beached

Before 1.0.x there were plenty of things preventing you from using "any engine for any purpose". Common sense things, that apparently go over your head, since certainly you wouldn't make sweeping statements like that just to have an argument against our gripe, right? You understand the difference between "restriction" and "forbidden", correct? You just used an upper-stage engine as a sea level lifting engine for 12 tons of payload, assisted by 8 of the max-size solid boosters. Clearly you didn't make the point you intended. Obviously we think there's something wrong with that. Every other "more realism" update or add-on to the game I can think of has added to gameplay in some form, except for this. All this does is shorten the choice of engines at your disposal, from an already short list. You nobly defending Squad doesn't mean every opinion that isn't yours is irrelevant. Your last paragraph gave me the idea that you've gotten a bit confused about who is arguing what. It's harder to stifle something that's lacking to begin with, surely? Why aren't I making any sense? The OP titled the thread "I just can't get to like how the engines are knobbled now", so obviously what we're arguing against are the changes to the engines. Where could you get the idea that I want all engines to work equally well at all tasks? That's not how things were before the changes. The "make everyone happy" solution, if Squad are so adamant on engines only being useful in their designated roles, would be to add a fuller selection of engines. Some people perceive having to compromise their designs to accommodate constraints (which are still imposed just for the sake of it) as creativity, others perceive it the opposite: less varied designs, more of the same compromising to make designs functional. In my opinion, I don't really see the creativity in the tired old "moar boosters" gimmick anymore, which is essentially what this ends up being. By which point we're halfway through the thick atmosphere, the vehicle has already built up speed, and the "lift" phase of the project is over. Could you elaborate on why my opinion's misguided? What gets my point across are the statements in between the implications the person I'm talking to is "stupid". What made them redundant? Plenty of my designs utilized them, especially the radial ones. The "right tool for the job" will tend to be the same when the jobs you're doing are similar. Lifting isn't the only use for engines in atmosphere. Whether or not gimping the performance of engines outside their designated roles, just for the sake of realism, is an interesting constraint is mostly what's in contention.

Why would I want to use it at sea level when there is a two-and-a-half-ton smaller engine which consumes less fuel but gives me more thrust? Are you catching on yet? It seems like it's taking longer than it should. Perfect for augmenting TWR at sea level when you're catapulting the weight of a van (generous comparison) to orbit on 3.75m parts? They aren't working fine when they're doing more pulling with their drag and mass than pushing with their thrust. It's an unrelated gripe, though, I don't use SRBs much so I'm not too bothered. Sounds like they'll be getting tweaked for the new-new atmosphere in 1.0.3 anyways, so that's fine, hopefully it's alongside the engine rebalance. Why do you have such a bad memory? You just got done making a point about how an engine in a mod is fashioned for a specific role, and you chose to use it differently anyways. I simply used your wording. Your point would have been valid before engines were simply recommended for their intended roles (i.e. the 909 description hinting: "...particularly useful as a final stage and landing engine.") Now they are being RESTRICTED to those roles, for absolutely no reason other than realism. If you can't keep up at this point, I doubt there's any point in continuing this much longer. If you never had any reason to use other engines in space, your designs must have been incredibly bland or incredibly one-size-fits-all. But the fact that you automatically specified that remark to "in space" makes me lean towards the former rather than the latter. No, I've told you that there's no "efficiency box" which the person advocating UNrealism has a problem stepping out of. You're now confusing "efficiency" with actually accomplishing things.

In that case, then, I agree. 1.0 definitely lifted a lot of those limitations. But unless you're classing the performance of engines in that, it doesn't mean much in regard to the issue here. The fuss now is the same as it's been before. If you build crafts with mods like B9 or KW, you aren't expecting to share it with people who don't have those mods. The same applied to FAR, as well, since a lot of things that behaved like planes in FAR, behaved like anvils in stock. It's different when you want to play stock and build stock crafts, but are using a mod to correct some kind of ridiculousness in the stock game. That's why we prefer the ridiculousness to be corrected rather than just living with mods. If stock itself is already suffering with bugs, why would you want to add more bugs on top of it with mods? And when the spring is so rigid that creativity is actually hampered, that's how you know something's screwy. You especially know something's screwy when the creativity is being hampered "just because", rather than for actual gameplay value as is the case for career, with the constraints of funding on top of the standard constraints of gravity, aerodynamics, ineptitude, etc. It's a simulation of an alien species and their space program on an alien world. If you want to use impossibility as an argument, and also use our real world as the definer for what's possible, then things like atmosphere-capable Ion engines are probably near the bottom of the list of things you disapprove of, and not solely because atmosphere-capable Ion engines are (apparently) already in the works. Of course, as long as they just want to admire them on the ground and don't plan on actually doing much with them. I realized the efficiency price for aesthetics myself when I sandwiched a plane in a fancy and complicated wing setup. Had all the lift in the world, but also a glide distance of like 2-3 kilometers before becoming a stone. The issue isn't really about that, though (my problem there was drag), it's about how severely the engines have been restricted to their designated roles. Aesthetics doesn't have as much to do with that. Keep telling me to step outside the box, then keep telling to to stay inside it when I ask how to get out. This is whining in general discussion. Just not on my own thread. Why create another when someone's already made one on the exact topic? "More boosters" was a KSP mantra before they were (appropriately) nerfed to accommodate the thinner atmosphere, but then promptly ignored after the atmosphere was reverted to soup again, albeit a more sophisticated soup than .90 Your point about the RD-171M would have been valid before the engine restrictions, when people were just told that certain engines were used for certain tasks. Even then there was still plenty of drawbacks and advantages for different situations to warrant using one engine over another. Obviously not nearly enough for the blessed realistic space hippies, though. 12.2 tons is around the payload that conventional shuttles tend to carry in their cargo bays, isn't it?... I'm tempted to say it's hardly half as much. Edit: Temptation won, turns out that conventional shuttles can carry more than twice that much, comfortably, in the longest bay.

