Bedwyr

Well I hate Photobucket, but it's what I've got at the moment. Two pictures: Picture of forces and parts used. I mucked with the angles of incidence for horizontal stabilizers and wings to adjust the CL so it's halfway between the center of the CM marker and its edge. I've usually found that to be pretty well behaved on takeoff; I don't have to rotate super hard to get up and flying. The center of thrust is at the same height and through the CM. I might mess with the engines later for looks, but it's fine. So testing the gear placement. What I did was move the gear up and down the fuselage by very small increments and then nudged the nose gear up and down to match. At any reasonable point below halfway (that would be where the word "flammable" is on the fuel tank fuselage), the aircraft becomes unstable on takeoff, exhibiting that roll oscillating moment. I found that the on snap-to locations (pressing C) I could adjust at what speed the oscillations begin. One notch down exhibited unstable oscillations at 40+ m/s, two notches down occurred at 30+ notches. Each time I rotate the gear so that they were properly vertical and met the ground flush. No canting in or out like a low-rider. The only time the plane became stable was with the gear mounted directly to the side, no rotations. That makes it nearly impossible to rotate the plane on takeoff; the tail will drag and crash the plane. One thought I had was to take the position of the gear where it's unstable at 40+ knots and attach it to the cubic octagonal strut like this: Well guess what? It was reasonably stable through the takeoff roll. Again, in the picture dead sideways is level with that flammable label. So it appears that the instability is purely a function of gear width. The gear need to be located at least at a width normally seen at the sideways attach point. Using the cube strut is an ok fudge for testing, but not for a normal career mode playthrough. If the gear need to be attached at the sides, they also need to keep that fuselage high enough not to have a tail strike on rotation. Layperson's recommendation: Increase the size and the stiffness of the L01 gear so that it gives better ground clearance when attached to a 1.5m fuselage at the sides and might remain stable at some reasonable location just below the sides. Adjust size and stiffness of the nose gear so that a normally designed airplane at early career mode playthroughs will rest with the fuselage perfectly level. Edit: sorry for the second picture size. Photobucket insists on not replacing the larger image with the scaled smaller image like it's supposed to.

Ok, no worries.

Yeah. The streamlining is suppose to be like a teardrop with the spiky, pointy end facing aft.

Nose looks like. I could be wrong. The wheelpants fairing is supposed to trail behind like so:

Cool thanks! I notice your nose gear is reversed. That might be unstable for steering even if the steering direction is properly reversed. Is it possible that could cause the veering? For comparison's sake, I've got my CL closer to CM than yours and you've got a high-wing config with a level or slightly down angle of incidence. The Mk1 cockpit with two trailing fuel tanks is the same. Different engine. So I'd anticipate that the weights are similar. I'll go try a few things.

For completeness sake, could you post a side pic of CM, lift, and thrust locations? I'll do the same when I can.

Ok, some new information Slashy. Please reference: I'll be following up in that thread to limit spamming yours.

Ok, so talking with Alshain, he's got a video I'm linking here from the 1.1.2 thread: I asked him to take a look at a craft file from the bugtracker linked here: http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/9498 It *looks* pretty close to the same issue that Alshain and I have had with the '01 gear. I decided to try the airplane and it flies off the runway just as well as you please. Alshain tried raising the gear mount location to get the CG, and therefore the gear moment of inertia, down. He reports back that it stops the oscillation but results in undercontrolling and veering (did I get that correct?). I don't have time at the moment to tweak my own airplane but will report back when I follow up on it. If anyone else has the gumption to experiment, it would probably be useful to squad as an addition to that bug report or a new report with a link back to 9498. I'd really like to trace exactly where on a normal 1.5m fuselage the oscillations on '01 gear when turning on a takeoff roll move from damped to undamped to unstable. Although I have to go to work, erm, "race ya!".

Hey Slashy, Would you be willing to cross compare my craft file with this one: http://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/9498 I'm trying to evaluate the two and whether this is the same problem, but to my surprise this craft file flies just fine for me. Some tweaking needed and I see the nose gear clipping through the runway but it gets off the runway ok. Maybe the lower CG position or the further-to-the-side attach point is enough of an arm to prevent the runaway harmonic of the suspension.

Alshain's video is exactly my problem with the gear. Simply unable to fly an early-career plane off the ground because of it. The only difference might be that my experience is the same pre and post 1.1.1.

I'm cross-referencing this discussion here: Most of the issues GoSlash fixed are in corporated in 1.1.1 but my conversation with him should probably contribute to this conversation. And also re-linking the pastebin of my rudimentary career mode airplane with '01 and '05 gear: http://pastebin.com/RtGUtmFr The behavior is the same before and after the patch for me though GoSlash said the file flew better post-patch for him. I'm afraid I still haven't gotten this ship above 40m/s without crashing. If there's a straight design flaw (not a "here's a workaround you're not using" comment please) such as total lift being insufficient or weight and drag forces overwhelming the gear naturally and inducing the oscillation moments, please let me know.

Oog, sorry, no luck. I recreated the vehicle in sandbox mode and observed a sudden nosegear crash. Launched again and saw the same oscillating behavior. I'll try to load the craft file back in and check that. Edit: Yeah, tried it with the pastebin data and got the same thing. No dice there. It's like the 01 gear and the 05 gear are acting like tundra tires on stiffened oleo struts:

Ok, I'll give it a go with same/similar design and report back. Was my design quite heavy? I suspected it might be as the "engine" bodies were Mk0 fuel tanks. I couldn't figure out a better place to put them and didn't have 1.5m engines unlocked.

