AgentRev

There seems to be a bug with scaled-up landing struts, their strength does not scale accordingly. and so they often instantly explode from overstress on contact with ground.

@NathanKell Okay, the issue is not as straightforward as I believed, but still, the problem has to do with the fact that velocities/trajectories are not using the same reference point as angular momentum, which should be the CoM. I ran some tests with the following rig (the weird radial decoupler thing was just to rule out staging as a cause), and regardless of what I would do, velocities and trajectories were always calculated relative to the bottom lander pod. The vessel was rotating from its CoM, the controlled part was the middle pod, yet when I built up a decent amount of yaw momentum, I could clearly see the surface velocity varying according the bottom pod's movement; when the bottom pod was rotating in prograde direction, the surf vel increased, and when it was rotating in retrograde direction, the surf vel decreased. If I removed the top and bottom pods, then the velocity was roughly relative to the bottommost girder segment that was right above the bottom pod... And, as expected, if I removed everything but the middle pod, then all worked fine and the surf vel didn't change on rotation. So, there's definitely something wacky happening here. The velocities roughly appear to be relative to either the bottommost or outermost part, regardless of any other variable.

AFAIK this has been plaguing KSP since forever, and it's quite surprising that it hasn't been fixed in such a long time. An absolute indicator proving this bug is still present is that the maneuver prograde (blue target) on the navball starts shaking violently when the maneuver dV is very close to 0, with a large ship that is prone to wobbling a bit. The fix is as follows: Velocities and distances should be relative the CoM while in Staging View & map view, and relative to the controlled part while in Docking View Navball maneuver markers & orbit markers should always be relative the CoM, regardless of the view Navball rotation and target markers should always be relative to the controlled part, regardless of the view (as is currently) If you are serious about fixing this bug, and have trouble understanding the above explanations, please do tell, I will be happy to go into further details as necessary.