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fourfa

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  1. OK, here's a good one https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Mk3-Speedster-4 Set blade controls to Throttle, launch at full throttle, then when speed levels out, try reducing throttle and watch speed increase
  2. Congrats! Well right away I see with one of my record attempt planes (EM-64s motors and loads of R-12 blades) the controller pushes the blade angle way too far. I always found peak speed with this craft at 62 degrees, but only after a long slow ramp up to that speed with a lot of time spent in the high 50s. In Thrust mode, the controller jumped right to 66 almost right off the ground. Then after a few maneuvers it seemed to get stuck at 53 degrees and never went above it again. Reverting to runway, twice in a row it tried to launch with negative pitch (and tipped over and exploded). Then back to the initial behavior. I could not get it to repeat the speed record in that screenshot until disabling and manually using the settings illustrated. Repeated with my Mk3 heavy speed plane - similar, blades go to a too-high setting too quickly (15° too high) Try using physical time warp - typically I see the blades stretch out from the hub and start doing a bizarre dance, speed drops drastically, craft loses control. Cancel physwarp and control is slowly regained - but the controller has become confused and seems to get stuck in a slower/lower pitch valley. Not sure this is in scope through? (BTW if you enable "rigid attach" on blades and hub attachments it seems to be able to tolerate 2x physwarp, but not higher - and this seems to come with a speed penalty) Auto-feather on throttle cut is nice Stall recovery, and dynamically tracking during maneuvering is very nice Ah, maybe the reversing on launch has to do with brake being set on launch? Is there a default braking routine bound to brake key? What's the best way to help debug with details? Share craft, share logs, screenshots, ??
  3. https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Dunalander This one fits neatly into a 2-unit Mk3 cargo bay for ease of mothership integration
  4. On the topic of prop plane design difficulties- check out this recent challenge: Standard procedure for me: a pair of motors set to counter-rotate. Can be L&R nacelles, front and back facing motors inside a service bay, or axially-inline clipped almost together to simulate a puller or pusher contra-rotating design. Place one motor, place blades, then copy to the other position NOT using symmetry, then switch rotation on motor and blades on motor #2. Re: number of blades - first, forget about IRL. The parts are balanced too weirdly, if you want best speed for fun or gameplay time efficiency, you will end up with crazy numbers of blades. Max motor speed is 460rpm from Unity limits (50 rad/s?). I’ve consistently found that best speed occurs with no excess motor torque - ie enough blades to drag RPMs down a bit to ~440rpm on a top speed run. If it stays pegged at 460rpm, add blades. If it drops well below 400rpm, I’ve always found more speed by removing blades until you’re just below max RPM. The combination of motor size and blade size has a lot of different ideal blade numbers (more details in the challenge thread). My most fervent wish is an automatic blade pitch controller! I put blade pitch on H/N (or I/K, J/L whatever you like), motor torque on main throttle. My gut tells me there’s a linear airspeed vs ideal blade pitch curve, or close enough. But the H/N keys and the angle readout in the PAW are pretty blunt - the tiniest taps can produce visible changes in speed while still rounding to the same 1° increments in the slider. But typing numbers in when switching to PAW ‘#’ mode is too slow and clumsy. Simple open-loop blade pitch control from prograde airspeed would be a huge improvement, and would make stall recovery much safer. Currently you need to rapidly manually unstall the blades after a wing stall, and since top speed runs are always at low altitude, it’s dicey. Closed-loop control seeking max speed would be fun to play with too. Motor torque doesn’t get a lot of use, as blade pitch is a much more direct speed control for takeoff and landing. Currently I’m playing a lot with tilt-engine VTOLS, and the props that get you 300+m/s level flight are absurdly overpowered for VTOL. Like at top speed I’ll be at 100% torque, 51° blade pitch for 350m/s. 1% power and 1° pitch for VTOL and the craft leaps into the air. Way too sensitive to key taps for vertical speed control near the ground, so I set the motor brakes to 1% and duty cycle the brake key to slow the motor a bit to make final vertical descent and landing. Perhaps it’s smarter to put RPM limiter on main throttle instead for these craft...
