NeoMorph

The search engine really sucks tbh. Never finds what you are looking for so new users come here, search for stuff and don't find it and then they ask nicely and plonkers say "SEARCH FOR IT FFS" or something like. Nice to see someone who realises the search engine is a pile of bullock doodoo for once. Just search for Mechjeb for instance. A VERY popular mod... instead of it appearing at the top of the page it's near the bottom... and the top of the page has something that has nothing to do with Mechjeb... totally barmy. This is what I got when I searched for MechJeb... http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/67194-Shakey-Numbers?highlight=mechjeb

There is something called "Ground Rush" where the speed at landing seems to get faster than it actually is. I used to get it when I went skydiving... nice... slow... glide... in... to... landing... and... then.... OMGHERECOMESTHEGROUNDREALLYFAST. Got me every time lol. BTW, I don't think they landed on the moon at all. They just took KSP, did a bit of a retexture and made it out to be real. Seriously though, the image where it hovered for a bit made me think it was still miles up. Was a shock when it started kicking up dust...

God... I'm having sooooooo many problems with this build. Half the problem is not having the right tools. I know WHAT to do... just don't have the tools to do it accurately enough. Yup, the real problem is accuracy in my fabbing. I'm currently saving up for a small CNC machine which I've been yearning for for years. Once I get one of those it will be dead easy. My latest version works but there is a problem with the pitch gears again. The fact I ordered two gears that were listed as having 10mm bore holes arrived looking great but when I went to fit them to my new 10mm shaft I found... that the holes were actually 8mm. I turns out I missed one sentence in the description... To get them to drill the correct size that the table shows clearly is 10mm... (I ordered the 25 tooth version)... THEY WANT TO CHARGE ME £2.75 EXTRA FOR A GEAR THAT COSTS £5.76. Here is the chart of the gears... The bore hole size is D1... http://www.technobotsonline.com/gears/mod-1.0-steel-spur-gears.html So yeah... Kind of peed off with the whole project at the moment. I'll get it done but will get easier when I have the right tools.

That second one needs more reaction wheels. Even Jeb would get seasick on that one... The first video... X1 was driven by Jeb for sure... he dropped the binocs out of the ship on the way down lol.

This one is a LITTLE big... (err... is that an oxymoron?)... Have to say it turns what we do in designing rockets into something rather minor heh... Oh and it also does a Grasshopper and lands vertically as well.

I wrote my first real programs for a 370/158, 3033 and 3031... though I did manage to upset it logging into the APL interpreter using an ICL terminal... oh those were the days. Actually I loved using APL. A great maths based computer language. Brilliant for coding in multi dimensional arrays. Looked total greek to most people though and you had to learn what all the weird symbols meant. Most didn't know their quote quad from their dels.

The needle system is pretty cool... and sooooooooo darn easy to implement. All you need is an Arduino plus a little Adafruit 16 channel servo board (each needle uses a single servo). For example, look at the original... As you can see, there are two servo motors on each of the three sides which has a wire that leads to the indicator needle painted on the front of the display. One needle shows the rate of change (ie the speed of the axis - it's the outer indicators on the above FDAI picture) and the other needle is drift from a set angle (the inner needles on the FDAI pictures). So when you set the node up in KSP the needles show which direction you will need to go to get to the correct attitude. They are actually BETTER than the KSP icons in fact because that system doesn't tell you which way you have to turn. Cool thing is all you have to do is send the signal to the servo and it will deflect the needle. The only hard part is initially calibrating the needles. Actually, not even hard... just time consuming to make sure the deflection isn't too much that you bend the needle. I've made some jigs so that I can hot bend the wire without stressing it and making them good duplicates so they match the three sides. Another thing that is different with the needle system is that you can set the needle's scale factor. This allows you to use 2x, 1x or 0.5x the true value to narrow in on the correct attitude. You would start off at 2x so that you know which way to go but when you are getting near to the correct attitude you would use 1x and then 0.5x to make it more sensitive. I'm planning on using this in my system. At the moment it's not part of the current prototype but should be easy enough to set up once everything else is working. The weirdest thing about designing this nav ball is that there are SOOOOOO many different versions for the Apollo program. For example the version in the picture above has white needles but in other versions there are yellow needles. There are soooo many different marking layouts for the ball that I don't even know which one to choose from. Some are from training rigs, others from previous versions so it makes kind of sense. Then they used the same system on the shuttle too (with even MORE mods). I just have to choose one I guess... after all this is Kerbal and not Human. In fact out of everything in my simulator build there is only one thing that I have absolutely ZERO idea of how to make.... and that is the tape altimeters and speed indicators (see image below). I could easily make the tape and use stepper motors to move it up and down but the big problem is... how would I do the markings. They would have to be printed onto the tape somehow. Oh well, one problem at a time. Left hand tape is the radar altitude and the right hand tape is the rate of descent/ascent.