The person arguing in favor of an UNrealistic game aspect isn't willing to step outside of his "efficiency box"? It has nothing to do with that, it has everything to do with the fact that engines were specifically gimped in all the areas Squad didn't intend them to be used. So could you elaborate on how far outside my efficiency box I need to be before a KR-2L magically no longer has less thrust at sea level than an engine half its size? The point we make is that the changes to engines make designs LESS open to creativity. Telling me to "get creative" isn't sound advice. The "limitations" the stock game forced you to deal with? Like the ability to glide infinitely, or power planes with sunshine and electricity? Are you sure you're part of the realism crowd? Because from my modest experience with FAR, DRE and TAC Life Support, it's been about ADDING limitations to the game. Besides, most of the whining was because of the aerodynamics, not engine balancing, which is what this topic is about. I want my game to be SHAREABLE, which doesn't involve going in and changing a bunch of config files to correct ridiculous things that seem to have been tossed into the update just for the sake of it, or maybe to make it more worthy of being called 1.0 And how can you say with a straight face that KSP is more moddable than ever before when stock alone has more bugs, memory issues, and crashes than it has since like <.20? Yeah, and the problem we're having with the changes is that it's now often unfeasible to make the wrong tool work in any reasonable way. Using the wrong tool itself is now inherently unreasonable, as evidenced by the standard reply given when someone asks why an engine isn't performing as well as they hoped ("You aren't supposed to use it in that situation!") You either change the job or you use the tool that the game has specifically designated for that job. The fact that people are actually happy there is now a defined and enforced "right/wrong" for things like this is surprising. Those two words never used to exist in Kerbal vocabulary before now. Just to clarify, by the way, my personal gripe is only with the rocket engines. How the airbreathing engines now function adds to gameplay in my opinion, since how I fly actually has an active effect. I've genuinely enjoyed that, and the supposed nerfs to SSTOs seem to be an issue with drag more than anything, which is a different subject entirely. The changes to rocket engines, on the other hand, adds nothing to the game besides realism for the sake of realism (thus not comparable to the improved aerodynamics).

Whereas the new, supercool realistic way means you just go into the part list and look up the engine performances to see which ones correspond with what you're planning to do. Incredibly creative. As soon as it's required and standard, it's not creativity. It mattered before that you picked the engines more suited for different phases of the mission, as well. The difference now is that only the realistic missions are allowed.

I'll just leave this here: http://imgur.com/a/vw9l3 Even with FAR, as long as your drag was symmetrical and you were flying close to the prograde, rockets would not constantly try to fly themselves backwards, with or without reaction wheel/fin spamming. Throwing a dart backwards would be an accurate comparison if KSP rockets were built with massive fins on the top, had the majority of their mass at the engine in the bottom rather than the fuel tanks and the payload, and were launched with slingshots instead of several minutes of controlled explosions from rocket engines. Pancake rockets and gravity turns that don't start until you're out of the thick atmosphere end up being more viable than slender, aerodynamic rockets and realistic gravity turns: the opposite of FAR, and funnily enough, more reminiscent of <1.0 stock.

If I understand this right, control surfaces which are behind the center of mass should pitch like this _/ to push the tail down, helping the nose go up. And when you want the nose to go down, it should pitch like this ¯\ to push the tail up. Usually they do that. For some reason, if you attach it to a wing whose "placement point" is in front of the center of mass, the control surface is treated as being in front of the center of mass as well, i.e. it functions like a canard should. In stock KSP, this seems to just be a visual thing that doesn't have any actual affect on "aerodynamics", because my stock A-10 Warthogish plane flew perfectly, despite the odd control surface behavior. Recently, though, I've started using NEAR, and now because of the realistic aerodynamics, these reversed control surfaces are ruining me. It basically means the lift provided by my tail is completely overridden by the incorrect lift from my main wings, when the main wings should be assisting the tail.