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

[FenrirWolf]

It already is an option toggleable through a settings menu.

[Azimech]

I don't expect a failure and I'll make sure the most recent MM will be installed. Still, if problems occur, is a rollback possible?

[FenrirWolf]

Certainly, by deleting the new version and putting the old one in its place.

[illectro]

I seem to keep losing undercarriage during reentry, I need to star building my planes upside down.

[Azimech]

I don't use KJR in my testing folder (dunno if it affects anything), but the dynamic pressure forces seem okay. Only when I hyperedited a plane in Jool orbit at 100 km did it disassemble, at 120 km it was fine and deorbited gracefully (spinning like hell). Kerbin didn't affect my plane at all. Gonna try again. I want to break some stuff.

[Zeroignite]

Ok, dynamic pressure disassembly is awesome.

I'm re-learning how to build planes for FAR (I think I like it!), got a good one operational, and cruised over to the Pyramid complex.

...and ripped the wings off about 2km away, flying too fast and being non-gentle on the controls. I throttled up, flew the plane in "cylinder with tailfins" mode semi-successfully, but had to eject Jeb to clear the ridge west of the complex.

EDIT: how do Procedural Wings play with the current version of FAR, KSP, and VesselViewer?

[smunisto]

No it doesn't. I play with only a keyboard, and I'm just fine; you just have to learn to use pulse-width modulation on the controls, which has always been a useful way of getting fine control working.

And if the DCA makes the craft non-responsive, odds are you can get away with turning it off.

Yes, now that I gave it more shots it seems to be ok. DCA makes things easier. Sorry for the premature statement.

And growing up with games like Re-Volt and then the NFS series, I do know how to use "pulse modulation"(even though Re-Volt did not have gradual wheel turning)

[DaMichel]

Procedural Wings control surfaces have issues but the actual wings are okay iirc.

Interesting update btw. Low & slow flights worked well so far. Looking forward to trying space planes later on

Edit: I have trouble with the new airspeed indicators. Sometimes they show just 0. This happened during landing attempts. Then i got this during a quick test flight.

EAS was around 120 m/s.

Edited April 28, 2014 by DaMichel

[Tiron]

It already is an option toggleable through a settings menu.

Except that said option doesn't work. Toggle it, and stuff still falls apart just as easily. Unless there was a super-stealth update with zero indication of it since yesterday.

I'm also a bit worried about what this change is going to do to an aerobraking or de-orbiting spaceplane. Gonna test it in a sec (I gotta edit my testing sandbox save first.)

[Sof]

I don't know if this is a bug or not, but I'm having trouble landing the 3 man pods. On my way back from a Mun mission with the 3 Kerbals in the pod, and set my periapsis at 30km, which worked perfectly for the single man pod. Only this time they barely slow down at all. The apoapsis is still near Mun orbit and the pod was still going around 3000ms.

Tried again lowering the periapsis to 20km, but deadly reentry just made the pod explode going in that steep.

What is going on? Do I have to slow down the bigger capsules first because they're too heavy or what? It seemed strange to me that the atmosphere was barely slowing it down even though there was plenty of fiery stuff. (It did lower the apoapsis a bit, but the same journey with the little pod would land it on Kerbin)

[Kaa253]

Except that said option doesn't work. Toggle it, and stuff still falls apart just as easily. ...

Confirmed. Turning it off does NOT turn it off. This is a problem for me as the control surfaces on my shuttle are being torn off during the solid booster shake-down stage 1 of launch.

I had no real trouble with aerobraking and de-orbit return until I pulled 6 g in a turn back to KSP after I overshot. Snapped my fuselage in half and tore both wings off all at once. That seems a bit too low a g force really. Perhaps 15 g might be more realistic? Fortunately my F-111 Aardvark style cockpit survival system worked flawlessly and Jeb got to enjoy an undignified and unplanned swim.

[Klingon Admiral]

I can second the 3 man capsule problem:

And that pod came in from LKO.

[Tiron]

Confirmed. Turning it off does NOT turn it off. This is a problem for me as the control surfaces on my shuttle are being torn off during the solid booster shake-down stage 1 of launch.

I had no real trouble with aerobraking and de-orbit return until I pulled 6 g in a turn back to KSP after I overshot. Snapped my fuselage in half and tore both wings off all at once. That seems a bit too low a g force really. Perhaps 15 g might be more realistic? Fortunately my F-111 Aardvark style cockpit survival system worked flawlessly and Jeb got to enjoy an undignified and unplanned swim.

There's an ejection and eva parachute mod too: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/25305-0-23-Vanguard-Technologies-EVA-parachutes-23!-Sry-4-not-fixing-earlier-%28Dec-30%29

I'm testing Aerobraking and de-orbit myself right now. I'm at 600km coming from Duna, set for an aerobrake pass before full deorbit, I have a suspicion that half the plane's going to get torn off, if it doesn't burn up (I don't think burning will be a problem with this PE based on prior testing of DReC).

You can tweak the thrust on the SRBs in the VAB, which may help with that (it makes them burn longer too).

There's a .cfg file in FAR that specifies the strength values for the aero stress, or some such. I may tone it down a bit.

I might also add that I *did* get a plane to tear itself apart in 0.23.5 using either FAR 0.13 or 0.13.1, not sure. Specifically, the FAR Thunderbird design that comes with it. In a high-G pullout, it went completely to pieces (F3 indicated max-Gs in the 20s).

