Kerbal Space Program: Breaking Ground Expansion - Grand Discussion Thread

[Geonovast]

1 minute ago, Snark said:

I don't think that's going to work

I suggest you give it a try.  It's the first thing I did.  It's... interesting.

[fourfa]

1 minute ago, Snark said:

I don't think that's going to work.  I believe Unity has a built-in rotational speed limit, i.e. it's physically impossible to rotate faster than a certain speed, and I believe that limit is something like 500 RPM.  The rotors are already pushing that.  If you try to stack them, I think you'll run into the Unity-rotational equivalent of the lightspeed limit.  Nothing the game can do about that.

Goodness knows I'm no Unity expert, so I might have gotten some of the details wrong, but I think that's in the ballpark.

So far, in real use the rotors aren't pushing close to the 460rpm game max. Especially not if you're getting useful amounts of lift or thrust from them.  I've found stacking two motors can help get a lot closer to that 460rpm max, without breaking the form factor and having to add nacelles.

More than 2 - so far it turns into a wiggly stack of jello for me.  I found one rudimentary way to stiffen it up here:

https://kerbalx.com/fourfa/Kessna-Twin

With external struts to secure the loose end.

[Superfluous J]

10 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:

I tried stacking three rotors on top of each other, the top two reversed, the outer ones with blades, but they wouldn't sync

I've been having some luck clipping radial-mounted cubic octagonal struts into the bottom rotor, and mounting the top rotor on those.

I've also been having helicopters shake themselves apart, so YMMV.

[Ultimate Steve]

Update, got to 22,222m plus a bit but that number sounds cooler.

However, I used a glitch. Highest alt without glitch was like 21.3-ish km.

If you go into physics warp, if your blades are made of more than one segment then they will stretch out, which will reduce rotor speed for a bit, but when you jump back to normal time they contract back in and move faster for a few seconds, giving you a speed boost. Repeat for profit.

This craft wasn't optimized very well, I suspect that 30km is doable.

[Superfluous J]

Is there a trick to getting more than one wing section per blade? One wing section is solid. Two and the craft shakes violently until 2-4 of the outer sections break, and then it calms down but is then unflyable.

Also HOLY COW MY LAPTOP IS BURNING. Like, almost too hot to touch.

Edited May 31, 2019 by 5thHorseman

[theJesuit]

27 minutes ago, Snark said:

If you try to stack them, I think you'll run into the Unity-rotational equivalent of the lightspeed limit.  Nothing the game can do about that

That sounds like it should be added to the head cannon.

Peace.

[MaverickSawyer]

14 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

Also HOLY COW MY LAPTOP IS BURNING. Like, almost too hot to touch.

I've noticed a significant drop in game performance with the update, compared to stock 1.6.1... maybe that's causing your computer to work harder?

[Pthigrivi]

Squad: Don't use these to make propellers.
Literally everyone: *makes propellers*

[Ultimate Steve]

I have been doing some robotic arm experiments with the idea to assemble a space station using it. However, I'm having trouble getting it precise enough, and the docking ports like to derp out and not work.

Is there a mod, or a quick patch that can be done to give the right click menu option to set the docking port state from "Disengage" to "Ready?"

[Opus_723]

If you saw the freely rotating hinges and thought "I'll bet making a rope out of those and attaching a command chair to one end and a rocket to the other would be fun..."

Then I'm here to confirm: Yes. It's very fun. 

Edited May 31, 2019 by Opus_723

[I_Killed_Jeb]

are the robotic parts (esp. hinges and rotors) re-entry capable in terms of heat tolerance?

[Dragonking]

C

Edited May 24, 2023 by Dragonking

[purpleivan]

Anyone having issues with assemblies using rotors attached to hinges shaking themselves when not in use. It doesn't happen for me all the time, but on about 1/4 of scene loads everything downstream from the rotors start to robble about quite violently.

Don't know if the rotors had the same behaviour on their own (I should try that out). The hinges are used to swing the paddles up above the wate line, so that I can safely drop the thing in the water using Vessel Mover.

For anyone curious, this is probably (no definitely) the slowest thing I've ever built, as it speeds along along at the awesome rate of 3.6m/s, but that's at 200rpm on the motors. Higher than that and the splash particle rate makes my already choppy framerate drop to a slideshow.

Note to self... must build a new gaming rig.

 

Edited May 31, 2019 by purpleivan

[purpleivan]

I moved back to something I was working on yesterday and I'm no getting some really strange behaviour when using action groups to control parts.

On my vehicle I have all the hinges that deploy/retract the wheels on Custom One key. However when I use this, some wheels are affected, but others aren't. At first I thought it was just an error on my part and remade that part of the vehicle. When I tried out the new version, the same behaviour occurs.

