SAS that actually holds a direction?

[The Lone Wolfling]

Exactly the title. I'm looking for a mod (probably a plugin + MM config) that modifies SAS control so that the standard SAS mode actually tries to, say, hold the heading you locked in when you enabled it. None of the wishy-washy "let's give up and just slide" business, which makes it utterly useless for pretty much anytime I would want it for atmospheric work.

(In particular with spaceplane reentry - "Let's go from a 45 degree angle of attack to -5 in 5 seconds! Because that's what he really wanted, right? Right? ...what are those flames doing there?". A small component of that is just absolute versus body-relative orientation, but nowhere near all of it - and that would tend to increase AOA, not decrease it. Stock SAS is supposedly a PID controller, but I have no idea what they did to mess things up that badly - it doesn't seem to have an I or P term, or it would at least try to return to its original setting later.)

I wonder - is it possible to read the target position of stock SAS and just reset it every game tick? Or would that even help?

[Wanderfound]

Pilot Assistant is the mod you're after.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100073-1-0-x-Pilot-Assistant-Atmospheric-piloting-aids-1-9-3-%28May-18%29

Edited May 29, 2015 by Wanderfound

[The Lone Wolfling]

Pilot Assistant is the mod you're after.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100073-1-0-x-Pilot-Assistant-Atmospheric-piloting-aids-1-9-3-%28May-18%29

That mod does a whole lot more than just replace SAS, unfortunately. It makes a whole lot of other changes. If I wanted that level of automated control, I'd just use MechJeb.

It also is active-craft-only.

[Crzyrndm]

Your options are Mechjeb and Pilot Assistant in this area I'm afraid. There may come a future point when I break SSAS out into it's own mod when I feel it works well enough to do so, but at the current time it will remain bundled because it allows me to make use of common back end systems for all three functions (most importantly, the presets)

Pilot Assistant SSAS is completely separated from the more automated functionality, and requires manual tuning unlike MJ (and will see a significant upgrade probably before the end of the weekend). You can also try using PA to tune the stock SAS, sometimes it will stay in one place with a bit of fiddling (it slides when the wobble gets too abrubt and/or sometimes if the output reaches ~70% on any axis).

Edited May 31, 2015 by Crzyrndm

[Wanderfound]

Dynamic Deflection plus Pilot Assistant's PID tuner with these settings:

...gets me SAS that doesn't wobble, and stays where it's pointed unless the control authority required to hold it exceeds the power of the available control surfaces (at the roughly 2/3rds stick that SAS will apply). Since that only happens at extreme AoA, it's actually more of a help than a hindrance; those sorts of AoA's demand manual piloting anyway. This is the only part of Pilot Assistant I regularly use; the autopilot features don't intrude if not activated.

If that isn't enough, you'll need to find something else, but I don't know what.

[The Lone Wolfling]

That's what I figured, unfortunately. Meh, I guess I'll live with the stock SAS for now.