GreenWolf

@Joco223 SMURFF changes the masses of command pods and such, which will affect your reentry velocity, and therefore the amount of heating you get. Values of 1 give you masses similar to real life rockets, which is too high for a 6.4x rescale. With values at 1, your rockets have way more thrust than they should for their scale, your command pods are too heavy, and your fuel tanks have way more fuel. If 0.5 on all values is too low, try making tanklever and enginelever 0.6 or 0.65 and podlever 0.5.

@Joco223 The problem isn't with Dimenions, but with the stock part config values. They're all wrong for a scale-up, and this mod doesn't do anything to change them. I highly highly highly recomend you grab SMURFF and set its lever values to 0.5, since that will adjust the masses and such of stock and mod parts to fit a 6.4x rescale.

Could do this with a low-thrust/low-isp mode that can be switched to, that consumes LqdHydrogen and removes heat. Heck, a simple mod manager patch could add that to every nuke engine.

Funny, I'm not. As in, I am an actual physicist. And as an actual physicist, I am telling you, I have never once, ever, heard anyone use the term fissionable. The definition that has been and is used is "an isotope capable of undergoing nuclear fission". The distinction between high-energy and low-energy neutrons is only useful in certain limited engineering circumstances, which I'm sure is where fissionable is used. But in the wider realm of general physics, the term is fissile. Heck, the very same wikipedia article (the accuracy of which I find highly questionable) even says that the two terms are synonymous.

@fredinno No, I'm not. 238Pu is fissile. The fact that you apparently don't understand what nuclear fission is doesn't make this any less true.

In today's news, a mini-update that probably comes as more of a surprise to myself than to you. Let's go now to the third page of the Imperial Times, the Greater Kerbal Empire's finest news source. **** THE IMPERIAL TIMES KSC – Earlier today, sources inside the Ministry of Aerospace Studies leaked this image of a concept design for the Sparks 6 mission. While the Ministry has refused to officially confirm or deny the veracity of this image, our sources have told us that the designs are mostly accurate, but said the scale "may be a little bit..." followed by holding their hands approximately half a meter apart and shaking them slowly.

@Joco223 I am aware that it does rescale cloud height (otherwise my clouds would be inside the planet). I'm asking which value controls the scaling.

1. 64k looks to be dead in the water, development wise, seeing as the last update was back in August. Additionally, it does some things I don't want (adding additional KSCs, mainly) and isn't as fully featured/customizable as Dimensions. (Also, spiky terrain.) 2. Only thing I can think of is automatic remote tech scaling (unless that is implemented and I managed to miss the ranges getting hith with two 6.4x multipliers in my testing), although not a big deal since RT comes with a config option to increase ranges by a constant multiplier. 3. I actually goofed there. I thought that atmosphere visual effect scaled independently of the atmosphere height, so I just set them to the same thing. (I also wonder if this might be the root cause of the weird "Cannot warp while under acceleration" bug I've been encountering in orbit, or if that's just down to Weird Mod Interaction or even just Weird KSP Bugs.) I do have one question though: Does EVE cloud height scale with atmosphere height or atmosphere visual effect. What I've seen in this thread leads me to believe it scales directly with atmosphere, but I'm not confident in that assumption now. Also, just a heads up that rescaling appears to mess with the tidal locking of Ike to Duna (although resonace frequencies of Jool's moons appear unchanged). Ended up installing Sigma Binary (great mod, btw) to deal with it, since I do enjoy tidal locks, but figured you might want to know.

I know Ven's stock part revamp adds a 2.5 meter nuke, Modular Rocket Systems adds a few, I think RLA stockalike has a tiny nuke (maybe?), Atomic Age (natch), and Taurus HCV. That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Also, seconding the request made upthread for a nuclear thermal turbojet, seeing as the only ones I know of are in Atomic Age (which hasn't been updated to 1.0.5) and KSP Interstellar (which is... not something I want to install just for nuclear turbojets). Also, maybe some kind of nuclear thermal steam engine? Could be useful on Laythe, or for powering boats/subs. Not sure if that's within scope of this mod, but figured I'd ask.

This is patently, absurdly, egregiously false. Fissile material does not mean "reactor fuel or bomb making material". Fissile materials are those which are capable of undergoing nuclear fission. Plutonium-238, the most common isotope used in spacecraft RTGs, is fissile. Please do some minimal fact checking before making such bold-faced claims.