What's really strange though is that if I use Revert to Launch, I get different wheels not obeying the action, each time I revert.

This behaviour only started for me today, after making some changes to the vehicle (different wheels and more of them). Yesterday it seemed to be fine.

My final guess was that it was a mods issue, but removing mine and firing up in stock didn't fix it.

So anyone else seeing this?

[klgraham1013]

7 hours ago, basic.syntax said:

Classic Kerbal mayhem, nobody dies - great cinematic!

This.  We don't need another 1.0 trailer.  ...and, in my opinion, Kerbals aren't stupid.  Just overly enthusiastic to the point of mayhem.  The trailer shows that.  They are doing real work and real science.  They are competent.  They can just get a bit overzealous leading to broken beakers and electrical fires.

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, purpleivan said:

So anyone else seeing this?

Me too, and I’m using straight stock. I’ll have to be more rigorous to understand how to reproduce it but yes copying things and even adding and removing things seems to wreak havoc on the KAL. At the very least a lot of suboptimal behavior. And agreed with some others being able to copy key frame profiles would help a lot. 

Another minor issue is hitting “.5” in the value entry field in the controller panel doesn’t work. You have to put in “0.5” the first time or it will drop the decimal.

I might have to wait for a patch before putting in more work in on my centipede. 

Off to see if these surface features show up on Kerbnet!

Edited May 31, 2019 by Pthigrivi

[KerikBalm]

Well, I very quickly got a working, easy flying helicopter... But I couldn't get it going much over 20 m/s, less than that sustained. It also brought up an old gripe of mine, the stupid SAS that won't even try to hold a hrading.

This sas mode needs to die

Next, I tried VTOLs, and they work fairly well. One issue seems to be related to autostruts... Stuff often wont rotate when autostrutted. A few times the Autostrut Locked feature broke my designs this locking needs to die.

Another vtol i did had 8 rapiers on a single servo (largest size). I had to throttle back, or when they got into their powerband, the engine pods would shear off.

I also found that tilt wings are not good at high speed with floppy servo joints.

I made it work by engaging Autostrut just after rotating the wings and engines, but before I pick up too much speed. It would be nice if I could action group that.

Then I tried to make a compact science helicopter that fits in a mk3 bay.

I used telescoping poles to increase rotor diameter, and it worked, but it had worse handling than my first helo, and still only had a 20 m/s top speed. I might as well use a Rover at that speed.

I was overly optimistic when I was dreaming of V-22 osprey knockoffs transporting cargo around duna

So I finished up playing by making a twin panther Vtol, packed with all the old science, and the new, then flew to the mountain prak west northwest of ksc, and set up a science base right on the cliff.

Fyi, it seems solar panels generate 1 power unit by default, but 4 when deployed by a maxed engineer.

Im a bit disappointed that they cant share power with normal craft.

Also, the panels track the sun, but there is no sun exposure readout, I wonder how they will work with day/night, and different distances from the sun. Their power output right now is listed as small integer values... A default of 1... Will it still make 1 on duna? Must test (there's got to be a reason for the RTG part)

 

[Klapaucius]

11 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:

What if you stacked the rotors, giving twice (or even more!) the spin speed?

I've trying to get a prop plane off the ground. I cannot get it to go more than 25 m/s.  I tried stacking the rotors and that increased it by a stunning 3 m/s.  So I reckon @Snark is right about that.

 

9 hours ago, Snark said:

 I believe Unity has a built-in rotational speed limit, i.e. it's physically impossible to rotate faster than a certain speed, and I believe that limit is something like 500 RPM.  The rotors are already pushing that.  If you try to stack them, I think you'll run into the Unity-rotational equivalent of the lightspeed limit.  Nothing the game can do about that.

Goodness knows I'm no Unity expert, so I might have gotten some of the details wrong, but I think that's in the ballpark.

This is frustrating. A proper plane in the real world is doing way more rpms than that. I did a quick Google search and a Grumman Hellcat was rated at 2400 rpm and those Merlins in the  Spitfires were doing 3000.  I think my hopes for building a lot of prop planes will need to be tempered somewhat.

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

I was overly optimistic when I was dreaming of V-22 osprey knockoffs transporting cargo around duna

Yes, I had a lot of hopes for doing more extensive stuff with props. It seems we have some pretty underpowered stuff here.

[MechBFP]

4 hours ago, purpleivan said:

What's really strange though is that if I use Revert to Launch, I get different wheels not obeying the action, each time I revert.

Someone else mentioned that reverting can cause the KAL to lose it’s programming sometimes. 

1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

there's got to be a reason for the RTG part

When you are on the poles of planets and have either very little or no sun.

Also on the dark side of Moho, as it is tidally locked to the Sun. 

