UmbralRaptor

Many of my missions never leave the drawing board. Either they are clearly impractical, or all the fun is in the design. (Hence my Kerbal Excel Program jokes) If an exploration mission is going to require a dozen assembly launches for each craft leaving Kerbin's SOI, it's not likely to be done) Many of those that are actually built never get past proof of concept or some basic flight testing. It works, do I really have to go through with it? I don't care about the lives of my pilots. Oh, sure, there are missions where success means that they come home in one piece, but some missions are one-way, and test failures are no big deal. This also ignores the occasional destructive test, or launcher that uses a crewed section for additional control.

TWR is just thrust to weight ratio. That is, thrust / weight or thrust / (mass * local_gravity). (9.81 m/s² for Kerbin's surface, other values findable on the wiki) Given that KSP rockets operate under radically varying gravity, I tend to prefer thinking in terms of thrust / mass, but that's less common. For ÃŽâ€V, you want the rocket equation. For KSP purposes, it's Isp * 9.82 * ln(Initial_mass/final_mass). Note that you'll need to calculate ÃŽâ€V for each stage separately, and then add them together.

OKB (Experimental Design Bureau) Raptop, though they may as well be a rogue nation at this point. In theory, Strato-Starburst Technologies is a major subcontractor, but their products rarely see external distribution. No official site, but they do offer cheap design and mission analysis options...

Something as simple as this works. I suspect a better question would involve how you fly it.

The bandwidth figures are calculated wrong (the large antennas actually transmit faster), but the extra power and fact you can use multiple of the small antenna make them of questionable value. As of 0.23.5, the Communotron 16 and 88-88 (the advanced dish) are actually massless (due to the PhysicsSignificance setting), but the DTS-M1 (the first dish) is not.

There's an entry in the wiki for this

The Shuttle orbiter vehicle itself was an extra 68,500 kg - 109,000 kg that was nonetheless lugged to LEO and back. Hence why the Shuttle-C would have been able to fairly easily get 2-3x the payload.

Yes. eg: in 0.23, the Z-100, Z-400, and OX-STAT all had mass.

KSP (usually) treats rockets as trees, so the 2-to-1 portion is... problematic. Putting docking ports below the decouplers and above the 2-to-1 extender is a possible workaround. An alternative is not doing a direct connection with multicouplers. Only use decouplers on the central engine (or a structural part that reaches above and between the engines from the lower stage), while the rest of the engines hang free on the sides. (Taking advantage of how tanks can be radially attached)

Some of Tavert's charts come to mind

I can't argue with that. Also, the balance issues make it even more of an SLS model kit.On the upside, THE KLAW is really nifty, and as best I can tell, the LES and new SRB don't overly conflict with existing parts.

They greatly outperform existing engines, to the point that you should be using them for any 15+ tonne payload. (IOW: use an LFB and 2 orange tanks, rather than 3 Skippers with orange tanks and fuel crossfeed. And don't bother with the Mainsail.) None of the engines are geared up for landing, though I suppose you can attempt that. The size 3 tanks are slightly worse than their size 2 counterparts (mass ratios of 8.2 instead of 9), which means that sticking an S3-7200 on a Skipper or S3-14400 on a Mainsail is pointless. The KS-25x2 has a slightly higher effective TWR than the quad version, and can more easily use the size 2 tanks. It also acts as a drop-in replacement for any mainsails. The KS-25s clones and KR-2L have a breakeven Isp at 1/3 atm (~5.5 km).

As best I'm aware, orbits in KSP are fixed with respect to the celestial sphere. The various precession effects require n-body, relativistic, etc effects that are not modeled.

-.- The problem isn't that "part x is OP" but that part x does part y's job better than part y. Especially if they're both available on the same tech node (eg: Mainsail / LFB). Having lots of parts with no real value makes the game less interesting. Meanwhile these new parts, for all their performance are weirdly limited. The size 3 tanks have lower mass ratios than the size 1 and 2 ones. (This is a shame, since it would be interesting to put an S3-7200 above a Skipper or an S3-14400 above a Mainsail.) The thrust increase from the Mainsail to the 4xKR-25 is less than from LV-T30 to the Skipper. Or the Skipper to Mainsail. Buffing thrust (with appropriate changes to other stats) would in fact add roles for other engines. As for your example, the 0.16 Mainsail (1200 kN, 7 Mg) was notably worse than the LV-T30. (Same TWR, lower Isp) It was remarkable how many people used it and the first iteration of the BACC, even though those parts did more to make craft big than lift anything. The real balance problem was that the Aeropsike of 0.16 and 0.17 (250 kN, 1 Mg) had top end TWR and Isp. (Though 0.16 was a bit silly balance-wise, given that there were fuel flow and throttle bugs...) The present Mainsail is marginally less efficient than LV-T30/45 clusters in terms of payload fraction, but not by enough to matter.

Updated, but you can calculate TWR directly from ingame / part.cfg stats. Also, I distrust an analysis that seems to lock mass ratios at ~2.

Maybe, but you can still attach rockomax tanks to the engines.

