drhay53

I think I was confusing some of the Kerbin Side Jobs contracts with KSGAP contracts. I filtered out the KSJ contracts through the contract filter addon and then lowered that number you mentioned and have been getting a number of contracts from KSGAP more to my liking. thanks!

Ah, I couldn't figure out where the engines came from. Happy Birthday

Out of curiosity, what is that long and narrow test craft that is in a lot of your videos?

@allista thanks for continuing to investigate. Things are looking good. I'm sure it's frustrating to have tested it so much yourself and then have people find ways to break it right away I've been sick all day today but I will test the new version as soon as I play again.

Hmm. I'm also having trouble reproducing that first result. At one point I changed the location of the engines to be closer to the center of mass. That might have reduced the monoprop usage or something. The next time it happens I will post the craft and see if I can debug it.

sorry. I don't think the monoprop engines are in the expanded spaceY, I think it's probably either the tanks or the big module itself that you're missing. Try this: using the SpaceY engines, make a lander that has ~1000 delta-v and try landing it. See if that triggers the message and the crash. I will try in a little bit but I can't at the moment. edit: i think 1500 dv is about the right starting point for the one that crashed

@allistait requires SpaceY for the monoprop engines, and USI Modular Kolonization Systems for the tanks (those may be USI core?) and the lander. https://www.dropbox.com/s/3vsczx36us5l4h8/TCA_MKS_tester.craft?dl=0 Removing one of the two tanks on top should give the 'not enough fuel' message. With both tanks, it works fine. This was from 50km around the mun.

@allista things are looking much better! ok after some quick testing (with the USI MKS lander from my imgur album): 1) The KAX helicopter flies flawlessly now 2) The landing module seems much more reliable, but I still had some crashes. From what I can tell, here's what happened a) The first test I got the "not enough fuel to land properly. will decelerate as much as possible before impact". However it never tried to decelerate. This actually happened to me before this update as well. It never burns the engines, it just crashes. It had something like 700 delta-v left so it should have been able to burn enough to 'land wherever', without searching for a landing site properly and all of that. From as user's perspective crashing your ship when it seems to have enough delta-v is a pretty tough learning experience Adding more fuel makes that message not come up, but it's a tough way to learn that lesson. However, using the 'jump to' module for testing, I saw this message and it actually did the burn and landed safely. b) I'm taking care of my 3 month old son at home and so on one test I started the landing procedure without remembering to turn RCS on, and walked away for a few minutes. When I came back, the craft was a few thousand meters from the landing site and kind of tumbling around trying to do some burns. Probably trying to get lined up with the landing site, I guess. Anyway it slammed into the ground at a few hundred m/s I'm guessing it was a control authority issue. 3) This is something that I've seen for a long time but never really reported. Sometimes the landing module gets stuck on 'checking landing site....' and will just hover there until it runs out of fuel. This can usually be fixed by simply turning the landing module off and back on. On one test, it actually did something even weirder. It got down to a few hundred meters and killed all velocity, and switched to 'checking landing site...'. Then the vertical velocity module kept oscillating between +10 and -10 m/s. The craft was overall gaining altitude at around 6 m/s and it did this for a few hundred delta-v and a couple thousand meters. I killed the land from orbit module and started up the standard 'land' module and it broke the cycle and started actually looking for a place to land. The standard 'stuck in checking landing site...' mode though seems to be to just hover there until it runs out of fuel or you cycle the module. The good stuff: I think I can figure out how to design craft in such a way that I will get very high success rates out of the landing from orbit module; but you should probably look into the 'not actually decelerating' issue as that will definitely cause some ships that will easily have enough delta-v to land with mechjeb to crash with TCA. Also if you can find where the landing module is getting stuck that would greatly improve the confidence in hitting 'land' and walking away for a few minutes.... for those of us with little babies, or who want to make a sandwich, or whatever else

awesome, yes, I will put it to the test!

what do you do when you update a mod with CKAN? When I try to run partfinder I get an exception about trying to create files that already exist. I was hoping to just run it on the same main prunelist I had run before and just have it re-prune the files installed by CKAN in the update. edit: ok so quick update, even with the exception it looks like it still runs on the whole prunelist and prunes all of the files. I just had to clean up the mod's directory, which was not fully deleted by CKAN, and had the pruned files left there.

