Pre-cooler & Engine Nacelle are the same part.

[Violent Jeb]

[redacted, done]

Edited August 16, 2016 by Violent Jeb

[Slam_Jones]

Allow me to answer a few questions, if I might be so bold:

"(never seen a plane that seriously overheats anyway)"  -  Have you ever seen a spaceplane?  Or an SSTO?  How about during re-entry?

"(and i'm in the upper 50% of pc's)"  -  So I assume you have KSP on an SSD?  I do, and have noticed minimal loading lag due to "extra" parts.  In fact, it's faster now than it's been at any point in it's development, even with mods installed.

"extra planets" - Yeah, it's been suggested since forever.  It's probably going to happen.

"but how does this help someone who is new to the game, trying to go to SPACE, when they have redundant, duplicate plane parts cluttering their install."  -  Career mode.  I had no idea which parts did what when I first started playing, but Career mode introduces them slowly so you can understand the function of each one.

"Better hope MJ doesn't go the WAY of KER or i'm all done with you KSP." -  Well, that's a mod and not an official part of the game.  If you stop playing because a mod is no longer supported, it says more about you than it does about the game...  Besides, you can't expect modders to stay interested forever.  They are human, y'know.

[Alshain]

They most definitely are not even close to the same part.  The pre-cooler is designed for much higher speeds, while the nacelle peaks at Mach 2-ish.  The Nacelle is really no good for an SSTO, it's mostly just atmospheric planes.

I do not believe there is a cooling effect n the pre-cooler, that is just a name (pre-coolers in real life cool the air avoiding the need for condensing, they are also a theoretical device, never used before in practice).  It's an air intake.

Edited January 11, 2016 by Alshain

[Violent Jeb]

36 minutes ago, Slam_Jones said:

Allow me to answer a few questions, if I might be so bold:

A - "(never seen a plane that seriously overheats anyway)"  -  Have you ever seen a spaceplane?  Or an SSTO?  How about during re-entry?

B - "(and i'm in the upper 50% of pc's)"  -  So I assume you have KSP on an SSD?  I do, and have noticed minimal loading lag due to "extra" parts.  In fact, it's faster now than it's been at any point in it's development, even with mods installed.

"extra planets" - Yeah, it's been suggested since forever.  It's probably going to happen.

C - "but how does this help someone who is new to the game, trying to go to SPACE, when they have redundant, duplicate plane parts cluttering their install."  -  Career mode.  I had no idea which parts did what when I first started playing, but Career mode introduces them slowly so you can understand the function of each one.

D - "Better hope MJ doesn't go the WAY of KER or i'm all done with you KSP." -  Well, that's a mod and not an official part of the game.  If you stop playing because a mod is no longer supported, it says more about you than it does about the game...  Besides, you can't expect modders to stay interested forever.  They are human, y'know.

A - good point, thats why the pre-cooler features should be retained, while the duplicate part should be deleted. FWIW, Spaceplanes in the SOI of kerbin will require no Heat-Shields that i know of, unless you're wreckless.

B - I sure do. My complaint isn't about my system lagging. My system runs fine, and i manage my install to keep it that way. My complaint is that parts that serve no purpose WILL lag other peoples systems. Its almost more of a complaint that my parts list is already loaded with spaceplane parts, and I shouldn't have to sit here confused at the appearance of a part because it in-fact has the exact same characteristics as another.

C - I'm fine with introducing parts slowly. (don't get me started on the tech tree). It would be infinitely less confusing to simply have one part, rather than two where the advantages are almost nil and very hard to discern. New players aren't going to be building spaceplanes primarily (based on where the RAPIER and similar tech unlocks), but they are going to have to parts that are virtually the same once they unlock hypersonic flight.

D - I'm aware that MJ and KER are mods. My closing point is more to illustrate that poor decisions are constantly affecting my ability to enjoy this game even as much as I have in the past. Duplicate spaceplane parts strikes me as ignorant, as does keeping DV readouts secret. Why "keep out" relevant parameters of space flight, but "keep in" almost identical plane parts??? Makes no sense. That's my point. When all these modders have lost interest and all i'm left with is duplicate parts and arbitrary difficulty/grind, who do you expect to stay interested?

Would you care to weigh in on the function of the two parts, and that they are virtually the same in application and operation? Would you be able to give me a purpose for the Nacelle once I've unlocked the Pre-Cooler? 

See, other parts in the game, when you "upgrade beyond" them, they still have a use in certain situations. Not this one, sorry.

 

Edited January 11, 2016 by Violent Jeb

[swjr-swis]

7 minutes ago, Violent Jeb said:

who do you expect to stay interested?

<timidly raises hand>

Am I annoyed at some things KSP? Sure. Can I imagine a time where I'd lose interest in designing fantastic contraptions and flinging them across land, sea, air and space? Honestly, nope.

After years of playing the game, and watching the game and mods not always develop along my preferred paths, I am still finding more fun and challenging things to do with it. Every now and then I have a slight dip, or my curiosity for some other game gets the better of me, every now and then I huff and puff and mutter about specific annoyances still/new in the game. But I keep coming back.

