Getting so fed up with Eve and this game's excrements

[martinborgen]

Rant warning: 

I'm trying to land a large plane and a lander on eve. Everything is the Mk3 and Big-S parts, so very good heat tolerances. I managed to land a smaller plane with the same lift/drag ratio, but upscaling it causes all sorts of weird effects - especially wings breaking off halfway through the atmosphere, sometimes without cause, sometimes due to structural failure, sometimes to G-forces exceeded (the plane is not rotating or anything). It feels like the game, when more parts are in play, tends to let things break esier if it struggles with the framerate and more complex parts (as in more partcounts). 

The aerodynamic forces are beyond what the game is designed to cope with. The forces acted upon my lander by the rear inflatable heatshield warped my craft - I had to reset the autostrutting to get the cockpit/top part aligned with the bottom again. There are no lander leg of the required sturdyness to land an eve lander - the engines are far better! The inflatable heatshield seems to be perfectly designed to keep a craft going sideways - you should not be required to build redicilous heat-shield parachute on top of the craft just to keep the correct end pointing towards space.  

Edited March 27, 2017 by martinborgen

[Aegolius13]

Yeah, I've experienced some very weird physics on Eve as well.  Like if you save while your chutes are open, and then try to reload, it will insta-kraken your ship into oblivion.  Though part of what you're seeing may have a grain of reality.  If you upscale a ship by 2, the mass goes up by a factor of 8, while the surface area only goes up by a factor of 4 - so reentry is inherently harder with bigger craft.  There may also be issues of leverage on longer wings.  

As far as lander legs, the best I've done is to put like 8 on my ship, expect a few to break, and hope there are still enough left to keep my ship intact.  I've had plenty of heat shield problems too.  I can usually get it working with oodles of airbrakes and mass balancing, but it takes a while.

All in all, I've definitely been super-frustrated with Eve in the moment, but (physics glitches aside), I'm glad it's hard.  Once you've got the basics down, there's not much variation in difficulty in the other planets. Eve makes you work a little harder, but that makes eventual success all the more satisfying. 

[martinborgen]

Yeah, the chute-kraken I know too! 

By upscaling, I tripled the mass, and tripled the ammount of big-S delta wings attatched to the side fuselages. So the forces should remain the same, as each wing is still directly attatched to a fuselage, and the drag, distributed evenly on the wings should be equal provided the craft is not spinning around, which it's not. When keeping my heading with no roll, some wing on one side breaks but the other side it doesen't - which makes no sense! The drag and heating on both sides are equal! An intersting note is that it's always the same wings, that go poof, which leads me to believe it's a bug or otherwise strange code related phenomenon to the radial attatchment or something. 

 

It feels like the game tends to calculate some of these things in a "spikey" manner, heat is often fluctuating - easily visible on the engine parts, and I would assume other calculations work in a similar fasion. 

Edited March 28, 2017 by martinborgen

[Hotaru]

The lack of decent size stock landing legs bothers me as well. Two admittedly less-than-ideal options while we wait for Squad to get around to adding better ones: use a mod that adds bigger landing legs (I personally like Kerbal Reusability Expansion but there are plenty of choices out there) or use the stock aircraft wheels, which look a bit funky but are MUCH sturdier than the biggest stock legs.

[Snark]

Yes, Eve is hard, by design.  That's kind of the point of Eve.    It's doable, just... hard.  (You think it's hard now... you should have seen some of the contraptions people built before that handy 10m inflatable shield was available!)

15 hours ago, martinborgen said:

There are no lander leg of the required sturdyness to land an eve lander

No argument there!  I'll certainly agree with you that the game has a "hole" in the lander-leg department.  There really needs to be an additional size-up available.  If you don't mind using mods, the SpaceY mod has some nice big landing legs, modeled after the ones SpaceX uses on its reusable boosters.  The Karbonite mod has some pretty good ones too, albeit with a very different design.

15 hours ago, martinborgen said:

The inflatable heatshield seems to be perfectly designed to keep a craft going sideways

Yes, it's a challenge, but it can be worked around.  There are a lot of potential ways to design around this, it's all a question of ship design.  Yes, it's hard, but Eve's supposed to be hard.

[Hodo]

Eve, the purple Kerbal Eater....

 

I love hate that planet.  I have been there 3 times, and only landed 1 probe there, which I never bothered to recover.  But the thing with Eve is the atmosphere scales completely differently than Kerbin, and is MUCH thicker so an upscaled version of something that worked there before may not be the correct answer.  The smaller craft may have only JUST barely worked before, but the larger, more fragile and heavier parts will not.  

 

You have to look at the increased surface area of the larger craft, thus higher drag, and higher friction so more heat.   So for a larger craft you will have to change your decent profile to come in slower and shallower than the smaller craft.   

 

This why many landers on Eve are your standard run of the mill pod landers.  

[Foxster]

Thank you for your interest in contacting the feedback department of Eve Inc. 

We would like to apologise for the difficulties you have been having, but won't. 

In your future endeavours when visiting our planet you might like to think of travel to Eve as like a difficult but rewarding school subject, such as Maths or Physics. She is not like taking a pretend subject such as Media or Drama.  

If you are the sort who enjoys Media or Drama then I suggest you redial to 1-800-boo-ooh-life-is-hard-fix-it-for-me.  

[martinborgen]

4 hours ago, Foxster said:

Thank you for your interest in contacting the feedback department of Eve Inc. 

We would like to apologise for the difficulties you have been having, but won't. 

In your future endeavours when visiting our planet you might like to think of travel to Eve as like a difficult but rewarding school subject, such as Maths or Physics. She is not like taking a pretend subject such as Media or Drama.  

If you are the sort who enjoys Media or Drama then I suggest you redial to 1-800-boo-ooh-life-is-hard-fix-it-for-me.  

My math and physics tells me my wings should either be completely fine, or blow up evenly/proportional to the stresses acting upon them - not a select few randomly dissapear when the other wings are fine. My math also tells me three evenly spaces inflatable heatshields shouldn't induce rotation to my craft. Also my physics tells me detatched heatshields should eventually come down, not spin forever in the air, kept up by some kraken force. 

[Blaarkies]

6 hours ago, martinborgen said:

My math and physics tells me my wings should either be completely fine, or blow up evenly/proportional to the stresses acting upon them - not a select few randomly dissapear when the other wings are fine. My math also tells me three evenly spaces inflatable heatshields shouldn't induce rotation to my craft. Also my physics tells me detatched heatshields should eventually come down, not spin forever in the air, kept up by some kraken force. 

Can you show us this math, please?

[Dafni]

15 hours ago, Snark said:

 If you don't mind using mods, the SpaceY mod has some nice big landing legs, modeled after the ones SpaceX uses on its reusable boosters. 

The SpaceX-style landing legs are part of the Kerbal Reuseability Expansion mod, AFAIK.

I'm not sure right now if SpaceY has them too, but the ones I use at the moment are definitely from KRE

[Snark]

4 hours ago, Dafni said:

I'm not sure right now if SpaceY has them too

Well, you might not be sure, but I am, because I use them all the time and they're right there.

Nobody ever said that two different mod authors can't add similar parts to their mods...

[Dafni]

7 minutes ago, Snark said:

Well, you might not be sure, but I am, because I use them all the time and they're right there.

Nobody ever said that two different mod authors can't add similar parts to their mods...

Point taken, cheers. I'll have to look at the SpaceY ones too, then. Thanks for pointing this out.