[PLUGIN, PART, 0.17] Bigtrak KSP Edition v.30 Liltrak

[Kreuzung]

Go slower... Fast rockets cause lag because the weels of the Bigtrak collide with the lander...

[SmiteZero]

How is anyone getting the cuttlefish/lander/bigtrak to the mun? Everytime I try I have a weird camera bug issue where my camera ends up way behind my launch vehicle, and makes it pretty much impossible to fly/land this thing to/on the mun.

Any help?

Really? This is still at the top of the page your reply is on, as well as being mentioned half a dozen times throughout the thread.

[Nexus-7]

Yes, really.

I saw the remark earlier on the page and it didn\'t help. I tried fuel tanks and other means of stacking higher and it still didn\'t work. Thanks a bunch for your insightful and helpful attempt to flame me for no reason. I wouldn\'t have asked if I didn\'t need help or advice, you provided neither.

[Katalliaan]

It isn\'t Smite\'s fault that there\'s a bug with the cart plugin (and also the wheel plugin IIRC) where high speeds cause the wheels to separate from their intended locations, and solutions have already been provided. There\'s no further help to be had, short of Tosh finding some way to keep the wheels from drifting away from their parent part.

[Nexus-7]

I realize it\'s not Smite\'s fault. Let me be clear. I\'ve seen pictures in this thread of people having the Bigtrak on the mun, and using the cuttlefish lander. I\'m extremely thankful to the people who made these neat parts for me to play with, and I was just wondering what I was doing wrong and they were doing right. Specifics. I\'m every bit as excited by this game as everyone else, and as part of the community who paid for this early on to continue development on it, I was hoping for very specific advice like 'I used part X from package Y beneath the bigtrack, and connected it to part Z, and was able to get past this problem' or even referring to a craft file.

My response to Smite was specifically that the whole intention of his post was to basically call me an idiot when I am just like the rest of you and excited and thrilled about this game and asking for specific help/assistance and his comment contributed nothing but basically insult.

Thanks to those of you who have helped. I will try to redesign my launch vehicle to go slower (this is going to mean moving away from SRBs). With that in mind, does anyone have any advice on specific rocket builds that keep the vehicle at reasonable atmospheric velocities? Thanks.

[chickenplucker]

Check the previous page for a picture of the launch vehicle I use, it\'s made mostly from the down under pack and is all liquid powered. Generally with that lifter you can floor it and forget it without having your tires drift away. When I get around to fixing some of the kinks I\'ll upload some craft files

[Nexus-7]

Thanks Chickenplucker!

[Capt'n Skunky]

[gmod]Play nice or I'm going to drop the hammer. Got it? Good.[/gmod]

Carry on.

Cheers!

Capt\'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager

[GeneralIssue]

Annnnnyyyway,

chicken, were you thinking about adding some sort of explosive-bolt part to attach the shell parts to? I think it would be a real cool option for people who want to use the lander deck and crew module as a separate entity of it\'s own, and jettison the fairings in what would most likely be a spectacularly dramatic fashion.

Just a thought, it would definitely give the addon set a little more flexibility.

[chickenplucker]

Yuppers, it may be next week/weekend before I get to it though since I\'m camping and trail riding on my old Honda\'s this weekend. I\'m going to fix the legs/ramps so they are clickable, add the explosive fairings, a downward facing lamp with a node, some cfg file tweaks so the parts can be nuked by Tosh\'s laser and a taller decoupler. Might scale the first 8 sided test lander down to fit on 1m tanks for a smaller lander/cargo hauler so you can put whatever will fit in it.

[BamBam]

finally i got it down in one piece!!!!!

[chickenplucker]

Very nice BamBam Now just be carefull about going to fast, nothing more frustrating then getting a rover down and then ramping off a hill Dukes of Hazzard style into a crater wall

What does everyone think about the amount of fuel in the lander? I tried to give it enough so that there should be a bit of extra when you touch down just in case, but only tried it on my one rocket. Don\'t want it to feel to 'cheaty' but also would like to have enough extra for a safety buffer.

Trying to get this finished up for the next update

[BamBam]

What does everyone think about the amount of fuel in the lander? I tried to give it enough so that there should be a bit of extra when you touch down just in case, but only tried it on my one rocket. Don\'t want it to feel to 'cheaty' but also would like to have enough extra for a safety buffer.

my big problem getting it down in one piece was the need to keep my munar transfer stage attached most of the way through the braking burn and only need the onboard fuel to get me down the last 5000m or so. i kept running out of gas and hitting the ground too hard.....

a bit more fuel, and maybe integrated rcs would be helpfull.

[pina_coladas]

Trying to get this finished up for the next update

[SmiteZero]

A Bag \'o Fuel? Sloshing around in the tray of the BigTrak?

What could go wrong? I LIKE IT!

[Jontu]

I\'m having a problem with the flood lights. They keep doing weird things. This is the most extreme.

The exact same ship without the floods has no problem. It doesn\'t matter where I put them.

I\'ve attached my .craft file in case I\'m doing something wrong.

[Nexus-7]

This is exactly what happens to me (later in flight, usually around 1000m/s+ while burning to establish orbit), though I\'ve been led to understand it has to do with the wheels of the bigtrak bumping into objects beneath it, not the floodlight I have attached to the front of it.

