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[1.0.5] Adjustable Landing Gear v1.2.0 (mass/cost scaling, tech nodes, drag) - May 30


BahamutoD

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Is there a way to create a smaller version of the two-wheeled variant, via rescalefactor?

When i set it to 0.6, the plane seems glued to the runway and cannot move. Then i went and adjusted wheelradius by the same factor, but that didn't help either. I don't see anything else in the configfile, that might cause it. Any hints?

EDIT: Okay, this is weird. I redownloaded the package, to instead play with the default ones. Guess what? The smaller single-wheeled one does this out of the box. If i enable and then disable the brakes, everything works fine. So i think, something weird is going on with the brakes.

EDIT2: Am using the current firespitter plugin (i put it in GameData/Firespitter/Plugins)

EDIT3: Possibly related (Might be an issue with the tier 2 runway): http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/108259-Possible-bug-with-Tier-2-Runway-Please-assist-confirm-it-s-not-my-system

Edited by rynak
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  • 2 weeks later...

My Ideas list :D

º Adjustable rover/car wheels with suspension (Scale, height etc.)

º Smaller landing gears for smaller planes

º Adjustable wheels scale on all landing gears

It would be so awesome!

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Anyone know why my Shuttle is turning right as soon as it touches down? I have steering enabled and I tried disabling dynamic steering. No help. I have tried adjusting the nosewheel slightly to the left, but nothing... It just jerks to the right and rips the left wing off when it tips. Also, I'm using this with .90. Could that be it? If it is, is there an update?

After watching the footage, it seems like the wheels aren't spinning. The tires hit the ground and the legs shake like nobody's business. Then it twists off to the right like it's skidding...

Edited by Mykill Metal
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Hard to tell without pictures or craft file. More probably that your plane have yaw problems then landing gear problems.

Also excesive weight could misalign wheels, so that is another possible reason. Landing gears works just fine, I have made nice planes with both, 0.25 and 0.90 KSP.

Check links in my signature.

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Anyone know why my Shuttle is turning right as soon as it touches down? I have steering enabled and I tried disabling dynamic steering. No help. I have tried adjusting the nosewheel slightly to the left, but nothing... It just jerks to the right and rips the left wing off when it tips. Also, I'm using this with .90. Could that be it? If it is, is there an update?

After watching the footage, it seems like the wheels aren't spinning. The tires hit the ground and the legs shake like nobody's business. Then it twists off to the right like it's skidding...

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that you're having the same thing I am. When I place the rear gear with symmetry, as one must obviously do, the NON placed unit, that is to say the gear on the opposite side of the one that I'm actually 'holding onto' with the cursor, the motor on that unit is always reversed when I launch to the runway. To put it another way: If I place the left landing gear, that means the right one is the 'mirrored' unit, correct? Yes, well, no matter how I try to set things in the editor, when I launch the plane the motor on the right-hand gear is ALWAYS set in reverse. And by 'reverse', I mean 'backwards in relation to the airplane's natural direction of flight', not simply reversed compared to the unit on the other side. If I set THAT one's motor to 'reverse' in the editor and the right one to 'forward', BOTH are in 'reverse' when I launch the plane. Believe me, I've tried every single permutation of editor settings to figure out how to get around it, but nothing has worked so far.

So, I just got into the habit of right clicking the right-hand landing gear unit AFTER launching to the runway and manually changing that landing gear's motor setting to 'reverse'. The way to check if everything is set right is to motor around on the runway a little bit before taking off. If when you press the 'forward' or 'accelerate' key (this is for the landing gear controls, mind you, I'm not talking about the engine throttle controls), if the plane pulls to the right and seems to move forward only very sluggishly, that means that the right gear motor needs to be switched from whatever state it's in now, no matter what the right-click GUI says it's set to. Now when you motor forward the plane should track (mostly) straight. Once you have it set it should be fine for the rest of the flight, I've done multiple landings and takeoffs in a single session without a problem. I THINK that it will also be okay if you switch away from the vessel and then go back to it later, but I'm not entirely sure about that, you'll have to check that one yourself. Although, I have left a spaceplane in orbit (after going through the whole routine described above before takeoff), saved and quit the game, and then come back to that ship days later and landed it and landed it just fine without it pulling to one side, so I guess that the settings remain persistent once you've quicksaved or autosaved that flight. It's only on launch that the motor functions don't correctly detect which side of the craft the gear are on, it seems.

