Tyko

Thanks! How is that different from this?: @PART[PARTNAME] { TechHidden = True category = none subcategory = 0 }

There are lots of grumbles to mention about the stoch tech tree, those just being some of them. Plenty of threads on this forum talking about it. Don't expect too much logic or realism out of it; just see it as a way of gauging progress in your career. We didn't send out anything further than Mars or Venus until the early 70's - after the first Moon landings. The tech tiers needed to do an Apollo style moon landing are pretty close to the long range direct antennas...

If you're looking for a decoupler with an interstage check out Decoupler Shroud. It does a great job and the interstage shape is highly customizable.

I'm toying with a mod idea and looking for feedback. Oscar tank always bothers me because of its magical ability to hold more LFO for its size than other LFO tank. It feels cheaty and it's always tempting to just Tweakscale it and use it for all kinds of things. In my game I have a house rule that I can only use Oscar tanks with the Ant engine and a couple of others - the head canon is that it's not really LFO. Now I'm thinking about actually building a mod to reflect that house rule. Here's how it would work. Create a new fuel type called "Hypergolic" or some other name. open to ideas but I'd like to keep it somewhat generic in the style of LFO or Monopropellant. If someone else has already created the fuel then I'll save myself the trouble. Copy the Oscar, Oscar-like tanks in VSR and maybe other mods to create new Hypergolic versions. Hide the standard Oscar(s) - I don't want to break saves, but don't want to leave the LFO versions visible. Create copies of the Ant and a few other small engines that run on Hypergolic - may or may not hide the originals, but I'm leaning against it. Mod support - add Hypergolic to: Procedural Fuel Tanks Interstellar Fuel Switch Future - create / convert other appropriate engines for Hypergolic, add more mod support This is just in the ideation stage, but Hypergolics are generally more dense than traditional LFO options, so it kinda makes sense. Also these engine types are more often used for probes and small landers - which also traditionally use Hypergolics because of long storage times and frequent restarts.

IMHO you should start with Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux - it's in active development and @Nertea sweats the details. Ven's has a couple of cool parts and development is still progressing somewhat in the background. MKS is cool because a lot of the extensible structures require kerbals and additional equipment. MKS comes with a lot of other game mechanics though and it's not easy to strip them out, so you kind of have to either buy into the MKS game mechanics or not. Tokamak is maintained by the inestimable @linuxgurugamer, but it's not being expanded, only kept updated for compatibility.

Lots of options...here are a few off the top of my head... Stockalike Station Parts Expansion Redux, MKS, Ven's Stock Revamp, Tokamak Industries Refurbished Parts

I'm trying to picture the use case for this part...there aren't any craft I'm aware of that have a 1.875m nose. Why do you need a part that has a cover of that size that can open and close? Why not just use a shroud or a fairing? Your idea is interesting just because it's interesting, but is there enough of a use case to ask @Snark to spend time on this versus other projects? I'm just not sold at the moment

If you don't want to use a mod you can get a bit more precision by hovering over the handle and using your mouse wheel instead of pulling the handle. It's better, not nearly as precise as numbers, of course.

They have said, in case you didn't notice, that they're working on early tech parts and probe cores for this release. So if you "guessed" this part was going to be part of 1.5, it's probably wrong.

Has anyone else noticed the issues with this stock part? The top looks too big and the texture is more green and purple than white

What fun would that be? LOL...KSP is about building things In all seriousness, give it a try. If you need some guidance you can check KerbalX to see if someone's uploaded something

Thanks...I'm with you and @CobaltWolf = zero interest in weaponizing KSP The Almaz would be interesting only insofar as creating some challenging launch profiles.

Yep, and not only ground stations either. During early missions they'd place ships at sea spread across the Pacific to act as "ground" relay stations.

Nice design! I've done something similar using the nodes inside a fairing. I used a lower elliptical orbit and several passes, but basically the same idea as yours. It works great. Here's my ship with the stacked comm sats.

