love the new action axis system, but...

[Nuke]

first the whats good about it part. its certainly making it a lot easier to control vtols. i made some hastily thrown together attempts at a helicopter and it got off the ground in kerbal fashion and then plummeted to its doom also in kerbal fashion. some other vtol attempts were more successful and its nice being able to bind that to an axis and have some control over it. i didnt really play much with the robotics controller thingie but it looks like i can do things like collective pitch and throttle control, anywhere where you need to control more than one thing with a single potentiometer. and the potential for control hacks (im going to need more hall sensors and arduinos) is just overwhelming. anyway this was a great little feature.  onward to the buts. 

the first is i need moar axes. moar! axes are the new boosters. especially if you use them to aim the boosters. 

the second is that i wish i could control anything with a tweakables bar on it. like the engine throttle limits. i put a jet engine on the side of my tail to act as an anti torque rotor which i just ended up controlling with the throttle. the possibility of using k1s as rcs thrusters or being able to trim a vtol by changing the throttle of the engines independently. 

also maybe some forward thinking here, would be cool if you could do feedback driven robotics. say like you can get the control torques from the sas and feed that back into an articulated engine. another example would be where you can pull the angle of a rotor and feed that into a controller, mix that in with some physical input and use the outputs to control servos for cyclic control of helis. ability to take readings from scientific instruments as sensor input like using four thermometers as a crude heat seeking missile controller. there is potential here for the ksp equivalent to redstone. 

 

anyway im going to go see what else these things can do. 

Edited June 4, 2019 by Nuke

[Geschosskopf]

Yup, we definitely need the throttle axis added :).

As to feedback systems, you can do that with kOS.  A lot of folks already have so you can probably find the code lying around and tweak it for your vehicle.

[Klapaucius]

On 6/5/2019 at 1:17 AM, Geschosskopf said:

Yup, we definitely need the throttle axis added :).

As to feedback systems, you can do that with kOS.  A lot of folks already have so you can probably find the code lying around and tweak it for your vehicle.

I would love control surface trim added as well, so we can make small adjustments, rather than the current all or nothing.

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, Klapaucius said:

I would love control surface trim added as well, so we can make small adjustments, rather than the current all or nothing.

The current axis controls allow for small adjustments. But there are only 4 of them. Well, 5 sets of 4 or 20 of them, but it'd be a bit clunky to regularly use more than any 4 at a time.

[Nuke]

and there it is in 1.7.2. thanks!

[Nuke]

i finally got around to playing with this. set up a bunch of k1s as rcs thruster quads. stuck one quad at each end of a large fuel tank. i used controllers to merge the 2 throttles into a single axis. so i have 2 per quad, or 4 axes of things to control where once i head 8. then i have another 2 controllers that use those axes for rotation and another 2 that use them for translation, one each for x and y. then i bound those four controllers to the built in pitch, yaw, horizontal and vertical translation absolute axes. 8 controllers in all. 

4 are used to merge engine pairs within each quad

2 are used to combine engine pairs to translation

2 are used  to combine engine pairs for rotation

so heres the quandry. my rotational pairs and my translational pairs control the same engine pairs which control the same engine thrust limits. but these are being set from 2 different sources. one would think that in this situation the curves would be maped -1 to 1 and multiplied so it would combine the inputs. right now it seems to use the first source and ignore the second entirely. so i can either have rotation or translation but not both. would be nice if the controllers had a checkbox to combine multiple sources. 

Edited June 20, 2019 by Nuke