NathanKell

Well, that was...quite the break. Oh hi, forums! I took advantage of the downtime to finally finish my tech-levels modding of every engine, and making some custom textures for StretchyTanks and Procedural Fairings. Expect much prettier (and more realistic) rockets and probes! Examples, coming soon: Meton 3 on Granite launch vehicle Meton 3 and its kick stage falling towards the moon (apparently KSA had better luck than JPL/NASA with this spacecraft design!) Mond 3 on its Langschiff-A3 launcher. You might say the RRA are something of pioneers in the field of probes.

Astronautix, from what I've read, well, whoever is writing the articles really has it in for NASA's Apollo-era choices. For example, read the entry on Apollo D2. Elsewhere I've read it estimated that Lunar Gemini costs and time would have bloated at least as much as Apollo, which is a good part of why they didn't go for it. (Of course, empire-building and turf wars, as the article says, is part of it too, don't want to pretend it's not.) Hell, they originally were going to do EOR without LOR, which meant TWO Saturn V launches! (IIRC.) But LOR meant they could squeeze it all in one. What's really interesting is EOR-LOR, or LOR-LOR. Now that's Moon on the cheap! You could swing that with two uprated Titans, I think, especially if you went the Soyuz route of separate orbital hab to cut down on CSM mass. Maybe four, if you had to do LOR-LOR with a newPollo-Centaur and newLEM-Centaur.

It's...both. That's why it's confusing. AND to top it off, there _were_ plans to use both stages for Lunar Gemini missions! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_%28rocket_stage%29 You can see how the Centaur is basically one giant LH2 tank, with a bitty LOX tank at the top, and two RL10s, whereas the Transtage has a built-in fairing around the two long-and-narrow tanks for the hypergolic fuels. It looks like Gemini-era Centaurs were finished in polished aluminum, (to better reflect heat away from the cyrogenic propellants?) and kept in fairings. Modern Centaurs have the foam insulation characteristic of, i.e., the Shuttle External Tank. You might want to look at http://www.astronautix.com/craft/gemntaur.htm for pics of how Gemini would mate to Centaur. Sorry if that's TMI...

yongedevil, I see. So that's why any changes made once the part is placed (i.e. any kind of procedural part) won't be seen by IonModuleSRBManager. (Also, I apologize for misspelling your name before!) Oh well. This will still be great for standard SRBs though! (And I implemented a key+mouseover way to determine burn time, and thus thrust, on procedural SRBs, so no worries.)

Ah, excellent!

Fair. The question is whether that overbalances the detailed areas the first compression smooths...

They just changes what the button says. It's still download.

Again, the models _are not taking up lots of space and memory_. The limit for KSP that people talk about with "size" of mods is _memory_. And models aren't taking up much memory. What's taking up memory is the _textures_ for the models. Novapunch uses pngs and tgas. Kethane uses mbms. See my previous post--mbms are uncompressed, of _course_ they take lots of space on disk. Try zipping one up; that's how big an equivalent resolution PNG would be on disk. But remember, image file type _does not_ have correspondence to KSP's memory use! Resolution does.

SRBs working.

Folks, size of mbm != size in memory! mbm, png, tga, it all gets read and compressed to DXT ingame, so the final size in memory won't differ no matter what format is on the disk. (With the exception of if what format is on the disk is already lossy, then it might get compressed tighter, because it'll have less detail to compress.) And models take up next to no space, animated or not.

No, the TVPP wingtips are like .6m! I used those before I went all-pWings.

pWings, of course. But if you want premade, try TV PP. Although there aren't any flying stabs of smaller than AV-R8 size, there are .5m control surfaces, mini winglets, etc.

sirklick, I really don't want to derail this thread by talking about that here. I don't blame AG for not implementing stuff either. And as to not integrating mods--just because mods play nice with each other doesn't mean you're forced to use all of them together. But for those who do...it's important that they _do_ work together.

Yongdevil, I'm trying to figure out how (well, _when_) you read a SRB's resources and maxThrust. Is it really on load of KSP? If so, is there any way to modify the data once you've read it?

Looking good! IIRC yes that is a collision mesh problem--KW had that issue too, and it was traced to the collision mesh. EDIT: What Tiberion said--that's the better approach.

mwlue, Starwaster, thanks! Dragon01, I asked about that upthread. AncientGammoner said it can't be done with the way the code's written (tanks are scaled using model transforms, not bones like pWings). Conti, AncientGammoner talked about that upthread, it's by design, to be like airplane tanks (which hold less LF than their equivalent-volume rocket fuel tanks).

Point being if StretchyTanks had a solid mode, combined with this (to modify thrust) you could have fully procedural solid rockets.

Thanks! Been using that site for spacecraft specs (only place I found that actually lists the propellant mass of the Mercury LES, for example!) Encyclopedia Astronautica has the a similar version for max vac Isp too. Reality...not so hot, yeah. :\

Someone upthread was asking about Saturn-style tank textures. I went ahead and did that, and also a checkered one. AncientGammoner, you have PM.

The more I look, the more I find N204/UDMH to have a lower Isp than kerolox. So never mind that bit. Small sample problem. You say "this page"--which page? Because your post _is_ the bottom of this page. That kludge sounds pretty cool, actually, but yeah, might as well write a plugin. I saw that too, heh. Either in Eyes Turned Skyward or the Charlie Stross story linked from there (dealt with FOOF as oxidizer...yikes!). Huh. Interesting bug. Probably just a missing if() block somewhere, then. Think for now, like with folks in the DRE thread, community has to step in to maintain MFS (and thanks to ialdabaoth's generous license, which requires only that we honestly reaffirm how awesome s/he is, we can).

Hurrah! Now if only this would interface with StretchyTanks...

You're welcome! You could do transposition/docking without extraction, before circularization. Then they'll burn up. (Decouple the fairings but not the decoupler attaching the LM to the interstage.) Or you could use your TMI to put you on an intercept course and blow the fairings only when very near, hopefully they'll be sucked into the moon, and use your SPS to burn enough away for an orbit. But yeah, I too want an option for decoupling to be separated from fairing jettison--in my case the reverse, so the fairings will stay attached after decoupling the interstage.

Right, sorry, hadn't used it yet so forgot about flight mode. RT1, I was thinking, but only selfishly (I'm still using it, as are, it appears, a number of folks, because RT2 is still very much in playtest-at-most mode). RT2 would be more long-term, though. Both, obviously, would be best.

Better count the Griffon as like an F-1A, then, throttleable to 75%. Should be possible to do the throttling that way*, but I'm not sure whether you then have to set an actiongroup (or right-click) to turn the engine off, rather than throttling to 0. And it wouldn't fix the reignition problem, for that you do (I think) need a plugin, no? *there's a maxthrottle and minthrottle in the ModuleEngines node. Or something like those names. I've mostly been looking at early stuff--like the conversion of Titan's engines from kerolox to hypergol. But I haven't dug in depth. From what I've seen, for similar timeframe engines, you get about the same TWR with maybe 1-5% better Isp. I think just N2O4/Hydrazine, or UDMH, or Aerozine, or whatever floats your boat, would work. Could use it as reasonable standin for "non-cyrogenic dense fuel" and, eventually "that can be restarted easily." I wouldn't touch Flourine with a ten foot pole, in real life or with a mod. I also hope to write something that might make it explode on occasion. I'm getting tired of lack of failures in KSP (weird, I know).

Ah, so this is what you were working on! Awesome! Can you include Remotetech Antenna, dish, and SPU electricity numbers? You can read from the partname's module's confignode so no dependency needed.