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Nate Simpson

KSP Team
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Posts posted by Nate Simpson

  1. 18 hours ago, Wubslin said:

    Oh wow, these are pretty! And fast. Really fast! One of my biggest nitpicks over Realplume was that the particle effects felt like they were going only 40 miles per hour. These clearly don't have that problem. The second stage cams on the 100+ odd Falcon 9 launches there have been have really imbued the spaceflight community with an excellent expectation of what a real engine looks like when it's screaming into the void. And this is it!

    That said, now I'm brimming with questions about these plumes, and specifically about atmospheric deflection.

    BDCBaSa.jpg

    This guy is clearly a magnetic nozzle, right? That paraboloid shape is a result of magnetic field lines using whatever evil Maxwell's equation dark magic and right hand rule incantations to continue to squeeze down on a charged exhaust even though it has left the physical part of the nozzle.

    But that's quite a lot of squeezing. Magnetic fields drop off with the inverse cube, which is to say incredibly fast. Perhaps this engine is also at altitude and air is helping out?

    sdhVHoS.jpg

    (Here's that other, delightfully more leaky and flamboyant nozzle from earlier media. The field can be seen to be of similar size but much weaker.)

    How about that other plume?

    SAg9jPJ.jpg

    Again amazingly beautiful. A column of perfect white (salt o' the nuclear saltwater seas?) plasma pounding down and illuminating what appears to be the vaporized remnants of the inert layer of water which is applied to the outside of the propellant flow. The layer that's doped with x-ray absorbing material and provides film cooling to keep the engine from vaporizing, of course. But is this plume also in a thin atmosphere? The exhaust does seem to have climbed back up the rocket as it does in thin atmosphere and vacuum in real life. However, I can still make out out faint dregs of that classic in-atmosphere revolved parabola shape.

    FZ5SjFH.jpg

    For reference here's some really old art of a Falcon 9 performing SECO-1. It's pretty evident the artist was depicting some ambient pressure.

    zzLJUWW.jpg

    And here's actual footage of a Falcon 9 immediately after fairing deploy, which is very soon after SECO-1. The vehicle is still very much in atmosphere and that paraboloid effect is definitely apparent at massive scales (see 3:20 on this video, gorgeous: )

    But on the close up you've basically got that unimpeded Prandtl-Meyer expansion with the exhaust pressure layers beautifully diverging and peeling off in all directions. 

    Again, I love the work and have no problem with any tiny amounts of license that would be taken with the rocket exhausts (who would? A wise man once said "It's only game.") But the fact that these are all animations and set to a space background is a little confusing. That turbojet plume certainly wasn't in vacuum!

    DTzT4mA.jpg

    vvArdrp.jpg

    The space background is just the test scene skybox that Aaron uses to display in-progress effects, so no worries there. But where did you get those last two b/w images? These are INSANELY helpful. Are these from a particular paper? I want to learn more!

  2. On 2/26/2021 at 9:35 PM, WalebKassa said:

    I would also like to know when this is. I was really expecting something on Friday, but we got nothing... :sad:

    We're trying to keep to every other Friday for now, since that's how often we do internal studio show and tells. Since @KSPStar came aboard, we've hit three in a row! 

  3. 7 minutes ago, Knight of St John said:

    Thank you :-)
    Nertea is the real hero here though. He's been working tirelessly on developing this mod, so that us ksp-players can make our own plumes like the one above.
    There's more where that one came from ;-)

    Many of us are huge Nertea fans. In many ways he's been trying to turn KSP1 into KSP2 for years, and I for one am here for it.

  4. 1 hour ago, Knight of St John said:

    This is looking promising. You guys might be interested in @Nertea's Waterfall mod for KSP1. @Zorg and myself have been creating some wonderful exhaust plumes with said mod that look very similar to what Aaron has been making.
    As an example, this is my most recent plume design for the aerospike. it shows throttling up, then expansion due to decreasing atmospheric pressure.
    OutTJm2.gif

     

    Holy mackerel, that's gorgeous! Nice work!

    Just now, Starhelperdude said:

    maybe the video quality has been downgraded so that we can't figure out better what secret engine that is xD (jk)

    Uh... yeah, right! THAT'S why! 

  5. 2 hours ago, whatsupsevensup said:

    Will the engine exhast change between spreading out when it leaves the nozzle or staying in the coneish shape when it leaves the nozzle depending on whether or not you are in a vaccum or not?

    Yes indeed. Exhausts look radically different depending on their environmental context.

  6. 7 minutes ago, K^2 said:

    Good visuals. What I would really like to see is the exhaust adjusting dynamically as ambient pressure changes. Mach diamonds getting further and further spaced until they disappear, following by the expanding plume, and then the characteristic bell of the overexpanded exhaust.

    Exhaust does adjust dynamically as ambient pressure changes! Yay!

