Some questions about the nature of thrusters and Kerbal

[Falaris]

Having sent up a few rockets (a good hundred or so) I\'m starting to get these nagging questions. I\'ll fire them off and see if anyone has answers.

1: At what thrust does the engines provide the highest thrust per consumed fuel?

2: How similar is the earth and moon to Kerbal and Mun? Initially I thought they\'d be rather similar but the Mun\'s orbiting speed is roughly half that of our moon. Are there other differences? What is the needed speed in M/S for a low orbit of Kerbal compared to earth?

3: Bugs: After returning from the launch pad to the hangar, sometimes struts has changed position. Sometimes a craft launches okay, but crashes, and on the next launch (no changes), falls apart on the landing pad before the engines are even engaged.

4: Variable stress tolerance - see 3 - is there randomness in how much stress parts can take?

5:Accelerated time seems to make a craft in atmosphere become less stable. (It will crash and burn in accelerated time when it won\'t at normal speed).

6: A friend of mine - we both donated & got the 0.14.4 update - made test craft to find out how many fuel tanks a 200 thrust engine could lift. He got it up with six tanks - mine did not. Even when I had a barebone version and he had some extras(sas, wings, etc). (Another time, the exact same design took off. Thrust was at full both times, no boosters.). Seems to be something wonky with the physics when you\'ve had crashes.

7: A question on mods: They seem to be either silly, offer overall better things (thus reducing the challenge) or specific designs you can\'t alter (which removes most of the fun of the game). Assuming I want mods that mostly extend the basic components of the game with more utility but not change the basic balance, is there any good ones?

8: Lastly, is there any good guides on the gimbal / navball / thingy?

In advance, thanks!

Regards,

Me

[Endeavour]

The navball is pretty simple, the yellow circle points toward the direction your travelling, the green circle with the 'x' points directly opposite the direction your travelling. The purple markers point toward and away from the launch pad. I thought that the parts form the Novapunch pack were pretty balanced while offering new opporitunity, but I don\'t use many mods.

[silent_prtoagonist]

1. Fuel consumption and thrust both scale linearly with the throttle, so efficiency is constant at all throttle settings.

2. Both Kerbin and Mun are approx. 1/4 the size of Earth and Moon, respectively, and their mass has been chosen so that they have the same surface gravities as their real-world counterparts. (Note that this means that they\'re ridiculously dense, somewhere between solid plutonium and a stellar core O_o) The Kerbin-Mun distance is also roughly to scale. Low Kerbin Orbital speed is about 2,350 m/s, while Low Earth Orbital speed is about 7,800 m/s

3. This is a known bug. Hopefully will be fixed with the upcoming rework of the staging system (or not, we\'ll see).

4. See 3

5. Time acceleration will make any physical simulation less stable/accurate. Nature of the beast.

6. There\'s a bug where the launch pad can be somewhat 'sticky,' i.e. it takes a thrust/weight ratio > 1 to lift off. Once you\'re airborn, though, performance should be much more consistent. (try using landing legs or stack decouplers to 'boost' yourself off the pad briefly with the engines going full bore)

7. NovaSilisko\'s mods (especially the 'Silisko Edition') tend to be fairly realistic, and a bit tougher to use, performance wise, than the stock parts. There are several other realistic packs around, but those are a good start.

[Anachronda]

My problem with the navball thingie was that it seems one of the axes is backwards in the default install. I had to go switch the keys around so they all have the same effect on the ball \'cause I ain\'t the sharpest bulb in the drawer.

I also had to spend some time thinking about what the navball means. When you\'re sitting on the line between blue and brown, you\'re tangent to the surface beneath you. If you\'re rolled so that the brown is on the right and blue on the left, pitching up and down will turn you long the various compass headings; you\'ll see the lines go by with degree notations on them to tell you which way you\'re pointed. If you\'re rolled so that the dividing line is horizontal, pitching up and down will point you towards or away from Kerbin.

Your velocity vector goes through the navball, entering on the side with the plus and exiting on the side without.

I\'m not sophisticated enough yet to care about the direction to the space center, so I haven\'t given it any thought.

[BillWiskins]

My problem with the navball thingie was that it seems one of the axes is backwards in the default install. I had to go switch the keys around so they all have the same effect on the ball \'cause I ain\'t the sharpest bulb in the drawer.

Do you mean the way in which you press \'S\' (theoretically, \'down\') to raise the nose of the thing you\'re flying? I think that\'s the norm for flight-based games, as it refers to the way that you pull back on a control stick in an aircraft to climb. Once you\'ve thought of it like that it makes the other configuration seem totally wrong (or it does to me... )

[mc8888]

7: A question on mods: They seem to be either silly, offer overall better things (thus reducing the challenge) or specific designs you can\'t alter (which removes most of the fun of the game). Assuming I want mods that mostly extend the basic components of the game with more utility but not change the basic balance, is there any good ones?

I reccomend the Down Under Aerospace mod, for extra fuel tanks rockets, etc. they seem to have kept the same basic balance between mass/fuel, thrust/fuel consumption etc.

[The_Duck]

1. Currently, at least, thrust per fuel consumed is the same at all throttle settings.

2. The Kerbin-Mun system is basically the same as the Earth-Moon system scaled down by a factor of 10, but with the same surface gravities as our universe (so the bodies must be much denser). One exception is that the Mun is bigger in proportion to Kerbin than the Moon is in proportion to Earth, so that it doesn\'t look tiny on your screen.

6. There is a bug where occasionally the launch pad is a bit 'sticky,' meaning your rocket won\'t take off until it is putting out much more thrust than it should need, or until you rock the ship around a bit on the pad. One way to defeat this is to put stack decouplers on the bottom of your rocket, so that the rocket rests on the decouplers instead of the pad, and fire the decouplers at the same time you ignite the first stage engines.

[silent_prtoagonist]

2. The Kerbin-Mun system is basically the same as the Earth-Moon system scaled down by a factor of 10, but with the same surface gravities as our universe (so the bodies must be much denser). One exception is that the Mun is bigger in proportion to Kerbin than the Moon is in proportion to Earth, so that it doesn\'t look tiny on your screen.

Whoops, it is a factor of 10, not 4. My bad

[Falaris]

Thanks for the responses, guys! ;D

Now, to do more science on those poor Kerbals.

This should be the KSP Theme song