Hector_919

I ran into something of a bug: it appears as if all bullets/missiles are attached to the position of your vessel instead of an inertial frame of reference. This manifests as: - Explosions moving across the ground at the same speed and direction as my plane. - flares turning along with my jet, so that the 'flare pattern' moves along with my jets just as if they were formation flying - Hydra rockets turning the same way as my flares did - 20mm vulcan bullets moving/turning along with my jet as well - Cluster Bomb submunitions are also affected by turns and velocity changes of the vessel the cluster bomb was fired from apart from this: - the GPS-guided 1000lb bomb did not steer towards the target and fell as if I had no target selected - the AGM-86C cruise missile also did not steer in any way and fell to the ground like an unguided bomb with a small engine This happened both in the 32-bit and the 64-bit version of KSP Edit: I use KSP 1.2.2 and BDAc v 0.2.1.0

I built a fighter jet today and noticed that whenever I was doing turns, the flares I just fired would turn along with my jet. Not an urgent issue, the flares still appear to do their job quite well, but something possibly worth taking a look at if this seems annoying to other people. Awesome Mod BTW, keep up the good work.

It probably is - that's why I've asked for other people's opinions. If we start from what I've described here, your system basically welds the turbine and a compressor to the combustion chamber. It's a little less complex that what I've posted here, but it looks very similar. I personally would prefer being able to choose turbine and second-stage-compressor by myself, though. You're right - I've seen some of these mass flow calculations, and they're just sick - sorry for all the sticklers, but at some point stuff gets too complicated for everyone, some simplification will have to do. The problem with determining every value of the engine parts by the use of sliders to me sounds like allowing to set the ISP and maximum thrust of Rocket engines - there would be one set of settings for the most OP engine ever, and no need to optimize for different purposes. Having different compressors/intakes/combustion chambers/nozzles allows not only some basic balancing to prevent people from creating said OP jet engine, the part descriptions would also help people by letting them know what a certain part is most useful for. Just being given a bunch of sliders to play with would probably have me end up like this. I can understand that you would rather like to see a Mod for this instead of it being added to vanilla KSP, and at the moment I don't know what I'd prefer - I'd be happy with any of them. My first concern when posting this rather was a way to allow the creation of engines optimized for certain situations rather than realism - and the way people optimize engines in reality seems to work quite well. I don't think a velocity-based overheating would be such a good idea, since it would quite likely lead to the engines of SSTOs blowing up on atmospheric reentry - and this Suggestion was aimed at allowing to create specialized engines, not an overhauled overheating system (which would by the way also make sense). I'll try. *twitch*

Currently, the Jet engine system in KSP works just like the Rocket engine system: move whatever the engine needs to it with pipes, no matter from where the fuel is pumped. While this makes perfect sense for rocket engines that only need Fuel and Oxidizer, the idea of Pumping intake air across an entire airplane to the Jet engines made the physics student inside me twitch uncontrollably. In reality, the air intakes are part of the engine and pumping air through pipes doesn't really work. I'm not sure if it would be better to design jet engines seperately, save them as a whole jet engine and add them to your plane similar to subassemblys that you can't edit (which would allow engines to work like a single object, saving CPU power and preventing eventual wobbling) or just build them like anything else in the SPH/VAB - but now let's get to the actual engine concept: My idea would be to construct each engine out of its single components: intake, compressor, combustion chamber and so on. In order to simulate the engine behaviour, the airflow inside each engine will be described with four properties: air pressure, air temperature, airflow speed and the amount of oxygen/oxidizer. Every engine component will change these four values acording to its purpose and depending an 'how the air arrived here': Intakes will basically provide the air 'as is', fan compressors will increase pressure behind them and decrease the pressure in front of them, bring the airflow speed closer to a target value (based on their rotation speed) and increase air temperature slightly, combustion chambers drastically increase pressure and temperature, increase airflow speed and decrease oxygen amount while burning liquid fuel and so on. If radial intakes are needed, a radial intake body part that allows to use the air provided by them would be an idea to make them compatible with the new system. Engine construction begins with a combustion chamber: it determins the radius of the engine (if we get engines of different diameters) as well as its type (Turbojet, Ramjet or Scramjet - each with different behavoiur in different altitudes / at different velocities). (nearly) all combustion chambers need their intake air compressed, and if the engine temperature gets too high precoolers would finally have an effect worth the name 'precooler'. additional parts allowing a wide variety of engines would be: -afterburners -oxidizer injectors (quite self-explainatory) -thrust vectoring nozzles I know that this system may be quite complicated, but KSP itself also requires some explaining, and as tutorials are already planned and the description system present in SPH/VAB can help a lot, And for beginners some basic example engines should allow them to get used to the engine system. If Engines are to be built seperately, allowing a testing function where you can test engines in a pressure tunnel would also be an Idea to help people build the engine they need. I'd really appreciate hearing your opinion about this Hector

just thinking about it - have you considered using an upside-down MK2 cargo bay and putting the engine inside or place the intake inside a normally placed cargo bay (frontal F-35 intake-style)?

