Levelord

I like how you made a bulldozer to move the rock into place

When you mentioned Launch Windows I thought of this

Nooblet reporting in. I still havent visited dres or eve.

The tech tree just enhances their ability to find stuff lying on the road for rocket parts

The landers come apart because each SAS module acts on it's own center of mass and not the center of mass of the ship. So having several SAS modules spaced so far apart would cause the ship to rip itself apart from the torque as the SAS tries to move from different angles.

It's....It's... GOING SUPERNOVA!!! D:

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Made corrections to the OP. Would still be an awesome addition to KSP methinks.

Is there a gameplay reason why repacked chutes don't re-deploy during staging, or is this purely a technical limitation of the game engine? In either case I'd prefer to have the chutes re-usable as a stage, it's more logical that way.

So there is news of NASA developing a new supersonic decelerator that can replace assist the supersonic parachutes the Curiosity Rover used. I feel this could be an interesting addition to KSP since I always felt it looked silly seeing re-entry effects on parachutes when landing on planets. http://youtu.be/e1EJlj2cMhM

If you are all really that concerned about being experts, go enroll in a university, get a physics PhD and then you can call yourself an expert. Otherwise don't waste my time trying to compare e-peens over a video game.

Shameless self-plug

If I find a class E around my system I think it's high time I commission Whackjob to design a massive rocket for me :I

I've addressed this point in an older thread before the update about ion engines. You either enable time warp thrust, or you buff up the engine, because in their current state back then, they weren't practical in the game. Since the game cannot support warp-thrusting, they went for the second option. The reason why we used Hohmann transfers in KSP is also because of the time warp limitations. So I can see why the engines were changed to make up for the game engine's shortcomings. So you want the engines to be nerfed back to their exact real life counterpart. What then? Still doesn't solve the problem of Hohmann transfers and still doesn't solve the timewarp problems and people won't use the ion engines except for those who can afford a whole day of burning. The buff is a solution to a lot of gameplay problems, your suggestion solves nothing and doesn't encourage any use of the engine except for the hardcore of hardcore people with unreasonable amounts of time.

I think ground launch NTRs have such a low TwR that they can't lift payloads out of the atmosphere Earth or Mars, and yet NERVAs on Duna can. That's besides the point, I'm not arguing about the NERVA engines being overpowered and not conforming to real life and whatnot. I'm using NERVAs as an example of an engine that is pretty much in the same boat as ion engines as far as realism is concerned, since those people want to argue about the realism side of things. Those two engines don't conform to their real life counterparts and are purely made to fit into the game of KSP, it's unique scale of bodies and the physical laws in the game. It's been established that the ion engines have an increased fuel consumption to compensate for the increased thrust, effectively normalizing the dV. They are capable of landing on low gravity bodies, but still cannot replace the usefulness of already conventional rocket engines for landing and takeoff. The final point of realism is questionable, since KSP is not Orbiter, but that alone is still not a justification for a nerf. All in all, I am going to have to side with SQUAD on this decision because it's balanced the ion engine very well against the other list of engines we can use. The ARM heavy engines on the other hand, I feel are a bit over the top in terms of the iSP and TwR and they either need to buff up the Mainsail to compensate, or nerf the heavy lifter.

Because of how the KP atmospheric model works, clipping doesn't seem to add any calculable advantages to a craft compared to a non-clipped part. Here are my reasons: 1.) Clipping parts for an aesthetically pleasing craft does not make the craft any more aerodynamic or fly further than a non-clipped part, since the game calculates drag based on mass regardless of an item clipped into another. A 20 part non clipped plane will still impart the same amount of drag as a 20 part clipped plane. 2.) Clipping parts doesn't make the craft lighter because the game still calculates the mass of each part and you are still going to have to lift that extra weight anyway. 3.) Clipping engines to give a higher TwR still provides the same amount of thrust as a non-clipped cluster of the same type of engine. They both consume the same amount of fuel and have the same ISP. 4.) The only advantage clipping seems to give is real estate space on a craft and making it look less ugly. Unless clipping allows you to fly further than a conventional craft that doesn't use clipping, then I would consider it cheating. For example, I consider intake stacking/clipping a bit cheating because it makes you fly higher and further than you normally would.

They can fire, but I doubt they can lift payloads in atmosphere based on thermal energy alone and the nuclear waste would be disasterous.

