[1.12.3+] RealChute Parachute Systems v1.4.9.5 | 20/10/24

[felcas]

2 minutes ago, Starwaster said:

Not really; you are paying for it with extra mass. Material density is taken into account and mass adjusted for the part as appropriate.

Thanks! I will check it. I am doing more tests. To better understand in practice.

[felcas]

Funny, 

at 40.000m if I am at around 750m/s the icon staus is red. If I deploy it failure, ok no big deal.

But at 2.000m and 600m/s the icon status is OK to deploy but if I deploy it fail.

Bug?

 

Edited June 26, 2017 by felcas

[Starwaster]

3 hours ago, felcas said:

Funny, 

at 40.000m if I am at around 750m/s the icon staus is red. If I deploy it failure, ok no big deal.

But at 2.000m and 600m/s the icon status is OK to deploy but if I deploy it fail.

Bug?

 

600 m/s? That's about Mach 1.8

Thats the upper end of parachute technology. Failure sounds about right. How are you still going so fast 2km up? 

[felcas]

16 minutes ago, Starwaster said:

600 m/s? That's about Mach 1.8

Thats the upper end of parachute technology. Failure sounds about right. How are you still going so fast 2km up? 

I am not complaining about the chutes not working at 600m/s @ 2000m, I am only noticing that in other circunstances the ICON STATUS is black and in this circunstance it does not show as black. even nylon and silk chutes does show black at their respecting limit speeds at 2000m but not the kevlar one. You think it is ok to deploy just to have a nasty surprise because the icon say it is ok to deploy. I am not complaining the chutes have a low deployment speed.

I am going that fast because I am making tests, in normal play I would speedbreak with lithobraking and airbrake as much as I can and then chutes.

 

 

[maja]

42 minutes ago, felcas said:

I am going that fast because I am making tests, in normal play I would speedbreak with lithobraking and airbrake as much as I can and then chutes.

When you do lithobraking, then chutes are kinda pointless afterward

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking

[Starwaster]

4 hours ago, felcas said:

I am not complaining about the chutes not working at 600m/s @ 2000m, I am only noticing that in other circunstances the ICON STATUS is black and in this circunstance it does not show as black. even nylon and silk chutes does show black at their respecting limit speeds at 2000m but not the kevlar one. You think it is ok to deploy just to have a nasty surprise because the icon say it is ok to deploy. I am not complaining the chutes have a low deployment speed.

I am going that fast because I am making tests, in normal play I would speedbreak with lithobraking and airbrake as much as I can and then chutes.

 

 

Ok I missed the last bit about it saying it was safe to deploy.

But.... lithobraking? No....

[felcas]

7 hours ago, maja said:

When you do lithobraking, then chutes are kinda pointless afterward

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking

I got it wrong, I thought lithobraking was about using a frontface resistant to absorb the heath for example the engine or ablative. Sorry for my confusion.

4 hours ago, Starwaster said:

Ok I missed the last bit about it saying it was safe to deploy.

But.... lithobraking? No....

No, I got confused, check my previous  reply pls.

[Starwaster]

1 hour ago, felcas said:

I got it wrong, I thought lithobraking was about using a frontface resistant to absorb the heath for example the engine or ablative. Sorry for my confusion.

No, I got confused, check my previous  reply pls.

Hey I've done it a few times. Understand though... not on purpose. But it's not fun watching your lander bounce and roll its way across the munar landscape... shedding useless parts of itself each time... you know which parts I mean... landing legs.... engines.... life support tanks.... until finally all that's left is the cabin. Wondering if THIS bounce is going to be the one that smashes it to bits or if it will finally come to rest so that the crew can crawl out in a daze. Oh well, any landing you can walk away from... right?

[mrpotato103]

 1

Edited June 28, 2017 by mrpotato103
wa

[Gordon Dry]

"Apply to all symetry counterparts" does not work.

I had added radial parachutes to boosters and decided to change them to Kevlar and enter the dry mass manually, also entering the total amount of chutes per booster manually.

But the settings were only applied for the single chute I clicked at in the AG editor. -> the only place where that UI window is available btw.

