Dr.LoveJoy

Quick question.. Im in 1.3.1 and the Otter reactor doesn't seem to be cooling down. The otter cabin doesn't take thermal panels either, and in any event, I had thought that the cooling was integral. Am I doing something wrong here? I only have a ballast tank, some dive planes and experiments and an inline float installed.

ISRU being unrealistic is no different from the fact that we are literally bolting together components to make a rocket, tossing equipment on the exterior surface attached, as well the size of Kerbin vs its density. Reaction wheels are so powerful because if you are steering with a joystick or keyboard, and using a normal computer, you generally won't have the ability to positively steer your spacecraft, even with RCS. I don't think it is in scope for SQUAD to make the game more realistic per se, as that would be an incredibly huge amount of work.. work that the RO people are doing very well.

Tested in 1.3 from Kerbin to Duna and works quite well. I was wondering.. were you planning on adding an animation for the jump? I think it would add a lot to the experience. Also, I wondered if you could post how much energy is needed given that a ship and beacon is almost entirely outside a gravity well, say orbiting at something like 40 million km for bodies like Kerbin and Duna. I would think you would have to expend at least as many joules as the kinetic energy difference for the two orbits (aka, the difference in kinetic energy between Source Orbit1 -> Escape Velocity -> Target Planet Orbit -> Target Planet Escape Velocity energy - Orbit2 Energy), but it seems to be much less than that. Personally I would like it to be based on something like this :-) So roughly, to move a 40million km orbit around Kerbin to a 40 million km orbit around Duna for one ton would have a kilowatt hour cost of ~4820. I know KSP doesn't have real units with regard to electric charge and volume, but I would think that 4.8 Megawatt hours expended in an instant would be... lets say difficult for a battery to handle. I know you are just wonking around with this mod part time, but I was imagining the feel of the parts would be better if there was a longer "windup" and "cooldown" of the vessels, an animation, and a larger electrical cost when free of gravity wells. It would be tougher, and more dramatic! Regardless, thanks for the work you are doing :-)

Re: Moral Obligation. I never said anyone had a "moral obligation" to do anything whatsoever. It isn't about morals. It is about reality. Quote economics all you like, but the reality on the ground is simple. SQUAD is a small group that makes an excellent product, and early, enthusiastic adopters made it possible for them to make this into a viable enterprise. They are clearly aware of that, and seem to attempt at every turn to service those people ( as well as their wider user base), as well as involve the customer base's ideas in the stock product, over time. SQUAD isn't a behemoth, nor does it have deep pockets. They are still a small group, they are still fragile, and they could vanish tomorrow due to some accident, contract problem (such as the lower quality than expected for the console port), or market turn. I for one do not want that to happen to a company that makes such a quality game, and since I know they can't afford to have a dedicated business shark, I'll remain quietly dedicated to seeing them succeed. In other words, if you don' like it, don't buy it. But please don't try to convince me that somehow this is all just sterile economics. SQUAD is small enough to be considered as a bunch of people who are trying to do the right thing. They make mistakes, but their intentions are good, and in my opinion, they deserve whatever extra support we can give them in order to get over the bumps they encounter. And again, $15 is NOTHING for this game. It is barely a price at all, considering the endless hours I have enjoyed it. One lunch costs as much or more than this game did, so by that scale, it is more than a bargain. It may not have that value for you, and that's fine. But that is it's value to me, and many others, and I think we are all going to take issue with anyone who is baldly complaining about something which is, in the end, essentially irrelevant to the value everyone is receiving. So, thank you SQUAD. There are many more of us out there, I guarantee.

Oh I see. Well, chalk one up for Astronomy not being quite clear when you look up references online. :-) Thanks very much for the clarification! Makes perfect sense.

Kerbin precesses? I don't think it does.. or do you mean its "stellar day" is that amount? I suppose, this is a nitpick.. OF the nitpick... ;-)

I am amazed so many people don't understand basic economics. You paid the equivalent of a decent dinner for a game that has been continuously upgraded and updated for years. SQUAD has to be one of the most responsible gaming groups I have ever encountered. I am, quite frankly, very very thankful they have continued to tweak and enhance the game for as long as they have, for as little compensation as they have received for it. I'm certain they had no idea it would balloon to the size it has when they developed it in the first place. They have, to my estimation, responded with integrity and professionalism to every issue they have encountered, and every mistake they have made. I genuinely hope that SQUAD succeeds long term, that they charge a good and fair price for new expansions (for which I will most certainly pay) and that they have a long and healthy life as an organization. If they had a Patreon, I would donate to it a monthly amount because I receive so much benefit from KSP. Life ain't free guys. There are many gaming groups that sell sub standard material for too high a price. SQUAD is not one of those guys and should be getting a lot of support from us, with our dollars and sense. Some of us understand that and have put blood, sweat and tears into mods and overhauls that have shown SQUAD and the world what the game is capable of. This has had an enormous effect on the game, and is probably one of the largest factors in its success.. which SQUAD is very aware of. So please give back guys. Saying "I paid for it" is silly. How much did you pay again? As much as it costs to refill a motorcycle's gas tank once? Im not impressed. Do something more! You want multiplayer? Well, that's *hard* to do well ( look at all the incredibly bad multiplayer stuff out there), if you didn't know that, and SQUAD isn't a big org So, if you really want it, then offer to work for them, send them donations, do work on multiplayer mods.. whatever it takes. Because SQUAD doesn't have deep pockets. They have to keep the lights on first, and that means they are bootstrapping everything they do. And that takes time, effort and persistence. Which is something its user base should possess as well, considering the kind of game this is ;-)