[ferram4]

@DaMichel: IAS doesn't account for compressibility effects, and becomes incredibly inaccurate over Mach 0.6. That's supposed to happen, that's why no supersonic planes use IAS, they use Mach or EAS.

@Tiron & Kaa253: Confirmed bug, mentioned a few pages ago. In addition, it's not g-Force that determines whether parts are destroyed, it's the aerodynamic force on them. Otherwise, you'd be able to have a wing break off under 10 kN because it was connected to a really light vehicle, so those 10 kN translated to 20 g's, but the same wing, attached to another vehicle can make 200 kN and stay attached because the vehicle is really, really heavy, so those 200 kN translate to 2 g's. You need to reduce your wing loading or your total mass if you want to do higher-g maneuvers at decent speeds.

@Sof & Klingon Admiral: Well, to start, the 3-man pod has always had a higher ballistic coefficient than the 1-man pod, but I've never seen the effects you're describing. Either you're doing something equivalent to the people who clip a heat shield into the 1-man pod (thus reducing its drag to nothing) or you've got a bad install. I mean, I've done hyperbolic returns at 25 km and the pod comes down perfectly fine, so I'll need more information before I can find out what's wrong.

[smunisto]

I made it! Now to get back to the ground without electric charge for the reaction wheels:

[dlrk]

Will this work with module manager 1.5.7? For some reason 2.0.3 is making KSP lock up at start

[FenrirWolf]

Chances are the lock-up is caused by you still having 1.5.7 or some other version hiding in your GameData directory someplace. 2.0.3 doesn't get along with his buddies. He works alone

[dlrk]

I looked for an old 1.5.7, there isn't one. Oddly enough, if I put 1.5.7 back and leave 2.0.3, it will load without locking up

[Mystique]

Something seems wrong in 0.13.2: I made kind of test craft and jettisoned fairings (procedural ones) while it was stationary. Guess what? They started to sloooowly float away from test craft, like this:

They float reeeeealy sloooow, feels like Matrix

[ferram4]

@dlrk: No, it will not work with Module Manager 1.5.7; it requires the new features from 2.0.3.

@Mystique: Very light object, decent surface area, FAR not designed to handle very low speed aerodynamics = things are weird there.

[Azimech]

Procedural Wings control surfaces have issues.

Haven't encountered any today.

[Tiron]

@Ferram I haven't really had that much trouble with it so far, other than when I deliberately *tried* to break things. I'm still testing deorbit: aerobraking has gone fine...multiple times. I'm trying to do a space-shuttle-style high AoA black-side-down entry, and it keeps pushing the PE up and not slowing down enough. It's coming down on this pass for sure, though.

The biggest problems I have is that your answer to the problems is 'use the DCA', and I avoid using the flight aids at all (they tend not to work well with the SAS or Mechjeb, and I don't like it when things interfere with me controlling the plane anyway.) I *might* use it, if it was a set-it-and-forget-it thing that I didn't have to mess with all the time (I have ADHD, remembering to turn stuff on or off is a BIG problem for me.) Unfortunately, the 'help' guide for configuring it is singularly uninformative and I gather the default settings can cause overly weak controls at high altitude (and all my designs are high altitude hypersonics, one of which already has terrible pitch control.)

But honestly? If it takes a lot of time or work to get things set in a way that makes stuff work, I'll just downgrade or edit the .cfg values to make it not be a problem.

And as for the Mark1-2 pod problems...could the reduced transonic/supersonic drag have changed its deorbit profile enough that you can't come down in one pass if you're using DReC, maybe?

[Mystique]

Even more strange things about fairings - when decoupled in actual flight, they fall on ground and don't destroyed, they just land softly as feathers. Anyone can confirm this?

[ferram4]

@Tiron: I only say to use the DCA because most people don't want to be told to not throw the controls around like a fool. To be honest, I haven't sued it since I set it up, it's just easier not to.

The Mark1-2 pod's properties haven't changed between FAR 0.13.1 and FAR 0.13.2, those changes only affect wings and planes. That said, I don't know what Klingon managed to do with his thing.

@Mystique: Low mass object, large surface area. In reality, the fairing should be torn apart, but it's a single part, so that doesn't happen, so instead it comes down as one light, fluffy chunk. For a piece coming down at those speeds, perfectly realistic in the context of the object being indestructible.

[Tiron]

@Tiron: I only say to use the DCA because most people don't want to be told to not throw the controls around like a fool. To be honest, I haven't sued it since I set it up, it's just easier not to.

@Ferram4 Yeah, I tend to just do what I've heard you say you do... Manual PCM.

That said, I deorbited, transitioned to hypersonic flight, realized I was over the ocean past the space center heading away, did about a 220 degree turn starting at mach 5.5 at 26km or so (ended up at mach 2.2 at 13km by the time I finished turning), descended and landed without any significant problems.

I did get 'high dynamic pressure' warning during a fair portion of the descent to the space center, and my Multiwheels Flat-4 Monoprop engine (contained entirely within the fuselage!) broke off without damaging anything else, but it's for taxiing and I'm out of monoprop anyway.

I am kinda curious as to why that of all things broke off first, (not being terribly aerodynamic probably contributed, but it shouldn't've been taking any substantial force I wouldn't've thought?) and may try to find a way to keep that from happening again. If anything, the deployed B9 speedbrakes should've broken off rather than the engine.

Edited April 28, 2014 by Tiron