CombatWombat

Had a problem with aircraft wheel brakes. Braking on uneven terrain and the aircraft hopped off the ground. When it came back down the brakes caused the plane to accelerate wildly. The wheel physics seem to go unstable if you try to accelerate them with changing loads. It's like the physics integration of the wheel's rotational velocity oscillates to infinity and wraps the variable around to crazy numbers.

I have no idea what you are trying to explain. Gravity losses maybe, but not Oberth. We know Power = work / time. and work = force*distance. and velocity is distance / time. Therefor we can do some substitution and see that Power = Force*Velocity The force generated by a rocket doesn't really give a crap about it's velocity (unlike a car or whatever we are normally more accustomed to). So taking the force to be constant, it's clear that the power generated by the rocket is greater when it is operating at a higher velocity. The bit I don't get, and where I think a lot of people get confused... Velocity is a relative quantity. If my target is Duna, what velocity do I "maximize"? I have a velocity relative Kerbin. A velocity relative to Duna. A velocity relative to Kerbol. And a velocity relative to some small furry creatures from Alpha Centuri. I would suspect the answer is "Velocity Relative Kerbol (Sun)", but I can't explain why. I made a diagram to explain my confusion... Shown is an orbit equal to minmus (A). And an orbit *around* minmus (B,C). We can burn at A, B, or C to go to...someplace. Duna. Whatever. Let's ignore the fact that some of them take you off in entirely the wrong direction... C sounds like the winner, but I guess it took fuel to GET to that position to start with? Do I even *care* about my velocity relative to Kerbin, if I'm interested in a cheap orbit around SUN?

People seem too worried that "more accurate" means "more difficult". Fixing some of the wonkiness in the aero should make things more intuitive. Not less. There is an important distinction we must make between physical accuracy and complexity. The former means that the behavior of the simulation follows sensible trends. Even with non-sense numbers plugged in, it should still "work". IE: planets that are too small... but the orbital mechanics still jives. The latter means one thousand buttons to start your engines. We need the former. The latter is best left to Orbiter et-al. Some of the silly quirks need to be fixed to make things respond in ways that make sense. The wings/fins need halfway decent lift/drag polars instead of the completely bat**** insane things they have now. This is a simple table look-up. No worse performance than we have now. Simple to implement. The total ship drag model is a bigger nut to crack. That probably has to wait.

I would question the cache friendliness of the Unity PhysX implementation first. Especially for the constraint solving application that KSP needs. The CPU sitting on its arse waiting for things to be dumped into cache is a major bottleneck on modern systems.

Having played this game since 0.8.something, I will be disappointed if the R&D system doesn't give me some kind of incentive to leave the "comfort zone" and fly to new places in new ways. Sure, I can set my own bizarre goals, but there is something special about a game *handing* you a challenge, and stepping up to that challenge and saying, "see that? I got your number, game!" When X-COM dishes you a terror mission in Siberia in the dead of night, you suck it up and do it. Even if you don't have the right equipment, or the right squad. And it's somehow more rewarding, because I did not choose the terms of the battle. I had to make do with what was available. This is what I hope to see out of career mode as a whole. I can set myself a goal to go to Duna. But when the game throws me that goal, and I haven't researched Nuclear Engines yet, and my best pilots are stranded on the Mun, and the coffers are running dry, and we only have 3 landing struts in stock...and they're all different sizes!... It's time to DO IT ANYWAYS. And should success come, it will be all the sweeter. If success does not come, I'm sure it will be in a pyrrhic explosion. On the subject of development pace: It's been a very long time since there was an update that fundamentally changed how the game played, and added "freshness". The last time for me was probably the 0.18 DOCKING update. In December. Of 2012. Nearly a year ago. Some parts have been added. Some features have been half implemented, and then cast aside... but the game as a whole largely plays as it did a year ago. Still entertaining? Yes. Growing? I'm not sure.

Rover wheels have such rudimentary slip-angle "simulation" that this wouldn't do much of anything. Ackerman adjustment is barely noticeable even in dedicated racing simulations that put the bulk of their development time into their tire physics. In KSP the wheels struggle just to stay above the collision mesh of the terrain, most of the time.

Frankly the old ASAS would be fine if... 1) We had adjustable PID gain on each control module 2) ASAS modules could be enabled/disabled by stages, such that stages with high control authority / mass ratio could have its own ASAS module with higher gains. As a bonus: ASAS modules should have checkboxes for "Use Fins", "Use RCS", "Use Gimbal" I don't understand why the neutering of ASAS gain was chosen as a "catch all" solution. It just makes control response mushy.

Never. Disastrous screw ups are part of the game.

You can get an intuitive grasp of gravity drag vs aero drag by pushing the situation to its logical extremes. IE: Logically, the slowest ascent rate we could have would be 0m/s. In which case, you are effectively 0% efficient since you're just burning fuel to hover, not gaining any ground. On the other extreme (high velocity), thrust that would normally accelerate you, is being thrown away (into the wind, as it were). So clearly there is some optimum place, between the two extremes, and that will vary by ship design, atmosphere, etc. I guess you could make a pretty good guess of this optimum rate with some fancy spreadsheet antics.

This is my attempt at retrieving my polar expedition team. If WW1 were fought with jet engines, this is how it would happen. Arrival at the north pole. Successful landing. Except the damn wheels sunk into the ground for no good reason. Rescue? Rescue! Now boarding all Kerbal priority pass holders. This seems like a perfectly logical place to camp out for a while... Sadly,firing the rockets was necessary to break free from the broken ground hitbox. Which resulted in Rolin Kerman flying off the back. Which turned out to be very beneficial for him. Maybe next time....

I only use stock parts, so I have no guns. So I did loops around the balloons instead. And screwed up the landing a few times before finally getting it right. Take note of the G-meter 8)

To be fuel efficient enough, you'd have to be cruising at maybe 75-100 m/s @ 15km. So... Many hours.

The lift provided by winglets is really very broken (but I'm sure this is known and being worked on). On landing approach, I have managed to go to 90 degrees angle of attack. And it didn't stall. So that plane will 'fly' down to about 10 m/s with its nose pointed vertical. Of course it still explodes instantly upon touching the runway. I tried firing rockets from it, but anything slung underneath makes it unflyable. A completely different design might work though. And I'm a bit worried over the behavior of parts that have separated from the main craft. I've been able to build planes that can glide by themselves (using fins and/or radial decouplers on the top to create positive pitching moment, to keep the nose up). This works as long as the active capsule is there. If you duplicate the entire thing, but now separate it so that it's on its own, it will just go into a sort of parabolic dive. Furthermore, SAS modules that are jettisoned no longer function. I think if they are 'on' at the time of jettison, they should remain active *for the stage they are attached to*. I think these fixes are necessary for 're-usable parts' for more traditional rockets as the game progresses.

Launch yourself and another vehicle. Split off, come around, and ram it. Stock parts preferred.