Gaarst

How long have you been there ? Have you ever heard of GIC (he shall not be named) ?

Wait, I'm able to flow Az50/NTO fuel with fuel lines from radially attached tanks, is it any different for cryogenic fuels ?

I've been doing reasonably well with sticking to chemical rockets in RSS, so I don't feel the need to use cross-feed, ion or nuclear stuff. Also, remember that criterions I or you use are subjective, I understand that banning crossfeed but keeping physically impossible reaction wheels might not be considered as sensible by some Nuclear stuff is both more and less dangerous than hypergolic and nitrogenous compounds. Crashing a Proton with close to 700t is really bad, but people freak out when a few kg of Plutonium reenter the atmosphere. Hydrazine is nasty stuff, but gram for gram, plutonium is worse. So much worse that these few kilograms of Pu are encased in a basically unbreakable case making any leak very unlikely (even when reentring from a lunar trajectory, cf Apollo 13).

Are there any rockets with cross-feed out there ? No, there you go. Cross-feeding does not exist in real life for a whole bunch of technical and practical reasons that SpaceX couldn't overcome, I find KSP to be permitting enough to forbid myself from using it. It's a design constraint like another one. SRBs were never used for manned crafts except for the Space Shuttle and the coming SLS. The SRBs used on both these systems are basically the same so that's one man-rated SRB (2 if you count Ariane 5's EAPs which I think were designed to be man-rated). I'm no expert in security and stuff but there might be a reason behind it. If I ever need to use some on a manned craft, I will (I said "avoid" so it's not a "hard" constraint). RTGs and nuclear rockets are restricted because of safety but also because of technological issues. Using a nuclear powered engine requires technology that my current save has not yet reached (at least in a RP-ing aspect, being only out of my lunar program for a short time). And RTGs are pretty hard to make, NASA is having trouble finding isotopes for its, so putting one on every mission might be a little overkill (plus, solar panels and a few batteries is usually more efficient).

Do not leave space junk No excessively unrealistic design (Asparagus is banned from my game) LES and abort systems on all my manned crafts (except shuttles, because a safe shuttle is not a shuttle anymore) Not excessive g force on crew, I try to keep it under 3g or 3.5g for manned rockets Avoid SRBs on manned rockets (expect those really cool 500t SRBs because they are just so big I can't not use them) Life support, so no leaving stranded Kerbals behind Safety first, especially for manned crafts because no respawns No RTG or nuclear stuff on manned crafts (for now) Minimise the use of nuclear stuff on all missions No long missions (over 2 weeks) in a small vessel, except if its built to host Kerbals (space stations, deep space ship...) No solo missions No hundreds tons heavy hypergolic rockets (Real Fuels) because Proton (and these Chinese rockets) is the second stupidest thing to have gone to space (after the Space Shuttle) And probably a few more I can't think of right now

We can get away from the tyranny of the rocket equation but not that much, the mass growth is still exponentional. While a 100km/s dV ship would only weigh 37t, a 300km/s ship has over 200 stages and weighs about 230,000t.

I have a (theoretical, of course ) craft powered by a single ion, with 36 stages, with a burn time of 53.8 Kerbin days, weighing 100t and giving out a respectable 122,128m/s of delta-V.

So I went a bit further with theoretical experimentations, and found that the lightest nuclear powered ship with a single engine and a 10kg probe core to achieve 100k dV would have over 200 stages (Excel doesn't want to let me go further and I don't know how to write a more optimised spreadsheet, also I don't want to go into coding something right now) and most likely weigh between 5 and 6 million tons. Using an ion engine, you'd only need 22 stages and you ship will only weigh 37.458t with a burn time of 19.3 Kerbin days ! (Note that I did not account for discrete fuel quantities caused by tanks of given sizes, let's just assume you're using procedural parts)

Continuing on what @Snark said, the mod (Burn Together) is distributed under a CC-BY-SA licence, meaning that anyone can take and reuse assets from the mod, giving proper credit to the author and redistributing the reused code under the same licence. More details here.

You have to copy the image URL not the page URL, that is, the link ending in .jpg, .png or .whatever after the image ID.

Poor fps, and I saw a few cursors here and there (hopefully it's because they took footage from the PC version). My expectations are met.

I have a bad experience with TweakScaling parts that produce thrust (thrust not being scaled up) so I try to avoid that, but I will give it a try. Didn't think about RSB, I will see if there is something that can help me in the mod (though I really don't want to use F-1s )

(Only the solar panels with cases are retractable now, so yes I'm talking about them) 1000K is the same as the non-covered panels, so it is too low IMO, the 2000K of the other covered panels seems right. 1000K blows up when reentring (RSS) no matter what I do, wihle parts that have a 2000K are more likely to survive if I pay a little attention to what's cooking when reentring. The 1000K max skin temp is indicated both in the VAB and by KER, and tests I've done show that they blow up as easily as non-deployable panels, even when retracted.

