Commander Zoom

Mother of God.

Kryten: Thanks. Wouldn\'t have thought a few fins would make that much of a difference - I tried putting some on before (on the SRBs), to no apparent effect. Active control helps, I gues. (And thanks for replacing the interstage fairing, which I removed in the hope that might help some (it didn\'t).)

All of you, get off my interlawn.

Nope, not at all. Launching from load. Off-course, restart. Off-course in exactly the same direction, restart, until I give up and quit the program. Try it yourself and see.

Silisko, I\'ve tried that with a ship built under your edition (.craft below). Manual flight, ASAS, SAS, RCS, it doesn\'t matter - your large SRBs end up pitching it off-course and into the water, no matter what, every time. Incredibly frustrating. It\'s as symmetrical as I know how to build it, so why does it always want to fly in one direction? (Posted here because you did, and because it also has sixfold symmetry.)

As noted in the OP - we don\'t have stock legs. We do have stock SRBs.

I have a rocket with the (original) 5x1 plate on the base - I\'ll try firing it off and see if there are any obvious heat issues. EDIT: Done, and oh yes - I was able to run Munatic at full throttle before, and now that\'s a quick ticket to overheat. 2/3 throttle is the new upper bound to keep it steady.

Capsule - 'mission' stage (lander, orbiter, whatever) - upper booster with one engine - lower booster with multiple engines - ring of SRBs around the base to get the whole thing off the ground and moving.

Damn, Silisko. That\'s just... daaamn.

A++ writeup, would lol again.

When anchored near the base (only), my Orbiter 2\'s six SRBs tended to do that. The addition of a bracing strut near the top fixed it.

On topic? Fine. Parts look good. Might clean up your textures a bit, though - I\'ve noticed a lot of fuzzy-looking 'KSA's, especially compared to SP\'s original stencils.

Either the numbers are good, and we should all be using them as our yardstick; or the numbers are bad, and we are all just building on sand, and (IMO) we are NOT at the point where people should be asked to, let alone required to pay. (I know it\'s pretty much industry practice these days to ship unfinished and/or broken games to retail and patch them later, or rely on the community to fix them for you, but frankly, I expected better.)

IMO, when we\'re almost at the point where we\'re going to have to pay to play, we are at or past the point where the most basic parts should be balanced. That\'s only the core of the game upon which all else rests, you know. Being able to put a rocket together, out of the box, and have it work right. Or should .13 ship with a readme that says 'hey, these parts you just paid for are actually trash, everyone knows it, go download these instead to get a working game'?

So is someone going to make a damn thread in KSP Development about this, or do I have to?

I think all parts, upscaled or not, should use the same numbers (or best approximation possible). If the original numbers are IYO wrong, then IMO you should petition the program creator to fix them, officially. Rather than making up your own and declaring them not only more to your preference, but objectively superior. In practical terms, we\'ve got how many code/performance forks now? There\'s stock, and then there\'s NS\' version, and now... If we\'re no longer all playing the same game, then what\'s the point? I might as well make a 'lander' that\'s a single stage, as light as thistledown, with infinite fuel and enough thrust to put me in Kerbol orbit before Jeb can finish saying 'let\'s light this candle.' We need some sort of reasonable baseline, and if the baseline is currently IYO not reasonable, then it needs to be fixed, not ignored.

But until he changes it, that is the number we should be shooting for. IMO. Otherwise, we\'re all just pulling numbers out of... thin air. :/ Personally, I use modded SRBs not because they\'re overpowered, but because I want fewer, taller ones that burn longer. I\'m all about fewer, nicer looking parts instead of massive Jenga-stacks, which I find unaesthetic. When it comes to the numbers we should be basing those on, however, I think we should go with the ones used by the guy who wrote this program. (Imagine that.)

One is official. The others are mods. What you\'re saying is that all the mods are overpowered by the standards of the official, stock SRB. (That\'s unfortunate, IMO.)

Probably true, but until HarvesteR changes \'em, that\'s the standard against which all others should be measured and balanced.

Wow, I\'m surprised at how young the responses skew. I expected more like myself, children of the Space Age - born a month before Apollo 13, grew up with the Shuttle and the Voyagers and a lot of disappointment that we stopped going to the Moon about the time I started walking (and no sign of going on to Mars, either).

The thing is, it sounds like in this latest attempt, Tiberion decided it should be harder and more 'realistic', and cranked the handicap way up over even the stock parts... and found out, oops, that was too far and the fun little rocket game no longer is. IMO, this project - which started as nothing more than an attempt to collect and keep current two widely-used, but no longer supported, early parts packs - is beginning to suffer from a bad case of feature and/or mission creep. If the original goal has been met, then stick a fork in it and start a new project.

IMO, the first set of modified numbers - normalized to match the ratios of the stock parts better than SP\'s original approximations - were just fine. If there\'s a problem with the capabilities of parts with those numbers, it\'s up to HarvesteR to rebalance the stock parts, again IMO.

A bit, yes, which suggests it\'s a relatively recent capture from somewhere in the outer system.

Very nice, but that last one looks FAR too refined to be Kerbal. Thanks for the 'shorty' fuel tank. I\'ll definitely consider that for my lander(s).

But then it wouldn\'t be (just) (rebalanced) SIDR + Wobbly parts, would it?