pina_coladas

Imgur was being a giant idiot and it took like 5 tries to upload this: http://imgur.com/a/f3K1c The first craft was the one giving me error 4, probably because I had only one set of stupidly placed rcs blocks. The rest of the craft didnt give me any errors but they all displayed the same odd differential thrust behaviour, seemingly independent of kerbcom settings. In the last picture you can see that half the engines are throttled down even though no control input is being sent to the craft and the throttle is set to full. Hope this helps.

Tried out the bugfix. Now stock engine control disables gimbals, and combined control (apparently) disables all engines. Pod torque now appears to behave normally though. Also, I'm still getting gimbal roll authority even when no mode is activated. Is that intended? I don't mind it but it implies that kerbcom is doing stuff even when the UI says nothing is turned on. e: combined control is showing "internal error 04"

Thanks for the reply. This plugin seems pretty vital to KSP so I`m happy to do a bit of testing. Last night when I was testing, combined mode loved to flutter the engine thrust pretty much whatever strength the slider was on, even when I edited some engines to have 10 degrees of gimbal. I had a rocket lander thing with four radial engines, and even without touching the controls the engines would be pulsing very rapidly (which seemed to cause a bit of lag). When throttled up fully and without touching the controls, two engines would be at full thrust and the other two would be jittering around at a few percent below full thrust. Even with improvements that lower the priority of differential thrust, I would still really appreciate being able to turn it off entirely on a craft-by-craft basis. Also, I second the request for more detailed descriptions of the different modes. What exactly does simple engine mode do for example?

Oops, reposting this from the release thread. I think you wanted bug reports in this thread... So is there a way to disable certain control methods? Say I wanted to disable differential thrust control and rcs and use only reaction wheels and gimbals... Is this possible? Because it would be super useful to have. In combined mode it seems to tinker with the thrust levels more than I would like. Also, I disabled reaction wheels on the pod but the craft was still able to turn on its own with engines and RCS off, depending on whether or not I had the combined control menu open. The behaviour seemed inconsistent so I'm not sure exactly what was happening. E: I'm a bit confused about the logic of the interface as well. Is kerbcom active whenever the menu is open, regardless of the submenues? Because I seem to have gimbal roll control even when none of the modes are active, and reaction wheels seem to be still running even when I disable them on the pod. Also, kerbcom seems to interfere with mechjeb's smart a.s.s. (mechjeb does not respond to pressing prograde or retrograde buttons for example), but inconsistently. E2: Even when I take mechjeb off my ship (I only have the mechjeb config installed, so kerbcom should disappear), I still have always-on reaction wheels and gimbal roll authority. I then made a whole new craft and never put mechjeb on it and I still get the same behaviour. E3: Restarted KSP, started a new save file, made a craft without mechjeb case. Still have always-on reaction wheels and gimbal roll. Plus I noticed the extra bonus of zero electricity usage whether pod torque is enabled or disabled.

So is there a way to disable certain control methods? Say I wanted to disable differential thrust control and rcs and use only reaction wheels and gimbals... Is this possible? Because it would be super useful to have. In combined mode it seems to tinker with the thrust levels more than I would like. Also, I disabled reaction wheels on the pod but the craft was still able to turn on its own with engines and RCS off, depending on whether or not I had the combined control menu open. The behaviour seemed inconsistent so I'm not sure exactly what was happening. E: I'm a bit confused about the logic of the interface as well. Is kerbcom active whenever the menu is open, regardless of the submenues? Because I seem to have gimbal roll control even when none of the modes are active, and reaction wheels seem to be still running even when I disable them on the pod. Also, kerbcom seems to interfere with mechjeb's smart a.s.s. (mechjeb does not respond to pressing prograde or retrograde buttons for example), but inconsistently. E2: Even when I take mechjeb off my ship (I only have the mechjeb config installed, so kerbcom should disappear), I still have always-on reaction wheels and gimbal roll authority.

I can't try it out just yet but I'll give it a look at some point. Thanks for putting it together.

