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

[Picard]

Ahh bugger

 

How do I load a file onto this forum?

[Enot02]

I wonder if someone actually beat KSP with FAR... Did they?

[taniwha]

@EnotMunin: how do you "beat" KSP? But anyway, I have cleared the tech tree twice now (and almost cleared it several times) over the years since ksp 0.22 (when the tech tree was introduced), and I always use FAR (about two weeks after I started playing back in 0.19).

[Xd the great]

I found the following error in one of my installed mods:

Spoiler

//@PART[BFR_cargo_variant]:NEEDS[FerramAerospaceResearch|NEAR]:FOR[FerramAerospaceResearch] {
    @module = Part
    @maximum_drag = 0
    @minimum_drag = 0
    @angularDrag = 0
    !dragCoeff = DELETE
    !deflectionLiftCoeff = DELETE
    !MODULE[ModuleLiftingSurface] {}
    %MODULE[FARWingAerodynamicModel] {
        %b_2 = -3.75
        %MAC = 2.25
        %TaperRatio = 1
        %MidChordSweep = 26.57
        %rootMidChordOffsetFromOrig = 0, 1.313, 0    }
}

How do I solve it?

[Enot02]

8 hours ago, taniwha said:

@EnotMunin: how do you "beat" KSP? But anyway, I have cleared the tech tree twice now (and almost cleared it several times) over the years since ksp 0.22 (when the tech tree was introduced), and I always use FAR (about two weeks after I started playing back in 0.19).

Not bad man, I think it's just me with instability in rockets 

[AloE]

On 1/13/2019 at 8:21 AM, Picard said:

How do I load a file onto this forum?

On 1/11/2019 at 9:59 AM, Picard said:

left and right vertical stabilizers are identical in the pressure they're imparting. Instead of mirroring eachother and offsetting

 

usually by a public sharing link...needs to be uploaded to a cloud service you have and then you share a public link to it....if you do not already use something like google drive, onedrive, or dropbox...then I suggest creating a KerbalX account so you can easily share as well as find & store interesting craft in 'hangars'...such an account can also be useful integrated ingame with Craft Manager ... this suggests to me that I should also add some 'forum tips' to one of my KerbalEdu help topics as I also had a steep learning curve on using this forum...Also if you highlight a part of someone's post, the KSP forum should popup a small window near the highlight that says something like "quote selection"...if you click that it adds the text to the message being composed (e.g. see the quotes I added above) and (usually) notifies the person being quoted so they can respond more easily if needed.

Edited January 16, 2019 by AloE

[taniwha]

12 hours ago, Enot02 said:

Not bad man, I think it's just me with instability in rockets 

This comes down a lot to piloting style (rockets are generally inherently unstable). However, that instability can be overcome. Fins help somewhat, as do gymbals, but the main thing is to start your turn early and then hold prograde out to space (or at least the upper atmosphere).

General tips that I got from the original thread back in the beginning and that still hold true:

• Get your CoM as high as you can and your CoP as low as you can (this is the most difficult, and may even be impossible)
• Long and slender tends to work better than short and wide.
• Keep you on-the-pad TWR in the 1.2-1.5 range
• Start your turn early. It varies, but somewhere between 40-100m/s is a good time.
• Turn only a small amount (about 5 degrees).
• Hold prograde from then on.
• Design for the first major staging event to be above 10km.

I have found that with reasonable second stage TWR (1-2), hitting 50-60 degrees around 10km altitude generally leads to a very good ascent profile, and you will generally be going 300-400m/s.

Note that the above are only guidelines: some variation is possible.

[Gordon Fecyk]

On 1/15/2019 at 4:28 AM, Enot02 said:

I wonder if someone actually beat KSP with FAR... Did they?

Does building a single-stage orbiter with a 40+ tonne capacity count as 'beating KSP' with Ferram Aerospace? I figured with one of these, you could construct almost anything else in orbit.

 

[inkwell]

On 1/21/2019 at 10:17 PM, Gordon Fecyk said:

Does building a single-stage orbiter with a 40+ tonne capacity count as 'beating KSP' with Ferram Aerospace? I figured with one of these, you could construct almost anything else in orbit.

 

FAR actually makes spaceplanes (especially of the cargo carrying variety) MUCH easier. still, it sure satisfying when you release that big orange tank next to your station/fuel depot from a ssto that you'll pilot back to the KSC runway

[Bla Bla]

On 1/27/2019 at 6:33 PM, inkwell said:

FAR actually makes spaceplanes (especially of the cargo carrying variety) MUCH easier

Allow me to disagree... With stock aerodynamics, the location of wing parts has no impact on the lift they provide, and they can be clipped as much as one wants. With FAR, if a wing is clipped, the lift reduces by as much.

Furthermore, in my experience, every spaceplane that works with FAR works as well with stock aerodynamics, but the opposite is rarely true. That alone is quite self-demonstrating...

Making good planes with FAR is an art, it is much more demanding than the stock aerodynamics model (and a great incentive to learn more on real life aerodynamics).

