The Lone Wolfling

Yes, please. Name: The Lone Wolfling World Preference: Someplace with an atmosphere, preferably Kerbin or Laythe, as jets work. Someplace else with an atmosphere would also be acceptable, though. Character Name: The Lone Kerman CV: Seaplanes and amphibious rovers, mainly. I've landed on every planet though.

Agreed. The fairings look cool, but that's about it. They don't really end up serving a purpose - in stock they don't do anything and with FAR you pretty much need a fairing mod anyways.

So, with the proceeding data in mind, I decided to make a table to see what wings are the best. The results are... surprising-ish. Name Mass Lift Drag Total Drag L/D Ratio L/M Ratio Small Control Surface 0.01 0.5 0.5 0.005 100 50 Delta-Deluxe Winglet 0.02 0.7 0.6 0.012 58.33333333 35 Swept Wings 0.05 1.6 0.6 0.03 53.33333333 32 Structural Wing 0.05 1 0.4 0.02 50 20 Wing Connector 0.05 1 0.4 0.02 50 20 Delta Wing 0.07 1.9 0.6 0.042 45.23809524 27.14285714 AV-R8 Winglet 0.02 0.4 0.5 0.01 40 20 Standard Canard 0.04 0.7 0.5 0.02 35 17.5 Advanced Canard 0.04 0.7 0.5 0.02 35 17.5 Standard Control Surface 0.04 0.7 0.5 0.02 35 17.5 Tail Fin 0.02 0.3 0.5 0.01 30 15 AV-T1 Winglet 0.05 0.3 0.5 0.025 12 6 First off, interestingly enough, the best wings in terms of Lift/Drag ratio are the same best wings in terms of Lift/Mass ratio, with the exception of the delta wing. Second, the basic swept wings are better than the various delta wings. Also, the small control surface is the best, but the standard control surface is near the worst. Weird, huh. Also, have you figured out the control surface calculations yet, ChevronTango?

As would I. If nothing else, it would allow me (with MFS) to get rid of all existing cylindrical tanks and replace them with... 5? That's a lot less memory use.

What about when closed? Just the native drag? Also, this seems suspect. The radial air intake at 0 speed displays a drag coefficient of 0 open, and 0.2 closed. The 0.2 closed suggests that it displays the total drag, but the 0 open suggests that it displays the additional drag only. What gives?

Oh, ok. About drag: what about air intakes? Well, continuing in the same vein, let's assume AoA >= 0, and we're moving straight forwards. Lift = velocity * sin(AoA) * (1 - sin(AoA)) * cos(AoA) * deflectionLiftCoeff * StaticAirPressure; Drag = sin(AoA)*NativeDragCoefficient; Force(Drag) = 0.5 * StaticAirPressure * velocity^2 * Drag * mass + otherDrag Force(Drag) = 0.5 * StaticAirPressure * velocity^2 * sin(AoA)*NativeDragCoefficient * mass + otherDrag

Lift = CrossProduct(velocity, wingRight) * Cos(StupidAoA) * (1 - Abs(Cos(StupidAoA))) * Cos(AoA) * deflectionLiftCoeff * StaticAirPressure; Drag = Abs(cos(StupidAoA))*NativeDragCoefficient; Cannot you rearrange this, as StupidAoA = AoA + pi/2? Lift = CrossProduct(velocity, wingRight) * sin(AoA) * (1 - Abs(sin(AoA))) * cos(AoA) * deflectionLiftCoeff * StaticAirPressure; Drag = Abs(sin(AoA))*NativeDragCoefficient;

What about the drag value of wings?

Someone managed to come up with the formula that KSP uses recently: Lift = CrossProduct(velocity, wingRight) * Sin(AoA) * (1 - Abs(Sin(AoA))) * Cos(AoA) * deflectionLiftCoeff * StaticAirPressure; Where AoA is the angle between the velocity and the upward vector of the wing. So lift is entirely independent of mass in stock KSP. (This also says that lift is maximum at ~25.7 degrees, among other things. An interesting graph)

Minor suggestion. Could you have a way to click somewhere on the porkchop plot to center and recalculate?

Docking ports do work well for that. A couple of radial decouplers inline also work.