Well I certainly appreciate the effort. I think this is important because it is a common configuration early in career mode. The weight imposed by jet fuel Mk I tanks and the swept wings shouldn't be unreasonable and the expectation is that these gear should be sufficient for anything you fly that early (and pretty necessary to complete early survey missions). You concur that's not a crazy, out-there opinion right? Essentially I don't want to be accused of "doing it wrong".

Thanks for the information. Here's a pastebin of the craft file: http://pastebin.com/RtGUtmFr Do you have a link to the bug tracker entry for this one or any further details? Is it treated as a bug or a no-fix due to other issues, low priority vs other wheel issues, etc, etc?

Can I get a clarification on exactly what this fixes? My main problem is an undamped, unstable roll oscillation from left main gear to right main gear starting at 25-30m/s on the takeoff roll and growing until the aircraft crashes. Is this the skittering problem? Some caveats: I'm in career mode with only the minimal aerospace parts, using fuel tanks behind mk I cockpit, two small Juno engines in an "MD-80" config, and swept wings main gear (LY-01) are attached to the fuselage just below halfway up the sides and rotated to the normal vertical position to have the tires at the same vertical position as the nose gear gear have been checked for correct orientation attempted takeoff with suspension active and inactive rudder control frozen upgraded runway once I'm observing the same behavior using the cfg and not using the cfg. Thanks much!

So do the Logitech pad sticks give an analogue control input or do they just map to WASD, full control deflection as with the keyboard? Do you know what input axes they're mapping if they are? So far I'm kosher with the Steam Controller's operation once i grokked what they were doing (and I'm amazingly impressed by all the mode shifting stuff they did... You really don't need to use the keyboard at all. The only key bindings I feel I'm missing are X and C in the VAB), EXCEPT for the flight control inputs. That's not a huge problem with rockets but it makes airplane control, not to put too fine a point on it, complete pants. I'm a real life pilot and, well, partial input should result in partial deflection. It's just a thing, you know?

Rephrased the question to ask about gamepads generally. Looking for information on what kind of support to expect.

Ok, so the words "Steam Controller" might have have killed interest in answering. Let me try one more time but ask a bigger question: Primary question: Does KSP allow for analog gamepad inputs? That is, does gamepad support allow partial control inputs or can joysticks only input full deflections as with a keyboard? I would like to fly an airplane without having to flick control surfaces to full deflection. Corollary: The official steam controller profile maps keyboard inputs to the controller's joystick. If possible, I would like to change this to analog inputs. Is that possible?

Isn't Apple incredibly reluctant to harm their margins when installing extra memory of any kind? The Air 2 only just recently added 1GB of ram. It might be 3-4 more revisions (maybe more?) before they would think about expanding that I'd guess.

Good grief are some of the reactions in this thread out of proportion. I'm happy to see some of the silly reactions earlier in the thread have died down, but still... my word. Without much more information I can offer nothing more than some worry that they can pull off three console ports in succession, congratulations and best wishes to Flying Tiger, congratulations and best wishes to Squad for expanding the popularity of the game, and a warm welcome to console fans. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman: "[squad] is not your ...... This is a useful thing to know, perhaps a useful thing to point out when you find yourself thinking that possibly [squad] is, indeed, your ....., and should be out there [programming] what you want to [play] right now. People are not machines. Writers and artists [and programmers and designers] aren't machines." http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html Words of wisdom from a wise man, certainly applicable here, and worth remembering to bring your role as fans and occasional co-creators in the mod-universe back into proper prospective.

I'm confused by the most recent chatter. How should I treat this mod? 1.0.2 compatible? Incompatible? Partially compatible, but get ready to dig into it and change a lot of things? Partially compatible but a few tweaks needed?

Mechjeb is a very realistic way to fly your rockets. I recommend flying them by hand at first so that you learn what is happening, why, and what good and bad responses are before turning on Mechjeb. If you are playing in career mode, it should be less of a problem because you will have to figure out how to fly before unlocking more advanced features. That said, as a pilot, engineer, and especially as a low tech stick-and-rudder glider pilot I'll personally defy anyone claiming that it's cheating or look down on people who do. They're flat out wrong. They're socially wrong for getting a bug up their behind, trying to micromanage someone else's game. They're also technically wrong as most advanced flight is conducted under some level of autopilot control, especially space flight. There is a time and a place for manual control and there is a time and place for automatic control. Especially in airplane training there will be lots of manual flying before you're allowed to use an autopilot, hence my suggestions above. But it's there for many good reasons. The proper response when it comes to KSP is to be self referential. If someone wants the challenge of hand flying rocket launches, great! If someone else wants to use Mechjeb just for attitude control to free up brain space to do other tasks, awesome! (And that's a big part of what aircraft autopilots are for in real life: to free the pilot up from task saturation.) And if someone is bored after the 150th launch or simply doesn't want to bother with the whole "flying" thing and spend more time designing and building rockets, marvelous! So, recap: - It's your game, not someone else's. They don't like what you're doing in yours, tough. Go jump in a lake. - Real life uses just as much and often more automation. - In real life pilots learn manual control first, but commonly fly auto far more often later.

Ah, ok. I do not use blizzy if I can help it. I recall having that extra icon always floating around the game screen in previous versions.

That is gorgeous and well designed Wanderfound. Well done.