suddenly, my plane is made of cardboard

[king of nowhere]

tl:dr airplane wheels are supposed to be able to take strong impact, yet suddenly my airplanes are destroied by very mild landings. i'm fairly sure it's some kind of bug

 

let's go from the start. i'm trying to make an eve spaceplane. to test it, i found a place that's fairly flat, so i can use the cheat to drop the plane there from a low altitude and experiment takeoff. i've been doing this for a while now. the planes are fairly big, at around 200 tons, because they must also have fuel for orbiting. i use several big-S delta wings. the wheels are LY-60, though i experimented with other models. i attach the wheels to NCS adapters on the wings, but i also tried attaching them to the wings themselves.

i've been doing this for a while, dropping the planes at the chosen spot from 5 meters of altitude, then accelerating and taking off. some worked, some didn't, but i never had any problem with the drop-off part. i could drop them from 10 meters too, and they'd still stay in one piece.

the latest model exploded when i dropped it on eve. i even tried lowering the altitude to 3.5 meters (less than that it sticks into the ground), and still it explodes, from a very small bounce. i tried several different configurations of autostrutting and fixed attachment, i tried to attach the hweels and wings in different ways, it always explodes when i drop it. i couldn't figure out what was wrong with my new model, until i had a realization, and i made a test with one of the older models. the ones that i tried and tested over and over and have always worked (well, except that they failed to reach orbit on powered flight, hence why i'm trying new models. but they never exploded on being dropped off on eve surface, and they can even take off and fly well). and they exploded too.

this looks to me like some kind of bug. the game behaved one way until a few days ago, until suddenly it behaved differently. i also had a similar bug with docking ports attached to robotic parts, where they always worked in the past, until at some point they always crashed.

today i tried reinstalling the game. the docking port bug disappeared, so reinstalling at least worked there. but my planes keep exploding as i drop them on eve. and yes, physical facilitation is active during the drop.

i don't know what to do to try and fix this. onnly thing i can think off is to active the "indestructibility" cheat, but that seems a bit extreme

[Serenity]

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

i don't know what to do to try and fix this. onnly thing i can think off is to active the "indestructibility" cheat, but that seems a bit extreme

First make sure all your parts use grandparent autostrut.

Place your wheels under the main body of the plane and use the Move Tool to get them under the wings or wherever you want.

You can hold Shift to move them even further the game allows you, so you can literally move them anywhere you want.

You will be able to land very harshly BUT if you crash your plane really hard and you get explosions etc you might see some wheels just floating in the air.

It is a bit cheaty but its like the most straightforward way to make the landings easier, placing wheels under wings its tricky.

Edited September 5, 2020 by Boyster

[king of nowhere]

8 hours ago, Boyster said:

First make sure all your parts use grandparent autostrut.

Place your wheels under the main body of the plane and use the Move Tool to get them under the wings or wherever you want.

You can hold Shift to move them even further the game allows you, so you can literally move them anywhere you want.

You will be able to land very harshly BUT if you crash your plane really hard and you get explosions etc you might see some wheels just floating in the air.

It is a bit cheaty but its like the most straightforward way to make the landings easier, placing wheels under wings its tricky.

good try, i learned a new way to place parts. but not working.

i placed them attached to the central body and i moved them so they look like they are under the wings. i made a try with rigid attachment, and it exploded. it said structural failure in the connection between the landing gear and the fuel tank. then i made another try without rigid attchment, this time the message said the landing gear crashed into the wing

EDIT: i decided to activate "no collision damage" from the cheat menu, and when the plane hit the ground, a wing detached. it was autostrutted.

EDIT: i also checked unbreakable joints, and it worked. what the hell. i've been flying for a week planes bigger and heavier than that.

EDIT2: after a few working attempts, now even with unbreakable joints and no damage, the plane disassembles as soon as it touches the ground of eve, after being dropped by 4 meters. it really is a crazy bug.

Edited September 5, 2020 by king of nowhere

[Serenity]

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

good try, i learned a new way to place parts. but not working.

i placed them attached to the central body and i moved them so they look like they are under the wings. i made a try with rigid attachment, and it exploded. it said structural failure in the connection between the landing gear and the fuel tank. then i made another try without rigid attchment, this time the message said the landing gear crashed into the wing

Never use rigid attachment, most times it makes things break easier.

