Pds314

"Aspected RCS" Time to make some craft that don't exist on radar from most aspects lol.

Hardest and easiest peaks, side by side

This is an old map I marked approximate locations of each. I probably have a physical piece of paper with altitudes and coordinates somewhere but the center of each X is generally gonna be +/- 1 degree and the nearest large peak is probably the one in question. Note that the locations are for the modern keography rather than that of 0.18.2. The topomap is much much much older than my 6000er search. The easiest peak is probably 31 S 20 W. The hardest is immediately next to it at 33 S 18 W.

What is meant by *A S C E N D *? This seems like it could dramatically change the difficulty involved. If I fly an aircraft up there it's gonna take no effort. If I try to get there without thrust propulsion... that could be much trickier. Especially given that the spire near KSC is actually a harder thing to climb than 13 out of 14 of the planet's 6000 meter peaks (that have at least a 500 meter prominence). Only one of them is actually more of a spike.

What kind of thermal exploits are allowed? I can probably get something into the sun's upper atmosphere with the jankiness of the stock heating model as it relates to root fairings and interstages.

Sadly (the reason I don't have KSP 2 is) there is currently a mismatch between what kind of GPU they expect you to have and what kind normal people actually have. The steam hardware survey suggests that less than half of GPUs meet the minimum requirements and something like 3% on Steam meet the recommended requirements and that a good number of people on Steam still have something that has less than or about 50% the graphics performance of minimum requirements. So yeah, I have a laptop with bidirectional voltage throttling on the CPU and a 1050 Ti. The recommended GPU is RTX 3080. The minimum GPU is RTX 2060. These have performances at graphical tasks on the order of 3-7 times mine if it could run full throttle without dropping CPU performance into the MHz range, which it can't. They either need to greatly improve the graphical and other performance or allow extremely severe cutbacks of settings to boost the performance because currently, from the looks of things, I probably have 10% the sustainable GPU power it recommends and 25% the minimum requirements. While I have to say the recommended settings are at least more honest than KSP 1's recommended settings if the goal is even remotely smooth frame rates, they are sufficiently high that unless they are reduced, it will be years before most people come anywhere close to having that level of hardware performance.

I tried messing with the props, making a version of the DR I prop scaled down for lawnmower engines, and it makes the small engines lovely. The one issue is that they aren't compatible with scaled down stock landing gears because of excessive rolling resistance, but using modded landing gears these little engines are great for making ultralights (well, by weight and fuel capacity anyway. 12.3 m/s as an upper limit for stall speed seems kinda annoying and I am definitely not adding enough drag to prevent the craft from going over 28.3 m/s. As a sidenote, I would be shocked if there aren't combinations of paramotor and wing that end up allowing maximum level flight speeds over this limit IRL). I wanna make an MM patch that creates selectable configs of them with different props, while maintaining the original DR I prop, but I'm not sure how to get MM to give me a config selection thingy.

Is there a way to configure turrets to have less accuracy? Like slow down their turn rate or angular acceleration? I want to be able to have the equivalent of interwar or WWII turrets on aircraft and ground vehicles without them being a death ray.

I was afraid this thing would be a bit busted. Although I'm happy to use its bustedness for other purposes in the future. I really didn't expect it to be THAT busted though. I had assumed that the electricity generation would be scaled with torque output and absolute RPM. This thing is truly bonkers.

A lot of the engines seem to assume improbable prop diameters at least in the CKAN installation. Like for example the Durraqc single cylinder requires ~200 m/s airflow to actually reach its power rating of 10 hp and has a prop diameter of 2.59 meters and peak rpm static of around 300 instead of the 1000-1500 it should have. Am I doing something wrong or is this engine either misconfigured or was made IRL with no hope of ever flying? It managed an impressive(ly terrible) 81 N (=~17 lb) of thrust in my test on an ultralite trike and barely got it to rotation speed over a 2 km runway. The vehicle didn't actually lift off. 2 Brakeshaft horsepower and much much less actual thrust power. I can probably pedal a propeller harder than this can push. So... am I doing something wrong or was this engine just historically built with a prop 8 feet wide on a lawnmower motor?

