Zorg

Gemini/Langley lander

possible? Maybe. but I dont have the motivation to keep messing with it, the alpha cutoff shader used for opaque effects is tricky to work with and the latest update to the effects are borrowed from plumes made by Katniss which I thought were a notable improvement on our older effects. If someone wants to have a go themselves I'm happy to look at the results and integrate them if they look appropriate.

0.625 is the standard scaling factor and thats what we use (with rounding where appropriate)

Yeah I think we talked about that before the asymmetry option was added to deal with the tip. Its quite feasible to convert now but to be honest the Agena standard fairing is quite similar looks wise and quite a few people like recreating the angry alligator incident with th e GATV parts. Its probably better if we leave it as it is.

UPDATE - BLUEDOG DESIGN BUREAU V 1.10.4 "Луна" This is a minor patch update. v1.10.0 RELEASE ALBUM DOWNLOAD GITHUB DOWNLOAD | SPACEDOCK DOWNLOAD (pending upload) should also be available via CKAN soon. Changelog v1.10.4 New content and features - New Beacon 1 Satellite - Delta GPS shark decals - Filter extensions compatibility with custom icons and categories (Thanks to Rodg88) - New United States style BDB flag Updates and Enhancements - Add clickable window to Skylab IVA - Fireball effects to F1 and E1 engine startup (make sure to update Waterfall!) - Update bundled Waterfall to v0.8.2 Bug fixes - Skylab ATM ladder fix - Fix node clearance on EOSS Aft MDA. COULD BREAK OR AFFECT SOME EXISTING CRAFT - Payload sep texture fix - SNAP texture fixes - Wetlab module capitalisation issue (Thanks to Ash19256) - Various other minor fixes

Do you mean on existing craft already in flight? Or do you mean on newly launched parts? If the later case please give specifics on which parts are affected and a screenshot of the part action window of at least 1 example.

System Heat integration - TESTING NEEDED So we are currently testing integrating System Heat into BDB as a soft dependency to manage boiloff. We are looking for feedback and testing right now. Some notes 1. System Heat in the future will likely become a BDB dependency but a soft one. Meaning you can remove it without adverse effects and things will work as before (this is an aspect that needs testing, ie is everything working fine even if you dont install it with todays updates to the dev branch?). For the time being System Heat is not bundled with the development branch files, you need to grab it separately 2. For testing integration please grab the DEVELOPMENT version of System Heat from github here : https://github.com/post-kerbin-mining-corporation/SystemHeat/tree/dev 3. Things like Centaur jettison etc should be working and have an effect and different types of tanks should have different levels of boiloff and cooling requirements too. Unlike the old BDB system boiloff rates are fixed in config so you cant tune to taste in the difficulty menu. However unlike before you have ways to mitigate boiloff. We may also get a feature to turn off boiloff in the SH menu in the future for people who want to use System Heat but not use it for boiloff. The way we have balanced things is outlined below. 4 How it works In order to manage boiloff simply enable cooling on all tanks that require it in the VAB. You can then spam enough radiators until the loop temperature stablises in the part action window. Better would be to open the System Heat ui. We can see for instance we need 5kW of cooling here with 3 conformal MOL radiators we are good to go. With a 4th we have a bit more margin. You can also assign parts to loops. Radiators in a given loop will only cool heat generating parts in that loop. In this case the loop is red because the radiators and tank have been reassigned to loop 1. Loops are helpful to keep ships cooling systems separate when docking, or within a single vessel if you have different requirements. For example a nuclear reactor and high powered rads on one loop, and the cryo tanks and small rads on another. Parts cannot be reassigned from 1 loop to another in flight but the ID of each loop can be changed. You might want to do this for instance if you are docking 2 nuclear tugs and both have their tanks and rads set to loop 0. To avoid merging the loops upon docking, you can change the ID to another number on one vessel. Note that in such a case merging the loops is unlikely to cause issues since the two loops contain similar parts. You can check the system heat wiki for more information. The UI might look a little intimidating at first glance but I feel its actually informative and intuitive once you've used it just a little. And of course as I said you can remove system heat if you would rather not deal with it. With this you are ready for zero boiloff cryo adventures. And of course huge thanks to Nertea for adding these features to System Heat for our needs.

Most FAM stuff once they move past historical Apollo dont really work performance wise. For example the LSAM is supposed to be a single stage to lunar orbit and back hydrolox lander but its way way too small for that especially considering the low density of hydrolox. Compare with the IRL 2 stage Altair from the constellation program for instance. This is a big problem for us as we would have to configure such parts in a very unbalanced way against other parts for it to be able to work. Exact same problem with their Pathfinder shuttle, even worse there (although we wouldnt be doing any shuttles in any case). Jamestown admittedly is very cool and i dunno I think Cobalt has said it *could* be possible sometime. But in general there are more than enough weird and whacky real world proposals to work on that would both be very cool and actually work in terms of balancing and performance.

Congrats! Some beautiful work here

Thats a nice document, thanks! Theres some information I didn't have and definitely some diagrams at better resolution than I did before.

The fireball is a simple enough effect to do, made possible by a new particle esque shader in Waterfall that Nessus contributed. A burnt texture is another matter, I might consider it for extras but we dont have a custom plugin like Tundra that can fade that effect in. So if I do make such a thing it would strictly be for BDB extras as a B9 switch, maybe switchable in flight.

To get this to work properly had to add throttle response to the RS68 so it will ramp up and down slower like the F1 now.