@DC Heya mate. Easier mode is to burn even with the horizon before/after Apo, starting at a point where the surface is less then 45 degrees to the tangent of your orbital position (so, your rocket will be, if the surface is evenly below you, 45 degrees or less to the screen, if it is pointed prograde) and adjust your positive/negative angle while watching your orbit develop. This guarantees Radial -/+ in the right places, and also puts energy into prograde. So you can set your MechJeb to 0 pitch, and change the pitch as you watch your orbit balloon out to control it. If you test a few things, you will see that it is possible to setup a reasonably circular orbit (it will still be a bit eccentric) by setting up a high Apoapsis with an overpowered first stage, then burning "Radial -" before you get there with your second stage. This is actually what the Vega rocket does for some of its ascent profiles in real life (since its first three stages are solids). This flattens your apoapsis and raises your periapsis, because by burning "Radial -" before your Apoapsis, you are adding energy to your orbit, and removing it from your ascent vector. Think of your rocket as a Vector arrow pointing towards where you want to add/subtract. You can also wait until after your apoapsis.. well after.. and burn Radial + . This will also drag down your apoapsis and raise your periapsis. If you wait long enough, it will do it by quite the amount, if you are close to orbital velocity. I have gotten out of a suborbital periapsis with a TWR of <1 by doing this. You can play tricks with Radial burns if you have enough Delta V. Pre Apo, burn negative. Post apo burn positive .If you have two ignitions on your second stage, you can extinguish before the Apo and resume after. I'd recommend something like at least 1 minute either side. During my ascent profiles I wait until at least a minute post/pre before doing this to get better results. If you think about it, standard practice for normal KSP is to burn half your Delta V before and after the Apoapsis to circularize. This means you are burning radially in part for the entire burn.. slightly negative on the way up, slightly positive on the way down. So this is just a brute force way of doing the same thing. If you use MechJeb, you can adjust your attitude during this burn, if it has to be all at once, to accomplish it. Its tricky and requires a lot of attention. One thing I realized was that with long duration Radial + burns well after passing Apoapsis, you can push your Apo way out on the other side of the planet using this method, then with RCS you can circularize. This is what I think of as a bounce. I've done this multiple times with TWR of less than 0.50 on second stages, but had to descend to something like 120k from 250k, burning the whole way, to get there. So basically, if your Apoapsis is over the height you want it to be and you have deltaV left over, start burning radially negative until you reach the Apo, then go back to prograde and slide slowly into Radial + over time. EDIT: forgot to mention.. if you have the ability, add a small tank to the underside of your command pod that has 100% hydrazine or HTP.. whatever you set the command pod up to be, and add 4 RCS blocks to the bottom edge of the pod. If you are using probes, make sure it has plenty of RCS. It will save your butt up there :-) You can also setup linear RCS thrusters to point "down" like a rocket engine, and they will respond to the throttle, as will the RCS blocks above. Its a simple way to get linear thrust that can be used over and over again for adjustments.

This can work, except in my case where the second stage has a TWR of <1 and the first stage has a TWR >1.. so even if I wait, the boosters "hang around" for a long time and draft upwards in the air stream.. long enough so that side slip happens downwards, they collide, and often bounce off my spacecraft. In my case, angling them away worked very well to avoid this. That's why I said "in certain cases" instead of "in the general case" :-) In the general case, your second stage will have a TWR >1 and your spacecraft will accelerate away from any devastation that might happen below. BUT, if you are trying to save money, and your TWR on higher stages start out at TWR <1, you can get into this sort of problem depending on the design. Basically, angling the boosters slightly away from your spacecraft costs nothing, and s a way to get out of that problem very easily, once you encounter it. You don't have to pile on sepatrons :-) I wish I could do that on a supersonic first stage with no wings while below 15km ! :-) THIS is a link to a more obvious screenshot which might make things clearer. It's fairly simple. The 4 poodles up above are just slapped on the 4 small fuel tanks, which are radially attached, plumbed with fuel lines to the main orange tank, and angled slightly to avoid cooking the nose cones below. I needed the TWR in that stage so I sacrificed the delta V to get it with more engines, and it turned out that I got more delta V with 4 poodles and the extra fuel tanks than with a skipper, plus it made the whole design shorter, which helped with aerodynamics. Three large reaction wheels. Asparagus staged. This can lift probably more than 50 tons to orbit, if you don't mind sacrificing the upper stage to space. And its pretty cheap.

