Kerbal Space Program: Breaking Ground Expansion - Grand Discussion Thread

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, LameLefty said:

The KAL module forgetting all the programming upon reverting a Quick Save seems like a pretty obvious bug to have been missed.

The obvious things are the most easily forgotten. It's the reason we used to use a thing called "Planning" on my corporate time.

The Plan would be revised by people that would pinpoint missed things, and then would be "exploded" into Tasks where more missing things would be detected, and then a Test Plan would be wrote using the revised Implementing Plan.

It's boring as hell, a pain in the SAS. But… I had its value, as we see.

(And I agree - this mishap alone worths a new release for the thing)

[naglebagel]

Anyone have any luck with swept wings? I've tried a few variants, and they all are too weak and tend to wobble around.

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, AmpCat said:

I understand. I realized later my wording was maaaybe a bit harsh, despite being accurate. My point was more than sometimes people blame instability on new KSP versions and Squad, when the real reason may be incorrectly installed or corrupted mods, or even just poorly written mods. Remember, believe it or not, it's actually a lot more likely a mod is poorly written than the root game. The main difference is a mod will get feedback and fixed within days, rather than months.

So just because a new patch comes out, don't fear the patch. Just play it and help hunt bugs, rather than accusing Squad of bad programming. Or, if you rather not deal with it, then sure, just wait it out. But it might be a month or two.

But sure, paying money for a new patch that could be more buggy now, than in a month? If you're tight on funds, sure, wait. If not? Live a little!

This has been my outlook. I've jumped into a stock career runthrough with BG just taking notes on gameplay and balance issues. The KAL is absolutely brilliant conceptually but it's got some issues. I'll try to give feedback when I dig it out of the tech tree. In the meantime hopefully others can break down some of the problems with reverts and part-copying/mirroring. 

Edited June 2, 2019 by Pthigrivi

[CosmicHunny]

22 hours ago, Phil deCube said:

No, not touched it. But I did figure out that it was a mod that was causing it. Doh! Should have thought of that first. Turned out to be Kerbal Joint Reinforcement, which makes sense.

Thanks for your suggestion anyway.

Do you know which mods exactly were causing it? I'm having the same issue and don't want to uninstall all my mods if I don't have to.

[Klapaucius]

2 hours ago, naglebagel said:

Anyone have any luck with swept wings? I've tried a few variants, and they all are too weak and tend to wobble around.

Something is really weird in 1.7 with wing flex. Check out my thread on this. I posted a video of the same aircraft in 1.6.1 and 1.7.1 with no modifications. The wings flex like crazy now and they never used to.

 

Edited June 2, 2019 by Klapaucius

[AmpCat]

11 hours ago, LameLefty said:

That depends very much on the system involved (actual engineer here) and how it is designed. It's quite possible for a failed or de-powered hydraulic system to still allow movement. Aircraft, for instance, often have 3 independent hydraulic systems for control surfaces. If the moving parts froze upon system failure, the redundant systems would be unable to continue carrying the workload. 

 

Though the real question is, why the heck would you use hydraulics on a spacecraft? We use all motors and screw drives for pistons here. Hydraulics are too complicated and too prone to failure. Look at real space missions. Modern ones likewise use screws and motors. Extensions on engine bells are a good example. Maybe older craft used hydraulics, but I'd be a bit surprised if any new ones do.

But, to the original point, yeah, even a motorized screw piston is next to impossible to back-drive, without breaking it. Power fails, it just doesn't move.

3 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

This has been my outlook. I've jumped into a stock career runthrough with BG just taking notes on gameplay and balance issues. The KAL is absolutely brilliant conceptually but it's got some issues. I'll try to give feedback when I dig it out of the tech tree. In the meantime hopefully others can break down some of the problems with reverts and part-copying/mirroring. 

I sure used the word 'sure' a lot. For sure.

Edited June 2, 2019 by AmpCat

[AmpCat]

Another bug with losing power. I went to test the power loss issue, and see if I could 'lock' each actuator to avoid slipping when out of power. I used Hyperedit to dump all the power, and it seems to have killed the actuators entirely. They won't move at all now, regardless of what commands I give or how much power is available.

[LameLefty]

6 hours ago, AmpCat said:

Though the real question is, why the heck would you use hydraulics on a spacecraft? We use all motors and screw drives for pistons here. Hydraulics are too complicated and too prone to failure. Look at real space missions. Modern ones likewise use screws and motors. Extensions on engine bells are a good example. Maybe older craft used hydraulics, but I'd be a bit surprised if any new ones do.

Shuttle used them, the SpaceX Falcon 9 uses them to run the grid fins for landing, and I'd be utterly shocked if Dream Chaser doesn't use them too, but I'm not particularly familiar with its design. Point being, hydraulic systems offer very high torque and response speed for very low energy input. The trade-off, of course, is the weight and complexity of the plumbing, but risks of leaks and pressure failures. 

There are always trades. *shrug*

[dok_377]

So, can somebody from Squad explain why that's a thing? This is going to break a lot of crafts, you know. 
https://bugs.kerbalspaceprogram.com/issues/22733

Edited June 2, 2019 by dok_377

[lajoswinkler]

Two questions.

1) In the cinematic trailer we see Kerbals having orange and blue glowing suits - I've managed to see only orange in my game's EVA. Where is the blue glow?

2) What happened to the old Soviet style suits from "Making history"? I don't see them anymore.