A stage powered by a massless nuke, with no payload and using the highest full/wet masses ratio (9) tanks will only have a maximum delta-V of about 17.2km/s, even with infinite amounts of fuel. (Applying the same reasoning to a ion powered ship yields about 36km/s). If you do it with the smallest amount of stages (6, so 16.667km/s per stage), with only one nuke per stage and a 10kg probe at the top (no decoupler, no structural stuff, just tanks, engines and a probe), here is what you 100k dV rocket would look like stage by stage: Stage number Contents Stage mass (t) Stage fuel mass (t) Rocket mass (t) Stage dV (km/s) Stage TWR Stage burn time 0 Probe core 0.01 0 0.01 0 0 0 1 1 Nuke + fuel tanks 316 278 316 16.667 1.94e-2 10.1h 2 1 Nuke + fuel tanks 33,434 27,717 33,750 16.667 1.81e-4 180 Kerbin days 3 1 Nuke + fuel tanks 3,540,494 3,147,103 3,574,244 16.667 1.71e-6 44.7 Kerbin years 4 1 Nuke + fuel tanks 374,918,264 333,260,676 378,492,508 16.667 1.62e-8 4736.3 Kerbin years 5 1 Nuke + fuel tanks 3.97e+10 3.53e+10 4.01e+10 16.667 1.53e-10 501,544 Kerbin years 6 1 Nuke + fuel tanks 4.20e+12 3.74e+12 4.24e+12 16.667 1.44e-12 53,110,706 Kerbin years You're ending up with a rocket weighing 4.24e+12 tons, that is 4.24 trillion tons (or about 700,000 Great Giza Pyramids or 1.3 billion Saturn V). And your burn will last about 15million Earth years, assuming no physics lag. (Note that this might not be the lightest way to do it, reducing dV requirements per stage will exponentially reduce their mass, and the increased mass because of more stages will probably be compensated by the reduced mass of each stage, I'm too lazy to do the maths though) Now, let's see the what an ion powered rocket would look like: Let's take 33.333km/s of dV per stage, giving us the 100km/s dV in 3 stages only, keeping a single engine per stage and a 10kg probe at the top. Stage number Contents Stage mass (t) Stage fuel mass (t) Rocket mass (t) Stage dV (km/s) Stage TWR Stage burn time 0 Probe core 0.01 0 0.01 0 0 0 1 1 ion engine + fuel tanks 15.96 8.86 15.97 33.333 1.28e-2 8.45 Kerbin days 2 1 ion engine + fuel tanks 995.5 561.2 1,011.5 33.333 2.02e-4 1.26 Kerbin years 3 1 ion engine + fuel tanks 62,098 35,017 63,110 33.333 3.23e-6 78.4 Kerbin years This definitely looks more reasonable, our rocket is not "only" 63,110 tons heavy (or only one hundreth of a Great Giza Pyramid or 21 Saturn V), furthermore, our burn is reduced to a more reasonable 20 Earth years. Conclusion: use warp drive, and start thinking about overthrowing the tyrant.

I think I have spotted an issue with DRE: the 2x3 retractable solar panels only have a skin max temp of 1000K while the 1x6 retractable panels have 2000K. (Both internal max temps are 1000K and both max temps for both parts are 2000K in stock, I assume that it is DRE that changes these). Note that I have other mods installed, so confirmation is needed as to whereas it is caused by DRE or another mod (I will try with only DRE installed).

Added @Andem's law, as well as another one I wrote. The 3rd theorem only describes structural integrity. However structural integrity is calculated using essentially properties of the vessel's joints. A one part vessel is solely linked to air or the ground but you will notice that these links are extremely weak (a simple push is enough to move the part around), so technically speaking the structural integrity of the ensemble is nigh 0. This case was accounted for when writing the theorem and was totally not thought of 5 mins ago

So I've come to that point in my RSS save where even the 24MN 4xEmu cluster from SpaceY Expanded is not enough to lift my rockets. My latest design, a three core 7.5m rocket made to put payload heavier than 100t to LEO, weighs 3700t and is hardly lift by 3 of these 4 Emu clusters. The problem is, it's currently fully fueled by hydrolox and I'd like to use kerolox for the first stages which is a lot heavier, to achieve better performance. Any ideas or mod that don't involve 30-engines clusters or F-1s salvaged from a Saturn V mod ?

Wheels are broken in 1.1. Bouncing, sliding, exploding and such are common when using them, even in a stock game. I wouldn't even bother searching for a workaround and wait for a fix that will (hopefully) come before 1.2. Though if you are lucky, this is caused by a mod meaning that it would be able to be fixed before 1.2. (Sorry for my utter non-helpfulness)

What version of KSP and RSS are you using ? RSS v11.3 is compatible with 1.1.3 but the integrated version of Kopernicus is not; though that problem should be solved with 11.4.

I am not able to tweak fuel tank contents exactly (only discrete fractions as in stock) in 1.1.3 (RF v11.3) as I was able to in 1.0.x, any ideas ?

It doesn't affect your computer that much, at least for me. I'm using it on a laptop with about 60 other mods, with 4096 textures and am still able to launch 100+ parts ships without any lag. If it's really bad for you, you can try the lower resolution textures (2048).

Why don't we first let Squad make parts that stay on the ground before parts that are made to hop ? Not that I think that a stable lander is more important than hopping around, but still...

Is there anything that changed in 1.1.3 that could affect the Variable Thrust Limiter mod ? I'm using Real Fuels (so did I in 1.0.4 and it worked fine), and even though the "end thrust" slider appears in the VAB, it doesn't do anything while in flight. Any ideas ?

It's definitely less crashy than 1.1.2. "Only" crashed 5 times in 2 days with a heavily modded install. Compare that to a crash every 5-10 min on a stock install when in the VAB in 1.1.2. Still a lot less stable than 1.0.4 for me: had almost no crashes on 1.0.4 (not counting memory crashes) with about the same modlist.

Had that one this afternoon. After spending an hour trying to calm down my PTSD from the previous VAB crashes, I realised I was not deleting parts so it's not the same thing. Seems less frequent than the previous crashes (at least for me) so that's a good thing. Except that removing mods one by one will probably not allow to find the cause since it's pretty rare (and seemingly random). Since no crash logs are generated and the output log doesn't show anything special besides "Crash!!!", it might have a cause related to the 8241 crashes which did not generate logs as well. EDIT: and the crash when decoupling is still there....