[1.8-1.12] Ferram Aerospace Research Continued: v0.16.0.5 "Mader" 03/04/22

[steve_v]

7 hours ago, BrawlerAce said:

how do I successfully land in FAR with my landing gear brakes? Whenever I try landing and braking with my landing gear, my plane always ends up steering to one side and sometimes tipping over and crashing.

Honestly, with wheels in the state they are have been for three years, I don't think you can land reliably without 'chutes.
 

1 hour ago, The-Grim-Sleeper said:

Past posts on this thread suggested I need more wing. 'Enough wing to not stall when flying at 50m/s or less.'

That's kinda ridiculous TBH, real aircraft landing speeds can much higher than that (180-200kts) , and their landing gear don't ever bounce around all over the place or randomly weave from one side of the runway to the other, at least not without serious abuse.
Even with steering completely disabled and no pilot-input KSPs gear will often have your craft swaying down the ruinway like a drunken sailor, and touching the brakes above 80m/s is usually suicide.
 

1 hour ago, vossiewulf said:

use twin nose landing clear

Good advice, but again totally unrealistic.
 

1 hour ago, vossiewulf said:

the plane starts lurching back and forth

This is the problem, 99% of the time. FAR is fine, it's KSPs unbelievably bad springs/dampers that make landing nearly impossible.
Braking on touchdown starts the hopeless spring model oscillating, the craft starts swaying from side-to side and slewing as load varies across the wheels, then it flips over or noses into the ground.
 

1 hour ago, vossiewulf said:

many military aircraft have and use chutes for exactly this reason.

Real aircraft have drag-chutes to reduce landing roll-out distance, not to keep the suspension from loosing the plot. Most real aircraft can land just fine on wheelbrakes alone, because they're operating in a world where physics works properly.

[GDJ]

Having the same issues as the rest of you when it comes to landing. Craft I've replicated from KSP 1.6.1 are taking off fine (Stock or FARc physics), flying beauty, and I can slow down and flare just fine for landings, but when I touch down all hell breaks loose. I've tried altering the resting angle of the craft in relation to the runway (Nose slightly up, slightly down, level), played with the spring/dampener/friction settings, and altering the placement of the rear wheels in relation to the CG. Airbrakes help a bit, but the wheel brakes are knackered above 75 m/s.

Apart from parachutes, if anybody finds a hard solution to the wheel issues, please share with the rest of us. I'll keep tweaking.........

[Jognt]

12 hours ago, GDJ said:

Having the same issues as the rest of you when it comes to landing. Craft I've replicated from KSP 1.6.1 are taking off fine (Stock or FARc physics), flying beauty, and I can slow down and flare just fine for landings, but when I touch down all hell breaks loose. I've tried altering the resting angle of the craft in relation to the runway (Nose slightly up, slightly down, level), played with the spring/dampener/friction settings, and altering the placement of the rear wheels in relation to the CG. Airbrakes help a bit, but the wheel brakes are knackered above 75 m/s.

Apart from parachutes, if anybody finds a hard solution to the wheel issues, please share with the rest of us. I'll keep tweaking.........

Reduce braking strength on the rear gear by 50% and keep an eye on the nose gear. 

KSP ‘simulates’ inertia by simply applying torque when you brake. So each rear wheel is essentially compressing the front wheel when braking. 

This means the nose gear is easily overwhelmed and starts to drift left/right. 

Esit: keep an eye on the front wheel. If the little ‘ankle’ bottoms out: reduce rear brakes further, increase spring on the front wheel, or add another front wheel. 

Edited August 5, 2019 by Jognt

[BrawlerAce]

16 hours ago, The-Grim-Sleeper said:

As far as I know, yes, you are missing something. What that something is, I can't really tell you, because I have the EXACT same problem.

 

10 hours ago, GDJ said:

Having the same issues as the rest of you when it comes to landing. 

