r_rolo1

@LethalDose I'm also OK with asparagus being somewhat handicapped, but IMHO the way devs did it was ... unrefined, to say the least. I always thought that the best way of dealing with asparagus would be either part failure ( a thing that the devs strongly dislike, for reasons I'm not 100% in agreement with ) and/or limiting the fuel flow of fuel lines ( something that would probably need more code, but given that Harvester apparently spent some days working on the fuel lines some weeks ago, I was with some faith on that for 0.90 ). Those would be atleast realistic sounding reasons ... while decouplers and fuel lines cost costing fortunes probably does not. But that is OT . On the topic, the cost and science structure of KSP in 0,24+ is strongly against asparagus staging, or broadly, against anything that uses extensively fuel lines, decouplers or even cubic struts. And it is like that by design, for balance reasons ...

Well, we could say that the devs made sure that asparagus would not be cost efficient, and TBH they used some very crass methods to do so, like making decouplers costing the same as a ICBM capable rocket or a individual fuel line costing more than some rocket engines. In other words the OP, due to lack of historical context, saw the situation completely backwards ( it is not his fault, though ,like no one would blame people that saw the kind of ships we used in 0.16/0.17 to think that we were crazy to spam so much aerospikes ... ): asparagus is costly because the devs made it costly on propose , to make other aproaches less handicapped in comparison. That said: a) the Kerbal X is a badly designed ship, as others pointed, and it is like that on propose. Using the words of one of the workers of SQUAD, the stock ships are supposed to be "almost good" and all of them have a flaw of some kind ( to give beginners the chance of tinkering with it and make it better, like the OP did ). The Kerbal X flaw is bad management of the fuel in hand and some dubious staging, as the OP discovered As DerekL1963 said, SRBs have their own trappings. Besides the ones (s)he mentions, the lack of variety of SRBs in game at this point is also a big issue, making that for some loads it is hard to get a satisfactory solution at a good price and it is not that difficult that a simple asparagus solution can be cheaper for some payloads than using SRBs ( it already happened to me ). More, unlike RL, where you can somewhat control the thrust per time profile of a SRB by fuel shaping, it is completely impossible to have a varying thrust SRB in game, that makes that a SRB solution will always be quite short of perfect in low atmosphere ( and , due to their specs in game, somewhat useless out of it ) ...

That is pretty much my point, but I stress: electricity as it in game is also under a heavy idealization and if it was implemented in a minimally realistic way it would suffer the exact same issues you are pointing out about a realistic life support: batteries self discharge, ships have baseline consumptions, solar panels degrade, radioactive decay generators lose efficiency and the task of replacing any of those components in situ is in the same order of magnitude of difficulty than reliable life support in far away places ( in other words, we have neither in RL ) and it is actually harder to make batteries and solar panels than ladders in RL In spite of that, we have the electricity we have in game ... So, why does this kind of argument is being thrown against life support ? If HarvesteR wants to say that he doesn't want to have a second ATM electricty feature, that is fine. if he wants to say that he believes that his vision about life support does not fit the game he wants, that is also fine. Saying what he said ... well, it doesn't make sense. And that is what I was pointing out ...

And as we are there, that would actually be a nice feature for electricity as well Talking about your post in the previous page, I am confused with the HarvesteR response about research times regarding life support. I assume he meant that in his view , life support has to be in a high level tech ( probably higher than the current ones in game ) and that the high costs of those techs would make it prohibitive to make your first Jool and beyond missions in terms of the needed life support ( that or he simply dislikes the idea and is scrapping for excuses ). My previous posts already said my position on that: it only has to be that way if HarvesteR wants to be that way, so that surely is not a good reason :/

I'm understanding you perfectly. The issue is that you could say the exact same words about the in-game electricity, since it surely isn't a exact analogue of the RL thing ( batteries self discharge in RL, just for starters, and this not mentioning the baseline spending a ship needs to have to keep itself functional ): You could call it glow juice, since it only depletes when you are in focus view if your ship is manned, and that can easily be seen as defeating the propose of actually having electricity in game vs what we had in the olden days ( assumed infinite glow juice for your ships )

