fourfa

If the video the OP is working from is the one I think it is, this would have been in v1.0.2. So post-release and not the ancient souposphere. But I wouldn't expect the speed/thrust curves on those old engines to be the same. Drag and heating curves have changed as well. The game has changed a lot between v1.0 and v1.9, so it's reasonable that there are large differences in performance in craft over that time. It might even be accurate to say the engines have been 'nerfed' - there were lots of features of the early game that were wildly overpowered, and those jets at that time may have been one of them. But yeah I see no reason the craft won't reach orbit; it looks broadly similar to planes I fly all the time. You just need to try your own flight profile rather than copying from the five year old video FWIW it's kind of unfortunate that people are still recommending Scott's videos all over the internet in 2020. They're high quality and entertaining and engaging to be sure, but so badly out of date. There needs to be some modern equivalent, and I haven't really seen it. edit - the last couple of posts have good ideas on flight profiles. What @jbdenney describes in his last post sounds like some kind of crazy drag error, like parts are not node-attached correctly, or objects in the cargo bay are not shielded from drag properly. Try turning on the aero debug overlay (F12) and see what parts have very long red backward-pointing arrows attached to them.

If we’re requesting changes in this area, I’d like the ability to activate RCS by staging. For instance leave the RCS on your lander deactivated along with its engine while stowed in a cargo bay, or being handled by a transfer stage..

Couple of reasons @eberkain. One, boosters spend a lot of their lifespan in the low atmosphere surrounded by the ambient 14.7psi. Not just flight, but stacking, fueling, defueling, destacking, lots of potential abort situations etc. Many rocket stages will collapse under their own weight if they’re not inflated with substantial pressure inside. Then in flight, the volume of fuel getting sucked into the turbopumps needs to be replaced with something - pressurized gas - or the internal pressure will drop below the external ambient pressure (while still in atmo at least) and the tank will implode. Bad news. This is the routine reason that applies to all rockets. The gas could be compressed nitrogen; Saturn/Apollo used cryogenic helium, some rockets even use a fraction of their own propellants that run around the engines as coolant, turn from liquid to gas, then get routed back to the tank as pressurant. The headlines about Starship pressure tests are another reason having to do with the particular propellants chosen. Oxygen and methane are gases at ordinary temperatures. Cool them to very low (cryogenic) temperature and they turn liquid. But how to keep them liquid on a hot Florida or Texas afternoon? Insulation helps (the orange stuff on the outside of the space shuttle external tank is foam insulation). But increased pressure helps a lot more - if you can hold the tanks at high pressure, the tendency of cryogenics to boil is much reduced. Then there’s a safety factor - imagine the pressure relief valve that maintains that desired pressure fails and sticks closed, let’s say on the hottest Florida summer day with hours and hours of launch delays. The cryogenics are going to continue to slowly boil and increase pressure in the tank, and you definitely don’t want the tank to rupture and explode - especially when there will be people on top. So you design for the pressure you need to minimize boil-off, then add a safety factor (and triple up on safety release valves too). For Starship that safe pressure level looks to be 8.5bar (about 125psi). SpaceX has been experimenting with new methods of tank construction, and testing their experimental tanks to destruction. Some of those tests, rather than using explosive propellants, have been done with inert nitrogen instead. Now it looks like they’re starting to test with real propellants, which they have to do eventually because they’ll be different temperatures than liquid nitrogen. They need to prove to NASA or the FAA or themselves that the tanks are safe. But none of it is to cram more propellant in the tank by compressing it to make it more dense. SpaceX does, however, cram more fuel and oxygen in its Falcon 9 tanks by making them more dense - by making them COLDER. This works, and gives you a few percent more fuel for the same volume tank. This is one of the reasons the Falcon 9 payload has gotten upgraded significantly over the years. The downside is if there is a launch delay, the propellants warm up and start to boil off more aggressively. Delay too long, they have to call an abort, detank and try again with a fresh batch of super-cold LO2. Not only that - but usually a rocket is filled with propellant with no one on board and minimal staff around in case of an accident. Then the long and complex process of boarding astronauts and sealing up the cockpit happens. But that takes too long with super-cooled densified propellant, it'll warm up and boil off too much. So SpaceX has to board and seal up the crew first, then fill up the rocket with them on board (they call this "load-and-go"). Lots of people consider this more dangerous; some don't. Its a complex topic and easily mixed up!