I'm glad I'm not the only one having these issues. I've made so many aircraft/spaceplanes and thought I was doing something wrong haha. I've asked around in a few other places too, and the general consensus is that the best way to slow down is by ignoring the gear brakes and using airbrakes/spoilers/thrust reversers/drag chutes/etc. (anything to slow your velocity besides the gear brakes) until you're moving slow enough that the gear brakes won't have any substantial effects. This isn't an ideal solution, but it's better than nothing. An alternative is braking for half a second to a full second, releasing, and braking again, using the rudder to adjust until you're moving slow enough, but this is really inconsistent and can cause your plane to steer out of control anyways, not to mention increasing your landing length. It's the only thing I can think of without resorting to unrealistic solutions.

14 hours ago, steve_v said:

Honestly, with wheels in the state they are have been for three years, I don't think you can land reliably without 'chutes.
 

That's kinda ridiculous TBH, real aircraft landing speeds can much higher than that (180-200kts) , and their landing gear don't ever bounce around all over the place or randomly weave from one side of the runway to the other, at least not without serious abuse.
Even with steering completely disabled and no pilot-input KSPs gear will often have your craft swaying down the ruinway like a drunken sailor, and touching the brakes above 80m/s is usually suicide.
 

Good advice, but again totally unrealistic.
 

This is the problem, 99% of the time. FAR is fine, it's KSPs unbelievably bad springs/dampers that make landing nearly impossible.
Braking on touchdown starts the hopeless spring model oscillating, the craft starts swaying from side-to side and slewing as load varies across the wheels, then it flips over or noses into the ground.
 

Real aircraft have drag-chutes to reduce landing roll-out distance, not to keep the suspension from loosing the plot. Most real aircraft can land just fine on wheelbrakes alone, because they're operating in a world where physics works properly.

That's a real shame. 

For whatever reason though I have a much easier time landing in stock with the landing gear brakes; if I don't turn off steering, the plane may wobble a little but it doesn't steer out of control. I wonder why it's so different in FAR. With that being said, the springs/dampers are clearly noticeable whether using stock or FAR aerodynamics.

[GDJ]

58 minutes ago, BrawlerAce said:

I'm glad I'm not the only one having these issues. I've made so many aircraft/spaceplanes and thought I was doing something wrong haha. .

I doubt it. I've been building planes since 0.19 and this is the worst I've seen the landing gear.

[steve_v]

4 hours ago, GDJ said:

I've been building planes since 0.19 and this is the worst I've seen the landing gear.

Likewise. I don't know about worst (WRT 1.7.x), but wheels in general have been various degrees of terrible since 1.1.
I will say that 1.7.x is far worse than 1.5.x, I haven't been able to land anything reliably of late.

[Iguas]

On 8/4/2019 at 3:42 AM, BrawlerAce said:

Hopefully this isn't too dumb of a question, but how do I successfully land in FAR with my landing gear brakes? Whenever I try landing and braking with my landing gear, my plane always ends up steering to one side and sometimes tipping over and crashing. I've tried disabling my steering, using a wider wheel base, flying with the FAR stability controls, and using a different mod, Atmosphere Autopilot. Am I just missing something here?

I had the same problem, but it seems like the stock wheels just suck...

Try installing Kerbal Foundries, their landing gear work a lot better, and i don't have this kind of problem anymore

Edited August 6, 2019 by Iguas

[Jacke]

2 hours ago, Iguas said:

I had the same problem, but it seems like the stock wheels just suck...

Try installing Kerbal Foundries, their landing gear work a lot better, and i don't have this kind of problem anymore

I've not tried this meself, but for those wanting to try fixing the stock wheels the same way, there's @Shadowmage's framework mod that fixes things:

and its configs for the stock parts, which haven't been updated for 2 years.

https://github.com/shadowmage45/KerbalFoundries2/tree/master/KerbalFoundries-Patches/Stock

[Beetlecat]

One further derail from the FARc topic -- since we're on wheels

3 minutes ago, Jacke said:

and its configs for the stock parts, which haven't been updated for 2 years.

https://github.com/shadowmage45/KerbalFoundries2/tree/master/KerbalFoundries-Patches/Stock

If more of us try these out and give some feedback, they could get an actual update/release with KSPWheel

[Shadowmage]

Just now, Beetlecat said:

If more of us try these out and give some feedback, they could get an actual update/release with KSPWheel

Pretty much exactly that    (please feel free to post up any feedback on those patches in either the KSPWheel thread or KF thread; either works for now;  or simply report issues on one of the repositories).

