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Throttle Controlled Avionics 1.4.1 [0.90] (5 January '15)

qfeys

By qfeys
in KSP1 Mod Releases

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  • 2 weeks later...
JeffreyCor

JeffreyCor

Posted
Posted

In some future version, being able to adjust mean thrust below the current 80 limit would be very helpful for when landing in low gravity environments so there is greater usable throttle range without over thrusting during landing. :)

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Zenka

Zenka

Posted
Posted
In some future version, being able to adjust mean thrust below the current 80 limit would be very helpful for when landing in low gravity environments so there is greater usable throttle range without over thrusting during landing. :)

Wouldn't simply turning down the main throttle work in low G?

I haven't tried this myself, but TCA is reactionary (since SAS is) so I see no reason to believe TCA won't work at low thrusts. (might not be a very smooth experience though :P)

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JeffreyCor

JeffreyCor

Posted
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The problem isn't that it doesn't work at low thrust the problem is you can't use a thrust limit below 80% with TCA active. Sometimes you need more thrust for effective maneuvers but when it comes to landing a very high TWR gives very little throttle range where being able to adjust TCA lower limit say 20% for example instead of 80% would give far greater control.

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qfeys

qfeys

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  • Author
Posted (edited)

The problem is that increasing the range of the slider reduces the resolution on it. I could maybe set it to minimum 60, or use a nonlinear scale, but I think it is easier to disable some of the main engines and use the upcoming reaction control function on all the smaller engines.

Also, I'm still working on it, but I have some problems with exactly this feature, to figure out what direction is forward. Also I'm having exams.

Edited by qfeys
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  • 5 weeks later...
dethsturm

dethsturm

Posted
Posted

Will there ever be a way to specify what axis are being controlled? Also how about a way to exclude an engine from the controls, such as a center lift fan on a VTOL? Or a way to flag an engine as normally off and only to be used when rotating (throttles up when turning, then goes back to 0)?

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arkie87

arkie87

Posted
Posted

Very nice work! It makes VTOL's actually fun to build!

A few suggestions/requests, some of which might have been asked before:

(1) can you make it so that you can select which engines should be controlled and which should be left alone?

(2) Its impossible to tell if TCA is on or off. Can you make it change color so we know its on? Or a light light up?

(3) Weird sound glitch for me when TCA is on. Not sure what info you need...

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steve_v

steve_v

Posted
Posted

Well that's truly strange, updated to 0.24.2 & now this mod along with some others (with identical issues, something like 'Missing method .ctor in...') work fine. Can't reproduce it in 0.24.1 now either, unfortunately logs long gone. Guessing not a mod related bug at all, probably my mono. Sorry for the noise.

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evilC

evilC

Posted
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Very nice work! It makes VTOL's actually fun to build!

(1) can you make it so that you can select which engines should be controlled and which should be left alone?

Install Davon Throttle Control and set the non-VTOL engines to another "Davon Group".

(2) Its impossible to tell if TCA is on or off. Can you make it change color so we know its on? Or a light light up?

There should be a light (red/green) on the TCA icon in the toolbar, to indicate current status.

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  • 1 month later...
Apophis

Apophis

Posted
Posted

I have found a serious bug. If in a ship there are 2 or more command modules with different orientations TCA will choose a random one as reference ignoring which one the user selected.

The result is that the torque generated is wrong. Sometimes wrong axis and other inverted controls.

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  • 2 weeks later...
dreadicon

dreadicon

Posted
Posted (edited)

I have noticed the same issues as Apophis. Building a VTOL plane is effectively impossible, as only engines oriented horizontally will be recognized correctly, unless launching from the VAB. In which case only engines aligned vertically will be recognized.

Moreover, this has presented a very vexing problem of being unable to launch a craft with rockets like the shuttle, and then land/relaunch as VTOL. Near Future/Interstellar ion/plasma makes wonderful hopping from low gravity body to low gravity body, but is almost impossible to launch from Kerbin...

Perhaps you could offer a button in the GUI to reset/recalculate the orientation to the currently active command module's orientation? This way docking ports can be used to change the orientation as needed.

EDIT: Just noticed "-TCA will compute everything based on the orientation of the root part." I know C#, so looked over the API, then did some digging. The documentation for this game is terrible, but luckly I found what you want: getFwdVector()

"Thankfully there is a vector available called the forward vector: vessel.GetFwdVector() which tells us how a positive pitch input changes the rockets orientation. When we start at the launch pad the forward vector is 0.0,1.0,0.0, that is to say positive pitch makes the rockets vector have a bigger y-component. By using some linear algebra we can also get a vector that defines what impact a yaw input will have, which I call the yaw vector. If we assume that there is always some way for us to turn in the right direction we can argue that some combination of yaw and pitch will yield the changes to te rocket's vector's x and y components as recommended by the PID controllers. If we call the forward vector fwdVec and the yaw vector yawVec we can express the relationship like so: A*yawVec+B*fwdVec=diff."

Full article here: http://www.svealiden.se/ksp.html

EDIT 2: did some more toying and examining of the code, GetFwdVector may or may not be what you are looking for. However, if you want the current control transform (so the transform which is being used for the nav ball and the craft controls), it can be found using vessel.ReferenceTransform.InverseTransformDirection(partfoo.transform.rotation), where partfoo is the engine in this case. With this I could see actually adding support for all sorts of engine orientations.

Edited by dreadicon
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  • 1 month later...
qfeys

qfeys

Posted
  • Author
Posted
This is a great mod, quick suggestion/question: perhaps we can tie it to an action group so we toggle the plugin functionality - this will address changing conditions/crafts while in same mission.

Actually, you can already toggle the functionality by pressing 'y'.

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Gfurst

Gfurst

Posted
Posted

Hey there , just passing by to report something I've noticed

This mod is flooding my log with exceptions, this probably caused a bit of lag with, and this wasn't even while activated.

I was just doing some test flights with a simpler type rocket( testing new mods).

Thought the functionality provided here is truly awesome, I'll be pushing to using this whenever I built a more weird deathtrap.

Either way, hope this is useful to you (this is just a small example, the exception is pretty much continuous):

[EXC 01:13:47.771] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ThrottleControlledAvionics.ThrottleControlledAvionics.FixedUpdate ()
[EXC 01:13:47.796] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ThrottleControlledAvionics.ThrottleControlledAvionics.FixedUpdate ()
[EXC 01:13:47.827] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ThrottleControlledAvionics.ThrottleControlledAvionics.FixedUpdate ()
[EXC 01:13:47.829] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ThrottleControlledAvionics.ThrottleControlledAvionics.FixedUpdate ()
[EXC 01:13:47.853] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ThrottleControlledAvionics.ThrottleControlledAvionics.FixedUpdate ()
[EXC 01:13:47.878] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ThrottleControlledAvionics.ThrottleControlledAvionics.FixedUpdate ()
[EXC 01:13:47.910] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	ThrottleControlledAvionics.ThrottleControlledAvionics.FixedUpdate ()

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Scottiths

Scottiths

Posted
Posted

This mod needs a bump. Sad to see it so deep in the forums for how amazingly useful it is. Especially for airplanes. I no longer need to line up multi engines perfectly to keep the ship from flipping out once it exits the atmosphere.

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