How do I kill the !@#$%^&* shielding mechanic that is screwing my designs?

[steve_v]

Here is a screenshot:

See that linear RCS port? See how it is placed between the engines?
A neat place to put it, one might think, out of the way and aligned, one might think... Except that it does not work. For no logical reason.
It's not obstructed, it's not clipped, the engine shrouds are disabled. Can you guess what fundamentally broken mechanic is causing this?

Here is the part data from the save:

Spoiler

                name = linearRcs
                cid = 4277508190
                uid = 1884030596
                mid = 1510180409
                persistentId = 3684495743
                launchID = 38
                parent = 23
                position = 2.0861625671386719E-07,-16.09996223449707,0
                rotation = 1.00000024,0,0,0
                mirror = 1,1,1
                symMethod = Mirror
                istg = -1
                resPri = 0
                dstg = 0
                sqor = -1
                sepI = -1
                sidx = -1
                attm = 1
                srfN = srfAttach, 23
                attN = root, -1
                mass = 0.0299999993
                shielded = True
                temp = 305.11643947131051
                tempExt = 305.11740897307732
                tempExtUnexp = 4
                expt = 0.5
                state = 0
                attached = True
                autostrutMode = Off
                rigidAttachment = False
                flag = Mk2Expansion/Agencies/IA
                rTrf = linearRcs
                modCost = 0

Note my emphasis ^.
Yes, you guessed it, "shielded". What a load of crap, there's no fairing there.

How in the seven hells do I kill this "shielding" mechanic? I'm running FAR, I have voxels, I don't want this "cannot foo while stowed" horseexcrements. I wanted it to die on day one.

Landing gear have a "deploy shielded" config option, where is the one for the other stuff this moronic system disables?
What about if I remove shrouds from engines entirely and use Decoupler Shroud? Which module do I need to remove from the engine parts to disable shrouds/shielding?
And cargo bays? Will setting lookupRadius to zero remove the shielding zone around them?

 

[Gargamel]

Steve, Have you tried just editing that field in the save?  Manually make it unshielded?  

 

Also, moved to gameplay Q's. 

[4x4cheesecake]

11 hours ago, steve_v said:

attN = root, -1

This line is probably even more interesting because it should not exists on a surface attached part. Looks like you attached the thruster on a 'surface node' created by a mod, so you may want to try to attach the part on a surface and not on a node.

[steve_v]

2 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Have you tried just editing that field in the save?

Sure. It sticks until the save is reloaded or the craft is  unpacked/goes off rails. I have a bash script to do this for all my saves, but it's not really a solution as the game just pig-headedly puts it back.
 

2 hours ago, Gargamel said:

moved to gameplay Q's.

How is this a gameplay question? I'm not asking how to play the game, I'm asking how to fix the game.
It could even be interpreted as a modding question - i.e. how do I mod-out this functionality?

 

1 hour ago, 4x4cheesecake said:

Looks like you attached the thruster on a 'surface node' created by a mod

Possibly, I do have some local MM stuff that adds nodes.
It makes no difference how I attach it though, only that it ends up within or very close to the invisible engine-shroud. I have tried surface attaching it, I have even tried surface-attaching it to remote parts and offsetting it back to the same position.
It stops working once it gets into the zone occupied by the invisible fairing, every time.
The same thing happens if RCS ports are placed on or close to cargo bays - the port quietly refuses to work, with no clue as to why until one opens the save file.

 

From what I can see digging around in part configs, the shroud functionality is built into ModuleEngines and there's no way to disable it. Others had gone so far as to add impossible nodes to prevent it from appearing, back before the editor button was added.
For some unfathomable reason, the editor toggle (or the node trick) seems to remove the visible model and leave the shielding effect.  Who wrote this thing anyway?

Again, how do I turn this stupidity off? Why the hell would anyone want invisible zones of stuff doesn't work on their craft in the first place, what purpose does it serve?

Edited January 27, 2019 by steve_v

[bewing]

1 hour ago, steve_v said:

how do I turn this stupidity off?

Remove all your mods and upgrade to a current version of the game. This isn't a problem in the core game, it's a mod problem. I just built a test craft in stock 1.4.5 with the same rear end as yours, and my linear RCS port works just fine. I can post a picture if you like. I also tested it in 1.6.1 and it still works fine.

Shrouds are not fairings. They do not shield anything. They are only there for decoration. You have misidentified your bugbear. The shrouds are not causing your issue.

