trekkie_

thats what makes the case for them simply deleting all posts and starting the forums from scratch. the general discussion section has over 100 pages of old posts that are entirely irrelevant to any recent version of KSP, and no one will really ever need them for anything. this makes searching the forums useless because most of those results will be irrelevant data, and just clutters the forums. at this point, no backup is better than such an old backup and I can't believe whoever is in charge of the forums decisions didn't realize that.

really at this point, they might as well have just started the forums from scratch. there's no threads from the backup that would be considered worth saving, and only serves to clutter the forums into the future. people often search older threads for info, but this backup is soooo old, it's worthless to have because all the threads are nowhere near applicable to any recent versions.

and when that happens, people responsible for such blunders as improper backups, get replaced. just sayin'

As you all know, the forums were wiped. Traditionally I gave my mods their own individual threads, but to keep from flooding the forums with multiple threads, I will instead consolidate past and future releases into one single thread. Current thread layout is just a quick access place holder. RoveMate XL v0.2 The stock RoveMate's bigger brother. A general purpose barebones rover platform. To be used as standalone, or built on top of. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/rovemate-xl/ Sweet Seats: The Pilot's Chair An attachable command probe leather chair for your EVA kerbals to sit in. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/the-pilots-chair/ XR-Series Custom Intake Pack A set of 3 detailed high-poly intakes. Includes 2 circular RAM intakes, and 1 radial scoop. http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/xr-1-custom-intake/

I really hate to say it, as I appreciate the work the staff puts in (as do the rest of us mod makers). But, whoever is responsible for such a blunder, even just to do with a simple backup, honestly deserves to be let go, fired, replaced. If KSP had not been available for purchase on steam, such a blunder could have cost squad an undetermined but significant amount of money.

and here I will provide examples to prove you incorrect. both test flights were done following the same exact course. straight up until 10K meters, then a turn that ends at 80K meters for a 100K meter orbit altitude. the only difference is that one was at full thrust the entire time, while another was at 75% thrust after hitting 10K meters. Total delta-v expended: 4438 velocity:2491 gravity losses: 24.5% drag losses: 21.2% steering losses: 2.4% speed gained: 52.3% altitude: 51K meters === Total delta-v expended: 5433 velocity:3300 gravity losses: 21.2% drag losses: 19.1% steering losses: 2.8% speed gained: 57.2% altitude: 76K meters same amount of fuel, different throttles, different heights, different delta-v's. NO fuel bug. what this obviously means is I can reach the same delta-v and velocity using less fuel, which means more fuel to play around with for orbital operations and transfers. as long as you find the right balance of lowering thrust enough to keep velocity rising at a decent rate, you can use less fuel to obtain the same delta-v because you're taking advantage of your kinetic energy provided by previous thrusts and weight loss from fuel consumption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget "Delta-v is a particularly useful measure since it is independent of the mass of the space vehicle. For example, while more thrust, fuel, etc. will be needed to transfer a larger communication satellite from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit, the delta-v required is the same. Also delta-v is additive, as contrasted to rocket burn time" don't quit your day job, NASA will not be looking for you any time soon

mass and drag reduces the higher you go, which means you need less thrust to maintain the same speed or even gain speed. it has nothing to do with a fuel bug, since it is all about thrust. even if I was suffering from the fuel bug (which I'm not) every ship I've designed so far must be suffering from it then, even down to the simplest ones. obviously using less thrust, uses less fuel. it's not that difficult to understand. your premise is even more silly when you consider that the max thrust of a ship's engines may easily surpass delta-v requirements. think of it this way, you have two ships. one with three 200 thrust lv909's, and the same design but with a 1200 thrust lv909 instead. throttling that 1200 thrust down to half, produces the same thrust as the other craft while saving fuel you would have otherwise expended very quickly in full throttle. so full thrust isn't exactly a requirement. reaching a certain speed more quickly is not necessarily as efficient. if I'm going 1000m/s and reducing my thrust just enough for speed to keep rising at a decent rate, I will always have forward momentum. I can even allow that speed to drop for more fuel savings by throttling back further. the speed may drop by a couple m/s at most, but you're not losing enough speed to for instance, lose more than ~200 m/s over 50 seconds but by then you would have covered just below 50K meters. by the time you reach near orbit altitude, if you get close to falling backwards you can thrust much more effectively because you don't have the drag of atmosphere and you are much lighter, even with fuel savings. your speed will rise much quicker for the same given thrust. even in space, mass plays a big role in how much fuel it takes to make a ship go a certain speed in a given time frame over a given distance. so the fuel required to reach a certain delta-v, may be different depending on the mass and drag on the ship. this is why fuel, mass, and delta-v are separate. delta-v is just how fast an object needs to be going, it's not an indicator of how much fuel a given vessel needs to use to gain that speed. lowering thrust does not necessarily mean a speed drop, nor a large enough one to matter.

