Struts drag quite severely

[Clouds]

Tested in 1.0.2

Even though I'm not the first to find this, I haven't seen it reported here in the support forum, either. So, here goes.

Struts drag quite severely. Certainly, long, trusslike struts would drag quite severely. However, very short struts, acting more like spot-welds, still drag quite severely.

By "severely", I mean that they can easily make-or-break whether something goes supersonic. Following is an imgur album with 3 images, each with the same test rocket except for how many struts are present. It's a simple demonstration with the kind of spot-weld-esque struts that one might use to stiffen a bendy joint (not necessary for strength here, but this is merely a test case.) Note the maximum speed reached by the time the SRB burns out.

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Strut drag is a real downer because for many of the larger or more aesthetically creative aircraft designs possible, struts are (presently) critical to make them hold their shape. Optimistically, I tried removing all the struts from one of my SSTO attempts which just couldn't break the sound barrier. Here's how it loads:

Here's how it looks when I fire up the engines:

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So, how could this be fixed? After all, long struts probably should induce a lot of drag, especially if they're not parallel to the direction of motion.

- Perhaps joints could be made globally stiff. This is pretty anti-Kerbal and renders struts totally obsolete.

- Perhaps there could be an interface in the VAB/SPH to mark specific joints or specific parts to be extra-rigid at a penalty of weight and cost.

- Perhaps there could be a new type of strut with very short maximum length and no drag. Name it a "Spot-weld".

- Perhaps it would be enough for struts to drag based on their length, although length & direction would be best. Maybe even there would be a minimum length below which struts would be dragless, acting under the assumption it's more for the purpose of "fusing" two parts into one.

- Perhaps struts, as well as other parts in general, could be detected for whether they're wholly inside some other part. I'm guessing this is infeasible for performance reasons.

[sal_vager]

Feel free to edit the strut drag values

{

url = Squad/Parts/CompoundParts/strutConnector/strutConnector/strutConnector

DRAG_CUBE

{

cube = Default, 0.05419693,0.532624,1.284088, 0.0529771,0.5661769,1.284088, 0.06662689,0.6387991,0.7649611, 0.06662689,0.5860444,0.8299828, 0.1433081,0.7462295,0.1586942, 0.1433081,0.7462369,0.1574544, -0.5322,0.3045477,0.0004060492, 1.295171,0.7753254,0.1161486

}

}