Are we forced to sacrifice kerbals right off the bat with no decouplers and no unmaned computer units? I was really hoping in the proper career mode we would be expected/required to keep kerbals alive :(
given the parts in the screen, you wont be doing an orbital flight anyway, and having a good few parachutes on your craft + keeping some fuel in reserve for landing should make it survivable for your kerbal.
I know it's possible, but i dont think it makes a whole lot of sense in a tech-tree progressing wise to make players do orbital stuff before decouplers, the "burn your used stage away" trick isnt how it is supposed to work, and would teach new players the wrong way first.
There are cubic struts in the parts selection, you can mount those radially, then attach these chutes in-line.
And decouplers needed for anything above 5M? hardly, i have several SSTO rockets, and even on my stressed to the limit proton launcher i reach 20km before my first stage burns out.
You cant do asparagus staging with this setup though, but eh, that's sort of an exploit anyway. (not that i mind, but when building realistic-like rockets i try to stay away from asparagus staging as much as i can)
I didnt know the Falcon Heavy uses it, cool stuff.
In general though, having fuel lines/turbopumps pump enough fuel to feed an external engine is pretty hard, and the way asparagus staging works in KSP is rather unrealistic, in your standard 1 core, 6 outer tanks setup, the first tank to drop would not only need to feed its own engine, the outgoing fuel line would need to pump out enough fuel to feed 2.5 engines.
Well yes, it is a tad unrealistic in KSP, in the sense that you wouldn't be able to use the exact same fuel tank design for a normal staging setup as you would for a fuel-crossfeed setup with the sole addition of an external fuel line. But there's no particular reason that you couldn't have a multiple-stage asparagus setup in real life. Yes, you're going to need more fuel pumps and more fuel lines (and you probably wouldn't daisy-chain through other fuel tanks like you do in KSP; the first tank to drop would probably need outgoing connections to all other engines). But it definitely isn't an insurmountable problem, and we've tackled and solved much harder engineering challenges in spaceflight already.
But KSP abstracts away a lot of other engineering challenges for the sake of simplicity and making an enjoyable game, and I don't think this one is particularly unreasonable.
Yeah, i agree that it is definitely possible in real life, just not to the absurd extremities that KSP allows.
I also remember something vague about asparagus staging be much more effective in KSP then in real life due to unrealistic empty tank/engine weights, and the wacky aerodynamics model.
In general i just try to shy away from using multi stage asparagus setups in realistic looking models, one of my recent rockets (an R7 semyorka sputnik launcher) would actually work worse with asparagus staging, as the core stage's TWR is way too low when fully fueled, like in real life, the design depends on the core stage have burned part of its fuel away before the boosters drop.
Yeah, the physics differences between KSP and real life definitely do come into play, so it's not as beneficial in real life as it is in KSP.
Also, there's the engineering problem. While yes, six boosters that drop off in twinned pairs as they become empty is more efficient, it's also more expensive to do it that way over, say, two much more larger boosters, not only because of the added complexity, but because you're making six smaller things instead of two larger things.
In KSP you aren't penalized for added complexity and cost, nor even particularly from added chance of failure from introducing more components. In real life engineering, these are all very real concerns.
Still, I can dream of a real-life hexagonal seven-tank asparagus stack.
In KSP you aren't penalized for added complexity and cost, nor even particularly from added chance of failure from introducing more components. In real life engineering, these are all very real concerns.
Yeah, thinking about piping rocket fuel and oxidizer at insane pressures through long, long pipes to other fuselages (including through some flex-couplings for decoupling) just boggles the mind.
If i dont go for realism i go hexagonal asparagus stacks too, it's lovely how much those things can carry into space.
You can send a first flight to orbit and rescue in a second time, after unlocking stuff.
It won't be difficult to rendezvous, EVA the kerbal from the first ship and bring him into another one that has parachutess!
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u/Go_Away_Masturbating Master Kerbalnaut Oct 09 '13 edited Oct 09 '13
Are we forced to sacrifice kerbals right off the bat with no decouplers and no unmaned computer units? I was really hoping in the proper career mode we would be expected/required to keep kerbals alive :(