BD Armory Peace mode and other questions

[Klapaucius]

I finally tried BD armory and had a blast finally seeing many of my planes in the air at the same time.  A lot of the tutorials I have come across focus on the combat, but really, I am just keen to get multiple planes up in the air.  I did divide my planes into teams to get things going.

Towards that end, a few questions.

1. What is peace mode?  

2. The whole time it seemed my team was getting into formation and never got past that.  What is happening?

3. Is there a way to use it just to set up formation flying?

Thanks 

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

HI firstly thanks for trying BDA.  Now to business,  let's clear up what BDA is all about  .    BDA is primarily a combat mod, everything about it is set toward having one or more craft engaged in some kind of combat. It is not an auto pilot, it is not suitable for flying groups of aircraft  in formation over any distance.  The AI  take off routine for example  always flies pretty much the same pattern, it always flies the same way around the KSC  the aircraft more or less always form into the same groups. 

  SO in short it's not really going to do what you want in it's basic form.  Competition mode places two teams of aircraft at a preset distance and altitude and turns them free to fight, Peace mode is only to prevent the turning loose and start of combat.
Now the wing commander accessible from the right click menu on the PAI will allow you fly numerous aircraft to any location on the planet, as many as you can get off the ground in one piece, but it takes a while to get the hang of it  I strongly suggest taking a look at the included manual in the in game KSPedia ,  and searching for you tube videos (like this one )  on using  BDA Wing Commander
 

3 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

2. The whole time it seemed my team was getting into formation and never got past that.  What is happening?

This is indicative of an issue or problems in your game,  in a clean game with few errors , using clean craft, and following assembly rules, (  1 weapon manager and 1 PAI  per craft, dont put two of any BDA control module on any craft, this leads to confusion between the modules and destroys performance)  It can be expected that  things will proceed as planned,  aircraft taking off,  waiting for teams to get into position and then starting combat once craft are all at the preset or greater distance.  It has been found that  the following things  can cause the AI to lock up and fail to complete it's routine; 

Dirty craft, that is craft that have been created in another save or version of KSP and  moved between saves, you can check this by looking in your KSP.log  for craft showing indexing errors, the more indexing errors you have per craft the less likely it is to perform well under AI control.   Theses indexing errors are produced by module manager rearranging the part modules at game load, and nothing to do with BDA.  

Next  not all parts are created equal, for some reason that we at BDA or the mod creator cannot determine airplanes plus parts have a multitude of issues when used with BDA, it is a regular issue that crops up, and 9/10 if the APP part is replaced with stock or any other mod part the problems go away

Finally and the real big issue is a generally buggy game, outdated mods, obsolete mods, incompatible mods, mods that spam error messages to the logs, mods that do not load properly, multiple versions of the same mod, and incorrect mod installations will all cause a problem for the AI, it needs a clean space in which to run it's routines , it doesn't like fighting with other modules and will simply sulk and go home.  SO a clean game, with clean craft will 99.9% of the time result in good performance from the PAI and associated systems

As this is all deeply MOD and BDA related we'd be happy  to answer all your questions in the dedicated BDA thread, which is where you'll find those who know how BDA works

  a link below

 

[Klapaucius]

@SpannerMonkey(smce)  Thanks for the detailed answer!  

[Xd the great]

16 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

@SpannerMonkey(smce)  Thanks for the detailed answer!  

Maybe you should start simple. Try getting 2 planes in the air first, then have them fight.

Basically, peace mode means nobody attacks anybody. Peace. Turn that off and missiles start slamming into things and kerbals get killed.

As @SpannerMonkey(smce) said, the wing commander will do stuff, but it has limited range for flying in formation (300m?). Maybe the mod burn together will help. Maybe.

[Klapaucius]

@SpannerMonkey(smce), @Xd the great

 

I achieved my goal. BD Armory + Camera Tools + Mission Builder = some pretty cool shots:

 

It works great for hydrofoils as well:

 

[Snark]

Moving to Add-on Discussions, since this is primarily about a mod.

Though it's worth noting that if you have a question about a particular mod, the best place to ask is generally in that mod's thread, since that's where the mod's expert users (and the author!) tend to hang out.