An almost-but-not-quite similar part? Doesn't even register on the list of possible reasons to not play.

[Slam_Jones]

1 hour ago, Violent Jeb said:

- snip snippy sniparoo -

 

Would you care to weigh in on the function of the two parts, and that they are virtually the same in application and operation? Would you be able to give me a purpose for the Nacelle once I've unlocked the Pre-Cooler? 

See, other parts in the game, when you "upgrade beyond" them, they still have a use in certain situations. Not this one, sorry.

 

According to the link in @Alshain 's post (Above), it appears that the intake of the Nacelle and Pre-Cooler are dead even until about Mach 1.5, at which point the Nacelle drops quickly, while the pre-cooler powers ahead til about Mach 3, at which point it begins tapering off.  Other than this, yeah, it would seem they are very similar.

As for uses, well, personally it'd mainly be aesthetic.  Sometimes I prefer the look of the Nacelle to the Pre-Cooler.  Really, depending on the mode or style you choose to play as, aesthetics could well be higher priority, than, say, efficiency.  As said above, I like my ships to look pretty, even if they are a touch to the inefficient side.  Others may sacrifice aesthetics for efficiency.  To each their own.

Do I agree that there should be two separate parts?  Well, I'll put it this way: I don't think either needs to be removed.  I like the meshes and textures of each, and one or the other may look better on certain crafts.

While I agree that it is somewhat redundant, I don't think there's really too big a need to remove it.  I'm sure there are less-frequently-used, more complicated parts out there.  The LES comes to mind.  Tons more geometry than a simple cylinder, yet I rarely see it used.  This is not a call to remove the LES: I'm sure it's still used often enough to warrant it's place (I once Tweakscale'd it and used it as a hood ornament for some of my rovers).  Besides, I feel like simply removing one part among many will do little to reduce the impact on lower-end PCs. 

But hey, that's just my opinion

[Temstar]

I say approach this problem from the other direction - make the pre-cooler do something unique. How about an actual togglable "pre-cool intake air" function that consumes LF but decreases effective airspeed as far as your jet engines are concerned by 100m/s. So for example RAPIER normally runs out of breath at something like 1200m/s, generating minimum thrust above this because the intake air after compression is so hot that very little fuel can be burnt to increase the exhaust temperature further before the engine melts. But with a pre-cooler running it now thinks and behave as if its on a plane with 1100m/s airspeed.

Make 100m/s decrease as the max and each pre-cooler can only cool a finite amount of air, so if you need a lot more air because you are running a large aircraft with many engines then you need more pre-coolers or else suffer a smaller cooling effect.

Edited January 11, 2016 by Temstar

[Violent Jeb]

That's a perfectly acceptable opinion.

That in mind, we should have two textures and slightly different versions of the MK1 pod,  MK1 cockpit The MK1 Inline and absolutely the landercan.

I don't see what makes these intakes so aesthetically valuable that we can get two of them OVER any two pods, liquid only tanks, or whatever. I would LOVE to have that same privledge when designing a spaceship. This is supposed to be a spaceship game right? Not one of the 500 "earthlike" flying sims right?

Its an oversight, and it just "plane" panders to the air/spaceplane committee, while the spaceshipfaring citizens here are stuck using the same sutff since who knows what ver.

How many engines added since .90 are designed for use in vacuum specifically? erm, not many. How many parts at all have been recently designed for use in vacuum specifically? 

Like, if you like the intakes because you build planes or whatever that's AOK with me but lets not cover up the fact that NOTHING else has that kind of variety.

There are more air intakes In this game than there are solid fuel rockets and ISRU parts COMBINED.
There are more air intakes in this game than there are scientific sensors.

PS, thankyou for the intakes link

Edited January 12, 2016 by Violent Jeb
talkin bout intakes!

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

What way did KER go?  I'm happily using Kerbal Engineer redux in 1.0.5 with the only problem being that it doesn't work with jet engines.

[swjr-swis]

4 minutes ago, Violent Jeb said:

(...) NOTHING else has that kind of variety.

There are more air intakes In this game than there are solid fuel rockets and ISRU parts COMBINED.
There are more air intakes in this game than there are scientific sensors.

There are more rocket engines than there are intakes. That is a fact. What is the true difference between one gimbal engine and the next? Just a differnt texture and another number for the thrust.

There are more inline tank parts than any other types of parts in this game. That is a fact. What is the actual difference from one tank to the next?

 

I get it, you like rockets and are not too fond of plane parts. But really? This is what you get steamed up about, two parts out of a total of...?

There's a number of things that can annoy when playing this game, that are genuinely troubled or bugged. A number of those things are on the list to be fixed with 1.1, others are still on hold or need a lil more lobbying. But having one more intake part, that is in fact, not identical, and that I can completely ignore if I so wish... I don't see how that is such a big issue.

[Violent Jeb]

There should be more rocket engines than intakes, this is a game about building rocketships, save for 3 atmospheric "stages". You already know this, but the engines are necessary to solve the rocket equation almost anywhere in the kerbol system. The intakes are relevent only in an airspace I can traverse vertically in about 60 seconds.

