"hidden" fuel tanks?

[Andersenman]

5 minutes ago, LetsGoToMars! said:

it seems like in the screenshot that it is sandbox or a developed career/science mode

I appreciate that, but that's not the point. It should work intuitively for all parts. Full-stop.

And even if that fairing is one of the earlier items, it's still at tier 4, costing 90 science, and is preceded by one adapter and one nosecone.

Edited January 3, 2017 by Andersenman

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

good point

[HalcyonSon]

1 hour ago, fourfa said:

Good points, many ways to skin this cat.

As to the rest of the hand-wringing in the thread, man it hardly matters.  We have cargo bays, service bays, and fairings when we need to shield drag.  For launching what looks like a space station module that will experience atmo exactly once, the drag of exterior parts is pretty irrelevant to the big picture.  So you reach orbit with 100m/s left over in your second stage instead of 110m/s, who cares?  Optimizing beyond that level probably belongs in the Challenges section, not Gameplay.  Gripes about how the game should be rather than how it is, there's a Suggestions forum for that.

Me personally... I routinely clip into the "empty" space of adaptors, for cosmetic reasons - particularly for pure spacecraft that don't experience drag (and I zoom in and rotate the camera to access the parts).  I usually try to make real-looking rockets - space station parts get fully enclosed in a fairing, despite the mass of the fairing probably costing more dV than the drag of the bare payload.  Spaceplanes get lots of cargo bay space, and all draggy odds and ends go in the bay.  

I have done the same with with 'chutes, batteries, probe cores, etc, in stack separators for recoverable first stages. I understand the reasoning if a part is radially attached and then clipped in, but I am disappointed to hear that parts stacked on top of the separator and then clipped into the hollow middle catch drag.  This deserves further testing.  I seem to build a lot of edge case rockets with only the Skipper unlocked, so that small margin can make or break a launch.  Plus, it helps the bottom line a lot to use two Kickbacks rather than four.

[bewing]

1 hour ago, Andersenman said:

I appreciate that, but that's not the point. It should work intuitively for all parts. Full-stop.

And even if that fairing is one of the earlier items, it's still at tier 4, costing 90 science, and is preceded by one adapter and one nosecone.

I completely disagree. Fairings are supposed to exist for a reason, and that reason is to enclose other parts to shield them from drag. To make other parts do the same job for less cost defeats the purpose. You get fairings at the point in the game that you do to make the game a challenge -- it is completely intended that it work this way. It is not an accident. If you want to shield parts from drag, use a fairing. If you don't have fairings yet, there is a reason for that in the game. Just because the planet is visibly hollow doesn't mean you should intuitively be able to store things inside of it.

Adapters & etc. are not fairings and therefore they do not work like fairings, full stop.

Edited January 3, 2017 by bewing

[Loren Pechtel]

7 hours ago, Andersenman said:

Goddammit, why is this a thing? How is a normal user supposed to know this? How can a user be expected to find out only through debug tools?

I thought KSP was supposed to be out of beta?

You're clipping fuel tanks in that picture.  If you're going to cheat the game don't be upset when your cheat doesn't work like you expect it to.

[Kerbal Fried Chicken]

skipping the discussion of defining "cheating" in KSP.. I don't clip (mostly cuz I suck at it) but there's that one part in Aerodynamics ...   just a piece of empty fuselage (I've used it occasionally to stick things on when I have a very small probe) I can see where a new player might assume that some parts could legitimately go inside.

[GoSlash27]

7 hours ago, Andersenman said:

What Signo said.

OP placed the tanks on top of the probe body, then covered it with an adapter. What now, is the player supposed to assume that the adapter is solid (why would it be?) so as to satisfy the "clipping inside" part in that, thereby telling the player that doing it this way is bad and verboten?

This is unfit for purpose and unintuitive to the player. The whole point in these adapters is to provide aerodynamic transitions between body sizes. Now, if using them comes at the price of A) dead, unusable volume, and B) the need to fall back to either putting the parts that could be stowed at drag-inducing locations OR putting them in one more compartment (with its own drag and additional weight), the user may as well just forego using them at all.

