Temstar

Ultimately, people come to the forum to talk about KSP, and having a common shared baseline gives meaning and context to discussion about KSP. That's why people worry about this whole cheating thing. If you achieve goal A and brag about it, but then another person also achieve goal A but using something (say, a mod like hyperedit) to make that goal easier, and that person also brag about it here on the forum then you will feel that the achievement is unequal. Of course, this is all very egocentric and in an ideal world there's no need to worry about who's achievement is worth bragging and who's does not. Alas the human condition means it does matter to people. Let's say for example there are ZERO stock parts, none. When you install KSP you just get an empty parts list. Instead Squad release all the stock parts we know now as an optional mod to the game, must like Asteroid Days. Using the "KSP is a single player game and you can play it any way you want, including any parts pack" argument it makes no difference if there are stock parts or Squad's semi-official parts pack. Yet does this not diminish KSP by taking away a common ground where players can talk about shared experiences? If you answer is yes, then you can see why people worry about cheating.

I personally really like the T2 tracking station because it shows a clear progression from T1 to T3. I mean you still need dishes when the big new shinny dish is under construction, so having three small one seems pretty reasonable to me. Having three means you can track three separate deep space spacecraft at once. This is as opposed to T2 VAB and SPH. The T2 SPH looks like T1, except with two new walls for more room inside and a curved roof. It's clearly not just a T1 SPH with a new roof since it's much roomier, yet it doesn't seem like an incomplete T3 SPH either. Overall the continuity is not nearly as good as T2 tracking station. I mean what were they doing with all my spaceplanes between the two demolish-rebuild phases?

Here's an interesting thought: Is "get out and push" cheating?

There's just something about a rocket with a lot of engines on the bottom, I mean: Look at dat ass. In comparison Mammoth is not nearly as satisfying I suppose another thing that killed off clustering is part count. Back in those days my computer could easily handle 300 part ships with even 500 parts being workable. Nowadays with the game being much more complex the game engine has to do more calculation per part so for my computer above 200 parts become impractical. Hopefully 1.1 will fix that.

Realistically you can only cluster 1.25m engines, I suppose on 3.75m stack the option exists for a centre 2.5m engine with a ring of 1.25m engine, but 1.25m engine is where it's at for clustering. Back in beta, before LV-T30 and LV-T45 got their nicknames the 1.25m engines had higher Isp but lower TWR than 2.5m engines, particularly against the Mainsail so for core stages of asparagus it made sense to cluster engines to make use of that high Isp, plus clustering was also useful on the core stage to make a core that was more powerful than a single mainsail. Back in the days of yore this was so popular that tools were created to automatically calculate for you what engines to cluster for a given amount of thrust and booster numbers. I am a bit saddened that 1.25m engine nerf + 2.5m engine buff + introduction of more powerful 3.75m engines closed off that niche. There's probably some sweet spot that we could aim for to make 1.25m clusters useful without being ubiquitous as it once was in beta.

It is quite possible to use high alpha reentry (ie large AoA) even on crafts with high wing loading, for example: This picture was taken at the moment of peak heat flux, original orbit was 75km x 75km. At peak heat the nose cone (which by the way only has 2000 degree max) is only reaching 76% max heat load. The one trick with high alpha reentry that people miss is you actually need quite a steep reentry angle. Coming in shallow means you spend a lot of time passing through the upper atmosphere, collecting heat and not actually doing much deceleration. By the time you actually reach thicker air you are already near your max heat capacity so you blow up. A steeper reentry angle allow you to punch through the upper atmosphere quickly so you don't pick up too much heat, leaving you plenty of head space for the actual deceleration zone. This reentry here for sample is done with a 250m/s deorbit burn from the initial 75km x 75km orbit. The burn was performed above the desert's eastern coast and after the burn the trajectory showed impact point was on the mountain range in the middle of the Africa shaped continent. The lift from the wings flattened the trajectory to move the landing spot to KSC. As you can see it's a much steeper reentry than your 200km test with large AoA.

I mean for ascent. For reentry high alpha reentry solves almost all heat issues. For ascent the part that get heated the most is the cockpit/nose cone. Problem is all nose cones and all cockpits only have 2000 degree heat tolerance, and I don' care for using shock cone as my nose. I suppose the shielded docking port is an option. Does the increased heat tolerance of the shielded docking port offset its increased drag?