  5. In KSP there's a "fine physics bubble" of 2.3km around the active craft. Inside that bubble, physics events like chutes opening, drag effects, solar panel EC charge etc get calculated even for craft other than the one you're flying. As you move away from a probe, some of these stop being calculated. For instance as you fly away from your drop probe, I would not be surprised if KSP stops modeling aero entirely and the probe plummets without deploying chutes at all. Even worse, entire craft that are in flight in atmosphere just get deleted when they're more than 25km (I think?) away. The solution is to drop the probe, throttle down, and circle around it until chutes deploy and it lands safely. I wouldn't change focus to the probe at all, just stay within that 2.3km bubble. Once it's safely landed, it's safe to leave the area and eventually come back to the probe via the tracking station. I do this all the time with plane-dropped relay stations, rovers, etc. Another solution would be for KSP to model fine physics to a larger bubble, or to all craft - people on potato computers would not like this solution. But if you're able to use mods, it is possible to increase the fine-physics bubble size on your install, or control both craft sequentially after the fact.
  6. Eve gravity is 1.7 times Kerbin's. Try testing the same craft on Kerbin with enough ballast to weigh 1.7 times as much, or use the F12 cheat menu to hack gravity to 1.7 for testing, and see what happens. Just going by gut feel, that rover looks pretty big for just 4 wheels. Eve's gravity is too high to do much EVA construction... Not many options other than send a new craft or revert to before the launch...
  7. Skip the inventory entirely. Click the hook icon on the right side to enter construction mode (or press the ‘i’ key shortcut). That’s the only way to manipulate larger parts
  8. Ladder drives have indeed been around in KSP for a long time. And as for Newton - unfortunately this is a phantom force originating from nowhere, and there is no equal and opposite reaction. Try this - take a craft based on one of the Vostok style pods (so no reaction wheels), send an engineer out on EVA (remaining on the invisible ladder). Now remove a part, observe the continuously increasing pitch rate, and see how long it takes before the ship flies apart
  9. One consequence of the tweak to mass around kerbals and jetpacks and anti-sliding boot glue: kerbals can only just barely fly on Duna now. Best to offload the parachute and get the EVA propellant quantity down first, then jump to defeat the sticky boots. Bring ladders - construction while hovering there is going to be difficult.
  10. This was fun, please make this a recurring event in the future!
  11. Nope, I’m quite happy to have two slots. It will speed up establishing deployed science stations when they need to be out of right-click range of the ship. And at times I’m going to love the mass savings of omitting them. And a crew of 10, why would you need more than say 2-3 jet packs? More options are good.
  12. The answer is: yes. I've done this a few times in previous versions, so why not check in on the current version... You'll need to zoom way in if you want to inspect the data yourself. It's just a big Mk3 plane with 8 simultaneous tail attachment variations on its RAPIERs. This is only at this one point, around Mach 5 at low altitude slightly before exploding. There's a drag curve at different speeds and altitudes but the offsets between different combinations track at all speeds (in my previous experience) so I'm not going to bother with plotting curves. There's a little angle of attack so a little side drag on the parts, though that's pretty typical for most SSTO ascents. Listed from worst to best: Bare RAPIER: 24.40 drag with Advanced Nose Cone A: 18.30 total drag (RAPIER plus nose cone) with CH-J3 avionics hub: 18.06 with Small Nose Cone: 17.69 with FL-A10 + Small Nose Cone: 17.00 with Circular Intake: 16.73 with Shock Cone: 15.81 with Aerodynamic Nose Cone: 14.87 Aerodynamic Nose Cone wins with a 40% reduction in drag! It's also one of the lighter options, so this really should be your go-to aero tailcone for RAPIER engines. Just remember to clip it forward 4-5 ticks as it will obstruct engine thrust and explode otherwise.
