AngrybobH

I was having an issue that I thought was OPM. I had low FPS while landed on Duna and the Mun but not other bodies in a mostly stock install (stock scale, tested all bodies). I tried the add oceans patch and it fixed everything so well I have higher framerate than without Kopernicus/OPM now(~60FPS no mod, 7FPS OPM, 68FPS OPM and ocean fix). The discussion for the last couple of pages seemed to be about rescaled systems(and ROCs). I just wanted it to be known for sure that the oceans fix probably needs to be stuffed into the mod even with stock scales.

I'm having an issue with OPM. I getting extremely low FPS on the Mun and Duna with OPM installed. I deleted all mods and installed MM, Mechjeb, KER, and KJRn. With a 34 part ship, Mun orbit 90 FPS, near surface 88 FPS, landed 63 FPS. Then loaded EVE and SVE with high res textures. Same ship, 93 FPS, 87 FPS, 58 FPS. Then loaded OPM and dependencies + custom barn kit. Same ship, 92 FPS, 23 FPS, 7 FPS. I removed just OPM(left Kopernicus, custom barn kit, and CTTP installed). Same ship, 92 FPS, 86 FPS, 46 FPS. I can duplicate this issue on Duna as well but, Kerbin and Minmus are unaffected. I have tested no other bodies. All mods were loaded/unloaded with CKAN Is there something I can tinker with or try? EDIT: I found my problem. It is with Kopernicus. Apparently, some of the places(like the Mun) don't have oceans defined and Kopernicus gets all weird without that definition. There is a super simple script in the Kopernicus thread that fixes this and brought the landed FPS on the Mun up to 68 FPS.

Except batteries are awful for the environment. As far as batteries go, our technology is terrible at storing power. And, we really need batteries for solar to work really well. We would be swapping our air pollution for ground pollution and probably more air pollution. Electric cars are a good example here. The carbon footprint of making the batteries for electric cars and recharging them is greater than the footprint of a similar sized gasoline powered car in normal operation for ~10 years. And how many batteries will an electric car need in 10 years? 3 probably. And, that only considers the carbon footprint. What about the mining waste from getting lithium? On the subject of 'hyperfisssion', I really think we have taken fission about as far as is possible. Maybe one day with some super alloy or something that can contain nuclear bomb levels of energy continuously, we could get MOAR fission in a single reactor, but probably at the same efficiency we get now.

Didn't they say that 20 years ago?

I finally got time to play with the new props. I built an ok helicopter that is almost stable. Then I tried a basic prop plane that turned out to be the most fun I have had in KSP in some time. It's a little tricky to take off and land but it looks and flies like an RC plane I once had. Airspeed is ~80m/s max.

I am entirely unsure of what KSPs' future actually is because I don't have Squads' metrics. It seems to me the game is doing pretty good in terms of people playing and, more importantly, buying the DLCs. I do wonder how much more content they could make for future DLCs. I do know I will probably buy future content. This game is cheap in $/hr of entertainment. For the future I would like to see some improvements in performance, career mode, and graphics. Sure there are mods for graphics but they can reduce performance. Maybe there is an optimization that can be made somewhere modders cannot access. DX11 support maybe? Performance is a big issue for me because I like to build extremely large stations. I am not sure what could even be done to improve that. I have heard that rigid body physics calcs are hard/impossible to multithread. Maybe there is a way for the game to cheat a bit to improve speed. I've already done what I can on my end by putting together a rather strong computer. Career mode is something I would like to see totally revamped. Contracts need some form of personalization. They need to give a better sense of accomplishment. The funding system is mostly bad. I would like to see something along the lines of a budget. You get x funds allotted and have to pay active and training crew, part development, constuction, and operating cost along with being given directives of things to achieve and a time limit on them. If the budget allows then secondary objectives can be tried. What if you got restricted to a selection of boosters until you developed other ones? I think constraints can actually increase the fun. I actually wouldn't mind any kind of change to career mode as long as it changes.

@Cavscout74 That is exactly the same way I did my last career run. I liked it ok but career mode started to bother me. I'm only doing science saves from now on until career mode gets some love.

Very cool thanks for posting that.

My discoveries are in agreement with yours. The 7 degree pitch seems to be nearly the same on all my designs. A couple of powerful (modded) rotor designs liked 8 degrees. Modding the g-11 rotor does not produce expected results, doubling the power does give double the rotation speed, quadrupling also does not give double the rotation speed. This is cool and opens another avenue to try for MOAR power. If 7-8 degrees of pitch is all the blades like, more/longer blades are required but then more power is need for it to perform reliably. Thanks for posting that. I'm probably going to lose hours upon hours mixing that design with mine.

