NathanKell

Protip on the chutes: If you copy from the stock chute cfgs, you'll get to deal with tuning the drag modifier modules. Any time you change a drag modifier, you need to delete PartDatabase.cfg in the KSP folder, that will make KSP regenerate the file and use the new multiplier. Fairings could probably be made usable with a relatively simple plugn (note, not volunteering, sorry).

Huh. Thought that was enabled on SRBs. Alt method: go to action group editor, click on the SRB, edit the volume of solid fuel it contains until mass is correct.

aaaand AeroGUI is up.

Sig too big. >.> Yes, speed of sound is related to pressure and temperature, and since both change with altitude, it will too. Also with day and night! Thanks!

Radam: Two things. one, atmCurve uses density, not pressure. Jet thrust (and you're right with constant Isp thrust is a linear function of flow) is related to density and mach, not pressure and mach. Two, density most certainly does take temperature into account. I invite you to grab AeroGUI and turn it on, and check how density changes between day and night.

Yep, bluntness will matter, and there's some occlusion going on too looks like.

Yakky: there's also flow separation from high pressure vs too-high area ratio, that would contribute to Isp being lower than a straight chamber pressure vs static pressure comparison. allmhuran, you've probably never played a flight sim where you can install incredibly powerful engines on tiny, tiny aircraft. Each Turboramjet is about 1.3x as powerful as the J-58s used on the Blackbird on the runway, and supports higher speed. You're right that they have unrealistic TWRs--something like 2-4x the TWR of real life jets. They also have about 10x the Isp of real jets. However, they are much much less overpowered in 1.0 than in .90, so I consider that improvement.

<horntoot> Or AeroGUI, finally in release form. </horntoot>

AeroGUI A small GUI that displays aero-related information. Press (mod)-I in flight to turn it on. That's I as in India, and (mod) on Windows is the ALT key. Download Github License: MIT

You're absolutely right! Why make fuel usage related to Isp--gameplay trumps realism! Why make gravity scale with the inverse square of distance? Wouldn't it be more fun if your orbital velocity increased the higher you went, and your orbital period stayed constant? Brilliant!

GoSlash27: thanks! As it happens I have a plugin I wrote that helped during experimentals called AeroGUI. I meant to release it with 1.0 but I've been busy answering stuff on the forums. I'll add terminal velocity to it, though it will only be approximate--since vessel Cd shifts with mach, your instantaneous terminal velocity (i.e. based on your _current_ Cd) will not ever quite be your actual terminal velocity. If nothing else, the ratio of weight (in kN) to drag force will tell you what ratio of terminal velocity you're at.

allmhuran: well yes, if you put fifty million kilonewtons on an F-16. Have you looked at your craft mass and your static thrust, and compared to real life? Real life jets have 1/2 to 1/4 the TWR KSP jets do.

Check out the specified specific heats and specific impulses. Looks like a much closer fit to Aerozine 50 and nitrogen tetroxide (assuming high-tech staged combustion for the upper-end engines, and [invisible] large area ratio nozzles for the vacuum engines).

Pipcard: fly like FAR is installed.

Kosmo-not: it was never linear interpolation, it was interpolation of a Unity AnimationCurve without tangents specified (i.e. autotangents). Look at that first link I gave. Also, again, atmosphereCurve uses pressure, and is for Isp. atmCurve uses density, and is for flow (i.e. thrust).

Use the utilization slider.

Use a fuel balancer like TAC Fuel Balancer, or Codepoet's, or Goodspeed. They support dumping.

GoSlash27: Ah, gotcha. Well, TV will be close to what it is in FAR, I suspect, so it'll be pretty high, and darn hard to catch even at 2Gs. For the aeroFX, unless things have changed that's based on density * velocity^3 which has an extra factor of velocity compared to drag (drag is 1/2 density * velocity^2) so it probably won't be that reliable. However, it should be very reliable for heating intensity, if heating tracks v^3 (as it probably does).

Radam: This is 1.0, not .90 Please see this thread on how floatcurve tangents work or here if you want the math behind evaluating them. tl;dr the numbers are time, value, intangent, outtangent. atmCurve relates density (in atmospheres, so density/1.225) to a flow multiplier. velCurve relates mach to a flow multiplier. Final thrust is based on the requested flow (from throttle) times the flow multipliers times Isp times g0 (9.80665m/s^2).

GoSlash27, how are you calculating terminal velocity? Almost all KSP rockets are statically unstable, unless you put rather a lot of fins at the bottom. This is because KSP engines are far heavier than real life, thus the CoM is lower than it should be (you want CoM high and center of pressure--i.e. bot lift and drag--low). That means they need to maintain their own stability by constant control movement (from control surfaces or engine vectoring; reaction wheels are probably too weak).

Robotengineer: Welcome to how jets perform in reality. You try flying a low overall-pressure-ratio turbojet (or ramjet) in the Mach 3-4 region and see how much thrust you get out of it. In fact...I suggest you use the AJE tester, load up the F100 with afterburner, set its pressure ratio to 1.1 instead of 17 or so, and see what happens to thrust as you increase mach.

Ah, but let's look at it from the other direction. Liquid engines are generally 8x as heavy as real life, and fuel tanks have about four times the dry mass of real life. Solids, on the other hand...had the same dry mass as real life. So they were, by comparison, insanely OP.

Jets perform like jets now. That means thrust varies with atmopsheric density and current mach number. The basic jet will taper off past Mach 1, the Turboramjet (note name change) peaks around Mach 3 but can still provide thrust past Mach 4, and the RAPIER (in air breathing mode) peaks around Mach 4.

Come in belly first, like the Shuttle did.