Since it might be useful for people considering doing a 6.4x rescale playthrough, here's the config values I settled on for my own career/aar, which I arrived at after many hours of testing to find a good balance for Sigma Dimensions and SMURFF: Sigma Dimensions // Base Settings SigmaDimensions { Resize = 6.4 Rescale = 6.4 Atmosphere = 1.285 dayLengthMultiplier = 1 } // Advanced Settings @SigmaDimensions { geeASLmultiplier = 1 landscape = 0.25 atmoVisualEffect = 1 resizeScatter = 1 CustomSoISize = 0 CustomRingSize = 0 atmoASL = 1 tempASL = 1 } SMURFF tanklever = 0.5 enginelever = 0.5 podlever = 0.5 These values give you an atmosphere height of approximately 90 km, a decent terrain scaling height, and (for SMURFF) mass ratios similar to real life rockets, which actually lets you launch just a little bit more payload per ton of rocket than on a normal sized Kerbin. Playing around with it, I've found that delta-v needed to get to a 100 km x 100 km low Kerbin orbit is between 6500 to 7000 m/s. Not sure how the values compare without FAR, but I imagine that they'll be clustered closer towards 7000 m/s than to 6500 m/s. Launches take about twice as long as on stock scale Kerbin. You'll want to start your gravity turn pretty early, but don't take it too aggressively. Orbital velocity is something like 5200 m/s. Doing a return from LKO, aeroheating starts between 60 km and 70 km up, and lasts until around 30 km. You'll want to stick tightly to the retrograde marker to reduce heating of non-heatshield parts, and don't skimp on that ablator. Note that for most of the heating regime, you'll still be going over 4 km/s. Speed rapidly starts dropping once you get below about 35 km, and I've found that by the time I hit 20 km, I'm going slow enough to deploy chutes.

Chapter 2 Flare Ups **** "But it's possible." Doctor Baxter nodded vigorously. "Yes, General. But it will take time." "You have two months." General Dean turned and gazed out the window, in what he hoped was an ominous but also inspiring manner. "I don't care what you have to do, as long as I can see a rocket on that launchpad by the end of two months." "Yes, General." **** <How you feeling, Jeb?> Valentina's voice sounded in his ear. It had been her idea to have other cosmonauts act as the point of communications between mission control and the cosmonaut in the capsule, on the basis that it would decrease pre-launch anxiety. So far, it seemed to be working. "Like a hamster, CAPCOM," he said, in reference to the distinctively spherical shape of the capsule he was sitting in. He heard Valentina laugh. <Don't get too comfortable, we're about to start the launch countdown.> Jeb did a quick check of his instrumentation panel. "Everything's green on my end." He heard several kerbals shouting in the background, before Valentina replied, <Greenlight on our end too. Starting the clock at T-minus thirty seconds. Good luck.> **** Jeb looked down at Kerbin through the pod window. "CAPCOM, you were right. The view is spectacular." <I expect it's even better from outside that pod.> "Hint taken. Be advised that I am opening the hatch now." The air inside the capsule whooshed out into space as he opened the door. He was glad his suit was, in fact, actually airtight. He slowly pulled himself out through the opening. "I am exiting the capsule." <Be careful. Don't take any unnecessary risks.> "Copy that. Only necessary risks will be taken." He was rewarded for his snark with another laugh. Clinging to the side of his spaceship, he looked back down at Kerbin again. "You were right again. The view is even better outside." **** "Main engine cut-out, jettisoning first stage. Bill, open that first goo pod while we coast to second stage ignition." "Opening the goo pod. I'm sure it's doing gooey things." "Get ready for some acceleration, I'm gonna light the engines as soon as the first stage is out of range." Valentina watched the spent stage slowly drift away. Once she was sure it was safely away, she opened up the throttle. "Shout when we hit orbit." Bill watched the numbers on his flight data readouts tick upwards. "Almost... now! Cut the engines." Valentina cut the throttle, causing the two of them to jerk forwards slightly. "CAPCOM, this is Sparks 5 actual, can you confirm our flight status." <Sparks 5, we confirm that you are in orbit.> Orwig was acting CAPCOM for this mission. "Copy that. We'll run the rest of our experiments, then get back to you in five." <Fly safe.> **** Almost exactly two months after he had issued the deadline to his scientists, General Dean stared out his window and saw a rocket. The rocket itself had been the easy part. They had taken the Spinnaker powered boosters that MiniSpace has used for Sparks 3 and used them as the basis for a modular rocket that his engineers had taken to calling Salamander. The core was a single booster, to which up to four more boosters could be attached to increase the delta-v. A small upper stage had been placed atop the whole thing, atop which sat Flare 1. Flare 1 had been the hard part. It was the brain which controlled the whole rocket, the point through which it could be remotely piloted and given limited pre-programmed instructions. It was going to be launched into orbit as a proof-of-concept military communications satellite, which was how they had managed to get the project within their jurisdiction. Now to see if it would work. **** "Explain to me how this... magnetometer, you called it?" General Dean looked to Doctor Baxter for confirmation. The doctor nodded. "Explain how this magnetometer falls within our jurisdiction as a military agency," the general continued. "It doesn't. Not directly, at least. But the data it will gather is essential to paving the way for future missions." "How so?" "It's about the van Allen belts. If they exist, this will tell us where and how strong they are. It'll help us avoid them in the future." "I assume these van Allen belts are a bad thing then." "That's what we want to find out." **** "The satellite will be launched into a polar orbit aboard a Phoenix rocket, which will give it full coverage of the planet's surface." General Dean nodded in vague understanding. "And how long will it take for it to generate the map?" "No more than two days." A thought occured to him. "Why the larger rocket? Isn't it the same size as the last two satellites?" "Different orbit. It takes more delta-v to launch into a polar orbit, and it'll be orbiting much higher than the previous Flares, which also means more delta-v." "I see. How long before you're ready to launch?" "A week, maybe a week and a half." **** Commentary Our plan after this is to continue some low orbit operations with MiniSpace, including a docking test, and start moving into setting up a comms network with the IRC. Sparks program will probably end once MiniSpace starts developing a standardized crew vehicle and launcher. (Also, yes, I'm aware this post is being made on Monday. I did the playing and the write-up on Sunday, however, so it still totally counts as a weekend post.)

