FeliusKerNes

I've tried with it both on and off. I can control the main throttle in the sense of the dial moving up, but the actual throttle of the engines doesn't change from 0 since TCA seems to insist to set the throttle limiter of them to 0. Edit: Huh, opened KSP today and it started working as it should. Nevermind it then.

I've been playing around with making a VTOL landing Rover for atmosphereless bodies, and grabbed TCA to help balance the thrust. Problem being, last time I used TCA it was still the older much simpler version. So, I built the rover and been trying to do some testing in Kerbin first, but I can't seem to get it working right. That is, unless I also turn on the vertical velocity module and use that to set a positive vertical velocity (or also activate the hover module and set an altitude), TCA instead just completely deactivate all engines, making thrust 0. Even if I toggle them on manually (or their groups), TCA still keeps their thrust limiter at 0, and the rover just sit still there on the runaway without moving. Only way so far to get TCA to balance the throttles and actually, you know, have throttle is to use the previously mentioned Vertical Velocity Control Module. What am I doing wrong? Is there some way to get TCA to just balance the thrusts and nothing else?

It must be to some degree, otherwise there'd be no point at all to making propellers and turbofans, just rocket engines that gather oxidizer from the air as they go (which is, as I understand, a standard ramjet engine). And the Isp of at least some airbreathing engines compared to rockets certainly wouldn't be as good as they are now. I'm not sure of the actual numbers and specific physics involved, but certainly, there must be some reason why they are better than just pushing reaction mass out, at least under some conditions. Or rather, some reason why turbofans can cross 10k Isp (in real life, not any KSP specific engine) while even cryogenic rocket engines (again, speaking of real life rocket engines) are under 500 Isp If nothing else, there must be some way of getting better efficiency than standard rockets in inert atmospheres, even if not strictly a turbofan that feeds oxidizer into the intake (although that would probably be the limit of my modding skills if I ever get the patience to try my hand at creating something for this).

Is there any mod that creates (or just apply a module manager patch to stock) jet engines and other air dependent engines so that they can be used in atmospheres without oxygen. That is, taking three "propellants", LF and some type of intake atmosphere (like Firespitter does (or used to do) for electric propellers) to generate thrust, allowing it to operate in planets with atmosphere that aren't Kerbin and Laythe. I mean, I suppose you could theoretically do it already by taking an electric engine, fuel tanks and a whole load of fuel cells to generate electricity, even with only Stock parts now with Breaking Ground, but I was hoping for a more elegant solution (specially with how much of a bloody effort it feels to me to actually try to control a propeller plane (and let's not even talk about helicopters) created through the new stock rotors) than that. And for what seems a current question that seems to pop out in every past thread about it I found when doing a search: How is it different from a rocket engine? It's not creating thrust by expelling it's reactional mass, instead being essentially a normal internal combustion engine that is carrying it's own oxidizer to create torque for the engines, so as to push the (oxygen-less) air around it, generating thrust that way. And while it certainly is going to lose quite a bit of efficiency (considering the standard rates of LF to Oxidizer in KSP, a bit over half of it), it's still far more efficient than to generate thrust solely by pushing internally carried reaction mass out. I mean, half of the worst jet engines is still better than even the best of non-ion rocket engines, at approximately 3200/2 or 1600 ISP for the Rapier equivalent, compared to 800 for a stock nuclear engine (in a vacuum). And about 6000 ISP for a Goliath Equivalent (good luck hauling a plane using that to far planets though :P ) I know there's the Exploudium Breathing Engine mod, but that's not quite what I was hoping for, even if it gets a bit close. That just "inverts" the relation of what's being carried, oxidizer instead of LF, and makes it breath Eve's atmosphere, which it assumes to be some form of combustible compound. Is not a bad approach, mind you, but not what I was looking for either. So, is there anything else like I was hoping for?

No changes, still doesn't appear. Log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ysex1eo2l9zx7y/KSP.log?dl=0

Zipped log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/40sp5npab08do7w/KSP-Log.7z?dl=0 Unzipped log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ysex1eo2l9zx7y/KSP.log?dl=0 Zipped is 100kB, unzipped 1800kB. I'm using stock toolbar, although I am using the toolbar manager.

I seem to be having rather the opposite problem with the mod: I'm not getting any icon whatsoever, no matter what screen.

Huh, I can't believe I missed that one. Sorry.

Are there plans to rebuild Near Future Aeronautics in the near future (pun not intended)? Not asking for a specific time table or anything like that, just if it is a "I plan to tackle it when I have some time" or a "No plans about it, but I might perhaps look into it again if the mood ever strikes me at some undisclosed point in the future"?

I've been noticing some issues with ascent inclination, specifically that mechjeb seems to treat negative values there as if they were positive (also true for inputting the values as ”360-value"), meaning that if using it to launch on a non equatorial orbit it only has a single launch window to match it, not two, the other leading to the opposite orbit. I'll be leaving town soon for a few days so I can't fully investigate it but I'd rather post it now in case I forget it later when I come back.

Well, I was not planning to keep Kerbin as a moon, but to have it back as its own planet and put the Mun and Minmus back orbiting it That said, according to this article: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/44-our-solar-system/the-moon/general-questions/104-can-moons-have-moons-intermediate It should be theoretically possible within a certain radius so long the satellite the moon orbits doesn't synchronously rotate, which unless I saw it incorrectly wasn't the case for Kerbin and Soonah, although admittedly I have no idea what would be it's Hill Sphere and if it wouldn't be so close it'd create problems with the atmosphere.

