Parts which should get their Part file modified

[Guest]

I'm SO going to write some MM configs.

[Snark]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

IRL, drogue chutes are supposed to fully deploy before your main chutes even think about partially deploying. In KSP, you really want your mains to partially deploy around 8000 meters or so, so that you are above the tallest mountains (at a pressure of .2 to .25 or so). So the full deployment altitude of all the drogues should be like 10000 meters. But the absolute max you can set in the tweakables is 5000 meters. So I'd like to see the altitude tweakable of the drogue chutes changed to slide between 5000 to 15000 meters, I think.

The full-deploy tweakable for the parachutes is height above ground level, not absolute altitude.  5000 meters above ground level is plenty.  (Considerably more than plenty, in fact.)  If you fully deployed them much higher than that, you'd have a long, slow, dull wait for the craft to descend.

[jf0]

On 16/1/2016 at 5:43 AM, Verran said:

Personally, I find all of the command pods to be center of gravity disasters, especially the Mk. 1 Cockpit, which is only half as dense as a full Mk. 1 fuel tank, yet three times as dense as any scientific equipment you choose to place behind it.  It's also more dense than any wing you can put behind it.  Wings are built like tanks; they have spars, ribs, and stringers (unless we start talking about monocoque or semi-coque carbon-fiber construction,) all supporting the shape of the skin.  Cockpits on aircraft, like the rest of the fuselage, are paper plates for a reason:  they need to be light.  They're not impregnable fortresses that can tolerate a service truck, much less a ground impact.  I don't think the reaction wheel justification holds water, either.  If reaction wheels are needed, that's what the SAS modules are for.  The Mk. 1 pretty much looks like a Lear cockpit.  The 35 empty only weighs about 4.1t.  This cockpit tries to account for more than a quarter of that. 

Squad continues to push this game in a direction that makes it more of a poor simulation screaming for a total physics and dynamics overhaul louder with each update.  And with the direction they're taking, there are inconsistencies with their methodology...

By comparison, the heaviest Mercury capsule was loaded to 1400 kg.  The Mk 1 Capsule is rated at 840 kg.  Deviation -40%

The Apollo/Saturn V command module was roughly 4,990kg, and that mass includes the reaction wheels, docking port, and the heat shield.  Total KSP value:  5.47 t.  +9.6%

The Apollo lander module (ascent stage) had a dry mass of approximately 2150 kg, but keep in mind that included the ascent engine, dry fuel tanks, and docking port.  Squad's Mk 2 lander can?  2.66t (just the can.) 3.66t w/ fuel tank and terrier.  +70%

The Cupola module currently mounted on the ISS:  1805 kg.  Squad's Cupola:  1.8t.  Rock on.

LOX has a density of 1.141 g/cm³ on earth, compared to Squad's .005 what? kg/L? So, 5g/cm³.  +338%.

H₂ has a density of 0.07085 g/cm³ on earth, compared to Squad's 5 g/cm³.  +6957%

N₂H₄ (Hydrazine, the most commonly used mono propellant,) is 1.021 g/cm³.  Squads?  4 g/cm³.  +292%.

Also, if the shuttle's external tank is any clue, it seems the burn ratio for H2/O2 is closer to 106261kg/629340kg (or 0.17:1) than it is 0.9/1.1. 

Isps are off on the engines they are derived from...

Now here's the real issue:  Kerbin is about 10.607 times more dense than Earth, which predetermines the aforementioned values.  Yet, gravity remains unchanged.  Circumnavigating this fact certainly requires some finagling. However, even assuming that if 1 cubic centimeter of water on earth is 1 gram, the same cubic centimeter of water on Kerbin should be 10.607 grams, the densities above are still off par.  LOX on Kerbin should be 12.103 g/cm³, Liquid Hydrogen 0.752 g/cm³, and Hydrazine 10.830 g/cm³.  Furthermore, the dry mass of all the parts would then be all knuckered up.  Whichever road you take, we come back to an issue with consistency.  If we want to assume all aluminum is ten times as dense on Kerbin, then we have to increase (and unify) the mass on all the parts and ramp up engine output.  If we want to stick with earth values, then we still need to be consistent with what's available (and experimental) on earth.  Can't cherry pick, and can't go making stuff up.

As far as actually figuring out what all the parts weigh dry, that's something that should have been done during the modelling process by cross-evaluating surface area and volume with density of material to be used (aluminum, titanium, iron, steel, etc.)  Now we're stuck to guestimating what a wing weighs.

