Markarian421

And here's a little insanity before dinner: an Orion plane. It works surprisingly well. Other than the whole keeping it from escaping orbit problem. It reminds me of planes I used to make in x-plane.

Consider it not your problem. I've been unable to recreate it with stock parts (+ Orion and MechJeb), possibly in part because when I start to approximate the masses involved in the troublesome vehicle it just breaks apart at some point. I can replicate something similar using the large spherical fuel tank add-on (huge mass) and a few other parts plus scaled up RCS units. It appears that 8 RCS units != 1 8x RCS unit -- ASAS & MechJeb don't seem to know how to control upscaled RCS units, and you can drive a large vehicle with multiple heavy masses and (and some flexibility at the connections) into oscillation. Then you can shut everything off and the thing still oscillates for a while, and if you're way way out on a barely bound highly elliptical orbit, this can result in some strangeness about exactly what your orbit is.

Let me check this evening -- at the moment I'm back to thinking it's not your problem. That ship had two landers, four command modules (one a probe), three mechjebs and ASAS units, and some room to flex. Maybe any tall long rocket I build would do that. Once I got it into a low orbit and detached the landers it was behaving itself. Earlier today I made a stock + MechJeb Orion and was unable to recreate even the slightest trace of the problem. (Note to self: next time you try to put an Orion into Minimus orbit w/o additional engines, bring something smaller than the 10MN's . . .)

I'm still running into the swaying thing, is anyone else seeing that? I flew to Minimus and while trying to establish an orbit the ship started bobbing up and down. I shut off RCS, ASAS, MechJeb, and the ship settled down but then my predicted orbit was oscillating . . . as if the ship's mass or center of gravity or something was continuously changing.

I played around with this some, using just the tail piece in all kinds of absurd positions intersecting the main body, the magazines, etc., no problem. Then I tried putting the engines on. The engines didn't want to attach so it was a two step process -- put a large structural piece somewhere, stick the tail to that, stick the engine to that, then remove the tail+engine and stick that on the main body. That didn't go over so well, as soon as physics turned on those parts were forcefully ejected.

I haven't had any problems with anything I've mounted on the outside in this version. These engines are just the standard ones scaled by rescaleFactor = (new thrust/default thrust)^1/3 (scaled by volume for thrust). I've also used scaled RCS blocks and spherical tanks on there with no problem.

Indeed it's possible to land it. I even landed it using the 10MN's (I only used scaled radial engines to ease it a bit north).

Ok, now I'm going to have to try and land it . . . nyrath, I've had no serious problems with the last two versions and I've started to use this for just about all my rockets. The swaying I mentioned on G+ I think is either an ASAS or MechJeb attitude control problem -- the PID parameters appear to be badly underdamped if I put enough RCS thrusters on this to really move it around, and it will just end up oscillating up and down after a turn, never converging. Probably means I just need to use less RCS.

And in case is sounds like I'm not having any fun with this (nothing could be further from the truth) -- last night using the engine w/o the rack, plus the 3.5x600 rack plus a single magazine of 80's I took off from the pad and intercepted Jool (mostly by luck) and aerobraked into a orbit between Lathe and Tylo. I brought along all that extra fuel and all those extra engines, and barely needed them . . .

From what I'm seeing, don't put anything on top of the magazine rack either. I can't tell if the stuff I mount on top is exploding because the magazines are hitting them or for some other reason, but whatever I have attached up there is being destroyed.

I'm still getting frequent explosions on the pad, but I suspect this has to do with how massive the magazines are and (thus) the ineffectiveness of the 3.5MN's to lift the thing off the ground. I can get in the air with the 80MNs, but if I try to use the 3.5's in the small magazines, I think what's happening is that the launch towers are instantly destroyed and I drop to the ground, and the instant I hit the ground all the magazines violently eject/explode.

It's not the newest machine but it's not terribly slow: Mac Pro Mid 2010 Processor 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon Memory 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB

Never mind -- next craft I tried to make, using only one level of the 80NM magazines, spontaneously exploded on the pad. (As soon as physics kicks in, before I hit launch.)

I tried v 0.11 -- so far no self destructs on the pad. But if I load it up with 3.5MN magazines it can't get off the pad -- it initially slowly rises, then sinks almost as if its mass is increasing. One curious thing I've noticed, I'm not sure if it's 0.20.2 or this mod -- in the VAB if I disconnect a part I sometimes can't reattach it. Or let go of it. I have to start a new craft or load one or sometimes kill the process to escape. I have only encountered it when I have a craft with an Orion engine, and it happens most often with the Orion engine part.

If the large tank is your main stage, yes. If your goal is to lift something else large with the tank, for instance, another large tank, you need more. (And many many SRBs.)

I just installed this tonight, and it's great fun, thanks! Whenever I tried the engine with the built in rack and manually added magazines, the results were similar to what's being reported above -- the ship would tear itself apart/explode as soon as I hit launch. The magazines shake and violently eject. I started over from scratch with the same end result. Using the other engine and any combination of magazines I've tried so far works fine. OS X, KSP 0.20.2

I love these tanks. A feature request: a 45 degree radial connector would be handy for adding the extra mainsails needed to get one of these off the pad!

I don't have this installed (yet) and I've seen that -- several times last night -- so it's not a problem with this mod.

Mechjeb 2.0.8. OSX 10.8.3 also. It just happened again -- it appears that the first time I visit a body (in this case Duna) with a craft with the dish on it, at some point soon after I start establishing an orbit the game locks up. I did a clean install of 0.20.1 and downloaded and installed the mods then, and (the next day) copied them over to a clean install of 0.20.2, so nothing is terribly old.

I'm seeing similar things but not 100% reproducible. The game slows down and then just stops. Last night it happened once on launch, as I was reaching a 100km orbit, and another time I think when I started mapping the Mun. I had to kill the game, but luckily in both cases when I resumed the craft was still there (in one case on the pad, in the other case in orbit around the Mun) and the second time everything went fine. The other mods I have are MechJeb and Crew Manifest (but these were unmanned probes).

A few of us were having similar problems and found that if you first select a target on the map, then edit the coordinates, landing works. If you type in coordinates w/o first selecting a target on the map, bad things happen. (My lander would spin out of control until there was no fuel left.) Have you tried that workaround?

I didn't sleep as much as I should have last night, but I finally made a successful landing in my Mohole Lander: (I guess spoiler tags aren't working?) It has a number of modified parts -- scaled parts and I converted the airplane tail into a fuel tank. Now I just wish I'd thought to put some sensors on it . . .

This fixes it for me as well. Thanks!

I was able to recreate the problem with this lander, trying to land near the singing hill on Duna. I got it into initial orbits with inclinations with a few degrees of the correct one, at 50km and 125 km, ejected other stages and tried to have mechjeb 2 land it. In both cases the initial burn ended with it spinning out of control. https://www.dropbox.com/s/36jg235hvtk9crz/Two-Stage%20Lander%20Mod.craft

It's interesting that you mention this, going back to my earlier problem with landing, I was trying to land near a second lander/rover. As I was landing, the second craft (which also had mechjeb) suddenly flung itself violently away, as if it was firing thrusters or something. I thought it must be some strange bug like the game suddenly deciding the landing gear on that craft had collided with something. Now I'm wondering.