AHHans

I really like your idea! In particular the idea of profession-specific animations.

I don't think that the torque from the props onto the plane is too high. I just made a single engine, single prop plane. It doesn't fly as well as its counter-rotating prop twin, but it does fly O.K. One major issue is that SAS "direction hold" doesn't correct for the constant torque, so it actually flies better using the manual trim without SAS. The biggest torque-related effect that I had was during landing, when I hit the brakes, at that moment the angular momentum in the prop turned the plane over. So I had to brake using the prop, by setting the blade pitch (authority limiter) to zero or slightly negative. (Which also helps against the planes tendency to faceplant when using the wheel-brakes.) Here is a screenshot of the plane trimmed for stable flight: [Screenshot on Google Drive] P.S. Yes, when you change speeds you need to change the trim. But that's not different on a real single engine plane. P.P.S. I'll stick to counter-rotating propellers for most of my craft anyhow. They are more fun.

The pitch, yaw, roll axis control groups that can be set in the editor are also controlled by SAS. So if you e.g. add the target angle of a hinge to e.g. the pitch group, then SAS will change the target angle of said hinge when trying to adjust the pitch. So I guess waht you want is already implemented.

Hmmmm, let's see... [...] That's strange... [...] Hmmmm.... [...] O.K. It seems to depend on which rotor/engine you use. With the big turboshaft (R7000) and the small electrical (EM-16 or EM-16s) I get the same result that you have. With the other engines (EM-32, EM-64, and R121) I get the results that I'm used to: some, but very small lift vectors. Because I usually only use the EM-32 or EM-64 for my craft I haven't seen this before. (Using fossil fuels is dirty! Electricity is the power of the future. ) It is strange, but my guess is that this will not affect your craft much (if at all). When the blades are configured to generate significant lift (e.g. deployed and with the authority limiter to 6 or more) then the lift vectors are much stronger, so that the differences that you see don't have a strong effect. They will generate some instability. (Which may be exactly what SQUAD wants to do: generate some instability that the player needs to correct for.)

I don't think it has enough buttons! SCNR.

Yes. If I don't shift, deploy, rotate, or offset the blades (except rotating them so that their forward edge faces into the wind), then I get very small (IMHO negligible) lift vectors.

Hmmm... The blades seem far away from the rotor. Did you offset them from their original position? [Edit:] Yes, with offsetting this effect can be triggered. But I also get large drag vectors (the red ones). You should not need to use offsetting with the new blades. They already contain quite a few "hacks" to create significant lift even with the low rotational velocities.

Yes, attaching two vessels to each other by clamping one with a robotic clamps with the Grip Pads (or “sticky pads” if you like ) does not make the vessels into one vessel. So time-warping will probably separate the two. (With lots of Krakenbait...) If you do want to make them into one (time-warp friendly) vessel, then you need to use the Klaw. But you can use your robotic clamps to push the other vessel onto the Klaw, or put the Klaw onto a robotic arm.

That looks to me like the stuff KSP does when it tries to use the helicopter blades as control surfaces. (Which it does seriously weirdly.) Did you disable using the blades as control surfaces? (Switch off pitch, yaw, and roll control.) What is the value you use for the authority limiter when not setting it to "4"? (I.e. do you have it at 100 or at 0?)

You should also check, that the blades on both props have the same amount of pitch (though in different directions). What helped me designing my craft was to switch on the aerodynamic overlay (<F-12>) . (Which made it clear, that one of my props was thrusting backwards...)

I agree with @bewing suggestion. This calls for for the Kerbal Universal Docking Adaptor, aka Advanced Grabbing Unit, aka The Klaw! In my previous career save I had the similar problem: I had several crafts (tugs) with a docking port but wanted to dock them to crafts without a docking port. So I sent up a small probe with several combinations of docking port and Klaw (you really only need these two parts (but make sure that the port faces the right way)), and then in turn grabbed my main space station with one of the Klaws and decoupled the docking port. And - voila - my space station had a couple more docking ports. (I then used those to dock my crafts to these docking ports, and disconnect the Klaw. Thus changing my tugs from only being able to propel crafts with docking ports to all crafts.)

@Geonovast O.K. Yes, that could be a thing. Thanks for the information.

Can I buy a second license of KSP on Steam now, and gift it to someone else later? When I try to "Purchase as a Gift" then the Steam client wants me to specify immediately which of my friends I want it to gift it to.

Well, both! This thread is titled "KSP Spinoff Game".

Have you tried the stock missions from the Making History DLC? (O.K. I only played the first few.) I think that if they had a few good (and no bad) stories in there, then the mission builder would have been more successful. And, yes, the number of points you get in a mission is part of the story that this mission tells. Hmmm... maybe the stock missions are so bad because at SQUAD nobody thought about telling a story with them.

(The angle of attack is the angle between the blade and the incoming airflow, because the direction of the airflow onto the blade changes with airspeed you cannot directly set it. What you do set is the pitch of the blade.) I believe you set the pitch of the blades by setting them to deflect and then adjusting the "authority limit" in the PAW, correct? You can bind this authority limit to one of the axis groups in the SPH and use that to adjust it during flight. What you describe is exactly the effect I'm talking about. If you increase the pitch of the blades above the value for optimum thrust at standstill, then it will give less thrust at low airspeeds (your plane lifts slower) but will give better thrust at high airspeeds. But: I made a test, switching the 2m prop blades with the 2m helicopter blades on one of my planes. And got essentially the same result you got: good acceleration at low airspeeds, but lousy maximum airspeed (for me it was ca. 40 m/s instead of 120 m/s with the prop blades). So I guess that this is the fundamental difference between these two types of blades: the helicopter blades give higher thrust in general but max out at low speed, and the prop blades have less thrust at low airspeeds but can keep their thrust up to higher speeds. You could try prop blades instead of the helicopter blades, or adding prop blades to the same engines that you have the helicopter blades on (i.e. have two sets of blades on the same engine). But my guess is that both won't work too well. (Prop only will probably have too low static thrust to lift the plane, and with both on the same axis the helicopter blades probably generate lots of drag at high airspeeds.)

