Galane

Looks like these may help a lot with MechJeb landings on Eve.

I've landed on Mun, Minmus, Kerbin, Duna, Ike, and one time on Gilly. It's just Eve that causes problems where MJ won't burn early enough unless there's plenty more than enough thrust available. What was a surprise last night was how it failed to lower the landing gear soon enough. That's a thing MechJeb has never done to me before. To optimize the lander for gasbag assisted launch it first has to be able to get down safely. Getting to an optimum fuel capacity/thrust is a bit difficult when the autopilot is being too conservative with the throttle when landing on Eve. I've built ships intended to just land on Eve, with enough excess thrust that they can make it down safe under MJ control without parachutes or any other non-rocket landing aid. That makes them overweight for their intended purpose and they could lift off, for a while, which is why I have the engines and fuel tanks setup to jettison with sepratrons to ensure they'll fly away to crash. I may alter their design some to use smaller fuel tanks since they don't even use half their fuel going down to near Eve sea level. Kethane drilling and converting rovers for Eve. https://mega.co.nz/#!vdtT1LIT!WsM8Zn-fdSGS4loOoIAdo0TOjs46GXXw_z9yO85Z_Z0 Requires KAS, ReStock and Kethane, possibly KSPX. Designed to stack the drilling rover (equipped with two small Kethane scanners) on top of the converting rover. Both of those are expected to stack on top of the manned lander. MJ ought to be able to safely land any ship with a TWR greater than 1 at Eve's surface, which can be done with manual throttle control. Landing with a TWR less than 1 but with aids like parachutes should also be possible, just go full throttle starting high enough so that when combined with the parachute drag the result is a non-damaging touchdown speed. Once it's down it's down for good.

For my test crash last night. Ship consisted of this stack, bottom to top. Skipper, X200-8, 2-man lander can, big reaction wheel and shortened FL-R1 from ReStock, orange tank, 4K battery, large RGU, 3-in-1 Sr. sized docking port. Stuck to the sides were a pair of VTOL mounts from Infernal Robotics (attached with hydraulic detachment manifolds) with Cirrus envelopes, pivoted down. Four radial chutes at the top of the orange tank. Had a ring of 6 OX-Stat panels and 8 5-way RCS blocks from ReStock mounted here and there. The landing gear was 10 short I-Beams hung from the bottom edge of the X200-8 with LT-2 legs. Landing was proceeding fine, chutes out, slowing down nicely, just needed enough push from the engine, soon enough, to bring it down slow enough. MechJeb didn't drop the landing gear until the engine nozzle was about to touch the ground. The gear hit the ground before it fully extended. Was it mis-computing some lift that wasn't there from the fully collapsed Cirrus gas bags? Why would it wait until too late to extend the landing gear? If it had extended the gear high enough the landing would've been hard but most likely nothing would have broken. The crash lost two legs (but the I-beam connections held thanks to the latest Kerbal Joint Reinforcement) and the orange tank plus everything attached to it except the VTOL rotatrons and the Cirrus bags was destroyed. I'm attempting to put together a minimum weight lander with gasbags to lift it to a height where it can make it back to orbit so I won't have to launch a crazy massive craft and transfer it to Eve. Problem is MechJeb keeps cutting the final burn too close unless the lander is way overpowered.

Had to Google ModuleManager_1_5_6.dll to find http://www.sarbian.com/sarbian/ModuleManager_1_5_6.dll A happy new year gift would be a forum search that can find individual posts instead of just threads, and indexes common three and four letter terms used in KSP.

add ShowInMenu = False to the cfg file in the Kethane folder

If you're playing career mode you have to accumulate science points to unlock it in the tech tree. In sandbox, every part and function of everything should be available.

Quantum struts and the strut guns from that mod work just fine in .23 You just have to ensure they don't intersect nor are mounted on certain parts like the cubic octagonal strut (girder piece). That can be a useful feature. Put a quantum strut on a small hardpoint and aim it at a cubic octagonal strut. Use an action group to toggle the strut and you have a device that will hold the ship in place against rotation. Should make docking easier because the ship can't wobble about.