Yeah. Especially not for diving straight down at near-stationary targets. The terrain threat distance in one instance said like 17 km when the craft was 1.5 km from the ground facing like 80 degrees down and definitely needed to pull-up-right-now-or-die-in-a-crater. Which it recognized, but also seemed to be like No. I must wait for sidewinder tone on this biplane even if I explode. every other second.

I fixed the not showing structural damage issue with reinstall. I'm not trying to use the G limit to prevent excessive instantaneous G, the craft can handle that fine as can the Kerbals, but instead to tell the craft its actual turning capabilities because otherwise it thinks it can make a 700 m radius turn at M1.3 on the deck, even though my craft has FAR AOA control and dynamic deflection preventing that and limiting it to a bit over 10 G turns. If Max G is set higher, it assumes that it has a tighter high speed turn radius at a given speed. I don't know why it does this but the G limit does seem to actually factor in somewhere or this wouldn't change the calculated radius by more than double. The control surface lag and distance multipliers for correct and incorrect orientation are set to maximum. 4, 10, 10. The highest possible on the "unclamped" setting. The craft will happily call terrain 10+ km away unsafe. It is also set to a minimum altitude of 350 m and will still frequently crash in a high speed dive even though it is more than capable of getting out of that dive, and will alternate saying it's engaging a biplane and trying to avoid terrain. My little biplane will happily fly around at 30 meters AGL and usually only crashes if there is a large and unseen building in the way, it has a midair collision, gets damaged by weapons, or it is pulling some crazy evasive action and bleeds its energy. Never just by not pulling up on the stick. But then again it's usually not going after targets that are a mile below it and moving at 15% the speed.

"Fix TweakScale config for Typhoon engine." It broke my TweakScale for some reason. It says it's duplicated. It is fixed if I just delete the caesar_hone_60_ts.cfg Not sure if this is something wrong with my install or what exactly but TweakScale does work on the part if I delete that file. Maybe it's a CKAN configuration bug or something that this file exists? I dunno but it says when that file is there that it is duplicate tweakscale modules. I tend to just use AJE engines however so I don't know if this solution somehow affects anything negatively.

Is there a good way to stop a high speed (440 m/s) craft from getting target fixated and nosediving into the ground? It recognizes the ground is dangerous but then oscillates between pulling up and engaging a slow moving target directly below itself. The plane in question has its max G set at 9 for the purpose of calculation which is fairly accurate to what it actually does in a turn. It has a lot of positive AOA control to allow it to remain stable and a lot of dynamic damping to keep g forces reasonable. If I didn't have the max G it would just assume it can turn very very quickly at any speed. But yet it still locks on to low altitude biplanes and crashes instead of saving itself.

CONCEPT: Your goal is to power an electric vehicle vehicle using only the power of engine alternators and take it as far as possible. RULES: 1. You may not use any drills, fuel cells, RTGs, or solar panels. Engine Alternators using resources you brought with you should be the only electricity source. 2. No non-electric sources of propulsion or infinite energy drives. 3. Any batteries must start fully discharged. 4. No net thrust should be generated by any method except the alternator from engines except for Ion engines and electric props. You only get the alternator output for all other engines. 5. Decouplers ARE allowed, however, they shouldn't consistute a significant source of propulsion. 6. You may travel by air, land, sea, or if you can get there, space but not by clipping through the ground. Vehicles may be Kerballed or unkerballed. SCORING: Your score is the distance from the launch site multiplied by the fraction of your starting mass remaining. You may place a starting marker or use latitude and longitude to compute distance. Altitude may be included as well if it is a significant factor. If you manage to somehow escape Kerbin's SOI, then the distance of your Kerbol Ap or Pe from Kerbin's orbit is counted.

