TiktaalikDreaming

Yes, sorry, that's not fully extended. The lower arm swings further and comes back slightly. I couldn't remember how many frames my animation was so that's somewhere in the middle of the deploy animation. More clarity (I added the undeployed as a demonstration of why I needed to not show it.); And..... I think I'll be setting my Unity values to 1.000000 :-D

Totally concur that legs have always been crazy complex to get right. I think I burnt a good few weeks (at my usual 30-60 min per day) trying to get my first leg working, and it still makes the launch pad explode. I haven't reoriented my legs, but my end position for the piston/suspension is close to vertical, so maybe it's acting vertically, and I haven't noticed (esp as I'm having trouble getting more than a cm of travel in the suspension). My wheelCollider is +Y for compressed, -Y towards ground. And now that I check in Unity, it's not just approximately up-down, it's exactly in line with the global axis.

Sounds like pretty good testing. I'll see if I can take a look after work. . . . and looked at; Pretty solid science! there. I like 16G or 2C as closest to perfect damping (slight overshoot but then returns without passing the equilibrium again). 2E & G look overdamped to me, and the rest seem underdamped. All my stuff then seem dramatically underdamped, as my settings are wildly lower on damping. As to spring constant, to me, it doesn't look linear, but I suspect that's just how it looks. And looks are deceiving. But it's definitely not standard SI units for spring rates, because that would put equilibrium for 10t per wheel at about .8m on the stiffest setting. Which is closer to what the 16 looks to get to. Maybe it's N/cm instead of N/mm. Or, adjusted in some mysterious way as suggested in devnotes. Maybe the stiffness is multiplied by tonnage. But that would mean you should always get the same deflection for the same legs regardless of craft size, which seems optimistic.

Yeah, all the units seem to be metric. But what ratio is the spring constant? The *normal* ratio used would be N/mm, or at least that's what springs are usually quotes in. But my legs are working with a ratio of 8. Which should mean under a 800 tonne craft they'd deform vastly more than what I see (should be 1m under 1G, I see about 10cm). I used to have the spring value set at 100 (big legs for big craft). But the new system, the spring rate doesn't seem to match up to an actual spring rate.

I concur. And it would be awesome to have an idea of what units some of the variables are in. Is that spring rate kN per m? Or tonnes per m? or... It'd be great to have an idea. That way, you have an idea of the size of craft (roughly most of the time), and the travel in the suspension, and some very simple maths gets you a workable spring constant. I really only have two leg parts to work on, one kinda works with wild guess work numbers, so I haven't touched it since. The other was so fraught with overlappy colliders I've removed the suspension and wheel collider (and 3 of 4 of the new v1.1 modules). So I don't have a lot of clue about good suspension values. My thought on hearing that the issue with phantom forces being wheel colliders not ignoring other colliders, even those marked to ignore was basically that that means only half of the forces are being modelled, which is going to lead to issues. If a wheel (or any part really) collides with a different part of the same craft, sure, there's force on the wheel pushing it, but there's an exactly equal and opposite force acting on some other part. Net effect *should* be zero. There's gotta be some very assumption based simplified physics going on. And that means, knowing said assumptions is fairly key to knowing how they'll behave.

I have a working update patch for prerelease 1.1 available here https://dl.orangedox.com/fwHMwGMo0A2iXdn3B6 It's just a zip of the parts updated. I've started creating IVAs, and the Lab IVA is in the wrong spot/orientation. I know that, sorry, tough. Legs: The only part that actually needed updating to work in 1.1 is the legs (feel free to just copy the legs in). Due to the established issue Squad had with Unity5 wheel colliders not ignoring other colliders, even when they've been marked for ignoring, I've actually ended up removing the wheel colliders (and thus suspension, etc) from the legs. Squad have a work around they're working on. If that makes it into the prerelease, I'll mess with wheel colliders again before 1.1 release, but if not, I'll wait until 1.1 release before making the legs complete again. The legs in the zip above do work. They deploy and retract, although I found that there's a strange huge delay. Most of the leg/wheel modules (there's four now) are commented out, but deploying still works, and these are pretty simple legs. Other updated parts are the Ascent module, which has a partly done texture now and an IVA (although no props working just yet). There's the very beginnings of a texture for the base/heat-shield. And ditto for the lab, plus the aforementioned broken IVA for the lab. Update: I've reverted the lab to stock IVA for the moment. I'm re-aligning the lab and IVA in blender to reduce IVA orientation horrors in Unity. This zip has a renamed thingy.

I think my issue would be the colliders of the part the legs attach to, so I'm seriously thinking of setting those to wheelCollidersIgnore, even though that part has no wheel collider. Ok, tested. Making the partly intersecting part all wheelCollidersIgnore didn't help. But I set a new record of 5000m/s using only Springs! ... Plus craft was destroyed and you cannot save at this point, but that's all part of the learning experience. I might try the genericAnimation without wheel collider.

And, based on the Tuesday dev notes, probably due to me leaving the wheel collider in the mu file. Also, knowing the issue is to do with wheels interacting with other colliders, makes sense considering the mem legs.

Hooray for uat environments!