Keepfit's support for other mods appears to be spotty at best, although I suppose you are correct that the burden of patching lies on them. As for CTT, I'm playing with several other part mods installed, and one of the things I noticed is that you end up unlocking about a dozen different capsules at once in one of the command module nodes, many of them for HGR. I was mostly hoping to see those sparts spread out a bit more so there's more of a progression, although as I think about this, it looks to be more and more of an issue with the combination of mods I'm using, and not necessarily an issue with HGR.

Part of it was just burning out on big, picture heavy mission reports. It took two hours or so to put together each chapter in the old AAR. Then 1.0 hit and killed all my mods. Then the forums migrated and killed all my formatting. Some of it also had to do with moving on to other endeavours for a bit, like writing for the SCP Wiki, running an IRC RPG group, doing preproduction work on a (still unreleased) webcomic, and, of course, ever present IRL commitments. I should be back for a while, and this time though, I promise to finish this one. Sticking all the photos in an imgur album cuts down "production" time to under an hour, and by limiting myself to only updating on weekends (which means one to two posts a week), I hope to be able to prevent any potential creative burnout.

All the rep to you, good sir. This was something that was greatly needed. Edit: Could we possibly get some Keepfit and Community Tech Tree configs in there as well? Also seconding the request for Real Plume configs.

