Galane

Useful info, but I'm still wanting a Size 0 radome for drones and other small craft like the Angry Gnat. With a Tiny radome on the nose it could mount a couple of AIM-20's. https://kerbalx.com/Galane/Angry-Gnat How does BDA handle 2 or more RADAR units on a single craft? If I mount two that can only track and lock a single target each, does that make the craft able to track and lock two targets simultaneously? A Tiny radome x2 would allow for some changes to my Vampirella by putting them on the fronts of the tail booms to free up the nose for other parts.

BDA has an issue with control inversion on surfaces placed backwards from their normal orientation. For example, using canards, winglets, or other control surfaces with their normal trailing edge pointed forward. BDA cannot fly this plane because it runs the control surfaces on the front edge of the wing the wrong way, opposite to how they work in manual piloting. It'll just corkscrew through the air, out of control. The workaround is to restrict a surface to a single axis and run the authority slider to negative in order to invert it. However, that screws it up for manual flying. https://kerbalx.com/dundun93/ASW-X-18M Launch it, poke the control keys and the surfaces move the proper directions. KSP can figure out how to operate a backwards pointing control surface but apparently BDA does its own thing. That plane is a very poor design, but just for the heck of it I did some modding. Replaced the frontmost tank and clipped in intake with the inline supersonic intake/tank. Replaced the rear two tanks with structural fuselage parts. (Nobody needs 1600 fuel for a dogfight!) Took the control surfaces off the front of the wings and put ones on the back edge. Finished it off by replacing the overkill number of ammo boxes with just two of 20mm, added flares and chaff around the back and a MasterTech Weapons jammer box to the underside. Locked steering on the main gear, upped the spring strength a bit, pushed the three Vulcans in a bit, set the AI altitude to 3000 and Steer Factor to 8.8. Set all surfaces to 150 authority. Hit it with all grandparent autostrut then went to battle. 4 vs 4 dogfight against the infamous ADF-01 Falken Crewed. Would you believe this polished turd took the Falkens down with a loss of just one ASW-X-18M2? Even with the diet I put it on, it's still a heavy plane. I'm going to have to find a tougher plane to beat, have some other planes in my stable that can also clean the Falken's clock most of the time. After poor results with planes approximately the same weight, dimensions and power, I went for small, light weight and fast, while also heavily armed. Haven't posted those to KerbalX yet...

Coolness! I've also downloaded your Blue Hawk Aerospace / Industries mods. I don't find a dropbox link in the MasterTech Aerospace thread.

Nice! Thanks for the fast update... but the download Spacedock is giving me is the previous version.

The RADAR, ECM, SONAR etc all needs an update now that BDArmory Continued has been updated to 1.0.0. They've gone to a pretty much completely new model for that. Since the RADAR needs updated anyway... how about a Size 0 / Tiny Radome? Edit: Update for the jammers is easy. Simply copypasta from the new BDA jammer cfg. Adjust all the new features if you want. Comments about them in the new cfg. name = ModuleECMJammer alwaysOn = false resourceDrain = 5 jammerStrength = 1200 lockBreaker = true lockBreakerStrength = 500 rcsReduction = false rcsReductionFactor = 0

All the RADAR stuff in this mod needs updated for the 1.0.0 release of BDA due to a major overhaul of its RADAR system. https://github.com/PapaJoesSoup/BDArmory/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Also, if you try mounting weapons not normally used to shoot at flying things, you need to toggle Target Air to enabled.

"Benjamin Kerman" is swamped with schoolwork and has no time. If you have some free time on your hands (ie *not* a college or university student) and want to take over maintenance on a fairly simple to do mod, and won't bail/flake out/abandon it... you can have ReStock. I've thought about starting over from scratch, modding the KSP 1.3 .cfg files to match the parameters for the modded ReStock ones, but I don't have the spare time. I have made a liquid fuel only and structural only version of a couple of the MK2 spaceplane parts to make them lighter, but nothing else as yet. While I was actively maintaining ReStock (and grumping with each new KSP release as squad changed many filenames and locations) I focused mainly on the rocket parts. What time I've had for KSP since getting back to it with 1.3.0 has been spent building planes for BDA dogfights, so I have ideas for fresh mods to plane parts.

I wonder if anything can be done to make B9 Procedural wings more damage resistant? They seem a lot more fragile than stock parts. One hit from a 20mm and *poof*, you're flying on a wing and a prayer, then just a prayer.

Might be related to the issue where BDA ignores the altitude limit, sending one jet running straight up with another chasing it, either until one or both run out of fuel, or the air is too thin for jet engines.

I wonder how much processing overhead scoring would add? Tracking who fired a missile and which plane it hit shouldn't add too much. But tracking the origin of every bullet, and what they hit, if they hit? The simplest kill criteria I can think of is scoring a kill if the AI module is destroyed or the part it's mounted on becomes detached. Can loss of all engines be detected? Without thrust a plane is good as dead.

Enhancement suggestion for the AI battles. Track who shoots whom. Jolly Roger Aerospace and others run BDA aircraft battles on YouTube and it's difficult to impossible to keep track of which planes have taken down others, so scoring is simply based on the order the planes get taken out of the battle. In some cases one plane may make it to 3rd to last survivor by virtue of simply having been ignored by the others for some reason, while never having got a hit on (let alone shooting down) any other plane.

