Eric S

Even when I play with Kethane, Kethane itself isn't "fun." I had a moment of fun the first time I started filling a kethane tank and then again the first time I started converting it, but other than that, Kethane has always been a means to an end, not something fun in and of itself. If the devs can find a way to enable those same ends without the tedium that Kethane brings, then I'm all for it. If they don't, then we've got a mod to enable them. And yes, the original chart was interesting in its detail, but that detail really just mostly teased my OCD, it didn't actually look that much more fun than Kethane.

Agreed. While I do like occasionally playing as realistic as possible, it's not something I do consistently because while there are some different and interesting challenges, it isn't inherently fun to me. True, and to make matters worse, it also varies depending on how immersed the person is in the setting. For example, you mention reentry heat. Kerbin reeentry velocities are half to a third that of Earth reentries, so it's not going to be as big an issue if they keep it realistic, where what we believe (based on what we actually see in Earth-based reentries) would actually be less realistic. Even as a supporter of asparagus staging, when you get more than one level deep, it starts feeling odd, and yes, the wider than tall pancakes just look wrong, even to me. I'm not sure better aerodynamics is the solution (even with FAR installed, I've done things that shouldn't be able to fly). Correct, patched conics are accurate enough for mission-duration time frames unless you're spending a lot of time at low relative velocity out away from planets. The Apollo missions were planned out using patched conics, not N-body physics, and there were no big surprises, but they didn't dilly dally out in the area near where we would consider the SoI transition between the Moon and Earth, which is where N-body physics would differ the most. This is probably the strongest point. Yes, I play with RT2 more often than not. It makes early probe-based missions a serious pain since we can only control the probe from one place and we don't have the level of automation that even early space missions had. Even later missions can cause me to spend more time setting up communications than doing the mission the communications are supposed to support, if I don't already have a network covering the area of operations. Just having range limits on communications would introduce too many problems, in my opinion, you really need the ability to relay, otherwise your probe landers need the big dishes even during decent, rather than leaving something in orbit to relay between KSC and the lander. That would be easy enough if you don't have to worry about LoS. With LoS (RT2 as is now), doing that involves either specific timing or having multiple satellites instead of just the "orbiter." Realism vs believability vs fun, not an easy balancing act. I trust Squad to find a decent balance for most players, with mods covering those players that don't find the stock balance good enough. I have no delusions that there is any one balance that can satisfy all players. The only measurements of value on any of the balance points that matter about the stock game would be how the balance matches Squad's intention and how much of the players are satisfied with the stock balance. I know better than to claim that I represent the common player, and I haven't felt that most players that claimed to do so really did that well either.

They specifically stated that they didn't want a mechanism that worked that way, so I doubt it would happen (devs don't always get their way on stuff like this, but the Squad team seems capable of coming up with ways around stuff like this).

This is very much true, there are quite a few ideas that were mods before they were integrated into the game. Docking, rovers, subassemblies, aircraft, etc. On the other hand, the devs have said that if they do satellite mapping, it probably won't be done the same way as ISAMap or SCANsat, as they didn't like the way either of those boiled down to 1) get satellite in orbit, 2) warp until the mapping is complete. I'm not sure what kind of alternatives they'd consider acceptable.

Drag is so high because the current aerodynamics system was put together as a placeholder, just something to work enough that squad could focus on the parts of the game that they considered more important until those more important parts were polished enough that they could come back and do an aerodynamic system that was up to the standards of the rest of the game. This isn't saying that the existing aerodynamics might not become the real one if the improved aerodynamics plans fall through the cracks. Basically, it's primitive and inaccurate because they didn't want to put effort into trying to make it more accurate when they planned to throw it out and replace it with something better at some point.

Actually, attacking the fuel lines would be the best way to attack asparagus staging if you wanted to reduce or eliminate its use in KSP. Asparagus staging is the natural reaction to 1) Low TWR engines, 2) High dry mass fuel tanks, and 3) perfectly reliable, zero mass infinite flow fuel lines. Changing either of the other two conditions would require massive rebalancing, and I'm not sure where that would end up. Tinkering with fuel lines also has issues, as it's really hard to prohibit asparagus staging without prohibiting drop tanks and many other things that are considered perfectly reasonable. Realistic aerodynamics won't do it. Even with more realistic aerodynamics, the gain of asparagus over the traditional stack is a bigger factor than the aerodynamic resistance until you reach "pancake" launchers. Given that asparagus staging is the natural reaction to the KSP technology, I don't have a problem with it.

Not sure, I think he's either talking about reduced air pressure to make it easier to get into orbit, or that easy will keep the current aerodynamics even after such time we get improved aerodynamics.

Mostly because they haven't gotten around to doing it. The devs have discussed the possibility of doing this.

The devs have said no to discrete difficulty levels like this before. What they have shown interest in is separate knobs for different things. So a knob to turn reentry heat on and off (once we get stock reentry heat, that is) fits with what they're thinking, but not a single knob to change several settings. Also, I kind of agree with Flight. If and when we get an improved aerodynamic model, it should apply to all games. And yes, real command pods are floaty... right up until you open the hatch. We lost at least one Mercury capsule, and almost the astronaut, that way. Still, flotation devices are something that should be built into the command pods, not some extra part. The devs have already argued against adding more types of necessary parts, and the last time they discussed it, their plan for reentry heat didn't involve discrete heat shield parts.