@GluttonyReaper You're not wrong, but that has much more to do with the fact that the devs took the conscious step of making atleast some electrical generation parts to be in the low part of the tech tree, while by some reason people always put the tech support as something esoteric that has to be in the top echelons of the tech tree ... and let's be honest, it doesn't have to be that way. While in RL life support in space is hard stuff, KSP devs already showed that they care very little for RL concerns about the tech tree placement ( otherwise the cubic strut would be in the same node than the small girder, just for a quick example ... ). There is no more reason to not have a low tech life support generator than reasons to have solar panels somewhere in the tech tree not above ladders Let me give you a example from my current hard dif career game. Because hard dif is hard, I faced myself with a decision about getting the first solar panels tech vs getting the 48-7S. Because the 48-7S is that good IMHO, I decided to go for it and my first Mun and Minmus missions are being done with only the stock supply of electricity ( aided be some batteries, but they weren't 100% needed TBH ). So basically I'm in a exact analogue of your Jool mission example if we switch electricity for life supports ...and TBH I don't see any issue with that being in game. It might be risky to do bigger missions without further electricity stocks and in case of stupidity of my part, I might even need to send some electricity refueling ( when I have klaws ). And all of that is already in the stock game ... In other words: IMHO the only difference between electricity and life support as people tend to imagine it is simply where in the tech tree you see the stocking of the feature and the generators of it. Hence HarvesteR posted reasoning is contradicted by his own work ...

True , but irrelevant to my point, since HarvesteR did not say anything about consumption of life support with the ship on rails. And in fact it is easier to rationalize no life support spent with a ship on rails ( hibernation/stasis/cryogenics ) than a ship that spends zero electricity and stays functional ...

The memories ! They hurt ! Really, well done ... and this is while I do not subscribe your point on the Mun looks

Since I do not have a reddit account.... @HarvesteR On the life support issue , you are being somewhat hypocritical. We already have a feature in game that we start with low non renewable supplies of and that the tech advancement gives first bigger supplies of and later generators of it : electricity. Unless you are planning to remove electricity of the game because it "would become a chore where you'd have to babysit all your ongoing crews as your newest mission speeds its way out to the outer solar system" to avoid depleted electrical charge issues, that excuse is not a excuse ( not saying that your point about feature creep is not right, though ... but this bit about life support is not supported by your own previous actions ). Oh and as we are speaking of electricity, how about a fuel cell part, that burns LF and O and produces electrical charge and zero thrust ? On your point against randomness, well , I'm thorn. I do understand your argument and while i do not disagree with it completely, I do not see how balancing the issue of parts with different reliabilities is any different of choosing between a LV-909 and a 48-7S.: simple risk management, not different of any of the cost benefits analysis we already do in game, even if unconsciously. And beware : you are making a game that has a strong group of science educated players, that can easily understand that kind of argument against using randomness as you assuming they are so limited they can't stomach randomness. Believe me: I've seen other developers going that way and it is not a path you want to go ...

Since I do not have a reddit account.... @HarvesteR On the life support issue , you are being somewhat hypocritical. We already have a feature in game that we start with low non renewable supplies of and that the tech advancement gives first bigger supplies of and later generators of it : electricity. Unless you are planning to remove electricity of the game because it "would become a chore where you'd have to babysit all your ongoing crews as your newest mission speeds its way out to the outer solar system" to avoid depleted electrical charge issues, that excuse is not a excuse ( not saying that your point about feature creep is not right, though ... but this bit about life support is not supported by your own previous actions ). Oh and as we are speaking of electricity, how about a fuel cell part, that burns LF and O and produces electrical charge and zero thrust ? On your point against randomness, well , I'm thorn. I do understand your argument and while i do not disagree with it completely, I do not see how balancing the issue of parts with different reliabilities is any different of choosing between a LV-909 and a 48-7S.: simple risk management, not different of any of the cost benefits analysis we already do in game, even if unconsciously. And beware : you are making a game that has a strong group of science educated players, that can easily understand that kind of argument against using randomness as you assuming they are so limited they can't stomach randomness. Believe me: I've seen other developers going that way and it is not a path you want to go ...