I\'ve been told to try and slow the ship down, though that has proven unsuccessful, and I can\'t imagine how one would get to the mun without going fast, much less get into orbit. I\'ve tried every kind of rocket I can think of, slow ones, fast ones, big ones, small ones, and once I am trying to burn into orbital velocity this always happens to me no matter what. I\'ve had to give up on the bigtrak, because though I see people have made it to the mun with the lander, clearly I am too stupid to figure out what they are doing right and I am doing wrong. I\'ve even set the compensation register in the bigtrack object to zero as previous suggested by Tosh earlier in this thread and that did nothing to help. I\'ve really hit a brick wall here. I\'ve asked for help, some have been nice enough to try and suggest strategies, but after about 5 solid days of doing nothing but trying different designs and always reaching this same conclusion, I\'ve given up. I hope you fare better than I.

I\'ll give it one more try with a bigtrak without the light, maybe that\'ll be the magic bullet?

Edit: I\'m SO glad you mentioned the light Jontu. I removed it from my bigtrak and this problem disappeared. You have no idea how many hours I\'ve spent trying to figure out why my cuttlefish wasn\'t flyable. Removed the light, flew it directly to the mun on a rather large and fast rocket and landed it within 100m of my base there with more than half tanks left in the cuttlefish lander. I\'ll send up another just to make sure it wasn\'t a fluke, but looks like the floodlight was the problem.

Edit 2: Confirmed. 2nd cuttlefish landed at base, no issues. Thanks again Jontu. There is clearly a problem with putting a floodlight on the bigtrak.

[chickenplucker]

I\'m still leery of blaming the issue on the floodlight as I have had many successful launches/landings with floodlights tacked on the front or back of a Bigtrak with no issues. On the flip side of that I have launched many Bigtraks with just a Mk1 Command Pod had to scrap whole rockets because the thing would not leave the atmosphere. I think the main issue is that Unity is just a fickle mistress when it comes to physics in certain situations.

[Nexus-7]

Maybe the floodlight is what is bumping into the wheels? Mine was attached directly to the nose of the bigtrak. All I know for sure is this: I tried to remake the same craft you did, chickenplucker, based on your pics and I\'m sure it was nearly identical. I made literally 7 entirely different rocket designs, flew some of them entirely out of the atmosphere at a speed below 165m/s, had the bigtraks stacked on top of multiple decouplers, I followed every single piece of advice everyone mentioned in the entire thread, and nothing helped until I removed the floodlight. This includes spacecraft designs where the bigtrak didn\'t even have anything beneath it at ALL for the wheels to touch (spacecraft built around the bigtrack in a dropship design). Without exception, every single time my camera would end up so far behind the spacecraft that I could barely see it. Once I removed the floodlight and used my stock super powerful and fast launch vehicle there was no problem whatsoever. What this may point at is not that there is a problem with the floodlight itself, but that while everyone is so focused on what is *below* the wheels, some of us might not have paid any attention to what is *around* or *above* the wheels and as a consequence while we were assuming that the camera error was caused by the wheels bumping into the fuel tank maybe they are bumping into the floodlight/bigtrak itself? Pure conjecture on my part, but I\'m trying to make sense of it. Two anecdotes does not make a scientific case study, but you do have two people who are reporting the exact same problem with the floodlights attached, and once removed, no problem at all. I\'d be happy to send you before and after spacecraft to test for youself.

Anyway, so glad to have my bigtraks at my munbase working hard now. Thanks again for the work chickenplucker, love the mod.

[Commander Zoom]

Coming back to this thread after a while away... just wanted to say, the grey texture update is much appreciated, since that was the color of the US BigTrak (which I had/have).

[chickenplucker]

No problem Commander Zoom, I have one of the grey ones as well.

So after some messing about there does seem to be an issue with the floodlights although I\'m still unready to point the full blame on it with out running some test on other computers first. Regardless of what parts I made the rocket from or what speed, the addition of flood lights caused the camera to drop at 6,000 feet every time. I had read some posts a while back in the Cart post and the addon support forum where the bug logs called it out as throwing an error but I\'m unsure what would be causing it. The light is a pretty simple object and theres not to much going on there. Plus I\'m curious why the crew part of the cuttlefish doesn\'t seem to have issues and its setup very similer. Bah, I\'ll mess with it later, untill then to avoid issues dont use the lights :

Update: Ha! I think I fixed it .cfg tweaks seemed to do the trick. Changed the part module type from Cart to Strut. Lights still work and the 6,000m camera drop is now gone, cleared it with the FTL engine at 330ms with no issues.

[noneyabidnis]

Sweet! I look forward to trying this out on my own.

Speaking of the BigTrack - is there a way I can get a Munolith detector thingy on it (the small one) without taking the whole ship apart?

I still haven\'t found any, and would love to send Cuttlefish landers to various spots I\'m honing in on.

[chickenplucker]

Yup, I fixed the issue with the top cone being un-clickable once attached, just need to upload the corrected files now. Which if I get some time tonight I may do.

[toastar]

Good Catch on removing the flood lights.

[chickenplucker]

Micro update/bugfix v.11 is uploaded. Let me know if there are any issues you find.

(the grab-able part of the nose cone is the black hinge point that attaches to the tank/deck)

5/3/2012 v.11

Lowered the amount of heat all parts can take, they now explode better with Tosh\'s Sunbeam Laser. Fixed some .cfg issues. Corrected

the issue where the lander legs/cone was unclickable after being attached. Corrected an issue with the Floodlights that caused the

camera to go wonky when the attached craft cleared 6000m regardless of speed.

Something odd was going on with those old floodlights, if you build a craft with them, or watch Jontu\'s video watch the altimeter. Every 6,000m the camera will lurch ahead. In the video this occurs at 6,000m, 12,000m, and again at 18,000m. Well, its fixed now but that pattern still bugs me. *shrug*