This is one issue that i have with the game. Each issue, whether big or small, is summarily discharged without a second thought. They tell you to take your bug reports to the bug tracker.

I'm not here to do anybody's job. I am providing evidence for things I have observed in this game. I am providing suggestions as best I am able for how modders or developers more capable than I could improve this game. If nothing else, the takeaway from this thread is that I feel -they- need to stop spamming intakes on KSP in general. We don't need new ones in 1.1. That sort of thing. just IMO.

 

Edited January 12, 2016 by Violent Jeb

[Raptor9]

3 hours ago, Violent Jeb said:

snip
My closing point is more to illustrate that poor decisions are constantly affecting my ability to enjoy this game even as much as I have in the past. Duplicate spaceplane parts strikes me as ignorant, as does keeping DV readouts secret.
snip

 

At the risk of bringing the moderators in to this thread to weigh in, I would point out that your statements are a bit overbearing in the fact that what you see as poor decisions, others would not agree with you  Further, indirectly calling the KSP devs ignorant is seriously poor taste.

Your particular play style may not see a significant difference in these parts' usage, but others (to include myself) utilize these components quite differently in how we use them in our gameplay.  Ever since the Engineer's Report feature was released in the SPH & VAB, people have been asking for a delta-V readout, as well as a more comprehensive aerodynamics overlay.  Squad has said multiple times that these features are on their radar for addition, but until they get them polished and/or working well enough to be implemented, they will be held back from release.  The importance of such features aren't in question, the priority of them are.  Bug-fixing and optimization for Unity 5 is the big fish on the plate.

The argument for removing a single part (by combining the features of the pre-cooler and nacelle intake) and then adding another one you listed to "help" those users with lower end PC's is ridiculous, as this will in no way help those players' KSP performance.  Also, since the upcoming Unity 5 update will bring a huge optimization boost utilizing 64-bit and more RAM, that will help those players with low-end PCs.  I would venture a guess to say Squad's decisions are sound.

[Alshain]

47 minutes ago, Violent Jeb said:

There are more air intakes In this game than there are solid fuel rockets and ISRU parts COMBINED.
 

That's a very convenient part filter there.  There are more SRB Parts than ladders, lets remove SRBs!  You don't remove parts because there is more of one kind than another.  It's not a competition.

If the parts are too redundant then the stats need tweaking to make them unique.  Perhaps the nacelle should have slightly better performance at lower speeds, or cost significantly less, or something to that effect.  As long as it doesn't throw balance out of whack.  Removing the part is not the answer.

Edited January 12, 2016 by Alshain

[Violent Jeb]

16 minutes ago, Raptor9 said:

The argument for removing a single part (by combining the features of the pre-cooler and nacelle intake) and then adding another one you listed to "help" those users with lower end PC's is ridiculous, as this will in no way help those players' KSP performance. 

I never made that argument. I had said if you are going to add exceptionally similar parts, you should at least add parts that are more central to the concept of the game. But it would seem clear that I have no idea what this game is supposed to be about anymore. So whatever, sorry to rile you all up.

[steve_v]

58 minutes ago, Violent Jeb said:

There should be more rocket engines than intakes, this is a game about building rocketships.

This is a game about whatever Squad wants it to be about. Is this thread about anything but "I don't like building planes"?

If you don't like the aircraft parts, just don't use them.

If you think that one part slows down your loading so much, delete it. Problem solved. As far as performance impact and memory use, there are much bigger fish to fry.

Edited January 12, 2016 by steve_v

[Violent Jeb]

10 minutes ago, steve_v said:

This is a game about whatever Squad wants it to be about.

my mistake, thought i read space in the title.

 

[steve_v]

4 minutes ago, Violent Jeb said:

my mistake, thought i read space in the title.

Funny you should mention that, I swear I saw some space in the game too, mostly after flying a space-plane to get there.

I also feel the lock hammer looming, but maybe that's just me.

[SpaceplaneAddict]

5 hours ago, Violent Jeb said:

Its an oversight, and it just "plane" panders to the air/spaceplane committee, while the spaceshipfaring citizens here are stuck using the same sutff since who knows what ver.

 

Please, try not to pair planes and spaceplanes. Though similar, the two are meant for very different tasks. So much so, that in essence, a space plane is more like a rocket in purpose

 

Realize this please, in fact, did you know, that, GASP, spaceplanes actually need ROCKETS to into space. WOW!

 

Sorry if I seem bitter, but people who have the wrong idea of spaceplanes, really tend to, shake me up.

Edited January 12, 2016 by SpaceplaneAddict

[Skalou]

some intersting things:

SR71  (and the m21 drone)

 

note also the engine and intake style.

the Skylon engine:

note the "Rapier style", the real precooler is the really big challenge of this project.

and this to better understand the intakes in KSP:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/125015-105-intakes-lets-figure-them-out/

Edited January 13, 2016 by Skalou

[SpaceplaneAddict]

If your thinking like that, you may as well only keep ONE type of intake.