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[1.12.x] Anatid Robotics / MuMech - MechJeb - Autopilot - [2.14.3] [4th March 2023]


sarbian

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One small 1.4 issue is the CoM and CoL spheres when displayed are buried inside the craft and purple in colour. 

Oh, forgot to say: Thanks yet again, Sarbian!

Edited by Foxster
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1 hour ago, Foxster said:

One small 1.4 issue is the CoM and CoL spheres when displayed are buried inside the craft and purple in colour. 

Oh, forgot to say: Thanks yet again, Sarbian!

Good catch. New Unity version means I have to rebuild the shaders bundle. Fixed in the new dev

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Has anyone besides me tried dev builds 788 or 789 using Aircraft Autoland stuff?

I like to faff about with stock Aeris 4A spaceplanes and manually fly entries and landings, but typically I use navball guidance for Runway 09 to get and keep myself on a proper guideslope. I tried several times tonight using build 788 but it seems like the whatever internal geographical marker MJ is using for the end of Runway 09 is offset substantially south and perhaps a bit east like a third or so down the runway, almost around where the Astronaut Complex is located. One time I tried complete Autoland from about the mountain range west of KSC and things were great until I realized the plane was coming in too high and aiming too downrange, and then instead of just flaring and landing long, the craft made a full 90 turn south and crashed. On F9 and flying totally manually, the marker just doesn't point to the end of the runway. 

I'll try again tomorrow and over the weekend with 789, but just wondering if anyone else has (yet) played around with runway guidance or autoland? So far MJ and the most recent MM are all I'm using in the way of mods (and just a single simple MM patch to add MJ to every command pod).

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I've noticed that the MJ2 dev repo on CKAN hasn't worked since the last CKAN update.. I'm not sure if this is a CKAN issue or something with the dev build metadata(?)  This problem predates the 1.4 release.  If this is the wrong forum for this report, please let me know.

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6 hours ago, ss8913 said:

I've noticed that the MJ2 dev repo on CKAN hasn't worked since the last CKAN update.. I'm not sure if this is a CKAN issue or something with the dev build metadata(?)  This problem predates the 1.4 release.  If this is the wrong forum for this report, please let me know.

I think I need to add the SHA of the file in the meta. I ll have a look when I have some free time.

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On ‎3‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 7:57 PM, LameLefty said:

Has anyone besides me tried dev builds 788 or 789 using Aircraft Autoland stuff?

Bad form to quote myself but hey, this time I've got proof.  And logs/save files. :wink:

So I started a clean Sandbox save. The only mods installed are MJ2 dev build 789, ModuleManager 3.0.5 and NavyFish's Docking Port Alignment Indicator version 6.8 (updated last night officially for KSP 1.4).

I put a MJ casing on a stock Gull airplane and spawned it on the runway. As you can see, at the very end of the overrun area, MJ's landing guidance says I'm 18 meters from the runway. Okay, given the height of the cockpit and the vagaries of exactly where the marker indicates, okay. Close enough.

wlC8OSq.png

Now turned around 180 degrees and moved forward a bit, it says I'm 16m away. Cool.

uZxrhzR.png

Unfortunately, moving forward I could only get within about 10 m before the marker flipped around, as if the marker is actually in mid-air. (No screenshot though).

Anyway, I took off east, looped around west into the foothills and let Autoland do its thing:

Um, very Kerbal but something's amiss, I think? 

Anyway, logs, save file, etc

Thanks, Sarbian!

 

Edited by LameLefty
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Ive used mechjeb for as long as i can remember, I bought the game in April 2013. In all that time the one thing mechjeb has never received was a face lift. Will there ever be an updated model(case) for mechjeb :-)

 

Edited by viperwolf
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Sarbian - just a quick note to say thank you for all your hard work and dedication over the last few years. MechJeb makes it possible for me to play KSP.

 

LameLefty - Great video! Kamikaze right into Administration, take that you pencil-pushing, bureaucratic ^&%$*@'s! But it needs more BOOM...

