Starwaster

@Battou As I thought this is a perceptual problem on your part and not a problem with the engine part. First: Do not compare any of the Real Fuels nuclear engines to the stock nuclear engine. STOP that. The stock nuclear engine is poorly designed and not based in reality. LiquidFuel an extremely dense compact fuel (probably some form of hydrazine) and the specific impulse (Isp) is way too high. Dense propellants will tend to have exhaust with high molecular mass and therefore lower Isp. To get higher Isp you need low molecular mass such as with hydrogen. TL;DR the stock LVN is extremely overpowered and has performance that far outstrips the engine it is meant to model. Second: Pretty sure It's been said to you repeatedly (@Raptor831 and I) liquid hydrogen nuclear engines require a lot of tankage. THIS IS NOT A BUG. The extra tankage requires extra mass. Third: Because of point #2 you should NOT be using this kind of engine on a small ship like the one you are using. You need to learn when and when not to use it. You've got some little Apollo type craft there, stick with the poodle or some other small light hypergolic engine. You use something like a nuclear engine when the mass of the hydrogen + hydrogen tankage is actually going to be lower than the mass of the fuel required by a smaller engine. In other words, an engine like that is best used for a larger payload where the propellant mass required for the poodle lowers your TWR too much. Then you might think about using a nuclear engine with all or mostly hydrogen tankage. Fourth: Get a mod that lets you replace all those tiny little tanks with one large tank. Sized properly you can see some mass savings. An example of how they planned to use nuclear engines in the real world is for the Saturn V third stage (S-IVB). they planned to replace the single J2 engine with a NERVA and no LOX tankage. The resulting stage would have been called the S-N. The goal was to increase carried payload as much as (or more than) to increase delta-V

That doesn't make a lot of sense, what are you saying has the same mass? The each total vehicle? The spent propellant? Neither case is possible at all; they can't have the same mass. In any event maybe you're just not using the NTR in the right kind of vehicle. It's the sort of thing that you would use on a vehicle that has a lot of mass to begin with and you want to lighten the load with a tank which is mainly hydrogen. That said though, @Raptor831 you might want to take a look at this line here: The engine mass in ModuleHybridEngine overrides the part mass and has the effect of slightly more than doubling the mass. https://github.com/Raptor831/RFStockalike/blob/9aa89103a400370b6c2f04f74342eb021cfaa42a/GameData/RealFuels-Stockalike/Squad_NTR_modularEngines.cfg#L150

Because the current depth is too shallow and breaks immersion. You should not ever be able to reach something resembling a solid surface, even if contact with that surface destroys the craft.

If it gives me something I can latch onto so that I know that the gear is deployed or retracted then sure. DRE can treat certain parts as shielded or unshielded depending on their animation state. That's how it's always dealt with such parts. (a similar method exists for models that disable parts of their meshes such as parachute caps)

They are, but that shouldn't affect vacuum behavior

It's probably been longer than I thought since I upgraded to a 64 bit PC and OS. I might have been confused about the timing of when I upgraded to 8GB of RAM as well and it was probably when I got the new PC.

Like what? You're trying to run KSP with the barebones minimum possible, 32 bit OS, 4 GB (and apparently don't think that should be the issue) Close everything you don't absolutely need and give serious consideration to upgrading your PC. Even if it's just an extra 4 GB of RAM (assuming your machine can handle it). Turn debris settings DOWN. (max debris in main menu settings - each one of those represents a vessel, things like spent stages or parts from destroyed ships floating around, those will drive memory usage up) It doesn't matter if KSP can directly use that extra RAM (it can't) but it'll give the rest of your machine more breathing room without KSP and your other applications struggling for available RAM. (your OS and KSP are going to want around 2GB each and anything else running is eating into that and you don't have the room) Edit: And don't expect that future updates are going to make things better because they won't, not for you. Barebones minimum and we've had several Unity updates that got incorporated into KSP. You're being let behind.

I'll try it but I'm skeptical of that being the cause. Just recalculating drag cubes of an object at rest or in a vacuum isn't going to do something like that Edit: Seems to work but doesn't make any sense unless B9PS is doing something else when it redoes the drag cubes? Is it reading the cubes for something and then applying changes to the collider? I don't get it...