"while more thrust, fuel, etc. will be needed to transfer a larger communication satellite from low Earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit, the delta-v required is the same. " see while delta-v is the same, there is obviously lee weigh in the amount of thrust and fuel required. which means you can most certainly save on fuel by throttling, especially when you weigh less than initial takeoff and other things like drag of the atmosphere reduces the higher you go. delta-v is the speed you need to obtain to do things like gain orbit, it is not dependent on the ships mass or fuel mass nor amount used...how efficiently you gain that speed means you can vary the amount of fuel used. you can't call it a fuel bug when it's about throttling efficiency. I think you're on a completely different page here. I'm talking about the entire lift off from on the ground to orbit altitude, to going into orbit. you can save fuel by throttling during ascent. the delta-v may be the same for a maneuver, but the amount of fuel and throttle required can vary based on time and distance, with quite a bit in savings being possible. in essence, going 2000m/s by the time you reach your target means more fuel used than going 1000m/s instead. we can afford to lose forward momentum for a lower throttle netting us fuel savings.

I'd have to say that it does save fuel, without being affected by the bug. ascent eats most of the fuel, especially early ascent. once you're in space/orbit you don't have to worry about drag or heavy gravity. the reason why it works well is because it's time vs thrust. you can go farther using less throttle as long as you're not losing speed, but of course you have to go at a decent speed to begin with so full thrust for a time in the beginning is obviously beneficial to gain momentum since this is when you are heaviest and more affected by drag. also the faster you are going once you reach orbit, the more power it takes to align into orbit. it's not as simple as half throttle, half gas consumption, half as far. max throttle may produce more speed, but more speed/thrust is not always more efficient. the higher you get and the lighter you get from fuel consumption, the less thrust that is needed to maintain the same speed or speed increase rate, which can allow you to throttle back quite a bit. for example, if you're going 1000m/s at 50K meters and throttle back enough to keep that rate or that rate with slow growth (which might only need 1/10th the throttle), it will take you around 50 seconds or a little less to get to 100K meters. but if you keep it at full thrust, you might only end up with ~3000m/s by the time you reach orbit, which will get you there quicker (maybe 20 seconds quicker), but consume much more fuel. 1/10th throttle while only taking twice the time is obviously a beneficial trade off. now you might not save 10 times the TOTAL fuel because most fuel is expended early launch (such as 50-20K meters and below), but you can end up with quite a bit more left over once you reach orbit than you would have otherwise. in many larger vessels, this can mean the difference between having no fuel once you reach orbit altitude, or only having enough fuel to align into orbit and go nowhere else. even a little throttling back can mean the difference between having just enough fuel left for getting into orbit or transferring to mun/minimus.

I think mechjeb should be built into the game. when I first got the game, I manually traveled to and landed on everything I could, eventually. but now....it's more trouble than it's worth, especially since the controls aren't all that precise in a game where you tap directional keys. pretty much all things that go into orbit in the real world have an autopilot. after you do it, and know you can if you wanted....the challenge isn't there anymore. mechjeb allows you to not waste hours on a simple mistake, and allows you to try out different ship designs and see if they have what it takes to be successful. with mechjebs auto throttle, you know that if a ship can do it using auto pilot, then there's plenty of room for error and fuel left over if you did it manually. anyone can strap some fuel tanks to a rocket and blast it off, but not everyone can create an elegant ship that combines form and function. so for me the game has shifted to creating new cool ships rather than tediously navigating it manually. ask any astronaut whether they'd like to manually control the ship or use autopilot, and all of them will say auto pilot because manually piloting a real ship is tedious while having your life in your hands. in fact, it's virtually impossible for astronauts to manually pilot every aspect of a space craft in the real world.....even the apollo landing used computers. granted they still have to use inputs....but it's not like they had a joystick controlling the whole thing. even then, computers would be programmed in newer space craft to keep a pilot from doing specific maneuvers at specific speeds, etc. the gforces could rip a ship apart or damage it enough to kill everyone on board. so even when an astronaut is allowed to manually control the vessel, most of that control is limited to what the software will allow, while at the same time it's activating a dozen systems to do what it thinks the pilot wants it to do.

