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Hooligan Labs

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Posts posted by Hooligan Labs

    Firespitter propeller plane and helicopter parts v7.1 (May 5th) for KSP 1.0

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    Is there actual aerodynamic modeling in KSP?

    After seeing some spaceplanes that seemed to be just big wads of wings, I was under the impression that it was more of a "i am a wing and no matter what i produce lift at a specific angle" type of thing.

    Their might be a mod with aerodynamics, but it is pretty much just lift at an angle. There are designs that "fly forever" due to this oddity.

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    I finally got a chance to go back and read some of the old forum posts!

    Finally managed it. Eve SSTO accomplished after numerous trials and errors:

    I think this new balloon is a winner.

    Ah ha! Has the impossible been done!?

    The version of the party starter on Kerbal SpacePort isn't working properly...
    Anyone else having trouble with the Squid stuff in .20. The Spaceport file doesn't appear to be updated. Am I wrong?

    I will update both soon. Note the comments.

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    If you actually want to carry any mass on Duna I recommend you stick with the 1m variant Duna has an almost nonexistent atmosphere.

    Well said. On the front page chart you can see that the basic Una only can lift 0.5 tons on Duna. If I were to scale down the envelope to have 1/2 the width, overall it would have 1/8th the volume (and lifting force).

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    77pszmY.jpg

    Release 2.0.2: Digging through my OLD stuff I got the .dae files I needed to restore the original rigid envelopes! Tested in 0.20.2. Colors are still wrong but the .png textures otherwise work fine.

    Note that I have made all airships equal in drag. This vastly improves the performance of the rigid envelopes. This is unrealistic, but in a discussion that was probably lost in the forum blackout of 2013 we decided that KSP just doesn't do drag right yet.

    I could use some help... I am in the midst of making a youtube episode to compare the efficiency of delivering cargo to a 100km orbit to dock with a station between rockets, spaceplanes, and airships. I have the rockets and spaceplanes covered, but for some reason I am having issues with making a good craft myself it seems... Hoping perhaps someone has one to share that works with .20+.

    What are you looking to do, get an airship to orbit with cargo? Note that each envelope will likely have different performance. Want to share what your craft looks like?

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    It's actually really good, you've made a good product that I was looking for for **AGES**, and you're personable and approachable!

    :cool:

    Whatever happened to the 'Mega'? I am fully curious now!

    It was so big that everyone despaired of ever actually being able to mount it. It was never actually usable and was eventually removed.

    ahappydude put about that much lift in a modeled party balloon and strapped it to a kerbonaut. He was last seen slingshotting from the Mun.

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    Both my old flagships had Ray envelopes on the sides, but they did also have some on top...

    Is mounting the Cirrus like this gonna be impossible, or am I just overlooking something?

    It'll have to look into it, but it is possible that the Cirrus outperforms so much that it's not usable in this case. 1% lift of a Cirrus is enough to lift over 2 tons on Kerbin. I will have to update the tables on the front page.

    I'm considering a rewrite of the code with a much improved pitch control... but it would take a lot of time. D:

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    Umm... Am I the only one who sees this happen?

    Because I have only been able to play around with this mod for a couple minutes, and everything I make ends up upside-down...

    You need to delete the old plugin and use the new one.

    I may have found a bug on the new balloon. I used the altitude control to bring my craft in for landing at a low speed, and now I've found I can't manually set the balloons buoyancy. Whenever I try the altitude control kicks in and overrides me by lowering the balloons buoyancy, even though it's not selected.

    I've tried restarting the game and it still persists. Other then that it's working great.

    I'm sorry, but I can't replicate that. Tapping the + or - buttons at the top or clicking the glowing control button should fix it. Can you share a screenshot or something?

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    That's just what has been made thus far! I admit this stuff is a bit near future, while KSP seems to be set in a miniature version of the 60s or 70s. But maybe that is changing now that Bac9 is coming on the team...

    It's beautiful, and my computer has much more problems calculating physics on a single core of it's aging Core 2 Duo than rendering whatever can be thrown at it with KSP. :)

    Great! I have a rather powerful computer, which is great for doing dev work but I could potentially overdesign things.

    Random tidbit: Before Tsiolkovsky got interested in jet propulsion and wrote his works on Tsiolkovsky's Rocket Equation, the one where delta V comes from, his first major work was investigating the possibility of metallic vacuum-buoyant airship envelopes. It didn't receive much attention and was mostly forgotten until the 60s or so.

    Are you saying that this is something Tsiolkovsky would have dreamed of? That is something to be proud of!

    Beatiful shot mihara ^^ I cant think of about all the hard work getting all to work but we salute you (Y) Alongside with the new kas and firespitter we can build bases that floats or flies and rebuild them in air ;) Thanks!

    Yeah these mods work well together! While I was working on it I imagined you putting kerbals inside or hanging log cabins from it. :cool:

    Thinking of realism, I'm going to take a shot at the amount of energy involved here. I think the volume of the balloon is about 3000 cubic meters. If it were a sphere, its radius would be 9 meters and surface area 1000 square meters. Pressure is force over area which at sea level on Kerbin (or Earth) is 101 kPa. Thus, the amount of force being exerted by the artificial muscle to remain at full size is F = p * A = 101 kN. The collapsed bubble has 1/8th the volume, a 4.5 meter radius and a 251 square meter surface area. The force of air is 101*251 = 25.3 kN.