    32 minutes ago, Poodmund said:

    Yeah I don't think its a YouTube issue, it seems like either the video has rendered at a much lower resolution and/or bitrate than intended. I'd wager that we might see a 'corrected' video up at some point.

    Alas, this is shown at the resolution at which it was captured. It was shared at a recent internal show and tell and I thought it was cool enough to show to you all. We're going to try to do a better job of keeping in the backs of our minds that any internal show and tell asset is a potential future public show and tell asset! In the meantime, pardon our pixels...

  7. 23 minutes ago, Ahres said:

    I haven't seen it mentioned yet so I'll present it: with the Show and Tell videos on loop you can now play KSP with the KSP2 soundtrack playing in the background - which I'm doing right now. This music is exactly what I want for this game. 

    Nate, please pass on another compliment to the composer. This one from Ahres.

    I was telling Howard yesterday about how much love the music has been getting online, and he continues to be his usual humble self. It's so good though! 

    When the drums drop in there at the end... CHILLS.

  8. 36 minutes ago, Wubslin said:

    Please excuse that we're all gasping and begging for new information here. But to ask for a meta update, can we assume that these little un-narrated dolly shot videos showcasing different parts are going to be a really regular kind of thing? It's been a huge stretch of radio silence and now we've got two of those in as many weeks.

    We're gonna do our best. It's a bit of a tightrope, avoiding spoilers and making sure information gets out in the right order and in the right way! But with @KSPStar on the team now, we do have somebody regularly reminding us to keep our eyes open for good stuff to share.

  9. 5 minutes ago, ballisticfox0 said:

    These base parts are getting so large it will be almost impossible to move them from the CAB to a good location.

    Will there be a "base editor" think top down placing buildings or will there a "survey stick" like object like in Extraplanetary launchpads?

    Yes, there's a base editor called the BAE (Base Assembly Editor) that allows you to move modules around as you like. You won't need to worry about the logistics of moving parts of your colony around within the build area.

  10. 14 minutes ago, Wubslin said:

    Okay, the orion drive's mini casaba howitzer nuclear bombs are obviously one of those two, that's a no-brainer. But the we've got to ask, what else? Seeing as you guys aren't trying to be hyper-simulationist with the fuel types I'm inclined to believe there's some catch-all "Blutonium" fission fuel that just works in reactors, orion drives and whatever else needs to split a bunch of atoms. Which leaves a single other fuel that hasn't been talked about.

    So, how do we guess that last fuel type? The existence of NERVA engines and their likely inclusion in the game makes me immediately think of Hydrogen, but that would be too complicated when there's already methane around to use by itself like the LiquidFuel of KSP 1 (Specific impulse and exhaust velocity be damned.) The same goes for fusion fuel. Helium-3 can be made to fuse with itself, but the addition of Deuterium makes it easier. No no, too complicated. All the fusion engines like the Daedalus have got to just use He3 by itself. Why would you guys hold back simple hydrogen as a mystery fuel? No no, there's got to be something else. BUT WHAT???

    Also unrelated note, I think I just figured out what that one mystery drive is that you guys kept showing in your material. The thing that looks suspiciously like a shower head. Lots and lots of little holes. No clear central throat that a traditional rocket engine would have. Fuel delivery pipes stanced as far away from each other as possible... it's almost like the thing's designed to avoid concentrating the fuel in one place until it's ready to be used. I wonder why that could be? :wink:

    WTypMJ9.png

     

    Oh, we've been above-board about nuclear pulse for a while now. That wasn't one of the two mystery fuels. 

    For that image at the bottom... hm. No comment. :)

  11. 1 hour ago, Master39 said:

    Just thinking: more than a VAB worth in mass and volume of resources to bring to orbit to build the huge "Daedalus" engine we've seen in the trailer, and that's just the engine for a ship that's even bigger, all launched from a station dwarfing the ship and the engine.

    That's a lot of mass to bring to orbit, plus the fuel, plus the fuel factory, plus the workers crew and their requirements. Even assuming a single universal "ore" resource we'll probably need a small fleet of  (hopefully reusable) heavy duty cargo lifters/landers.

    As others have said, there's an "easier" path and a "harder" path for building large colony modules. There's nothing (other than physics) stopping you from attempting to bootstrap a colony straight through Phase 1 and deep into Phase 2 by putting a ton of colonists, raw materials, and Phase 1 colony parts on an enormous lander. That's an area where I'm really looking forward to peoples' individual solutions to the interstellar colonization challenge. You'll be able to make some very ambitious colonizer ships that can essentially contain cities-in-a-box. But since you won't necessarily know what unique environmental challenges those colonists will face, you can either go full yolo and hope your design is flexible enough to work with whatever you stumble across, or you can send interstellar probes first to get a sense of what you'll be dealing with. THIS GAME IS SO RAD, GUYS! 

