Orion aka "Ol' Boom-boom"

[Anton P. Nym]

You have the exact same problem as I had, first I lost one engine during boost then an second during braking.

The upper parts however holds up well, makes me wonder if its some issue with mounting stuff on the orion engine. Some chance of the nuclear blast hit things on it.

I'm testing that now with a new revamp; same broad design, but lightening the NERVA outriggers and adding many more struts. I'm running a stress test on it now, lighting off a bunch of 400MN charges then doing a rapid RCS turn-about burn and lighting off an equal set of charges to put maximum strain on the craft. So far it's held up under 100km/s dV of this, plus some extended NERVA burns up to emergency thrust. (I took a screencap but haven't uploaded it yet; I'll get on that after work.)

One option might be to mount the engines higher up. one the magazines or higher. Downside of this is that mechjeb tend to get confused by this. The Minmus landing failed because of this. On switching to chemical for final decent it tried to rotate the ship, I switched to manual but was unable to kill all vertical speed.

If this stress test fails, I'll consider doing a big trussed-out pontoon arrangement mounted to the magazine stack or something similar, but if I can I'd like to keep the layout as it's surprisingly maneuverable for a giant ingot propelled by huge explosions.

-- Steve

[nyrath]

One strange issue, My current ship orion engine has gone dead after loading the game.

Restarting the game does not help, chemial engines work but the two remaining is on the same side.

Only thing odd I did was spawning an service module with orbital construction close to the ship, this module spawned to far away to reach it with rcs, probably the long and non circular orbit created problems, next atempt did not leave launchpad because of some bug but this should not affect the other ship.

argh, that's back again. I've occasionally had ships from saved games ignore the Z and thrust settings for no discernible reasons. I thought it happened when I saved a ship, edited the plug in dll, and reloaded the ship, but now I'm not sure.

[magnemoe]

argh, that's back again. I've occasionally had ships from saved games ignore the Z and thrust settings for no discernible reasons. I thought it happened when I saved a ship, edited the plug in dll, and reloaded the ship, but now I'm not sure.

Will do some testing in orbit to see if its orbital construction.

However first I will construct an huge kethane miner it should be usable as an tug and get the orion into Laythe orbit.

[magnemoe]

I'm testing that now with a new revamp; same broad design, but lightening the NERVA outriggers and adding many more struts. I'm running a stress test on it now, lighting off a bunch of 400MN charges then doing a rapid RCS turn-about burn and lighting off an equal set of charges to put maximum strain on the craft. So far it's held up under 100km/s dV of this, plus some extended NERVA burns up to emergency thrust. (I took a screencap but haven't uploaded it yet; I'll get on that after work.)

If this stress test fails, I'll consider doing a big trussed-out pontoon arrangement mounted to the magazine stack or something similar, but if I can I'd like to keep the layout as it's surprisingly maneuverable for a giant ingot propelled by huge explosions.

-- Steve

It might be worse, I use some KW rocketry super strong trusses, six from orion to tank and two from tank to orion and it still broke.

So unless the struts are weaker than they say they are we have other problems.

[nyrath]

It might be worse, I use some KW rocketry super strong trusses, six from orion to tank and two from tank to orion and it still broke.

So unless the struts are weaker than they say they are we have other problems.

I've got an ugly suspicion that it's my old nemesis the Density problem.

If you recall, that problem was causing the dancing bomb magazines. My solution was to magically suck all the mass out of the magazines and inject it into the engine. Which coincidentally is the ship part you have having problems getting parts to stick to.

I hate it when program bugs start imitating the Hydra from the Greek myth of Hercules.

[Anton P. Nym]

So far it's held up under 100km/s dV of this

It just struck me how blase I got... talking about a test run using 100km/s of dV to "do doughnuts" in a Kerbal parking orbit. Orion (particularly with the big 400MN charges) does mess with your sense of perspective.

-- Steve

[magnemoe]

I've got an ugly suspicion that it's my old nemesis the Density problem.

If you recall, that problem was causing the dancing bomb magazines. My solution was to magically suck all the mass out of the magazines and inject it into the engine. Which coincidentally is the ship part you have having problems getting parts to stick to.

/QUOTE]

Yes you are probably right, it only happens from time to time and only on heavy objects, has some docking ports, kas and stuff on the engine and it don't fell off.

I even used the largest bombs once, accelerated to one million m/s and with 8 torque modules weighting 0.1 ton. They worked well with no problems.

However they fell off during the Eve aerobreak, even the radial connectors disappeared however that did up to 7000 g braking force.

I hate it when program bugs start imitating the Hydra from the Greek myth of Hercules.

Welcome to the world of programming

[magnemoe]

It just struck me how blase I got... talking about a test run using 100km/s of dV to "do doughnuts" in a Kerbal parking orbit. Orion (particularly with the big 400MN charges) does mess with your sense of perspective.

-- Steve

True, however its fun

On the other hand you should be able to salvage you mission even without the nervas unless your ship get way to side heavy, try to shift fuel, worst case drop one of the landers.

