herbal space program

People are saying this is the first stock weapon, but I thought people had already made high-velocity cannons out of stacked decouplers at some point. Is that not so? It's also not clear to me why this would be superior to just sticking a bunch of Sepratrons onto a probe core/battery/reaction wheel stack and making that into a guided missile. Does the shell have some property that ordinary objects don't?

I did quicksave that plane under high aerodynamic stress, and then had to invoke "unbreakable joints" in alt-F12 to avoid it breaking up on reloading. But at the same time I'm pretty sure that my weird rotor displacement didn't happen because of that, because as I was driving around looking for rocks to scan, the plane was already starting to take off at ~30 m/s and would pitch up easily, which is normal behavior based on my sandbox testing. After the update is when I first noticed it didn't want to take off anymore. Anyway, due to 1.12 or not, I want them to fix it too! ...So I went and looked at what it said there, and it sure does sound similar! Except that I also quicksaved/quickloaded a number of times while flying upside down, which reverses all the stresses, and it didn't change anything. Maybe it is something that only happens sporadically?

The wheels on my Eve plane were definitely completely different when I loaded it in the new version. On mine they spontaneously started shaking with a very high frequency as the plane turned down the hill and started sliding. I was able to make it stop in my case by increasing the brake strength and manual friction control while lowering the damper strength. There's still less traction than there was before, but in my case that was a good thing. In other news @KerikBalm and @MechBFP, I figured out a totally simple solution to my rotor angle corruption problem, which in retrospect I should have thought of before: the way it is now, the plane actually flies pretty well upside down ! Thanks nonetheless for your suggestions!

I don't know. Do you perhaps have a link to a description of that? I have seen some strange behavior with the robotic parts, but never anything quite like this. FWIW, I reloaded it several times in that situation in the previous version, and while I'm not sure I would have noticed the rotor issue per se, it definitely seemed a lot more inclined to take off on several of those occasions, as I was rolling it around in search of rocks to scan, than it was when I ultimately tried to take off for real in 1.12. That's cool, thanks! Alas when I checked it out, I was reminded that I would have to remove each and every fan blade and nosecone from my rotors individually before it would let me rotate them, and then of course replace them all. With 10 rotors and 40 blades, I don't think I quite have the patience for that. Also, it seemed that the angle snap tool on the one rotor I did try it on was messed up, so that it would not snap to a straight placement in either local or absolute mode, which was definitely not the case in the SPH. At this point I think my easiest means of continuing to play as if this hadn't happened will be for me to make another uncorrupted copy of that plane with a probe core in it, teleport it in right next to the messed-up version, use EVA repair to transplant the old science container to the new vessel, and then teleport the old one back to the KSC to recoup my funds. I just hope none of my other fancy ships with robotic parts do the same thing when I switch to them!

Of course that all stands to reason, but what I meant was it seemed like the wheels were actually holding me to the ground when I was trying to take off. Turns out that was not really happening, but rather that opening the ship in the new version somehow changed the angle of my rotors so they were no longer parallel to my fuselage, causing my propellers to apply their thrust at a somewhat downward angle, constantly pushing my nose down. It's still flyable, but just barely, and it definitely had no such problem before the update. My plane before update: Note how all the propellers point straight forward. Pre-update, it looked just like that on the ground on Eve as well, I just don't have a screenshot. Now compare to my plane post-update: You can see how the propellers now point more downwards, and in close-up how the rotors are now displaced and angled relative to the mounts. They're not broken either, nor are they drooping from the high gravity, because neither the "hack gravity" nor the "fix repairable parts" cheats under alt-f12 did anything to fix them. Sending my engineer out to rotate it back didn't work either, because it's too heavy. Regardless, I would say that this is an actual bug in the update that borked my plane, so I would caution those who have big career games going in the previous version to finish any technically complex missions like this one before installing the update. Anyway, as to the wheel code, this feels just like the last time they revamped it, which is to say things that worked fine before now produce all kinds of bizarre behavior and phantom motion. Hopefully they will get that all worked out in the next patch.

Mmm. This new wheel code is not working so well with my Eve prop plane. Seems like the wheels are somehow sticky wrt the ground. Plane also shimmied wildly with all kinds of phantom oscillations until I turned down the damper strength manually.

Halelooooyah!!

Well hunting for Easter eggs in this new version is almost sure to be more fun than flailing away at my impossible rover arm scanning mission on Eve, so I'll be downloading it as soon as I get done working today!

