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[1.3](Jan28/17) Landing Aid: Kill your horizontal velocity to land (Now optionally using RCS)


Diazo

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  • 2 weeks later...

Diazo Seeing as you already have the necessary know how. I had a suggestion - I also mentioned this on the BD Armory thread but BD seems to bee very understandably busy these days with his game.

Orbit control of a vessel with radius and altitude settings. This would allow you to put a plane up in the air and have it loiter in a given area. The reason is for things like C-130 gunships. Have the plane fly itself while you use mods like BD armory to shoot the heck out of a given area while moving. Also make for really good Youtube videos :)

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Actually that is not something my mods can do.

All my mods work by controlling the downwards thrusting engines, if those are not present then there is nothing for my mods to work on.

Controlling a plane's flight like that is a whole seperate mod in itself. I do know there are flight assist mods out there, maybe one of those can do what you are looking for?

D.

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Actually that is not something my mods can do.

All my mods work by controlling the downwards thrusting engines, if those are not present then there is nothing for my mods to work on.

Controlling a plane's flight like that is a whole seperate mod in itself. I do know there are flight assist mods out there, maybe one of those can do what you are looking for?

D.

Oh no worries, Well just the same thanks any way it was worth a try. That's what I get for not knowing enough about the inner workings under the hood.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Running version 2.6 with KSP 1.0.4. Changed altitude setting to 5000m, angle to 89 degrees, throttle to 100%. Put my ship on a landing trajectory and turned on SAS. The mod appeared to be wiggling the engine gimbal very rapidly, as though trying to steer (strange, since the engine had no gimbal). Other than that it did nothing. Didn't point the ship retrograde, didn't fire the engine, just let it crash and burn. This was in [color = blue]blue "kill horizontal velocity" mode. I tried the "hover" mode also, but no joy there either.

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That sounds like the issue is partly unintended behavior and partly I need to revise the documentation in the first post. However, here is what I think is going on:

First, this mod does directly not touch gimbals in any way, it controls the SAS system through which KSP controls the gimbals. Is there any possibility you could do a test of the same flight profile with manual control inputs to see if the gimbals exhibit the same behavior? My suspicion is that this is something in the stock SAS system that is revealed because this mod applies SAS in incremental steps, not one large setting like the stock SAS settings do.

Second, you first say you set the throttle to 100%, then later on say that this mod did not fire the engine. I'm not sure what you mean here as this mod does not control the engine throttle at all. Because this mod specifically does horizontal velocity only, it leaves the throttle alone so whatever method you are using to control your vertical velocity (whether by hand or another mod) is free to control the throttle so you can control your altitude above ground and not crash. Do you mean the "Speed%" value in the settings window of this mod? That is not the throttle setting, that is how fast the mod will attempt to tip the vessel. Larger vessels need to reduce this value to damp out a pendulum effect their higher mass exhibits at the default settings. (The Vertical Velocity mod in my sig is what I used while developing this mod.)

Third, you say you set an altitude setting of 5000m. Above this altitude the mod will not try to do anything, below this altitude you should see it trying to do something. Note that while the mod is trying to control the vessel, the icon on the toolbar should get a yellow border to inidicate the mod is attempting to cancel your horizontal velocity.

I'll run some tests when I get home from work to see if I can replicate any of this.

D.

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  • 1 month later...

This looks like an intriguing mod for my upcoming career mode. I'm curious though, is this an easy mode mod that will break the difficulty curve for early career progression? Or is this tech-tree integrated so that I have to unlock it, and possibly even have a qualified Pilot at the controls? (In other words, could this be used as a mod not to break the game, but to actually make the Pilots "work" the way they're supposed to once they're veteran-status? Possibly integration with FinalFrontier?)

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@MisterFister: This mod will probably end up as an easy mode mod for you based on your description.

This mod (and my Vertical Velocity mod) came out of the fact that I have an old, klunky keyboard. Without this mods I am physically not capable of landing a skycrane because the smallest input my keyboard allows is too big for KSP and I can never get my horizontal speed slow enough to land, the large inputs my keyboard sends keep overshooting my target.

So this mod is simply available all the time, there is no tech tree integration or requirement of a Pilot kerbal being on board.

D.

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  • 1 month later...
It should still work.

I haven't officially tested it yet but it does not interact with anything that has changed in 1.0.5 so it should still be good.

I boot it up and test it once I get one of my other mods that did break in 1.0.5 up and stable again.

D.
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Alright. The mod itself works in KSP 1.0.5 without an update.

I'm not officially bumping it to that version however as the icon is not behaving correctly on the toolbar and I want to fix that and make sure there isn't some other issue lurking around I'm not aware of.

I don't expect it to be a huge effort to fix so I'm hoping to have that out some time this weekend.

D.
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  • 2 weeks later...
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  • 3 weeks later...
On ‎21‎-‎12‎-‎2015 at 8:44 PM, inigma said:

Would be awesome if you combined these two mods :) into one mod:

Possible?

Well, why would it be needed? With two separate mods, people can choose what they want to do themselves.

Also, about combining these mods, together they form an "automated" landing system. I love it! :D

(Or is that what you meant? :blush:)

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  • 3 weeks later...

Version 3.0 Release

-KSP 1.1 Update. No functionality changes.

Download here.

This update makes this mod functional in KSP 1.1 and nothing else. There are some possibilities around the new features KSP 1.1 adds, but experimenting with those will happen sometime in the future if it happens at all.

Happy KSPing all.

D.

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  • 5 months later...

Since you can get static ground coordinates, would it be troublesome to add a feature where you can target a nearby vessel and have the mod follow it (regardless of vertical location of targeted vessel... 2D tracking i guess)?

I've always wanted a pack of drones with floodlights to follow my rover at night :3

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  • 2 weeks later...

Version 3.1

-KSP 1.2 update. No gameplay changes.
Github download.

@achroma While probably striaghtforward, the one issue is that the drone would always try to hover directly over the rover. This mod has no capability to offset from the target. The drone would also need a height control mod of some sort.

Either way, I have no time to look at it right now, only half way done updating my mods.

D.

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