[v0.17] Damned Aerospace Version 1.5.3 + Crewtank

[cardgame]

So... this may have already been brought up, but...

Has anyone created a chopper capable of hovering in place and used it as target practice?

On that note, for some reason, anything I use a prop on seems to be really nose heavy; I mean, I throttle down in preparation to land, and try to bring my nose up to kill speed. And instead slowly have the nose come down until I pick up speed and smash into the ground. IDK, it might just be screwing up my designs, but I\'ve tested about a dozen different planes, and they all like to nose dive into the ground....

After reading the OP, it clearly states that the engines are placed ~15m in front of the mount to avoid engine damage (just like tailfins get damaged if you light some SRBs right above them).

[kellven]

If you want autohover, you need to use long axis engines, unfortunately. MechJeb won\'t even try to do off-axis thrust with KillVert, so helo units don\'t work right. If you set translatron killvert to 0 and check kill hs, MechJeb (assuming you have enough thrust) will try to counteract anything changing your position, EXCEPT your manual input. You end up hovering in place once it stabilizes, and you can carefully position yourself with wasdqe before you land/whatever. You can however, put a rack of rockets on the VAB roof, and use a helo craft for bowling.

I hope nobody minds my answering questions here, I\'ve just been playing with the MuMechLib and multi-axis thrust craft for a while.

[kellven]

Now that I figured out how to interface with MuMech code, I also believe I just figured out how to get rid of the engine death ray completely. I\'d better test it out first to make sure it really works this time, but I think it will, and you can thank NS if it does. Actual prop thrust? Possibly.

[DYJ]

[DYJ]

Short video showcasing swingwing mechanics, they currently don\'t do much when it comes to actual aerodynamics, but that will hopefully be fixed by .15. The actual part has yet to receive a specific texture in the video.

[madmat]

That swingwing is a definite must have, Also the 'trailer' attachment in the previous post is a great idea. I was thinking about this the other day but can\'t work out how i would launch it to the Mun while keeping it 'stable' in flight. Would be great on Kerbin though. You\'re definetly coming out with some Awesome stuff. This is the FIRST thread i check when i get online.

[kellven]

Work on an actual prop engine class seems to be going well so far, though I haven\'t gotten to to meaty parts or testing yet, but I\'ve yet to find a roadblock.

I also found Gimballed engines gimballing the wrong way in the archives. I noticed the helo units have a negative gimbal set, I don\'t know if the base class interprets that correctly, or even if the bug still exists, but it would explain why I couldn\'t get a puller unit to fly quite right, and also why I\'ve had problems with forward rockets in the past. I will try to make a really, really long rocket with puller props on the rear, and check where the gimbals send me when I get to testing my propengine class.

ED: In regards to your swingwings

  public float AoA;
  public float deflectionLiftCoeff;
  public float dragCoeff;

ControlSurface also has these, if your part bases from one of these, you should be able to update DLift and dragC through code.

[kellven]

Nothing defeats the angry pointers. Nothing.

Tosh and Victor Ludorum haven\'t been the only ones messing around with code lately, and the angry pointers finally managed to eliminate the 'death ray', and let puller engines pull in peace. It seems to fly like it should, but I only did one test.

<Stop barking, you\'re not a dog anymore, you\'re an engine now>

It\'s an ugly hack to an ugly hack spliced to mechjeb with an uglier hack that has a serious polymorphism flaw, and I butchered the model moving it back to origin, but it nevertheless does seem to work exactly like it should.

Tiberion(Yes, a mod now) requested a sort of moratorium on some stuff until it can be sorted out properly, and it will be be a little (I hope) while before I can do it the way it should be done. I also haven\'t asked r4m0n about doing anything related to his code, so this couldn\'t be made public anyway, but I could probably send you two(Japan and r4m0n) a copy of the modified demo version if you\'d be interested.

The properly done version should also be perfectly capable of autorotation, once I teach myself prop mechanics. The big problem with that branch is that MechJeb won\'t use them as it doesn\'t consider them to be engines.

[Kreuzung]

Epic win.

I hope we will be allowed to use this code as I\'m pulling more and more people into this thing.

BTW I like that thingy. Is it fun to fly? Is it fast?

[kellven]

It actually seems a little too fast, but I\'m pretty sure it\'s just my imagination, and no, this is actually a different way of doing things than I was originally working on. This is just MechJeb hijacking LiquidEngine to eliminate the death ray, not the completely custom engine classes.