I really like your lander design. I'm just not convinced with other people's points that the engine should be reverted because of immersion issues at the expense of how to practically intergrate it into the game. If we go along the lines of immersion we could very well add jet engines to the list (for the way intakes work) and nuclear engines (nuke engines are not meant to work at all in atmosphere, yet people use it to land on Duna and on SSTOs). I managed to build an ion mun lander recently using 8 engines, but the descent was quite painfully slow (felt like descending with RCS) that I still don't see anyone taking this seriously. Especially for the same people who found the original ion engine burn times excrutiatingly painful to wait for. I can see a Mublin approach using a shallow descent profiler to land but the lengthy burns is also probably why people don't use a low TwR lv-909 landers often enough even though it potentially is more efficient. Compared to the current ARM lifter engines that completely outclasses the mainsail and skipper engines by miles (effectively rendering them obsolete, which I find is an legitimate balance issue), I find that other people picking on the ion engine as an overpowered engine a big joke as it in no way has its buffed advantages outweigh the advantages of using conventional engines.

How many ion engines does it take for that? 6? 8? 10? and how many solar panels? I noticed you left out the details on how many ion engines you've used for your lander because spamming ion engines to overcome it's low TwR is not an argument that it's overpowered.

People use the nuclear engine for landers once in a while, but it's never popular enough as a lander engine to warrant people calling it overpowered. The same thing is true with the ion engine and that's the point I was trying to make; It'll never be as popular as conventional engines because conventional engines still do a better job overall. Bravo, it's nice that you can hop around in your ultra light ion-powered lander all over the mun, but because it has to be ultra light, means that you can't bring any of the worthwhile science equipment down with it (or even return them for that matter). Which makes hopping around to different biomes utterly pointless on ion powered engines. So other than being a nice sightseeing tool of novelty value, the ion engines will never replace the actual usefulness of the conventional engines to carry useful scientific payloads down to the Mun and back. That is, unless you're going to spam ion engines with solar panels to compensate, then in that case I'll go ahead and spam jet engine intakes and call the jet engines overpowered.

If I'm understanding this correctly, you can give the player the option to either 'upgrade' existing rocket parts or to use the points to upgrade further along the tech tree. I'd assume it's a bit like Starcraft, where you either choose to spend Vespene gas to upgrade current Protoss shield technology, or use the gas to unlock other tech items.

Laythe rescue mission. One of my proudest moments, but also one that is experienced alone

Even with a TwR below 1, landing on the moon is still possible, which is for one thing, not a special feature of the updated ion engine. I believe Mublin showcased this with a single LV-909 engine for a heavy Mun lander, all it takes is a shallower descent profile. Doesn't make the LV-909 overpowered because it's capable of doing a low TwR landing. Regardless, there are so many engines that do a better job than the ion engines at landing that it's only due to pure novelty value that people would decide to use the ion engines as a lander engine in the first place. It's the same reason why you don't see droves of people using the nuclear engines as lander engines on the Mun, even though it can get you around further and works perfectly well as a lander engine. Mublin's video showcasing this (http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/28073-New-Rebuild!-Apollo-Replica-Munbug-XI-Saturn-V-CSM-Lander-Buggy-and-A-L-S-E-P)

That's more of a problem with the game mechanics and interface and less to do with the ion engine. As I said previously a few pages back addressing this point: Ion engine spamming doesn't count in the argument, because people can spam any engine to land a lander anywhere. People spam engines for an Eve ascent vehicle, and you can even spam ant engines to land on the Mun.

Brachistichrone trajectories are done on real life ion engines to save time in real life, but doing repeated Hohmann burns is perfectly feasible, but takes repeated orbits and takes a longer time. Doing brachistichrone trajectories in KSP ironically takes longer because you are limited to a 4x physical time warp while you manually control where the craft should be going (as opposed to 100x or 1000x on rails time warp to complete orbits for repeated short Hohmann burns). So the thrust was boosted to save time in KSP. If you feel you are talented enough to eyeball a brachistichrone trajectory, you are free to do so, but it's likely that it's better handled with an autopilot like MechJeb. Either way, this has nothing to do with the changes to the ion engine's stat buff, because it doesn't change where you could and could not go from previous versions. The dV is still the same for both. Your argument for realism would require you to sit in front of your PC watching your ion craft do a brachistichrone trajectory for 45 minutes to an hour, because you have to be constantly readjusting the heading of the circular arc and can't activate an on rails timewarp. The ion engine's updated thrust doesn't change anything except for a bit of time spent staring at your screen doing it. So you are absolutely free to spend your incredible amount of free time doing the maneuver for yourself for the sake of 'realism'. I just don't see how an ion engine buff stops you from doing it if you wanted to. The final point is that a few orbits for Hohmann burns is not going to desync you from your destination and most of the time you are going to have to do interplanetary correction burns along the way anyway like any other conventional craft. I'd argue that brachistichrone trajectories are harder to do because KSP's maneuver nodes doesn't support it and setting up multiple burns is inaccurate; because of how the game gets less accurate predicting flight paths (conic patch) and the human error of trying to manually adjust the craft to face the changing maneuver nodes.