Hooligan Labs

I can't believe there's still pages of new stuff on this thread even after I've left! Ask any questions and I'll try to help. I'm still working in Unity and doing control systems and stuff. I thought I fixed that in one of my later updates. Or did they change everything again? JS, you have my full permission to give this a go... As does everyone else, as stated in the license. You can do everything but blame me when things go wrong. I think you'll need to upload the mods to your own page on the Kerbal Space Port. Can't wait to see what your flag looks like! C# is the easiest language I've ever programmed in. It's a great place to start. Also, Unity has a lot of physics built in, so you don't have to worry about coding things like force or acceleration very differently. I don't even know what the whole tech tree looks like yet. I kinda went about it a wonky way and now have to get to the moon to get any more science. I'm stuck with the gel! A basic envelope, like the original one that looks like a normal blimp, could be as early as basic flight control. It should be modified so it does pop at higher altitudes, though. The parachute types are somewhat possible with currently available technology. The Cirrus and such would be at the extreme edge of possible technology - up there with SCRAM jet engines. Same idea of very thin materials being able to handle extreme pressures. The SQUID - is there a "weird science" tech?

I did start with just adding models to the original mod. Then I started doing some edits to the code so balloons could go into space... and here we are. Always more KSP! Just not working on mods now. I'm going to stay involved though, this is too good. I respond with a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the "Star Spangled Banner." Your airborne rocking chairs will always be in my heart.

http://hooliganlabs.com has the latest. The Indie Speed Run entry is up now. Next, robots. I heartily encourage anyone to pick up and continue these mods under their own name! I learned Unity and C# by continuing the original airship mod. I think importing should be straightforward. The runway itself is an extremely simple box with a texture on it. If you can't get the model out of the download I can provide it.

Development by Hooligan Labs of KSP Mods has discontinued This is not due to a lack of love for the game. Far from it, KSP has been an inspiration for Hooligan Labs to work on new ambitious projects. This community is crazy fun and supportive. Keep going! I'll still be playing for sure. Please do continue to check the Hooligan Labs YouTube channel for new announcements. BTW, more details on the front page on using my models and code. It's pretty much all available for everyone.

See my Bungee Jumping on Jool video... ... and my Colonizing Jool album. Be warned, Jool's surface is very finicky. This colonization effort did eventually lose an airship to the Kraken, but a single vessel at a time should be safe.

Indie speed run! Probably going to do it this weekend. http://www.indiespeedrun.com/devsite/

Great airship, SA! Wakariyu has been messaging me about the submarine depth limit. The biggest issue is landing under 600m. When you reload the vessel, like after a save, it will not be able to judge the distance above the ground right and will stick your vessel halfway in the ground. A tremendous explosion results. I also know that KSP throws a constant stream of render errors under 600m, so who knows what else might go wrong with the code. It's amazing that KSP works as well as it does while underwater. I coded in the depth limit to give one distinct reason to not go that far down. Otherwise we have to deal with every other problem that KSP might have separately. Truly uncharted waters.

I actually was in a private message conversation with the guy while we was making it! It went something like this. Him: I am walking my kerbals on your airships! This is awesome! Why aren't you doing this? Me: I tried but something strange happens when you try to tell a ship that it is "landed" at a high altitude, not exactly sure how high. Him: Uh oh, my ship is stuck now. I can't get it to move. And it's lagging like crazy. Me: Yeah, that will happen. Sorry, but I really recommend that you land your ship first, using an anchor, and then click Make Stationary. Then you can walk your kerbals as much as you like without fear of breaking the game! That is how I did Bungee Jumping on Jool, etc. I have talked to Mu about this and it sounds like it may be possible in the future when they change how things are saved. No ETA. An Earth submarine is a huge, sealed volume that is mostly filled with air... Unlike a KSP space ship. I put the buoyancy of resources out of the question because of how they are handled in KSP. Consider this: In KSP, electricity has a density. It's very low, but if you attempted to use the density and amount of all resources in a part to determine if it would sink then batteries would float like crazy. It gets even harder when you think about what happens when a resource is depleted. Is it being replaced with air? Water? Nothing really, in the case of electricity? And what are the density units meaning anyway? And what if some mod brings in some new resource with an even stranger property? The challenge seemed outside of the scope of this mod. If anyone want to take a shot at coding it, go ahead!

You're fast! I'll leave it to you in the future.

Rockets, jet engines, RCS and SRBs... proving that there are many ways this challenge can be done!

