nyrath
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Posts posted by nyrath
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The bigger issue, I think, is if we have a Castle Bravo re-enactment. Castle Bravo, for those not in the know, was only supposed to just slip into the megaton class of warheads. Instead, due to a miscalculation regarding the different Lithium isotopes used in the bomb, they ended up with the second largest detonation America ever produced.
If something like that happens with an Orion spacecraft, whether on the pad or in flight, we have a HUGE problem on our hands. A normal LES system can cover for the second nuke off the pad being a dud but there isn't a damn thing the LES system can do if you have another Castle Bravo incident.
Well, yes, obviously. But presumably the propulsive charges were developed and tested at Kerkini Atoll, not just thrown together and given their very first test on the launch pad. Unless Jeb was the lead researcher. By the time this becomes a propulsion system the charges will be a well tested and debugged design.
Pretty neat. Not sure how you'll get that working with action groups though.I'm not sure either. The lack of adequate documentation for the KSP API is the main reason this is taking so long.
After some Googling, it appears I can make it work with action groups by using the [KSPAction] keyword
I have to disagree with you about the "none at all". I know an atomic bomb won't explode when struck with an object at a high speed. I was thinking about the kinetic damage to the structure of a (or more) magazines. A small rock will puncture the magazine and bend the metal out of shape, thereby (possibly) making the further release of bombs impossible. I know the chances of being hit by a large enough rock are slim, but at several km/s the effect is quite considerable. Even though the craft has sixty magazines, i don't think it would be something ignored especially since there's no shortage of power.Such damage would threaten all the spacecraft in the Kerbal system, not just the Orion. The velocity difference between an Orion vessel and an ion-drive vessel will be a tiny fraction of the velocity of the meteor. In other words, all the KSP spacecraft would need such a shield.
The more efficient technique is to just have a radar sweep, and dodge any incoming meteors.
Details here
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/lifesupport.php#id--Air
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How would one go about re-filling spent magazines?
I'm still trying to figure that out. Unfortunately they cannot be filled with Kethane. My current thinking is that the only source of new bombs is fresh magazines created in the VAB. The empty ship will have to rendezvous with a tanker fresh from the VAB and transfer bombs over a fuel pipe or something.
I'm also going to implement a system where empty magazines can be jettisoned. Then you can add full magazines by a Kerbal doing an EVA.
That might not be worth doing, empty magazines only mass 0.18 tons which is insignificant to an Orion drive. Especially if you can re-fill them from a tanker.
Thoughts on this, anyone?
You misunderstood me. I meant at the front of the craft. The velocity of the craft will be high enough that any object striking the front will cause quite some damage. Consider the effect a strike at a magazine would have.Such shields are typically not needed unless the vessel travels at significant fractions of the speed of light. Which this Orion cannot do.
In real life, an interplanetary Orion will use the same system as other spacecraft, Whipple shields or keep a radar watch so you can dodge if necessary.
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As soon as I get the magazines to enable/disable under user command, it will be time to tackle throttling. Then maybe ejecting spent magazines.
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Someone really complained about the content of your website?
Quite a few, actually. There were those who thought that putting anything nuclear on a rocket would end all life on earth. I do not know if you remember the protests over NASA's Cassini probe
http://wc.arizona.edu/papers/91/32/10_1_m.html
There were those who thought me irresponsible for promoting space exploration when they were of the opinion the money could be better spent on the poor and underprivileged.
And of course there are many science fiction fans who take heated exception to the facts about space fighters
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic.php#id--Space_Fighters--Efficacy
and the fact there ain't no stealth in space
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--There_Ain't_No_Stealth_In_Space
Anyway I have the pop up menu populating properly, but it is not behaving when it comes to deactivating fuel magazines. Yet.
The idea is that each menu entry shows whether that magazine type is feeding the engine or not (the status), along with a button to change the status.
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Snide comments, yes, but, not completely off-base, either. There are some very vocal people that are completely irrational about anything with "atomic" or "nuclear" in its name.
Tell me about it (said the author of the Atomic Rockets website). I used to get some savage email.
