is a limiting issue, one could do something like have one slider for total quantity and another slider for the ratios (really, controlling the ratios in 5% increments would be plenty, since the current rocket fuel mix is 45/55%. This could probably be done easily in a mod.

Of course, this would still not work if you also wanted to include monopropellant, but that is less of a concern for me at the moment as there are already monoprop tanks in all the standard sizes. My main interest here is for making appropriate fuel ratios for jet/rocket hybrid craft, like SSTOs.

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I'm happy that we're finally getting tweakables, but disappointed like most here that we won't be getting the customization we were expecting.

I'm not as much concerned with having a large orange tank filled with oxidizer like some; for me it's more about wanting to use those radial mono propellent mods and swapping out the mono-prop for regular fuel to make better looking / more realistic landers.

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Wait, so let me get this straight (I haven't been watching the steam): So we can't actually edit the amount of fuel in a tank, we can only set how full (or empty) it is? If so, then tweakables are practically useless for fuel tanks...

We can already do that right now, just don't disengage the launch clamps and burn...

Anyways, at least we're getting tweakables, but this is kind of a disappointment...

Edited by RocketPilot573
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Wait, so let me get this straight (I haven't been watching the steam): So we can't actually edit the amount of fuel in a tank, we can only set how full (or empty) it is? If so, then tweakables are practically useless for fuel tanks...

We can already do that right now, just don't disengage the launch clamps and burn...

Anyways, at least we're getting tweakables, but this is kind of a disappointment...

Far from "practically useless". The fuel load should be settable in the VAB / SPH, saved in the craft file, so you no longer have to waste time dumping or burning unwanted fuel on every launch. It may also enable things like large interplanetary ships or stations to be launched with mostly empty tanks (possibly allowing a larger ship), before being fuelled in LKO by tankers.

They don't allow you to do anything completely new, pretty much, and I don't think they were ever really intended to. They do make life easier or more flexible in various ways. They should hopefully mostly eliminate needing to configure your craft on every launch, by configuring in the VAB/SPH and saving that config in the craft file.

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I'm not really aware of any circumstances where a partially filled tank is more useful than a fully filled one, unless you were dealing with some razor-thin TWR margins off the pad. I'm sure Squad has plans for the tweakables system beyond what we see now, but a simple full/empty toggle would be very beneficial.

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You know what you can do if you want stupid numbers on a single ship? Save on the launchpad, then edit your save file. VOILA.

You know what you can do if you want stupid numbers of every ship? Edit your config files. VOILA.

If you want to cheat, it's not hard, but don't blame the devs for not writing it into the game.

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You know what you can do if you want stupid numbers on a single ship? Save on the launchpad, then edit your save file. VOILA.

You know what you can do if you want stupid numbers of every ship? Edit your config files. VOILA.

If you want to cheat, it's not hard, but don't blame the devs for not writing it into the game.

I'm guessing you didn't bother to read anything anyone said before having a little outburst eh?

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I'm not really aware of any circumstances where a partially filled tank is more useful than a fully filled one, unless you were dealing with some razor-thin TWR margins off the pad. I'm sure Squad has plans for the tweakables system beyond what we see now, but a simple full/empty toggle would be very beneficial.

This is actually really helpful for someone like me who likes to make serial staged rockets. A lot of times, it does require you to operate on pretty thin TWR margins.

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I'm guessing you didn't bother to read anything anyone said before having a little outburst eh?

There are basically two posts repeated ITT:

1) "I can't overfill the physical space and I shouldn't be constrained by realism."

2) "It's unrealistic to use LF capacity to add LOX or vice versa."

You know what you CAN do if you want more fuel than oxidizer? Decrease your oxidizer and leave your fuel the same. Yes, you won't have a full tank, but a single rocket fuel tank should have proportional max capacities. Squad can't make special tanks with every possible ratio of max-fuel:max-oxidizer just to make complainers happy. If you want the game to be more customized, modify your files. That's how it's worked for a while, and always will.

This is an alpha game still. This update will be an improvement. Is it perfect? No, but it's also not a finished product. Everybody who spent money on this game should understand that by now.

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There are basically two posts repeated ITT:

1) "I can't overfill the physical space and I shouldn't be constrained by realism."

2) "It's unrealistic to use LF capacity to add LOX or vice versa."

You know what you CAN do if you want more fuel than oxidizer? Decrease your oxidizer and leave your fuel the same. Yes, you won't have a full tank, but a single rocket fuel tank should have proportional max capacities. Squad can't make special tanks with every possible ratio of max-fuel:max-oxidizer just to make complainers happy.

1.) Literally no one has asked for that.

2.) it's a logical thing that would be done in real life, that has nothing to do with "cheating" or "complaining".

Your reasoning/solution is...."special"...the changes required to do this would not require "coding every possible combination", I'm not sure why you think that would be necesary.

And your solution would lead to low twr, unrealistic an overweight crafts.

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You know what you CAN do if you want more fuel than oxidizer? Decrease your oxidizer and leave your fuel the same. Yes, you won't have a full tank, but a single rocket fuel tank should have proportional max capacities. Squad can't make special tanks with every possible ratio of max-fuel:max-oxidizer just to make complainers happy. If you want the game to be more customized, modify your files. That's how it's worked for a while, and always will.

How often do real space programs carry dead weight just to reuse common parts?

Tweakables have been billed as a solution to many problems, including being able to change what gets stored in containers. Not just the quantities, but the actual types. I'm perfectly willing to consider that this didn't make it into the first pass, but if this is all tweakables can do, it's going to cause SQUAD to have to find alternate solutions to several problems.

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