[1.8.1-1.12.x] Modular Launch Pads v2.6.1: Launch clamps evolved: Real-style launch bases and towers [03 July 2023]

[AlphaMensae]

There's going to be larger sizes, I'm planning Mini, Small, Medium and Large ones.

The Mini is sized for 0.3125m and 0.625m rockets.

[TranceaddicT]

19 hours ago, AlphaMensae said:

Well, I have been hitting roadblocks in trying to make the launch rails.

...

The rail (or rod in this case) does have a full-length capsule collider, and it caused no problems with the rocket angled like that...provided it's not clipped into the rocket.  

Just after it leaves the rail it looks like a itsy-bitsy micro-Mercury. 

 

[CAPFlyer]

Looks like great progress being made AM!  I'm really looking forward to trying this myself with the US Rockets Aerobee and others!

[AlphaMensae]

I had an idea, and it turns out ModuleDecouple will work with surface-attached things...no need for ModuleAnchoredDecouple (used for the stock radial decouplers, but's that's because they leave the anchor bits behind-don't need that anyway  ).  But again, the root part has to be in the thing that is attached to the rail, not the rail part, launch base or anything on the "other" side of the decoupler, or else it will stay stuck to the rail.

This brings Animated Attachment back into the picture for rotating the rail. But there is something common to both using B9PS and Animated Attachment to rotate the rail: when you reroot to something on the rocket (usually a probe core of some type at the top) that's attached to the rail after the rail has been angled, KSP will then rotate the root part to make it vertical again. You then have to rotate the root part by the same amount the rail was to make the launch base vertical again. 

So I'm going to adjust the launch rail pivot animation to cover a range of 100°. This will make every 5 ticks on the deploy limit slider equal to 5° of rail rotation, the same as the B9PS rotate switcher, making it easy to compensate for when you reroot to the attached rocket. Again, AA won't move node-attached things, but does move surface-attached things (that do not have the root part), so that's a plus over the B9PS method, which requires rotating the rocket and offset gizmo adjustment to put it in proper position.

[AlphaMensae]

Ok, I put the Mini Launch Rail up on the AlphaDev branch of the GitHub to play with and get to learn how to use it--remember the notes I just gave.  

It's mostly done, but I do want to add some extra mounting plate options beyond the current small round one meant for the Mini Milkstool Launch Stand size 1. May be other tweaks as well.

Mini Rail is sized for 0.3125m and 0.625m rockets--the rail rod can be moved with a deploy limit slider to fit a 0.625m rocket. The rail rod also has two length variants: Short (7.5m) and Long (15m).

I'll make a guide video at some point as well to explain how to use the rails.

[AlphaMensae]

Made some revisions and updates to the Mini Launch Rail, and the updated one is now on the AlphaDev branch. I've added the latest Animated Attachment plugin to the AlphaDev branch as well, it works in KSP 1.8.x and up.

Changes are an addition of a small square mount plate, suitable for the small square hole launch bases (like the Mini Flat Base); a little spike for the rocket engine (has no collider); some texture changes; and changing the long variant of the launch rod to be a single piece with a single collider--previously it was made out of two pieces and two colliders, and the seam was causing trouble for launches, as the rocket engine kept hitting the rod right where the seam was.  Making the collider a single object eliminated that.

Also made a rough assembly and launch demo, using a 0.625m rocket cobbled out of the few stock and BDB parts I have right now.  

 

 

[TranceaddicT]

2 hours ago, AlphaMensae said:

Made some revisions and updates to the Mini Launch Rail, and the updated one is now on the AlphaDev branch. I've added the latest Animated Attachment plugin to the AlphaDev branch as well, it works in KSP 1.8.x and up.

<snip>

Also made a rough assembly and launch demo, using a 0.625m rocket cobbled out of the few stock and BDB parts I have right now.  

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!

[Cheesecake]

Have an issue with the General Launchbase 2 - Medium:

After building a new launcher:

After reloading the craftfile:

[AlphaMensae]

@CheesecakeI was able to reproduce the issue.

