What's fixed, what's still unfixed?

[Sharpy]

I'm returning after well over a year of a pause. I quit somewhere around 1.0.3, and only recently began playing anew. I like the new features, and I'm adapting to the changes (like the A.I.R.B.R.A.K.E.S. are no longer totally OP; no longer possible to land on Kerbin directly from return trajectory  from Minmus). I saw some old bugs unfixed though, and I wonder what I must be cautious about, and where can I go wild.

I know:

- the large decoupler is still bugged to hell. Had a launch stage fly right through the orbital stage, leaving through the front.)

- the random overheating bug. Not sure where it comes from. Came to a craft mid-flight, and saw just empty space. Log showed "[everything] exploded due to overheating"

- markers (craft, target position) on the rendezvous planning are still wonky as hell, vanishing at random. Possibly more so than they used to be.

- VAB editor still sometimes thinks radial symmetry placement of tanks attached to hydraulic detachment mainfolds means "place all tanks around the current mainfold" instead of "attach tanks to remaining mainfolds"

but...

- is the Klaw still a Kraken-bait?

- Do I still need to fear the large service bay?

- do engines throttle to near zilch while ISRU is running?

- does mining+ISRU still deplete asteroids at staggering pace while all fuel tanks are full and a little fuel is drawn (e.g. by fuel cell)

- do jet engines still have that funny center of mass placement? How is it with the new engines?

- when docking, does the target appear in the navball in the docking port direction from the root part, and not from the "control from here" docking port?

Also: the lab used to return the experiment after processing it into data. Is that still the case, or does lab-processed experiments vanish permanently?

Edited August 2, 2016 by Sharpy

[dafidge9898]

29 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

do jet engines still have that funny center of mass placement? How is it with the new engines?

I know the jet engines still have the funny center of mass placement, but really, it's not that funny. There's a lot more to a jet engine than just the nozzle: the compressor, combustion chamber, turbine, etc. All this takes up most of the mass of the engine, but in KSP only the nozzle of the engine is shown. It still takes into account the mass of the rest of the engine, thus the weird center of mass placement. 

[Sharpy]

1 minute ago, dafidge9898 said:

 but in KSP only the nozzle of the engine is shown. It still takes into account the mass of the rest of the engine, thus the weird center of mass placement. 

Except when you place a couple jet engines on your Munar rover, with nozzles pointing straight up. That way your rover's center of mass lands below the ground level, making it way more stable. Say what you want, I'm finding it funny.

[Vanamonde]

I have been using claws on space stations lately, and having no trouble. Looks like the Claw fixed the claw. 

[PT]

Wheels. Wheels got worse. So did landing legs. Ugh. Thank Kraken for girders.

[bewing]

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

 

- is the Klaw still a Kraken-bait?

No. The klaw works perfectly. But it is a very powerful device, so they made it finicky about the attachment angle to compensate. So you have to attach it quite precisely.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

- Do I still need to fear the large service bay?

Not as far as I know.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

- do engines throttle to near zilch while ISRU is running?

No, I don't think the ISRU affects engine throttle at all.

If you run the ISRU and a drill at the same time, the drill runs extra fast. That's the only issue I know about that.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

- does mining+ISRU still deplete asteroids at staggering pace while all fuel tanks are full and a little fuel is drawn (e.g. by fuel cell)

Not as far as I know. When your ore tanks are full, your drills stop. When your tanks are full, the ISRU stops.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

- do jet engines still have that funny center of mass placement? How is it with the new engines?

You have a CoM indicator when you are building a jet. Just follow it. Otherwise, the engines work very nicely.

1 hour ago, Sharpy said:

Also: the lab used to return the experiment after processing it into data. Is that still the case, or does lab-processed experiments vanish permanently?

No, the experiments get used up now when you process them. Gone.

 

The one big issue at the moment is landing legs and wheels. I always advise completely avoiding landing legs and using any other type of part to land on, until the issue gets fully resolved. My preference is wing parts to land on. Wheels can be bouncy. Use the "Absolute" rotation mode to make sure they are nice and straight. Tweak the friction (low on the front wheels, high on the rear wheels) to prevent veering and spinouts.

SAS has some issues, especially when trying to manage a lot of reaction wheel torque. As you say, markers are a problem.

Yes, there are still many old bugs around. 

But the one important thing is that almost all the kraken are gone. The game is very stable in that sense. So I'd say, except for the landing legs, go wild!

[Sharpy]

8 minutes ago, PT said:

Wheels. Wheels got worse. So did landing legs. Ugh. Thank Kraken for girders.

