mk-fg

Right. All surfaces seem to only get enabled below 70km (for Kerbin), didn't test reentry the last time. FAR toolbar button doesn't seem to work on the same save with git master though, but it's not critical for me.

Thanks. Should it only apply to newly-launched crafts though? Loading current save with FerramAerospaceResearch dir from the current master (3c7c50d879) doesn't seem to fix already-orbiting vessel, producing quite a few errors like this one in the log (they weren't there with stable 0.13.3) when I try to steer it: [EXC 02:11:10.021] ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range. Unity's Player.log has more info on these events: (Filename: Line: -1) Event Type Ignored: EnterNotify ArgumentException: Value does not fall within the expected range. at ferram4.FARControlSys.StabilityAugmentationUpdate (.Vessel vesselToChangeTo, .Vessel vesselToChangeFrom) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at ferram4.FARGlobalControlFlightObject.LateUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 Full log with 3c7c50d879 (1.8M): http://fraggod.net/tmp/KSP.far_control_surfaces_issue.log Player.log from the same run (~5M): http://fraggod.net/tmp/Player.far_control_surfaces_issue.log Aforementioned errors should be at the very end of these.

I was wrong, FAR definitely affects the issue for me, just needed to remove whole FAR dir, not just dll files. With FAR removed, all surfaces seem to work in orbit with the same savegame file.

I came here to look for a solution to a similar issue, as a few threads (all seemingly without any resolution) seem to mention that FAR is most likely suspect for this, but removing "FerramAerospaceResearch/Plugins" directory with FAR dll's doesn't seem to fix the issue here, so I strongly suspect it might be unrelated to FAR, at least in my case.

True that

Though I guess there might not be an easy answer, given vastly different ship engine configurations - i.e. with several powerful engines and 1 NERVA, guess it should definitely be easy to take-off and use ~800 Isp of the latter for longer trajectories...

Thanks for the tips, latest blogpost on the link explains it perfectly, indeed. So without atmosphere, 45deg would only be optimal on a discworld or for a relatively short hops. Should these angles change with the atmosphere, given the drag and Isp changes there? I imagine they should, as such most-efficient-for-vacuum arcs seem to be very low-altitude, so should it be more efficient to go up and do horizontal burn outside of the thick atmosphere layer at some point?

Imagine you've landed on a planet in one of the biomes. What will be the most fuel-efficient way to move from there to another (specific) point on the surface? And - more importantly - what are the important variables there? I'm using SCAN mod which allows to have navigation satellites in orbit to provide in-game map of biomes on the surface. And naturally, if there's some extra fuel left, I'd like to lift off and fly to another biome than the one I've landed at initially, or go visit some anomaly on the surface. Imagining that surface is mostly flat (wrt hills and mountains, still curved though), is it always most fuel-efficient for a powered rocket to take-off at 45deg angle from horizontal direction, burn as fast as possible to get the trajectory to the target (with an overshoot adjustment for an atmosphere drag and non-instant deceleration) and then only fire engines to decelerate as late as possible? Or would it be more efficient for planets with atmospheres to accelerate straight up to get out of thick layers of it asap, then burn towards target and travel in a thinner layers? And with no atmosphere and low gravity, can it be more efficient to have near-horizontal burn, not to waste fuel of Y movement? Can it be more efficient or easy to accelerate horizontally to some fixed speed and then maintain altitude via thrust towards surface? 45deg seem to be roughly the figure used for e.g. archery on earth surface, where I think air resistance is not a huge factor (i.e. arrow is massive and aerodynamic enough), but it's a rough number for just one gravity/pressure combination, for an unpowered projectile, with certain combination of aerodynamic surfaces, which is not expected to exit the atmosphere, don't need to take earth's radius into account due to short range, etc. ICBMs otoh seem to fly very Y-heavy trajectories exiting and re-entering the atmosphere, but this might have totally different reasoning - i.e. to gain as much velocity when approaching surface as to be nearly-uninterceptable. Can't seem to find any threads on the subject, can someone maybe point me to these, if it's been discussed a lot already?

True, but with Electronics it gives just the most basic info like "orbit info" and such (3-5 absolutely useless tabs, not even delta-V), and to get anything useful out of it, you also need: flightControl, advFlightControl, fieldScience, unmannedTech, advUnmanned. advUnmanned is 200, unmannedTech is 100, and so on... Fairly sure these techs are also fairly expensive in vanilla tree though, so also annoying there Full list can be found in part.cfg files of MechJeb2, and being disappointed at all these goodies being locked-out, tried to change tech names there to something researched, but to no effect - not sure if MJ2 code caches this list somewhere (haven't looked at it myself) or something like that, or maybe I just missed something. Ouch. Doesn't sound like a fun way to spend end-of-the-year holidays.

I found the tech costs a bit too grindy for my liking with .23 and a few supported mods (only few which looked most fun) - guess with .22 science might've been easier, but I'm probably not hardcore enough anyway Also, while I see why more hardcore folks might want to have MechJeb pushed high-up the tech tree (as it kinda is with vanilla), I find fiddling with nav curves, horrible locked map-cam and pixel-hunting nav-nodes' controls a bit too much, so can suggest moving MechJab-unlock nodes waaay lower. It doesn't prevent plotting and calculating stuff manually, which I guess people who like it will do anyway, but makes game more playable for more casual (or just interested in diff aspects) folks. Easy cheat to get these, of course, is just to set cost=1 in tree.cfg and parent=node0_start. Also wrote a little script to parse and adjust costs for all tech nodes - https://gist.github.com/mk-fg/8164365 - by factor of 0.5 by default (half the cost, --cost-factor option), with nodes costing 10 or less (--cost-min option) untouched. Maybe would save someone else a lot of manual editing as well Should probably work on windows, but will need python installed and should be started from cmd or something like that. Nice part is that it can be applied on-the-fly - just update the file, exit R&D center and go back, see stuff updated there. Having played a bit of vanilla career and Ack's, can attest that latter seem to be way better. Awesome work, thanks a lot.