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Clear Air Turbulence

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Posts posted by Clear Air Turbulence

  1. Hi RIC

    That's what I did. I did get the version for 1.0.5.  At least I think I did.  I downloaded it shortly after it was posted up. It was not on the main KER page but it was in a link someone provided in the comments page.  And it works perfectly.

    But once every 20 times I open KSP or so, I get that message. 

    Anyway, I will delete Kerbal Engineer and re-download...

     

  2. The flopping happens under zero acceleration.

    In other words, I am floating in interplanetary space.  I can't change my orientation at all.  All I need to do is hit the WASD buttons and the wiggling starts. SAS makes it worse. 

    Warp gets rid of it fora a while, then it comes back. 

    It did cross my mind yesterday that the problem could be that I have a different centre of gravity now that the big tank is emptier.  But pumping the fuel around did not solve the problem.

  3.  

    So here is my first Duna mission, all tooled up and ready to go: A miner-lander and a refinery , connected with an ordinary docking port.  I flew the lander up from the Space Centre and docked off minmus, thus constituting a midsize ship that hopefully can fly to Duna and refuel there.

     

    Spoiler

    vJvsImw.png

    In high Kerbin orbit, it handled well.  Responded when I want to orient the pointy end, and while there was some pogo type vibrations under acceleration, no major stability issues.

    200 days or so later, in midst of the hohmann transfer to Duna, I want to do some midcourse corrections.  And I can't turn the spacecraft at all without major wobbles and oscillations.

    I can see that the docking ports could be a cause of wobbliness, but why now?

    Why was the craft initially maneuvreable, but not now? 

    Why did did I lose my rigidity?

    And what can a man do to get his stiffness back?

     

     

     

     

  4. I have a miner/lander shuttling between minmus and an orbital refinery. 

    Docking is fine when it is fully laden, but every once in a while I have to do a dock with the holding tank empty, and then what happens is that the craft yaws/pitches rocks widely during the final moments.

    Translation (IKJLHN) works fine but attitude adjustment  (ADWSQE) produces wild and difficult to control rocking moments.  (If I use Lock View at these times I can actually get seasick :confused:)

    I assume this is because my craft is balanced for full holding tanks.  I further assume that the rocking is caused by a bad interaction between the SAS and the RCS controls...

    But what to do about it?

     

    (1) Position the RCS thrusters midway between hold full and hold empty, ensuring it ALWAYS rocks,  but not too badly?

    (2)  Make two sets of RCS thrusters, one for each centre of gravity?

    (3) Is there  a fiendishly clever mod that causes the RCS thrusters to slide between different positions to make up for shifting CoM

    (4) Somehow make up for it with piloting skill?  If so, how?

     

     

     

  5. FWIW for a complete noob 

    I played around with a lot of mods for a while, both cosmetic ones (EVE) and part ones (e.g.  the Near Future series).  

    In the end I have chosen to select my mods so I have the least performance hit & the least buggy experience.  I basically just use my mods to do the math and heklp design rockets. Also, my current game is based around orbital refineries and resource mining.

    So:

    • PlanetShine - because it moar beautiful
    • Mechjeb -  at the moment, just for the automatic node execution and the built-in maneuver node editor
    • KER. Can't d without it
    • Docking Port Alignment Indicator - essential
    • SCANSAT - because I just can't buy into instant resource scanning
    • RCS BuildAid - because docking.

    I have also just decided to install TriggerAU's Transfer Window Planner.

     

    P S And KAC, of course. 

     

  6. This may be a known one, but I only found this out yesterday, and I haven't see it in the list: KSP adjusts maneuver nodes to compensate for V lost during aerobraking

    When aerobraking for capture, while in your final approach to the body, make a maneuver node placed a little after periapsis. Place it as soon after peri as possible, just after emerging from atmosphere. Adjust so that you end up with your capture orbit.  

    It does not matter if the total dV required for the burn exceeds your fuel capacity.KSP automagically adjusts the amount of retrograde burn to compensate for your velocity loss during aerobraking, so that you end up with the same final velocity.

    As you lose speed, you will see the maneuver node adjust automatically.  

    This makes it much easier to plan planetary insertions, because you know ahead of time whether you have lost enough V  or not.

    A small thing, but I was really pleased to find it out!  

     

  7. 3 hours ago, EditorRUS said:

    So let's imagine we have a really long ship and somehow put it at exactly 84 159 286 m obit (hyperedit, anyone?) so that one part of the vessel would lie inside Kerbin's SOI and another inside Kerbol's SOI. What would happen here? My assumption is that these two parts would start to experience different gravititional pull and basically the vessel would get phantom thrust until the entire ship is in only one SOI.

       

    Try it and see?

  8. So last week my MacBook Pro suffered catastrophic hard drive failure while I was playing KSP.    Kernal panicked, hard drive extensively damaged.

    Just now I was playing KSP on my desktop machine, and it crashed to kernal panic.  Fortunately I was able to restart it, and verify disk finds no problems.  

    But twice in a row is really odd. 

    Both times I felt my computer was getting very hot

    I also noticed the sound from my spacecraft sounded very glitchy, as if Mac OS was having difficulty getting the sound clips from the hard drive.

    Log file

    I am running KSP 1.0.5 on OSX, with Mechjeb, KER, Docking Port and RCS Build Aid. 

  9. I hope this is not in the wrong forum.  I have an odd problem with KER.  I am using the provisional 1.0.5 compatible release I found here

    I am building a simple mining lander.  Holding tank, fuel tank, engines.  But KER does not give me any delta v in the VAB.  In fact it says delta v is zero (see HUD below in picture).  When I take it off to the launchpad I have 3000 m/s delta v and it goes up OK.  what's going on?

    Log file here:

    Picture here.

    Spoiler

    YE05yeZ.png

     

    P S I notice that it has something to do with disabling staging.

    I took those rockomax's off, replaced the structural pylons with radial decouplers.  Delta v showed up in KER as it should.  When I disabled the staging, the delta v disappeared.  When I re-enable staging, delta V stays zero. Hmmf.

     

  10. A question: one thing that is a big niggle is answers sorted by rating in stead of chronology. It makes threads unreadable.  Can we please default to sort by date? Or otherwise, please have an option for the default? thanks

     

     

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