Gawd They were supposed to fix the wheels in the upcoming updates! They used to be some kind of powered sleds with no traction/power on the reverse side. (I built a very flat rover that was meant to still drive alright when it flips upside down, It was a bummer to find out the wheels aren't really round and don't work when turned upside down!) - so you mean they broke it even worse?!

[PT]

1 minute ago, Sharpy said:

Gawd They were supposed to fix the wheels in the upcoming updates! They used to be some kind of powered sleds with no traction/power on the reverse side. (I built a very flat rover that was meant to still drive alright when it flips upside down, It was a bummer to find out the wheels aren't really round and don't work when turned upside down!) - so you mean they broke it even worse?!

Check out this thread

For me this weirdness turns wheels into pogo sticks, bounce bounce bounce explode.

[Sharpy]

16 minutes ago, bewing said:

The one big issue at the moment is landing legs and wheels. I always advise completely avoiding landing legs and using any other type of part to land on, until the issue gets fully resolved. My preference is wing parts to land on. Wheels can be bouncy. Use the "Absolute" rotation mode to make sure they are nice and straight. Tweak the friction (low on the front wheels, high on the rear wheels) to prevent veering and spinouts.

 

Yeah, noticed SAS still can't deal with too much control authority. At least you can throttle the RCS now. Still can't reduce the torque of reaction wheels, but that's not nearly as harmful (plus at last you can switch Roll/Pitch/Yaw off for RCS. It was making tiny craft with Vernor for propulsion impossible to use with SAS+RCS.

What's the current issue with landing legs and wheels? I was just planning to revive my "hopper lab" idea unrealized in the prior version (lots of legs all around the craft, so that it can land any way it likes, rolls to optimal position and jumps to the next biome once science is collected) and now it starts to sound scary.

[bewing]

9 minutes ago, Sharpy said:

What's the current issue with landing legs and wheels? I was just planning to revive my "hopper lab" idea unrealized in the prior version (lots of legs all around the craft, so that it can land any way it likes, rolls to optimal position and jumps to the next biome once science is collected) and now it starts to sound scary.

First, you have to understand that Unity 4 is now unsupported legacy software. So Squad had no choice but to upgrade to Unity 5 at some point. Which they did with version 1.1. The Unity model for wheels and legs is different now, so that code had to be rewritten. No choice. So what is the issue now?

First, when a wheel or leg is touching the ground, the collider pushes it back up again. A little too much. So wheels and legs are always vibrating against the ground. This causes a loss of friction. Which means things "slide". Actually they bounce in very tiny bounces downhill (usually).

Second, joints in Unity 5 seem to be perpetual motion machines. If you bend a joint, it will rebound with more force and energy than you put into it. Combine this with the vibrations coming up the legs and wheels from the ground, and you can easily get a bounce that intensifies and self-reinforces. Even if the suspensions on the wheels and legs are working, which I'm not sure they are. (It's so hard to tell with all the bouncing going on.)

Third, legs are too fragile. A wing can take a bigger impact and a heavier load than the biggest landing leg. There is no explanation for it. On that same vein, just having a kerbal walk near a leg can make it explode. Again, there is no possible explanation for it. You can try your hopper lab, but I'm not sure it'll roll to an upright position properly -- the legs may overstress and break first.

However, on the other hand -- wheels are basically working. You can make a rover that you can drive. You can make a plane that takes off and lands -- even out in the wilderness. The lowest-tier airplane wheels are very fragile, on purpose. They used to be indestructible, so that is a big change. Some people don't like big changes. So if you are using those, you have to be gentle and treat them with loving kindness. The other airplane wheels are quite sturdy. As I said above, there may be tweaks needed to make an airplane roll straight, but it's doable. Some people claim that it's impossible for them to make planes roll straight, but they've never proven it -- and MY planes roll straight.

[Sharpy]

1 hour ago, bewing said:

However, on the other hand -- wheels are basically working.

Keyword: basically. Just tried my ambi-upperous rover idea. The wheels are still just sleds. No propulsion if you flip over.

 

Quote

The lowest-tier airplane wheels are very fragile, on purpose. They used to be indestructible, so that is a big change.

Hey, the simple "fixed landing gear" still seems to be mighty. 125m/s crash tolerance, and behaved well both on Mun and Duna. Though the "Steerable landing wheel" with its alleged 325m/s crash tolerance exploded on Duna, despite hitting the ground really lightly, and caused me... uh, an adventure.

[bewing]

2 hours ago, Sharpy said:

Keyword: basically. Just tried my ambi-upperous rover idea. The wheels are still just sleds. No propulsion if you flip over.

Ah, perhaps I should have mentioned that. Yeah, it's only about the bottom 30 degrees of the wheel that acts like a wheel. Or has ever acted like a wheel. They are not circles, so you cannot ever flip them much and have them work.