CobaltWolf

No, someone else's but I've been providing technical advice. Not saying any more until they're ready to make an announcement.

Tagging @Jso and @komodo, they were making those. Basically they've been working on having SMURFF-derived (stats, not the plugin) tweaks for optimal performance at various rescale sizes.

Hey everyone! So I have something of an alpha - but its really closer to a cry for health. I have been having and issue, where the Taerobee nose assembly spins WILDLY end over end once you detach it from the sustainer tank. Does anyone know why this would happen? I've uploaded what I have in game so far to Github - just for testing, it's very very very very very very very rough right now. https://github.com/Tantares/Taerobee

Or you could just, y'know, use KJR and save yourselves the time if you're going to autostrut everything anyways...

Agreed - the interstages need some beef. Try and convey how big and powerful this rocket is. Lean towards making it chunky.

My plan was to see what I could get from just revamping the model of the Cacteye telescope itself, and touching up the textures for everything else. Fungeye is another story, and of course anything after that would likely be up to was @icedown and the community want; I got distracted in mid-July when I decided to focus everything on getting BDB v1.0 done in time for the one year anniversary, and then I was still chugging on residual steam for a couple weeks after that. Now I'm looking for a break from that, especially since my co-author asked me to slow down on content so he could catch up with the balance, so I've started cleaning out the backlog of the side projects I said I'd do months ago.

reread it. He converted them to DDS .EDIT: Also, about a month ago, I spoke with Rubber Ducky and got the source files for Cacteye, and I plan on trying to finish my revamp... I dunno, I suppose by the end of the year?

I agreed that the Lahar and Linkor are OP. I think there might be a misunderstanding here - I'm not disagreeing with you on that. 355 ISP is nearly 30 seconds more than the highest real engine I mentioned. But I wasn't talking about engines weighing the same, which I think is where we lose each other. I would like to try and be more clear on my response to this point: That's not true. There is absolutely a point where you get more dV out of having a lighter, less efficient engine than a heavier, more efficient engine. A monopropellant engine should be lighter, since it's a much simple engine - basically just a valve that squirts hydrazine over a catalyst bed and out the nozzle. So even though you lose some ISP, you'd get more dV because the reduced mass of the system means that your propellant doesn't have to push as much mass, so it accelerates more. In order to get more dV in that situation, the spacecraft with the higher ISP would need to add more fuel, which means the affect the weight of the engines have on the entire system is less important. But at that point you've changed the equation to favor one engine instead of the other - which is good. They both have situations where they're 'best'. But to say that higher ISP is better 100% of the time is incorrect. And KSP engines are significantly heavier than they are IRL, AND you save on having to have separate fuel tanks, whereas a monopropellant probe shares fuel between the attitude thrusters and the main engines, or better yet, uses the attitude thrusters for manuevers. If you want to have an engine that weighs the same, and has higher ISP, and is weaker thrust, then yes, that would 100% of the time be better for orbital manuevers. But I'm not talking about that. That's the difference between a purely orbital engine and... a weaker lifter engine? A second stage that needs to TWR to avoid falling out of space? Thrust is irrelevant for orbital stuff, apart from considering the Oberth effect (Not to say it doesn't matter balance-wise!) Hit up @Probus over at the ETT thread. While I'm sure he'd appreciate mod authors handing him some configs, that is his mod; @akron has quite a bit on his plate already.

Judging from the design, I'd say that these are dirigibles, rather than blimps. Dirigibles have an outer structural frame with a skin stretched over it, and the light-than-air bladders are located inside. So you wouldn't get any visible swelling. Good though tho - sounds neat!

For more dV, you'd need for fuel. At that point your system is big enough that ISP has a bigger effect than weight. But with probes and other small things like landers, your ISP can very easily be less important than mass. It doesn't matter if you have 10% more ISP if the engine makes the dry mass of your spacecraft 20% heavier. But if you're packing more equipment, more fuel tanks, and the total change in dry mass is more like 5%, but you still have a 10% ISP gain, then you benefit from the higher ISP. Follow?

Are you sure there isn't still some stock bug preventing them from working properly? Last couple times I tried to dock I had to F5/F9 to get them to work which makes it not my problem. And perhaps don't use rigid attach? You shouldn't be using it on Saturn V, it makes things LESS strong. Or save yourself some time and just install KJR... unless you're strange and like having to go through and manually auto strut everything to everything else... either way you get the same result...

