[1.3.1] Ferram Aerospace Research: v0.15.9.1 "Liepmann" 4/2/18

[WeatherMAN]

Thanks for the update ferram! We all appreciate your hard work making this mod essential!

[yithpistol]

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm certainly no stranger to manual installs and uninstalls. I may reinstall Blizzy's toolbar manually as well. Or see if the manual install of nuFAR I just did helps. Thanks again, Ferram for your hard work. You make playing a game feel like an actual accomplishment beyond just having fun. Kind of like how I feel playing SpaceChem. When you solve a puzzle in that game it makes you feel like a genius. Likewise, when you make a rocket soar and a plan that can bank without its wings taking off in what they think is a much better direction you feel like an engineer. That's the kind of design in a mod that makes yours so successful.

Edited May 9, 2015 by yithpistol

[Van Disaster]

After 1.0.2, I changed my physics.cfg to the old 1.0 values. I'm assuming I need the 1.0.2 values instead?

Pretty sure this simply turns stock atmosphere off now, so no need.

Congrats & thanks for the release, Ferram.

[PrometheanVR]

@eodh: Unless VSR is constantly animating something, there is no reason that should occur. That is very, very strange.

@PrometheanVR & yithpistol: If both of you were relying on CKAN, you made a bad decision. It isn't aware of the new ModularFlightIntegrator dependency, and so everything breaks. Install manually and everything will be fine.

Whoops, I feel pretty stupid. Sorry about that. I simply selected ModularFlightIntegrator in CKAN and everything is working fine now. Ferram, is it possible at all to list ModularFlightIntegrator as a dependency in CKAN so that it automatically installs it along with Ferram? I know a bunch of other mods on there have it set up like this. Also, I'm just curious but do you have anything against CKAN? To me, having a package manager has made running mods on this game so much more fun due to dropping the complexities of having to manually manage so many mods.

Anyways, thanks a ton for this amazing mod ferram. Kick ass job man!!

[ferram4]

I'm not in charge of CKAN and frankly don't care whether it works or not with FAR, but in my experience, it's just made things more difficult. The less people rely on it, the fewer issues they seem to have.

[Camacha]

Also, I'm just curious but do you have anything against CKAN?

One of the main arguments against CKAN is that it handles exactly those dependencies in some cases very poorly, leading to all kinds of confusion and frustration. If it works it works well, in other cases it can be very contra-productive.

That being said, that is my personal opinion and experience. I do not know what Ferram thinks.

[PrometheanVR]

Thanks for the feedback, I can see how situations like that could be frustrating.

[jrandom]

I dunno, I find CKAN to be extremely time-saving for swapping mods in and out while trying to stay under the RAM limit. But then again, I usually google around when I hit problems first before I go pestering the mod maintainers.

[Dermeister]

I can't seem to find The Update COL bouton anymore like we used to have... My craft thinks my COL is off center yet I've moved parts around ect and it doesn't fix this... I think it might be bugged how do I fix this?

I'm exploring the Far interface now to see if I might be able to find the

update COL" bouton but so far no luck.

[ferram4]

Nope, no need for it anymore. CoL should be exactly where it's supposed to be.

[Yuuray]

Thanks a bunch Ferram, this is one of the essentials!

[Dermeister]

SO then that leads to the question... Why is it off center when clearly the ship is cymetrical? Any tips to fix this?

[ferram4]

Probably because, for whatever reason, it is not actually symmetrical. Are there procedural parts on that, and have the mods been updated to inform FAR when they change shape? If not, then there's your problem.

[chunes]

Is anyone having an issue where the command pod re-enters the atmosphere at a funny angle? http://i.imgur.com/xIJygbN.png

The craft consists of stock heat shield, command pod, and Mk16 parachute. I am not using SAS. It points in that direction all the way down. I'm running 1.02, so I don't think it's the CoM issue with the heat shield that was in 1.0. (It doesn't do this with stock atmosphere.)

