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


sarbian

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15 hours ago, Schmelge said:

Guuuuuwd Moooorning everyone! 
I hope you all have a fantastic Saturday so far!

I have a question regarding MechJeb 2 and the Aircraft Autopilot. Since the wiki is so outdated it doesn't even contain a single line of text regarding the specific part of the MJ2 mod, I thought I would try my luck over here!

So far I managed to make the autopilot obey my orders of altitude and direction, however, I struggle with getting it to listen to my command when it comes to speed :)

Down here I have provided a screenshot,  you will see the Aircraft Autopilot window. Notice that I have set the speed to 200 m/s and also notice that my aircrafts actual speed is 358.2 m/s.

Screenshot

Why doesn't it regulate the thrust for me? What am I doing wrong? 

Please MechJeb gurus, guide me on the right path! :D

 

Kind Regards - Schmelge

I don't know what's up!  I tested it out and it worked perfectly.  My PID tuning is the same as yours...  and with a stock Aeris 3A heading, alt and speed hold all worked as expected.   First question - can your craft keep the altitude and speed you commanded?  Is it possible the autopilot is having to increase speed to hold altitude?

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5 hours ago, Capt. Hunt said:

I've had that issue with norton in pretty much every game I mod.  Norton auto-quarantines any .dll that isn't used by a significant proportion of the Norton userbase.  For executables it automatically deletes them irreversibly.  I've asked on the Norton360 forums for them to loosen that restriction, but they were no help.  I've also seen it ignore exclusions and delete files anyway on occasion, but I've basically marked the whole steam folder as excluded.

The last time I tried Norton (freebie that came with a motherboard) it was killing stuff that I had excluded and I figured out what it was doing.  I had mapped drives into subdirectories so all the drives would be available with a single drive letter.  (Beware: with XP at least you will have a big fight with it to share such a structure but I did succeed.  I haven't tried the situation on later versions of Windows.)  Thus I had drives that had no drive letter assigned, only the subdirectory link.  Norton was finding the drives anyway and killing the files--and since the way Norton found them didn't have a proper path I couldn't exclude them.

At that point I simply uninstalled, I didn't play with it to figure out if there was any other means by which it could come up with an alternate name and evade the exclusions.

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7 hours ago, artwhaley said:

I don't know what's up!  I tested it out and it worked perfectly.  My PID tuning is the same as yours...  and with a stock Aeris 3A heading, alt and speed hold all worked as expected.   First question - can your craft keep the altitude and speed you commanded?  Is it possible the autopilot is having to increase speed to hold altitude?

Omg thanks for answering man! I thought my question was gonna be forgotten :P

 

Yeah my craft is able to go way faster, it easily holds speeds above 300 m/s and it flies stable all the way from below 100 m/s up to top speed.

I tried different crafts, all the same.

 

One thing though, I am playing unmanned before manned. So it might be that the feature isn't unlocked? However in that case I don't understand how I can have the other parts of the autopilot function.

 

Only thing I didnt try yet was in sandbox mode so I will try that today

 

Update: So I tried to use the cruise control or Speed hold from a stock plane in sandbox mode. and it works.. I guess it must have to do something with unmanned before manned career thing. I guess that particular control will be unlocked in a later stage?. I guess I can understand that you don't unlock all the modules in mechjeb at ones, and I'm fine with that, however if it is like this that you have to research further to unlock segments within a researched module, it's a bit silly. Especially since it's a speedhold. It would be more logical to have speedhold first and the the maneuver holds..

 

Anyways, thanks and sorry that I didn't do more research myself, quite embarrassing actually. However :D now I know that before I post, I should try things in sandbox first :)

Edited by Schmelge
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So. First question is solved thanks to @artwhaley huge thanks for the reply! 

This brings me to the second question if anyone here can answer that, it would help me immensely.

It's about RCS and mechjeb - I made it nicely to orbit, I had plenty of fuel left to do corrections and also I had RCS and a monopropellant tank to fuel them. However, for some reason, the RCS just kept thrusting all directions whenever I activated them. Since I use RemoteTech I have to have a signal with KSC to be able to make commands. Due to this, I use MechJeb to execute maneuvers whenever I'm not in contact with KSC.

This makes it more or less impossible for me to make the correct alignments because the RCS thrusters eats all my propellant before MJ executes the commands, which in turn means I cannot make my correctional burns. 