TLDR:  Everything needs a complete rework.

All this just because I wanted to come in and talk about the cockpits being too heavy...

This all comes about because of the idea that KSP 'is a game not a simulator', so I imagine it went something like this: Oh we think a real sized Earth/Kerbin would be too difficult/not fun/whatever for a game, so we'll make it 1/6th the size. But for simplicity, we'll keep gravity at 9.8m/s^2. Now there is a problem: that 'simplicity' implies that kerbin is super dense. Oh no matter we'll just make fuel heavier, part heavier too. Oh now our eninge isp and thrust numbers cant match up to real life, so we need to change those too. But now something else is broken, so we need to deviate there from reality too.

In short, a change of one 'small' thing  right at the start (who knows what, size of kerbin or something else) led to some chain reaction that means every other thing needs to be adjusted in this artificial universe to try to make other things correlate to how they would behave in the real universe. Unfortunately that doesn't make sense and it means they will always be going around in circles readjusting and deviating further from reality or reasonable numbers because in some places they have decided some things should be like they are in reality, yet in others they should be different. Basically you cannot really have everything both ways, because it is inconsistent, but they are trying hard to it seems...

[bewing]

11 hours ago, Snark said:

The full-deploy tweakable for the parachutes is height above ground level, not absolute altitude.  5000 meters above ground level is plenty.  (Considerably more than plenty, in fact.)  If you fully deployed them much higher than that, you'd have a long, slow, dull wait for the craft to descend.

The problem you are not considering is that the partial deployment "altitude"/pressure for the main chutes is absolute. Because it's based on pressure, and pressure is absolute. Also, at altitude, you are not descending vertically. So, 95% of the time, when flying over low ground, your mains will deploy before your drogue fully deploys -- which means (if you really needed the drogue at all) that your mains will be destroyed. Alternately, as you say, if you get totally lucky and happen to fly over mountains, then your ground level will suddenly increase and your drogue will deploy first and you will have a safe landing. So drogue chute full deployment needs to basically match main chute partial deployment mechanics, or you will only be able to depend on the partial deployment of drogue chutes for all your landings. And anyway, the fully deployed drogue only slows you to 150 m/s or so, so it's not much of a wait to get from 8km down to the ground. Not like floating down at 5 m/s from 1000m.

But the main point is that a drogue that only fully deploys at 5500 meters altitude (or below) 95% of the time is not worth a lot.

 

Edited January 18, 2016 by bewing

[Snark]

42 minutes ago, bewing said:

The problem you are not considering is that the partial deployment "altitude"/pressure for the main chutes is absolute. Because it's based on pressure, and pressure is absolute. Also, at altitude, you are not descending vertically. So, 95% of the time, when flying over low ground, your mains will deploy before your drogue fully deploys -- which means (if you really needed the drogue at all) that your mains will be destroyed. Alternately, as you say, if you get totally lucky and happen to fly over mountains, then your ground level will suddenly increase and your drogue will deploy first and you will have a safe landing. So drogue chute full deployment needs to basically match main chute partial deployment mechanics, or you will only be able to depend on the partial deployment of drogue chutes for all your landings. And anyway, the fully deployed drogue only slows you to 150 m/s or so, so it's not much of a wait to get from 8km down to the ground. Not like floating down at 5 m/s from 1000m.

But the main point is that a drogue that only fully deploys at 5500 meters altitude (or below) 95% of the time is not worth a lot.

 

I'm still not following.  If your drogue fully deploys when you're 5000 meters above the terrain, you'll be slowed to safe mains-deploy speed far before you get anywhere close to the ground.

So you just semi-deploy your drogues as soon as speed has dropped enough not to rip them off, they fully deploy at 5000m above terrain (or lower, but 5000 is plenty), they slow you to below 200 m/s within a few seconds (long before you're in any danger of terrain collision), and you pop your mains, which then quickly slow you to your safe touchdown speed.  What's the problem?

I don't use drogues all that often (in my experience, on Kerbin they're almost never needed anyway), but when I do, I don't set their full-deploy altitude to anywhere near 5000m, and they do the job just great.  About the only time I've ever had any problem was when I was doing something egregiously stupid (like reentering very fast and far, far too steeply on Duna), but it's not the drogue's fault if I'm still going 700 m/s when I faceplant. 

