Loren Pechtel
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Posts posted by Loren Pechtel
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11 minutes ago, reapersms said:
If you're flying the thing back manually, SR won't kick in anyways. For fire and forget ones, it would be nice if the powered recovery could take into account the excess fuel to get the max velocity under the burn up percentage.
What I'm going to try on the next big launch is sticking a heatshield on the front of the booster, under the decoupler, and see if that improves the chances of it surviving a trip back from the end of the circularization burn.
I'm wondering about how you're losing them. I can't recall losing anything discarded at suborbital velocity except once when I didn't expect it to be recoverable and didn't put chutes on. (I was bit off on the delta-V, I thought it would burn out soon after leaving low orbit.)
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8 minutes ago, magico13 said:
Reentry heating is a Stock feature now, so Deadly Reentry isn't required for StageRecovery to cause stages to burn up. As soon as the speed goes above 2km/s at recovery then there's a chance of the stage burning up. The chance goes up to 100% at 3km/s, 200% at 4km/s, etc. You can either add a heatshield (doesn't have to actually be in a useful place) which will reduce the chance by 100% or you can change the DR Velocity setting. If you set it to -1 then StageRecovery will never destroy things from overheating, or you can up it to 2500 to even further reduce the chance of burning up. Personally I just don't expect anything that's nearly suborbital to survive reentry, but you are free to reconfigure things as you find appropriate for your play style.
While you might not expect nearly suborbital things to survive they do. Anything big enough to be worthwhile (no point in chutes on aerodynamic-only parts) that's going to be coming off before I attain orbit (even if it's coming off during the circularization burn) I slap chutes on and get back every time. (And really now, why are Kerbals so poor at shipping stuff around? The recovery percentage is stupidly low! I'm not blaming you--you seem to be using the stock numbers but they're stupid!)
I have enough success at recovery that anything that's coming back to Kerbin gets chutes.
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7 hours ago, reapersms said:
If your parachutes are set to activate at the time you stage the booster off, they're probably going to be destroyed instantly.
Tweak their min pressure to something around 0.46 or so, and they ought to survive, and still be there when StageRecovery looks at it. The 0.46 or so keeps them from opening at all until ~3000m or so, giving the atmosphere a while to slow it down, and still activate in case they get to the surface before they leave physics range.
If it's burning up due to a speed over 2k m/s, I think you can stuff a heat shield on and SR will give you better odds.
It's pretty hard to heat shield a booster because the engine is there. On those returns the engine gets very, very hot--I normally hold off on burning the remaining fuel until the overheat bar in the stage listing is well up there so I get the maximum benefit of the drag.
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2 minutes ago, MajorDonkey said:
No the system wouldn't even download it. Thanks again for the fast reply! KSP seriously has the best modding community of any game I've ever played.
I'm not even a modder yet (I know the language, I've never played with the Unity engine, though), just a fairly new player to the game.
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2 minutes ago, MajorDonkey said:
Hey thank you Loren! That download worked! Thanks to everyone! Umm as far as my internet connection, Time Warner Cable. How concerned should I be?
I wouldn't think they would be messing with your system, it's normally only the little guys that think they can get away with meddling. (No US ISP is going to deliberately inject malware but the biggest source of malware these days is compromised ads.) Do you still have the file that was flagged?
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33 minutes ago, NotTim said:
That one worked fine, I'm wondering if something was getting added in transit, in any case it was very strange.
Thanks for that.
What is your internet connection situation? (I'm trying to think of where the man in the middle might be.)
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5 hours ago, Foxster said:
If for some odd reason I have a wide load to get down and do need it vertical then I sometimes use Landing Gear rather than Landing Struts for their extra reach, making the base wider...
That looks so wrong!
But this game makes us do things that look wrong.
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2 hours ago, MajorDonkey said:
Anyone know of a work-around for this windows virus crap? Anyone tested the file downloaded?
Did you not see that two of us posted a VirusTotal report on the file? Everyone, including Windows Defender, feels it's clean. If you're having virus problems with it something else is going on. Either your system is already compromised or you're getting it through an insecure channel that's infecting it before it gets to you.
One test you can do--take your infected file and send it to VirusTotal. See what it says.
Also, in case it's a transport layer problem:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bwgj6j98l0vjepm/ForScienceFix.rar?dl=0
That's the same stuff but I put a password of "notinfected" on it--that will make it much harder for a man-in-the-middle to mess with it.
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3 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:
Radial chutes are physicsless, so they add their mass to the thing they attach to. So: They won't cause your ship to become unbalanced in (space) flight. And in any case, they wouldn't be big enough to notice so long as SAS is on.