That works in FAR as well. But the problem solved isn't that the boosters are not rotating away, it is when the bottoms of the boosters collide with each other on separation, or the spacecraft, when they do rotate away. If there is any 'side slip' in the design, they can quickly slip downwards and inwards if their center of mass is close to the center of drag of the spacecraft.

Really handy for perfect fairing separation though, so for an upper stage its a great technique :-)

Thanks! Done. In stock it can also be useful in some situations, especially when using many small boosters around a larger stage that are packed closely together. You've probably seen the 'wedding cake' style method of doing this with Really Big Rockets. You're right about that. In this design, it was about 95 m/s difference in final delta V after orbital injection with upright boosters. However since this thing is supposed to be able to get to very high or elliptical orbits to do rendezvous, I wanted to maximize delta V after orbital injection. In the end, I did rotate the engines to point straight down, which improved things. However I lost the side benefit of less sensitivity to angular perturbation. Which was ok in this one, but in another incarnation I was lofting a very unwieldy payload that had a tendency to oscillate, so I had to put them back to their original angle.

Thanks Temstar, I did know that :-) The issue is that in some designs, it is hard to achieve that balance. Also, using FAR changes things. In stock KSP, this isn't needed at all in my example design, but using FAR, and after putting in the boat-tail fairings, I needed a way to keep the ends away from the middle more definitively. I then realized there were probably a lot of people who may have made designs where their booster stages collided too rapidly due to other reasons. If you have significant overhang on the bottom, with FAR the vessel will shield the bottom from aero but not the top, so the rotation rate will be much faster than you would expect and the boosters end up colliding, even if you balance the center of mass. Once they collide, they can "stick", which creates other cascade effects. Especially in my case, where the craft is just over supersonic when the first boosters separate. Mounting them with a slight angle inwards avoids all the potential problems associated with this. It moves the center of mass away from the vessel a bit so the rotation angle is subtended beyond the crafts trajectory. EDIT: By the way, all of this is so you can use the stock parts and so on with FAR more easily. If you had added needle tanks and/or fairings up high, the boosters would separate out and down, and you wouldn't need this method. Clearly, there is a great deal to talk about with regards to separating boosters well, but I wanted to add this as a very simple trick to getting a design the otherwise works well to work better without having to redesign from scratch.:-) It's also a way to keep part count down, since you don't need to include sepatrons if you don't want to.

There is one in the link. :-) I suspect I do not have enough status here to post images as the "Insert Other Media' button tells me I do not have access.

Separating Booster Stages Gracefully I have seen this technique used in various craft designs, but I thought I would make an explicit post on separating booster stages, especially using FAR, with parts that tend to touch your spacecraft or each other during rotation away from the spacecraft while separating, due to aerodynamic effects. For booster stages, you generally don't need sepatrons to get your boosters away from the craft. In fact, in some designs they simply do not work the way you would expect due to aero drag overcoming their power, or due to parts clipping into each other and "sticking" to each other while rotating away from your main vessel (I tested this with full size Flea SRBs as separators and even they didn't work in FAR. the stickiness was too great). Take a tip from the Russians: mount your first stage boosters with a slight angle inwards: use the decoupler itself to rotate a few degrees inwards.. doing it with the tank alone will not work. When the boosters fall away, they will rotate around their center of mass, which is way down near the bottom of your boosters when the fuel tanks are empty. If you rotate them inwards a few degrees, a normal decoupler will provide enough force to rotate them away, and their rotation will never get near your spacecraft. You will lose a small amount of delta V, but in your first stage boosters, this likely doesn't amount to too much. For stages that are separated high up in the atmosphere, this isn't as much of a concern, and sepatrons will work just as you expect, but you can use this technique there as well to avoid the additional part count. This technique used in stock KSP will also help avoid your boosters impacting each other on the way down, if you would like to use a recovery mod to save cash. Basic Example of inwards rotation The example is not elegant, but it shows the principle. :-) This design is very simple, and is spec'd to cheaply take a full orange tank into orbit at 80km with 500+ m/s to spare (using FAR). It succeeds in stock KSP without the fairings with 1000 m/s to spare. This was intended at a Munar or Minmus orbital refueler. It has loads of RCS as well. To use it as a Munar/Minmus refueler in FAR, you can add a few solids to increase the delta V left after orbital insertion. Mainsails and Poodles for the entire thing. The shown craft game has FAR, StockBugFix and Procedural Fairings installed so that you can fire your rockets while they are protected by a boat-tail. If you don't have those mods installed, don't use fairings like this.. they will not work! The engines will not activate. POST NOTE: Yes, I do know there are other ways of achieving this (with different nose cones, etc) but this is one technique that I haven't seen getting much attention, and it has saved me a lot of hassle in early games! Also, in FAR, your boosters, if ejected in a low enough atmosphere with enough speed, will have a good chance of self destructing regardless of how you tweak it. To avoid that, you have to use more advanced nose cones, add back in sepatrons to keep the stage upright after separation, and use any other technique you can to keep them upright until they slow down enough not to get destroyed by aero forces. But they will still not touch your main spacecraft.