Tyko

Try building a stack that can launch 100 tons to LKO with a DV budget of 3400, then build a rocket that can lift the same 100 tons but with a launch DV budget of 6120 DV. Then consider the challenges in Career or Science mode where you have limited access to parts. Just getting into orbit during early career is really difficult

Atomic Age engines are too powerfull and universal, making almost all other ones useless. It breakes gameplay and career progression. Alcubierre drives are based on a hypothes instead of axiome, but they are logical and requires common engines to be suxessfully operated. Breaking a distance issue, they raise a speed issue instead, enriching gameplay. That's quite interesting. I love SciFi and that kind of FTL travel don't break my vision. After all, they requires TON of sciense and money, making reason to play further. Atomic Age engines ARE based on real-life physics though. The nuclear lightbulb engine would be projected to have ISPs in the 1500 - 3000. In a NASA study they concluded that "the feasibility of the nuclear lightbulb engine continued to be demonstrable". They stopped research because of money and politics, not because they couldn't do it. So the Lightbulb engine is based on known physics and building one would only come down to engineering. This isn't true of the alcubierre drive. Which is not based on widely accepted physics and couldn't be built today. Play however you want, but you started this thread stating "I'm trying to pick interesting realistyc [sic] parts build without OP or cheat parts to expand career gameplay. " The alcubeirre drive doesn't meet these criteria while the Atomic Age engines do.

I don't think RealScale is more difficult in and of itself. Launches tend to take longer, so the try/fail/repeat cycle will take more time as well. But apart from that it's still the same game. I think I wasn't clear...I'm talking about using stock parts here and only scaling the solar system. It's significantly more difficult to launch a rocket that takes 5000-6000 DV to get to orbit using stock parts. You can no longer easily SSTO like you can at stock scale. In a 2.5x universe the DV budget for any mission increases 1.6x. That's a LOT more challenging. At 3.2x the multiplier is ~1.8x. So, it's not just about taking longer, it's about having to launch a lot more fuel and solving for that is tough.

This whole idea of "navigational hazard" isn't really a concern for me. The odds of accidentally hitting another orbiting body are astronomical NASA estimated that "more than 170 million bits of debris smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in), about 670,000 pieces of debris 1–10 cm, and around 29,000 larger pieces were estimated to be in orbit around the earth" Even with those incredible quantities collisions are very rare with only one major collision I'm aware of between two satellites. With this in mind, having 1, 10 or even 100 asteroids floating around isn't going to present a risk worth worrying about. Consider that a object in a 100km orbit is traveling along a circumference of about 4400km. That object, at 100m across, is only occupying a given place along it's orbit 1/44000th of the time. For a collision to happen with it the craft's orbit would have to be within 100m of the object's orbit - any higher or lower and they'd miss each other anyway. So they have to be at that same altitude and in that exact 1/44000th portion of the orbit.

except this is something that could be better accomplished if it were baked into the game. Currently it takes 4 different mods plus a bunch of additional dependencies to scale the system and even then any other mod that tracks time has to be specially written to talk to another mod, otherwise the different mods' clocks aren't in sync. I'm not sure if there's enough demand to support it, I'll leave that to Squad to determine that. It's definitely one of those cases where standardization in stock would be very helpful and is not easily done by the modding community. It's also a straightforward way to scale difficulty if they wanted to create an advanced mode for experienced players.

I'll take a look at what's shareable. My tech tree mods is based on unmanned before manned with a bunch of customization. The core UBM license is very restrictive though, so I can't share that. The rest should be okay.

Got it...yep...When I started this thread I thought "OMG...I'm going to have to wade through tons of comments assuming I don't know about the basics of launching." I've been playing for 3 years and am well beyond that. I really am talking about ways to shave off that last 100 m/s of DV. your method results in a higher circularization cost at AP while mine is burning more on ascent by not using the engines as efficiently, but my circularization is really cheap because I'm circularizing all the way up. If I could build my stages so I'm not having to throttle as much it would be better - hence the reason I started this thread

Snark...I didnt say I went straight up...never said that...I appreciate you're trying to help, but please read... here's the second line again "I'll launch upwards to somewhere between 50 and 100m/s, tip 10 degrees and then lock SAS to prograde. Once I hit a time to AP of 50 seconds I'll throttle the engines to hold me at 50 seconds. Then I'll just ride prograde at 50 seconds to AP all the way to orbit, staging as necessary." Again, I appreciate you're trying to help, but don't read my first sentence which clearly states I AIM to be at 45 degrees and take that to mean I TURN to 45 degrees EDIT: yes, you didn't read it LOL...the reason I'm throttling down is because I'm trying to keep my time to AP at 50 seconds so i'm continually dropping into a more circular orbit. If I keep the thrust at 100% then my time to AP keep climbing and the ascent gets steeper not more flat. This means that I spend more DV doing my circularization at AP. By keeping time to AP constant at 50 seconds my typical circularization burn is about 25m/s. if I go a full on burn to AP my circularization cost is has been 80 to 100 DV, that's a big difference

my normal flight profile is to aim for 45 degrees at 10km. I'll launch upwards to somewhere between 50 and 100m/s, tip 10 degrees and then lock SAS to prograde. Once I hit a time to AP of 50 seconds I'll throttle the engines to hold me at 50 seconds. Then I'll just ride prograde at 50 seconds to AP all the way to orbit, staging as necessary. This works pretty well and gets me consistent launches, the question is just always when the 1st stage should be dropped. One thought is that I should be staging right when my time to AP hits 50 seconds and the next stage should be TWR balanced to hold me at 50 seconds as the gravity turn continues. This means I'm never throttling those big booster engines and not carrying their dead weight, but there's also an argument for keeping them around a bit longer so the 2nd stage doesn't need as much power. This is the conundrum.

