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

[kcs123]

@Crzyrndm, I was primary thinking of pilot assistant, to have different profile depending on craft velocity and Q, not only Q. DPCR that comes with FAR only have one set of scaling and it might be dangerous to use when you already have controls set for low deflections. For exmple, you start to dive on supersonic velocity in thin atmosphere and if you overall pitching is just few degree too low, you can't pitch up enough to regain level flight. That is with DPCR turned on that does not allow to delect at 100% and craft is disintegrated due to overheating in more dense atmosphere.

But, yes, if it is possible to set your own values for controls, for manual piloting - how quickly it changes from neutral to +100% or -100% and even more, if that can be determinated by Q and mach values, that will be awesome.

Most of problems that we have in KSP is for users that only have keyboard for input controls or when you use SAS. Stock SAS is just too dumb, it rapidly change control deflection and for too much deflection that in some situations can even increase oscilations instead of damping it down.

[RecidivistTwist]

Are you going to be listing this on CKAN or Spacedock? I only found this Mod because it's listed on the RPM page.

[Crzyrndm]

It's on CKAN, or it was last time I checked. Please go ask someone over in the CKAN thread why it's not working, because I don't know why it's not

[NathanKell]

Apologies if this is already added and I missed it in the OP, but @Crzyrndm it'd be awesome if one of the autopilot modes was "hold AoA". That's very important for reentry, and reentry is one of the times least able to be human-controlled, and none of the existing modes will work for it as far as I can tell. Descent rate is also useful there, but sometimes what you want to do is hold an AoA within stress and thermal limits rather than target a descent rate (at any AoA).

[Crzyrndm]

I've been debating back and forth over adding AoA hold it as its own control type (tl;dr it should be a thing, but the UI is already going downhill fast and I need to find another way of presenting the different modes or a new way of presenting the input information such that mode handles itself...).

Edited March 18, 2016 by Crzyrndm

[Miravlix]

Shouldn't AoA not be a mode, but a toggle for the Pitch Mode?

 

While AoA is a big deal for space plane, my main problem is that my plane drives off the runway, since PA sideway control seems turned off while on the ground. Even a perfectly balanced plane, doesn't keep a perfect 90 heading on the runway.

 

Edited March 18, 2016 by Miravlix

[kcs123]

On 18.03.2016. at 10:48 AM, Miravlix said:

Shouldn't AoA not be a mode, but a toggle for the Pitch Mode?

 

While AoA is a big deal for space plane, my main problem is that my plane drives off the runway, since PA sideway control seems turned off while on the ground. Even a perfectly balanced plane, doesn't keep a perfect 90 heading on the runway.

 

That sounds more like wheel adjustment problem than aerodynamic issue. It is not always obvious, buth minor missaligment on wheels can cause sideway controls on runway. Even if you perfectly align those in editor, depending on craft design, on runway it might become missaligned due to craft(part of craft) weight. More struts on strategic points usually can solve that issue.

[kendoka15]

Are there any plans to update this to 1.1? My flying skills have disappeared since I started using it

Edit: Should've read prior posts, sorry about that

Edited April 7, 2016 by kendoka15

[Crzyrndm]

On 30/03/2016 at 5:38 PM, Crzyrndm said:

There will be no public releases of any of my mods until after 1.1 is actually released. There may be some github activity when I get around to working on things but any of that will all be at user risk. I'm not going to try supporting something that is listed as being "frequently updated" (still haven't decided whether I will bother with the pre-release at all...)

Post-release, I will be pushing hard to get updates out, just not before

[SkyKaptn]

On 4.4.2016 at 7:52 AM, Crzyrndm said:

Post-release, I will be pushing hard to get updates out, just not before

Really appreciate that this mod will be continued. It is one of my top 5

[the_machemer]

Just downloaded and started messing around with it and it seems that I am unable to set multiple parameters for a particular type of navigation. For example: when using V-NAV i can only set target altitude OR vertical speed. If i set my Alt to 4000m and then go to the VSpd section and enter something, my target altitude just gets set to whatever my current altitude is and the plane just starts to climb endlessly at whatever i set the VSpd to, ignoring target Alt all together. Similarly if i set my VSpd and then go and enter something in Alt, it just resets my VSpd to 50 m/s and climbs steeply until reaching my target Alt. 

Basically, regardless of V-NAV, L-NAV or autothrottle, i can only set one parameter at a time. I'm assuming that isn't how you designed it so am i doing something wrong by entering one parameter and then another? I don't think i have install issues since i used CKAN but who knows. 

Thanks in advance, i really hope we can figure this out because this might be the best aviation mod i've stumbled upon yet.