@akron well Astronautix gives the KTDU-425A an ISP of 315 seconds. That's certainly a bit high IMO, I'd figure out what sort of capability you'd need for the canon Venera flight in terms of dV (no real point in making real world inspired parts if they can't be put together and complete their mission?), look at what sort of stats similar engines have in KSP, and go from there. Perhaps lower the ISP of the MAVEN engines, but keep them a bit lighter, while this is a bit heavier but has higher ISP? As a quick refresher, on smaller stages/spacecraft, dry mass is more important for dV than your ISP (which is why the 48-7S is useful despite the ISP), whereas higher ISP becomes more important the bigger the stage is - if the total mass of the system is higher, and there's significantly more fuel, having slightly less weight is less important than using that fuel effectively. I just found a source that says the MAVEN engines had an ISP of ~230 seconds. But since the system is much smaller, lighter, and likely has a higher proportion of propellant compared to a big, heavy, Vega, they probably wind up with similar capability. And MAVEN uses hydrazine monopropellant, which as mentioned above doesn't really compare to even storable bipropellants when it comes to ISP, but you simplify the system by only needing one set of tanks (two maybe, you might need helium for pressurization) which also provides additional mass savings. My point being that, our experience has been that real world ISPs have translated well into gameplay balance for us, and building off the real-world differences in the way that things behave has provided a lot of insight for how to fit parts into different niches. EDIT: Actually 315 on a vacuum optimized engine isn't that hard. Don't mind me. EDIT2: Fregat has an ISP of 327 seconds, which would be a significant enough nerf to be worth trying IMO. And if it's still OP, giving it a bit more dry mass - there's quite a bit of stuff crammed onto there besides just the engines and tanks - would probably make it pretty perfect.

There's some stuff. Making sure that there are structural/habitable parts to make the geometry line up, massive docking ports to hold it all together, probably some unique dedicated radiators, some massive communications dishes... Since the stock NERVA is, well, NERVA, I decided that any nuclear engines I do would probably be based on Timberwinds - perhaps two both the large / small variants. I haven't really given thought to the MEM but I might explore alternate configurations to see if I can find something cooler. Also, while I want Ares to be buildable, it's not going to be the only configuration that's possible... There are plenty that I can explore.

I'm not sure what you mean. Unless you have a specific comment on BDB (which IS meant to be lego) that somehow demonstrates that the approach is invalid, then I don't follow your train of thought. Kerbal ISPs are, by and large, near to real-world performances for kerolox + storable propellants, and in the case of propellants such as hydrolox, there are other ways of balancing them - having to have large volume tanks to hold the propellants, low power, and of course the expense. To the point where I often DON'T use cryogenic propellants, since they don't scale down well in terms of dV for upper stages. I'm still scratching my head at your comment. Real world ISPs are fairly similar to Kerbal ISPs. The difference is that everything in Kerbal is very, very heavy - which we maintain in our balance. EDIT: Also, just to throw 2c into the ignitions thing - 'hypergolic', while usually associated with being easier to store because they'retypically not cryogenic (LOX is, btw), are propellants that ignite on contact with eachother - making restarting them significantly easier. Whereas you have to have some sort of igniter for kerolox/hydrolox, which is naturally finite.

Take your time, no point in rushing. The new Merlin mesh looks spot-on. Btw, my dad just emailed me a pic from the woods. Got a nice 8 this morning with the bow.

That's a lot of states. Pennsylvania used to have a school holiday for opening day, since they knew that nobody would show up. We didn't have that growing up in Western NY, but they let you hunt on Sundays there unlike in PA soooo

Doubtful, not without changing the political climate significantly. The time period where they planned ASTP was sort of a high point in relations, which had already started cooling.

I had another beer and took a melatonin between those times.

Eyes Turned Skywards has another classic variation, where the Soyuz docks to Skylab-B/Spacelab via docking adapter, and then pulls away the docking adapter when they leave so it can be replaced with an airlock module.

Eh, it was 2 AM and was barely coherent.

With BDB @Jso has always been an extremely strong believer in using the real-world ISPs, and tweaking balance with mass. It's generally been working for us pretty well.

Portree's got the low down.

It's actually from Voyage, by Stephen Baxter. But it's one of the most iconic designs for a Saturn-derived Mars mission. As far as I'm concerned a Duna sortie and/or Mun/Minmus base would be the sort of 'end goal' for the mod. With plenty more along the way, and possibly more after, of course. But it's not something on my mind right now. This album by reddit user Winged_7 should give you an idea of the scale: http://imgur.com/a/fwFcg

Let's not start this... I have a fairly negative opinion of it but it always makes me miserable when people start arguing between Saturn/Shuttle/SLS on the thread... For all intents and purposes, assume that BDB portrays a shuttle-less view of things. EDIT: Also, I forgot to plug it here, but I'm hanging out on @akron's dev stream tonight. You can hear me talking on voice chat. Honestly I'd be ok with having a discussion there but not here. If it gets out of hand again here I'll probably ping a mod. https://www.twitch.tv/akron712