Mastodon engine exhaust wrong color: Please change

[KeranoKerman]

So I was watching Matt Lowne's video on youtube about the Making History Expansion, and he was demonstrating the Mastodon Engine, a obvious replica of the Saturn V rocket's F-1 Rocketdyne engine. 5 of these engines powered the first stage of the Saturn 5, and they burned until the upper atmosphere. They reminded me of my stock Saturn 5 which had the wrong engine exhaust color - A blue flame, which is the sign that a rocket is burning Liquid Hydrogen for its fuel, not sooty Kerosene. (The engines I were using were the RS-25 engines, which in real life shot out the blue exhaust of the space shuttles and will do the same for the future SLS) I thought that because this is an obvious replica of the F-1s and that it seems they were very accurate with their model, it would seem that they would pay attention to something the color of the exhaust. It would be very cool for the developers to fix this and make the engine historically correct. And while you awesome developers are at it, please make them powerful enough to lift fully-fueled tanks. Thank You developers! 

[KeranoKerman]

I also noticed that the Bobcat Engine (Reminiscent of the first stage engine of the rocket that the Gemini program used) has a blue liquid hydrogen flame, compared to the fact that it burned kerosene. (Just realized that it actually burned hypergolic fuels. I accidentally used the Titan 1 which was an ICBM rocket while the rocket that launched the gemini program, the Titan 2, ran on hypergolic fuels. Anyways, the flame should be a yellowish flame that is kind of neat, like the panther jet engines's flame. Not that they burn the same fuel) If you get to it, please fix this also developers. One last problem is that in the stock game there is a IVA glitch. I first though you probably had not finished the interior model, but in the youtubers live-streaming were able to use IVA. Please fix this and if the feature only limited to people who buy the Making History Expansion, please change that cause it is such a simple feature. 

Edited March 10, 2018 by KeranoKerman
I was incorrect that it burned kerosene. It burned Hypergolic fuels.

[_stilgar_]

You should report this to bug tracker. Devs may not see your post here. 

[GoSlash27]

5 hours ago, Dawn of Science said:

I also noticed that the Bobcat Engine (Reminiscent of the first stage engine of the rocket that the Gemini program used) has a blue liquid hydrogen flame, compared to the fact that it burned kerosene.

IIRC, the Titan used with Gemini ran hypergolics, not kerolox. I'll double check...

*EDIT* Yeah, it ran aerozine/ nitrogen tetroxide.
The Bobcat should have a yellowish flame with orangish smoke.
The Mastodon should have an orange flame with black smoke.

Best,
-Slashy

Edited March 10, 2018 by GoSlash27

[Starman4308]

8 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

IIRC, the Titan used with Gemini ran hypergolics, not kerolox. I'll double check...

Best,
-Slashy

The Titan did run hypergolics. Based on playing Real Fuels and RO, most of the hypergols seem to burn red/orange, though the Agena engine (burning UDMH and IRFNA-III) burns blue. Let me see if I can dig up a video of the Gemini launches and edit this post...

EDIT: Hard to tell from the mediocre image quality, but the Titan first-stage engines appeared to burn a very clear* red/orange. Somebody go back and tell 1960s NASA to use a halfway decent HD videocamera already.

*Distinct from kerolox, which has a very spectacular orange in low atmosphere from the exhaust continuing to burn, plus particulates. I think some hydrolox engines also burn red/orange if the exhaust temperature is a bit low, and possibly also if they're ablatively cooled instead of regeneratively cooled.

Still figuring out if the Agena's blue flame from RO is realistic...

Edited March 10, 2018 by Starman4308

[KeranoKerman]

6 hours ago, Starman4308 said:

The Titan did run hypergolics. Based on playing Real Fuels and RO, most of the hypergols seem to burn red/orange, though the Agena engine (burning UDMH and IRFNA-III) burns blue. Let me see if I can dig up a video of the Gemini launches and edit this post...

EDIT: Hard to tell from the mediocre image quality, but the Titan first-stage engines appeared to burn a very clear* red/orange. Somebody go back and tell 1960s NASA to use a halfway decent HD videocamera already.

*Distinct from kerolox, which has a very spectacular orange in low atmosphere from the exhaust continuing to burn, plus particulates. I think some hydrolox engines also burn red/orange if the exhaust temperature is a bit low, and possibly also if they're ablatively cooled instead of regeneratively cooled.

Still figuring out if the Agena's blue flame from RO is realistic...

 

6 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

IIRC, the Titan used with Gemini ran hypergolics, not kerolox. I'll double check...

*EDIT* Yeah, it ran aerozine/ nitrogen tetroxide.
The Bobcat should have a yellowish flame with orangish smoke.
The Mastodon should have an orange flame with black smoke.

Best,
-Slashy

I actually saw the somewhat different flame color but did not take it too differently. When I went to wikipedia and read that the Titan 1 rocket ran on Kerosene and liquid Oxygen, which was the wrong rocket. The Gemini capsule launched on the Titan 2 rocket, which burned hypergolic and put out a clear orange-ish flame a bit like the panther jet engine's exhaust in KSP, except more clear. Thank you for correcting me, Starman4308 andGoSlash27. 

Edited March 10, 2018 by KeranoKerman

[KeranoKerman]

Another way that the flame of the Mastodon engine (If it is a replica of the F-1 engine, which is insanely obvious) is wrong is the fact that we don't see the turbine exhaust. This would create a dark band of gas between the rear part of the engine and the blinding hot part of the exhaust. You can see this if you look up a video from camera E-8 which showed the bottom of the Saturn V lifting off) Now lets pretend that the engine doesn't have its name yet and it isn't a replica. All the evidence we have is the engine's texture, and Matt Lowne's livestream on youtube gives us all the evidence we need. At 35:01, we see the engine at the bottom his rocket with a tube running round the nozzle of the engine. The Saturn V's F-1 engines had this tube to inject the turbine exhaust into the bell to cool the bottom half of it, yet we don't see a dark band of cool gas or the hot part of the exhaust as I mentioned earlier. All we see is a blue flame starting right at the end of the nozzle that would have been created by Liquid Hydrogen as mentioned earlier. I know that you developers probably can't fix all this in 3 days, but at least make the Iconic Mastodon engine's exhaust orange. The exhaust type is in game: all you need to do is use the Mammoth or Rhino engine's exhaust, and you're Almost perfectly historically accurate: All you need is the dark band which you can do if you have extra time. Thank you again developers!

Edited March 10, 2018 by KeranoKerman

[NoMrBond]

In looking at 1.4 I'm surprised that some of the engines are still running on the legacy legacy fx_exhaustxxx and fx_smokexxx config lines rather than the newer EFFECTS{} system.

When the update to Shuriken was in the patch notes I was hopeful that all the old fx_stuff (and maybe even MODEL_MULTI_PARTICLE) was also updated to MODEL_MULTI_SHURIKEN, and maybe we'd even see effects like plume expansion