Edited January 18, 2016 by Snark

[bewing]

5 hours ago, Snark said:

I'm still not following.  If your drogue fully deploys when you're 5000 meters above the terrain, you'll be slowed to safe mains-deploy speed far before you get anywhere close to the ground.

So you just semi-deploy your drogues as soon as speed has dropped enough not to rip them off, they fully deploy at 5000m above terrain (or lower, but 5000 is plenty), they slow you to below 200 m/s within a few seconds (long before you're in any danger of terrain collision), and you pop your mains, which then quickly slow you to your safe touchdown speed.  What's the problem?

I don't use drogues all that often (in my experience, on Kerbin they're almost never needed anyway), but when I do, I don't set their full-deploy altitude to anywhere near 5000m, and they do the job just great.  About the only time I've ever had any problem was when I was doing something egregiously stupid (like reentering very fast and far, far too steeply on Duna), but it's not the drogue's fault if I'm still going 700 m/s when I faceplant. 

OK, it looks like the problem is that you never use your chutes in automatic deployment mode (ie. activate them in space, before reentry, on an unguided piece of debris). You always open yours manually, which you can't do on unguided debris.

Let's say you have a bunch of first-stage kickbacks in a cluster that you want to automatically recover. You activate all the chutes in space, then decouple the first stage, and it falls back to Kerbin. The main chutes must therefore partially deploy before they might hit the top of a mountain, so you set their partial deployment pressure to .2 = 8000 meters. You leave their full deployment altitude at 1000 meters above terrain, because that's fine. However, at 8500 meters you know from experiments that the debris will be traveling at 500 m/s. So you need a drogue. So you stick one on, and leave its partial deployment at .02 = 21000 meters. So it opens in partial deployment (which happens to be over the water) and slows you to 310 m/s at 8000 meters altitude, then your mains partially deploy and are immediately destroyed -- because your drogue never fully deployed, because the highest you could set it to was 5000 meters.

The moral of this story is that drogues exist to protect your mains. The only reason to have them fully deploy at all is to slow you to a parachute-safe speed before your mains partially deploy -- especially if you are not timing their opening manually. So if you set your mains to automatically partially deploy at 8000m, then you need to know that your drogue will be fully deployed before then -- say at 10000m, absolute. So I am saying that drogue chutes must either fully deploy at absolute altitudes, or allow an altitude above terrain that will always deploy them above 8000 meters.

 

[Snark]

2 hours ago, bewing said:

OK, it looks like the problem is that you never use your chutes in automatic deployment mode (ie. activate them in space, before reentry, on an unguided piece of debris). You always open yours manually, which you can't do on unguided debris.

I'm really having trouble picturing this.  I suspect you're playing KSP in a very specific way that is completely different from how I play it. 

And that's cool, one of the great things about KSP is that everybody can play it in their own style... but if you're making a case that "drogue chutes need revising because they don't work with my highly specific play style that's not the way most people play," it kinda helps if you give a specific scenario.

When I play KSP, there is never any case where I'm bringing unguided debris down from orbit with a parachute.  Ever.  I know that there are mods that let you do that, but I've never had any desire or need to do so (it's pointless from a practical standpoint, and I have no role-playing reason to want to), and therefore I don't use such a mod.

I'm trying to understand the use case you describe, but still not quite seeing it.

2 hours ago, bewing said:

Let's say you have a bunch of first-stage kickbacks in a cluster that you want to automatically recover. You activate all the chutes in space, then decouple the first stage, and it falls back to Kerbin.

This is the part where you lose me.

Kickbacks in space?

I've never once had a Kickback in space, or anywhere near space.  As far as I'm concerned, if I have a Kickback in space, then I'm Doing It Wrong™.  It's an SRB.  SRBs are for using on the launch pad.  If I have a Kickback, it's because I'm launching something really massive, and the Kickback burns out by the time I'm at 10-20 km and going no more than a third or so of orbital velocity.  And then I ditch them, because they're dead weight and drag, and why the heck would I haul a burnt-out Kickback into space?

I could imagine someone wanting to recover the Kickback atmospherically... but from space?

(The reason I've never been tempted to recover them is that it's simply not worth it.  It's chicken feed.  The recovery value of a burned-out SRB simply isn't worth the bother to me.)

Anyway, the only time I ever bring something down from space is if it's something I care about, in which case I'm piloting it.

Anyway, back to the point:  This thread is, basically, about wanting to modify the behavior of parts in stock because their behavior in stock is "wrong" when you're playing in stock.

I don't think drogues fit that category.  As I've described, they work just great as-is.  In stock.

