PickledTripod

I believe that the SLS will definitely fly at least once or twice. It will never send people to Mars though.

I have an idea for a feature: add modules in subtypes. For example a subtype of a crew pod could have a ModuleCommand with minimumCrew = 0 (adding a probe core), another subtype would have ModuleEngineFX (adding landing engines) and yet another could remove crew capacity and add a ModuleKISInventory to make it a cargo version. I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement, maybe it's not even possible or maybe it's actually trivial, but I think it would be a cool idea.

Or the LDC Titan tanks when that's done, 3.125m is a much better fit. Or maybe the mysterious modder Wolfy keeps mentionning is also willing to do Delta IV?

You could just recommend using Nertea's Kerbal Atomics and Near Future Tech for most of that stuff, just like how you tell people who want Russian rockets to check out Tantares.

That sounds like I missed something, is he unavailable due to IRL stuff? If you want to make new parts and need configs to be written while he's not there you could always ask me Anyway new engine mounting options are cool but I'd wait a little bit before adding switchable shrouds. Last time the (maybe) upcoming stock rocket parts overhaul was discussed in the devnotes they mentioned that they were considering adding procedural fairings to decouplers and completely getting rid of the inflexible engine shrouds. There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding future plans now that Porkjet is gone but I'd wait at least for a confirmations of their future plans, this would be a big change and it would be cool if modders adopted it.

Oh I see. The reason why it's so disproportionate is that planets and moons in KSP have the same surface gravity and pressure as their real-life counterparts. They would have to scale proportionally to the size to allow crafts to be proportionned the same way as IRL. Personally I don't mind these differences between KSP and real life, if anything it forces you to be creative instead of just building straight replicas and expecting them to work. My Falcon-alike can launch my Dragon-alike and return the first stage to KSC just like Falcon 9 IRL so I'm happy.

@Enorats I'm really confused reading your posts again... At first I thought you were saying that you don't get enough delta-v for landing with your Dragon-alike capsule even with a reduced weight Mk1-2 pod, but you said yourself that you get about 600 m/s which is the same I get, and now you say that you're not using the capsule's fuel for circularization and orbital maneuvers. Can you post a picture of your craft and launcher, and tell us in detail what you're trying to do with them?

Oh that's the part I missed, you circularize on the Dracos. I either read too fast or just dismissed it subconsciously because it seems so weird to me . Sorry if it seemed condescending. I just put a probe core on the upper stage so I can achieve full orbit before separating and deorbiting it, then I rendezvous with my space station using only RCS (having launched as close as possible it doesn't take a lot of monoprop.) Margins would indeed be pretty thight if I used any SuperDraco fuel for these maneuvers.

You need a third of your fuel for deorditing?! Dude what do you think heatshields are for, you're supposed to aerobrake. From the side of the planet exactly opposite to KSC burn retrograde to lower your periapsis to ~30000 to 35000m above the surface. It takes about 60 m/s from 125km orbit then the atmosphere will do the rest. To precisely land at KSC without using more fuel just change your angle of attack to alter your trajectory, with some practice it's doable even without a mod like Trajectories. (I play in FAR though, not sure if body lift is possible in stock aero.) With that you have enough fuel to perform your suicide burn at only 50% thrust and keep acceleration to a comfortable 3.5Gs, with a ~100 m/s of extra fuel at sea level.

Yeah I haven't really played with 1.2 and the newer github releases because the UI flickering bug annoyed me way too much, but now that 1.2.1 is out I'll give it a serious try. I suppose that the fuel capacity changes are less radical because you also made the parts lighter, result should be about the same if not more realistic. CryoTanks fuel configs are indeed very dense, but with the terrible mass fractions of KSP it's pretty much the only way to make it work as intended. I assumed that the fuel is super-chilled like SpaceX does, if your tanks don't hold as much fuel it would only make sense since it's older tech. And FAR works perfectly with BDB, it doesn't need to be supported by other mods for the most parts. It doesn't change atmospheric density anymore, and while it uses a different method to calculate drag in the end it's usually the same as stock aero for a rocket (unless you're doing something that would be buggy in stock, in that case it just fixes it.) The only parts that need actual support for FAR are wings and control surfaces, and even then they usually work okay without changes.

