LameLefty

Yeah, it'd be nice to hear some official details. I do note that somewhere along the way, my Steam purchase history for the game changed from just listing the game name (like most of my titles) to "Kerbal Space Program - Early Adopters." Presumably the patch and additional content with just automagically start downloading for me. I have no idea what folks who purchased elsewhere will do.

Why do you have "MPH" as your unit of measure for dV? To an American engineer, "feet per second" would be a much better measure. Ditto for your absurd units of mass. Decimal "pounds-mass" (*) would be perfectly understandable and eminently easier to code. (**) (*)DISCLAIMER: Yes, I'm aware of the absurdity of "pounds-mass" but having earned my aerospace engineering degree in a US college in the 80's, and having wrestled with the ridiculousness of the "slug" as a unit if mass, I think I should get a pass here. (**) I'm also aware your patch idea is generally supposed to be a joke.

I agree - Autoland works great for all runways except the one that most space plane folks need the most - KSC 09. Have you tried an Autoland there? I also agree this is likely an issue with the coordinates in the stock game for the runway western end. Perhaps recent KSP changes related to the runway have screwed up the coordinates used by MJ to land at that end?

Working on bashing together a "better" (for my head-canon) Duna configuration for SVE. I figure, for ice caps THAT large, there should be more moisture in the air, mixed with copious amounts of red dust. Still working on it, but here's what I got for now:

Actually, per the traditional engineering Right-Hand Rule, the new capsule has rotational and Y-axis/Z-axis thrusters. X-axis is the longitudinal axis. The net result of the changes in the new capsule is that you can have a very efficient design with just one set of four traditional RCS quads back along your service module/final stage, situated roughly around the stack CoM. That quad handles all translation (forward/aft) movement along any axis with just a tiny bit of assistance from the capsule RCS to avoid unwanted rotational coupling. Prior to this, for a properly balanced RCS setup, you'd typically want two sets of four quads - one set each at the forward and aft ends of your service module.

Besides the excellent advice to learn the physics well enough to play without MechJeb (which isn't as hard as most people think it is, honest!), I'd also suggest you read the MJ development thread and pay attention when Sarbian makes development builds available. See, e.g.: https://ksp.sarbian.com/jenkins/job/MechJeb2-Dev/ Build 789 works well as far as I can tell. There's some wonkiness going on with the Aircraft Autoland function when heading for KSC runway 09 - looks like maybe something is amiss in either 1.4 or the coordinates in MJ for the runway end - but that's about it from my end. Everything else is working fine.

Yeah, could be. I did try Autoland with the same stock Gull plane to Island runway 09, and returning back to KSC 27 was good. It's only affecting KSC 09, which - for spaceplane flyers - is kind of the most important most important (*). The one weird marker-shift I see regularly is flying due east on course to runway 09 coming off out of the foothills, when crossing into the coastal plain. Well, hopefully it'll be fixed eventually. Just something to note until then. (*) I admit to overshooting the runway from time to time, doing a Mach 3 one-eighty and ending up about 75 km away coming west to Runway 27 a time or two in the past.

Right, but that's an easy 3D coordinate transform, from a mathematics perspective. The point is, the guidance markers in the Mechjeb Aircraft Autoland worked properly with prior versions of MJ and KSP (it used to be called Spaceplane Guidance). I used it all the time. Now, not so much. But hey, more experiments: I spawned another Gull and flew it up to about 1 KM and generally south, then used Autoland to go to Island Runway 09. Came in perhaps a tiny bit low (a few meters maybe?) but otherwise perfect. Then I took off again and aimed Autoland at KSC Runway 27. Perfect landing. So I took off heading west out over the foothills, told it to land back at KSC Runway 09. Same thing - came in too high to land. Substantially. *shrug* Thanks, Sarbian. I posted logs and such last night. It does very much look like a coordinate isn't right for the 09 end of the KSC Runway. And to be clear, this is the Aircraft Autoland, nothing to do with landing guidance for orbital vehicles. I think the coordinate for the approach into KSC Runway 09 isn't quite right. My video above shows it. If you watch the approach from the foothills, there are (I think) two separate coordinate sets (or so it appears). Flying with the Autoland activated, the aircraft ends up on a straight-in flight over the foothills with the marker centered. By the time it descends over the edge of the foothills towards the plain KSC sits on, the marker has drifted down out of the Navball prograde marker, then suddenly jumps to centered again, as if the aircraft is now aiming at a new marker. But following that marker, the aircraft ends up way too high over the runway by several dozen meters. Not a big deal for a low-speed, high lift aircraft like the Gull, but for a high-speed, low-lift design like the Aeris that has to come in fairly hot and maybe deadstick (no power), it's not so good.

Yeah, I figure that's about the time that Autoland algorithm realized it was pretty far past the last marker and decided a One-Eighty was the way to go. I still can't figure out why every airplane tries to come in too high, or why I can't get more than ~5-10 meters from the Runway 09 final marker when taxiing around the runway. I think the terrain height is the airfield has changed, or something in the way the algorithm is calculating its position may have changed, maybe a side effect of the Unity engine change? I dunno. It's a head-scratcher to me. I can say though, that even though I've honestly never used Autoland before this, I've used the Navball guidance pips for a long time, since probably the first time I started messing around with spaceplanes in 0.90 or so. Never had a problem. The runway marker always seemed at roughly the beginning of the overrun stripes, maybe offset to the north (left) side of center just a bit. But following the guidance marker always brought me right down to the end of the runway no matter whether approaching from the west (heading for the Runway 09 marker) or the east (Runway 27). I haven't yet tested to see if the Island Airfield runway marker is offset in 1.4 or not. Time to go find out ...

Not the one you're referring to, but in my case, with the icons and menus broken, it's impossible to set any alarms in the first place.

