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My Ongoing quest to make a Kraken Drive in 1.0


quasarrgames

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I am now going to try and make a kraken drive in 1.0. One that is relatively reliable and can lift heavy payloads.

After about 8-10 hours of research, i have created what i believe to be the first 1.0 ship to get to orbit with a kraken drive, and then erratically deorbit itself a few minutes later, the Can't Touch This mk1.

JQCeBPT.png

It is powered by two simple cuboc-based kraken drives stacked on top of one another.

rtGbyWw.png

For other K-drive enthusiasts out there, here's what i have learned:

-k drives do not explode below 750m/s anymore, they just will not work

-stacking k drives creates a phantom rotation force which is very hard to control

-k drives are more effective when you wiggle them

-cuboc-based k drives are more reliable than adapter-based ones

So there you go! :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

I just made a controllable Kraken Drive :D.... flying to Jool right now. I'm just pointing my spacecraft directly at it :D I'm accelerating at 0.6g, with erratic bursts about +/- 0.1g. I think that >1 g is possible, actually. It's essentially the same violation of Newtonian mechanics as the EM drive claims- the spacecraft pushing against itself pushes the whole spacecraft forward. The Kraken engine operates at a fixed thrust in a fixed direction, and can be switched on and off. Going to 2X time compression cuts the thrust in half, 3X cuts it to 1/3, etc. I found this crack in the physics engine by accident, when I noticed that a legitimate spacecraft I made had an anomalous acceleration. I'll refine it a bit more then share it, I want to understand exactly what the mechanism is first. I'm surprised if no one knows about this one, in fact.

Hint: no Kerbals on ladders.

- - - Updated - - -

Haha this is why I wanted to wait... just exceeded 1g with a new design, but just barely... the spacecraft is kinda just eerily floating around.

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I spent a few hours today and the behavior of this drive is very puzzling... but I suppose it wouldn't be a Kraken drive if it was completely predictable. I would like you guys to maybe help me figure it out and optimize it, since I don't have the time myself :)

So anyway, you need to have landing legs that when deployed, push against your craft. I used landing legs pushing against another part that was attached by a docking port. It doesn't have to be that way, I just had the most success with that.

Puzzling aspect:

I could never get to orbit on Kraken power. It doesn't look like this drive applies a force at all, it appears to apply an acceleration- at least, near the surface of Kerbin. Like, let's say you have two Kraken subassemblies attached to your vessel, and it just floats above the surface of Kerbin. Now, you put 300 tons of fuel tanks on top- you STILL just float over Kerbin. That's right, 300 tons of mass didn't change anything! Now, add 6 more Kraken components and guess what- you still get almost exactly 9.81 m/s^2 of anti-gravity. You just float around.

Yet, the same drive that can't get me any better than 9.81 m/s^2 on Kerbin can accelerate me at 1.7-2.0 gs in deep space!!!! HUH?!

In my design, I have the landing legs pushing against a flat plate that is attached to a structural fuselage. The landing legs shifting around and the plate clipping through the structural fuselodge gives a bit of erratic behavior to the craft and necessitates A LOT of reaction wheels to keep it under control. Feel free to experiment around, I know it is possible to do better with this, I just don't have the time.

The number of landing legs can probably be reduced also... but why would you? The mass of the spacecraft the Kraken drive is attached to does not seem to matter in my experiments so far.

It should be possible to have different acceleration levels by using action groups to activate different Kraken drives. Some I was experimenting with gave 0.1g; some gave 0.6g, the one in the craft file gives 1.3-2.0 gs. Other than that, the acceleration is fixed. But, it might be that the drive behaves entirely different in space than it does at the launch pad!!! There was a time I was beginning to suspect that the drive's output acceleration is dependent on the local value of gravitational acceleration, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's just... strange.

Anyway, don't look at this ship and think it's in any way optimized. Please experiment around with different configurations of landing legs pushing on your craft.

Kraken off-

HsjScu0.jpg

Kraken on-

4HdH4du.jpg

Part file-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1voKzEnUopbRndZV1RFUENjX3M/view?usp=sharing

(Requires Mechjeb, sorry, forgot to remove the mechjeb case)

Edited by |Velocity|
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Hehe, I can get to Jool and back in less than a week with this... The biggest problem is, like I said, the acceleration gets cut when you go to 2X+ time compression. So you have to run at real time for all your maneuvers. 2g acceleration forever is pretty good, but even at 2gs it still takes you half a year to get up to light speed.

