Superior Propellants 0.2.0 (Formerly Liquid Methane) [May 1 2018]

[zekew11]

Superior Propellants: Development Thread

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Superior Propellants Intends to add a series of Methane and Oxidizer powered engines. Some Hydrolox engines are also planned. The performance of these engines is superior to that of liquid fuel engines, but they require a higher science investment to obtain. They will also tie in well with Coherent Resource System's new ISRU choices.

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Implemented to Date:

AH-CHHHOOOOOO Upper Stage Engine

An lv-909 for people that like going to duna.

Commodore Boost Stage Engine

Somewhere between a skipper and a mainsail, but the flames are purple.

Patches!!! ...and your local purple fire water vender...

• Module Manager is used to add tankage options to stock tanks via B9 Fuel Switch.
• Optional configurations for converting stock (and in the future other mod) engines are available via Patch Manager
  • non craft breaking
  • must change the second patch manager setting to force storing active patches under their mod directory, linuxgurugamer and I are working on a solution.

 

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Plans:

• Implement a system by which short and long variants of some engines are available with better sea level and vacuum ISP respectively.
• 2 more methalox engines
• 2 hybrid (methalox or hydrolox) engines
• If oft requested, implement standalone MethaLOX tankage.
• Patches to support common mods
• Continual revisits of models and FX

 

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Soliciting:

• Help rigging engine gimbal bones
• Action screenshots
• Constructive feedback of any kind

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Download 0.2.0 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

!!!    You Need B9 Part Switch if You Want to Have Fuel    !!!

!!!    You Need Community Resource Pack if You Want to Have Fuel    !!!

!!!    You Need Patch Manager if You Want to Convert Select Stock Engines to Hydrolox   !!!

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Changelog:

Spoiler

0.2.0

• CHANGED DIRECTORY! MUST DELETE OLD LIQUIDMETHANE FOLDER
• Fully restructured patches and added patch manager support
• Added optional Stock Hydrolox patches
• Texture pass
• Mixture ratio changed to 3:1 for numbering niceness (still more or less in line with reality)
• configured animated gimble for AHHHCHOOOOOO

0.1.0

• Alpha Release

0.0.1

• Yikes

 

Edited May 4, 2018 by zekew11
update

[mivanit]

looks nice, will try it out

[wasml]

On 11/1/2017 at 9:38 PM, zekew11 said:

Development thread for Methane Rockets (Working Title)

That title is short, simple, and anyone looking at it will know what to expect - I'd say it's an excellent title.

Engines look beautiful. Thanks for sharing these!

[zekew11]

Significant update. Fixed fuel ratios; improved module manager logic. See CRS update for IRSU options.

[Bottle Rocketeer 500]

@zekew11 AWESOME! 

[zekew11]

0.2.0 Alpha

Lots of polish put on the mod here, along with a scope change...

 

The mod intends now to offer the user a meaningful choice between 3 fuel types: liquid fuel, liquid methane, and liquid hydrogen. (CryoEngines recommended but not required). This is accomplished by adding engines where appropriate, as well as modifying existing engines (in a non craft breaking manner) that would ballance better with a different fuel type, or replicate an existing engine of a given fuel type, to use said different fuel type. For example, the SSME analogue in stock is changed via an optional patch to use liquid hydrogen and oxidizer, with stats reballanced accordingly. The mod will tie in nicely with the (also in alpha but being worked on) Coherent Resource System Mod, where varied ISRU options will create incentive for propellant diversity.

[Nathanson]

I tried your mod but LH2 option disappeared from all my tanks.

I guess that's due to absence of Patch Manager?

Anyway, I hope you'll continue your work on this mod, KSP needs three types of fuel: liquid fuel (kerosene), hydrogen and methane.

[zekew11]

2 hours ago, Nathanson said:

I tried your mod but LH2 option disappeared from all my tanks.

I guess that's due to absence of Patch Manager?

Anyway, I hope you'll continue your work on this mod, KSP needs three types of fuel: liquid fuel (kerosene), hydrogen and methane.

Yep, liquid hydrogen is not installed by default. If you're really anti patch manager, which I would understand, you can enable the patches manually by copying the ones you want or of the plugindata folders that are nested in the mod.

 

I'll improve this situation next release so it works with cryotanks out of the box

Edited May 8, 2018 by zekew11

[boribori]

@zekew11The volume ratios for Hydrogen are out of sync with Cryotanks. Where Cryotanks would have 6000, Superior Propellants has 30000.

I commented out @Volume *= 5 in BaseFuelTankSwitcher.cfg and edited BasetankTypes.cfg to be in sync with CryoTanks, and multiplied the volumes for the methane tanks by 5. That works.

While I was at it I created a patch to add Methane to the B9 Aerospace parts: https://github.com/codebori/SpaceBori/blob/SpaceBori/GameData/SpaceBoriResources/SB_ISRU_Plus/Tanks/SB_B9-MethTanks.cfg

And I also noticed on my new test setup, that if you install Superior Propellants on an existing save with CryoTanks already installed it messes with existing vessels. Could you make it so that it doesn't replace CryoTanks' LH2 config, but just adds Methane?

Edited May 21, 2018 by boribori

[GonDragon]

Hey @zekew11, maybe you are done with moding and KSP, but if you ever c0me back, maybe this could be of your interest: 

It sounds like it could work well with both of your WIP mods: CRS and SP.