If you mean using a Kerbal on EVA to move the data, yes it did, it was part of the 0.23 update. There's also a mod or two that I think can do this without EVA'ing, but I haven't used them so I can't comment on them beyond their existence.

Very much this. It depends on what I want to do. If I have a specific goal in mind, I'll usually do it in sandbox. If I don't, I head off to career. I like the challenge of the limited part selection in the tech tree and trying not to duplicate my previous missions exactly changes things up at least a little, but isn't necessary if I've got some big plan in mind.

When players talk about resources not being in game, they're referring to "in situ" resource utilization, along the lines of the Kethane mod. At one time (a bit over a year ago), the devs where talking about having something like kethane but far more detailed, and a lot of players got excited (myself included). While developing this, the devs learned that the system they were developing wasn't a good fit for how they wanted the game to feel, the process itself wasn't fun, it was just enabling other stuff that could be fun. They shelved the idea until such time as they could figure out how to do it in a way that better fits how they want the game to feel. Not the decision I would have made, but I understand their point.

I truly hate running ladders over RCS quads, or worse, accidentally placing an RCS quad over a hatch, trapping the kerbals inside. OP is wrong.

Very much so, especially when half of his first suggestion (budgets) is the dev's current top priority. The other half of that suggestion, resources, is an interesting topic. Basically, the devs didn't want to do resources as a stock version of Kethane because they felt that the core mechanic of that kind of system isn't fun. And they're right. I play with Kethane a lot, and while it does enable me to do some more interesting missions, the mechanics of the resource gathering isn't exciting or fun. Aside from the first time that I started filling a kethane tank, the process of drilling and converting kethane has just been something I have to do to get on with what I actually want to do. The devs would like to find a way to make enabling those missions fun, rather than just more hoops to jump through. It's not the decision I would have made, but I can see their point. There are people that have played this game for hundreds or thousands of hours, and yes, I'm one of them. This isn't saying that the game is fine the way it is, it's not finished and there's plenty of room for improvement, but there's obviously some appeal there that can go beyond "Yay, I made it to orbit!"

That was my first thought as well. Earth gets hit every day by meteors, they just tend to be on the smaller end. 10m meteors are a once-a-year event on earth, and depending on their composition, usually don't survive far enough into the atmosphere to cause damage on the surface. I forget, would a 10m asteroid be a class C or D?

It's potentially efficient (depending on how you measure efficiency), but can have problems. The idea is that if you're using a Minmus refueling station, you do not burn for planetary transfer directly from Minmus orbit, but rather depart Minmus in a Minmus-retrograde direction so that you have a periapsis in the LKO region, and then burn ship-prograde at your periapsis. Net result is planetary transfers for about 500-600 m/s less post-refueling delta-v than you'd spend boosting directly from LKO. The timing can be a pain since Minmus has a 12 day orbit, but most transfer windows are at least that wide at a cost of less than 20% of the fuel this can save. That said, I mostly use that technique for self-refueling motherships, though to be honest, it's because I like doing shakedown runs close enough to Kerbin that if there's a design flaw I can fix/rescue easier than I can if the ship breaks down in the Solar SoI. It's fun to do it that way a few times, but for craft that aren't self-refueling, it's generally not worth saving the 500-600 m/s delta-v.

Right. Patched conics may be an approximation, but they're a good one for most cases. The Apollo missions were actually planned out using patched conics.

Kind of off topic, but to clarify this, Eve and Laythe (the two non-Kerbin bodies with water) do not have multiple biomes. What you're seeing is you get different results within the same biome if you're landed vs splashed down. There are places you can see this in action on Kerbin.

Obvious to you and to me, but like I said, I've seen more people try to justify the efficiency of this launch profile by stating that you're not wasting delta-v circularizing than that actually understood where the efficiency comes from. Then again, there are people that have argued that it's obvious that #3 should be the most efficient launch profile. Orbital mechanics aren't intuitive to most people, so the term obvious may not fit as well as it does in everyday life. I never said you couldn't save delta-v doing this. I did say that it wasn't necessarily more efficient (if your point of circularization is above the atmosphere being the exception to improved efficiency) and that the difference between the two wasn't as strong as I've seen argued.