automcdonough, basically all your suggestions were things I thought about at the beginning of the design process and discarded because they just wouldn't work... and then I found this graphic from the Apollo manuals that showed this method of driving the ball... My design is a complete ripoff of this Apollo design.... been a few hiccups (err... understatement there) but it's good now. Actually the node indicators are going to be linked to the error needles like how Apollo did it in real life. Working out how to link the data to the needles was the first thing I actually got working. In fact 95% of the design I am using is what is in the real thing so I've just had to adapt for what hardware I could lay my hands on. Using wheels like an upside down mouse would have so much drift and lack of calibration lock that it would be next hopeless and would have needed cleaning a lot and would have eventually stripped the paint off the ball due to drag. The current design I am using is solid. One of the test models I have built has ran for over 6 hours with a capsule tumbling in space (went to bed and left it too it heh)... when I tested for calibration when I woke up I found that all but the roll was still spot on. The roll problem was just due to a overbind on the gearing (ie the gears were pushed together too much). What is even cooler is that the ball was linked to my LAN in the living room and KSP was running on my PC in the bedroom. Using the Arduino LAN adapter has been easier than I thought. I haven't done any more work on the current build in the last week because I am waiting for some specially cut gears as I'm replacing the plastic ones with metal for the final prototype now. Should turn out ok (I hope lol). I'm going to leave the current ball transparent so that others can see the innards working when I get around to doing a video. To be honest, what I really need is a CNC machine to make cutting my parts easier and more accurate. One plate that I cut and spent ages on looked perfect but the one motor mounting hole was off about a degree and it meant that the motor was straining at the gear meshing (which is what messed up the roll data as it caused slip). As the motors are using 1/8th stepping it means I have got 1600 steps per revolution so it's a slow creep of losing one step every few rev due to friction... but it adds up. Re- zeroing was easy though. Still lots of work to do... Got to work out the final painting method that I am going to do the sphere surface with. I'm going to get the eggbot and do some mods so that it will handle an engraver bit better and have a better pen up/down method that the floppy arm they currently use. Oh and my new Xbox will be arriving in a couple of weeks so I can see that eating into my building time too... I know it's not as powerful as the PS4 but I just can't handle Sony controller layouts and Xbox has all the exclusives I want (Titanfall, Quantum Break, Halo, Forza etc). Japanese games feel weird to me (like Metal Gear Solid games... the voice acting is like they are on some real heavy psychedelic drugs or something). I'm not giving up on this Nav Ball project. In fact it has already let me design my flight simulator artificial horizons (which are easier to make than the Space versions as they only have two axis).

I love KSP... Really I do... But lately I haven't been playing the game as much as work on things like my Nav Ball project. I think I just overloaded myself with the amount of KSP I did in the previous months... oh and maybe the fact that I had sooooooo many setbacks making this darn hardware panel. Perhaps that is it. Anyone else get a case of the Kerbal Blues Greens after playing too much recently?

I once had Jeb climbing down the ladder and he appeared to headbutt the lander three times in a row.... Lander flew off at ridonculous speed leaving Jeb on the floor wondering what he did. Yeah, the physics in this game can get a little wierd at times.

Mine was Duna but I got REALLY low (so low I actually started to see the flame effect which is hard to get to on Duna because of the thin atmosphere). Nearly came a cropper when I almost hit the side of a very high crater wall. Got me a perfect capture though with very little fuel expenditure.

This is what the nav ball is looking like (this is a view I did to see if I could fit the new motors into the ball without touching the sphere). It's not the final version because I made a few changes since then so I need to remove the thick support circles and replace them with copper plating that is definitely better (looks a bit steampunky atm).

The overshooting doesn't happen now. I even tried it with a heavily weighted disk to test whether or not it could do it... didn't think it could but WOOOHOOO... it worked perfectly. The problem is when you move fast the holding torque drops through the floor. Slow it's no problem because A) it's slow and it has high holding torque. It's just when your spacecraft gets into a crazy tumble after a collision and then it hit something and goes from crazy spin to dead stop... that's the overshoot problem that was causing me grief. These new motors I got though have decent torque which helped and the new drivers allow me to microstep at 1/8th rate which lets me have better control. The real trick is to move it into SLOW movement mode and it acts like a really strong braking system. I tried moving the shaft when the brake is on and I couldn't turn it. The only problem is that I've got to rebuild the central disc to that mounts the two internal motors so that they fit properly... oh and get some new gears because I'm now mounting the lower motor parallel to the Pitch shaft instead of using a bevel drive (basically the mounting area inside the sphere is crazy small for what I am fitting in there). I'm also still in two minds as to whether to include and auto calibration unit. I think I will probably leave it out until I get a working base prototype that can handle everything I can throw at it. Calibration is pretty easy though.... just throw a switch to "cage" the ball (ie make the ball go to what it THINKS is the 0 Pitch, 0 Roll and 0 Yaw) and then use some rotary encoders to manually turn the ball to the proper position. Then uncage and away we go. Same thing will be used for the Pitch, Roll and Yaw rate needles. That's the easy part thank god. Then there are the error needles which will be done the same way. Still need to figure them out from Telemachus though. Still, things are progressing.

