Hobizor

Thanks for the suggestions everybody, especially Smjjames: Turns out Kerbal Joint Reinforcement works like a charm. Not only does it prevent the rover from hanging too much it also (apparently) somehow allows collision detection between parts of the same ship: The wheels rest firmly against the floor without clipping and don't freewheel like before. When deploying the gears they briefly start clipping trough the floor but then abruptly retract a bit so that they contact the floor and support the rover. The same is partially true of the small landing gear - although that is a bit hit or miss. As a bonus I learned that adding small landing gears at the right angle plus RCS allows correcting for misaligned docking-ports without having to live with a high CoM or an unpractically low bay port. Either way, the wheels do tend to get shredded (about two-thirds of the time) when undocking regardless of deployed jacks. So I guess problem solved?

Thanks for clearing that up. Seems odd though that Squad would add a ramp when it's main use is unfeasible. Maybe it would be possible for them to fix it by assigning cargo-bay parts to a special layer like they did with jettisoned fairings to give them specific properties, or maybe I'm being an idiot and all parts of a craft have to be the same layer.

Hello, after installing 1.0.5 I tried to put the new cargo ramp to use and dock a rover inside a cargo bay, this was the result(on the left side: ) The back tires clip trough the floor of the bay and the whole rover hangs of the docking-port as if the rear tires disappeared. It happens both with the rear tires resting on the short straight section of the ramp and with the floor of the actual cargo bay. I tried adding a landing leg to the back to act as a jack: however that doesn't work either, with or without suspension activated. When I time-warp the problem goes away (on the right) with all parts properly resting on the floor but as soon as I go back to 1X time-warp it reoccurs. I tried different ways of attaching the wheels and it's the same every time.

Hi, today I finally got around start my recreations of actual NASA missions using FASA parts. But first I wanted to check how close the stock FASA crafts are, performance wise, to the real deal. Juno-Explorer-1 was weird- the second SRB cluster went completely haywire but it still limped into orbit. Next I went for Mercury-Redstone. Again, I used the stock craft file, but this time I added two parts: The posigrade rockets (which were somehow left out) and an accelerometer. I tried various ascent profiles and recorded the flight data using Graphotron (no part.) The resulting graphs were all supposed to look like this: However I used time-warp so most of them got misshapen (at least I learned that Graphotron does not respond to changes in values during time-warp.) For range data I had to use the flight log and for max ascent G I had to write it down before reentry so it doesn't get overwritten. In the end I did four flights using various pitch programes and compared them to the actual M/RS-3 data. 1. Was mostly my standard eyeballed gravity turn plus some manual corrections to keep speeds and Ap from deviating too much from RL. Overall I got kinda close if you squint, except for range which was massively off. No clue what happened there. 2. Gravity turn at the T+16 seconds. Ended up closer to 4 degrees than 3. Q was a lot higher due to much greater speeds early on. Range was closer, though. 3. The real-life pitch programe. Yeah, no dice, either I am doing something terribly wrong or my mods are set up wrong but the turn was simply too early and too fast. Q twice what it was supposed to be, speed pretty similar to the previous attempt. 4. Gravity turn after hitting 75m/s at a moderate 2 degrees initial pitch. The other attempts got closer in certain areas but this one was closest overall, if I did the pitch maneuver slightly latter I'm pretty sure I would have gotten very close to the real deal. Mission times (from ignition to splashdown) are shorter in all cases in part due to a lack of a drouge chute. Overall, I found out that the FASA Mercury-Redstone can get pretty close in performance to the real thing but not using the real-life ascent. Comments, suggestion? Did I screw-up colossally somewhere?