Time to make SRB "better"?

[SickSix]

That would be great. Would prevent the sudden 'backward slide' when your SRB's cut out. Losing momentum on a launch sucks.

[RobotsAndSpaceships]

A mod for it exists, it's bundled with the CSS pack. I had a dropbox link, but lost it a few days ago.

[NathanKell]

RealFuels also handles it, and therefore most Realism Overhaul solid motors do have thrust curves.

[kujuman]

The biggest problem I've encountered in setting up custom thrust curves is that it's hard to know exactly how much thrust you need when, particularly for complicated rocket setups (A total vessel TWR/time graph would be amazing...and amazingly annoying to make, I reckon). But a few very simple automatic profiles are really quite comprehensive. Constant thrust for duration; constant excess thrust (aka, how much net thrust is the booster contributing to the stack); and a few others are quite useful. The problem is that visualizing how the rocket will perform is a bit tricky if you're adding together boosters and LFEs etc.

I think I can speak in the name of those helping news player by saying "It's might not be really worth it".

Along many change for "realism" that could just add more complexity without bringing much to the gameplay.

Though at least this one don't require a lot of coding, so why not, having some control over SRB thrust over time would make Solid-fuel launcher more efficient.

Thrust curves on their own might not be so exciting, but a stackable SRB done right needs thrust curves. And thrust curves are invaluable for asymmetric lifters.

And yes, of course this wouldn't require that much coding for the engine to work (maybe 2 days to make it work right), but the issues crop up in the GUI design and implementation. There's a lot of information in a thrust curve that the player should like to know, but it's hard to keep it from taking up the entire screen.

RealFuels also handles it, and therefore most Realism Overhaul solid motors do have thrust curves.

Hmm, it may be time to see what the licensing on that is...

And to see if realfuels has a static thrust curve (.cfg) or editable in the editor...

Edited March 18, 2015 by kujuman

[Kegereneku]

Aside, I was thinking about how any much-necessary dVreader will have to make a special logic for those eventual SRB thrust curves, it could get messy UI speaking.

[Daze]

Aside, I was thinking about how any much-necessary dVreader will have to make a special logic for those eventual SRB thrust curves, it could get messy UI speaking.

Well DV is not calculated directly with thrust, so i don't see the problem

[NathanKell]

Why do you think changing thrust has anything to do with delta V? Do you see a thrust term in the rocket equation?

EDIT: as usual, next-page-ninja. Daze covered it.

[kujuman]

Well DV is not calculated directly with thrust, so i don't see the problem

Why do you think changing thrust has anything to do with delta V? Do you see a thrust term in the rocket equation?

EDIT: as usual, next-page-ninja. Daze covered it.

Actually, this is a complication for parallel staged boosters. If we accept that SRBs have a lower Isp than a liquid-fueled core (think STS), then for best dV we'd want to burn the SRBs out entirely before we touch the higher efficiency liquid fuel. Differing thrust on the SRBs will change the net?average Isp of the rocket during their burn duration. For best dV, we want to save as much of the LF for as long as possible; an SRB with increasing thrust over time will be less efficient than an SRB with decreasing thrust over time.

[Kegereneku]

Well DV is not calculated directly with thrust, so i don't see the problem

True, I was more thinking along the line of TWR over time calculation offered by Mechjeb2.

Although not strictly speaking necessary (it could be the only unknown) I would still include those data.

[klgraham1013]

We really really need a thrust curve feature for SRBs, I agree.

http://i.imgur.com/uzxnjtg.png

Something like this.

I need this yesterday.