Given what's capable now or envisioned as potentially near future possible, plasma weapons would at beast be a short range weapon only useful in space. Plasma is a HOT gas. What happens to hot gasses in an atmosphere? They rise. Fire a plasma gun in an atmosphere where there's gravity and you're only going to set fire to the ceiling. There's another gotcha with plasma weapons and atmosphere, resistance and turbulence. Fire the plasma and it will very quickly disperse. That's a very quick way to set a whole compartment in a space station on fire.

The basic thing about rocketry is the center of gravity (or mass) should be ahead of the center of pressure. The classic way to check COP is to cut out a cardboard silhouette and check its center of gravity. Compare that location to the location of the center of gravity of the actual rocket. Built that way, if the rocket veers off course, there's more drag behind the COM which forces the tail back into line. If the COP is ahead of the COM, there's more drag on the front end and it blows around farther. Rockets with a big nose and a small tail need either fins or additional weight at the tail. That's why payload lifting model rockets with capsules larger than the body diameter have large fins. Checking the COP in the VAB could be done with a simple parallel raycasting from one side to create a virtual silhouette object then calculating its COM to generate an indicator to render. Dunno if a plugin could do that but it's something that would be quite useful if built into a future release of KSP. Might be better to raycast from two directions, 90 degrees apart, then average the COP positions or show a high and a low position, since making rockets that aren't symmetrical in all directions seems to be a popular thing. Once out of an atmosphere, the COP doesn't matter because there's no gas to cause drag.

No restrictions on height from which it must be able to return. If you want to do something like using airship parts to lift to a high altitude before lighting the ascent engines, that's OK, but then the engines used to get on up to orbit count in the points. In the event of a tie in the engines used points, returning from the lowest altitude wins. Probably should be from the lowest altitude at which the engines are lit, so lifting to 26KM with gas bags then lighting up would be behind lifting directly from any point on the surface using the same number of engines. Only engines that are in use count for descent or ascent. So un-lit engines on the way down don't count for descent but if they're lit on the way up they count for ascent.

With my Duna kethane scanning satellites, it wasn't undocking, it was decoupling. They didn't have root parts. In .22 Mechjeb was able to control them. I did nothing with them after updating to .23 and MechJeb couldn't control them until I set control from here to their OKTO2 cores. So the not having any part set to control from must have happened in .22 but it having an effect on MechJeb's ability to control the satellites didn't crop up until after updating to .23 as well as updating to some .23 compatible version of MechJeb. I know a way to further test this. Tomorrow evening (most likely) I'll launch one of my Armed Guard missiles, making sure the root part is not on the Kinetic Energy Transfer Module, and see if the KETM is uncontrollable by MechJeb. Something I noticed tonight in the aftermath of yet another failed Eve landing experiment is that on a ship with an unmanned 2 man lander can and reaction wheels, but having lost the RGU in the crash, MechJeb can still control the orientation of the craft (I hyperedited the wreckage back to LKO). Can't control the throttle or landing gear or anything else that requires a Kerbal onboard or a part capable of remote guidance, but SASS can still point the ship this way and that, including using force roll - but no manual control of orientation or anything else is possible and MJ functions such as landing guidance won't do anything with it. Dunno if that should be called a bug or a feature. ;-) With no Kerbal and no part capable of remote guidance, I'd think a ship should be completely unresponsive.

