Hooligan Labs

Took a while for me to get this post up, but I got a lot to say about making ships. The answer is a little bit of both. To start with, here is something about upgrading the propulsion system to 300,000 nuclear bombs. Click to read!

The easiest would likely be to hang it from the top, like you first attempted. Try rotating it with WASD to find an attachment point. You can also use a Cirrus or the like, which is an animated envelope with an attachment point on the bottom.

Yep, I'm not even working on the project anymore. Jewel has been keeping it running since I left to devote more time to my new Interstellar game. I would love to see Squad add airships and submarines in the future, somehow! I think this shows it could work!

Thank you all for your interest! I put up a post about procedurally generating big spaceships. Feel free to leave a comment on the site! Click here! I also added a mailing list on the website, so please sign up! The more people who get involved, the more real this game gets!

I'm glad to see my mod still going! For something completely different, JewelShisen said he wouldn't mind me sharing that I'm working on a game I call Interstellar: Voyage Between Stars. Click here for more!

Hello, I'm Nate Johnson and I loved doing a whole bunch of mods for Kerbal Space Program! I loved learning about space physics, Unity3d and programming C#. Also, the KSP community is the best I've ever been a part of. After a while I wanted to make my own game. It would be about what happens between the spaceship launch and landing. How do those people live? How would you handle disasters during the trip? So I'm working on a game I call Interstellar: Voyage Between Stars. Click here for more! My KSP mods were 90% driven by feedback from players. Please check out the website, share and leave comments! Latest update: 4 Ways to Save Everyone from Dying in Space on Your Interstellar Generation Ship Includes new pictures of gameplay, including the upcoming resource system and 3D GUI. Click to sign up for alpha testing!

Oh absolutely those inspired the logo too. But octopus are very real, very smart and can do amazing things. They can be inspirations to us all. Speaking of which, here is some new research on the kind of stuff that future airships (and spaceships) could be made of: http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=49884

It's not too crazy, just a cross product of the envelope position compared to the vessel's axis to determine if it is on the right or left side.

The models look great! I know Firespitter has code for flipping objects over depending on which side of the craft they are on. Maybe that would help with the upside down octopuses.

The unfortunate thing about the Airship mod is that it is how I taught myself object oriented programming AND Unity. My apologies to all, a lot of what you are looking at is something made by a complete scripting amateur. I'm taking a look at the references to lead envelope in the source code and it looks like it doesn't really do anything other than control if the GUI is displayed or not. What was the specific question? Yeah that was a great episode, and they brag about it incessantly now. When I last did the buoyancy to weight calculations, all the envelopes were assumed to be sealed vacuums. If you can find my old thread I did a giant post on it.

I write this without having kept up with the latest changes to my mod, by those keeping it up to date. Yes, the custom script affects nearby EVA Kerbals and makes them sink like they had ballast tanks. KSP has a real problem with objects at an altitude of -600 meters or less. While it might seem like it works at first, if you open a debug window you would find it constantly spewing errors. The biggest problem is how it handles loading back in a vessel that is below 600m underwater. It will place the vessel partway underground, causing the vessel to explode into pieces. Same for EVAs. Perhaps there could be an option to allow vessels to go deeper, but also consider this... Under 600 meters of water, the pressure is something like that of 30 Mainsail rockets firing full power. Per square inch. Could almost anything survive that? I don't think it's too weak so much as a difference in design. If it is still like how it was when I based the submarine parts off of the Firespitter parts, then the Firespitter parts only change how their own colliders interact with water. Thus, a pontoon might do fine in water but for any other part it is like hitting solid earth. The submarine ballast tanks make it so the entire vessel has its parts' colliders replaced with ones that treat water as water and not as solid ground. So yes, your whole rocket not splashes rather than crashes! Though it probably doesn't float anymore.

Wow, my mods are (completely thanks to JS) on Curse! It was parachute-like inflatable balloons that inspired my original animated envelope designs. I think I wrote up some posts on how to make animated shape-changing parts in KSP on my old thread. I used Blender. If you can't find it there, I could probably put something together... And I bet I still have all the old Blender files to act as a template too.

Sure, check my old YouTube videos. Here is the video on the SQUID: I'm assuming it hasn't changed much. There are other helpful videos as well. I moved onto a new project before doing a video for submarines, but Scott Manley and other did videos on that.

This looks like a really ambitious mod! I'm hoping that these tools get used to add planet-scale megastructures like a Dyson Swarm.

In a way... When you research mass drivers the inventors often propose doing it in steps. It usually begins with something that we could just about build now, basically a very tall monorail, and then they add in things like monopole magnets as they are made reliable and cheap enough.

This does work with KerbTown. I've tested it. BTW, I noticed the comment about making this a part. Sorry if this has already been suggested, but one idea might be to make a little "Mass Driver Comlink" part or something. It would be a normal visible part, but hidden in the file would be the mass driver model with everything except the mesh renderer and collider turned on. Maybe then use the normal right click menu on the comlink to place it. Something like... namespace MassDriverCode { public class MassDriverComLinkPartModule : PartModule { public GameObject MD_Template; // Set in Unity Editor or find at start [KSPAction("Order Mass Driver Construction")] public void MDC_Action(KSPActionParam param) { MDC_Event(); } [KSPEvent(guiActive = true, guiActiveUnfocused = true, unfocusedRange = 2000, guiName = "Order Mass Driver Construction")] public void MDC_Event() { GameObject MD_Clone = Instantiate(MD_Template, transform.position + new Vector3(0, 2000f, 0f, Quaterion.identity) as Transform; // Plops a copy of the Mass Driver 2 km ahead with the same orientation as the part. Obviously could be done better, but a start. MD_Clone.transform.parent = null; MD_Clone.renderer.enabled = true; MD_Clone.collider.enabled = true; } } } Maybe that would be a good challenge for Northstar?