Well, I'm still failing to communicate in some manner, because every point you made there is not only something I agree with but something I said (or at least tried to say). If you have a lower atmosphere periapse that you're not raising, then you're either burning at the horizon doing the #2 launch low enough that atmospheric drag will play a major role (which is what I think you're thinking I'm talking about), or you're burning prograde higher than the horizon, at which point you're doing a #3 launch, which will involve heavy gravity losses (which is what I was trying to say). Or maybe I'm not making my original disagreement clear enough, because the point I was trying to make isn't contradicting anything brought up explicitly in this thread. Of all the people that I've seen talk about the efficiency of the #2 launch style, you're the first one to acknowledge that the savings come from the fact that you're possibly effectively circularizing at a lower altitude, one that wouldn't be maintainable (for long) with a #1 style launch. The people I've seen previously discuss the efficiency of this launch style seem to think the improved efficiency comes from them not circularizing, which they still are if they're doing this right, they're just not stopping the burn once they've circularized. I'm not saying that it isn't more efficient, I'm disagreeing (with them) on why it's more efficient, and in some cases, the amount of delta-v that would be saved this way. I haven't done the math, but I think you'd be hard pressed to save more than 100 delta-v on this, and only about 30-40 m/s of that will be post-circularization transfer burn. I've seen people that think this method saves them however much delta-v it takes them to circularize and that just isn't the case for "typical" launch profiles.

Sorry, I didn't explain the point there very clearly. The comment about gravity losses was dealing with the case of "don't raise your periapsis, just put your apoapsis at the height of the moon." Unless you've got an insanely high thrust, this usually involves focusing on vertical or prograde thrust by following a very weak gravity turn. Let's see if I can explain it better. For the "efficient direct ascent" Munar transfer, you'd start off with a regular gravity turn, and when you are building horizontal velocity, rather than stopping when you've got an apoapsis in the LKO orbital range, you continue until your apoapsis is at Munar height. My main point there is that if you're doing it efficiently, at some point before you achieve an apoapsis at Munar height, your apoapsis is at LKO height and your periapsis will probably be above (or at) the surface rather than below the surface of the planet. The upper vs lower atmosphere comment was more about the fact that I generally find that if my periapsis is still below the upper atmosphere when I'm raising my apoapsis for a transfer then something is wrong, because I should be raising my periapsis until it becomes my apoapsis in that case. If I'm ahead of my periapsis approaching my apoapsis and burning for a transfer to the Mun, then the drag losses I'll encounter at my periapsis won't matter since my orbit will be changing before I get there. I can actually explain the point using an "efficient return from the Mun" type mission, which doesn't involve drag losses, where the goal is to go directly from the Munar surface to a transfer orbit back to Kerbin without making a Munar orbit. Without atmospheric drag losses, the most efficient ascent is, as you said, just enough vertical thrust to keep you from colliding with the terrain. So at first, you're building up vertical velocity. This doesn't last long, I'm usually starting my gravity turn as soon as I have vertical motion. Then you're applying just enough vertical thrust to maintain your apoapsis while you raise your periapsis. At some point, you'll have raised your periapsis to the point it becomes the apoapsis and your current position becomes the periapsis. Even though you're not stopping there, you're now in orbit of the Mun. If you were to stop there, orbit, then continue raising your apoapsis when you arrive back at your periapsis, you have not cost yourself any efficiency. You were already in an orbital trajectory, so it cost nothing to orbit. I think the point I'm trying to focus on is that even with a gravity turn, a direct ascent via raising your apoapsis without raising your periapsis isn't going to be efficient due to gravity losses, whereas raising your periapsis until it becomes your apoapsis and then continuing to raise it until it reaches a Munar transfer orbit passes through the point of being a low kerbin orbit, so it isn't necessarily more efficient than a launch to orbit then do a transfer burn. All you're really doing is combining your circularization burn with your transfer burn. You can save a little delta-v by having this circularization point being in the upper atmosphere since you won't be there long enough to accumulate significant aerodynamic drag losses, but having the circularization point in the lower atmosphere means you'd have more aerodynamic drag losses which would nullify the benefit of not raising your periapsis higher (in this case, you're right, it would be because of the atmospheric drag).

Do you have FAR installed? That makes this issue much more likely to crop up. However, I don't see anything that looks likely to cause this problem. What parts are the nosecone and engines? I'll try to recreate the rocket and see what I can see, but I can't without knowing what mods you're using for parts.

Options #1 and #2 aren't as far apart as people tend to think if you're doing them efficiently. Because of the way orbital mechanics work, you're going to get the most efficiency if you focus on horizontal velocity rather than vertical velocity once you're far enough out of the atmosphere. This is the point of the gravity turn. Now, if you're doing that, at some point you're going to be in LKO even if you don't aim for it because you'll be moving at the right speed to be in an orbit. The biggest difference is that #2 is going to have a lower periapsis since the periapsis doesn't have to be out of the atmosphere, but not hugely so because if you have too low of a periapsis, you're running into the gravity losses of #3. If you're minimizing your gravity losses, the periapsis will be in the mid to upper atmosphere at the lowest.

Yeah, I occasionally take a month or two off from KSP to avoid burnout, been playing Dwarf Fortress on this break. Not sure how long the ARM pack will keep me back, especially since one of my make-the-game-harder mods isn't updated for 0.23.5 and probably won't be.

Good tips, but not always simple, and not always effective. If you're already out of the craft and don't have a kerbal inside the craft to aim it, you're out of luck, and I've found not being thrown around to be far more about luck than whether I'm moving or not. The problem is particularly bad if you've got anything interfering with movement (a lander with fuel tanks that come up above the bottom of the command pod, for example).