Not 100% sure on the heating up, but as they're all on the same side, just make sure that side isn't getting direct heating and you should be fine. Coming back from Mun or Minmus, you almost have to intentionally burn stuff up anyway.
Ok, the chutes should be safe. I'll redo my rocket.
As for burning up coming back from Mun or Minmus--it's not hard. I try to recover my booster so I leave it attached as re-entry begins. If I let it be it's certain to blow. What I normally do is wait until it's well up in the danger zone I burn all remaining fuel and jettison it. I have a decent chance of getting it slow enough that Stage Recovery snags it.
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As has been said, upgrade the astronaut building. However, the easier answer is to rescue them from space. Even if you don't consider what the contract pays it's cheaper to send a rocket after a Kerbal than recruit one. (Admittedly, the type you get this way is random.)
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5 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:
There are two ways around falling over catastrophically on landing:
- Build your ship wide. This has the problems you describe above. If you build too wide, it'll be harder to fly. If you build it "just wide enough" then it might still fall over.
- Build your ship to land on its side. I much prefer this method. Put all the parachutes on one side, down the length of the ship. If you want landing legs, put them on sideways as well.
Note that if your ship fully lands the parachutes will go away, but if you land at a 45 degree angle and slowly "fall" over, they will NOT disappear and will help guide you down.
I never thought of chutes on only side but that certainly would fix the tipping. Will it cause balance problems in flight? And I've always been a bit scared of chutes that appear to project beyond the heat shield (they do draw fire during re-entry) but so far the only time I've seen chutes burned was ones on a booster. (I use Stage Recovery and depending on the fuel I have left I sometimes manage to recover the booster. If the fuel is low the chutes burn off but the booster would be lost anyway.)
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On 4/3/2016 at 5:46 PM, surge said:
Also, the other kerbals don't need to be engineers, they can be any profession.
The idea is that they are 'lackeys' that just help to hold heavy stuff, they don't need to know how to use a spanner.
Just what I was looking for and about to Google. Now I have a job for my pilots!
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On 3/31/2016 at 2:46 AM, p1t1o said:
On airless moons, there is no reason to use a "reverse gravity turn".
The shorter your burns, the less dV you waste fighting gravity.
On airless moons, it is entirely legitimate to simply zero your horizontal speed on orbit above your chosen landing area. Do this with as hard a burn as you can, a tool to view your horizontal and vertical velocity components is very useful here.
Now you should be falling vertically towards the spot on the moon where you will be landing.
Zeroing your vertical velocity in one sharp burn at an appropriate time - sometimes called a "suicide burn".
These short, sharp burns are quite efficient, and though the seperate treatment of your horizontal and vertical speeds might seem quite clunky and counter intuitive, it can approach maximum theoretical efficiency by minimising gravity losses. The vertical and horizontal components of your velocity must be zeroed in order to land, there is no curve or thrust regime which will get around that, doing each component separately does not add any extra dV.
On bodies with an atmosphere, things are of course quite different
Huh?? I don't see how you conclude that doing the burns separately doesn't cost you anything.
1) Oberth. You want to do as much of your burn as low as possible.
2) Time. Every second you're not in orbit you're expending fuel to counter gravity.
I have found I use the least fuel when I set my periapsis as low as I dare, then kill most of my orbital velocity at periapsis, aim retrograde and burn when the suicide timer (Mechjeb) is down to a few seconds. If your rocket is not very maneuverable you need to be a bit higher up--I have a self-refueling science lab rocket that would certainly crash if I tried this approach with it.
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If you just bring back a capsule this isn't a problem but when you have something big enough to lug a dozen tourists around I've been having quite a problem with this. If it goes into the water, fine, but I've tipped once even on what looked like totally flat land--and it's not like you have much choice (short of reloading and trying slightly different parameters) of where you touch down when you aren't coming from low orbit.
If it just comes apart no big deal but when one of the hitchhiker capsules blows up... If the chutes wouldn't just insta-collapse they should be enough to avoid disaster but they go away the instant it's down but while it's still vulnerable to tipping.
I've tried landing legs, it doesn't seem to make a difference.
Do I have to take the aerodynamic penalties of a multi-stack rocket like I've been using for landing on the moons?
Should I be looking at smaller rockets and make two trips instead? (Two hitchhikers is somewhat tippy, 3 is quite a problem but I generally have enough tourists to use the three-capsule design.)
Should I be looking at spaceplanes? That means either over 800 m/s of fuel for orbit matching/docking or else trying to work out aerobraking and hauling along a small rocket behind a heat shield.
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1 hour ago, secondcircle said:
Any idea why your change would be showing up as a virus on windows?
Anyone else used this? My windows virus detector is probably just acting dumb.