Might even be posible to run the odd nerva together with the orion to balance.

Even without the extra engines you just lose precision control.

[Hremsfeld]

the struts are weaker than they say they are

I believe this is the case. I can't say for sure, because I don't have them, but I think I read that in a discussion somewhere.

In other news, I tried config-editing the KSPX large nuclear engine to be a Zubrin drive. The results were...interesting. Doubly so because I just now realized that engine power in .cfg files is in kiloNewtons, so this thing's 1000 times more powerful than it's supposed to be. Oops.

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Edited July 11, 2013 by Hremsfeld

[nyrath]

Modified textures can be downloaded from here.

http://dfiles.eu/files/uu6blcjyx

Excellent Textures! And I love the "NY-R-4TH" on the rim! You even got the "UKAF" correct.

It just struck me how blase I got... talking about a test run using 100km/s of dV to "do doughnuts" in a Kerbal parking orbit. Orion (particularly with the big 400MN charges) does mess with your sense of perspective.

Yes, one of my concerns is how the Orion breaks the game. Why use anything else?

Of course the real world tells us why: despite the Orion's overwhelming advantages, the fact it uses radioactive nuclear explosives is a deal breaker. Public opinion is not currently modeled in KSP, though it could be indirectly simulated by making the Orion really really expensive.

One of my motives in making this mod is to expose a generation of KSP players to the Orion's advantages. Just to get them thinking about it. The missions NASA could perform with that thing...

I hate it when program bugs start imitating the Hydra from the Greek myth of Hercules.

Welcome to the world of programming

Yes, tell me about it. 30 years of programming does not make Lernaean Hydra bugs any less annoying.

It's actually other evil bugs concealed from view in the first bug's shadow. Much like turning over a rock in your back yard.

In my case I was handicapped by not knowing C#, .NET, and the regrettably sparse state of the KSP API documentation (which is not the fault of the KSP Devs, the priority is getting the game done).

In other news, I tried config-editing the KSPX large nuclear engine to be a Zubrin drive. The results were...interesting. Doubly so because I just now realized that engine power in .cfg files is in kiloNewtons, so this thing's 1000 times more powerful than it's supposed to be. Oops.

Oops indeed. What's three orders of magnitude between friends?

Reminds me of about 40 posts previously, when I was adding the "kicks-like-a-mule" code. The recoil shot the control module into the stratosphere at about Mach 15.

As near as I can figure a Zubrin NSWR using 20% enriched uranium tetrabromide should have an atmosphereCurve key = 0 7000

a maxThrust = 12900

and mass = 33

The totally outrageous NSWR with 90% enriched UTB has atmosphereCurve key = 0 480000

maxThrust = 13000

and probably mass = 33

Edited July 11, 2013 by nyrath

[Hremsfeld]

Oops indeed. What's three orders of magnitude between friends?

Reminds me of about 40 posts previously, when I was adding the "kicks-like-a-mule" code. The recoil shot the control module into the stratosphere at about Mach 15.

As near as I can figure a Zubrin NSWR using 20% enriched uranium tetrabromide should have an atmosphereCurve key = 0 7000

a maxThrust = 12900

and mass = 33

The totally outrageous NSWR with 90% enriched UTB has atmosphereCurve key = 0 480000

maxThrust = 13000

and probably mass = 33

Yeah, I'm not sure why it was champagne-corking when it was just sitting on the launchpad; I've had denser objects behave themselves just fine. I guess it is a mystery.

I figured, if I'm going to config-edit something as ridiculous as a Zubrin into existence, it was a case of go-big-or-go-home, so 90% enriched was the obvious choice. The mass change sounded good, though. Also, I'd blatantally disregarded significant figures for my vacuum-Isp calculations. Using a few formulae found here and there, I came up with a 479,543s specific-impulse...The atmosphere one was a 100% genuine Rectal Extraction Figure. Either way, smoothly adjusting the throttle is key to avoid having an engine fly through the cockpit; Interestingly, MechJeb can throttle it to the point of an acceleration of a few hundred tens of millimeters per second, so this thing can land, lack-of-legs be damned.

Double Edit: Nope, the engine goes straight through terrain. Ah well, it's a fast trip back.

If you want to show off Hohmann vs. Brachiostochrone, I cobbled this together:

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Edited July 12, 2013 by Hremsfeld
Correction, I've seen it go as low as 18mm/s

[Anton P. Nym]

Weirdness, and I'm still new enough at KSP that I can't tell if it's the mod or the kraken.

My revision for Big Stan worked very well in Kerbal orbit, with nicely controllable pitch-overs (a bit sloppy some times, but I gather that's me botching it) but when I try for maneuvers that take her into transplanetary space she becomes completely uncontrollable. Pitch-overs (or yaw-overs, I was desperate enough to see if there was a difference) somehow transfer motion to the roll axis about 60 degrees into the maneuver, which kills the pitch- (or yaw-) over apparently because the whole thing becomes a huge gyroscope. At some point roll will escalate out of control (or frantic attempts to kill the roll will end up in a tumble) and then the parts start shedding.

