Monthar

A university building doesn't make any sense. However, a Simulator building would make perfect sense. Such a building could be used for playing or replaying tutorials as well as testing out new ship designs and training crew.

I disagree. You'd still have the same total mass from the tanks and the amount of xenon they hold. The only difference between bigger tanks and multiple small tanks would be the part count, which means the game will run smoother as it wouldn't need at much memory for that ship. By your logic, we don't need multiple lengths of the LFO tanks either, because the shortest one for each diameter is good enough as long as we stack several of them. Edit: I decided to add some screenshots to demonstrate my point. Nuclear engine with the tallest of the LFO tanks of the same diameter as the engine. Nuclear engine with 8 of the shortest LFO tanks of the same diameter as the engine. Notice how in both cases you have the same total mass and delta-v. The difference being the part count jumped from 3 to 10. To compare with the nuclear engine here is an ion engine with enough tanks to exceed the delta-v of the nuclear engine from the previous screen shots, along with the minimum number of fold out solar panels to power this one engine. This also take 10 parts, but you'll notice even though it has significantly less total mass it also has a significantly lower thrust to weight ratio, so you're going to have to burn the engines for much longer to reach the same speed/course change. Also note, that if using the small flat solar panels (first one unlocked), you'd need 12 of them instead of 5 of the fold out panels thus increasing the part count by another 7 parts for a slight decrease in total mass. If you went with RTGs so you could run the ion engine when on the night side of any of the planets/moons it would also take 12 of them which would increase the total mass of the ship. However, after replacing solar panels with RTGs you have to add 2 more inline tanks to have slightly less (40 less) delta-v than that of the nuclear engine ship from the first two screenshots, but still less than the first ion engine ship's screenshot. That raises the total mass of the ship by approximately 72% over what it is with the 5 fold out solar panels. The extra fuel and tanks of course increases the total mass even more and raises the part count to 19. See the next screenshot. It would take 19 ion engines on the ion ship to equal the vacuum thrust to weight ratio of that nuclear engine ship. That's only if the total mass of the ship remained the same. However since the mass will increase just from adding the extra engines. then you have to also add the extra power generation from RTGs or Solar Panels to power them all. Since you can't mount an inline xenon tank on the side of another inline xenon tank you have to add cubic-octagonal struts to mount the extra ion engines. Luckily you don't need to run fuel lines to them. Here's an example with just adding 6 more ion engine, the extra RTGs to power them and the extra tanks to have a similar delta-v and it only doubled the thrust to weight ratio of the single ion engine ship. This increased the part count to 133 and total mass to almost double that of the nuclear engine ship. If you're playing in Career mode where you have to worry about costs, it costs more than 35.5 times as many Kerbucks as the 3 part nuclear engine ship. Therefore, no matter how you look at it, there is absolutely no way adding some larger xenon tanks would ever make the nuclear engines obsolete.

I was testing this using KER, KAC (alarm clock) and active texture management mods, so this isn't for submission, at least not until I replicate the ship in a pure stock install. Based off Zipmafia's design I changed out the probe controller for the lander can to do a manned landing. For this manned version it needed another 12 of those Mono-prop tanks, 60 more of the mono-prop engines, 6 more decouplers and 36 struts for a total cost of 90,512 kerbucks. I had 61.95 mono-prop (503m/s delta-v) left in the last tank after landing. That's approx 3.705x the cost of his unmanned attempt to complete this challenge with the lightest manned capsule. Edit: The struts were required, because of how much taller the manned version ended up being, it would collapse and explode as soon as the physics loaded when attempting to launch.

I can see bigger ion engines making the nuclear engines obsolete. Bigger xenon tanks however would not. The entire point of this thread is about bigger tanks not bigger engines. Currently we have 2 tank sizes for xenon, but if you look at every diameter of LFO tank and you'll see up to 4 different lengths of the inline tanks. We have only 1 length of the inline xenon tank and 1 side mounted tank that holds even less. We also have adapters to allow running 1-4 engines on a single LFO tank. So it's no unreasonable to have large enough xenon tanks to allow running 1-4 ion engines off them.

What I meant is more mass means burning more fuel to achieve the same delta-v. Of course more fuel means more mass to move.

Shouldn't a manned mission either have a bonus or at least a separate leader board? After all the command pods cost more than unmanned and need a lot more delta-v, thus much higher cost in engines and fuels.

I was just making sure, because I've never even been to Duna, so I have no idea how much Dv I'd need to get home.

We only have to get to and land on Duna, not return and land back at Kerbin as well?

I don't think we need bigger ion engines to warrant larger tanks. Yes, we can put more tanks on if we need more fuel. However, as more parts are added the slower the game runs. Therefore, by having some larger tanks we can get the same amount of xenon with fewer parts, thus less memory drain, fewer connection points to break/flex, etc. making the game run better. Along these same lines, I think we could also use some 2x2 and 1x6 and 2x3 versions of the first solar panel and perhaps some wings that have built in solar panels. Then we can have a means to generate power while moving in the atmosphere while trying to keep the weight down. The fold out panels are nice, but they break if used in the atmosphere and the RTGs only generate the same power as the basic solar panel but weigh a lot more. Again, this is to cut down on the number of parts needed.

