Maxsimal

Hi, question. Does MM have any sort of logging functionality? I'd like to write out the stats of various engines after MM has done all it's patching work to a file. Is that doable or will I need to write a plugin that does it?

So what's the current direction of RP0? @pap1723 is working on a new tech tree, I heard? Is he also doing new contracts? EDIT: Should have just checked github earlier - https://github.com/KSP-RO/RP-0/issues/642 . Also, any idea what the Zero in RP0 is for? Always been curious about that.

@NathanKell Wow, I picked the perfect time to be getting back to KSP it looks like That procedural avionics thing is something I was hoping for for ages, that's amazing! Is everything ckan grabbable now? I've been lightly following RO and RP0 the past few months and unwilling to dip my toes back in, been swamped with work,and saw threads of configs being tossed around and grabbed from github that made me shy away. Also, is there any chance my 1.1.3 save will function? Was midway into my 3M (manned mission to mercury) - I expect I'll just start a new playthrough in 1.2.2 anyway though.

Seems like this could be made open ended if the 'extra funds' feature was removed. And more rigorous if the common mod list was enforced - could see this becoming a real thing instead of a testbed then. I would certainly love to be chasing Nathan down in your game, just getting back to KSP after being busy with work for a few months

Hey just a quick note. In your main post, you mention that the choice between xenon/argon comes down to cost. I really doubt that's the case, realistically, fuel costs for rockets are really a low percentage, especially when you're talking about final stages. Instead, it's about the tradeoff between ISP and thrust. Scott Manley has a good video about it here, but the TLDW version is 'xenon gives better thrust, lighter noble gases give better ISP, but when you're dealing with ion thrusters, the ISP is already good and the thrust is abysmal'

I'd really like a mod that alters missions to both ask for a variety of payload sizes to be sent and varies the rewards based off of the payload. Satellite contracts would be a lot more fun if you had to build rockets that sometimes delivered a little 100kg comsat and sometimes a 10 ton behemoth military sat.

It would be really nice if mechjeb supported something like switching over to GT's system at a preset altitude. For my launches, I usually do this semi-manually - I figure out what a good MJ profile settings are to get to about 70 kilometers with a nice smooth prograde-facing gravity turn, and then just adjust MJ's pitch angle to manually control vertical speed the rest of the way up, knowing roughly what sort of vertical speed/altitude I need to be at to hit my typical desired apoapsis of 150km. I've generally found that I can't get MJ to give me a good gravity turn but also an efficient burn-to-apoapsis otherwise, due to the very different TWR and burn times of the stages. Of course, it gets much easier once you unlock booster engines that have more than one restart and you're ok with MJ hitting your desired apoapsis before your booster stage has run out of fuel, but for most of the difficult portion of RSS/RO that's not the case.

Are there any balloons in RSS/RO? I was looking at a venus surface mission, and it seemed the only reasonable way to get something from the surface back would either be a balloon or first stage consisting of an electric prop plane - that atmosphere is just too thick and too deep to force a rocket through at the reduced ISP's involved. However, is there really any material that could make good balloon fabric and also be acid-resistant at those temperatures?

Yeah I get this with certain contracts, like the 3 man low lunar orbit ones. If you go to the cheats menu though, you can finish contracts from there, no need to save edit

@SirusKing If you want people to take you seriously, you need to start reading their replies more closely, you just seem angry and willing to jump on everything as being broken without much thought.

Is that a mod or you making this stuff yourself? Got my mercury craft going. Thing was brutal to launch, ended up with 300 parts and about 1/4 speed on liftoff. But so much science when it gets to mercury!

It looks like you didn't understand Starwasters post. Yes if the tank wall was exactly the same thickness regardless of the dimensions of the tank, then the tank mass would scale at a 2/3 power to the tank volume. However, as he mentioned, tanks DON"T just scale due to fluid volume. They are also support structures, and have to prevent the rocket from buckling under load, and that scales based off of the height of the rocket as well as the mass the tank needs support - not easily calculated. Thus the need to do an approximation.

Gotcha. Thank you for the reaply! Yeah I dunno what's really actually realistic. I can easily have a non-ablative stage survive a 3000km/s entry if the angle is reasonable shallow and I follow it in myself, but on the other hand, when i was looking up recoverable speeds for the real world, the only references I was getting were SpaceX boosters and the Shuttle SRBs. Shuttle SRB's are detached around 1300m's. SpaceX detaches at close to 3000m/s, but then they do a boostback. They say they have a total of 1.6km/s on the stage for that and landing, not sure how much is boost back, but at least 1km/s I'd guess and use gridfins for further braking. And not sure what RO is doing - they have two sets of heat shields, one for LEO reentry and one for lunar-speed recoveries. I guess the LEO ones might not be stock, I'll try the lunar ones sometime. Btw, thanks for the mod, I like the extra strategy it requires.

Refueling works just fine in realism, fwiw. I haven't tried it using KIS/KAS, but docking and fueltransferring works.

It's supposed to, if you read how allowable reentry speed is calculated in the first post. Pretty sure it doesn't care, just like it doesn't care how you place your parachutes, as long as there's enough of them. fwiw, putting on the required avionics and RCS to allow a falling stage to orient correctly wouldn't necessary be a big deal, though it would bloat part count. I may just end up setting my DR speed to 1.5x what I feel is reasonable always try to be conscientious about attaching the required heat shield, but I was hoping this feature worked.

