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Convair NEXUS - super heavy Historical Launch Vehicle


TiktaalikDreaming

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Happy Newton's day everyone.  I'm away for a couple of days driving several hundred km around to see various bits of family.  Then I have some spare time.  Or work from home with low expectations anyway. 

I'll be looking at changing the colliders for the decouplers to convex in preparation for KSP 1.1, because I know that's comng, AND the new collider system works fine (in fact, that's default for all other parts) in 1.0.5, but it needs tweaking for decouplers.  Esp the Nexus decouplers, which do tend to create plenty of trouble even without convex colliders.

Be good to each other, fly weird craft, and try not crashing or exploding too much.

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Well, the scheme of adding a bunch of convex colliders in a circle to form a non-convex collider works fine.  Apart from slowing everything to a horrible crawl.  Hopefully that'll be fixed by the time non-convex colliders can't be used (aka, unity 5, KSP 1.1).  At least I think it was the colliders.  :-/

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On 29/12/2015 at 9:03 PM, TiktaalikDreaming said:

Well, the scheme of adding a bunch of convex colliders in a circle to form a non-convex collider works fine.  Apart from slowing everything to a horrible crawl.  Hopefully that'll be fixed by the time non-convex colliders can't be used (aka, unity 5, KSP 1.1).  At least I think it was the colliders.  :-/

And now I think it was that my HDD SATA cable was fubar.  Corrected and not only does my KSP work fine again, but the separators work nicer.  I'm not sure what was wrong with the old ones, I can't tell from importing the mu file into blender if the collider was marked as convex or not.  Thye behaved like convex colliders.  So I'm going to update the two main adapters that this affects and upload the updated Nexus.

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  • 1 month later...
10 hours ago, tater said:

It's the Boeing concept from the mid 1970s.

http://pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld043.htm

Tracking this down, yep, was often also referred to as the Onion.  Lowther has some good diagrams.
I should probably set myself a limit on projects.  :-/

Just some really basic shapes so far.  LOX tank, LH tank, RP-1 Tanks, outer shell for tankage, and a heat shield with holes for main engines only so far.  I also have a rough shape for the whole craft, but making that visible results in weird overlapping surfaces.

 

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More of the Boeing Big Onion.  I'll get this ready for post KSPv1.1 release of the Nexus mod.  It's not Nexus, but it is a big poophole historical planned SSTO.

For the record, I'll be having the engines as separate parts, so there will be engine substitutions and so on possible.  Not yet 100% certain how I'll split the tankage up.  For stock, it's easy, liquidfuel + oxidizer.  For RealFuels it's considerably messier.  But I suppose with building parts, it'll need to be one part for all tankage so that it works in Stock KSP, and then just have 3 resources for RF/RO. 

And, the 22 way symmetry will be a pain in the proverbial posterior when building, because the closest divisible symmetry is x2.  So there'll be 11 main engine placements and 11 auxiliary engine placements when building.  24 would have been SOOOO much better.  :-)

Anyways, here's my mesh deconstruction;

 

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Progress on the Onion, which I now realize is not 100% exactly the same as the LEO.  I'm not sure which design predates the other, they're both Boeing, both for the SPS, and very similar to each other.  But I have more detailed info for the Onion, via aerospaceprojectsreview, so that's the basis of what I'm doing here.  If anything, I suspect the Big Onion came after, as a "can we scale this up?" thought experiment.  Because gross lift-off weight is 10,270 tonnes and it's payload is only about 20% off being able to lift one of those LEOs into orbit as cargo.

Anyway, I've been looking at the gap between the cargo space and the outside of the top end of this.  And, quite frankly, it's huge.  So I'll be making some slot in pieces that fit around the cargo bay, for extra fuel, batteries, generators, small towns, etc.

Mostly I've been working on a water cooled J-2ish rocket for the main engines of this sucker.  Judging from the scale, the numbers and so on, I'm guessing like many other plans around that time, they used the J-2 as their base-line LH+LOX engine.  The size fit very nicely with the heat shield holes I had as well.  I suspect I've made my water piping waaay too big, but hell, it's an "artists impression".  :-)

 

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Notes for 1.1 based on prerelease;

Mostly working.

As far as I can tell, the main parts all seem to work.  I don't think I've updated all the colliders on the weirder decouplers yet.  Those legs for the second stage don't work.  Legs use wheel colliders, and wheels are a "re do from start" job for 1.1, and well, landing legs from pre1.1 in 1.1 behave in a way you really don't want.

So, I'm not marking this as compatible with 1.1, but the majority should work so long as you don't want to land a second stage somewhere.

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I have an updated leg part https://dl.orangedox.com/2oCZiLVyv7e0Nu4hCO

The remainder of the mod should still work fine.  Once 1.1 comes out officially, I'll bundle this into the current version and re-release, but not until then.  People playing with prerelease versions of software will just need to get used to some manual jiggery.

Edited by TiktaalikDreaming
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  • 3 weeks later...
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37 minutes ago, Denko666 said:

Hey @TiktaalikDreaming

Will you be updating this mod to KSP 1.2? 

Yip.  Mostly done.  I was going to take the opportunity to add in support for realism overhaul, and that bit isn't done yet.  But the basic 1.2 compatibility is done.  Those legs finally work properly.  I had to do some tweaking on colliders, and it seems I hadn't updated some at all for 1.1.  But I'm running tests for the next few day.  Without KJR it's hairy as all hell, but it's working.

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I've been tweaking towards a RSS+RO edition.  Here's a first flight of the Nexus 1 booster;

08ESCim.png

Yl7QbXX.png

The control rockets' RCS wasn't working, so I'll need to mess more with that.  Plus I want to add in some MM config so that if throttle controlled avionics is installed, the control rockets are just rockets with throttling capability.

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1 hour ago, Denko666 said:

I hate to bring bad news already, but...

30263020981_286fa4b7f5_h.jpg

... The Aero Plug Engine for the Nexus II seems to be a size too big. 

Damn.  :-/

I see the error though.  The engine configs for RO are via a spreadsheet by NathanKell for RO engine configs.  I used that, modified the output a bit and (for all but the Nexus 2 Plug engine) changed it to "NEEDS[RealismOverhaul]" so it doesn't apply unless RO is installed.  Cleverly, I didn't change that for the larger of the two plug engines.

Options:

Option 1: Edit GameData/Nexus/Parts/RealismConfigs.cfg line 433 to read

@PART[Nexus63EnginePlug]:NEEDS[RealismOverhaul]

(This is the fix I'm applying, should fix the incorrect application of RO config on non-RO installs)

Option 2: Delete GameData/Nexus/Parts/RealismConfigs.cfg  This file has the ModuleManager config for Realism Overhaul, and it's not finished and doesn't include all parts.  And last I checked, RO isn't updated for 1.2 yet as it is a bundle of mods so is as slow as the slowest of those.

 

PS: That's the full scale beast. The stock edition of the Nexus is half scale.

Edited by TiktaalikDreaming
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