Might as well mess with the stock values if it helps the whole mod make more sense IMO. And it has always bugged me a bit that larger tanks in KSP don't have better mass fractions due to increased volume to area ratios. It would be cool to do something about it...

^^^I stand corrected about the fuel tanks!

Well, do the stock ISP values make any sense if we're pretending LiquidFuel is hydrazine or something and Oxidizer is N204? Could the ISP for LF/OX be lowered further? Wikipedia tells me that the proton rocket hypergolic first stage gets 285s, and the upper hypergolic stages get ~325s. 370 is pretty high. I haven't actually tried this mod yet so I don't know how the numbers add up for all the different engines and fuels...

Maybe the ISP advantage from low density fuels needs to be exaggerated a bit instead, just enough that you actually come out ahead. Would this be any better than messing with fuel tank masses? Either way, it's clear that realistic values do not work well in the ksp universe with its wacky scale.

Yeah guys this is all about the fuel tank mass ratios that are much worse in ksp than in real life. Squad has balanced things in a slapdash way with only one set of fuels in mind, and they will face the exact same rebalancing problems if and when they add more fuel types in the future. This thread is fun because it highlights (in an exaggerated way) the drawbacks of nuclear thermal rockets that eat away at the dv gain you get from the high ISP; you have to consider mass ratios and ISP together, and the lowest density of all fuels plus the high mass of the engines hurt your mass ratio. KSP masses are apparently weird enough that the worse mass ratio of NERVAS completely negate the increased ISP! So yeah this mod will have to be totally rebalanced to make sense in the KSP universe. Maybe all fuel tank dry masses can be lowered by the plugin? It would be a pretty dramatic change to the balance of the game but maybe it's worth it.

This is super amazing, but I'm a little concerned that the OMS engines and main engines will clip through each other as they gimbal due to their close proximity. As it's been mentioned, if you use kerbcom avionics the main engines will need a fairly large gimbal range to work well (without resorting to differential thrust). It's pretty cramped back there, especially for the third optional OMS engine. That's about all I can do for useful commentary. Your artwork is excellent and I can't wait to try it out!

So what you're saying is that orion would be more effective underwater...

There was an old plugin called KSSConect or something that played with connections to make them all more rigid. Pretty sure it made the damned robotics of the day explode everywhere though. It might have been lost in the forum purge but it could be worth looking for to give you ideas.

The quantum struts mod includes a quantum core part that allows you to place quantum struts manually in EVA. This could tide you over until the KAS part moving system gets more mature. Which is really awesome, btw, good job on that kospy!

Just use struts... That does still work, doesn't it?

It's most likely because this plugin doesn't account for eccentric orbits. The slight eccentricity of Duna is apparently enough to throw everything off by a few degrees sometimes, unfortunately. The closest approach figures really help though!

I was having trouble with that until I noticed that you can to click the very top of the window to drag it. It's confusing since we're all used to mechjeb windows that can be dragged from anywhere. Hope this helps!

When I check task manager it looks like TOT is using a bit of both cores, yet remains locked at 50% usage, not maxing out one core like I would expect from something single-threaded and computationally intense like this. That's why I thought it was worth mentioning. Am I the only one?

Minor question: is there supposed to be a 50% CPU usage cap on this? Or could it be due to some weird java setting on my end...

That's not true. You will accelerate downwards until you reach terminal velocity, which is when the force of the air pushing against you equals the force of gravity pulling you down. A change in velocity is the definition of acceleration.

Why not both days and seconds? It could be configurable. I'm really curious about what you're planning for those other tabs like flight planner and trajectory viewer. That's when it gets real

Oh how you tease us Anariaq...

Here's a question for you: does your system assume instantaneous impulse to the desired trajectory? I only ask because in the Kerbal universe celestial bodies are so tiny that a low thrust to weight ratio craft can get pretty far from apoapsis during an insertion burn, which I imagine would throw off the accuracy of some of the more delicate slingshot maneuvers. Is this a dumb question? Am I asking something outside the scope of this project?

Are you planning on presenting some kind of instrumentation or data in-game? Maybe eventually mechjeb integration? Is it too soon to ask?...