As has been said, a screenshot would be very helpful here, but when I got a mission like this what I did was launch into a polar orbit so that I could exit Kerbin's SOI in the normal direction to a solar orbit that's the same shape but in a slightly different plane. Getting back from that is pretty easy, because all you have to do is more or less "boost towards Kerbin" like you said, which is why I suspect that's what you did as well. As a matter of fact, if you actually exit Kerbin's SOI in a perfectly normal direction, all you need to do is wait until you approach your Kerbin nodal point and you will re-encounter Kerbin automatically. In fact if you don't see that encounter in the map view right after you exit Kerbin's SOI, then you know you had some non-normal component to your motion when you exited, which means your orbital shape/period is no longer identical to Kerbin's. In that case, if you wait too long to get back down to Kerbin's orbital plane, you will come in either ahead of it or behind it, potentially requiring a whole bunch more solar orbits before your intersect and Kerbin's position line up again. So it's not really an anomaly so much as an artifact of trying to encounter a body that is in nearly the same orbit and position as yours. Of course if you boost significantly more towards Kerbin from this situation, so that you reach its plane again before you have time to get too far ahead or behind of it, this won't be an issue. Anyway, does that make sense to you or have I got the wrong idea?

This threw me as well on the last career game I started. I thought they had just somehow decided to scrap all that.

Not sure what you mean by "minimalist", nor exactly what aspect of the Mars Direct concept you mean to emulate, but this is the smallest Duna return capable vehicle I was able to come up with a while back: It has a mass of only 5.7t at launch, and uses a Rapier ascent stage and Ion propulsion to get as much dV as possible. If anybody has a smaller one, I'd like to see it! But maybe that's not what you meant...

If you do it to the right degree, it actually produces less drag at high speeds, because it lets you keep your fuselage pointed directly prograde while your wings still have some angle of attack. Adding more rather than less wing area can also somewhat counterintuitively reduce drag at high speeds/altitudes, because it lets you keep your fuselage pointed more prograde up where the air is really thin.

This is a very nicely written tutorial, just keep in mind that it is so old that it says stuff about the KSP aero model that is no longer true.

Some more advice on building a plane that will actually fly: 1) get to know the center-of-mass (CoM), center-of-lift (CoL), and center-of-thrust (CoT) indicators in the SPH. A good plane will have the CoL indicator on or just behind the CoM indicator, both when the tanks are full and when they are empty. Achieving this balance is not trivial, and I highly recommend using wet wings rather than just tanks to help you with that. Trying to mount at least some of your engines further forward along the sides rather than having them all in the back helps as well. If your CoL is too far behind your CoM, your plane will keep trying to nose down. if it is in front of your CoM, your plane will flip over and try to fly backwards the second you go off prograde. 2) Don't forget to put control surfaces! You'll need both horizontal stabilizers and a tail fin of some kind near the back, and sometimes a canard on the front can be quite helpful as well. Also, surfaces that are meant to control your pitch should be either well forward or well aft of your CoM. 3) Put most of the weight on the rear wheels, but don't have your tail sticking out too far. Takeoff and landing are much easier if your rear wheels are relatively widely spaced and just a little ways behind your CoM, while your nose wheel is as far out in front of your CoM as you can put it. This also puts quite a bit more weight on your rear wheels, so they should often be one notch beefier than the nose wheel. The front and rear wheels should also be mounted so that your plane is pitched slightly up on the runway, so that your wings generate lift as soon as you get rolling. As was mentioned before, tilting the wings slightly up in the SPH is often a good idea as well, as it allows you to generate lift while your fuselage is pointed directly prograde, which minimizes drag in flight. Having said all that, make sure your tail section doesn't protrude so far behind the rear wheels that it will hit the runway when you pitch up for takeoff! 4) Familiarize yourself with "absolute" vs. "local" mode when using the "rotate" tool in the SPH. You should make sure all your wheels and control surfaces are absolutely horizontal/vertical with respect to your fuselage before taking off, or else you could see some bad behavior. 5) Consider turning off the steering on some or all of your wheels, at least for takeoff/landing. I generally find that they respond too aggressively to control inputs in these situations, greatly increasing the probability of disaster. Happy flying!

You make a good point. Changing the speed and/or altitude probably would have worked. I'm pretty sure that at 20km and that speed, the aero forces wouldn't have been strong enough to snap off my wings, although that would have represented re-flying a lot of the approach. Another thing that probably would have worked is changing my motion where I was so that it had an upward component that would reduce the force on the wings. As to changing the attitude of my craft where it was to unload the wings, in that situation on Eve, the only thing that did that seemed to be going into a vertical nose dive, which becomes really fast really quickly. In the end I determined (based on my first landing attempt) that invoking unbreakable joints in alt-F12 for just the couple of seconds after loading was in fact only temporary, so it seemed like the least amount of cheating to get me around this problem. My second attempt at landing was successful, so I'm past that roadblock now, but I do think my experience with this does point out an area where the game really isn't behaving the way it ought to. I wouldn't call it a bug per se, but obviously the way they have combined the relaxed save state of the craft and the instantaneous activation of the physics engine in the atmosphere can readily produce catastrophic events when they shouldn't happen. As a plane enthusiast, I do hope they get around to fixing that behavior at some point, at least before KSP2 rolls off the line.

