Claw

You can set it in the same place as "answered" and "unanswered."

But you can't disable them selectively for rotation vs. translation. You are only allowing or disabling a given port with the tweakables.

Try not to think of it as "cheating" or "not cheating." The beautiful thing of an open ended game like KSP is that you can play how you like. If you get more enjoyment out of using FAR and DRE, then do it!

This I cannot deny.

Oops, my bad. You're right. I was confusing my thoughts with another quad-coupler thread. They can cause roll off axis.

*sadface* Take a break. Come back and start over when you're ready.

Haha, yes. They must win time to time. Especially when it's V-day... This isn't an unrealistic goal (in KSP anyway). There are lots of reasons this could be happening beyond needing more lift. More wings help, to a point. After that they aren't really helping and just add to the part count. A reasonable rule of thumb is 0.5 to 1.0 points of lift rating per ton of aircraft. It looks like you have 80+ points of lift per wing layer. You are welcome. I'm sure you can meet most (if not all) of your goal. Not lifting off the runway on it's own is pretty typical of planes, especially big ones. Yes, but angling up isn't necessarily the best option. It's not a bad option either, but big planes will often require pitching up to take off. EDIT: I will caveat this by saying if you're aiming for a long range cruiser, angling up the wings can make it easier to fly. I didn't mean to say don't do it. Give it a try. It can help, but don't expect it to fix all your other problems too. Yes that is what I mean, in a way. Try it this way. Launch your plane and takeoff. Level off around 500m (so your prograde marker is on the horizon) and take a look at your trim indicators. If the SAS is already putting in a lot of trim, that's going to be a problem at altitude. It's one of many things to look at. The question ComradeGoat asked about the bottom engines pertains to engine flameout. The last set of engines you place on your craft can experience thrust rollback before they flameout completely. If it turns out the bottom set is the last ones you placed and they are rolling back, it can cause your plane to pitch over. Your engines also look like they might be clipping together, this can cause phantom forces. Anyway, there are lots of reasons this could be happening. Based on the pictures, I don't think you need more wing or control surface. If anything you have too many control surfaces at the back and you're probably envoking the control surface AoA bug. Also your CoM is too far forward. These two things coupled together are probably causing your nosedown at altitude.

Luckfish, I tend to temper my comments when someone asks about FAR because I have no experience with it. But I feel bad nobody is trying to help, so here are my thoughts. (Maybe I need to get FAR so I can answer some of these posts...) 1) I would guess that if there are separate sections, then it probably controls the range of motion for each axis. 2) Pitch and yaw are more important for rockets (generally). You can disable roll if you want, but to go back to your original point of testing, I doubt that disabling roll will get you much improvement in performance. If you are going to selectively disable roll, make sure you do it symmetrically or you will end up with unwanted yaw/pitch when you try to roll. Engine gimbal will only help roll if they are off axis (i.e. you have more than one engine). SAS will help roll no matter where you place it. Either of these can be sufficient to control roll, but that really depends on the size of the craft. 3) I can talk all day long about flight control gain parameters, but I don't know if k & d are gains or limits in FAR. Sorry. If they are gain and limit parameters, I still doubt you will see much performance improvement. MJ already tailors inputs to not overcontrol (in most circumstances). Gain and limiters are usually implemented to aid in "feel" of a craft while you're flying it, so that it reacts similarly to inputs at different points of flight. MJ is already imposing this on itself.

I'll echo what all three have said in the above posts. -A picture is worth a thousand posts. -Without any pictures or description of how your plane is going out of control, my initial guess is your CoM has shifted aft during space flight. -If/when you try to adjust your CoL vs. CoM in the SPH, do like Capi said and take off the landing gear. My goal is always to help you make your design fly, not how to build my designs. So if I can see yours, it'll help a lot. There are so many reasons why this might happen that we need to know more. EDIT: If you can provide a craft file, I can usually tell a lot more from that. Good luck

Ahh. Yeah, if you're going to time the turn then space would be better. The need for a fixed reference frame was to address the "rotating around the CoM or around the SAS module" question.

Since we have hijacked this thread, here are the results of my testing using intakes on a quad connector. I combined all the intakes on one test airplane because I wanted the flight conditions for each set of intakes to be as similar as possible. The only difference in flight conditions is in how long it took me to activate the action groups. The quad adapter is flipped around and connected to an FL-T100 fuel tank. Each symmetric set of intakes is on an action group. I took off with the two inboard intakes and the nose intake open. After climbing up a ways, I closed the nose intake and just flew off the two inboard. During the flight above 20km, I periodically toggled all the sets of intakes, only running two intakes at a time, and continued a steady climb. Once the engine flamed out, I opened four intakes (two on each side) on the quad adapters. The engine started back up. I then toggled on the inboard intakes, and turned off one pair of intakes on the quad. The engine still ran. Once the engine flamed out again, I opened all six intakes (three on each side) on the quad adapters. The engine started back up. I opened the two inboard intakes (one on each side) and closed the six intakes on the quad adapters. The engine quit. I repeated this experiment, replacing the TurboJet with a RAPIER. I removed all oxidizer to make sure it was completely obvious when the engine shut down. The results were the same. This isn't to say there is not a case where the quad adapter isn't bugged, but it seems to work with this setup. Maybe this was previously done in v.22?