Well, I have some really simple legs in my MEM mod. They probably shouldn't have any suspension, they just fold out from a heat shield. I've been trying to get them to work in prerelease 1.1, but they seem subject to enormous phantom forces. I tweaked and tweaked the various modules, but it didn't matter what I tried, the always launched the craft at truly impressive speeds. So I switched all the wheel/leg modules for ModuleAnimateGeneric. Good news, that now seems to animate the colliders that it should, so it's workable as very simple legs. But, also subject to huge phantom forces. Which means the huge phantom forces aren't part of the wheel/leg modules. They're just a lot more common with legs for some reason. Posting this here so anyone chasing down strange phantom forces in leg modules knows they can probably stop looking so closely at the leg module settings. I don't have a solution, just a teeny bit of problem isolation.

I haven't checked these parts, but only the science module would be affected as far as I know. Wheels, legs, hollow parts and custom modules need changing for 1.1. And the science module's mini cargo spaces are (AFAIK) the only things that would qualify.

Well, the first step would be changing RescaleFactor from 0.5 to 1.0 and multiplying masses, resources, and thrusts by 8, because it's based on the real (proposed) figures half scaled. Everything is hypergolic due to the FLOX oxidizer, although the ascent stage definitely has separately allocated RCS fuel which is more traditional, which is slightly baffling, but maybe they didn't want to be spewing out hideous corrosive fluorine clouds near the orbiting craft. And 1.1 is increasing motivation for me to get off my poophole and make IVAs. :-(

I have an updated leg part https://dl.orangedox.com/2oCZiLVyv7e0Nu4hCO The remainder of the mod should still work fine. Once 1.1 comes out officially, I'll bundle this into the current version and re-release, but not until then. People playing with prerelease versions of software will just need to get used to some manual jiggery.

My understanding is that Squad will be migrating parts and UI stuff over to the non-Legacy Unity stuff, so although all the existing parts (that I've checked, may not be 100%) still use "Legacy", that system is essentially deprecated, although stuff all is actually moved over except the UI elements. I agree "legacy" usually infers something more past tense, but I honestly can't think of a better term.

That seems like the cause. Switching to and from the craft does similar things. Stock landing legs are giving a small twitch, so I suppose you can tune it to non-hazardous levels.

All large rockets do this sort of thing. Add kerbal joint reinforcement to your mods list

Quick query regarding an "anybody else see this weirdness?" type question. I've got my legs basically working. Not really tuned, cos their for craft big enough to cause the launchpad to explode, but they basically work. I have noticed that when you've landed somewhere, if you EVA/rover/whatever away from your legged craft, when you come back within "let's enable physics again" range of your craft, the legs seem to trigger some strange behaviour. It's a bit like while you're away all the legs compress, and the moment you come close again, all the springs are released and the craft bounces up (and tips over usually). I'm probably seeing an exaggerated edition of the effect due to the scale of my legs. And I haven't checked stock legs yet. Just wondering if others are seeing similar stuff.

I've always figured the prerelease was to provide testing of the stock game, and to give modders time to look at things before release. Not so much to have modders frantically try to provide updated modules for a prerelease version of the game that has a predetermined short life span. It's meant to reduce franticness, not increase. Any mod release within the prerelease timeframe is going to be wildly development. While I think it's OK for releasing speculative builds (as @emerald did), expecting anything remotely like an updated release is a crazy pipe dream. So, please, @ferram4 take your time. Don't rush, don't stress, and don't listen to people whining that your mod, tha you make for free, isn't working in either prerelease (or release for that matter) 1.1. That said, I haven't used KSP without this mod in so long, that now that I'm testing my mods without it, I'm seriously thinking I should just mark this down as a hard dependency. What the hell is stock KSP doing with joints? It's like there's negative damping. It's totally crazy.

Thanks @NecroBones and @nli2work for your work on this. I now have functional legs, even if the feet dangle off the end and they have strange spring constants. That's just a tuning issue.

Ah, OK. Thanks. That will help quite a bit.

So, in the config, in the new modules, for animation it has animationTrfName = miniLeg animationStateName = probeleg I assume the animationTrfName is the named animation from Unity, but what's animationStateName ?

Notes for 1.1 based on prerelease; Mostly working. As far as I can tell, the main parts all seem to work. I don't think I've updated all the colliders on the weirder decouplers yet. Those legs for the second stage don't work. Legs use wheel colliders, and wheels are a "re do from start" job for 1.1, and well, landing legs from pre1.1 in 1.1 behave in a way you really don't want. So, I'm not marking this as compatible with 1.1, but the majority should work so long as you don't want to land a second stage somewhere.

Notes for 1.1 based on prerelease; The parts all seem to work as well as they ever did. There's no intrinsic plugins required, there's no legs or wheels. There's requirements to have the system function using realistic fuels (depends on RealFuels, Community Resource Pack, and ModuleManager), but without module manager, the included config will do nothing. I suspect a lot of parts mods will be in this situation.

Notes for 1.1 based on prerelease; While the conversion to RealFuels won't work until you have an updated module manager. And RealFuels. But, assuming stock fuels, this looks to all be working fine.

Notes for 1.1 based on prerelease; The module/plugin doesn't work, as all plugins won't without recompiling. Parts not related to Orion propulsion should work. I'm not sure when I can get the module fixed up, seeing as I have no idea what I'm doing. I have solicited help, so we might even get a working UI by the end of this (the existing UI depends on a separate library that's not in 1.1 afaik).