Azimech
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Posts posted by Azimech
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9 hours ago, Noir said:
Not to be a downer, but when I heard that stock propellers were coming in a future update I expected them to behave more like how modded prop engines do, like in Airplanes Plus or KAX. That is, effectively like a jet engine in game. I can't help but feel these won't work as well as they should. I already known they won't work in FAR all that well. And the fact the Propeller blades themselves are a fixed shape and length, suggesting there will be limited customisation and creativity. Plus the current Breaking Ground rotors already struggle when spinning at a high RPM, and just turn into a glitchy mess. Makes me wonder why they didn't just go down the Airplane Plus route. I guess on the bright side they won't be charging another $15 for content we've been waiting years for.
Props work fine with FAR. Built and flew the first ever mod turboprop in 2014.
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Guess I'll really only focus on piston engines, gearboxes and suspensions from now on
2 hours ago, Quoniam Kerman said:At least they'll be solid parts that won't get funky with game physics, that's already something.
We don't know that, yet.
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Just now, Brikoleur said:
That sounds like a possible solution. You could even place the CoL outside the visible and physical radius of the propeller. What didn't you like about the result?
Ehm ... I don't recall atm. It's been ... three years?
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52 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:
I like the design/test process, that's the main reason I play KSP these days.
I'm not a big fan of mechanical rote repetition however, and building a rotor with the current parts involves a lot of mechanical rote repetition.
It's not the only possible solution. An alternative is to fudge it -- create a propeller blade part with fudge factors that make it behave like a propeller would at the desired max RPM. That's the main reason I suggested it -- hard limits of the game engine are difficult to break through, but they can be worked around with fudge factors.
I invested some time into that in the past. Place the CoM at the attachment point but place the CoL at the far edge ... I actually wasn't impressed with the result back then.
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On 6/22/2019 at 1:44 PM, Brikoleur said:
There is one limitation with stock propellers that I would like to see addressed: efficiency with small diameters. I wouldn't object to a new "rotor/propeller blade" part that provided adjustable pitch out of the box, and implemented some fudge factors so that they worked at somewhat realistic efficiencies at low diameters. They wouldn't really change much other than cosmetics for big rotors, but would make it possible to make functional propeller aircraft that looked similar to RL ones.
The only possible solution: an increase in max rpm. Time will tell if Unity will be able to do it.
QuoteAs things currently stand, making a rotor involves a fair bit of rote, tedious fiddling -- placing servos, placing aero surfaces on the servos, adjusting servo min/max angle, binding the angle to an axis. There isn't anything particularly creative, challenging, or interesting with that process and I wouldn't mind a stock part that removed some of the tedium.
Just like real life ... the development of the propeller has been going on since 1901 and will continue ... probably for ever.
"Back to the drawing board, guys!"By the way ... some actually like this design/test process.
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1 hour ago, KerbMav said:
No. Squad needs to give us actual propellers.
Preferably electrical and fuel/air powered ones.
What, a model and an animation, with something that provides thrust due to the configuration file?
What's the fun in that?
Stock rotors and propellers are good enough, people have even been able to break the sound barrier, impossible in real life. -
7 hours ago, Mignear said:
Wanted to see if the rotors would make for an effective way to get something rolling on the ground with a decent speed.
Currently tops out at about 30m/s. Perhaps the small cubic struts would work better as the "tires", and maybe additional rotor-wheels. The bouncing of the vehicle from the rotor-wheel interaction with the ground affects the performance as well, I had to hold down the W key to keep the nose down.
Replace them with the smallest wheels you can set the brakes on, set springs & dampers to minimal.
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2 hours ago, Brikoleur said:
Question to you all mega-engineers who have been working magic with stock stuff for years: what's the canonical, best, or only way of making circular/closed/looping structures? Strutting up the point where the loop closes, or is there some better way?
I was playing with a chain drive a while back and couldn't get it to close properly, the strut I used just magically stretched to amazing lengths when I decoupled it from the rest of the device.
Interesting ... In 1.7.1 strutting to a loop does seem to work. Didn't I post my chain a few days ago?
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1 hour ago, 4x4cheesecake said:
Apparently, you can build a "gear box" but unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of friction so the powered rotor doesn't reach max RPM:
Oh and if anyone is curious: this is one vessel on launch but the axis are separated by decouplers so the gears are actually able to act like gears
Unity's way of collider interactions means they become impressively imprecise at higher rotational speeds. The exception seems to be rover wheels and landing gear.
