the_bT

With the space shuttle I always wonder one thing. There is only really one thing it could do that no other system can do and that is bring heavy stuff back from orbit. Why would you develop such technology And the whole re-useability deal? I don't buy that anyone really involved ever expected that to turn a profit. In the end you need to re build the whole craft each time anyway. You're just doing it with used parts Maybe if you build it smaller... but at this size? BTW, I kinda did see a launch once. Was on vacation in Florida (from Europe so probably most distant vacation to date), and it turns out, there was a shuttle launch scheduled during the one week I was there. Went to the KSC several days before (planned that obv.) and saw the shuttle on the launch pad from the bus. To my surprise () the guide says: "As we launch the shuttle in 48 hours we can't go closer that this, sorry." The launch itself I didn't see up close, saw only a thin white line going into the sky. Still cool though.

You can download it, it's content. Call it DLC if you must. But it's free, so better call it free DLC. Wait, it was also released before the game got to version 1.0, so maybe it even qualifies for day zero DLC. I'm not sure about the last one though, I'm no DLC-Lawyer Does it make a difference how people call it?

I only remember, the first version I played did not have struts and the only thing that would attach radially were SRB's... what version was that? Edit: I mean, struts where huge when they got added, there should be a strutted update

Turned out I could remove enough of the cargo hold ceiling without losing structural integrity. Also dragging an asteroid with a KAS winch works remarkably well. There was some glitchiness when the whole assembly (asteroid in cargohold) got loaded when I approached it with the truck to unload, had to turn on unbreakable joints for that. I therefore conclude, using procedural wings and fairings + some of the large B9 structural elements, you can make a plane of sufficient size to carry an asteroid. The trickiest bit was actually putting on the ladders so the cargo loading guy could get back into the craft. Airlock is 12m above ground...

I have arrived. My cargo hold is a tiny bit to small it seems and I'm not yet 100% sure whats the best approach to load the thing... I need to take the floor out, the ceiling is the backbone of the whole craft, so it needs to stay. Without floor there will be no ramp and the main landing gear has a load bearing girder going through the body below the floor, so that needs to change as well, hmm... Maybe I should build a bigger plane It's actually not that heavy, only 4 tons or so, I can carry that much easily...

I'm on my way with the largest plane in my fleet, just to see how it compares to the thing... And to see if I can actually land in the terrain around the landing site. Edit: I took the liberty to hack the persistence file into sandbox mode because I'm modded to hell and back and there was no craft In my fleet that I could build without "buying" a ton of parts from the R&D

Thanks again, I was messing around and found the part.checkLanded() method. It seems to return true when a part itself touches the ground. It's close enough for what I want. I use it on each frame to enable or disable the GUI event. It seems to work good enough, there might be some cases where this fails, will test that later, a second check in ActivateEvent() should not be the big problem. Might even be better that way because I can better communicate to the user like that... As for the originally planned height above terrain, I really only wanted to test for really close distance to ground, so I was thinking about casting a ray and see if I hit ground or something. However I discovered a problem with the whole approach, if I anchor myself to nothing like this and no part of my vessel is touching the ground, the vessel will be set to flying state, it will therefore be deleted when you switch scenes or drive away from it. So It might be best to drop the whole Idea This is my current code: using System; using UnityEngine; public class GroundAnchor : PartModule { [KSPField(isPersistant = true)] private bool anchorActive = false; public override void OnStart(StartState state) { if ( anchorActive ) { attachToGround(); } } public override void OnUpdate() { if ( this.part.checkLanded() && !anchorActive) { Events ["ActivateEvent"].active = true; } else { Events ["ActivateEvent"].active = false; } } /* * This event is active when controlling the vessel with the part. */ [KSPEvent(guiActive = true, guiName = "Activate")] public void ActivateEvent () { ScreenMessages.PostScreenMessage ("Anchor fired", 5.0f, ScreenMessageStyle.UPPER_CENTER); attachToGround(); anchorActive = true; Events ["ActivateEvent"].active = false; } private void attachToGround () { FixedJoint fj = this.part.gameObject.AddComponent<FixedJoint>(); fj.breakForce = Mathf.Infinity; fj.breakTorque = Mathf.Infinity; } } I think it's pretty ok, but please point out problems if you see any. Thanks.

