At wit's end with landing legs

[Jarin]

Okay, I'm officially done dealing with the landing leg alignment. No matter what I do with the heavy things, I can't get them to work properly on a horizontal craft; specifically, I mean for base building. I know the bug will get fixed eventually, but in the meantime, I'm sick and tired of my bases eventually shuddering themselves apart as they get too large, or just sliding along the surface from leg vibrations. I need a good mod recommendation for a pack that has decent mid-heavy landing legs, suitable for multi-component base construction. 

Also appreciated: any mod that lets me bolt my bases to the ground properly. Tried it with KIS/KAS, but the conduits jump when they link, which means linking to a ground-attached pylon actually makes the problem worse, not better, as it increases the strain on the whole craft. I want something that reduces physics strain, not increases it.

Edited May 22, 2016 by Jarin

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Jarin said:

Okay, I'm officially done dealing with the landing leg alignment. No matter what I do with the heavy things, I can't get them to work properly on a horizontal craft; specifically, I mean for base building. I know the bug will get fixed eventually, but in the meantime, I'm sick and tired of my bases eventually shuddering themselves apart as they get too large, or just sliding along the surface from leg vibrations. I need a good mod recommendation for a pack that has decent mid-heavy landing legs, suitable for multi-component base construction.

UKS/MKS has some pretty good stuff that works well.  Modules that are designed for surface bases.

1 hour ago, Jarin said:

Also appreciated: any mod that lets me bolt my bases to the ground properly. Tried it with KIS/KAS, but the conduits jump when they link, which means linking to a ground-attached pylon actually makes the problem worse, not better, as it increases the strain on the whole craft. I want something that reduces physics strain, not increases it.

That I do not know.  My own solution for KIS/KAS is that I just mount all my base components on landing legs, so that none of them have non-leg components touching the ground.  Eliminates the jumping completely.

The legs I'm using are just the basing stock heavy legs.  My base components aren't long horizontal things, they're vertical towers, so I just mount the legs radially around each one and it works fine.

Sorry, I know that's not your design scenario.

[Jarin]

57 minutes ago, Snark said:

That I do not know.  My own solution for KIS/KAS is that I just mount all my base components on landing legs, so that none of them have non-leg components touching the ground.  Eliminates the jumping completely.

See, that's the situation I was in. Nothing but LT-2 landing legs touching the ground when the jittering starts. The problem was, my base was built around horizontal components, designed in the SPH. LT-2 landing legs needed to be rotated 90 degrees to point at the ground, and they Do Not Like Doing That. It took huge amount of tweaking with the rotation tool to get them aligned right, and even then, it wasn't perfect. I think it was this that caused the start of my problems. Then I took to using KIS pylons, which kept the base from sliding, but increased the structural stress.

I would note, this jittering/sliding was on Minmus' flats, so it's not like I was sliding down a hill. Some kind of phantom forces were at play. The first pylon, I literally had to run to catch my sliding base, attaching the pylon ahead of it and linking it as it slid past.

[bewing]

This is also an answer that you do not need to hear/does not help/does not solve the problem -- forget the landing legs completely until version 1.2.0. Just use wings. Or wings that have been modified to have no lift and less drag. If you have 3 symmetry-mounted wings, and one is pointed straight up, then the other two will make most excellent landing legs when sitting horizontally. I like the type A swept wings for landing legs, myself.