Nuke

sorry for so many consecutive posts, but download is now on the space port. can haz some feedback this time?

because lftr. its a really sexy reactor design. and i said it was a forefather, not the same, there is a difference.

^ or unlimited budgets

i was perplexed by this too. i tried to get the craft to be mod-local such as GameData/*modname*/Ships/*VAB or SPH*/*.craft, and several variations, but nothing worked. ultimately i just packeged my mod to match the ksp folder structure all the way to the ksp root folder, and encased that in a master directory with the readme. ArchiveRoot/ |-readme.txt |-KSP_Root/ |-GameData |-ModName |-Ships |-VAB |-*.craft |-SPH |-*.craft then in my readme i said something like 'dump the contents of KSP_Root into your KSP dir'. of course theoretically if you disregarded that and dumped the ArchiveRoot into your GameData folder, the mod should still work, just not the craft files. dont know what would happen if you took a mod intended for the new system and stuck it in the legacy folders, thats whats got me worried. thats what i did, im not sure what you are supposed to do. this seems like a way to make everything a mess if you ask me. chances are if you uninstall your mod you end up with a bunch of dead craft that dont work that you cant get rid of in game. mods, including example ships should only have one entry point into the game's directory structure. not sure about #2. i have a feeling that mods will use the local instance of the plugin, even if there is a newer version of that plugin in some other folder. i wouldnt worry about it unless it causes a mod to not work, or makes the game unstable. ive been intentionally avoiding making any new plugins or using other plugins in my mods for a few versions now. there are some modules in mumech and other plugins that id like to use, but im not going to start doing any coding or using dlls till beta.

molten salt reactors (forefather of lftr) have been demonstrated while installed in an aircraft. making lftr work in zero gravity would be a tough challenge. some of the safety features might not work. for example in the gravity well, when the reactor gets too hot, or the power goes out, all the fuel drains out to subcritical tanks. that would not work in space so well. perhaps draw it out of the reactor with ambient vacuum and a small amount of inert gas. on the other hand it would have similar benefits to the liquid metal reactors that have already been used in space. probibly in a fluoride with a liquid metal secondary loop, a thermionic converter and radiator panels, or i suppose to provide heat to a reaction engine. this kind of reactor is something i would use with nuclear-electric propulsion, rather than a nerva type engine though. it would be a lot more efficient than a nerva, with say mpd or vasmir type thruster (newtons to tens of newtons, and isp between 3500 and 6000), which are severely limited to what can be done with solar panels and rtgs (milinewton thusters are about all you are doing with those). and you would have power for more instruments and/or life support for manned missions, not to mention more powerful transmitters. nerva does have one benefit of being extremely simple with fewer moving parts. and we are probibly better off saving the thorium for ground based applications anyway since its really good at burning up long term nuclear waste. for an interplanetary or interstellar mission where the reactor is as far away from habited areas as possible, and probibly wont be coming back, nuclear waste is less of an issue, so use the uranium/plutonium for those jobs. we will be seeing nervas long before nuclear-electric is used (barring other breakthrough propulsion technologies making either of them obsolete).

glad to see someone has some taste. freespace may not be physically accurate. but it is fun as hell. probibly has the strongest mod community on the internet (http://www.hard-light.net/). the engine is still being worked on. megalithic mods are still being made. and this game came out in the 90s.

as little as possible

1 post from a hardware hacker, explaining how to drive 1000 leds off of a light socket (which only costs about ten bucks if you source your parts directly from china).

i use shop. i only recently moved up to cs3 (before that i used photoshop 7). id hate to switch to something else because i know the interface and many of the keyboard shortcuts. if i didnt have any previous knowledge id use some open source utilities. for modeling i use max9. regardless of the tools used, the process is pretty much the same: create model uv map model export template import template to a paint program color it in save to a texture file use texture on model im assuming you got passed uv mapping. if your paint program does layers (such as using psd for photoshop), they help. never ever flatten them. when your are ready to import stuff to unity, then you export to png or whatever and keep your image in its original format. if you need to make revisions, go back to the unflattened texture. some more artistic people are good at overdrawing, but i am not. what i like to do is go into photoshop with a blank canvas, draw a bunch of random crap and play with filters to make some fill patterns. photoshop also has styles which i also make extensive use of. not to mention brushes, shapes, swatches, etc. i have a massive collection of assets that ive built up over the years which makes my texturing a much easier job. of course ive seen some really good texture artists who can with just a brush make some really impressive textures, i even seen one guy print out the uvw template and then pencil in textures, scan them back in and use those, to great effect. some of them will go out into the world with a camera, photograph some materials, and use those for fill patterns. thing here to remember is build up art assets, even if they suck, you might find a use for them one day. to start out section off some of the poly groups and fill them in with a color that is about what you want that to be. i keep my template on the background layer and create a new one on top of it and work in there. you can use fill patterns, layer styles, or if you dont have anything you can try adding noise and bluring, smudging, burning, whatever, play with airbrushes. noise and motion blur are useful for making metallic or stone textures. once you got a basic fill then you start adding details, like rivets, burn marks, caution stripes, text, things like that. just keep throwing down layers until you like the results.

