Part Heights?

[Wyvern]

Does anyone have any hard data for the height of each part (Ideally in meters)?  I've been trying to find them, but I can't find any kind of list with that information.  The parts list on the wiki has radial size, but not height.  Does anyone have a personal or public link they can post?

[qzgy]

You could always use the engineers report to get the dimensions of the part. It's rough but it works quite okay. 

Curious why you need the heights though

[Snark]

Hello, and welcome to the forums! 

13 minutes ago, Wyvern said:

Does anyone have any hard data for the height of each part (Ideally in meters)?

Well, that depends on what you mean by "height"-- it's not quite as straightforward as you might think.  There are three possible "heights" you could be talking about, depending on why you want the information (i.e. what you plan on using the information for):

• "Visual height":  how tall the model is when you look at it.
• "Physical height":  the height of the collider, which is the (invisible) part of the model that determines the physical surface used by the physics engine when it's checking whether the part collides with something else.
• "Structural height":  for stack-mounted parts, this is the distance between the top and bottom connector nodes.

For aesthetic reasons, parts are usually designed so that these three heights (visual, physical, and structural) are fairly close to each other... but they're not necessarily exactly equal.  So which one "matters" to you depends on why you want to know.

"I have 10 of these fuel tanks and I'm going to connect them together in the VAB to build a rocket, so how tall will the stack be?" --> you need the structural height.

"I have 10 separate, unconnected copies of this fuel tank sitting around KSC as debris, and I plan to stack them like blocks to build a pile so that each one is physically resting on the one below." --> you need the physical height

My guess is that the structural height is probably the most relevant to you, assuming you want to know the height for purposes of building vessels.  Fortunately, that's the easiest of the three heights to obtain. 

You can get the structural height of a part fairly easily just by opening its .cfg file in a text editor-- the coordinates of the connector nodes are explicitly listed right there in black and white, so all you need to do is a bit of arithmetic and you've got it.  As an example, consider the Mk1 Lander Can.  If you go look at its config file, which you can find under GameData/Squad/Parts/Command/mk1LanderCan, it looks like this.  Look for the lines that specify two fields called node_stack_bottom and node_stack_top.  (Every stack-mounted part will define those two fields.)  In the case of the Mk1 lander can, the relevant lines from its config look like this:

node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.625, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 1
node_stack_top = 0.0, 0.625, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1

Each one of those lines contains seven numbers.  In order from left to right, those numbers are:

1. the node's X coordinate
2. the node's Y coordinate
3. the node's Z coordinate
4. the X component of the node's "pointing vector"
5. the Y component of the node's "pointing vector"
6. the Z component of the node's "pointing vector"
7. the node's "size" (0 for 0.625m parts, 1 for 1.25m parts, 2 for 2.5m, 3 for 3.75m, 4 for 5m).

In other words:  the first three numbers say where it is, the next three say which direction it "points" (for connecting parts to it), and the last number says how big it is.

For your purposes, you care about the second number:  the Y coordinate.  That specifies the node's vertical position.

So, if you want to know the "structural height" of the part, just take the Y coordinate of node_stack_top, and substract the Y coordinate of node_stack_bottom, and there's your answer.

For example, in the case of the Mk1 lander can:

node_stack_bottom = 0.0, -0.625, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 1
node_stack_top = 0.0, 0.625, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1

The top node is at Y = 0.625.  The bottom node is at Y = -0.625.  So we subtract -0.625 from 0.625, and get 1.25 as our answer.  Therefore the structural height of the Mk1 lander can is exactly 1.25 meters.

I don't happen to have a list of this for all the parts-- but you can find the height for any given part by looking at the config, as shown above.  It wouldn't be hard to build a list from that.  Tedious, but not hard. 

Does this answer your question?

[Wyvern]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Hello, and welcome to the forums! 

 

Thanks for the welcome!

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Does this answer your question?

 

Yes, it does, thank-you.  It's unfortunate that you have to go into each specific .cfg file, rather than there being a simple list somewhere on the web, but such is life.    Perhaps someone could add this kind of data to the parts list on the wiki?  I get that including too many columns on the tables can get kinda cluttered, but this seems like fairly useful information for planning purposes.  

[peteletroll]

The engineer report in the VAB gives you the height of the vessel. If you make a vessel with just one part, you read its height.