A simple suggestion re. radial decouplers & wobbly rockets

[KincaidFrankMF]

Without getting into the whole debate of whether or not rockets should wobble at all... which has been covered extensively elsewhere... Could we please have some bigger radial decouplers?

When I attach big SRBs and they immediately sag, it's not the wobbly physics that's frustrating me. It's that there is no bigger/better/more appropriate part to connect them with. I shouldn't have to resort to struts here, auto or otherwise. If you attach a huge booster with a tiny decoupler placed halfway up of course it's going to noodle - or just snap off outright - but you just wouldn't do it that way, would you? For the same reason you wouldn't hang a door by placing a single tiny hinge halfway up. Noodliness is perfectly realistic here, we just need a more sensible design solution.

What's needed are some bigger, and in particular, longer decouplers. A single part that attaches at the top, middle and bottom of the SRB will keep it stable. If the player opts to save weight by using something small and silly instead, hilarious wobbly hijinks will still follow.

[The Aziz]

Think of the strut as the second attachment point - because real SRBs rarely come with less than two. Look it up.

[KUAR]

5 hours ago, KincaidFrankMF said:

Without getting into the whole debate of whether or not rockets should wobble at all... which has been covered extensively elsewhere... Could we please have some bigger radial decouplers?

When I attach big SRBs and they immediately sag, it's not the wobbly physics that's frustrating me. It's that there is no bigger/better/more appropriate part to connect them with. I shouldn't have to resort to struts here, auto or otherwise. If you attach a huge booster with a tiny decoupler placed halfway up of course it's going to noodle - or just snap off outright - but you just wouldn't do it that way, would you? For the same reason you wouldn't hang a door by placing a single tiny hinge halfway up. Noodliness is perfectly realistic here, we just need a more sensible design solution.

What's needed are some bigger, and in particular, longer decouplers. A single part that attaches at the top, middle and bottom of the SRB will keep it stable. If the player opts to save weight by using something small and silly instead, hilarious wobbly hijinks will still follow

One issue with that is that multi-point attachment wasn't (until recently) routinely supported. In all decouplers currently, there is a single node which is just stiffer if the decoupler is bigger. The apparent visual size increase is just cosmetic.

Multi-point attachment was recently bespoke to the craft, as in struts or autostrut.

Nonetheless the recent change to multi-point attachment for procedural wings may be applicable?

[KincaidFrankMF]

5 hours ago, KUAR said:

Nonetheless the recent change to multi-point attachment for procedural wings may be applicable?

That's what I had in mind - though I don't know how it works in practise. But even if they just make the attachments stiffer, it all helps.

[Lowi_Sace]

They should add a way to easy put a booster with multiple radial decouplers to a rocked.  Like one on top and one on bottom of the booster. Real rockets also often have two

[Lyneira]

The branching tree-like nature of KSP vessels is the reason we have the wobbly decoupler problem in the first place, as there can only ever be one true connection point between the core stage and the decoupler and its booster. Struts are a band-aid for this technical limitation and get around this by adding an extra joint between distant parts on the vessel tree but there is only one strut with a predefined mass for all cases from small to huge.

Allowing parts to be connected in loops would allow us to manually place multiple decouplers along the length of an SRB and handle the stress far better, without having to resort to struts. With this, we could also use trusses to build strong, solid support structures for our large projects and dock vessels together with multiple docking ports for a much stronger combined connection.

Struts would still be useful, but we should maybe have multiple sizes of them to better suit more massive vessels.

Edited July 17, 2023 by Lyneira