[1.0] XT Landertron - Smart Retrorockets for Landers and Spaceplanes v0.08 Oct 10

[ManuxKerb]

Ok so i got a chane to test them now and i run into this issue:

Setup: Rover for Mun, testing in VAB in a Launchclap with Landertrons.

When i try to Arm the Landertrons so after decoupling they will be doing their thing, the imidiently burn all their fuel and are useless. So instead of arming they get activated right awway. (Using FAR)

Any Ideas ?

Thanks

[charfa]

@ManuxKerb, Can you double check if your Landertrons are set to Soft Landing mode, and not Short Landing? I was only able to reproduce the behavior you describe in ShortLanding mode. I'll try to correct this either way, but ShortLanding isn't really supposed to be used this way. BTW, I installed FAR on my dev install and didn't notice any change in behavior.

@lodestar, Sorry for late reply, I must have missed your post. I think that putting airbags on a lander might have it's merits even without explicitly telling Landertron to stop at some altitude above terrain. It would make fragile cargo safe from being dropped from too high when you're coming in at high speed. So I don't really see a benefit from being able to tell Landertron to stop at least x meters above surface. I'll look into reimplementing that tweakable, but you haven't convinced me it's worthwhile

[ManuxKerb]

Hi Charfa,

Unfotuantelly, it was set to Soft landing mode. Sorry for not been clearer in the org. post.

Thanks for looking into it. Over the next week i will also have time to post some pics if needed.

 

[lodestar]

3 hours ago, charfa said:

 

@lodestar, Sorry for late reply, I must have missed your post. I think that putting airbags on a lander might have it's merits even without explicitly telling Landertron to stop at some altitude above terrain. It would make fragile cargo safe from being dropped from too high when you're coming in at high speed. So I don't really see a benefit from being able to tell Landertron to stop at least x meters above surface. I'll look into reimplementing that tweakable, but you haven't convinced me it's worthwhile

That's fine. I added the extra height and recompiled it for myself.

[Hacki]

Cool mod, i really like it.

Just one question - the landertrons dont fire over water; is this normal or a symptom of my mod infested ksp installation?  (KSP 1.0.5; Landertron release  0.11.0 from Github) 

 

 

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

I just tried it on my test install, and I get the same thing.  It's probably because the "terrain" is far enough below the water that the lander isn't close enough to start the landing burn.

The soft-landing code doesn't do any calculations based on altitude; instead, it shoots a ray out from the thrust direction of a vessel's landertrons, and uses the length of that ray to gauge the firing time.  Currently, the ray is set to collide with terrain only, not water, but while it seems like that should be a quick fix (set the layerMask to be (1 << 15) | (1 << 4) instead of 1 << 15 as it is now), it isn't working when I tinker with my local version of the source.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

According to @NathanKell, the surface of the water isn't actually a collider.  Thankfully, @Crzyrndm gave me another idea -- since the surface of the water is (by definition) the radius of the planet, I could do some trig to work out the distance to the water, compare that to the distance to terrain, and use the minimum to work out the firing time.  It seems to work in my testing, so I'll have a PR to @charfa in a jiffy.

[SpaceBadger007]

how do you download for 1.0.5?

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

8 hours ago, SpaceBadger007 said:

how do you download for 1.0.5?

Grab it from @charfa's GitHub repo (you'll want version 0.11.0): https://github.com/charfa/XTLandertron/releases

[CatastrophicFailure]

Amazingly this actually seems to work on my insanely modded setup. Cool. But...

 

is there any way to make the parts smaller? Like maybe a tweakscale cfg floating around?

[komodo]

2 hours ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Amazingly this actually seems to work on my insanely modded setup. Cool. But...

 

is there any way to make the parts smaller? Like maybe a tweakscale cfg floating around?

As they're almost impossible to make root parts, you could just slap in rescaleFactor = 0.5 or something suitable.

[Booots]

Is there any way to make a Landertron controller part that has no engines in itself but would fire with all activated engines? I'm imagining a small box on the side of my lander that would use the deorbit/ascent LF/O engine for landing as well without the need for more, specialized engines. This would only work for throttle-able engines since they would need to be activated but throttled down for it to recognize them. Preferably it wouldn't also then dump their fuel after landing because it would just go back to zero throttle. The old throttling code for a gentle landing could be reintroduced for this use case. Ambitiously, the Landertron controller could even detect and account for armed solid fuel engines with the Landertron module and use them too.