I named the ship Ion Glider 2 when designing it, but let's go with The Red Baron since it's a tri-plane and it looks kind of evil.

Here's my first manned attempt. No control surfaces of any kind, no batteries and no RCS (although I forgot to drain the monoprop from the command module). The vertical stabilizers are Tail Fins. Shortly after the last screenshot the aircraft started an oscillating roll that I couldn't recover from and ended up crashing. I know it got above 7300m before losing altitude, but I was too busy trying to regain control to remember to take a screenshot. I'll likely try again after some redesigning. I'm still happy with this attempt since it is the only legal manned flight for this challenge so far. 7262.1m (according to the flight engineer) altitude and 48.4m/s speed

I've managed to get into a solar orbit with a sun periapsis over 11,000Mm. However, I only had 2 stages on the ship, the 2nd for the deorbit burn, so even with over 67 years in space I couldn't get back into Kerbin SOI unless I used that 2nd stage and ended up stuck in orbit or worse, getting flung out of the solar system. So I think I'm going to add another stage to that ship for getting back into Kerbin's SOI. Then I'll see if I can get the Kerbin periapsis as close to the edge of the SOI as possible.

Yesterday I was looking at the Flight Engineer's available choices when editing what's displayed in the Rendezvous window and couldn't find a choice for closest approach distance. If it's there I'll look some more to see if I can find it, but if it's not there please add it.

Why no batteries?

Since you're only banning autopilot functions, are you going to have separate categories for Stock, Stock with KER, NEAR/FAR, etc?

I've been testing these changes and they work out quite well.

I know, but if you rotate the command pod to line up it also rotates the controls, making it harder to control properly. If you rotate the other modules you can forget about some of the symmetry options for some of the stuff attached, because it'll either block the ladder on the lower module or be so close to the ladder that you Kerbal's helmet hits the attached part preventing you from moving on the ladder.

I never noticed the mismatched thrusters on that command pod, but have always been annoyed with the location of the hatch and ladder. To link then to the science or hitchhiker modules several of the small ladder segments cocked at odd angles.

The 550 AU (Astronomical Unit) requirement on the IR Telescope doesn't make much sense to me, since Kerbin is at 1 AU, so 550 AU would be an orbit around Kerbol that's 550 times the radius of Kerbin's orbit.

I've tried Docking Port Alignment Indicator, the Navball Docking alignment mod and the Lazer Docking Camera mod and found the Docking Port Alignment mod to be far easier to use. You get graphical and numeric indicators for rotation, distance above/below, distance left/right, distance to target and the above/below and left/right indicator lines are also green when on the correct side of the target and red when on the incorrect side of the target. IMO, the Docking Port Alignment mod should be added to the stock game.

