Talk:LV-N Atomic Rocket Engine

Bug?

Hey, can somebody explain what this edit means? According to the part data, the efficiency is in vacuum almost 4 times better. — xZise [talk] 05:43, 20 April 2013 (CDT)

I think he means it provides less output, but by my math that shouldn't be the case either. It may consume less fuel, but not so much less fuel that it is providing less total thrust --Ruedii (talk) 18:19, 2 May 2013 (CDT)

What do you mean with “output”? Thrust, fuel flow or specific impulse? And all engines are consuming less fuel in space. By this mechanism KSP increase the efficiency in vacuum as the thrust is fixed. I guess I post on the author's discussion page to inform the author. — xZise [talk] 04:46, 3 May 2013 (CDT)

I found the actual bug -- displayed fuel consumption when right clicking on the engine is in tonnes/s, rather than the Units/s that it says. This may be confusing, since earlier versions of KSP showed it in Units/s. UmbralRaptor (talk) 20:53, 3 May 2013 (CDT)

Okay I did some testing and it seems that this isn't engine specific. The LV-909 for example has a fuel Consumption of 0.01689 U/s which shows me a little lower fuel consumption than the specifications. Doing the same math on the LV-N (0.0267 U/s = 26.7 kg/s) I can confirm the specifications again. So as you said U is simply 1 000 kg and nothing quirky/buggy about the engine. — xZise [talk] 09:31, 6 May 2013 (CDT)

I clarify what this means. (I posted this) When I was playing KSP I had a LV-N in orbit,and guess what? Not efficient. The fix for this is just to restart the game. -BigBoy

What do you mean "efficient" Do you mean fuel efficient or effectiveness. It does provide significantly less thrust than other engines. This is normal. Ships powered by the Atomic Engine tend to have a very low thrust to weight ratio in this stage, but you just need to do longer burns to compensate. Currently in KSP engines simply use less fuel in vacuum, instead of giving more output thrust like they would in the real world. This is just the way the game is written.--Ruedii (talk) 16:55, 16 June 2013 (CDT)

But physically this doesn't change the “effectiveness”. Applying real life physics the TWR is less or equal the KSP TWR as the thrust is lower in atmosphere than in vacuum. I don't know how and if the dev team will change this, but the easiest way should be to simply vary the thrust and fix the fuel flow the vacuum value. This won't change the craft's behaviour in the vacuum, but provide lower thrust on start (which might impact the craft's payload capacity). — xZise [talk] 17:10, 16 June 2013 (CDT)