StevenRS11

I mean, SQUAD out and said that they intended the new parts to be quantitatively better than the old parts. They are, and its silly trying to say otherwise. I think they intend to balance them for career mode with cost and research, but thats a form of brute force balance. When you can have all the parts each optimally fulfilling at least one unique function, then you have elegant balance.

Your poll implies that the parts dont scale, regardless of which option we pick. What if someone thinks they are balanced, and scale fine? That said, I uh, tend to agree with you on the scaling part- they do seem just better. Id like to see some ISP nerfs, and maybe some weight reductions on the old parts. Ideally, each part should remain relevant. Edit: Gha, ninja'd

Sometimes, when I need to laugh, I just think about how this was a serious idea, and the main reason that development never progressed is that it was too capable, ie, we didnt need to lift things that heavy into space. Not because, you know, nukes everywhere.

As for my 'perfect part', either a strut that can contract/lengthen like artificial muscle fibers or really, really fast rotator that uses fuel for helicopters or wheels.

It would be cool if tanks with fuel set fire to things they crashed into, so dropping a full orange tank of fuel on something would give it a very bad day.

I know, its super satisfying to have someone recognize something like that. I make a mod for minecraft (Is that anathema around here? I feel like it might be. Oh well.) and when my compsci graduate TA told me he had played with it, I almost died. Not quite my professor, but still. It was nice. Dartmouth college, but he is about as non-industry as a physicist can get, and his field is all about very small things. He is definitely pure academia, haha. I don't think we offer any aerospace stuff at the undergraduate level, though I wish we did. Is it sad that I would seriously consider taking a class just to make better virtual planes? And of course understand how they actually work, instead of just parroting what I think stereotypical airplanes look like.

Some of northstars designs have more research put into them than I put into my exams. I swear he is going to find a way to fly the VAB to duna eventually. And that looks really cool! It reminds me of the old tri-plane designs from the early days of aviation.

I think its understandable to make a new thread with a significant vision change, as older, non-applicable negative feedback can easily poison someones perception of an entire project before they are willing to understand what is really going on. Look forward to seeing new stuff!

I see this is still alive, yay! I have some new ideas for this, as well. Maybe I can find some time to send some of them to duna, and update my scores for .23. Ive also been using AJE lately, and am curious to see if I can make an ssto with that.

Ferram4, I was doing a physics lab at college the other day, and my group and I started talking about KSP. My professor (who was already amazing) overheard and joined in; apparently a group of the physics professors share a KSP save between themselves. When stock aerodynamics came up, he said "Have you heard of Ferram Aerospace Research? Its honestly pointless trying to build planes without it." and I just smiled. Yes, I have.

Hey malkuth, been having a great time playing with your mod. Its something that now, I wont really be able to play without- Right up there with FAR and KAS. I do have a few questions/comments/ideas/all the things that mod devs hate to get pestered with, but it comes with the job, am I right? So, as for the costs you have assigned things. Did you do real world research for these things? It seems like, atleast for the fuels, that you did. Impressive. Did you do the same for parts and such? I imagine that would be harder. Either way, I have been tweaking these costs heavily from a gameplay perspective, using real world data as loose guide, and this is what I have discovered based on the following goals. 1.) Strictly better things should cost more. 2.) More difficult to use/do things should cost less. Fuel seems to cost way too much, and the actual spacecraft parts cost way to little. Most of my spacecraft, especially shuttles, cost more in fuel that in parts. This makes actually trying to use shuttles or SSTO's economically infeasible, which are generally harder to do than rockets. There is no reward for building a shuttle and carefully reusing it even though that is far more challenging than building my station with rockets. This also doesn't make that much sense- the real world Space Shuttle cost over a billion dollars to manufacture, but the total fuel for a launch was less than half a million dollars, and combined price for the entire launch was about To remedy this, I started having lots of fun with your config, and all the options it provides. Starting with the category mass cost multipliers, I massively increased the cost of pods, aero, and control. These things are EXPENSIVE, yet can be reused if you are careful. Structure and utility are also more, but not as much. Propulsion I had to be a bit more careful with. Using the module costs, I increased the cost of engines substantially. I still would like to do more here, but I have a few questions about the options you have. Can I take the thrust of the engine and multiply it by the average ISP, so like, power=isp*.01? Ideally that would make high power or high isp cheaper separately, but far more expensive together. It would also be nice if I could somehow make price inversely proportional to the mass, for pods as well. I also had fun with fuels. I preserved your original ratios, but pretty drastically reduced costs for all of them. Tank price for cryogenics are way more than the others, and caustics are slightly more. Kerosene tankage is cheeeeap. Solid fuel tanks are very expensive, being combustion chambers as well as tank, but I make the fuel practically free. All in all, the price of standard rockets stayed about the same, or maybe went up just a tad due to engine and control costs. Payloads generally cost more, though, as well as upper stage stuff. However, its far more beneficial to try and recycle spent stages than before. Spaceplanes and shuttles cost about 1.5 times as much, with some bigger SSTOs costing more than twice as much. The big change though, is that if you can land it on the runway, you can recoup 80% or even more if you are really good. I also decreased the returns for autorecycling so slapping parachutes on rocket stages doesn't make them too cheap, though it is still better than before. If you want/are ok, I can post the config, and I am still tweaking it.

