[1.3.1] Ferram Aerospace Research: v0.15.9.1 "Liepmann" 4/2/18

[NathanKell]

Start your turn at ~200 meters.

[lumpman2]

Thanks, I think I got it. Might need to practice a bit more, but I was able to get into orbit with about a fifth of the second stage's fuel left.

[roxedboxer]

Why does far keep making my SAS go insane a few seconds after launching? This is extremely annoying and keeps causing my crafts to fly out of control.

Edit: Nevermind. Screw FAR. Deleting it.

Edited December 30, 2013 by roxedboxer

[NathanKell]

I think there's a weekly quota for these posts, Ferram

[Hodo]

Why does far keep making my SAS go insane a few seconds after launching? This is extremely annoying and keeps causing my crafts to fly out of control.

Edit: Nevermind. Screw FAR. Deleting it.

Wow you gave up easily, I hope you are more patient with life otherwise you are in for a ROUGH road ahead.

FAR and SAS don't often get along, I have no problems running my SAS on, on any of my craft. But I have read others having major issues with the SAS. So you may want to look at your control surfaces, and aerodynamic design of your craft. If it is shaped like a brick, it will fly like one.

[jrandom]

I'd just like to take this opportunity to blame ferram4 for the shipment of aerodynamics books I have on the way, my lighter bank account, and the time I'll have to spend re-learning all that math I forgot years ago.

This mod was one of those "see the light" moments for me. You jerks. Now I have to go learn stuff.

[AbeS]

Excessive control surfaces, or wrong deflection angles could be the issue.. I have never had trouble with SAS either

[longhornchris]

Wow you gave up easily, I hope you are more patient with life otherwise you are in for a ROUGH road ahead.

FAR and SAS don't often get along, I have no problems running my SAS on, on any of my craft. But I have read others having major issues with the SAS. So you may want to look at your control surfaces, and aerodynamic design of your craft. If it is shaped like a brick, it will fly like one.

SAS works just fine with my rockets when using FAR... not so much with my spaceplanes. Then again, I also make my rockets look like rockets and use procedural fairings on almost everything as soon as I an unlock them. I also make sure I have plenty of control authority, reaction wheels and aero-surfaces, to keep the pointy end up and the flaming end down. Finally, I make very gradual direction changes during my ascent.

[Hodo]

SAS works just fine with my rockets when using FAR... not so much with my spaceplanes. Then again, I also make my rockets look like rockets and use procedural fairings on almost everything as soon as I an unlock them. I also make sure I have plenty of control authority, reaction wheels and aero-surfaces, to keep the pointy end up and the flaming end down. Finally, I make very gradual direction changes during my ascent.

This is what I learned to do. Very slow gradual direction changes with rockets, my planes, it depends on the design. Some can turn on dime, others turn in a few continents.

[ferram4]

@roxedboxer: Your problem, had you the patience to solve it, was too much control surfaces.

Alright everyone, version 0.12.4 is out, including increases in body lift, fixing the intermittent supersonic roll-twitch introduced in v0.12, a serious increase in the mechanical lag of control surfaces, which will probably make SAS behave worse, but everyone's complaining about the unrealistically fast control surfaces causing twitching so we'll see if this fixes it / causes a nice placebo effect, tweakables got tweaked, and some other odd bugfixes. Also, there's a new stock craft, the FAR Ugly Duckling, which you should try flying. Landing it is the hard part.

[Hodo]

Yeah! 12.4 Thank you F4.

[jrandom]

I'm still getting the roll-twitches at around 519m/s.

[ferram4]

Really? Using what craft?

[jrandom]

I just slapped together something really quickly to test it out. I'm using RSS/RO/KJR and RealEngines. RE rescales some of the B9 parts, if that makes a difference. The worst seems to be between 500-700m/s at around 20-28km in altitude. Higher/faster than that they tend to not occur very frequently.

Edit: they come back with a vengence at around 1100m/s at 34km.

Alterations to the config .xml:

    <string name="incompressibleRearAttachDrag">0.01</string>
    <string name="sonicRearAdditionalAttachDrag">0.2</string>

On a positive note, I haven't encountered any of the dreaded SAS wobble yet.

There's only four struts in use, and the plane does not exhibit any structural wobble.

Edited December 30, 2013 by jrandom

[Hodo]

I'm still getting the roll-twitches at around 519m/s.

Same here, using my X-152.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

I use it as a test craft for almost everything now.

The canards are set to roll, the control surfaces on the wings are set to pitch, the small control surfaces on the tail are set to yaw.

I tested with some of my other designs, the H-2 utility helicopter it had no random roll at its usual flight altitudes, below 10km.

My SVO-25A Orca II, it also suffered from random rolls at mach 4+.

Javascript is disabled. View full album

All three are different craft, 2 out of the three had the same random roll affect.

[likke_A_boss]

Craft files?

[Picard]

Hey Ferram, thx for the update and the previous response. I believe this to be a great improvement. The sas seems to stabilise much easier and the twitches are easily avoidable and occur less.

Thx mate

[jrandom]

Upon further flying, the roll-twitches seem to really hit at high speeds when the plane is most directly facing prograde.

[camlost]

I'd just like to take this opportunity to blame ferram4 for the shipment of aerodynamics books I have on the way, my lighter bank account, and the time I'll have to spend re-learning all that math I forgot years ago.

This mod was one of those "see the light" moments for me. You jerks. Now I have to go learn stuff.

Which one? I got Anderson's Introduction to aerodynamics and liking it.

[Hodo]

Craft files?

I think the X-152A is in the RAPIER SSTO challenge thread. That is where I posted that craft file. And the SVO-25A Orca II, is not released yet, it is my baby, and does most of my medium lift work.

[Donziboy2]

0.12.4 seems to have moved the CoL for alot of craft, not sure for good or bad yet, ill keep testing:)

[DaMichel]

Tested one craft today. CoL closely behind CoM and it was stable as expected. The roll twitching was also mostly gone. Thanks for fixing.

Ferram, if you don't mind i have a small gui suggestion.

I think this would be more convenient.

[AmethystZhou]

The game freezes while loading, I have B9 and FAR installed. The freeze happens every time it loads this particular part:

Because the game didn't actually run, so there is no crash log available

When I uninstall FAR, the problem disappeared, what is wrong?

- - - - - - - - - -

OK I have fixed the problem myself. It's because the game is 0.22 and I have the latest version of FAR (for 0.23) installed, I switched to the older version and everything works fine!

BTW, thanks for the great work!

Edited December 30, 2013 by AmethystZhou
Problem fixed!~

[DaMichel]

Correction, i think there is still a bug somewhere. After reloading my craft in the SPH the CoL indicator was in a totally different place than before the last reload. That is with FAR 0.12.4 exclusively. The craft has pWings and my custom parts, so cannot tell if it is really a bug in FAR ...

[jrandom]

Which one? I got Anderson's Introduction to aerodynamics and liking it.

Oooh! Didn't see that one. I might have to order it as well. Since I don't know what approach is going to be best suited for my particular brain, I'm casting a wide net. Once I have a better idea of what works for me I will be able to get more targeted materials. Also, haven't been on a book-buying binge in years. It's time.