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Yeah, ven was a must have before... I just love the fact that the huge mass of parts I have to pick from is now all "good stuff" and not 4 versions of each tank diameter, all of which are ugly . Regarding windows... I sorta like the 75% I suppose, but it doesn't matter much which size, and you're right on no smaller than 50%. IVAs only need huge windows because we are stuck viewing them from a seat, instead of getting closer to the window. I can't remember if it was mentioned up the thread, but will the general bodies of station core have texture choices? They clearly don't need many choices, even if the Russians tend towards more colorful spacecraft.

Anyone joining this thread who hasn't tried SSTU... go up and look at the Apollo Block V image of what its supposed to look like. Here's the stock version (13 parts): SSTU (10 parts): The two, together: Any questions? That's literally the first thing I've built with stock parts since a little after 1.1.3 came out. Wow, they are ugly.

Regarding feature requests... this thread is a little like hanging out in Santa's workshop, it's hard not to . BTW, if I had a realistic solar panels mod installed, that Apollo Block V I made would have looked pretty spot-on, I think (I loaded up my "pure SSTU" testing copy that I have with no other mods installed).

Duh. I think I forgot about the vertical length slider. It's sort of like only learning you can click on orbital nodes and they stay highlighted---after playing for more than a year or two, lol. (should I admit that?) @RedParadize is right, I didn't mean to spam requests. The part counts are so absurdly low once you stop using regular parts that Adding parts here or there is really no big deal. Heck, KSP has trained me so badly in terms of parts usage that I forget that I can simply connect the capsule than use SM decoupling...

I was thinking for an upper stage tank. Sorry if I was not clear (I might have switched gears, mid thought, my bad). Those already don't have the piping---of course the regular tank A-0-5 size tank doesn't have the piping anyway, it starts with the next size up. You can double the tank count and simply use 2 of those, and no pipes for an Apollo-like SM. Easy Peasy (SSTU is so incredibly flexible!) Ie: MUS-CB, but with a "no mount" mount option, and the RCS blocks on the tank: So a third upper stage tank, where the RCS is below where the fairing starts, and the bottom RCS is gone (and a non-beveled mount option). Of course an Apollo replica is moot, anyway, as we have the real thing! I was more thinking for the Block V, but as I showed, that is entirely doable with SSTU as is, IMO.

They don't get as small, and they have the RCS, etc built in at the base. You know what would be a really cool additional tank, actually? Something like MFT-D as a regular tank. Has the radial decoupling built in, but is just a plain cylinder with various nose/mount options that work for that part.

This popped up as I was typing... I agree completely.

Career is supposed to tell a story. There needs to be some suspension of disbelief in a career mode. Having to "do science" to invent ladders kinda throws that out the window.

Because it's not demonstrated to be real. It might be, we don't know. Saying otherwise is showing severe bias, in fact, people who know are fine with "we don't know" as a legitimate answer. Also, like ion engines, it's pointless in KSP because we do not have constant thrust trajectories as a thing.

Yeah, sorry I mentioned it, but I was playing with the parts... Yeah, that makes total sense. I didn't realize the crew part textures were so large. I don't really think the US parts need it at all, to be honest (unless mirror finished is an option ). Maybe just a white option for the Soviet parts? In that way, mixing and matching when that happens would not look so busy. Regarding the small Apollo SM... I guess I don't really see the need, as someone can easily make any SM from a functionality standpoint (not "replica" clearly) in SSTU. Use one of the upper stage tanks that includes RCS/APU, and there you go. Perhaps add a new mount type that provides a different appearance? The RCS requires a mount, I suppose. You could make a new mount that has no mount, and that moves the RCS up onto the tank? The current plain tank (MFT-A) has a large jump from A-0-5 to A-1-0... adding a step in between that would cover the stubby SM. Another issue is the external pipe on those. Perhaps could one or another of the MFT tanks simply not have that external pipe detail? Then, if looks demand not using it, you use the other tank, even if it is a little less optimized (which doesn't matter much in stock, frankly). The only thing missing would be the solar panels (you already added the antenna). Pretty darn close, uses 10 parts... I'd lean towards fewer "unitasker" parts. If you wanted to make a generic SM part that could stretch, perhaps with an older style RCS block mounted on the tank vs the mounting ring setup on the existing upper stages that would make sense to me. If such a tank had a couple solar panels, that would be awesome (in the same 45 degree offset from the RCS). That would mean our replica would take 4 parts with a high gain (and would allow engine/propellant options). Latest renders and greeble: Looking nice. I have to say I tend towards minimalism, because it makes the parts more generic in terms of non-replica use.

