P^4 Current Engine Module Questions

[kellven]

I think I'm just going to go ahead and remake my rotor/prop physics engines again. I still have my mountains of algebra scribbles on BET somewhere.

Without further ado, I present the KIS Propeller Propulsion Plugin Project, or P^4:

Our chief of development had a few questions.

-Does anyone have(or know of) a current mod that replaces an engine module's update code? Would save me a ton of time if I didn't have to reinvent that also.

-Does anyone have(or know of) a current mod that replaces stock engine stack icon behavior? Fuel remaining and heat are probably the least useful metrics to display on a propeller.

-Does anyone have(or know of) a current mod that replaces the stock metrics in the VAB select-a-part GUI? Rocket motor metrics have no meaning in the aerofoil world.

-I remember C7 at least tentatively deciding to replace the "throttle as %thrust" behavior on the nuclear motors with "throttle as %fuel consumption" a while back, did that end up in the game, and did the idea propagate to the rest of the motors? While it may make some sense in a rocket motor, it's beyond useless on a propeller, and if it's propagated through the control code, I'll have to fight with that also.

[kellven]

Feel free to ignore this unless you want to code aerofoil physics.

Ok, so obviously nobody gave a $#!^, so I didn't either, and dropped the thing.

And decided to kill my KSP modding habit for good.

But I mod things because I want to, and this gave me an itch that needed scratching, so...

I spent a couple hours dusting off C# and came up with

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/74137297/AtmoData.cs

which is an interface/default-implementation/static-factory for encapsulating the atmospheric data one would need to have to compute aerofoil thrust, or at least the start of all that.

No idea if it works in game, but it's necessary as the stock density calculations are completely FUBAR, or were the last time I logged it out back in 2012.

Still needs relative wind speed, but that was going to be in a larger data class "FlightCondition". Basic idea is you slip in a vessel reference, store the object, call a polling method once a frame, and everything now has access to a static copy of the current flight conditions. The stock code simply has each and every single part calling expensive calculation functions in FlightGlobals every single time they need a bit of data, which is beyond idiotic.

And the itch is now scratched, so I'll just abandon this again.