    If the Cirrus is 6.4 meters tall undeployed then it is 19.2 meters tall deployed. Work is change in force times change in distance, so maybe the amount of work exerted by the artificial muscle is (101000-25351) * (19.2-6.4) = 75649 Newtons * 12.8 meters = 9,681,267 Joules or ~10 MJ. Assuming this is done in 20 seconds we get 500 kW.

    Two BES-5 RTG reactors could produce 6 kW of electricity for 2 metric tons of weight. So it could perform the work in 20000 seconds (5 hours). Not bad, but no-one wants to sit around that long in KSP waiting for it to inflate. :)

    If the Cirrus' shape memory alloy was driven by heat, transferred by graphene again as it has a higher heat conductivity than diamond, then it would have 200 kW to work with and be done in ~ 45 seconds.

    At least my mind is at rest knowing that, electricity wise, my design is only off by a factor of a thousand.

    [0.21] Hooligan Labs - Airship, Submarines and More

    in KSP1 Mod Releases

    Posted

    /me looks at the specs of "Cirrus" in the released version.

    Mass 2 tons? Mwahahaha, I might actually pull off an SSTO airship with this. :)

    Really awesome job as always HL!

    Looking forward to rebuilding my 2 flagships with the new Cirrus envelope! Gonna look better and save parts (the Goliath had 28 Rays, the Bowheemith had 32 Rays)

    I want to see screens of the new one, AND those other massive ships! They must look like a sea of silver! Everyone share their ships! :D

    Glad you all like the new envelope so far! You beat me to the official post, I have a lot to rant about and open to discussion.

    First, a modeling rant...

    Making the Cirrus was very challenging and I feel that I really pushed the limits of what Blender, Unity and KSP can do for such an abstract shape. There were many compromises but I am overall very happy with it, though if I were to redo anything I would redo the shield. The shaders are beautiful and the file structure, when you get used to it, is much cleaner. I was also held up by the changes with the new update, but I feel it was overall a significant improvement.

    The animation of the "core" and "shield" effects were done using two separate armatures. Both were rooted in the "base" with an inverse kinematic tie into respective empties, acting as the top of each. These began in the same location, allowing for the starting egg shape, but would move and spin to give the unraveling and stretching appearance. Unfortunately, I was limited by Blender to less than 180 degrees of spin, but I still think that looks pretty dramatic.

    What was most unfortunate was how Unity imported the Solidify which gave the core and shield its depth. While Blender itself can make the stretch look right, with the walls getting thinner as it gets larger, that does not work with Solidify. Perhaps if I were able to apply the armature deform and then the solidify, but that would take away my ability to edit the stretching motion further. Also, Blender originally exported the armature animations separately. I had to edit how it was saving the animations to get them all as one animation that Unity could easily control.

    To create the transparency effect, it took not one but two double sided ovoid meshes! The first uses a semi-transparent alpha to create the foggy condensation effect. However, this does not work for the overlaying grid pattern because the grid in the back was appearing over the front. If it sounds strange, it looked even stranger. Thus I had to create a second mesh, tucked slightly under the first, which uses the KSP "Cutoff" transparency. That does not allow for semi-transparent, but it is perfect for "solid" and "clear" parts.

    I apologize in advance to anyone's computer who gets eaten by this monstrosity, but it should not be much worse than an equivalent number of Ray envelopes. :)

    As for new code, I found the texture issue was due to a really old thing I had left in the .cfg files. I was telling it to look for a texture that did not exist. That did not matter before, but I guess the new 0.20 parser takes that seriously. Commenting it out fixed it.

    Also, there had to be a change in the airship plugin code. Previously, I believe the part origin (0,0,0 in the model) was the center of gravity. That was perfect also for setting the center of lift. However, that is now different... It seems that it is using the center of the render box or something. So you can imagine that as the Cirrus would grow its center of mass would move far away from the center of buoyancy. Thus, it would flip upside-down!

    I tried using part.Renderer.bounds.center with no luck, my guess is that doesn't reference the real renderer being used. But part.worldCenterOfMass did work! So now it floats correctly again. This should also fix the occasional bug where Ray would flip upside down as well.

    Ok, physics!

    Unfortunately, I do not have time to hyperlink all this stuff now, but Google is your friend!

    What is the Cirrus made out of? The stretchy envelope and shield is a sort of artificial muscle. The exterior and interior coating is at least one layer of atom-thick graphene, which is highly conductive, tense and heat resistant. In between the graphene "sandwich" is an elastic substance. When a current is applied the graphene layers are drawn together by magnetic force. The elastic is squeezed together and it stretches like a tendon.

    Cirrus itself is actually using a vacuum for buoyancy. This has been proposed for Martian airships. Using a vacuum removes the weight of whatever gas you would have inside, like hydrogen, though you need something extremely tough to keep it from rupturing. Thus, graphene.

    So, how much should the Cirrus weigh? Well, it is as big as an orange tank. Kerosene weighs ~0.8 g/cc, and steel ~1 g/cc. In comparison, graphene weighs only 0.1 g/cc! However, we could not expect to make this large object only a few atoms thick, and graphene must be doped with other materials to give it the properties to make this work. Also you have to consider the elastic as well as supporting electronics and compressors. So, while in theory the Cirrus could weigh as little as 0.4 tons, even less if the whole thing was only one atom thick, I thought 2 tons was a more realistic estimate.

    What do you think?

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