Im not implying it- I am trying to claim that quite explicitly. For computer gaming in general, resource gathering was like, the first thing developed after moving around. Think of all the text roguelikes... Find the rope, find the bucket, make the pulley. Multiplayer is definitely "newer" in that regard, even more so for KSP. And honestly, I find all this ranting rather encouraging, to some degree. It means people care deeply about things. If this was silent, and no body cared enough to post their opinion, much less essays on the justifications of changing the direction of development, then it would be a sad place.

I sort of look at this from a different direction. SQUAD thought that multiplayer was impossible- and now, someone proved to them that in fact, using the relatively unmodified engine and codebase already there, that it IS possible. I'll bet you that they are just excited. It's a challenge, with possibly very large rewards. For a software engineer, that's irresistible. I really don't know how they plan to get that to work intuitively or effectively, and I imagine they recently had the sort of 'Oh, maybe we CAN do this' feeling. Looking at that resource chart, on the other hand, I find myself shuddering slightly. It would be a MASSIVE amount of coding, and not the fun kind either. Lots of annoying UI stuff, tons of fine tuning balance problems, more part configs, models, etc. Nothing really revolutionary, or really anything new. Moreover, kethane already solved the real implementation issues with resources very well. The scanning, mapping, and resource distribution are the big ones. After that, its just a matter of part configs and coordinate lookups. If you wanted, you could use the kethane API to make that entire resource chart pretty easily, I think. All that would be missing are models for various drills and refineries. (I am not trying to bash kethane at all, or saying that it was trivial to do. I'm just saying that expanding it into a larger resource system is trivial, given what it has already accomplished.) Anyway, I think that they changed their mind. And I think they KNEW people would be unhappy, and of course they don't want to intentionally cause unhappiness. So, they must have some reason to do so. I imagine its probably because multiplayer, if it is going to be implemented well, really has to be in the core game. Kethane, on the other hand, proves that resources can be done perfectly well through mods. The fact that it looks like harv expected this reaction from the community is a little sad, actually.

Also, Geschosskopf, my first submission didn't use interstellar at all. Only my second entry for 101 points used the reactors and turbojets.

I think it might be a better idea to tweak the scoring from "Only one run per body" to "Only one part per distinct impact". So, if I have thousands of struts, I have more or less skim over the surface, slowly tearing parts off my orbiter.

I agree that interstellar does rely on a fundamentally different method to provide balance for its parts- one that so far hasn't really been present in KSP, "Leveling Up". Not sure if its a 'good' thing, but it sure is fun. I will say that it seems like it is balanced if the tech level remains capped at fission reactors. Its only when you get the fusions/antimatter than it gets out of hand. Just messing around, I tried it with antimatter reactors. The resultant aberration of a plane was more than capable of flying into Jool's atmosphere, then accelerating to KERBOL escape velocities while still inside its atmosphere. Each turbojet gave over 1000kn of thrust. @Northstar, The fusion powered turbojets peaked at right under 200 k/n each, if I remember correctly. Thats actually just about what a regular turbojet would give at its maximum operating efficiency, I think. The thermals, unlike the regular turbojets, don't produce less thrust if they go to fast though. Thats the kicker. As for Last Dancer, it actually does have ladders leading down the sides of all the compartments, all facing towards the outsides. I can confirm that it was actually flying on a non ballistic trajectory at 18,000 feet, as cutting thrust caused me to instantly being to descend. If you have some sort of test that I can perform for higher altitudes, well, I can turn it around and blast it back into duna with no problem. Also, I have no problem with you splitting up the scoreboard, or anything. I still like my first plane the best, anyway. Too bad kerbals lag so much in lawnchairs. They look so happy.

I have seen videos of Scott Manley trying to orbit a probe through the munar arches, rather unsuccessfully. He was, though, consistently orbiting literally meters above the mun, and smacked parts off his spacecraft without totaling it more than once.

