Cleric2145

The great thing about career mode is that you don't have to worry about 'getting it right' in the final version. You can toss all of your experimental and rough parts in as über-low tech level parts, and the final product can eventually come in as the high-tech variant. All-in-all, I'll be pleased with anything you put out!

No need to get so complex. Just use the existing 4-way RCS port as a dump valve with increased dump speed and no net force--the resource would flow through all four valves simultaneously and cancel each other out. Perhaps leave a much less expensive 1-way port as the low-tech version, and work up the the 4-way. KISS ;P I haven't used that valve since around .25, but it was my understanding that it only vented the resources inside the tank to which it was attached, limiting it to only Monoprop/LOX. My idea is to repurpose the 1-way and 4-way RCS ports as universal dump valves integrated into Ship Manifest, so that you can use the GUI to dump whichever resource you want, provided it's flowable and can crossfeed to the valve. I guess to clarify what I'm asking is to dump waste TACLS resources like Waste Water before reentry. Monoprop and LOX are already dumpable through a decent number of mods, but only TAC fuel balancer and Ship Manifest so far are able to specifically dump just these resources.

Thanks for the reply! Since that's the case, if you were to create a part, perhaps you could repurpose the linear RCS Port and adjust the thrust produced based on the density of the vented resource and have it be a universal dump port. If you were to venture into part creation, it'd be a reasonably simple foray, no?

I had a creative moment today about the reliability of engines: The overall cost of the engine essentially reflects its complexity and generally its effectiveness. A very expensive engine might have great gimbal and efficiency, but requires a lot of moving parts to create this efficiency. A very cheap engine might not perform as well but is actually just an ice cream cone filled with kerosene and lit on fire and virtually never fails. This in mind, would it be possible to implement a reliability gradient for engines based on their cost? For instance, a super cheap engine (e.g. a Russian hypergolic engine) might be overall less reliable, but more corners can be cut without sacrificing as much reliability. A complex engine (let's say the SSMEs) might be overall more reliable, but you can't cut really any corners without severely affecting the safety of the engine. In essence this might play out as the first engine being able to reduce it's price by 25% at the cost of only 10% reliability, but the latter engines lose 30% reliability at the same discount--however, at base cost the costlier engine would be more reliable, and conversely would benefit more from increased QA than the first (you can polish a turd etc.) I'm not sure if this would be easy to implement, but if so it should be fairly simple to apply to all engines using a formula taking into account their base reliability and cost.

Thanks so much for all of your work on this mod! It's incredibly useful for easily maximizing science returns. I do have one question/request regarding resource dumping however. Why would it not be realistic to vent resources into space mid-flight? For instance, several spacecraft in real life discard spare monoprop and fuel before reentry to ease the thermal load by reducing the mass, and thus the inertia. Needing to turn on god mode to dump resources hurts my soul, and results in other things such as experiments being affected. Currently I could use TAC fuel balancer to do this, but I'd just as soon eliminate a mod from my gameData and go solely with Ship Manifest. Thanks for reading, and sorry if this has already been discussed!

First thought on seeing this.

I love the idea of this pack but are the contracts only supposed to give you something like 18h to complete them? That seems tight for your average Career game, but using Kerbal Construction Time makes them impossible. Is there any way to bump the completion time to be on par with stock contracts, i.e. lasting months or years? Failing that, where would one find the parameters to alter the completion time on the contracts? I'm not having luck finding anything that looks like it in the .cfgs.

An easy fix to the FAR/parachute/drag issue would be to cut the nosecone into two pieces, the cylinder beneath the cone becoming the "Gyroscopic Guidance Package" (probe core) and the actual nosecone becoming the non-rootable parachute part. That way you have one part creating drag. This would also open the door to using the nose cone parachutes on the solid rockets as boosters without actually adding probe control cores to them (mainly for aesthetics, since they are too cheap to care about recovering.)

I'm sure we'd all appreciate, at the very least, a more compact module for the basic entry level commands--perhaps one more smaller or more rounded than the current square chip that sticks off the edges of a 1.25m or even .625m rocket .

