Devnote Tuesday: The experimentals Quest!

[0111narwhalz]

6 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Dedicated to the Kerbal Mesh Anomaly

Convergence is upon us. 

Make us whole.

[Sirad]

4 hours ago, Laguna said:

Ok, there needs to be some clarification here.  Does this mean that while the first batch of parts (those in the pic) will be released separately for modders to use, they are part of a larger revamp that WILL be part of a future version of KSP? 

If, they would tell.

[Alshain]

1 hour ago, Temeter said:

Oh yeah, I've seen that. Is there actually over a reason to lower that setting? I could imagine performance problems and the flickering earlier, but it should work fine now, shouldn't it?

What... what do these mystical options do? Oo

No reason to lower it, I max it out personally.

[Superfluous J]

9 hours ago, SQUAD said:

(Jeremie @nightingale) ... added auto-strut visualization in the editor so you can see what the auto-struts will do while building your craft.

Okay I give up. How do you turn this on?

[NoMrBond]

37 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Okay I give up. How do you turn this on?

It's in the ALT+F12 debug menu from memory

[Edit] This seems to be CTRL+ALT+F12 now? It's under the Physics tab of the debug menu

Edited September 14, 2016 by NoMrBond

[Superfluous J]

9 minutes ago, NoMrBond said:

It's in the ALT+F12 debug menu from memory

Aha found it, thanks. Nice it works in flight as well.

It's in "Physics" btw.

[Scientia1423]

9 hours ago, Temeter said:

Also should save some peoples worries the part might not be kerbal anymore. @Andem

Is this becoming a meme?

[Commander Zoom]

10 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Dedicated to the Kerbal Mesh Anomaly, as seen on Sunday during Das Valdez’ 1.2 preview stream.

(A dozen or so kerbals, all suited, are lined up a safe(?) distance from the launch pad, watching the carnage with expressions of horror, nausea, or both.  Almost in unison, the unfortunate onlookers convulse as sickly green semi-liquid - roughly the color and consistency of pea soup - spatters all over the insides of their helmet faceplates.  One lucky and/or hardy kerb manages to get their helmet off and reach a nearby waste bin before retching into it.)

Edited September 14, 2016 by Commander Zoom

[JedTech]

11 hours ago, SQUAD said:

auto-strut visualization in the editor so you can see what the auto-struts will do while building your craft

 What we wanted was rockets that aren't so floppy. Why implement such a complex and click-happy solution to the problem?

Please consider the sloppiness that KSP is becoming over the last few updates. It seems like squad has hired several coding minded individuals and lost a few human interface minded individuals. Not everything needs a button and configuration options. It may take more thought towards design, but it is always better to just "make it work" without all of the buttons and options.

[richfiles]

Hmm... Is it me, or did the engine redesign fail to address the fact that KSP nozzles are just so wrong? In space, big nozzles are the norm. There's a bunch of fancy physics reasons why it matters, but long story short, in a vacuum, you want a nozzle with a different shape than you want for one that only operates in atmosphere... And KSP has it ack bassward.


Note how huge the nozzle is? This is an engine designed for operation in a vacuum. The long deep nozzle is able to expand the exhaust to a much lower pressure, closer to the vacuum of space, while keeping the ejection of mater mostly linear. Without the long bell, mater has a tendency to "spray" out in a wide pattern, thus reducing the efficiency. The ultra high efficiency engines like the Poodle and Terrier... By all rights, they NEED large bells to justify that high efficiency!


The RE-L10 Poodle and the LV-909 Terrier are both tiny engines.

If you ask me though, the Terrier isn't bad! I still think it could stand to have it's bell widened a little bit more, but overall, The redesign seems to accentuate the bell more than the previous design did, so I certainly approve. I actually like it without the white shroud. I hope that shroud is able to be toggled in the VAB.