One minor (very minor) nit: the .version file claims it's for KSP 1.3.0 - 1.3.1 and gives you a nag from the AVC plug-in at launch that you can safely ignore. I edited the .version file manually to fix it for my own install.

Bad form to quote myself but hey, this time I've got proof. And logs/save files. So I started a clean Sandbox save. The only mods installed are MJ2 dev build 789, ModuleManager 3.0.5 and NavyFish's Docking Port Alignment Indicator version 6.8 (updated last night officially for KSP 1.4). I put a MJ casing on a stock Gull airplane and spawned it on the runway. As you can see, at the very end of the overrun area, MJ's landing guidance says I'm 18 meters from the runway. Okay, given the height of the cockpit and the vagaries of exactly where the marker indicates, okay. Close enough. Now turned around 180 degrees and moved forward a bit, it says I'm 16m away. Cool. Unfortunately, moving forward I could only get within about 10 m before the marker flipped around, as if the marker is actually in mid-air. (No screenshot though). Anyway, I took off east, looped around west into the foothills and let Autoland do its thing: Um, very Kerbal but something's amiss, I think? Anyway, logs, save file, etc Thanks, Sarbian!

Glad you're back, @NavyFish, and thank you! Docking without your tool is so painful now!

I get mad at entitled people who expect reality to comport with their desires to the detriment of everyone else. KSP is great, mods are great, people have been whining about mods not getting updated since I started playing this game (0.19 lo those five years ago). "Same as it ever was, same as it ever was ..."

Looks like it's working great, thanks!

It's not just the re-entry; it's all the aerothermal effects, even on ascent.

I just checked the source code license; it allows modifying and re-distributing it provided the original copyright notice language is preserved as specified in the Readme file. It'd be great if you could upload a copy somewhere shared so others could test it. Well, @NavyFish was online about a week ago, right before the update. With luck he'll be able to recompile soon-ish. Until then, time for us all to brush up on doing it the old-fashioned way.

Has anyone besides me tried dev builds 788 or 789 using Aircraft Autoland stuff? I like to faff about with stock Aeris 4A spaceplanes and manually fly entries and landings, but typically I use navball guidance for Runway 09 to get and keep myself on a proper guideslope. I tried several times tonight using build 788 but it seems like the whatever internal geographical marker MJ is using for the end of Runway 09 is offset substantially south and perhaps a bit east like a third or so down the runway, almost around where the Astronaut Complex is located. One time I tried complete Autoland from about the mountain range west of KSC and things were great until I realized the plane was coming in too high and aiming too downrange, and then instead of just flaring and landing long, the craft made a full 90 turn south and crashed. On F9 and flying totally manually, the marker just doesn't point to the end of the runway. I'll try again tomorrow and over the weekend with 789, but just wondering if anyone else has (yet) played around with runway guidance or autoland? So far MJ and the most recent MM are all I'm using in the way of mods (and just a single simple MM patch to add MJ to every command pod).

1. Steam doesn’t touch your save files. Your saves may or may not work with 1.4. I start a new save with every major release so I don’t know how 1.4 handles old ones. 2. The latest MechJeb developer release works in 1.4 for basic functions, I haven’t tested it extensively but it functions well enough for basic ascent guidance and maneuver planning. I don’t use Tweakscale so no clue ther.e 3. Steam updates games automagically when developers push out updates.

I played with parachutes. Badly.

Version 1.4 was released early last evening US time.

Always fun to start a new save when the update drops. And always a good refresher for eye-balling launcher and spacecraft design (no KER or MJ), mission planning (no help with planning or flying maneuver nodes), and rendezvous, docking and proximity ops.

So there's a Forum announcement for 1.4 tonight, a Facebook post to that effect, and Steam claims to have started a download (which hasn't actually downloaded a byte yet). Where's 1.4?

Lemme toss my tuppence into the mix (and it may be completely off-base here and inappropriate) but let me tell a quick little story: Back in early January I updated my laptop BIOS per my manufacturer's recommendation. The very next time I tried to launch a full-screen 3D game several days later, within 2 minutes or so Windows crashed hard (who knew BSOD's were still a thing in Win10?) The reported error was with the Nvidia driver. I uninstalled and reinstalled drivers, no change. I uninstalled drivers and manually deleted residual directories, rebooted and reinstalled the drivers. No change. I ran registry cleaner utilities, scanned my system with three different antivirus/anti-malware products (with zero results), then ultimately wiped my C: drive and reinstalled Win10 from scratch. No dice. Occasionally the BSOD's had different error messages but they nearly always pointed at the graphics hardware. When I contacted my manufacturer's support forum, I found a rash of vaguely-similar posts from people having sudden crashes, failures to launch games, etc. all stemming from the BIOS updates. In the meantime, the manufacturer removed the offending update and replaced it with an earlier version from December. Reverting my BIOS to that prior version did not fix my problem. So I posted a thread asking for advice - my machine was 2 months out of warranty when this happened, by the way. A support rep messaged me, got my info and details and tl;dr: within 5 days, they sent a service tech to my house to break my system down to parts and replace the motherboard/GPU (an Skylake i7 and Nvidia GTX1070 with 8GB of video memory). I'm not saying the BIOS update destroyed my GPU, but that was one heck of an expensive out-of-warranty repair they performed for me for free. Go figure. So from now on, I'm blaming peoples sudden graphics-related issues to the crappy BIOS updates companies pushed out in the wake of the Intel Spectre/Meltdown bug revelations a couple months back.

Aerobraking at Duna from Kerbin-transfer is rarely likely to require much of a heat shield. You're more likely, in my experience, to dive too deep into the atmosphere in an aggressive attempt to get ENOUGH drag at all, that you smack into a mountain. Except in the basins and canyons, there air is just pretty darn thin.