Upon discovering that BDA guns produce recoil (pushed the remains of a splashed fighter jet to shore), someone needs to try this. Build a gunfire powered airplane. https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/

I'd love to see some Size 0 (Tiny) RADARs.

They can't be switched to with the left and right bracket keys either, all debris landed or splashed. I always try, sometimes there's a partially destroyed plane spinning around, minus its BDA control parts, but sometimes it's just going round and round with nothing there. If the last surviving plane gets within about 1KM of one it'll go full throttle (and engage afterburners if it has them) and head towards it for a second then drop back to idle and circling around. Sort of like being startled by a ghost.

Look up the Ercoupe (a later builder renamed it the Aircoupe). It has no rudder pedals. The rudder and aileron controls are both linked to the wheel. Its designer wanted a plane as easy to learn to fly as it is to learn to drive a car. How easy is it? Jessica Cox, born with no arms, flies an Ercoupe. She also surfs, scuba dives, plays piano, has a black belt in Taekwondo.

Frequently during a dogfight I see target icons for destroyed planes circling around. Can't switch to them, they don't show up in the map view either. They don't seem to run out of fuel. What up with the 'ghost planes'?

I installed Aviator Arsenal, added the module manager patch to fix the bullets. Installed a couple of 30mm cannons on an airplane along with the correct ammo boxes. Set the cannons to engage air = true. Launched the plane, did a manual fire check to ensure they worked. Flew off into an all AI dogfight and BDA refused to fire the cannons. Got a whole bunch of really fast head on passes with my new plane playing chicken VS a pair of Vulcans on another plane before I ended it. Surprised me how maneuverable* and fast it is. (B9 wings, I really like them!) Less than 10 tons takeoff weight with two AIM-20 under the fuselage and two AIM-9 overwing. Closest thing to the original Lightning armament. A plane inspired by** the English Electric Lightning *needs* dual 30mm cannons. Gets a bit 'dancy' from landing gear spring compression at the rotation to liftoff. May need to raise the speed up from 75. *Of course that's with thrust vectoring on. Probably would be less swoopy without that. But when the Kerbin Electric Lightnang has been the last plane standing, I think it's pretty neat. Can also get a bit vertigo inducing with camera locked on its back end. If only the 30mm's would work so I could try them instead of having to use Vulcans. **Not trying to super accurately copy the looks, but has the stacked engines and wings that are like straight ones swept way back, with a small bit of anhedral.

It's like turning a mouse upside down to use it like a trackball. The horizontal axis will be reversed but vertical will still be correct. Rotate it 180 degrees to fix horizontal and vertical is reversed. I do have a plane where I used elevons ahead of the COL and have to limit them to just pitch with reversed authority. If I enable roll too they work opposite the ones at the rear because the single authority slider can only reverse *all* active axes. If I don't slide the authority over to negative numbers, they respond by tilting UP to a pitch down control input - but roll will work correctly. But during the process of improvements and alterations, I removed and replaced the wing assemblies, and in that version the elevons forward of COL operate like the canard parts and I don't have to invert authority. Something happened to alter them to the canard behavior.

Where this would be most helpful is when using regular elevons forward of the center of lift. The authority has to be turned to negative numbers to make the pitch direction work properly, but then for roll they work backwards, so you can't use them for both. Two ways to have settings for this. 1. A simple direction toggle for each axis so that one authority setting works for all yet axis mixing will still work. 2. A full authority amount+direction slider each for pitch, yaw and roll. That would allow for much finer tuning of flight control. Say you want a rudder to have a lot of yaw authority but just a small amount for roll, or angled canards on the nose to have lots of pitch authority but less for yaw and a bit in between for roll.

Or I can figure out a way to insert the pointy radome into the middle of the plane, without clipping it. Presenting the SF Dart Duo Deux. The SF Dart had one engine. The SF Dart Duo had two engines, and two pointy radomes. Too much weight etc. So I did some major alterations, cut a bunch of weight, improved maneuverability, only have one radome. Thus it's the SF Dart Duo Deux. One thing I can't figure out is how the elevons forward of the COL got their control direction sorted out so they can work properly for both pitch and roll without having to reverse control authority. On the previous two I have to reverse authority on them, so they can only be used for pitch. Enabling roll on them goes backwards while pitch is reversed. (KSP needs separate authority settings for each axis.) All I did when rebuilding it was remove the wing assemblies then replace them onto the new front pod. https://pastebin.com/R45ZQpzY Initially I was just goofing around, experimenting, but the third iteration has turned out to be a surprisingly good dogfighter - and looks darn weird too. Just don't fill up all the wings with fuel unless you're planning a very long flight.

B9 Procedural Wings. CKAN will get the latest KSP 1.3 compatible version for you.

That is one of the things they did say they were going to bend, not having conflicts in the crew. All the other ST shows *have* had conflicts between members of their crews, but nothing like a permanent animosity.

How about a patch to add BDA radar to the stock, Firespitter and Airplane Plus cockpit modules that have no way to mount a radome or anything else to their front?

Discovery-Klingons by g_alan_e, on Flickr