woot

My KSC (and space station) is overrun with tourists and I'd love to have a way of killing them without a big reputation hit. Any way of building that in? Kind of cheaty, but my game is extremely laggy and stuttery right now and I'm wondering if all the tourists are at fault.

I'm up to over 20 tourists hanging around after their contracts are completed. I've tried to assign them to a ship and then recover them but they're still there. I even killed them all in a fiery explosion, which was fun, but I had to revert after it destroyed my reputation. Any ideas?

Today's updates to Toadicus Tools and Tweakable Everything removed my ability to change the shape and texture of procedural parts (those two tweakables disappeared from the parts' right-click menu). Uninstalling them fixed this issue.

A. The 10k hour phenomenon is a Malcolm Gladwell thing, and he's not known for being accurate. B. Even Gladwell describes it as being something that experts generally have done, not that anyone who does it becomes an expert. Big difference.

Is there a fix for this floating around? I went through the process of adding science nodes and engine tweakables to all these parts but ended up deleting the mod. If I wanted to give this another shot is there a downloadable fix available?

I gave it a whirl last night, and it seems pretty good from what I've seen. Your engines used to be the most efficient, but after 23.5 and now with these changes, they seem to have crept back into the pack is far as ISP and TWR. Obviously an inter-mod efficiency competition would be bad, but it is nice to have some go-to engines.

I'm also still using SSRB and can confirm it's an issue. In my current build, I have to move a thrust plate w/ engines and two interstage fairings to their proper position every time I load my craft (The payload fairing ends up in the right place each time for some reason).

That would be great. While I think the interstage adapter can become too thick at larger sizes, the KW-style version doesn't seem thick enough to prevent tons of issues with overlapping attachment points, making it impossible to use in some setups. The KW one is a bit lighter, making it advantageous, but with so many nodes all crammed together its functionality becomes unreliable. This game just doesn't seem set up to deal with thin parts, especially ones with multiple additional attachment nodes. Procedural engine shrouds might fix this problem entirely though. Another thing I wonder about is whether it'd be possible to have two rings of nodes on a thrust plate. At larger sizes, having a ring of engines around the outside with nothing to fill in the middle is unfortunate. There are ways around it though so no big deal.

At 3.75m, the interstage adapter weighs 1.35t, and the side fairings (3m tall) add another .487t, for a total of 1.837t. Compare with the stock one, which I think is .8t (I don't have it in front of me) At 5m, the interstage adapter weighs 3.2t, and side fairings (3m tall) add another .867t, for a total of 4.067t. The only other 5m decouplers I have are from FASA and Nova Punch, and they are both 1.2t. Auto-fairings tend to be massless, which exacerbates the imbalance. I assume yours are more realistically massive, but it does present a gameplay conundrum.

I second the idea about batteries -- basically anything with surface attachment that doesn't have to be could be made better with this mod.

What's the best way to use the thrust plate on an upper stage? I still haven't figured out a way to put the multiple engines in a fairing. It seems like the interstage adapter should work, but I can't seem to get it to attach on the central node. At larger sizes, procedural interstages are also many times heavier than regular decouplers, which creates an unfortunate decision between aesthetics and function. Is there a way to tweak the weight curve to be more in line with other mods and stock parts?

I do my editing in Notepad++, and my version had the line break (although it was on line 63 or so). Hopefully that's the source of the issue.

Denny, I put it together and it looks amazing. I did notice a few things that you might want to take a look at (just trying to be helpful): -The reaction wheel torque on the CM is messed up somehow. It uses scientific notation in the VAB tweakables. -The SM RCS module is named "CM RCS". The model also seems out of place due to the simple texture (similar to the ALSEP instruments, and compared to the beautifully textured LM RCS modules). -No worries if you don't care about this, but several of the parts seem to be in the wrong category. The heatshield and LES are pods, while the interstages are aero (all should be structural except the LES, which usually goes into utility). -The textures still have quite a bit of red, which you'd mentioned you were planning to get rid of. The F-1 engine mount is missing the characteristic black and white pattern, and the red and yellow looks pretty weird. -The LM descent stage VAB icon has the extreme zoom bug caused by its .cfg having 3 resources without a module. -I can't get any of the 3 ALSEP instruments to attach to the ALSEP box properly (this was an issue before, so maybe I'm just missing something). -When put together, this is a very wobbly rocket. I didn't do any strutting like you recommended, but I'm hoping the finished product won't need any. -I'm also not sure exactly where the docking lights and separation SRBs go, but I can figure that out by looking at pictures. That's it for now. This is looking like it'll be the definitive KSP Saturn V with a few tweaks. Thanks for all your work on it.

