Ladder Physics and Glitches

[astropapi1]

Just took a small trip to the Mun on a 0.15t ship...

Backwards flags on screenshots... Why did you program kerbals to move around when planting flags, SQUAD?!

Coming in for a landing. Decelerating on Kerbin with offset thrust is hard!

I went a little agressive on this one, just because of my high TWR and infinite Dv. Landed directly without entering Mun orbit, and then shot back directly into Kerbin without using its atmosphere to slow down. As I'm using Deadly Reentry, I had to start decelerating even before hitting the atmosphere so Bob wouldn't burn up. Oh, and I almost (1.2km) crashed into a passing space station when coming down. Fun times indeed!

[Tw1]

Landed on Eve, returned to orbit under ladder power.

[SkyRender]

There's another odd ladder bug that I don't think has been mentioned yet here: if a Kerbal on EVA has the ladder he's currently climbing retracted, that Kerbal will have all of his momentum relative to the body he's over canceled. The short of it is that you will have a Kerbal falling towards the surface below at an alarming speed if you try this. It can be a useful way to quickly get to the surface of certain moons, I guess, but it's definitely not supposed to be a feature.

[Laie]

Yeah, now that we're seeing some commitment from Squad to fixing the stock aero model, I'm reasonably confident the infiniglide glitch will eventually be closed up.

Citation? Last I heard it "wasn't the nicest piece of code" and I certainly don't take that as commitment considering some of the production code I've seen that was never changed because "it does the job".

What Red already said; plus, there was another tweet from maxmaps that implied that a) someone was looking at the aero code right now and finding a few more corpses in the basement than they were comfortable with. I have an inkling that mass-based drag may go away soon, possibly as early as 0.26.

Edited October 4, 2014 by Laie

[Guest]

What Red already said; plus, there was another tweet from maxmaps that implied that a) someone was looking at the aero code right now and finding a few more corpses in the basement than they were comfortable with. I have an inkling that mass-based drag may go away soon, possibly as early as 0.26.

I highly doubt 0.26 as that already seems planned out and possibly the end of the main line of career mode development (feature complete on that side). 0.27 at the earliest, I say, and don't get your hopes up for it being fixed in any way that is recognizable to current FAR/NEAR players. Also, don't go around saying "it'll be fixed" because we still haven't breached the "fun barrier" that killed resources or the "difficulty barrier" of unrealistically tiny planets which need thick atmospheres to compensate.

Basically consider any news to be "at this time" and nowhere near concrete.

[lajoswinkler]

Yes, this is a known bug. It pisses me off because it goes in the way when I do EVA.

[megatiger78]

but daqnny alredy found it

[Andrew Hansen]

Since Tw1 proved that it's possible to lift off of Eve with a ladder-powered craft, I decided to visit both Eve and Gilly in one trip. I learned a lot of interesting things about ladder-powered crafts:

1. They don't fare well with maneuver nodes at all. If you need to perform a maneuver node, set it up first, point at the vector, and then delete it before thrusting.
   
2. When going interplanetary, try to get an encounter with your target planet, but don't try to bring its periapsis down. These types of crafts have unlimited delta-V, but not unlimited accuracy. It was ridiculously hard to get my periapsis down when I did it the former way, and I ended up wasting lots of EVA propellant because of performing maneuver nodes.
   
3. When going through spheres of influence, do it on rails warp or let go of the ladder with your Kerbal, or else... bad stuff happens.
   

Anyway, here's the video:

[Tw1]

I am a bit impressed you managed to do that with the one tank of eva- my kerbals tend to float about a bit more, which leads to my preference to using seats.

But then, moving from seat to ladder requires more fuel, so maybe this stable timewarp thing is something I should master, when I get around to finishing my ladderforce Jool moons tour.

[Andrew Hansen]

I am a bit impressed you managed to do that with the one tank of eva- my kerbals tend to float about a bit more, which leads to my preference to using seats.

I agree, it can be challenging to minimize drift during timewarp. What I like to do is let go, grab on to the ladder again, and then let go a second time. Generally, I don't see much visible drift when going at 100x timewarp after doing this. Once, after going halfway around the sun, I only ended up 800-and-something meters away from my ship! Of course, it's also possible to end up dozens of kilometers away, so sometimes you just have to deal with that.

But then, moving from seat to ladder requires more fuel, so maybe this stable timewarp thing is something I should master, when I get around to finishing my ladderforce Jool moons tour.

It seems to me like moving from a seat to a ladder would use much less fuel, but perhaps with how much Kerbals like to reorientate themselves, you could still end up losing lots of EVA propellant.

And, ladderforce Jool moons tour? I'm pumped!