How does one harden their spaceplane against high temperature anyway?

Come to think of it, why shouldn't all 1.25m engines be surface attachable like Vector and Aerospike. That would make the Reliant and Swivel more useful. After all their form factor make them uniquely suitable for clustering.

TWR of 2 is much too high. With a high TWR what happen is your max Q happen earlier in the fight, in worst case max Q happen right about as you start your gravity turn which puts vast amount of dynamic load on your rocket, causing it to flip around as soon as it shifts away from prograde by a tiny amount. A lower TWR means max Q happen later in the flight which means the absolute amount of dynamic pressure at max Q is lower. High TWR is also bad because you're not getting enough use out of your engines. Remember engines are expensive and fuel are cheap, so for a given amount of delta-V it's always cheaper to use more fuel and less engine, up to the limit of your mission (ie TWR > 1 for launch vehicles). Personally I favour a TWR at lift off of about 1.3

Is a 2.5m engine between Skipper and Mainsail really needed though? Why not just:

All craft files uploaded to KerbalX now that mediafire is banned. In other news: I was able to use a pair of Auroras to launch a 80 ton modular space station composed of five modules in a single launch as part of a challenge. The whole craft was created under 30 minutes including both making the station as well as integrating the Auroras to it to form a launch system. Demonstrating the usefulness of the modular design.

The problem with microgravity is not that we can't get our foot on the ground. It's that in microgravity your body degrades in various ways (bone density, heart size, immune system etc). In trying to simulate gravity by spinning you counter the physiological change. If instead of spinning you could have a pill that stops body degradation then there wouldn't be any need for simulated gravity. Floating around using your arms and having hand holds all over your space ship work just fine for locomotion, I can see benefit for construction work if with a flip of a switch you could anchor yourself to an arbitrary point on the ship's hull, but walking is unnecessary.

I use it a lot for upper stages,and yes as an upper stage engine it can lift a lot of payload: But it's not exclusively for 229 ton payload, I also use it as an upper stage for a 45 ton to LKO rocket where the Rhino stage does most of the work (2200m/s delta-v) after been lifted up by an all solid first stage: 45 ton is a fairly common payload size, even in career. I would note that Rhino is pretty expensive though so in both examples above the upper stage are designed for recovery after payload release.

No, it's not possible. You are asking for a reactionless drive which violates Newton's third law of motion. Even beam power or light craft or ion drive all have propellent that they shoot out the back to produce thrust (even if they can do it much more efficiently). Photon rockets take 300 megawatts of power for one lousy Newton of thrust. For anything other than spacecrafts with undetectable low level of thrust its beam will be a weapon of mass destruction, Death Star style. And even then it's not quite reactionless since that 300 megawatt per newton has to come from somewhere and a good bet is that you're doing some kind of matter annihilation, so even with a photon rocket you will eventually run out of matter.

Even if money is not a problem you can't just shoot the ISS into a high orbit and leave it there and think everything will be okay. ISS have to be actively steered in LEO to avoid debris fields. Suppose you fire this 413 ton spacecraft higher up and 50 years later it gets smashed Gravity style by a large space junk. You will create an enormous debris field that will make orbit extremely dangerous to all spacecraft. When China did its anti-satillite test in 2007 they destroyed a 1.4 ton spacecraft and that created about 150,000 pieces of debris. You leave the ISS up there without active avoidance and you basically put up a giant, 413 ton target in orbit. If it gets destroyed the resulting debris might keep mankind out of orbit entirely.

Yeah ARM would help Planetary Resources a lot. Imagine if ARM managed to grab a dirty snowball and around the same time people figure out how to do propellant depot. Suddenly that snowball is going to be worth more than it's weight in solid gold. It still won't provide a justification for setting up a colony on mars, but it would at least make going to mars easier.

Still, there is that one "if you plow the field, the rain will come" type view that I think has some merit. Basically we don't know how to make money by going to space, but we assume there are ways and we go to space anyway and look for them. I understand that this is pretty much Planetary Resources's business case and they get funded by billionaires as their pet hobby project.

The problem is the time frame is really too short to do anything useful. What does the book suggest?

I stand up and yell "Mein Führer, I can walk!"

