Tiron

Electricty, Monopropellant, and Xenon are all shared automatically throughout a craft without any infrastructure, and when you dock it turns into one giant craft. One of the side effects of this is that it doesn't bother running these resources through the fuel flow logic, and as such when you use one of them, all storage for that resource is drawn upon equally (except any that are empty, obviously). Liquidfuel and Oxidizer on the other hand, follow a defined flow path. Docking ports are supposed to be able to do fuel crossflow through them (which you can disable on their right click menu), but I've never really tried to use it. In my experience crossflow is a little...erratic at the best of times. But any resource you really want filled on a particular part you can do transfers as stated earlier, including the three auto-flow ones. Batteries will fill automatically if there's excess power production, so that's usually not a concern.

Well I don't know about anyone else, but I started looking at it (again) because my stock rover's having so much trouble with the suspension's weird interactions with the terrain that it's almost unusable. The first few times I looked at Multiwheels, I was more interested in complete rovers than parts to build one with, but with all the new stuff that's been added (Girders and trusses, external seats, wheels) I've taken to trying to build my own. And not having much success, so I'm kinda praying that a mod implementation might work better. The new landing gear look fantastic, but so far I've had two main problems with the car wheels: There's no fourpack of Electric motors, and the car wheels have a LOT lower ground clearance than the stock wheels(Good for handling, I know). My first test drive took out the electric motors and the RTGs (It was a nuclear powered stock rover) on the bottom of the rover trying to go over the runway. A third problem I found was that the engines don't seem to list their resource consumption, other than intakeair if they use it(I presume the ones that need air are Liquidfuel powered?) Edit: Oh yeah, and the controls are reversed for some reason I've yet to figure out... Edit2: Fixed the controls(apparently it was tied to the orientation of the girder that is my root part)...and discovered a slightly exploit-y thing while I was at it. Resource consumption is DRAMATICALLY reduced in reverse, but the speed isn't particularly. I had a straight six of electric motors running off a single RTG, doing 50 m/s over the terrain (before going into a skid and ending up rolling it for massive damage). I was somewhat interested to discover that the suspension system on the car wheels at least has the exact same problem with the terrain that the stock wheels have. It'll sometimes go clear to full extension and go all unstable. Except the fact that your wheels skid seems to alleviate it somewhat, at least on a flat. I've yet to get up into the mountains and test it, as I'm still playing with things and working on trying to convert it, but so far a 3-motor setup seems to provide slightly better performance on the same power resources (without using the reverse exploit anyway). I'll be interested to see what happens up in the mountains, where I've had SO much trouble with the stock wheels it isn't funny. That said, I love some of the landing gear options so much I'll probably keep the multiwheels pack just for them, even if the rover wheels don't work out. Edit3: Nevermind my complaining about electric motors lacking a fourpack, btw. With the 'resource consumption hugely lower in reverse' thing, it made using more than a couple seem easy. Which it's not, when going forwards.

I've seen mods with parts that were overpowered compared to stock. I've seen mods with parts that were underpowered compared to stock. I've seen mods that had both in the same parts pack! But then you consider that there are stock parts that are overpowered compared to other stock parts. The AV-T1 hasn't been useful for a very long time: It's heavy compared to the other winglets, has no control forces, and doesn't produce as much lift as other winglets. The AV-R8 similarly has been largely superceded by the canards and the Delta Deluxe winglets (Canards for Control force strength, Delta Deluxe for light weight controllability). The new Stratus-V Cylindrified monoprop tank holds half again as much monopropellant as the FL-R25 but has the same dry weight. A friend of mine once pointed out that some of this will probably have other factors balancing it in career mode, like availability and price. That being the case among stock parts, if you don't personally feel it's cheating, does it really matter if someone else does? Lots of people think Mechjeb's autopilots are 'cheating', but an equally large number of people think they're an indispensable way to alleviate boring repetition, increase precision, etc. Nobody's forcing you to use or not use any of it, so do what you're comfortable with. And if you do think something's overpowered? You could always edit the part.cfg file to alter the parameters yourself. Personally, I can't quite bring myself to use B9 aerospace, not because I think it's cheating or anything... but because there's no decouplers included that fit the new cockpits he's added. I like to include escape mechanisms for the crew on my craft. On rockets, sometimes only untested designs, but for spaceplanes all of them. For a spaceplane this takes the form of a 'cockpit ejection system', which uses a decoupler to get the cockpit(s) off the craft, and parachutes to bring it safely to ground. Can't do that with B9's new cockpits, because there's no decouplers for any of his new (or not so new, in the case of the Mk2 stuff) form factors.