If you like to play with some mod that lets you recover things when you're not flying them, then great!  But that's no longer a stock scenario.  To me, that's not a reason to change the stock behavior of drogue chutes-- it's a reason for your recovery mod to make any needed changes to parachute behavior so that the mod will work as desired.

[Kerbart]

19 minutes ago, Snark said:

I'm really having trouble picturing this.  I suspect you're playing KSP in a very specific way that is completely different from how I play it. 

And that's cool, one of the great things about KSP is that everybody can play it in their own style... but if you're making a case that "drogue chutes need revising because they don't work with my highly specific play style that's not the way most people play," it kinda helps if you give a specific scenario.

When I play KSP, there is never any case where I'm bringing unguided debris down from orbit with a parachute.  Ever.  I know that there are mods that let you do that, but I've never had any desire or need to do so (it's pointless from a practical standpoint, and I have no role-playing reason to want to), and therefore I don't use such a mod.

It's not debris. I used to play it like that, until Teh Squad took that option (as a feasible playing style) away in 1.0. Chutes would stage together with the last decoupler, and since reentry takes such a long time (unless you were willing to roll the dice with physics acceleration) I would wonder off and do other things like doing the dishes, folding laundry or work on my penmanship. And when I'd return to my computer the return capsule was safely landed, with the various parachutes opening at decent heights and there was happiness and joy in Kerbart Country.

So, setting up your chutes for automatic deployment at various heights is great... if it works. And currently it doesn't.

 

19 minutes ago, Snark said:

This is the part where you lose me.

Kickbacks in space?

I've never once had a Kickback in space, or anywhere near space.  As far as I'm concerned, if I have a Kickback in space, then I'm Doing It Wrong™.  It's an SRB.  SRBs are for using on the launch pad.  If I have a Kickback, it's because I'm launching something really massive, and the Kickback burns out by the time I'm at 10-20 km and going no more than a third or so of orbital velocity.  And then I ditch them, because they're dead weight and drag, and why the heck would I haul a burnt-out Kickback into space?

 

I fully agree with you questioning how reasonable it is to recover SRB's from space, but having SRB's in space in itself doesn't mean You're Doing It Wrong™; it could merely be a case of A Stupid But Very Lucrative Contract™. But yes, no need to recover them.

[bewing]

39 minutes ago, Snark said:

Anyway, back to the point:  This thread is, basically, about wanting to modify the behavior of parts in stock because their behavior in stock is "wrong" when you're playing in stock.

I don't think drogues fit that category.  As I've described, they work just great as-is.  In stock.

If you like to play with some mod that lets you recover things when you're not flying them, then great!  But that's no longer a stock scenario.  To me, that's not a reason to change the stock behavior of drogue chutes-- it's a reason for your recovery mod to make any needed changes to parachute behavior so that the mod will work as desired.

 

I can't believe this. FROM THE PART DESCRIPTION ITSELF: 

This super heavy booster is designed to be recovered after jettisoning. Once recovered, it is refurbished and refueled for another launch.

I am not doing it wrong. I can recover 25% of my launch cost by recovering the boosters. That is not chicken feed. Recovering the boosters works just fine, if you do it the way you have to do it -- and in ver 1.0.5 that means you have to launch them all the way into space. I am sorry that this is one entire aspect of the game that you don't do, but it was designed to work this way. And the drogue chutes are not useful in the game right now because they don't serve the purpose that they were designed for. You say you barely use them, and then claim that they work just great as-is? WTF? And that IS the point of this thread -- making slight mods on stock parts that people don't use because the parts don't fulfill their intended purpose on a cost/performance basis.

[Snark]

34 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

It's not debris. I used to play it like that, until Teh Squad took that option (as a feasible playing style) away in 1.0. Chutes would stage together with the last decoupler, and since reentry takes such a long time (unless you were willing to roll the dice with physics acceleration) I would wonder off and do other things like doing the dishes, folding laundry or work on my penmanship. And when I'd return to my computer the return capsule was safely landed, with the various parachutes opening at decent heights and there was happiness and joy in Kerbart Country.

So, setting up your chutes for automatic deployment at various heights is great... if it works. And currently it doesn't.

Okay, see, that makes sense to me.

Doesn't apply to me, since I love reentry and landing, it's a "payoff moment" in KSP for me, I'm always raptly glued to my screen all the way down... but then I'm a bit OCD, and also enjoy simple pleasures (oooo!  flames! pretty!), and totally get that it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea. 

