MinchinWeb

You can post it inline here. Use the "Code" button (it looks like angle brackets "<>") and then past inside the block. That way, whitespace (tabs and indents) is preserved.

Would you post the (updated) patch here, inline? Dropbox links have a way of dying...

I tried out the light speed setting, and it doesn't seem to be switching over for me... Here I am doing 7.5% the speed of light (and it should swap over at 1% light speed, yes?) (Link to mod settings I'm using --> https://imgur.com/sct9hCe )

That makes me feel quite a bit better. I guess it's been too long since I did high school physics...

So I love CPT, but it's never (really) included engines. It's something I've wanted to add for a long time, but I was always lost at how one would go about organizing engines. And I've never felt like I've really understood engines either...usually I just slap on something bigger or more of them until my rocket gets to space! (MOAR BOOSTERS!!) Then, a little bit ago, I came across the "Developer Insight" posting by Chris Adderley of the KSP2 team taking about Engine Archetypes (also here). He proposed (roughly) five archetypes: Solid Boosters, Boosters (or Lifters), Sustainers, Orbital, and Deep Space. Roughly: Solid Booster have high thrust, but low efficiency, and are also cheap. Boosters (or Lifters) are high thrust on the launchpad, at the expense of everything else. This is what you use for your first stage. Sustainer are designed to keep a rocket already in motion moving towards orbit. They tends to have less raw power than booster, but better efficiency. Typically used for your second stage, they are sometimes the right choice for any stage in a pinch. Orbital engines are designed for vacuum use and are designed for efficiency. These are used by upper stages. Deep Space engines tend to use more exotic fuels, and provide amazing efficiency, but usually at the cost of raw thrust. The in-game example is the Dawn Ion Engine. The Cryo Engine Extensions were also explicit about using these categorizations. Generally, when we measure thrust, we actually care about Thrust to Weight, and we measure efficiency using Specific Impulse: Isp. The Developer Insight also had this handy graph, so I set out to recreate it with KSP's engines. However, my graph wasn't so useful, but it turns out graphing the engines using the Isp in vacuum (rather than at Sea Level) much more clearly separated out the engines! And so I set to categorizing the stock engines in a way that could then be extended to mod engines. One thing I noticed is that the ratio of Isp in vacuum to at sea level was a first easy way to categorize engines: booster would have a ratio between ~1.05 and 1.10 (so up to 10% more efficient in vacuum), sustainers would have a ratio of ~1.15 (so 15% more efficient in vacuum), which orbital engines were often 4 or better! (Deep Space engines tend basically not to work in atmosphere, so have absurdly high ratios.) It's this ratio that spreads out the engines into bands seen in the above graph. As I added more engines, I noticed that Isp varies by fuel. Where Liquid Fuel Boosters have an Isp of ~300s, methalox Booster have an Isp of ~340s (~15% better) and hydrolox Boosters have an Isp of ~410s (~35% better). So I threw a lot of engines (~300) into my spreadsheet, plotted them, and started applying classes! And I got this: By now I understood (roughly) what to look for in an engine, and thus what I could use for a useful title for engines: for Booster, I can most about Thrust to Weight at Sea Level; efficiency is a bonus. for Sustainers, I still care firstly about Thrust to Weight. for Orbital engines, I care firstly about efficiency, but I want to make sure they also have decent thrust. for Deep Space engines, I care firstly about efficiency and secondly about raw thrust (which I'm assuming to be poor in any case.) I picked out prefixes: I wanted something close to the "typical" LV used in games, so went with LB for Boosters, LS for Sustainers, LZ (I wanted a letter after S...) for Orbit engines, and then reused IX for Deep Space Engines. (As a side, this leaves LA open for "Eve Class Boosters"; few engines generate any thrust at all when air pressure rises to 3 atm, and "sea level" on Eve is about 5 atm!) In the end, I would also end up using IZ for non-typical Deep Space engines (think futuristic torch drives and the like). If the engine use a "non-typical" fuel (i.e. not Liquid Fuel for Booster, Sustainer, and Orbital engines, or Xenon for Deep Space engines), I would add a code for the fuel used: e.g. "/o" for Monopropellant. For numbering, the first number is the size (radius), and then the second number varies by series: for Boosters, it's *Thrust to Weight at Sea Level* / *Isp at Sea Level* for Sustainers, it's still *Thrust to Weight* / *Isp*, but this time at a pressure of 0.5 atm (in practice, I averaged the values at Sea Level and in vacuum) for Orbital engines and Deep Space engines, it's *Isp* / *raw thrust*, both in vacuum So the stock engines now look like this: LB-12-017/265 "Reliant" Engine LB-12-024/295 "Vector" Engine LB-25-018/280 "Twin Boar" Engine LB-25-023/285 "Mainsail" Engine LB-37-025/295 "Mammoth" Engine Cluster LB-R-019/275 "Twitch" Engine LS-03-014/293 "Spark" Engine LS-06-013/285 "Swivel" Engine LS-12-017/315 "Dart" Aerospike Engine LS-12-021/300 "Skipper" Engine LS-18-018/273 "Rhino" Engine LS-R-010/275 "Spider" Engine LS-R-013/290 "Thud" Engine LZ/o-R-250/020 "Puff" Monopropellant Engine LZ-03-315/002 "Ant" Engine LZ-06-345/060 "Terrier" Engine LZ-18-350/250 "Poodle" Engine IX/n-12-800/060 "Nerv" Nuclear Rocket Motor IX-06-k004/002 "Dawn" Electric Propulsion System (The Rapier isn't here, as it's a "jet engine", but in rocket mode it performs roughly like a low thrust-to-weight sustainer or a powerful orbital engine.) The system isn't perfect: it drops any connections to real life model numbers, it doesn't account for duel mode engines, it sorts "other fuels" above the "normal" fuel, it doesn't have a good way to deal with mods like ReStock+ that change the engine base radius, and the values it uses aren't always exposed by the default UI so it may not be obvious to players who encounter it for the first time what they represent. So I'm posting this here to get feedback: is this renaming helpful? Does it make sense? Can it be made better? Should it be added to CPT? (Under the Spoiler is a bunch of mod engines as they'd be renamed.)