Currently the antenna and both dishes have a packet size of 2. The differences between them are the interval the packets are sent and how much power is used to send each packet. The breakdown is as follows. I'm guessing the interval is in minutes, so I'll use minutes to help this make sense. Thus to send 20 units of data with the 2 packet size that's 10 packets for the data set. Stock settings in 0.24.2.559 Communitron 16 (antenna) 10 electricity per packet, packet size 2, interval of 0.4 and mass of 0.005 Comms DTS-M1 (1st dish) 12.5 electricity per packet, packet size 2 ,interval of 0.3 and mass of 0.03 Communitron 88-88 (2nd dish) 20 electricity per packet, packet size 2, interval of 0.18 and mass of 0.025 Amount of electricity and minutes used to send the 20 units of data in the data set. The Communitron 16 will use 100 electricity and take 4.0 minutes or roughly 25 electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. The Comms DTS-M1 will use 125 electricity and take 3.0 minutes or roughly 41.666 electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. The Communitron 88-88 will use 200 electricity and take 1.8 minutes or roughly 111.111 electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. If you used 2 Communitron 16 antennas and transmitted 2 experiments/report (one per antenna) at the same time, you'd be able to send 40 units of data for the same 200 electricity that a Communitron 88-88 uses to send only 20 units of data. That equates to having an interval of 0.20 compared to the Commnitron 88-88's 0.18, but at only 50 electricity per minute. To top that off you'd only have 0.010 mass. Therefore 2 Communitron 16s can send the same amount of data in almost the same total time as the Comminitron 88-88, while using less than half the electricity per minute and less than half the mass. Due to the amount of electricity per minute used by each type of transmitter, even with 2 Communitron 16s you'd need fewer batteries and solar panels/Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, thus far less mass to do the same job. Therefore I suggest increasing the packet size of the Comms DTS-M1 and Communitro 88-88 to 3.333 and 8.888 respectively. The way I came up with these numbers was by dividing the electricty per packet of the Communitron 16 by the product of its packet size and packet interval 10/(2*0.4) = 12.5. Then I used the electricity per packet and intervals of the other two with the 12.5 from the previous equation to solve for the new packet sizes. Which gave me a 3.333~ packet size for the Comms DTS-M1 and 8.888~ packet size for the Communitron 88-88. Hey look, that also fits the 88-88's name quite nicely. Proposed Settings (changes in bold) Communitron 16 (antenna) 10 electricity per packet, packet size 2, interval of 0.4 and mass of 0.005 Comms DTS-M1 (1st dish) 12.5 electricity per packet, packet size 3.333 ,interval of 0.3 and mass of 0.03 Communitron 88-88 (2nd dish) 20 electricity per packet, packet size 8.888, interval of 0.18 and mass of 0.025 Now with these new packet sizes to send 20 units of data we get the follow changes. The Communitron 16 will still need 10 packets using 100 electricity and take 4.0 minutes or roughly 25 electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. The Comms DTS-M1 will need only 6.0006 using 75.0075 electricity and take 1.80018 minutes. That's still roughly 41.666~ electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. Still more electricity per minute, but less total electricity. Plus the entire data set is sent is just over half the time. The Communitron 88-88 will need only 2.250225 packets using 45.0045 electricity and take 0.4050~ minutes. That's still roughly 111.111 electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. However, the time to send them is cut to about 1/4 what the DTS-M1 uses. It could send 2 sets 10 packets in under a minute using a total amount of electricity that's only slightly higher than the Communitron 16 uses. In practice the Comms DTS-M1 would need 7 packets total using 87.5 electricity and take 2.1 minutes or roughly 41.666~ electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. Still more electricity per minute, but less total electricity. Plus the entire data set is sent is just over half the time. The Communitron 88-88 would need 3 packets total using 60 electricity and take 0.54 minutes. That's still roughly 111.111 electricity per minute to send the entire 20 units of data. However, the time to send them is cut to about 1/4 what the DTS-M1 uses. The way this change works out, the higher tech transmitters still use the same amount of electricity per minute, but by transmitting in lager packet sizes, they use less total electricity for the same amount of data instead of more and finish their transmissions much faster. This means not needing quite as many batteries, the same number of solar panels/RTGs, which saves some mass and cost, while also making the mass and cost of the transmitters themselves actually worth using the Comms DTS-M1 and Communitron 88-88 instead of just adding more Communitron 16s. For the amount of electricity per minute used by the stock settings, you could run 4 Communitron 16's (4x the data sent) and still use less mass and electricity per minute that 1 Communitron 88-88 uses, or you could use 2 Comms DTS-M1s (2x the data sent) for the same amount of electricity, but almost twice the mass compared to the Communitron 88-88.

Please say one of the new parts you're adding is a new science instrument for the impact study so the seismometer can go back to its stock functionality. I hate having to edit the .cfg file to restore the stock functionality every time I instead an updated version. I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Are you putting the mods in the Plugins, PluginData or GameData folder? Mods go in the GameData folder.

The only one of the mods you have listed that I never tried is the ScanSat. I don't currently have Chatterer installed. I do have the latest version of the other mods you're using and didn't have any problems with the hatch a few minutes ago. So try removing Chatterer and ScanSat one at a time as long as you don't have any parts from those mods on the ship and see if that fixes the problem.

I did some more thinking on the idea. Instead of just 1 shot like my original proposal, we keep the reduction for repeated experiments and include repeated reports for each location, but on a linear scale. First time it's 5 science, 2nd 4, 3rd 3, 4th 2, 5th 1. That would bring the science per planetary system to to approx 9000 if you went on a grind fest. Next instead of my original proposal of only 5 science per contract max on all contracts, make that apply only to the part testing contracts. Then change those explore Mun, Minmus, etc. contracts to provide large amounts of science depending on where the contract is sending you. Think of those contracts as science missions. Include the first 4 contracts in this group of science mission contracts. Examples Launch a ship - 10 science Reach 5000 meters - 20 science Reach space - 40 science Achieve orbit - 80 science. This gives 150 science just for completing the first 4 contracts. Then perhaps the Mun mission could be 300 science, Minmus 450 science. Duna 1000, Eve 1500, etc. The mission to each of the moons around the other planets could give the same science as the planet for completing the mission. That's just the basic explore missions. Now add more science mission contracts asking you to explore specific locations on each of the planets and moons, including Kerbin. If possible these mission contracts could also spawn some anomaly at the location it wants you to explore that you have to investigate as part of the mission. It could be anything from a crashed satellite to a monolith, to an out of fuel lander with a Kerbal that needs rescuing (another Kerbin nation's ship and crew), to some strange plant or other lifeform. These types of missions would give more science on completion than the basic explore the planet/moon mission did for that planet/moon.