Alan Aerospace Recycling and Packaging has been busy attempting to perfect a manned Eve lander that can return to Eve orbit. We're getting closer and closer to that goal and have perfected two rovers that can land without parachutes. One carries a pair of heavy Kethane drills, the other carries a heavy Kethane converter, a Kethane tank and a pair of KAS winches and fittings to connect to the drilling rover and the still in development manned lander. (Also known as doing productive things while waiting for the Duna to Kerbin return window.) The AARP board has voted to call upon outside contractors for proposals for a vehicle which can land on Eve and return to orbit, then be capable of docking with a vehicle to return to Kerbin. AARP will be sharing our one way down Eve rover designs with any other company that wants to have a look at them. (Our chief engineer and head janitor says he'd be pleased if the design included his RockoOKTOClampo combination decoupler and Clampotron docking port.) Any engines you want to use, as long as they burn fuel, so nothing super exotic. (Specific ones that should be disallowed?) At least one Kerbal must make the trip. No wings or any parts that do the infiniglide glitch. Rocket, not spaceplane challenge. MechJeb allowed. FAR disallowed. Any other parts packs allowed. (I'm thinking Hooligan Labs airship pack is going to be a necessity.) Points are simple. 1 point per engine used directly in the descent and ascent, lowest score wins. Tie breaking will be decided by whomever lands at the lowest surface altitude. Descent and ascent scored separately then added together so the lowest possible score is 2 by using only one engine, unless you manage to land or ascend without using engines then the lowest possible score is 1 - unless you can build a ship capable of landing then returning to orbit without using any engines to score a 0. Landertrons count 1 point each, same as any other engine. Dropping engines on the way down or up or on the surface is also allowed. Engines on the ship but never fired don't count. (Not that it's expected to carry the weight of engines you won't use but never know what people will do.) If the ship has to refuel on the surface you can simulate it with hyperedit, unless you really want to go to the extra effort of landing a refueling system (AARP will provide our rovers for this on request) or putting it on the ship. Any additional equipment landed to service the ship on the surface doesn't count toward the points. Getting to Eve may be done using hyperedit but the ship should be designed to be mounted on a booster for launch from KSC and flight to Eve. Ships may be assembled from pieces in Kerbin or Eve orbit. Here's AARP's Eve surface refueling rovers. https://mega.co.nz/#!vdtT1LIT!WsM8Zn-fdSGS4loOoIAdo0TOjs46GXXw_z9yO85Z_Z0 Requires KAS, ReStock and Kethane, possibly KSPX. Feel free to use any bits of their designs. The wheel alignments and heights were manually edited in a craft file of an earlier rover built in .21 and I saved that girder and wheel combo as a subassembly. Very handy for rover building. The drill rover has a pair of small Kethane scanners. Land your lander on a Kethane deposit, follow with these two. After touchdown, jettison the engines and fuel tanks. It's a good idea to do that a ways away from anything you don't want damaged. They're built to be launched from Kerbin then stacked with the drill rover on top of the convert rover. The docking ports are on decouplers so they can be dumped during the landing to save weight.

I'm not using B9 or KW. The only texture reduction pack I've used was the Squad one, but I deleted and replaced the Sqaud folder to put it back to stock before trying any version of the texture compressing mod.

Works in .23 but that triple side by side tank still needs some tweaking to fix the fuel flow issues. With tanks mounted above it draws from one on one end first (or possibly will draw only from the one end) unless fuel pipes are used to connect the tanks above to the triple tank, or TAC Fuel Balancer is used to keep it balanced.

Like I said Deleting all those then running and quitting KSP didn't properly restore the textures.

If we zoom in on that ship, will we see a PAN-AM logo?

I just removed the B9 and KW folders from the folders section then changed it to this FOLDERS { folder = Squad/ folder = BoulderCo/ folder = nothke_DROMOMAN/ folder = MagicSmokeIndustries/ folder = HooliganLabs/ folder = Kethane/ folder = StretchyTanks/ folder = KAS/ folder = Keramzit/ folder = BoJaN/ folder = KSPX/ } The rest of the cfg I left alone. Deleting all those then running and quitting KSP didn't properly restore the textures. Ships were ghostly white so I extracted the Squad folder, copied it over the existing one and did the same for all those mods. I replaced the 2-4 version with the 1-1 version and it works. I'm running on XP with only 2 gig RAM. The last time I ran into UI textures going wonky like this was with KSP .21, before I found PolecatEZ's reduced size Squad textures, which I'm not currently using with this AMR mod.

