j-don
commented
7 years ago Wings have long needed special definitions to function properly in FAR, and what you have essentially done as your fix is turned something that is not a wing into a wing. This is clearly an odd situation, but is the right answer really to define everything as a wing? Far is already giving wings some benefit of the doubt that they are appropriate materials and shapes for a wing, and non-wing panels probably shouldn’t get that benefit.
The real question is why the oddly placed panel isn’t being properly handled by the voxel model. I’m curious if other structural elements that are a little less flat would also have this problem, and if the voxel model just isn’t processing the flat panel properly.
I moved this from issue #159 for ferram4's sanity.
I took a stab at reproducing a drag problem and noticed a considerable difference in behaviour between wing panels and structural panels. Assuming the same surface area between the panel types, wing panels have a lot more drag than structural panels.
In the first example the two structural panels appear to have the same drag despite the orientation. But in the second example, the same sized wing panels have dramatically different drag.
It turns out the structural panels don't have any Module Manager definitions in ferramaerospaceresearch.cfg. Copying the data for wingconnector3 to a new definition for structuralpanel2 'fixes' this, though I got the orientation wrong on my first attempt.
It might seem silly to create MM defs for every single part in KSP to accommodate them, but I've seen sillier things: Planes built with structural panels as wings and propeller blades, and radiator panels as tail planes. These things behave as expected in stock.
Rather than delay ferram4 with making more MM defs, could I ask FAR KSP forum thread to crowd-source this?
This is in otherwise-unmodified KSP 1.2.2 with the current (as of four days ago) KSP_update branch, but the lack of MM def for panels is also in the master branch.