curiousepic

Quick question. In the OP, it is suggested that if we want real-ish ISP to go along with real-ish mass fractions and thrust, to use CryoEngines. Is there something about CryoEngines+SMURFF that scales ISP across the board, or is that just a suggestion that the engines that come along with CE have somewhat real-er ISPs?

For those of us not too pedantic to be excited by the game/sim/software... It's been greenlit! And! Quietly announced as a Steam news post:

I'm curious to see if it conflicts with Kerbalism's background resource processing.

Found it - SMURFF doesn't adjust ISP but rather masses of parts, particularly fuel tanks, to get the mass fraction of stock parts more in line with the scale of RSS. There is also ROMiniFork which is does RO-style rescaling, which I might prefer for RSS. Neither are officially 1.1.2 however.

One that is explicitly not RO (or Simple Realism). And recent enough to be updated to 1.1.2.

If not, I thought I saw another mod that did something similar, allowing stock parts to be used more sensibly in RSS. I can't find it now though; was I hallucinating?

Loving this. It saves me from reading through the entire CKAN list every day. Do you think it could link to the CKAN-listed homepage for the mod? If you need to save characters, the format could be: ModName #KSPModUpdated for 1.X.X bit.ly/link

Why is minimum Separation so low?

Xenon tanks with 660 Liquid Fuel each? ಠ_ಠ

I think that's what it was - forgot to change the command line option in CKAN.

After messing around with trying to add RSS Expanded (which caused issues like it just being the kerbol system) and giving up, and creating a new installation and re-downloading RSS, max res textures, and a few other mods, Kopernicus is crashing. It does not crass without RSS installed. I had everything working fine before. Here's the log [will edit in.. having trouble posting with it] It says out of system memory, but I have 16GB... anyone know what's going on here? Weird... I'm getting a 500 error when trying to paste even a very truncated version of the log in here, and I can't figure out how to attach files... how do I even?

If it's working in 1.1.2 can I poke someone to update CKAN?

Speaking of simulating multiplayer, yesterday I loaded up a couple of Servo's D-62s to pit against each other in orbital maneuvering. I noticed they had a load of 6 deployable probes, which I assumed were decoys. I haven't seen any mention of decoys (at least in this thread) but they were a heck of a lot of fun to use, and it seems like they would be a huge (if unrealistic) part of multiplayer gameplay (if indeed they would work like I think, with the opponent not being able to distinguish them in map mode if labelled and named properly). I had the defender deploy a few after getting an elliptical orbit I wanted, and randomized each one's orbit a bit. They have the potential to be a huge pain in your opponents ass, wasting their time and dV and probes of their own to scout and confirm the identity of each signature, assuming they have time to get an intercept within the dV limit of each probe... which I wasn't smart enough to be able to do before I gave up and chased down the signature I assumed was the ship at that point. It wasn't It also seemed supremely easy, even without decoys, to flee an aggressor. It all comes down to how much extra dV the aggressor is willing to spend.

NavHud significantly aids with aiming. I perfectly understand the desire to maintain a mod-free standard. I also think it is fun to more accurately simulate multiplayer, and Persistent Rotation would help with that.

What do you think about a standard of setting target ships to a certain acceleration and/or rotation to reduce the effect of precision aiming and drilling weapons? Or, as I suggested previously, somehow have the target's orientation, and thus directional armor, matter (Whoever responded to me was right that SAS modes are cancelled when switching away from the ship, but perhaps with the Persistent Rotation Mod?) Also, aren't fuel lines physics-less? Do they actually impact framerate?

What kind of work? Mind posting in that thread?

FYI Orbital Survey Plus is looking into adding this kind of feature. It seems a lot more doable with the system it uses. I am super excited to play with that kind of mechanic for planet packs.

Make sure you aren't hacking gravity? I've had that issue and though that fixed it, but correlation isn't causation.

