NikkyD

What happened to me is that i had a plane with 2 rapier and 2 ram intakes, i ALT-clicked on both rams to show me the air. Once flight my left ram had exactly 0.2 air less (or was it 0.02... smallest digit). It was way below what would be needed to power the rapier and because of fuel lines it would have been impossible for the rams to exchange air. Shortly before the air ran out both ram suddenly showed the same amount. In another flight i had the issue with the left rapier giving about 2 kN more thrust than the other and that made the plane fly to the right.

I dont understand why so many ppl feel the need to answer so aggressively but i want to thank the ones who gave me some contructive answers. I will try out some of the plugins mentioned and get into some points later on because i think i have been misunderstood in some issues.

The skipper has gimbal, which can be important for launch. But i also feel that the rapier has too low thrust and imho a bad ISP in space. If you plan longer voyages in space, like mun-and-back you would be better off with some other engine. For a mere to-orbit transporter that is recycleable (in the future maybe) the rapier is the only one that allows small crafts. Never underestimate the importance of only needing one mount-point

I've been playing the game for about 8 month and i feel its time to share my thoughts/give feedback. 8 Month ago some frieds told me about a new funny game and i started playing it. We were having a lot of fun crashing our giant rockets onto the moon and stuff. It didnt take long before i started reading up on the math/physics behind rocket science. As a software developer i also wrote myself some primitive tools to help me calculate stuff, i didnt know about mechjeb at that point. My main motivation at that point was to build the most efficient rockets possible and to land them where no one has gone before I calculated A LOT and experimented a lot... but at some point the limitations of the game became obvious. I will get to that later, because just in time i found mechjeb and it restored my fun with the game, at least for a while. I had two things that i wanted to accomplish. One, fly to Jool/Laythe, land there, eventually build a base there and get back. Two, reach the moon with the smallest possible rocket. I knew there were some community challenges in the forum but i missed them by several month so i just did it for myself. I soon reached a point where the game limited my plans, both of them and i couldnt see why the devs wouldnt change them but, again, as a sw-dev myself i thought i just takes a bit more time... About five month have passed since that point and... i dont see any real issues fixes, all i see is candy for the kids (career mode). So im disapointed and thats why i want to give you this feedback. Let me explain what exactly crushes all my efforts in reaching my self-set goals: - Rocket stability I understand that struts are free, but when its possible to build something like a jumbo tank, than why should 4 tanks of the same size, mass and content wabble around like they do ? Cylindrical objects attached to eachother to build an even longer cylinder are extremely sturdy in real life static. Its not even hard to do. Just code it in a way that if two objects are connected with the exact same connection shape, they are treated as one object or give that connection some ridiculous value. Its ok if something with a really small mount-point breaks off if its really heavy, like 2 Jumbos next to eachother, but not two jumbos building a longer jumbo. It often happens, that my spaceplanes land and when they touch down, the ENGINE, off all things, just detaches and crashes into the ground. Imagine a fighterjet like a F18 Hornet, how could the exhaust part of the engine suddenly break off ? The whole thing is built as nearly one piece. Or i land on a planet, looong way from home and the engine just falls off the second i land. Im talking about a lander-capsule- rocket kinda thing. The landing struts dont break, nothing else but the engines. Ofc that mission is a bust because without engines you dont go nowhere. - Drag. I understand the entire math behind it and i can see why you chose this formula, but i think you dont see the side effects it has. Upon reentry once the drag really sets in, the heaviest part of the rocket will face backwards. On tiny rockets with a heavy cockpit that means the one ton cockpit will suddenly turn to the sky and the empty 0.5 ton engine + 0.1 ish fuel container will point towards the planet. Its like throwing a dart into the air and the heavy tip will point to the sky once its falling down... I know that calculating real air resistance "on the fly" for every possible combination of parts is a mess, but there would be some easy-to-use tricks and simplyfications that COULD do the trick. - In addition to the drag, on spacesplanes... the air flow Because of the whole drag n thrust issue often enough my planes start spinning like crazy once a certain amount of fuel has been expended. Its just NOT POSSIBLE. A plane flying with 1000 m/s cant just spin around its horizontal axis. The wings stabilize it. If the nose would suddenly go up by 90 degrees the air would hit the entire wing-surface with maximum resistance, the plane would explode like a firecracker. But no... its just spinning around. Once spinning, its almost impossible to catch. Now u cant tell from the beginning of the design that it will happen. And i had it happen upon return from Laythe. A LOT of work behind me and the last steps, the landing on Kerbin... disaster. I did reload the game 20 times, it always happened and the entire mission was a failure, for no good reason. All those things destroy missions once their under-way but there are things that make rocket design a pain in the back. - Efficiency of engines Now because the engines in the game are way too heavy in relation to the fuel, staging sometimes makes no sense. But even if it does, if you look at the engines, they are just not balanced out. There is just no alternative to the Mainsail. Its ISP and thrust/weight are unrivaled. But what if i need an engine with only 1k thrust and not 1,5k ? If i have to combine two big engines with less thrust, where do i place them ? But its worse with the smaller engines. The LVT30 and 45 for example. Ive been over the math countless times and it never makes sense to take the 45 unless you REALLY need the gimbal. So if you look at it, for 1 deg of gimbal it has to sacrifice almost 10% of its thrust and gains somewhat 20% weight. What if i just want 0.5 gimbal, but therefor only gain 10% weight and lose 5% thrust ? You can do this with so many engines. Sometimes i just need 10 kN more and i could sacrifice the gimbal for it. Why not give every engine some sliders/bars where everyone can adjust them ? With some simple limits and rules, like for every 1% thrust you increase the weight by 2% etc. I know you can create ur own parts via config files but with the endless loading times of the game its annoying to always go out of the game, create a new engine with some tiny amounts changed and the try this one out... missing 20 kN, exit game again, tweak etc... cmon - scalability of fuel containers Just like the above, the rules of containers are quite simple, 1/9 emtpy weight, 8/9 fuel. Why not let the player decide how long a container should be ? If its not possible because of the engine, well then just make em the same size but change the values. When building really small rockets i sometimes need 1,5 small fuel containers if i take 2 it messes up my delta-v, if i take one im short a half one... in the end calculation i 'have' to take some extra 200 kg of stuff i dont need to not return with still half a tank fuel. Now you could say "why bother", well because in game with no real goal its my personal goal to achieve the smallest slimmest rocket but i dont want to spend hours exiting, changing config, loading again. Especially if what i need is such a simple thing to code. I dont like/need the career mode and i think the tech tree and all is... really bad, but i dont have to use it so i dont have a problem with it. But the above issues made me stop playing again after 2 hours of patch 0.23 . My friends asked me "so how is the new patch, whats new?" And all i could tell them was "still all the same issues... dont bother" Its really sad because i do like the entire rocket thing a lot and the game CAN be fun, if only it wasnt for those annoying rocket-killing issues.