Hilarious the science tree gives us Skipper before Mainsail

[Pecan]

As far as I remember there's no good reason for using the skipper. Travert(?) calculated all the mass-optimal engines and the 2.5m engines really don't win anywhere useful. Mind you, "because I want to" is a good enough reason ;-0

[UmbralRaptor]

Why use skipper, instead

of e.g. three LV 30's?

Part count, mainly. Depending on craft design, the thrust vectoring, but since you can get control authority from command pods, or running the occasional LV-T45...

[Jimmy Jazz]

Well, even the 45's which have thrust vectoring do much better than a Skipper: carrying

same amount of fuel a LVT 45 flew up to 1073km and achieved 2457 m/s compared to a

Skipper's 940 m/s and and 50 km.

[Ravenchant]

Pah, who needs Mainsails? Engine clusters of a Skipper + 3-6 LV-T45s are awesomely powerful as long as part count is no issue

[Jart]

Is that a bad thing? Isn't half the game about trying, failing and trying again?

Enjoy indeed.

For me, a newb, this is what the game is about. Fail fail...fail...fail... fail... fail... WIN!

That win is a great gaming moment.

to quote...

Baseball

written by Ken Burns & Geoffrey C. Ward

spoken by narrator, John Chancellor

"I see great things in baseball. It's our game--the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us." -Walt Whitman

(Eds Note: "Baseball," a nine-part documentary by Ken Burns ("The Civil War") was an excellent miniseries that aired on PBS in 1994. Not exactly a movie monologue, but definately worthy of being featured here.)

Narrator: It measures just 9 inches in circumference, weighs only about 5 ounces, and it made of cork wound with woolen yarn, covered with two layers of cowhide, and stiched by hand precisely 216 times.

It travels 60 feet 6 inches from the pitcher's mound to home--and it can cover that distance at nearly 100 miles an hour. Along the way it can be made to twist, spin, curve, wobble, rise, or fall away.

The bat is made of turned ash, less than 42 inches long, not more than 2 3/4 inches in diameter. The batter has only a few thousandths of a second to decide to hit the ball. And yet the men who fail seven times out of ten are considered the game's greatest heroes.

It is played everywhere. In parks and playground and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers fields. By small children and by old men. By raw amateurs and millionare professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game where the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years, while they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights and the meaning of freedom.

At the games's heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time.

It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to father and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.

It is a haunted game, where each player is measured by the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.

[UmbralRaptor]

Well, even the 45's which have thrust vectoring do much better than a Skipper: carrying

same amount of fuel a LVT 45 flew up to 1073km and achieved 2457 m/s compared to a

Skipper's 940 m/s and and 50 km.

Giving two engines with such different thrusts the same amount of fuel isn't really meaningful. If the Skipper weren't slightly underpowered, it would be a clear choice for payload sizes that would require several LV-T30/45. I would suggest giving the Skipper 3x fuel of the LV-T30/45 (so it has a closer mass ratio and TWR), and then running the test again.

[Jimmy Jazz]

Giving two engines with such different thrusts the same amount of fuel isn't really meaningful. If the Skipper weren't slightly underpowered, it would be a clear choice for payload sizes that would require several LV-T30/45. I would suggest giving the Skipper 3x fuel of the LV-T30/45 (so it has a closer mass ratio and TWR), and then running the test again.

You got me here. Why should I compare the Skipper with the LV-T30/45 by giving it three time as much fuel? That would give it a closer TWR,

but also three times the fuel. Wouldn't that make the results uncomparable? I don't see how TWR is the problem here.

[Jouni]

I found Skipper quite reasonable, when I first started playing in 0.22. Before unlocking Skipper, my lifter cores were based on three LV-T30s or LV-T45s. Skipper had basically the same performance, but because it allowed using bigger fuel tanks with stronger connections, I was able to build larger rockets with it. (Of course, this was way before I learned using struts effectively.) Mainsail was a completely different beast. It took me quite long to figure out any uses for it, because it always ripped apart everything I put it into.

These days I rarely find any use for the intermediate engines, as I prefer to use as few engines as possible. I usually use Mainsails and Mark 55 engines in lifters, nuclear engines in interplanetary ships and tankers, and Poodles, LV-909s, and 48-7Ss in landers and utility craft. Sometimes when I have a small payload that would be silly to launch with five Mainsails, I build an ad hoc lifter with a Skipper or an LV-T45.