Saturable Reaction Wheels

[Dodgey]

I don't really see how this is hardcore in of it's self. It depends on how it is balanced, for example if it was set up to become fully saturated at say 30 seconds of full power before needing another 30 seconds to be come unsaturated it would allow ships on the smaller side to not be affected much if at all. Where as it would encourage the use of RCS on bigger ships, higher or lower diffuclty settings could affect the length of effective time it can be used for as well as the cool down time respectively.

Different reaction wheels could sacrifice power for effective use time or vise versa. There are numerous balancing options for the mechanic so I don't see why it has to be a hardcore feature.

[klgraham1013]

Yikes. Message received. In a rocket science game about delta-Vs, mass ratios, and orbital mechanics the concept of paying back your debt to Newton might boggle the poor little noobs' minds....

My thoughts reading up to here. The "it's a game" comments seem really lazy. Anyway. I'll finish the thread now.

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I really like the alternate idea. Seems a good compromise.

Edited January 21, 2015 by klgraham1013

[THX1138]

I support the inclusion of reaction wheel saturation limits. I'm not sure there should be magical slow desaturation though.

[NonWonderDog]

I don't see the point. Better would be to just remove reaction wheels from plane cockpits, if the problem is reaction wheels in atmosphere. If someone still wants to throw a reaction wheel on instead of using control surfaces... let them? Cut the reaction wheel torque by 5x or so and nobody would even want to do it (I have a modulemanager config to do this for myself -- mostly because I don't like how ridiculously fast the pods can spin themselves).

And who cares if someone parks on a slope.

There are no gravity gradient (tidal) effects on spacecraft anymore in KSP since 0.10 or something. Without those, there are very few ways to permanently store significant angular momentum on a spacecraft outside of physics glitches. Really the only way you'd notice is if you spun up before decoupling something heavy. There would be a smaller effect if you spun while thrusting due to the loss in propellant mass. But if you just turn from one vector to another, the net angular momentum is zero. The reaction wheel spins to start you turning, and stops spinning to stop you turning.

It really seems like people are misunderstanding why this is an issue for real spacecraft. Even if implemented, it wouldn't change anything about space operations without HarvesteR making gravity work on every part individually again. And even then, I can't think of any in-game reason you wouldn't just let your ship align to the gravity gradient. And even then, it wouldn't do anything during time acceleration, so you'd have to be fighting gravity gradient for a week straight at no more than 4x normal speed before the gyros saturated.

Edited February 5, 2015 by NonWonderDog

[Crzyrndm]

So the discussion here may have sparked my interest in how this could actually play inside of KSP. Some experimentation quickly put the first iteration of the idea on a slippery slope, not only would timewarp pose some issues, but KSP damps rotation above a certain rate (read: you slow down without any input). So as suggested, stored momentum decaying over time is not only sounds better for gameplay, you don't have to fight KSP as much over it either.

This (link removed. See thread linked below) is the prototype I've been playing around with for those that are interested (NOTE: No promises over the validity of the maths involved. This is back of the scratchpad type stuff). Reaction wheels store momentum in world space coordinates, the greater the amount stored, the less torque is available along aligned axes. The inflight tweakables allow the torque storage and bleed rates to be adjusted (for getting an idea of how things feel). Bleed Rate is a % of the maximum part torque being removed every second, Max Scale controls how much momentum can be stored (and thus the rate at which available torque is reduced).

EDIT

Mod development thread here

Edited February 19, 2015 by Crzyrndm

[Sethur]

I am very much in support of this idea, even the first option without the magical AM dissipation, but then again, I would also be in support of adding FAR-like aerodynamics to Stock, and this will probably never happen. Sure, going towards more realism would make KSP more difficult in most cases, but what's wrong about adding multiple levels of realism/difficulty between which players could easily switch. Don't like Newtonian Saturating Reaction Wheels? Well just go back to medium difficulty. Don't like flat spins with your fancy new hypersonic plane? Medium difficulty. Wanna work for SpaceX or NASA in the future? Go to legendary mode and turn everything on. This would also increase the challenge of doing many of the standard KSP achievements (first Mun landing, first successful docking, etc.) and as such the reward would be so much nicer. I don't get how people here are claiming that KSP is just a game, which shouldn't be too realistic.

