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KSP-RO / TestFlight

KSP Mod that provides a part research and reliability system
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display likelyhood of ignition failure? #183

Closed glilienthal closed 5 years ago

glilienthal commented 6 years ago

I am playing RP-1 on KSP 131. I find playing with the frequent ignition failures quite challenging. Looks like otherwise similar engines can be vastly different here.

It'd be great if the information about ignition failure rates could be displayed in the VAB and in the testflight interface during flight mode. It'd be great if in the flight mode window this could also include the effect of dynamic pressure as I understand this has an effect, too. (It does, doesn'T it? )

Starstrider42 commented 5 years ago

I'm not in a position to try to implement this any time soon, but yes, dynamic pressure is a huge factor. Playing on stock I've found that I can avoid most ignition failures if I'm careful not to stage at low altitudes.

jwvanderbeck commented 5 years ago

Dynamic pressure will generally only have an effect if the engine is traditionally a ground lit engine, not designed to be air lit.

glilienthal commented 5 years ago

I'd love to bump this up. could the chance of successful ignition (maybe ignoring dynamic pressure if this simplifies things) be displayed?

siimav commented 5 years ago

Implemented in 411011578768a266592581516e50ba5afe7e4a55

glilienthal commented 5 years ago

This is very cool. No more digging through config files. - I'll give it a thorough testing, once RL stops annoyingly intervening with KSP.

Thank you, @siimav

siimav commented 5 years ago

Latest release has ignition reliability rates shown in the VAB and also in the part info panel. There's also a difficulty setting that allows disabling dynamic pressure penalties. My own experience with that feature is that sometimes the Q values are way off and thus cause the ignition chance to be unfairly low.

jwvanderbeck commented 5 years ago

sometimes the Q values are way off

What do you mean here? That TF is using incorrect pressure values? This shouldn't be the case.

I'm not sure I like the idea of ignition failures being disabled on anything lower than hard difficulty. Ignition failures are a large part of the game play of TF.

siimav commented 5 years ago

I didn't actually disable the ignition failures entirely on difficulties less than hard. I just did it for the dynamic-pressure-based penalties that TF used to apply by-default. See Here.

The reasoning behind the decision is that this feature just doesn't work consistently enough to be enabled by-default for everyone. Based on my tests, most of the time, the interstage fairing was correctly shielding my engine from external dynamic pressure. Sometimes for no apparent reason, it just wasn't doing it at all. On one case I was consistently getting 40kPa of dynamic pressure at an altitude of 100km+. I'm sure that TF is doing everything correctly here but the issue is on the side of stock KSP or ModularFlightIntegrator. Another side of this dyn-pressure based penalty is that this information is not surfaced to the user in any way and usually just leaves him frustrated when his engines almost never ignite at high Q.

Starstrider42 commented 5 years ago

On one case I was consistently getting 40kPa of dynamic pressure at an altitude of 100km+. I'm sure that TF is doing everything correctly here but the issue is on the side of stock KSP or ModularFlightIntegrator.

If you have dynamic pressure at >100 km then I assume you're playing with RSS/RO? Could it be an issue with one of those mods or TF's interaction with them? I play TF on stock, and I frequently get ignition failures at 10 km (which is around max Q for my designs) but never at 40 km.

jwvanderbeck commented 5 years ago

TF was made specifically for RSS/RO so I doubt it.