LameLefty

I think that would be grand. I’d be happy if I could just get a mostly-parachute single stage lander to drop within 100m or so (save that precious prop for returning to orbit!). It used to be possible but the game atmosphere has changed and, to top it off, apparently now there’s an issue with farings producing too much drag. That’s a big deal because, for instance, it’s generally necessary to encapsulate large rovers or complicated habitat hub modules to avoid tearing/burning off fiddly bits. Anyway, we non-coders do appreciate Sarbian’s efforts, as well as those of everyone else who has or will contribute to the codebase.

Not everyone wants to watch a video. How ‘bout you just explain what you did? BTW - I got far enough in to see you’re editing the LT-5 gear. Many of us are having trouble with the LT-2 gear, which already have CoMOffset, BreakingForce and BreakingTorque values in the config files. So if the issue is related to that, it’s not that the values don’t exist in the files, it’s that they’re wrong.

This might explain why MechJeb can't land my fairing-encapsulated heavy rover payloads on Laythe very accurately (they tend to undershoot the target by anywhere from 1 - 3 kilometers, depending on the mass of the encapsulated payload and the exact starting trajectory.

So I had an interesting issue that might apply to others. I'm posting here because it occurred while trying to grab an item ('G' key) and drag/drop the item into a KIS inventory slot. As it happens, one I hover the cursor over an item, and press 'G' to grab it, my cursor stops responding and simply cannot be dragged over to an inventory pane slot and dropped there. Flat-out does not work. As it turns out, it's not a KIS issue at all, but rather one with the trackpad or the driver software used by the trackpad on my gaming laptop. IT IS NOT A KIS ISSUE AT ALL! When I plugged in an external mouse, everything works just fine. I don't know why the heck my trackpad stops responding in KSP flight interface with the left button pressed, but it works fine with a mouse. I'm posting here just in case others are running into any similar-sounding issues with a trackpad. If so, perhaps using a mouse will resolve the issue for them.

Yep, in a vacuum it's damn near perfect. Atmosphere landings are still somewhat problematic, even from a dead-circular equatorial orbit aiming for an equatorial landing spot. One single-stage lander design on Laythe might undershoot the landing target by 1 - 3 km; another single-stage lander design from the same orbit and target might overshoot by just as much. Not sure if it's because drag calculations are screwed up in KSP for certain parts or what, but back around 0.26 or so, another player/coder put a crap-ton of effort into helping get the landing code straightened out and it used to be possible to land, even with parachute assist, within a 10 - 20 meters of an equatorial target easily from a reference starting orbit of about 100km equatorial.

Since you asked ... What is a Nyan Cat?

Last night, really ... Fooling around in Sandbox, testing Laythe lander designs and techniques in preparation for an upcoming Jool window in my Career save. (this design doesn't work, BTW - explodey overhearing kerbality late in descent. Ended up having to totally encapsulate the rover and land via a top-mounted skycrane, but this screenshot was just too good). This design works fine, but landing legs in 1.4.2 are insanely touchy, tending to explode by "colliding with terrain" at even 0.5 m/s touchdown speeds. Something is quite messed up at present.

I reproduced in a bone-stock game (all mods removed). Something's changed in the landing leg physics of 1.4.2. I'm afraid to continue my Career save until a fix comes out, so I'm just playing in Sandbox, testing designs. I've found that if I double (or more!) the number of landing legs I use, the risk of things going Kraken-shaped is reduced. But there's still a chance things will explode, especially if you land on any kind of slope.

I'm experiencing the same thing. I've got a Jool launch window coming up in my Career save, so I've been fooling around in a Sandbox save, using the Cheat menu to put landers in orbit around Laythe and testing designs for an Ore miner/refinery craft and a habitat lander. Generally, as soon as the landing legs touch the terrain, even at 0.5 m/s, they explode violently. The log sates that "LT-2 landing leg collided with terrain." So my Career game is on hold until there's a fix for this landing leg issue. Ugh.

I'm so happy - Jool has rings again (I use SVE).

Auto-strutting is now the default for landing legs and cannot be turned off. Makes no difference with either the bouncing or the "explode as soon as the craft touches the ground" issue (which I still think are inter-related).

If you keep up with the mod threads for the dependencies, it seems like a holdup may be an update to Kopernicus, which hasn’t (yet?) happened.

