AbhChallenger

I just did a quick test and found that at 89 deg inc. Total dv favored saving fuel on the departure stage. However I did find that for a small increase in cost for departure. The theoretical tanker would slowly drift into a great LAN at SOI change. Your display options helped me to find that balance so thank you! When I send the crew. I would spend the extra propellant to arrive at a normal time.

Actually I would not mind having a more expensive ejection burn. If for instance. If I needed to spend 150 extra m/s on the ejection stage to save the tanker 78 m/s later that is fine because I normally have a dedicated ejection stage. Could there be perhaps a way to add weights or optimize for the insertion burn? Regardless as it is now I should be able to do the missions I want once I return to playing KSP again. Thanks!

I actually want to request this if possible. You are right that it is not too difficult to find a smaller insertion burn. But for near polar orbits it is a bit more difficult to find a good one. Heavy fuel tankers really eat their propellant reserves with every meter per second they have to spend. Edit: For instance playing with a random orbit I am able to get that normal burn down to 78.41 m/s That is already far far better than what I was able to do before. Yet if I could just get that number down even further. I could save propellant for the lander.

It must have been because I did not set an inclination. As I was focused on LAN. That indeed seemed to have fixed it! Thanks!

I don't have any exact orbits in mind. Just situations that have messed up my attempts to do different types of missions in the past. For instance. I wanted to place a dedicated lander that can be refueled into lunar orbit first then transfer a crew to it for landing. What I quickly found was unless I was lucky. I almost never arrived in a similar LAN to the lander from Kerbin. So I ended up having to use large amount of propellant to correct the plane. So I tried to use your app to target just the LAN and even with those options off. The ending orbit is still a completely different LAN than I need. I know you compute time is limited. So in my case. I just need the ability to match the plane. Or even just the LAN. I don't care if the ending orbit impacts the moon or barely scrapes the SOI. I can fix the orbit the moment I enter SOI. But LAN has to be changed at the node.

I messed around with the app. However, unless I have messed up the settings. I can't get it to actually target the LAN of the arrival orbit. This is important for say resupplying a lunar station or proceeding to landing soon after orbital insertion. As correcting LAN is very costly in propellant. Any possibility of implementing that?

The low thrust trajectory thing is not very important to me. It was more of a question about how high to be so that the trajectory is relatively flat at say 0.2 TWR. Not how to do spiral trajectories or the nearest onramp to the interplanetary highway. Most gate orbits should be fine for this I think. If you happen to have the time one day. Perhaps you could just make an example post about how you would go about setting up that TLI burn? That is really the main thing I want to use TOT for.

I just want to give the teams of Kopernicus and JNSQ time to work out all the issues and integrate whatever new 1.10 features they can before I do a long term save. As I don't want to have to break the save later. And I want to wait for any updates to USI-LS and associated mods dealing with habitation and life support.

Just wanted to add my thanks for you spending time to keep this project updated. Stock is fun but I look forward to playing GPP again and trying JNSQ. Yet I don't want to be trapped in an old version of KSP forever. I also hope that one day you will be hired to integrate Kopernicus into the stock game and KSP 2.

Is there any chance of a series of video tutorials or just videos of how you do various things with TOT? A few I have in mind if you have time to do so. I intend to play using the JSNQ system once it is updated to 1.10 but any system will do. The main one is doing a TLI burn to end up at the correct inclination and LAN after SOI change. So that you are in plane with a station or fuel depot orbiting the Mun. The other is lets say you have to launch into a polar orbit but you want to go to Duna. How do you figure out the correct LAN to launch to? The last one is finding the best orbit to put a fuel depot or perhaps the best orbit to depart from if using a very low TWR engine and want to do the transfer in a single burn.

Sorry to make a third post in a row but I wanted to see what you have done with classic stock so far and when I configured one of the Titan tanks to use Proplox. It seems you have already made it Hydrolox like when it comes to ratio and density. https://imgur.com/KGbzKQw vs https://imgur.com/lddaKYG If this was intended. Then the ISP values you had before seem more balanced. (Its just the thrust that is less balanced) However, If you are willing to edit the density and ratio (If that does not break other things that use classic stock) of Proplox and the tanks and rockets that use it. I think that middle ground between stock and cyrogenics can be achieved. And it is a way to do away with boiloff and still keep balance. So maybe 5-6 tons or so after the rebalance? (That 6 ton tank combined with proplox at 402 ISP is going to be amazing even with the lower thrust) After that is done you can again find a halfway point and use that for Raptalox. I would guess that perhaps the end result would be around 7.5 tons for that tank? You will want it to be a bit less dense than LiquidFuel but the challenge to come from the tech level requirements and perhaps fuel/engine costs. Again all of this is just what I think balance should be. There have been plenty of times when I have use cryogenic engines and thought as I have to stack tank after tank to make an all hydrolox lifter "It would be nice to have a midway propellant between this and LiquidFuel"

Thinking about the Fulcrum. I think it should not get proplox at all. Yes there are multiple first stage engines in real life that use hydrolox. Yet generally they fall into two categories. Very low thrust and meant to use as a sustainer engine (That does not work well in KSP stock scale where launch times are typically well under 5 minutes) Or they have good thrust but are very very expensive. I know KSP is not supposed to be compared with real life engines but it makes it difficult to balance an engine like this when the entire point of the engine is to be very powerful. Raptium makes far more for an interesting alternative fuel here.

