The Cost of Struts

[aman608]

now we are all excited by the new .24 update coming out, and with it comes budgeting however i found one thing to note.

The price of a LV-T30 is 850 that's fine and dandy however the LV-T30 is an item that is not used much into the late game

Struts however are an almost essential add-on to every ship and the average ship has about 64 separate struts (estimation)(kinda based of myself). Ok, that sound fine but what's the price of struts... 250 that doesn't seem too bad right but going back to the average number of struts on a ship 64*250= 16000 ...that's only for struts you could buy Just under 19 LV-T30's with all that cash

with the new update the cost of struts on some over engineered ships will be very game changing instead of slapping on 80 struts to make the thing solid as a rock we will have to find out new ways to make our ships stronger or we just have to be very conservative with our strut usage (i know scary right).

now then to some people this wont be a problem however to people who love HUGE over engineered ship (i'm looking at you Whackjob) this will be a huge game changer no longer can we spam struts to get a extra dose of Dopamine (if you don't know what this is Google it) this might be a good thing.

[problemecium]

You have a decent point but DANG those run-on sentences made the whole thing hard to read and I wasn't going to say anything initially but really it was tripping me up so much I just had to point it out because a little is fine but at a certain point run-ons just make everything really confusing you know what I mean sorry if I sound like a grammar [see below] but it really is a problem when it gets this bad.

IN RELATED NEWS AFTER 7869345 EDITS, apparently the name of the German National Socialist Party is a swear word on this forum.

Anyway, regarding the actual points made, in my experience the average ship since the 0.23.5 update has far fewer than 64 struts on it, not to mention that I get the feeling a lot of people still put a lot more struts on their ships than is really needed. Besides, I have a hunch that 0.24 and probably a few updates after that will include some rebalancing of prices for these sorts of things. Even if not, I think it's a good thing to challenge players to build sensible ships that don't need 64 or more struts to maintain their shape.

Edited July 11, 2014 by parameciumkid

[vexx32]

I've moved this to Development Discussion.

Please take more care in where you place threads. Just because General Discussion exists doesn't mean everything should automatically go there.

[sardaukar11]

maybe the actual parts cost are only placeholders for the final ones, consider that after this update squad still haa time to polish the economic system.

[RocketPilot573]

The prices at the moment are practically random and make no sense. Of course .24 will change it.

[Jouni]

The prices will obviously change in 0.24.

With the stronger joints introduced in 0.23.5, we don't need as many struts as before. I now use 1-2 struts per booster, and bigger rockets may need 4 struts for securing the payload and/or the interstage. When I'm trying to be efficient, there's usually one strut per 5-10 tonnes of payload.

[Boomerang]

Never mind that your estimate is way off. My own average is probably 8-12 struts/craft.

With all the dev time that's gone into .24, I imagine that quite an effort was put towards balancing the costs of everything.

[SkyRender]

Of course it was from a month ago, but there's a screenshot in the second 0.24 update blog post showing a budget of around 165,000 whatever-the-currency-will-be-called with only 28 minutes of game time clocked. Odds are decent that starting budgets are pretty generous (my guess is that initial funds were set to 150,000 at the time of that shot), to account for the fact that a lot of players are rather overkill in their rocket design. Excessive struts are a lot less of a problem than players who build rockets that could get to Eeloo in order to go to the Mun.

[LethalDose]

LOL. Yeah, the current "prices" in the game have been, literally, nothing more than place holders. There were fields that required a number, which had absolutely no game effect what-so-ever. I think I've seen at least 3 other threads about this in the last few weeks. None of them have been even remotely insightful.

That all being said, it cracks me up to think that some players that build wildly insane vehicles that would never fly and are only held together with an absurd number of struts would suddenly find their vessels as expensive as they are unbelievable.

/Sigh. Dare to dream.

[KNSA Scientist]

If you are using more than 65 struts to get to the LKO/Mun, then you need to design your rocket better. Struts should be expensive, so that people build more sensible rockets. And I don't mean sensible as in real life rockets, I mean instead of making a pancake rocket with much more fuel than is needed you make a smaller rocket with less boosters . But that is just my opinion, so you are free to disagree.

[Red Iron Crown]

Struts are a bit of a concession to KSP's joints being really weak, a properly engineered real world rocket would have orders of magnitude less flex than a wobbly KSP rocket. As such, I think they should be very cheap. I like that you can build improbable, unrealistic, insane things in KSP.

[guest91111]

I usually don't really have to put a lot of struts on my spacecraft. Half of them don't even have struts (And are stilly pretty big). And when I have struts, it are only a few of them. But I see your point. Struts are to expensive. I think the cost of struts should be measured in cost/meter instead of cost!

[RidingTheFlow]

Never used many struts. Even less with 23.5 joint fixes, it mostly all comes down to choosing proper part sizes and then just about 10 struts top for some critical structural points.

I think it's good that struts have visible price impact, that keeps designs clever instead of easy way out "just slap put more struts on".

Edited July 12, 2014 by RidingTheFlow