[INDEV]-[1.4.3] - To Boldly Go | An external application designed to procedurally generate an entire galaxy for KSP.

[Jim Starluck]

1 hour ago, seanth said:

Could you PM your seed, and resulting txt file? Maybe post your galaxy file somewhere I can see?

Sure.

[seanth]

Return of the glitchy space center bug!

I'm half way to to target star and wanted to see whether I could switch to the space center and back to my warp ship.

The space center was glitchy as though Kerbin had been reparented. I entered the tracking station and exited back to the space center screen and everything was ok.

I'm not sure whether this is some consequence of the TBG configuration, something about Kopernicus, or the fact that I have been running KSP on my poor laptop for over 24hrs now.

So just consider this a heads up I guess.

[bunjatec]

6 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

A warp drive is not "cheaty" and OP, good sir. A warp drive is a warp drive.

There are caveats to using these things, namely, once you warp to a planet, your approach parameter matters and you need a high powered sub-light engine (or a convoluted warping technique) to set a proper orbit once you arrive at the next planet. Further difficulty is imposed if a life support mod is in use and a crew absolutely needs to get somewhere fast. Karborundum is the nearest option for uber-efficient and uber-powerful sub-light propulsion, as it is another USI mod, for setting a proper orbit after warping somewhere... But Karborundum is super rare and is challenging all on its own. You also have to watch your throttle and distance on the last few million km towards a planet. And if I may suggest, forcing a warp drive to be disabled anywhere within Eeloo's SMA is totally unreasonable. Absolutely no one would entertain such a handicap on a technology.

On a light note, I just happen to have been experimenting a lot with warp drives lately and found something relevant to you. If you delete the call to a thrust transform in ModuleEngines in the part configs, you can cure the phantom thrust problem (No thrust transform = no thrust). It might cause a null but I'm sure it will be harmless.

USI's Warp Drives differ other than in just their sizes. The big one has 3x the top speed of the small one.

Also.......indeed, the NavBall is LoL when warping.

I have my own 'modified' version of EM drive for large delta v corrections to get into orbit.. it takes a shedload of electrical power, but as you can recharge from reactors or solar panels and perform multiple burns it's quite capable of making 20km/s+ corrections quite easily..  usually do about 4-10km/s per burn dependant on the craft configuration.

[seanth]

Almost there....

Spoiler

 

[Cabbink]

6 minutes ago, seanth said:

Almost there....

  Hide contents

 

 

Wow you are going fast. Any plans to slow down? XD

Edited September 4, 2017 by Cabbink

[seanth]

4 minutes ago, Cabbink said:

 

Wow you are going fast. Any plans to slow down? XD

I'm using a warp drive, so once I disengage the warp I'll be in normal space traveling at only a few hundred m/s. I'll have to do some normal burns to adjust my orbital speed relative to my target star, but that shouldn't be too hard to accomplish

[seanth]

Success. 3.5 kerbal days at (very)high warp to reach a planet around the closest star (a brown dwarf)

Note to self: get rid of star-like appearance to the brown dwarfs. 

[daniel l.]

Just now, seanth said:

Note to self: get rid of star-like appearance to the brown dwarfs. 

I support this.  They shouldn't have visible flares. They should be invisible in the night skies, same with red dwarves actually.

[seanth]

10 minutes ago, daniel l. said:

I support this.  They shouldn't have visible flares. They should be invisible in the night skies, same with red dwarves actually.

Yup. We are of one mind on this.

[Fizwalker]

So this is not compatible with RSS (the Kerbin scale version) so I expect it won't be compatible with RO either. Just for further info.

[ble210]

A nitpicky question (and one that may have to do more with the base game than this mod)- but is there a way to make it so the stars are dimmer (a mod or something)?  It seems like no matter how far you are from kerbol, it is the same brightness and size, and that problem seems to have passed on to the other stars in this mod.

[seanth]

2 hours ago, Fizwalker said:

So this is not compatible with RSS (the Kerbin scale version) so I expect it won't be compatible with RO either. Just for further info.

I think TBG could be made compatible to Kerbin scaled RSS by editing the "TBG_Planet_Templates.csv" file in TBG's Data_Folder. I haven't tried, so user beware. 

5 minutes ago, ble210 said:

A nitpicky question (and one that may have to do more with the base game than this mod)- but is there a way to make it so the stars are dimmer (a mod or something)?  It seems like no matter how far you are from kerbol, it is the same brightness and size, and that problem seems to have passed on to the other stars in this mod.

Can you clarify a little? Do you mean the apparent size of _all_ the stars or just Kerbol? I know that Kerbol doesn't get dimmer beyond a certain distance, but haven't messed with settings too much in this regard.

If someone wants to look into this, I'm happy to accept pull requests over on github.

[ble210]

On 9/5/2017 at 11:06 AM, seanth said:

Can you clarify a little? Do you mean the apparent size of _all_ the stars or just Kerbol? I know that Kerbol doesn't get dimmer beyond a certain distance, but haven't messed with settings too much in this regard.