I'd say there's definitely a fuel bug going on with Caroliano's ship. you lost little more than 50% weight getting to orbit....and with ships in the 800+ ton range, lose over 3/4th of their weight getting to orbit altitude alone, then there's circularizing, then thrusting to minimus, then circularizing orbit around that too. with ships that large, by the time you get to mimimus orbit you should have about 1/7th the weight of launch. nhnifong, one of the best ways to reduce lag is to make the ship as stable as possible, i.e. not wobbling. that kills FPS tremendously. I had a huge 950 ton ship that got me about 1 frame a second or less. it had a spot between two large fuel tanks that had some SAS and RCS connecting the gap, with some strings attached between the gap for stability.....but it still allowed the ship to wobble ever so slightly. I removed that section altogether and my FPS went back up to a reasonable rate. the FPS drop was probably because when the ship wobbles, it has to calculate the wobbles of everything attached to the ship and probably collision and structural integrity checks as well across the entire ship. couple all that with the fact that the game is single threaded (only uses one CPU) it has to do every series of calculations one at a time, then display the final result. the game code definitely isn't efficient. And without further ado I present to you not just a ship, but a piece of art..... The Urchin Class Communication Hub able to handle the communication needs of an entire solar system thanks to its plentiful omni-directional transceivers. all stock parts. it's not breaking any records, but it's good enough to steal 6th place hehe. took me FOREVER to get this thing balanced enough to do it. should actually get me first place since my weight is mostly dry weight...only about 2 tons of fuel left could of probably had more weight to orbit if I had focused on a ship with just engines and fuel, but that's pretty bland design wise.

all stock parts, no jet engines or aerospike.

it's also important to note that slower fuel burning engines like the aerospike, won't necessarily get distance. in some configurations the higher thrust engines will get you further because of the extra speed they allow for early on. by my calculations you have to be going at least 1500-2000m/s once you reach 100K meters in order for the 20 thrust lv909 engines as a last stage, to not fall back to the planet at some point, and to go the distance. otherwise you will lose too much speed from the lack of thrust.

not counting jet engines (which aren't even counted anymore anyways), yeah thats pretty far. how high were you when you got down to the last stage?

which would bring me back to my original point....they provide what....160 thrust or so, for 4.0 weight and 1.6 drag. on top of the extra weight and drag from the extra decouplers. that honestly does not negate the 0.8 weight incurred by the empty tanks, even taking into account their low fuel usage. this is more apparent considering it didn't break any altitude nor speed records, so in comparison it's fair to say it's not worth it when going the distance nor for speed. don't take offense to the facts people.

a) honestly, you don't get further (nor faster) with it. maybe further than other less efficient designs you've tried, sure. weigh little or not, over tens of thousands of meters, they do make a difference in distance and speed. I've had just 2 decouplers make as much as a 200K meter difference in a 1000KM journey. even if you are jettisoning them in order from outer to inner, you're still forcing them to carry the extra weight of the inner engines which are dead weight until they're activated. basically think about how many of those 20 thrusts you have activated at once, and figure out a way to keep only those while jettisoning just the tanks. that way you're not carrying the extra weight of engines when you already have other engines providing the same thrust, only to throw them away, while still carrying their weight and drag twice fold in previous stages....get it? "In this thread you appear to be taking great pleasure in tearing down other peoples submissions for no good reason (e.g. calling somebody a liar and a cheater for having a flight time 16 seconds too long). If this is all you are going to do, I would appreciate it if you would stay out of this thread. " actually, I'm giving honest and fair tips. I'm not saying "you suck!", I'm saying "you can do better!" in a positive way. as for the lying/cheating......that was a legitimate gripe. it wasn't just about the flight being clearly longer than the available fuel burn time, it was also about the distance that flight achieved in that time frame, and the use of parts that were explicitly disallowed in the rules which allowed completely different ship configurations that wouldn't have been an option otherwise.