i kinda like the way docking worked on babylon 5. seems once a ship is through the airlock, and before it makes contact with the station, its in a pressurized environment. just lock on to the elevator platform and get lowered down to the docking bay. seems they put a lot of effort into that design concept. as for my ring concept up there, the idea is cargo would be kept in a pressurized zero g hold(which would be in the hub and adjacent modules, thats why its hollow), supplies are brought up the spoke tubes to the interchange car and into a rotating section as needed. since there are two interchange cars across from eachother you can load cargo through both of them at the same time (and you kinda need to in order to keep it balenced). all docking and cargo is handled on the zero g section. there really isnt any reason to bring a ship into a gravity section, especially if it isnt designed for it. and if you consider that supply ships possibly are robotic one off craft (essentially an engine and a guidance system attached to a crate), which would be totally disposable, or could be refueled and used for sample return (say rocks from titan). you can loose pressure in any of the 3 pressure hulls and still have it in the other 2. in an emergency the crew can relocate to another compartment until the problem is fixed. the cool thing is you could vary the speed of the sections independently of each other to keep the ship torque neutral. to optimize gravity stability, crew would reside in the ring that they work, and crew transfer between rings would be kept to a minimum, essential buisness only. to minimize that, and to also allow for some crew redundancy, each side would have its own cook and its own maintenance personel, its own engineer, its own doc, etc. the captain and xo would each be in charge of a section. crew and equipment movements would need to be actively tracked. things like the weight of the crew would need to be monitored all the time. crew gatherings would need to be limited (or limited to the zero-g section). storage space in the ring needs to be balanced out. in general a well disciplined crew would be neccisary. the ring would then auto-balance itself by moving the water reserves around (and sometimes the crew would need to move stuff around as well). if the tanks are in the ceilings, walls and floor, then you get extra radiation absorption from those as well. of course for balence there needs to be some empty tanks to move liquid to when more ballast is needed. the only real down side is it isnt really good for use on a ship with huge acceleration. i wouldn't want to use it for interstellar travel, you would need gimballed compartments for those kinds of accelerations. but my concept was to use mpd thrusters and a nuclear reactor, acceleration would be small and tolerable. i suppose you could use articulated floor plates which would change angle slightly, if more powerful engines were used. at zero thrust they would be flat (more or less), but with a lot of acceleration from engines it would rotate a few degrees so it would be like climbing stairs when you walk aft from one plate to another. this would probibly work fine up to 15-30 degrees or so, depending on the size of the plates.

ive thought about this problem a lot. two things i notice: you will probibly need 2 counter rotating rings keep the non rotating hull of the ship from spinning. you dont need to have air tight connections between roating sections and non rotating sections. the latter issue can be solved with an interchange ring. i actually drew this on a peice of paper lying on my desk pretty cool. anyway one section rotates one way and the other deos likewise. in my design the sections are hung on rails, something like you would find on a roller coaster track, tubular steel with bering wheels on 3 sides. so they are independant pressurized compartments. in the center there is a track, with a pair of cars on a rotating frame. in its idle mode it is not rotating. if you want to go from one side to the other, the ring spins up with your current section, locks on to an airlock, you step in, then the ring slows down and begins spinning in the other direction to match the other rings rotation while lining up the airlock, then it docks with the other side. optionally the ring can also dock with a zero grav transfer tube that connects with the hub. i actully started modeling it as kind of a mod: if iva ever becomes very robust, like allowing kerbals to float/walk on the inside, i might do a complete modeling of the interior, instead of just the bridge. for reference the bumpout windows are 1.25 kerbals high.

dont know what the space port is doing. it said the pack uploaded, but i've yet to see it show up.

just finished up the 0.20 compatibility fix. added a few more structural parts (new lattice system). fixed a whole pile of bugs. re-exported everything with the newest part tools and unity 4. textures are all png now so if you dont like em you can change 'em. waiting on the space port. i guess il upload it to google drive for now.

while sitting on my mod waiting for a sound fix to rear itself, i made use of the multi-part-per-file system and added larger versions of my more useful structural widgets to the mod, which has the added bonus of giving players additional options without adding expensive textures and models to the game database. of course now you have two identical parts and only the mouseover text to tell you any different. now im thinking it might be cool to make a fuel tank and have different versions of it with different fuels, but reusing the textures. for example give the tanks emmission maps for decals to identify their contents, and then just tweak the emmission color from unity and output a new model (but reuse the same textures). what would be even better is to be able to set the emmission color in the cfg, then one model and one set of textures will suffice for several different parts.

i think im just gonna disable the sounds in my mod for now, until this gets fixed. im calling this a bug (or an oversight) that will probibly be fixed in 0.20.1. it either didnt get implemented in the new system, or it did and the implementation didnt work, or it did work and there is something we need to do that we dont know about. really dont want to have to support sound effects with a plugin, especially since i only have one custom sound in my entire mod, and really dont want to use plugins at this time.

