Superfluous J

I could joke and say "dV info" but won't. For me it's gotta be the editor as a whole. I've tried many 3d building software in my time, large and small, dedicated and integrated, art- and game-related. I've never really enjoyed the process before. Some of them I gave up in frustration, others I was able to make work in spite of the problems, but none were actually a joy to work with. KSP's ship editor is fantastic in comparison. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it's solid and a joy to work with.

Is it a probe? More specifically, does it have a command pod where a Kerbal can sit and is there a Kerbal in it? If so, it's not a probe.

May need a better definition of "tiny parts" as there are no 0.625m command pods, so there's no way to get your Kerbals onto the rocket unless you use chairs and have them standing around beforehand.

Only if you edit the even-numbered lines. I get around this by re-rooting until what I want to edit is on an odd numbered line.

So now playing stock is cheating. ;)

How is that a problem? Ignoring that stock KSP can't ask "how would this work with all the mods available for the game?" on every change they make, how would adding a second variant (while keeping the original) cause problems in FAR? The problem I see is that instead of potentially lessening the number of parts in that side list, this suggestion will instead double them.

"Cheating" is when you want to go a different direction than your rocket is going, but you want most of your thrust to go into increasing your velocity, so you veer a little bit to the left or right. That's called "Cheating to the [left/right]."* Anything else in the game isn't cheating. *I don't know exactly where I got this term, but it's closest definitive definition** is the #3 intransitive verb definition here. **Actual alliteration, alas and agog!

...that I know of. Or knew of, until now.

Note it's not that the thrust increases over time, it's that it's constant but is pushing less mass than it did when it started so it seems like there's more thrust. In fact, though, it's the craft's TWR - Thrust to Weight Ratio - that has increased. Sadly, you can't just edit this with a config as "constant thrust" is just a thing the game does so there is no config to modify. I know of no mods that implement a variable thrust in SRBs but do know the request has popped up several times over the years. I'd assume it's either not that important to any modders, or it'd at least take more time and effort than any modders are willing to invest for the benefit.

I didn't mean the workarounds the community has come up with are BAD. Just that using that technique in a stock part would be bad. It's a kludge. It works in spite of the programming, not because of it. Neither am I. I'm going by the fact that IR has been a mod for longer than I've been playing KSP and it's always been buggy. I hate to be defeatist but a lot of very smart people have looked at it and it's still buggy.

Last time I checked, the days DO change over time. If you time warp to sunrise and note the current time of day, and then time warp several years into the future and then to the next sunrise, the time of day will be different.

The reasoning to remove the butt plate is that you could more easily mix-and-match engines to stacks. Would you ever want to attach an Ant to an SLS fuel tank? Probably not, but it'd be nice if you could without it seemingly floating in the air below the tank like it does now. How much do I care? None. That's right. I care none. If it bothers me I use the gizmo to translate the engine up so it looks like it's physically attached to the tank, and am happy with that. Sometimes, I'll actually do what the screen shot shows, but not always. And I never use larger engines on smaller stacks so there's no issue there for me. I heard talk in a devnotes recently that tank butts might autosize to the stack to which they connect. This seems fine to me though I'd like to see it in practice before endorsing it. I remember back when Minecraft stairs automatically "figured out" which direction to face and how to fit into corners and it was no end of trouble when you wanted to do anything but the most simple design.

Other than looks, no.

I did not. I swear it wasn't there when I first read your post. Or, I totally blanked on it. That's probably more likely but I really did not see it. However, "Look at this crazy kludge involving cramming a bunch of thermometers together" is a far cry from "hinges now work and should be implemented in the stock game."

Are you talking about using airbrakes to "climb" or "walk" so docking ports can connect, or a ship can move across another ship? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a single craft that can - the way IR does it - rotate a hinge or something to change the way the ship looks. This causes bugs that are very apparent, reproducible, unavoidable, and (it seems) unfixable. Introducing that level of bug into the game on purpose just for "yay hinges" would be a terrible idea.

Other than the claw (which does it by default), there is no way to attach anything to a moving part in the stock game. and no, I'm not talking about cargo bay doors. Or landing gear. I'm talking building a ship so that in flight, you can activate something that causes the ship to change shape, which is what was wanted when talking about hinges.

You hook Infernal Robotics parts together with docking ports in stock?