Probably related - last night I was testing potential designs for a Laythe lander (Cheat Menu editing it into low Laythe orit). As soon as the craft spawns on the launchpad before I can edit it, at least one or more landing legs will explode with the log message that the part collided with the ground. Similarly, when the craft lands on Laythe at a whopping 0.1 - 0.5 m/s, at least one or more legs will explode with the same log messages. This leg fragility wasn’t occurring with 1.4.1.

You guys need to read the pinned post about asking for mod updates.

So I've got an issue with both the 793 and 794 builds - Landing Guidance to an equatorial site on Laythe using a single-stage vessel is waaaaaay off-target. The vessel does a deorbit burn, resulting in a landing estimate within a few minutes of the target. The landing estimate remains there until basically the craft hits atmosphere and then it all goes to hell. From an equatorial 67km starting orbit, aiming at an equatorial landing site, I repeatably end up touching down >60km west of the targeted site when using parachute landing assist. Back in the (good? bad?) old days, before the atmosphere stuff got rejiggered for the 0.90 release, landing guidance used to be able to hit the spot almost perfectly even when using parachutes. Basically, after the deorbit burn, MJ didn't need to touch the throttle at all until the last few dozen meters to zero out landing velocity. Before I go bombarding Sarbian with logs and .craft files and such, I need to know if anyone can get reasonably good accuracy landings from a similar Laythe orbit using either dev version and KSP 1.4.2? (If so, I have a mod or something causing some kind of issue). If not, and this is a broader issue than my install, I start doing more controlled tests, gather logs and screenshots, etc. Thanks!

Sure. But expired site certs can also indicate that a site has been compromised and exploit the user's tendency to click past errors. In any event, even if it's an innocent issue, I doubt I'll be the last to notice and ask about it in the coming hours/days until and unless Sarbian gets an updated cert for his site.

Hey Sarbian - both Chrome and MS Edge are giving warning about invalid site certificates for the link to your dev site. Any chance you've been hacked? Hope not ...

Many spacecraft - even today! - have star and solar trackers that integrate with the vehicle’s attitude control system and either provide navigational fixes in 3D space or provide pointing data for solar arrays. Heck, KSP itself does this whenever you jump to a a craft and physics kicks in; you can see the arrays turn and try to orient perpendicular to the sun. But is there a mod that will actually add “Sun pointing” to a craft itself? For instance, I have some mid-Career tech space stations in my current save that have barely enough power to transmit a full load of Science after processing experiments. So whenever I visit the stations and try to transmit, I have to manually orient the craft to the Sun to ensure maximum solar flux on the arrays to get the batteries charged up quickly, then make my transmission. It would be excellent if the craft would automatically orient itself sunward- much as an SAS mode would do for Normal/Anti-Normal, Radial/Anti-Radial, etc.

It's typical MS-halfassery. Run any of the game executables or any of mod .DLLs (especially ModuleManager, MechJeb and Chatterer) through VirusTotal and you'll see 60+ other malware scanners mark everything clean. I finally dumped Defender and installed a third-party anti-virus instead. Problem solved.

I visited an old friend today ... It was a good day.

That's correct. You'll need an Engineer to repack your parachutes. Not a problem if you have a separate Duna lander and Kerbin-return capsule, or if you have an Engineer waiting in orbit to repack the 'chutes before return. You need to do it from EVA however.

Is this a probe (unscrewed) lander you're trying to set down on Duna? If so, and you're playing a stock or stock-like game, you'll need both a probe core on the lander and one of two things: either a direct line-of-sight connection to Kerbin to control the lander remotely, or a direct LOS connection to a piloted vessel in orbit nearby that has remote control capabilities AND has two pilots aboard (one for itself and one to control the remote lander).

Check in your Plugins folder (GameData/MechJeb2/Plugins) and make sure brain-dead Windows Defender didn't delete your MechJeb2.dll file. That stupid false-positive Trojan warning is still showing up, despite literally 60+ other anti-malware programs deeming it clean. It's also still flagging ModuleManager. Grrr ....

I spent tonight designing and flying a little mid-Career expedition lander to sortie down from an orbital laboratory station and retrieve that sweet, sweet Science! from wherever the urge strikes me. I decided to use the fun new stock tanks from the DLC along with the wonderful Pug engine from Porkjet's parts pack. No, this design isn't particularly optimized, and yes, it's a pain in the booty to refuel after a sortie, but it makes me happy anyway.

Well, it's ISP is an easy enough fix by changing the part config file (the part is called RCS_Captank).