That looks great! I never got the particle effects working just the way I wanted for the SQUID, so I know how hard this is to make it look that good. That was kind of what I was proposing with the code I put there. By raycasting and adding force in the direction of the part's local "down", you represent the force of the air coming out from the skirt. The part's down may be in any direction in the real world, so hopefully it would act just like a normal hovercraft. If Snjo instead wanted to place transforms in the Unity editor and then reference them in his script, that could work just as well.

Yes, probably better to write something like this... // Width and length of the air cushion skirt public float skirtWidth = 2f, skirtLength = 4f, spaceBetweenForces = 0.5f; public float forceMax = 1f; void FixedUpdate() { // Check in all spots under the skirt for (float wide = -1 * skirtWidth / 2; i <= skirtWidth / 2; wide += spaceBetweenForces) { for (float long = -1 * skirtLength / 2; i <= skirtLength / 2; long += spaceBetweenForces) { Vector3 downVector = transform.TransformDirection(Vector3.down); // Force out the bottom of the skirt Vector3 worldForcePosition = transform.TransformPoint(new Vector3(long, 0, wide); // Where we are checking on the skirt Vector3 pointGravity = FlightGlobals.getGeeForceAtPosition(worldForcePosition).normalized; float airForce = 0; // First check for water if (vessel.mainBody.GetAltitude(worldForcePosition) < downVector.magnitude) airForce = Mathf.Clamp(Vector3.Dot(downVector, pointGravity) * forceMax, 0f, forceMax); // If not, check for objects under the hovercraft, should work for everything but water else if (Physics.Raycast(worldForcePosition , downVector, out hit)) airForce = forceMax - forceMax * hit.distance / downVector.magnitude; rigidbody.AddForceAtPosition(downVector * airForce, worldForcePosition ); // Apply force at this point on the skirt away from the thing below } } } Details coming soon! Edited in some more quick thoughts on the calculation

Cool! My thought was to use invisible spheres underneath on spring joints. Unfortunately, spring joints can only be made between separate rigidbodies. I'm going to guess that KSP does not support importing a Unity file with multiple rigidbodies, so it would have to be added later by scripting. BTW, don't know when I could work on this... Trying to release my first game on Google Play soon.

Do you still have the model somewhere?

Snjo, I thought I remembered us working on a hovercraft part long ago. Did that not happen?

I did a quick check through my old code and it doesn't seem that anything special should happen during a pause or unpause. My guess is that Unity has an issue with suddenly recalculating the forces involved. It seems you've found a solution, otherwise maybe some kind of force ramp function following a change in the physics time scale would help. Nothing terrifying about tons of rocks from space being suspended overhead! Good idea. People always will request to have the old parts back anyway, and you want to stay backwards compatible to not break what other people are doing.

Hello! I wanted to say that I got a question on my channel asking if my mods were still available, and I was able to point them to Jewel's work. I haven't tested them myself, I'm working on a space game of my own, but I am very happy to see the new development. Actual airship nose cones, so long requested, finally exist. Keep it up! I'll check back every now and then to see how things are going and check messages. P.S. You could be putting your own logo on all this, with your own work.

Rover does science in space! I do love alternate ways of traveling to space and have experience with Unity, the Kraken, KerbTown KSP mods. I have some ideas on how to make your mod work, any way I can help? ... Okay, I'm just going to write my ideas down before you answer that. Maybe the Kraken code is almost working! If so, please forgive me. Create a box-like object and port it in with Unity. This will be the superconducting element that lifts and pulls the spacecraft along the track. The element can be attached to the bottom of the spacecraft. When it is activated between the two rails of the launcher use Lerp (straight track, should be fairly easy to program) or Slerp (arc shaped track, much more difficult) to have the superconductor travel the path from start to finish. To properly reflect acceleration, have the T increments increase at a steady rate. When the end is reached, use the decouple script command to have the spacecraft break away. If there are issues with KSP not having it launch properly, I think you can painlessly set the velocity vector using SetWorldVelocity. I would strongly recommend having zero drag on the vessel to represent it traveling through a vacuum tube. You probably don't need to model the tube, just assume that it is closed by an invisible plasma barrier with walls made out of transparent ultrastrong graphene. To zero drag, upon entering the tracks make a list of every part, it's drag (a simple Unity value that does just what it says) and node sizes (I think this is what Ferram uses to calculate drag). Set these values to 0. Upon leaving the launcher or breaking away from the vessel, set these back to their original values. As a final note, it would be most realistic to have the launchers climb the slopes of Kerbin's mountains. Launch pads accessible by KerbTown would make access easy. That's all I can say for now! Lots of the ideas came from the wiki article on the StarTram.

We at Hooligan Labs were not killed in a tragic airship accident! We're 3D Printing right now! We thought our old test subjects at KSP would approve. Video: Download: http://www.thingiverse.com/HooliganLabs/collections/super-mario-ornaments