eberkain

Multiple mentions of Snacks... is this a hint of a future expansion adding a stock life support system? That would be great by the way.

Poor wording on my part, there does not appear to be a way to anchor a part to a planets surface with the new stock construction system.

EDIT for clarity: there does not appear to be a way to anchor a part to a planets surface with the new stock construction system.

Playing around with a minisub.

I guess I've made a mod.

Maneuver Node Evolved does this and much more.

I have been using it without issue in 1.10.1

I did link it in my post, so yeah, played with it years ago when it was in testing.

So, I've never done an underwater base before and I want to mess around with it for fun, so I am looking for a solution to make submarines. Kind of disappointing that the new helicopter bits don't work underwater. But still the biggest problem seems to be getting a neutral buoyancy. Virtually every stock part floats aggressively, so you can add weight to counteract that, but in stock you need lots of extra parts to accomplish that and we all know that fewer parts on a craft is better for performance. So what I am looking for is a simple mod that lets me sink a vessel. My preference is to have an elegant solution that does not add any new parts. I've been searching and testing mods that cover this... Ballast Water Tanks Adds some tanks and a radial compressor to fill them. Seems to work pretty good but a little fiddley in practice. Adds some tanks that look ok alongside stock, and clones to the atmo analyser, which is pretty clever. MOIST adds a bunch of new parts that are all white, so they really clash with everything else. I assume it works, but didn't test further. Ballast and Nuclear Submarine Parts Not updated since 1.2, depends on KAX and Firespitter. Did not test. Ballastanks not updated since 1.3, only adds a single part. Works great, simple, you can fill and empty the tank in flight to add/remove weight. SinkEmAll from the same page. Adds a new superheavy resource and adds that as another resource option that is default empty on all fuel tanks and command pods. No in-flight adjustment, but it definitely can make things sink. Has a 1.10 update on CKAN. SubPack from RoverDude, now part of the exploration pack. Adds a full set of submarine parts and has multiple dependencies. Played around with it in the past and works well. Maritime Pack from Fengist, older mod that was updated back in 1.4, but has issues in current version from the posts in the forum thread. Not sure if this even had a ballast tank, not tested. Submarine Pack also from Fengist. But that seems to be long gone. Maratime / Sub Pack 2.0 found a dev page for a mod that seems like it never happened. That is about all I can find. To do a submarine right you would want 4 tanks on the left/right front/back sides of your vessel. By balancing the weight between those you should be able to keep the vessel flat and level when the engines are unpowered. Lets do some experiments. Here I have 4 ballast tanks that are symmetrical around the center of mass. In the water this behaves as expected once you find the sweet spot for how much ballast is needed. The Ballastanks mod actually works nicely here, you can bind 2 action groups to toggle on/off the fill/empty function. It may not always be easy to have tanks balanced around the center of mass, so what if they are offset? Its definitely leaning backward, the weight farther from the COM in the back is throwing the balance off. I shifted some of the mass to the forward tanks and the craft balanced out. But I had to use TAC to do it. Lets try something where the COM is offset. By playing around with the balance of the ballast you have control over the pitch and roll of the vessel while it is unpowered. At the end of the day the ballast im using is just a resource like any other. What if there were 4 ballast resources? You could remove symmetry from all the tanks and then have BallastF and BallastL in the front left tank while the other two were locked out, etc.. Then you need a way to add and remove ballast, then you need some convertors to change BallastL into BallastR, and the reverse, etc... hm.... Ok, so here is the new test vessel with the COM really offset. I split the tanks and locked/unlocked each type of ballast based on where it was relative to COM. Then set two action groups to toggle tank fill/empty on all the tanks. Only took about a minute to get the craft to dive and balance and I have simple control. I also changed over to using the ModuleResourceConverter and it works vessel wide, so pulling up part actions for any one tank lets you shift the balance around among all the tanks. And thats it, seems simple and easy to use to me, will work for what I want to do. I think I may clone the radial ore tank to use as the model in game.

Yeah I have used RealChute in the past, its great, but its also really fiddley.

never seen that before, are you sure its installed correctly?

I wish there was a way to auto-cut drogue chutes below a specific velocity. I wish you could disable chutes getting auto-cut on landing.

Do you have a way to make the parallax effect static between loads? What happens when loading into a vessel that was already on the surface?

Commnet Constellations allows each ground station to have a different upgrade level.

@HebaruSanThanks for the education, I have no idea how CKAN works. I tried making a plane with the stock wings and just couldn't get happy. So I went back to github and did some digging. Tetraflon's fork is based on a release from CarnationRED, that is where the handle bars were added, which are totally amazing. But same thing with it, loading the game hangs without FAR installed. Going back one more step takes us to the Rafterman release, and it does work fine in 1.10.1 without FAR. No handle bars sadly, but I've been using the mod for years without it. FAR is just more of a headache than I want to deal with. Planes are harder than rockets.

Can we get a reaction wheels mode that displays a torque circle letting me know how strong they are relative to the vessel weight?

I know Ship Manifest has a transfer system, but sure if it will do a balanced transfer as you are looking for.

If so could you look at Airpark to go along with it?

the numpad keys 0-4 toggle the radiation fields. also, B, opens the body info window.

also, not much has changed in modding in the past few versions, so many mods from 7,8,9 work just fine in 1.10. I recommend reading the most recent posts in any mod you are looking at and seeing if users report it as working or having issues.

yes

you need to look at the inputs and outputs of any resource convertors. I think that one also produces water? You need to change the dump settings if you don't have a container for whatever is getting produced. Edit: Beat me to it.

The mod KEI will let you collect all the KSC science automatically. I used to just turn the science down to 10% and collect it all, then turn it back up to normal.

Many of the experiments in BDB do not have extended parameters, has anyone worked on a patch?