[purpleivan]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Me too, and I’m using straight stock. I’ll have to be more rigorous to understand how to reproduce it but yes copying things and even adding and removing things seems to wreak havoc on the KAL. At the very least a lot of suboptimal behavior. And agreed with some others being able to copy key frame profiles would help a lot. 

Another minor issue is hitting “.5” in the value entry field in the controller panel doesn’t work. You have to put in “0.5” the first time or it will drop the decimal.

I might have to wait for a patch before putting in more work in on my centipede. 

Off to see if these surface features show up on Kerbnet!

I'd included a KAL unit in my vehicle, thinking it might be required for anything robotic to work, or that that I'd set it up for use later. However I'd not actually used it, instead I just set a custom key to "Toggle Hinge".

I just now set up the deployment of my wheels to be done via the KAL editor and the result was the same. Random wheels failed to obey instructions, both on first launch and then on return to launch. At the moment I can't get reliably working robotic hinges, even when freshly launched.

One thing I noticed is that it doesn't seem to be a problem with the robotics programming on launch/relaunch that's the issue. Instead it seems that the individual hinge parts fail. If I use the right click menu to try and rotate the hinges that don't deploy, they start to rotate, but after about 10 degrees they just stop. The hinges that deploy correctly when the custom key is used, also work from the right click meny.

Here's a video of what I mean.

[Phreakish]

5 minutes ago, purpleivan said:

I'd included a KAL unit in my vehicle, thinking it might be required for anything robotic to work, or that that I'd set it up for use later. However I'd not actually used it, instead I just set a custom key to "Toggle Hinge".

I just now set up the deployment of my wheels to be done via the KAL editor and the result was the same. Random wheels failed to obey instructions, both on first launch and then on return to launch. At the moment I can't get reliably working robotic hinges, even when freshly launched.

One thing I noticed is that it doesn't seem to be a problem with the robotics programming on launch/relaunch that's the issue. Instead it seems that the individual hinge parts fail. If I use the right click menu to try and rotate the hinges that don't deploy, they start to rotate, but after about 10 degrees they just stop. The hinges that deploy correctly when the custom key is used, also work from the right click meny.

Here's a video of what I mean.

Try disabling auto strut on your hinges. 

[Pthigrivi]

Anyone know a good robotics tutorial online yet? I figure I should start out doing things 'correctly' and sort out where some of the errors are from there. 

[Klapaucius]

It's not an amazing replica,  and I am sure others will do it far better down the line, but....

 

X-WING!

 

 

Edited May 31, 2019 by Klapaucius

[Klapaucius]

9 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Anyone know a good robotics tutorial online yet? I figure I should start out doing things 'correctly' and sort out where some of the errors are from there. 

What are the specific questions? I was confused at first, but am starting to get my head around it.  Downloading and playing with @Brikoleur's copters which are on KerbalX was very helpful.

They've mapped the following keys to the new axis groups:

Translate Up: K

Translate Down: I

Translate Left: 

Translate Right: L

Translate Forward: H

Translate Back: N

 

The cool thing is you can set the hinges and arms to do an all or nothing, (as KSP works now on PC with control surfaces) OR you can move things partially.  For example, with a hinge I can move it 30 degrees and take my finger off the key, then press the key again to move it another 30 degrees.  You can also restrict the extension to within certain parameters and also control the speed at which it moves.  I don't know if that is at all helpful, but it is easier than I thought at first.

[Pthigrivi]

6 minutes ago, Klapaucius said:

What are the specific questions? I was confused at first, but am starting to get my head around it.  Downloading and playing with @Brikoleur's copters which are on KerbalX was very helpful.

They've mapped the following keys to the new axis groups:

Translate Up: K

Translate Down: I

Translate Left: 

Translate Right: L

Translate Forward: H

Translate Back: N

 

The cool thing is you can set the hinges and arms to do an all or nothing, (as KSP works now on PC with control surfaces) OR you can move things partially.  For example, with a hinge I can move it 30 degrees and take my finger off the key, then press the key again to move it another 30 degrees.  You can also restrict the extension to within certain parameters and also control the speed at which it moves.  I don't know if that is at all helpful, but it is easier than I thought at first.

Good to know, and yeah... I only had a few hours to play around with it last night. Primarily my issues are with making walkers with the KAL. I've been able to manually sequence the legs to move in a satisfying way in the SPH--building a leg, copying it, then manually setting the movements of each joint in the control panel. But when I did further work some joints stopped working after launch, sequences disappeared on revert, etc. If I knew the intended assembly protocol--(build one leg > sequence it > copy it > modify sequence; or build the whole craft > put on the KAL > manually sequence each joint for each leg individually, etc.) then it would be easier to log errors and find work-arounds.