If you're referencing the Kerbal deaths on the landing breakup of one of his spaceplanes, if definitely looked lethal--at least to me. Keep in mind that that was a massive craft, and what might look and a hard nose wheel bump could have been a pretty lethal 15-25m drop. Unrelated--It looks to me like th difficulty settings aren't quite tweaked yet. On hard mode I find my pods (non-RSS) to come back in from a 200km orbit with 28km reentry with very little reentry effects and zero shield ablation, whereas on normal I see massive reentry effects (appropriately) and good ablation even on a 70x70km orbit with a 28km Pe. Can you replicate this or is this something broken in my install?

Woo! Early Christmas present! I presume this also fixes the engine/decouple effects freaking out occasionally?

The strange thing is that I don't think I've been experiencing the wandering nodes issue until last night, and nothing in my install has changed. I suspect I've just not run into the issue before now, but it's suddenly grinded my current mission to a halt since I need a tiny .625m sounding-style rocket to get temperature data from high altitudes several km away without having advanced-supersonic tech yet. Tweakscale has become pretty integral to my KSP experience, so I'll be more than willing to wait! Merry Christmas Bio, hope you're doing well!

Yes, an old mod called AdvSRB added modular SRBs (with 2.5x2m segments you could stack, with a nose cone [chute+sep charge] and nozzle) that you could create totally custom SRBs with. It featured realistic SRB dynamics (longer=more thrust, but same duration no matter the length.) In addition, the last two seconds of the SRB were very low thrust, and when combined with the separation charges in the nose cones, would create a gorgeous realistic separation. Not to mention custom action groups, for instance the abort action, which simulated blowing out the SRB nozzle in an emergency to greatly reduce the SRB thrust. I wish that mod was continued .

It's surprising how useful these parts are for everything even after the initial sounding rocket phase. JATO auto-ditch boosters, Launch sticks that auto-magically release, self-contained science rocket-bombs. I wouldn't mind it if you expanded on these parts and took their unique traits (auto-jettison, tiny size) and applied them to new non-sounding rocket parts. It'd be nice to have larger SRBS that also auto-jettison, or small nose cones with integrated parachutes and probe bodies that were designed for exploring other planets (both of which I feel like I already exploit this mod plenty for. c: )

Are you guys using CKAN to install ENB? CKAN just pushed a fix for CKAN installing old incompatible versions and calling them the current version, i.e may have been installing the old version of ENB that isn't compatible with .90. Try a manual install of ENB and see if that fixes it.

Launching directly into the inclination should still be most efficient. Imagine your rocket's delta-v as a full bucket, and your orbital velocity in each direction is an empty bucket. Instead of pouring half your bucket into the East bucket, then pouring that heavy East bucket into the North bucket, just start filling the North bucket to begin with. c: I love metaphors.

For a crowd of folks who use a mod designed to make you wait patiently, you sure don't do much patient waiting. XD

We have an incredible tool, having KSP. Being able to have all of the orbital mechanics automatically calculated and visualized is a huge deal. Back in the Gemini days of space travel, when astronauts where getting shot up into space by teams of the smartest living human beings, the astronauts and mission controllers could not, for several hours, understand why the hell the pilot could thrust directly at a target and miss wide to the right until they pulled out their slide-rules, and sketched some circles and realized they weren't looking at orbital mechanics properly. I believe Buzz Aldrin wrote a thesis before he went into space about that type of orbital movement, but I could be wrong, I'm very sleep deprived at the moment...

I'm assuming that's probably because the repository is populated by crawling through all the mods every so often. If a bunch of mods update right after a crawl, the repository will probably be behind quite a bit.

Having not flown without FAR since .21, I was shocked flying through the atmosphere and not being able to break the sound barrier at 1000m with a LV-30 strapped to the back of a small UAV. It's simply bonkers D:. I can strut the hell out of things (especially with B9 invisistruts) and hobble into orbit, but you can't fake a real Aero model. Give Ferram space to work and he'll churn out some good code when he's got it ready. From what I can tell, 0.90 threw a lot of mods into a pit of hell they'll need to dig themselves out of.