As for getting fusion reactors, I guess I did cheat a bit for those by unlocking the entire tech tree, but I am not doing any of this in my career save which DOES have the entire tree filled out, but it is currently 1300 miles away from me at college. If I was there, however, it honestly would have been worse because I would have been using antimatter reactors instead, but I don't have an antimatter factory on this save. I cant imagine what that would be like, probably just tear this thing apart. As for welding, I did use ubizos, I wasnt aware that it could so subtly tinker part coefficients like that. If that does count as a a disqualification, then I can go back to using the non-welded versions, because other than being almost constantly in the red, it still flies with them. (and the 6 or so struts required to hold them together-curse KSPs inability to join more than one node). Actually, the first picture with the larger intakes is before I started welding anything. This craft did have a bit of lag, especially when I activated all of the reactors. It was constantly in the yellow. I really wish I was at college still, you seem to think that this computer is a monster, but iirc it's over 8 years old, running one of the first intel dual cores. Im just used to dealing with laggy everything here, I guess. Its funny, that one of the main reasons I decided to do a space plane challenge was because of my part count limitations- I used to regularly launch 600/700 part rockets without too much problem. This computer crashes before it can load 300 parts, and is unplayable with anything over ~90. If you honorably want to continue this bound by your tech tree, send those probes out to jool, lots of science to be had, and fusions are rather nice. This isnt quite the same craft with the fission reactors. Unfortunately, it is the nature of challenges like this that award uncapped points for kerbals to end up being decided by larger and larger craft. I do feel like this might have been a bit exploitative, though. Your planes have a certain elegance that mine don't quite achieve. Either way, you may be surprised how well your thermal turbojet designs perform on duna. Last Dancer was baaarely able to creep into LKO, with quite a bit of work being done by the plasma thruster. For some reason, though, it absolutely blasted through duna's atmosphere, obtaining essentially uncapped speeds in its outer atmosphere. I got up to over 3000 meters per second before I let it kick me out into orbit, and the thrust on my turbojets was still increasing due to increasing intake air. It took forever to get to 2000, but once it got there, it just went nuts. Still landing and taking off with my planes is a nightmare, especially landing for this one. Essentially a matter of luck if I can find a flat place.

I dont think I can compete with your crazy low wing loading (I mean, climbing at 7m/s??) or your part frugalness, but I can do speed. So, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! I finally got the interstellar pack to work, and I learned two things. One, flying on Duna is lots of fun, and two, thermal turbojets are probably the coolest thing EVER. I designed a plane to play with them- Let me introduce Last Dancer Its a massive vessel, but only weighs 50 tons and has 70 parts. The 3 interior crew sections are actually welded parts, and I made sure that they have the correct mass and fuel capacity. Structurally, they are connected to each other and the other parts normally, so I didnt form the entire backbone out of a single welded part. This way, I dont think I am making anything stronger than it otherwise would have been. I also tried to weld the engine nacelles into a single part, but it wouldnt let me weld reactors or the large intakes. It would let me weld the small intakes with the quad coupler though, so that reduced part count further. Its powered by 6 thermal turbojets, each connected to an un-upgraded fusion reactor. There are four atmosphere intakes for each, with one large one just because.This ensures that they still produce great thrust at extremely high altitudes, assuming that I am going fast enough. The one plasma thruster lets me perform orbital maneuvers. The idea was that I was going to just play around with it, like I had my other designs, but this one turned out to be fully capable of reaching orbital velocities in the atmosphere, so I decided to take it to Duna, and gave this challenge another run! Looong burns. Luckily, I discovered that I can run fuel through those thermal turbojets, so I shortened this down to about 10 minutes. It had a nasty habit of turning over upside down trying to reenter duna, but after excessive simulations, I finally got it to land in once piece. Taking off, once again, proved to be quite a challenge, but eventually I found a cliff I could just sort of drop it off of, and it gains velocity fast enough that I got it into the air. Now is when things get interesting. It seems that thermal turbojets dont care so much about how fast I am going, only how much intake atmosphere I am getting, and there are looots of intakes on this guy. Even in dunas thin atmosphere, the faster I went, the more air I got, so on, and so forth. Turns out it is quite capable of reaching escape(!) velocity in dunas atmosphere, and by steering down towards the planet, maintain constant altitude. That said, it's tricky to define its maximum altitude. At 18,000 feet I confirmed that it is capable of maintaining altitude at less than orbital velocity, but this should always be the case as long as their is some atmosphere at all. To really determine it, we would need an infinity long, flat duna to fly over. If you just want to stick with the basic interpretation though, its maximum altitude is the end of duna's atmosphere, or 30,000 meters (I think thats it, it might be 50km) It also carries a total of 73 kerbals, all inside. So, let me add this all up. +71 kerbals +1 all inside +2 SSTDABTK +25 operating altitude(or whatever you think it should be) +1 for FAR +1 for Circumnavigation That adds up to 101 points. As for refueling it, it only used up about 2 percent of its liquid fuel on the trip over, and the deuterium in those reactors is enough to last for years. If it does start to run out, its pretty easy for it to just fly back to kerbin. Here are the rest of the pictures from the mission-

So, I have been playing around with this mod, and keep hearing people talk about 'lifting reentries'. How do I go about actually doing this, because it seems like its a good thing. And FlowerChild, I am going to go out on a limb and say you are the FlowerChild of BTW fame, correct?

