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willitstimothy

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Posts posted by willitstimothy

  1. Ha. Sounds like me (though I now know how to land in real life, so it shouldn't be too hard).

    I know how to land in real life too, and I know that a big jet doesn't make it into a short GA strip. 5000 feet if you\'re good, maybe, but 2000 feet isn't a safe landing in any large transport jet. A old Vulcan bomber could do it if it had a drogue parachute, good brakes, and reverse thrust, but forget it with a big bird.

  2. Whether it's in FU3 or the FS series or X-plane, my favorite thing to do is just the landing.

    Taking off and flying is easy enough but every landing is exciting, can I make it? will I stall and crash?

    One of my favorite landings was in FS9 with a huge Vulcan bomber, unfortunately I have lost the file and can't find it again.

    I was trying it out and wasn't planning to land at this time, but thought what the hell, and spotted what I thought was a large runway.

    I brought the plane down by eye and was far too close before I realized it was a tiny concrete strip, suddenly it was a full flaps nose up oh god I'm gonna die panic.

    The Vulcan is heavy so I had a lot of power on just to stay aloft, and I just didn't know how to land this thing, it was all roaring and smoke and speed, all aiming for a strip I'd never landed at before.

    The trees, huts and dirt taxiway were just a blur, the rear wheels touched tarmac and I hit everything I could to slow down, throttle to zero, flaps up to put weight on the tires, spoilers out, front wheel only inches from the ground as I lost speed, cessna's lazily taxi'ing alongside as if all this was normal.

    Finally I got the nose down and hit the brakes, they didn't do a whole lot, and the end of the runway just got closer.

    The nose, then the front wheel went over the runway marker, then the nose went over the grass and I was still slowing, until the behemoth finally decided this was a good place to stop.

    With the nose wheel on the very lip of the tarmac and with an irate cessna on the holding position line I could finally start breathing again, my nerves were too shot after all that to try taxi'ing over to the little wooden huts that marked the aircraft stands, not that I'd have fit anyway.

    Quite a narrative.

    You should try landing a smaller plane at Paf Cannery in Alaska. The longest runway in the game there is 800 feet and the shortest is 400 feet. Either that, or you could just land on the Helicopter runway at Miramar Marine Base CA it's lighted, paved, looks like a miniature version of the runways just to the north of it, and it's only 1000 feet long.

    I landed the F-18 there once.

  3. You can orbit.

    You can't hit Kerbol [the star.] However, your ship could be shredded by G-forces.

    Yeah you can orbit, and you can also 'crash,' as it were, at Kerbols 65400 Km radius. Just trust me, I crashed once at exactly that distance from the center of the point light source.

    B5H1I.png

    nodgz.png

    EaP5l.png

  4. Hi all--I've just put up a part gravity plugin here that includes (with permission) gravitating versions of JellyCube's 500m asteroid and NovaSilisko's old Mun part, as well as a black hole. Check it out.

    I've ignored considerations of realism in setting the magnitude of the gravitational fields, but you can edit them to be whatever you want with the part.cfg files.

    Oh! Thank you so much.

  5. What do you do in Sims? Joyride? or are there missions?

    Joy ride sounds...boring...

    I'd like to get into a Sim, but I don't know any good ones

    Chances are that if you do not like flying in real life, you won't like it much on a computer. Some sims do have missions or, by nature of being combat sims, are thrilling to play, but most of the real flight simulators such as the Microsoft FS series and the X-plane series are really only entertaining if you enjoy going to terrestrial destinations such as mountains, desert isles, big airports, tall buildings, or anywhere on earth that you can imagine in an aircraft of your choice. You can fly fast or slow, high or low, correctly or incorrectly. You can land (and try to takeoff again) on buildings and ships, bridges and highways, lakes rivers and oceans, deserts and mountain peaks, and with good simulators you can challenge yourself to learn to fly properly, thus gaining experience that could save your life someday (or you can just fool around all the time and fly low, takeoff without clearance, fly between building, and terrorize imaginary people). There is a ton of stuff to do but you have to appreciate it.

    (most of that stuff is only really worthwhile in newer sims, older ones are not nearly as feature rich, but again they can still be cool if you appreciate their features properly)

    Real, and good sims, would either be X-plane 9 or 10 or Micrsoft Flight Simulator X (get it with the Acceleration Expansion if you want better scenery, 'missions,' and aircraft (like the F-18 or P-51).

  6. Something the size of a small town has almost no gravity. A 2km lump of lead would still have almost no detectable gravity, so you wouldn't even notice the gravity, let alone be able to land on it.

    A 2 km lump of lead:

    R = 1km = 1000 m = 100000 cm

    V = 4.1887902*10^15 cm^3

    ? = 11.34 g/cc

    G = 6.67384*10^(-11)

    m = ?V = 4.75008809*10^16 grams = 4.75008809*10^13 kg

    gsurface = G[m/(R^2)]

    = [6.67384*10^(-11)][(4.75008809*10^13)/(1000^2)]

    = 0.00317013279 m/s^2 but in KSP there is a scale of 10 increase for size hence:

    gsurface = 0.0317013279 m/s^2

    Which means that it would only take about 30 seconds to accelerate to 1 m/s.

    Way weaker than Mun, but still strong enough to be somewhat usable.

    Escape velocity would be about 25 m/s in KSP

  7. My personal experience is with

    Microsoft flight simulators 5, 95, 98, 2002, 2004, X

    some X-plane 9 and 10

    Janes Combat flight simulator

    Bob-Hoover's air-racing (and Combat)

    In addition, and partially because of all that, I am also a real world pilot. I got my license at age 17, and have been a pilot for over three years, but have been flying for the last 7 years.