Have a table of SSTO designs: (download file here) Notably: using the new tanks knocks ~10% off of your payload (all other things being equal) due to their inferior mass ratios. The new engines pretty dramatically outperform the old size 2 ones. This is especially silly, as the LFB can be used as a drop-in replacement for the Mainsail, and is available at the same tech node. The LFB has slightly better TWR than the quad RS-25, but that gets lost in the chunky nature of KSP's fuel tanks. More generally, there's the problem that these parts start to make sense "too early" in terms of payloads. Their thrusts are only 1.25 - 2.13x that of the Mainsail, so by the time you're considering using lofting an orange tank, they're the way to go. Compare with the Rockomaxx engines, where the Skipper's thrust is 3.02x that of the LV-T30, and the Mainsail's is 6.78x. Perhaps if they had thrusts of 4000 - 10000 kN (with comparable mass increases), there would still be a role for existing parts. But really, this is just another general symptom of KSP needing another round of balancing, as half the parts obviate the other half. The Poodle has a clear role as an orbital transfer / lander engine but is generally worse at those than the venerable LV-T30. The LV-909 and 24-77 once had clear roles for lower mass craft (especially landers and probes), but those were eaten away by the 48-7S, and all but eliminated with its thrust buff. The surviving utility of the LV-909 is early in the tech tree. The Skipper has always suffered from being outclassed by arrays of LV-T30s (with perhaps the occasional LV-T45), and the Mk 55 only briefly had a clear role. The tricoupler was rendered superfluous back in 0.13, but nonetheless bicouplers and quadcouplers were added. The Mk1 fuselage is worse at storing fuel than any other aircraft tank, or even rocket tank. The Aerospike has been fixed from a reasonable though poorly executed nerf, but remains a hassle to use outside of (surprisingly efficient) launch stages for small payloads. Nosecones are generally better done without. Ditto adapters. The tech tree is the only reason not to use an okto2 over the other probes, and still leaves the RGUs without a reason to exist. A large number of parts (eg: cupola, Mk2 cockpit, TVR-300L, TVR-400L, docking ports, and perhaps SRBs) have rather WTFy drag values. Please note that I am not complaining about these parts making the game "to easy." I am complaining that they are not well integrated into the rest. Buff/nerf, whatever. I'm somewhat concerned that the LV-1 and ion changes are solving the wrong problems, but that's a different issue.

Still using "orange" as the standard unit of heavy payloads and rocket design. Not sure why the size 3 tankage is bulkier and proportionally heavier...

Meters. Also, keep in mind that given the lower masses of Kerbin and Kerbol, impact speeds would usually be significantly lower (~3.5 - 24 km/s) than in real life (~11 - 70 km/s)

They're mostly in the later portions of the the upper branch (as would be expected of rocket parts)

4500 m/s is just a rule of thumb. There's no analytic way to get the required amount when there's an atmosphere in the way, so it's best to use MechJeb's ÃŽâ€V recorder, or setup a numeric approximation. It's worth noting that rockets are more about changing your momentum than your energy. Also, going straight up, then sideways is notably less efficient that 2 sideways burns, even if you have infinite TWR(!) That said, I'm rather confused about the units (shouldn't they be m/s, rather than km/s2?), and how the gravity figure showed up. (If you hit that speed at 0 km without any atmosphere, you'd be on an escape trajectory)

cubic octagonal struts (which despite the VAB listing of .001 tonne are actually massless) are good for clustering the 48-7S. The aerospike actually suffers a great deal from its low TWR, though still makes a high performance lander engine. Tavert's charts may be useful. That said, Isp dropoff is only worth worrying about if you're squeezing every last bit of payload fraction out of a design, or doing an Eve ascent. (see also the infamous "what altitude should I start using the LV-N?" discussions)

The LV-T30 has a higher TWR and Isp than the Skipper, hence the latter being outperformed by a triplet of the former. I'm slightly surprised to see only 2 of them able to launch larger payloads. For SSTOs it's reasonably simple to to generate tankage requirements and max payload for a given engine. 2STOs are slightly harder, but could be split up into a 2300 m/s (in vacuum) upper stage and a 2200 m/s (in 0.5 atm) lower stage.

11-12% is already doable with the 48-7S. I'm currently more interested in the LFB, if perhaps because I read the KR-2L's vacuum Isp as 330 s, rather than 380s. In any case, an LFB + 2 orange tanks (110 tonnes) should be able to loft 21-23 tonnes into LKO (16-17% payload fraction). If you use 3 of those as a 2STO with crossfeed, 80-90 tonnes (19-21%) appears possible. For a full set of 7, I'm less sure, but would expect a minimum of 150 tonnes into orbit.

Have some pics. (from the streams and preview videos. Stats subject to change, but probably not that much) comments: The new tankage only have mass ratios of 8.2, somewhat worse than the 9 of the FL-T and rockomaxx series. The LV-1 and LV-1R are now up at LV-T45/Mk 55 TWR (interesting). The PB-ION uses less electricity, due to the ratio change (looks to be from 120:1 to 18:1 electricity:Xenon). The J-2 clone is a better Mainsail. The LFB appears to have been designed by adding an orange tank worth of fuel to a "normal" engine (stats are somewhat like the quad RS-25 clone), but the effect is equivalent to an orange tank attached to an engine with a TWR of 102(!). Have fun with it.