Edited January 29, 2019 by Bla Bla

[taniwha]

19 minutes ago, Bla Bla said:

Allow me to disagree... With stock aerodynamics, the location of wing parts has no impact on the lift they provide, and they can be clipped as much as one wants. With FAR, if a wing is clipped, the lift reduces by as much.

This is what makes designing planes with FAR easier: no magic and a lot of reference material. About the only things that stock makes easier are landing and stability, and rather than "easier", "more forgiving" might be more appropriate.

[Gordon Fecyk]

43 minutes ago, Bla Bla said:

every spaceplane that works with FAR works as well with stock aerodynamics, but the opposite is rarely true.

I don't know about that. I've been told that this Tier 4 creation is very poor in stock aero, probably because of the side-attached FL-T400 tanks and nothing to cap their forward-facing nodes. But in FAR it has decent body lift and little drag.

 

[Jognt]

1 hour ago, Bla Bla said:

Allow me to disagree... With stock aerodynamics, the location of wing parts has no impact on the lift they provide, and they can be clipped as much as one wants. With FAR, if a wing is clipped, the lift reduces by as much.

Furthermore, in my experience, every spaceplane that works with FAR works as well with stock aerodynamics, but the opposite is rarely true. That alone is quite self-demonstrating...

Making good planes with FAR is an art, it is much more demanding than the stock aerodynamics model (and a great incentive to learn more on real life aerodynamics).

My mate’s spaceplane that worked fine in FAR couldn’t get up to speed in Stock aero. 

Spaceplanes are super forgiving in FAR because you are far less limited by the weird drag system that is stock, allowing you to easily get up to speed on air.

I fail to see what you claim is self demonstrating. 

Edited January 29, 2019 by Jognt

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, Jognt said:

Spaceplanes are super forgiving in FAR because you are far less limited by the weird drag system that is stock, allowing you to easily get up to speed on air.

It's only easier to get up to speed on airbreathers in FAR if you design your craft right, a brick flies like a brick.
In stock it's just about having no open nodes, minimising the number of stacks and having an unrealistically high TWR. It's not harder, just weirder.

[Jognt]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

It's only easier to get up to speed on airbreathers in FAR if you design your craft right, a brick flies like a brick.
In stock it's just about having no open nodes, minimising the number of stacks and having an unrealistically high TWR. It's not harder, just weirder.

I didn't mean to pass judgement on what was 'harder'. I merely pointed out the flaw in Bla Bla's comment that essentially said "if it works in FAR, it'll work in stock" which just is not true.

[Beetlecat]

A quick question for FAR users... having some frustration/fun!:

On the subject of the slower end of the craft spectrum, I'm fiddling with a small cessna caravan-like replica that has some mod components that achieves ~90m/s or so in stock. With FAR, the thing tops around 180m/s at level flight. Am I right to expect that drag should be keeping this thing at a much slower pace than nearly mach .5? The engine could be overpowered (not unusual for KSP) but the plane glides like mad as well.

I've not tinkered with any FAR settings, but I also haven't checked to see if all the components have proper FAR configs (crew cabin, tail boom). I'm using a set of MM patches for the Airplane Plus wing bits.

 

Edited January 29, 2019 by Beetlecat

[Jognt]

From what I've seen on my mate's KSP that's entirely possible. Note that I haven't yet played much with FAR myself but from what I can tell there's less drag in general than in stock (less 'soup-y' atmosphere?). Every time my mate asked me for advice in stock it was "How can I make my plane go faster?" yet in FAR it was "How can I stop my plane from stalling at take-off and landing?"

I could be wrong though, in which case I'll probably be corrected in about 12 garbage collection cycles.

[Beetlecat]

Less drag, for sure -- but certainly more opportunity for failure(s)

The sensation of transitioning from stock to FAR has been hilarious --un-learning some bad habits, re-learning good ones, and dealing with the fact that once a craft is airborne, it can wind up going ridiculously fast, and be super hard to slow down for an actual landing. That feeling of slipping through the air like a greased pig in a craft that looks not-at-all capable of reaching those speeds...

After some more craft adjustments and practice, I've gotten my craft down to a rotate/stall speed with the help of flaps at around 60m/s -- oddly close to the real deal!

[Bla Bla]

On 1/29/2019 at 5:37 AM, steve_v said:

In stock it's just about having no open nodes, minimising the number of stacks and having an unrealistically high TWR. It's not harder, just weirder.

Absolutely ! I have to temperate my opinions (and express them better), cause I actually agree with a lot of what you (all) said.

I should definetly have elaborated more... In my experience, the abominations that I created and that flew well enough (to beyond the Mun) with stock aerodynamics always ended up very unstable and either flipping over at take-off or being dismantled in mid-air by the stronger aerodynamic stress on the most external parts (such as wings) with FAR.

The carefully designed spaceplanes that I created later with FAR could always fly without modification and stay stable with stock earo, and never facing unplanned disassembly in mid-air, that what I meant by "I disagree" that FAR is "much more easy".

