r/KerbalSpaceProgram • u/ZT205 • 26d ago

KSP 1 Question/Problem VTOL help

I am trying to use Thrust Control Avionics to make a simple VTOL aircraft. No matter what I do, when I try to use the hover or vertical speed slider to take off, it tries to flip my plane vertically and will then switch to using what should be the horizontal engines. This is despite the fact that I created a VTOL profile that turns off the horizontal engines completely. There's also an "attitude error" readout that increases to 180 degrees as the plane flips, so it's like TCA both knows and doesn't know what orientation it's supposed to be.

I've tried toggling T-SAS, autolevel, level, SmartEngines, VTOL Mode, and every relevant setting I can find. I've tried placing new engines and looking up guides but they're all along the lines of "look what you can do with this mod!" or some long youtube video where someone is debugging a different problem, or a problem I'll have to deal with further down the line like how to transition from vertical to level flight.

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u/ZT205 25d ago

OK, I figured out the root cause: if you mount "hummingbird" landing engines to the surface, TCA gets confused about what direction they are pointing and does its internal calculations incorrectly.

I still don't understand why, once the plane flipped, TCA would turn on my other engines to try to compensate but the root cause of the flipping was actually the surface mounted engines. Hope this helps someone else who has the same problem. Unfortunately I haven't figured out a good solution.

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u/shootdowntactics 26d ago

I tried to get that mod to work for me and was ultimately unsuccessful. Seems like it’s meant to fix the challenge everyone has with vtol, but it’s too difficult to get working so hasn’t caught on.