[JohnTomato]

My wheels have LOCKED autostrut, therefore hinges don't work. Is there any way to disable this?

 

EDIT: Disabling KJR fixed this problem for me.

Edited June 2, 2019 by JohnTomato

[Tapeta]

24 minutes ago, lajoswinkler said:

1) In the cinematic trailer we see Kerbals having orange and blue glowing suits - I've managed to see only orange in my game's EVA. Where is the blue glow?

You can have only one color of the suit light for gender. By default it is orange color.

see following video by Inter's Odyssey:

 

[SkyRender]

Alright, more problems have emerged with deployed science.  It only works when you're not in time warp; as soon as you time warp, it becomes disconnected from its power sources and does nothing.  This includes when you time-warp from another vessel.  This, needless to say, is a big problem.

[Pthigrivi]

1 hour ago, Tapeta said:

You can have only one color of the suit light for gender. By default it is orange color.

see following video by Inter's Odyssey:

 

^Thats cool. Damn though they should really assign suit colors by class rather than gender though. 4 suit colors total with orange for the original 4?

[Qwarkk]

So I cant get the hydraulic cylinder pistons to work at all. The current extension always goes to something like -3.14165E-05m and changing the target extension has no effect. The part also never registers any electric charge being supplied to it.

Im playing a modded install but I cant find any incompatibility.

Any ideas?

[jarnold]

All the robotic parts get stuck on a certain angle sometimes for me, I think it might have something to do with copying. Then it was mentioned before, that they need to be attached to nodes properly, so holding alt while attaching them seems to help. Can't replicate anything consistently though...

 

At least building from scratch has always helped, but that might be a lot of work sometimes

[Superfluous J]

2 hours ago, JohnTomato said:

My wheels have LOCKED autostrut, therefore hinges don't work. Is there any way to disable this?

We've noticed that they don't ALWAYS do that. Only sometimes. I had a craft that the pistons wouldn't move very far due to autostrut, then I reverted to launch and it worked as expected - pistons were able to move wheels even though they were autostrutted to root.

I personally think they're supposed to work but there's something buggy, but I can't reliably recreate it so can't submit a bug with a craft file that will fail 100% of the time. If you have such a craft, I suggest you report it.

[JohnTomato]

44 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

We've noticed that they don't ALWAYS do that. Only sometimes. I had a craft that the pistons wouldn't move very far due to autostrut, then I reverted to launch and it worked as expected - pistons were able to move wheels even though they were autostrutted to root.

I personally think they're supposed to work but there's something buggy, but I can't reliably recreate it so can't submit a bug with a craft file that will fail 100% of the time. If you have such a craft, I suggest you report it.

I have tried some 30 times or so, reverting to launch and to SBH. I'll submit it then. I've tried creating a CFG file in order to disable autostrut on ModuleWheelBase modules but it did not work.

[MaianTrey]

5 hours ago, JohnTomato said:

My wheels have LOCKED autostrut, therefore hinges don't work. Is there any way to disable this?

are your wheels mounted directly to the hinge? Try putting a part in-between the hinge and wheel (might want to node-attach the part in between to the hinge).

[JohnTomato]

23 minutes ago, MaianTrey said:

are your wheels mounted directly to the hinge? Try putting a part in-between the hinge and wheel (might want to node-attach the part in between to the hinge).

I feel so dumb. I disabled KJR and it works perfectly. Wheels mounted directly to the hinge or not.

[Xavven]

Breaking Ground seems to have changed the level 2 VAB. Full action groups (including custom keys 1-10) appear enabled at level 2 instead of having to wait until level 3.

Before this patch/DLC the level 2 VAB did not give custom buttons 1-10. It only gave you stage, brake, lights toggle, etc.

Was this change intentional? If so, the building's description needs to be updated.

[MechBFP]

12 minutes ago, Xavven said:

Breaking Ground seems to have changed the level 2 VAB. Full action groups (including custom keys 1-10) appear enabled at level 2 instead of having to wait until level 3.

Before this patch/DLC the level 2 VAB did not give custom buttons 1-10. It only gave you stage, brake, lights toggle, etc.

Was this change intentional? If so, the building's description needs to be updated.

Check your new game settings. There is an option to always allow action groups from the get go. 

[Xavven]

Just now, MechBFP said:

Check your new game settings. There is an option to always allow action groups from the get go. 

Thanks for the reminder, and yes indeed I did check that. When I noticed this change in my new career, I verified by starting another new career game for testing, ensuring that option was off, then maxing starting funds and science, setting funds penalties to 10% so I could easily upgrade the VAB without running any actual missions. I opened the level 1 VAB, saw there were no action groups, then upgraded it to level 2 and all action groups were available.

[SkyRender]

I don't remember seeing this happen in any previous version, but mini-docking ports sometimes just sort of... bounce off each other now instead of actually docking.  Angle and speed are completely irrelevant, they'll just slam headfirst and then jettison the craft that should have docked away in a random direction at 0.5 to 2m/s.  It's weird, and annoying.

[Pthigrivi]

12 hours ago, MechBFP said:

Check your new game settings. There is an option to always allow action groups from the get go. 

I like the BG changes. Still I think this could be refined more. Possibly offering standard groups at level 1, then adding some axis groups and custom 1-3 at level 2 and the balance at level 3? I’ll be writing up some more concrete feedback once I get deeper into my run-through. 

Edited June 3, 2019 by Pthigrivi