tater

The in-flight highlighting is really no different than having the spacecraft leave nyan cat rainbow trails. I can see some people with visual problems wanting more in the VAB (though I certainly don't), but I find it hard to believe that anyone would like the effect in flight.

The design sheet is awesome. Kudos, @Porkjet! Exactly what parts have needed for ages, a coherent design document looking at the parts as a whole. Truly excellent work.

Yeah, I agree, my off topic tangent was because I was saying that the lack of economic drivers in game wasn;t unrealistic, as there really are no economic drivers, stations are for other reasons. Yeah, these two are great, although they come with a standard KSP problem---Kerbals are useless by themselves, so the player has to hand-deliver all the supplies needed. I'm all-in for construction yards, though. Fun, but I'm unsure how this works in game. Honestly, the "tourism" could take care of these with better contracts (and less random). Glass in large quantities really isn't a thing, growing stuff would likely be under electric light, powered by solar, or via a heliostat directing light into a more enclosed (and easier to regulate) greenhouse. That one is out there, but yeah, the contract system need to have hotels be a thing. Again, unsure of the mechanism for incentive in KSP. I have suggested that certain parts require specific "science," so this could be a thing... build a certain facility, and run it for XXX days to unlock new parts. This is just logistical, and I think many of us do this anyway---if for no other reason than we want to use our stations, for something.

I wonder if the new upgrade functionality could be useful for otherwise very similar engines (Merlins, for example)?

Who thought the green highlighting was a good thing? Clearly someone did, though I have trouble imagining why. How do I turn it off? I turned off Highlight FX to no avail. I have trouble playing at all, it's so incredibly distracting.

Tantares has great Soviet stuff, and SSTU has Soyuz/R-7 stuff, and station parts as well.

From a KSP standpoint, construction of something huge doesn't require a station, they can just live in a pod while they work, if you even need kerbals. If kerbals had AI, and could be tasked to do things, then orbital construction might be a thing. You'd send kerbals to supply a depot with parts, then kerbals based at the depot would build whatever they were taken to build. As it is, you really need only 1 with KIS, or a probe core otherwise to dock stuff together. Seems like the major costs would be transportation, not equipment, so if you are sending something to GEO, you might as well bring the spare as SOP. The only reason to bring the broken bit down would really be to deorbit it. I'd think that telepresence would be superior to risking people in a high radiation environment, as well.

I'm not quibbling, it's exactly the same, satellite service. How is it economic to keep people in LEO 24/7/365 so that you can occasionally send them up on short duration missions to GEO?

Yours is exactly the same as Giscard's. Servicing an unmanned satellite. What the sat does doesn't matter. The only real world example had repair cost more than replacement. Note that a station is likely in LEO because of radiation hazards, and solar power is likely in GEO. So such a maintenance requires an equatorial station ideally, and then require sending workers TO the power sat. Why would you not just send them there directly, instead of keeping them on a station, then sending a spacecraft that will certainly require fuel deliveries anyway.

Why would it require human beings? Beamed solar has not been considered viable for a long time now, however (it was the initial rationale for O'Neil stuff, back in the day, but it's not taken very seriously now). EDIT: I'm open to solar power stations, however. I just don't see why they require people. To stare at gauges, and turn 1950s style knobs?

Yeah, the He economy has been cited for decades WRT lunar stuff (one of the proponents at LANL taught a class I took on Lunar bases back in the 90s). The trouble of course is that such an economy is predicated on Fusion power plants. "Plausible" with such a caveat places it in the "currently implausible" category to me, though I welcome my fusion powered masters.

Given that the engines have "mount" available, do the tanks really need them? Is it merely for stock compatibility? Maybe I'm being dumb here, or it could literally be that I now never use the stock engines. Ever. Regarding size-changing adaptors, I find that a common use is linking a command part (say Orion) to a station part to create a large, interplanetary vessel. I have used the petal adapter for this. A Station Core part that is just an adaptable crew passage might be a cool part. To give it multiple use, add in a volume of tankage equal to the difference between a 1.25m passageway and the outside shell volume (assuming it can do this easily). Basically "structural fuselage," but with variant top/bottom diameters.

I reread the entire thread and posted literally, the ONLY concrete suggestions made about "real world" station ideas. You can admit defeat, that's fine, or you can simply find another post and hit "quote."