A couple of things / suggestions: , first off. Second, an idea. Would it be possible to have a fuel tank that expanded radially when full? Something along the lines of the old inflatable habitat? Third, MFS support! And I second the thought of having the fuel tank be adjustable radially. Still keep the different sizes, though, or alternatively have a button/key that snaps it to the size of the part it is attached to (or if that is too hard, snap to the nearest standard radius). Better textures would be cool. An idea for that would be to have three sets of textures - one for the top/bottom end cap, one for a ring around the top and bottom, and one for everything in between. (When you rescale the fuel tank just rescale the middle bit not the rings.) No idea how practical that would be to code, or if I described that in an intelligible way, though. Finally, would it be possible to have an elliptical tank (egg-shaped. Rescale height and radius, optional lock to keep current aspect ratio.) and/or ones for the fuselages (Mk I/I/III)?

That is all.

This. I would certainly be interested if such a scenario was created (although I might not have the time to try)

No no no no no! Do not add resources into ResourceGeneric, or IonCrossCrewSupport for that matter! (Well, it "works", as long as only one mod is doing it. As soon as 2 or more are, though, all but one will be overwritten) Instead make a cfg file inside the Resources folder of whatever mod you're making, name it something with a cfg extension, and drop something along the lines of the following into it: RESOURCE_DEFINITION { name = Jello density = 0.0056 flowMode = ALL_VESSEL transfer = PUMP }

Something like the following should work - it won't actually affect the Kerbal's mood, though. ION_SUPPORT_KERBAL_RESOURCE { name = Jello GUIName = Jello ratePerKerbal = 0.000277778 boolCauseDeath = False boolCauseLock = False } Notice the boolcausedeath = False / boolcauseLock = false. Also, don't forget to define the Jello resource elsewhere.

It is hypothetically possible to install anything using MM without using MM. That being said, it requires you to redistribute other people's work, as well as meaning that mod compatibility gets rather hairy (you have to manually fix config files)

Hmm... Sounds like that might be the cause of the issues.

Really? Look at your imgur album. Because the mass ratios of the tanks shown don't match with the tank mass ratios of stock tanks. In particular the mass ratio of LF/OX is lower. (Sorry, I seem to have gotten that wrong earlier. The other mass ratios are above stock, but this one is lower. Still the same effect though.) this screenshot. Tank mass ratio is 57.01 / 4.799 = 11.88. Compare that with the stock orange tank at 44.47 / 0.96 = 46.32. This shows that that formula is incorrect.

Pretty much. I got waylaid by real life and won't be able to work on the mod for a while, though.

I'm not sure how to respond to someone the internet conceding a point. ...Thank you. Look at the tank mass ratios of the album posted earlier versus stock fuel tanks. What's happening is that the rockets with higher specific I've tried that. See here. The problem is that it breaks the game - the NERVA and advanced fuels in general ends up being too good. Radius is proportional to the cube root of volume. Surface area is proportional to the square of the radius. Therefor, surface area is proportional to volume to the 2/3 power. Although this assumes spherical tanks. In actuality, it would be proportional to the volume, but with a different constant for the different radii of tank. If you think about it, assuming a cylindrical tank of constant radius, the surface area and hence mass is proportional to volume. Finally, I talked about this briefly, but discarded it as it isn't really practical in KSP, as we cannot currently say "I want a 2.4m radius X 4.9m height tank". If/when we get procedural fuel tanks, though...

KW rocketry's fuel tanks have a higher mass ratio than stock parts, which is why they end up with those results. As I said, this is with the stock game + realfuels + kerbal engineer redux. The "command pod" you see is the Kerbal Build Engineer surface-mounted on a Probodobodyne OKTO. Total mass 0.1t.

You want real-world testing? You've got real-world testing. Stock install + Kerbal Engineer Redux + MFS Real Fuels, these configs. 0.1t payload: 5 tons of launcher: LV-909: LF/OX: 7,297 m/s, LF/O2: 6,646 m/s, H2/O2: 6,767 m/s LV-N: 3,832 m/s 50 tons of launcher: LV-909: LF/OX: 13,062 m/s, LF/O2: 9,995 m/s, 9,665 m/s LV-N: 10,924 m/s ...Hey, look! Pretty much everything matches up with what I said in my earlier post! ...Are you sure that you tested this? (In hindsight, sorry if I sound snippy, but I took quite a bit of time to test this before I made my previous post, and your response was simply "you're doing it wrong")

See here, down at the bottom. If I am doing it wrong, then please explain how so. You've mentioned modified configs, perhaps that is the reason why your tests are different.

And as I've said before, even with an infinite number of fuel tanks, a LV-909 engine always* ends up with more delta-v, mass for mass, than a LV-N in advanced fuels mode. Advanced fuels is deeply broken currently. Due to the mass ratio difference, one should always* use the less advanced fuels - mass for mass they end up being a higher delta-v. * With a single stage, that is.