  13. Mass limit is 0.06t, divided by gravity relative to Kerbin. So Minmus (0.05g) limit is 1.2t
  14. A simple MM mod to override all stock part buoyancy settings is a great idea. I’m imagining subs that can rise or sink by opening and closing cargo bays (“flooding the tanks” etc), needing to test whether your reentry capsules float, seaplanes requiring certain wing and fuselage structures to float, etc. All with stock parts and no clipped Vectors and ore tanks etc. I would definitely contribute and play test. An duplicate of stock prop models that actually work in water (and don’t work in air) would be a nice option too, if progress is made on that. I don’t really go for part mods but I love stock overhauls that add depth (pun not intended)
  15. I did a little research on part mass limits on a few celestial bodies. In orbit, the engineer can handle all parts listed under the Cargo tab (top left corner), the most massive of which is the 1.875m monoprop tank FL-R5 at 1.85 tons. On Minmus, full FL-R5 (1.85t) is too heavy, as is FL-R5 with 255 units of monoprop (1.270t), but with 254 units (1.266t) it could be moved. Though around these masses, the green highlighting on mouse-over flickered in an odd way, whatever that means. Max = 1.266t? On Mun, FAT-455 tailfin (0.36t) is OK, but XL girder (0.375t) is too heavy. Max 0.37t? On Kerbin, the HG-5 antenna (0.07t) is too heavy. Playing with slowly emptying fuel tanks, 0.060t seems to be the max I've been able to move Might be fun to try deriving an equation relative to surface gravity to predict limits on all bodies..? Weird bugs I found through this: - Occasionally the mass limits are not obeyed. For instance on Minmus the full FL-R5 is too heavy, but once in a while I would succeed in picking it up but then be unable to place it again, or even to drop it. The only way to get out of this stuck condition is to exit Build mode, at which point the fuel tank vanishes. Return to Build mode and it's still stuck to the cursor but unable to be placed. And in this state, Esc does nothing - no pause, no ability to revert or leave the scene. The only was I found to clear this (other that force-quit) was board the craft, EVA again, press 'I' as fast as possible - then I was able to (illegally) place the too-heavy part again, and the Esc menu came back. Maybe there's a brief window of time after starting EVA where illegal build ops are allowed? Can anyone reproduce? - In attempting to measure the maximum allowable mass, I made a craft with one full tank and one empty one. I transferred contents from the full one to the empty one until the engineer was able to move it. However on reattaching the part-full tank, it magically became full! I investigated a bit - if the tank starts out full on scene load then gets emptied, remove and replace the depleted tank and it returns to however much fuel it had at scene load. Exit the scene with the tank empty and return, and the refill glitch stops. Hello exploits! Can anyone reproduce? - There are tons of parts that should be buildable if mass limit is the only factor. For instance the 1.875m FL-TX220 tank from MH (1.2375t) is listed, but FL-A151S (the 1.875m-1.25m tapered tank, 0.9t) is not. If you put the A151S in front of an engineer they can't manipulate it. The HubMax at 1.5t is less than FL-R5, but not listed (would be handy at times for station building). I'm going to assume these are simple oversights and can be patched? Or is there something evil about non-listed parts? - In the VAB/SPH editor, there are weird errors when sorting parts by mass (as I did while trying to find these limits). For instance go to Cargo -> Fuel Tanks and the order I see by descending Mass is: FL-R5 (1.85t), PB-X750 (0.76t), FL-TX220 (1.2375t), FL-T200 (1.125t), Radial holding tank (0.125t), FL-R25 (0.56t), FL-T100 (0.5625t), Fuel Duct (0.05t), R-12 Doughnut (0.3375), and so on. 6 or 7 parts out of sequence out of 19
  16. TIL: if you send your engineer out to work on a craft in orbit, and job one is attach a ladder you had stored in cargo to make the task easier, then grab onto the ladder, then accidentally detach the ladder while holding the ladder: you get flung away from the craft at 50m/s while holding the ladder. Can't activate jetpack and fly back to the craft without dropping the ladder. Fun! lol
  17. Remove the landing gear light action from the Lights action group and put it in the Gear action group, make sure they’re on when you launch, and you’re good to go. Not hard to write a Module Manager patch to make this the default setup for every landing gear part either.