FAR personally motivated me to learn a lot about real life planes, like the section surface area rule (how constant), the surface area curve rule (how smooth the variations), how the weight of the attached engines can prevent the wings to bend too much (same for the weight of the fuel inside, that is always emptied last IRL), you have the mach cone, transition phase, the difference between "surface drag" (linked to the area in contact with air, predominant at subsonic speed) and "shock wave drag" (linked to the "unpointiness" of nose and unsmoothiness of shapes, much more potent than the former at supersonic speeds), added stress in manoeuvers on parts further away from the CoM, and so on... All these things I didn't have to care about with stock.

In stock aero the parts have a drag value (and a side drag value) in the .cfg file, and the model compute a value of drag in flight between the two (depending on the part orientation). Radialy attached parts add their drag to the part they are attached to, same with parts attached to a bicoupler (even the mk2 one). Nose cones reduce the drag of the part they are attached too. Parts inside of fairings have close to no drag. If you know these rules (and so avoid bicouplers) stock planes should be easy. FAR calculate drag from the occlusion (same as heat) and from an elaborate model based on the shape of the whole craft that I mostly wouldn't understand anyway ^^. The stall speed relies much more on the altitude and so thickness of the air (realisticly), and stability will vary across all the flight enveloppe (speed ans altitude). Not having to vary the control surfaces' settings in flight (cause it's more pracical) to stay stable is much more challenging.

With regard to performance, it is true that drag is reduced in FAR compared to stock (with a streamlined craft), as both the lift and drag are reduced when parts are clipped (and a wing's lift will drastically reduce if it's not "clean" on one of its sides, like irl. Most of the stock spaceplaces on Steam would find it hard even to take off with FAR, or at least certainly the bigger ones that have so much stuff stuffed in sandwitch between their wings). Compared to the stock model where wings/control surfaces produce the same lift even from the inside of a fuselage, and all parts also produce drag from the same inside of a fuselage. But you can also cheat drag in stock by attaching clipped nose cones to engines, using fairings, etc... So stock is, definetly, "harder" in the sense that you have to know and adapt to the game's specific set of rules and their tricks to keep your drag low, that are further away from real life and sometimes counter-intuitive. FAR in "simpler" in the sense that the drag depends only on the shape and position of parts, and if you conceive something that is closer to a plane that'd be stable in real life it should perform well, and you have plenty of examples to work from. It is also much "harder" in the sense that you have to conceive a plane that'd be stable in real life, or fail (much more spectacularly than in stock). ^^

And now that you say it, it is true that my Eve Lifter seems to have lost quite some performance when flown without FAR... Still the added lift with stock allowed me to add a little fuel and make it fullfill it's mission (that is : lifting an SSTO high enough in Eve's atmosphere so it can escape in a fully reusable way). It also remained much harder to make it break the tips of it's wings in hard manoeuvers in low Eve atmosphere in stock, so I still think stock is more forgiving.

By the way, I'd love to use FAR with the lattest ksp version, but the curves seem not to appear anymore in editor, am I the only one?

Edited January 31, 2019 by Bla Bla

[Proximity4]

Hello people, how do you play with FAR since official KSP became 64-bit only? I have heard that FAR works only on 32-bit versions. My CKAN FAR for 1.6.1 64-bit doesn't want to work with this version (no proper CoA, no data about aerodynamics, nothing!), and i cannot launch the 32-bit version because there isn't such one. Please help me, which screenshots/logs shall i upload?

[taniwha]

@Proximity4: As of KSP 1.0, FAR has supported 64-bit Windows KSP, and has always supported 64-bit Linux KSP.

[Proximity4]

4 hours ago, taniwha said:

@Proximity4: As of KSP 1.0, FAR has supported 64-bit Windows KSP, and has always supported 64-bit Linux KSP.

I have official licensed KSP and installed latest fully compatible FAR via CKAN, but it shows no graphs and the icon is black. It shows the curves in trans-sonic simulation but still no stability data. What am i doing wrong?

without pressure and cross-section curves

with curves

log

[SpaceFoon]

So is the stock system still really bad? Do I need this? Does this hurt my frames?

[Proximity4]

7 minutes ago, SpaceFoon said:

So is the stock system still really bad? Do I need this? Does this hurt my frames?

Stock system isn't aerodynamic at all, just stupid multiplication of drag values. It is quite hard to build a REALLY FLYING plane with FAR but it will be very realistic. FPS will not be affected much, if you have more than 40-50 then don't worry. It is all loading the processor, if your CPU is good in single-core, then no problem

[SpaceFoon]

Just now, Proximity4 said:

Stock system isn't aerodynamic at all, just stupid multiplication of drag values. It is quite hard to build a REALLY FLYING plane with FAR but it will be very realistic. FPS will not be affected much, if you have more than 40-50 then don't worry. It is all loading the processor, if your CPU is good in single-core, then no problem

Cool thanks for the quick reply. A decent CPU is all my computer has going for it so I will install this. I really miss the building aids this mod has.