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Yes, but in Footfall, Niven and Pournelle do make some snide comments about the status quo. Along the lines of the scientific advisers to the President saying "Yes, I know the environmentalists start squawking when you say the word 'Nuclear', but this Orion-drive battleship is the only way for us to free ourselves from being the slaves of the aliens. Nothing else will work."
And here is a second vote for The Mote In God's Eye being the best "alien contact" novel ever written. I quote from it extensively in my Atomic Rocket website.
The big concern was whether or not the propulsion-bomb feed would actually work. While the first bomb was a given, being preloaded on the ground, the second one would be loaded in flight. And if the feed failed, you were already a mile up.Specifically, if your Orion-drive spacecraft is sitting on the launch pad, you fire off a nuke, and the nuke is a dud, there is no problem. You are still sitting quietly on the pad. So you can try again, or stop the mission until you figure out what went wrong with the first bomb.
If your Orion-drive spacecraft has just detonated its first nuke, your ship is a few hundred feet above the ground, and the second nuke is a dud, you have a problem. You better hope you can fire off a third nuke real quick or you are going to create a large crater where your spacecraft augers in.
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@ nyrath i have a question about the Michael. What are those tower like things that sit on the pusher plate? And what functions did the shuttles had?
There are two types of towers: tall and short.
The tall ones contain the propulsive nuclear bombs. The launcher is at the bottom edge of the hemispherical pusher plate.
The short ones contain "spurt bombs". These are bomb-pumped gamma-ray laser weapons.
The spurt bombs are "Excaliber" style bomb-pumped lasers without the bomb.
Instead of having an integral bomb, the Michael uses non-shaped charge propulsion bombs. The excess gamma rays from the propulsive bomb detonation is capable of pumping quite a few spurt bombs. The Michael dumps a few spurt bombs, the spurts RCS aims them at the enemy ships, the Michael detonates a propulsive bomb, the Michael undergoes acceleration, in the brief moment before they are consumed by the fireball the spurt bombs are pumped and fire a gamma-ray laser beam at the enemy ships.
The Space Shuttles, the stove-pipe fighters, and the main batteries from the Battleship New Jersey are because the Michael's purpose is to destroy the alien Bussard Ramjet starship and free Earth.
The diagram is here
http://www.up-ship.com/apr/michael.htm
created by Aldo Spadoni president of Aerospace Imagineering
http://www.freewebs.com/knownspace/gal1.htm
http://www.linkedin.com/in/aldospadoni
Was it launched in a single stage?Yes. It had to be. The alien Busard Ramjet starship and a horde of combat spacecraft were in orbit. If it was launched in pieces, the combat ships would destroy the pieces before they could be assembled.
Instead, the people of Earth made the Michael under a dome to hide it. It made it into orbit in a few minutes, then proceeded to attack the surprised combat ships. Then it started chasing the Bussard Ramjet, which was frantically running away.
I'm afraid I'm spoiling the novel, but you might consider reading it anyway. Footfall by Niven and Pournelle is arguably the best "Alien Invasion" novel ever written.
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Footfall is a 1985 science fiction novel written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell. Earth uses a ship such as described here to defeat the invading enemy.
The direction of travel of the ship is managed by steampropulsion and launching the drive-bombs off-center. "Finer" adjustments to the acceleration are made by the distance at which the drive-bombs are exploded. (only one type of drive-bomb was used). The further the bomb is away, the less push it has.
Yes, I had forgotten about that.
Now I fear that the USAF design I am using as a model will be severely damaged if the bombs are detonated off-center. The Michael from Footfall used a hemispherical pusher plate, not a flat one like the USAF.
(I know this because once I worked with Aldo Spadoni to make a Blender mesh of the Michael. Unfortunately the mesh cannot be released until certain third parties give their permission)
However, varying the detonation distance to reduce the thrust is a good idea. I will look into it.