What I said is written above. I said nothing at all about tank content. I'd like to see carbon fiber tanks at some point... the dry mass savings for composites is probably pretty decent, and it all adds up, particularly at the top of the stack. I used to use KIDS for upscales. When I get sick of 6.4X and start messing with RSS/RO I'll likely have to dive in and figure out what to do with SSTU for that myself, as I honestly don't use other parts at this point, they are too limiting/painful compared to SSTU. Since @Shadowmage has added a number of SpaceX engines, perhaps we'll see a Raptor once the crazy BFR/MCT concept is announced on Sept. 27. Looks like my retro-future dreams of 1963 VTVL monster rockets have someone actually working on them now... interesting times.

For Enterprise, it's the warp engines that are separated. Impulse (KSP type) power is on the back of the saucer. Make the warp nacelles heavy enough, and the thrust axis likely runs through the saucer.

? The LC tanks are always orange, no? The LC pods are always gray, with orange tanks. I was merely discussing the texture map. The other tanks have white, striped, orange, green, etc, all available. The crew parts, OTOH, currently have no texture options (and that might not be possible, or it might be more complex because of details on their surfaces, I don't know). I could see the Soyuz parts as having some color options as well. I've seen them painted a few colors, or with various thermal blankets (green, gray, silver, black). I used a regular SSTU upper stage tank (with RCS). The engine in my image above is actually a vacuum Merlin. BTW, @Shadowmage, the Progress (SMX?) craft also shows up as "Debris" instead of as a probe or craft. For 6.4X people: I was experimenting with 6.4X some more, and I made a Soyuz replica to test what worked in the upscale (with FAR). I have SMURFF on, but I'm not sure if it does much with SSTU, frankly. Suffice it to say that with SMURFF on default, a Soyuz replica (I'm a little unsure on the upper stage just below Progress) I just got it into a 100-something km orbit (I wanna say it was like 180x147). I have propellant in the SM to clean up the orbit, and to reenter (300 something m/s). If SMURFF on default is indeed doing nothing with SSTU, SSTU must be perfectly scaled to 6.4x out of the box, as it were. Probe core: Obviously the probe core ring part is copied from the decoupler. It could use the same texture options . Other observations on that part: 1. the attachment node doesn't seem to scale with size---does that affect joint strength? 2. Could it get a minimal flywheel as a toggle? That would be useful for small probes, particularly given how flakey RCS can be. 3. Can core parts change shape? Ie: could you borrow the octogon shape you just added as an option for the probe core?

If you hit the fine mode control for RCS, it balances RCS for translation. That's my understanding, anyway. It would be cool to have some simple color choices for the LC parts. All white for the crew section, and perhaps white or gold foil for the tanks as an option.

I posted this image in another thread or two... This design is a Phil Bono design from 1963 (artist William Black: http://william-black.deviantart.com (his gallery is fantastic)): 450 mt to LEO. The diameter is 24m. MCT is supposed to be lofted by BFR, and we guess MCT to be a nominal 150-180MT. Call it 150, and it's 1/3 of Rombus, and the volume of the BFR booster is roughly... 1/3 of Rombus. Fascinating.

Amos 6 goes up on the 3d from Cape Canaveral, and the 19th or 20th is Iridium from Vandenberg.

The entire mission had 4 non-SSTU part types in it (6 total parts), all visible in the 2 images above (and I didn't need the fuel lines I guess, dropping it to 4 total parts).

After some docking testing, I did my first munar landing of this 6.4X career. The 2-stage lander I built was a little OP---I staged it after munar liftoff---, but it turned out useful as my KOR/MOR mission profile with a hydrolox munar injection stage was little under designed for contingencies, so I used the remaining hypergolics on the munar ascent stage for the trans-kerbin burn, then the CSM for setting up my EDL. Had 200 m/s left over. (yeah, I guess I didn't really need the fuel lines, I could have enabled crossfeed, but old habits die hard). It uses and lr-81 attached to the ascent stage, but at 6.4X, it's a little underpowered. Landing from a low munar orbit was a little scary. OTW home.

