I keep losing boosters to the launchpad tower. Is there any way to place my rocket further away from it?
How to avoid collision with the launchpad tower
kerbal-space-program
Related Solutions
This feature has been added as of .20.
Editor Improvements
- The Editor no longer requires you to start with a command pod when building a ship.
- The Editor now allows deleting or replacing the first part of your ship.
To answer #1 I constructed a test rig.
As you described, the outer-engines overheat faster than the inner one regardless of vertical placement. This means that the overheating is not a result of the heat emission map (which extends in a cone underneath the engine that drops off rapidly and is hotter than the engine itself). When I placed temperature gauges on the same rig it didn't overheat at all which inadvertently gives us our answer.
All parts have three config parameters relating to heat: maxTemp, heatConductivity and heatDissapation. By default conductivity and dissapation are set to 0.08 and they are never redefined in the config files. This means that all parts, even the tiny temperature gauge will receive heat from neighboring components at the same rate.
In our scenario the inner engine has four components with which to transfer heat via conduction but the outer ones only have one so they overheat faster. To prevent the outer-engines from overheating you could install a heat sink in the form of a few structural girders.
As for #2 the wiki states that:
As of 0.18.2, this tank does not transfer heat effectively. Engines attached directly to it and running at full throttle (especially Mainsails) will overheat.
I suspect this is a deliberate tweak in the coding since my usual trick of adding a small girder between the tank and engine reduces overheating by an approximate factor of 8 instead of a factor of 2 which you would expect from abusing the heat conductivity parameter as described above.
EDIT
Based on a comment by Philipp I re-checked the results of #1 and it turns out that the inner engine heats up at a slower rate by transferring heat upwards into the command pod, not across to the other engines as I assumed.
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Best Answer
As of .19, there is no more launch tower. Until the demo gets updated as well, though, this still applies to it.
There's no way to move your rocket away from the launch tower, but what you CAN do is build AWAY from it. When in the VAB, there's a hallway on one side. The side facing the door on the left is the side facing the launch tower.
I have helpfully drawn a diagram to illustrate this point:
As long as you don't build too close to the outer edge of the VAB circle, you'll be alright:
This far out will work. Adding more boosters to the side of the central engine will clip the side of the launch tower.
Theoretically, you COULD move the central point of the rocket out of the center of the launch circle, but that may be more effort than it's worth.