Question XR5 refuel behavior and altitude hold CTD

[Iberville]

Ok, so I manage to do my first Earth-Moon trip with a fully crewed and loaded XR5 to prepare my Arrow freighter for a deep solar system exploration! I barely made it to a stable moon orbit before realizing that I did not have enough fuel to land!

-I wanted to use one of the 20s fuel UCGO in the cargo but I can't find a way to put them in my XR5 main fuel tank.
-I then launched a Delta gliderIV to dock with it to refuel the XR5 (yeah I know, a small ship refueling a big f** plane...) I launched my DGIV with its main tank fuel and with 4 UCGO fuelcell to transfer enough to the XR5 for landing. But instead of transfering fuel from the DG tank to the XR5, the XR5 was behaving like if the DG was a space station and I could fill it completely withought touching my DG reserve. Is this normal behavior, like a know limitation? Is there a way to use fuel UCGO inside the XR5?

-I also keep having a CTD when I try to use the generic cockpit view Altitude hold button when landing on the moon with the XR5. Is it a bug or also a limitation? The descent autopilot is great, but the altitude hold is great with the DG for final tuning of landing.

Thanks for the help!
Orbiter is génial!

 

[Richy]

I also found me in the uncomfortable situation in moon orbit, with just a little bit lesser fuel than needed for landing (about 100m/s dv missing). So, I looked out for a flat side and tried a crash landing. It worked, and later I managed to recover the ship with a Shuttle-A attached via [ame="http://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=439"]tether[/ame] and lift it back to a near base to repair it!

 

[Lucy]

But instead of transfering fuel from the DG tank to the XR5, the XR5 was behaving like if the DG was a space station and I could fill it completely withought touching my DG reserve. Is this normal behavior, like a know limitation? Is there a way to use fuel UCGO inside the XR5?

Yes, this happens if you dock the ships together. Orbiter used to, a long time ago, differentiate between space stations and "normal" vessels, but no longer does so. When docked to anything, the standard behaviour is to allow full refuelling, because there's no way to tell what the user has docked to.

Woo482 has been working with the XR vessels and UCGO, but I'm not sure what he's done with the XR5.

-I also keep having a CTD when I try to use the generic cockpit view Altitude hold button when landing on the moon with the XR5. Is it a bug or also a limitation? The descent autopilot is great, but the altitude hold is great with the DG for final tuning of landing.

If it's crashing to desktop, then it's not a pre-defined limitation, but a problem somewhere. I wrote an article a while ago now which detailed the information I'd otherwise ask you for in addition to this brief problem report, you can find it here. Please especially pay attention to the notes on clean installs and the specific note about the XRs. It is very often not their fault.

 

[Iberville]

-I'am using stricly add ons recommended from this site: earth, moon, and mars textures by Dr. Schweiger, Dan's orbiter sound 3.5, UCGO, UMMU, ShutttleA and ISS ummu, and XR5 vanguard. All the up to date versions. I did not change any files but the textures one (as stated in the read me files) and the names of the crew of the Vanguard. My Orbiter is very simple and clean.

-My computer: XP PRO, 3 GIG of RAM, and an NVIDIA QUADRO NVS 130M (able to play FSX and Starcraft 2 minimum).

-I tested again and i's doing more like an EXIT to the desktop. It's not like the usual crashing scenario with the error report from windows. It seems to quit like If I had presed F4 and pushed the Exit button. I even tested it with a brand new orbiter folder with ONLY UMMU and ORBITER sound3.5 and it keeps shutting Orbiter when I press the Altitude hold.

 

[dbeachy1]

I also keep having a CTD when I try to use the generic cockpit view Altitude hold button when landing on the moon with the XR5. Is it a bug or also a limitation? The descent autopilot is great, but the altitude hold is great with the DG for final tuning of landing.

I have tested this here and the CTD is indeed a bug of some sort -- I'm tracking it down now. You may well be the only XR pilot on Earth (no pun intended ) who uses the glass generic cockpit for the XR5 rather than its custom 2D panel view, which explains why this bug was never detected before now. I suspect the issue is that XRs have their own custom implementation of Altitude Hold (it's called Descent Hold) but that the generic glass cockpit button is still trying to activate the default "Hold Altitude" autopilot: the XR code does not expect that since neither its custom panels nor its key handlers ever send that command.

I'll fix the CTD in the next XR build, but in the meantime (or, actually, all the time ) you should just use the XRs' built-in Descent Hold autopilot with the descent rate set to zero. The shortcut key is the same as Orbiter's old "Hold Altitude": A. Just press A to engage Descent Hold; its default descent rate it zero, so that will hover unless you've changed it: in that case, just press the NUMPAD-. (period on the numpad) and the ship will hover. No need for the glass cockpit. :thumbup:

As for refueling behavior, Xyon nailed it: what you are seeing is by design. If you want to transfer fuel from a UCGO payload you will need Woo482's XR UCGO 2.0; however, currently only the XR2 version is released. Woo tells me an XR5 version is in-work.

 

[Iberville]

Well, thanks dbeachy1! :thumbup: I was using the generic cockpit only at the last phase of descent to see better where I am! But I will asbolutely use the descent function of your ship! Thanks for the quick response and thanks for this great addons.

 

[dbeachy1]

Oh, in that case you can still just use the key commands to activate Descent Hold to hover (and then descend): A, NUMPAD-., then use NUMPAD-8 to descend or NUMPAD-2 to ascend. A complete list of autopilot shortcut keys is in the XR Flight Operations Manual. :thumbup:

In any case, good catch on that bug! A fix is in-work.