Since Making History came out in 2018, and the question was asked in 2015 - probably not....

I’m confused how increased pressure would increase storage density of liquid fuels. Unless we’re talking about neutron star levels of pressure, liquids are effectively incompressible. I’m not aware of any successful rockets that run on gaseous tankage either. however there’s nothing wrong with creative clipping if you just want your craft to look a particular way. General etiquette is to call out extensive clipping when you share craft, as some players prefer to stick with somewhat realistic non-clipped construction

Most if not all of the ones you’ve listed are not yet compatible with 1.9. Scatterer is the root mod, it’s being worked on but not ready yet. Most of the others are config packs that depend on Scatterer (and Kopernicus, which is also not ready). Try a test install in 1.8.x and you’ll see the YouTube quality effects. Or read the Scatterer thread on some hacks to get it sort of working now. Or be patient and wait until updates come. p.s. - the one thing not to do is go to mod threads and ask when updates will be ready. This is all volunteer run effort and the forum has had to make anti-pestering rules after many many years of conflict about it

Vector engines are also extremely dense, I've clipped a few together in a cargo bay to sink a sub before

Those particular main wings have a fatal flaw - their max temperature rating. They're intended to be airplane wings, not spaceplane. I suspect they're blowing up from over-temping, not being ripped off by aero forces - so struts won't help. edit: ninja'ed. And looking at the previous answer - it seems in 1.9 (and 1.8?) struts no longer have aerodynamic drag. Nothing reported when aero info is activated per part. Did squad decline to fix the old excessive strut drag problem, by simply deleting drag?

How about any port only becomes active and scanning when it's been "set as target" by another craft? For me, this would make the entire disable/enable process completely invisible and require no behavior change, nor yet another PAW line

I'd agree with the above - there's a very simple method, which is set all main wings parts to +5 deg AOI. If that's not enough lift, add wing segments at the same +5. If it's too much, remove some. Keep elevator surfaces level (if we're keeping it simple). It's nice for handling if the main wing stalls before the tail. If you need more wing partly because it's significant fuel storage (Big-S segments) it's OK to tweak around with 3-4 degree AOI, IMHO. But optimizing involves a lot of repeatable test flights and can be boring (for some) or relaxing and interesting (for me)

What is it? That sounds nice

This is already true in stock (sort of). Planet-crossing asteroids spawn continuously. They frequently impact planets - or rather, they would, if you switched to the asteroid and watched it impact. Otherwise, physics won't be calculated and the asteroid and planet will happily pass thru the same simulated space with no interaction. Furthermore, if you do ride the thing down it won't be as dramatic as one would hope. It won't burn up, it won't break up in the atmosphere, it won't make a massive crater, it won't launch molten ejecta. It won't do very much at all, really. It might just poof at the surface. It might actually bounce off the ground. It's possible that it will float on water. One of the last tutorial missions is an asteroid redirect - is that redirect an impactor, or just bring a passing rock into orbit? Can't recall. Anyway this dates to around 2014. So I think what we should be talking about is the realistic impact part. More interesting atmospheric entry behavior, permanently deformable terrain, ejecta that have mass and can cause damage (think about the physics rate with a thousand new asteroid-like craft flying in atmo at the same time lol), climate change over days months and years scale... Someone will likely be along shortly to explain why none of this is possible in stock KSP 1.x. Perhaps we can hold out hope for KSP 2.x.

