dr.phees

Could the UI be more compact? Or allow a second, tighter theme? I have loads of vessels and Haystack's UI ist just too space wasting for me, so I am using the slightly outdated Targetron. It is compact and fun to use, most often without scrolling, while in Haystack I have to scroll around far too much. Having a second theme as seen in MechJeb might do the job, and I would switch over.

And here it is: A working, mechanical multiwinged bird in Kerbalspaceprogram. After my original flappy bird, this was a bit more complicated to animate, but much simpler to balance. This craft uses kOS for automation and Infernal Robotics for animation. My BETTER craft is the Flappy Bird. You can also download it: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/95885-Soaring-with-my-flappy-bird Game footage captured from Kerbal Space Program (http://kerbalspaceprogram.com) Music by the wonderful Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com)

My first Ornithopter: The Flappy Bird: This video is long, but I have been told the last third is well worth the wait! And my larger one: The Flappy Crouching Dragon:

Whenever I use IR parts in symmetry mode, they loose random amounts of tweaked settings when being moved / re-attached. Sometimes the main part I am moving keeps its tweaks, but sometimes not. Sometimes the symmetric child parts have some of the tweaks, sometimes nothing at all. So far I could not reproduce one of these outcomes for sure, apparently there is no system to it. Is this a problem with KSP in general?

I have a VTOL design, where I use twekables to balance the vertical thrust (reduce thrust for one of the engines). But when using kOS's maxthrust query, I only get the maximum thrust value for the untweaked engines. Using TWR to calculate throttle settings is impossible that way. I can work around that with the :SENSORS:ACC query, but still, would be nice. Also, tweaking the engine from within kOS would allow to balance unstable craft (losing an engine and similar). That would be brilliant. Oh, and getting the thrust and maxthrust as a vector would be brilliant. That would actually allow hovering together with perpendicular engines to work. My wish list would be: - maxthrust AND/OR tweaked maxthrust - actual thrust - tweaking or engine thrust via kOS - maxthrust/tweaked maxthrust/actual thrust as vectors Nice checklist, eh? By the way, 0.14.2 is working fine, so far. All my old scripts seem to work and I am very much looking forward to the coming changes!

I have gone back to ornithopter development in stock 0.25. I guess I will return to FAR/NEAR when I fell I'm done with playing around with them and climb the aerodynamics mountain later.

Yes, same for me. I used two sepatrons to boost it into the air, but taking off is complicated so far.

No, actually just the current position of the moving parts, that might be rotation or travellength, depending on the part.

Oh, good! I love this to bits! Haystack is too large and Targetrons compact approach is much more usable!

I second that! Mods must be removable from the AppLauncher! (Or the AppLauncher needs an opt-in functionality, maybe with a popup at first launch for the newbies)

Really? I never had any problems with ModuleManager. And would you really like it better if every single mod developed its own ModuleManager functionality?

I got up to 25m/s in FAR before breaking my four-winged Dragonfly, but I need around 60 m/s to take off! And since in FAR the air has a much lower dampening effect on moving parts, the wings rip off when flapping fast enough to reach higher speeds. I guess this calls for a very new design. And I will be testing NEAR as well...

Playing around with kOS and IR to build some ornithopters, I have come up with a very quick list of stuff I would love to see kOS do with IR: - Set IR group speed value (Allow faster or slower movement) - Set IR part target max/min position values (Allow moving a IR part to certain values) - Address IR parts directly (not only via action groups) - Read the position values of a part - If parts have addressable IDs (like engines, or IR parts) it would be great if kOS would add the ID value to the rightclick menu in the SPH/VAB and while in flight One unrelated thing: - Get the throttle value (to allow using the throttle to control stuff)

I made FlappyBird and Dragonfly work in 0.25. Now it is time for FAR/NEAR. Wish me luck

I am having an issue with the move to center function. I am using IR for Ornithopters (see in my signature), so, the movements are quite quick. Now I want to reset the parts to their neutral position and they keep flapping around and never quite get to 0. Releasing the button (or the Actiongroup), I never know, where the parts will end up in the end. Reaching the exact min and max positions is currently not as important to me, but at least resetting to neutral should be reliable. I think reducing the stepwidth when less than one step away from the target for a few iterations should do the trick. Maybe halfs or thirds for 4 iterations and then keep the stepwidth while close to the target position. That would give us a minimal stepwidth of a 16th or 81th. That would look smooth in nearly every situation. If there is some way I can help or test, let me know.

I realised I wrote that I had used KAS for the moving parts. That is so not true! I used Infernal Robotics. Sorry.

Erendrake, did you contact me on youtube? And here is a little appetizer of what I am working on: The Dragonfly (Imgur Album)

Glad to be of service. And there is MOAR to come.

Ha, did not know of that one!! How brilliant!

I call it FlappyBird. Watch the video in its forum thread! (And download it and flap it yourself...)

Thanks! I actually managed to fly Flappy at lower levels, the reentry got a bit messed up, but with k-OS at its helm and 10 PB-NUKs it could fly non-stop. Damn. Now I think I have to setup a computer to do a Kerbin world tour. Let's see, at 25m/s that would be about 41 hours. A tad more, maybe. That sounds manageable!?

I mainly use kOS to automate stuff (like with my Ornithopter). I am looking for better interaction with kOS. That would include entry of data at runtime other than via the action groups. Since kOS is catching keypresses nicely when the console is active, I hope this will be available some time. Also, printing at x/y coordinates on the screen would be lovely. This would enable us to create simple dashboards and UIs. (Ncurses for kOS

By the way, I added a link to the craft and kOS script in the original post! Thanks for the praise!

Thanks! Cost me quite some time, but totally worth it, especially the bird! In kOS you can use the commands "AG1 ON", "AG1 OFF" and "TOGGLE AG1" and similar for all the action groups. If you bind your KAS stuff to the actiongroups, you can toggle them. I also locked the throttle to my speed variable, which I control with actiongroups 1 and 2, so the throttle next to the navball shows kOS's correct speed settings

A working, mechanical bird in Kerbalspaceprogram. (See below video for download link!) The part on Kerbin is a bit long, but make sure to watch to the end, or miss good stuff! I planned this video to be narrated, but while editing could not find the right moment to step in, so I made it a musical homage to the beauty of soaring. And Flapping. That is also why the mouse cursor has been captured and is pointing at various things throughout the video! Game footage captured from Kerbal Space Program (http://kerbalspaceprogram.com) Music by the wonderful Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com) Here is a link to a zip file, containing 3 versions of the FlappyBird: flappybird.zip Use FlappyBird-kOS B.craft , which is the latest version. The others are just for your entertainment and the non-kOS version must be flapped manually! The kOS-script should be used with the k-OS crafts. WHAT YOU NEED: - k-OS (obviously) - Infernal Robotics - TweakScale (I just found out that I attached smaller wheels, don't know what will happen without tweakscale)