although it would look awesome, I doubt it will be added - the B9 pack already includes VTOL Engines, and I dont' see any necessity to get another type of them. If you think about some kind of 'Bomb bay' i have to disappoint you - this has already been denied.

they have the same lift, and it would be realistic (being reaslitic is one of the main goals of FAR) to give them different steering/stalling behaviour. You could try that out quite easy by building a plane with pitch control winglets/stabilators at the front and measure the takeoff speed. lower takeoff speed => higher steering power.

right-clicking on the wings in KSP 0.23 should open a small menu which allows you to set the maximum deflection of control surfaces. try increasing the maximum deflection of the B9 wing control surfaces. In KSP 0.22 this can not be set this way, you need FAR for that. greetings Hector

It should probably be noted that the aforementioned stock-gear-wobbling is of a different kind than the B9-gear-wobbling. the latter occurs in all kinds of situations with mostly/only heavy air- and spacecraft where their gear bends sideways while the plane stays rather stable - until it crashes nearly instantly. the first happened because of an engineer not paying attention. (sorry). greetings hector

regarding KJR: I did that in KSP 0.22 and yes - it worked. However, downloading an entire mod just for fixing one bug doesn't sound like a solution for everyone. regarding "more wheels": when I hit the 40-wheels-mark It started to get crowded at the bottom of my plane and aside from that: fixing bugs is never wrong...

If i may present my theory of wobblyness of the B9 gears: KSP (and post-school physics) calculates movement by newtons law (acceleration = accelerating force/mass) and rotation in a similar way (angular acceleration = torque/moment of inertia). The moment of inertia of a pendulum is (pendulum mass) times (pendulum length)², and since we're only looking at rotation along one axis, we can use the pendulum as an approximation for the B9 gear - this may even be the way KSP calculates it. If you now look at the weigth of the stock gear (0.5 tons) and the B9 gear (~0.1 tons), we notice that the stock gears mass is much lower, and if Bac9 didn't set the 'pendulum length' to a value high enough, the moment of inertia of the B9 wheels will come out to be extremely low, resulting in minimal torque causing maximal angular acceleration. This also explains why struts won't stabilize the B9 gear as much as desired: the force applied to the Gear by struts is (probably - as I suspect) calculated using the current strut strain - which is zero at the time the Gear is still behaving normal, but as soon as the gear starts wobbling, it deflects by up to 45 degrees within a single frame - and as the struts dont do anything until then, the wobbling has already begun and the struts only add more chaotic torque. Given that this theory of wobblyness is correct, the solution to the gear wobbling problem would be to increase the moment of inertia of the B9 Gears to one similar or higher than the stock gears. If the 'SidewaysStiffness' is somehow connected to the moment of inertia, the fix has already been found. If not - who knows where the moments of inertia are set? However, that's only my idea - are there other theories out there? please let me/us know if you have one. gretings Hector

Something I want to ask bac9 for the next KSP update would be to first release a version update of the current version of B9 and then add the new parts which would improve two things: 1.: after the KSP-version works and is released he would only need to worry about the new parts when bubfixing the B9-update-version 2.: we would save ourselves about 20 pages of Forum thread posts of "the old version doesn't work with my new KSP"-complaints after each KSP update... and last but not least something regarding the "Bac9 is lazy"-post I've seen a few pages ago: If it isn't that hard, you're free to do it for Bac9 if you want it that much. If you can't/don't want to: shut the f**k up. I'll wait for Bac9 to do it his way. sorry for swearing Hector

No they didn't. I had them in 0.22 already and posted the probelm here. Try Kerbal joint reinforcement to make your crft work again (and even better than before) - or try attaching the gears to the 1.25m Fuel Tanks / Fuselages supplied by B9 Aerospace (which you may need to ad to your craft). Both could solve the problem for me on their own - together the will solve yours for sure.

first: please keep in mind that the version of B9 you are using is designed to work with KSP 0.22, not 0.23 - bugs are to be expected here. second: I fixed most of the wobbling gear problem in KSP 0.22 without Kerbal joint reinforcement by placing the 1.25m Fuel tanks or fuselages underneath my construction - these parts are seemingly less susceptible to gear wobbling. Moving the last axis of wheels leaving the runway on takeoff closer to the center of mass, decreasing the torque necessary for pitching the plane upwards also helped a lot. I have no explanation for the off-center CoL, my suggestion would be to wait for the 0.23 update of B9. greetings Hector

This gear-wobbling was mentioned a few dozen pages earlier, and it seems like bac9 can't do much about it on his behalf. I fixed the problem by installing the "Kerbal joint Reinforcement" mod, which also helped me save 90% of my struts, and I can only revommend it since my Rockets can still break, but bend much less (which seems much more realistic to me).