three words: basic jet engine. using them (and only them), as the first stage, stretches the distance a ship can travel on an escape trajectory by at least 2-4 times if you use them to launch you up the first several thousand meters, and decouple them. then activate your primary rocket engines/stages and be on your merry way with tons of fuel savings. but wait there's more. if you make your first stage a basic jet engine, and the second stage turbo jet engines to be decoupled when you reach its maximum usable height, with your remaining stages being rockets (especially low-medium thrust ones), you have the potential to increase your crafts space traveling distance even more!! but wait there's even MOAR!! instead of making your third stage rockets, make the third stage solid boosters only, then the 4th stage you can fire off your rockets. this means a craft you normally would take off with at the launch pad, doesn't have to fire its rocket engines until you're tens of thousands of meters off the ground! I don't think I need to emphasize anymore about how much this method massively increases your traveling distance while immensely conserves on fuel. use all three of these tips in conjunction and you can take small or even big heavy ships to distant planets with ease.

broke the (my) old altitude record (the legitimate one that followed the rules) by just a smidgeon with a wacky, inefficient but sneaky design... now here's the trick, the basic jet engines use very little fuel but provide a lot of thrust, even with 6 of them and the extra weight such as the nacelles and the ram air intakes. anyways, with these mounted, they will bring you to around 6-7K meters before they stall out, because that's too high for them to operate enough to give you forward momentum (much more efficient than the aerospike except it doesn't operate in all altitudes). so once I reach that height, I jettison them. the pay off is using very little initial fuel to steal several thousand meters while also getting a free ~65m/s at the same time. this is essentially like taking off at several thousand meters instead of on the launchpad, for the cost of less than a quarter tank. using this method should be able to benefit every other submissions performance by a large margin. since the design was woefully inefficient, I expect to be able to break this distance record too. but it did get MUCH farther than it would have on its own. I forget what the distance was of the rocket without the basic jet engines, but I'd say it got anywhere from 2-5 times as far, definitely 2x at the very least. EDIT: yep, broke it again....by a lot, with my original altitude record holding design. virtually doubled the distance, thanks to the basic jet engine. these things are soo efficient I don't think I'll ever launch a ship again without adding them into the mix for the initial launch stage, they save a tremendous amount of fuel. EDIT2: BEHOLD my mighty efficiency! this is one for the record books. might not be a rocket, but that's pretty dang far!

I built one very similar to that one, the 20 thrust lv909's aren't worth it due to their weight and lack of thrust, even when you're able to decouple the tanks. in fact, the extra decouplers add drag and weigh you down too. think about it, you have a whole bunch of engines with 1 tank each that will all run out at the same time. which means you're going to have to decouple them all at the same time anyways, so multiple decouplings are useless. also, there is no reason to share fuel between them if they both have a single tank each and the same engines....they'll still burn fuel at the same rate...and the fuel lines add even more weight and drag. those 20 thrust engines weigh more than a 1200 thrust lv909 combined and only produce 160 thrust combined while incurring 8 mass extra weight. basically they produce less thrust than your main engine and weigh much more, which negates their slow fuel usage. and you're burning them at take off which is when you need either the most thrust and more fuel for the higher thrust engines to get momentum going. if you rework your design a bit I'm sure you could push it further. the best design is that which decouples tanks as they're used up, one at a time, otherwise you're carrying all that extra weight with you. for example, if you took all of the outer 20 thrust engines off, and connected them via fuel line to your main engine; then stage them to where the engine feeds off of them one at a time (and the tank it's connected to for last) while also staging to decouple them as they're used up, you'll lose a lot of weight and drag. also, so far on your final stage with the center 20 thrust engine, it's best to give those at least 2 full fuel tanks to themselves if you're trying to go for distance.

I tried both configurations, one with the 2 side engines burning first, and another with all engines burning from the start....the latter actually got the 916K meter distance, the former got only 760K meters or so. like I said before, no matter what his configuration couldn't have gotten him as far as he stated. that's why I said he either used boosters or coasted or both. either way he couldn't have possibly reached his stated distance no matter what with the ship he showed.

NOOOOO!!...... I shall rename it from the munpire state building to the leaning tower of mun and pretend it never fell over.

it's important to note all the ships with ~20+ fuel tanks height are either using mods to launch from orbit, or the fuel bug to save on fuel, because I've probably done 50 runs with similar designs, and even if you can get into orbit and circularize, you basically run out of fuel a few seconds into transferring to mun (best case scenario!)....that's about as far as you can possibly get no matter how well planned every stage is, and no matter what types of engines you use or how efficiently you use them. under stock circumstances without using mods or bugs, it's pretty much impossible to have enough fuel to get to mun let alone circularize orbit around it or land on it with ships of that size. the main reason being that you have to carry all that extra weight the entire time, where normally you would just jettison empty tanks. plus you would need massive amounts of fuel to slow down something that large and heavy without exploding from the impact speed. sure they're tall....and they're on mun, but that's not really the accomplishment.....the real accomplishment is taking off without any fuel bugs/mods, getting to mun, and landing....which is only something you can do with a much smaller craft else you will run out of fuel no matter what your design is.