This mod is amazing. Amazing that it actually works, amazing what it lets you do, when it breaks it breaks amazingly, I could go on all day. But seriously, this is one of those mods like KAS or Kethane that fundamentally change how I play KSP. Now all I am missing is electrical charge consumption for these guys.

The last two I hyperedited there. I dont quite have the patience you do for interplanetary transfers, or actually calculating what the performance should be based on kerbin performance. That said, the second design (not the massive one) is functionally identical with my first, so launching it wouldnt be out of the question. That third one, though... I mean, with enough struts and mainsails its possible, sure, but my computer would explode everywhere. Gha. Now Im going to have to try. Not today, though. The problem that I have is that installing interstellar just by itself makes this PC run out of memory. You have a larger part pool to pick from, but I can use more from my limited pool at once, heh. I suppose I could just grab a few parts, like the thermal turbos. Orrr.... I wonder if I could make a tiny little plane powered by a VASMIR or something. That way I wouldnt have to worry about intake air, just lift. Lift I can do. Anyway, flying on duna is lots of fun. It actually feels like I am designing a plane. On kerbin, just about every plane I have ever made has a TWR>1, which is silly. Even that huge flying wing could fly straight up on kerbin.

One other thing- it might be a good idea to tweak how you score this challenge, because right now it awards carrying lots of kerbals a bit too much. Maybe something like this- Altitude: +1 per 500 over requirement Single stage from Kerbin to duna: +2 SS from kerbin to duna and back: + 4 more all Kerbals inside: +2 Speed: +1 per 100 m/s over 200 (or something like that) Maybe change the points you get for carrying kerbals to be like the base 2 log of the number of kerbals you have, or maybe you multiply your final score by 1+0.1*(number of kerbals-2). Something like that, so I can try to either fly really fast and high, or carry a whole bunch of kerbals. If I can combine the two, I may or may not get a better score, but it makes the challenge more nuanced. Id say that might make scoring the challenge to complicated, but honestly, look at the game we are playing. If we where afraid of math or complexity, we wouldnt be here.

Ok, so with my new-found knowledge that kerbals are made of lead, I designed this guy- Those passenger compartments hold 2 kerbals each, for a total of 22, all inside. For some reason it doesnt actually show that they are inside, but they definitely are. Its actually lags less than my other design, impossibly. I upgraded two of the electric engines, and added a special spoiler to the back. You can see it better in this picture- It has a bearing from robotics, and lets me rotate it to adjust the angle of attack of my plane as a whole. Takeoff is SO much easier, it can gain altitude and speed going at only 50 mps. The addition of small wheels on all the little pods also helps deal with dunes. I am fairly confident that I could scale this design indefinitely, either by using the larger nuke reactor and clusters of 4 engines, or by continuing the existing pattern I have here. Think add one more of this on the tail, and one more on each side of the big wings. I didnt take the time to see how high its cruising altitude is because it cant survive physwarp at all, but I imagine its higher than my first. EDIT-Yea, I couldn't help myself. So I made it bigger. I dont think I could ever actually get it to Duna, because its pretty flexible. But if the need arises, I can try to strap a bunch of mainsails on it and see. Either way, I hyperedited it duna, and it flies! It climbs very, very slowly. Slower, infact, than that mountain that is approaching. It was one of those crashes where no parts get destroyed really, everything just comes apart. Other than its questionable climb rate over 4000, its really pretty nice to fly. Takes off at around 40 meters per second, and is so large and covered in so many little wheels it just flows over whole dunes. It carries 41 kerbals total, and probably could carry a few tons of fuel in all those fuselodges. I emptied them before I tried it this time, but with a few more engines I dont think that would be necessary.

Thanks guys! Im glad you liked my plane. Though if kerbals are so heavy, I might be justified putting them inside something, and dealing with the extra mass. Hmmm... Ideas.... And Northstar, thats no fun! But seriously, pwings is amazing for stuff like this. You also brought up a good point with TV aerospace, it does rebalance some parts. Namely, it reduces the thrust of stock turbojets and jets to more realistic levels. Its actually a mod that I dont generally use, I installed it just for this challenge. So, mods I am using- NearFuture TV Aerospace FAR Firespitter Infernal Robotics Procedural Wings and Fairings Are all of those legal for this challenge? One last thing, have any of yall used the Ubio's welding mod yet? I havent used it for this challenge, but I have used it before and it can cut part counts down by half easily. 20 kerbals on lawnchairs was not fun to play, lagwise.