Edited May 9, 2015 by chunes

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

It's not explicitly in the changelog (mainly because FAR wasnt released then) but ProceduralParts should already be compatible with FAR.

[Dermeister]

Probably because, for whatever reason, it is not actually symmetrical. Are there procedural parts on that, and have the mods been updated to inform FAR when they change shape? If not, then there's your problem.

Yes I have procedural fairings but they claim that they are built to work with far. How ever it could be my problem but I removed parts 1 by 1 to see what caused this.... I striped it down to the Fairing base still off centered. SO could be the fairing base.

[ferram4]

@chunes: Yeah, I see it. I think the hypersonic moment might not be high enough to counter the drag of the heat shield. Should be an easy enough fix.

@Dermeister: But have they been updated since FAR updated? No? Then they're probably not informing FAR of the shape change.

[Gaugeforever]

I'm having trouble keeping my pods at retrograde during reentry. Firstly, I can't not use SAS and let aero take over, that's REALLY bad. Secondly, I end up flipping anyways. I'm using symmetry so I'm not sure what's up. Will be more than happy to test it for you. I tried shallow and steep reentries. It didn't seem to matter.

I will say, launching a rocket is worlds better than stock. My only issue now is getting back in one piece!

Edited May 9, 2015 by Gaugeforever

[ferram4]

As noted right above your post, it is a confirmed issue, and I'm working on it. I know, repeating it unfortunately doesn't fix it faster.

[B15HOP_xmen]

@ferram4

I use FAR religiously. It is by far the best mod for KSP. I also use procedural wings religiously. The reason why I love procedural wings? Not just to keep part count down but because the stock wings are not delta enough for hypersonic speed. Procedural wings in my eyes are the 2nd most important part of having simulated design. Why on earth would I use a wing that is either too big, too small or just shaped for something other than what I want. I think nuFAR will make this more obvious because the whole plane is now part of the drag model. Especially if air flow gets calculated. I would even go so far as to say procedural wings should be in vanilla.

[Wanderfound]

Woo! NuFAR! Thanks, Ferram; saved us from the soupmosphere once again.

--

In the department of minor niggles: anyone else getting lock-ups and computer crashes following aerodynamic failures? The last one didn't just crash the game, it crashed my whole PC with one of those "shutting down to avoid physical damage" warnings.

[ferram4]

Ouch. That sounds like the computer tried to allocate a lot of memory for voxelization all at once and then broke things horribly. I can look into putting a cap on that and instead make the voxelization wait, unless the issue is actually the number of threads set to work to handle that.

[Silent_Thunder]

One of the things that's happening, likely due to the aero changes, is stock parachutes are much less effective than they used to be because of their drag. I'm just wondering if for FAR this is WAD or a known issue? Or if I should be using far more chutes than normal? I've noticed similar issues when using 1.0 aero settings in 1.02, which leads me to suspect when they made the atmosphere soup again, they reduced the effectiveness of chutes to compensate.

For instance a standard career mode "starter" ship of a goo pod, the starter solid booster, command module, and standard chute, will impact at around 8.5m/s, which is above the crash tolerance of many parts, including the bottom stage solid.

Of course, depending on how soon 1.03 comes out, worrying about this may be moot as whatever atmos tweaking they do will likely involve a chute rebalance as well.

[ferram4]

Stock parachute code is replaced with RealChuteLite code, as noted in the changelog and the announcement post a few pages back. To the best of my knowledge, stupid_chris set up the parachutes to provide the same drag when deployed as the stock chutes did, so the difference is not due to the chutes being weaker, but due to the rocket itself having less subsonic drag.

I don't think you should expect to recover the booster when the only thing you're using to land all of that is a single parachute.

[jrandom]

...it crashed my whole PC with one of those "shutting down to avoid physical damage" warnings.

That means your processor is overheating. Have you doublechecked the processor fan? And if it's running fine, you might want to scrape off and re-add the thermal paste between it at the heat sink. (KSP makes my laptop fan go absolutely nuts. It's a gaming laptop so it even has a special "run the cooling fan as fast as possible" button).