The main drawback (in the real world) is that weapons grade plutonium is so expensive that it would be criminal to waste it on a large bomb detonated at a distance, when it would use so much less plutonium to instead just use a smaller bomb. Having said that, in the Kerbal universe, the price of various items has no effect, so who cares? It is true that the smaller bombs have significantly smaller mass, but when you are dealing with such an over-powered propulsion system this is not a major concern.
From my standpoint, it will be far easier to code a thrust level in the plugin by varying the detonation distance instead of trying to vary the detonation frequency.
Quick skim of Footfall
I think from the part I read that they did NOT detonate the bombs off-center in order to do thrust vectoring. My reading indicates it was done because their RCS was damaged and the ship was in a spin. The bombs were launched off center in order that they would be on-center when they arrived at the detonation point.
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god, there is no finesse in this "engine", 1 nuke is knocking my orbit around like the ship's made of paper. ammo selector for different yield devices would be a nice feature down the line
Yes, even the weakest has a kick like a mule. In your honor, I'm adding another type of nuke, one with one-quarter the power of the standard one. Probably cannot lift the ship into orbit, but much better for fine maneuvering.
I was trying to work it out for myself but this is exam week so I had to put it on the back burner... I did make a little collection of links to the githubs for some of the best mods by the best modders though, so have a look.https://github.com/MuMech/MechJeb2
https://github.com/r4m0n/KSP_DeadlyReentry
Thanks! I'll give them a look over.
OK, redteddy23, the key seems to be [KSPEvent]
Do a search on that term in the AddOnDevelopment forum for some details
I stuck this into my engine plug in as a test, just to see if I can get a menu to appear. It works. Right click on the engine and you'll see a menu that says UKAF ORION PULSE DRIVE Deactivate Magazine with a button. Click the button and it changes to Activate Magazine.
[KSPEvent(active = false, guiName = "Activate Magazine", guiActive = false, category = "Thrust Control")]
public void Activate_Magazine() {
Events["Activate_Magazine"].active = false;
Events["Activate_Magazine"].guiActive = false;
Events["Deactivate_Magazine"].active = true;
Events["Deactivate_Magazine"].guiActive = true;
// do something here
}
[KSPEvent(active = true, guiName = "Deactivate Magazine", guiActive = true, category = "Thrust Control")]
public void Deactivate_Magazine() {
Events["Activate_Magazine"].active = true;
Events["Activate_Magazine"].guiActive = true;
Events["Deactivate_Magazine"].active = false;
Events["Deactivate_Magazine"].guiActive = false;
// do something here
} -
A 1971 NASA document about the lunar rover. Might give you inspiration for your next Kerbal version.
http://silodrome.com/lunar-rover-operations-handbook/
arrgh, forgot the title tag
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Yes, different sized nukes are not the problem. Figuring out a user interface to allow section is a problem. How does one code those little pop-up windows that appear when you right-click on a part?
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I was asking about the possibility of making homebrew Apollo-style hand controller in this thread
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/27561-Hand-controllers
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I decided to have some fun using the Orion to build a nuclear deterrent.
Fortress Orion currently sits in a 1329 x 1293 km orbit. It has 8 NTR surface-to-ground missiles, each with 5 independently steerable MIRVs. The engine itself counts as a sixth warhead. The idea is to use the NTR for orbital plane changes and deorbit, then try to use the RCS on the warheads for precision targeting.
Lordy, that's awe inspiring! And a little terrifying as well.
Some concern was given to the fact that it's a big fat target in the sky, but it was quickly realized that the drive system itself is DESIGNED to withstand nukes, and can fire them off at will as a self-defense mechanism. If someone tries to attack the station from the ground you just pulse the drive once the incoming nuke (or boarding party, whichever) gets close enough for EMP to scramble its circuitry. For attempts at a kinetic kill you turn the shield towards the projectile, and then pulse at the last minute... or just let it hit the shield; it's unlikely to do anything the shock absorber can't handle.That is true in reality.
In KSP, when the Orion detonates a standard 3500 kN nuke, everything within 1700 meters of the detonation will be hit by 1750 kN of impact, impact force falls off with distance from ground zero.