The below have been the only reasons given (aside from my own) for a station. Servicing satellites has exactly one example, and it cost more than sending a new (and better) replacement (Hubble). Satellites are sent up all the time, no one is trying to service them. Even if they did, dragging them to a station for a person to do so... the math seems very unlikely, and honestly, as launch costs drop, it becomes less likely, not more likely. Remember that dragging to a station requires that they all be in a coplanar orbit, else the dv requirements of to and from are insane. Moon anything has no economic reason whatsoever, that's a national space program goal. Except, as I said, unless tourism is an actual market. The point is ECONOMIC reasons. Not fun or cool reasons. I'm all in for a real Moon base, but it's lighting money on fire, there is no "profit" motive. This is the only reason for the foreseeable future, unless somehow it's cheap enough (a million? less?) to send tourists.

We had actual space stations decades ago, not the idea that we might have them. Any of the contractors could have made private versions at will. They have not because there is no plausible economic reason to do so. I was using arpanet back in the day, and the reason the "web" is what it is today is because there was actual money to be made. That is simply not the case with manned space stations. There is nothing in space that cannot be done better by electronics other than "living." Any economic model for a space station must monetize "living."

We've had stations for 40 years. No contractor has built anything aside from for the one customer wilting to throw money away, NASA. Every part of ISS could have been done privately in the 80s. Crickets. Didn't happen. A real world example requires a real world project hitting real world milestones.

National space programs are not part of the discussion, since they are not a thing in KSP minus a total overhaul of career. We're talking about real world, private sector stuff. NASA contractors could have made their own station decades ago if there was a reason to do so aside from letting NASA pay for the pork. There is not a reason, so they have not done so. Right now, the current best bet is BO and Bigelow, since they actually have a business model built around stations for profit (at some point). So that is a plausible, near future space station for economic reasons. No other station for the private sector has been suggested that I know of (by anyone working to actually do anything about it). It;s like saying Mars One is a plausible rationale for colonization.

If they were plausible, we'd already have them, we've had space stations for 40 years.

^^^That is what I asked. "Real reasons" requires that they actually exist, I didn't ask for hypothetical reasons. The real world. That we live in. Show me a real station making money. You just admitted there were none. No plausible hypotheticals (except maybe my own about tourism) have been provided.

A station is a manned, "permanent" vehicle in orbit. You provided zero examples of any station demonstrated to have made money---because there are no such examples. If you want to discuss possible ways to make money, sure, there are a few. But not many, and the idea of profit with them is very, very sketchy at best. Just like there is basically zero possible "trade" between Earth and Mars for the distant foreseeable future (many hundreds of years), even if we took as given a full-blown colony.

I like that idea a lot. I differentiate between the A and B for hydrolox tanks, basically, but a "variant" would work perfectly well, and I really like the idea of cleaning up the menu. I just DLed and I'm thinking of hiding most all of the stock parts.

I said name a single actual economic example. The answer is there are none at all. Science fiction doesn't count. Skylab, Mir, ISS... all cost money, make nothing to speak of. The most realistic economic near-future argument might be Bigelow habs as hotels. The idea of servicing satellites is likely not a thing, frankly. Its like servicing Hubble---it would have been cheaper to just build and launch a new one than repairing it (had they used a decent LV instead of Shuttle). Science is a circular argument. You need stations for long term habitation so you can learn about long term habitation. I think that is a good reason in game---add life support, and tie LS pimprovements to long term habitation (i.e.; you make a station to learn stuff to make better LS parts for farther missions). There are zero examples of economic reasons to build a space station. There are few reasons that are plausible even as science fiction. I think there should be contracts to create space hotels. Any craft created to fulfill such a contract then gets tourism contracts to deliver passengers to it.

From an economic standpoint I think the jump makes a certain amount of sense. I think Bezos is all-in for tourism, and that's not necessarily a bad idea. In other threads, we've discussed the LEO launch market, and at some point I looked at a couple years of launches, and decided that only about a dozen were fully up for grabs for commercial launch providers. Slightly more for US providers given military payloads. Otherwise, national payloads tend to stick with national LVs (the Russians will not launch a Russian comsat on an F9, for example). Those launches tend to be in the F9 bracket. Adding a new LV will get a share of that, but even all of it is a flat market. I also don't think that reduction of cost per kg to orbit will vastly increase the number (and mass) of satellites. The only close to "bottomless" driver for LEO is tourism assuming the price can be made right. There are apparently ~12 million people on Earth with an investable wealth of over 1 million USD, and around 1200 who are billionaires. Clearly you need to be competitive for the former.

Yeah, this was the DSP-SMA-S I think.

I missed @RedParadize's report and your answer, lol. I was worried it related to welding, and retested.