you obviously don't understand the implications. 1. drag doesn't affect distance or speed all that much, especially only 0.2 extra of it. drag is meaningless in a vacuum, and even further, at a 100,000,000m journey, only 10% of of the total flight distance suffers any of that miniscule 0.2 lag anyways. however, the extra configuration options from using 2 half tanks changes everything alot. it allows him to add 2 side engines in a first stage without having to take any fuel from the second stage. the second stage using the 20 thrust power lv909 engine heavily depends on 2 full tanks to reach distances. it consumes fuel very slowly, but goes very far when on an escape trajectory. 2. this is all meaningless since I've already proven he couldn't have possibly gotten that as far as he did with his design, without cheating. he only has enough fuel to burn at full throttle for 14 minutes and 56 seconds, taking into consideration all of his engine types. his flight time was 15 minutes and 12 seconds. this is a discrepancy that outright proves he wasn't burning his engines at all for 16 seconds at some point in the flight. that's 16 extra seconds he shouldn't have, on top of two half tanks he shouldn't have, which drastically alters the results he would have had if he followed the rules. as I said before, the math doesn't lie.

perhaps you didn't pay attention. the point is by having 2 half tanks, he was able to add an extra engine and have weight balance.....had he used the regular full tanks, he would have to of taken an entire fuel tank from the center mass in order to add 2 extra engines....or make due with less engines/another design. the point of using 10 of the same fuel tanks is not only being limited by fuel....but also being limited in how you can design your rocket and what stages get X amount of fuel, how the weight is balanced, etc. for example, to add 2 side engines with 2 full size fuel tanks to attach them to, he would of for example, had to of taken a full tank off of the 20 thrust lv909, which would have severely limited his distance later on in the launch. (if we didn't follow strict rules, we could just use any tank as long as it came up to the equivalent amount of fuel, which would give a severely mixed bag of results) after all it's called the 10 tank challenge, not the 9 normal tank and 2 half tank challenge. not to mention I timed the amount of the time it would take to burn through all of his fuel at full throttle the entire flight with immediate decoupling.....which took about 14:56 ......however he ran out of fuel at 15:12, which is a HUGE discrepancy. so either he cheated by using a different design than he showed, or an extra booster, or didn't decouple/coasted for well over 16 seconds at some point, which is unacceptable. either way he didn't follow the rules in multiple instances. what's the point of participating in a challenge if you're not going to follow the rules of it?! so in conclusion he broke at least 2 rules: 1) he didn't use the right tanks, which allowed him to use a design that he otherwise couldn't without taking fuel from other stages 2) he coasted with engines off for at least 16 seconds! (or throttled below maximum thrust) I'm guessing he coasted when he decoupled the first stage. 16 seconds of coasting before activating a second stage is obviously unacceptable. his speed is also FAR more than it should be, so he could have used some solid fuel boosters too, or it's a result of his coasting. either way, his flight time is well above the time it would take to burn through all the fuel with his design in the allotted time. the math simply doesn't lie.

perhaps you didn't pay attention. the point is by having 2 half tanks, he was able to add an extra engine and have weight balance.....had he used the regular full tanks, he would have to of taken an entire fuel tank from the center mass in order to add 2 extra engines. the point of using 10 of the same fuel tanks is not only being limited by fuel....but also being limited in how you can design your rocket and what stages get X amount of fuel, how the weight is balanced, etc. for example, to add 2 side engines with 2 full size fuel tanks to attach them to, he would of for example, had to of taken a full tank off of the 20 thrust lv909, which would have severely limited his distance later on in the launch. (if we didn't follow strict rules, we could just use any tank as long as it came up to the equivalent amount of fuel, which would give a severely mixed bag of results) after all it's called the 10 tank challenge, not the 9 normal tank and 2 half tank challenge. not to mention I timed the amount of the time it would take to burn through all of his fuel at full throttle the entire flight with immediate decoupling.....which took about 14:56 ......however he ran out of fuel at 15:12, which is a HUGE discrepancy. so either he cheated by using a different design than he showed, or an extra booster, or didn't decouple/coasted for well over 16 seconds at some point, which is unacceptable. either way he didn't follow the rules in multiple instances. what's the point of participating in a challenge if you're not going to follow the rules of it?!