Yes. I have built a fully articulated(without cyclic because we don't have anything to simulate that) rotor with stock hinges. I dumped the lead/lag portion because of kraken attacks and the added weight is bad for rotor speed. Flapping hinges work mostly as you'd expect. Sometimes, though, they can overcompensate and reverse the roll and I am unsure as to why. You still end up with a maximum speed, based on min/max value of the hinge, before forward flight causes asymmetric lift to be too unwieldy for your craft. But, the max power of the rotor is usually hit first, at least with the things I have built. And to add to this, you can have props that produce thrust without having wing shaped blades(see ceiling fans). At my shop I have a fan with basically sheet metal blades that produces a 30MPH wind. It is on wheels and must be chocked or it will drive around the shop. As I understand it you cannot get decent subsonic flight without a typical wing shape. In KSP you get no lift from angling a structural panel into the 'wind' because it has no magical lift value and KSP does not model the thrust that would be produced. In KSP a fan would not cool you on a hot day.

I've noticed very similar behavior at ~21km with a significantly larger craft. Part of the problem appears to be the RPM limit does not do anything close to limiting the RPM. Lowering it seems to do the same as limiting torque(even before the limit is reached), max seems to be not a limit at all. The only way I have found to control rotor rpm when the air gets thin is to put in a huge amount of blade pitch. Which, in turn, usually stalls the rotor and sometimes over accelerates the freewheel. Alternating the brake and rotor power SOMETIMES bring the rotor and freewheel back into agreement. My plans for a similar Eve launcher is to abandon the rotor section at the pressure altitude that corresponds to 21km on kerbin. If I get lucky (not usually) I'll switch back to the rotor craft and attempt a landing for future re-use. I really think the 460 RPM limit on rotors is because the game cannot deal with anything faster. And, it seems the Kraken starts to take notice ~300 RPM but is fully summoned by 500 RPM. What the Kraken does when he comes is, as usual, completely random. Rotors need some serious looking at by @SQUAD.

put a servo motor on the rotor first then attach your blades. map the target angle to the translate up/dn or l/r or f/b. set your min and max desired angle and translate speed. I've been messing with helicopters with the new robotics parts. I'm really not sure KSP can handle the physics fast enough or is not modeling props quite right. A couple of notes: FAR ruins propellers, they don't provide meaningful lift/thrust at any pitch. Avoid this mod for now. Rotors behave very strangely and often do not produce the power they should. minor changes to prop design produce great differences. ~300 RPM is about the safe limit before the Kraken starts to take notice. not that spinning higher always causes RUD but things can get strange especially when changing directions. the rotor RPM limiter seems to also limit torque even before the RPM limit is achieved, so I recommend doing what you have planned, let the drag control max RPM and leave the RPM limit at max. I don't know the exact relationship (or terms) but the more pitch you have the less efficiently you produce thrust(or something like that). Think about a plane flying near level. It produces enough lift to stay flying when at the right speed. Take that plane to 45 degrees nose up at the same speed. You will climb but also lose speed. If you where to go to 89 degrees(instantaneously) you would produce nearly all drag with your wings and nearly no lift. You don't need to worry too much about this in KSP because the rotor will stall long before you get to 45 degrees. Most of my helicopter designs rarely get to 7.5 degrees blade pitch before the G11 rotor runs out of torque. Granted a helicopter main rotor is much bigger than an airplane prop but I was also having similar problems with the tail rotor with ~20 degrees pitch.

If you detonated a gas canister wouldn't you be adding more debris? Of course, if the debris was suborbital, it wouldn't be that much of a problem but, that debris could be struck by what you are trying to deorbit. I see potential problems. As far as an object flying through the gas, it could be utterly obliterated if the gas was sufficiently dense or the object was sufficiently flimsy. Okay, maybe that's an edge case. I do see a potential problem with delivering enough gas at the precise time to make any real difference at all. The question is would it at least be worth the effort and cost to launch a 'gas bomb'? Someone smarter than me could probably answer that. I like the laser method better. Far less explody but not without its' own issues.

The muns day is 6 days 2 hours 36 minutes and 24.4 seconds (according to the wiki). Your landing site would line up with the plane of the orbiter twice in that period. This is not a direct rendezvous because the station would not necessarily be right there but you would be launching into it's plane. Rendezvous from there should be fairly easy on the fuel.

I did but it doesn't seem to have an effect, positive or negative. I think next test is a counter rotating rotor with no blades and see if that helps the power. That makes me wonder about FAR. I wonder how that handles helicopters. I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at here. Got a pic or a diagram?

Like @FleshJeb was getting at, attaching the BG pistons to a cylinder head and the down to the crankshaft similar to the piston driven steam engine shown. So, the up/down of the pistons is what drives the crank. It's about as close as you'll get to a reciprocating piston internal combustion engine considering we don't have gasoline, ethanol, diesel, etc and we don't have controlled explosions. Well gasoline doesn't explode in an engine, it burns but, I bet if Kerbals had gasoline it would explode.

So I played around with some rotor designs and got something I can somewhat fly. I then went for a little extra mass. Things were fine until I exceeded about 45m/s horizontal. Asymmetric lift then got me. I then attempted flapping hinges because that's what real helicopters do for that issue. I also tried lead/lag hinges but I do not recommend that. It felt like I was about to summon the Kraken. Here's the current iteration with flapping hinges. I guess I need to tune the flapping because horizontal flight caused the opposite roll. I'm thinking differing up and down angles might be the answer. @Brikoleur How are you getting any power out the rotors? I had to write a MM patch to create a copy of the G-11 rotor with triple the power to get this 17t craft to fly.