If you threw the rock at a speed of 2 m/s to the East, it would briefly travel 2 m/s faster in the "ground orbit" before hitting the ground. If it was thrown West at 2 m/s, it would be travelling East 2 m/s slower than everything around it. It's a very strange frame of mind to think about, but by throwing the rock to the West, you are decelerating it. If you stood on Earth's equator and fired a bullet West at ~465 m/s, it would essentially be standing still in the reference of Earth's rotation, getting battered by the atmosphere soup that spins along with the earth. If you fired it to the East, it would be moving twice as fast as the Earth is spinning, and have almost the same effect on the bullet. Once you start firing North and South you start getting all sorts of fun effects. In the frame of reference that we live in, it's almost impossible to see or perceive the effects that the orbital velocity of the Earth has on movement. Leaving the atmosphere doesn't effect anything differently other than allowing our rocks to not immediately vaporize when we throw them fast enough to see the effects. If you are in orbit going 1000 m/s Eastwards, and you send one rocket to the West and one to the East, one will fall straight down to the planet, the other will nearly fly off to Duna. Being in the atmosphere wouldn't change the idea other than having to deal with the all the bothersome junk like air. EDIT: And this the great thing about KSP: set up a scenario like this with hyper edit and test it and find the answer to your question. Then blow up a Kerbal for fun. It's like being a scientist, but with more screaming and explosions!

To clarify a little bit: Just sitting on the Kerbin surface, you are moving 174m/s Eastwards. If you launched perfectly upwards, that lateral velocity would still be there, and your trajectory would look similar to your first picture. Sitting on the surface, you could say you are on a perfectly circular orbit, with the trajectory making a ring across the surface. Now imagine you are in an 'actual' orbit at 100km, perfectly circular and equatorial, and you burn directly west or north. Your trajectory doesn't immediately about-face (or left/right-face for North/South), but it slowly tilts in the direction as you overcome your orbital velocity. This is same thing that you do at launch when you take off headed anywhere other than East. Since you are moving East at 174m/s at the same speed as the ground, your surface velocity (the difference between your speed and the speed of the planet) is zero. When you start boosting West, you are actually still moving East at 174m/s but you are essentially decelerating to a 'stop' before moving West. Once you 'stop' your orbital velocity, you will appear to be moving Westwards, but it's actually the planet spinning under you as you 'stand still.' When you keep accelerating, you will gain a retrograde velocity and see your trajectory start shifting. EDIT: And to answer your question about launching into highly-inclined orbits, you'll need to aim closer to West than you want to end up. Again, because you start with a high Eastward velocity, once your navball ticks into Orbital velocity, your vector marker will jump towards the East. I suppose starting with your navball in orbital might actually help, but you'll be losing a lot of energy to fighting your surface velocity until you leave the denser atmosphere, and if you're using FAR, you'll probably lose control because you'll be aiming pretty far off your velocity and you'll get flipped by the airflow.

Probably due to the fact (as noted in the title of the thread) that this was last updated for .22.

Just out of curiosity (I took a hiatus from KSP since .23 and rejoined at .25 so I missed a few updates to DRE), have the mechanics for heat dissipation/ablation been totally reworked? Previously, the hotter the reentry, the quicker your heat shield would ablate, and the quicker it would ablate (i.e. evaporate), the more the actual shield's temperature would drop (evaporation causing a drop in temperature.) Once the shield was depleted, its temperature would start rapidly climbing until it over heated and shattered with the rest of the craft soon following suit. In the current version (which I've only tested in the Kerbin atmosphere thus far), a different series of events has been occuring. As reentry gets hotter, the ablation rate also climbs--just as before. Except now, the temperate seems to climb with the ablation, until the shield fully ablates (which previously would only happen on a botched reentry profile but now regularly happens) at which point the temperature plummets from ~1800C down past ~800C. Am I just lucky in timing the shield running out with deccelerating enough to not overheat, or is this intentional? Additionally, I would play with the Shockwave Exponent and multipliers at around 1.07, but now with the both of them set at 1.00 I seem to be hard pressed to keep my shield from depleting by the end of reentry, where previously I would hit maybe 25% on a hard reentry. I very well may be totally misunderstanding all of the values' effects, but there definitely seems to be something different. Running out of AS would previously be a death sentence, but it wouldn't happen unless I came in too steep or spent too long in the mid atmosphere burning it off.

Hurr. My bad. I got back from a long hiatus in KSP and had to update a bunch of mods. I didn't look well enough and just mass-updated a dozen addons.