Fixed rover suspension system. Actually, I'd like to see that a lot sooner, but I'll settle for 0.22

Yeah but I thought it was some kind of online-only thing...thus the thread.

More like 10 times, but yes. I knew the parts we have aren't as good as real ones, because it's so much easier to get to space given the planet (and particularly its atmosphere) are so much smaller, but the magnitude of just how much this was the case hadn't really hit me till then.

The 'terrain instability' problems seem to be worse to me, at least up in the mountains. There seem to be both more 'bad' sections of terrain and I swear they seem larger. I can't recall ever getting stuck on one in 0.20 or earlier, but it's happened in 0.21. the available thrust on the 'bad' segments is so low that if you'll end up clear down at 1.25 m/s if you get stuck on one, at least with my design. I actually think there's two different kinds of bad terrain segments, negative and positive, depending on if the suspension thinks the terrain is higher or lower than it appears to be. You'll see certain segments where the suspension jacks all the way down and stays there, or jacks all the way up and stays there, regardless of anything else, and these are the 'bad' ones I'm talking about. I'll call the ones that push the suspension all the way down 'Positive' (because to do that without a bug, you'd have to have substantial positive G forces on the craft), and the ones where it jacks all the way up 'Negative'. The Positive ones don't cause any problems: It pushes the suspension all the way down, so you've got no flex left...which doesn't really matter. I used to drive a no-suspension Bigtrak around on the mun all the time, with no issues (didn't hurt that it was completely immune to impact damage, as it turned out, but all of my crashes were caused by the fact I was cruising at 80 m/s and catching massive air off every tiny rise, not by it being unstable). So it drives just fine on the 'Positive' segments. On the 'Negative' segments, it's like the suspension is actually trying to lift the craft off the ground and failing to do so. It looks and acts much like there's something clamped to the rover, holding it up so that the wheels barely touch the ground, except it also makes the steering highly erratic. From what I've seen, it doesn't seem so much like the rovers are more unstable as that there's more, and larger, bad terrain segments of BOTH types that came out of the new terrain generator. From what I've been told in the past, it has something to do with 'imprecision' in the terrain mesh, or something, that fools the suspension and makes it act stupidly. I reckon you could cure that by just...well, disabling the suspension. I'm not sure though, because my attempts to do so through the .cfg file have all failed. It seems like the suspension system is so tightly integrated into making the wheels work at all that you can't strip it out and have them still work, or at least I couldn't figure out how to.

Time for a KAS Magnetocrane rover I think.

No, you'd have to hack persistent.sfs to do that, and you don't need to, because unless you've already hacked it to turn permadeath on they'll go back on the active list on their own after awhile.

The 'Complexity' of the SSME is because it's old, more than likely. You have to remember, the whole space shuttle 'system' was designed in the late 70s, and while it got a number of substantial upgrades in the meantime (glass cockpits, etc), they were still using some very old tech right up until the end. Like 386DX processors. That old tech wasn't particularly compact, making things rather larger than their modern equivalents. The other thing there is radiation: Once you're outside the ionosphere, the radiation levels jack up tremendously, especially if you go anywhere near the van allen belts, and this will screw up electronics if they're not shielding (flipping bits, etc). One of the reasons they kept using older tech for so long was that they understood how it responded to radiation very well and could deal with it better. But they still needed shielding, which bulks things up quite a bit. The final thing to remember is that the SSMEs were particularly complicated and expensive compared to most rocket engines, because they were designed to be reusable. This entails a lot of extra complexity that you don't run into with 'disposable' engines, which also drives the price up. A better comparison for a non-reusable rocket would be the J-2X, which makes all the KSP engines look sad and pathetic. Vacuum Thrust: 1,307 kN (294,000 lbf), Dry weight 5,450 pounds (2,470 kg). Isp (vac.) 448 seconds. Can't find the unit cost, unfortunately, but it ought to be a fair bit lower than a SSME. What makes me sad though is that when you look at those numbers... It's putting out almost as much thrust as a Mainsail, but weighs a bit LESS than a poodle. And better vacuum efficiency than a LV-909. Whimper.

There's no way to independently throttle the engines at present. Except for SRBs, which very realistically go at full throttle from activation until they run out of fuel. Jets on rockets, when you're not just flying a rocket like a spaceplane, seem to work best when used as boosters on designs that are going for extreme Delta-V efficiency. Otherwise you're probably better off with a spaceplane or a regular ol' rocket.

It's actually in Persistent.sfs , the only option listed in the "Difficulty Options" or somesuch section. I think it's labeled something like 'Enable Lost Crew Respawn' or something.

