RAM Air Intake Stacking - Exploit or no?

[Javster]

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Spanish uses 2 punctuation marks!

[sporkafife]

Waiting for the lock. It's an open sandbox game, play it how you want.

I personally don't like stacking them because I like a challenge, but if you want to, more power to you.

[csanders]

The questions people should be asking is "will this feature likely change in the future? Will any craft that uses this feature be broken beyond repair? Am I willing to live with that?"

Personally, I don't want to get used to something that will likely change drastically in the future. So I don't stack intakes.

[Tank Buddy]

It seems pretty realistic to me, you know, accurate spaceflight, etc.

[RSwordsman]

Most complaints like "lol no magnetic docking or infinite life support either!" fall under acceptable breaks from reality. Deliberately exploiting the system for gains that are not intentionally designed is cheating, plain and simple.

Is that bad? KSP is a sandbox game which has no rules, so all bets are off. But I like to cling bitterly to the tiny bits of realism I can have, so I'm willing to sacrifice intake stacking in my designs even if performance suffers.

[Kingtj44]

Is shoving a whole ton of ram intakes in a very confined space so that they are unrealistically meshed into a blob considered RAM stacking?, or is that only when you do the double intake glitch thing?

[Spatzimaus]

But I like to cling bitterly to the tiny bits of realism I can have

"Realism"? Look at any real-world high-altitude planes. Say, an SR-71, since everyone knows what that looks like. These planes all have a single intake per engine, with the intake having the same cross-sectional area as the engine (more or less). And yet, it can fly for hours without running out of air.

Try doing that in KSP. Make a spaceplane with two intakes and two jet engines, then fly it at 13000m (40,000 feet), a typical height for a jet airliner and well below the SR-71's ceiling. Measure how long it takes before your engine flames out. (In the time it took you to read this post, your plane flamed out and crashed.)

The simple fact is, the intakes in KSP have ridiculously, impossibly low flow rates for their sizes. If you truly valued "realism" you'd hack the part files to multiply all intake areas by at least 10 to allow for the sorts of flights you see in the real world. Or, you'd download a mod that adds better intakes (say, B9). So if people want to stack a dozen stock intakes to effectively mimic one that has the effectiveness of a single real-world intake, I'd say they're a heck of a lot closer to "realism" than you are.

[Jarin]

Yeah it's an exploit, but I don't lose any sleep from doing it.

This man has the right of it.

[FlamedSteak]

It's certainly not meant to be there, so you are exploting a bug. However this is just a video game, nobody is going to prison for it.

[RSwordsman]

"Realism"? <snip> So if people want to stack a dozen stock intakes to effectively mimic one that has the effectiveness of a single real-world intake, I'd say they're a heck of a lot closer to "realism" than you are.

Whoa, u mad bro? I get your point, and might actually take your suggestions about mods and editing the part values. But the fact of the matter is that it takes mental gymnastics to rationalize how putting Kerbal intakes one after the other is a good approximation for actual tech.

I think what we really need are ramjets, because as far as I know, the SR-71 used that sort of principle at high speed.