[WIP][TechTree @ 0.23.5] - [MS19e] - Realistic Progression LITE

[NathanKell]

Been playing "real rockets only", more or less.

Bumper-WAC:

(I first flew WAC Corporal, then Tiny Tim-boosted WAC Corporal to get aero science; then this for the low-space.)

Vanguardnik

Sputnik1 + 4x separatrons = Vanguard satellite plus upper stage. Then an Able based off the A4 (y u no support Mini Orb Bertha? Makes a great Able in RftS) and a lower stage based off the (over-powered) Decurion with two verniers.

[MedievalNerd]

Jealous of your rocket building skills Nathan! D:

Those are really awesome! The Bumper-Wac is just wow.

[Visari]

He made it possible to make them so sexy himself by making stretchytanks so awesome.

Those conic tanks really allow some creativity with different shapes, this is unfortunately the only and the least impressive design I have a screenshot of.

btw, did anyone ever try an SSTO spaceplane in RSS, with AJE, FAR, DREC & RO?

This design took me 12 hours from initial design to final touchdown on runway after full orbit to get right.

Very nice challenge!

Edited April 23, 2014 by Visari

[MedievalNerd]

He made it possible to make them so sexy himself by making stretchytanks so awesome

Which in of itself is already pretty damn sexy! Much Sexy!

@ALL

Been talking with Nathan, and the new way that RSS v6 calculates atmospheric cutoff is quite different than stock. So I have to do some tests to see how stock reacts and make my plugin behave the same.

From what I can understand the InSpaceLow cutoff will have to be 180km. :/

I'll keep you updated.

Edited April 23, 2014 by MedievalNerd

[Ratzap]

Been talking with Nathan, and the new way that RSS v6 calculates atmospheric cutoff is quite different than stock. So I have to do some tests to see how stock reacts and make my plugin behave the same.

From what I can understand the InSpaceLow cutoff will have to be 180km. :/

I'll keep you updated.

Heh, told you so :-p

Time for sleep, I just got my first comsat into a stable 6,000km circular orbit. I shall not be saying how many launches failed...

[MedievalNerd]

Heh, told you so :-p

Time for sleep, I just got my first comsat into a stable 6,000km circular orbit. I shall not be saying how many launches failed...

RSS still gives me a kick in the bag of wallnuts on a regular basis. I'm assuming with relay stations it's easier now, but I'd struggle like a madman to only have KSC as an initial contact and try to circularize an orbit whiel only being visible while above KSC... Gahhhh lol

[Visari]

@ALL

Been talking with Nathan, and the new way that RSS v6 calculates atmospheric cutoff is quite different than stock. So I have to do some tests to see how stock reacts and make my plugin behave the same.

From what I can understand the InSpaceLow cutoff will have to be 180km.

This is correct, some experiments require the ship to be at InSpaceLow location, which is by your mod's standards, I think, the previous RSS 105km(ish?) altitude.

When the experiment is performed anywhere between 105km and 180km, the experiment will fail, telling the player that it is not available or can't be done right now, consuming the data gained in the process.

Likewise, the data resource can be obtained while in that altitude range for InLowSpace data generation probes.

Don't quote me on those numbers, they're out of the top of my head.

Also gonna call it a night, so good luck!

Edited April 23, 2014 by Visari

[NathanKell]

Aw, thanks folks. :]

The issue is that the plugin is still using stock science for the actual experiment, which means we're stuck with Squad's determination of situations, and thus even a trace amount of atmosphere is enough to make a situation FlyingHigh, not space. (IRL the Earth's atmosphere extends out past 7,000km IIRC....180 is not that much in comparison!)

That said, Earth's atmosphere *does* end before the 100nm reference orbit (185x185km).

[MedievalNerd]

Aw, thanks folks. :]

The issue is that the plugin is still using stock science for the actual experiment, which means we're stuck with Squad's determination of situations, and thus even a trace amount of atmosphere is enough to make a situation FlyingHigh, not space. (IRL the Earth's atmosphere extends out past 7,000km IIRC....180 is not that much in comparison!)

That said, Earth's atmosphere *does* end before the 100nm reference orbit (185x185km).

For simplicity sake, I'll bend to the new RSS 180km. I'll go through the numbers with Nathan and update the OP with the new altitude cutoffs for each body.

Then I'll update the method used for calculating situations in the plugin, Nathan already suggested a fix.

Sorry for the messy release guess I had more reading and verification to do! Thanks for all the feedback and testing.

[Guest]

He made it possible to make them so sexy himself by making stretchytanks so awesome.

Those conic tanks really allow some creativity with different shapes, this is unfortunately the only and the least impressive design I have a screenshot of.

http://i.imgur.com/dnlMC74.jpg

btw, did anyone ever try an SSTO spaceplane in RSS, with AJE, FAR, DREC & RO?