Be it adapters, nose cones, or similar stackable items with no other excuse than their shape for the volume they occupy; if they look like they would cover items, they should do so, especially when the model clearly suggests they are hollow.

Andersenman,

 Unfortunately, what "should be" and what is are two different things. From the software's perspective, it's not a simple task to declare what is shielded and what is not. The software has to raycast to determine that for fairings and cargo bays. Raycasting is pretty hard on frame rates. 

 We just have to suck it up and deal with it until Unity gives the devs better tools to do this sort of thing with.

 Not the answer you want to hear, but it's the answer we're all stuck with.

 Best,
-Slashy

[swjr-swis]

2 hours ago, bewing said:

Adapters & etc. are not fairings and therefore they do not work like fairings, full stop.

Equally, grappling claws are not docking ports and therefore they do not work like docking ports, full stop. Yes? Oh wait, not exactly.

RCS linear ports are not heat shields and therefore they do not work like heatshields, full stop. Actually, depending where you place them...

Wheels are not pogo sticks and therefore they do not work like pogo sticks, full st.. ok I couldn't even finish that one without bursting into laughter, sorry.

Seriously, the game is full of things that 'should not work like' and yet they do, a good bunch of them very intentionally due to physics engine limitations, workarounds, balancing choices and/or plain arbitrary decisions. For every intently single-purpose item introduced into the game, players have found a myriad of unintended and unimagined uses, and some parts practically only see use in the non-intended ways anymore. Squad has always known this, accepted it, and even applaud and encourage it.

It feels very unreasonable to 'chastise' new players for being surprised and miffed at one of these arbitrary choices (and yes I venture to call solid-traversing drag an arbitrary choice because unlike drag, heating is in fact occluded by leading parts, so it would seem there is no inherent problem with simulating occlusion).

 

[bewing]

Andersenman is a long way from being a new player. He has been around quite long enough to know better. None of what I said was directed at Victor3.

[Sharpy]

A small word of warning with fairings.

Setup: [propulsion]-[decoupler]-[payload]-[decoupler]-[fairing]-[nose cone]

would sometimes crash the game for me. The game seems to dislike the situation where your fairing is upside down and you can simultaneously deploy (open) the fairing and discard (decouple) the fairing base.

 

[Andersenman]

10 hours ago, bewing said:

Andersenman is a long way from being a new player. He has been around quite long enough to know better.

Let's please not be presuming what can or what cannot be expected to be known depending on registration date, especially for a game that is as … fluid as KSP.

Quote

It feels very unreasonable to 'chastise' new players for being surprised and miffed at one of these arbitrary choices (and yes I venture to call solid-traversing drag an arbitrary choice because unlike drag, heating is in fact occluded by leading parts, so it would seem there is no inherent problem with simulating occlusion).

Thank you.

Edited January 4, 2017 by Andersenman

[Champ]

On 03/01/2017 at 4:10 PM, Andersenman said:

Goddammit, why is this a thing? How is a normal user supposed to know this? How can a user be expected to find out only through debug tools?

I thought KSP was supposed to be out of beta?

There is no "normal user".
You can be a noob, or an expert

[strider3]

W-O-W! Thanks for the help, gang. I did not expect to open a can...nay, barrel...of worms? Worry not on my part, y'all...I will always be a "noob", no matter how many times I launch in KSP. 

From listening to some of the forum discussions, I have a feeling that there are a LOT of real world "rocket scientists" here (I know...that's probably an insulting term for those amazing people who actually studied and use this knowledge), to be honest, I'm not even sure of all the different disciplines it takes to put an object in space, at an exact spot, in an exact manner.

Vic the Newbal.

[Palaceviking]

5 hours ago, Victor3 said:

 to be honest, I'm not even sure of all the different disciplines it takes to put an object in space, at an exact spot, in an exact manner.

Vic the Newbal.

Struts and boosters,  works everytime.