Do you use grandparent autostruts in every part?

If you have external fuel tanks make sure you follow the same logic as the wheels.

Attach the fuel tanks first to main body and then drag them wherever you want them.

Try to attach as few things you can in the wings, especially heavy ones.

Also try when you land to have no fuel in your wings,

if you want post a picture or something to take a look i guess.

Edited September 5, 2020 by Boyster

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Boyster said:

Never use rigid attachment, most times it makes things break easier.

i tried that on and off. anyway, with cheats on, things should not break in the first place.

1 hour ago, Boyster said:

Do you use grandparent autostruts in every part?

 

yes. i tried also the other autostrut options.

Quote

Also try when you land to have no fuel in your wings,

perhaps you misunderstood, i did not "land" normally after a flight. i was testing the plane, so i was using cheats to pop it on eve surface. i drop it at 4 meters of elevation. if i pop it at 3 meters, it sticks into the ground, so the plane starts from immobile at less than 1 meter from the ground, with physical facilitation (i tried deactivating that too). without facilitation, doing some quick calculation (s=0.5*a*t^2, with s=1 m of free fall, and V=a*t) the vehicle should touch the ground at 4 m/s. there should be nothing that can break at that speed. and physical faciliatation makes it float down slowly and land even more gently.

[Serenity]

Have you messed around with Hack Gravity in Debug Menu?

Things can get weird if you alter the gravity then load a save without turning it back to default value.

I dunno, might be a bug, although i suspect something else is going on.

Maybe you did too much clipping or you just need more wheels, 

I would suggest quicksaving before messing around with debug options and then revert to that save.

Maybe someone else can help a bit more, or just a picture of the craft but probably it would be way too hard to tell something.

[swjr-swis]

4 hours ago, Boyster said:

Do you use grandparent autostruts in every part?

3 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

yes. i tried also the other autostrut options.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound: try with less autostruts. Too many autostruts, especially on craft with lots of parts/weight, can make a craft too rigid - it ends up brittle, like glass. Some residual flexibility in the structure actually protects against this.

In general, only add as few autostruts as necessary to survive normal flight and landings, and no more. Start adding autostruts to the parts 'furthest' away from where the wing roots are attached, test, and build from there. Don't just indiscriminately set autostruts on every part.

[Serenity]

6 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

As counter-intuitive as it may sound: try with less autostruts. Too many autostruts, especially on craft with lots of parts/weight, can make a craft too rigid - it ends up brittle, like glass. Some residual flexibility in the structure actually protects against this.

Actually thats not the case with grandparent autostruts, no matter how many.Your vehicle is stronger and you never experience that rigid effect.

Rigid Attachment is the cause for the like glass break not grandparent autostrut.

In space if you have a huge space station is not a bad idea to turn off some autostruts but save before doing it.

One more problem is with Heaviest Autostrut, then things do get complicated, especially when mass changes or you dock/undock with different mass crafts.

You can still use heaviest autostrut but you need to be careful and after launch maybe change it to grandparent/save etc and when you are in orbit and/or undocking,

its a bit tricky but it can work out.

Edited September 6, 2020 by Boyster

[king of nowhere]

13 hours ago, Boyster said:

Have you messed around with Hack Gravity in Debug Menu?

 

nope

Quote

Maybe you did too much clipping or you just need more wheels, 

if that was the case, why my earlier models had never, ever crashed when dropped on eve, and suddenly they started exploding too? same model, same altitude, same exact location, nothing changed whatsoever. one week ago it just settled on the ground, now it loses pieces.

that's why i'm sure it's a bug of some sort

Edited September 6, 2020 by king of nowhere

[king of nowhere]

incidentally, with those cheats active, after taking off i managed to fly a bit before crashing on a hill, and i took no damage there. i only take damage when i am dropped on eve surface. makes no sense.

[king of nowhere]

now with indestructibility i am again able to drop planes on eve. no idea why it stopped working, and why it started working again. i tested it, again, on the very same models, and i changed nothing in between.

[Serenity]

43 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

incidentally, with those cheats active, after taking off i managed to fly a bit before crashing on a hill, and i took no damage there. i only take damage when i am dropped on eve surface. makes no sense.

