[1.4] StageRecovery - Recover Funds+ from Dropped Stages - v1.8.0 (March 11, 2018)

[speedwaystar]

hmmm. from memory, the distances are around the 85-95km mark. i have a fully upgraded tracking station. i'll double check and get back to you.

[JohnWildman]

25 minutes ago, magico13 said:

What do you mean by session change? Do you mean any scene changes (going from Flight to the Space Center) or do you mean exiting/loading the game? (the latter is a subset of the former, so I'd be surprised if it was one and not the other.) StageRecovery is generally a purely reactive mod (before version 1.6 it was entirely reactive) meaning you won't see any recovery messages unless the game was telling SR that it destroyed a vessel. Annoyingly the game does say that during scene changes, but SR tries to ignore those until the new scene is fully loaded. It's possible that some are slipping through though. The one place that SR is proactive is with recovering Kerbals, so if your bases are all kerbal-less but you haven't gotten any recovery messages then that sounds like an SR bug. Either way, SR isn't supposed to do any checks on anything outside of Kerbin's atmosphere. If it's landed somewhere or isn't on Kerbin then SR shouldn't be running on it at all. That implies that you're building your bases on Kerbin, is that correct?

Yes exactly. I am building a base on Kerbin.

By session change I mean the following:

- build a base and place some Kerbals in it

- switch to space center

- launch a craft and recover it

After doing that the Kerbals in the base on Kerbin are gone and shown as missing or dead.

[magico13]

46 minutes ago, JohnWildman said:

After doing that the Kerbals in the base on Kerbin are gone and shown as missing or dead.

Ok, if it's just the Kerbals then that's from the pre-recovery code added in 1.6. The base should be "landed" so it shouldn't be triggering that, but I'll try to add a workaround to fix it. You might want to switch to the 1.5 version in the meantime.

[JohnWildman]

36 minutes ago, magico13 said:

Ok, if it's just the Kerbals then that's from the pre-recovery code added in 1.6. The base should be "landed" so it shouldn't be triggering that, but I'll try to add a workaround to fix it. You might want to switch to the 1.5 version in the meantime.

Will do!

Thx alot for your help.

[speedwaystar]

Quote

hmmm. from memory, the distances are around the 85-95km mark. i have a fully upgraded tracking station. i'll double check and get back to you.

did i say 85-95km? i meant 4.13km...

all of the recovered parts were scrapped

this happened for both boosters -- they were recovered <5km away from KSC, took 90% damage and were scrapped.

Edited January 26, 2016 by speedwaystar

[magico13]

13 minutes ago, speedwaystar said:

did i say 85-95km? i meant 4.13km...

Your speeds are really high. You're just under the High Cutoff (where you start to have any recovery, default 12m/s). You want to shoot to be under the Low Cutoff (below the low cutoff it's 100%) which by default is 6 m/s. The message tells you that you're getting 97.8% for distance and only 10.3% for speed, so speed is the limiting factor for you. You can also check that by using the full StageRecovery GUI in flight or using the Editor Helper in the editor to see what percent due to speed you'd get. There's also a graph in the first post (linked again below) that shows how speed affects recovery.

 

Image (speed in m/s on the horizontal axis, "speed percentage" on the vertical):

 

[speedwaystar]

ah right, thanks. that makes a lot more sense.

[magico13]

5 minutes ago, speedwaystar said:

ah right, thanks. that makes a lot more sense.

I'll make a note to update that message to say that under 6 is desired, since it does seem a bit misleading to say "under 12 needed". Something simple like "ideal: <6, required: <12" might do a better job. Sorry about the confusion 

[speedwaystar]

97.8% distance, 10.3% speed reads at first glance if you're 97.8% of the maximum distance away, at 10.3% of the maximum speed. that was the root of my misunderstanding.

[magico13]

Ah, I see the source of the confusion then. They've been given the way they are since the beginning so I likely won't change them. Just think of them as the % of the total value that you're getting back.