The Poodle, on the other hand, is downright awful. It needs to be scrapped. That big ball... That needs to go, and the bell needs to be at least that same diameter of the old ball, if not bigger! adding that additional pair of balls doesn't actually help anything... This isn't a truck hitch in Texas.  The base, where it enters the engine housing shroud should probably be as big as the existing nozzle exhaust, minimum! In order to keep craft compatibility, the length could be maintained (you can always say the engine extends into the vessel, much like how it works with jet engine models... Implied internals). Maintaining length maintains craft compatibility. Landing legs don't suddenly become too short, etc. I'd also say keep the design simple. Sure, you could certainly add a few bits of external piping, but the Poodle is supposed to be equivalent to the CSM engine, as far as I understand... Why not model it's simplicity. If we wanna keep some of the Poodle's kerbalish heritage, then sure, you can add some external piping... Maybe even a small spherical chamber on one of the pipes... But not in the bell itself. That should be mostly clean.

***EDIT***
Did not notice the 303 appears to be a miniature Poodle... Dear lord, the bad design is multiplying!

If There IS one of these ultra low profile, short/small nozzle engines in use, I'd love to know about it, and what it's application actually is. I somehow doubt that the Poodle or the 303 deserve efficiencies as high as they get, with such a design. I'd rather see the Poodle redesigned as a CSM style engine, or the design split off two ways, with a CSM style engine and a low profile engine. The low profile engine needs new specs though, to approximate how such an engine would actually perform. Given that removing that silly ball will expose a lot of usable space int e model though... I think just focusing on a good, clean bell nozzle design would do wonders for the Poodle/303




Both the second and third stages used a J2 engine. Note that the bell of the nozzle is rather long on the third stage. The third stage primarily operates in low Earth orbit.


While the F-1 engines were physically massive, the nozzles are not as deep, proportionally, as vacuum specified engines. The nozzle bell size and shape would be designed to average the ideal range of it's exhaust pressure to match up with the different air pressures at different altitudes.

I really would love to have seen a nozzle bell redesign on at the very least,t he small high efficiency engines. The efficiency shouldn't come because they are tiny, but because they are small engines with a large bell. Just sayin'. Those tiny nozzles on the tiny engines have been violating physics for far too long now!

Edited September 14, 2016 by richfiles

[cfds]

Regarding sensible nozzles: I fear this ship sailed with the "release". If SQUAD where to play around with the bell sizes now, everyone(*) would complain about breaking saves.

 

_{* not actually everyone}

[KerbMav]

2 minutes ago, cfds said:

Regarding sensible nozzles: I fear this ship sailed with the "release". If SQUAD where to play around with the bell sizes now, everyone(*) would complain about breaking saves.

 

_{* not actually everyone}

Yup.

[richfiles]

26 minutes ago, cfds said:

Regarding sensible nozzles: I fear this ship sailed with the "release". If SQUAD where to play around with the bell sizes now, everyone(*) would complain about breaking saves.

Except I addressed that. You don't change the bell length. You only change the shape and exposure. Reduce the amount of shrouding concealing the bell, expand the diameter of the bell, and give it a shallower angle. Imply "internal machinery" The Apollo CSM engine did this beautifully. Next to no hardware, save for the actually nozzle bell itself was actually exposed. There was just a rectangular cover, with rounded edges. Iy's certainly possible to accentuate the bell without drastically altering the overall model dimensions in the game. You basically redo the design within the old overall length bounds. It's certainly possible, and the awful Poodle could be drastically improved...

I can't tell of that 303 engine is a new small diameter engine... If it is, it looks like a Poodle clone, and exactly the wrong direction to go, period. If the 303 is a "mini Poodle, then that means two engines are in desperate need of a redesign, instead of just one. The Terrier isn't perfect, but it has enough "implied internal hardware" to feel "right", and I think the redesign actually brings that out even better now.

The Poodle... It looks like it just made a little mess over there, next to the Terrier. 

Edited September 14, 2016 by richfiles

[Dafni]

7 hours ago, Wabbit said:

His palms are sweaty, joints weak, payload's heavy,

There's LF on the launchpad already, Kerb spaghetti,

He's nervous, but on the surface he looks calm and ready,

To hit launch, but he keeps on forgetting the staging,

The launchpad goes so loud, he opens the hatch but the crew can't come out,

It's broken now, everything is broken now,

The Kraken's up, the rocket goes ka-pow!

 

bounces hands and goes: B-Wabbit, B-Wabbit, B-Wabbit

[Curveball Anders]

5 hours ago, 0111narwhalz said:

Convergence is upon us.