I doubt thats it but, in Main Menu Settings, there is a Max Physics Delta, you can reduce that to 0.03 and see if its better.

How many parts is your vessel?

Have you changed the Debug menu settings with Ease to ground and Ease in Multiplier?

I am guessing you using Ingame's Set Position and not hyperedit.

Edited September 6, 2020 by Boyster

[king of nowhere]

2 minutes ago, Boyster said:

How many parts is your vessel?

about 100

Quote

Have you changed the Debug menu settings with Ease to ground and Ease in Multiplier?

i haven't modified them. ease to ground is active, and ease multiplier is 0.1

Quote

I am guessing you using Ingame and not hyperedit.

i have no idea what hyperedit would be

[Serenity]

12 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

about 100

i haven't modified them. ease to ground is active, and ease multiplier is 0.1

i have no idea what hyperedit would be

First Set Position something in the spot you want in EvE

Open the Debug Menu and go to Flight Info

You can see exactly the altitude and all the other thingies, put it a bit higher, increase the multipliers and see how it goes(so it doesnt take ages to land).

Also if its possible maybe close the wheels before doing it.

Hyperedit is a very useful mod and not a long ago one of the few ways to cheat vessels wherever you wanted.

Edited September 6, 2020 by Boyster

[swjr-swis]

8 hours ago, Boyster said:

Rigid Attachment is the cause

I've never used the rigid attachment setting beyond the first few experiments right after it was first introduced. What I've observed was purely from changes in autostruts.

Anyway, experiment I guess. Apparently previous results are no guarantee for the future.

[Serenity]

8 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

I've never used the rigid attachment setting beyond the first few experiments right after it was first introduced. What I've observed was purely from changes in autostruts.

Anyway, experiment I guess. Apparently previous results are no guarantee for the future.

I honestly never found a reason to use Rigid, i doubt it has any uses and if it has it will be like very limited.

I have endless hours messing with grandparent autostruts and never had a ''rigid'' effect no matter how many i used.

Except the Heavy ones, those are really tricky and they like to call the kraken.

But if used correctly, creating like a tree of autostruts they can be very handy with very few of them used.

You can Visualize Autostruts from the Debug Menu.

Also when you change the Autostrut type while in flight and you pass through the options, its really wonky.

Needs a lot of quicksaving everytime you try to change or disable autostruts in launched vessels.

There is a nice trick with tall rockets, you can put the highest decoupler or something, or the fairing, with a heavy autostrut

and the rocket will be very stable BUT you need to disable it after you get in orbit...and it might has some weird handling while launching it.

Its generally better to just spam grandparent autostruts and maybe disable them afterwards so the number of parts are kept kinda low.

Edited September 6, 2020 by Boyster

[Spricigo]

On 9/5/2020 at 8:18 AM, king of nowhere said:

onnly thing i can think off is to active the "indestructibility" cheat, but that seems a bit extreme

There is nothing extreme about using that one.  Specially if you are already using the teleport "cheat".

On the other hand, you may try to stop the physic easing a bit above the ground. It seems to me that is a issue with physics kicking in, rather than the actual impact.

 

[Linkageless]

I too, have notice this RUD after set position to Eve, with the indestructible cheats enabled.  (I even found some previously solid designs that didn't need the cheats at all falling apart when loading on the KSC runway.)  I've found the 'unbreakable joints' cheat seems to spontaneously stop working, persisting after revert to launch or SPH and initially resorted to quit/start the program.

I then discovered that it almost always can be cleared by disable/renable the unbreakable joints cheat.  After this problem is usually cleared.

It's not clear if this is a change in behaviour however, as I've only really recently been pushing the boundaries of what my feeble laptop can handle in terms of spaceplane complexity.  My machine runs hot and most atmospheric flights are in the yellow not-quite-realtime, only eased by reducing graphics effects.  Certainly I recall it being a problem in 1.9.1 which has persisted in 1.10.

Hope that helps!

[swjr-swis]

18 minutes ago, Linkageless said:

It's not clear if this is a change in behaviour however, as I've only really recently been pushing the boundaries of what my feeble laptop can handle in terms of spaceplane complexity.  My machine runs hot and most atmospheric flights are in the yellow not-quite-realtime, only eased by reducing graphics effects.  Certainly I recall it being a problem in 1.9.1 which has persisted in 1.10.

