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ferram4

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Everything posted by ferram4

  1. ferram4
    I'm interested in this, but I gather that you're trying to have the same spirit as the Circumnavigation Challenge; with that in mind, I'd like some clarifications: Are we limited to only jet engines? Are we allowed to use separatrons for RATO purposes? Is there an altitude limitation? Are disposable fuel tanks allowed? As things are currently written, I'd suspect that the fastest way to get around the planet is to get into a very low (say ~55km) orbit around Kerbin going west with a rocket launched from the runway, since it actually doesn't run afoul of any rules if stock parts are used. You may want to rewrite the rules a bit to fix that.
  2. ferram4
    @White Owl: There were no changes to the WingAerodynamicModel class in the update, so either it is a problem with Procedural Wings or there is some other interaction there that you're not mentioning (such as cargo bay parts, which might cause a problem).
  3. ferram4
    A good thing to try for fixing trim issues is to change the angle of incidence of the tail / wing / canard to reduce the necessary trim for your vehicle. If you need downward trim when you first take off then you're probably fine.
  4. ferram4
    @Dragon01: tan(x) doesn't explicitly appear anywhere; it's probably more likely that I'm taking the square root of 1 - cos2(x) somewhere and floating point errors are causing that to be negative. @Samuel Jenks: No, that issue was fixed. The problem appears to be that you're trying to analyze your ship in the VAB where the air vector points downwards rather than out the front.
  5. ferram4
    @betaking: No problem, glad to clear it up. @taniwha: Ok, so it's somewhere in the wing code; that narrows things down a lot. I actually didn't look into that for this release since I was more focused on actual physics-related bugs rather than the GUI bugs. Hopefully I catch it for the next release.
  6. ferram4
    @CaptainArbitrary: I haven't noticed any change in performance from making the debug values visible or not; make sure that nothing is spamming the log, and if that's not the case, then it's possible that I haven't optimized something as much as I should have. @betaking: The RemoteTech part you're talking about doesn't interface with FAR in any possible way; there is no way for it to tell that it must first check to see if it is shielded by a payload fairing or a cargo bay before breaking. This is not a bug with FAR, this is a RemoteTech class not being designed to take advantage of FAR's features if it is installed. Long story short, there's nothing I can do; it's not my code that's the problem.
  7. ferram4
    Oh, apparently I did. I don't think it actually slows anything down though, so I'm in no rush to fix it. I'll fix that when 0.21 comes out and I need to (probably) do a compatibility fix.
  8. ferram4
    FAR version 0.9.5.2 is out, fixing some bugs, some lift and drag adjustments and adding compatibility with procedural fairings.
  9. ferram4
    @Palec: That is likely a problem stemming from the fact that the current FAR download has an out-of-date ModuleManager.dll. Reinstall the one contained with B9 and it should work fine.
  10. ferram4
    I'm not seeing the FAR GUI anywhere on your screen; this implies that you didn't install it properly. Also, the fact that you were able to flip the rocket around like that implies that the winglet code hasn't been overridden since that would prevent the rocket from being turned around like that.
  11. ferram4
    Your design looks like it's going to be a little too stable in pitch for you to control it properly at supersonic speeds. You really want the Cm (moment coefficient - yellow line) to have a lower-magnitude slope for easy pitch-control; which means that you want to push the CoL further forward. Make sure that you do your static analysis at a variety of Mach numbers because the physics change a lot with Mach number. Another problem is that the sudden increase in Cm as stall begins indicates that your vehicle can't recover from a stall. The solution to this is to make the canards have a larger span or to reduce the span of the main wing; this will cause the canard to stall first, forcing the vehicle to pitch down. You've also got a lot more wing there than you need, you can get rid of quite a bit of it and still fly fine. To help with yaw stability I'd say to try shifting the fuel tanks forward so that the vertical stabilizers you have there can be more effective. Keep in mind that as you go higher and faster the aerodynamic damping on your aircraft will decrease, meaning that you will probably need to use some active control inputs to keep in under control.
  12. ferram4
    Yeah, I didn't expect someone to create working procedural fairings so quickly. I think that simply making the "determine fairing size" a public method that this plugin can call should solve the problem. Until then, you can try removing the "payload" and "fairing" tags from the name and have the FARPayloadFairingModule manually removed and added every time the fairing is re-sized. It's clunky, but it's a quick work-around.
  13. ferram4
    @TheGadfly: You must consolidate them. Just keep the latest version of Module Manager (which i think is the one in Deadly Reentry). @SHOT(by)GUN: There are two things I want you to try: the first is remove the control surfaces on the wing and see if the problem persists. I think the main wing thinks that the control surface is in front of it for some strange reason. The second is I want you to rebuild the vehicle, but instead sweep the procedural wing backwards and then flip it over so that you have a forward-swept wing again. This will help determine if the bug is in FAR or Procedural Wings.
  14. ferram4
    @foamyesque: I guess I can look into the ability to toggle control surfaces. I don't know if I can do anything with the RCS units, since I don't know what the code is doing there. I can look into it though. @Doomydoom: First, leading-edge slats are intended to prevent stall at high angles of attack, which won't help you if the CoL is in front of the CoM. You'll need to move the CoL back or else it will continue to suffer from the same problem.
