[1.3.0] Kerbal Engineer Redux 1.1.3.0 (2017-05-28)

[OSUNightfall]

Either I've gone stupid or Engineer has. I only recently came back to the game from like, long before there was science, so maybe I just don't remember how things work. I'm trying to use Engineer's dV calculations to build a simple rocket. I need to see the cumulative dV for each stage, which as I understand it, engineer does. But when I try to view the craft's characteristics, it does not seem to notice all of the engines on this very simple rocket. Here is a screenshot:

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/53243610355743838/33F675AE004F694352DCE75EB3621B5E6D5EE1A7/

Please note the quite simple and logical staging sequence, and the fact that I have two LV-30 liquid engines with access to fuel. What is the problem here?

I suspect that my problem is so simple nobody has ever bothered to post about it, but I am at a loss.

[Red Iron Crown]

Either I've gone stupid or Engineer has. I only recently came back to the game from like, long before there was science, so maybe I just don't remember how things work. I'm trying to use Engineer's dV calculations to build a simple rocket. I need to see the cumulative dV for each stage, which as I understand it, engineer does. But when I try to view the craft's characteristics, it does not seem to notice all of the engines on this very simple rocket. Here is a screenshot:

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/53243610355743838/33F675AE004F694352DCE75EB3621B5E6D5EE1A7/

Please note the quite simple and logical staging sequence, and the fact that I have two LV-30 liquid engines with access to fuel. What is the problem here?

I suspect that my problem is so simple nobody has ever bothered to post about it, but I am at a loss.

A few questions:

Which part did you place first? If it was one of the parts in the lowest stage you may get erroneous readings, the simulation has trouble with stages mounted above the root part at times.

Might you have accidentally tweaked the thrust in the upper engine to zero in the right click menu? Or disabled fuel tanks in the same manner?

Are you sure that the couplers are ordered correctly (they have similar icons)?

Have you tried launching the rocket and seeing if the staging works as planned?

Forgive me if those questions seem overly basic, but your vessel is pretty simple and shouldn't confuse KER. If you could upload the craft file I could take a closer look.

(Also: Welcome to the forums!)

[OSUNightfall]

Yes! It seems my problem was building from the bottom up, which was my habit when playing stock with the trial and error mentality. Now that I'm playing with FAR and other mods, a much greater degree of precision is needed, thus going back to Engineer.

Thank you for all your help.

Is this limitation noted in a FAQ or help file somewhere? I looked for something like that but could not find it.

[Red Iron Crown]

Is this limitation noted in a FAQ or help file somewhere? I looked for something like that but could not find it.

Not as such, I have read some discussion of the limitation in this thread by Padishar, one of KER's contributors who has done a ton of work on the simulation code that calculates delta-V. Apparently it is not an easy problem to fix.

You might consider building from the top down, as changes to a lower stage don't affect the performance of stages above but changes to an upper stage often have a ripple effect down through the lower stages. This will also minimize the impact of this limitation on KER's usefulness to you.

If you wish to stick with building bottom up, another option would be to use the SelectRoot mod, which allows you to change which part is the root. As you add stages you can reroot the design from a part in the uppermost stage so that KER works correctly.

[OSUNightfall]

For any rocket that has to do something as complex as "go to the moon" or beyond, I do build top down for the reasons you specified. But for simple rockets to test parts, or those that need only to reach orbit, I usually just throw something together, and thanks to habit that means bottom up . If anyone is listening, it might be nice to update the first post to mention this. I can't be the only person this has caused a lot of frustration for.

[Padishar]

Not as such, I have read some discussion of the limitation in this thread by Padishar, one of KER's contributors who has done a ton of work on the simulation code that calculates delta-V. Apparently it is not an easy problem to fix.

You might consider building from the top down, as changes to a lower stage don't affect the performance of stages above but changes to an upper stage often have a ripple effect down through the lower stages. This will also minimize the impact of this limitation on KER's usefulness to you.

If you wish to stick with building bottom up, another option would be to use the SelectRoot mod, which allows you to change which part is the root. As you add stages you can reroot the design from a part in the uppermost stage so that KER works correctly.

Yes, this isn't an easy problem to fix. I have made some progress on it but I haven't been able to spend much time on modding recently as I'm far too busy with work things.

