P.Funk

I was afraid this was going to be the answer. I already do this and thats a lot of micro for flying even 1/4 of the way around the planet. I guess I'm going back to KOS to try to make a level autopilot for myself. Thanks for the answers.

Not in my experience. It flops around like crazy and stalls out. It always quickly ends up with increasing oscillations that lead to full departure from control.

Basically is there one? Everything I find seems to be geared towards orbital autopilots or rocket ascent autopilots. These naturally perform dreadfully in atmosphere and flop around until you stall out. All I really want is something that'll fly straight and level at a set altitude (with FAR installed) while I walk away from the computer or time accel to get somewhere. Its tedious as all hell trying to trim a high mach aircraft to maintain its optimal altitude and SAS of course is of no use in that situation. I've examined KOS but there may be some limiting factors, not sure yet. Anybody got anything?

I'm still trying to figure out what this means: Suffix 'control' not found on object It happens everytime I try to do a 'set ship:control' command.

Have you addressed the issue I see with just about every single cargo ramp part, namely that there isn't enough headroom to drive something that can fit the full height of the interior up the ramp itself? If you watch videos of actual real life cargo ramps opening you'll see that they create this headroom by having a part that recedes upwards, not just downwards. This is a problem thats especially bad with B9 Aerospace cargo ramps.

Rather than starting a new thread I figured I'd throw my thought in here. Basically it would be nice to have a Hanger of sorts near the runway at the KSC that you could place recovered vessels into, mostly I'm thinking things like SSTOs and regular aircraft, that are despawned form active memory so that you can store perfectly functional ships within easy taxi range of the runway without having to deal with the massive lag of loading all of them up when you come in to land or take off from the KSC. Basically it'd be like the garage in a GTA game. You just have a few big hangers and you can taxi your aircraft in there, or drag them in there or whatever and when you close the door it isn't in memory anymore but all the flaws in the ship are still there. If you had a hard landing and lost a bit then its gone, or loose or whatever. Ultimately this could allow another menu where you'd be able to do things like refuel it or perhaps open it into the VAB/SPH where you could make more limited alternations like adding struts or removing little things like lights or ladders or whatever. If you had a design that was iterated further you could bring it in to the VAB this way to basically upgrade it to the new "block" as they do with real aircraft. With an SSTO you could use this as the way that you reassemble it with a new payload for launch. My thought is I really want to avoid the gamey thing of removing a recovered vehicle from existence and having some abstract way of justifying how its recovery benefited you. I don't want to get a free part that was in the old vessel, I want the same part attached to the same fuselage with all the same aerodynamic properties or torque issues or fuel line problems and you get tweak not just a design but the same literal assembly of parts and see how long you can use it. Imagine being able to literally use the same SSTO for years in KSP. Every reentry would have serious meaning because you're really trying not to lose that ship that has served you so well for so many missions. Not only that but as you refine your designs every iteration that you field will be unique. The Mk1 will have a tendency to do THIS while the Mk2 specifically avoided this. The Mk1 you recovered last mission you brought up in the VAB and tried to add some of the changes made to the Mk2 so that it handles a bit better, but because you can't fully revamp these ships in the VAB/SPH you make compromises and it will always handle just differently and so it has character. To me this would make a properly re-usable fleet possible without needing to be too involved in balancing some arbitrary recovery system. Land your spaceplane and taxi it to the hanger and reload it for another mission and fly her again and again, warts and all.

Every hardcore sim I can think of has a menu that lets you turn it from something so realistic that you need to read at least one 500 page PDF file and study it for weeks down to something thats as arcadey as a gameboy game. Options are always better than no options. Options are the holy grail of gameplay in my opinion. Its the difference between making a good game for most people and a great game for everyone who plays it. Too few developers appreciate the value of offering options to their players. Consoles particularly have gutted this I believe and it has leeched into some of the PC gaming mindset. Nevertheless this is a sandbox game at heart. Sandboxes are all about options and thats inherent to gameplay. Why shouldn't we have all the options we want on the meta level as well? Give us hardcore difficulty with reentry, aerodynamics, life support, remote communications, the works. Then let everyone switch those off and play a stripped down version if they so choose. It doesn't harm the gameplay. Its easy to strip a difficulty feature from a game and see no change than to try and shoehorn one into a game that doesn't quite fit it. In the end playing KSP with all those realism switch turned off will be akin to playing KSP by deactivating your mods. I have no idea why some people feel upset with options. Sometimes it feels like someone else playing the same game at a harder level than them emasculates them or something. I know for a fact that making all these "hardcore" options off by default will go over better than if they are on. I just know thats how the psychology will break down.

