nyrath

That is a truly amazing vessel! I am most impressed! Ah, you mean dock the bomb tender to the big ship and pump the bombs from one to the other? Yes, I am still trying to figure out how to do that, I want it as well. Trouble is that bombs are not quite like resources, and the documentation is sketchy. But that does have a high priority. Oh, dear. I'm sure the explosion blinded most of the Kerbals on the hemisphere facing the vessel.

New Version 0.16 available at the first post. Only difference is the animation of the dropping bomb. WARNING: this means the explosion happens 0.16 seconds after hitting the Z or spacebar, instead of immediately. I had a couple of designs where the vessel was held in the air by launch supports. Previously the spacebar would release the supports and the throttle would make the first bomb immediately loft the vessel. But now, if the vessel is held too low, it might drop and hit the launch pad before the first bomb goes off. Having said that, in most cases you can just launch the blasted thing with no launch supports, pusher plate sitting flat on the launch pad. Due to the extra animation (bomb drop), the pusher plate animation will be swifter. The entire sequence has to fit into 0.8 second.

Well, the original NERVA solid core NTR had a pathetic thrust of 49 kN. The stock KSP LV-N atomic rocket motor has a thrust of 60 kN. The Dumbo NTR was estimated to have a thrust of a whopping 3,500 kN, which is ginormous compared to the stock NTR. It would have the same atmosphereCurve specific impulse, that more or less depends upon what you are using for propellant. I didn't do the math for Agarax's ship, but it looks reasonable. Oh, my. That is a freaking NEXUS booster, with gas core nuclear thermal rockets. And they didn't say anything about "closed-cycle" either (translation: you get twice the specific impulse compared to a closed-cycle gas core, at the cost of having glowing radioactive death spraying from the exhaust nozzle). http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=700 http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#id--Nuclear_Thermal--Gas_Core--Open_Cycle That monster can boost 1,500 metric tons into orbit with one trip. You are probably looking at a thrust of 3,500 kN to 5,000 kN, depending upon the specific impulse (Isp goes down as thrust goes up). It does have a chemical first stage which is a small mercy.

An ion flying out of the exhaust of an ion drive into the vacuum of space is not going to find any electrons to unionize themselves. This means that the spacecraft will become more and more negatively charged. Eventually it will be so charged that the ion exhaust will be bent around until it strikes the ship and/or the ion accelerator cannot counteract the attraction of the ship so they refuse to leave the ion drive exhaust port. This is why ion drives have cathodes emitting electrons. This neutralizes the beam and prevents the ship from becoming charged.

m4V the quote Kryten alluded to is more commonly: No Buck Rogers, No Bucks. Meaning taxpayers are far more enthusiastic giving money to NASA for manned space flight as opposed to some unmanned space probe. Translation: yes, you get more science bang for your buck with robot probes as opposed to manned missions, but that is bitter consolation if you cannot get any taxpayer funding for your robot probe. Werner von Braun, Carl Sagan & Gerard O'Neill http://theforvm.org/diary/bill-white/werner-von-braun-carl-sagan-gerard-oneill

Yes, NovaSilisko gave me his old code. I used it as a skeleton for developing my mod's plug-in. However, I had to change so many things that very little of it is left. The plug-in contains all the mechanics for the Orion: moving the pusher plate, applying the impulse from each bomb blast to the vessel, that sort of thing. Using my plug-in, and the notes in the readme file, anybody who can create 3D models could make their very own Orion parts, and link them to my plug-in with the part.cfg file. NovaSilisko was in the process of doing that, making his own marvelous Orion parts. Naturally he was running into trouble, since the mod's author (me) was a rank novice at KSP, C#, Unity3D, and Kerbal mods in general (still am, actually). After making us all salivate by showing us his ultra-sexy Orion, NovaSilisko went on vacation, where he undoubtedly has better things to do than fix the Orion mod.

Great Galloping Delta Vee!!! Look at the size of that monster!

In that case, the main thing I have too look out for is too fine a granularity. For example, the Orion had 2MN magazines and 3.5MN magazines (for historical authenticity reasons). As it turned out, nobody was really using the 2MN magazines (with a couple of notable exceptions), so they were wasted parts just clogging up memory (blasted textures were 3 megs apiece). So I have to choose my atomic engines such that they have thrust and specific impulse sufficiently distinct from each other. I am tempted to make the nuclear lightbulb more cinematic. In the real design one cannot actually see the lightbulb through the engine bell, but I think it would be much more visually interesting to be able to see it glowing in all its radioactive fury.