Building from the top down is far more sensible, for exactly the reason given by Red Iron Crown. Usually you have a specific payload required for the mission and can then design each stage of the lifter to lift what you have so far. Building from the bottom up is awkward as, when you discover you haven't given your bottom stage enough thrust and/or fuel it can be rather awkward to change it later, especially if you have to detach the payload to change parts and then reattach it to check the performance.

One question I have about your rocket, the staging list shows 3 stack decouplers (in stages 0, 1 and 4) and 3 radial decouplers (in stage 2). I can see the radial ones (though I'm not sure what purpose they are serving) but I can only see one stack decoupler. Is that another one (non-stock) immediately under the pod? Where is the other one?

Even when building top down, SelectRoot can be a very useful tool, especially once you start designing more complex vessels using sub-assemblies.

[Boomerang]

I don't know whether this has come up before, but is there any chance of Engineer using a more stock-alike font? At least for 1.x.x?

Maybe it's a bit nit-picky, but the Engineer font is less bold and ends up looking squished together, especially since my less-than-wonderful resolution forces me to use the smaller GUI size.

Edit: Nevermind. I'd been running an older OSX. Updating to Yosemite makes the display for this look much neater.

Edited November 17, 2014 by Boomerang

[Drew Kerman]

Yes! It seems my problem was building from the bottom up, which was my habit when playing stock with the trial and error mentality. Now that I'm playing with FAR and other mods, a much greater degree of precision is needed, thus going back to Engineer.

See the last link in my sig for a top-down construction method that'll get you what you need as long as you properly define your mission requirements

[OSUNightfall]

@Padishar - That decoupler is a heat shield from Deadly Re-entry but I also removed all mods and tried it without that, and the problem persisted. I had already taken the screenshot though, and saw no reason to take another since they both showed approximately the same thing. Sorry for the confusion.

@Gaiiden - I appreciate the help, but I do know how to plan a mission. With such a simple mission (get into orbit) I did not follow normal procedure.

[BudgetHedgehog]

KER 1.0.11.3 doesn't like TweakScale 1.46, I'm sad to report. Those are the only mods (aside from ModuleManager) installed, otherwise it's a stock game.

This is probably more thanks to TS problems, but if you cycle through the various scales of parts in the editor, KER just keeps adding the masses, resulting in crafts of hilarious apparent weight (click enough times and it reaches a mass of infinity kg!).

I should note that upon launch, the vessel mass readout is correct. It's just in the editor that things go pear-shaped.

Edited November 17, 2014 by ObsessedWithKSP

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Is there an option in Kerbal Engineer v1 for setting the kind of days that are displayed (in e.g. "Time to Apoapsis")? They're all in 24-hour times, which makes them the odd duck out among all of the other time displays in my install. I've not been able to find any such thing in the "edit" menus.

[cybutek]

Is there an option in Kerbal Engineer v1 for setting the kind of days that are displayed (in e.g. "Time to Apoapsis")? They're all in 24-hour times, which makes them the odd duck out among all of the other time displays in my install. I've not been able to find any such thing in the "edit" menus.

It is there... Under miscellaneous.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I see, the "time reference adjuster". Thanks for the heads-up.

[bob89]

Hi. I am back at KSP after being away for a while and wanted to install your mod as I heard that it is really useful. If I am correct all I have to do is unzip the download and drop the contents of the main folder into the KSP folder. To use it I have to just add a pod and then attach the Kerbal Engineering module onto it and the engineering window should open straight away. Am I missing something? I just can't seem to get it working. It is a vanilla 0.25 KSP.

[Red Iron Crown]

The contents of the zip have to go in the ksp/GameData folder, that might be the issue.

Edited November 20, 2014 by Red Iron Crown
Fixed some silly autocorrect.

[JackGruff]

Would it be possible to display my expected periapsis for the next SOI I'm going to enter?

[westamastaflash]

When I'm on the launchpad I want to launch into Minmus' Inclination. Angle to Rel. AN / DN is useful (launch when the angle is near 0), but the Time to Rel. AN / DN sits at 11m 35.8s until the angle is close enough to be under that. It'd be nice to be able to get this so I can set up Kerbal Alarm clock. Problem is that the "Time To Ascending Node" that alarm clock uses looks to be the same one that engineer uses (and the same one that mechjeb uses).

Am I confused on how the ascending / descending nodes work? Is this a bug in KSP? Or do I not understand how the AN/DN works if I'm on the launchpad?

[Starman4308]

Am I confused on how the ascending / descending nodes work? Is this a bug in KSP? Or do I not understand how the AN/DN works if I'm on the launchpad?