So I was mucking around trying to make sense of engines, and plotted Isp (in Vacuum) against (empty) Thrust to Weight, and and your Sepratron 8-1 is an outlier! This is likely because this is based on empty weight, that you appear to have set to 1.6 gram, which is about the same as a paperclip! Setting it to ~10 grams would bring it closer to your Septratron II, which is the which has the next best Thrust to Weight I've found in the game, or at ~13 grams would match the Thrust to Weight ratio of the original Sepratron. And considering this carries 7.5 kg of fuel, I would expect it to be wrapped up in something more than a sheet of paper anyway... Or ignore this all, and add MOAR BOOSTER! P.S. Thanks for making this awesome mod.

I guess perks of going first is even an minor win still puts you on the scoreboard! With the parts, I have no idea how to "launch" a Kerbal anywhere, but I wondered how "wiggly" the probe cores are. So I strapped Jeb to one and "launched"! Wiggle right, wiggle left, repeat, repeat... and then poor Jeb ended up facedown on the edge of the platform. 15m?

There is a long standing issue with the Sounding Rockets contract pack. Is there a better way to do vessel tracking? I would love to update the contract pack and get this resolved once and for all, but I need some pointers on how to go about that. Conceptually, the idea is to require the rocket to use the Sounding Rockets' Avionics Package and to start with (but not be required to finish with) one of the two Sounding Rockets' boosters. The current WIP code is here --> https://github.com/MinchinWeb/ksp-ContractPack-SoundingRockets/blob/retry/Core/KSP-SR-2000m.cfg Many thanks!

Per comments earlier in this thread, that appears to be the default for existing saves, and means the surface features are disabled. Set this to any other (positive?) integer to activate surface features.