Chapter 1 Sparks Fly **** A rocket was an unguided weapon. That was how they had been used in the war, and it had gradually become the prevailing school of thought. It was the dogma upon which the Rocketry Corps was built, and, until that morning, it had gone virtually unchallenged. That morning, however, would change everything. Wing Commander Jebediah, Imperial Glider Force, stared at the largest rocket he had ever seen. It wasn't the largest rocket ever, he knew, but it easily dwarfed the small tactical rockets and air-launched missiles he had encountered before. Certainly, it was the largest rocket outside of the Rocketry Corps' armory. "I'm supposed to fly that?" "Not so much flying as sitting very still and keeping the nose pointed straight up." The technician's response did not contain the assurance of safety Jeb had hoped to hear. His next statement was even worse. "The sitting still part is very important. If you don't, it could shift the center of mass and send you into a tumble." "And how high will this thing take me?" "Not far. Ten, maybe fifteen kilometers." That was more than twice the altitude of the highest glider flight, which had been made from the summit of K2. Jeb wondered, with no small measure of disbelief, what this kerbal considered to be a high altitude. Finally, the technician finished checking the seals on Jeb's pressure suit and said, "You're good to go." He gave Jeb an enthusiastic thumbs up, then scurried off towards the safety of the nearby observation bunker. Slowly, nervously, Jeb climbed into the rocket. **** In a way, it made sense that the Ministry of Aerospace Studies had been the first to successfully guide a rocket in-flight. The Rocketry Corps, after all, viewed rockets as weapons, and there was no place for a pilot inside a weapon. Still, the event had shown that the concept of guided rocket flight was not entirely unfeasible. Might it be possible, General Dean wondered, to have the pilot outside the rocket? **** <Commander, are you ready to launch?> The voice sounded tinny and crackly over the tiny radio. Valentina ran through the mental pre-flight checklist she had made. Flaps locked? Check. Ignition charges primed? Check. Seatbelt fastened? Check. "Affirmative, control. Just tell me when to go." <You may launch now.> The voice of mission control had barely finished the sentence before Valentina had slammed her fist down on the very large, invitingly red button which someone had scrawled the words "GO TO SPACE" upon in black marker. **** Sparks 3 was the largest rocket ever built to-date (with the possible exception of the massive rocket fielded by the Circumferential Powers during the Eleventh Battle of Gordon Flats, which spontaneously exploded before it could be launched). The fact that the Minister of Aerospace Studies had publicly, and rather vigorously, stated that they had plans to build even larger rockets did little to diminish the stature of the Sparks 3 rocket in Orwig's mind. Or in reality, for that matter. You did say you wanted to go to space, he thought. And not just space, but orbit. Or fiery, explosive death. One of the two. At least, he had thought it was two possibilities, until an engineer had reminded him that crashing into the ocean, getting stuck in orbit, suffocating, burning up on reentry, and smashing into the ground were also all possible. The same engineer had also hurriedly assured him that all of those things were very unlikely, an assurance which did little to ease the panic caused by the preceding statement. Orwig took a deep breath and pushed all thoughts of rocket-related death from his mind. Instead, he focused on the launch countdown, listening as the numbers slowly ticked down to zero. He was so focused that he almost forgot to press the ignition when the count reached zero.

By Their Bootstraps A Tale of Rockets and Cosmonauts (and some other stuff too) About This Story This is a career mode playthrough of a 6.4x rescaled, heavily modded game, done in the style of an after action report. In some respects, it can be considered a sort of spiritual successor to my previous AAR, Because It's There. Unlike Because It's There, this AAR will be told in a more traditional style, with a mixture of in-universe dialogue and out-of-universe commentary. Updates will happen on weekends, and I'll try to have at least one launch per update post. In-Universe Background By Their Bootstraps takes place shortly after a major, decade-long war which saw the end of many longstanding nations and empires. The dominant powers in the aftermath of this conflict are the Greater Kerbal Empire, formed from the remnants of several former imperialist nations, and the Coalition of Free Republics, a loose alliance/confederation of former colonies of said former imperialist nations. The two powers are in state of cold war, with neither side willing or capable of starting another protracted conflict. Our story focuses on the Empire's space program, which is split between the military Imperial Rocketry Corps and the civilian Ministry of Aerospace Studies. Chapter List Chapter 1: Sparks Fly Chapter 2: Flare Ups Intermezzo 1: Sparks 6 Design Leak Chapter 3: Spark Gap Chapter 4: Flash Lights and Test Flights Chapter 5: Cold Embers Chapter 6: A Flash of Lightning Chapter 7: Gumdrops Chapter 8: Probes and Preparations Chapter 9: Plum Full of Problems Modlist Yes, that is 130 installed mods. Amazingly, I can load into the main menu with just under 3 GB of memory usage. If anyone wants, I can give you a .ckan file to save you time installing them all. Data Tables Career Stats Funds: 3700278 Science: 65 Reputation: 74% Building Upgrades Vehicle Assembly Building: 2 Launchpad: 3 Spaceplane Hangar: 2 Runway: 2 Tracking Station: 2 Astronaut Complex: 3 Research and Development: 2 Administration Building: 2 Mission Control: 3 Tech Nodes Unlocked Missions Rosters

Wow, how have I missed this. This does, in fact, appear to be exactly what I wanted in a rescale. A few questions for clarification: Am I correct in my understanding that this works natively with OPM? Does this only rescale the orbits and sizes of planets, or does it also do recolors and/or other changes? (I saw mention of changing Eve's rotation earlier in the thread, which worries me.) If there are other changes aside from rescaling, can they be disabled easily? Aside from Kopernicus (and, presumably, ModuleManager) are there any other dependencies for this? What's the mod support looking like right now? Does it play nicely with things like RemoteTech, ScanSat, etc...?