  8. If we can make parts that are the size of small towns, and by all rights massive enough to have a detectable gravitational field, we should allow them to have gravity and small SOI.

    It seems like realism is to much of a bother, even in this matter (this is a space game, thus it seems to me that a space game should strive to treat all massive objects equally), thus I will just concede that this idea is out there but that I am not going to try to promote it further unless some olive branch of opportunity presents itself.

  9. Because the Mun has no atmosphere, theoretically you can orbit at any altitude; you just have to make sure you clear the hills. I don't actually know what Kerbin's minimum orbital altitude is, but I usually aim for 75-100 km.

    Really? You can go down to 4k with no problems at all. The highest mountains are around 3k or so, but for the sake of the safety of your crew you should probably go 1 or so kilometers higher. It's when you set up to land that you want to be higher (so you can be ready to deal with any problems that may arise, and so as to ensure that you can decelerate fast enough.

  10. @NovaSilisko

    So, use a variation of that plugin, make a module named LargeBody or something, input gravitational parameters in the cfg, and you have yourself an asteroid you can land on.

    In fact, I might just do that myself.

    Please do, and then release it. I'd try it myself, but I am terrible at troubleshooting code, and not much better at writing it.

  11. I later tried to land and ended up accidentally toggling on the auto-rotate on the camera and couldn't manage the RCS and crashed; I have my RCS remapped to the numpad.

    When setting up for a landing on Mun there is nothing more annoying than having your pc's accessibility controls pop up, taking you away from your nicely controlled landing which is now doomed to be a crash.

    The second most annoying thing is running out of RCS, hence I modded one of my RCS tank parts to have a capacity of 25000 volume units of 'fuel.' ;D

  12. @Mr_Orion

    (In reference to an earlier comment you made to me)

    I talked with C7 about the part gravity thing already, and he mentioned that there would be some sort of problem if a dynamic (movable) ship had parts that were being treated as a celestial object. All pieces of debris are considered ships in the persistent file and that is why (currently) they are saved in their orbits and are cluttering up the sky as we speak. Hence it stands to reason that if one made sure that only static ships were used there should be one less problem.

    Well, that is why, as I have said elsewhere, that SOI could be only assigned to certain object that met certain mass and volume requirements so as to make it so that only the largest of objects would have SOI, thereby cutting the processor load enormously.

    When they give us the ability to create our own celestial bodies, and give us their own creations as well, I will be very grateful, but it still seems funny that I'll be able to ram a giant asteroid part into one of the future celestial asteroids that are roughly the same size and mass as the part, and have no orbital, or otherwise, effect on it. It will also be funny that I can land on one of them and not on the other.

  13. We can't add new celestial bodies currently, and likely won't have any new ones until they release all of them (who knows when?), but for the sake of realism mainly, which is what this game has sought to a degree uncommon in its genre, and for the sake of being able to properly use the over-sized parts, which we are allowed to make and use, for more than just something to look at, it seems like part gravity and SOI for sufficiently large parts would be a must. Otherwise, at what point is this game going to make realistic use of parts that are 2 km across? Especially when everything is scaled down to 1/10th of the realistic size?

    In the real world, the Japanese have landed a probe on a clump of rock that was formed by smaller pieces merging together due to micro-gravity, this rock is called 25143 Itokawa, and it measures 535 x 294 x 209 m, and it's g is 0.00001 m/s^2 (it has unusually low density though). Now with a scale of ten factor in KSP this rock would realistically have a g or 0.0001 m/s^2, and with higher density and maximum size one can see that the g would get to the point where one could feasibly treat a very large part as a small 'planet' such that one could land on it and use it to catch a ride to somewhere.

    I understand now that there will be such things later on in a different form, and if part gravity is really such an enormous problem that the realism of it is not worth it to the game developers, I'll live with it and still love this game. I want this game to be perfect, and if it can be done it should be done. That's my view and my opinion.

  14. 'Wormholes - alphav1' doesn't work in 14.4. I tried using it already by placing the black hole parts at the center a static asteroid part via persistent in 14.4. It didn't work. But that's just me. Also, given an asteroid made of some sort of dense metal, i.e. lead, the gravitation of a 2 km part could realistically be enough to land, and even orbit if the velocity vectors of the objects were within a couple of meters per second of each other. Rovers wouldn't work pretty much at all though.

  15. @NovaSilisko

    It would be much effective to make a plugin to do it only to specific parts, rather than reworking the game code and adding a lot of stress on the engine for something you'd never see until you have incredibly large parts...

    Why?

    Doesn't the game at execution load all the parts involved? Why not just add in (I know I must be wrong...it can't be simple right?) a check at part loading to see whether a part has a mass and volume (for the sake of game stability) that is compatible with the part having an SOI. If it doesn't, nothing changes. If it does then the game can then check to see if that part is in use and, if it is, if it is a part of dynamic ship or a static 'ship.' If it meets the mass and volume requirements and also is a part of a static 'ship' then it can have an SOI, otherwise not.

    Then all you need is a specific part ID, to differentiate between instances that are a part of dynamic ship vs. those that are a part of a static ship, that is never the same for the 'same' part. But you already have this, in a way:

    part = smallfuelTank_4294771432

    part = smallfuelTank_4294780418

    Same part, two different ships, and the numbers tacked onto the end are different (though initially similar).

    If the volume doesn't matter (from what I now understand, the acceleration is constant, and only varies because of simulated change), then forget that check.

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