Functionally the "recovery %" is just "distance % x speed %". Then the funds you get back are just: "total value x recovery %", so that's why they're displayed that way, since that's the way they're in code and that's also how the distance percentage is conveyed in the Stock game for normal recovery.

[alexman142]

Wrong thread sorry

Edited January 30, 2016 by alexman142

[WuphonsReach]

On 1/26/2016 at 10:29 AM, magico13 said:

If you're dropping the stages once you're almost to orbit then they're gonna end up going pretty far. Usually how I build I drop my boosters fairly close to KSC and take my main stage all the way to orbit and send it down manually (often I just discard it in the atmosphere and don't recover it at all). You might need to tweak how you build to find a system that works best for you.

I could add "recovery zones" for downrange recovery that could be used for minimizing losses due to distance. I could even give them limited ranges so you'd have to somewhat aim your boosters. That sounds like it'd tie in well with NIMBY, the proof of concept mod I worked on that restricted recovery to be within a certain range of "recovery beacons". 

My usual tactic is that the boosters give me about 1200-1500 dV, then first stage burns out at around 3000-3300 dV (usually around 58km to 62km altitude).  That drops the boosters 5-15 km from KSC, while the first stage is recovered with about 60-75% of its dry value.

But my designs are also designed to be flown by MJ's ascent guidance with a 60% curve and 80km final orbit.

I wouldn't mind a NIMBY beacon to boost my recovery values (never say no to free funds).

[bradleyjh]

Trying to figure out why powered recovery wasn't working and I suspect it is the SAS requirement, I'm using mechjeb as a control point on my first stage as I was previously landing it manually. Could it be added that mechjeb be a valid control point?

EDIT: I tested this theory by adding a probe with SAS and the powered recovery worked perfectly so if MechJeb could be added as a valid control point for powered recovery that would be really great as I prefer MechJeb as it can be attached radially and I think feels/looks a lot nicer. Cheers!

Edited February 11, 2016 by bradleyjh
Additional info

[DBowman]

Hi @magico13 thanks for all the work that went into SR, it's well conceived and pretty easy to use.

I had a craft with 2 boosters and one core with chutes, green for SR highlight (and the circularize & payload). The 2 boosters recovered fine.

The core gets an Ap of 100 km, I've flown in manually bells first and it survives reentry and will splashdown safe at just below 6 m/s (per SR prediction). When I let the core alone I get a KSP notify that the core was destroyed. When I look at SR it says destroyed, but the info tab looks like its going to refund 40% of funds and also that the stage burned up on reentry. Is this more or less what you expect? From reading the docs I'd expect to only recover a proportion from the distance effect, but the 'it burned up' and the notify of destruction are confusing me. If I flew the core down 'by hand' to splashdown and manually 'recover' what happens? do you 'hook' into that for distance effect? or does it just grab the craft to the vab? or something else?

Oh as an aside I think powered recovery and MJ don't play nice together (MJs 'fault'). MJ wont stage if there is any fuel left, at least last time I was trying powered recover by hand with a small tank 'disabled' MJ wouldn't stage cause it thinks it has fuel even though it cannot use it. Do you have a way around that?

[magico13]

On 2/10/2016 at 7:59 AM, bradleyjh said:

Trying to figure out why powered recovery wasn't working and I suspect it is the SAS requirement, I'm using mechjeb as a control point on my first stage as I was previously landing it manually. Could it be added that mechjeb be a valid control point?

EDIT: I tested this theory by adding a probe with SAS and the powered recovery worked perfectly so if MechJeb could be added as a valid control point for powered recovery that would be really great as I prefer MechJeb as it can be attached radially and I think feels/looks a lot nicer. Cheers!

I'll see about adding MechJeb as an alternate to SAS capability. It shouldn't be too hard to add in, I just need to find some time to sit down at my computer.