My understanding as that stack nodes largely determine joint strength now, up to a max of 3 for 3.75m parts. The NovaPunch version of the F1 stage does 10,000 kN and weighs 30t (was 40t forever, but was recently adjusted in response to the new NASA engines). Hakari's F1 engine weighs 8.4t and does 6773kN, but I'm pretty sure that's not been kerbalized at all, as that's very overpowered for a single engine. His model and textures are just about perfect though if you want to take a look.

The Saturn V flew great for me. I do wonder about the 1st stage engine configuration, since 6125kN in a 53.5t engine will make this an undesirable choice in other designs. The overall TWR for the 1st stage of this rocket is actually pretty high at 2.3 -- it's almost like the CSM/LM is too light. But I can tweak that stuff myself if I feel compelled. Overall, things are looking pretty good. Frizzank, will be you incorporating Denny's S-IVb models into FASA like you did with the LM? It wasn't clear if his latest update represents a fork. You really nailed the opening of the SLA panels; that was cool. Thanks for all your efforts on this.

While I will insist that it's silly to whine about this to Frizzank as if his representation will be canonical when he has already stated his intentions repeatedly, I can agree that I would get a lot more use out of 6.25m parts than 5m parts, since we already have pretty good facsimiles of Saturn V stuff in 5m scale.

Kerbals are smaller than humans. Of course it's not going to be a 10m rocket. That would be absurd. My Saturn V (cobbled together from various mods) was 5m and it was just about perfect.

Obviously that works, but it remains an inferior solution for those of us who like our rockets to be as aerodynamic and low-part count as possible. I managed to get one of my big rockets into orbit, but it was definitely a lot more wobbly than before (even the size-3 sections). If there's simply no way around it, then it's not a huge deal. But the standard strut-heavy style was never appealing to me.

This seems true for most everything, but 5m parts will still have difficulties without further stiffening, no?

KW Rocketry's "3.75m Dual Purpose Docking Ring" can dock with both 3.75 and 2.5m ports.

Yeah I can't believe anyone would say that Apollo was particularly failure-prone or the result of bad engineering. Relative to what? The missions were many times longer and more ambitious than anything previously tried. Obviously it was bound to have issues. But it's still the greatest engineering achievement in human history.

Where are you getting all this? I've never heard of the SRB segment being dropped and dented as contributing to the disaster. I also haven't heard of one of the O-rings having a particular fault (as opposed to the fault being inherent in the design of the O-rings, particularly in cold weather). I also don't think NASA went away from segmented SRBs after Challenger. The diagram of the Challenger SRB doesn't seem relevant.

I got tired of waiting for the release of 19 (no offense intended!) and am giving 18 a go. I'm not using RSS/RO/RF and am nevertheless having a great time. I am using TAC life support and RemoteTech2, and although I'm only just beginning to do manned missions after spending a lot of time getting my communication networks setup and exploring various places with probes, I've found this tree to be really well done, providing a rewarding and challenging progression through the early game. I fear that things will become a bit less challenging now that I have my comm network just about finished, but I am also starting to unlock some of the interstellar parts, which will hopefully keep things interesting.

Would love to use this, but is it true that FAR breaks it?

I enjoy this mod, but would highly recommend that the author choose his favorite textures and incorporate them into the main download. It's confusing deciding which combination of user-provided textures will eliminate all of the stock textures without being redundant, particularly since they don't always use standard names. I know from reading through this thread that this change would also eliminate a great deal of complaining for those who don't read the OP thoroughly, and would likely greatly increase the image and usage of this great mod.