Is there an easy way to reduce the number of contracts that are available from KSGAP at one time? I'd like there to be 2-3, but it seems like it's always at least 4-6. Actually I think mainly what's happening is that I don't want the Kerbin Side Job contracts, but since it's a dependency, I'm getting them. I'll try to separate them from the KSGAP ones and turn them off.

Thanks @allista. I use the orbit at 14km because of the community delta v chart and because sometimes I make landers in the Apollo style that rendezvous with their command module. Anyway like I said, I also tested with a 50km orbit and it seemed like it still came in really fast at low altitude. is the shape of the descent configurable in tca.glob? anyway it sounds like your changes should be positive. I want to be able to trust that TCA will land reliably. Edit: also, I would never do a plane change at 14km, that's way inefficient. Usually if I wanted to land in some random high latitude I would get into a polar orbit during my transfer and then wait for the location to come around. In practice I usually land from more like 20-30km than 14km.

Well, unfortunately I don't have time to test anymore, but I will say this; using the exact same craft and landing in slightly different locations seems to cause a crash as well. Basically, I can't find a surefire reason why it crashes. I have a couple of thoughts on possible reasons: 1) terrain is not properly being accounted for. i.e. TCA doesn't really know exactly how long it has until it hits the ground near the landing site 2) TCA is not properly calculating the burn time needed for deceleration. 3) TCA is coming in too flat, and has no margin for error If you know the time to impact, the delta-v needed, and the burn time, you should always be able to stop in time. You should be able to come in this close to the surface and still get it landed. Unfortunately, it seems my success rate with even a very simple craft is pretty low.

I'm currently using the NRAP procedural test weight to see if I can nail down the crashing lander to a correlation with TWR. That's my current hunch.

Tried testing a different FTP tank, and it seems to work ok. Lands fine. My hunch here is that it has something to do with TWR and the fact that TCA is coming in generally too fast, waiting a bit too long to decelerate. Not sure why it claims there's not enough fuel, on the test that included the monoprop engines. Does it check specifically for LFO? In all of the tests, the PID controller is still overshooting by a lot.

I used to land like that, yes, but that defeats the purpose of having a TCA module that is supposed to handle landing from orbit. I'm sure @allista will want to know what's happening here. Yep, so, literally, I added FuelTanksPlus tanks to the craft that just worked, and now it crashes.

This one landed fine on my windows save. No clue how to predict whether a craft will land or not now Literally the only difference between this craft on the 2nd one that crashed above was fuel tanks. Guess I'll strap a fueltanksplus fuel tank to this thing and see what happens! edit: BTW, don't stress about the long warp time thing. That happens when you accidentally turn on the landing function before activating the engines, which I forget to do since I'm hyperediting the craft into place.

So, on my Mac this craft landed fine. I don't even know how to go about debugging something like this. The next thing I suppose will be to load this craft into my main save on windows and see if it still crashes into the mun. If it does, I don't know what the heck to do. Do you know of any mod interaction that could mess with TCA?

FWIW this mostly stock craft does the same thing. It does at least try to burn before crashing, but it still slams into the planet at 200 m/s. My last planned test is a fresh install on my mac, with just hyperedit and TCA installed.

Here's the imgur album. FWIW I've also tested 50km starting orbits with the same results. Now I will try to test a more "traditional" craft and see what happens. I should mention also that TCA doesn't even try to burn the engines after this. It just crashes into the planet without doing anything.

Working on the screenshots now, will post to imgur soon interestingly as I was testing, I picked a target right along my equatorial orbit and clicked "land" and TCA set the burn for 172 days in the future o.O I cancelled the landing and clicked it again and it worked fine.

Unfortunately I cannot capture video. I can try to do a series of screenshots. One thing I realized after testing a little more was that on the last craft I was testing TCA was popping up an error message after the final burn saying there wasn't enough fuel and that it was doing an emergency landing. I am using monoprop engines on this particular craft and it had 500+ delta v. Mechjeb was able to land a very similar design but this version wasn't fully balanced so mechjeb couldn't burn in the right direction. However, I had the exact same thing happen with an LFO engine on Kerbin. It it seems like what's happening is that TCA is coming in very, very shallow, and doing a final alignment burn between target and landing site just several hundred meters from the ground, and not really leaving enough time for a deceleration burn.

Something else that's happening to me is that the landing module is not decelerating in time, and the craft is crashing into the ground. This has happened with 3 different crafts now and on both Kerbin and the Mun. Has anyone else seen this?

awesome! always wanted more rotors in KAX.

@tsuvekio the easiest way to share a log is usually through dropbox.