Zephram Kerman

Remember, KSP was originally designed for rockets. Winglets on the bottom of a rocket are set up to work in combination to provide pitch, roll, and yaw, in whatever arrangement we slap together. So it helps to think of the control surface behavior as being "mapped" in the same way as RCS thrusters. The response of a control surface is dictated by its location relative to Center of Mass. The proportion of the response is a simple SIN(°) function. So if it is put on the tail, exactly centered, it will not respond to roll inputs, only pitch. If you put two surfaces, it doesn't matter if they are linked by symmetry or not. (Turn on part clipping, and put two surfaces in the center. When they are perfectly overlapped, they will not respond to roll input.) Same thing with ailerons. If they are placed exactly even with CoM, they will not respond to pitch inputs. (The only way I can ever do this is by mounting them flush to the top or bottom of a wing surface, near the leading edge.) Since most people put them on the trailing edge, they are behind the CoM, so KSP treats them like rocket winglets. I'm sorry, this would be much easier to understand with sketches or a video. But I need to run off to my job! I am looking forward to tweakables, very much.

Oh yuss! Deformable voxel-based terrain. I'm sure it's a simple thing. Make it so! [snaps fingers] I'll expect that in one of the next versions, maybe 0.78, give or take?

Waves magic wand... Peter Tyson has made an amazing theme park, just for you! Disclaimer: some rides are not rocket-powered, but most are, and they all explode. Sorry for the off-topic, but I think everyone will appreciate it just this once.

Numerobis reminded me about the module = winglet line up near the top. That kinda makes a big difference! The thing still crashed all over the place though. It seems to be the large part wobblies problem that plagues all my maniacal creations. If I do 'hack gravity', it does sortof fly around. But it was hard to control, can't get enough lift even in low gravity, and parts kept sliding off. I think maybe a smaller station disk might be in order.

Aha! I didn't see that line. Changing it from "module = part" to "module = winglet" did the trick. Thanks!

Well, two things make a big difference: • lots of lift; maybe you can rotate, but it's lift that makes you actually change direction of travel • CoM just slightly ahead of CoL; it must be ahead, but the distance between these two has a huge affect on stability/maneuverability. Oh, and #3, canards are cool, but I avoid them on small planes. If it's really necessary, and if you have FAR, tilt it up 5° so that it stalls before the control surfaces in back.

Just simply copying the two bits of code from the deltaWing part.cfg wasn't enough. There are some factors I hadn't considered until getting into it. Here's what I borrowed: // --- winglet parameters --- // dragCoeff will override the maximum_drag value drag Coeff = 0.6 deflection LiftCoeff = 1.9 But I find nothing to establish the orientation of forces. Also I don't have any idea what values would be reasonable for such a large lifting area. Anyway, once added to my part.cfg, there was apparently no effect at all. The CoL marker did not even appear until I added other aero parts. Has anyone else ever attempted to give wing attributes to a part? Any suggestions?

I'm having a hard time with this. Just simply copying the two bits of code from the deltaWing part.cfg wasn't enough. There are some factors I hadn't considered until getting into it. Here's what I borrowed: // --- winglet parameters --- // dragCoeff will override the maximum_drag value dragCoeff = 0.6 deflectionLiftCoeff = 1.9But there is nothing to establish the orientation of lift and drag forces. Also I don't have any idea what values would be reasonable for such a large lifting area. Anyway, once added to my part.cfg, there was apparently no effect at all. The CoL marker did not even appear until I added other aero parts. Has anyone else ever attempted to give wing attributes to a part? Any suggestions?

Here's something I'm working on for my next space station. The cupola and engines are attached for a test flight, but those attach nodes will eventually be used for docking pylons, infrastructure, etc. The whole disk section is one part, thanks to UbioZur Welded Parts mod. But I've kept the original unwelded assembly, so as to continue editing. It weighs 280 tons, but it does fly. I hope to add a wing module to it, so that it can launch like a space plane. If you look closely in the background, you can see an earlier prototype where it came to rest on the wind tunnel.

Just copy the file from \ships\SPH\ to \ships\VAB\. If you feel like it, change the vessel info to VAB.

Bear in mind those fixed solar panels are known to cause lag. A few won't hurt, but you have a lot of them on there. Instead, use maybe one or two of those, and replace the rest with the retractable kind. Oh and, "wider is better". What you've got there sure looks cool though.

Back in my day, if we wanted lander legs, we made our own. And we were grateful! I suppose a Heinlein-style tailsitter could be done with fins and legs. To do that fancy teardrop shape, get procedural fairings mod and stretchy fuel tanks mod.

However, I think you could build the ships out of several welded assemblies. This way, the part count is reduced, but the ships are still modular.