  18. The Hitchhiker is tough. It’s a real struggle just to make 80km orbit with a perfect ascent. Gotta use the heavy structural adaptors for drag, and even then I was flaming out during circularization. Forget about taking it anywhere; target craft and engineers will have to come to it. So we’re looking at either lawn or orbital assembly to bring its dead mass somewhere with just three baguettes (its max cargo payload). It’s obviously far cheaper just to carry the three baguettes directly, No, I think carrying stored parts as cargo is a dead end for the Cave. And generally too - the mass and size limitations are pretty strict. Can’t move much mass at all on Kerbin. But there’s still a lot of potential in orbital refinement (remove empty tanks, add full ones, add landing legs to a bare lander, swap Terrier for Spark etc)
  19. In 1.11 there are new stock RCS thruster block variants (2-way, 3-way, 5-way, as well as the old 4-way). Place a new part created in 1.11, and RCS_BA seems to behave as if it sees all five possible thrust axes active, regardless of which variant is selected. Trivial to reproduce and expected for new functionality on launch day, but might as well report it... Thanks for keeping this essential mod alive!
  20. From Modder’s Notes (here, as it’s more general than mod-specific): ”Kerbals are no longer massless, and the weight they carry in their inventories matters in terms of physics. In order to not impact the way existing vessels fly, an amount of mass equal to the size of the crew times the mass of a kerbal with a full jetpack and a parachute (94kg) is subtracted from the vessel mass and added back in function of the crew in the vessel. This is all already done automatically, but if you want to play around with different mass values for a kerbal, the value is kerbalCrewMass in Physics.cfg (defaults to 45 kg).” @JPLRepo does this mean a pod launched with a crew, who then exit and stay behind, will be lighter than one that launches with no crew? That seems odd and probably not what you’re saying here. Clarification? Thanks
  21. There is a larger container available: the Hitchhiker. Going to be tricky to launch a 2.5m part in caveman, but it has a lot of container volume. I was thinking of replacing external Baguettes to refurbish late-cave crewed Mun landers... There is mass savings by deleting jetpack and personal parachute (useless except for ladder riders). There is part count savings when full RCS arrays are needed, with 2 5-way parts instead of the usual 4 4-way parts, plus the new small RCS is a lot lighter EVA propellant is now infinite, a kerbal on a ladder can store and retrieve it to refill without ever boarding. This is a big change for interplanetary missions! And kerbals landing and returning on Minmus from orbit via jetpack - this will probably become routine now I'm thinking a tall rover/crane could bring an engineer to command pod height on the pad to install small bits and bobs, significantly easing the part count limit and slightly easing the mass limit I think orbital stations are a lot more appealing now as a place to keep things and build/rebuild craft. Ladder ride to 80km orbit is a lot simpler than to Minmus or Mun. Though a Minmus flats junk station could be interesting... EVA science is cute, but I think it's just once per surface, plus space-low and space-high? Haven't checked yet. It's not a lot, not going to be a game-changer. Two bugs I found: with existing games, you have to go to R&D to "discover" the jetpack and parachute on the start node, which could come as a surprise. And due to some change in the HG-5, I had to unlock it again at the cost of 1500 kerbucks.
  22. Fuel transfer bugfix finally? ohhhh that's nice, I just tested and seems to work Don't know what's meant here - diameter still doesn't match other 2.5m parts, second line no idea what that means
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