NathanKell

Well, at this point all I can suggest is (1) posting your output_log.txt (from ksp/KSP_Data); even though there was no crash, there might be something in the log; and (2) start by removing half your mods. If problem goes away, add hafl of what you removed back; if it persists, remove another half, etc., until you narrow it down.

Each Rocketry node will increase their max allowable size.

You need to provide ullage control for the tanks. Basically, when you're in microgravity, the propellants can disperse all around inside the tanks, and in particular away from the feed lines. If so, there won't be any propellant for your engine's turbopump to suck in, which means your engine won't start. Before engaging the engine you need to settle your tank by providing some forward acceleration to the spacecraft (some small solid motors kept around for this occasion, or an RCS burn). Try thrusting forward with RCS a bit; the fuel status should settle towards stable. Then you can ignite your engine.

Huh! Do you have an output_log.txt from this incident? Is it repeatable?

Um, no, the problem is very likely that you ran out of memory. 8k textures take LOTS of memory. Always, always, *always* check your output_log.txt and make sure that it doesn't say anything about trying and failing to allocate. Memory crashes are *the* most common crash in KSP, and if you're slinging an extra 500mb of textures at KSP, you really ought to expect some crashing.

Yes, I will be putting the autoconfigure buttons at the top. xZise: looks like a bug in the density calc in your first image; your second image looks correct. I'll find and fix. Also--yes, despite talking about how EVAs would use up a capsule's monopropellant, Squad pulled that feature at the last minute. And please, don't worry. I'm always happy to get bug reports. Well, not happy exactly (means I screwed up ), but I'd sure rather have them than not!

In the same place where you set your range multiplier (Remotetech2_settings.cfg) also change the consumption multiplier to like 0.1 or 0.05; that will give a more realistic power draw.

That is indeed what I meant, although the engines cfg is really all you need (unless you want the flags or nosecones or other stuff from the pack). And yes, you should delete the SFJBRealEngines folder before installing RftS.

List all your mods *and* their versions. Also, make sure you're using the latest FAR.

