Launch Escape System needs refinement

[check]

The new launch escape system part is neat, and I appreciate the fact that the part includes a small side thrusting motor to tilt your craft away. Unfortunately, I think the side thrusting motor is a bit too powerful, as it causes violent tumbling end-over-end of the spacecraft when activated. And if you want to jettison the tower when it's no longer needed, the tower itself tumbles away insanely fast.

Anyway, I propose the ability to tweak the side motor's thrust and/or have the ability to disable it completely (maybe have 2 solid motor stages show up for it? You can stage it so that both activate if you want to abort, and only the vertical thrust motors activate if you want to jettison the escape tower).

That is all.

[stupid_chris]

The new launch escape system part is neat, and I appreciate the fact that the part includes a small side thrusting motor to tilt your craft away. Unfortunately, I think the side thrusting motor is a bit too powerful, as it causes violent tumbling end-over-end of the spacecraft when activated. And if you want to jettison the tower when it's no longer needed, the tower itself tumbles away insanely fast.

Anyway, I propose the ability to tweak the side motor's thrust and/or have the ability to disable it completely (maybe have 2 solid motor stages show up for it? You can stage it so that both activate if you want to abort, and only the vertical thrust motors activate if you want to jettison the escape tower).

That is all.

The LES technically should thrust you away from the craft, and right as it burns out, it should flip the pod bottom facing windflow. I believe it's how it behaves right now and I don't think that should be changed really.

[check]

The LES technically should thrust you away from the craft, and right as it burns out, it should flip the pod bottom facing windflow. I believe it's how it behaves right now and I don't think that should be changed really.

For Apollo at least, the pitch-control motor wouldn't be totally used to reorient the craft so the heatshield was pointed in the direction of airflow. It would pitch the craft away from the vehicle (firing for only 0.6 seconds) and then 11 seconds later, canards on the escape tower would deploy to reorient the craft. 11 seconds is a long time, and since we have enough torque from the pod itself to reorient it manually, we don't need the canards and can just do it ourselves. We do however need a pitch motor to to move the craft out of the way of an exploding rocket, like we have since we only have a blink of an eye to react. But again, my issue is that the pitch motor is too powerful or burns for too long and shouldn't be causing backflips in the pod with SAS enabled and it should be toggleable if we want to disable it for a normal jettison.

[stupid_chris]

For Apollo at least, the pitch-control motor wouldn't be totally used to reorient the craft so the heatshield was pointed in the direction of airflow. It would pitch the craft away from the vehicle (firing for only 0.6 seconds) and then 11 seconds later, canards on the escape tower would deploy to reorient the craft. 11 seconds is a long time, and since we have enough torque from the pod itself to reorient it manually, we don't need the canards and can just do it ourselves. We do however need a pitch motor to to move the craft out of the way of an exploding rocket, like we have since we only have a blink of an eye to react. But again, my issue is that the pitch motor is too powerful or burns for too long and shouldn't be causing backflips in the pod with SAS enabled and it should be toggleable if we want to disable it for a normal jettison.

My guess is because it works on the same ModuleEngines as the rest. I'm not sure how two ModuleEngine on a part would behave :/

[check]

My guess is because it works on the same ModuleEngines as the rest. I'm not sure how two ModuleEngine on a part would behave :/

Fair enough.

[stupid_chris]

I can think of solutions though. A well placed CoM offset could probably slow this down until the LES is nearly empty. I haven't mesed a lot with the LES so I don't know exactly how fast it is, but it should be possible to minimize it with some hacks. However I don't know how much of an offset it would need. A large offset could give strange behaviour when not actually firing the LES.

[BFGfreak]

Yeah, when I was making my launch abort system I had that very problem. The problem is that a proper LES would need at least 2 separate engines (3 if you want a powered decouple) you'll need high thrust escape motors which can be accomplished by the current modules, and a lower thrust pitch motor to direct the entire craft away from danger. What I ended up doing was separating it into 2 parts and forwent the pitch motor in favor of abort motors and separation motors.

[Javster]

I wish there was an Orion capsule instead of using an Apollo one...

[Deltac]

The LES technically should thrust you away from the craft, and right as it burns out, it should flip the pod bottom facing windflow. I believe it's how it behaves right now and I don't think that should be changed really.

I'm surprised you're supporting the new LES. If you abort at ground level, or near it I should probably say, RealChute modded chutes do not have enough time to deploy before the pod smacks the ground. Yes yes, I know, can't talk about mods here, but I just want it noted.

So yeah, we need to remove the thrust transform for that side motor. Is this possible with only the files provided by Squad?

[zeel]

Ideally it would simply have two thrust regulators, one for up and one for sideways. Then you can tweak it however you need it.

[Mmmmyum]

I'm surprised you're supporting the new LES. If you abort at ground level, or near it I should probably say, RealChute modded chutes do not have enough time to deploy before the pod smacks the ground. Yes yes, I know, can't talk about mods here, but I just want it noted.

So yeah, we need to remove the thrust transform for that side motor. Is this possible with only the files provided by Squad?

If you adjust chute deployment time it works fine

[FenrirWolf]

Ideally it would simply have two thrust regulators, one for up and one for sideways. Then you can tweak it however you need it.

Now there's an idea.

[Ekku Zakku]

Yeah, I'm really not happy with the stock LES... I once spent hours tweaking the escape tower from NovaPunch some time last year, trying to mimic the LES from Orion as closely as possible from the pad abort test video. I actually got pretty close, and I was happy with how it turned out. I really wasn't happy the first time I saw the new LES in one of the .23.5 preview videos though, and I was hoping I could at least tweak it a bit myself. Sadly I cannot, and I'm left with a part I will never touch because of how repulsive it looks when used. At least there are mods =P

Also in my campaign playthrough, I did a quickload from just before I unlocked the tech tree node for the LES as well, since I figured my science points could go to something that would be more immediately useful.

Edited April 6, 2014 by Ekku Zakku