This is the same for me. I try to first fly steady, then be able to pick a direction without crashing, then worry about cargo/load capacity. I am currently on step 2. I have done this to a lesser degree. The heli in the pic I posted originally had 4 but 3 worked much better. This is good advice and I'll tinker a bit more with it. What RPM are your Kadzook rotors turning?(it is a beautiful creation by the way) My tail rotor work wonderfully. I have used 2 designs that worked well but both require an inordinate amount of tinkering. First design used collective pitch tied to yaw (on a joystick for more control) and the second one just has control surfaces that react to yaw (because they are vertical). They both need their starting pitch adjusted to get a near 0 yaw when not giving input. The first design is easy to fine tune trim on the fly but has more vibration and weirdness. The second design is the opposite and must rely on in game trim in flight but is far easier on the pilot in general. A note about both tail rotors, I never alter my RPM limit of my main or tail rotor once I get my 0 yaw point. All control is from collective pitch or reaction wheels. And, yes, that means a change in the main rotor requires all the tinkering to be done again. This I will try tonight. It sounds like the thing that is going to make the most improvements for me.

I am trying (and nearly succeeding) to build a helicopter with the new robotic parts because of a deep love for these flying contraptions. I have collective and anti-torque(tail rotor with collective) somewhat working decently. Cyclic seems impossible without some form of rotational angle feedback system to control it. So, I went with a tilt rotor type of design. On the 47th (or so) iteration I have scrapped the tilt mechanism and rely solely on reaction wheels for attitude control. I now have something that is nearly able to fly. I have some issues, though, and I'd like to know if anyone has any ideas for combating them with stock parts. Of course, mods may be necessary to make any of this work. I haven't flown fast or long enough to make a determination if flapping or lead/lag hinges are needed. Anyone care to guess if KSP might inadvertently simulate uneven lifting from coriolis (and other) effect(s)? Here's my list of issues. The large rotor does not make enough power. With a collective pitch of 0 it has a real hard time getting to 300 RPM. Any stress or over pitching the collective (more than ~5 degrees) can stall it. It seems to slow down considerably with any amount of mass attached. putting a rotor on a rotor does not work. With rotor blades and collective pitch motors attached in symmetry, the main rotor and tail rotor wobble as if they were unbalanced when getting near 300 RPM. You can't put an increment amount into a single keystroke for better fine control. Parts pull away from their mounting points when nearing ~350 RPM (see pic, tail rotor in spinning ~400 RPM) I scrapped the tilt rotor because all the hinges are floppy. It seems ANY amount of force against them causes a change in angle and the imprecise control of them cannot counteract this quickly enough. Also, if you are like me and trying to push these parts beyond there apparent design conditions and don't know how to solve it, share your current engineering nightmare. Perhaps something can be learned from our experience with the new parts.

seems less cluttered than the actual space shuttle. maybe kerbals are better at reducing clutter than humans.

Micro gravity for hours would probably have no appreciable effect on humans. Days is space can a bit jarring to some but a week or two can start bone decalcification and other effects. I imagine that some people would experience an uneasy feeling after some hours in micro G when getting back to a gravity-all-the-time environment. Though, I do believe it would be quite short lived. NASA has done quite a bit of study on this and is currently running a study on the ISS. Valeri Polyakov spent the longest consecutive time in space (438 days) and probably poked and prodded for some time. Info on this is readily available. As far as food goes, vegetarianism is a perfectly good solution. plants do grow in micro G. Clothing can be either synthetic or organic. Synthetic fibers can be made from plant material and most clothes could be recyclable. Also, why wash clothes with water? why not dry clean, no tumbling or spinning required.

Ooops yeah thats what I meant

I always thought the B type was for engine mounts instead of SRB toppers. Well, thats how I usually use them. Like this I like the A type on radial boosters because the angle toward the ship is good for mounting sepratrons. I have never noticed the tendency of the type A to move toward the core. Good to know though.

That is the very first mod I installed because my first docking experience almost made uninstall the game. I was so terribly frustrated I couldn't see what I was doing wrong. Rendezvous by itself was challenging at first but, docking was a herculean task. After finally getting docked, I downloaded DPAI and MJ. I actually don''t let MJ auto dock anymore (too much wasted monoprop) and just use DPAI with decently placed RCS thrusters. Of course, MJ has an auto RCS balancer in it that I do use. Just recently I had to learn to dock without RCS. My lander ran out of fuel during the rendezvous burn which left RCS to slow down when I got near my target. The target ship had no RCS but had plenty of fuel. DPAI still helped there and the experience wasn't that bad. Compared to my first attempt docking it was easy.

over 2100. It's my go to entertainment and it's pretty cheap too.