 

And now back to your regularly scheduled F.A.R. programming....

[Cruss]

On 7/29/2019 at 7:42 PM, Aelipse said:

That is not an intended behaviour. Parts with max temperature 2500 (mk2) should easily survive speeds around 1600 m/s at altitudes above 10,000 m. One of the mods probably messes with the temperature calculation or the settings. You might want to test which mod is the culprit here by switching them off, reloading the game and repeating the flight. A cannot give you a more helpful advice as I've never encountered this particular bug myself.

EDIT: Come to think of it, when I was testing the Real Solar System mod, I noticed it increased the maximum temperature or rate of heat dissipation as I haven't encountered any overheat until my velocity was well beyond 3000 m/s. Maybe the Rescaled Solar System does something similar, only on the opposite direction? Hard to say.

Thank you! That'll help me troubleshooting 

 

i too have been using kerbal foundries. Seems to work great except for minor symmetry issues.

 

edit 2: I've looked at rescale! Config settings, it should not modify anything related to temperature on itself. I'm starting to think it might be a conflict between far and ksp interstellar extended. The latter does modify temperature related mechanics somewhat.

The warppluginsettings cgf specifically has a setting called "engine heat production" among various others. 

Edited August 8, 2019 by Cruss

[Modding Maniac]

hey is there anywhere that explains what the different control surface settings do? like what does a spoiler do if i turn it on

Edited August 9, 2019 by Modding Maniac

[kcs123]

1 hour ago, Modding Maniac said:

hey is there anywhere that explains what the different control surface settings do? like what does a spoiler do if i turn it on

Gooogle is your best friend here. There is Keptin's old but still good thread about creating planes in KSP. It apply to FAR usage too.

Spoiler act as air break when turned on. It deflect upwards and deflect airflow up, while flaps deflect downwards and can be set for 3 different angles. For initial climbing while craft does not have enough velocity yet, for taking off or landing.

[Xt007]

1 hour ago, Modding Maniac said:

hey is there anywhere that explains what the different control surface settings do? like what does a spoiler do if i turn it on

Spoilers reduce lift, flaps increase lift.  Want to take off at low speed? Flaps to both wings! Want to roll fast? Flaps on one side, spoilers on the other.  Yaw? “Flaps” on vertical tail to increase “lift” on tail in the opposite direction of desired rotation.

[dskzz]

Hi, so first thanks for the mod, one thing drives me nuts is how silly some of the aerodynamics are in game.  Seems to be a lot smoother from what I can tell.  Problem is that on first run, while it goes great in atmosphere, the moment I leave the atmosphere I start to get the Null Reference Exceptions spam and framerate slows to a crawl, I mean not the barely playable move - pause - move - pause drop, I mean the pause...pause...get a sandwich...move..pause...pause..etc framerate drop.

Heavily modded.  One thing that fires when I leave the atmosphere is the mod that stops control surfaces in vacuum, that might be the problem. I'll try that at some later point.  Also note I dropped this in mid-career, so I don't know if that makes a difference.  The ship was built from scratch though.  

