Volume slider for stock fuel tanks

[lolstock]

Some of the stock parts have only liquid fuel or LFO, and don't have an identical part with the other fuel type. To be clear, I'm not asking for more parts.

Anyone who has ever removed Oxidizer or Liquid fuel from an LFO tank knows that you will not be able to use the part at full volume, wasting space and becoming difficult for aesthetics and balancing. I would like some sort of variable fuel composition slider.

This slider would allow one to increase the volume of one type of fuel as the other is decreased, allowing one to utilize all available volume for fuel. There would still need to be an option to carry the tank at less than max volume though.

Easier Explanation:

Ex. I have a spaceplane that needs extra liquid fuel. I take the LFO adapter and remove some oxidizer to give the jets more fuel to run on to keep fuel balanced. But now I'm not using the full volume of the tank. Instead, I would have a slider (on the tank) that slightly decreases oxidizer while proportionally increasing liquid fuel. Or greatly increases LF when greatly decreasing O. Or totally removing O and making the total fuel volume composed of only LF. Or Vice versa for all three of the former.

[LethalDose]

When the devs first described "tweakables" about a year and a half ago, it was made to sound like it was exactly what you have described. I believe the words were:

"Tweakables will let you change how much of each type of fuel a tank holds."

Anyway, much to the chagrin of a sizable portion of the community, we got what we got...

I understand this is a suggestion for the stock game, but based on SQUAD's initial response, they aren't changing this. A mod called "Procedural tanks" allows you to create tanks of specified size for what you're looking for. Unfortunately, it's about as close as you're going to get.

I would love to see tanks implemented the way you've described. It would actually reduce the number of parts in the game, but, alas, don't expect it to happen.

[chaos_forge]

I too would much love to see this. Or even just a button to switch each tank from LFO, Liquid only, oxi only, or structural, along the lines of porkjet's nuclear engines mod

[NathanKell]

This is precisely what Modular Fuel Tanks was designed to do, and it's been doing it since, like, 0.19 or so.

We had hoped .23 would obsolete it (as LethalDose says) but we were sadly wrong.

[lolstock]

Well I'll be damned, I'd never tried Modular Fuel Tanks so I'm gonna have to give it a download. Personally I have no problem with modding as much as my computer can handle, but yeah for stock purposes, it would be super useful.

[Renegrade]

When the devs first described "tweakables" about a year and a half ago, it was made to sound like it was exactly what you have described. I believe the words were:

"Tweakables will let you change how much of each type of fuel a tank holds."

They said that? Dammit, I want my tweakable fuel tanks!

I already felt that the tweakables system fell way, way short of what was promised BEFORE reading that :/

I would love to see tanks implemented the way you've described. It would actually reduce the number of parts in the game, but, alas, don't expect it to happen.

Yeah - I could totally get behind that too. They could ditch the separate tanks for LF and LF/O, and we could tweak up the contents as needed (ala MFT as Nathan points out).

The tank definition files could contain simple data to express the dry mass overhead of each tank type.. would be fairly straightforward to implement.

[rkman]

"Tweakables will let you change how much of each type of fuel a tank holds."

We have that, it's just that we can't increase the amount of fuel above the default amount. Which is a bit unfortunate but doesn't mean we can't change how much fuel a tank holds.

[pincushionman]

I dig this suggestion. Not only would it eliminate some redundant parts, you could use it as a tool to prevent a stack of tanks' CoM from drifting as far back during burn by dedicating the lowest tank to only fuel or oxidizer and forcing the fuel draw to be more balanced along the length. May be useful in FAR or the nebulous new aero.

Also would be good if we could switch RCS tanks to LFO using the same system and have more available small side tanks.

Of course, then people would need to be more aware of their propellant stoichiometry.

[bdito]

There are several mods that do that. I don't know why squad doesn't implement a feature like this as it would simplify the parts list dramatically.

[Jouni]

I'm starting to like this idea. With the new Mk2 and Mk3 spaceplane parts, there are now too many fuel tanks in the game.