As someone pointed out, expense. Jet engines are much more complicated and expensive than a rocket engine, and you can't really cheapen it up much to make it single use (like you can with a rocket). This pretty much limits jets to reusable designs, and there HAVE been several proposals along these lines. The trick being you need some kind of rocket to finish your ascent, and carrying two sets of engines, one of which is ALWAYS going to be dead weight, sharply increases the empty weight of your craft. Keep in mind that while Earth has the same gravity and sealevel pressure as Kerbin, Earth is MUCH larger and its atmosphere extends MUCH further out. Orbital Velocity at 200km (still well inside the atmosphere, although it's so thin that it doesn't matter much short term) for Earth is about 7.8 KM/s, over THREE TIMES the Orbital Velocity at 70km for Kerbin (which is outside the atmosphere and therefore equivalent to a MUCH higher Earth Orbit). For a real world SSTO, you need to have around 90% of your launch mass as fuel. It's extremely tricky to build a craft that has that and can carry any significant payload. Adding Airbreathing engines you can use partway up reduces the amount of oxidizer you need to carry (-weight), which could improve it...except then you have dead weight engines sitting there all the time. Unless someone comes up with some kind of hybrid jet/rocket engine (they're working on it), but even then, one of the biggest things that jacks up weight on jet engines is the intake ducting (one of the reasons airliners have theirs in nacelles). So there's a lot of debate and question about if having air-breathing engines partway up could increase the payload fraction or not. Nobody's tried it yet because, well, frankly an all-rocket approach is easier to design.

Not as many as you'd think: The trick is that I'm using Turbofans rather than Turbojets. They develop a LOT more thrust at low altitudes (12 turbojets can barely get it off the ground), and I found in early testing (with an admittedly slightly different flight profile) that flying a rocket flight profile rather than a spaceplane profile, it never got enough speed built up to really get the Turbojets to develop more thrust than the Turbofans, even at altitude. Turbojets have a MAJOR speed factor in their thrust determination, so on a relatively low TWR lifter like this one, they actually don't work as well as Turbofans do. The fact the Turbofans are more efficient doesn't hurt, but it's mostly a bonus. Didn't take it to orbit, because I had my flight path set for a higher TWR rocket, and this one didn't like it. Didn't make it crash but it did waste a lot of fuel before I figured it out, and I'm about to go to bed, so I'll launch one to orbit later. I'm actually debating mentally if I could improve the efficiency a bit with some changes(mainly engine changes), but it'd take a LOT of testing to work it out. Edit: Also, try not to use any intakes except the ram intakes, but especially not the radials or double-especially the engine nacelles. They all have intakeair quantities and drag determined by the size of the intake, except that there's a cap on how high the drag will rise...and the cap's the same on all the different types of intakes. They all max out at '2'. Not sure if that's the drag coefficient or what(If it is, the Nacelle and the Radial are both far heavier as well, so that'd be EVEN WORSE!) Anyway, what happens is once you get some speed up, all the intakes end up with the drag capped, and yet they all produce less intakeair than the ram intakes. The radials don't produce much, and the engine nacelles barely produce any at all, and yet end up with massive drag anyway.

Agreedo. I totally book marked that thing. That's awesome. You should edit the first post to say 'answered, too

Note that by default, 'killed' Kerbals will become available again after an Unknown period of time. There's a setting in the persistence file that allows you to enable permadeath, but you have to turn it on manually.

I'll try to remember to check in, I'd love to find out another mod that can do that, but I've never so much as heard of one. There's at least one other thing out there that can provide the same Information Mechjeb does for most things, except that. So far as I know it's unique in the 're-entry simulation' department. If you want to do it manually, the thing you have to remember is that the atmospheric drag is going to make you land short of (But in line with) where the initial orbital estimate shows it at. The thing to remember there is that the atmospheric density increases exponentially as you descend. Laythe's atmosphere is aproximately 80% as thick as Kerbin's at Sea Level, and has a lower scale height, so it's going to be even more bottom-loaded than Kerbin is. The gravity is lower too, though, by a similar factor, and I'm not sure what that's going to do to the final Descent speed. There'll be less drag, but also less gravity. But the key thing is, you'll lose most of your speed when you hit the lower atmosphere, so for precision you want to avoid having a shallow trajectory coming in, or you'll lose so much speed to drag that you'll end up WAY short of where it originally said you'd land. Coming in fairly steep might help. Less horizontal velocity to lose in the first place would reduce the deviation from the initial predictions. It also means a lot more G-Forces though, as you'll descend more quickly and thus the drag will ramp up faster without much change to lose speed to it. I'm not very good at targeting an area manually myself so...take my BSing with a big grain of salt.