At first I thought this might have been because of SAS, so I tried to first deactivate SAS and only had RCS online when I had contact with KSC and nothing particular happened, the ship continued to orbit. after that I made a maneuver node and executed the command in mechjeb, instantly mechjeb started to thrust the RCS engines. You have a picture here JZd6kmm.png

I don't understand why it does this, as you can see the "Hold Maneuver" isn't supposed to be executed until 20m and 57 seconds in the first place. And also, well this is probably cause I have insufficient RCS thrusters but even though all thrusters are active the ship doesn't move, especially not to the blue marker. If I manually use the RCS I can get it to that point...

 

What am I doing wrong? And yes I promise it's guaranteed it's my fault somehow but I don't know what it is, hence asking :D

 

Kind Regards - Schmelge  

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5 minutes ago, Schmelge said:

I didn't actually know that RT could set courses? I thought it was just for "need to be in contact with KSC"?

It has a simple flight computer that mimics many of MJ's Smart A.S.S.  controls. 

Your screenshot seems to show the NODE button toggled. If so then RT will align the craft so it is pointing in the right direction for the next node burn. 

Edited by Foxster
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7 minutes ago, Foxster said:

It has a simple flight computer that mimics many of MJ's Smart A.S.S.  controls. 

Your screenshot seems to show the NODE button toggled. If so then RT will align the craft so it is pointing in the right direction for the next node burn. 

Hmm might be... I want to remember though that I tried the "OFF" button too but I might be remembering wrong :P

I'll try again later today :) thanks for the reply m8!

 

Uptade: Dude am sorry, this might actually be the wrong forum to be honest.. I didn't realize that flightcomputer was remotetech.. I was thinking the whole time it was mechjeb. Im sorry, as you might understand I am very very new to this game :)

Edited by Schmelge
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11 minutes ago, Schmelge said:

Uptade: Dude am sorry, this might actually be the wrong forum to be honest.. I didn't realize that flightcomputer was remotetech.. I was thinking the whole time it was mechjeb. Im sorry, as you might understand I am very very new to this game :)

No probs, it's easily done. 

MJ offers more functions so it might be a better bet in the long run. 

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5 hours ago, Schmelge said:

So. First question is solved thanks to @artwhaley huge thanks for the reply! 

This brings me to the second question if anyone here can answer that, it would help me immensely.

It's about RCS and mechjeb - I made it nicely to orbit, I had plenty of fuel left to do corrections and also I had RCS and a monopropellant tank to fuel them. However, for some reason, the RCS just kept thrusting all directions whenever I activated them. Since I use RemoteTech I have to have a signal with KSC to be able to make commands. Due to this, I use MechJeb to execute maneuvers whenever I'm not in contact with KSC.

This makes it more or less impossible for me to make the correct alignments because the RCS thrusters eats all my propellant before MJ executes the commands, which in turn means I cannot make my correctional burns. 

At first I thought this might have been because of SAS, so I tried to first deactivate SAS and only had RCS online when I had contact with KSC and nothing particular happened, the ship continued to orbit. after that I made a maneuver node and executed the command in mechjeb, instantly mechjeb started to thrust the RCS engines. You have a picture here JZd6kmm.png

I don't understand why it does this, as you can see the "Hold Maneuver" isn't supposed to be executed until 20m and 57 seconds in the first place. And also, well this is probably cause I have insufficient RCS thrusters but even though all thrusters are active the ship doesn't move, especially not to the blue marker. If I manually use the RCS I can get it to that point...

 

What am I doing wrong? And yes I promise it's guaranteed it's my fault somehow but I don't know what it is, hence asking :D

 

Kind Regards - Schmelge  

That picture makes me suspicious your RCS thrusters are misplaced.  As far as I can tell all the thrusters are in a plane around the rocket.  Unless that plane is perfectly on the center of mass (effectively impossible as it will change as you burn fuel) this will work very badly.  From a practical standpoint you need them both above and below the center of mass.  Getting them equidistant from the center of mass is best but with something like MechJeb controlling them it's not essential.

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13 hours ago, Schmelge said:

Yeah my craft is able to go way faster, it easily holds speeds above 300 m/s and it flies stable all the way from below 100 m/s up to top speed.

My worry was - if the plane slowed down to the speed you set on the autopilot...  would it be able to hold altitude?  It's possible the autopilot has to increase speed to keep the vertical speed at 0 if there's not enough wing area to make sufficient lift at a lower speed?

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27 minutes ago, artwhaley said:

My worry was - if the plane slowed down to the speed you set on the autopilot...  would it be able to hold altitude?  It's possible the autopilot has to increase speed to keep the vertical speed at 0 if there's not enough wing area to make sufficient lift at a lower speed?

