Pds314

Keep all parts of the aircraft sharp-edged and very distant from vertical when viewed from plus or minus 10 degrees. Do not use any vertical or near vertical surfaces anywhere. Check the RCS and make sure that all parts of the craft are black. Grey is bad and white is very very very bad. In my experience a 3 meter wide procedural cone 1 meter in height has effectively no RCS. So probably the closer your craft is to a flying saucer with a sharp bladed edge, the better. Also don't try to do directional stealth. IIRC BDA does not calculate RCS on the fly or even used cached RCS values for different aspects. Stealth needs to be all-aspect (all horizontal aspects) to be useful. One last thing is don't bother thinking about serrations, large surfaces, limiting sharp edges, or edge wave diffraction. It seems like BDA uses a simplified Fresnel camera model that means this kind of complex calculation isn't needed.

ahh. So just giving a RealFuels tanks the self sealing tank module doesn't mean it will actually act like it has those features?

Is there an easy way to get self-sealing tanks and firebottle GUI to show up for RealFuels tanks? I set it so that they have the module but it doesn't seem to actually show the GUI for self-sealing tanks when I click a real-fuels tank.

Thank you! Also wow dissecting BDA's MM cfgs is a good way to learn how to make module manager mods. At least at the level of "make this part behave how I want." Although it won't go below 100 just from setting max HP. Maybe I need to set the current HP as well.

Is there a good way to make Kerbals much squishier? It feels wrong that I can hit a Kerbal with a 20mm round, penetrate straight through them and they are just built diff, and then hit a cockpit which survives but procedural-kills its Kerbals. It effectively makes open cockpits much stronger than non-armored enclosed single part cockpits. I'm having situations where Kerbals piloting a 500 kg wooden biplane take a 20mm round to the face at 500% damage and a ballistic damage modifier of 3, survive with half their plane and no apparent discomfort from being shot with an autocannon, and proceed to use their rifle caliber machinegun with inert slug ammo to pilot snipe the 3000 kg Aluminium WWII aircraft they got in a headon with as it goes by. If I could set Kerbals to hhave like 5 or 10 health so they have some chance to survive an inert rrifle caliber round bbut pretty much no chance to survive pretty much anything stronger and can get wiped out by splash damage that would feel more sensible.

press alt-b or press the settings icon in the weapon manager.

So, I figured out settings that make 7.62 slugs a viable, if not exactly strong, weapon for BDA. 1. damage 500% but you were probably gonna do that anyway. 2. ballistic damage multiplier = 3 (maximum value). 3. Procedural battle damage = 100%. 4. Engines flame out at 80% HP. Frequency of engine damage at maximum. 5. make sure pilot snipes are allowed. Don't get me wrong, based on the tag mode, my new more efficient biplane still needs a lot of hits to kill a late WWII monoplane, about 80 concentrated in a small area, but 80 hits out of 1800 rounds is more than doable if the enemy is dumb enough to turn with a biplane. To be fair I also made my biplane better than my previous one. It's about 570 kg in flight rather than 770, and it has a slightly better engine (130 horsepower vs 100) and much better turn performance with actual optimizations. That being said, it still doesn't have leading edge -aoa surfaces like literally every other plane I make. And the 10 meter wingspan isn't that unreasonable.