Thank you for your kind words. Hmmm, I'll have to look into super jumbo RCS. Which will probably need super jumbo monopropellant tanks. Yes, I had been toying with the idea of more ferocious atomic rockets. Nuclear lightbulb, gas core, all that. And a NSWR if I want to go full-Jebidiah on my mod-making. Again my main concern is breaking the game. With those monsters, who wants to play around with piddling chemical rockets?

Alas, they become separate parts linked by ConfigurableJoints. But as far as the physics engine is concerned, they are still separate parts.

I do not think they are talking about the wobble problem. It is my understanding that in KSP the frame rate will rapidly degrade if the part-count of the ship becomes too high. The good news is that with KSP 0.20 it is now easy to make multiple parts that share the same model and/or textures. I did a quick test, just by changing the part.cfg file a bit I made two multi-magazines appear in the VAB catalog. The bad news is that making one magazine part containing multiple nuke types will be tricky. Currently the magazine and the magazine handler code assumes only one nuke type per magazine. Increasing the number of nukes in a multi-magazine is doable, but I have to be careful. Increasing the mass of a part but not increasing the volume has the effect of increasing the part's density. And for whatever reason the KSP physics engine does not handle dense parts very well, the physics break and strange things happen. I'll have to experiment.

I'll see what I can do. I think it is possible to make multi-part part.cfg files. The main issues are [1] not having to re-use the texture for each multi-magazine, since the blasted texture file is 3 megabytes! KSP's ram usage is tight enough as it is [2] clogging up the VAB catalog

The nays have it.

Idle thought: should I make it so if the throttle is in the red zone, the pusher plate will tend to overheat and explode?

Yes, I had to. In the engine part.cfg file are values for detonationDelay. In the two engines I supply, the shortest delay is 0.8 seconds between bomb detonations. This means that the animation has to take no longer than 0.8 seconds. Before, the only thing the animation had to do in 0.8 seconds is make the pusher plate move up and down. Now it has to animate the bomb drop AND the pusher plate movement in 0.8 seconds. So the pusher plate animation is faster and less smooth. In order to simplify the code, I have the 0.8 seconds divided into five equal sections: bomb drop, plate from neutral to full up, plate from full up to neutral, plate from neutral to full down, plate from full down to neutral. I might have to try and make the bomb drop section shorter. Of course that will make the bomb drop less smooth. The only way I know to make an explosion is by calling FXMonger.Explode(). I'm open to a better animation, but the documentation is sparse. Understandably so, the Dev's priority is making the game work and implementing features, documentation is secondary.

I'm still trying to make resources work. In the meantime, my only successes are silly stuff like animating tiny bombs dropping. Why does everything take so long?

...you must spread some reputation around before giving it to Tommygun again... These images are classics!

No, that is the entire point. Relativity makes it impossible to accelerate anything with a rest mass to the speed of light. So the warp drive does not accelerate the ship to the speed of light. Instead it accelerates a bubble of space to a speed faster than light. The ship is stationary inside the bubble, as far as relativity is concerned. And nothing in relativity says you cannot accelerate a patch of space faster than lightspeed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

USAFOrionmag1kt2mn was removed from Orion 0.14. (the 2MN magazine is practically the same as the 3.5MN magazine, and the blasted texture file is 3 megs) You can find it in version 0.13 here: http://ubuntuone.com/44qIfp6I86yoWzHtAwNW1b sorry for the trouble

Thanks for the report, let me know the results of your narrowing. Sorry you are having trouble. Now, did MechJeb ever work with Orion? One of my major bugs is that since Orion does not use a resource, it is invisible to MechJeb and others. The delta V appears as zero. I'm still trying to figure out how to spoof MechJeb.

Thanks! Is there a download link for the .craft file?

and Markarian421 turned in this tour de force: https://plus.google.com/101042352076384750112/posts/QNNZP3Rys4Q Landing on Eve was routine. Lifting off was anything but. Eve's dense atmosphere prevented the nose from pointing skyward. The ship almost flipped over and augured in. He had to panic start the liquid fuel engines and fight to get the nose up.

I'm running out of superlatives! That was wonderful! And yes, the re-entry shaders do look quite nice.

Yow! That is one serious spacecraft. Lookit all the hangar bays. I like it!

Yes, as I said "there has been a bit of that". Your have done more than your fair share of pushing the envelope, others should see what they can do in the realm of heavy lift.