So, a few days ago I did a bunch of weapon vs armor testing similar to this previously posted video, but more exhaustive, with gravity hacked, etc. I recorded the results in this Google Sheet. Keep in mind this is a very restricted domain: range is 100m impact velocities only reached 80-200 m/s atmosphere likely caused some drag everything (except in the armor angle trials) was perpendicular to the armor the armor and target do not accurately simulate an actual vessel the full range of armor designs were really only tested with lighter weapons the target did not involve structural elements in the line of fire, only the armor and the target fuel tank etc. etc. etc. But there were some interesting results. Here are some highlights: Most armor designs were roughly %50 effective. This is kind of disheartening because it may mean that survivability is influenced more by the Kraken than by design. With a single plate of armor, unattached fairly close to a fuel tank, weapons almost always phased through it and destroyed the tank. A single plate of armor attached to the fuel tank was destroyed by non-light weapons The most survivable armor designs against the initial test weapons were: A plate unattached to the target tank, and an empty 2.5m fuel tank outside of that. Survivability of the target tank was 10/10 against 650 I-Beam Sepx2 and FLT-200 Full Sepx10, but only 6/10 for Long I-Beam Sepx4. 1.25m empty tank, attached to target tank: 10/10 vs 650 I-Beam Sepx2 and Long I-Beam Sepx4, but 3/10 vs FLT-200 Full Sepx10. wing attached to plate, unattached to target: 10/10 vs 650 I-Beam Sepx2, 8/10 vs Long I-Beam Sepx4 but 0/10 vs FLT-200 Full Sepx10 After determining the best armors, I did a larger variety of weapon trials vs that design (2.5m empty tank and 1 plate). RT-5 with a plate warhead was indeed 100% effective. Runners up were: Oscar-B Empty Sepx10, Triple (spammed stack) 650 Sepx2, RT-5 short I-Beamx2, and Short I-Beam Sepx10 Oscar-B Empty Sepx10 and Short I-Beam Sepx10 almost always phased through even the large empty tank (not destroying it, but destroying the target tank), and everything that phased had impact velocities greater than 175 m/s. The plate armor itself almost always survived. The only thing that (occasionally) destroyed it was a Long I-Beam propelled to 185 m/s by a Vector engine and FLT-100. The highest impact velocity was the Cubic Strut Sepx2 at 200m/s. It also had the highest reached max speed, almost 1km/s even in atmo. But it was only about 30% effective. I think the empty tanks work well because they are a larger cross section in which fast-moving weapons can be detected to collide with it, so there is a greater chance the weapon doesn't phase through it. But, that doesn't explain the 30% discrepancy between an empty 1.25m tank and a 1.25m structural fuselage. Next I tested the same armor vs the three best weapons above, at varying angles of incidence. Each trial increased the angle by 15 degrees away from perpendicular. For the lowest angles (60 and 75 degrees), some weapons may have hit the plate head on, some the target tanks, some the armor tanks. Head-on, I had them only hitting the armor tanks. Phasing was generally very rare, which makes sense. From 60 to 90 degrees, RT-5s destroyed plates, something that virtually never occurred at higher angles. Bizarrely, while striking perpendicular in the initial tests RT-5s were 100% lethal, at 15 degrees off perpendicular, they only destroyed the armor tank. This is promising if not a fluke. Still, at lower angles, they varied somewhat randomly between 30-60% lethal. I'm not sure the data actually shows this, but while running the trials, the angled plate did seem to be pretty effective and glancing projectiles away after the armor tank was destroyed. I'm not sure but suspect that having the armor plate outside the armor tank would be less effective, but perhaps I should test that as well. I feel like I'm on to something with empty tanks as armor. I built a test ship using it and found it somewhat successful (before it succumbed to the Death Wobble bug and I ragequit), but I'm still new to actual orbital combat. I'd be interested to see practical designs using this armor from you all. Something else I was experimenting with in that ship was redundant fuel systems. Using a central structural truss, I attached 1.25m fuel tanks with 4x symmetry, but only attached to the truss, not each other. Then, fuel lines between the trusses, and from each tank to the truss (not the tank) below it. Even RT-5s would only ever destroy one or two tanks per hit, but left all remaining tanks functional and their sweet, sweet Delta-V pumping to (any remaining) engines.

Just FYI the game itself does not restrict the shape of the armor. If you watch the video closely, the ship editor appears to form the armor in a similar way to procedural fairings in KSP, adjusting to the interior modules (and perhaps it allows you to customize it further), so the game itself is not making that assumption. (I guess it is making the assumption that it would be radially symmetrical, but I bet you could make a roughly spherical ship at least). Weapons loadout is likewise customizable. I believe Zane is still investigating more types of lasers, which may vastly change the interplay between the types, but I wouldn't call the "distribution of armaments" an assumption. Otherwise, CoaDE is making these assumptions, yes. I have to agree with the rest of your assertions. CoaDE's "vision" is a very specific domain. But within that domain, the assumptions are few. I think that's the best we can hope for for what appears to be a one-man, no-budget project. Also FYI, theres a lot of good technical discussion going on on Winchell "@nyrath" Chung's G+ posts of the blog entries: https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com

Ugh... I'm on to something ship- and armor-design-wise, but ragequitting because of this Resonant Death Wobble bug.

Nevermind! I did not realize they were only available in Tracking Station (could bear specific mention in description on front page). Would be nice to have access in map during a flight though.

Are DestroyAll and RecoverAll wrapped into SmallUtilities itself? If so, are they updated to 1.1.2? I'm not seeing them in the stock toolbar button after installing 1.4.0 via CKAN.

Have flak missiles been found to be less effective than equivalent monolithic mass? Also, I'm currently experimenting with using empty large fuel tanks as armor. Would it be kosher to clip a full fuel tank into an empty?

Unfortunately looks like CoaDE isn't currently planning to be multi, so the point is moot for now. There's a new blog post up that details a bit more of what the game is actually like to play - looks like more of the gameplay is actually in the orbital mechanics than combat!