Edited June 28, 2017 by Gordon Dry

[Gordon Dry]

I started a new game with different mods, most significant change is instead of RSS I use RR:

Now in VAB and in flight in early career the readings for the chute say all 0:

I don't find anything related to RealChute in the log, but here it is:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/g5p87xx95okufsa/2017-07-03-2 KSP.log.zip?dl=1

It armed, but pre-deployed too early and was ripped off - normally not a problem, because there are spare chutes.
But I was not able to deploy any of them.

Edited July 3, 2017 by Gordon Dry

[felcas]

2 hours ago, Gordon Dry said:

I started a new game with different mods, most significant change is instead of RSS I use RR:

Now in VAB and in flight in early career the readings for the chute say all 0:

I don't find anything related to RealChute in the log, but here it is:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/g5p87xx95okufsa/2017-07-03-2 KSP.log.zip?dl=1

It armed, but pre-deployed too early and was ripped off - normally not a problem, because there are spare chutes.
But I was not able to deploy any of them.

I can't answer about all but...

I think you maybe confused for what exactly spare chutes mean. It means once you landed you can repackage the chutes X number of times, for example, 1 means if you land with chutes, you can re-pack, take off and land again with chutes. If you have zero spares means you still have one to use but you can't re-pack. HOWEVER, depending on MOD settings, you will NEED an ENGINEER for the sole purpose of re-packing, so even if you have spare chutes, if you don't have an engineer in the team you won't be able to re-pack the chutes again.  

So, it DOES NOT MEAN you have reserve chutes to release multiple times during flight/descending. 

I hope this can be helpfull.

[evileye.x]

Do real chutes have "deploy only when safe" option (the same as sock)?

[felcas]

23 hours ago, evileye.x said:

Do real chutes have "deploy only when safe" option (the same as sock)?

For what I could understand after several experiments and using RealChutes for some time, there are 2 ways of using RC regarding the moment you stage the chutes:

1-The chutes becomes ARMED

2-The chutes are DEPLOYED

The difference between them is that ARMED will deploy only when safe. And DEPLOYED is exact the same time* when you stage.

UPDATE: sorry, my mistake. It seems I am still a bit confused. I spent a few hours to try to understand better what happen. 

Unfortunatelly RC does not seems to respect safety parameter (maximum speeds) when deploying, whichever the option you choose.

*There is an option inside settings that allow you to postpone the deployment X seconds after the deploy command is sent. Soo you can have a stage sequence to deploy chutes, separate stages and burn separatrons. If the settings is default to zero, once you stage the chutes will open immediately and this might not be what you want or may lead to disaster. But if you set this option to lets say 5s once you stage it will only deploy the chutes 5 seconds after separation. This is usefull because you wont have control of that stage anymore.

Back to the options I first wrote, I need to say they are selected only on the KSC menu (when you have the overview of the entire Kerbin Space Center), you then access the menu and select if you desire depoy or arm once stage, by the way try the NyanCat feature, it is very cool too  

------------

On a side note, If I remember correctly, I had problems with ARM only, because it was opening  on safe but was being ripped of anyway, or once it tried to deploy once it achieved the desire altitude but if it was unsafe then it DISARMED and did not arm or deploy again when safe. I am not sure because it has been some time, but I know I had problems. To remedy this now I always use DEPLOY command and I set semi-deploy to 3000 and full-deploy to 2000 and it always works. I also use STAGE RECOVER MOD. 

UPDATE INFORMATION:  after more trials I understand better what happended, for some reason that I don't know, bellow 7000m (low atmosphere) the safety status will change from red to light grey from around 800m/s to lower, BUT if I deploy them, they get ripped off. The safe speed to deploy is bellow 600m/s. This does not happen at high atmosphere or medium atmosphere, once the status goes from red to light grey it is safe to deploy.

If I have a big expensive stage that goes to orbit with me, I fit it with probe, airbrakes and before I reach around 15% fuel I cut the burn and separate, then I circularize at around 70km and when I am just above the mountains before KSC I full retrograde to cut speed to around 50% (~2200 to ~1400/1000) once I do this, the periapsis will shorten to just around KSC the problem with this is that the rocket will plunge really fast and it will not have horizontal distance to slow down to chute speeds, to remedy this, I use the airbrakes once it stop burn, it will then slow down really fast, soo even if you are close to the ground, lets say 5000m you still have lot of distance to parachute, the airbrakes works really nice, then just deploy the chutes. If you liked this aproach but you don't want to use a probe, you can use a mod to fit in some programable modules that will open the airbrakes and the chutes whenever you want. If you are interested I can dig in the name of the mod as I don't remember right now.