Even if you do not remove any crafts the savegame should load, crafts that have modded parts not present in the KSP install will simply not load. Of course, if there is something with modded parts attached to the asteroid, that would be a problem... Not a big one though I guess...

Is it just me or would this be an awesome challenge, I'd like to try it Sure I can mess up my own asteroid landing somewhere away from KSC but there is something to this landing location that interests me somehow... Would you want to post your save? I personally would try to lift it with a really huge plane, but that is only because I like building huge planes Maybe it can be designed so that it can drive over the asteroid and lift it from above with a KAS winch. That way you have pretty good control over where the COM will end up... How heavy is that thing anyways?

This is very enlightening, thank you. I will try to implement this as you suggested. I still need to check the height above ground, any advice on that?

You need to put: [noparse] [/noparse]to embed the imgur album. That being said, nice craft!

According to this the Cygnus spacecraft has navigation lights. (Red on the left, green on the right, 2 white lights on top and one yellow light an the bottom.) I've begun to put something similar on my crafts, at least sometimes

I'm trying to do my first plugin, it kinda works like I want it but not quite. I'd like to make a module that when triggered in some way anchors the part its on to it's current position. But only if the part is close (1-2m max) to the ground and the vessel doesn't move. So far I managed to set up Mono, and make a dll with a module and add that to a part. This is my code: using System; using UnityEngine; public class GroundAnchor : PartModule { /* * This event is active when controlling the vessel with the part. */ [KSPEvent(guiActive = true, guiName = "Activate")] public void ActivateEvent () { ScreenMessages.PostScreenMessage ("Anchored", 5.0f, ScreenMessageStyle.UPPER_CENTER); FixedJoint fj = this.part.gameObject.AddComponent<FixedJoint>(); fj.breakForce = Mathf.Infinity; fj.breakTorque = Mathf.Infinity; // This will hide the Activate event. Events ["ActivateEvent"].active = false; } } As you see, I'm not doing much at the moment. I've got the activate by right click stuff from the TAC Examples which works as advertised. I removed much of it because I need my module to work only once. I create a fixed joint on my part and set it to be unbreakable, I do not set a part to be joined to so it will join me to the world instead. I still need to implement the close enough to ground and speed checks though, and I don't know how I would go about that. But the bigger problem for the moment is that my anchor stops anchoring on quickload. I assume it will do that whenever the vessel is loaded. I figure I need to save the joint somehow (I assume adding a member variable to my class will do?) and reapply it on vessel load. How do I do that?

Which is why it should only be an option. A while ago I did a challenge which required multiple launches with the same craft, refueling etc. from ground vehicles in between. I did that in front of the hangar because it's a good place to do it. I ran into the issue you describe in reverse with the tanker trucks Anyways, the feature can probably be modded in easily enough with the Kerbtown plugin, I wonder though if that still works for 0.23.5... If it does, more taxi ways should be possible as well... on the north side of the runway though, more free space there.

I need a taxiway too, my planes are getting to big to turn around on the runway

In addition to the above regarding floating, drag when moving sideways in water (for building boats) is just the same drag you would get from stock aerodynamics multiplied by some number. That's why intakes work so well, they have no ordinary drag and instead get drag applied to them from the intake air code which does not care about water. In effect, radial intakes are almost without drag in water, have an impact tolerance of 70m/s or something, and if you mount them in a row they even kinda look like a float. Wings work also because they have their own drag code that doesn't care about water, but they have a crash tolerance of about 10m/s or so. Crash tolerance is only checked when something enters the water and rarely when it leaves. So if you avoid that you can use wings instead of intakes. They have more volume, so you can do with less. At least I think that's how it works. I don't care if or when squad does something to the water. Aerodynamics yes, but water, I could live with it as it is now... Not to say I wouldn't immediately download "MysteryPersons Hydrospace Research" Edit: I just remembered, I think buoyancy calculation based on the internal volume of the colliding geometry is a feature of the unity engine you can use out of the box. Maybe that's whats going on here... It does not really explain why two small tanks float better than one large tank though Oo