Cool, Did you base LF/LOX quantities on actual tank volume or balanced so that you can actually build a Jupiter? @benjee10's original problem was that the RL tanks had to be so big because lqd hydrogen was so much less dense so you either needed smaller tanks or you were packing a lot more fuel so the DV and TWR were thrown way off.

I'd back this...I'll throw in $15 US to the @linuxgurugamer cause - it's worth at least as much as MH

This is what you want...it's under development, but there's a beta release to play with.

You should really be asking on the MKS and RSS mod threads...that's where the modders and players for those mods hang out.

I think it would be cool if they released cheap <$5 parts packs for various RW spacecraft. They kind of did Apollo, minus the cool lander bay, with MH and portions of Gemini. They also kind of tackled Vostok. A pack that covers Soyuz would be really cool. They could also do one for early space stations and maybe a Salyut pack and an ISS pack later on. This would set them up for recurring revenue...You could do a SpaceX pack, a Mars mission pack, an SLS/Orion pack...etc etc. Yes, modders have done these really well, probably with more TLC than @SQUAD has shown, but having a stock set would reach a broader audience - this is assuming of course that @SQUAD gets their parts graphics standardized

Line of sight is a real issue and can be managed by timing your missions. This is a problem for real world mission planners too. As @Aeroboi mentioned above, if you're performing a Hohmann transfer Kerbin won't be far behind your spacecraft and should be on the same side of the Sun. You also have to contend with being in the shadow of Eve, and again that's a real world issue. One solution is to plan your first Eve mission to enter a polar orbit. This way your circularization burn will occur somewhere above Eve's Pole and won't be in Eve's shadow. If there's a relay on that polar satellite it's a lot easier to plan later equatorial missions to be able to see either the polar satellite or Kerbin.

can the change made by Tweakable everything be written as a MM config so I didn't have to install that mod or does it require a DLL? I'd love to have a MM config that said "for every docking port reduce the magnet strength by 75%"

Yea, if you're playing Career I'd imagine that would work quite well...a modder could probably write up a mission pack pretty easily. We'd still need a solution for Science mode though. Are there biome definitions for "near asteroid" and "clawed to asteroid"??? If so, you could add these biomes to any science experiment

I progressed from Mercury to Gemini with only one orbital launch (plus lots of science collected by probes). I'd agree that using parts should be required and money as well when you're playing Career. I'm picturing something like this...three different resources are required to develop a new part - let's say a new engine. Science points - these are generated using science parts - I'm not getting into how those should work because this is about the tech tree, but it does need to be tweaked Rocket Engine research points - these are generated using rocket engines. Recovered engines generate more points than expended engines. Money - if you're using Career mode. This would require a new tech tree that's sorted to match the different research point categories, but would force users to do a number of launches or a lower number of launch / recovery tests to unlock the next tier of the tree. You could maybe get more granular are require additional resources to unlock a given part within an unlocked tier...not sure about that The big trick is the make it challenging, but not just a grind to launch the same rocket over and over again.

Oh yea...I'm not arguing for crazy high costs... was just trying to reason through why it may be the way it is. Custom Barn Kit gives you the ability to modify crew costs.

That's actually a good point. You'd imagine, after getting your complex up to level 3, that they'd have figured out the infrastructure to recruit and hire a new kerbal. The 'diminishing returns' for each new kerbal should be smaller each one, until it becomes a fixed cost. Not saying it should be cheap, but the cost difference of hiring your 4th and 5th kerbals should be less than your 24th and 25th.  In 2015 the cost to train a UK astronaut was 16M pounds or ~$21M US dollars. This is roughly the cost of an RD-180 or RL-10 engine. From this we could come up with the cost for a Kerbal. I guess the balancing factor though is the crew member's value to the program. In RL the loss of an astronaut is huge due to factors way beyond their training cost. Making Kerbals really expensive could be a balancing factor since the loss of a Kerbal isn't that big of a deal from a game perspective.