Seriously? :o it can calculate stuff like this? :o I have to try, hold on, takes ages to start the game :D 

Update: Hold on a minute I think I have an answer for that already :P I did try to set the speed hold on 300 as well, and 250 and 350 I believe. All of which I know my plane can fly stable at the altitude.

Also when I was in sandbox, I set the speed before takeoff and saw the thrustmeter instantly change to fullspeed and with 3k altitude, 10 m/s climb.. All I did was start the engine and the plane took off and flew to the correct altitude and speed.

I'm more into that this is because of unmanned before manned. I know that in the tech tree there will come "updates" to mechjeb which gives more modules.. So I'm thinking maybe that speed hold will be an added function when it is researched? 

 

Update 2: So I just went through the entire tech tree, I see a couple of mechjeb updates, however the text informing what will be in the updates just talk about more modules in mechjeb, non of them explicitly talk about Speed Hold. So from my understanding, what should happen is, that when you unlock a module within mechjeb, you should be getting everything in that module. But I may still be wrong

 

Update 3: Yupp, just made an exact replica of my plane in sandbox mode. Speed Hold works like a charm. Extreamly annoying...

Edited by Schmelge
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55 minutes ago, Schmelge said:

Update 2: So I just went through the entire tech tree, I see a couple of mechjeb updates, however the text informing what will be in the updates just talk about more modules in mechjeb, non of them explicitly talk about Speed Hold. So from my understanding, what should happen is, that when you unlock a module within mechjeb, you should be getting everything in that module. But I may still be wrong

I sure think this is the intended behavior.   Interesting!  I'll try to remember to look into this on the next career save!  

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1 hour ago, Schmelge said:

I'm more into that this is because of unmanned before manned. I know that in the tech tree there will come "updates" to mechjeb which gives more modules.. So I'm thinking maybe that speed hold will be an added function when it is researched? 

 

Update 2: So I just went through the entire tech tree, I see a couple of mechjeb updates, however the text informing what will be in the updates just talk about more modules in mechjeb, non of them explicitly talk about Speed Hold. So from my understanding, what should happen is, that when you unlock a module within mechjeb, you should be getting everything in that module. But I may still be wrong

 

Update 3: Yupp, just made an exact replica of my plane in sandbox mode. Speed Hold works like a charm. Extreamly annoying...

 

8 minutes ago, artwhaley said:

I sure think this is the intended behavior.   Interesting!  I'll try to remember to look into this on the next career save!  

It very much *IS* intended behavior. In Sandbox, all MJ modules are available at all times. In a Career save, MJ modules unlock at different Tech Tree nodes as you progress through the game.  There are Module Manager patches available which modify this behavior, as well as some that put MJ functionality into all command pods and probes without needing a specific MJ part attached.

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9 minutes ago, LameLefty said:

 

It very much *IS* intended behavior. In Sandbox, all MJ modules are available at all times. In a Career save, MJ modules unlock at different Tech Tree nodes as you progress through the game.  There are Module Manager patches available which modify this behavior, as well as some that put MJ functionality into all command pods and probes without needing a specific MJ part attached.

But have I understood it correctly that when you unlock a certain module, all functions within this specific module should be working as intended?

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There you go, an official release so I can work on the dev on in peace

 

2.7.1

  • KSP 1.4.1
  • auto-deploy antennas
  • Plane landing improvements
  • Rover AP fix
  • other bugs fix
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But, is that official release backwards compatible with 1.03?

Sorry...  I couldn't resist.  I'd hate for you to think we weren't thinking about you @sarbian:P

Edit:  And now I'm wondering....  how hard it would be for him to make sure that all future versions of Mechjeb automatically lawn dart all of my rockets... but only mine.

Edited by artwhaley
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I hate to be a bother Sarbian, but it looks like something messed up with your download links. The 2.7.1 link and your curse page all point to the 2.7.0 release. I'm also unable to find 2.7.1 on Curse in the version history tab.

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18 hours ago, Doc Shaftoe said:

I hate to be a bother Sarbian, but it looks like something messed up with your download links. The 2.7.1 link and your curse page all point to the 2.7.0 release. I'm also unable to find 2.7.1 on Curse in the version history tab.

Complain to curse about how log it takes them to validate an upload

18 hours ago, njbrown09 said:

You didnt post the download links :P

It's in the OP.

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I just updated my KSP 1.3.1 with the new version of Mechjeb (using CKAN), now it gives me a notice upon loading that I run an incompatible version...
What gives? Did I mess something up, is it CKAN or will it simply work and I can disregard that warning?

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