I like most of this except the changes of Kerbin and its moons, finding it annoying to have it as a moonless moon of Sonnah. How would I go about editing that aspect of the mod while keeping the rest of the changes?

Main thing I'd like to know is "how gentle?" with a greater degree of precision instead of either having to extensively test it out to discover the tolerances involved or just severely low balling it. Anyway though, any chance of a "maximum air speed for parachute deployment" in some future version? It'd certainly take care of most issues in terms deployment of armed parachutes without having to guess at which height the initial aerobraking will have slow it down enough.

The question remains though. I know it wasn't due to heat since I did check the chute info (not the part, the actual chute info that opens by clicking the respective button on the part right click widow) and it didn't got even close to the max chute temperature. Essentially, I'd like to have some theoretical idea of how strong the chutes instead of exclusively depending on empirical testing and/or playing ridiculously safer with when opening the chutes and possibly in terms of backup chutes too.

Tried to find how strong the parachute cables in real chute are but not didn't find any answer so: How strong are they? I mean, is there somewhere I can figure out how much force the cables can take before snapping? I know I can see how much heat they can take, but most snaps I had were due to aerodynamic forces, not overheating, and while I can always just play safe and leave opening the chute to the last minute I'd like to have an alternative to that. On a related note, is could there be some option to restrict an armed parachute from opening unless the craft speed is under a certain value, so arming the parachute before aerobraking didn't require you to guesstimate at which altitude/pressure you'd have lost enough speed?

Yeah, just discovered that. Apparently the Explorer pack uses the 4.0 version which has near zero thrust or something. Now back to the drawing board and possibly setting the Atmospheric VTOL engines back to not immediately responding to changes in thrust.

Hmmm, weird, I do have the exploration pack installed but it doesn't seem to make the RCS in the ducted fans to work.

Gonna have test that, although I don't seem to find how enable rcsfx and google doesn't seem to be of a great help right now. At around 100m/s-150m/s somewhere between 500m to 3000m depending of the region, although after disabling the heat gauges with F10 it seems that the heat don't actuall go over a certain level, at least in the half hour or so that I flew around at most at any one time (because vtoling around is rather boring to be honest, even with mechjeb SmartASS for heading control, and those were just test flights ). Since disabling said gauges with F10 also removed the memory issues that would cause the game to crash, which was what was previously stopping me, it does seem to be working well enough, even if it does get a very mild red glow after a while. Edit: It still might be the fans though actually, the craft does have a rather symmetrical layout with a lot of fans that nearly every other part is at most 1 connection away from a fan, if not connected directly to one. Karbonite is damn heavy.

Playing around with a atmospheric vtol heavy duty Honeybadger and I'm having some issues with all the parts overheating without anything in particular coming to attention. It runs on 6 atmospheric vtol engines plus 4 scaled up (2x 2.5m 2x 1.25m) nose electric propeller from Firespitter for TCA, classed as maneuver engines (it was either that or a ridiculous amount of RCS parts), capable of lifting 75000 units of Karbonite, powered by a honeybadger nuclear reactor. The problem I've encountered is that flying around, every part (except I think the engines) start to overheat, glowing red and having that little bar about heating up. I can't say if it would stop there or not though, as that's also about the time my game tends to crash (I'm assuming the overheating parts are causing my computer to run out of RAM). Also, in a related subject, a couple suggestions about atmospheric honeybadgers: There really need to be a electric+air stronger RCS or some engine capable of quickly responding to changes of thrust (assuming TCA is also being used) to make it feasible without having go rather "Frankensteinish" in the design of the craft. Edit: And on another possible thing of note: It might be interesting to enable the honeybadger cargo tanks to be able to also carry Karborundom as well as Karbonite and other resources, specially given how that's the one that actually needs to be carried around the most. Edit2: Yes, I've tried those fan propellers that theoretically have some RCS as well but for some reason the RCS part doesn't seem to work at all. Edit3: Hmmm, it seems that the heating issues are actually a vanilla issue, so nevermind that part I guess.

Question on Solar collecting: Been doing some testing on it with hyper edit, and found a few issues: First and more importantly, it doesn't seem to be working at all. Set orbit somewhere between 1500-2000m, open the advanced collecting dish, tell it to start collecting Karbodurum, it says the load is 100%, but the amount acquired per second is 0. Even letting it on while warping from the space center some 30 days or so doesn't seem an increase of even 0.01 in how much my vessel has stored. Before you ask, yes, I do have empty storage space and my power generation is perfectly stable with a good surplus, with both solar panels and the stock permanent generator. Second thing: Time and time warp; How you guys handle it other than going back to the space center to time warp?

So, by using NEAR my launches tend to have to be far more vertical than in vanilla, since if I try to do the gravity curve, the atmosphere buffet my rocket into losing control and generally point to the ground. What I'm getting at, is there any guides or guidelines on how to better design your crafts given this add-on aerodynamic model?

Was using 0.751, and was unable to use symmetry mode, which in turn creates some issues with trying to add radial parts with some symmetry and keeping the rocket properly balanced.

Honestly, the drag calculations seem to be a bit overly harsh, having to add far too many parachutes to get to green.

Having all red landings, which leads me to ask: How exactly is the chute drag calculated here? Furthermore, on weights, do the script take the difference between a full and an empty fuel tank into consideration when calculating if the parts lands safely?