I will add that if you want the true WW1 experience, adding AJE gives you many variants of mostly correct WW1 and interwar engines as variants once you install whatever mod gives you the engine's model. Now just to find BDA damage settings that make rifle caliber machineguns without incendiary or explosive rounds into viable weapons, since there's nothing like getting a sustained burst of fire on an enemy only for their engine to be at 499.27581000045 HP out of 500. (and also don't completely ruin larger caliber weapon performance, i.e. 7.62mm punches holes in a plane's skin, damages the engine, and severely injures the pilot, .50 cal goes straight through and damages it, kills the pilot, severely damages the engine, 20mm damages the structure or turns the engine off. 30mm blows up the structure of small planes and damages that of large ones, with pilots or engines being very squishy to it. Anything larger makes airplanes go boom. The trick is making it so you don't have to burn through 7200 rounds of 7.62 to achieve the results of a single 20mm. And without resorting to late war or interwar ammo types). In my tests, with 500% damage and 25% proc frequency, somewhat optimized mid to late WWII dogfights tend to end quickly with the current state of BDA+. Usually the planes merge without dying and go one circle but then first turn kills aren't rare. By comparison, I tried a fight with unoptimized WWI planes with inert slug ammo and couldn't get them to actually take each other down except by maneuver kills. The matchup of optimized WWII plane vs unoptimized WWI was especially brutal. 1 WWII plane took out 3 WW1 planes within 24 seconds of the merge and wasn't even hit once even by a useless 7.62. Really it should be more like 18 seconds because it managed to circle back around and obliterate a stricken plane before it fell the 200 meters to the ground. Given all this, I would say giving the aircraft decent weapons and tuning them in such a way that they will actually climb rather than hugging their lower altitude limit is probably a bigger problem than finding a supply of sub-200 horsepower engines.

It seems to me like it has a slight vertical component at least. I just want to mention that this mod hates me. I try to land in hurricane force crosswinds (like 100 mph) and it decides "no, for this particular second you get 300 mph winds."

Wind normally: 30-60 m/s. Wind literally the second you're trying to land:

It was at this moment I realized I did not know how to fly my hastily constructed 115 meter long, 1200 tonne cargo jet that had never flown before... And this moment I realized I did not know how to land it.

This challenge requires Kerbalwind and all of its dependencies. Use CKAN if you want to make it super easy. Mods are allowed if they are reasonably balanced compared to stock values or compared to real life. Just don't use non-FAR wing surfaces because those won't be affected correctly. The mission is simple. Go to the island runway, land, and return to the KSC runway. However, you must attempt this with the following KerbalWind settings: Enabled: yes Median: 40.0. Gust duration: 1.0. Gust intensity: 5.0. Extreme weather: yes. Many light aircraft can be simply blasted off the runway or into the air under these conditions. Even a heavier plane will blow around trying to take off. Best attempt so far: I almost landed it...

Does this mod have compatibility with FAR (and produce sensible output data?) I'm kinda guessing not because it would need to gather the data on lift and drag from FAR's own aerodynamic sim. EDIT: read the thread and realized it's a long term goal but not currently supported.

Alright, for a quick estimate: Eeloo is inclined 6.15 degrees, with an argument of periapsis of 260 degrees and a longitude of ascending node of 50 Jool is inclined 1.304 degrees, with an argument of periapsis of 0 degrees and a longitude of ascending node of 52. We will assume that the ascending longitudes nodes are in fact identical. The calculation isn't that accurate to start with. So the closest approaches will be something like 30-40 degrees off of Eeloo's periapsis. That is, at 220-230 and 290-300 degrees. Those are 170-180 and 110-120 degrees off the ascending node. The latter approach will clearly be much closer. Since the ascending node is 4.85 degrees apart, it will be 40-50% of about 0.08 radians. So about 3-4% of Jool's orbital radius of 70 million km. in conclusion, their orbits come within just about 1 hillsphere radius. It is at least plausible that Eeloo would enter Jool's SOI within a single orbit and be severely disturbed within a few more, and the configuration isn't remotely stable even over a single orbit, but more careful computations are needed. In other words, thank Squad that Eeloo isn't aligned to get close approaches every few orbits.

If they were not in resonance but they had their current orbits (just not synchronized), how close could they end up getting? I could do the math but maybe someone has already done it. Jool is a big planet with an immense SOI. Some 5 million kilometers across and half that in radius. I'm fairly certain it would enter the 8 hillsphere radius limit so Eeloo wouldn't be stable for billions of orbits with a different epoch, but could it actually enter Jool's hillsphere and begin to cause chaos within a single orbit?