Jarin

You know, usually I have to be flying around Jool to get an orbital projection like this. Makes braking nice and easy though. Add in a touch of airbraking and this is probably my cheapest interstellar return ever.

Okay, the craft in the center mark (lander icon) is on approach to the nearby asteroid, with an actual closest-approach at less than 1km. The orbital predictions aren't registering that, though, it's picking almost-random locations on the next orbit as first and second intercept. No flickering or bouncing of the orbit lines, they're solidly where they shouldn't be. The SOI change in the lower right is just clipping into Mun's influence for a bit. I adjusted out of that SOI though, and it still didn't have an up-close intercept on the map.

I'm not sure if I'm looking at a bug or not. Mostly it's just weird and I was hoping someone could tell me how to handle approaches to avoid this, or just say "it's borked" so I don't have to worry about it.

Something wrong here. (for the record, I passed within 0.1km of the asteroid not 15 minutes past this point)

I'd actually re-set the target several times when I took that screenshot. The buttons did enable in time, but it was at about 30 seconds until encounter when they came on.

Is there anything that would cause a survey station's range to stay locked at 20 with a 3-star pilot inside? Or am I looking at a probable bug? Edit: nevermind, this is borked, it's not detecting a survey stake less than 10m away. Gonna reinstall. Edit2: that did it.

Try opening the TCA window in the VAB/SPH and setting it disabled there.

I am an endless font of questions. What triggers the target-relative maneuver options? I keep having them go gray when I really want to be using them. (they tend to activate when I'm really close, but I get nervous with low-TWR craft about having time to stop) Edit: It also doesn't play nice with rockets that have a jet-style "spool up/down" period, like the ones in the OPT spaceplane pack. Had it blow past at high velocity on one attempt, and stop 30km shy on another. I think it's confused. And question two! Is there a way to make the "match velocity" setting use RCS for station-keeping?

Ah, thanks. Found it. Had managed to make a copy of the TCA folder inside another mod folder somehow. Flubbed drag-and-drop at some point I guess.

I also seem to have gotten TCA double-installed or something. Ever seen an issue like this? I'm sometimes seeing doubling in the engine control list as well.

Discovered annoying mod feature conflict today. TCA's "warp" feature for maneuver nodes overrides Kerbal Alarm Clock's "stop warp" feature for alarms. Blew past an alarm at high warp and almost lost a craft to deep space. =/ Easy to avoid if being careful, but it'd be nice if the warp feature in TCA would respect stop commands from elsewhere. If I'm madly mashing the "/" key, maybe it should disable the warp toggle instead of instantly going straight back to high warp again?

Okay, I tried stepping down reaction wheel control authority to see how low it could go. It looks like you're SOL below 50%. Tested with RCS, but TCA doesn't seem to use RCS blocks for stabilizing, so no luck there. The wheesley just doesn't have the throttle response time to be the sole source of control. I tried using Thuds alongside the Wheesleys, and it worked a lot better, but that does terrible things to your fuel efficiency, obviously. I tried pushing for the higher tech tiers to get the proper VTOL control modules, but that didn't do much. Without engines with faster throttle response, or some kind of rotation control, I don't think you're going to be flying any VTOLs any time soon. I'd look for modded air maneuvering engines with rapid throttle response maybe?

And upon further testing, it seems you just simply lack the TCA tech to balance the engines properly. This is what I unlocked for initial testing: And yeah, it's impossible to control. Unlocked VTOL assist and Horizontal Thrust Control: And it's a lot easier to fly. Make sure you have "stop" or "level" selected in the TCA mode. It's still entirely possible to crash like this (and will be until you get Specialized Control at the 160 tier), but it's flyable. Just don't push it too far, and it can autocorrect. Edit: Scratch that, "level" doesn't help much. Stick with "stop".

Okay, I'm not seeing anything like this. I can throw this thing all over the place, mashing WASD for all I'm worth and it just hovers sedately around KSC. Maybe you don't have the right TCA tech yet. I'll let you know.

Are you using time-warp in flight? That's the only way I've been able to make the craft flip out in testing so far. Going to toss it into a cheaty career and test it with limited unlocks next. Preliminary conclusion: Lack of rotational authority. Stick a reaction wheel on the back of it and it won't even flip in time-warp.

I never use angled engines, but TCA supposedly handles them fine. Can you get a screenshot of the TCA panel, with engine settings? I'm going to toss together a duplicate craft to see if I can get it to spin out like you're describing. Any further details to assist in reproducing the issue?

Got pictures of the craft? I've been working out the bugs in my VTOL designs recently, so I can at least see if you're tripping over one of the problems I've found a workaround for.

Sounds like they lost the entire front page, including stickies. Seems a likely candidate for someone accidentally hitting "select all/delete" in the mod view. <.<

'Ey, now don't start that again!

JFC... that's a lot bigger issue than I thought. Helloooo dropped DB table.

Depends on whether they have database backups, I suspect. And then there's a chance that we might have to lose all posts from the past few days to restore the lost threads.

Did the OPT mod thread get deleted?

Looking good! Just wanted to note that you could probably squeeze a bit more performance out of both the craft and your computer by dropping those structural intakes out of the part count. 8 shock cones is already overkill for that number of engines, so the rest can just be tossed.

Considering that you're headed for the sound barrier while in a 45 degree climb, I suspect you're well into "supersonic brick wall" territory.

In the meantime, the proper strategy seems to be "use enough engines to make a brick wall go supersonic".