Thanks for the explanation, that makes perfect sense to me. And obviously you can't fix that by editing the save file. Perhaps if I enable auto-strut and rigid attachment everywhere that will help going forward, although there's obviously no time to do that on my save while flying. I'll try your suggestion about the gravity parameter. Maybe I was just really lucky, but after I turned "unbreakable joints" off in alt-f12, it really seemed like I could still get away with stuff that would have broken my plane up before, and I want to land it fair and square. As an aside, it really seems like it shouldn't be so hard for them to fix this. They should just apply some kind of damping to the structure's movement for the first second or so after reloading so that the momentum of the parts doesn't apply double stress to everything. I suppose that might open the door to some exploits, but it still seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me in exchange for not having perfectly good airframes spontaneously disassemble upon loading.

Hello all, I'm playing through a career game with the BG DLC, and part of that is the propeller-driven Eve spaceplane pictured below approaching the place I want to land: It handles re-entry just fine, and getting it to stable flight on the props and keeping it that way is a bit tricky but doable, as is landing it based on sandbox testing. So long as I don't push it too hard or lose control with the props (easier said than done!), it holds together perfectly well. What it doesn't seem to be able to survive however is quicksaving/quickloading in atmospheric flight. No matter how slow, straight, and level I have it before I hit F5, it always seems to break up instantly when I reload it, forcing me to start all the way back in early re-entry if I mess up anywhere in this long, long phase of flight between around 40km and the ground. Basically as soon as the physics load, the wings just snap off no matter what I do. So my my question is this: is this some kind of a bug in the vessel file or is it just some inherent bad feature of how the game handles static vs. dynamic loading? In the former case, does anybody know how to edit this behavior away? I'm not above using physics cheats transiently either, since it seems so unfair, but it appears that once I load a vessel with "unbreakable joints" enabled, it stays that way until I reload it even if I turn it off, which of course takes all the challenge out of landing it. Thanks in advance for any insights from the knowledgeable!

the way I figure it with my mediocre math skills is that no matter how you enter Mun's SOI, you're going to have at least enough gravitational potential energy to put you back to that altitude after your PE. Any net motion towards Mun that you have as you enter will add to that potential energy, and by definition you can't enter Mun's SOI with a net motion away from it. So the best case is crossing the boundary with an infinitesimal amount of radial motion towards Mun, in which case only an infinitesimal amount of retrograde boosting at PE is required to keep you from going back out. In my case, I think what happened is that I just grazed Mun's SOI on its inside boundary at the AP of my ship, moreover from a PE that was considerably higher than LKO, which allowed me to enter it with a motion that was small in the sideways dimension and minuscule in the radial one, just enough to avoid unplanned lithobraking. If you manage to enter the Munar SOI with that type of motion, I can see how a rounding error might put you directly into orbit, as @Zhetaan described above. But that was I-don't-know-how-many versions ago, so it doesn't surprise me that they've since cooked up some kind of a kludge to make achieving orbit due to a rounding error impossible. In any event, I'm pretty sure that trying to shoot for that is never going to be the most efficient way to get into orbit, because you can't do it from an Oberth-friendly PE that is much lower than your point of entry.

You sure don't seem like that to me. I don't think I really have the patience to try something like that either, but indeed, that's the direction the wheels in my head were turning!

Hmm, makes me wonder what happens if you place separate control points that are all within physics range of the adjacent point, collectively spanning some larger distance. You just haven't been around that long, and frankly a lot of these questions are completely trivial for those who understand the code behind the simulation. I have been willfully blind to those things in general, just so I could feel like more of a scientist about it. Regardless of that, there have been endless discussions about just about anything you could imagine, which is why this forum has been so cool! This particular question is just something I never saw discussed before myself.

(Channeling Terry Jones) How is it that you have so few posts and yet are so knowledgeable in the ways of KSP?

I suspected that, but I was about to test it anyway with this: There's a docking port, a thermometer, and a barometer at the end, to test if atmo physics apply at that point and also to see if switching control points changes what happens. Don't need to bother with that now, thanks! I should have known that no such question would go unanswered for long in this particular community! So what does that mean? If you create a craft longer than 2.2 km, does the game just load the part that's within that radius of the root part and ignore the rest?

That's easy! Now rescuing a stranded Kerbal before you have maneuver nodes or RCS or the ability to set distant targets, that's just a little hard!

I swear that there was one time in some version that I actually found myself in orbit right after entering Mun's SOI, but it was probably some bug that happened near the boundary condition. As I understand it however, if you make a perfect entry into another body's SOI, i.e. you have no or nearly no motion as you cross in, you could in theory put yourself in a stable orbit for what amounts to an infinitesimal amount of dV.

@ColdJ Got it. The Jool dive is something pretty much every long-term player tries at some point, although it sounds like you pushed it to the extreme with that vessel! At any rate, I am now much more interested in the question of what happens if you put a ship half-in, half out of an atmosphere, and how far you can push that....