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1 hour ago, El Sancho said:

LameLefty - Great video! Kamikaze right into Administration, take that you pencil-pushing, bureaucratic ^&%$*@'s! But it needs more BOOM...

Yeah, I figure that's about the time that Autoland algorithm realized it was pretty far past the last marker and decided a One-Eighty was the way to go. I still can't figure out why every airplane tries to come in too high, or why I can't get more than ~5-10 meters from the Runway 09 final marker when taxiing around the runway.  I think the terrain height is the airfield has changed, or something in the way the algorithm is calculating its position may have changed, maybe a side effect of the Unity engine change? I dunno. It's a head-scratcher to me.

I can say though, that even though I've honestly never used Autoland before this, I've used the Navball guidance pips for a long time, since probably the first time I started messing around with spaceplanes in 0.90 or so. Never had a problem. The runway marker always seemed at roughly the beginning of the overrun stripes, maybe offset to the north (left) side of center just a bit. But following the guidance marker always brought me right down to the end of the runway no matter whether approaching from the west (heading for the Runway 09 marker) or the east (Runway 27). I haven't yet tested to see if the Island Airfield runway marker is offset in 1.4 or not. 

Time to go find out ... :) 

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6 minutes ago, LameLefty said:

Yeah, I figure that's about the time that Autoland algorithm realized it was pretty far past the last marker and decided a One-Eighty was the way to go. I still can't figure out why every airplane tries to come in too high, or why I can't get more than ~5-10 meters from the Runway 09 final marker when taxiing around the runway.  I think the terrain height is the airfield has changed, or something in the way the algorithm is calculating its position may have changed, maybe a side effect of the Unity engine change? I dunno. It's a head-scratcher to me.

I can say though, that even though I've honestly never used Autoland before this, I've used the Navball guidance pips for a long time, since probably the first time I started messing around with spaceplanes in 0.90 or so. Never had a problem. The runway marker always seemed at roughly the beginning of the overrun stripes, maybe offset to the north (left) side of center just a bit. But following the guidance marker always brought me right down to the end of the runway no matter whether approaching from the west (heading for the Runway 09 marker) or the east (Runway 27). I haven't yet tested to see if the Island Airfield runway marker is offset in 1.4 or not. 

Time to go find out ... :) 

Well The Runway in KSP is flat while Kerbin in round so it seems like the elevation relative to kerbins center of mass will be highest on the ends and lowest in the middle. In real life the shuttle runway is curved with the earth because it matters even when the scale is 10x.

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The current landing AP is a contribution and others have been happy with it. It sure is better than the old one. The strip coordinate night be off. I ll check them

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44 minutes ago, SpaceFoon said:

Well The Runway in KSP is flat while Kerbin in round so it seems like the elevation relative to kerbins center of mass will be highest on the ends and lowest in the middle. In real life the shuttle runway is curved with the earth because it matters even when the scale is 10x.

Right, but that's an easy 3D coordinate transform, from a mathematics perspective. The point is, the guidance markers in the Mechjeb Aircraft Autoland worked properly with prior versions of MJ and KSP (it used to be called Spaceplane Guidance). I used it all the time. Now, not so much.

But hey, more experiments: I spawned another Gull and flew it up to about 1 KM and generally south, then used Autoland to go to Island Runway 09. Came in perhaps a tiny bit low (a few meters maybe?) but otherwise perfect.  Then I took off again and aimed Autoland at KSC Runway 27. Perfect landing.  So I took off heading west out over the foothills, told it to land back at KSC Runway 09. 

Same thing - came in too high to land. Substantially. *shrug*

 

3 minutes ago, sarbian said:

The current landing AP is a contribution and others have been happy with it. It sure is better than the old one. The strip coordinate night be off. I ll check them

Thanks, Sarbian. I posted logs and such last night.  It does very much look like a coordinate isn't right for the 09 end of the KSC Runway.

And to be clear, this is the Aircraft Autoland, nothing to do with landing guidance for orbital vehicles.