Hope this helps.

 

Edited July 12, 2017 by felcas

[Starwaster]

@evileye.x

@felcas

No, armed does not work like that. Armed means the chute will deploy when it reaches its deployment conditions: Pressure or altitude for predeploy (basically the chutes are reefed) and altitude for full deploy (disreefed). It doesn't check safe state. All such checks are only used to color the icon background.

Basically, playing using arming makes real chute deployment work like stock chutes, except that you can't configure them not to deploy in unsafe situations.  Otherwise you have to deploy yourself and if they don't meet deployment criteria (pressure/altitude) then they don't deploy and you still have to deploy them when they meet those criteria. Armed does that for you and just deploys when they are at the right pressure or altitude)

[felcas]

2 hours ago, Starwaster said:

@evileye.x

@felcas

No, armed does not work like that. Armed means the chute will deploy when it reaches its deployment conditions: Pressure or altitude for predeploy (basically the chutes are reefed) and altitude for full deploy (disreefed). It doesn't check safe state. All such checks are only used to color the icon background.

Basically, playing using arming makes real chute deployment work like stock chutes, except that you can't configure them not to deploy in unsafe situations.  Otherwise you have to deploy yourself and if they don't meet deployment criteria (pressure/altitude) then they don't deploy and you still have to deploy them when they meet those criteria. Armed does that for you and just deploys when they are at the right pressure or altitude)

Well I was taking for granted @evileye.x knew that independent of which mode, they do deploy only when the requirements are meet. If you take that in consideration then my explanation makes more sense.

 

[felcas]

@Starwaster @stupid_chris

Why RC wont respect safety specifications? 

I mean after armed and once it reaches the settings specifications like pre-deployment altitude, it will deploy even if it is dangerous to do soo (red square - normally because speed is too high). 

This seems to be lacking feature to me, but perhaps the developer had some reason in mind to take away the deployment restriction on overspeed? Or this is something that is indeed planned for future release? I am trying to understand why the developer took away this usefull feature from stock.

Also, in which circunstance NOT CHECKING "automatically arm when staging" is usefull? I am trying to understand why the developer gave us this feature since it doesn't look very usefull to me and until now.

Thanks

 

Edited July 12, 2017 by felcas

[Starwaster]

@felcasbecause it does what you tell it to. Even chutes used on spacecraft  IRL work that way. They have a set of triggers and when those criteria are met they deploy. Apollo didn't have a 'safety check' it had a barometric trigger and when it reached a certain pressure the chutes deployed. 

They knew that it would already be at a safe speed when the altitude corresponding to that pressure was reached. 

That's how it is in real life and these are Real Chutes not KSP Chutes. The whole point of them is to bring a measure of reality to parachutes and that includes the ability and responsibility to properly design them them for the craft and expected environment. 

[felcas]

20 hours ago, Starwaster said:

@felcasbecause it does what you tell it to. Even chutes used on spacecraft  IRL work that way. They have a set of triggers and when those criteria are met they deploy. Apollo didn't have a 'safety check' it had a barometric trigger and when it reached a certain pressure the chutes deployed. 

They knew that it would already be at a safe speed when the altitude corresponding to that pressure was reached. 

That's how it is in real life and these are Real Chutes not KSP Chutes. The whole point of them is to bring a measure of reality to parachutes and that includes the ability and responsibility to properly design them them for the craft and expected environment. 

I understand, but do you understand that games/sims does not fulfill exactly what happens in reality and that sometimes it is better to makes things a bit simpler to make them more interesting, we as player don't have all the resources real space agencies have to put their rockets/ships/probes in space oe calculate exactly how a re-entry will happen, ALSO Kerbal does have a ludicrous side which you can do things you can't or should not do in real life. And one more argument is that there are lots of mods that allow for "programming" autonomous actions that can help players achieve what they want and I don't think that is un-realistic because in real life you could have a safety trigger to avoid deployment in dangerous circunstances - the feature would just facilitate player's life by not needing another mod just to measure if it is safe to deploy.

 Soo I think it is reasonable to have such safety autonomous OPTION available, if you don't want to use it is up to you, but I would be gratefull if @stupid_chris could add it in future release.

And the other option? how you think it is usefull? Or realistic in anyway? 