Actually the link DOES work, the spaceport page for that one is broken, probably why it doesn't come up in search. If you click the link (the only thing on the page, basically) you get a direct download of the working version of the docking strut. And yes, it still works in 0.21, amazingly enough.

You need to accurately predict the effect of the atmosphere on where you'll end up. Mechjeb's landing module can do that (even for manual landings), and I think I saw a posting in addons the other day where a guy posted a calculator for aerobraking or something? Maybe it does landings too. Forget what it's called, because I've been using Mechjeb's landing and aerobraking prediction for so long I didn't look that closely at it. Sorry. :| Edit: Okay, it's an out-of-game calculator for aerobraking only. That leaves you with only Mechjeb that can accurately predict landing sites through atmosphere, so far as I'm aware.

They threw in a conversion tool to help a bit, but did mention it wouldn't be perfect. That said, I always used to have problems with Kerbals that were assigned to missions not always getting flagged that Way. I'd have Bill up on my station, and go to launch the next part of it...and he shows up in the pod on the lifter! Cancel the flight, go out the tracking station and switch the station, yep, he's on the station. Restart the flight, he's in the lifter, again. I flew him up a second time in this situation once and things got a little odd until I EVA'd him to the part he was in from the prior launch. At any rate, I'd say a reasonable possibility is that the kerbals in question weren't properly flagged as assigned in the first place, and the update's conversion process 'fixed' it, removing the phantom assignment entirely in the process.

...I forgot to mention that, yeah. I assume it can't calculate their Delta-V because their thrust and efficiency vary with speed as well as altitude, which it can't predict.

Not entirely: Due to imprecisions in the terrain, or somesuch, there are sections of terrain that will make your rover bobble about like crazy, and generally act like it's barely touching the ground at all. This makes it very hard to design a stable rover, because when you hit one of these, it bounces all over the place and steers more or less randomly, and becomes very prone to flipping over entirely.

Higher Weight = Lower Delta-V, means you have to burn more fuel to accomplish a given maneuver, which means less ability to maneuver with a given quantity of fuel, which means fewer places you can go. On a rocket you can minimize the problem of asymmetric flameouts pretty easily. They're so heavy they don't turn much anyway, so with Mechjeb's slightly inept 'prevent flameouts', an action group to cut some of the engines, and a little attentiveness, and it's not much of an issue. That particular design is my mapping probe, so it was designed to maximize Delta-V at literally any cost. Almost the entire thing is either fuel or engines. The whole point is to be able to map as many places as possible with a single probe, since you can only map with the focused craft, having multiple up at once doesn't help much (though you can do other stuff while you transit). I'm praying it's got enough Delta-V for a single probe to do the Entire Jool System, but I'm not counting on it, and keep getting my saves broken before I can find out.

I have one rocket that uses jet engines as liquid boosters. It flies a standard rocket trajectory, but doesn't even use the main rocket engines until I start the gravity turn at 10,000m. There's twelve engines with twelve intakes and 2 mk1 fuselages for fuel. I start cutting the engines off four at a time as it starts to run out of intakeair around 20km, and cut them all lose shortly thereafter when the last four can't get enough air. For all 12 engines there's only four decouplers, and only two fuel tanks, so the total weight it adds is amazingly low considering. Takes a little more work to manage but it's not particularly any longer than a normal rocket launch and adds a LOT of Delta-V. Edit: I'll put it this way. Without the jet Engines, Mechjeb says it has a total of 17999 m/s worth of Vacuum Delta-V. I currently have one of the probes it launches up, it's in a 80,978 KM orbit around Kerbin at the moment after having fully mapped Kerbin, the Mun, and Minmus, with 9727 m/s Vacuum Delta-V Remaining, awaiting a Transfer window to Duna.

I've only done SSTO Spaceplanes, and gave up on landing on the Mun with it. It had enough fuel to GET there, but it'd always run out a bit above the ground and end up either scattered across the landscape or with SOME breakage. Also, landing a spaceplane on the Mun is Hard even without that: They're designed, generally, to land horizontally...which you can't really do on the Mun. So you either have to put landing legs on the back of it, or land on your nozzles and try to flop it onto the wheels. It's hard. For a spaceplane it's much easier to go to Duna: Basically the same Delta-V to get there, you can aerobrake, and land horizontally. For a rocket SSTO it's probably easier to go to the Mun. Duna's atmosphere is so thin parachutes don't cut it, and the Mun's lower gravity makes it easier to land without them.