It's a problem with surface-attaching hold-downs with the General Launch Bases and the Soyuz Launch Base; the Flat Launch Bases, Launch Plates and Saturn/Shuttle Bases are not affected.  The Soyuz and Large bases also had the issue show up in flight mode.

I have no idea what's causing the weirdness, it could be a KSP thing or maybe not.

I did a test by making the Atlas clamp node-attachable, and setting stack symmetry to 3 (for 4x) in the Medium General Base. It worked fine, so the problem is with surface attaching parts in symmetry.

I'll make the hold-downs also node-attachable as an interim solution, add additional nodes for them, and bring back the stack symmetry switcher for the General and Soyuz Bases.

[AlphaMensae]

@CheesecakeDo you have Animated Attachment installed?  Because I'm pretty sure now that is the reason for the wonkiness with surface-attach symmetry.

On a hunch, I took out AA, and the bases that were having problems worked fine. I then did a new test with the Soyuz base, since that had the clamp arms being attached at the default 45° "corner" positions getting twisted over in flight mode. With AA, the problem happened. Without AA, no problems. Put AA back in again, problems.

So Animated Attachment is the reason.  Since it's very useful for the launch rails (as well as other things), I made a little MM patch that removes AA from launch clamps after AA puts itself into them.  

It's now on the AlphaDev branch of the GitHub, but if you want to do it manually, copy the following into a text editor and save it in the Compatibility_Patches folder of ModularLaunchPad as file "Modify_Animated_Attachment.cfg":

@PART[AM_MLP*]:HAS[@MODULE[LaunchClamp]]:AFTER[AnimatedAttachment]
{
    !MODULE[AnimatedAttachment] { }
}
 

The launch clamp support was added for the FASA tower in BDB after someone wanted to have lights attached to it move with the arm as it's retracted. So Katten just added AA to everything with ModuleLaunchClamp, except that screwed up some of my launch bases, and my arms aren't clamps and don't AA.  

I've edited the MM patch to only affect AM_MLP parts.

Edited August 15, 2020 by AlphaMensae

[OrbitalManeuvers]

Unfortunately, even with your MM patch above, this new addition is still just problems for me so far. First, it adds 5 useless PAW items to things like engines. But worse, it messes up attachments for things other than the launch clamps, too. I can show you this on video if you can't reproduce it, but these steps will show you if you have Probes Plus installed:

filter by "landv" ... grab the lander with legs, attach the 3 vernier engines, save, new, load same craft ... and the engines have completely moved. 

Can you MM patch this thing out of everything except where you really want it? And also, if you need a video of the above magic, just let me know and I'll record it.

Edit: before and after save pictures added below

Spoiler

 

Edited August 15, 2020 by OrbitalManeuvers
added screebshots

[A_3]

I actually have no idea how this is supposed to work. there's no explanation, and every time i have a rocket in the pad, the pad wont release it, clamps or no clamps. there's no current tutorial either? help!

 

[AlphaMensae]

10 minutes ago, OrbitalManeuvers said:

Unfortunately, even with your MM patch above, this new addition is still just problems for me so far. First, it adds 5 useless PAW items to things like engines. But worse, it messes up attachments for things other than the launch clamps, too. I can show you this on video if you can't reproduce it, but these steps will show you if you have Probes Plus installed:

filter by "landv" ... grab the lander with legs, attach the 3 vernier engines, save, new, load same craft ... and the engines have completely moved. 

Can you MM patch this thing out of everything except where you really want it? And also, if you need a video of the above magic, just let me know and I'll record it.

I can remove AA from all MLP parts except the launch rails, but I don't want to go beyond MLP to altering other parts, stock and mod ones.

The other stuff can be changed by altering the AnimatedAttachment.cfg.  What it is is four sections that add ModuleAnimatedAttachment to parts that have ModuleAnimateGeneric, ModuleGimbal, ModuleControlSurface and LaunchClamp. You can delete them manually or make a MM patch to remove the AA module from the affected parts.

[OrbitalManeuvers]

5 minutes ago, AlphaMensae said:

You can delete them manually or make a MM patch to remove the AA module from the affected parts.

I'm happy to do this for now, but do you think there's hope of getting this fixed or done by default? This breaks saved craft ... even ones that don't even use launch clamps.