So far the thrust and ISP levels look way too high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RL10 This is a good example of hydrolox when used for its maximum ISP at the expense of thrust. And it tops out at 465 isp. I think cryogenic engines has one with similar ISP but of course it is difficult to use because of the lower thrust. Perhaps 402 or so? Thrust reduced to 80 for Proplox and 110 for Raptalox (ISP for that should be slightly reduced. But more balance can be achieved via a high cost of the fuel and tech tree requirements) I don't know how to calculate the correct density here. Look at the difference between stock tanks and those configured for cyrogenic and cut that in half? You will want players to need to possibly add another small tank or two. But not have to build rather large rockets to take advantage of the benefits of proplox.

I don't think that is enough of a tradeoff considering how simple it is to make rockets in stock scales. There would be absolutely no reason to use anything but Proplox (Or Raptium if the goal is to make fuel elsewhere) as it would be simple to defeat the lower ASL thrust with boosters. I think a better balance is for Proplox to be balanced to be a halfway point between stock LFO and Cryogenic engines hydrogen. That should make the math to balance it easier. You will want players to still use LFO for the second stages for really heavy payloads into low orbit. But explore the benefits of proplox for payloads going to the Mun and beyond.

First of all. This is awesome! Having a choice in propellant will lead to interesting new design choices and less reliance on building monster rockets to achieve high delta-v. A question of balance however. Will PropLox be balanced to be lower thrust and lower density like Cryogenic engines? Raptium can be balanced via cost but hydrogen without the negatives of density and lower thrust it will possibly end up overpowered.

That is really really saddening to hear. The insane prices for RAM right now are preventing people from buying more. Thus it continues to limit the amount of mods they can install. However, thank you for ending speculation about it. Better to know now rather than get hyped up for a feature that does not exist.

I have seen the Unity changelogs. What we don't know is how much of those changes are actually being implemented and how they will affect things. For instance wasn't there a change to the way assets are loaded? Could this mean mods can be loaded as needed rather than all being loaded at startup? For those of us stuck on 8 gigs of RAM due to the insane prices right now this is very important. What about Vulkan? newer versions of Unity support it. Will KSP take advantage of the benefits of CPU use?

All we ever hear about 1.4 is that it is being worked on or some parts. I understand the team is excited about the expansion but when are we going to get details about what the change to the newer Unity means for mod development? Will it enable lower RAM use? What about he new particle system? Can we PLEASE have a blog centered around 1.4?

Personally I find the potential of this tool to be awesome! I had been waiting for RSS and RO to update to the latest KSP versions but this makes we want to just scale Galileo up and use SMURFF. Most autopilots for KSP can take inclination into account but struggles with LAN and especially upper stages with far less TWR. I want to be able to do 14 minute Centaur style burns to LEO so I cant wait to try this. If you are taking requests about missions you can use this for. I would like to see the Soviet N1 launcher use this. A lunar mission if possible but even just using it to add something to your station would be fun to watch. Or perhaps one of the classic Atlas rockets that used SRBs and the 1.5 staging. It would be fun to see this adapting to those odd launchers. Like you showed in your last video with the Atlas V.

I have been considering trying a Realism Overhaul KSP install (Just my opinion. That REALLY ought to be made into a single install package so that the challenge is the realism of the mod instead of needing youtube videos just to get it running) Yet this seems like a massive difficulty spike for those used to stock career mechanics. Will the default difficulty settings be forgiving for those not yet used to these mechanics?

Just want to say that I can't wait for the next update. Going to be using ProbesPlus to do more unmanned exploration so I can actually visit and explore these planets instead of trying to cobble together a manned mission before I reach the right tech level.

I don't mind if I have to use other mods to build additional relays. I just hope that it feels realistic. For instance the moons are much further out than the Mun so I hope I will still be able to communicate with the probes without having to use a relay satellite. That is a good idea regarding science gain. I will set it to 50 percent. I have decided to also use USI life support and community tech tree to add some challenge to this save. I don't mind the reduced science gain if your mod creates interesting scientific contracts instead of the boring stock crap.

Sorry if this has been asked before. On my next career save I want to use SSTU for the rockets, Galileo's Planet Pack for the solar system, and hopefully this mod for unmanned science. Will this be a balanced mix of mods? Will the increased distances of that solar system mess with the communication parts?

I am planning on starting a new career save with SSTU and Galileo's Planet Pack. Does stage and a half make rockets at stock like scale too OP? If not could you consider making an Atlas Centaur version? What I want to try to do less in this save is making a rocket for every mission.

I really hope they are not that stupid. The modders that have joined the team would have informed them of what a horrible idea that is. That would absolutely destroy the modding community for just a few extra sales of the expansion. NOT worth it. However, as far as expansions in general. We can't delude ourselves into thinking that KSP can be developed forever without them. KSP is not THAT popular. And even if it was most people who have heard about it likely already own it. There are things in the core code that modders simply can't change. So once development stops those issues will be around forever. Or even worse another company could purchase the IP and decide to go full on paid mod like Train Simulator. I hope you will be understanding of them as long as they do not start acting like EA. Especially if this gets them back on the path towards multiplayer.