philonius

Not sure if this has been discussed in this thread before, but I just rewatched BBC's 'Space Race' (which I highly recommend, awesome miniseries) , and one of the things that strikes me was just how experimental these rocket designs were, in other words, how often an unforeseen design flaw / manufacturing error caused the rocket to explode. Has there been any thought about incorporating failure probabilities in the realism overhaul? Fuel line ruptures, stuck fairings, 'Houston, we've had a problem here' ? Perhaps a per-part failure chance, which can be influenced by techlevel and experience with flying the part. First time trying a new rocket? Expect debris. Perhaps a mod could be made that uses subassemblies for this purpose: When you design a booster, save it as subassembly. Then the mod tracks how often the subassembly has flown, with failure chance decreasing with flight rate. A new rocket's failure chance would be a function of tech level and how new the components are. A rocket comprising of an proven design with a modified upper stage would be more reliable than a new rocket. If this can't be done automatically, it might be done manually. Upon launch, a dialog window could ask the player to identify the rocket's stages, and the failure chance is then set. Perhaps the bravery/stupidity of the crew (if any) might modify this setting. Not sure if this would significantly add to the fun in the end, but it would introduce some choices to the gameplay. Do I chance the lives of my brave kerbals on an unproven rocket, or do I do some test flights first? Obviously, this will be a more pressing choice when the money system goes live. Also, it provides a use for launch escape systems.

This is a great idea, I've been looking for a combination of mods and tweaks that does what you're trying to do, but haven't really found anything yet (early days in 0.22 still) One thing that's been a hallmark of real life spaceprograms is that the designs they came up with were determined by the previous rocketry work that was done by that country, to save time, money and effort. So they might make first stages based on ICBMs, and slap a second stage on top based on an smaller rocket design, to end up with their orbital launcher. In KSP however, you're always free to use whatever parts you have available in whatever combination. While we can't change that, we might use the tech tree to encourage similar behaviour. One idea might be to have many parallel choices in the tech tree, where a particular engine development leads to followup engines that are more capable. Instead of unlocking all tier one rocket engines, you pick a family and base your rocket designs on the path you've chosen. This might require the techtree to assume you have some modpacks installed, to provide more choice. In this way, you'd end up with a techtree with many more, smaller nodes. Instead of a generic 'advanced rocketry' node, you might even have nodes that are just 'Mainsail Engine Development' , and yield just that part. This would give players a choice, to either develop a big powerful engine, or save the resources and cluster some smaller engines, even though that provides lesser performance. Another realism aspect would be that in real life, you can't just build a bunch of solid fuel rockets, do ~science~ and then start flying heavy liquid fueled boosters. You need experience in a technology before it can be developed further. Would it be possible to have the tech tree use multiple resources to unlock nodes? Could we, for example, have flights with tier 1 LF engines yield 'Engineering Experience - Liquid Engines' , which is required to unlock 2.5m liquid engines, and similarly for other categories of parts? Additionally, you might include credits as a required resource, for those that have the mission controller mod. These suggestions entail some more thorough reworking of the tech tree though, and I'm not sure how expansive you want to make this effort.