The Kraken

[SnailsAttack]

This game is great and all, but how can I avoid being launched away from Gilly at Mach 53 every other time I timewarp, land, or load a save while my ship is anywhere near the surface? It's incredibly frustrating and makes visiting any low-gravity planets a massive pain in the ass.

[Vanamonde]

I have not experienced this, so I'm going to presume that it's a bug. Therefore, thread moved to Support. 

[Atkara]

From what I've experienced so far myself, it seems to be the result of physics easing (in it's current form) and how it acts on anything with suspension on it: landing legs/wheels & rover wheels.

The best way I've found to counter this behavior, is to:

• Set the spring strength, in proportion to the gravity of the body the 'x' craft is going to land on, e.g: 0.05 for Gilly. Anything with a gravity of 1.0 & higher, doesn't seem to suffer from this, so I leave springs as they are.
• Set the damper strength all the way to 2.0, regardless of spring setting.

These, given that you've enabled advanced tweakables through the game's options -otherwise you won't find them anywhere.

The downside is that you can't directly edit them, on crafts already launched. You have to either do it before launching, or edit the save file -which is how I saved miners from disintegrating and stopped outposts & rovers from jumping around, anywhere from Gilly to Moho, as far as gravity variations go.

[SnailsAttack]

14 hours ago, Atkara said:

From what I've experienced so far myself, it seems to be the result of physics easing (in it's current form) and how it acts on anything with suspension on it: landing legs/wheels & rover wheels.

The best way I've found to counter this behavior, is to:

• Set the spring strength, in proportion to the gravity of the body the 'x' craft is going to land on, e.g: 0.05 for Gilly. Anything with a gravity of 1.0 & higher, doesn't seem to suffer from this, so I leave springs as they are.
• Set the damper strength all the way to 2.0, regardless of spring setting.

These, given that you've enabled advanced tweakables through the game's options -otherwise you won't find them anywhere.

The downside is that you can't directly edit them, on crafts already launched. You have to either do it before launching, or edit the save file -which is how I saved miners from disintegrating and stopped outposts & rovers from jumping around, anywhere from Gilly to Moho, as far as gravity variations go.

Thank you, I'll definitely try this. I never really understood how to use the landing leg spring and damper settings. 

[Atkara]

You're not alone. Before this started happening, I hadn't bothered with them either. At about the same time, I started fiddling with the suspensions on the landing wheels of my planes, but that's another story

[SnailsAttack]

20 minutes ago, Atkara said:

You're not alone. Before this started happening, I hadn't bothered with them either. At about the same time, I started fiddling with the suspensions on the landing wheels of my planes, but that's another story

How should plane landing wheels have their suspensions set? I've had an awful hard time landing some of mine.

[Atkara]

Depends on the weight of the aircraft and your descent rate.

If you see the suspension of the main landing gear getting squeezed all the way down, you have to either increase the spring strength, or add another set of landing wheels. The latter usually does it on heavy planes, as it also helps on the wheel stress during taxiing, accelerating to takeoff speed and ofcourse, landing. As for the nose wheel, I set it's spring at ~0.25, to avoid having the plane's nose bounce up and down, when it's first placed on the tarmac.

Your descent rate has to be no more than 5m/s. Anything higher than that and you're bound to damage the plane -or outright lose it.

Your speed during final approach also plays a big role. You generally don't want it higher than your takeoff speed and you don't want it too low (or you'll stall). How much is too low, depends on your design.

Edited February 25, 2018 by Atkara

[Guest]

The wheel kraken is nasty and unpredictable. I just had another brush with it. A tanker rover which docks to a plane. I had tested it thoroughly with a full fuel load on Kerbin, but it turns out that when empty on Duna, it summons the kraken when just resting on the plane's cargo bed and switching focus to something else.