On 2/13/2016 at 6:39 AM, DBowman said:

Hi @magico13 thanks for all the work that went into SR, it's well conceived and pretty easy to use.

I had a craft with 2 boosters and one core with chutes, green for SR highlight (and the circularize & payload). The 2 boosters recovered fine.

The core gets an Ap of 100 km, I've flown in manually bells first and it survives reentry and will splashdown safe at just below 6 m/s (per SR prediction). When I let the core alone I get a KSP notify that the core was destroyed. When I look at SR it says destroyed, but the info tab looks like its going to refund 40% of funds and also that the stage burned up on reentry. Is this more or less what you expect? From reading the docs I'd expect to only recover a proportion from the distance effect, but the 'it burned up' and the notify of destruction are confusing me. If I flew the core down 'by hand' to splashdown and manually 'recover' what happens? do you 'hook' into that for distance effect? or does it just grab the craft to the vab? or something else?

Oh as an aside I think powered recovery and MJ don't play nice together (MJs 'fault'). MJ wont stage if there is any fuel left, at least last time I was trying powered recover by hand with a small tank 'disabled' MJ wouldn't stage cause it thinks it has fuel even though it cannot use it. Do you have a way around that?

When it burns up it still does the rest of the calculations, it just doesn't refund any funds. If you see "destroyed" anywhere then no funds were returned. When a stage "burns up" it's based purely on the speed of the vessel when KSP deletes it. There's a whole bunch of information about that in a spoiler tag in the original post. The distances used for calculations are the distance of the vessel from KSC at deletion. That's not totally accurate because deletion happens around 25km altitude, so the vessel would continue moving further away, but it also likely didn't have any atmospheric forces act on it for a while so it's already further than it would be if you had manually flown it.

If you manually fly the craft down and recover it then StageRecovery doesn't do anything with it. SR only kicks in when the vessel is deleted by KSP.

I don't use MechJeb so I don't have any suggestions for that. You could ask in the MJ thread for them to add an option to stage when the delta v reaches a certain value rather than when it runs empty perhaps. Or you can take a look at kOS and write your own ascent code. Or you might ask the GravityTurn developer to add that as a feature and use that for launches instead (it's based on the MJ code, but is supposedly more efficient).

[bradleyjh]

On 14 February 2016 at 5:20 AM, magico13 said:

I'll see about adding MechJeb as an alternate to SAS capability. It shouldn't be too hard to add in, I just need to find some time to sit down at my computer.

Thanks, no rush, I had an idea that worked, I edited the MechJeb part.cfg for the radial MechJeb part and added the level 1 SAS capability and that fixed it as StageRecovery now sees that as a control part with SAS

[casper88]

ditto the issue JohnWildman reported..

though it seems to only occur when going from a landed vessel then using the switch to button to another object

Edited February 16, 2016 by casper88

[magico13]

26 minutes ago, casper88 said:

ditto the issue JohnWildman reported..

though it seems to only occur when going from a landed vessel then using the switch to button to another object

That issue is solved and fixed in a beta build but I was trying to also solve another issue before releasing that. I'll try to get an updated version out this weekend with that fix in it (unfortunately the other thing is being tougher to solve than I thought), but until then I suggest using the .dll from the link above.

[casper88]

i'll wait for the release  i just thought i would highlight its a common issue.

 

i have also noticed that SR doesnt activate the "recover" handler on rescue contracts 

 

thanks again

[magico13]

5 minutes ago, casper88 said:

i have also noticed that SR doesnt activate the "recover" handler on rescue contracts 

An attempt to fix that is what caused the other issue, actually. The reason the "recover" parameter doesn't activate is because the kerbal is actually killed and then resurrected which causes the contract to fail. I tried to get around that by "prerecovering" the kerbals prior to them being killed, which had the unfortunate side effect of triggering on landed vessels and setting those kerbals to MIA. The prerecovering mechanic only works in the flight scene though, so if you're trying to use SR for recovery then make sure you don't leave the flight scene.

