Brotoro

I was playing a lot with RAPIERs today... and I can't say I noticed anything amazing about them. The yet-again lowered thrust is annoying. Is there some magical realm of altitude and velocity where they display their wonderfulness?

Why do you RAPIERs have cones on them?

I expected 1.0.3 was mainly going to be fixing heating issues and tweaking reentry heating of capsules vs. spaceplanes trying to reach orbit... so I was surprised when an aircraft I had been playing with in 1.0.2 (a variation of ADELINE) would not fly in 1.0.3/4. Apparently quite a bit got changed in the aero model. So now I'll have to go back and check all the other craft I've been getting ready for my next missions. I look forward to the time when Squad will quit making major changes to the aerodynamics model.

The SAS needs its abilities to point at prograde, retrograde, normal, etc. fixed so that it doesn't wander your ship back and forth when trying to lock on the point. Seriously embarrassing. Pol's surface collider needs to be fixed to remove the sudden-death land mines (and above-surface mines) that cause ships to explode in certain places. It's a nerve-wracking to drive around the place. NERV engines need to NOT make lots of heat when operating. Bad Rocket Science should not be encouraged.

Oh, my. What new part would I ask for? Surface refueling hoses. I bet THAT was a surprise. - - - Updated - - - I'd also like docking cameras built into docking ports. Bimodal nuclear thermal rocket engines (that can generate electricity as well as provide propulsion), plus retractable radiators for same. Also, compact nuclear power reactors (which can use the same radiators). Folding fins. Grid fins such as the Falcon 9 uses, and conformal fins that fold flush against the body when closed. I want these so that I can change which direction a ship will want to face, so it can have different launch and landing configurations. Inflatable heat shields to protect large diameter payloads. And surface refueling hoses, of course.

I don't know that I would believe that without tests. It's true that you don't have water to hold the grains together...but you also have grains that are much more jagged and have rougher surfaces than Earth sand, which should help the grains hold together, AND you could get vacuum welding effects to also help if you squeeze the regolith sand together with enough force for enough time. So I also feel we should send return missions to test this important subject.

I don't know what tangent you want to head off on with this...but I prefer to continue talking about the heat mechanic which I think is goofy and you say is not. Because Squad chose the have the NERV produce unphysical LOLHEAT, we have to deal with it. Having to soak the heat up in propellant mass to the point where parts of our ships reach ludicrous temperatures so that inefficient parts can act as radiators should result in tank explosions. The whole thing makes my Physics-sense squirm. All because of a bad decision about NERV heat production. Yes, I know how to build ships to get around this...I figured that out right after 1.0 came out (and it's easier in 1.0.2). But I find having to do so distasteful. I know you enjoy it...but it's all a negative for me.

No. Boiling the propellant in a tank will cause the tank to explode simply from the pressure increase -- you don't need any combustion. Rocket propellant tanks are built for light weight -- they are NOT built to withstand extreme pressures.

You'd run into the same problem even if you DID have liquid hydrogen tanks. If you try soaking up heat from your engines and storing it in the thermal mass of the propellant, the propellant will boil and your tank will violently explode.

No. Expecting your propellants to soak up heat until you have your "Aerozine" at 1500 Kelvin in a rocket propellant tank is goofy.

I've seen it twice.

The heating is goofy. I've had my whole ship (engines, structure, propellant tanks and the propellants inside the tanks, capsules containing kerbals) at well over 1500 Kelvin from soaking up the heat from goofy NERV engines. Do you think the propellant tanks wouldn't explode? Do you think kerbals wouldn't bake in their capsules-turned-to-ovens? It just massively goofy.

The orbital elements simply describe the path of the satellite. You could get the elements by just observing the motion of the object long enough without knowing anything about the forces involved (but if you want to calculate an orbit quickly from fewer observations, it helps to know things about the force of gravity operating in the system). Similarly, I could describe the motion of a rock circling around on the end of a string without having to go into the forces causing it to do so. It would also just be parameters that describe the motion (and from which you could derive the Physics involved, if you wanted).

Oh, well that's easy to understand. Overpowered reaction wheels make the game more playable for people who aren't into the realism of turning your ship very slowly to conserve RCS fuel (so they can just fumble around and still succeed without all the tedious maneuvering and training for the maneuvers that astronauts need). And, if I like realism, I can simply not add reaction wheels to my ship (and Squad happily gives me a simple stock in-game method of disabling them if I want to -- no need for mods or cfg editing). But if Squad insisted that we do something non-physical, such as add fins to our rockets to keep them stable in a vacuum, for example (just because they got an incorrect notion into their heads that spaceships work that way from watching ancient movies), then this would be A Bad Thing, making the game more difficult for no good reason. Sure, it would just take a few extra parts to get around the unphysical limitation, and sure, some people might enjoy having to design around that unphysical limitation because they LIKE fins, so sure, I could deal with it...but it would bother me because it would NOT be proper rocket science. Not that I want to stop anybody from adding fins to their rockets just because they look cool...but they certainly can do that even without the unrealistic requirement. As for the fact that NTRs should not get hydrogen Isp's while using liquid fuel...absolutely. And THIS is where Squad should have gone to nerf the NERV. I would prefer it if Squad changed liquid fuel to liquid methane, and rebalanced engine and tank capacities accordingly (so NERV Isp would be around 645)...but, alas, Squad did not listen to me when I asked for that.

Whereas I hope the unrealistic heating gets nerfed so that real-looking NTR designs can be made. Adding something unphysical to the game just to make an aspect of gameplay more difficult for players is goofy.

We knew the orbits and masses of the major planets in our solar system before the start of the space age. But having detailed views of the surface before sending probes is unrealistic.

38 m/sec?? Yeow!

Too heavy. And they make it more difficult to strut payloads than they used to be. Otherwise I have found them to be workable, and they have been necessary to get some of my payloads to fly stably.

Thank you. Have a kerbal snack!

An engineer can improve the efficiency of your ISRU ship, I hear tell. Does this engineer have to be in a cabin attached to the ISRU ship, or can she be in a command seat attached tot he ISRU ship?

This is definitely a concern...and I hope squad fixes this.

I would certainly be in favor of surface refueling hoses.

OK...that one strangely amused me.

I'm waiting for 1.0.3 before finalizing the new designs. Just in case.

Because Nuclear Thermal Rocket Engines don't work that way.