He was the only KSP guy I really followed when he was active, other than Scott Manley. He did some really excellent things with stock. I think my favourite was how he retrofitted the front of his carrier which had been damaged by flying up new parts and attaching them with docking ports. His imagined fiction behind his videos was also lots of fun. I keep him subbed just in case....

FAR makes anyone who has any latent understanding of how real airplanes fly have an infinitely better time building airplanes. I play lots of flight sims and trying to fly in KSP without FAR involves turning off a big part of my brain that contains learned knowledge and reflexes. Its worth it in my opinion just to have the airplanes do things in an expected way. Stock aero is just terrible in all kinds of not so fun ways. I don't buy the whole "it fits the cartoony style" thing either. Even looney toons rockets had nose cones. Also, considering the fact that teachers are now using KSP to help people understand things like orbital mechanics it kind of points towards the intent of the game is not about being unrealistic to a huge degree because while you can use KSP for teaching about space there's no way you'd ever use KSP in its current form to teach aerodynamics. Using FAR has made me more interested in exploring Kerbin itself. Before I used far I was always put off by the goofy aerodynamics and got into space as fast as possible.

Thanks for helping me get started. However when I tried to launch this script I get the following error: Error on line 0: Suffix 'control' not found on obj etc Any ideas? I've discovered that it happens anytime I try to execute a 'set ship:control:' command. I use lots of mods like Ferram but should this be a problem?

Yea, I saw that. I basically posted earlier as I was about to go out without having reviewed everything. By looking at it more closely it should be relatively simple to tell it to do something like say: Or something? Right now I'm not looking for anything too sexy. Basically my goal would be to recreate a program that would emulate the autopilot on the real life A-10. Basically its a Pitch, Heading, Altitude hold autopilot that is not integrated into the throttle so it literally just has 3 modes that allow either level flight at a fixed altitude, level flight at a fixed vertical pitch of the velocity vector, and fixed altitude with a fixed bank angle. So far looking over what KOS is capable of I'm wondering if its even possible to have it respond to the altitude hold settings by using the altitude at the time it was activated and not one I enter as a fixed interger. Possibly I guess once I get into it. The other thing that I'm curious about is whether it can distinguish the velocity vector from the pitch of the longitudinal axis of the aircraft. This would be more useful than just telling it to maintain a given pitch or pitch a given amount until vertical velocity is zero. Anyway, I haven't even tried yet so I'll get down to it and be back when I have some results.

I can't really read 44 pages so I'm just gonna ask, is there anyone who has or knows if you could use this to create a level autopilot for atmospheric flight? Basically something that will vary pitch angle to achieve a stable altitude or a null vertical velocity. I browsed the syntax list and didn't see anything specifically for that. I don't mind doing work on my own to achieve it, I just want to know if I'm sniffing under the right tree.

I don't care if I forgot to get rid of the UI, I just like the way that looks.

I recall the math saying that using technology from the day it was estimated that a ship of this design could reach a speed so close to that of Light that it could get to Alpha Centauri in something like 100 years, assuming they didn't bother to actually slow down. Its pretty startling if you think about it. Seems pretty obvious that if we ever have interstellar travel beyond our solar system it won't be happening with a manned crew before we get some kind of long term life-stasis system working, that or we find a bunch of genius prodigies to send around the age of 10 once we've advanced health care tech to the point that we live more than 100 years reliably.

There's too much that's just not possible without mods. I like to use as much stock stuff as possible while using parts that increase the capability of things I build without giving them a leg up in terms of engine efficiency or fuel payload versus weight. Sometimes I just wanna try and land the Buran from the Soviet Pack without needing to spend a week trying to build a balanced shuttle and launcher system, you know? There are some things I'd never get around to doing without mods to make getting to the problem possible.