Corona688

Bill and Jeb are fighting over the controls at ground control...

Like minecraft on console vs minecraft on PC, it's going to be a somewhat different game. Remember, these will be primarily new players, ones who haven't spent the last 4 years wringing out every possibility of the game; they will also be console players, used to the limitations console games face in general. I think they will also be somewhat younger on average. So, they're not going to run around in circles and tear their hair out like distressed rabbits. Instead, like minecraft on console vs minecraft on PC vs minecraft on tablet, there will be relatively separate playerbases. That is what everyone is really dreading, I think, an influx of newbies. Too bad. We were all newbies once. Squad ought to start setting up wiki and forum spaces for that pretty much immediately though, if it's not there on launch there will be confusion.

What does the vertical velocity mod do?

Play style: No mods. Crashes: Extremely rare. Weekly or less. Coincidence: I think not.

Let's imagine another spherical cow: A ship made of nothing but xenon tanks. One full tank weighs as much as 2 empties, so, by the time this stack is one-third empty, that's 20% dead weight and (I think) 125% benefit to dropping the empty tanks. The more often you drop tanks, the smaller the benefit, and the fuller your craft is, the less the benefit. Decouplers every tank would add 10-25% dead weight so it'd be easy to overdo it. In other words -- this is just the rocket pyramid again, looked at upside down. That works exponentially. Drop an exponentionally smaller number of tanks the emptier your craft gets. I'm arbitrarily picking one-third here since that's a nice clean number with xenon tank weights, starting with 81 tanks eject 27 tanks, then 18 tanks, then 6 tanks, then 4 tanks, etc. Don't bother ejecting either of the last two since the dead weight of the decoupler will ruin the benefit. Hypothetically speaking, anyway. A real craft will have engines too.

Oh, you're using ion engines! Wow, yeah, I can see that. Xenon tanks are heavy suckers even when empty.

Once again, it's possible, but the benefit of doing this looks to me like a lot less than the benefit you'd get from bringing along one gigantor array. Powering the ion engine for a 2 minute burn, vs powering the ion engine for a 200 minute burn, is 100 times the benefit. As for fuel cells, a fuel cell converts 1 unit of fuel into 400 units of electricity, while a "swivel" engine converts one unit of fuel into 15,680 N of thrust. (Aside: Assuming they're roughly equally efficient, and as a very rough metric, I think this means 1 unit of electricity is worth about 40 joules of energy. Finally! Electricity in KSP has a unit!) The Dawn engine takes 3.66 electricity per second to produce 2,000 N of thrust. Fed from fuel cells, (400 / 3.66) * 2000 = 218,579 N from one unit of fuel. So, wow, yeah, you can get more thrust out of fuel cells and ion engines than you could by just burning fuel. I still don't think cogeneration is a viable strategy. Not because it wouldn't work, but because so little of the ion engine's potential would be used. For just 0.3 tons more weight, you could keep running the ion engine long after the rocket fuel runs out.

Yikes, that's a lot, did you accidentally subtract the weight of the fuel? you're supposed to leave it in, i.e. calculate the weight of the craft and the fuel but not the fuel tanks.

That happened to me the first time I discovered a mun arch. I landed 2 kilometers away ( a good landing by my standards of the time) and Jeb spacewalked all the way to it -- then exploded on contact with it. Spooky. For a while I was convinced the arches were intentionally deadly.

There's spaceplanes in this thread which literally look like several smaller spaceplanes bolted together. There's no reason you can't do that in principle as long as you're willing to make it look really strange.

We like to put docking couplers on the ends of our space stations because it looks nice and is convenient to reach -- but that's the worst place to put a docking port, mechanically speaking. Anything that hits off-angle gets a huge mechanical advantage, the same way a wrench does. The farther your station's docking port is from its center of mass, the worse it'll be tumbled by an impact against it. The spacecraft you're flying, on the other hand, gets bumped in line with its center of mass and tumbles much less, and has the gyro capacity to absorb that in moments anyway. Try bumping into your station's center of mass and see how it reacts. (Also remember that empty tanks and habitable sections are made of marshmallow while command pods are mostly solid metal with a tiny amount of meat.)

I'm not. They went too far, making it absolutely useless.

...not to mention a buy-three-get-one-free deal.

The Vector gets twice as much thrust as the bigger, heavier, larger-diameter engine with similar performance characteristics. The Vector's T/W ratio beats the Mainsail's. The Vector's thrust-vectoring is even more extreme than the "joke" engines designed for thrust-vectoring at the expense of performance. The Vector's ISP is as good in-atmosphere, as some are in space. Two of these features are interesting. Three get a raised eyebrow. At all four, the Vector is so obviously OP it's painful to watch. The only way it's even remotely balanced is in price.

It'd make the early game so very much easier, too. Maybe that's why. But you're right it should be available from the first. It makes no sense they'd invent big boosters before little ones. Heh, I asked on the channel when/why they nerfed the 48-7S. It apparently had the nickname "48-OP" until the balancing. "How do I do (X)?" "48-7s" "But I'm lifting 300 tons!" "Use lots of them." I'm still not exactly sure how it was nerfed, though. The wiki doesn't mention its parameters ever changing.

You can prevent your ship getting too much course deviation from that by putting it into a spin. That's how they "stop" solid fuel engines, they just spin it so it cancels itself out, thrusting one way then the other. It only works on really low thrust, since when it stops, it'll be necessarily asymmetric.

That's when the vast majority of your drop tanks leave, and the one time TWR really dominates the interaction, but if you're thinking of droptanks for extraorbital things, here's a really simple way to gauge the maximum benefit: Put all that fuel in one stage and calculate delta-V. Then subtract the weight of the tanks but not the fuel and calculate delta-V again. This is your "upper bound", the theoretical maximum benefit; you'll never manage better than this number no matter how you drop your tanks. So if the number's not that impressive, it's not worth bothering with.

Spaghettified. I tried to fit a kerbal in the 1.25m parts container -- which usually works -- and something went wrong. After this I started doing all my rescue missions by robot so passengers would have a real cockpit to climb into.

I think you can simplify that question by rephrasing it in terms of dry weight. Imagine a stack of ROUND-8's connected by TR-18A's. The dry weight of the fuel tanks is effectively doubled. So the question just becomes, how much extra weight can your bottom stage tolerate.

It's been almost exactly 30 years since ramdisks ceased to be a performance boost in most situations. Modern operating systems do it for you without you having to ask. That's why KSP loads so much faster the second time you run it than the first.

Banana tank?

To be honest, "large" and "ssto" aren't really things meant to go together. You can do it, but if it was easy that'd be game-breaking.

Things which weigh less than a Mk16 parachute right now: 1.25m Docking ports All but the hugest wheels The robot grabber Radiators 1.25m reaction wheels 1.25m decouplers Structural panels Some kinds of I-beam Depleted uranium lawn gnomes Radiothermal generators Most of these are much larger than the mk16 parachute while weighing much less. Either the mk16 parachute should weigh less, imo, or all of these should weigh a whole lot more.

Why not just turn a heat-shield upside down? I do that sometimes, to make rockets with a pretty golden nose.

Because they deliver so very little thrust. The bigger the craft, the less difference thrust makes. On a large craft, an ion engine would take years to decades to make a serious impact. Sometimes that's tolerable, especially since they're so efficient, but your craft doesn't have years, it only has until the NERVA's run out of fuel. Solar panels are stock. Off-hand I don't know any other in-game way to turn electric power into thrust than ion engines. It'd be nice if the game had more in-game uses for power.