I got better! * Misuses meme, is banned from the Internet * Maybe I should re-label 0% "Float" and 100% "Sink". But ballast tanks can contain two things, air and water. When you enter water this mod simulates the buoyancy of displaced water to provide lift. As the slider moves towards 100% the ballast tanks fill with water, pushing out air. This not only reduces lift but also increases mass and thus the force of gravity on the vessel. There isn't an effective way of measuring displacement in KSP, so the only things that provide buoyant force on submarines is ballast tanks and crew quarters (which are assumed to be filled with 1 m3 of air for every crew member). 1 m3 of buoyant air lifts 1.025 tons of weight on Kerbin and other watery planets. Thus, a light vessel with a lot of crew would require filled ballast tanks to sink. A heavy vessel without crew (more common in KSP) requires emptied ballast tanks to not sink! It might seem strange to call the parts "ballast tanks" when they can also help a vessel to float, but that seems to be the appropriate nomenclature based on what I have read about submarines. Any suggestions from self-taught submarine captains are welcome. BTW, added to wiki: http://hlmods.wikia.com/wiki/Submarine_F.A.Q.

If you want to add more realism, I highly recommend that you create a mod which does just that. FAR and Deadly Re-Entry are extremely popular.

Fixed. When it parsed the URL it thought the . at the end wasn't part of the URL.

Awesome! Exactly. I added this to the Submarine FAQ. http://hlmods.wikia.com/wiki/Submarine_F.A.Q.

Update! Download link! Version log: 1.2.0 - Should reduce lag, particularly when in space (or just above 600 m). - Found an odd bug when toggling GUI in space and when toggling camera on an EVA. Should be better now.

I will probably compress the debug output. Right now it outputs for every part, where it removes the old buoyancy and then applies the new. I think part of the problem is that the Destroy(partBuoyancy) is not immediate, it happens after all parts seem to run FixedUpdate at least once. Thus, you see each part post that it is trying to remove the old buoyancy from every other part (so messages roughly = number of parts squared). So the amount of lag this could generate could be exponential and there is no reason to report it happening all the time, it's spam. I can always turn the full debugger back on when more bugs come up and I'm given a good description of the issue to work from.

Thanks! This should only run once when the plugin first starts in order to replace the stock buoyancy code. However, something must be happening in space which is causing the stock buoyancy to be reapplied to the parts over again (causing it to need to be removed again). My guess is that it is quietly but rapidly loading between different scenes. There are two ways I can make this run faster... 1) Remove that debug output. That makes everything run much much faster. 2) Have a better check for when it should be running. It ONLY should attempt to replace stock buoyancy when the "main body" (which the vessel is orbiting) has an ocean. Maybe KSP thinks that the sun has an ocean or something strange? An altitude check might do it.

Good answers! Stock KSP water is very dense and dangerous. It will destroy your parts as if you are hitting it as hard as ground. That is, a part with impact tolerance 30 can survive hitting land or water at speeds up to 30 meters per second. I think the Firespitter mod lets the pontoons hit the water at speeds up to 125 meters per second. My submarine mod changes the whole vessel. Any part can survive water impact at speeds up to 10 times ground impact tolerance. So the above example can enter the water at up to 300 meters per second. However, it also makes it so water has normal buoyancy and most parts sink.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you found a workaround in the meantime. I've been watching your series in both awe and dreaded anticipation of the bugs you might find. I think no-one has tried to make such a complex interplanetary submarine as yours. Usually a frame drop like that is caused by errors being spammed into the debug log. Can you open that up and see what was causing the issue? I have some other projects going on now but I will try to take a look as soon as I can. I do rely heavily on users to bring problems they find to this forum. Well done!

The KSP developers themselves have said that, unfortunately, right now temperature is only a factor of height and now location on a planet. However, each planet does have different temperatures (see the wiki). Here is what is in the documentation... /// <summary> /// Converts an atmospheric pressure into an atmospheric density. Atmospheric density is what /// appears in the KSP drag equation. This function seems to just multiply the input by 1.2230948554874 /// </summary> /// <param name="pressure">Use the output of getStaticPressure</param> /// <returns>An atmospheric density, suitable for use in calculating drag.</returns> public extern static double getAtmDensity(double pressure); So you may be right, without going to another planet and testing. This could be a suggestion to SQUAD as an easy way to do a small mathematical change and improve accuracy (even easier than fixing buoyancy in water!) Can this be added to the wiki? hlmods.wikia.com

I have been informed that all KSP mods must have a license, so here is the one that was recommended and this now uses: http://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/ I want to stress that I have learned so much from doing these KSP mods and want to pass that knowledge forward. I think this is the most free software license that I can use and hope that it does not discourage anyone from using my mods our the source code in any way. Sorry, not anytime soon. Stack Lemurias.

Ah, yes it can if you increase their ballast. But if their ballast control setting is close to zero then they are mostly filled with air! That floats in water. Check the FAQ link on the front page.

That is a really cool design! Check this video out for how he got his heavy vessel to float (by adding many of the largest part to the side):

Nope! It's in the plates they are standing on.

This has been sitting on my hard drive for a long time. I didn't know what to do with it. In the end, I decided to share it. Right back at you ahappydude! You could open up the Camera source file, remove the part where it crushes at depth and then rebuild the plugin. Well there is no water surface when underwater (it looks like just open air above, but darker). All I did was make it so you can control the camera in a similar way to above water. The rest is probably your graphics settings.