Got a standard rescue kerbal-and-craft contract, in low orbit of Minmus. Flew my claw module there, and bounced off the craft (a Mk1 plane cockpit) half a dozen times without getting the claw to engage. Realized in a panic I'd knocked it suborbital - VERY suborbital with only ~100s until crash. I only had time for one more go-around, I line up, RCS translate toward the ship, and for whatever reason this time it hooked up. Quick radial-out burn with Better Burn Time reading "50 seconds to impact" but the wall of a big mountain next to the flats looming VERY big. Skimmed 100m over the mountain ridge and got into stable orbit. Burned so much fuel it'll have to wait there for a rescue-the-rescue craft. This game can still get my heart pumping with unexpected situations, 3300+ hours on!

The easy stock way to do what the OP wants: have one smallish fuel tank with enough fuel for the landing, and lock it off on the ascent phase (the checkbox next to the propellant quantity slider in the right-click menu). Then you can burn to fuel depletion, and unlock the tank when you set up for landing.

Looking for feedback from users - anyone tried running the 1.7.x version in 1.8? Any crashing, nullrefs...?

I'd been wondering if they nerfed something in aero & drag in 1.8 to give a boost to prop planes and helicopters. One of mine that made 254m/s max in 1.7.3 now goes 279m/s, with drastically different prop pitch settings than before. Then, realizing that they'd nerfed some of the challenge out of SSTOs, cranked up aero heating to balance the scales a bit. Just speculating. All I know for sure is that Kerbin's newly-thin atmosphere feels more like Laythe's did. Haven't been to Laythe yet in 1.8, perhaps it's like Duna now.

Rebalance decoupler, MK1-3, MK1 lander can, MK2 lander can, separators costs, crash tolerances, weight. Anyone had time to look into this yet? Could be significant, could be negligible. Would it be so hard to be more specific in the patchnotes?

Add do not show again option to re-runnable science experiments. kaloo kalay oh frabjous day!!!!!!!

Good analysis here. I have an alternate take though - the Vectors (despite obviously being modeled on the RS-25) aren't the best choice for STS-style shuttles in stock KSP. Too much power (shuttle/ET TWR was far lower what we get with 3 Vectors in a STS lookalike), FAR too heavy (very difficult to make STS-lookalike CoM/CoL work with 12 tons of dead weight hanging off the tail, unless you add huge ballasts to the nose). Try 3X Skiffs, and you'll find yourself encountering design challenges that feel a lot more realistic. On the downside, they could probably use the large gimbal range from the Vector. You'll still have far too much delta-V in the end with a proportionally-sized external tank, but like all KSP things that too goes away your ~3x stock resize

Do I need to add characters to this post? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua This is just a bunch of long-time KSP streamers and modders eating tacos and chatting about KSP2 after meeting with the devs

Good reminder to everyone; there are many corners of the internet we all gravitate to, and it's helpful to share here for others in different corners

I guess no one watches the major KSP streamers on Twitch? On Saturday, DasValdez will be live-streaming Q&A with devs from KSP2 (and KSP1?) from PaxWest. Also a panel Friday about realism in scifi games, and a Thursday virtual field trip (sounds like to Seattle's Museum of Flight?) with streamers EJ_SA and Scott Manley.

You know how if you disable the 'deploy when safe' tweakable on your main chutes, and deploy them at 1000m/s, they rip off and give you a warning 'parachute was destroyed by aero forces' or something like that? I want to reduce that safe deploy limit to something like 50m/s, in order to force use of drogue chutes to slow down to main deploy speed. This would go along with a tech tree rebalance that gives you the small drogues before the big mains, making you crash sounding rockets and transmit data before you can safely recover probes and get full science recovery, etc. Along with revamped rocket engine tech sequence, flight first, etc. I mucked about with some stock chute variables but despite changing quite a few things I never seemed to have an effect. Anyone have some pointers?

So weird to for a company to have their own highly organized forum, with ~35 subforums, at their own branded .com domain, and the announcements on that forum just link to external twitter and reddit discussions

For this situation I always just have a probe core hidden somewhere in the correct orientation, and make it the root part. Problem solved