here's an example of what I'm trying to understand...I often have to throttle a stage's engines during a launch so I'm not raising my AP too fast during a gravity turn. If I'm running a bunch of engines throttled at 30% for a long time i'm clearly losing efficiency because I'm lifting a bunch of dead weight. On the other hand, I'm also lifting dead weight if I'm staging too often, so sometimes it makes sense to run in a throttled down state for a bit if it saves me a stage - the Saturn V famously turned off the middle F-1 engine mid-launch to lower thrust but continued to carry the heavy engine. So there are times when it makes sense to run with throttled / shut down engines rather than staging. I'm just trying to figure out how long is too long for running in that throttled mode.

haha...yea, the game designers of "NASA - The Real Life Game" really screwed the balance of that part up. Maybe it'll get nerfed in the next patch

was playing around with Engine Lighting and noted that the light from the engines will pass through intervening parts of the ship to strike other parts. For example, I have a wide lower stage, a narrow middle and then it widens again. Light will shine on the widening area as if the lower wide area didn't exist. Is it a limitation of the game engine that prevents parts of a craft from casting shadows on other parts of the same craft?

I find it amusing that you consider the Alcubierre drive "realisticy" but think Atomic Age isn't balanced. Atomic Age is based on proven, demonstrable science while Alcubierre is not.

hmm..not sure. I quit using 2.5x when I encountered and reported this visual bug that caused the surface of many GPP stellar bodies to appear translucent from orbit. This may be a GPP/ ReScale thing but since I'm just not sure which of the three mods is responsible, I'd reported it to both you and @Galileo and I kept an eye on the Github tracker and AFAIK it hasn't been fixed. while not "unplayable", it certainly screwed up the view from orbit which is a pretty big deal in this game. I'd answered a bunch of questions and tried a bunch of suggested fixes a few months ago, but when those didn't work the bug just sat there, so I thought it was dead. I'd love this to be fixed and happy to assist further if you two want to tackle it. 2.5x GPP is definitely my fav setup

I've been playing with the updated MH engines and I'm wondering if changes are necessary at all any more. My test criteria are "Will the engines let me build historical rockets that work in a 2.5x scaled system". I picked these criteria because a stock system is clearly too easy even with the stock parts and 2.5x appears to be a point where stock rockets have to look like real rockets - you need 2 stages to orbit or 3 stages to the Mun. This is loosely defined, but if I can build something that looks like a Saturn V and fly the Apollo mission or something that looks like a Gemini/Titan II stack that gets into LKO, then I feel like I'm able to "Make History" and the parts are doing their jobs. So, I did that. I had to use shorter 2nd and 3rd stage fuel tanks for Saturn V because LFO is more dense than HydroLox, but I built the rocket, the TWR's were in the right ballpark and I could fly the mission. I'd love to get others' opinions, because I'm still entertaining keeping this live with some adjustments, but if people are happy with the stock changes I'm also equally happy to shut'er down. Thoughts?

Hey all, I'm trying to get better at optimizing stages during a launch. Are there some guidelines, or (yikes) math, that others use to decide how much DV each stage should contribute based on the engines and mass?

that's fine..if you haven't been following the Fallout 76 fiasco that @NISSKEPCSIM was referencing you're better off

GAAAAK!!!!! I can hear the product announcement already "This is our biggest KSP yet. With Even Betterer (TM) graphics and Even Biggerer (TM) planets and Even Morer (TM) bugs" NOTE: Totally an editorial on Mr Howard, not Squad

This is my favorite idea for a DLC yet. a set of standard tools that let you rescale the game like the combo of @Sigma88's Dimensions & Kronometer and @Galileo's ReScale used to do. I'd gladly pay $15 for that. My most memorable playthroughs have been 2.5x and I was really sad when support was dropped for new KSP versions.

If you create it in stock you could submit the entire save with steps to repro. That'd be a fairly simple way to show what your seeing

My first interplanetary crewed mission using Life Support. It pretty much took all the skills I'd developed to date including - on orbit assembly, orbital fueling from a captured asteroid ISRU, planning crew survival for a year-long mission, etc. It gave me the slightest glimpse of what Mars mission planners are dealing with.

Several Planetary Encounters that went wrong - A Moho orbital attempt became a flyby when I grossly underestimated how much velocity I'd pick up going deeper into the Kerbol gravity well. A Jool orbital attempt became a Jool deep dive expedition when I went a little too deep into the atmosphere during my aerobraking maneuver Plus the obligatory "forgot to open my solar panels for the umpteenth time"

So cool!! How many launches did it take to get that beast into orbit? Also, on this pic the big round tank looks like a mini death star

I have a giant folder called "TykoMods" that contains all of the tweaks I've made to either the Stock game or other mods. When I first started I was pulling ideas from The community database of MM patches and from Unmanned Before Manned. Now I have my own custom tech tree and lots of parts tweaked. I just copy this folder from game to game and update it as necessary. I've thought about publishing it somehow, because IMHO it's a great experience (obviously I think that ), but it would be a bear to support.

hmm...1.6 is enticing, but I'm taking a break waiting for the PartDatabase fix and for mods to update. I think I'm gonna restart because I really want to build the new playthrough around ReStock & ReStock Plus.