Edited July 13, 2017 by felcas

[Vrana]

felcas, your request requires extra work for a feature the author did not want.

 

Remember, mod authors make mods for themselves, not for others.

 

They are merely kind enough to let others use them and sometimes even provide free support.

 

Still... some do take feature request and others don't. Honestly not sure what the case here is.

[felcas]

1 hour ago, Vrana said:

felcas, your request requires extra work for a feature the author did not want.

 

Remember, mod authors make mods for themselves, not for others.

 

They are merely kind enough to let others use them and sometimes even provide free support.

 

Still... some do take feature request and others don't. Honestly not sure what the case here is.

Just to clarify, I perfectly understand your point and I share that understanding.
In no way I pretended the mod author had any obligations with me or anyone else.
But I see that it is common that people make suggestions to improve mods, there are even requests to make mods from scratch. Unfortunatelly I don't have the skills to make mods otherwise I would be doing them as well. I also understand that it is a good thing to have people sharing vision, because sometimes, someone have a good idea but have no way to make them happen while others have the skills to make that idea happen.

My reading on @Starwaster and you, is that you see me as being somewhat demanding, which I am not. I am just trying to understand why such an interesting feature is out while other that makes little sense is in.

Thanks!

 

[stupid_chris]

@felcas

Starwaster pretty much hit the nail on the head. There is no such "safety indicator" in real life. This is the extra step I took for everyone to help them gage when they could or should open their chutes. If you don't know around what altitude you'll be able to open them, then just do it manually.

[strudo76]

9 hours ago, stupid_chris said:

@felcas

Starwaster pretty much hit the nail on the head. There is no such "safety indicator" in real life. This is the extra step I took for everyone to help them gage when they could or should open their chutes. If you don't know around what altitude you'll be able to open them, then just do it manually.

Is there scope to include a deployment velocity option, in addition to altitude and pressure? It would seem possible that a real chute system might be linked to trigger on a certain velocity.

I'd also make the suggestion of moving the chute material selection to the calculation area. Where it currently is near the texture selection area I think has caused a few posts I've seen here where people don't realise that the chute material selection is anything more than a visual. Moving it to the calculation area might make the distinction a bit clearer.

[Starwaster]

8 hours ago, strudo76 said:

Is there scope to include a deployment velocity option, in addition to altitude and pressure? It would seem possible that a real chute system might be linked to trigger on a certain velocity.

It's certainly 'possible' but to what end? Safety again? A safe velocity at one altitude would be dangerous at another. Chutes designed for Mars for example have to open at velocities much higher than they would typically be operated at here on Earth. but they not only can (because of the lesser atmospheric density) but have to because atmospheric braking is less effective over Mars (or Duna). Velocity as a trigger is probably the least desirable.

[felcas]

On 21/07/2017 at 3:51 PM, stupid_chris said:

@felcas

Starwaster pretty much hit the nail on the head. There is no such "safety indicator" in real life. This is the extra step I took for everyone to help them gage when they could or should open their chutes. If you don't know around what altitude you'll be able to open them, then just do it manually.

Soo, I understand the reasons. But I was thinking more like a feature that is just available in case the player want to use, I think it is just cool to have automated tasks, it is my playstyle, but you are the developer, not me. I am happy with what I already have, thanks.

I found 2 little problems, would you mind to have a look into them?

1st-When a long stage touches water (even with some inclination) the parachutes are cut, diferent from when they touch ground, which they fall off with the chutes still open. What follow is that the stage falls to the side and hit hard exploding. Sometimes on the ground the stage touches, speed reaches zero and chutes are cut, but the stage is actually not stable, then it fall to the side but the chutes are gone. 

Is it possible to add a feature to keep chutes for a few seconds after the stage land and reach zero?

2nd-I made a lot of tests to find the safe speeds on diferent altitudes and to better understand how Realchutes works and I found out the status indicator show SAFE on too high speed, as the light goes from yellow (or red?) to grey, I deployed but the parachutes are cut because of airforces. If I am not mistakenly the light change to SAFE around 450, I wrote down all the data but all of them are at home and I am now travelling and I wont be back home for a couple of weeks now. By the way all the above is for LOW ATMOSPHERE KERBIN ONLY (light blue band). The status light is working normally at medium and high atmosphere (dark blue and black band on atmos. indicator).

Thanks

Felipe