It's not just you others do this too. First you need to understand that RF does NOT DO ENGINE CONFIGS ANYMORE. You should be bringing this to the thread of whatever engine pack you are using that provides your engine configs. Second, you need to understand that it's not all about thrust and Isp, you need to look at your entire rocket design. If you are LITERALLY getting as much deltaV as a poodle then your dry mass for the two vehicles you are comparing is different. Nuclear engines also tend to be heavy and maybe your poodle is lighter. Also, in comparing the LV-N vs LVN trimodal, they have very different Isp so the fuel consumption per amount of thrust is different. The thrust levels and consumption are correct for each engine for their respective Isp ratings considering LH2 consumption only. Though not explictly brought up, the trimodal should have the same LH2 consumption in afterburner mode as in its default mode but does not because the assigned thrust level is slightly higher for that mode than it should be.

Wrong! The mod cannot 'crash CKAN' because it doesn't execute any code during a CKAN installation. Bring any and all CKAN errors and crashes to CKAN. And / or download Deadly Reentry manually from its official Github releases page: https://github.com/Starwaster/DeadlyReentry/releases

Well that's discouraging. Thanks anyway for the reply.

@Shadowmage I'm writing up some Deadly Reentry support for the deployable KF wheels and I need an animation name for each wheel that would tell me if it's deployed or retracted (that's how DR determines these things: rather than using reflection on the modules, we just look at animations and change things such as thermal related fields based on the animation status - IOW the wheels would gain better protection when closed than when open) But looking at the wheel configs I see no mention of animation. Is there any standardized naming convention for KF wheel animations?

Put my first station parts with this pack in orbit... attached two of them together and then sent up the crew in an OPT shuttle... MJ gently brought it in for docking... and then stopped just above the port... I think the proximity of the centrifuge was preventing it from completing an otherwise flawless docking. I finished it myself and the wings barely missed hitting the support struts on the centrifuge

Playing with this a bit and it's bizarre... does it even with empty tanks but I don't see anything physically changing... empty tank has same dry mass for each type of cargo and its mesh doesn't change either that I can see? But it's definitely very destructive, breaking part joints or the launch pad or just catapulting things hundreds of meters into the air...

@Platonicsolid @Nertea Repro'ed and it looks like a physics issue. The physics engine can't cope with instant mass changes, which 'teleporting' resources effectively is. The funny thing is though that it also happens even if I put an empty tank on the pad. (I have successfully managed to destroy the entire pad. Good going Nertea!) Dunno if it's all one issue or two issues, one for the resource dump (maybe look at how ModuleJettison does it?) and one for the resource type switch.... no idea what's happening under the hood for that one.

KSP 1.4.0 looks like it offers greater player control over what the vessel is classified as in the part context menu in the editor - you can not only select vessel type but priority as well (if I understand it correctly, if you dock the vessel to something else then the part with the greatest assigned priority gets to decide what the composite vessel is)

I let Steam update KSP but that's because I have all other KSP versions backed up... as soon as 1.4.0 dropped I copied it to a special Games folder containing all KSP versions since... uh... 0.23? I think? Makes it easier to keep playing on current version while developing for new version

@kerbini think of it as transportation fees for barges or Super Guppies or something similar

You're free to say what you want, but as a long time modder of many games over many years, KSP is one of the easiest games to mod that I've ever seen. Certainly there's been a few things that I would have liked to be different but for the most part, Squad has been very accommodating in opening up to us. But I think it also depends on how they're approached. A lot of people on these forums have a very antagonistic approach Re: Squad/KSP and that can't make for a very good working relationship when you're trying to get things changed/added/included. People are free to say what they want I guess and free to form their opinions or take their balls and go home and they'll always remember this day as the day that KSP died for them, but for me it's just Wednesday and I guess it's time to start updating. (especially since I'm way behind on certain things that need updating. Time to tackle RF thermal I guess)

Yeah we might have to switch that one around these days...

@TheUnamusedFox You crazy lunatic!

Some days you get the EULA and other days the EULA gets you.

It should be noted that the limit is actually based on static pressure (1 kPa) and so the destruction altitude can be different for scaled star systems which may have custom atmosphere curves. For RSS this is somewhere around an altitude of 34km.

Ah so you don't yet have multiple missions going at one time. At some point you'll want to pick up Kerbal Alarm Clock. Helps you focus on individual missions while having multiples going on. (alerts you to important events like maneuver nodes, SOI changes, launch windows for other planetary transfers)

That's why I can't stand screenshots of game folders... just send the dang logs and cache files; they have everything you need at a glance and are text searchable.