Purist or not? Do you use DLC parts in your creations?

[Walden]

Honestly, the base game is just limiting and gets boring pretty quick if you are already in the post-end game. That's why I use non-stock parts all the time in my missions. But if I'm ever designing a plane that I will publish or use to complete a challenge, I keep it 100% stock so others could replicate it.

Edited April 23, 2018 by Walden

[RatchetinSpace]

I shy away from using modded parts but I consider DLC parts stock because they are officially supported.

[Tyko]

2 hours ago, Orbiter Space Program said:

It was 17 missions, not 11 apollo missions. I know this because I am a space nerd, I also looked it up.

Except I'd already stipulated I was counting "Manned" missions. there were 11 Apollo manned missions...cuz I"m a space nerd and looked it up first before posting  

Arguably there was a 12th manned mission - Apollo 1, but the tragedy happened prior to the planned launch during ground testing, so I didn't count that.

Edited April 24, 2018 by Tyko

[OrbiterAirFields]

If modded parts are their, I use them, every once in a while, I use stock.

Edited April 24, 2018 by OrbiterAirFields
grammar error,

[Bill Phil]

I usually use stock parts, and the occasional engine plate which itself needs to be stock.

[qzgy]

I do not use the DLC parts. Mainly cause I don't have it. Actually almost entirely because of that.

[HeliosPh0enix]

I play on heavily modded games and I use some of the DLC parts quite frequently, while not much some of the others. I like the new color changers for the stock parts, and the 1.875 m stuff is pretty good when you need something bigger than 1.25 mbut don’t want to go all the way up to 2.5 m, like if you want a fairing to cover a 1.25 m component that has a lot of surface attachments. 

[blakemw]

Some thoughts:

I like the 1.8m parts and the Skiff. It makes for some good rockets when you don't need a Skipper and you've outgrown the low performance of the Swivel, the Skiff is a great sustain engine, burning from surface to orbit, with SRBs giving a kick off the pad. The 1.8m fairing is good - it'll be better once they fix the fairing bugs. The wolfhound engine is OP which makes me not like it as much as I would (I'd like crank the cost up to 5800 and call it balanced) and it has a bug where the nozzle has basically infinite impact tolerance. The Cub engine is good, fulfills a niche and is appropriately balanced. No other engine is really worth mentioning, some are okay but nothing to write home about, some are just bad.

The engine plates are good. No complaints there. I don't actually use them much because usually natively large engines (like Twin-Boar or Mammoth) are much better performing than a bunch of small engines but I haven't found anything wrong with the implementation and occasionally find a use for them.

The structural tubes offer no drag shielding, hiding stuff in hollow, non-openable parts is usually pointless (you can just offset stuff) and they are structurally weak (like to come apart at the joints) which tidily ruined my cool idea of a rover with a bunch of fuel cells and stuff in a structural tube trunk, stupid thing pretty much snapped in half as I tried to drive it around. Nice in principle but the implementation is poor and probably won't be improved, but hey can always hope. (I'm not a big fan of parts that look nice but don't work well, I want my parts to not have stupid drag idiosyncracies and make vessels more prone to RUD. I prefer parts you'd actually want to use in a hard career, rather than "don't use these if you're serious about playing the game" parts).

Those... service modules things, nice in theory, but when I've used them totally loaded with bugs, they don't seem to be able to decide if they are deployed or not and frankly they are so buggy I have no idea how they're even intended to work, astonishingly if you put stuff inside them that stuff is actually shielded from drag so I guess the structural tubes not having drag shielding is just being inconsistent. Should be nice once the bugs are fixed though that depends a bit on how it's actually intended to work.

The pea command pods, those things drag like a mofo, you basically can't launch them if not in a fairing, which is not all bad because having over 9000 drag is good for reentry. They lack reaction wheels or monoprop which makes them usually inferior. The fact that they do contain ablator is nice, they slow down so fast due to the massive drag that the period of intense heating is very short and the amount of ablator is actually appropriate which is quite astonishing, you'd think they'd at least have 10x as much ablator as is actually used so skilled players always have to take a moment to remove 90% of the ablator. The 1 seater feels a lot pointless for reasons of lacking reaction wheels and absolutely requiring a fairing for launch, but the ones with more kerbals are potentially quite useful because you can add reaction wheels and stuff and still have a nice compact reentry vessel.

 

So Skiff and 1.8m parts are cool and I use them. I probably would use structural tubes and service modules if they had a better implementation.