  15. ferram4
    @Black-Talon: The panels will add a bit of drag, although I think that I'll have to increase the drag for them. You are correct in your assessment of how things should function there. @foamyesque: IIRC the 3-man pod is only ~4 tonnes, so adding an extra tonne of mass to that (without much increase in surface area) will cause nasty things to happen. Also, the fact that the shield is very blunted will cause it to add quite a bit of drag (if I coded it properly) so that shouldn't affect things. How recent is the control surface issue? I've never had this issue occur on my end. @Clamps: I can't keep track of compatibility with other mods. If you manage to cause a problem with another mod, you must provide the output_log or I can't do anything about it. I have no idea where in the FAR / Kethane code the problem is occurring.
  16. ferram4
    @foamyesque: Is the heatshield very heavy or something? It should be working properly unless the origin of the part is messed up, which would cause the heatshield to not make all the drag that it should. @Resender: Does this problem still occur if you go very high into the atmosphere before reaching Mach >1.2? It could just be the stock atmospheric effects causing your graphics to lag. @StelarCF & taniwha: Yep, the coefficients are independent of altitude and velocity. Taniwha's equation is almost correct, except for Q, which is: Q = air_density (kg * m-3) * velocity2 (m2 * s-2)
  17. ferram4
    @foamyesque: Keep in mind that the surface area of the pod-heatshield combo will be slightly larger than the pod alone, which will drive the drag coefficient down. It should still behave the same. @gracae86: That is a known issue and is only a visual bug. The actual CoL is centered, the indicator is simply wrong.
  18. ferram4
    @foamyesque: Make sure you're using the latest ModuleManager, although I doubt that would affect the drag of that part. I woul;d suggest actually updating to 0.9.5.1 since the difference in aerodynamics between the version you're using and the latest version could be causing the issue. @Monkthespy: The payload fairing will cancel out all of the aerodynamic forces on the shuttle. It wouldn't be a useful payload fairing if it didn't. @s20dan: There is a known issue with parts at the very edges of cargo bays not being shielded properly, although I think that any parts placed more in the middle of the bay will still be shielded properly.
  19. ferram4
    @Spanier: MechJeb should never "work fine" with FAR, as it is unable to determine the drag forces that FAR applies to the vehicle. If it was "working" in anyway then that means that you were using a vehicle that either: Had a large number of intakes Had a large number of parachutes Both of those still apply drag through the stock drag model. @foamyesque: Are you talking about the shield for the 3-man pod or the expandable heat shield? If it's the former, make sure that both attach Nodes have the proper values and that they are not overriden by modulemanager at any point. If it's the latter, I don't know what to tell you, I don't have the math of that set up yet.
  20. ferram4
    @Spanier: It is addressed here. The error is due to MechJeb calculating things using the old drag model, which has been zeroed out.
  21. ferram4
    @Black-Talon: Trying to set up the FARControllableSurface module to work on wings with control surfaces causes some very weird things to happen, primarily because it acts as if the entire wing part is rotating. FAR can zero out the values for Winglet and ControlSurface parts in-game, so changing that is unnecessary. Further, the FSwingletRangeAdjustment can only affect the stock ControlSurface part, not FAR parts. The extra values in the Firespitter configs are old fields and are unnecessary. Finally, if only Cl is appearing on you AoA sweep then that means that something is wrong in the drag / moment calculations and those values are being pushed off the chart. @Asdefjak: The "isShielded" field only applies to parts in cargo bays and payload fairings. Everything is functioning properly. I guess I'll just remove the visibility of that field to reduce confusion.
  22. ferram4
    This is a pretty cool tool, I can't wait to try it out! Would it be possible to get some measurement of the sensitivity of the transfer orbit with respect to errors in the departure hyperbola? Such as, say, how sensitive the parameters for that orbit and for the intercept with the target are to changes in the argument of periapsis, departure time, eccentricity, inclination, closest approach, etc. This would be very useful for launching large, low-TWR vehicles to other planets and trying to figure out how much piloting errors could interfere with getting a proper transfer orbit. I'd also suggest adding Ascending and Descending Nodes, argument of periapsis, etc. to the target orbits (using Kerbin's orbit as a datum plane). Perhaps you could make the parts of the orbit above the datum plane solid lines and below that plane dashed lines for added clarity?
  23. ferram4
    No, that is actually the result of a scaling resize back in 0.16 (?). Basically, the sizes used to be 0.5m, 1m, 2m, etc. but back then a 3-man command had a 1m diameter. When problems with mini-Kerbals popped up, their height was pegged at 1m, the parts all got scaled up by 1.25, and the 3-man pod was stuck on the now-2.5m new parts. Basically, divide the number by 1.25, that will give you the proper size.
  24. ferram4
    @The Lone Wolfling: Flap placement is pretty simple: put it on the back of the wing were the wing is closest to the CoM. Design the pitch control surfaces to be able to adjust for the effects of the flaps. Would you mind posting examples of your joke and fail planes? The code might be malfunctioning. The nodes at the bottom of engines also affect drag. @Xechran: Yes. Attempting to use non-integer values will cause bad things to happen.
  25. ferram4
    @rhoark: Partly, for stealth reasons; that angled trailing edge reduces radar cross-section. It also allows the flaps to be closed further forward, closer to the CoM; this makes deploying the flaps affect the necessary pitch trim less. It can also be done to change the area cross-section of the entire vehicle at that point, which can reduce drag at transonic and supersonic speeds.
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