If someone wants to look into this, I'm happy to accept pull requests over on github.

Sure- I guess it is a problem with the base game then, that stars don't get dimmer beyond a certain distance (and I'm talking about all stars).  From the screenshots on the initial post to this thread, you can see the sky full of other stars that you can reach (red, green, blue, all of them).  However, their sizes in the screenshots are larger than they should be (they should be more points of light, not large spheres).  To compare to the real world, the closest stars to the Earth are mere specks of light, not large blots of light nearly the size of the moon (and the very closest star isn't even visible to the naked eye).

Sorry if I'm not explaining this well, but is there a way to reduce the illumination of the stars?  (And I'd love to find a mod that would reduce the illumination of kerbol as well, so that when you get to the outer solar system, it is really small).

[daniel l.]

2 hours ago, ble210 said:

Sure- I guess it is a problem with the base game then, that stars don't get dimmer beyond a certain distance (and I'm talking about all stars).  From the screenshots on the initial post to this thread, you can see the sky full of other stars that you can reach (red, green, blue, all of them).  However, their sizes in the screenshots are larger than they should be (they should be more points of light, not large spheres).  To compare to the real world, the closest stars to the Earth are mere specks of light, not large blots of light nearly the size of the moon (and the very closest star isn't even visible to the naked eye).

Sorry if I'm not explaining this well, but is there a way to reduce the illumination of the stars?  (And I'd love to find a mod that would reduce the illumination of kerbol as well, so that when you get to the outer solar system, it is really small).

The screenshots are terribly outdated. The star sizes have since been reduced to a fraction of that size. Though they are still somewhat too big in my opinion.

[seanth]

1 hour ago, ble210 said:

Sure- I guess it is a problem with the base game then, that stars don't get dimmer beyond a certain distance (and I'm talking about all stars).  From the screenshots on the initial post to this thread, you can see the sky full of other stars that you can reach (red, green, blue, all of them).  However, their sizes in the screenshots are larger than they should be (they should be more points of light, not large spheres).  To compare to the real world, the closest stars to the Earth are mere specks of light, not large blots of light nearly the size of the moon (and the very closest star isn't even visible to the naked eye).

Sorry if I'm not explaining this well, but is there a way to reduce the illumination of the stars?  (And I'd love to find a mod that would reduce the illumination of kerbol as well, so that when you get to the outer solar system, it is really small).

I think what you are describing has already been fixed with the "a little less scopolamine" release last month.

Does this look better?

 

[ble210]

21 hours ago, seanth said:

I think what you are describing has already been fixed with the "a little less scopolamine" release last month.

Does this look better?

 

I see!  Yes that does look much better!  Thank you- I didn't realize the original screenshots were out of date

[Bandus]

I'm having some trouble with To Boldly Go. Basically, KSP will load just fine until I try to install To Boldly Go. Once the mod is in place (after I generate a galaxy and all), when I try to start a game "Loading" appears in the bottom right and the planets spin and spin forever. In my KSP.log, I see this over and over again:

 

Quote

[EXC 20:44:21.009] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.Components.KopernicusStar.LateUpdate ()
[EXC 20:44:21.024] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.StarLightSwitcher.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.025] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	GalaxyCubeControl.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.026] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.Components.KopernicusStar.LateUpdate ()
[EXC 20:44:21.041] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.StarLightSwitcher.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.042] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	GalaxyCubeControl.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.043] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.Components.KopernicusStar.LateUpdate ()
[EXC 20:44:21.058] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.StarLightSwitcher.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.059] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	GalaxyCubeControl.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.060] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.Components.KopernicusStar.LateUpdate ()
[EXC 20:44:21.069] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.StarLightSwitcher.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.069] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	GalaxyCubeControl.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.070] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.Components.KopernicusStar.LateUpdate ()
[EXC 20:44:21.091] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	Kopernicus.StarLightSwitcher.Update ()
[EXC 20:44:21.092] NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
	GalaxyCubeControl.Update ()

If I remove To Boldly Go, it loads normally again. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong.

[seanth]

11 minutes ago, Bandus said:

I'm having some trouble with To Boldly Go. Basically, KSP will load just fine until I try to install To Boldly Go. Once the mod is in place (after I generate a galaxy and all), when I try to start a game "Loading" appears in the bottom right and the planets spin and spin forever. In my KSP.log, I see this over and over again:

 

If I remove To Boldly Go, it loads normally again. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong.

Could you send me your galaxy seed and the txt file that is generated?

[seanth]

Minor bug fix for generating cluster galaxies:

https://github.com/kjoenth/To-Boldly-Go/releases/tag/0.3.0.5e

[seanth]

Looking for opinions:

Over the weekend I was messing around with the free-for-use warp drive model made by ZZZ to make it work with RoverDude's "Alcubierre Warp Drive (Stand-alone)" mod.