But true, collider friction is pretty high.
For this kind of krakentech, we should have the ability to choose the material and if it's "lubricated" or not.
Collider friction is a set value in Unity when you export the model, but through coding there is a way to modify it. The library "ModuleWheelBase" (which governs all wheels in the game) has the option to adjust the friction setting on the fly.
As an extra: the colliders with the least friction are box and sphere colliders, with spheres really winning. Complex colliders like tanks and wings and especially a Vernor are terrible.
That's why the most gears you see are made from RCS balls.
https://gfycat.com/anchoredfearlesscapybara-kerbal-space-program-ksp -
6 hours ago, boomchacle said:
So I've been trying to make a stock XP-55 replica, and despite having 8 juno engines, This thing cannot seem to get past 30 meters per second. Any tips?
Probably the turbine diameter and/or propeller blade pitch.
4 hours ago, FleshJeb said:You guys probably know the answer to this:
What's the optimum blade pitch for cruising? 3 to 5 degrees above the vector sum of the tangential and the forward velocity? (Same as the optimum lift-to-drag ratio for a plane wing)
If that's true, the max power should be +25?
It depends, every speed has its own optimal angle. When I'm accelerating I'm adjusting it every 5 seconds or so. The engine speed has a redline (50 rad/s, 477 rpm) but too low doesn't work either. Props in KSP generally start to perform well above 35 rad/s (335 rpm).
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12 minutes ago, Noir said:
Not sure if this is what you are after, but I managed to create a makeshift leaf spring suspension.
An alligator hinge is connected to a G-00 hinge, which is than repeated on the other side. On one of the G-00 hinges is a cubic strut which the wheel sits on. The G-00 hinge that the centre cubic strut is not connected to, is strutted together with a normal strut connector. This image may help. Keeping the motors turned on, but with a very low output, means the hinge will want to return to it's target angle, which in turn creates a suspension/springy like result. It's not a best, and the numbers need tweaking, but it works.
That is seriously impressive.
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11 hours ago, Klapaucius said:
It would be nice if there was some sort of weld function. While this is an out there aircraft, the fact is, if it were built in the real world that wing would be a single reinforced unit. The only reason for the I-beam is you need to start with a base part, and wings won't cut it.
PS. How do you get the strut diagram?
I think a weld function would make KSP into X-Plane.
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1 hour ago, boomchacle said:
Jet engines and rockets have an infinite exaust velocity in this game as a bunch of jet engines can fire a projectile past super sonic velocities
Also, our stock bearings have 0 friction, so you're not going to get more power using less engines, the only difference is that the part count is going to be lower and the bearing is going to be heavier. It's a trade off.
Don't forget about the drag. There's always the drag. And stock bearings always have some friction, some of it comes from vibrations. They always vibrate.
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@Servoyes the DLC adds some interesting opportunities. Instead of using the DLC for planes and helicopters I will use it for other things. I've been a master in both for almost 5 years, it's time to let it go.
We might need a new engine (Unreal?) for this because joints continue to be a friggin' wreck in Unity. Anyway ... I'll be focusing more on piston engines now. It's my deepest love. -
Just now, Gargamel said:
Understandable, but at this point, we have identified an issue, and we need to narrow down it's root cause. Only way the devs can get around to fixing it.
Just a reply that I find it strange I can't like more posts per day with 7.5k rep. This like was aimed at you.
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12 minutes ago, dok_377 said:
We might not like it, but it may be intentional, who knows. I tried asking JPL during EJ's stream, but never recieved an answer. I certainly don't like this change and changed my feedback on the tracker to a bug report.
Keep reporting. And I'm out of likes today. I was in EJ's stream as well.
1 minute ago, Gargamel said:Try a clean install and then build the plane from scratch. See if it still wobbles. It might be the importing of existing designs, or it might be in the new code.
In any case, this is not acceptable.
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1 minute ago, Lisias said:
Sometimes I think the developers should spend more time playing the game than trying to fix things. That would allow them to get the feeling to minimize breaking things to be fixed at first place.
Eat your own dogfood.
What makes you think they don't this?
I've made mods myself and playtesting for weeks is a normal thing to do.
But ... there are more styles to play than there are users ... a dev can only anticipate so much. -
4 hours ago, dok_377 said:
Yeah, I don't know why they changed it. And the worst thing is we don't even know if that's a bug or an intentional change. Squad members seem to ignore those kind of questions for some reason.