Taking a look at those images, I'm inclined to blame directional instability on those vertically mounted structural wings on the sides of the fuselage, especially the ones up front. While they look very cool, they also create lateral "lift" as soon as they get any angle of attack. As that slip angle increases, they get more and more lift, so the problem is self-reinforcing and inherently unstable. In the SPH, turn the entire plane on one side, so a wingtip is at the floor. I suspect the CoL will suddenly jump way forward of the CoM. If you want to keep the look, replace those structural wings with the square structural plates instead. They have no lift rating, so they would be totally passive. Alternatively, add one tail fin in back for each wing up front.

I avoid the situation by putting CoM, CoL, and main wheels very close together. If the plane can rotate at 50 m/s, it doesn't have a chance to wander away.

I've read elsewhere that large numbers of the OX-STAT fixed solar panel tends to cause lag. If you have a bunch of those on your station, that would do it.

Well said. All I can add is to visualize (sorry I have no diagram for this) the two thrust axes going through the center of mass. The IRL shuttle SRBs burned out long before the external tank was empty, but they did gradually slow down to sortof match the decreasing fuel mass. Our SBRs don't do that, which is why you need a lot of control authority. If you can scale the thing so that the external tank is just one orange jumbo tank, that would make it relatively much easier, since the tank CoM wouldn't change. A project like this really does increase one's appreciation for real rocket scientists.

In my opinion: clipping yes, airhogging no! Clipping allows us to build things that should work, but don't because of software limitations. Airhogging allows us to put jets in orbit without trying very hard. But I must admit, I'm no saint when it comes to airhogging. I'll sometimes break my "one intake, one engine" rule and add one or two more intakes, but never more than a 2:1 ratio. (More than that is cheating in my rulebook. But fortunately, there are as many rulebooks as there are KSP players!) Anyway, the technique relies using the cubic octagonal strut to radially attach another intake (or more). You can also use the front of the airplane tail if it is mounted radially. Or, just use any leftover front-facing node. You can even hide intakes within the vessel, thereby "cheating" with no one the wiser. Mwahahaha! Oops, I shouldn't have told you about that...

So, here's something. It's... kinda big. That's no space station, it's a small moon! I don't recommend doing anything this large. It contains over 1000 parts, took 15 minutes for the welder to render the thing, had thousands of nodes to be deleted, and it takes a full minute to load the launch pad. But, it works.

Or, pump fuel around like ballast, to make the ports align. That works beautifully for floating bases at Laythe.

The new welded part should appear in the items list after you refresh the list by clicking on some other category and returning. (That threw me off at first.) To get the original assembly back, just do CNTL-Z (undo). After a short freeze, it should reappear.

Sorry for the delay. It's been a long work week! So this is about the problem where a welded part will snap to a node, but then turns red and will not attach. I finally got it to work! Like UbioZur said, it's due to too many nodes causing a conflict. I took his advice and edited the part file. In there I found two pages of nodes that I did not know were even present! (I had thought they were occupied, but I was wrong about that.) Deleting them cured the attachment problem. Building a launcher for the massive thing is my challenge now! Pics once I make it work. Here's what I did to delete the correct nodes. The ones I wanted to keep were at the center, at the top and bottom. So they were the only ones with very tiny numbers in the X and Y axes. They look like 7.89234E-7. That E-7 is what I looked for; it is scientific notation to represent a very small number. (In this example, 0.000000789234.) In other words, the X and Y are practically zero. So I avoided those two nodes and deleted all the others. This way is not very precise, but for "quick and dirty" it worked the first time. Another more precise way would be to find the ID numbers of the parts you want to attach to, temporarily mark nodes that attach to those ID numbers, delete all the others, then remove your temporary marks. I know it sounds tedious, but it took much less time than I had spent trying to get the part to work other ways!

Yes, that's the way to go. The easiest way to make docking ports the same height is to make a standard platform for all your modules. Make each module starting from a copy of that same platform, and it'll always match. It helps to have two docking ports on the platform; one at a slightly different height than the other, to compensate for uneven terrain, craft variations, etc.

Yes, that's it exactly. Zander, you said it much more concisely than I did. I got one part to work, so now I'm even more confused. Does it make a difference if the welded part has a command pod or not? The one that worked was a complete vessel including a mk1-1 capsule, but welded part remains red if I made it from a sub-assembly without the capsule. Sorry if that's confusing again. The impression I'm getting is everyone else figured out a work-around, to which I'm still oblivious...

I am having the same attachment problem as Space Scumbag and Lexar. When trying to attach the welded assembly to anything else, the nodes snap but do not actually attach. Even worse, Lexar's fix about choosing the welded part first didn't work for me. Perhaps I'm missing something? I can only attach welded assemblies at their center, and then only radially, so it always looks very weird. I can only get the attach nodes to work on very small assemblies; but then, what's the point of that? I want MOAR bigger stuffs!