However, my earlier post was addressing @bewing, who specifically said "unguided debris", and also made it clear in context that this was about stage recovery.

Nothing wrong with stage recovery, and if Squad ever adds that to the stock game, then yeah, the parachutes will definitely need some revising.  But until then, in my book "stage recovery doesn't work" isn't a reason to change default parachute behavior, it's a reason to update the stage-recovery mod so that the various parts do what they need to do.

[bewing]

As I said, stage recovery works just fine, within the game's limitations. And my game is perfectly stock.

So, "in my book 'stage recovery doesn't work' isn't a reason to change default parachute behavior, it's a reason to update the stage-recovery mod so that the various parts do what they need to do"  is a non-operative argument. And this is not just about stage recovery, it is about any passive reentry system -- which I understand you have never bothered to think about.

Here is a tutorial on how to do stage recovery: http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Tutorial:_Recovering_Rocket_Stages

 

[Snark]

16 minutes ago, bewing said:

 

I can't believe this. FROM THE PART DESCRIPTION ITSELF: 

This super heavy booster is designed to be recovered after jettisoning. Once recovered, it is refurbished and refueled for another launch.

And the part descriptions are basically just window dressing designed to add some "spice" to the game for people who read them.  There's nothing special about Kickbacks and recovery.  If you're going to recover a part, any part is going to give you cash back if you recover it.  Nothing special about Kickbacks that way.

19 minutes ago, bewing said:

I am not doing it wrong.

Who ever said you were doing it wrong?  I certainly didn't.  I said that if I did that, then I would be doing it wrong.  Note the use of the first person pronoun there.  It would be hopelessly, stupidly, flagrantly wrong for me to do that, because of how I play.  You're not me, and you decide what works for you.

23 minutes ago, bewing said:

I can recover 25% of my launch cost by recovering the boosters. That is not chicken feed. Recovering the boosters works just fine, if you do it the way you have to do it -- and in ver 1.0.5 that means you have to launch them all the way into space.

If it works for you, great.  I have no idea what your typical designs look like, if you've found a place where it's economical for you, then more power to you.

For me, it would make no sense whatsoever.  It really is chicken feed to me.  An empty Kickback is worth just 1140 funds-- that's at 100% recovery value, which I won't get unless I drop 'em right on top of KSC, which I won't.  But let's take the best-possible argument for recovery and say I'm throwing away 1140 funds per Kickback if I don't recover them.

I don't use Kickbacks on little ships.  They're for launching monsters.  A typical Kickback scenario for me is having eight of them, in order to lift a craft off the pad that masses a few hundred tons and likely costs upwards of 200,000 funds.

In that situation-- do I really want to bother recovering the Kickbacks?  Really?  Recovering all eight of them, even if I could do it at 100% value, barely amounts to 9000 funds!  That's less than 5% of the cost of the rocket.  In the absolute mathematically best possible case.

But it gets worse:  the way I do it, I jettison the dead weight and drag of the Kickbacks the instant they burn out.  You're proposing that I haul them all the way to orbit.  That means I'll need more rocket to get to orbit than I would have if I had jettisoned the Kickbacks.  I haven't done the experiment, but I suspect that the extra cost of the additional rocket power would exceed the maximum-possible-9000-funds value of the Kickbacks.  But even if it only costs half that much:  now my "profit" from recovering the Kickbacks is down to 5000 funds or less.  Minus any recovery penalty.  Do I really care about that if I've just launched a rocket costing upwards of 200,000 funds?

And this brings us to the real kicker:  Even the whole 200,000 fund cost of the entire ship is chicken feed, really.  If I'm launching a monster like that, I'm doing it for one of two reasons.  Either it's to satisfy some contract that is going to pay off massively more than that (say, 700,000 funds), or else I'm doing it in late career for my own personal "fun" reasons, and at that late stage of the game I've got plenty of cash to spread around.

(And yes, some folks like to play with difficulty settings cranked so high that they have to grind for every penny to keep their space program afloat.  I assume they do that because they like it.  I do not, I don't play that way.  I like to fly rockets, I want to spend my time designing them and solving orbital mechanics problems, not accounting.  I do my own taxes and that's plenty enough accounting for me for the year, thank you.)