I volunteer for the forum! I'm good at planes, docking (including rendezvous) and stuff with wheels (from rovers to 50m gantry crane and beyond). I can do rockets reasonably well also... It's been a while since I did an interplanetary mission but that was a 3 man Duna return mission in career (taking all the science) which worked without flaw on the first try. I have enough free time and I do not cause drama PM to hire. Let's show those reddit people how pretending to be a bunch of little green men is done!

Seriously true. The amount of vehicles I've built that use that one strange looking B9 pod (this one) is positively ridiculous... And it's really not that good a pod for that... the hatch is on top, there is no ladder so I have to add one. The rest of the truck is cylindrical because made from 2.5m rocket parts. Ladder therefore almost always looks strange. It is not ideal at all. So... yes, pods for rovers/cars or trucks I would very much welcome. Also, please with IVA if possible Edit: I don't know if there is some sort of issue that is difficult to overcome with the seating in pod IVA's but I have noticed that you never get a good view out. The space plane cockpits in B9 seat you so low you see only sky. Even that strange pod I use for trucks only has moderate vision out the front window and more or less none at all to either side... Maybe it's the kerbals big heads with the low eyes or something, but for ground vehicles you need to see where you are going

Reusability is tricky in real live because you most likely have to take the craft apart and do inspection on a lot parts before the next mission and all such problems. In KSP however you do not and likely will not. So one more point why one shouldn't compare them too tightly... Also if y'all derail the thread to discuss public spending and the space shuttle the OP is going to be a sad panda. So... Is there truly no mod that has stock like looking cylindrical (so they fit without adapters) cargo bays? I find it hard to believe, I might need to try to make them then If there were such a part mod, what problem would using it be? Yeah it would be a mod but just like 2 or 3 parts. I don't know how the B9 cargo bays work without FAR, do they do anything actually? I ever only shielded cargo in bays or behind fairings while using FAR as well... If they do nothing, adding them in stock would not be useful at all. But if adding cargo bays means also putting in code that is related to the place-holding aerodynamics that part of it is work that will need to be redone when the place holder gets redone. Not ideal. Biggest problem with reusable SSTO crafts in stock is loading cargo anyways, bays do not make that any easier

Yeah it's a small error in the docs so no sweat. As long as it gets fixed some time it will be fine. I must confess when I saw the video on vecdraw I was kinda having mixed feelings about it because it doesn't really fit with the idea of 60s terminal computers and all that. But its usefulness outweigh that flaw by several orders of magnitude. Doubly so as long as you have to convert vectors manually between coordinate systems. So let me be among the first to respond and thank you for this fine piece of code and your work on the project in general.

If we really are going to name the first warp capable space ship we build "Enterprise" it's first mission needs to be to go find some new ideas...

2 suggestions: One, have a field for the kOS version scripts are written for. Second, Code text aligned to center... really?

So bottom line it works like it should and there is a type in the docs.

Hey, I've got another question. This time it's more of a math question really but it is related to the kOS Documentation so I post here. On the page explaining vectors (here), it says: Maybe I'm wrong about projections but I played around with the new vector draw thingy and it seems to me it is the other way around. VB is projected onto the plane that is normal to VA. Bug or typo, that's the question I don't know who's right, never heard of no vector exclude in my life Edit: Here's a picture: So if that's not projected into the plane normal to z I don't know what projection or normal mean. Which could be...

RPM support would put this onto a whole new level... Just to be clear though, are we talking the whole thing with entering code and everything (no more console window) or just having programs send output to an RPM panel instead of the console and being able to listen for the button presses from the panels? First would be cool, but I'd probably be just as happy with the second...