Something to consider: if you have any kind of reasonable graphics chip in your laptop, an entirely differnt cause for it running hot could be that it is actually performing too well. Rendering even toned down graphics at a very high FPS (maybe uncapped?) will quickly cause your graphics chip to heat up.

The good news: if this is the cause the solution is simply to cap the FPS. In game this can be done by setting the V-Sync and Frame-Limit options, or if you prefer (and usually more effective), you can let your graphics driver handle it by setting a specific profile for KSP. One cave at: it will affect the initial loading time of your game (loading code is tied to frame rate for some reason), so you'll have to decide which one is more bothersome to you.

[Linkageless]

54 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

The good news: if this is the cause the solution is simply to cap the FPS. In game this can be done by setting the V-Sync and Frame-Limit options

Good call - yes, halving my FPS does increase my performance and might have marginally reduced heating.  I already have v-sync on, and had actually considered turning it off.

 

58 minutes ago, swjr-swis said:

or if you prefer (and usually more effective), you can let your graphics driver handle it by setting a specific profile for KSP.

I've not experimented with how to do that in Linux, could be interesting.

It's not clear to me if system performance has a bearing on the original problem of occasional RUD after set position, but it can only help with gameplay!

[steve_v]

59 minutes ago, Linkageless said:

I've not experimented with how to do that in Linux, could be interesting.

It could indeed, and it depends on the manufacturer of your GPU whether or not they bothered to implement the feature (or application profiles at all for that matter).
I can't speak to AMD or Intel, but I can say Nvidias "control panel" is missing many features on GNU/Linux - FPS limiting included. The best option I am aware of right now for this would be MangoHud.

[Incarnation of Chaos]

Are you using KJR or KJR-Next?

That's really the only way iv'e found to make larger planes stable.

[Linkageless]

2 hours ago, steve_v said:

it depends on the manufacturer of your GPU whether or not they bothered to implement the feature

Sadly, it doesn't look like Intel have bothered with anything for Linux for the HD Graphics 5500.  I wasn't holding my breath.   I'm content to bumble along with what I have for now, but it's always nice to be able to coax some more performance and reliability out of it.  I shall tinker further with the game settings

Back on topic - it did seem to me that the high thermal load that has been causing me CPU throttling at times coincided with a few oddities like this.   I'm not complaining - I'm asking a lot of this little machine at times, and the game is a complex beast that has every right to demand to be run on decent hardware.

[king of nowhere]

7 hours ago, Linkageless said:

I too, have notice this RUD after set position to Eve, with the indestructible cheats enabled.  (I even found some previously solid designs that didn't need the cheats at all falling apart when loading on the KSC runway.)  I've found the 'unbreakable joints' cheat seems to spontaneously stop working, persisting after revert to launch or SPH and initially resorted to quit/start the program.

I then discovered that it almost always can be cleared by disable/renable the unbreakable joints cheat.  After this problem is usually cleared.

It's not clear if this is a change in behaviour however, as I've only really recently been pushing the boundaries of what my feeble laptop can handle in terms of spaceplane complexity.  My machine runs hot and most atmospheric flights are in the yellow not-quite-realtime, only eased by reducing graphics effects.  Certainly I recall it being a problem in 1.9.1 which has persisted in 1.10.

Hope that helps!

problem disappeared a few days later, just as mysteriously as it appeared.

if what you say works for all, it is possible that after i got tired of building the spaceplace, i got back to the other flights, i untagged unbreakable, and this may have reverted the bug.

[Tony Swallow]

Thankyou to everyone replying to the thread, but especially to Serenity The bit about removing rigid attachment and Auto-strutting to Grandparent Part has made a real difference  in my experiments in making an Eve SSTS. At first I made a spaceplant that was difficult to land so I went to great efforts to tweak it, in doing so I sure that everything was strutted and rigid. This had the opposite effect and got to the point where my craft was basically unlandable! I opened the saved craft last night, removed all rigid attachments and auto-strutted everything to grandparent and Presto! I could practically throw the craft at Eve and and land it!  

The plus side is that my piloting skill gets better, and I learn how to make more forgiving craft!