BrickedKeyboard

Just require firespitter. There's already a small subset of people who will try this tree out, there's no reason to cater to the 3 people who want to play this tree yet refuse to install firespitter.

Since fuel lines and struts have 0 mass, and you already have a decoupler attached to hold the jet engine onto your spacecraft, you could stick a rocket fuel tank on your jet engine booster and have it feeding fuel to a rocket stage. That way, when you stage separate, you drop off the empty tank. Only tricky part is getting the size of the tank right.

I know, right. I try telling him "Jeb, that rocket is going somewhere far away and it's not coming back. Notice how I am not bothering with a parachute?". But he never listens.

Indeed. Hope he's wearing an armored spacesuit with armored underpants.

I'm trying to find out how much drag there is with different design variants of a basic rocket. Here's the rocket : I want to know how much those nosecones actually help (they are from procedural fairings mod, which claims to support FAR), and I want to know how much drag all those batteries are adding. I did read the help documents, and I clicked static analysis, and told it to sweep the mach numbers. In theory, that should tell me how much friction there is at different speeds. In practice, no friction is plotted on the graph... I would also like to find out if it matters if I place those batteries in-line with each other, such that the ones in the front should block the airflow to the ones in the rear, or scattered around.

I have the "deadly reentry" mod installed. This seems to more or less realistically burn your rockets up if you try to enter at too steep of an angle without a heatshield. However, I was coming back from the Mun with a couple of goo cannisters, and I had not yet unlocked a method to shield them from reentry heat. So I made my periapsis 33 km (discovered after some trial and error) and found that I could skim the upper atmosphere, bleed off some speed, and not burn up. I still had a rocket motor and a couple of fuel tanks attached as well at this point. I made two passes, until the friction had moved my apoapsis into the lower atmosphere, and found I was now going slow enough that I wouldn't burn up. Now, I thought about this maneuver on paper, and I realized that skimming the upper atmosphere without a heatshield is realistic. Technically, low flying satellites are doing this all the time. However, when you do this maneuver, in the best case scenario, you end up in a suborbital trajectory headed towards the planet at several thousand m/s. (because on your last pass through the atmosphere you lost as much energy as you could, and now you are going to be headed in) Is this survivable on earth under any circumstances? I realize that kerth has a smaller atmosphere, and you have less kinetic energy in low orbit. When I right click on the ship parts during this kind of reentry, I can see that they are heating up quite a bit - the rocket motor nozzle peaks at 1100 C, the fuel tanks at about 400 C. However, deadly reentry does not consider this hot enough to destroy these objects, and I can see that, spacecraft aluminum doesn't melt at 400C. However, there's also a force on the thin aluminum skins of a fuel tank, and DR doesn't seem to model that. So, what's the deal?

I feel that science, as currently implemented, encourages rather tedious repetition of tasks. Specifically, how you can repeat the exact same experiment and get a smaller amount of science, and you have to repeat it several times to get the max. It's even worse with transmissions. Instead, here's how it should work : a. Every science activity can be done only once, after that, it's 0 science. b. If you choose the transmit option, some of the science is lost permanently. Obviously, the losses need to be made smaller, perhaps only 20-40%, depending on the activity. This would cut down the tediousness of science by a factor of 5. There's nothing wrong with having to return to the Mun many times to max out all the science, what I have a problem with is when I'm in an area I have to repeat the same experiments over and over and over to get all the points out of them. That is not fun. Also, it would be nice if I could hotkey the experiments to both perform and transmit them, without a popup.

Well, it doesn't fly without them, so...

Ok, I made a few slight tweaks. Yes, I saw that tutorial. What it didn't mention was you need canards or you need to go home. With just these tiny tweaks, it went from being a crash magnet to a perfectly flyable and stable aircraft. https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ug9eex9roto2eq/flyablebrick.png I don't suppose someone has a better design using the same part limitations... Where's a tutorial on what all this aerodynamic data actually means for FAR?! I'd love to be able to make a better design.

Hey, I could use some help here. I've got the following parts available : Mk1 cockpit, basic jet engine, jet fuel fuselage, structural fuselage, tail fin, AV-T1 winglet, small control surface, swept wings, small gear bay. I'm trying to make a flyable airplane. Here's a screenshot of the "plane shaped object" I tried making. It isn't flyable. When it gets to the end of the runway it gets "picked up" and flung out of control. I'm not sure if it's my plane design, or this mod. Can someone here come up with a readily flyable plane using these parts? Edit : I got it to fly-ish by giving it a lot more cowbell and using a rocket to get it moving.

Alright, I found out that simply cutting and pasting the top 3 nodes from the "KSP Interstellar" config file into "tree.cfg" from Yargnits tree 1.0a works perfectly. I've tried all the trees available in the loader, and Yargnit's is still the best one. This is because while I really do like the idea of being required to explore Kerbin by rover and aircraft, the trees that require that have a bunch of "dead nodes", which grant nothing if you research them. Anyways, Treeloader should work differently than it does. It's sort of ass backwards, no offense. The way it should work is this : 1. The program should look in every single mod folder for a file called "additionalnodes.cfg". It should parse these files, and add these new nodes to the "tree.cfg" used in this save's playthrough. If a node of the same name already exists (many of the custom trees make extra nodes for mods), it should add the parts listed in the additional node. 2. This part is probably why you haven't added this feature already. I noticed that the variable "pos" defines where the node will go in the tech tree in absolute coordinates (with 3 coordinates? what's the third one for?). This means that nodes can end up in spots that look bad or even overlap with other nodes. You'd have to write an algorithm to fix this - such as dividing the space around the node "start" into a grid of a minimum space to comfortably draw a node. Then, you'd have to scan the grid for a free spot that does not have a node box in it that is as close as possible to the parents of the new node added by the modder. Another key thing : if a part is defined in multiple locations, for example, if it is defined as being part of a stock-game node AND is also listed in "additional nodes", then the latter entry overrides it, so it will not appear in a stock node. I think Tree loader already works this way. End result : if this works, then modders can add extra nodes for their stuff, and users can pick any custom tree they want, and all their modded stuff will be there, in extra nodes. Also, if users don't have TreeLoader installed, they will still get all their parts in the vanilla tree, if the modder defined them that way.