And everything within 220 metes of the detonation will blow up. That is, everything that is not attached to the vessel the Orion is a part of.
Which is pretty good missile defense. And a rather drastic way of cleaning debris in orbit. And a reason to have auxiliary engines for docking, or you will annihilate whatever you were trying to dock to.
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Oh yes, because the chip is able to do all of that. -.- You know, it's the magic chip that can do anything.
If the chip doesn't have the capabilities to control a person, then guess what ... no hacker will be able to do that. You obviously don't know anything about what your talking about. A chip is not a computer. A single chip can only do so much. Someone hacking a computer is not the same as someone hacking a chip in someones brain. The most this chip can do is send and receive information. It doesn't have the capabilities to control you.
Your computer's internet connection comes in through your ethernet or wifi connection. Those are I/O devices. They transmit information into your computer. The I/O device does not know or care if the information is a web page, a data file, or a worm or trojan. It is all data as far as it is concerned.
People try to protect their computers but there are too many vectors for malware to gain access. Recently Mozilla decided to totally block Java in their Firefox web browser because it rendered the browser vulnerable to "drive by malware", where just visiting a website was enough to become infected.
The described brain computer chip is an I/O device. It transmits information. It does not know or care if the information is a web page, a data file, or a memetic virus. It is all data as far as it is concerned. It could be full of subliminal stimuli for all it knows.
The point being is the chip is not controlling you. The data is.
Even if all this was possible, you are underestimating the power it would take to try and do something like this. Another thing is you said "Unprotected" computers. Let me ask you this, if you made a password say DoGv5.37D Do you know how long it would take to brute force this password?According to this website
https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm
the time required would be 1.77 hours, by a botnet optimzed for brute force password cracking.
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Anyway, I just don't see the worry. Hackers? The only reason hackers even usually hack is to obtain information such as credit cards. There are some who just do it to try, but what are the chances you will be involved? It probably be even less common then getting robbed.
Ummm, I'm sorry, that turns out not to be the case.
The vast majority of unprotected computers are infected with malware uses to create botnets
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet
aka "zombie army"
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/botnet
These botnets are used for a variety of unsavory purposes, such as denial-of-service attacks, email spam, click fraud, and fast flux.
According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, through the first six months of 2006, there were 4,696,903 active botnet computers.
A chip in your brain could do similar things to your mind. Such as recording everything you see and hear, identity theft, and even hypnotizing you to alter your behavior.
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base is a reserved keyword in the C# language that refers to the superclass of the object running the code. In this case probably either PartModule.
Yes, I was trying to make it clear that this was in the nuclear engine code, and not somewhere else
Anyway, back to the question. Firstly I'd remove the ChangeWorldVelocity call when testing forces. If it's perfectly smooth I'd guess it's adding acceleration outside the physics system which may be causing the funny results you're seeing (i.e. stuff not exploding). I don't know how much experimenting Nova did or his knowledge of the game when he wrote it but I'd personally attempt to propel the vessel purely through physics forces first and only resort to changing velocity if I couldn't get it smooth enough.It always helps to define what you'd consider to be correct behaviour. What should happen if you apply massive forces to a lightweight vessel? I don't know if unity/KSP simulates explosions from excessive force or whether it's just the joints breaking and the colliders colliding.
I'm sorry, I did not make myself clear. The problem is that stuff is exploding, proper behavior is not exploding.
Currently the code works perfectly with a 3500 kiloNewton bomb. The bomb goes off, the pusher plate moves, the entire vessel undergoes acceleration, and the various parts composing the ship might rattle a bit. The acceleration is from ChangeWorldVelocity, the rattling is from AddRelativeForce.
The incorrect behavior occurs with the 80,000 kN and the 400,000 kN bombs. The bomb goes off, the pusher plate moves, the entire ship undergoes acceleration, the cockpit detaches from the Orion engine and shoots for the sky like a bat out of hell, reaching an altitude of 92,000 meters before plummeting to the ground, the Orion engine makes it to about 500 meters before falling to the ground.