Are you sure about that?
Some high profile builders noticed it and weren't happy about it. Also very vocal. Me included.
3 hours ago, panzer1b said:Still, i can see how this is a problem for very complex planes, albeit, im pretty sure i prefer the 1.7 version of that plane, the wobbliness is way more "kerbal".
This hurts me. You know I need rigid stuff.
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5 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:
I disassembled Azura. That is some seriously impressive engineering there. I also appreciate the simplicity of the turbine. I guess the bearing was the hardest part? Now that we have stock bearings that ought to be solved. It does look like you got that superb control mostly by piling on lots of reaction wheels though.
-- In other news I did some very light tuning of BAK-12 and explored the limits of its envelope. It broke 10500 meters on hover which is way more than I expected!
That's pretty good for a helicopter ... It's higher than my first coaxial (which was also the first ever ;-) )
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On 5/31/2019 at 3:55 PM, Tyr Anasazi said:
So - Breaking Ground is here and I've had a play with rotors and servos. I may be biased but in my opinion reaction wheels are still better performers!
One major disadvantage of the rotors is that they create equal torque in both directions - any design using BG rotors must be counter-rotating.
One thing is for sure - Servos make the best bearings.
Here is Global Dumpling MK3, which uses M-12 Servos as bearings. Motor overspeed and random explosions are now a thing of the past. The engine will now happily spin at maximum RPM indefinitely.It's not even a bearing anymore, just a model and some code.
And I actually like motor overspeed and random explosions. We've been developing props & rotors since 2012 ... and when I invented the turboshaft engine in 2013 my helicopter lifted off with 7 rad/s because that was the game limit. The devs have increased the limit at my request every time.
This is the very first turboprop on the planet, KSP 0.90. At one point something says poof but the engine continues to wobble and work. I like that.
Once I flew a turboprop around Kerbin and at one point was a bit lazy ... didn't watch the revs enough. Damaged the engine. It continued to fly for many hours. -
25 minutes ago, Brikoleur said:
Impressive.
I did disable the motor, and the problem was the opposite -- it built up too much revs; I'd need to limit it somehow. It was a very simple design, just three Junos directly on the drive shaft. The limit wasn't power but that it shook itself apart after it 300 rpm or so.
Right now though as I said I'm not all that concerned with power, the electrics have all the oomph I need for now. The thing I'm struggling with is control. I can brute-force it with reaction wheels of course but I very much prefer aerodynamic control. The contrarotating BAK-52 and BAK-12 fly rather nicely through aerodynamic control, but I got there entirely through trial-and-error tuning. Basically, I can't figure out why some of my choppers have no or almost no roll or pitch control, while others are super roll- or pitch-happy?
Your Asura has superb roll, pitch, and yaw control, so I would very much appreciate any pointers on this score actually!
This is my current single-main-rotor testbed, and while I got the torques roughly balanced the aerodynamic control is garbage, it was barely flyable and then the control inputs seemed to do more or less random things depending on... I don't know what. I brute-forced it with a bunch of reaction wheels to make it flyable but that is distinctly unsatisfactory.
Another way, but even more brute force is how Cronus and Rhea do it. But it depends on how much power you feed the system.
If a chopper is lacking control, the cause can be the CoL too high above the CoM. -
13 minutes ago, Flying dutchman said:
Helicopters are great now though
The DLC is the reason I probably won't be building helicopters or planes anymore. Only release what was already on the shelf.
Interesting movement on this useless contraption.
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Agreed, the sliders aren't precise enough.
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A stock solution might be to use multiple sets of legs or wheels, each with their own spring/shock settings. It's what I use on many cars to give them the exact cornering ability I want. Even use it on large airplanes to cope with difficult terrain.
What I really dislike is the lack of bump/rebound settings. This could solve many issues, i.e going from underdamped to overdamped instead of bouncing off Gilly.
KSP Loading... Preview: Turbine Engines
in KSP1 The Daily Kerbal
Posted
@RoverDudeany chance the 50 rad/s limit can be increased? It's high enough for a helicopter, way too low for a propeller to be useful.
Now I know how to edit a part to increase lift and change the CoL/CoM to get the required thrust but this feels more like cheating than else.
A prop just needs to run between 2k and 3k rpm.
I hope one day KSP/Unity will be able to handle collider interactions at this rate.