[1.3] Pilot Assistant: Atmospheric piloting aids - 1.13.2 (May 28)

[Hyomoto]

I understand part of that except that should only be the case if I use the wing leveler since my relative direction is going to change. The question is about heading lock, the expected behavior is to lock in, for example, 315, and have it hold that heading. The only real time that would be an issue is when crossing over the poles.

[Crzyrndm]

Well it'll be easy enough to stick the heading (number) lock back in as an option next to the heading (direction) lock.

The reason it was changed to direction lock is that it fits better with any "heading to target" readout (eg. waypoint manager). The wing leveller just isn't even close to being accurate enough for things like that.

Edited May 25, 2015 by Crzyrndm

[Crzyrndm]

Latest Github version includes a heading value lock (and some tweaks to the resizing code for a really minimal view).No smarts for crossing the poles on this one though

[Gfurst]

@Crzyrndm

Cheers for your hard work and continued development on your mods.

Personally I preferred the direction lock, eg the heading/direction discrepancy happens all over the globe, and for real aviation, except when travelling straight on over the equator.

Anyyywayyy... have you taught about including blizzy toolbar support yet?

[Crzyrndm]

@Crzyrndm

Cheers for your hard work and continued development on your mods.

Personally I preferred the direction lock, eg the heading/direction discrepancy happens all over the globe, and for real aviation, except when travelling straight on over the equator.

Anyyywayyy... have you taught about including blizzy toolbar support yet?

Hdg direction/value: Well now we have both (The recent overhaul of mode selection paid off big time here. Less than 5 minutes to add the alternate "Heading #" lock)

Blizzy toolbar: It's already in. You do need to enable it in the settings file though (Pilot Assistant/PluginData/Pilot Assistant/config.xml => useStockToolbar = 0)

Edited May 26, 2015 by Crzyrndm

[Hyomoto]

Sounds good, I'm sure I'll get use out of both modes.

[Tontow]

I will have to update, but I have had issues with version 1.8.1.0 .

When I fly a aircraft that has low power or even at low speed and I enter in a large increase in altitude: Pilot Assistant likes to go vertical. This is bad because it causes the aircraft to stall. How do I keep it from going vertical when I set an altitude hold? (note: The aircraft in question can do very tight and hard banks under manual control and not spin out of control with the same amount of power.)

Edited May 27, 2015 by Tontow

[Crzyrndm]

Show Limits => Altitude controller => Reduce Max climb rate

The latest dev version has an automated function to prevent things going completely vertical but that could still result in an unmaintainable climb

[Tontow]

Thanks

[Midnight Jade]

I really like this mod! It replaced a feature that MechJeb had long long ago but is not present anymore (or at least, it changed so much that I cannot recognize it anymore).

I especially like the heading and vertical speed options, but is there any way I can specify a pitch? For example, let's say I want a pitch of 8º. Can I input that somewhere?

[Crzyrndm]

Pitch angles require using SSAS

[Midnight Jade]

Pilot Assistant works flawlessly. But activating SSAS makes the controls instantly go all crazy... yaw all the way to the left, all the way to the right, up, down, cumulatively, until the airplane is almost flying sideways () and then stalls and falls. I'm using FAR by the way.

[Crzyrndm]

Yea, it needs a bit of work (for one, pitch > ~30 degrees is kept in one piece by a whole lot of hackery...). However, you can specifically set it to use only pitch (click the pitch button in the UI instead of activating it by the button near the navball) and/or leaving Pilot Assistant heading control active will keep it limited to the elevator controls. It should be able to handle that atleast...

If all else fails, Pilot assistant overrides stock SAS so you can use that for pitch control

NOTE: I am currently rewriting SSAS pretty much from the ground up, so hopefully it'll be somewhat more reliable soon...

Edited May 28, 2015 by Crzyrndm

[Midnight Jade]

Thanks for your reply.

Yeah I can kinda force it to work in some situations, doesn't work all the time. Even by specifying a heading and leveling the aircraft (in Pilot Assistant options), the pitch in SSAS goes up and down a lot. I tried decreasing the control authority of the elevons (from 8 to 4), but that simply makes it take longer for the wobbling to become unbearable. It DOES try to stay at the specified angle though, but it keeps overpassing it up and down over and over. I guess if you consider it an "average pitch", it IS going where I told it to in the end, it just looks ugly doing it lol.

All the other options are really good and work great though

My reason for wanting a specific pitch option is for my spaceplanes flight profiles. Even if I set a vertical speed that makes it stay on the desired pitch angle for some time, the increasing horizontal speed makes the Pilot Assistant pitch down slowly to compensate since I'm going faster, so then I need to keep raising the vertical speed to make it pitch up...

I'll be looking forward to your updates

Edited May 29, 2015 by Midnight Jade

[Tontow]

Since your recoding SASS. Could you please include min and max limits for acceleration, deceleration, acceleration torque and deceleration torque?