Resistance is futile.

[Ser]

12 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Dedicated to the Kerbal Mesh Anomaly, as seen on Sunday during Das Valdez’ 1.2 preview stream.

Holy Kraken! Gonna show that to my QA team for they knew what the real bugs look like

[Sharpy]

oooh, the interstage and truss system for fairings at last! No more cobbling of this through steel beams, struts and heavy abuse of the offset tool!

[boborene]

I see kerbals are getting stars with level and are upgrading level during missions?

[Frank_G]

Those new parts look awesome, but actually the most needful things are those interstage struts... they bring tears of joy to my eyes... i have the suspicion that you guys at Squad are planning to end my KSP vacation early... must... stay... strong... hnngnnn... must...

Well done

[Capt Snuggler]

The Parts look beautiful! fantastic work as usual @Porkjet. Please Please Please add these to the full release (at some point) the current stock models need to be retired.

Would love to see what the pigglywiggly one can do with the 2.5m parts!

Excellent news about the fairings and Comms system also. Lovely work by all. well done!

[eddiew]

14 hours ago, SQUAD said:

Bob (Roverdude) wrapped up the biome cleanup: Eeloo and Duna are now especially interesting!

Hoping this means more biomes, canyons, craters, plateaus and the like   Duna especially seems a little sparse for being the Mars-analogue...

[Sharpy]

2 hours ago, richfiles said:

Note how huge the nozzle is? This is an engine designed for operation in a vacuum. The long deep nozzle is able to expand the exhaust to a much lower pressure, closer to the vacuum of space, while keeping the ejection of mater mostly linear. Without the long bell, mater has a tendency to "spray" out in a wide pattern, thus reducing the efficiency. The ultra high efficiency engines like the Poodle and Terrier... By all rights, they NEED large bells to justify that high efficiency!

Not necessarily.

The efficiency (ISp) is in the nozzle shape - proportions, length to width.

The thrust is in the nozzle size.

You may freely make the engine quite small (though with the nozzle still quite elongated) with no significant loss of ISp, if you sacrifice thrust.

I don't know what were the motivations behind making the engine of Apollo CSM so huge - they *could* have done it with longer, weaker burns (and what they'd lose to Oberth Effect, they'd recuperate in lower engine mass). Maybe it was the mathematics - approximating impulsive burns better, computers of that time unable to calculate a long burn adequately enough.

Instead of Apollo, compare Merlin atmospheric and vacuum variants.

The one on the right is for vacuum, and it's actually pretty high thrust ( 411 kN, vs 60 of Terrier and 250 of Poodle ), as it still has to bring the rocket to the orbit from the point of stage separation.

It also has 342 seconds of ISp (vs 345 Terrier and 350 Poodle).

And compare it in size to Vector.

This is Vector IRL:

Now taking this into account - Poodle having a bit over half the thrust of Merlin (but a bit bigger ISp) and Terrier having about 15% the thrust - and as result, necessary size of Merlin, and comparing the size of Merlin-VAC to SSME,

tell me again they are too small.

 

[taniwha]

12 hours ago, Temeter said:

I've got no clue what I'm seeing here, but I aprove as long as it's not jittering like crazy.

Others have covered the what (turns out I had my patched conic limit set to 5 from long ago, forgot , luckily). As for jitter: even on the red patch, I remember no visible jitter. I didn't check numerically for that situation, but while the apoapsis on the post-encounter patch, even when highly eccentric) did not move visibly, the numbers did twitch a little (on the order of a few hundred meters). That said, I'm pretty sure I know the cause, and how to fix it, but I haven't had the time to do so yet. In other words, there are further improvements I can make to SoI searches (the problem seems to be SoI entry: exit seems to be solid).

[The_Rocketeer]

I personally will mourn all the old models and textures as they fall one by one to the cries of 'too ugly'.

 

[KerbMav]

35 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

I personally will mourn all the old models and textures as they fall one by one to the cries of 'too ugly'.

 

I see a future for them as starting parts, getting visually upgraded as the tech tree progresses - I am only hesitant about supporting the idea of engines becoming better, feels like "engineers make rockets faster" all over again somehow.