Yes "easy" is a relative term, but yeah, this is a good starting point. For the most part. Gravity turns also play a big role. Something else for you to look into if you haven't already. Not quite. Like Taki was saying... When you keep it at full throttle with a TWR of 2.0, you WILL (and you want to) keep accelerating. The rate of acceleration will keep you roughly on track to maintaining terminal velocity during your ascent. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "i should slow down until i start to decelerate." But if you find yourself going faster than terminal velocity, then you would want to throttle back a bit. How much depends on the TWR, but you don't want to slam the throttle to idle. Just work it back. Eventually you'll get the hang of it. Remember that terminal velocity is higher as you climb. So you WANT to accelerate as you climb out.

Copying the files using this method will allow you to pull the whole rover over. The files are in the saves/ships/SPH (or VAB). Each method has its advantages/disadvantages. Try them both.

I'm not in a position to test this at the moment so I will double check, but I recall using quad adapters with intakes and it didn't have this problem. I'll try it in several configs tonight.

Yes, large ASAS modules have lower crush strength. If you put them in the middle of a heavy rocket being pushed by a lot of thrust they break. That's why it's nice to be able to put them anywhere. Of course, they could always increase the strength...

That is hysterical.

I suppose since I may have started this tangent discussion, it is rather irrelevant where the camera anchors. If you don't have an external reference frame, the ship will always appear to rotate around the center of the camera view as long as the camera angle is fixed. It won't matter if it's centered on the CoM or another random part. Also realize that if the parts of a ship are wobbling asymmetrically, the CoM would be moving too.

While the KSP model is not ideal, it isn't always directly to blame. Lawndart behavior and loss of lift due to elevons are real phenomina. FAR is a more realistic model (from what I hear), but straight off blaming the KSP model is counterproductive. Wings do not produce more lift simply because you are supersonic. In fact, all kinds of other bad things happen at supersonic speeds. Mach tuck (nosediving while tryung to get supersonic) has killed many pilots, and that was aerodynamics in the real world.

It looks like you have plenty of wing area (probably more than you need). I often find this is due to over reliance on flight control surfaces for main body lift, or that you have a lawn dart that your flight control surfaces can compensate for at low altitude. It's a long explination I can get into if you want, but I would recommend trying two things to narrow down your problem. From the picture, it seems like your CoL is too far behind yor CoM. What is your pitch trim state right after takeoff when flying level? If it's already pitching up a lot that will tell you something about your CoL and CoM. Starting out by trying to fly your plane with the CoL a bit closer to the CoM and see how that goes. That will obviously have other consequences (because it looks like your CoM moves backward a lot), but just try it to see how it flies. Let me know how that goes before I recommend flight control changes. You probably don't actually need so many, but I can guess why you have them. If you are able to provide a craft file, I can probably be more specific in my recommendations (if you want). Good luck

I'm sorry we were not able to address your question. Realize the dV charts still apply to FAR on non atmospheric bodies.

I think so. I think intake air is a bad example because the intakes are saturated at low altitude. At 10km it seems like a dramatic change in the atmosphere, but that's because of the logrithmic dropoff. And terminal velocity is about 260 m/s at 10km. Because of the simplified drag model of stock KSP, if you fly at terminal velocity you can save a lot of fuel. The wiki page below will give you terminal velocity at several points in Kerbin's atmosphere. I can post the equation if anyone wants it. http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Kerbin Keymaster, I'm not sure if we've answered your #3 question of "why." Let us know if you want more. EDIT: Also realize that flying at terminal velocity might not be the best ascent profile for a particular craft. So if your ship breaks up trying to do this in conjunction with, say a gravity turn, then don't do it.

I don't know about this specific example, but the editior lets you get away with a lot for the little 100 tanks. Radial attach them to the side and rotate. The editor is pretty liberal with nose cones too (rightfully so0.

Improvement is great! By the way, there is noting illogical with what you said above. If you replace a mainsail with four LVT-30s (or 45s), you're going to experience exactly what you said. LVTs are more fuel efficient (higher ISP) than a mainsail, so you will end up getting better gas milage for a given flight. 4 LVTs also have less thrust than 1 mainsail. So you will need to have a higher throttle setting to have enough thrust to takeoff. You could also run into the problen where 4 LVTs can't lift your rocket, but 1 mainsail will. The total thrust outpu is different. EDIT: Oops, sorry for the repeat info. I'm using my phone and I missed Streetwind's comment.

Not true for air intakes, they work fine. Why? Because intake air acts like electricity and monopro. It doesn't matter what the intakes are connected to, so long as they are there.

Check what Comrade said. You can set the thrust limit for a given engine to zero using the right-click tweakable menu and the SPH will update the thrust vector. Just remember to put it back when you're done or you'll get an in-flight surprise. Also, what is your takeoff profile? If you are launching VTOL and then moving forward (while moving up) then you probably are causing downward lift. That might make an offset CoT problem even worse. Also, that picture angle makes it hard to tell if your CoL is forward of your CoM. It seems pretty high, so if it is directly above your CoM that could cause some instability too.