That way you can setup how aggressive the SASS ends up being without having the craft end up in a flat spin.

Ideally, there would be some kind of test flight recorder that auto tuned the SASS after I was done with the test flight. IE: I get up to speed and do a few turns. The auto tune recorder kicks in one or two seconds into the turn - (When the nose stops bouncing around // once the rads per second is steady) - and tunes it self (the max limits) based on the rads per second while in manual flight.

[V8jester]

Alright guys, Please forgive me if this has been answered before. I admittedly have not been fallowing this thread so I don't fully comprehend everything Pilot assistant can and cannot do yet. But, my question is. Can you use this (or another mod possibly) to auto dock two atmospheric planes? Same idea as Mechjeb auto dock but in atmosphere. I am working on a mid air refuel project and to test everything I will need to repeat a successful docking multiple times.

Thank you for the help. And again I do apologize if this has been answered, I read a couple pages back and didn't see anything right off.

[Midnight Jade]

Alright guys, Please forgive me if this has been answered before. I admittedly have not been fallowing this thread so I don't fully comprehend everything Pilot assistant can and cannot do yet. But, my question is. Can you use this (or another mod possibly) to auto dock two atmospheric planes? Same idea as Mechjeb auto dock but in atmosphere. I am working on a mid air refuel project and to test everything I will need to repeat a successful docking multiple times.

That's quite an ambitious project...

I guess the easiest way is you could have the tanker airplane controlled by Pilot Assistant, with 0 vertical speed and a horizontal speed of your choice (if I'm not mistaken there's a throttle option for that. I'm not in game right now), and then you switch to your other craft and approach manually. At least you know the tanker will have a stable and predictable flight path, with a constant speed and altitude, and the only unknown element is you with the other craft approaching. Wouldn't be much different in concept from a real world refueling I guess. The tanker pretty much goes on rails.

If you want to make it even more automatic and minimize risk of collision, you can set up the following craft with the same heading and try to match speed slowly until you dock.

Docking will still have to be made manually of course.

[Crzyrndm]

Nope, that won't work either. Pilot Assistant currently only runs on the vessel under active control, so as soon as you switched away from the tanker it would start drifting. I do have plans to rectify this, but it's quite a bit of work to make it run multiple concurrent instances.

[Midnight Jade]

Oh really? The active vessel limitation thing seems to affect so many mods... It prevents quite a few good ideas from coming to fruition

[Crzyrndm]

That's because there are two ways to make plugins. Part modules (as many instances as you have parts with the module) and single instance. Doing it as a part module has all sorts of annoying drawbacks for vessel level plugins (like having to decide which one on a vessel is actually in control...), while a single instance plugin handles that without a hitch (until you introduce multiple vessels that is).

Either way, it can (and will) be done at some point. I've already done some of the groundwork in the last update (The code running each of the control systems can be switched to run multiple vessels with a bit more work)

[V8jester]

Well thanks guys for at least answering. I'll keep looking into this. And if any of you are curious. There will be a video at some point. It will be the Osprey I already built docking with a tanker plane. I have a working boom and the scoop that is towed behind the tanker. All I need to build is a low part count tanker and stabilize it's flight path. The video and info will be posted in my thread linked bellow when it's ready - stay tuned.

[guitarxe]

Wow, this is an awesome mod!

I haven't really figured it all out yet, but is there a way to adjust how quickly it will change heading?

[Crzyrndm]

Depending on exactly what you mean by "how quickly it will change heading":

NOTE: Make sure "Show Limits" is checked along the top of the window for anything other than Kp/Ki/Kd/Scalar adjustments

Heading Controller

• Increase easing to increase the speed at which it acknowledges changes in setpoint (low numbers are smoother, high numbers are more abrupt. May or may not apply to keyboard input, I'd have to double check that). Changes "turn in" rate
  
• Increase maximum output / bank angle to increase the maximum turn rate
  
• Increase Kp to increase the bank angle it will maintain for a given level of error (10 degrees of error with a Kp and Scalar of 1 results in 10 degrees of bank, increasing Kp to 2 would give 20 degrees of bank for the same situation). Changes "turn out" rate
  

Yaw Controller

• Set Kp to a non zero value. With a Kp/Ki of zero it will always try to maintain a yaw angle of zero (the most stable configuration for most planes), increase it and it will give your turns a little rudder assistance. By default, this is limited to 2 degrees of yaw, increasing that should be carefully considered as yaw stability is not most planes strong point.
  

Edited May 30, 2015 by Crzyrndm

[guitarxe]

Nvm this post I'm editing, thanks for your explanation! Didn't realize those were actually buttons I could click and not just for showing numbers

Edited May 30, 2015 by guitarxe

[Black-Talon]

Dumb Question: Is it 'bad' for any reason that folders in GameData have spaces in their names?

I notice Pilot Assistant has a space but nothing else does. And vaguely recall hearing "spaces are bad" and mods updating to remove spaces from their folder/file names. But I actually don't know that it causes problems.