Idea for a new mod

[JeeF]

Hey guys,

I've been playing modded KSP for as long as I can remember and I just had an Eureka moment, a new large mod idea, something to change the game quite a bit and, for me at least, greatly increase the fun of research and development, which I think it's a part of the game that is really lacking. I couldn't find a similar idea on the forum on my quick search, so forgive me if this was already discussed before.

The idea is taking part development to the next level.

Instead of having a set of parts offered by the game or other mods that you can simply unlock based on the science points you have, you actually develop these parts yourself.

For instance, you can dig for ore, find a set of metals with different properties, develop a new type of combustion chamber based on these new metals that allows for a higher compression rate, combine different techs into testing benches, experiment with different compression ratios, materials and fuels and watch them blow up when you go overboard, finally settling down on a value that proves to be efficient and reliable, and using it on your rockets. Then maybe on another planet, you can dig a new type of metal that allows you to build more powerful engines, etc. I love the idea of trial and error.

Maybe smelting 2 new types of metal you just discovered, creating a brand new type of metal with new properties, comparing them to what you already had, building, testing....

Mod would provide the player with a testing bench which provides part information, such as temperature, thrust, weight, ISP, and more, and would let the player control the amount of fuel injection and compression rates on the fly during these tests, to find out the sweet spot.

 

This doesn't have to be limited to engines, I guess, but would be a good start. I for one would certainly spend hours and hours creating new tech out of nothing, testing again and again to find the sweet spot, and finally using it and feeling proud of it. Would be pretty awesome seeing people here on the forums discussing about the new compounds they've created and discovered. The mod would be set to give each metal/compound/material/ore random different properties when you start a new game, so each time you play it's a different experience, instead of already knowing which ones are the best and what combination works best.

Mod would also add the option to uprate an engine to around 125% of it's intended thrust, for heavy launches, but with a higher probability of catastrophic failure.

I don't know if I managed to illustrate my idea well enough, I've got so much going on in my head at the moment, lol.

I know a bit of 3D (for creating new parts) but kinda hate coding so I'm probably not the right person to start the development of something this big... but the idea is out there for anyone interested. =)

Edited March 23, 2017 by JeeF

[JeeF]

Well I was hoping for a reply after 125 views... Anyone has any idea if this is at all possible to mod?

[HebaruSan]

13 minutes ago, JeeF said:

Well I was hoping for a reply after 125 views... Anyone has any idea if this is at all possible to mod?

"Make this mod for me" topics tend not to go anywhere. People with the ability and interest tend to work on their own original ideas instead. Even so, 13 hours isn't long enough for once-a-day forum members to see it yet.

The idea of spending resources to improve parts has come up before. Your idea seems to be distinguished by the amount of detail you want to see on the hardware development side. Rather than "spend 100 science points to increase ISP by 1%", you want to actually build the parts.

If you really want to see this happen (you're hoping someone else will be sufficiently motivated by your words to work on this, so presumably you're at least that motivated yourself), try working on the pieces of the concept that you might be able to handle. For instance, why not create a few mock-up screenshots in mspaint for the screens where you'd be doing all this experimental metallurgy and materials science work? Show us the engine nozzle lab. Show us the screen where you design a testing bench and the screen where you turn a successful testing bench into a production part. Think about what needs to be shown in each window and what actions the user needs to be able to take, then turn that info into displays and buttons. Get feedback and iterate till it's clear and polished.

Then start specifying how the materials will be generated/populated on the planets and how they interact. You don't need to be able to write code to design the rules that would govern this. Will it be the same mystery metal names with randomized properties each time, or randomized names? Will there be more than 8 of them, fewer than 20, unlimited? Which specific properties of each metal will the game track for part simulations? How will they be randomized, with what distributions? How do the properties interact when the user tries to make an alloy or build a part?

Right now my reaction is, "I dunno, that sounds really complicated," but if you can lay out the vision at a sufficient level of detail, it'll be easier to convince a C# programmer to fill in the technical blanks for you.

[JeeF]

Yeah Im working on a concept to be able to show, I was just interested to see replies to gather whether or not people were interested or liked the idea, and whether or not this has been tried or discussed before. I was waiting just for general feedback.