So here's the logs:

output - https://1drv.ms/t/s!AhBGIkI6WIgGgcMBYjBU5YOL4Tk85g?e=co1dkr

ksp.log - https://1drv.ms/u/s!AhBGIkI6WIgGgcMACLDBRqFCX3-M5A?e=TkKJnS

 

NullReferenceException
  at (wrapper managed-to-native) UnityEngine.Component:get_transform ()
  at FerramAerospaceResearch.FARGUI.FARFlightGUI.PhysicsCalcs.CalculateTotalAeroForce () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at FerramAerospaceResearch.FARGUI.FARFlightGUI.PhysicsCalcs.UpdatePhysicsParameters () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
  at FerramAerospaceResearch.FARGUI.FARFlightGUI.FlightGUI.FixedUpdate () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 
 

 

[kcs123]

4 hours ago, dskzz said:

One thing that fires when I leave the atmosphere is the mod that stops control surfaces in vacuum, that might be the problem. I'll try that at some later point.  Also note I dropped this in mid-career, so I don't know if that makes a difference.  The ship was built from scratch though.  

That could be culprit. IIRC, FAR already do the same thing, it stops movement of control surfaces in vacuum. So, you wil not need that one along with FAR. Another issue may be that FAR rename control surface modules, so if that mod is created for stock only then it is very highly chance that it would do nothing when FAR is installed.

Although, GUI related exceptions is something that I didn't ever noticed with FAR, it may be something totaly new issue.

[dskzz]

Thanks kcs123 Ill try that out, I suspected as much.  One other thing - looks like on installing my ailerions dissapeared from my parts list and on the planes they have no more surface controls.  Was a shocker trying to lift off with a working plane and the thing never lifting off! 

[kcs123]

11 hours ago, dskzz said:

One other thing - looks like on installing my ailerions dissapeared from my parts list and on the planes they have no more surface controls.  Was a shocker trying to lift off with a working plane and the thing never lifting off! 

What craft parts you have used for ailerons ? Not all mods are compatible with FAR. While most of parts like fuselages and such are properly calculated trough voxelisation routine, wings and control surfaces require additioanal config files for FAR. FAR on it's own covers stock parts and maybe(I'm not sure) parts from some mods. Usually mod creator of craft parts also provide configs for FAR, but it is not always a case. For example, author of APP mod don't want to bother with FAR configs, so other users wrote patches for that mod.

[The-Grim-Sleeper]

I've been poking around in the .cfg's of the new helicopter and propeller parts, and their 'when moving'-aerodynamic properties are derived from using some new ModuleControlSurface properties: liftCurve, liftMachCurce, dragCurve and dragMachCurve. And the parts still have maximum_drag, minimum_drag and angularDrag.

Using ModuleManager to set all that to zero and inserting some random FAR properties is straightforward enough. FAR diligently calculates Voxels for the parts, and from what I understand of FAR (next to nothing so please teach me where I am wrong), it handles the lift and drag based on speed and the shape based on those 'FAR properties , without needing any 'precalulated curves' to work.
So it might be possible to make these new parts fully FAR compliant without requiring an extensive expansion... provided I can decipher how those 'FAR properties' apply so a set of control surfaces that are more or less 2by4 shaped.
What am I missing that makes this problem way out of my league?
And if it isn't, would somebody be interested in a dirty hack-job to make FAR-helicopter blades and FAR-propellers?
And if it is, would anybody be interested in me trying to make a dirty hack-job anyway?

Update: well it turns out that just setting the Stock ModuleControlSurface properties to zero also removes the deploy options. So I am going to need somebody to help me.

...Or just accept that these parts have stock physics.

Edited August 23, 2019 by The-Grim-Sleeper
Disappointment

[MOPC]

Updated the config for Airplane Plus mod with latest wing parts, except those which were already added by @Wronk and @theonegalen. If you guys okay with that, I can merge three configs together for ease of use.

Also added simple configs for APP flaps, but not yet sure if they work correctly - would be great if someone tests them.

Link: https://pastebin.com/AdiUwgkB

 

UPD: found and fixed a bug in the .cfg above, which caused NRE when using Basic Curve Winglet (warhawkwing). Thanks to @qromodynmc. Also merged with two aforementioned configs.

Also tested the stock propellers, and looks like they don't work as I expected - flap/spoilers feature of FAR doesn't work the same way as Deploy for stock-configured rotor blades, sadly.