This design took me 12 hours from initial design to final touchdown on runway after full orbit to get right.

Very nice challenge!

Willing to share that RSS SSTO craft file?

My RPL MS19 Mission 1 to 4 craft screen shots on steam:

M1 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252125933

M2 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252125946

M3 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252150045

M4 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=252150142

Edited April 23, 2014 by Guest

[Probus]

I love your tech tree. It is awesome! I do have one question.

I read that "In the current state of MFT, you NEED TO manually increase your tech level to match your highest researched tier. IE, tech level 0 rocket fuel engines need to be set to level 1 once you've unlocked Rocket Fuel Engines TL1. And so forth." I think I just figure this out. You do it in the action configuration screen, right?

Thanks

Edited April 23, 2014 by Probus

[ThorBeorn]

Will the upcoming hotfix(es) break saves or dare I start a new career?

[Ratzap]

Will the upcoming hotfix(es) break saves or dare I start a new career?

This is never a problem, even if it does you can go into your new game after hotfix and add the amount of science you had previously.

Medi, I know you like screens so here's my lovely low tech com sat . 1m and smaller parts only.

I've used hinges to fold up the home made solar arrays so I can use a smaller fairing (much better flight performance) and deploy them in orbit. With the lack of decent SAS, gimbals or throttle settings under 100% at this tech level, I used the fuel weight and tweak settings to keep it from going too fast and flipping. Plus the first 2 stages have only 1 ignition, so you better make it count

Craft file if you're interested: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/71576136/KSP/LEO%20Comm%201b.craft

[Visari]

Willing to share that RSS SSTO craft file?

http://speedy.sh/4PJmf/SSTO-v3.craft

With the lack of decent SAS, gimbals or throttle settings under 100% at this tech level, I used the fuel weight and tweak settings to keep it from going too fast and flipping.

I was under the impression tweaking the maximum thrust of an engine would be unrealistic.

With my very limited knowledge of rocket science, I would assume that an unthrottlable rocket engine could only have reduced thrust with reduced efficiency (lower I_sp). Though this is purely guessing, so it's very possible NK will correct me here.

[Ratzap]

I was under the impression tweaking the maximum thrust of an engine would be unrealistic.

With my very limited knowledge of rocket science, I would assume that an unthrottlable rocket engine could only have reduced thrust with reduced efficiency (lower I_sp). Though this is purely guessing, so it's very possible NK will correct me here.

Not a foggy. I'm not a stickler for realism (hence the asparagus staging) or history but I like the tech levels stuff. Tweaks could probably be switched off with a plugin but they're in game and I've no problem using them to avoid unnecessary hassle/rebuilds.

[Ratzap]

From the OP:

#4 - If you are using RemoteTech2 (you should), make sure you copy the included settings file (it's in RPL_Tweak_Pack/RT2_Settings_Files(DeleteOnceMoved) to your RT2 installation folder.

This is missing from the rar file. Has anyone made a working one? Or have a copy from ML18? It'd explain why a lot of my RT2 antenna ranges are all over the place.

[Mirean]

Alright, so after a couple of hours (actually almost 2 full days), these are the bugs I encountered:

- Bumper data limit - pretty easily fixable, just adjust the data requirement for the expirement to a number lower than 500 (e.g. 100), or increase the possible amount of stored data to 750

- Few experiments have a weird behavior coupled with the data acquisition - e.g. the probeCoreCube2 probe has 2 experiments for high lunar orbit (1 of them is bio samples), 1 for low lunar orbit, 1 for moon landed and the other 2 I haven't identified yet. But the data needed for these experiments can only be obtained while in Moon near-space area, so no data acquiring at high orbit or landed. It's not just this experiment, actually, it's quite a lot of them.

- Obviously the part where you get 10% of science from every experiment - fix to this has been posted few pages ago

- Few experiments also have the requireAtmosphere flag set to true even though they are supposed to run in low orbit. Again, easily fixable, just set it to false where needed

- Stretchy SRB's not appearing in the R&D facility (-> not appearing in VAB), although Stretchy tanks are working fine (all of them, the conic or cyllindrical ones, service module, cryogenic, etc)

- A lot of empty nodes (this technically isn't a bug of course)

And I guess that's it. I haven't gotten to the end of the tech tree yet (still missing few nodes), but I'm quite far and I haven't encountered any other problem so far.

[NathanKell]

Probus: yes.

ThorBeorn: even if it does, you could copy a new tech.cfg over your old one.

Ratzap, Visari: tweakable throttling shouldn't actually work, since it's no different from regular throttling. If it does for you, that's strange, since I've never seen it work. (It works for SRBs, of course).

