Hi! Also, RCS:

[Olix]

Hi,

I bought this game yesterday. It\'s super cool. Currently, I\'m trying to land on the mun. I\'ve yet to do this successfully - touchdown is hard!

MY latest plan is to cover my lander in RCS, and do most maneuvers with these. However, I\'m running into a problem: My rocket is going through RCS tanks in the wrong order! For liftoff, it uses the RCS tanks on my lander rather than the tanks on the 1st stage engines. Why is this? I would have thought that the ship would go through tanks starting from the first stage, but this isn\'t the case.

(Incidentally, what is the correct terminology here? My \'first stage\' engines are actually marked as the 8th stage in the game.)

I\'ve attached my rocket file. Any ideas?

[RC1062]

Welcome to the forums!

I believe RCS tanks drain based on their position in the staging. So if you split the RCS tanks and put the lander\'s in a lower stage number the other should drain first. (This might be completely wrong and may have been part of a discussion at some point... :-[)

[Olix]

Thanks for the tip, but this doesn\'t seem to be working. I have RCS tanks in stages 0, 2, 4, 6 and 8, and yet the first tanks to drain are in stage 4! I tried splitting them so they\'re placed individually rather than as a group, but it doesn\'t seem to work.

[Monkthespy]

RCS Tanks drain from top to down I think, it should be the other way around, but, it\'s just like that :U

[HOC]

Oh, wow. That is a silly feature I never noticed before, as I generally don\'t use more than one or two RCS tanks. I agree that it should drain in reverse stage order, i.e: Launch stage first, lander last.

[Olix]

It doesn\'t really seem to be 'top down' or anything like that - Moving the RCS cells either physically (changing the order of things on the lander) or logically (changing their stage) doesn\'t do anything - the lander cells are still used each time, even though they\'re in the middle of the stages, and in the middle of the craft physically. It\'s super frustrating.

[RC1062]

Well after messing around it does seem to work, my tank in the lowest stage draining first. However, I have another theory; The order in which you add tanks to the VAB. Try building a rocket minus the upper tank, disconnect everything below where you want the tank, place the tank, reconnect everything.

Going to test some more.

[Vanamonde]

You can change the order that things are called upon by adding them in order like you\'re suggesting, but you have to be REALLY careful that you\'ve moved everything that needs to get moved, and the really nasty part is, if you later alter your design at all, the components get automatically flipped back to their original order, and you have to manually move them all again.