Spoiler

On 8/23/2019 at 1:06 AM, The-Grim-Sleeper said:

inserting some random FAR properties is straightforward enough

@The-Grim-Sleeper, here, I inserted "proper" values for stock rotor blades, following the FAR wiki guide: https://pastebin.com/nnrcyB8L. Not tested that yet, still to open them in career.

Quote

t turns out that just setting the Stock ModuleControlSurface properties to zero also removes the deploy options

Maybe FAR will take over the deployment control if parts have configs, or perhaps we could assign deployment to thrust axis via Action Groups?

 

Edited August 29, 2019 by MOPC

[Wronk]

On 8/26/2019 at 7:45 PM, MOPC said:

Updated the config for Airplane Plus mod with latest wing parts, except those which were already added by @Wronk and @theonegalen. If you guys okay with that, I can merge three configs together for ease of use.

Also added simple configs for APP flaps, but not yet sure if they work correctly - would be great if someone tests them.

Link: https://pastebin.com/rKCb1QaV

@The-Grim-Sleeper, here, I inserted "proper" values for stock rotor blades, following the FAR wiki guide: https://pastebin.com/nnrcyB8L. Not tested that yet, still to open them in career.

Maybe FAR will take over the deployment control if parts have configs, or perhaps we could assign deployment to thrust axis via Action Groups?

Combining the three configs would be great

[AfterLyfe]

Good day,

I recently did a new install of 1.7.3 with about 70 mods or so through CKAN. Once I get in to orbit, and a dropped stage gets unloaded, I also seem to get the FARGUI nullref spam until the debris gets destroyed about 45 seconds later. Then the spam stops. I thought it could be related to the stage recovery mod, but it persists even after I uninstalled it.

[LOG 22:07:01.183] 0004 - Updated Orbital Debris Unloaded
[LOG 22:07:01.188] Packing 0004 - Updated Orbital Debris for orbit
[EXC 22:07:01.203] NullReferenceException
	FerramAerospaceResearch.FARGUI.FARFlightGUI.PhysicsCalcs.CalculateTotalAeroForce ()
	FerramAerospaceResearch.FARGUI.FARFlightGUI.PhysicsCalcs.UpdatePhysicsParameters ()
	FerramAerospaceResearch.FARGUI.FARFlightGUI.FlightGUI.FixedUpdate ()

[LOG 22:07:45.890] [F: 50953]: Vessel 0004 - Updated Orbital Debris was on-rails at 1.0 kPa pressure and was destroyed.

 

ksp log: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h6vp5q1fltqkv8p/KSP.log?dl=0

output: https://www.dropbox.com/s/q9rml9o14fhi6wf/output_log.txt?dl=0

Hoping this can give you some more information as to the cause.

[Drew Kerman]

I've been trying for the longest time to get access to the data in the FAR Flt Data window or calculate them in kOS but you know what? I don't think I've ever just asked whether it's possible a future release of FAR itself could just spit out a CSV when enabled in the settings. Nothing fancy

[BOBBER]

Hey, great mod you've got here, I'm just wondering: does leading and trailing edge shape matter in FAR calculations (b9 procedural wings) and what would you suggest for a supersonic jet?

Edited September 2, 2019 by BOBBER
Grammar

[kcs123]

3 hours ago, BOBBER said:

does leading and trailing edge shape matter in FAR calculations (b9 procedural wings) and what would you suggest for a supersonic jet?

I don't think that shape matter at all. AFAIK, FAR have to made some assumption and aproximations to be able to calculate everything in real time for game usage. One of those assumptions is that thin aerofoil wings are used. So, leading edge wing shape does not make any influence or have very little influence. It might have influence on area rule drag calculation as trough voxelization process edge have some influence on cross section area, but that is usually minor impact so it can be neglated as well.

People who have looked more deeply into FAR code might tell you more about it, I'm just regular user of mod and I can only tell you as much as I can recall from past conversations or when I was seeking for answer on similar questions for myself.