Psycix

It'd be great if this allowed us to do some sort of "sample return" mission.

I bet some of the experts will love this. The idea is to be able to add delays to staging operations so that they activate in a certain order and timing. An example: 0.000 decouple stack 0.100 fire sepratrons on detached stage 0.800 engage second stage engine Perhaps we could even throw action groups in there, like "fire action group 5" or "lower landing legs" Spill your thoughts! EDIT: Sorry, this has been suggested before, didn't see it!

Say that we have a rocket with LV-T45's and a Mainsail. Throttling down for terminal velocity optimizes fuel usage, except for the fact that you're burning fuel through the mainsail that could have been spent in the throttled LV-T45's. Being able to throttle separate groups would allow us to throttle down the most inefficient engine first. There are many more uses for this, like VTOL aircraft, SSTO's (throttling jet engines separately from rockets), spacetugs and skycranes just to name a few. It's probably more of an advanced feature for expert users, just like action groups, and I think it would add some extra possibilities to craft design. The only hurdle that I can see is a challenge in interface and input design (which buttons will throttle the other groups? do we switch control between them?), but it should be possible to overcome. What do you think?

Perhaps you can mount your cockpit upside down, or use the lander cans, they are made for landing and have downwards IVA vision. I'd like to see better IVA though. The windows tend to be awfully unuseful.

I'd like to see a high-gravity moon in a very low orbit around perhaps Jool, which would allow us to play with very significant gravity assists. Currently gravity assists are usually not worth the effort. (You tend to spend more dV because of being restricted to a certain window)

Perhaps a physics benchmark can determine the acceleration your ship makes and add it into the rail.

Or the nonsteamers learn to deal with the fact that the steam workshop is a perfect solution to this. Steam workshop was built to do this. No need to spend the effort of replicating an existing system.

Do you have thrust vectoring engines?

The question is whether or not you regard to the wobbling as a bug or a feature. We wobble because that's how this engine simulates physics: You need dislocation in order to generate force. Real rockets are pretty rigid - until they break.

Please leave the thread if you're not willing to discuss things properly. You've gone from discussing to "ROFL keep dreaming ^^" to calling someone who clearly knows a lot more about physics than you incompetent simply because you do not understand or agree with the matter at hand. The physics is correct, and from a programmer's perspective the engine should be able to work this way. If you are really certain that this is impossible, then the game developer who knows his way around the physics engine will be sure to prove me wrong wouldn't he? Actually, if someone knows who that is, please invite him to this thread. I'd like to hear his opinion on this.

Just edited an example into my previous post. EDIT: I was already editing that in while you posted. I got ninja'd and used a new post to refer to the edit.

Just like the mass and CoM the moment of inertia would indeed be pre-calculated. This is not very hard to do. A programmer who knows his way around in physics will code this up easily. It won't be very heavy for the CPU to do this calculation either. It might be possible to have the parts loaded while simply not emulating them as physics objects. EDIT, how to calculate the subsitute: CoM calculations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_mass#A_system_of_particles Moment of ineria calculations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_of_inertia#Calculating_moment_of_inertia Mass calculations: 1+1 = 2

I am very confident that you can model a set of masses on a rigid body as a single entity. Mass, location of the CoM and moment of inertia should cover everything you need to simulate an equivalent substitute. The only noticable difference is that there is no wobble. Wobble is effectively a delayed angular momentum because the masses are on a spring. This makes a rocket hard to steer. Note how all other parts, like a fuel tank, have correct rotational inertia's while being a single entity! All you need is mass, CoM and the inertia matrix. By then you will have separated most of your lifter; this frees up the CPU budget. Laggy rockets will get incrementally less laggy as you separate stages. We're not "disabling physics", we are simply optimizing the use of them. My CPU runs at 4.2 GHz. Pretty sure that it's not the hardware. Since KSP is on Unity and not multithreaded, we are stuck doing heavy physics on one core - no matter how powerful - so we need to optimize. If we can cut the load of parts in half during ascent, then that is an astronomical improvement. Have you ever tried building something big? I can build a launcher capable of launching a certain amount of tons and I can build a payload strutted up enough to survive. Combined however, the game is unplayable and I can't Optimization is not a low priority - look at the changelogs, you will find multiple optimizations in the last patches alone.

