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Airships in KSP2


Fullmetal Analyst

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  • 2 weeks later...

I know people figured out how to add modded parts already. It'd be trivial enough to make a part that has a negative weight, but, of course, that would float straight to the edge of SoI, which is not exactly great. You could also make an "engine" part with an infinite ISP and a custom altitude profile that allows it to only go up to certain pressure altitudes, but then you could angle that and get an infinite thrust, which is also not ideal. Proper atmospheric buoyancy would require a custom module, I think, and I don't know if anyone got that far with modding the game. It's certainly possible, but I don't know if anyone has done the work yet. I'm also not sure if that level of modding is in agreement with forum rules, given that SDK isn't out yet, so that might have to stay on the outskirts of Discord until official support is added.

But I'm definitely looking forward to some sort of lighter-than-air builds in KSP2. It seems like it would very much fit the style of the game.

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5 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Proper atmospheric buoyancy would require a custom module, I think,

KSP1 modeled buoyancy in water, although probably not ideally.  Having no knowledge of the game's inner workings, I would not think making lighter than air parts is impossible.  That's one thing I would enjoy seeing, it would be useful on any body with an atmosphere.  There are 4 planets in the basic KSP system (ok, one of them is a moon..) where that would be useful.  With additional systems hopefully coming eventually, they could be even more useful.

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7 hours ago, 18Watt said:

KSP1 modeled buoyancy in water, although probably not ideally.  Having no knowledge of the game's inner workings, I would not think making lighter than air parts is impossible.

Lighter-than-air buoyancy is even easier, actually. With water, you have to worry about a surface, and that's the tricky part - you have to estimate how much of a part is actually submerged. It's very simple for some colliders, like spheres, and gets progressively harder for others. Even for a cube, if it's tilted, computing the precise volume displaced at any given position is surprisingly complicated. Of course, there are very simple estimates, like you can just take the top and bottom extents and see where the water surface falls relative to the two. If it's between, take a percentage of the collider's volume. It's not quite right, but it's good enough for a lot of games, and I wouldn't be surprised if KSP1 did something like that.

For lighter-than-air, there is no real surface to worry about. Yeah, there is a cutoff for atmosphere in KSP1/2, but by that point, the atmosphere is so thin as to be irrelevant. So you can always use exactly the same formula for displacement lift while in atmosphere: gravity * volume * atmospheric density. All of these are available to the components in the game, so it'd be very easy to write a module that handles this. This would be very simple for Intercept to add if they decide it's something they want in the game, and it will be very easy for modders to add if Intercept doesn't. The only barrier right now is lack of the SDK, and even that might not be a blocker already.

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I would love to have lighter than air vessels! So many possibilities with Eve, Jool, Laythe never even mind the exoplanets!

They would need to find a solution for background vessels though, they would need to stay afloat rather than falling to the surface when you left them alone.

Edited by Periple
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2 hours ago, Periple said:

I would love to have lighter than air vessels! So many possibilities with Eve, Jool, Laythe never even mind the exoplanets!

They would need to find a solution for background vessels though, they would need to stay afloat rather than falling to the surface when you left them alone.

i think the game would then act as if the airship is landed and just keep it at the same point over the surface

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7 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Are you... Are you Kraken-driving this thing to hover, so that the engine can look like it's a burner?

There is a Vector hidden in the basket. You can see the ring outline in the top image.   I just shut it off to take the screenshot.  The burner engine is set to very low thrust--just enough to look cool.

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  • 6 months later...
On 3/30/2023 at 1:40 AM, Periple said:

They would need to find a solution for background vessels though, they would need to stay afloat rather than falling to the surface when you left them alone.

Perhaps the game could have a new vessel state, like instead of "landed" or "flying" it's "floating at x altitude." It would stay at that altitude even if you leave it there.

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