Anyway, I hope that this info helps, Mykill. :) Oh, and I'm aware that this issue was supposed to be 'fixed' in the latest version, and yes, I have the latest version installed. All I can say is that for whatever reason the 'fix' didn't seem to work in my particular case. I do have a LOT of mods installed, so I'd not be surprised that there's some minor conflict going on somewhere, but this is a very minor issue as far as I'm concerned, so it doesn't really bother me. It's actually kind of fun to biff a landing every once in a while, just to see the new explosion effects, lol. But, I could see that if one were literally unable to land AT ALL because of this, that would get really frustrating PDQ, so there you go. :)

Later everyone! :D

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Does it matter that I don't use the motors? They're both disabled. The landing legs, no matter how soft I touch down, jiggle around like maniacs and then I start skidding to one side or the other. It doesn't seem to matter what I do.

http://youtu.be/aNkOvo_CiRQ

Edit - Made a video of a few landings to show what's going on. I'd say those are textbook soft landings. Is it that the gear are too small for this shuttle? If so, is there a way to tweak the .cfg so that it compensates for it? Like can I make them stronger/sturdier? Or do I need to find a different set of landing gear?

Second edit - So I added Kerbal Joint Reinforcement and it seems to have helped. First try, landing was a success... Now I'm even more confused.

Edited by Mykill Metal
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If you put all firespitter wheels on your craft you can actually spin around in circles, they have no lateral friction or something weird. I usually use a stock wheel on either the nose or tail gear to help offset that behavior.

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Does it matter that I don't use the motors? They're both disabled. The landing legs, no matter how soft I touch down, jiggle around like maniacs and then I start skidding to one side or the other. It doesn't seem to matter what I do.

http://youtu.be/aNkOvo_CiRQ

Edit - Made a video of a few landings to show what's going on. I'd say those are textbook soft landings. Is it that the gear are too small for this shuttle? If so, is there a way to tweak the .cfg so that it compensates for it? Like can I make them stronger/sturdier? Or do I need to find a different set of landing gear?

Second edit - So I added Kerbal Joint Reinforcement and it seems to have helped. First try, landing was a success... Now I'm even more confused.

Yes, the gear are too small for that shuttle. You can put additional landing gear on.

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@Mykill,

Aqua and Alshain are right, you need to distribute weight over more wheels. I forgot to make a screenshot where wheels are more visible, but here is small trick that could help you:

Q0gqV4I.jpg

First attach structural panel somewhere on plane. Next, attach adjustable landing gears on that structural panel. You can attach up to three landing gears on that panel.

It is much easier to align them when they are on panel. When you aligned them properly, you can use whole structural panel as subassembly.

Now you can easy attach perfectly aligned gears anywhere on plane. Those on picture is actualy two such structural panels. If you still have problems with weight distribution you can use additional struts to strenghten connection between wings and structural panels. You can craft file as example in link in my signature.

Hope that it will help you.

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Okay how do I modify the file so I can make the gear stronger/support more weight? I'm not adding more gear. I want a realistic looking shuttle with three sets of wheels, and this is the only mod that allows me to put the gear on the fuselage and still spread the gear out enough to be useful. I'm not putting the gear on the wings, they clip through and look dumb... And adding any structural panels would change the overall look with the grey panels and the white wings. Not happening... GAHHH, why did they add the MkIII shuttle parts, but no useful landing gear? So frustrating.

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Okay how do I modify the file so I can make the gear stronger/support more weight? I'm not adding more gear. I want a realistic looking shuttle with three sets of wheels, and this is the only mod that allows me to put the gear on the fuselage and still spread the gear out enough to be useful. I'm not putting the gear on the wings, they clip through and look dumb... And adding any structural panels would change the overall look with the grey panels and the white wings. Not happening... GAHHH, why did they add the MkIII shuttle parts, but no useful landing gear? So frustrating.

BahamutoD said he wanted to add bigger gear but this was kind of a first pass (it's a relatively new mod).

I don't think it's as simple as editing one number, unless you want to really unbalance them and basically be in cheat mode with a craft that can't fail to land. All the documentation can be found here.