[AlphaMensae]

18 minutes ago, OrbitalManeuvers said:

I'm happy to do this for now, but do you think there's hope of getting this fixed or done by default? This breaks saved craft ... even ones that don't even use launch clamps.

How so?  Missing modules don't affect craft loading like missing parts do.

You don't need Animated Attachment for the launch rails, they can still be rotated with B9PS, it will just require some offset and rotate gizmo adjustent on the rocket.

Additional lines for the Modify_Animated_Attachment.cfg:

@PART[AM_MLP_LaunchRail*]:AFTER[AnimatedAttachment]
{
    keepAnimNodes = yes
}

@PART[AM_MLP_*]:HAS[~keepAnimNodes[*]]:AFTER[AnimatedAttachment]
{
    !MODULE[AnimatedAttachment] {}
}

This removes AA from all MLP parts except the launch rails.

[OrbitalManeuvers]

20 minutes ago, AlphaMensae said:

How so?  Missing modules don't affect craft loading like missing parts do.

AA, as included with your mod, has an issue with radial attachments. The screenshots I added contain no MLP parts, and so your patches won't fix what I showed/gave steps for above. What fixes it is editing the AA cfg file, which you pointed out. So I'm fine with that personally ... it's a dev branch after all ... but I just want to be clear that saved craft can load incorrectly with this mod installed, whether you're using MLP parts or not (without the aa cfg edit).

Edited August 15, 2020 by OrbitalManeuvers

[AlphaMensae]

Ah, yeah, I can only worry about MLP parts, everything else AA affects is not my responsibility.

You'll have to take it up with Katten in the Animated Attachment thread to see if he can make the AA .cfg not so wide-acting, since as of now it adds AA to all animated parts, gimballing engines, control surfaces and launch clamps. Or maybe not automatically add it to parts, and let the user decide what parts it gets.

 

[crisisalsam]

do you plane on adding a water sound suppression system similar to how you have the sparks?

[AlphaMensae]

38 minutes ago, crisisalsam said:

do you plane on adding a water sound suppression system similar to how you have the sparks?

The sparker FX was made by JadeOfMaar, as I have no idea on how to make plumes.  So unless some makes a decent-looking water shower plume effect that doesn't look like engine exhaust, the rainbirds will be just decorative.

[AlphaMensae]

The Small Launch Rail is now done and on the AlphaDev branch of the GitHub!

Also added a third length option to the rail for both the Small and Mini sizes, and the upcoming larger ones. I discovered that colliders do not count towards the size limits for launch pads, so I was able to keep the single-piece rail colliders and have the rail mesh made out of smaller sections that get moved into place with B9PS.

Also discovered that Animated Attachment will move the rocket when the rail is rotated with B9PS.  

I also removed the node attachment for rockets from the Mini size, as AA will not move node-attached thing, so there wasn't any point to it.

The revised Mini rail is also on the AlphaDev branch.

[TranceaddicT]

15 hours ago, AlphaMensae said:

The revised Mini rail is also on the AlphaDev branch.

You are a god among men.

[Beetlecat]

Hot diggity. Now I just need to revisit how to build BDB's sounding rockets, and decide if it's time to say farewell to those charming USI parts.

[CAPFlyer]

Other than Scout, are there others you can build with BDB?  I use the RN US Rockets Sounding Rockets pack for Aerobee and similar and then a combo of Procedural Parts/Tanks/SRBs for the rest.

[AlphaMensae]

Yeah, all you can really do is kitbash stuff out of the Scout engines, which I did with the Small rail demo rocket, though it has a stock Mite on top.  

BDB does need more longer inline 0.3125 and .625m solids with straight nozzles.  

[AlphaMensae]

One furthur update to the two current Launch Rails: I added a 20° reverse rotation animation deploy limit slider for the rail, since many sounding rocket images show the rocket "hanging" from the rail rather than the "lying" on the rail as I have it.

It's not perfect however, as the rocket will fall away from the rail a little bit when decoupled, rather than riding the rail the whole way.

I might just keep it in for future use when I get around to making actual attachable launch lugs for rockets that will hold them to the rail like real ones do. So as of now it's more of a screenshot feature.