So given that my rocket launches easily pay for themselves, and that recovering the Kickbacks would be worth less than 5% of the ship value in the absolute best possible case, and in reality would likely have a negative value, then no, I'm not gonna recover them.  And furthermore, it's not fun for me.  I'm not going to spend even thirty seconds of my time to try to recover those boosters; I'd rather focus on the mission.

The fact of the matter, the reasons for recovering rocket stages don't have anything at all to do with rocket science.  They're about economics.  And although I'd say that KSP is a great rocket game, it's an extremely mediocre economics game.  I don't mind that, because I don't play it for the economics. 

1 hour ago, bewing said:

I am sorry that this is one entire aspect of the game that you don't do, but it was designed to work this way.

My issues with this statement are:

1. It's not an aspect of the game,
2. it's what the large majority of KSP players don't do,
3. and it wasn't designed to work that way.

Stage recovery is not part of stock KSP.  It's just not.  Squad didn't put it in.  The way the stock game is designed, you can't recover stages, at least not unless you want to personally fly each spent booster down to the ground, which frankly is not my idea of a good time.

You can reasonably recover stages if you use a mod.  Lots and lots of people do; I've heard good things about StageRecovery, and it's had over 170,000 downloads, so clearly it touched a nerve, there; it's one of the most popular mods ever.  But "many" is not "most."  I'd hazard to say that the majority of KSP players don't use it.  If you do, great, good for you; just don't expect others to do the same.

And the game wasn't designed to work this way.  It just wasn't.  If it was, there would be a reasonable way to recover stages without resorting to mods.  Yes, real life rockets are designed for recovery because those economics are critically important, but this isn't real life, this is KSP.

And when I say "the game wasn't designed to work this way," I don't mean that Squad are a bunch of stage-recovery-haters who deliberately crippled the game to stop us from having this.  I seriously doubt it's deliberate.  Rather:  Squad has got their hands really full.  It's a small company, and there's a huge list of things that need doing.  My guess is that they didn't add stage recovery simply because it's low on the priority list.  Would it be cool to have?  Sure.  But reentry heating is more important than that.  So is decent aero.  So are a lot of other features that they've been working on.   If there's enough demand for it as a feature, then presumably one day they'll add it, and if so I'll happily hold their hat and cheer them on and start adding parachutes to my boosters.  But not until then, and even then, only if "add parachutes to boosters" is the only thing I have to do, because otherwise it's simply too much hassle to try to recover 2% of a rocket that I can afford to lose 100% of.

[Warzouz]

@Snark, I agree with you. And speaking of recovering launch parts, I must say I looked into it a lot as I was searching for an economic way to lift of space stations. The answer was "recoverable SSTO rockets" (check signature). Nothing beats it, except SSTO space planes, but they aren't scalable (harder to fly and much harder to design). SSTO rockets are so simple to design, to scale up and easy to fly, that this advantage is turning into a drawback in the long run...

One launch, no stage, no aerodynamic change while staging, one aim to KSC nearby, one reentry to manage, nearly max recovery rate (I'm never under 95%). in 1.0.4, I even had the chutes autodeploy...

Ok, it's a bit harder on 1.0.5 but still doable.

To get back on the original subject, I d'ont find that chutes needs some tweaking. They are fairely nice. I only regret the change on Duna, but mostly because I find that all plantary bodies need to be handled the same way, as there was more significant variants in the past.

The only thing I wouls say about drogue is they could be available sooner, because they are more needed than in 1.0.4.

[Pthigrivi]

Well lets not get hung up bashing Bewing about the Kickbacks. The real question is whether using parachutes ought to work for any unguided module. I tend to think there could be a number of clever applications for this, so why arbitrarily cut off creativity? All he's asking for is a raise in the cap deploy height so we can more efficiently use drogues. I can't see how this would negatively effect anyone. 

We haven't mentioned cost here. I've noticed some weird ones over time but the MK2 stack Quad-Coupler stands out. 2000f seems like it must be a glitch.

Edited January 19, 2016 by Pthigrivi

[cicatrix]

Ladders! They really should be more heat resistant as they tend to always protrude outside the heat shield.

[Warzouz]

39 minutes ago, cicatrix said:

Ladders! They really should be more heat resistant as they tend to always protrude outside the heat shield.

I don't remember having blown retractable ladders. I don't use fixed ladders since their weight is stupidly high (as high as retractable iirc). Further more, since 1.0, part count is more an issue, so fixed ladder are also bad for that matter.

[MagicFireCaster]

Yup definitively i agree with most of them, we need a thread like this to be pinned, part balancing should be an important matter for the community