As far as cargo bays go, they were recalculated in version 1.4.0 as I recall, so that they no longer shield things that are surface attached to the outside. Show me a picture of an RCS port on a cargo bay that isn't working. I'll try to duplicate it in stock 1.4.5 and see if it works or not. But I bet that it works perfectly.

Quote

How is this a gameplay question? I'm not asking how to play the game, I'm asking how to fix the game.

No, you're asking for tech support on a mod issue.

Edited January 27, 2019 by bewing

[steve_v]

39 minutes ago, bewing said:

Remove all your mods and upgrade to a current version of the game.

Frankly, no. I'm not playing this game without FAR, which I have been using since 0.19.
I'm not upgrading to anything post-1.3.1 either, until Squad fixes joystick support.

I have zero interest in the "current version of the game", on account of the missing input support and the performance hogging ΔV gauges.

 

39 minutes ago, bewing said:

This isn't a problem in the core game.

Now that you mention it, I appear to have conflated this with the well-known cargo-bay issue.
Probably because that one is causing me so much aggravation.

The actual cause is that FAR is bridging between the engines, likely due to voxelisation fidelity and the meshes being so close together.


The other questions remain however - how do I disable the engine shrouds permanently, and how do I disable the "cannot foo while stowed" permanently? The latter would still solve my problem, and shielding disabling parts still serves no purpose.

 

39 minutes ago, bewing said:

As far as cargo bays go, they were recalculated in version 1.4.0

KSP >1.3.1 has broken input handling. Not going there.

Edited January 27, 2019 by steve_v

[OHara]

The aerodynamic protection of cargo bays is more sophisticated (introductory post here https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/developerarticles.html/on-cargo-bays-and-part-occlusion-r156/) than what most posts in this forum assume. 

If a badly-written mod puts things inside the airframe  that should be outside,  you can let RCS thrust anyway:
@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleRCSFX]] {
    @MODULE[ModuleRCSFX] {
        %shieldedCanThrust = True
    }}

(The buggy mod that made me learn this was Making History, with the shroud toggle on the SM-25 service module.)

 

[steve_v]

7 minutes ago, OHara said:

@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[ModuleRCSFX]] {

 

    @MODULE[ModuleRCSFX] {
        %shieldedCanThrust = True
    }}

Thank you! This is exactly what I was after.
Why it isn't the default is beyond me, real RCS thrusters thrust just fine inside a cargo bay.

[bewing]

18 minutes ago, steve_v said:

real RCS thrusters thrust just fine inside a cargo bay.

Not a closed one. Which is what "shielded" is designed for. When you open a cargo bay, everything inside it becomes unshielded.

Edited January 27, 2019 by bewing

[steve_v]

1 hour ago, OHara said:

The buggy mod that made me learn this was Making History

LOL, that sounds about right. 1.4 and MH were a mess.

 

44 minutes ago, bewing said:

Not a closed one.

Yes, they do. They might not actually move the craft, but they certainly will fire if you activate them.
Bad things may happen if you fire an engine inside a cargo bay too, but there's no reason whatsoever that the engine itself would not work.
Perhaps someone is trying to cover up the insubstantial nature of fairings and prevent unsightly rocket exhaust passing through them? That's totally not why this "shielding" thing exists, right?

 

44 minutes ago, bewing said:

Which is what "shielded" is designed for.

"shielded" is nothing but a lousy over-simplified hack to work around the lack of collision detection on fairings. Dare I say a certain developer taking the easiest course, as usual?
Like most lousy hacks, it has corner cases where it causes new problems.
Remember all the complaints when it was introduced? Notice how Squad is still "tweaking" it several releases later? That's because it's a garbage solution.

The real solution to engines and RCS thrusters firing through fairings, as well as extendable parts phasing through them, is to just make cargo bays and fairings collidable.
Fairings are physical objects IRL, they do not allow parts to magically pass through them, and unsurprisingly none of this artificial restriction crap is required to make physics behave.

 

How does "shielded" help with this rubbish? Magic ghost fairings anyone?

Edited January 27, 2019 by steve_v

[bewing]

Thrust is not a physical object, and therefore it is not collidable. Collision detection on fairings, bays, etc will not magically create physically correct behavior, either. The game is based on an engine, and the engine has limits. The game code has to respect the limits of the game engine. The most important fact about engines inside closed bays is that they will not produce useful thrust. It's not a "garbage hack" to make them not produce thrust inside a closed bay. It's the only way the code can reasonably achieve the main proper game behavior. This is a game, not a physics simulation.