Well, if it can lift, then it has a TWR greater than 1 when standing still. But once you start moving the angle of attack on the blades changes and they produce less thrust if the blade pitch is not adjusted. I.e. did you adjust (increase) the blade pitch in horizontal flight?

Getting back to the original question about a spinoff game from KSP: I'd love ho have a game like KSP that has an actual story to tell. Something like an adventure, where you need to build and fly rockets to proceed. Or XCOM like, where you have a story in an overlaid "world view" and then go onto missions from there. Maybe "dumb down" the engineering and flying part of KSP somewhat for that to keep the skillcap low and make it more approachable for a wider audience. One issue with that, is that - at least in my book - SQUAD doesn't have a good track record for telling stories.

I would love to have some actual story in KSP, or in a spinoff from KSP. But I'm with @MR L A here, I don't know how well this would fit with most of the community. If there is a story added to the existing KSP, then something like the original storyline would indeed be a good choice. But using actual SSTV signals is IMHO not a good idea, it would be better to stay in-game with the decoding. Ah, no! Just, no!

You can move the mouse only left/right and up/down, but not forward/back. Thus when placing a component the program essentially has to guess, at which distance from your screen the component should be placed. So what the program does is to put the component onto the already existing component that is closest to you. So if you cannot attach a component where you want it to, then do try moving the camera around until you find an angle KSP agrees with what you want. If there is no existing piece of the rocket where you are pointing, then the actual position in space that KSP assumes is indeed often strange. But for me that is only an issue if I put something "to the side" and then need to search for it when I want to attach it again. In your video (this one: https://photos.app.goo.gl/t9mPoHNAW6h48i2f7) KSP has no idea at which height you want to place the component, so it moves around erratically. It is also not really clear to me what you want to do. Place some unconnected components next to each other? That is unlikely to work. (And I don't understand why you want to do that.)

I don't know about pigs in mud, but I do enjoy playing with the new toys. I just made a solar-powered, folded-wing plane, that can get to Eve, fly over Eve on solar power, and boost its cockpit back into Eve's orbit. The biggest problem there wasn't getting the propellers to works, but to survive the aerobraking without burning up or getting ripped apart and tweaking the ascent trajectory to make it into orbit without running out of fuel. To me it feels like I finally mastered the last bossfight of KSP. IMHO there are issues with the new parts, e.g. the non-functional cyclic control of the helicopter blades, the fact that they are extremely wobbly when attached to a heavy load, that they rather suddenly loose lift at a certain altitude, etc. But the fact that to use them one has to learn a bit how propellers work is not one of their problems.

@mystifeid "16 deg" on a servo between engine and blade is probably not the same as "15" units of blade authority. No, I'm not using the biggest motors. On the contrary, I'll try to use the smallest motor that I can get away with. Extra weight is just extra cost getting it to the surface of Eve. And thanks my plane now not only survives aerobraking on Eve (having folded its wings into the shadow of a 10m heat-shield), but can also go from parachuting to flying, and can get it's 3-Kerbal capsule back into Eve Orbit. Even if the latter is tricky and requires to get the ascend trajectory just right. Btw.: Well, te forums seem to have a "nasty"-word filter. I wouldn't compare Eve to one of my favorite vacuum-stage engines. "Poodle, when a Terrier just doesn't have enough bite."

what? Why does it need negative pitch for autorotation? That doesn't make sense... Well, I guess that's Kerbal physics. I use a servo between the engine and the blades to set the collective pitch. And of course I set the limits for the servo to not allow negative pitch. So I never tried that. Yes. I'm constantly monitoring blade pitch, engine RPM, and ascent speed. With the old (elevon-based) blades I needed to gradually lower the blade pitch the higher I got to get the best ascent speed. (Also because the torque wasn't enough to keep the engine at max RPM for most of the ascent.) With the new blades I can use a fairly high pitch and still get max RPM and a pretty high ascent rate, that increases with elevation -- until it starts decreasing and things go pear shaped. Lowering the pitch at that point (from ca. 16 deg to 5 deg or whatever) doesn't really help much if I don't have the spare engine power. I guess my current strategy is at least related to your "high speed" approach: I ascent at best speed (maxing out at around 20 m/s) until the ascent speed starts to drop, then I fire up the rockets and drop the rotors. For me that's because If I don't do that then I start dropping fast, and with the low TWR that I have in Eve's atmosphere I would spend a long time just reversing the drop-speed if I'm not quick... Well, Eve is a poodle! In my folding-wing Eve plane the parachutes rip my craft into pieces during the descent. Not because of high stress during unfolding, but because the static forces are too high. Guess I have to attach them to more than one spot...

I don't know about yours. But my Kerbals don't like playing lawn-darts. (Too many bad memories of being inside the dart I believe.) But, yes! Some space to move around in is required, so 2.5m parts it is. Since the BG expansion I include a gravity ring in my stations, its current iteration is made from the 1.25m passenger cabin.

Yes, I think I do it they way you mentioned. For pitch/roll/yaw control I essentially just do not set the authority limiter of the blades to zero. (Setting it to 30 works well for me.) Because it is a quadcopter and the rotors and their thrust-vectors are all well away from the COM, this works reasonably well. The one thing I really did, is to use servos between the rotor and the blades for the collective control.