I think the coordinate for the approach into KSC Runway 09 isn't quite right. My video above shows it. If you watch the approach from the foothills, there are (I think) two separate coordinate sets (or so it appears). Flying with the Autoland activated, the aircraft ends up on a straight-in flight over the foothills with the marker centered. By the time it descends over the edge of the foothills towards the plain KSC sits on, the marker has drifted down out of the Navball prograde marker, then suddenly jumps to centered again, as if the aircraft is now aiming at a new marker. But following that marker, the aircraft ends up way too high over the runway by several dozen meters. Not a big deal for a low-speed, high lift aircraft like the Gull, but for a high-speed, low-lift design like the Aeris that has to come in fairly hot and maybe deadstick (no power), it's not so good. :)

 

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LameLefty - I wonder if it is a new Unity engine issue, let me explain.

I started a new Career campaign with the new version, and I'm doing manual re-entries from sub-orbital flights, (ferrying tourists to build up cash reserves). I'm manually following the retrograde marker on the navball, and I noticed that when it switches from Orbital Speed to Ground Speed, the retrograde marker jerks to the right about 7-8 millimeters. This sounds like a similar phenomenon, and I suspect it's Unity because I'm flying manually without MechJeb. Or maybe it's something completely different,  but I don't recall it ever doing that before.

Edited by El Sancho
correct typo
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2 hours ago, El Sancho said:

LameLefty - I wonder if it is a new Unity engine issue, let me explain.

I started a new Career campaign with the new version, and I'm doing manual re-entries from sub-orbital flights, (ferrying tourists to build up cash reserves). I'm manually following the retrograde marker on the navball, and I noticed that when it switches from Orbital Speed to Ground Speed, the retrograde marker jerks to the right about 7-8 millimeters. This sounds like a similar phenomenon, and I suspect it's Unity because I'm flying manually without MechJeb. Or maybe it's something completely different,  but I don't recall it ever doing that before.

Yeah, could be. I did try Autoland with the same stock Gull plane to Island runway 09, and returning back to KSC 27 was good. It's only affecting KSC 09, which - for spaceplane flyers - is kind of the most important most important (*). The one weird marker-shift I see regularly is flying due east on course to runway 09 coming off out of the foothills, when crossing into the coastal plain. Well, hopefully it'll be fixed eventually. Just something to note until then. 

(*) I admit to overshooting the runway from time to time, doing a Mach 3 one-eighty and ending up about 75 km away coming west to Runway 27 a time or two in the past. :D 

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Why does not work the function of displaying windows in the mode of building a rocket and in flight mode? Or rather, of all the selected windows, only two are remembered. In the settings, I mark the checkbox, but still I have to open all the windows that I need every time.

P.s: I apologize for my English, I use Google translate. 

https://imgur.com/a/fEpky

Edited by Grem
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It seems that there is a bug with the settings saving for some players. I guess it s related to how you change screens because it works for me...

Also the "Show in..." settings is not to choose if the windows is open or not but to hide it in the editor or flight mode

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If you switch to a rocket that was previously put into orbit, all the windows are in place. But when creating a new rocket and installing it on the launchpad, only two windows are open, I tried different settings of the checkboxes, as if they did not perform any functions at all.

Well, thanks for the answer, I think I'll get used to it.

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Post Deleted: Turned out to be user error, I had been using a mod that added the mechjeb control to probe cores and forgot to reinstall it. Hence no MechJeb functionality without the MechJeb components.

Edited by Ravenex
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LameLefty-

The more I play with the Autolander, the more impressed I am, and the more convinced I become that the landing issue at KSC is an game/engine problem rather than an MJ problem.

Fresh Sandbox game, latest KSP version 64-bit, MechJeb 789

Here I approach the Island Runway 27 in a stock Gull with a MJ box added. Island runway 27 has a hill just past the end. In this video you can see the plane is headed for a collision with terrain. Just as I thought for sure we were about to have a Jebediah moment, the Autolander suddenly wicks up the throttle, lifts the nose, skims the top of the hill with about a meter to spare, and lands on the end of the runway slicker than cat**** on linoleum. I would say the Autolander itself is working very well

 

 

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