II: Higher, Faster Part 2 Postwar Sounding Rockets and Their Wartime Roots (Germany) While the Verein für Raumschiffahrt had never disbanded during the war, it was at best in a holding pattern even before it began. As the 1930s drew onward and Russia became ever more belligerent (and more industrialized) rearmament intensified; innovative officers in the more firmly middle class Kaiserliche Marine, and in the Luftstreitkräfte (which had been made independent from the Heer late in the Great War), looked to rockets as perhaps a way to even the odds against the titan to the east. Even earlier both the navy and the air force had reached out to the VfR, given their meteorological needs and the potential for sounding rockets to deliver instrument packages to the higher atmosphere; as the ties built, and like-minded officers were assigned as liaisons, at some point the idea of ballistic missiles took hold. Given Anglo-German advances in RADAR, and Russian shows of strength in the air, by the mid 30s the idea that "the bomber would always get through" was dying. Besides, Russia was so vast (and, at the time, bombers' ranges so feeble) it appeared that to build an airplane that could get to its target and return was an impossible task; a missile, which needed only to arrive, must be simpler. Many had joined the VfR in the service of a shining, peaceful future, however, and would not see their rockets fly in the service of death. A similar phenomenon occurred in America, later, during the buildup of the Prometheus Project (and the Knoxville Project), as some scientists and engineers would not stand to see either rocketry or atomic physics used in that way. While some members of the VfR would finally offer their services after the invasion of the Fatherland, it would not be until well after the War that there was anything approaching a full reconciliation; a similar pattern occurred with the American Rocketry Society. One of the first projects that the new Raketenamt of the Reichwaffenamt ordered was an upscale and conversion of the latest mark of Repulsor sounding rocket which the VfR had been testing. The Repulsor series had been funded in part by the Kaiser, a very generous patron of the VfR; with his support the VfR had moved to Berlin, under the joint aegis of Karman and Oberth at the Kaiser Friedrich Institute. There, with funding aplenty, they could build much larger rockets than their previous Mirak "Minimum Rocket" designs. Repulsors used gyroscope-based inertial guidance and alcohol-liquid oxygen engines; these soon graduated from the old pressure-fed designs to new turbompump-fed ones (powered by steam from catalyzed high-test peroxide). To solve the heating problem in the nozzle, Repulsors used the regenerative cooling method developed by Irene Bredt and Eugen Sänger, a newcomer to the VfR and later Bredt's husband. As secrecy became an issue rocket testing was moved from the VfR's Raketenflugplatze in Berlin to a hunting estate of the Kaiser some ways out of the city, northeast of Potsdam. It was there the first government-sponsored Repulsor was tested. At the time of its first test-firing in 1938 it was the largest and most powerful liquid-fueled rocket in the world, with an engine capable of just over 20kN of thrust and weighing over half a ton wet, with instruments, parachutes, and ballast. By the start of the war it had gained a 250kg warhead, a 50km range, and a new name: Pfeil (arrow); by the end, it had a 29kN engine, a 340kg warhead, a 75km range, and a series of more famous descendents. After the war, surplus Pfeils regained their old name of Repulsor and performed valuable high-altitude research. The post-war Repulsor, like its pre-war predecessors, was equipped with parachutes and scientific equipment. However, as it was by then designed for a 340kg weight right in the nose, its light scientific payload required ballasting, limited its altitude. Nonetheless, it was sufficiently powerful to bring its instruments up to nearly 60 kilometers above the earth and return them safely to the ground. In so doing, it gave German scientists the first opportunity to make observations of a new layer of atmosphere above the stratosphere: the mesosphere, which begins approximately 50km above the surface. The Repulsor/Pfeil was a simple rocket. At the front was either an aluminum nosecone fairing or a steel-encased warhead, respectively. For civilian use, inside the nose cone would be ballast and scientific instruments, and four small parachutes. Behind the nose section was the inertial guidance unit and its gyroscopes. Behind that were the liquid oxygen tank and the 75% ethanol/25% water fuel tank. Behind that came the engine section. First was a small tank of high test hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst to break it down into steam; this would drive the turbopump. The turbopump, below that, would feed the oxidizer and fuel to the mixing chamber at high pressure. The model "A" engine--A4 in the late-war Pfeils--had a single large mixing and thrust chamber, which fed a large conical nozzle, regeneratively cooled. Carbon vanes in the exhaust would, on command from the guidance unit, divert it; the engine itself did not gimbal. The Armbrust used a derivative, the model B engine; it used 8 scaled-up A2 thrust chambers, and a similar thrust-vectoring system. The final distinctive feature of the Repulsor/Pfeil was its fins. Purely for stability, unlike later rockets they resembled the rakish designs gracing the covers of science fiction and science "fact" magazines of the 1920s and 30s. They had also been designed to cushion the tail-first landing of the early civilian Repulsors, and that ability, though unused, remained during the rocket's later use, only to be called on again when the Pfeils were released from military service and returned to their sounding rocket roots. Mission: Flight 12b Mission Control: Kaiser Friedrich Institute / VfR Vehicle: Repulsor (ex-Pfeil no. 17582) Launch Site: Northeast of Potsdam, on the shore of the Grosser Wannsee Objective: Return readings from the upper atmosphere Intended Orbit: Suborbital Description: Launch the Repulsor sounding rocket, attempt to exit the stratosphere (if there is something beyond the stratosphere), return rocket and instrumentation (with data) to the ground. Outcome: Success Repulsor T-07:00:00 Engineering statistics; Repulsor being checked out in Potsdam prior to journey to launch site. T+0:00:00 Repulsor positioned on its launch trailer just inshore from the Grosser Wannsee lake. T+0:00:01 Liftoff from trailer. T+0:00:15 Nearing supersonic velocity. Pitch program has begun, so the rocket will not land on top of its trailer! T+0:00:35 Burning skyward. Shoreline can now be seen. Nearing burnout. T+0:00:42 Burnout, fuel exhausted. The atmosphere has so little density this high (20km) that all visible atmospheric effects have ceased. Velocity at burnout just over a kilometer per second. The Repulsor has begun to turn significantly under the influence of air pressure, to stay aligned with its velocity vector (a gravity turn--gravity "pulls" the velocity vector downwards and the rocket follows). T+0:02:22 Apogee (59km), and success! The Repulsor has passed through a boundary layer and into a new kind of atmosphere, the mesosphere. T+0:02:30 Nose fairing separation, revealing the instruments and parachutes. The parachutes are gradually fed out; as yet there is not enough air pressure to fully inflate them (nor even to stabilize the rocket in a tail-first attitude). T+0:06:55 The parachutes deploy fully at around 600m AGL; the rocket swings to tail-first attitude. T+0:07:20 Stabilized. T+0:09:21 Landed! Pfeil Here is a late-war mark of the Pfeil tactical ballistic missile. It had the punch of a dreadnought's shell, like the American Fat Albert, but twice the range of a Second World War battleship's main battery. Used en masse against fortified Russian positions it proved moderately effective, and while expensive (though obviously less so than the larger, more sophisticated Armbrust) it did prove far more versatile than the massive railway guns that would otherwise have need been employed. This launch occurred in mid 1945, months after the Winter Peace that ended the war. Pfeil 12246 was launched from the Kaiserliche Marine sounding rocket station at Wilhelmshaven. Mounted for testing In flight; pitch program beginning for maximum-range flight. Burnout. The rocket will manage 77km downrange with a 20km apogee, the best yet.