Visari: yes, that would be the case, although you can do things with varying turbopump rate and lowering chamber pressure (bad for atmosphere, nearly meaningless in vacuum).

Ratzap: since you should be using brooklyn666's RT2 antenna ranges, you should have range mult set to 1.0 and consumption set to 1.0 in RT2 Settings. You should also have MultipleAntenna set to 1.0 and range model to Root.

[Ratzap]

Ratzap, Visari: tweakable throttling shouldn't actually work, since it's no different from regular throttling. If it does for you, that's strange, since I've never seen it work. (It works for SRBs, of course).

Visari: yes, that would be the case, although you can do things with varying turbopump rate and lowering chamber pressure (bad for atmosphere, nearly meaningless in vacuum).

Ratzap: since you should be using brooklyn666's RT2 antenna ranges, you should have range mult set to 1.0 and consumption set to 1.0 in RT2 Settings. You should also have MultipleAntenna set to 1.0 and range model to Root.

It works with the Miles, I have 2 set to 80% on that craft file I posted. As for the RT2, that's probably true, I'm just saying that according to the ML19 install instructions there's a file missing. I reckon it's a MM file missing since all the antenna ranges were off by 10 (ie stock ranges, I checked with another GameData and vanilla install). I also put in Madrid + Canberra deep space communications places as stations.

[NathanKell]

Ratzap: verify that thrust actually changes when you play with the limiter in flight? Thrust limiter works by lerping between min and max thrust, and since they're the same in RO, it shouldn't make a difference. (Note that MJ will report, in the VAB, limited thrust, but it won't work in flight.) Unless Squad changed how it works in .23.5 and I haven't noticed.

Yeah, I'll get with MN about changing the instructions. But if your ranges are all off by 10 you don't have brooklyn666's antenna patches. Grab them in post 2 of RO thread.

[Ratzap]

Ratzap: verify that thrust actually changes when you play with the limiter in flight? Thrust limiter works by lerping between min and max thrust, and since they're the same in RO, it shouldn't make a difference. (Note that MJ will report, in the VAB, limited thrust, but it won't work in flight.) Unless Squad changed how it works in .23.5 and I haven't noticed.

Yeah, I'll get with MN about changing the instructions. But if your ranges are all off by 10 you don't have brooklyn666's antenna patches. Grab them in post 2 of RO thread.

I looked at that but brooklyn666 writes "HERE is my Realism Overhaul for RemoteTech2. To use, simply put both cfgs in your Gamedata folder" however the link only goes to 1 file called RT2_RO.cfg. Then talks about settings and some suggestions. I decided to do it myself since there were discrepancies. If something doesn't look right or add up, I tend to do it myself is all. And with RPL being a patch collection trying to be seamless, it really needs to have the RT2 stuff in it rather than go link diving.

And yes the tweak does work, I just checked: 14.7 m/s2 off the pad with no tweak, 12.7 m/s2 with tweak to 80% on 2 out of 3 engines.

[Ratzap]

One other thing while you're reading here Nathen, why do my tanks lose cyro fuels while I'm on the pad? Surely clamps/tower would keep it topped up until I launch?

[Visari]

Cryogenic fuels evaporate over time and need to be vented out to relieve the pressure, I think.

When in the atmosphere, the tanks are affected by the surrounding air, slightly warming up despite insulation. Same with sun exposure (not sure whether this is simulated in-game).

You could have the launchclamps top your rocket off by having them constantly generate resources, or consume negative resources.

I think it was a fairly easy alteration in the cfg to get this effect.

or make an MM file with

@part[LaunchClamp1]

{

RESOURCE

{

name = LiquidOxidizer

amount = 1000

maxAmount = 1000

}

MODULE

{

name = ModuleGenerator

isAlwaysActive = true

OUTPUT_RESOURCE

{

name = LiquidOxidizer

rate = 10

}

}

}

Suppose you would need TAC fuel balancer to pump it out of the launchclamp to distribute it over the rocket, and add these lines for every desired resource.

Also double check the code, I don't really do this sort of editing a lot..

Edited April 23, 2014 by Visari

[NathanKell]

Ratzap: weird. I'll test throttle limiting.

There's only one file; the post's instructions seem wrong. >.>

I do agree with you about inclusion, but last brooklyn666 mentioned this, s/he wanted the fix kept separate.

Regarding launch clamps. The issue is that the launch clamp fuel pump in RF will only fill *the tank it's attached to*, which is kinda dumb. I'm rewriting.

[ThorBeorn]

MedievalNerd: What are your thoughts about integrating support for space station parts, let's say Fustek, in the future?

I know a proper RO .cfg for the new Fustek dev build is yet to be made at the moment. But when there is one available, could Fustek space station parts be integrated via a hotfix? I know I would enjoy it atleast