Spoiler

In my test using the provided galaxy file, I travelled from the Kerbol system to the nearby Tovsis system (~if my math is correct, it's about 8.08e16 meters, or 8.08 light years) in 3.5 kerbal days. The warp drive is set so high that it's basically unusable inside a star system; you zoom past any target even at the lowest throttle.

The existing warp drives in KSPI and Alcubierre Warp Drive (and maybe others) consume "Exotic Matter" which is made by consuming LOTS of electrical power. What if:

1. TBG provides the ZZZ model and appropriate ModuleManager files so that if the Alcubierre Warp Drive mod (or other similar mod) is installed, this special warp drive part is available
2. The existing warp drives remain unchanged for in-system use
3. The new ZZZ drive is only for interstellar travel, and enforces that by not working if too close to a body. For example, in the Kerbol system, you'd need to be out near Eeloo. 
4. The new drive _also_ uses "exotic matter" but we pretend the interstellar void is full of the stuff. That means we have a special part--like a bussard collector--that only works far away from stars. Sooo...like a reverse solar panel. The further away from a star, the better it works.

Taken all together, the player would be able to continue to use existing warp drives inside a star system, but get access to this new type of drive outside of the system. Once outside the system, the fuel for the new drive would essentially be free. The tradeoff being you need to get outside the system first.

I'm not entirely sure how to achieve #4 yet. Right now I'm imagining a modified solar panel part with an inverted powercurve{} so you get maximal "exotic matter" production far away from stars. 

I'm open to other ideas. 

Edited September 12, 2017 by seanth

[JadeOfMaar]

@seanth USI's warp drive module has a requires min throttle parameter that you can use to make it only work at high(er) throttle, making it a little more impractical for use inside a star system. Below the required throttle it will still consume fuel but not actually warp. Have you considered the inability to use > 1 USI warp drive on the same ship? This restricting feature could save you the trouble of trying to devise a way to make an inverse solar power curve thing.

Before anyone complains, there is a good reason why this exists and its current setting is very, very low, so that even if a player bumped the throttle they wouldn't accidentally zoom way out from their current position (or to prevent some issue that would occur with the warp drive just being on and at zero throttle).

[seanth]

9 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Have you considered the inability to use > 1 USI warp drive on the same ship?

I'm not sure I understand. I had more than one USI warp drive on a craft and they were both working fine

[daniel l.]

2 hours ago, seanth said:

1. The new drive _also_ uses "exotic matter" but we pretend the interstellar void is full of the stuff. That means we have a special part--like a bussard collector--that only works far away from stars. Sooo...like a reverse solar panel. The further away from a star, the better it works.

 

I like that feature.  It's like the mass-lock feature we see on FTL systems in Elite or the Asimov stories.

[bunjatec]

My experience of using the KSPIe mods is that the warp drive charges with exotic matter before warping, then power is used to drive the warp bubble.

I use this mod to get to the far out planets (mission to jool in a matter of hours) and for interstellar travel.

I do think TBG could do with a scale factor at generation time that allows both realistic and fun sized galaxy generation, perhaps real scale, kerbol scale, and fun size.?

For example I tweaked my extrasolar installation to reduce the distance to valentine by 2 orders of magnitude, this made it more fun to play as the times between stars was less.

I think that adding parts to this mod is perhaps unnecessary, as there are recomended mods that already provide enough functionality..  unless you can find a stargate/jumpgate/wormhole mod

Edit.. I do think that some sort of interstellar collector could be a useful feature (refueling with hydrogen and helium) perhaps a suggestion for KSPIe?

 

 

 

 

Edited September 13, 2017 by bunjatec
extra thought..

[seanth]

7 hours ago, bunjatec said:

I do think TBG could do with a scale factor at generation time that allows both realistic and fun sized galaxy generation, perhaps real scale, kerbol scale, and fun size.?

This sounds like a good idea, but the implementation would be pretty hard. You'd have to make sure the SOIs of the various stars wouldn't overlap with one another. That's not a terribly hard problem to solve, but in my experience calculating overlapping spheres can be a computationally intensive exercise. Plus, a smaller galaxy would necessarily mean a much brighter sky as seen from Kerbin (see some of the early screenshots).

7 hours ago, bunjatec said:

I think that adding parts to this mod is perhaps unnecessary, as there are recomended mods that already provide enough functionality..  unless you can find a stargate/jumpgate/wormhole mod

I advised against providing parts in the past, but I have not read about anyone traveling from the Kerbol system to another star made by TBG using a stock mod. 

Now, @JadeOfMaarpreviously shared some mod links that could get players to other stars, but if I understand how they work correctly, you need a gate to exist in the target system before you can go there. That means slowboating to the destination first. I wonder, though, whether you could force certain astroids (magic boulders) to have ESLDBeacon modules on them so they act as "naturally" occurring "jump points"....

I could post a special TGB package that includes the warp drive I have been messing with if people are interested in seeing how it works. It would just be for demonstration purposes and to get people experimenting with