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...Yeah, that's a wall of text and I have no clue what to look for. Should I just change the "suspension spring" and "suspension damper" to a higher number in the .cfg file? Or possibly the "forwardsStiffness" and "sidewaysStiffness" ones? And I'm basically using this as a stop-gap until I get a bigger version of the gear. It's not really "cheat-mode" if you know you're going to land it successfully every time... I've done 13 approaches with this shuttle design (all on video) and every single one has ended in me touching down perfectly and softly, THEN something goes wrong with the mods/parts. So I know it's not me. I've done it successfully so many times (with other designs/planes) at this point that it's second nature. Besides, instead of looking at it as "cheat-mode", why not just say "the engineers noticed a weakness and reinforced the parts".

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...Yeah, that's a wall of text and I have no clue what to look for. Should I just change the "suspension spring" and "suspension damper" to a higher number in the .cfg file? Or possibly the "forwardsStiffness" and "sidewaysStiffness" ones? And I'm basically using this as a stop-gap until I get a bigger version of the gear. It's not really "cheat-mode" if you know you're going to land it successfully every time... I've done 13 approaches with this shuttle design (all on video) and every single one has ended in me touching down perfectly and softly, THEN something goes wrong with the mods/parts. So I know it's not me. I've done it successfully so many times (with other designs/planes) at this point that it's second nature. Besides, instead of looking at it as "cheat-mode", why not just say "the engineers noticed a weakness and reinforced the parts".

That's not what I meant by "cheat mode". I meant it's possible to adjust them so you could hit the ground at Mach 1 and land correctly. That's what I call cheat mode.

As for the wall of text, your guess is as good as mine.

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Okay how do I modify the file so I can make the gear stronger/support more weight? I'm not adding more gear. I want a realistic looking shuttle with three sets of wheels, and this is the only mod that allows me to put the gear on the fuselage and still spread the gear out enough to be useful. I'm not putting the gear on the wings, they clip through and look dumb... And adding any structural panels would change the overall look with the grey panels and the white wings. Not happening... GAHHH, why did they add the MkIII shuttle parts, but no useful landing gear? So frustrating.

You don't need to edit any files you just need a couple more wheels. I use 4 in a 2x2 formation as my front gear (3x2 for rear sets) for most of my heavy stuff only breaks cause it's moving too fast for the fuselage to handle.

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Okay how do I modify the file so I can make the gear stronger/support more weight? I'm not adding more gear. I want a realistic looking shuttle with three sets of wheels, and this is the only mod that allows me to put the gear on the fuselage and still spread the gear out enough to be useful. I'm not putting the gear on the wings, they clip through and look dumb... And adding any structural panels would change the overall look with the grey panels and the white wings. Not happening... GAHHH, why did they add the MkIII shuttle parts, but no useful landing gear? So frustrating.

There are two possible solutions depending on where the problem is. If the joint between the gear and the fuselage is sagging, then either get Kerbal Joint Reenforcement (a very good mod to have in general) or put a lot of struts between the gear and the hull. If the gear itself is sagging you can increase the spring constant in the tweakables.

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Where would I find the "spring constant"? Is it "suspension spring" and "suspension damper"? Or am I looking in the wrong place? If correct, do I increase or decrease the numbers?

Also, I use KJR when I can. Though, the latest build tends to blow things up when undocking...

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Where would I find the "spring constant"? Is it "suspension spring" and "suspension damper"? Or am I looking in the wrong place? If correct, do I increase or decrease the numbers?

Also, I use KJR when I can. Though, the latest build tends to blow things up when undocking...

Increase "suspension spring" (though you may need to adjust the damper if it ends up being underdamped or overdamped).

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Yeah... that shuttle just needs stronger suspension spring and slightly stronger damper.

So before I left in December, I made a few attempts at modelling heavy duty landing gear, but they ended up either just looking like scaled up versions of the first two, or wouldn't be able to be adjusted by any reasonable amount.

Currently this is sitting in blender. As you can see, its ugly as heck since the gear bay has to be huge to accommodate 4 wheels.

http://i.imgur.com/YwDOAQy.png

Edit: actually I took a look at it again, and with cheating (clipping), I can get it to fold into this gear bay:

http://i.imgur.com/9O4aihe.png but still..

So, I'm open to suggestions (not requests) for the design of the heavy adjustable landing gear.

As for the plugin, I've started working on forking certain classes from Firespitter, with Snjo's permission, to fix ALG specific bugs and generally adjust it so it's geared more towards customizability, and to no longer have a dependency on FS.

Anyways, I also want to say that mod development from me has slowed because I started working on another project, so thank you for your patience.

Edited by BahamutoD
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