I had that with my Kethane satellites at Duna. Apparently when I decoupled them in .22, KSP never set the one and only part on them with control function to be 'control from here' yet earlier versions of MechJeb would control them. Now it requires 'control from here' to be explicitly set or it'll either do nothing at all or will just wobble it around a bit. Dunno if it might also have something to do with changes in .23 upsetting it. At least the issue is fixable simply by setting control to a part. Logically when there's only *one* part on a craft that can be set as control, KSP should set that automatically, or if there are more than one part that can be set to control but only one command part (manned pod or RGU) then the command part should get control. If there's more than one command part then if one is the root part it should get control. If no command part is root then the highest one up the tree should get it. Would be nice to know the actual method the game uses to set which part has control when a ship is undocked or decoupled, and why when a probe with only one command/control part is decoupled that control from here doesn't get automatically set. Would it be possible for MechJeb to report that no part has control from here set? "Warning! This craft has no part set to Control From Here. MechJeb cannot control this craft until that is set."

Use the force... roll. In the docking autopilot, force roll aligns the axis of the control part of the docking ship (which normally should be the port you're going to dock) with the target docking port on the ship you're docking to. Smart A.S.S. force roll appears to align to the SOI the ship is in, with the way the front of the ship points dependent on the OBT or TGT selection or if docking autopilot is active. It definitely does not align roll to a target ship. (Unless that's been changed recently.) Switch between the two while using TGT+ to aim at another ship and you'll see the roll angle change.

The easiest way to get Kethane conversion to fill your tanks in a complex setup where you can't connect pipes from tanks to the converter is to mount a small fuel tank to one end of each converter then use TAC Fuel Balancer. Set the oxidizer and fuel to balance all, with the tanks attached to the converter to transfer out. Then all the fuel that goes into those tanks will continuously be evenly distributed amongst all other tanks on the craft, no matter where or how they're attached. Once all the other tanks are full or almost full, change the mode of the tanks attached to the converters to Stop so they'll also fill. Would be nice if Kethane converters could have that same system built in. Fuel Balancer doesn't play by the normal fuel path rules, don't see why Kethane should have to.

I'd just like to have a mod for the vanilla system that does what this mod does to improve performance. Something the Kerbol system really needs is an asteroid belt. Not one of those impossibly dense SciFi movie asteroid belts. Just a few thinly scattered rocks out there.

The VTOL rotators need some attention. They're rather fugly looking. The stationary attachment part is too large. Holding the center button to return to the starting position doesn't return them all the way. But even with all that I just did a test with a pair of them mounting a pair of Cirrus lift envelopes so they could be pivoted down for landing and to move the COM down for better RCS control. Once landed I flipped them back up straight (manually adjusted since the automatic is off a bit), inflated the gas bags and lifted off. On top of that I mounted the rotators on the large radial decouplers so as I enabled MechJeb's ascent guidance I jettisoned the rotators and the gas bags to lose the weight. A rocket with a couple of big gas bags on top is not the most nimble of craft, especially not when there's still a bunch of atmo to get through. What would be a very useful addition to rotating parts and hinges is a way to move them to a set of preset angles, and tweakables or some other way to set their rotation direction. Since I put these two on with symmetry they both rotated to the same side. That may cause my lander to fall over on Eve. If one could be adjusted to reverse rotation direction, that would balance the weight as they're turned.

If you have overlapping SOI's what happens When Worlds Collide?

I put 2-4 in and now I'm getting what looks like Z-order rendering errors in the UI where textures are displayed out of their correct stacking order. The warp arrows went first, then the vertical velocity indicator needle and the brakes icon. The RCS light went buh-bye and the parts at the top of the navball went behind the outer ring. If I hid the navball, many of the textures in the pitch/yaw/roll indicator section got hid too.

Yay! Now I can use the Eve puncturing landing legs and they'll at least stay attached to the ship.