Apparently the AddRelativeForce is adding so much force to the engine that it impacts on the base of the cockpit perched on its nose with enough force to snap the connection and send the cockpit into the sky.
p.s. Have you had a play around with RigidBody.AddExplosionForce?Yes, I have. I use it for the collateral damage the bombs inflict on other vessels in the vicinity. Works well, other ships on the grounds around the launch site reacted as expected. Ones that are far away are shoved around. Ones that are near the explosion get blown over the horizon.
However, this is not suited for the bomb propulsion proper. The pulse units are not so much bomb as they are nuclear shaped charges. They really do not inflict force in a bomb-like fashion, they are focused enough so that the reduction due to distance does not really happen.
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You don't need nukes to achieve this
Good one!
But yours has a rocket motor on it.
meanwhile: arrgh. I spent all this time hand making a collision mesh for the engine, with concavities in it to accommodate the magazine stacks. Come to find out that collision meshes must be totally concave. arrgh.
Well, at least I can try moving the edges inwards so the struts can snap onto the outer edge of the frame.
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Forbidden Planet is an oldie but goodie. Dated, but if you watch it you will discover where Gene Roddenberry cribbed many of the details you see in Star Trek. And the plot is based on Shakespear's The Tempest.
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Comrade Jenkens, the sad fact of the matter is that among spacecraft propulsion, the rule seems to be High Isp, High Thrust, choose one.
Example: the ion drive.
The only drives that have both are the utterly outrageous ones, like Orion, Open-cycle nuclear thermal rockets, and Zubrin's infamous nuclear salt water rocket. All of which have a problem with exhaust plumes that are just sizzling with blue glowing radioactive death.
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I would not let a chip be implanted into my brain unless it had one massive firewall.
If you attach an unprotected computer to the internet, it will be infected by a computer virus in about five minutes flat.
I do not want a mental virus turning me into a cyber zombie.
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All those individual parts could also get hard to handle for some computers.
Yes, which is why I am retaining the old engine with no magazine frame, and the old magazine array.
Over and above the fact that if I made all of your existing designs break you'd be chasing me with torches and pitchforks. I am very carefully testing my new plugin with the old parts to make sure everything still works.
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Hi, stupid newbie with the Orion here.
I'm having a problem with the jolt of the nuclear bombs exceeding the structure of the vessel.
The mod models the Project Orion nuclear pulse rocket. Due to its nature, the plugin bypasses the standard KSP propulsion module. Instead, the bomb impulse is directly applied to the vessel.
I am building on a code fragment graciously supplied by NovaSilisko. The delta V is gently and magically applied to the vessel by
this.vessel.ChangeWorldVelocity(base.transform.up * (aNukeRound.bombImpulse / totalVesselMass));
The kick-in-the-pants is brutally applied to the vessel by
base.rigidbody.AddRelativeForce(new Vector3(0f, aNukeRound.bombImpulse, 0f), ForceMode.Force);
where "base" is the Orion engine part. The idea is that poorly constructed vessels with get shaken apart.
This works fine with the smaller bombs, where aNukeRound.bombImpulse equals 2000 or 3500 kiloNewtons. But it does not work very well with the larger bombs, of 80,000 or 400,000 kiloNewtons. On the launch pad, the first bomb makes the test cockpit and ASA placed on top of the engine shoot off like an atomic powered champagne cork. Even though I tied them down with 16 struts. They made an altitude of 5,000 meters before they fell back.
Trying to cool things down, I mistakenly tried using this code:
base.rigidbody.AddRelativeForce(new Vector3(0f, aNukeRound.bombImpulse, 0f), ForceMode.Impulse);
Bad move. The cockpit detached and made the jump to lightspeed. Apogee of 92,000 freaking meters. I've never seen a ship develop a plasma sheath in the atmosphere while moving up.
I'm not sure what my best options are, and I'd enjoy any input the forum would care to offer.
I could just remove the impulse kick, but that's no fun.
I could tone down the amount of impulse, though with the largest bomb I'd have to divide it by 100 or so.