Uh...wow. Yeah. Massive is the word!

That's wonderful! With an addon gimbal module that'll even give us excellent roll control.

xZise: sorry, I tend to assume people using 7km/s hydrolox stages are using RSS. Glad it's sorted, and I'll see what I can do about the info, although for the right-click info either the Isp or the fuel flow or the thrust will be wrong and I'd pick the fuel flow as the one to display wrong :] mcirish: fuel ratios are whatever the engine calls for. There aren't that many engines that share the exact same mixture ratio. Also, note that the mixture ratio quoted is almost always a mass ratio, mass of oxidizer : mass of fuel. (I.e. a 2.27 mass ratio for kerolox means 2.27kg of liquid oxygen for every kg of kerosene). KSP, however, stores resources in units of volume, so the number of units stored, and the ratios you see ingame, are volume ratios. As a general rule, kerolox ratios are on the order of 2.2-2.7; Hydrolox is usually 5.5 or 6 (with some lower); and hypergolics are all over the place, there are so many different mixtures (NTO/MMH clusters around 1.65 in US use though, IIRC).

Yes. It does.

That's stretchy tanks. Note it only happens for the stretchy tanks. You must have added, and been using, stretchy tanks (StretchySRB in particular, my fork of it).

Heh. Also, frizzank, words cannot tell you how happy I am to see those engines. An H-1 if ever I saw one! And no fuel tank butt permanently attached either

1. I think you mean StretchySRB, not MFT or RF. 2. e-dog was working on it, last I heard.

Only the second had the problem; it's fixed. Thanks! I can't change the ModuleEngines.GetInfo() method because it's Squad's own engine module. I *could* change what's shown on the action editor GUI by writing my own second info function and no longer calling mE.GetInfo(), but that still wouldn't change what you get from right-clicking an engine in the part list. Given that we've survived without anything like it until .23, and the usage per second shouldn't matter unless for some reason you're not using a vessel info plugin like MJ or KER to calculate your burn time, it's not been on my radar; I barely even registered it was there now. Also, wait, you're trying to get into orbit with only 7km/s dV? But it takes 9.3-10km/s! Well, there's you problem right there. Anyway, pic of the rocket, with info from KER or MJ, please, and I'll figure it out. MJ will use what the engine actually uses, which is 9.82 until I go through and set them all to 9.80665 Though that is on the order of 0.1%, or 10m/s for each 10,000m/s dV, so it's not like it's a major issue.

Aw, thanks. :] Weird--I had no trouble with the crashTolerance set like other tanks and engines. You are using FAR and KJR, right?