Isp and fuel is not an issue. For all we care LFO could be distilled unicorn blood and it wouldn't really make any difference. KSP engines can have arbitrary Isp as Squad see fit. I don't see anyone complain about Vector's relatively high Isp, particularly not after Squad made a point to mention staged combustion in the description. The problem is that the SRBs in game are too weak to lift a big tank of LFO STS style and to make up the number Vector was made very powerful. Which is fine if all you want to make is shuttle replica as was the original intention. But then if you use the Vector on its own to make other types of rockets it's mentally jarring because it's too powerful for its diminutive size. If instead we could have say, a 2.5m SRB that's big and beefy and up to the job then whatever engine we choose to represent KSP version of RS-25 could be made to be much weaker and more inline with the the actual shuttle layout and better match to its physical size. Also, in real life fuel only affects Isp, you could very well make a huge cryogenic engine (eg, RS-68) with lots of thrust or a tiny hypergolic engine with very little thrust.

With the space shuttle stack, the two SRBs provide 83% of the thrust at lift off, the three RS-25 engines only provide 17% of the thrust. The story is similar with SLS, despite it having one more SSME it also uses a pair of even more powerful five segment SRBs. Basically those SRBs are enormously powerful machines, each putting out as much thrust as two F-1 engine of the Saturn V fame and the two SRBs together make up half of the weight of the shuttle stack at lift off. What that mean is if you rearrange things, a single SRB makes a pretty good first stage (vibration not withstanding) for a heavy lift launch vehicle. Where as SSMEs are a bit too small and underpowered for replacement of something like a modern Saturn V first stage if not used with SRBs. The story is the other way around in KSP, the biggest SRB, the Kickback is rather wimpy compared to the might that is Vector and Mammoth. This means Kickback is not very useful for heavy lift unless heavily clustered and Vector is overwhelmingly powerful when used on its own.

Not to mention that when it does come in a package of four that package is much bigger in volume than four vectors on their own.

They are about as easy to fly as any other SSTO spaceplane. Of course I had to crash many of them in the sandbox to nail down the design, but once the design was perfected recovery is a doozy. If you crash one then obviously your price per ton will grow significantly, just as with any other fully recoverable design. My SSTO spaceplanes (yes, I have them too for my career for payloads up to 40 tons) generally manage about $200 per ton to orbit, so this type of SSTO reusable launch vehicle costs you about twice per ton to orbit as SSTO spaceplane. However SSTO spaceplane has its own set of problem like CoM shift with payload, cargo hold dimension limitation, slow climb to orbit that takes up much player time and so on. On the other hand my fully disposable design can manage about $1000 per ton, but with the advantage that they are fire and forgot. The SSTO reusable rocket sits in a nice middle ground between these two extremes. It also has the benefit that it's a super versatile design that I can reuse for all sorts of things like this single launch modular space station: So I think it's pretty clear to say that Vector and Mammoth have uses other than space shuttle clones. And in many cases like my SSTO reusable rocket the high TWR of these engines is a huge advantage because it reduces vehicle dry mass and so increases payload. Again, I'm not arguing that Vector and Mammoth are overpowered, merely that their high TWR is definitely one of, if not the best strong feature of these two engines. I do think Vector's size is a problem and it concentrates too much thrust in too small of a physical package. No one here for example is complaining that Mammoth is too powerful for its size, your mind justifies the Mammoth because of its huge superstructure above the nozzles make it look like it should be very powerful. Vector is jarring not because of it's performance per say but because it's too much performance for too little engine. I propose again to increase the size of the Vector, but not by giving it 2.5m tank butt. Instead I say make the engine longer by showing all the turbomachinery above the nozzles, so it's long and skinny not like LV-N. Then modify the three engine mark 3 coupler so that the nodes sit in three recessed holes so that when you attach vectors into these holes the coupler hide the machinery and it still looks like it does now. That way people can still have their shuttle clones that look the part. Yet when you use Vectors on rockets they look sensible next to Mammoth with its huge superstructure. And in the case that people insist on using Vector on the bottom of the rockets and they don't want to see all the engine guts they can still hide it into their fuel tanks with the offset tool.

They reach orbit in a single stage and then split up into individual crafts and return one by one, including the engine-less ET.