jcogs

jtaylor13: I tested 1.3.7 with the .22 release on two machines and had a friend test it on his machine with no issues. Can you describe how you installed it? Might lead to more clues.

The problem is most likely due to something in the .22 update. I am downloading the update now. Will investigate.

Hello, everyone. I apologize for this late fix and for my absence. The last few months have not necessarily been kind to me. After many extensions, I finally finished my project at work and was promptly laid off at the end of May. I work in visual effects. The job market for VFX has been exceptionally poor, especially in LA, making it difficult to secure a job. Because of this I have had to move out of the house that I was living in and have instead been living on the couches of friends and family. I did not have access to the computer with KSP, nor did I have time to play the game. After moving for the third time in two months I was able to find some time to at least update the plugin to allow the engine switching to work again. The updated plugin is available as its own download on the front page of this post, and has been added to the pack downloads. Again, I apologize for not keeping this up to date, but this has not been anywhere near the top of my priority list.

I have fixed the frontpage of this entry so it is identical to what it was before the crash, including downloads for the newer version with eva support and crew elevator. As was mentioned before the crash, I am currently working overtime and weekends and have not had time for development. That will end when my project is set to end on May 3rd. The company that I work for recently went through bankruptcy and is in the process of restructuring, and by all indications I will be unemployed as of May 4th, theoretically leaving me with an abundance of free time.

@elven_sword: I have been really short on free time recently, and have not had much time to work on getting the eva stuff to work well. As mentioned previously, the ship has to be scaled up by a factor of 3 to compensate for the size of the kerbals, which leads to several unfortunate consequences: when the camera is zoomed out to view the ship it goes beyond the shadow draw distance, meaning no ground shadows. This can make landing somewhat difficult. Scaling up also changes the positions of the rcs thrusters, meaning that they will have to be tweaked to compensate, which has led the asas to cause some instability and waste rcs fuel. I also still need to model, texture, rig, animate, and program a crew elevator. All I have right now is really just a placeholder to make sure the size is about right. In other words, it might be a while. @halocon720: You are probably having difficulties with the lasers due to their mass. As previously mentioned, I deliberately made the ship under power and under weight with respect to the other parts in the game. This was primarily due to stability issues I had with the old collision system, and it reduced the amount of instability caused by the asas unit. If you increase the mass of all the parts by a factor of 10 or so, while also increasing the maxThrust of the engines and the thrust of the rcs thrusters in the part.cfg, you might be able to get a more equal mass ratio with the lasers allowing you to take off better in the horizontal configuration. Keep in mind that adding anything will likely throw off the balance of the ship, which is rather precarious due to the asymmetrical design. You might also try dropping the mass of the lasers to an absurdly small number, which would avoid the balance issues. This can easily be done by editing the mass values in the save file (persistent.sfs), if the save has the nostromo with the lasers on it. @Sabactus: There are several ways to change the scale of the ship, some easier than others. As of version 0.16, the easiest way to change the scale of the parts is to add the rescaleFactor variable to the part.cfg's. The default is 1.25, so if you want to scale it up by a factor of 3, you would add the line rescaleFactor = 3.75 to all of the part.cfg's. If you do this you will also need to adjust the thrust magnitude of all of the rcs thrusters to compensate for the position and size change. You will also have to rebuild the .craft file, either by rebuilding it manually in the hanger (this will become difficult with any scale change greater than 2), or by going into the existing .craft file and increasing the positions of all of the pieces by the same scale factor (this will be tedious, but it is pretty easy to write a script to search through the file for lines with pos = and multiplying the three transform values by the scale factor). Also, to answer your other question about getting a life sized version of the ship, I built the original model to scale in meters in Blender, but scaled everything down by a factor of 10 when I saw how big it was going to be once in KSP. In effect, you could scale it by a factor of 10 (rescaleFactor = 12.5 due to the default of 1.25) to get a "life sized" version of the ship. This might be too big to be usable in the actual game, though.

@coinslot: Awesome video, I am truly honored. @bpkwarrior: Can you be more specific about what is breaking? @Momo3773: I put in a variable in the part.cfg's so that you can change what button switches the engines. Open the part.cfg files for each engine piece and switch the bindKey = z variable to something that is convenient for you.