Strange as nobody thinks it's evil:
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4 hours ago, dr.phees said:
3) When my craft is fully seated, I cannot move two Kerbals between two seats without having one EVE to allow moving. It would be nice when trying to move a Kerbal to a fully seated compartment, to have him/her switch seats with one of those.
4) Grouping or better filtering of craft in the map overview. It would be lovely if groups could be set up or craft could be filtered by things like "sphere of influence" aka "in orbit around", having queued maneuver nodes, maybe even manned etc.
Additionally a "hide craft from overview" options would be great.
#3 is rare but definitely an issue.
As for #4 I definitely would like grouping by SOI. And I would like a jump directly to the tracking station when you call up the menu. It's annoying to have to wait for KSC to load. (Will that be an issue with 64-bit anyway?)
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How to improve portrait stats: Show what the tourist wants to do.
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9 hours ago, xytovl said:
Sepratrons are detected based on their orientation. There is no difference between a solid booster and a retrorocket, the mod can't guess what the purpose of the engine is.
The solution would be to add some sort of UI to configure some parts or parameters but I have not found how I could do that in an user-friendly way.
Oh, well, I guess you can't detect them then. It's become a moot point for now, anyway--landing my tourist bus on Mun proved impractical, I sent up a dedicated lander to take the tourists down. Since the main vehicle won't touch down anywhere else it doesn't matter if the Landertrons get staged. That simply arms them, they won't fire until touchdown.
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The game's late!
My transfer burn was 007.0m/s
(Reality: The target orbit went right through the middle of the leading 8.)
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1 hour ago, magico13 said:
@Loren Pechtel I'd need to see the vessel itself to have any idea if there's even a problem. I think the PEBKAC and there's just a misunderstanding of how StageRecovery defines stages (which is different from how KSP defines stages, which I think is what MechJeb uses). I highly suggest using the highlight buttons to see exactly what parts StageRecovery is saying belong to the stage, it'll no doubt be different from what you're expecting.
StageRecovery defines a stage as all the parts between decouplers (or the start/end of the stack where appropriate), with identical "stages" grouped into one (I can't remember if each gets it's own stage number though, which would explain the jump from 2 to 6). It provides estimates for every stage it finds since it doesn't know what's a booster and what's payload, plus you might want to know an estimate for how fast your command pod will land.
Take a picture of the whole craft with and without the whole vessel highlighting active and we can start to figure out if anything is actually wrong.
Ok, if it's grouping like stages that certainly could explain it although it's not what I'm used to it doing. If Stage 6 were really a grouping of the missing stages it would make sense. I do not recall ever seeing it group like that before.
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13 minutes ago, PocketBrotector said:
It is showing you the terminal velocity (at sea level, presumably) and expected fund-recovery fraction for each stage, assuming fully deployed chutes. Looks like everything is working fine here.
Except it's showing the recovery of a stage that doesn't exist and not mentioning two stages that do exist and were successfully recovered (at the speed given for stage 6.)
There are some aerodynamic parts on stage zero that are blown off as soon as the engines shut down and I'm out of the atmosphere. Could they be confusing it?
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What is it thinking???
Reality:
Stage #0 isn't coming home.
Stage #1 is simply a decoupler that I now realize can be merged into stage 0
Stage #2 will be lost in orbit.
Stage #3 should recover fine.
Stage #4 should recover fine.
There is no stage #6.
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Finally, automatic staging that actually works! One mod it would be nice if you could support, though:
They're tiny solid boosters that fire just before touchdown (think of the Soyuz capsule) but since there's nothing underneath them they get staged with the initial engines. I'm not sure how you are handling separatrons but I suspect these could be handled in a similar fashion--they should not arm so long as there are other engines anywhere.
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7 minutes ago, ImmaStegosaurus! said:
I'm not sure if this is right thread but I think some sort of drag and drop folder structure to VAB and SPH would be a great help to get spacecraft designs organized. Having all the things in one pile is fine as long as there are few saved rockets but after there are dozen or so different rockets with two dozen or more different payloads each it gets pretty messy. It would make it easier to keep prototype and service ready designs separated.
Yup, and it would be nice to have "designs" that consist only of mate booster X to payload Y. Basically an extension of assemblies. It wouldn't see much use in the SPH but it would be nice in the VAB.
But this game makes us do things that look wrong.
[1.4] StageRecovery - Recover Funds+ from Dropped Stages - v1.8.0 (March 11, 2018)
in KSP1 Mod Releases
Posted
I would think landing fuel would be small compared to speed-reducing fuel unless you're right at the cusp of survival. My inclination would be to save what you need for landing and burn the rest to avoid burning up.