Feedback on "tradional tech" : The nodes "experimental aerodynamics, aerospace tech, experimental motors, robotics, nanolathing" all contain no parts. I think that these nodes need a part or two, each, players don't like empty unlocks.

I've noticed that if you attempt to make a tall rocket where the tip tends to flex, one of the things that guarantees mission failure is when you have the control pod at the top of the rocket, and the flexing of the rocket causes it to oscillate back and forth, and then SAS tries to correct for that... Fun stuff, and you can fix it by installing a probe core or something lower down, nearer to the center of mass. However, the "inline probe cores" and so on tend to take up space and mass, and I haven't found a 2.5m wide one yet in career mode. In real rockets, you'd install a circuit board with an IMU on it, and wire it to the rocket's control system. You wouldn't need to add some huge module.

Only one person mentioned the obvious - instead of saying "that NASA prototype made x kN in thrust", you need to mention the thrust/weight ratio. I would not be surprised if the thrust/weight ratio of the nuclear engine in Kerbal was excellent, even better than any humans have ever built. Another factor - think of how much waste heat is going to get conducted to the engine's outer casing. A real NERVA engine is going to need some massive radiator panels, which you do not have to install in this game. You also can ignore the radiation - even if Kerbals are radiation immune, we're talking radiation fluxes enough to destroy plastics and make metal brittle.

Heat Mechanic : 2 major complaints 1. I suppose I would have to do the math to prove this, but I feel like the "heat capacity" stats are far too high. If you aren't radiating waste heat just as fast as you are producing it, most real life objects don't have the thermal mass to soak up the excess for very long. 2. It shouldn't furl your solar panels, it should cause them to shut off for a period of time. Well, realistically, it wouldn't be the solar panels that were overheating, because that is not where the waste heat is being produced, but I can understand killing the output of the panels because a thermal regulator tripped, and the panels being offline until the temperature of the spacecraft cools. I lost 2 space probes so far from overheating, and the problem was, it took hundreds of game-days for the overheating to happen. Then, BAM, sucked out of time warp and my spacecraft is effectively destroyed. (since the panels furl up, I get no chance to unfurl one before my batteries are drained and I lose power). It feels unrealistic and forced this way. On an unrelated note, do antimatter containment units require power to work? That's a fun fact I recall about antimatter containment, there's no way to do it passively, you need a small amount of power to operate some control electronics at all times or the containment will fail. Realistically, it could fail in a non-explody manner - any competent engineer would design a spacecraft antimatter containment system to vent the antimatter to space if it was about to fail for lack of energy. Of course, this is Kerbals we are talking about...

The hilarious thing is that reactor probably leaks a little, and I can just imagine the Kerbal scientists wondering why every biome they take a reading of has various transuranic elements in it...

I'd like to be able to use KSP Interstellar and Kethane with a modified tree. How do I do this? Does someone else have the part files already unlocked, or is there some option in the GUI? The current tree is kind of silly, at the beginning of the game you are ridiculously limited, then pretty soon there's an overwhelming number of options and no need for them. (such as all the airplane ones)

I'm playing in career mode, and I've noticed that you get the maximum science when you have a bunch of laboratories and goo tanks and other things onboard your spacecraft. The problem is that the most stuff I cram in, the less stable the rocket gets. For instance, if I say : let's go to one of the inner planets with maximum fuel if I screw up. So I'd put a pod, then a buncha laboratories and instruments, then an ion engine to get back with several stacked xenon tanks, then an ascent stage, then a lander stage (I tend to break engines landing so I need ,both), then an ion engine with more xenon to maneuver around the solar system, then a gigantic mess of liquid fuel asparagus lower stages. The problem is this huge stack of crap wobbles back and forth during liftoff, and will fail catastrophically if I don't baby it on ascent. I'd like to be able to mount stuff parallel to each other, and reuse the same engine to go home that I used to land. Also, it would be nice to leave most of the laboratories in orbit and land with just 1 lab and a kerbonaut.

Ok, What's the deal. How do I get mechjeb to help me fly my rocket? I unlocked the "Ar 202" and installed it on my rocket. I've tried the version on SpacePort, the very latest version on Github, and the last 2.09 version per a suggestion previously in this thread. Every single version, I see the same menu. Maybe I'm blind, but I do not see "Ascent Assist" or anything to help me do rendezvous or burns to go to other planets or anything else. I know there's a way to get to the Mun the hard way using manual tricks of navigation (but it wastes fuel), but there's no way I'm going to get to anywhere else in the solar system without some assistance (or a lot of trial/error and wasted propellant). I mean, even in the days of Mercury, they used computers for all phases of flight. Heck, the very first V-2 ballistic missiles were computer guided using crude mechanical computers... Frankly, how does anyone play this game without MechJeb, and how the heck do I get it working in this version?