LOL of course Kerbals wouldn't use "real" lightspeed! My inclination would be to go with "real" lightspeed; I don't think KSP actually redefines other speed units. Plus I think it would throw me if lightspeed wasn't the "normal" ~300,000 m/s. Now I'm wondering which one RemoteTech uses to calculate transmission delays....

I'm wondering if it makes sens to extend this to indicate the percentage of light speed you're going... I've been playing around with some overpowered Epstein Drives (my ship was showing a max TWR of ~150!), and so I conceivably could get going a significant portion of light speed if I wanted to....

So I decided to try these out, and see how well they work. I just played around with the smaller Epstein Drive, but expect that all four drives will work somewhat similar. One of the interesting things is that the drive is configured to have no thrust at sea level, which means that you need something else to get it off the launch pad. However, the thrust is so large that as it starts scaling up as the atmosphere pressure scales down, it starts providing meaningful thrust as soon as you've "jumped" off the pad. Once you're in space, the Isp (~1,300,000 seconds) is so large that you have almost unlimited thrust: My half full LFO tank read something like 2 million m/s of delta V! The thrust is also very high if you're in a small craft (like I was); I set the engine limiter to 10% or even 3% for much of my time. For actual flying, the idea with such a high thrust and high impulse engine is basically to skip transfer orbits and go "straight" to where you want to be; you spend the first half of your trip pointed at your destination, and the second half backwards burning off all that speed you just put on. Unfortunately, KSP's navigation tools aren't really set up for this, and the best you have is Target mode, but you want to be in orbit around the planet/moon you're going rather than smack into it... Issues aside, I was able to do a "direct" transfer from Kerbin to the Mun is ~1 hour game time! Here is my ship (single stage to orbit): One issue is that this drive in particular has no plume when running; there was a patch on the old thread that I submitted as a Pull Request on GitHub. The drive also runs very hot. In fact, the first time I took the drive out for a spin, the ship overheated and exploded! Adding some radiators and not running full out seem to have solved that. It makes for an interesting thought if it could be integrated into SystemHeat, although the nominal output of these drives (into the GWs) makes it hard to balance against the default radiators (the wrap around radiators I used here are set to disperse ~150kW of heat each...) This is the rough ModuleManager code; adjust to taste: // Katts = G * Isp * Thrust / 2 // (get Isp from "atmosphereCurve", get Thrust from "maxThrust") // (assumes Vacuum) // divide nominal values by 20,000 for gameplay balance @PART[EpsteinDriveV4]:NEEDS[SystemHeat]:FOR[MEVFusionTek] { // add system heat main module MODULE { name = ModuleSystemHeat // Cubic metres of coolant // assumes 5cm thick outer cylinder at bell width (2.5m) and 1m tall volume = 0.777 moduleID = engine_heat iconName = Icon_Gears } MODULE { name = ModuleSystemHeatEngine // must be unique moduleID = engine // ModuleSystemHeat to link to systemHeatModuleID = engine_heat //engineModuleID = ReactionProducts // in KW at peak output //systemPower = 47823750 // ~48 GW systemPower = 239 // Nominal system output temperature systemOutletTemperature = 750 // Valid system temperature range temperatureCurve { key = 0 0 key = 300 1.0 key = 1400 1.0 key = 2000 0.0 } } } But overall, a very fun addition! Thanks for keeping this alive! P.S. for navigation, I did find this --> although I'm not sure there's a working 1.12 build of it. It's designed for Solar/Photon Sails, but navigation is similar with a constant thrust out and then spending the second half of the journey slowing down to allow orbital capture. It may be worth looking more into (or reviving). P.P.S. the "old" forum link in the first post is wrong... it should point here -->

Is there a way to add a GitHub token to CKAN? I notice a place for authorization tokens in the settings, but I'm not certain what to provide for the "Host". Also, does adding a GitHub token here do anything?

Thanks so much for getting out the latest update!

Hey @flart! I put together a pretty big update back in October, but haven't seen any traction on it. (see https://github.com/yalov/CommunityPartsTitles/pull/19 ) Is there anything I can do to move it forward? Alternately, would you be okay setting me up to push out the release myself?