Agathorn: the VAB, ignoring the art, I consider something like a giant blackboard where the rocket is sketched out. So of course they'd use the optimal environment for all engines. xZise: They're not arbitrary volume units anymore. In RF they're liters. [For gases, liters at STP.] Also, the Engines GetInfo() that display propellant use per second is wrong, because it's an unoverrideable part of the original engine module and doesn't realize that its thrust will be lower at sea level so its fuel flow won't be any higher than in vacuum (it display "max" fuel flow, i.e. fuel flow at sea level). To get correct max flow in liters per second, multiply those numbers by SL specific impulse and divide by vac specific impulse. Well, 7km/s is reasonable if you only have like 150kg of payload. Remember your rocket equation: dV = ln(gross mass / dry mass) * Ve (which is Isp in seconds * 9.81). So if you have a gross mass of, say, 2.5t, a dry mass of 0.5t, and an Isp of 450s, you get ~7.1km/s dV. (150kg for payload, 100kg for tankage, 250kg for engine)

It's cylindrical enough that a procedural interstage should do the trick.

Two scalings involved. One is if you make the part itself procedurally scalable. For that you'd need to (a) rescale the transform, ( rescale the stacknodes involved, and © move anything either stack or surface attached to the part. StretchySRB is a good source for how to do that; it's about to become a better source, as swamp_ig is adding support for rescaling by tweakables. You'd want the scale and rescaleFactor in the cfg to both be 1.0 I think; makes life easier. Second is changing the node size. FAR uses node size to calculate drag, which means it's important to get it close to right. That is, if your part is 5m across, you don't want it to have four size-0 nodes; you want it to have four size-2 nodes. Thus you should calculate how wide your part is, how many nodes you've placed (and thus how large a radius around each node is its own space), and thus what size to make the nodes. If you would then also add support for a cfg-tunable scalar for node size, that would be great for RO (since in RO's case the example for size-2 nodes would be a 4m part with room for four size-2 nodes). Again, StretchySRB might be a good place to nick code from.

Wedgenet: the reason for deleting those files is that the realistic engine configurations (RftS, and the default SFJackBauer RealEngines as soon as SFJackBauer has time to upload the current version) do (or shortly will, respectively) come with their own engine ignitor configs. I had kinda forgotten that RealEngines didn't come with EI configs right now; sorry. For now I guess your best bet is to use RftSEngines... junkie_business: make sure you redownload it regularly; I'm often changing and improving things. Last update about 3 days ago. tygoo7: thanks! Dragon01 was working on the American Pack; eadrom had a good ocnfig for Kethane that lets the converters produce RF resources. Which habitat pack? palker: Feature. Monopropellants other than MonoPropellant itself are set to STACK_PRIORITY_SEARCH rather than ALL_VESSEL, which means they need a fuel connection. This is because most of those resources double as oxidizers, and you wouldn't want to drain your upper stage when burning your booster! Anyway, I do plan to (once I get a chance) write a little plugin that will enable crossfeed between a radial tank and the stack it's connected to. Devinci: you have a broken install. Delete any ModularFuelTanks or RealFuels folders in GameData, and reinstall the latest RealFuels. Also, given that the example you were showing was of a fuel tank, I have no idea why you were trying to edit the solid fuel tank_definition; I'm also not sure whether it will correctly parse things if you stick characters into it, so please don't.

Agathorn, in my post I just mentioned that MJ *can* display sea level TWR in the dV stats panel. Click the All Stats button to make it show up. Now you don't have to guess. As I said, in the dV stats panel, TWR and Max TWR are calculated for when the engine is in vacuum, SLT (sea level TWR) is calculated for when the engine is at sea level. The "max thrust / TWR" in the *vessel* stats panel shows what is *currently* true about the engine, and in the VAB the engine "counts" as being in vacuum, whereas on the pad, it is obviously at sea level.

ECLSS does its checking in a separate thread, yes. Although it doesn't check water yet (will soon). TACLS is good stuff, but it is single-threaded.