CobaltWolf

Something that I think may be getting lost here, that I feel I can chime in on given I'm one of the part mod authors that have long stated the stock part balance is more appropriate for 2.5x systems. In @fragtzack's example, with 1.25m parts - that translates to a 2m diameter rocket IRL. That is very much at the small end of the scale in terms of size. Pretty much any rocket with substantial performance is going to be the equivalent of 1.875m, 2.5m and up (in KSP diameter terms). 1.25m parts are more comparable to something like RocketLab's Electron - suitable only for small, LEO-ish satellites. Re "where the 2.5x/2.7x number came from" - it has long been accepted that KSP parts are 62.5/64% of the IRL size for their equivalents. I personally do not know where that number came from - it was already an assumption when I started modding. I believe it's based on the relative size of the Mk1 pod to the Mercury among other things. Given that, and assuming that you're balancing in line with stock parts - a tank of given volume has the same ratio of fuel, dry mass,etc compared to stock tanks, for example - then to make rockets perform "realistically" the sweet spot was found to be ~2.5x/2.7x. IE if you build a rocket with a realistically proportioned payload it will more or less do what it does IRL. Think, building out a Saturn V and having it actually *just* accomplish a moon mission rather than being able to go out to Jool on like, the second stage. Personally I don't know where the specific comment on engines came from - proportionally, KSP engines are more or less realistically balanced other then their dry mass. My understanding was that it comes from the sum total of the way the KSP parts are balanced, particularly in that they have much higher dry masses overall than in real life. The point is the net effect of the scaling, balance ratios, etc results in ~2.7x being the point where kerbal scale rockets behave realistically.

Well I'd hope you'd have thousands of delta V to spare... the Pioneer 4 is a pretty undersized payload for that LV. @Friznit you gotta make sure your Juno IV stuff doesn't use the Pioneer 4 or the sergeant clusters. I'll have to see what payloads were tapped for it... I think the predecessor to Ranger was going to use it before switching to Atlas-Vega and then Atlas-Agena. re: GATV, in my defense, I didn't expect it to be deprecated for three months without replacement. I've never seen anything about them being used outside GATV other than vague implications that GATV wasn't the only use of them... if you have a link that would be very helpful. I just haven't felt motivated to finish GATV... at least partially because I struggled to get an accurate model of the interior beneath the docking cone. That kind of killed my motivation for it... I asked Zorg to take a look at reducing the fuel and structural mass loadings of the Juno IV upper stages. I think it'll probably reduce total performance slightly, but in flight it will probably be nicer due to overall shorter burn times and better TWR. The Juno IV 6K stage and the Atlas-Vega third stage are very different, Pappy. The Vega third stage would have been exposed tanks and trusses encapsulated in the Vega's 10ft fairing, but the Juno IV 6K stage would have been a normal tank-with-skirt construction ala, say, the Titan 1 second stage. Exposed tank walls and intertanks/skirts connecting them. RE: the "Vega instead of 45K" - that's not quite a correct way of stating it. More accurately, since they had decided the 6K and 45K would be developed "in serial" due to the limited resources at JPL, they decided the much lower thrust (34K? can't remember) X-405H would be used temporarily for three launches before the 45K came online. Also worth noting that supposedly, the Juno IVA's second stage was larger than the IVB's third stage would be - that also probably contributes to the performance issues.

That looks great! I wonder if it's worth adding the cable connectors too? I know this was answered but I just wanted to chime in with a fun fact - as I understand it, in real life it was a common adapter! Only the straight part of the interstage was different between the Thor Agenas and Deltas. Darn, I noticed that the other day too and didn't think to fix it. That's the kind of white glove type issue we can easily miss so if you see more don't hesitate to call them out. It's also worth noting that Juno IV, many ways, never even got TO the drawing board. The Juno IVB was never anything more than notional when the program ended. If you want to know more, the sum total of all information available on the Juno IV is present in this document. The drawing and photoshop'd image on Ed Kyle's site aren't really based on anything real besides the fact that both upper stages would be 70 inches in diameter. There's an interesting table near the beginning showing the relative fuel loadings for different mission profiles. I believe another factor is they assumed that the S-3D could be upthrusted as much as 100% - see also the Saturn C-2 proposal that was a mainstay of early NASA planning. I dunno about you, but sticking a bigger-than-S-IVB stage in the middle of a Saturn C-1 seems like you'd run into TWR issues unless you've got quite a bit of confidence in Rocketdyne... Something else worth pointing out, that I think is being overlooked - the Jupiter stage in BDB is very underscaled. It should sit about exactly between 1.5m and 1.875m but I didn't want to add another size. As a result the Juno IV is out of proportion - it should have upper stages more like 0.9375m but I decided that was already overly full with the Deltas and Agenas. So I decided to make them 1.25m because BDB doesn't have enough parts in that size. RE: remaining stuff... I have OGO and Pioneer 6 to finish remaking. GATV and a bunch of misc Agena stuff. KH-9 Hexagon. After that... well, I want to remake Vega and Centaur and finish a couple Centaur payloads - Mariner 10, Pioneer Venus... I think in another month or two when the main chunk of this update is done we'll see if that should be broken off into BDB 1.8 but personally I'd rather finish remaking everything so we don't break saves every couple of months.