@Hyratel: No plans for the Prometheus in the immediate future. While I love the design, at this time I don't think that I have the time and resources to really do it justice. There isn't enough reference out currently (that I have found, anyway) to build it as accurately as I would like, and there would be a lot of work to get the mechanisms working for it to function as it does in the movie. A better plan would be to attempt to build the Serenity as there is plenty of available reference and any work that goes into the swivel engines can be applied to the Prometheus if I choose to build it in the future. The Prometheus also has a few of the balance issues that the Serenity has when looking at volume distribution. @Naoma: As far as my understanding goes, the issue with landing vertically using mechJeb is an issue with mechJeb. Something about it not paying attention to the thrust vector of the engines. This leads to two possible solutions: comb through the mechJeb source code and figure out how to get it to work (far above my skill level and not something I want to do since mechJeb isn't mine), or figure out a way to swap the orientation of the entire ship with a button press without causing any other problems. My experience with mechJeb is very limited, so if someone else has different ideas that don't require drastic changes to anything, let me know. All this said, I have found a little time to play with a few things: This required scaling the entire thing up by a factor of three. The elevator still requires some work to get it functioning correctly, and the model is just a temp model. The rescale also requires a rebalancing of the RCS thrusters.

I have released the latest version of this that is KSP .16 compatible. The release also features normal maps and improved landing gear that make it easier to land on Minmus and the Mun, along with a few other tweaks.

According to the sources that I used to build the ship, this is the Nostromo, separate from the refinery. If I wanted to be completely accurate I should have named it Refitted Lockmart CM 88B Bison M-Class starfreighter. http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2011/10/nostromo-blueprint---enclos.jpg http://nostromo.joeh.org/content/nostromo/..html http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/USCSS_Nostromo

Okay, here is the deal. I am not opposed to doing a Firefly. I quite like the design as it is visually interesting and has a lot of little articulated bits that I would like to try to incorporate into a mod. My big issue is with the physics of it. KSP is a physics based game, and center of mass plays a huge role in the handling of a spacecraft. Anyone who has tried to build an asymmetrical rocket has found this out. In general the net thrust vector of the engines must pass through the center of mass of the rocket or the engines will apply torque and the rocket will rotate. Due to this idea the Firefly has a definitive location for its center of mass. It needs to be positioned very accurately to maintain balanced flight, especially since the engines need to swivel for landing. Looking at a profile of a Firefly reveals the problem with the design in regards to this balance: Notice that the visual distribution of mass is balanced on the rear half of the craft, but the front of the craft has most of its mass distributed above the center of mass. This makes it very hard to balance, as any mass that you add to the rear-bottom to balance the front-top will require the front to have more mass to balance the added weight to the rear, causing a horribly vicious cycle. Compare to the Nostromo: Notice how the visual mass is more evenly distributed around the center of mass. There are a few things that can be done to cheat it, but it will still be difficult to balance. When I have time I will attempt to do a quick mockup and run it through my mass solver. I do ask that the community to be patient as my free time is dwindling. Most of the Nostromo was done while I was on break from work, and I am back on a new project with more responsibilities, so updates will likely be slow. @SquirrelMachine - As mentioned a few posts ago, I designed the Nostromo without taking into account the mechjeb plugin. There are a few modifications that can be made to the part.cfg files to make it somewhat workable with mechjeb, as mentioned in previous posts.

@chrisdanger - Make sure to transfer the nost_pluginModule.dll that is in the plugin folder of the download to the plugin folder in your KSP directory. Without that it will not recognize the engines since they are a custom part. That is the only thing that I can think of that would cause the issues that you are describing. If you have already done this and it is still not working, I would recommend downloading again as your previous download may be corrupt.

MechJeb users rejoice! Kind of, anyway. After messing with it all weekend, I have figured out a solution that gets mechJeb to kind of work. In the nost_crewCompartment part.cfg, change the rotPower from 0 to .1. That shouldn\'t make it fly any differently, but should help mechJeb to at least point it in the right direction. Or try to, anyway. The ascent autopilot seems to work quite well, and I have gotten it put me in Munar orbit, but Smart A.S.S has a tendency to overshoot by a lot, I am looking in to a solution. I have a suspicion that it has to do with how mechJeb dynamically updates the kp, ki, and kd of itself. It should also come as no surprise that mechJeb does not like doing anything with the landing engines active, so no horizontal landing yet. While messing with trying to get mechJeb to work, I discovered an error in my math for calculating the ideal center of mass for the ship with respect to the landing engines, so I am going to attempt to fix that. Hopefully it helps eliminate some of the tendency of it adding forward momentum when trying to land. It might also help with landing stability (see below). Regarding landing stability, I don\'t think it is a question of weight/mass. My original mass and thrust values were about 20 times higher than they are now, and the same hopping occurred on landing. The ship was also a lot more unstable. I believe that the current issues might stem from two sources, one being the current way that the game handles physics and inter-part connectivity (which might be fixed in the next release), the other being the location of the landing gear with respect to the center of mass. In order for the ship to turn correctly the center of mass must be located between the four landing engines/rcs thrusters. The rear landing gear are positioned slightly behind this point, making the craft decidedly back heavy. For a truly stable landing do not deploy the landing legs and just land on the landing engines. This provides a much more stable landing platform due to how the center of mass is balanced between them. Creation of normal maps is ongoing. I will hopefully have some screenshots to post soon.