For me, KSP is as much about fun as it is about education (which is also fun, at least for me), and successfully completing a mission with maneuvers and crafts that are at least close to reality gives me so much more satisfaction than doing it in an environment where you could have won by operating your X-Box controller with one hand while slouching on the couch and eating chips with the other. I actually enjoy finding out how orbital mechanics work, how momentum preservation works, etc. For me, that's what makes KSP unique, what makes it standout before other space games. And yes, I would totally count it towards the simulation genre, although Squad tries to hide this between the cute green Kerbal environment, but it still is, and there is nothing wrong with that.

[MarkusA380]

My mod (link in signature) may be interesting for you guys.

[mdosogne]

I'm all for the increases in simulated realism (it is a game after all - I can live without the gyro complexities).

I'd make 3 changes to suggestion #2 to keep things noob-friendly:

1. Whenever feasible, automatically bleed off angular momentum:

a. anytime in landed or splashed down state.

b. in atmo. with non-saturated control surfaces.

c. in space when RCS is enabled and controls are inactive

d. when firing gimbaled engine, gimbal is not saturated and gimbaling provides torque in the necessary direction.

e. (Edit) upon coupling/decoupling with a station that has other wheels, "balance" the RW load (so all wheels have the same % saturation).

For the micromanagers out there, AM could be displayed on right-clicking and transferred like any other resource.

2. Display a HUD warning (similar to time warp overlay) when approaching saturation. Something along the lines of:

WARNING: (>75% max AM in any direction)

Reaction wheel approaching maximum angular momentum.

Reduced reaction wheel (pitch/yaw/roll) torque.

Enable RCS to bleed off angular momentum.

WARNING:

Reaction wheel at maximum angular momentum!

Reaction wheel can no longer apply (pitch/yaw/roll) torque.

Enable RCS to bleed off angular momentum.

3. Nuke the Mk1 command pod's wheels and give it weak RCS thrusters; it already has monopropellant included.

Put RCS earlier in the tech tree, and move reaction wheels later. Early in the squad tech tree you don't have solar panels and batteries are limited, so using RCS might actually make things simpler.

In v1.0 there's supposedly a 'checklist' for missing ship components. Maybe warn if RCS is not present on rocket (with explanation?).

For "hardcore" mode (mod only?) RWs should consume some minimal EC just to maintain their angular momentum to compensate for friction losses. Unpowered RWs would bleed off AM by applying it to the vessel.

The difficulty-scaling option is also a good idea (assuming SQUAD ever implements this).

The overheat-bar is a good idea. But the real question is - should it explode?

Edited April 3, 2015 by mdosogne

[Fel]

Well... reaction wheels are just too broken to really be "fixed". Its like ie6, ie6 was so non-compliant with standards that IE7 required a compatibility mode to prevent breaking webpages tailored for ie6. Similarly, the crazy strong magical reaction wheels have become so important in people's builds that fixing them would simply cause more problems.

I haven't really checked, but I recall that RCS was horribly broken and SQUAD had no plans on actually fixing it.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/28044-WIP-Plugin-KerbCom-Avionics-Analytical-engine-and-RCS-thrust-balancing

Of course, the biggest disadvantage to using RCS is that SQUAD still hasn't removed the legacy "anti-kraken" code that turned off rotation while on rails. Using RCS would mean you do a small puff, timewarp, then a small puff to stop. But, what we do instead is press and hold.

I'd like reaction wheels to get fixed... but squad really has made it clear that they're here to stay as is.

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And it should be noted just how much better planes perform without magical reaction wheels. They have a far more "aerodynaic" feel rather than "rocket with wings"

Edited April 5, 2015 by Fel

[John FX]

After using the mod for a while I quite like it. Still some bugs to be ironed out but it works well and is fun.

[lude]

On 4/28/2014 at 0:32 PM, Sirrobert said:

This is a GAME

Adding something that makes it more difficult to enjoy the GAME just for the purpose of realism is a horrible thing to do

To each his own, I'm more like a Fakir

before I can even enjoy a proper 'sim' game I have to go through excruciating times of modding it and making these mods compatible, in some games that I played hundreds of hours to under a thousand this can make up more than 3/4 of the time and a lot of these mods are more like an iron maiden than they are a lofty bed with silken beddings.