Towards the end of testing I noted that there was a lot of trembling happening when using ASAS (even without RCS or NERVA gimballing active) and I'm just not good enough a pilot to kill the tremble manually. Adding additional SAS modules didn't damp out the trembling.

I think I'll shelve Big Stan for the weekend and come back to the design with fresh eyes next week.

-- Steve

[nyrath]

I'm waiting for KSP 0.21, to see if the improved ASAS fixes anything

[nyrath]

Such agonizingly slow progress!

I've got it so when you right click on the engine, and select show nuke menu, the dialog appears. Eventually it will only show buttons for the types of magazine that both docked ship have in common. You will hold down the buttton for the type you want to transfer. The plug in will attempt to evenly distribute the transferred bombs between all available magazines, for balance.

I will say that making windows in KSP is a major pain in the posterior.

[Railgunner2160]

Very nice Nyrath!! Looking forward to seeing it completed!!

@TurboNisu Any plans to expand your textures to the other engine, and the other magazines??

[TurboNisu]

Excellent Textures! And I love the "NY-R-4TH" on the rim! You even got the "UKAF" correct.

I'm really glad you liked it!

@Railgunner 2160 I'll probably do the magazines at some point, but doing the other engine is a bit tricky because the central column shares textures with the engine.

[mushroomman]

Ach, those beautiful textures make me want to start using this again, but it's so darned overpowered D:

[nyrath]

I have a kludgy way of parsing the part tree and identifying docked ships. It will probably break under some circumstances.

What I do is do a depth first recursive parsing of the part tree. Two adjacent parts that contain the ModuleDockingNode module is the signal that the following branch of the tree is a docked ship.

In the dialog window, I have one column for each identified docked ship. Only the first column has a name. This is because when you dock a ship to another ship, it sort of merges into one ship (the other ship becomes a branch of the active ship's part tree). And I do not know how to find the name of the ship that merged.

There is one row for each type of Orion bomb magazine. The row is omitted if there are not at least two docked ships with that type of magazine, because you have to have the same type of magazine in both ships in order to transfer that type of bomb. Pressing and holding a button in the column of one of the docked ships transfers bombs of that type from the docked ship into the main ship. Bombs are (will be, haven't written this part yet) automatically and uniformly drawn from the various magazines of that type in the docked ship and evenly stored in the various magazines of the main ship. This is to keep the center of gravity of both ships in the proper place.

What I haven't quite figured out is what happens when you press a button in the main ship column. Specifically: which docked ship receives the bombs?

What I need is some kind of weird "radio buttons" for the ship names. Conventional radio buttons only allow one button to be active at a time. I'll need to program ones that only allow two buttons to be active at a time.

Each button displays the type of bomb and the current total number of bombs on the docked ship.

[Boosterspice]

I see good progress! Love the bomb-drop animations, adds a nice look to it

TurboNisu, I love your textures. It looks like they were the original textures for Orion (I like yours as well, nyrath )

*One hour later*

I've run into the same problem as magnemoe >.< Just installed the latest version and Turbo's texture, and then it won't work.

Any idea on how to fix this?

*One day later*

I just completely re-installed the mod, and it worked

Edited July 16, 2013 by Boosterspice
*Stuff* happened

[nyrath]

I've got the bomb transfer pretty much working, I think.

But I have a slight problem.

When you press one of the buttons, it starts transferring bombs from one ship to the other. As long as you hold the button the bombs are transferred. This is because they are what Unity calls "RepeatButtons".

Unfortunately they go by so fast that even just tapping the button will send over 5 or so. It is almost impossible to send over just one, or send a specific amount over.

I can replace these with Unity "Buttons". That way a tap will send over just 1 bomb.

The trouble is if you want to send over 600 bombs, you have to tap the button 600 times.

Other GUI frameworks have more sophisticated controls beside buttons to avoid this sort of thing. But Unity is more limited.

I'm inclined to leave it with RepeatButtons, since generally one will be draining the entire tanker ship's load into the spacecraft.

What do you all think?

[Mekan1k]

Why not use one of each button? Or better yet, a number that can be configured to be the number of bombs that transfers over with a single click.

[NovaSilisko]

Multiply the transfer rate by both Time.deltaTime and a second value which increases the longer you hold down the button, so it will start at 1/sec and then increase in speed.

[nyrath]

Multiply the transfer rate by both Time.deltaTime and a second value which increases the longer you hold down the button, so it will start at 1/sec and then increase in speed.

Thanks! I wanted to do something like that but had no idea how to go about it.

[Boosterspice]

I can't imagine why we should only transfer one bomb at a time. They are used up too fast for that. Good thinking, Nova

[nyrath]

For now the primary ship has its name displayed. The others are "Docked Ship #1" etc. I'd like to show their names as well, but when they dock the vessel data structure melts into the other one. EndlessWaves said that a stub vessel data node is stored somewhere, but so far I have not managed to locate it. I did a part scan as he suggested, but none of the components seem to be it.