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

At that level of complexity, you're probably better off using MechJeb.  It even comes with a small box to put on the side of the lander! 

[Buster Charlie]

Amazingly useful, this should really reduce parachute spam for some designsI'm having visions of using these to deploy supply drops for colonies 

Edited March 22, 2016 by Buster Charlie

[Booots]

On 2016-03-22 at 9:46 AM, Kerbas_ad_astra said:

At that level of complexity, you're probably better off using MechJeb.  It even comes with a small box to put on the side of the lander! 

Turns out it was pretty easy to do! I created a child class of Landertron and created new methods to override the fire, shutdown, and thrust calculation methods. Then the old ModeHandler logic takes care of everything like when to fire and accounting for other Landertrons because the child class is still an instance of the Landertron partModule. I just added the new module to a dummy part, and now my LF/O rockets can land with their own engines and the Landertron logic!

I could upload the new file here or add a pull request if anyone else is interested in this feature.

[CatastrophicFailure]

Out of curiosity, could you mod it like that to make it come to a stop a set distance above the ground?

 

[Booots]

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Out of curiosity, could you mod it like that to make it come to a stop a set distance above the ground?

I mean, with the source code you can change anything about it, but doing that would be going way outside of the tiny section I looked at changing and into the base functionality of the mod. So yeah, that could be done, but it's beyond me.

[Buster Charlie]

I'm having some issues with them not firing, they're armed and blue i'm facing the right direction. I can fire them manually. I test fired them above the launch pad before I launched and they worked. Now on reentry, they're not firing, i'm splashing down in the ocean, so they not work properly over water? 

EDIT:  I used hyperedit to shove the same craft a little to the north so it would land on the ground, and the rockets fired as expected. So at least on my install, they don't seem to fire above water, only land?

Edit: apparently this is known issue, I don't remember reading about this in the OP maybe I just need glasses.

Edited March 24, 2016 by Buster Charlie

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

OP is loooong gone (since August 2015), unfortunately, so there's not going to be any mention of the latest updates and issues there.  Troubles with water-landing is a known issue with @charfa's releases; I've made a PR to fix it, but I'm hesitant to jump the gun and put out a release since he's still active on the forum.  (Charfa, if you're game, I could figure out GitHub's "organization" and collaboration features so we can each make releases on the same repo -- and then we can have .version files and other cool things.)

[charfa]

Oh crap, sorry people. I've stopped playing KSP and stopped paying attention to what's going on here. I knew this was going to happen, that's why I didn't want to make my release the official one

@Kerbas_ad_astra, I somehow missed your PR on github. I can put out a new release with it, but if you intend to stick around then maybe it's best if you take back the maintenance of this mod. I feel like my job is done here

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Yeah, I'm sticking with KSP for the long haul (we'll see if I'm up to the task of fixing whatever needs fixing for 1.1), so I guess I'll put out the 0.12 release. Many thanks for the cleanup for 0.10 and 0.11!

[charfa]

Great, feel free to ping me if 1.1 changes prove problematic, I'm always up to a challenge

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

Version 0.12 is out!  Featuring support for ocean landings.

[pejmany]

On 23/03/2016 at 6:13 PM, Booots said:

Turns out it was pretty easy to do! I created a child class of Landertron and created new methods to override the fire, shutdown, and thrust calculation methods. Then the old ModeHandler logic takes care of everything like when to fire and accounting for other Landertrons because the child class is still an instance of the Landertron partModule. I just added the new module to a dummy part, and now my LF/O rockets can land with their own engines and the Landertron logic!

I could upload the new file here or add a pull request if anyone else is interested in this feature.

I'd appreciate that file upload! This sounds like a great spacex-y feature. 

[Kerbas_ad_astra]

On 3/23/2016 at 6:13 PM, Booots said:

Turns out it was pretty easy to do! I created a child class of Landertron and created new methods to override the fire, shutdown, and thrust calculation methods. Then the old ModeHandler logic takes care of everything like when to fire and accounting for other Landertrons because the child class is still an instance of the Landertron partModule. I just added the new module to a dummy part, and now my LF/O rockets can land with their own engines and the Landertron logic!

I could upload the new file here or add a pull request if anyone else is interested in this feature.

I'd be happy to accept a PR, but I'm curious about why you changed some functions to be "virtual".  (I have some experience programming, but I'm not very familiar with C# specifically.)

Also, I'll need to get some modeling experience to add a model for the landertron-box, although I guess I could just add it to all probe cores with a Module Manager patch.