Base colors are in, just needs to have the detail painting done <3 https://i.imgur.com/jeJJFPI.mp4

You'll notice the arrays in the other images I linked were quite different than the one showing the overall probe, which is from a different source (which I should have clarified). I went with the other mechanism, since I had more reference for it and frankly it seemed easier + more in line with how most KSP parts attach As far as I can tell I have no control over how gfycat embeds. Which is annoying, since I'm certain it didn't have this sort of issue before...

Proof of concept was successful! As before idk why it's doing this, hit the full screen button. This rig was a complete pain to work on...

I was actually going to make a SNAP-10 but I believe @Nertea wanted to make one when he circles back to... whatever mod that would be. NFE? I could of course still make my own, but since I don't intend to have any additional functionality like the kind NFE adds, so I feel like it would be kind of hollow. Fun story about the ion stuff in BDB - if I remember, they were developed in the 60s and literally put in a warehouse until they started looking at comet missions in the late 70s to fly some time in the 80s. That also means this would technically be a shuttle payload but... shhhh it's not like I'm making the whole thing anyways.

Not sure if that'll be possible, unfortunately. All those parts are on a 512px sheet and there would be a lot of waste if I made a duplicate for the color variant. Idk how long it'll take, but another part that's been on my mind - probe-style solar panels big enough to power the ion drives. Making me painfully aware how innacurate the current ion engine in the mod is...

If nobody has any complaints this might be what the probe looks like in game? I tried it with a Pioneer 5 style paint scheme and I didn't care for it. I wouldn't really care about this payload at all but since they're pre-existing parts in the mod I felt it was necessary to revamp them.

Yep - the arrangement is going to be different than the parts currently in the mod, but hopefully it makes the Able-4 Engine more flexible. Think of it as an earlier counterpart to the Ranger Midcourse engine. I think I might tear out some parts of the model to refine them - I found some better pictures of the engine unit and the sat itself. Will people be mad if I omit the thermal control vanes? I experimented with them a bit yesterday and couldn't figure out a way to make them look good.

Didn't have any of my current WIP files handy yesterday... Anyone here ready to test the new Atlas-Able?

Well it's a 0.625m ring, I was thinking something that uses the ions... I still need to make some probe-style (I know the various MOL panels are "sufficient") big solar arrays for it.

I just looked, I think we spaced on the descriptions because I don't see anything explaining that the ring has to dock with a fork port and vice versa. That'll have to be fixed. More or less textured version of the new small klaw.

There's a little fullscreen button I guess, it won't let me change the size

Did I forget to post this here? I did... edit: why it so smol??

hahahahahaha my disposable income goes into student loan payments

Dev stream booting up! Going to work on OGO and see how much of the art I can finish up for that! EDIT: ended early due to a headache

If I remember, we had issues with cost balancing a couple years ago between the Titan and Saturn 1. If you have more feedback, please share - most of the devs don't really have time to play in career a lot to see how it feels. If you hold shift the snapping becomes 5 degrees instead of 15. That lets you place 3 sets of 3 SRBs easily - necessary because the 9x solid Deltas fired in a 6-3 pattern. For early Deltas with the Castor 2s, I use the blocks near the top to align - see below. For Delta II, there are little holes in the boattail that the struts in the GEMs line up with. Same idea - 3 sets of 3, hold shift for the last (?) set to get the offset right. Note that I'm planning on ripping the engines out of the Delta II boattail so that it becomes an alternate to the Thor one. Maybe the Agena resupply pod should be remade specifically for transporting film? Planning on streaming tomorrow ~ 1 PM Eastern. I'm still burnt on Hexagon, so I think the work will focus on OGO.

Glad you have so much more faith in us than I do... if you notice anything sticking out, please don't hesitate to bring it up

Yup, exactly - you can only have one staging icon per part. Granted, I'm not sure there are many situations where those parts are getting used where you wouldn't want to stage the fairing and decoupler essentially simultaneously... in any case, I figured it helped by giving us the truss-style interstage for use with other encapsulated Centaurs

Indeed. The module was only written with non-tracking panels in mind (since usually a tracking panel, y'know you want it to fold in radial symmetry and then it will just track to be parallel once deployed), so the Nimbus panels were an edge case in that they had to mount mirrored but still track. A minor change to the module by @Jso and we are all good! Nimbus 7 / Delta 2910

Nimbus E / an erroneous Delta M with a Delta F upper (it's supposed to be a Delta 900)

Doing a short (1-2 hour) stream to get these in game!

Well, I do have good news... The cluster of three experiments in the middle are the daisy-chain experiments using the science definitions @MaverickSawyer wrote. The two on the left are microwave radiometers. The two on the far right are an infrared spectrometer and infrared radiometer, respectively. The griddy boi above is a "Beacon and telemetry antenna" apparently.

Sorry to cut the stream short everyone! Sometimes the Adderall just doesn't hold as well as I think it will. I'll try again tomorrow night and see if I can get this stuff done and in game!