Edited April 12, 2016 by the_machemer

[Crzyrndm]

Under altitude, set the limit parameter to the climb rate you want (to see the limit parameters, click on the "L" toggle at the top of the window). Yes its terrible, but that's just how it happens at the moment

The UI is not my favourite bit of this mod and.I've been planning a complete rehash for quite a while now (but with 1.1 being the UI overhaul it was a wait and see thing)

Edited April 12, 2016 by Crzyrndm

[DeputyLOL]

How do you think pilot assistant will cope with the new 'actuator speeds' of the control surfaces? Because from my first impression they seem very slow.

I know that right now isn't probably the best time but do you think we could have some sort of presets for different speeds/altitudes? I ask this because PA starts to have trouble controlling heading at low speeds and will start oscillating, at the same time I don't want to increase the control authority too much as the plane is also designed for high speed flight. Having the limits and scales change as the plane gets slower would be a great help.

Also, MOARdv+ 'might' be adding a continuous transfer mechanism to RPM, if that is the case then it could be possible to feed pilot assistant a constant stream of targets (speed/heading/altitude) to follow. Do you think that it would be feasible?

[Crzyrndm]

Slower actuator speeds just mean retuning the lower level controllers if required. I can always add a :NEEDS[FerramAerospaceResearch] to the defaults if they get too different

4 hours ago, DeputyLOL said:

I know that right now isn't probably the best time but do you think we could have some sort of presets for different speeds/altitudes? I ask this because PA starts to have trouble controlling heading at low speeds and will start oscillating, at the same time I don't want to increase the control authority too much as the plane is also designed for high speed flight. Having the limits and scales change as the plane gets slower would be a great help.

Dynamic Deflection. It exists to get around exactly this problem

4 hours ago, DeputyLOL said:

Also, MOARdv+ 'might' be adding a continuous transfer mechanism to RPM, if that is the case then it could be possible to feed pilot assistant a constant stream of targets (speed/heading/altitude) to follow. Do you think that it would be feasible?

Not in the current state. That would end up with no derivative control if you did that right at the moment. Adjusting it for continuous input shouldn't be an issue though

[DeputyLOL]

1 hour ago, Crzyrndm said:

Slower actuator speeds just mean retuning the lower level controllers if required. I can always add a :NEEDS[FerramAerospaceResearch] to the defaults if they get too different

Dynamic Deflection. It exists to get around exactly this problem

Not in the current state. That would end up with no derivative control if you did that right at the moment. Adjusting it for continuous input shouldn't be an issue though

Thank you, even though this is still a big 'maybe' and 1.1 is coming Soon™.

Also, thanks for reminding me about Dynamic Deflection as I completely forgot about that.

[Crzyrndm]

v1.12.5 brings Pilot Assistant to a KSP 1.1 compatible state. Only changes are the splitting off of the SAS Tuner / SSAS functionality for release as separate mods.

Anticipating a few bug reports about things...

Edited April 21, 2016 by Crzyrndm

[zolotiyeruki]

Woohoo!  Thanks for your hard work!  I only started using PA a few months ago, and it has made the game *so* much more enjoyable!

[Azimech]

Thank you for updating this extremely useful mod!

[Adoelrome]

Heading doesn't work.
When I press target pitch, the inscription "target pitch updated" appears.
And it works.
When I press target hdg, nothing occurs. Or, alternatively, it attempts to change direction, but no more than 20% of target and makes it extremely rough. Not the way it behaved when everything worked.

Tested with mods, without mods (only stock, only minimum common mods like module manager) - everywhere behavior is identical.

Also I constantly used this mod in 0,25 and his management is familiar to me. In all stances nothing changes.

Edited April 28, 2016 by Adoelrome

[the_machemer]

Not sure if this has been suggested before, but i think it would be really cool if you could add an "approach mode" to pilot assistant by using the glide slope provided by Kujuman's ILS mod. I'm not exactly a coder and have no idea what kind of work doing such a thing might entail, but i think that having an autopilot mode that can lock onto a localizer and bring the plane down via the glide slope to the runway threshold would be INCREDIBLY COOL and very beneficial to players who spend a large amount of time flying between Kerbin Side and/or stock runways.

Edited April 29, 2016 by the_machemer

[Torih]

Hi I've noticed that I'm getting a lot of NullRef spam when I put a flag down, this was happening on 1.1 and 1.1.1.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26687/output_logPilot%20Assist.txt

Normally get a few thousand entries of it, not sure what the cause maybe?

 

[Crzyrndm]

I'll fix that...(someone remind me why flags and EVAs are also vessels...)

Edited April 30, 2016 by Crzyrndm

[Torih]

Cause reasons

[Crzyrndm]

Fix for flag exceptions can be downloaded here (more things to fix prior to an actual release)

[gilflo]

Hello

Thank's for the update, but, when launched, I can't see the window that allow specific setting for each aircraft.