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Eh, now if someone recreated the mythical Prograde Drive (not affecting value of your velocity, just its direction; "turn on a dime" drive that let you e.g. enter retrograde Sun orbit just by turning your craft around outside Kerbin SOI).

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I spent a few hours today and the behavior of this drive is very puzzling... but I suppose it wouldn't be a Kraken drive if it was completely predictable. I would like you guys to maybe help me figure it out and optimize it, since I don't have the time myself :)

So anyway, you need to have landing legs that when deployed, push against your craft. I used landing legs pushing against another part that was attached by a docking port. It doesn't have to be that way, I just had the most success with that.

Puzzling aspect:

I could never get to orbit on Kraken power. It doesn't look like this drive applies a force at all, it appears to apply an acceleration- at least, near the surface of Kerbin. Like, let's say you have two Kraken subassemblies attached to your vessel, and it just floats above the surface of Kerbin. Now, you put 300 tons of fuel tanks on top- you STILL just float over Kerbin. That's right, 300 tons of mass didn't change anything! Now, add 6 more Kraken components and guess what- you still get almost exactly 9.81 m/s^2 of anti-gravity. You just float around.

Yet, the same drive that can't get me any better than 9.81 m/s^2 on Kerbin can accelerate me at 1.7-2.0 gs in deep space!!!! HUH?!

In my design, I have the landing legs pushing against a flat plate that is attached to a structural fuselage. The landing legs shifting around and the plate clipping through the structural fuselodge gives a bit of erratic behavior to the craft and necessitates A LOT of reaction wheels to keep it under control. Feel free to experiment around, I know it is possible to do better with this, I just don't have the time.

The number of landing legs can probably be reduced also... but why would you? The mass of the spacecraft the Kraken drive is attached to does not seem to matter in my experiments so far.

It should be possible to have different acceleration levels by using action groups to activate different Kraken drives. Some I was experimenting with gave 0.1g; some gave 0.6g, the one in the craft file gives 1.3-2.0 gs. Other than that, the acceleration is fixed. But, it might be that the drive behaves entirely different in space than it does at the launch pad!!! There was a time I was beginning to suspect that the drive's output acceleration is dependent on the local value of gravitational acceleration, but that doesn't seem to be the case. It's just... strange.

Anyway, don't look at this ship and think it's in any way optimized. Please experiment around with different configurations of landing legs pushing on your craft.

Kraken off-

http://i.imgur.com/HsjScu0.jpg

Kraken on-

http://i.imgur.com/4HdH4du.jpg

Part file-

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1voKzEnUopbRndZV1RFUENjX3M/view?usp=sharing

(Requires Mechjeb, sorry, forgot to remove the mechjeb case)

yes kraken drives behave differently in speeds above ~800m/s than below- it's because of the krakensbay code in KSP- kraken drives will produce anti-gravity when below that threshold and constant acceleration above it. legs are a pretty common way of creating kraken drive but they have become much more brittle- my Kraken Ultima got 26g's of acceleration back in 0.90 but when i tested it in 1.0.4 the legs broke everytime

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yes kraken drives behave differently in speeds above ~800m/s than below- it's because of the krakensbay code in KSP- kraken drives will produce anti-gravity when below that threshold and constant acceleration above it. legs are a pretty common way of creating kraken drive but they have become much more brittle- my Kraken Ultima got 26g's of acceleration back in 0.90 but when i tested it in 1.0.4 the legs broke everytime

Thank you! I knew this bug was far too easy and obvious for it not to be known. So apparently, I need to test my Kraken drives above 800 m/s, so effectively, in space... that will make it much more time-consuming. I'll probably just go back to playing real KSP. :D

BTW, I'm not using any other mods than Mechjeb, so your games ought to be behaving the same as mine in regards to physics....

Just did a close fly-by of Laythe at 110 km/s... WOW.

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Do other engines still work whilst the one with just-over-1g acceleration is active? Like, could you have a vessel with that drive for weightlessness but other engines/rcs for control? Star Wars repulsorcraft anyone?

It's weird, I'm not sure if other engines actually do anything or not. Here's a hoverbike experiment. It does float around- for a little bit until there is a hiccup in the drive- but it's not very controllable. Things work much better in deep space, where the hiccups in the Kraken drive- there are a lot when it first starts out as parts settle- don't cause you to immediately crash.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1voKzEnUopbZktpRVdEYURDUEk/view?usp=sharing

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