Wubslin

Remember when joints weren't unplayably floppy? Or when you were able to see vacuum AND sea level delta v for each stage?

1. Why no TWR on each stage in the VAB? I don't want to click a button to see that every time. 2. Vacuum exhaust. There's a thing called an Euler number, not the natural constant but the dimensionless parameter. I think it's off! Pressure dominates inertia in these engines. It's really subtle, but engines are like the left situation and I think they should be like the right situation: Minor difference but it irks me! The curvature as the exhaust peels away and expands is good. I just don't think it should be so exaggerated.

According to my precise calculations, please go outside.

I dunno, that particular piece is about as magnificent as the planet itself is. And have you heard Mars?

Straight and angled RCS jets/duos/quads that are mounted flush, like the nose RCS on Shuttle. I have no idea how that would be implemented what with needing to make the root part be partially transparent and all so that a visual cavity could be built in. Kind of a reach!

My attempt!

This was taken 20 minutes ago. The powered flyby is now done but we're still in LOS as I type this. Requesting a recreation screenshot from the devs, please!

I have a suggestion! When an engine is turned off, it would be nice to not have it gimbal. I think it looks kind of silly when I'm gently pitching around on RCS and my engine bells are uselessly flailing back and forth. I found an old gif of what I'm talking about: This would probably be easy enough to implement, if it hasn't been done already.

So did the devs imply/state that on launch the game won't have interstellar travel or multiplayer? If that's true, we might not even learn how it works until after February, even.

Temper your expectations. The game isn't going to run a raytracing monte carlo simulation every time you place a radiator in the VAB. Engines are just gonna work, and 90% of the game will be patched conics.

I'm fine with the current system. There's a lot you can get done with just transparent flags and two colors. My current plan is to do up some kind of a mothership where every tank looks like it's covered head to toe in the good stuff.

May I remind you that this image also has five vacuum exhaust plumes, precisely zero of which are interacting with each other? They're all clipped into each other. Also, I guarantee that if you plow engine first through the atmosphere your rocket exhaust won't form a blunt stagnation layer where the upwards rushing air fights the downwards rushing exhaust. Do you think your radiators are going to suffer from reduced efficiency because of view factor obstruction if you start piling on more than two of them around your rocket? It's just a video game. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MST3KMantra

Question. Ages back, we got Game Informer claim no. 6 here about the navball gutter. You can also see that the navball is transparent, and markers on the opposite side of the ball can be dimly seen. Have these "which damn way is retrograde" helpers been cut in the name of visual cleanliness, or what? I thought they were pretty neat ideas.

That doesn't follow. "If you can lose millions of watts in coherent, defined plumes of water vapor out the top of your power plant's cooling towers then you can afford to be using that heat to turn more turbines!" Sounds to me like you're trying to pass off an artistic complaint as an engineering complaint. Since it's all fiction, the losses coming from that plasma will be as little or as much as you want it to. The devs are still going to punch in the same number for "WyvernEngine_isp_setequal" either way. If you don't like how the exhaust looks, just say so. I've voiced as much on here about the bright green skybox nebula and no one's come calling the police on me for it. Personally, I like the look of the leaky exhaust. It yells "MAGNETS!" right into the player's face.

Okay, here's one. I'm gonna run my friends down halfway between star systems and install a cool new hole in the middle of their colony transporter! It's amazing the kind of delta-v you can get on your ship when the only payload you need to carry is malice.

Without even reading any comments in this thread, I think it's kind of dumb to be hating on the magnetic nozzle having crazy wicked plasma leaks. I don't know where I recently heard someone describe magnetic plasma confinement as "squeezing jello using rubber bands", but it's basically true whether the plasma is quasi-neutral or not. Anywhere the confinement isn't perfectly even, some plasma's going to try and squeeze through the gaps. Even in inertial confinement fusion you get this problem. With pelletized ICF like the Daedalus drive (read: teeny tiny thermonuclear weapon secondaries) you get "Rayleigh Taylor instabilities" where your metal ablator gets turbulent and mixes into the fusion fuel. With electrostatic fusors, you'll bet the plasma in the center will capitalize on any minute change in voltage gradient to squirt out of the little cage. The same will apply for magnetic confinement just as it does for any other type. Dynamically confining plasma (or really any fluid) is inherently going to be a messy affair. Remember that it's Kerbals who are the ones engineering these drives. A little multi-thousand kelvin rocket exhaust shooting out the side of your nozzle never hurt anyone.

If it works anything like it does in Children of a Dead Earth, I'll be happy. Here's a ship in orbit of Mars. I simultaneously burn retrograde and normal to put myself in a polar orbit. The burn lasts an entire hour, and the curved path my ship follows while firing its engines is highlighted in orange. If the KSP 2 devs have built an iterative trajectory plotter for orbit around Rask and Rusk, that's probably the same technology they'll use for non-impulsive maneuvers just like in CoaDE. When multiple dynamic forces are exerted on your ship at the same time you really have to discretize the motion into little steps to accurately predict how it'll move. Firing your engine while in orbit of a body is almost like being in a Rask/Rusk system where one of the bodies is infinitely massive and infinitely far away (thus a constant acceleration gradient against the direction your ship is pointing, the same as firing your engines.) In this example, You can imagine a source of gravity in the direction of the orange burn arrow attracting my ship by a constant 60 milli-Gs for an hour. Mathematically, solving that motion looks similar to being in free fall around a binary pair like Rask and Rusk. In any case, just having the line show where you're going to go is fine. You can see an arrow indicating the direction my ship will be burning in at the outset of the burn. For very long burns, many of these arrows are present all along the orange trajectory illustrating the direction the ship will be pointing. And after the burn, a polar orbit of Mars:

I do tend to agree that the KSP 2 skybox is too colorful, if I'm being honest. That's just an opinion though. I happen to think that the KSP 1 skybox is too bright and colorful, too. Not even thinking about realism, it's more an artistic/aesthetic thing for me. When I mod KSP, I try to aim for a black and infinitely speckled background as best I can. I like to be visually reminded of the alienness and desolation that comes with being in deep space, and darker skyboxes serve that purpose well for me. I want to be reminded that, aside from the celestial bodies, there's truly pure nothingness extending outwards in all directions forever around my ship. A loud skybox feels closed in and small compared to the expansiveness of a quiet and starry one. For some examples, here's Pood's Deep Star Map:

I think it would be really cool if we had the option to switch between the top two designs here. I just love how clean the right one is, even if the left one is more useful. Also this might just be my KSP 1 experiences talking, but I think having the graduations and numbers on the navball be universally white on both the sky and ground hemispheres looks nicer than having them be dark on the sky hemisphere.

This is wrong.

Holy cow, we have a release date

IT'S IN

Oh come now. Imagine a helium cooled, high enrichment, high temperature gas reactor. Now imagine you take a jet engine and replace the combustion chamber with this reactor. Now connect the exit of the turbine and the entrance of the compressor with radiators which directly cycle the helium as coolant. Now attach a generator. This is called the nuclear closed Brayton cycle, and it would be ideal for a vehicle employing HVTR engines. Such a power plant would be lightweight and could potentially develop large amounts of electrical power. It's also one method by which to achieve sci-fi orange radiators, so there's also that going for it. Just add a low temperature ammonia loop as needed (it would be good to indirectly interface your ammonia loop with your gigantic water tanks via a heat exchanger), slap a huge stack of whipple shields between the spinners and the power plant, and there you go. (Not pictured: cryocoolers rejecting heat from the superconducting HVTR bearings to the lukewarm ammonia, the ammonia return lines, or the ammonia-water tank heat exchanger)

Beautiful. Do we have plumes for it yet?