I did clarify it. I remade the ship in 2 ways, one with a Kickback SB and one with 3 BACCs in 2 stages, first 2 of them and then 1. Both of the ships only needed 2 LFO tanks in the 2nd stage and I still dropped fuel back to Kerbin. They needed more control authority as the SRBs don't gimbal, of course, but they were still cheaper than the original, cheap enough for me to not feel the need to make them recoverable. But anyway, this is ancillary to the mod itself which IS very cool and useful, both as a teaching aid and as a "go make a sandwich during the boring stuff" aid. I'm going to bow out. You DO make very good arguments that I don't (completely) disagree with.

Your first launch was WAY too vertical to start, and then you turned too fast at 40km, also, throttling down during launch is never a good idea. If you MUST throttle down, then your ship has too much TWR (note: your ship has too much TWR) and you should remove engine power to save the weight. Why carry what you're not using? During my test launch, my (stockified so may be slightly different) rocket made orbit with fuel still in the center launch stage. Your 2nd launch in comparison is much better, but the ship does do odd things. I wouldn't call that a "flip" though, more of a veer. I must apologize, the COM/COT thing is not related to this problem. I agreed at the time with whomever said that, and after I actually built my copy of your rocket I realized that it doesn't matter. That has more to do with SAS getting confused about which way to auto-gimbal the rockets and has nothing to do with aerodynmic stability. Sadly, there is no "center of aerodynamic stress" indicator because that depends on more than just the rocket size and shape, but your COM marker is obviously very low in the rocket, which is what's causing the problem. Really, you should redesign the rocket to raise that COM, and you should start by ditching at least one of those three engines. I know that 1 engine isn't enough and 2 is troublesome to work with but still that's what I'd suggest. 1 engine and 1.1 launch TWR is more controllable AND cheaper (though it'll use more fuel and take more m/s of dV, but see my signature for what I think about that) than 3 engines getting 2+ launch TWR. One thing I've done in early career is to use a single BACC Kickback SRB on the bottom of my craft for the initial kick off the surface, and not actually stage the LFO engine until the BACC Kickback burns out. It's a cheap way to get some early height and speed, without removing mass from the top of the rocket where you want it during the early rise. One thing I'd like to know, how does MechJeb handle similar parameters, or how does this mod handle the parameters you plug into MechJeb? I don't know anything about MechJeb (and very little about this mod TBH) but these tests don't seem useful as they're using very different parameters.

I have no idea the details, just that IR + docking = bad. There are warnings all over the IR thread and I've never had a good experience myself with it either. Because of these bad experiences I've essentially sworn off of IR until they say they've fixed that, but I have no expectations about it. I *DO* expect Squad to not implement something that buggy into the main game, and likewise expect they *WILL* implement it quickly once a way to do it without the bugs is found. I don't know why "whatever works for the claw" can't be adapted to IR style hinges. The claw has some issues but I think they're mostly fixed, and it has a hinge and is useless without attaching things together in-game, which to my knowledge is handled like docking. Obviously there is some reason it won't work, or one of the very smart people who mod for this game would have done it by now. Also let me stress this: I'm not dogging on the IR guys. It's a very cool mod and the bugs aren't their fault. But they're there and Squad would get (and deserve) a lot of community flak for implementing it into the stock game.

I always assumed it was the huge bug caused by docking moving parts together. If a fix was found for that I would expect robotic parts in the game not too long after.

Thanks for this. I actually might have had time for this but do in no means mind not having to do it, so much that I'll at least double if not triple negative that. I actually poked into the stream, and just saw DasValdez doing his thing. Nothing against him but I really only watch these for the info and I thought there would be none. Happy to see there actually was some.

@vardicd I built your ship as best I could. It had a decent number of non-stock parts so I just made a stock equivalent. As I suspected, the COM starts out quite low. Also, it has a TWR over 2 at launch which - as stated before - is too high. It launches *okay* but was a bit squirrely until the two side tanks go. I suspect your mod parts - and your tweaking that engine into the bottom tank - may have more to do with the flip than this mod. One thing: The parachutes on the drop stages are essentially useless unless you've modded that too. By the time they trigger you're going so fast they get ripped off.

Generally if it helps me or is obviously helpful to the person it's directed to. Also teh funnay.

@gilflo that looks a lot to me like you're editing the orbit of KERBIN, not the active ship. I know I've tripped over that before but don't remember the steps it took or what to do instead.