Sorry to disappoint, but I don\'t use mechjeb and never intended the Nostromo to work with it. My current opinion is that mechjeb, while amazing, takes some of the fun and skill out of the game, but that is a discussion for a different place and time. Eventually I will make this mechjeb compatible, but I am not too familiar with it so it will take time.

I have re-uploaded with the source code. I have also made it possible to rebind the engine toggling using the bindKey attribute in the part.cfg, which has been switched to z instead of ~. It should also be more responsive than the previous version. The reason that I felt it necessary to write my own plugin for the animated landing gear was due to instability when using the HLandingLeg module, as documented here: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=13549.0 If the bug is fixed I will likely switch the module back to HLandingLeg and not need to use that part of the plugin. Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

This is a construction of the Nostromo from the film Alien for KSP. This features both vertical and horizontal engines that can be toggled for landing, as well as animated landing gear. This has been given a temporary update for KSP version .181. This version has been checked and is compatible with KSP version .21.1. The parts have been updated to make the Nostromo compatible, but it has not been fully converted to the new Resource system yet. I am working on converting it, but it is going to require a complete rebalancing of the ship as well as updating the parts to be compatible with the new part modules, which is going to take time. Please Note: A custom plugin is required (Nost_pluginModule.dll, included in the download package) for the engine switching as well as for the animated landing gear. Make sure to move the file to the plugin directory within the KSP directory. Source code has been included. Controls: This can be launched in a vertical configuration or a horizontal configuration. Controls are standard KSP with one difference: Use the z key to toggle the two sets of engines. It defaults to the vertical configuration. Two versions are being made available. Version 1.3 is a direct port of the previous release with the only other change being an increase in the mass of all parts: Download: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/84434883/Nostromo_1_3.zip Version 1.3.7 has EVA support, but the ship is 3 times larger than the previous release. The crew elevator is now functioning using the now standard KSPEvent system. Right click to raise and lower the elevator. PLEASE NOTE: when the elevator is in the down position the right click menu will pop up near the hatch, so you will need to zoom out to see the menu. Download: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84434883/Nostromo_1_3_7.zip Due to a change in code between versions 0.19 and 0.20 the previously available plugin for engine switching was broken. I have updated the plugin so engine switching can work for version 0.21.1 and have made it available for download separately as nothing else changed in the download package: Download updated plugin: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84434883/Nostromo_PluginFix.zip Changelog: ver.1.1: -Switched the engine toggle default key from ~ to z -Added bindKey attribute to engines to allow the user to change the toggle key -Made the engine toggling more responsive -included the source code in the download package ver.1.2: -New KSP .16 compatible .craft files -All parts have normal maps -Changes to engines and crew section to make it more mechJeb friendly -Changes to landing gear to make it more landing friendly -A few model and texture tweaks ver.1.3: -Changes to parts to make them more compatible with KSP .181 -Increased the overall mass by a factor of 10 ver.1.3.5: -Added EVA support, but no functioning crew elevator -Increased the size of the ship by a factor of 3 to bring the ship in scale with the Kerbals ver.1.3.6: -Small model tweaks to elevator -Added functioning code for the elevator ver.1.3.7: -Fixes to plugin module to allow engine switching Include in the package: -All the parts to build the Nostromo. Many parts have both left and right sides because they are not rotationally symmetric. -Craft files for both the VAB and SPH so yu don\'t have to put all the parts together yourself. -The custom plugin Nost_pluginModule.dll that handles the engine switching and animated landing gear. -The source code for the above plugin. Known Issues: -I have tried to stay as faithful to the original design as possible. While I have done my best to balance it, sometimes it can get a little unwieldy. I would recommend the use of sas. -Due to its size and configuration, it is not always mechJeb friendly. MechJeb does not recognize the horizontal landing ability. -In order to keep it stable the mass and thrusts of the parts are low relative to their size. This means that the parts might seem underpowered when used with other parts. -Due to the asymmetrical design and the need to keep it balanced, the parts are only attachable through stacking. This dampens the ability to use them for custom designs. -The elevator works but has not been rigorously tested. The right-click menu will always pop up near the hatch. -This version is not converted to the Resource system, so the fuel gauges will no longer update on the UI. Good thing that this has so much fuel that it shouldn't be a problem. Future Plans: -Add a cockpit for IVA -Make all parts compatible with the new Resource system