Well, you spoke about gravitational referentials as the only ones where the Oberth effect is not meaningless. That is factually wrong, hence my correction. You are right in saying that you need a external referential, but gravity has nothing to do with the issue. To avoid bringing more misunderstandings to the discussion, it is better to not bring gravity to the fray until needed

No, it happens when you have a referential that it is not the center of gravity of the rocket + exhaust system ( that is, always ). Gravity has zero to do with that, so don't bring it to the discussion...

Yeah, gravity has zero to do with the Oberth effect. It is simply a fancy way to say that, as you go faster the kinetic energy of the system rocket + exhaust tends to be more on the side of the rocket than on the exhaust ( some simple math with high school physics will show you that ). OFC that is quite visible in lower parts of gravity wells ( because you necessarily need to go fast there, otherwise you would not be in orbit ), but it is not exclusive of those locations ...

When I said whackjob I didn't meant a monster rocket ... I meant literally a whackjob ( Aka something done by a crazy person ). If you read my text you'll see that I used 30k including the engine, so nothing too bad. IIRC I used some structural girders and 16 BACC, a thing that I consider to be not as bad to put 10t in suborbital ( it might had been slightly OP and probably 12 BACC could had done the job, but I couldn't care less since I did this in between a somewhat tense Mun landing with a ship that didn't had solar panels ( hard level can be hard at times ) ). As I recovered the ship whole, I actually spent very little cash anyway ...

This is false. I've got a lot of contracts on repeated NASA parts in the same save ( in fact the code seems to love the KR-1x2 ,as it appears quite often in my saves ). In fact if you read my previous post in page #1 you'll see me mentioning that I've gotten the same contract on the same part twice with only different test heights ...

Hum, I just did boring stuff in my career ... Recovered a kerbal out of space and took the oportunity to make a flyby pic of KSC and the island runway ( BTW this rescue was iffy because I used a SRB based recovery ship that has really tight margins ... I ended needing to get out and push twice to deorbit ) Also got some munar science contracts ... and took the opportunity to make a pic of the not-equatorial arch ... ( BTW this was exactly how I discovered this arch back in the days ) Oh , and did you knew that you can put a kerbal standing in top of a flag? I didn't

Well, ATM I don't have any crazy contract of 11 million to show, but TBH I think this is even worse because it is easy to get done ( BTW I got this exact contract in this career 2 times ( this is the first ), only differing in the test altitude ): Given that I could make some whackjobian SRB assembly for 30k ( includes the engine to test ) that can go suborbital ( aka straight up ) that is 100% recoverable, this is really money for nothing ... P.S Also notice the launch clamp contract on the Mun ... :/

My first post was actually reporting on some strange arch like things that had popped out in a update ( can't recall what one :/ ) and about the feasibility of trying to land on them or pass inside them ( you could land on them if the kraken was sleepy in that moment, but it was instant CTD if you tried to pass through them ) Edit: I checked my next post and it didn't CTD on pass below the arches. You just couldn't land below it and change ship, otherwise it would accelerate your ship up until it crashed in the top of of the arch. And apparently the version was 0.15

Well, cheer out, friend, you're not alone

You can use the tiny engines as hinges + landing legs as hydraulics and macgyver out a solution that pushes wheels out as will

As we already have Batt-Man in game, I vote for iron Jeb

Not OP, realistic The values SQUAD used in those days for the aerospike were textbook ones straight out the tests made by JPL. The issue is that, exactly like in RL, the aerospike engines were massively better in terms of thrust/Isp than conventional bell shaped engines, and thus were bad for gameplay. OFC that the aerospikes have their own issues, but those couldn't be modeled in the day. But, yeah, I agree it would make sense to bring back the ol'days aerospike specs, but at a outrageous price ( like in RL? ) and high in the tech tree ( well, it already is ... )

I use it ... when feasible, economic and necessary. That was always my policy , even when decouplers were not outrageously expensive.

I do actually weep for the ol'days aerospike. I know that their thrust/Isp was too much in comparison with the other engines, especially with inbuilt insensitivity to outside atmo pressure, but ...

That looks like the "phantom VAB" bug ... in other words the game is "putting" fictional invisible VAB everywhere in the system and if you crash one of them , though luck. I've seen one in the Jool system yesterday