Perhaps this allows us to conclude something about the way Kerbals reproduce.

Solve it kerbal style, duct tape a mirror behind it to see the back!

Perhaps the weight of the fairing can make up for this advantage. Read the first post, this is all accounted for. It is. (Intended as a joke.) The idea behind it though is that it allows us to focus on the actual gameplay (building rockets, launching stuff, doing stuff with that stuff) rather than spending hours strutting everything until it works.

Post to react to Themohawk (can't edit since my previous is being moderated) Of course the volume matches it, just like procedural fairings does: First screenshot for procedural fairings thread For wider payloads and lifters, there are larger fairing bases. (procedural fairings has quite big ones) What do you mean with the hatches? It is. Learn physics A rigid body consisting out of multiple sub-bodies that have mass can be modeled like a single point perfectly. The point would be at the collective center of mass, with the collective mass. And next to that you need to define the angular properties as well. If executed properly you will not be able to tell the difference between a normal fairing and a magic fairing. (aside from the lag)

I think the intention behind that is not to suggest new parts which are combinations of others, like an engine attached to a fuel tank. Only if the developers choose to spawn the parts on sep. You could also have the parts existing, simply sitting there without physics. Another option might be to have the parts loaded in a cache. Long story short there will be multiple ways to do this, and it's up to the developers to determine which is best. True, it's just for the launch. I said: We can launch anything. Not play anything. There's more to it than just space station components. This will also be useful for rovers, landers, or other contraptions. You do not seem to understand how the fairing substitutes for the mass, CoM and angular inertia. Of course I could replace these fairings for a gazillion struts, but it's not pretty, not realistic at all and certainly not beneficial to the gameplay. I feel KSP is about launching stuff and then using it up there, not strutting the crap out of something until the rocket is stable enough to go up.

While sending up another huge floppy space station component, flailing around in <1 FPS on top of more Mainsails than anyone is supposed to use, it hit me: We don't have to render and emulate physics of parts inside fairings. Now of course we all love the Procedural Fairings mod, something that should become stock immediately in my opinion. This idea would expand on that, making them more useful and providing a real solution to a very difficult problem (game performance). How it works: Parts inside a fairing are not rendered (optional), nor physics emulated. (Perhaps they don't even exist at all, until spawned when the fairing opens.) The weight of the parts is calculated into the fairing base. Of course the center of mass shifts accordingly. (Don't forget angular inertia as well.) Because of this, the fairing is a perfect substitute for the parts, it physically represents all of them - in one single physics entity. Effects of doing this: -A 1000 part "thing" can be sent up by a huge lifter without any lag. (No longer plagued by physics lag, now we can launch anything.) -The fairing "protects" the part from structural failure as a result of wobbling or G-forces. (For realism, you can think of the parts being structurally attached to and supported by the fairing.) -Less flailing, wobbling, wiggling and whatnot that makes attitude control a PITA. (We can actually steer.) -There is a good reason to use fairings other than aesthetics. (I want to use pretty fairings, but they waste performance.) I will repeat, that with lag out of the way: Now we can launch anything. EDIT: Summary of the conclusions made in 10 pages of discussion: It seems to be the best option to simply freeze the physics of the payload. Unity can do this, and unfreezing should not give any problems (It also happens on launch start and exiting timewarp.) The following measures address the issue of the payload not breaking under stress, which is a result of the physics freezing: -The fairing supports the payload. In real rockets, a stack of satellites or landers are not bearing eachother's weight, there are supports that carry each module. In KSP we cannot properly do this because of the parts only attaching in a tree. -The fairing has extra weight, roughtly equivalent or more to what you would normally spend on struts and girders. -The fairing is breakable. Physics inside are resumed when it breaks. -Excessive G-forces or jerk will break the fairing base. Adding more struts will not help. EDIT2: Ubiozur's welding tool is capable of welding parts together as one rigid body. This might be the most viable way to realize anti-lag fairings.