NGL I have the latest version and it straight up doesn't include this in the menu. Like, it just goes directly from subsystem damage to ammo explosions Some of the new stuff is awesome though. I particularly like the BDA Vessel Mover

Hmm... is there any way to get the AI to know it shouldn't wait for a BVR missile to go within visual range, show up on radar, or go active to defend? I just find it annoying to have a BVR fight where the AI is purely reacting to what it sees rather than anticipating that when it launches, the opponent might also have launched, and doing something proactive to mitigate the threat posed by that missile (diving to lower altitude, turning but keeping the enemy within its radar, etc).

Gamemodes: Add BD_PART_STRENGTH BattleDamage option to have part/joint strength weaken as parts take damage. I don't see how I can access this. It's not visible in the UI. In the settings.cfg it is there and set to True. Which is probably good because I definitely want this enabled but like, it would be nice if I can see this in the GUI rather than just the game files, or ideally a slider to tune its sensitivity with a slider.

Keep all parts of the aircraft sharp-edged and very distant from vertical when viewed from plus or minus 10 degrees. Do not use any vertical or near vertical surfaces anywhere. Check the RCS and make sure that all parts of the craft are black. Grey is bad and white is very very very bad. In my experience a 3 meter wide procedural cone 1 meter in height has effectively no RCS. So probably the closer your craft is to a flying saucer with a sharp bladed edge, the better. Also don't try to do directional stealth. IIRC BDA does not calculate RCS on the fly or even used cached RCS values for different aspects. Stealth needs to be all-aspect (all horizontal aspects) to be useful. One last thing is don't bother thinking about serrations, large surfaces, limiting sharp edges, or edge wave diffraction. It seems like BDA uses a simplified Fresnel camera model that means this kind of complex calculation isn't needed.

ahh. So just giving a RealFuels tanks the self sealing tank module doesn't mean it will actually act like it has those features?

Is there an easy way to get self-sealing tanks and firebottle GUI to show up for RealFuels tanks? I set it so that they have the module but it doesn't seem to actually show the GUI for self-sealing tanks when I click a real-fuels tank.

Thank you! Also wow dissecting BDA's MM cfgs is a good way to learn how to make module manager mods. At least at the level of "make this part behave how I want." Although it won't go below 100 just from setting max HP. Maybe I need to set the current HP as well.

Is there a good way to make Kerbals much squishier? It feels wrong that I can hit a Kerbal with a 20mm round, penetrate straight through them and they are just built diff, and then hit a cockpit which survives but procedural-kills its Kerbals. It effectively makes open cockpits much stronger than non-armored enclosed single part cockpits. I'm having situations where Kerbals piloting a 500 kg wooden biplane take a 20mm round to the face at 500% damage and a ballistic damage modifier of 3, survive with half their plane and no apparent discomfort from being shot with an autocannon, and proceed to use their rifle caliber machinegun with inert slug ammo to pilot snipe the 3000 kg Aluminium WWII aircraft they got in a headon with as it goes by. If I could set Kerbals to hhave like 5 or 10 health so they have some chance to survive an inert rrifle caliber round bbut pretty much no chance to survive pretty much anything stronger and can get wiped out by splash damage that would feel more sensible.

press alt-b or press the settings icon in the weapon manager.

So, I figured out settings that make 7.62 slugs a viable, if not exactly strong, weapon for BDA. 1. damage 500% but you were probably gonna do that anyway. 2. ballistic damage multiplier = 3 (maximum value). 3. Procedural battle damage = 100%. 4. Engines flame out at 80% HP. Frequency of engine damage at maximum. 5. make sure pilot snipes are allowed. Don't get me wrong, based on the tag mode, my new more efficient biplane still needs a lot of hits to kill a late WWII monoplane, about 80 concentrated in a small area, but 80 hits out of 1800 rounds is more than doable if the enemy is dumb enough to turn with a biplane. To be fair I also made my biplane better than my previous one. It's about 570 kg in flight rather than 770, and it has a slightly better engine (130 horsepower vs 100) and much better turn performance with actual optimizations. That being said, it still doesn't have leading edge -aoa surfaces like literally every other plane I make. And the 10 meter wingspan isn't that unreasonable.