I probably wont use DLC parts on my KerbalX crafts, since none of the DLC parts are compelling enough, but I also wouldn't rule it out if some of the bugs/issues are fixed since the structural tubes, service modules and engine plates all have potential to be cool.

Edited April 24, 2018 by blakemw

[KerikBalm]

I'd consider DLC to be stock, but not "vanilla" KSP, to borrow terminology from other mod friendly games that also have DLCs.

Making history is not a mod, its official squad content.... so... I'd call it stock

[passinglurker]

An install of ksp is only pure if all your parts are made with the same art styles.  This can only be achieved in the practical sense with mods.

[klesh]

6 hours ago, blakemw said:

The structural tubes... are structurally weak (like to come apart at the joints) which tidily ruined my cool idea of a rover with a bunch of fuel cells and stuff in a structural tube trunk, stupid thing pretty much snapped in half as I tried to drive it around. Nice in principle but the implementation is poor and probably won't be improved, but hey can always hope. (I'm not a big fan of parts that look nice but don't work well, I want my parts to not have stupid drag idiosyncracies and make vessels more prone to RUD. I prefer parts you'd actually want to use in a hard career, rather than "don't use these if you're serious about playing the game" parts).

 

There is currently a bug on the T-37 structural tube, where it's top node uses the smallest 0.625m size instead of its proper one. 

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/18299

Thats been on the bug tracker for almost a month, and is still marked as "new" so it will probably still be a bug in 1.4.3.   The fix is easy enough to perform yourself, should you not want to wait for a solution.  Should take you about 1 minute to fix, instructions included in the link.

[Lisias]

On 4/24/2018 at 10:48 AM, klesh said:

There is currently a bug on the T-37 structural tube, where it's top node uses the smallest 0.625m size instead of its proper one. 

https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/18299

Perhaps it's not a bug, but a visual way to tell what's "up" and what's "down" on the part?

These markers are purely aesthetic - or at least, I didn't found absolutely any difference by using different markers on my parts.

But what I would like is a way to tell where is +Y and -Y on the part. Sometimes, I ended up rotating the parts while stacking them up, and then when I attach something on these parts, that part became 180º rotated and I need to rotate it back. While adjusting the CoL, it's usual to reattach the wings on an adjacent part, and this rotate and rotate again thing can be annoying and error prone.

Without visual cues about what's +Y and -Y (as the part you screenshoot), you cannot prevent such errors before they bitting you, and perhaps this is the way the Add'On author found to solve this.

Edited March 20, 2019 by Lisias
tasting my own medicine :)

[klesh]

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Perhaps it's not a bug, but a visual way to tell what's "up" and what's "down" on the part?

 

Perhaps.  However, the T-12, T-18, T-25, and T-50 all have matching nodes top and bottom.

When I read "structural tubes have flimsy breakage" I presumed he is using the T-37 in that image.

[Lisias]

27 minutes ago, klesh said:

Perhaps.  However, the T-12, T-18, T-25, and T-50 all have matching nodes top and bottom.

Well... A bug is only a bug until it's fixed.... Or documented and promoted to a feature. :-) There's no choice but to wait and see what happens. =D

[blakemw]

7 hours ago, klesh said:

 

There is currently a bug on the T-37 structural tube, where it's top node uses the smallest 0.625m size instead of its proper one. 

1

 

It's nice that there are even more bugs I didn't know about with them (actually yet another is that sometimes if you join two tubes they seem to like joining by their inner nodes rather than outer nodes, which the drag model hates and is annoying to workaround), but I mainly would just want them to occlude any contents from drag - if adding interior parts is encouraged by the available attachment points, they should work as a player would naturally expect.

[klesh]

You only need a minute to fix the T-37; I suggest you do that instead of letting yet another bug annoy you. 

[Zeiss Ikon]

I grabbed Making History a couple days after it dropped (had to wait for payday, things were a little tight that month).  I use the Mk. 1-3 Command Pod on almost every flight now (I fly a lot of 2.5 m hardware, I've just finished the 160 science tier in a career game).  I recently used six Skiffs on Lf/O boosters for my crewed Duna flyby (significantly better performance than Reliants, and they can mount on 1.25 m tanks), and I made use of the tiny conical Service Module on a recent  mission that  needed to "haul" a Mk. 16 parachute, but was flying with a Mk. 1-3 Command Pod.  Looking forward to a career in the future that will have two-Kerbal pods and 1.875 m tanks etc. in the part of the tech tree where it matters (I was in the 160 tier when the DLC dropped).