I've a multitude of ideas in my mind regarding all of this. I'll try to put into visuals so it's easier to understand, might take a while! =)

But thank you for your feedback!

[Akira_R]

It's an awesome idea, there is a game out there that does this, can't remember the name off the top of my head but I know Scott Manley did a video on it. It gives the option to select material used for combustion chamber/nozzle/pumps etc. select size and shape of the combustion chamber and nozzle, select fuel pressures and such, and you can do this for every part in the game, guns, reactors, hulls etc.

However trying to accomplish this in KSP would be an absolutely massive undertaking and not one that just one or two developers could pull off. You are essentially asking for someone to develop an entirely new game and integrate that into KSP.

Just off the top of my head there is one glaringly massive problem that would need to be overcome and that is how KSP loads and handles parts. The ability to generate at runtime a new part cfg is something that, to my knowledge at least, no modder has been able to achieve. The closest thing would be Shadowmage's procedural parts in SSTU, and that took an incredible amount of work in his(or hers I don't actually know) plugin to get already loaded parts to generate new MODULEs at runtime and change parameters already loaded by a MODULE.

I feel it would take the combined efforts of the likes of ferram, sarbian, Shadowmage, Angel-125, and Rover Dude to accomplish something like this.

Sorry for being such a negative nancey here, it's an insanely cool idea that sounds super awesome, but is absolutely gargantuan in scope, at least as described.

 

If you abstract things a little bit it could work though. But you would essentially just end up with a more complex version of KR&D... Which isn't a bad thing in any way, wanting different levels of complexity is why we have so many versions of life support mods.

Edited March 23, 2017 by Akira_R

[hikoriyami]

7 minutes ago, Akira_R said:

It's an awesome idea, there is a game out there that does this, can't remember the name off the top of my head but I know Scott Manley did a video on it. It gives the option to select material used for combustion chamber/nozzle/pumps etc. select size and shape of the combustion chamber and nozzle, select fuel pressures and such, and you can do this for every part in the game, guns, reactors, hulls etc.

Children of a dead Earth.

This might be possible by using code similar to procedural tanks. But I seem to remember KSP storing hard coded values for ISP. So having a engine building or designing mod probably wont work.

We might not get infinite options to modify an engine. But a few options per engine that changes it's weight or its ISP or maybe even optimizes the engine for atmosphere could be accomplished. 

Honestly the more I think about this the more it sounds like a version of real fuels and tweakscale.

[Akira_R]

3 minutes ago, hikoriyami said:

Children of a dead Earth.

This might be possible by using code similar to procedural tanks. But I seem to remember KSP storing hard coded values for ISP. So having a engine building or designing mod probably wont work.

We might not get infinite options to modify an engine. But a few options per engine that changes it's weight or its ISP or maybe even optimizes the engine for atmosphere could be accomplished. 

Honestly the more I think about this the more it sounds like a version of real fuels and tweakscale.

That's it!!!

 

Take a look at KR&D, like I said, with a bit of abstraction you could take this idea and turn it into a more complex version of KR&D.

Here are my thoughts on that matter

Implement a new set of resources, not resources your ships use but the resources we have in the space center (Rep, Science, and Funds) for the sake of not getting confused lets call them Currency for the remainder of this post.

These Currencies would be various types of metals, you could aquire them by purchasing them for funds, or mining and recovering an equivalent in flight resource, this resource would give you the corresponding Currency instead of funds when recovered.

An example for how these Currencies could be used would be to have an upgrade point system, a "lightweight combustion chamber" upgrade would cost a certain amount of say Aluminum and Titanium Currency. This "lightweight combustion chamber" upgrade could then be applied to an engine in the editor and it would decrease it's weight. A "heavy reinforced combustion chamber" could increase both vac and asl thrust and isp by some amount but also increase part weight.

You could add as much complexity/realism you want into this upgrade point system, you could have variety of upgrades that are only applicable to certain types of engines such as reactor casings or something for nuclear engines, upgraded electrodes for electric engines etc., exotic alloys/currency metals that give ridiculous performance improvements but are only minable on Laythe or Eve or Eeloo, (and remember they have to be recovered), integration with other mods that add things like part failures etc.

While what I have described above would still be a massive undertaking, especially in the mode compatibility department, it is definitely feasible.