Little tidbits/bigbits to make KSP a tad more realistic.

[Whirligig Girl]

Let me just say right now that I am NOT suggesting turning KSP into RSS. I do not want RSS or even 6.4:1 Kerbin to be implemented.

Engines

Tankbutts

These are the ends of an engine that force it into a specific mounting size, and that look like the ends of a fuel tank bulkhead. I feel that this is unnecessary. It hinders building. Now that tweakables are implemented, engines can be given different fairings based on the size of the tank you mount them on, or even turn the fairings off.

Exceptions to the tankbutt removal may include the LV-909, because it looks to good with it's golden thermal protection; and the Liquid-Fueled Booster for obvious reasons.

Engine Shape

Nozzle-extension length is a major part in the atmosphere-vacuum Isp difference, so make sure the models for the engines reflect this. Also, with the removal of Tankbutts, internal tubes and turbopumps need to be exposed.

KR-1 and KS-25 engine standalone

Similar to THIS suggestion, but without the actual mounting point.

Still include the KR-1 engines on the LFB.

Fuel Tank Changes

Tweakables that allow the tank bulkheads of Rockomax and FL-T tanks to be exposed to place engines on without them being on a dank flat end of a tank

, or that extend them on kerbodyne so engines don't float. These modifications would increase the fuel capacity of the tank, but also make the dry mass heavier than the fuel mass is gained.

Isp increases with thrust, not fuel flow rate

This is just stupid. Why would the atmosphere slow down the turbopumps that deliver fuel to the combustion chamber. Thrust should increase with Isp. Fuel flow rate should not.

Also, Isp should keep scaling down as the atmosphere thickens. A nukengine on the surface of Eve should have horrible Isp.

RCS should keep it's thrust and Isp unlinked, for balance.

Features

Life Support

Similar to Snacks! mod, this implementation seems the best. Would obviously be part of the difficulty settings.

VAB/SPH build time

Another difficulty setting, make the VAB and SPH have build times. You can just timewarp, but keep in mind that timewarping will make ships move, life support deplete, and rep will go down. Ships that have already been launched once or have not been heavily modified will have quicker build times, and reusable ships are available instantly.

Rep and Budget

Moar difficulty settings...

As rep goes into the red area, budget should start to deplete. And as Rep goes into the blue area, budget will begin to raise. Budget will lower over time if ships aren't launched for a while or if new boundaries aren't being broken.

Atmosphere

Drag effects

NEAR with a still-soupy lower atmosphere so you still need roughly the same Delta-V to orbit.

Gees

Very High gees (over 15 or so) will kill a Kerbal. Difficulty Setting.

Harmful Re-entry

A more lenient version of Deadly Reentry. Amount of damage scaled on difficulty settings, but can not be turned off.

Fairings

This is the only procedural part, perhaps along with wings, that I think should ever be in the game. Look at procedural fairings and make it better.

Tell me what you think of this list. Don't tell me what you think of ProceduralParts or RSS. I'm looking at you, regex.

[Andrew Hansen]

I agree with everything you said. KSP is a game, but it also needs to have semi realistic physics. I'd say, however, that the tankbutts idea should have the least priority in getting implemented. Better aerodynamics, reentry damage, and life support should be top priority. I certainly hope that one day (a year from now, maybe?) KSP will include all the above features.

Also, one thing I would add to the above list is to re-texture a ton of fuel tanks and parts so that there's a more consistent texture style to KSP. Having an orange fuel tank with a white on on top and a striped black one underneath just looks bad.

Edited August 29, 2014 by Andrew Hansen

[tntristan12]

Regarding the atmosphere fix, you wouldn't need to make the lower atmosphere soupy to get the same delta-v. Just make Kerbin 50% larger.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

I agree 98%. Procedural parts should NOT be introduced. Unless if the atmosphere was modeled so things that are 15 meters wide would still be inefficient, it would make abuse.

[tntristan12]

I think procedural fairings make perfect sense. Possibly wings, but that's it. However, I like the tweakscale approach to resizing parts: it would greatly reduce the number of parts in the VAB while retaining the same flexibility of construction and do much to clean up the overly cluttered part selection screen.