Hey, got an issue, maybe addressable, probably not. I'm playing in RO, so still on 1.1.3 using SR version 1.6.4. I have a stage dropping and burning up, but it has a heatshield w/full abalator attached that should have guaranteed that it didn't. (It burned up above the DR recovery speed setting but below 1.5x that setting, thought that was ok for heat shields?) Is it possible that SR isn't recognizing whatever RO might or might not have changed with heatshields? Is anyone else having trouble using heatshields to increase the permissable recovery speed?

Just finished landing and collecting manned data from every Biome on the moon. Was not using Apollo missions though, just 1-man mercury capsule landers & no command module for time efficiency's sake. Next up is me trying to put a 2.5t package of comm sats, biome mappers, and 3 probe landers onto mercury. Since I don't have any nuclear propulsion yet, it's looking like I'll need ~ 120 tons in LEO for this beastly thing. Did a flyby of mercury on the last transfer window, this time it's time to really scour it for science! After that I guess I'll be figuring out interplanetary manned missions... probably with nuclear powered landers to mars.

I'm sorry I wasn't being precise in my terminology. Rather than saying 'impacts your ISP' I should have said something more like "affects your effective fuel efficiency," The latter is what the OP is really asking about when discussing when to burn what, and because this KSP, ISP is often used as a shorthand for fuel efficiency, rather than its precise technical meaning.

Is that just SVE + scatterer or more?

You know you can also use cryogenic tanks? AFAIK they prevent all boiloff at the cost of some EC. Btw, to answer the OP's question with a little more nuance: Impulse doesn't matter UNLESS you're dealing with the oberth effect. If you have a high efficienty, low impulse engine, you can't get as much out of the oberth effect as you can with a higher impulse engine - though you can split up burns to still get the oberth effect boost before you've reached escape velocity. Propellant density doesn't matter - but different tankage dry mass penalties do. For instance, if your high density propellant has a tank dry mass fraction is 3% while your low density propellant tank dry mass fraction is 10%, it has an impact on your ISP. Once you're in space already with a particular ship, though, that's locked in, so you should burn the low-ISP engine first.

Why not just make it space fantasy without relying on Star Wars at all? You have a huge number of obstacles in your way. I'm a game developer who's worked on triple A games for 10 years, and know a lot of people who've worked with the star wars license. Here is what you'd face. Star Wars games are nowadays always high exposure&budget. Disney would not allow a unknown developer rights, that's just not now they work. They want movie tie in projects, delivered reliably on schedule for the release, or high profile projects that expand the brand. Even for thieir little mobile RPG, they licensed to Zynga to do it. As mentioned, EA holds the license to do an MMO, and PC titles, probably exclusively. You aren't going to out compete them. Even if you did, Disney would expect a large cut from you for licensing anything to you - which means not only money, but affording the lawyers and IP directors involved in them managing their license. And beyond that, Star Wars is one of the most nit-picky licenses to work with. They have a huge world bible, and expect you to adhere to the details of their universe, which can get to be a huge pain in the ass when design decisions conflict with something the IP manager deems doesn't fit with the license, another reason only bigger teams can jump through those hurdles. By the time you 'waited for the license to come up', if you really wanted to do this, you should have A: Formed your own company B: Released several decently reviewed titles to establish a track record C: Have a demo and pitch ready. Good luck with that.

That's not bad either - but some of the satellite cores are relatively deep in the tech tree, I'd hope for something that adds variability earlier in the RP0 career. Plus, there's not THAT much weight variety in the satellite-oriented cores. You could possibly do the same thing with something like the procedural test weight mod though. What I'd like is for there to be a range of targets, everywhere from a 10 kg mini sat to some 5 ton behemoth spy sat or heavier.

One suggestion I'd have for new missions for RP0: Define a new resource called 'payload' that's around .5kg/L Create missions that override the stock satellite contracts, adding a 'payload' resource requirement, and scale reward based off of payload. This would add variation to satellite contracts, as you'd no longer be launching the exact same rocket configuration (with whatever science instruments) for a particular mission. It's a big difference if you need to put 2000kg into GSO vs 50kg. I'd also add payload requirements to more advanced versions of the sounding rocket contracts, to add more variety to those too.

@chrisl I agree RP0 in general needs more contract variety. At the point you're at, your repeatable cash comes from either the manned flights RP0 provides (1 to 3/LEO and eventually 1 to 3/LLO) or from the stock-derived satellite contracts. Note that if you get your reputation higher, you'll get more of the geosynchronous/tundra/Molniya contracts that award more money. However, the first geostationary weather satellite wasn't actually launched until 1965, so RP0 is not behaving ahistorically in this particular case. Also, you can download RaiderNick's US probes pack, which gives you access to the actual Tiros Satellite before you unlock Electrics, if you want to do it that way. One thing that really affect's RP0's historicity, also, is that building spacecraft is just faster, even with a little money invested, than it was in reality. Partially this is because, unless you're skipping around to different bases, all your construction is concentrated in one VAB. Whereas in history, hundreds of sounding rockets got produced in a short span, but at lots of different VAB's across the world, so then when it comes time to build larger, one off craft, that faster speed is applied to them as well. Not much you can do about that other than not invest in the VAB too much. One thing you CAN do, though, is turn off the KCT's part inventory. Historically, spacecraft were never reused until the space shuttle (maybe with a couple of exceptions?). Where as KCT is always reusing your mercury capsules, and cutting out much of the construction time of your next mercury launch.

Known bug, hasn't been fixed. I also ran into it months ago.