Does anyone know if Community Tech Tree has been or is being updated to account for the new parts?  I'd be interested in adding "airplanes before rockets" to that future career.

[fourfa]

23 hours ago, Tyko said:

Except I'd already stipulated I was counting "Manned" missions. there were 11 Apollo manned missions...cuz I"m a space nerd and looked it up first before posting  

Arguably there was a 12th manned mission - Apollo 1, but the tragedy happened prior to the planned launch during ground testing, so I didn't count that.

Seems like you're not counting Apollo-Soyuz Test Project or Skylab 2, 3, and 4.  All using the Apollo CSM and Saturn 1B, same as Apollo 7.  but anyhoo...

Edited April 25, 2018 by fourfa

[Tyko]

1 minute ago, fourfa said:

Seems like you're not counting Apollo-Soyuz Test Project or Skylab 2, 3, and 4.  All using the Apollo CSM and Saturn 1B, same as Apollo 7.  but anyhoo...

Ha..darn, you're right about that..I only looked at the main line Apollo program launches. I stand corrected!

[ARS]

The only MH part that I ever used is R-7 style fuel tank with integrated sepratron. Not as rocket, but as a boat, since making a fore section of a ship with stock parts is kinda... Blocky

About the new crew capsules, I never used them, but perhaps the vostok capsule is useful as low-profile cheap reentry capsule/ escape/ drop pod

The engines... Meh. I prefer near-future engine. And also, wolfhound engine is ridiculously OP

[blakemw]

12 hours ago, klesh said:

You only need a minute to fix the T-37; I suggest you do that instead of letting yet another bug annoy you. 

I don't like to modify parts because I like to share vessels on KerbalX. Same reason I don't like to use FAR to fix issues with drag. I'm pretty mcuh a stock purists when it comes to parts. I don't mind being a MH purist - if the parts actually work correctly without mods to fix them.

Besides which I've never had a problem with the T-37, I'm not entirely sure I've even used it, the rover which broke in half was using the 2.5m one.

Edited April 25, 2018 by blakemw

[AtleSt]

i use the the dlc parts but not for my replica crafts (i know that sounds counter intuitive)

Edited April 25, 2018 by AtleSt
minor goof

[KerikBalm]

I haven't used the Soyuz parts much. I used them early in career for some tourist missions, but relative to vanilla parts they aren't so great due to the lack of reaction wheels, and they aren't very aerodynamic (and fairings are bugged currently).

I reluctantly use the wolfhound, but I play a 3x game, so its less OP relative to the "challenges" but still OP relative to other parts.

I haven't used the Skiff much aside from SaturnV mockups (IMO its too weak for that, oddly enough the much bugger KR-2L is also based on the J-2 - the J-2X) - but its actually a bit OP as well, its got the higher TWR in the game of all the throttleable engines (30:1 in a vacuum). Its also got pretty good Isp (onlythe aerospike/KR-2L/ dedicated vacuum engines are better than it) which would make it great for a tylo lander.

The Kodiak... sucks, its a slightly worse version of the LV-T30 (same thrust, mass, atmospheric Isp, no gimbal, slightly worse vacuum Isp)

The Mastadon... very similar to the Mainsail, slightly higher TWR, slightly lower thrust and Isp...

I do like the large diameter parts, if for nothing else than reducing part count of fuel depots.

I also like the engine plates, I've replaced the old quad adapters of my old designs with 2.5m engine plates set in the quad arrangement... it looks a bit cleaner, although there is slight clipping of Rapiers. The drag and mass is so similar as to not really matter

I wish we had 1.875m SRBs though.

3x game, with DLC parts... note that the only DLC part used on the SSTO is the engine plate. I did use the wolfhound for the orbital tug... because it saves me time over an LV-N tug. The tug has no severe TWR requirement, so... whatever

Pre DLC version for comparison:

Spoiler

A payloadless nearly empty CoM test:

an earlier design of post DLC re-build, after a mission:

And an earlier pre-DLC version... just showing the evolution of my heavy cargo SSTOs for 3x games

 

[JAFO]

On 4/25/2018 at 1:14 AM, Lisias said:

A bug is only a bug until it's fixed.... Or documented and promoted to a feature. :-)

Please DO NOT encourage Squad to start imitating Micro$oft practices!

[Superfluous J]

I install the stuff to use it, not to avoid using it out of weird "purity" reasons.

If I wanted to not use it, I'd not have bought it. Or, in the case of mods, installed it.