I'm not sure what you didn't understand since you're saying exactly what I said with different words... Saturn stage names maybe? According to Wikipedia S-I is the Saturn I first stage, S-IC the Saturn V first stage, S-V is actually Centaur. Like I mentioned before I adapted the latest BDB to 1.1.2 so I could test it in a 3X rescale with FAR and KJR right away. I found that the most underpowered part is the S-IVB, it doesn't have enough fuel to put an unfueled Apollo CSM in LKO on top of Saturn I or perform a Trans-Münar Injection while full because of it. I changed the config to fill it with an amount of LF+O matching stock tanks of the same size, letting Nertea's CryoTanks patch handle LqdHydrogen and boom, nearly all issues were gone. It really shows how hard the guys in Nert's dev thread worked to balance the fuel switching for CryoEngines, it just works. Saturn V in particular is now absolutely perfect: you need to entirely expand S-IC and S-II to achieve orbit and finish circularizing on S-IVB, which then has enough fuel for TMI. More than enough in fact, but it's better than not enough. Saturn IB and IC were still a bit underpowered with the improved upper stage so I added a wee bit of fuel to both first stages as well. The F1 engine might need a slight thrust upgrade but it was at least good enough to get to orbit. Full changes I've made: S-IB tankage: LqdHydrogen Oxidizer Current 38625 2575 Proposed 61800 4120 LF+O config 4635 (LF, not LH2) 5665 S-I tankage: Liquid Fuel Oxidizer Current 6255 7645 Proposed 6480 7920 S-IE tankage: 8100 LF, 9900 OX

Pretty sure it's actually 0.625. Or if you're converting from KSP to real life sizes it's 1.6. KSP size IRL size 0.625 m (Size 0) 1 m 1.25 m (Size 1) 2 m 1.5 m (size 1.2) 2.4 m 1.875 m (size 1.5) 3 m 2.5 m (Size 2) 4 m 3.75 m (Size 3) 6 m Generally you want to avoid sizes that aren't multiples of 0.625m/1m IRL. For example Falcon 9 is 3.66m, so you'd round it to 4m, giving 2.5m in KSP. Saturn S-1 and S-IVB are 6.6m IRL, for BDB they were rounded down to 6m/3.75m to keep commonality with stock NASA parts. Which is what caused the issues with S-II and S-IC: IRL they were 10m wide which would have translated to a nice 6.25m, but S-IVB looked to small in comparison so it was resized to 5.625m, or 9m IRL. And now it causes a bunch of performance/balancing issues in a 3x rescale where you actually need something equivalent to the real-life rockets for the corresponding missions.

The first launch or two are definitely gonna happen from everything I see and read about it, but I think it'll be retired very early unless NASA wants to actually start a full on space race to put boots on Martian ground before SpaceX. And the likelyhood of that happening is very, very low. Speaking of SpaceX, what do you think of their aesthetics @CobaltWolf?

@Nnimrod Being able to unlock multiple parts with a single purchase would be even better. It makes no sense that you have to pay twice to unlock two lenght of fuel tanks of the same diameter for exemple, if you see the entry fee as buying the tooling. Damn I can think of a lot of ways to improve the whole science/unlock system, but that part of the game is hard-coded, isn't it? Scout, Centaur, Skylab, ETS stuff... Getting hard to contain all that hype. Next update will be dank.

3.125m would be a really nice size to have tho...

I made a thing with your American parts...

Oh, a shiny metal rocket stage! Very nice. But you know what I'd like to put on top of my Atlas, or maybe on a Titan or even Saturn? A nice hydrolox stage with expander cycle engines and balloon tanks with a 2.5m option. Like, you know, something that used to be in your pack until you decided that the textures weren't pretty enough...

Oh... ahem... I was a bit confused, I tought that the real names would be default. Sorry for wasting space.

I don't, the pictures in the manual and part descriptions are usually good enough. What I'd really like is an optional patch that changes all the fictional names to real names.

Huh, pretty cool. But why use WildBlue Tools instead of B9PartSwitch? It can do a lot more and you're probably going to include it for fuel switching anyway.

I second that idea, I really love the concept. Parawing landings like they planned for Gemini would be really cool.

Well I made a MM patch that basically excludes your tanks from fuel switching patches, with the proper tank capacities the delta-v figures look perfect in the editor at least. Now that I'm looking at it up close I noticed that the S-IVB tank slightly clips into whatever it's attached to, like the Instrument Unit and engine mount. There are also small untextured bits on the exterior of the IU. Other that that Sarnus looks absolutely amazing, you've really outdone yourself. EDIT: The good news is Sarnus V can indeed launch the Kane/Sina spacecraft on a free-return trajectory with a 3X rescale, with some some spare fuel. Bad news is that the extra fuel is on the S-II rather than the S-IVB, you can easily achieve LKO with the second stage while the third need every drop of it's fuel plus the APS to complete the trans-munar injection if you don't use S-II.

I managed to test a full Sarnus V in a 3X solar system with normal 70,000m atmosphere, seems like it lacks just over a thousand m/s delta-v for trans-munar injection. Maybe 6.25m would have been better actually? Or maybe it's because of weird interactions with CryoEngines and B9PartSwitch, I have to investigate further. Also the J2 engines are much more powerful that what I expected, I get a max of 3.4 Gs on the S-II. Very impressive for upper stage hydrolox. EDIT: Nevermind, it's indeed conflicting config issues. In 1.2 the exact same craft has almost 1500 m/s more than in my hack-job of a 1.1.3 backport.

­>2016 >Using disgusting non-free software for modelling