[TaintedLion]

On 26/01/2016 at 3:29 PM, magico13 said:

I haven't ever seen duplication before. If you see it again, I'd love to get the log file. It sounds like the stage wasn't actually being destroyed and kept triggering the "destroyed" event. That could happen if there were some "bad parts" on the vessel, or could be a StageRecovery bug as well. It's likely a vessel specific issue or a part specific issue, so testing for it would be a challenge. If it doesn't crop up again then let's just call it a weird fluke, but if you (or anyone else for that matter) notice duplication issues again let me know (preferably with a log file  ) and I'll see if I can prevent it.

I'm afraid this isn't an isolated case. I detached a craft's service module at about 300000m, and by the time I'd landed I had received over 6000(!) notifications telling me the service module had been destroyed, causing severe lag. And as a special present, I have a log file for you . I'm sorry, as much as I love your mod, this bug is game-breaking for me, so I've had to uninstall it temporarily, until the bug is fixed.

Thanks for taking the time to help.

[magico13]

15 minutes ago, TaintedLion said:

Thanks for taking the time to help.

It appears the issue lies within Kerbal Konstructs (specifically due to KK and SR integration). If you're willing to do a bit of troubleshooting, could you remove that and add SR back in and see if you get the same issue?

There's an error where you're missing the Kerbal Konstructs config file, which likely means you have no launchsites, which would probably cause some problems. Are you actually using Kerbal Konstructs for anything?

 

Here's the related errors:

[WRN 16:11:57.021] File '/home/joseph/Desktop/Kerbal 1.0.5/Stockalike/KSP_linux/KSP_Data/../saves/Career Two/KK.cfg' does not exist
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Searching in RecoveryQueue (0) for dbbbd379-747c-4620-bdd4-b413285c2601
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Altitude: 35849.1554953253
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Vt: 200
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Trying powered recovery
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Stage not controlled. Can't perform powered recovery.
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] DR velocity exceeded (2329.72823096979/2000) Chance of burning up: 0.3297282
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Found 0 ablator remaining with 0 total.
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Burn chance: 0.3297282 rand: 0.768648941427771 burning? False
[LOG 16:11:57.022] [SR] Distance: 539625.9
[EXC 16:11:57.026] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	KerbalKonstructs.KerbalKonstructs.OnVesselRecovered (.ProtoVessel vessel)
	KerbalKonstructs.KerbalKonstructs.SRProcessingFinished (.Vessel vessel)
	StageRecovery.RecoveryProcessingEvent.Fire (.Vessel vessel)
	StageRecovery.StageRecovery.VesselDestroyEvent (.Vessel v)
	EventData`1[Vessel].Fire (.Vessel data)
	Vessel.Die ()
	Part.Die ()
	Part.explode ()
	Part.FixedUpdate ()

 

[CitizenVeen]

Thanks for the nice mod!

Where can I edit the modifier for money recovered based on distance from KSC? I use this with Real Solar System, and switching arround the launch site sometimes doesn really go well with it. Sometimes I only recover 10% (because of distance) from a stage seperated like ~1min into the launch.

I guess I want to remove the distance modifier, and only use the speed modifier.

Another question: What method do you guys use to recover upper stages? Even a big first stage usually surpasses the 2k m/s to be able to not burn up in the atmosphere. Or do you guys just let m burn? Thanks!

[magico13]

With RSS you'll want to turn up the DR Max Velocity to 7000 or so. The 2000 is for the Stock system. You can override the distance percentages in the config file, but there's no way to do that in-game (just open the config with a text editor)

[CitizenVeen]

43 minutes ago, magico13 said:

With RSS you'll want to turn up the DR Max Velocity to 7000 or so. The 2000 is for the Stock system. You can override the distance percentages in the config file, but there's no way to do that in-game (just open the config with a text editor)

Is that realistic? Wouldn't any debris burn up at even much lower velocities?

Still looking how to set the distance multiplier