Huh. That's interesting. I suppose you learn something new every day.

Do note that the usage data gathered already is not about part usage. Rather, it's looks at your system specs and sends them off to squad so they can see what kind of computers people are playing the game on.

So? Wide area synchronous grids aren't intercontinental. If it's night time over North America, it doesn't matter if you have solar panels producing in Europe, you can't (easily) move that electricity across the Atlantic. Even if we /did/ have undersea power cables connecting the two continents, you run into line loss issues, voltage differences, and the fact that you are placing your critical infrastructure under several miles of ocean. You can't get around the fact that you need base power generation, or an extraordinary amount of storage. Here's another thing to consider. Solar isn't actually renewable. Photovoltaic cells decay over time, and are constructed using some pretty expensive (and nasty) rare earth minerals. Eventually, we will run out of said rare earth minerals. Building enough solar panels to meet global energy demand would bring about that shortage much sooner. (Of course, this point is moot if you have asteroid mining, but that is a subject for another time.) On the other hand, we have enough fissile material to meet global energy demand for centuries.

It's not possible (or at least, it's very very difficult). Rocket engines are incredibly complex, delicate pieces of technology. If you build one to burn one type of fuel, you can only use that fuel with it. It's a bit like trying to burn diesel in a petrol engine. Except even worse.

Almost right. Ideally, it'd be kerbal planets scaled to real size. However, as mentioned, the only mod that does scale the kerbin system to 10x is feature incomplete and buggy. And unlike RSS, there's no massive modpack behind it to back it up. Could one be made? Sure, probably, but it wouldn't be nearly as well supported as RO, and it would almost certainly still have issues with "realism = real world", especially in engines. 64K is probably a better base to start off of, being more developed and better supported. So what would a 64K Realistic Kerbin System modpack look like? Off the top of my head, it would probably need to have the following: 64K Ferram Aerospace Research Real Chute Real Fuels (with either the stockalike configs or a custom config) Advance Jet Engines (a modified version that doesn't remove the stock engines) Real Heat (maybe) Procedural Parts Remote Tech TAC Life Support (or another similar life support mod) (would also need edited configs) Procedural Wings Some manner of ISRU I'm sure I'm missing some things, but that would probably be the core. So I suppose it is possible to make a realistic kerbin pack like I described, but it would require a non-trivial amount of work to get everything to work.

Let me start off by stating that this is not a discussion on whether realism is better, or about whether it sacrifices gameplay, or any of the myriad other debates that come up whenever realism is discussed on these forums. Instead, it is my attempt to describe what I see as a modding niche which has not been filled. ----- I, personally, love realism in KSP. It's great, it's challenging, it makes everything I know about real world rocket science even more useful for playing KSP. However, what I have noticed is that there is a tendency to equate realism to real life. If you're not sure what I mean by that, allow me to explain by example. Advanced Jet Engines is a mod that changes the physics of in-game jet engines to be more in-line with real physics. This is great, I love that kind of thing. What I don't love is the fact that it replaces all of the stock engines with real world engines. While I love playing with real physics, I don't want to play with real planets, parts, or people. This is my primary issue with Realism Overhaul. Sure, it makes the physics more realistic, but it also does its best to erase everything kerbal and replace it with real world equivalents. Now while some people may enjoy this, I don't. I want to be able to play with real physics, while still having the same kerbal planets, the same kerbal engines, and the same kerbal astronauts. This is why I love mods like FAR, which overhaul the physics without changing a single part. Are there mods that do what I've described? Sure, but they are nowhere near as common or well developed as their counterparts in the "realism = real world" category. I could play with the 10x Kerbol System mod instead of RSS, but it's buggy, less feature complete, and nowhere near as well supported as RSS is. While I am almost sure that my view is a minority one, there's no rule that says that we can't have niche mods for those minority views.

I think we're all missing the real problem here. If you see a mushroom cloud, it doesn't matter how far away you are, you're probably going to die. Because WW3 has started.