It might just be the game engine or KER/MJ being really confused on account of your "orbit" being a straight drop to the center of Kerbin: remember that KSC is not dead-equatorial, but a little offset. I usually eyeball it: I zoom out, line up Minmus's orbit with Kerbin's equatorial plane, and launch when it looks like I'm just about under Minmus's orbit.

[bob89]

The contents of the ziploc have to go in the ksp/GameData folder, that might be the issue.

Thanks. That was it, I was dropping the contents into the root of KSP not the gamedata.

[Red Iron Crown]

Thanks. That was it, I was dropping the contents into the root of KSP not the gamedata.

Glad it worked for you, and glad you figured out that I meant "zip" instead of "ziploc". That'll teach me to post from my phone.

[westamastaflash]

It might just be the game engine or KER/MJ being really confused on account of your "orbit" being a straight drop to the center of Kerbin: remember that KSC is not dead-equatorial, but a little offset. I usually eyeball it: I zoom out, line up Minmus's orbit with Kerbin's equatorial plane, and launch when it looks like I'm just about under Minmus's orbit.

Yeah. I can use the "Angle to Rel. AN" (or DN) to get a near perfect launch inclination. I guess I was just hoping for some way to show me how long it will take to get to the launch time, so I don't have to leave the rocket on the pad and do other things (I also use kerbal construction time, so I'd like to know if I have time to launch something else and have the pad refurbished before it's time to launch to Minmus again.

[TelluriumCrystal]

I have linked this mod to recurring lag spikes here: Support Thread

This might be unique to the OSX version as I am also running Kerbal Engineer 1.0.11.3 on my PC and have not come across this issue. Any thoughts?

[bob89]

Glad it worked for you, and glad you figured out that I meant "zip" instead of "ziploc". That'll teach me to post from my phone.

Well technically you owe me a new CD drive. Mine is broke because I shoved a sandwich into it. Plus you owe me a sandwich

[DaveMcC]

Hello and thank you for this great mod, I never leave the KSC without it!

I want to move from the .6 version to .1 but the OP says that some minor save game editing is needed, can someone point me to a set of instructions that tell me what needs edited? My google fu seems to have failed me

Cheers,

Dave

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I successfully did so by following these steps (I don't blame you for not being able to find them out of 165 pages of posts):

The differences are:

1.0 does not include the EngineerChipFlight part, only ER7500 and EngineerChip which are also only required when not running part-less.

1.0 does not use the BuildEngineer part module as it's always part-less.

The FlightEngineer module is now called FlightEngineerModule.

If your crafts contain parts from 0.6 and do not find them, or the associated part modules, KSP may delete them. The save file tweaking should just be a simple find/replace in notepad changing EngineerChipFlight to EngineerChip, removing 'name = BuildEngineer' and changing 'name = FlightEngineer' to 'name = FlightEngineerModule'. I have not tested this out though, so cannot guarantee any form of success, only that it's technically possible to tweak the save file so it could be compatible. Remember that backing up your save file is always recommended before trying anything like this this out though.

Has someone has actually tried making a 0.6 save compatible with 1.0? And can either confirm my tweak, or say it's a load of codswallop and recommend a better way?

This worked for me -- I was willing to try because the only vessels I had in flight on my main save were probes. I used Notepad++ to make the process less painful and less likely to fail horribly (Notepad++ is Windows-only, but I'm sure there are similarly-featured text editors for other operating systems). I selected all of my ships and opened them at the same time, and then used the Replace All in All Open Documents button in the find-and-replace dialog. As a sanity check, there should be twice as many replacements of EngineerChipFlight to EngineerChip as there are replacements of FlightEngineer to FlightEngineerModule, because each chip itself is named twice (once by the parent part, and once by the chip itself) while the module is only named once (within the actual chip). I then found all locations of BuildEngineer and deleted each of the BuildEngineer MODULE blocks. Notepad++'s bracket matching feature came in very handy here!

Editing the save file (persistent.sfs) itself was the tricky part, because when I deleted one BuildEngineer module, all of the line numbers of the subsequent modules changed, so I couldn't just jump directly to them from the search results window as I did the first. In retrospect, I should have started from the bottom and worked my way up. I'm sure there's a way to automate this (Notepad++ has a feature for recording and executing macros, for one thing), but it didn't take more than a few minutes.