    But if insane superlanders isn't your bag, the sane(er) way of doing this is to establish a small foothold colony and then set up one or more delivery routes - automated dropoff missions that periodically bring new materials to your colony to allow it to grow on a slower timeline. In practice, this method of growth works best at least until you get to the metallic hydrogen portion of the progression. That's when your heavy lift abilities start to get silly. :)

  12. 35 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

    You probably won't need to land them, considering that these are for colonies you'll probably build them in situ alongside the power generation modules using resources you harvest there.

    Correct! The three small factories shown here are Phase 1 factories, which are brought to the surface in vehicles (you can tell, both by their scale and their tech level, that these are early-progression parts). The two larger factories can only be built (using very large amounts of collected resources) on-site after you have installed an ISRU module.

    6 minutes ago, shdwlrd said:

    Hmm... are the only connection points for these going to be through the foundations? Will they be stackable?

    Some parts are stackable and some are not (we are trying to follow commonsense rules on this). Surface-attachability is still a thing as well, so if you're feeling bold, you can pretty much stick anything to anything. But your mileage may vary there.

    To elaborate a little on the colony module connection logic: you'll frequently see "sanctioned" connection points around their bases and underneath, as well as occasionally on top -- these are appointed with stack attach nodes and will give you a nice orderly Lego-like connection that keeps everything on-grid and tidy. But as with vehicle parts, all colony parts also have a surface attach node that allows attachment of the part to other parts in a much more freeform way. As colonies mature and get more complex, being able to keep everything on-grid is surprisingly handy. But we also recognize that Kerbal is also about freeform creativity, so if you want to get weird with it, we're happy to let you be you.

  13. 1 minute ago, Spaceman.Spiff said:

    Nice!

    Those things are huge! I assume this is a test scene again, right?

    I hope they make it less abstracted. Hopefully there are multiple kinds; from basic cold gas to hydrazine thrusters.

    Especially considering that there are multiple "Liquid Fuel" variations, there should be multiple types for each "class" of KSP1 fuels. (LF/O, MP, SF, XG)

    edit: d'oh :ph34r: 

    I assume there will be mods aplenty to diversify the fuel and resource types. Never fear!

  14. 7 minutes ago, The Aziz said:

    Go Big or go home, am I right?

    Just curious, among all defined resources, is monoprop still going to remain monoprop?

    Yep! Good old monoprop. Internally, we assume monoprop is hydrazine -- that's what informed the factory details, anyway. But it works the same way it does in KSP1. 

  15. 19 hours ago, Wubslin said:

    Oh forgot to mention, I am in love with the music that this video is set to. It's like a slower, ambient remix of some of the classic "ship in space" KSP 1 music. Makes me super excited for all the new music we might get with this game.

    I'm excited to see Howard's music getting so much love here. I'm forwarding these comments to him as they pop up. 

    We've already picked out the music that'll be on the next show and tell video! It's really pretty, too. :)

  16. 21 hours ago, mattinoz said:

    Is this the first time Roverdude has been acknowledged as part of the project even thou his finger prints are all over it since the first video?

    I think he actually did an interview about this recently, so I don't believe this is a huge scoop. But yes, he's splitting his time between KSP and KSP2 these days. I don't know if you've met him -- he's just about the most fun human I've ever met!

    15 hours ago, DanDucky said:

    Not sure I like the size of these reactors, I'd rather it be a small reactor but lots of interchangeable parts to customize them, like radiators and such. The idea of having huge pre-built machines isn't my favorite. Like, for example, we have the fuel generators in ksp but we need to design where the radiators and drills go. 

    We're sensitive to this -- you still need to place radiators and drills for these (and in the case of radiators, you'll need quite a few). For the reactors, if we broke them down into smaller chunks, they would no longer be recognizable as reactors. We'd have to do something like separate cryostats and steam turbines or something? I'd actually love to see a mod that broke these things down to such a granular level -- but I suspect it's a little too fiddly considering how many other things you'll be keeping track of when you develop a colony...

    1 hour ago, Elthy said:

    The music reminded me of this (so much i had to check if its the same composer):

    One of the most inspiring videos of all time, its like a real-life Trailer for KSP.

    We are massive fans of the Wanderers video -- I gave it a shout-out on our Kerbal trailer animatic video here: 

     

  17. 1 minute ago, prestja said:

    I'm sorry I didn't get my thoughts out correctly - what I'm referring to is not the VAB placed on the ground but the equivalent to the VAB that allows the player to place new surface modules. BAE (Base Assembly Editor) maybe?

    Ah! Yes, the BAE is not a structure. You can almost think of it as a virtual blueprinting interface, where you build and modify your colony and then the actual "building" action takes place when you hit the Build button at the end.  Does that answer your question?

  18. 36 minutes ago, prestja said:

    I'd like to know what the colony analogue to the VAB will be like. Is there a certain point that KSP 2 could be played like a city builder?

    The ground colony VAB is already out there -- it's even in the last shot of the announcement trailer. It's that thing that the final rocket falls off of. Basically a big box with a landing pad on its roof.

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