I voted for "I'm Very confident in what I do!".... unfortunately the rockets still blow up lol. Hey, but how many others of you are building their own rocket ship in the spare room... SIMULATORS ROCK! Coming up in the next few weeks... A real, physical NavBall... THAT WORKS! (built about 9 so far and every one had a fault but I think I've nailed all the bugs now).

Well it's been a LONG hard slog with a LOT of prototypes dropping by the wayside because of one thing or another. I never figured that the inside of the ball would be such a sod to cram everything in and then let me put the ball back together. The problem was that the motors I required needed more torque to move the weight of the system and not overshoot due to inertia. Unfortunately more weight meant larger motors which meant even MORE weight (bit like the problem when deciding the size of a rocket and the amount of fuel you are going to be using). I've got some new motors (again) and some new drivers (AGAIN) but now the torque is where I want it and isn't causing the whole thing to overheat and melt the ball (don't ask lol) so that's a good thing. I still need to get a few more pieces that will let me build the final version (why the hell don't they make a range of gears that have the identical shaft size across all the sizes of gears ffs) but I'm going to be cutting the new chassis parts tomorrow so hopefully I will get a set of images up on here in the next few days (hopefully that is... this project has been murphy's law writ large). Oh yeah, and strangely enough it was that EggBot above that gave me the idea of how to drive the motors. Turns out the guts of the thing is available as separate drivers which work really well. This is the the board in question... Looks huge here but in reality it's about the size of your index finger... My system needs three of the suckers but they are cheap as chips if you get them from China (hehe... pun unintended). Connect them up to power and an arduino which supplies the driving signal and it is fast (which is what I was aiming for). I will be about to spin the globe 360 degrees in less than a second so I think that is going to be quick enough for space travel hehe.

I've included this feature in my hardware build which was easy once I figured how to do it. Have a look at Telemachus which has a remote control option that lets you press a 100% button or a 0% button and various values in between. I can highly recommend this app because you can even put it onto a tablet or phone that has a web page access. I use it on my iPad.

Sometimes external boosters need full thrust while the central booster needs partial. I know we have a workaround by fuel pumps from external to the central tank but it would be nice to have three throttle channels for flexibility. For example when you are building the craft you allocate the thottle channel to A, B or C. That way you could use the central booster on channel A and have all the external boosters on channel B. When you launch you could throttle down the center booster going through Max Q leaving the externals to do the work. Like this... Regarding Max Q... could we have a meter or variable to show the dynamic pressure on the craft... I've lost rockets because I was pushing too much and they end up eating themselves from the top down. Would be nice to know when to throttle back without having to guess all the time.

I love my heavy mod build... but my current build of 0.22 is stock except for including Telemachus to drive my remote instruments.

I hate this game... HATE IT... Keep trying to make my hardware addons and KSP keeps making me play the game when I should be testing stuff... THIS GAME IS ADDICTIVE... Digital Drugs... Nice one SQUAD... the only thing I think is wrong is the start of the tech tree... you should be sending out mini probes first, not stuff Jeb in the can and chuck it into the air.... Should be Sputnik....

You hate mods... why? Have you even SEEN what is possible with the mods? They take an awesome game and make it even better imho. But hey, the beauty of the game is that you can play it any way you like... The devs nailed it when they opened the game up for modding from day 0.1.

I was looking around the net for unusual payload shapes that I wanted to see if I could duplicate in KSP when I came across one payload that I definitely DIDN'T want to duplicate. But man, it was an instant ROFLMAO when I saw that...

What I don't get is that you normally pay for the website server a year in advance... Does the US government get a daily rate instead?

I meant that as you are diving into Duna you are using the gravity to suck you in and whip you out to Ike. As the aerobrake calculations kick in it can help with plotting the orbit to intercept Ike... but yeah, you are right in that they are two separate things.

Planning gravity assists is EASY if you use MechJeb. Just load up the landing dialog and if you clip the atmo it shows whether you are going into a aerobrake or a landing manoeuvre and gives you the numbers. My favourite one is to aerobrake around Duna and then flip out to Ike. Use the engines to do coarse course changes and use the RCS for the fine course changes.

I actually expected Jeb to end up stuck in the middle of the Mun but I found that he ended out going out the other side of the planetoid... and while in mid-space he was still labelled as "Landed".