As far as 15 meter wide rockets go, they should only be inefficient if they are not aerodynamic (i.e. a flat disk)

[Wanderfound]

I agree with everything you said. KSP is a game, but it also needs to have semi realistic physics. I'd say, however, that the tankbutts idea should have the least priority in getting implemented. Better aerodynamics, reentry damage, and life support should be top priority. I certainly hope that one day (a year from now, maybe?) KSP will include all the above features.

Also, one thing I would add to the above list is to re-texture a ton of fuel tanks and parts so that there's a more consistent texture style to KSP. Having an orange fuel tank with a white on on top and a striped black one underneath just looks bad.

Or just make the colour scheme into a tweakable.

I really, really want something vaguely approximating Kerbpaint to go stock. Racing spaceplanes is much more fun when you can put 'em in team colours:

[Capt Snuggler]

I agree with all.

but while I like procedural fairings (and I use them), I think for the stock game there would need to be a series of stackable, standard shapes and sizes with adapters.

I don't think an automatic adjusting fairing shape really fits the stock game.

or at least the cylinder part of the fairing should be a series of standard diameters with an adapter that adjusts to what ever it's stacked on top of.

[Whirligig Girl]

Regarding the atmosphere fix, you wouldn't need to make the lower atmosphere soupy to get the same delta-v. Just make Kerbin 50% larger.

NO! We are NOT going to rescale Kerbin. I won't let it happen.

[Red Iron Crown]

Regarding the atmosphere fix, you wouldn't need to make the lower atmosphere soupy to get the same delta-v. Just make Kerbin 50% larger.

Another option would be to extend the atmosphere height. Though I haven't run the numbers to see how high it would have to go to keep dV requirements similar.

[Andrew Hansen]

NO! We are NOT going to rescale Kerbin. I won't let it happen.

What's the matter with resizing Kerbin? It would just be so that you keep 4.5 km/s to orbit without having an unrealistic soupy atmosphere. Honestly, I wouldn't like it if FAR or NEAR had a thicker atmosphere.

[The Mechanic]

See, I know you said you don't want to hear what anyone thinks about procedural parts (in general or do you mean the ProceduralParts mod? Probably this.) but I'm not so sure about doing anything procedural. Even fairings and wings. With a variety of wing parts (maybe even some larger parts than now) you can do quite a lot. So making them procedural is not really that necessary.

As for fairings...I have used procedural fairings for quite some time purely for aesthetic reasons and liked the mod in general. What I didn't liked was that you were able to make a really huge fairing on a 1.25m base. That shouldn't be possible. I would actually prefer either a tweakable fairing with predefined sizes or KW-like fairing parts.

The tweakable fairing would basically be all the fairing parts put together in one part. So somewhat like a middle ground between procedural and a whole lot of parts. You place the fairing base and adjust the size of the base. Then you would be able to choose between various heights and between standard/wide fairing.

That way you would only have one part but you would still have limited sizes for fairings bound to the tech tree.

I know there are a lot of different points-of-view on the matter of limiting fairing sizes versus the unlimited possibilities of the KSP LEGO-like system but with a better aerodynamic or better drag calculation you need fairings. And you have to limit those fairings sizes, in my opinion at least.

[tater]

Limiting fairing to standards for stock is not a huge issue, it will force certain design choices on payloads, and anything else you'd need to build in space.

Related to space construction, it might be nice to have a "coupler" that is not a decoupler for assembly of rigid structures in space. You put them together as in docking, but once you right click and "lock" them, the 2 bodies become a single body. The idea is less wobbly stuff that is "docked" together, as possibly a help to huge structures that start lagging people (since the smaller units become one). Think of it as 2 flanges with huge bolts .

Nice list though (although I'm open to any improvements, including changing the scale of whatever is needed, it's not like the scale of a planet would be noticeable after you play a little).

[metaphor]

Looks good.

I don't think Kerbin or its atmosphere needs to be changed in any way if a better aerodynamic model is implemented. Pointier rockets would take less delta-v to get to orbit, but blunter rockets would take about the same delta-v as stock. So there's an advantage to making your rocket more aerodynamic, but it's not required.