JerryIRacer

On that picture is this the craft in exact configuration causing you problems? If so, why stage 5 has 5 engines? Are you sure you dont have 6th engine misplaced in later stage? Also are these engines above your center of mass? If so, they are gimbaling wrong way. KSP always assumes engines are bellow COM. Lock up their gimbals and try again. Impressive stack of equipment. Good luck.

I feel really stupid. I'd swear it was not working on my first attempt. Now I have just made total contraption and it works no problem. Here it is: So it does work with ISP scaler. Apologies for stirring things up.

I think it does not work with Kerbal ISP difficulty Scaler. I built small asymmetrical craft and it was tipping over. Then I built something similar to example shown in OP vid and it worked great. I think TCA is reading original engine stats not modified ones. As long as craft is symmetrical and uses one type of engines TCA will do good. Steering by throttling individual engines is great idea. I insist on using NEAR. Lessened drag forces me into nerfing engines behavior in the atmosphere. That is what ISP difficulty scaler is for. So, Allista would you consider looking into it? I dont know If it is something easy to correct. No matter your answer, thank you for your work, mod is great, I can certainly design around some of its limitations.

+1 for the OP option 3. I especially like "fuel flow logic" to establish if transfer is possible. Hope to see it implemented at some point.

There is something else going on too! When you look at the side picture its easy to notice that front wing is has negative angle of attack and acts like a spoiler on the car. It keeps your nose pushed into the ground. I dont know if you need it that way for your plane to be stable in flight. It would definitely help on lift of if you have it inclined with positive angle off attack. That and the fact that your gear far behind CoM makes hard to lift up the nose to produce any lift...

Here is what I mean: This shows what the plane looks like as tested on Kerbin and as intended to be used on Laythe And here it is after adding some fuel and engines necessary to reach orbit. Also had to add more wings to help to lift the contraption off the runway. Once I enter Laythe atmosphere I will stage and wings with empty tanks and useless rockets are going to be disconnected. In about 160 days that is...

Hey Szputnyik, on Eve there is no oxygen. Is your plane a rocket one or electric? If its rocket plane strap some additional tanks to it and maybe some solid boosters to get it to orbit. Then dock it to your interplanetary stage and take it from there. But even in space load has to be balanced along thrust axis.

Take two of them on the opposite side of your lifter. Their aero lift forces are going to cancel themselves out.

These are mine Nuke I am using is equivalent of 3 stock ones. 3 times the mass and thrust. I like to use some additional engines for initial burn to bump TWR and shorten burn time.

HA, never occurred to me! Also my idea has some issues of its own, like when you switch to control from docking port for docking. Should action groups be off, or inherited form command core? If inheritance is possible then you can safely dock bits without any control parts. But then to operate them would need to control from associated docking port. Thats far from elegant or useful. Other solution would be to have stock Info Part allowing for action groups. No Info Part on Vessel means no action groups at all. And then just implement cycling through all Info Parts to activate different action groups. Now that is radical surgery... I leave it to Squad as it seems to be more complex than I thought.

I love the game! Been playing about 2 months. Recently I run into a problem which does not seem to have any solution. Action groups of two or more crafts are getting combined after docking. I would like to have them separate. In my opinion action groups should be associated with command pod or core. That way after choosing "Control from here" only that action group list gets executed. Now, why do I think it is important? Lets think through certain popular scenario. Lets say I want to explore Laythe. After establishing a base, sending rovers and men, next natural step is sending in airplanes. I happened to build two VTOLs which will do great. Each of them has its own action groups - you know to rotate engines for VTOL, turn on/off Jet engine, Turn on/off Nuke as the other VTOL is SSTO. I had info part with short description added to each one so I do not get lost in my own engineering ( people on this forum pointed me to that, thank you! ) . Now, after lifting airplanes to orbit I docked them with my interplanetary tug. It has its own action group to turn on and off its engines. Two of them are aerospikes and are meant to increase TWR in expense of Isp. It is crucial to burn only with Tug's engines. But since all three action groups are combined, trying to turn something on operates two other things unintentionally! So VTOLS are moving, Props are running out of breath, jet fuel is dumped, and four unbalanced engines on payload are messing things up. Only solution is to manually tend each engine. I know its not really a deal breaker. It is small unintended consequence of the design rather than a bug. It would be nice if at some point it could be looked at and resolved. Thank you for your time.

Back wheels are little to far back. If you move them closer to center of mass its going to be easier to lift the nose. Also they are attached to engine housings. These are flexing a little and that introduces toe in. What I mean is the wheels may point in or out instead of being parallel. To get rid of that effect get rid of the camber and put some struts between engine housings and main fuselage. May I also suggest replacing one of the fuel tanks with structural empty equivalent. Keep fuel at center of mass. You do not need that much gas anyway, and as you fly your center of mass is not going to shift. Good looking plane. Little light on lift. I dont know what is your take on mods but I I cant recommend enough procedural wings. It changes a mess of stock parts slapped on top of each other into some good looking and making sense designs. It adds only handful of parts, so its not going to disorganize your editor. Your plane kind of reminds my early approach This one is VTOL or near to it. Easy to fly and safe to float at 20 m/s

B9 has info part in Science tab. It does exactly what I want it to do. Editable in VAB and available in space by pressing . Thanks again - case closed.

Thanks for all your comments. I have B9 and FireSpitter installed. I remember trying Firespitter info part. But I edited it on the launch pad and content did not save so I kind of gave up on the idea. I will brush it off now and give it a try in VAB/SPH. About stock solution - I could use that comment area to write down instructions, but once there it is equally easy to look up action groups by pressing its tab. I kind of need it when I cycle through my crafts on Laythe or on Mun, or just in Kerbins orbit. No, its not personal issue being unable to remember procedures for 20 different crafts. Pen and a paper is an absolute last resort! Screenshots and txt files are unacceptable. From my experience nothing kills fun more than micro management of that kind.

Is there a way to find out what action keys are set up for in space? I am getting lost in my own designs... I have a VTOL plane designed to explore Laythe, some launchers with locking gimbals, SSTO with engine switching, and Mun landers with disabled RCS/Engines, not to mention parachutes on every 2nd craft. I try to use conventions like 8 9 0 to toggle the engines 1-2-3 to raise lower and toggle VTOL, but it is not enough. It would be nice if I can press a button and look it up on the list. Any stock or modded solution welcome. Otherwise I will have to start making notes on paper...

You can start small like I did. This is my first Laythe exploration ship. One man lander ( with smallest possible rover ) attached to command module, strapped on single orange tank tug, powered by one atomic engine. It uses single atomic LVN 240 kN. If you dont want to use mods just use a number of stock LVNs. Its all about TWR ( Thrust to weight ratio ). Well, its all about available delta V, TWR is 2nd of importance. if it is bellow 0.3 your burns will take forever. If it is bellow 0.1 its hard to make a burn in one PE pass. Ideally the higher you can keep your TWR WHILE keeping desired delta V the better. On my 2nd trip I added two boosters powered by 4x 200kN chemical rockets. It was wasteful but bumped my TWR close to 1.0 for initial burn. Stack shown with docked refueling shuttle ...during Kerbal escape burn ( took only 3 min ) detaching used up boosters, finishing the burn with LVN with just 200 m/s to go. All my screenshots contain MechJeb windows so its easy to find out what is my available delta V, thrust, TWR and mass of the ship. Hi, Its my first post on the forums, I absolutely love the game!!!! I want to say thank you to developers, modders, and the community.