Reblet

Cheers mate! Didn't get to play KSP yesterday, but from a quick tour with 0.4.0 it seems to do exactly as promised on the tin! Trims work without a hitch now. Excellent work. Reblet

Hello Zengei, Your mod is a lifesaver as my stick does not allow swapping axes in the profiler (despite having three shift modes :/). Unfortunately, I found a bug: if no control input is given either on roll or yaw in plane mode, the trims are not applied, either. The pitch indicator doesn't move either, although pitch input is in fact applied to the craft. I think the offending piece of code is in turning the autopilot on and off explicitly. If fly with the SAS off, but by setting FlightGlobals.ActiveVessel.Autopilot.Enabled = true I guess it's forced on anyway? I wonder if it is necessary to turn the autopilot on and off (and mess with SAS) in the first place? As the swapping occurs in OnPreAutopilotUpdate, it appears to me that the yaw and roll can simply be swapped and then it's up to the SAS code to figure out what to do with that (if anything)? Hope it will be possible to squash this bug. Regards, Reblet

I've also found the Kerbal Engineer Redux very useful for manual landings. It gives readings for both your horizontal and vertical velocity, which is a bit more informative at low speeds than the navball. As an added bonus, it can also show you the current actual altitude (rather than 'sealevel') which helps avoid any unexpected early impacts into the ground.

I typically go for a first stage TWR of about 1.5. In my very unscientific experiments I've found you can squeeze out a bit more dV even after gravity drag than with the 'optimal' TWR of 2 as you need to bring along less weight in engines.

Well, that takes the IT meme of "the users are the problem!" a bit far... It's not just mods that are affected, the default flags (and any custom ones) are .png files as well. The devs have already stated that they're aware of the bug and working on it, so I'd expect a fix sooner rather than later.

Interesting. According to http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Advanced_S.A.S._Module it is angular momentum. The page on the normal S.A.S. module also states: 0.11.0 (undocumented) SAS now use angular momentum instead of angular velocity - takes into account inertia momentum of the ship. This suggests that an early version did, in fact, use angular velocity, but this was changed in 0.11.0. I just tested with a very small ship and there the PID values from the standard ASAS do give a stable output, which suggests the input is indeed angular momentum.

... otherwise known as defeating ASAS wobbly-wob of death. Although I've only been building KSP rockets for a short while, I've already noticed that ASAS, while very useful for keeping a rocket pointing approximately straight up, does have a tendency to... overcorrect. Even with smaller rockets using gimballed engines there's a distinct wobble and the mainsail can make some rockets look more like snakes. I'm sure most players will recognise this. Now, I decided to tune the ASAS PID values a bit and came up with the following: Ki = 0.015 Kp = 0.075 Kd = 0.015 This is pretty different from the default values: Ki = 1 Kp = 0.6 Kd = 1 Even so, this modified ASAS was able to take my Alpha II rocket (about 50 tonnes, pictures below) straight up, without any significant wobble. Even after unbalancing the rocket with a few RCS tanks one side, the modified ASAS took her pretty much straight up. An added bonus of the low ASAS strength is that you can 'push through' the controls for minor course corrections with ASAS enabled. Unfortunately, according to the wiki, the ASAS input is angular momentum, which makes the optimal PID values dependent on the (distribution of) mass in the rocket. Thus, there are currently no single optimal set of values; however my values should provide a useful starting point for optimising ASAS for your particular rocket. Probably, lighter/smaller rockets should have higher PID values (with Kp being the most important parameter), whereas bigger ones should have lower ones, but more experimentation is needed. If you find some good PID values for your craft, please share. Perhaps one of the devs reading this can clarify why they chose to use angular momentum, rather than angular velocity? I think if angular velocity is the input for the controller, it should be possible to come up with a set of PID values that gives stable (not wobbly) behaviour for a very broad range of craft. As promised, some pictures: Stats for the test craft. Unsurprisingly, turning off ASAS for an unbalanced rocket doesn't end well. With the modified ASAS, the rocket keeps pretty much pointing straight up. The pitch control stays stable at about -5/8, to counteract the unbalance in the rocket. With the normal ASAS, the pitch would swing back and forth wildly. Thank you for reading and may your rockets launch straight up, without wobble! Disclaimer: No Kerbals were harmed in the production of this post.

Another way to nicely spread out satellites, is to use the target function. Put the first satellite in geosync orbit and the second one in a low parking orbit. Then from your second sat, click the first one in the map view and choose 'set as target'. Next, set up a maneuver node to raise your apoapsis to the geosync orbit. You will now get two markers that show the location of both satellites at closest approach. Adjust your node until they're spaced out as you'd like them to be (in your example, 90 degrees apart), burn at the node, circularize at apoapsis and you should have your satellites in the desired spacing. If you're not being particularly conservative with launching satellites you can simply launch the first one into any geosync orbit as a 'marker'. If you then want a satellite over a particular area, figure out the angle between the marker location and the target area, and separate your satellite and marker at an equal angle. If you're not too worried about precision, this is fairly easy to do just by eye. Reblet

I find this to work very conveniently with the subassembly loader: - Use decoupler as root part. - Plop lifter subassembly below. - Plop payload subassembly above. - (Check you have sufficient delta-v for your intended mission.) - Liftoff! Not having to include a pod as root part definitely makes assembling easier.

Well, I know how you feel, having just completed my first successful munar landing! I had a whole 0.32 units of fuel to spare... I think I might budget landing delta-v a bit more generously next time. Doesn't that look like a happy lander?

Hey all! I just discovered KSP about a week ago and... it's awesome! Still a bit rough at the edges here and there, but I fear I'm utterly hooked. And it's hard making good rockets, like it should be! Well done, Squad, well done. Now, I'm off to see some more rockets explode... err... launch, hopefully! Reblet