Move ore from moon A to planet B where I have no facilities. Right. Suborbital only requires that the craft intersect the world, I can be at the very edge of the SoI, and still be suborbital. It's ridiculous. True. The mechanic is still silly, and offers poor gameplay. It is silly because a dirt sample in no way informs engineers about how to create an RTG or a rocket engine. Poor gameplay because it is boring, the parts are in bizarre groupings, and because as a reward system, it just ends, long before the game ends (because the game doesn't really end). For Science mode, I think I'd rather see a budget system that includes points to buy tech... you have a science goal, and you use your limited $$ and R&D budgets to try and achieve that goal. As you unlock more tech, your inventory of "off the shelf" solutions increases, allowing for less R&D to accomplish a given goal.

I think the weakness of the "career" game is pretty unambiguous. The contract paradigm is sort of bizarre, and provides nothing more than side quests, where a substantial percentage are frankly absurd. 0% of the ore moving contracts make any sense at all (moving raw ore defeats the entire point of isru). Surveys are intentionally dispersed and made needlessly goofy. Ditto tourist contracts. Most part testing contracts are idiotic, and many don't recognize simple facts---that a suborbital trajectory over an airless world is identical to any other airless world, or any orbit. You have to carefully curate to find any contracts that aren't awful.

When selecting an integrated docking port as a target, I literally flip a coin because I can never for the life of me remember top vs bottom. Guess I should make sure I have a flag on them.

The Shuttle was partially sold as very low cost access to space, though. The robot arm could be added to another spacecraft if it were ever needed, I suppose. Something like Orion, or CST-100, or D2 could have a "repair" pod added to an interstage that it docs with. This functionality is 100% predicated on the idea that such a repair would be cost effective vs just replacement. Hubble was launched in 1990, broken. Minus the Shuttle, it would have been launched (equally broken) in 1985. The repair was done 3 years after launch in 1993. Had Titan III launched HST in 1985, that gives them 8 years to make a replacement and still have a functional HST by 1993---more time than it took to build the original, and minus the excessive shuttle launch costs, it would have been a substantial savings. Instead of the other 4 service missions, they could have simply flown new telescopes as new HSTs, plus expendable LV costs was comparable to a shuttle flight. Heck, slop it up, and of the 4 flights after '93, do 2 new telescopes and pocket whatever chuck of a billion is left over. This is legit, but did the animal studies require a 100 ton orbiter? Minus shuttle as we know it, but with, say, a smaller crew shuttle, or various capsule concepts what would have happened? Note that minus shuttle, stations would have been lofted in just a couple flights, ready to go. Shuttle did not get cancelled in a vacuum. The Columbia disaster was an Apollo 13 moment. The Apollo people thought (and you might have mentioned above someplace) that more Moon missions meant they would likely have an accident at some point. The problem that faced Columbia was not easy and perhaps not possible to solve without a massive redesign. But we all know that big ticket NASA stuff exists primarily as a jobs program, right? It employed many (too many) people at high wages. That was kind of the point. It's exactly analogous to base closings. The Pentagon wants most shut down, but every district want THEIR base in perpetuity, because a base is a cash cow. As I have said above, Shuttle might well have been the best possible post-Apollo we could reasonably have hoped for because of politics. I dunno. The cargo bay was constrained by payloads that we don't actually know about . No idea how much smaller, but it would take a long time to make a brand new shuttle, right? What about the heat shield issues? This would certainly have made sense, I'm no fan of us decommissioning Shuttle without a replacement capability for manned spaceflight. Commercial Crew is very much along these lines, but instead of piling on the money to make it happen quickly, that money went to Orion/SLS.

Yeah, the regenerative cooling is in fact part of many of the VTVL designs of that era.

No argument there. Still, from a cost standpoint, seems like a self-return would make more sense if KH actually needed that.

Yeah, exactly, which is the point of the construction. Made me wonder if the clustering methodology could work, as SSTU seems to treat it as a single unit. Ie: you create a new cluster type that includes the "plug," and that engine type then gets unique performance stats. I have no idea if such a thing is possible, however. Alternately, a single plug engine part. The nice thing about SSTU though, would be the ability to customize the size, however.