Real fuels configs for BDB are handled by RealFuels-Stock themselves, since the BDB development team do not use that mod we don't have the expertise or time to configure it. I don't know when RF-stock was last updated. You would need to report any issues on that side (maybe help them out with a pull request if you're up to it )

Needs a little more work still and will try to do a bigger one for RS68/ delta IV as well

You can keep an eye on commits by selecting the relevant branch and clicking Commits. The messages vary in how informative they are but should give you a general idea of whats being done. But anything important like new parts are generally announced here on the thread.

Its in the Thor folder. huh let me check on that later. We need official patches for all our radiators anyway.

Something like this @MODULE[ModuleB9PartSwitch]:HAS[#moduleID[meshSwitchSide]] { @SUBTYPE[Double] { MODULE { IDENTIFIER { name = ModuleSystemHeat(or whatever module you want to change) } DATA { ........all the stuff you want to change in the module you're targeting } } } }

Now that I'm back at my PC I thought lets take a look at a practical example since this is an interesting design consideration. Here we have a standard S4B and a regular J2 with no payload. The stage masses 27.2 tons with 21.67 tons of mixed LH2+Ox propellant (burned mass in the MJ window). With no payload this stage gets roughly 6,500 m/s of delta V Now for the second case, to get close to the 21 tons of prop with just LH2, we have had to use TWO(!!) maximum length 6m stretch S4B tanks and even had to add an S4 tank on top for another ton of fuel. The rocket equation is working against us as we make a single stage larger and larger. In addition having to haul all the mass of fuel we have the dry weight of those enormous tanks to still haul around. This is why staging is important and why you see multiple stages or drop tanks in NTR based Mars Transfer Vehicles such as from Constellation or the MEM proposals. Note that the stage is overall heavier at 33 tons vs 27 despite similar prop mass and we have gained only about 2300m/s. Kind of doesnt seem worth it at least when you build monolithic stages like this. Also keep in mind KSP tank dry masses are higher than IRL making this worse. Now lets look at a more interesting scenario With just a 3m extension an all LH2 S4B with NERVA full flow slightly exceeds the original hydrolox S4B delta V with with 6,600 m/s. And yet the total stage mass even with the much heavier NERVA engine is an incredible 13.7 tons vs 27.2 tons. The stage is bigger yes but much much lighter than the original S4b. You would get a lot more performance from the stages below it in a launch vehicle or simply be able to use a smaller launch vehicle altogether to put it into orbit. Keeping the above in mind now lets look at a final scenario and the benefit of staging even for a space tug setup. Here we have a 3m stretch S4b and a pair of drop tanks which I built from S4 stages (couldn't surface attach S4B tanks to the decouplers, not sure if that's a balance decision or mistake, I think the later since cobalt is also making radial docking ports for lashing stages together like this in orbit) Anyway similar to the 1st and 2nd scenarios we again have 21 tons of fuel but we have the benefit of ditching dead weight. Compared to scenario 2 we have a more complex multistage setup but total delta V has jumped for similar dry and wet mass from 8,800m/s to 11,000m/s. And compared to the original no.1 scenario we have gone from 6,500 m/s to 11,000m/s So building nuclear stages and getting the most out of them requires some thought and presents a lot of challenges. Note the low TWR and very long burn times. We can compensate by clustering more engines but the engines themselves have much worse TWR than hydrolox engines so dry mass starts adding up. Its up to you to find the best balance between performance, stage complexity (including operational complexity such as on orbit assembly) and thrust to weight/burn times PS. on the subject of TWR, I will add a separate patch to BDB extras for NTR thrust buff to double it. Separate from the regular one in case maybe you dont want to use the regular one but just dont have the patience for a 30minute NTR burn

The reason was money. And you wouldn’t see a delta V gain by switching a tank of the same size to LH2. Because a pure LH2 tank of the same volume has much lower density since you don’t have lox/oxidiser and thus lower fuel mass. the rocket equation after all is concerned with mass not tank size. If for example you have a 50 ton hydrolox tank you need to build a 50 ton lh2 tank to compare 1:1. You would get considerably more delta v but the stage would be much larger. Alternatively you could build a 25 ton lh2 tank to get the same delta V but you have the advantage of it being lighter even if the tank might still be a bit bigger. Since the stage is lighter you get more delta V from the stages below. above figures are just illustrative.

Thats probably something I should have already done. Shouldnt be too hard.

The last planned nuclear engine for now. The Los Alamos National Laboratory "Small Engine" concept for the shuttle payload bay. Now on github. PS. we now have a new sound effect for all nuclear engines thanks to Katniss which adds an ominous Geiger counter click to the sound loop.

If you look inside a "Paint" folder inside a part family folder and there are subfolders in there like Blue, White etc, you should safely be able to delete any of those sub folders. If you want to delete more granular than that you will need to look at the configs and file paths and work it out yourself.

Think this might be one my favourite builds that you've posted here. We dont have any firm plans for nuclear electric propulsion at the moment though. Just on the subject of (solar) electric propulsion I had some vague ideas of redoing the Halley/Tempel ion parts including the rest of the probe but this wasn't a definite plan.

I do have a DSKY prop model yeah, but im hoping to redo the IVAs for the LM and CM at some point and was thinking of adding it then.

No. Note that I'm not doing project rover test articles either. Rather I made NERVA engines which were fully fleshed out flight engine designs based on Rover reactors. Dumbo never progressed beyond a reactor design.