i also noticed that if your mod pack has example craft, they need to go under the main KSProot\ships (eg. 'ksproot\ships\*vab or sph*\*.craft') . i tried creating one under my mod folder in game data but they didnt get loaded. seems this would be a nice way to keep things tidy, i forsee a horrily malformed ships dir in the future. of course if there is a way to have mod dir local ships, please let me know. i wanted to roll this mod out before i went to bed, but it looks like its gonna have to wait, sun is coming up.

was rolling out an updated version of my mod pack. im having the same problem. ive got all the scaling bugs fixed, everythings in a PART{}, new directory structure is set up. and this is the only thing holding me up ive tried sound fx defs with and without the .wav extension. ive also tried copying the heirarchy in the squad folder. tried sounds in both ksproot\GameData\*modname*\Sounds\sound_*.wav ksproot\GameData\*modname*\Parts\*part category*\*partname*\Sounds\sound_*.wav neither one of these worked. i did notice one thing though, under ksproot\GameData\Squad\Sounds\ i noticed a file called 'sound_decoupler_fire.wav.meta', its a text file with some info in it. im wondering if sounds need to have these (or some other cfg) to work. to tired to play with it now, but its worth looking into. *edit* i was too stubborn too sleep and so i copied that meta file over to my sounds dir, renamed it to match my sound effect and tried it, didnt work. didnt try tweaking any of the vars though.

i discoverd somewhere that the best time to go for munar injection you usually have the mun directly in front of you while in lko and pointing prograde. if you launch when the mun is on the other side of the planet, you usually wind up facing right at it as soon as orbit is achieved. so with those two things i can usually do the munar injection from the surface to intercept with just one burn. though a second burn is required if i want any kind of predictable inclination when i get there (most of the time i dont care). it has the added bonus of ensuring that any spent stages will hit kerbin so space debris is at a minimum. sometimes i wonder if its orbital parameters weren't selected for this very reason.

my method is this: 1: send up a small probe 2: point it at the thing you want gone 3: throttle up 4: cross fingers if all that went right, your station should be missing the thing you wanted to get rid of and if you are very lucky everything else you wanted to keep should still be there.

just remember when you launch a rescue mission, do not land directly on the kerbal you are rescuing. that would be very bad.

pretty sure thats a movie quote. nah, we can survive the sun stepping off the main sequence. we just have to move the earth. 1: build large self contained underground cities with closed biospheres, create caches of genetic material, seeds, etc. and move populations underground. 2: pump the the oceans and atmosphere (compressed) into large underground tanks. 3: cover the surface of the planet in engines, they have to have an exaust velocity greater than escape velocity. large fusion or antimatter engines should do. 4: raise the orbit slowly over the course of centuries/millinea (this will be a slow spiral out). 5: when you reach the new goldielocks zone, release the oceans and atmosphere. slowly terraform the planet back to its original state 6: ??? 7: profit!

submit to entropy! you are all doomed!

id argue that calling ip violations theft is bad vocabulary at best and outright deception at worst. the government does not call it theft, they have terms like "copyright violation" and "patent infringement" that describe it better. if it was theft, a lot more people would be going to jail for copying cds and downloading warez. the people making those 'piracy is stealing' adds aren't government entities, they are ip holders. they only call it theft to invoke an emotional response. misleading the public about the law in this way should be illegal.

totally awesome. i like the premise of mining ore, converting to metal and then using that as a means to build rockets. but then where does the fuel come from? i kinda think that you should spawn an empty ship on the pad, but allow the pad to refuel the ship. wouldnt mind the pad being modular in that you would also need to build up a larger installation of buildings to support launches. things like a fuel dump/refinery. mining complexes, expandable metal storage (want to launch bigger things, add on to the base). so pretty much take kethane and supercharge it. my biggest problem with kethane is you couldn't really mod it to include detecting/mining/conversion support for other resources besides kethane. i mean you could make a converter to convert kethane into about anything. but id like to see that mod expanded to mine other resources. would be better if the scanner revealed different color pixels, green for kethane, grey for iron, orange for titanium, yellow for hydrocarbons, blue for water, etc. then every planet and moon would have different resource distribution. some places would have lots of iron but very little fuel, some places would have lots of water but little iron. miners could be set up to mine a specific resource, and converters could be set up to convert anything into anything else, possibly with some mod-defined conversion logic (like iron+carbon -> converter -> steel). id love the kethane mod to work on a larger (and moddable) stack of resources.

patents and copyright are meant to stimulate innovation and creativity, respectively, by giving inventors and content creators a limited period of exclusive rights to their works in order turn a profit. it was never meant as a way to stop theft. right now they aren't doing either of these things. we have things like patent trolling and tech companies making and fighting over patents on the shape of interface elements in their software. i dont even want to discuss what the entertainment industry gets away with.