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[0.90]NEAR: A Simpler Aerodynamics Model v1.3.1 12/16/14


ferram4

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There is no interface or GUI for NEAR. User feedback suggested that it was unnecessary and confusing, so it is not available for NEAR.

Thanks! GUI not needed! :) Was just making sure it wasnt supposed to be there and i was missing it. Thanks for all the hard work.

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@AngusJimiKeith: I dunno if the KSO can be made to work with this. Even though NEAR isn't as much of a deviation from stock as FAR is, it's still enough to make a lot of stock designs completely unworkable.

Well, from what I understand, it worked "acceptably" with modified configs with FAR. I'll worry about that once it's updated. For now, I'll try out NEAR and see how I like it!

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Sure, just like you can flip around with the Stock Drag Fix. That's what happens when you disconnect drag and mass; there's no way around it. Either you have to deal with instabilities or you have to argue for drag proportional to mass at all times; you can't have both, since they directly contradict each other.

Just pushed a fix to deal with ModStats support.

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Sure, just like you can flip around with the Stock Drag Fix. That's what happens when you disconnect drag and mass; there's no way around it. Either you have to deal with instabilities or you have to argue for drag proportional to mass at all times; you can't have both, since they directly contradict each other.

Just pushed a fix to deal with ModStats support.

I havne'nt done an aerodynamic flip that I couldn't recover from in Stock Drag Fix.

Which is not to say that flipping with a high AoA or Sideslip, especially with Cylinders in cross-flow, is not realistic. It is realistic. But it's not fun. Flipping out and being completely unable to recover from it if i press a button a little too hard is not something I think the stock game should have.

Whatever the updated Aerodynamics model will be, I really hope it won't be too realistic. Leave realism to the modders, keep Authenticity to the Stock Game.

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I can finally launch rockets with a greater than 50% chance of them actually taking off now, hehe. Though I still keep looking for the atmospheric density readout during launch, I'll have to break myself of that habit. Full FAR does makes my head swim a bit, maybe once I get used to NEAR I can graduate back to FAR and figure out what I'm doing!

As an aside, the naming convention made me nearly choke on my morning cup of tea from laughter.

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Great, so now we got us a three front war >.>

Ferram, got two questions about this alternative:

First, does it still require parts to have metadata - like FAR does? I suppose yes, since as i understand it, this plugin does take shape into account, and that FAR metadata in wings etc is about behavior caused by shape, right?

Second, what are the implications to performance? If you had to make a rough estimate by just holding up fingers - out of five, how much work does NEAR do compared to FAR? Three? Two? One? Asking because SDF is basically almost for free, since it doesn't truely simulate anything (which poses inherent limitations that NEAR wouldn't have).

EDIT: Ah yes, and.... going to hold of updating to 0.24 until KIDS is ready. Really don't want to play without it anymore, since my designs are now based on fixed thrusts and ISPs.

EDIT2: Oh, i see - already updated - thanks!

Edited by rynak
KIDS addendum
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@GregroxMun: Funny, I always thought the possibility of horrendous failure caused by poor piloting was more fun than the alternative. It actually makes launches exciting and eventful as opposed to a routine like it is with the stock model.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "authentic," because it's certainly not authentic aerodynamics by any stretch of the imagination; it's just too far away from reality to be believable.

@rynak: Wing parts still need the configs to function properly, but the overhead for wings in NEAR is greatly reduced. The overhead for other parts (which was always low to begin with) has reduced slightly with NEAR, but not quite as much as for the wings.

SDF actually has to do quite a bit of work, since it needs to iterate through all the resources on a part to get the total mass of the part to properly scale the coefficients around; this is also done by the stock game itself, but since that value doesn't seem to be stored anywhere, it needs to be calculated again for SDF to use it. There's more overhead there then you think. It's not much, but it is quite a bit more than "free."

@Themorris: Surprisingly, even without FAR's structural failure code you can produce forces that are enough to rip things apart, which means that you really overdid it. NEAR does not have any of FAR's code to force aerodynamic failures, since that's the first thing I stripped out of it. It's not a bug, it's stock behavior.

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@Themorris: Surprisingly, even without FAR's structural failure code you can produce forces that are enough to rip things apart, which means that you really overdid it. NEAR does not have any of FAR's code to force aerodynamic failures, since that's the first thing I stripped out of it. It's not a bug, it's stock behavior.

So if it broke, it would have in the stock game?

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I've used FAR quite extensively before, but this idea sounds interesting! I'm going to give it a go. Thanks Ferram!

Is 400 m/s at 400 meters and shock cones (white "reentry effects") expected behaviour when flying a plane?

Just a note - m/sec speeds can be deceivingly small-looking. 400m/sec is 1,440 km/h, 895 mph or 778 knots. Or 2,405,153.9 furlongs/fortnight. Definitely supersonic. (apologies if you know this already)

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What it doesn't do, that FAR does:

--Changes in physics with Mach number

--Complicated changes in wing lift and drag due to other parts around them

Neat. Not for me, but it did take me a bit to get used to designing for mach tuck and exploiting slats (they seem to work at increasing AoA before stall, but it could just be additional lift area/placebo), and I've got a pretty decent understanding of aero.

I can see the lack of mach effects being a huge difficulty reduction for the spaceplane crowd.

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