First iteration feedback

[Cristiksp]

Good idea to use already created engines, stick to it, at least for the moment.

Short term: UI side - have minimum and maximum possible values shown for thrust and ignitions

• full tooling info - add cost after tooling, untooled cost and cost of tooling are already there
• no click-through if possible
• for the moment on the VAB left pane there are details of original engine, might be confusing
• if it's possible, use the SPEngine UI to mark what configs should be seen in the SPEngine config window, for decluttering purposes
• what is [U][P] in the SPEngine config window?
• both sea level thrust and vacuum should be shown

Test flight - separate data for every design will be nice, with maybe some 10-20% flight data taken from the maximum engine config in the same family and tech level

• possibility to change burn time - it should affect cost and development time

Long term: KSC integratation - A new design will take an amount of time until it's available depending on some variables (number of ignitions, tech level, burn time, maybe thrust) Visual - increase/decrease the engine depending on the thrust level, just an idea, definitely not essential

• choose engine model based on what parts are available (FASA, BDB, SSTU)

Bugs: Setting ignitions to 0 means infinite ignitions.

[ec429]

Thanks for your feedback!

UI. If I can figure out tooltips they'll be useful for a lot of this "squeeze in extra information".

• min and max, can do (max is already shown in the Family window). Maybe a tt on the thrust input field.
• cost after tooling is shown in the input row at the bottom. Also, dividing by 1,000 isn't that hard ;) but again a tt on the cost could do it.
• anti click through is technically possible, haven't got around to it yet.
• VAB pane I know about, still investigating why that happens. Will have to look at my MM cache a bit more.
• decluttering - already planned. Though I wonder if I should give each config a guid separate from its name, so you can change their names, and reuse names if you hid the old one.
• Ullage and Pressure-fed. Again, tts could make that clearer.
• SLT I can probably squeeze in somewhere, yeah.

TF: I looked into the possibility of separating designs, but that (or anything else that procedurally creates TF configs) would be a mountain of work and I'm still not sure if it's actually possible with the TF API as it stands. That sadly rules out burn time as a design parameter too. Maybe one for the far future (or after I rewrite TF better and stronger in my own image :rofl:).

KCT: if we ever have build times for regular (tank, fairing etc.) tooling in RP-0, I'll try to integrate with / copy that. Visual scaling: already tried to do that the easy way (setting part.scaleFactor) and it didn't work. Given how much trouble TweakScale causes, and how much complicated-looking code it seems to need to accomplish that, I'm tempted to just not bother. But if someone comes along later who knows how to do it, I'll happily take PRs :wink: Engine models: for the short term I'm assuming anyone who wants a different model can just alter the cfgs to use it. The part cfgs in SPEngine are really simple, just change the +PART[somePartName] in the first line. I don't really want to create configs for every model, otherwise someone who has all of those mods installed will not only have five J-2 parts, they'll have five J-class proc engine parts as well, cluttering up their VAB, which seems antisocial.

Ignitions bug: derp. Some classes (eg A, K) are supposed to (at least initially) be ground-light only, and on those, ignitions=0 really does mean zero ignitions. I need to make the others (upper stages) refuse to set ignitions to 0, because a ground-light-only AJ10 is the silliest idea ever.

[ec429]

Several of these are now done:

• Various tooltips to display more info.
• Decluttering & renaming in the Design list (this involved a save-breaking change, to give each Design a guid to reference it by).
• Ignitions bug is fixed.
• VAB pane now shows all-zeroes rather than original engine thrust&mass. Still shows a huge number for cost, but I know why and have a change planned which will make it show 0 instead.

[ec429]

Anti click through now also done (and I'm finally happy with how unconfigured parts behave in the VAB), so I think all the stuff from this issue that's on the roadmap is done; closing.