A really nutty contract

[Loren Pechtel]

"The amount of times there would be another unintended ignition was making the outstanding minds trying something really exemplary at Research & Development Department feel actually genius.  That (eventually) made it clear that having a test was by far the best option to learn if our LY-60 Large Landing Gear was entirely guaranteed to be reliable."

 

Sorry, if your landing gear is suffering ignition I don't want to haul it into orbit!  (Lacking a good way to jettison it at present I'm not going to piggyback this on another mission.)

[pincushionman]

Is this actually a gameplay question?

But in all seriousness, landing gear catching fire is actually a thing. One of the inportant tests in certifying a FAR 25 airplane is an aborted takeoff with 1) max takeoff weight, 2) worn-out brakes, and 3) no use of thrust reverser. You can generally expect large aircrafts' brakes to catch fire under these conditions, and as long as the fire doesn't spread, it's not a failure.

…but that has nothing to do with the game. The game is using boilerplate text that probably shouldn't be applied to that part. I'd submit a bug report. Although gears exploding is a thing right now, so…

Edited June 16, 2016 by pincushionman

[Padishar]

1 minute ago, pincushionman said:

The game is using boilerplate text that probably shouldn't be applied to that part. I'd submit a bug report.

I believe it uses a Markov chain type mechanism to generate the description text which results in some being very odd indeed...  I only ever look at them for the novelty value, the important info about the contract is reported much more precisely...

[Loren Pechtel]

23 minutes ago, pincushionman said:

Is this actually a gameplay question?

But in all seriousness, landing gear catching fire is actually a thing. One of the inportant tests in certifying a FAR 25 airplane is an aborted takeoff with 1) max takeoff weight, 2) worn-out brakes, and 3) no use of thrust reverser. You can generally expect large aircrafts' brakes to catch fire under these conditions, and as long as the fire doesn't spread, it's not a failure.

…but that has nothing to do with the game. The game is using boilerplate text that probably shouldn't be applied to that part. I'd submit a bug report. Although gears exploding is a thing right now, so…

The point is testing landing gear in orbit.  Somehow I think one should test landing gear where you can land!

[pincushionman]

1 minute ago, Loren Pechtel said:

The point is testing landing gear in orbit.  Somehow I think one should test landing gear where you can land!

This would be a good place to test the mechanism in a vacuum environment without a gravitational "up" or "down," rather than hauling it to another low-gravity planet, where it would potentially cause a mission failure because you need it there. In the real world that would be a terrible waste of money (when we could just use a vacuum chamber with the part mounted upside-down or sideways), but for the Kerbals it may make sense.

But that's just me pulling lore out of thin air here. The question is "why is it giving me this text, when it's clearly not applicable to this part"? Again, it's an oversight on the developers' part. The contract parameter generator AND the flavor text generator are playing Mad Libs, and no one took the time to exclude, for this part, this set of parameters (which may be intentional; I've given a suggestion why they might actually want the test) or the text (which is more questionable; but then again a mechanism catching fire because of low-gravity effects is a bad design).

[bewing]

Landing gear in space is a very nice thing -- they make great rover wheels. But you don't need the large ones.

In any case, the game tries to give you parts that you might want to keep -- with contracts that you have to go fill intentionally. If you get a wheesley to test on the ground, you can only use it once (without getting tricky). If you get one that you have to test at 1000 meters through the staging sequence, then you get to use it as many times as you want until you decide you actually want to complete the contract. That's how I always try to get my retractable landing gear, panthers, and kickbacks -- as contracts with finicky details, so I can keep the parts until I'm ready to spend the science to buy them.

[Pecan]

As there's no question here, I just assume from the title that I'm the most appropriate to do the contract.

[Loren Pechtel]

6 minutes ago, Pecan said:

As there's no question here, I just assume from the title that I'm the most appropriate to do the contract.

If you want to haul one of those giant wheels into orbit be my guest!

[bewing]

They only weigh .4 tonnes each, and you need to haul two for balance, of course.  They aren't that bad.