Now the earlier iteration, where I screwed up and made the throttle logarithmic with no cap and the ship exploded, that was fast.

[DYJ]

Revision3 is up.

[Caesar15]

Revision3 is up.

Damn you for making everything so fast.

[kellven]

Very very nice work, Damnyoujapan.

I\'m about to go try out the robotics now, been anticipating that for a while.

Just a feature that may not have been documented, aside from using the keys you define in the VAB; the swingwings and rotortilters will rotate through their respective min/max if you press the 'p' key. Wings closed->p->Wings open, tilters also do this.

Unfortunately, I had a lot of trouble actually attaching the wings level to the swinger part. I think it\'s just that the collider is so tiny, that it rotates to the next angle click with tiny tiny mouse movement.

Also, I really hate to say this, but I think you set the rotations on the rotor tilters backwards. They end up tilting the engines to thrust down toward the ground instead of up. Going to change sign in cfg, and see if that fixes it. If you notice in the first image, the engines are tilting the right way, but I turned the ship belly up.

I also noticed that while fully extended, the parts attached to the rotor tilters were bouncing around like they do with wobbly rocket stuff, but the moment I changed their rotation even a little, they seemed to lock in place much better.

Porting my deathray hack to the new MechJeb was painless, so I\'m going to send you and r4m0n a link in a message as soon as I get dropbox setup.

[DYJ]

I was going to tell people about the toggle key in the youtube video, but since I forgot to make that entire section of the video that got lost, will update OP.

It does indeed appear that the rotor tiltmech tilts backwards, guess that\'s what you get for releasing stuff in the middle of the night. As kellven suggested changing the sign on the rotation axis in the .cfg should work for now.

If you don\'t want to mess with the .cfgs but still make tiltrotors you can use the rotatron part from the robotics pack for now.

'The swingwingmech has very thin moving colliders so placing stuff on it is a tad bid finicky but works.' from the original post.

Haven\'t seen any wobblyness yet, I\'ll have to look into that when I get back home.

[kellven]

If anyone\'s wondering what exactly has to be changed in the cfg, I figured it out as follows:

Change
rotateAxis = 0, 1, 0
to
rotateAxis = 0, -1, 0

Took me a little while to figure out how to do that properly, but I hacked the props again to burn LH2, and made it to the moon. Can definitely confirm that the tiltrotor parts jump, wobble, and jive all over when at their 0' rest position, a tiny bump to rotation makes them lock down solid though. Also confirmed props spin in space, which can get funny with timewarp on.

Tiltrotors to the moon this time.

Edit: Or I could have just actually read through what Japan posted, and not spent an hour fiddling with it. Sometimes I think I\'m going blind.

[Asmosdeus]

The variable geometry wing system is pissing me off. How do I put wings on it? I can\'t get them damn things to centre.

[Tosh]

Helicopters, Ride of the Valkyries...

...napalm tanks and air-to-ground rockets under the wings, soldiers sitting on their helmets...

...and finally a synchronous multiplayer!

Then we\'ll turn KSP into hell :thumbup:

[Asmosdeus]

Fixed it, just have to zoom in all the way.

[kellven]

After further testing, the wobbly connection may only show up when the ship reaches a certain mass, and I caught it on two ships during the 45-95' arc also. May also show up when the engines are thrusting too far against momentum, or simply sitting on the pad. When it hits though, it invariably results in a new crater.

On a light ship however, I was able to do repeated VTOLs, including an immediate backflip and recovery on one.

[sanderlebau]

I get a message saying this part will not work in my version, but I have the most updated version!

[Misterspork]

I get a message saying this part will not work in my version, but I have the most updated version!

Are you using the version of MuMechLib that comes with the download?

[sanderlebau]

Yes, I think so.

[lonewolf2121]

Helicopters, Ride of the Valkyries...

...napalm tanks and air-to-ground rockets under the wings, soldiers sitting on their helmets...

...and finally a synchronous multiplayer!

Then we\'ll turn KSP into hell :thumbup:

hmmmm.........

[Asmosdeus]

The tilt-rotor mechanism wont work for me, the won\'t tilt to provide verticle thrust.

The only way they will tilt it to point the exhausts up plunging me into the ground.

[DYJ]

Are you using Rev3 or Rev3.1?