ummwut

If you wanna start at the bottom, learn some assembly: http://www.avr-asm-download.de/beginner_en.pdf I learned assembly on an 8-bit AVR, and they are easy and cheap machines to code for, and an emulator/assembler (I recommend AVR studio) can be acquired easily. The skills you pick up also scale to other low-level coding, and you'll be more aware of things like pointers in higher-level coding.

@ialdabaoth I don't see why it would. In Action Groups, you're selecting a group of parts (all in the same symmetry), so it wouldn't make sense to be able to get an individual part from that. Why do you need to have a selected part when in the Action Groups menu, anyway? @Caswal That might be a temporary file created during vessel loading or something. What kind of vessel data do you need? Most of your vessel info can be pulled straight from Assembly-CSharp's FlightGlobals class, from the ActiveVessel field.

Neato! Looking forward to it. As long as you can teach me how to do GUI stuff with popup windows, I could probably help with other stuff besides testing, too.

So consensus is that mechjeb kinda sucks at it's job (MJ2 moreso), and Kethane does not. Glad we got that sorted. Not that the mechjeb guys are even doing a terrible job, it's an amazingly heroic effort to figure out how the game works, and use that to your advantage.

How does mechjeb handle landing? Does it wait until it gets close to the ground and boost at max power to slow to a stop right before hitting the ground? Or does it take a slow approach and waste fuel? My landers are chronically low on fuel, which is why I grabbed Kethane in the first place.

Are you joking? I thought they fixed that! Okay, looks like I'll have to learn graphics for Unity and make a waypoint plugin :s

Banned for having one eye.

Alright. Seems like you got what you were asking for when you made the thread! Regular updates on your activity would be nice, and I think putting an emphasis on discussion is wise.

I like programming, but I haven't really gotten into the guts of the API just yet. Shoot me a PM, devogen.

You might want to try copying the parts you want, rename them, and set the rescale factor to something else.

Well, foamyesque, I suppose I'll be testing this later. Now I know it dodges negative mass when it loads the part, but what about mass being changed during flight?

Ah, you should go looking for DEADB33F's subassembly loader. It's a partless plugin (meaning it doesn't need to be bound to a part to load and run), and there's also some neat stuff he does with the VAB interface, but you could repurpose it for nearly anything.

Majiir, are there any plans to show Kethane on planet surfaces, say as green waypoints after it's been detected? Looking at the little map is fine, but without Mechjeb for Latitude and Longitude info, I'm missing my landings by several kilometers regularly.

In PartModule, it would be OnAwake or OnStart, probably. You should test both and see which one does what you need.

A positive mass and a negative mass would repel each other, simple as that. Settle down.

Safeguard, probably. Although, as someone who has studied a substantial amount of physics, I'm sort of disappointed. I suppose if I want negative masses, I should go and make my own game.

A negative mass ship flies like a normal one. I think the game just takes the absolute value of the mass. This is very unexpected behavior. Even assuming I could get into orbit, it would be elliptical and not hyperbolic. I would expect a negative mass to float away, even in KSP which should take into account negative masses, but this seems to not be the case!

I tried doing negative mass with just an unmanned probe. It did not float away, so there's something weird going on with gravity. I'll try building a negative mass rocket next.

I decided to try playing around with the config for my stand-in mod part, and ended up sticking a negative mass in for it. But oddly enough, when I launched it, it sat on the launch pad instead of floating away like I would expect something with negative mass to do. Why did it not float away?

You should look at the source for Kethane. That does sounds pretty well, and the code is pretty clear.

Well, I suppose the size can be anything, but it's not an engine. It's that large because it stores the electricity it uses, and even speeding up a mass of 15 by 800m/s would cost over 20k units of electric energy. It quite literally changes the speed at that instant, at the cost of energy, so there's no thrust in the sense of an engine shooting exhaust. In that sense, it could be put anywhere, even at the core of a ship. It will never be capable of FTL, because the energy cost is far too prohibitive, scaling with ship mass and the requested delta-V. The warp field generator simply changes it's own mass at a constant draw to electric energy. Also a somewhat prohibitive cost, which scales with ship mass. The only way to use either of these is with a pile of batteries and solar panels, which would probably be torn off if used in atmosphere. Ah, seeing as how I actually thought of official names after I posted, I'll share those: The IVM will be called a Ship-Wide Inertial Field Transformer, SWIFT. The energy cost for a change in velocity (either positive or negative) is at least abs( shipmass * requested dV). The warp field generator will be called a Higgs Field Gradient Generator, HFGG, since it is directly changing it's own mass. The energy cost per second of doing this will probably be (|new mass| + 1) ^ ln(|shipmass| + 1). I could also make an absurdly powerful Ion thruster that works on it's own (sans-plugin file), if you'd like, but it looks like someone else above has already started on one. Once again, I'm just dipping my toes into plugin programming, and changing velocity and a part's mass is easy enough, but also has interesting consequences on play.

Thanks for the post, kerbtrek!

Thanks, hooji!

I have two parts I'm thinking about making, just to dip my toes into plugin programming. However, I can't figure out blender for my life :/ The first is an "instantaneous velocity modifier" - it changes the velocity of the ship in an instant at the cost of a huge amount of electricity. I was thinking that it should be a long tube, gold-bronze in color with silver trimming, and black designs all over, and the black designs should sink in slightly so light reflection off the designs will be interesting. Size identical to a FL-T800 fuel tank, and the mass is planned to be about 50 (to match density of battery parts), but besides that, make it look as weird as you feel it needs to be. The second is a "warp field generator" - it changes it's own mass, at the cost of a constant draw of electricity. For this one, same color scheme as the previous part, so they match. The shape can be roughly spherical (again, let it get weird if you want) with two round surfaces on the top and bottom, but those round surfaces should match the attachment surfaces of a FL-T400 fuel tank. The mass is planned to be about 6.75. Am I asking too much?

You should try using a tug (Rockomax X200-32 Fuel Tank and a LV-N nuclear rocket) to bring your probe to where it's needed. It'll use a fair amount of the tug's fuel, but I've had no problem with it and using maneuver nodes to get an intercept. In times when I've been impatient, I've actually managed to get to Duna despite being on the other side of the sun with half the tug's fuel left over. You should get your tug and lander into orbit around 600k meters, and dock them. Then it's just waiting for the long burn time and time warps after setting up maneuvers.