I could make the engine grab anything stacked on it in a manner similar to a Quantum Strut. Trouble with that is I figure the part directly touching the engine will stay connected, but all the remaining parts will still be kicked off.
Or maybe there are other options I have not learned about yet.
Thanks!
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Ahahaha, atomic powered champagne cork. I rofl'd.
Any way you could let us turn magazines on and off? Perhaps that would solve it. The pilot would turn off the magazines they don't want to use and turn on the ones they do, and the engine can only draw from magazines that are 'on'.
Actually, I had more in mind something like right-clicking on the Engine, not the magazines. Have a pop up appear showing all the different types of nukes available, and letting the user check-box the ones they wanted to use. If I can figure out how to do this.
One has to use lots of struts to keep the magazines from jiggling around. Unfortunately 16 struts are not enough to keep the cockpit from doing a cork pop.
I'm going to have to hand-edit the engine's collision mesh. As you can see the struts are attached to thin air, not the framework.
I'm toying with the idea of making the attachment points on the engine act like Quantum Struts. Q Struts internally create an invisible ConfigurableJoint between the two connected parts, with the joint xyzMotion and joint angularXYZMotion hard set to ConfigurableJointMotion.Locked. In other words it is set to a joint that is rusted solid.
Trouble is, I fear what will happen is that the part directly attached to the engine will stay attached, but the next part above will do a cork pop.
I might be forced to create drastically weaker bombs. Or fudge the jolt factor.
Right now the code gently and magically changes the vessel's WorldVelocity (to change the ship's vector), and savagely & brutally does an rigidbody.AddRelativeForce to kick all the vessel parts in the pants. I could reduce the AddRelativeForce shock by a factor, but for the 400,000 kN bombs I'd probably have to reduce it by a factor of 100 or so.
The above system is straight from NovaSilisko's code for his prototype Orion.
GREAT HOPPING FARK!!!
I tried changing it from rigidbody.AddRelativeForce using ForceMode.Force to using ForceMode.Impulse
From the launch pad, one nuke went off. The cockpit made the jump to Light Speed. It went through the atmosphere so fast it started to develop a plasma sheath, like atmospheric re-entry in reverse. According to the map the AP was 92,000 meters!
Well, that certainly was not the solution to the problem...
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Let me present to you the next mission with my updated Orion Ship. Target: Jool and its moons.
The new updated version of my Ship including 2 capsules and 2 landers with spare fuel
Who needs Hohmann transfer orbits when you can go on Brachistochrone trajectories
It's Beautiful!
Yes, Torchships always use Brachistochrone trajectories. Accelerate, coast to halfway, flip over, decelerate.
I'm undergoing one step forwards, two steps back. I manged to get multiple bomb magazines working, barely. Simplistically the engine tries to draw from all the magazines equally, in an attempt to keep the rocket balanced. Unfortunately it pays you no mind if you have several types of magazines. It just draws from all the magazines so each detonation is an adventure. I'm still trying to figure out how to allow the user to switch from one bomb type to another.
It seems that the Kerbal physics engine is sensitive to density. The huge magazine array everybody is currently using does not give much problem. But the individual magazine are much smaller but of large mass. What happens is that when the rocket is on the launch pad, the magazines jitter like Mexican Jumping Beans. If you have a two magazine stack, they hit each other and explode, with the rocket following a second later. To prevent this you have to tie them down with lots of struts.
And the 80 kN and 400 kN magazines are too hot to handle. No matter how many struts I use, upon the first detonation the cockpit shoots skyward like an atomic powered champagne cork. The 400 kN charge will send the cockpit up to 5,000 m, the 80 kN will only send it to about half that.
I'm going to have to make a customized collision mesh for the magazine frame. The generated one makes it too hard to attach struts.
Orion aka "Ol' Boom-boom"
in KSP1 Mod Development
Posted
Wow!!! That's gorgeous! I am most impressed.
I do have multiple magazines working now.
If you have several different types of bombs, it tries to draw from them equally. When I tried it worked nicely: Bang! bang. BANG!!! Bang! bang. BANG!!! Bang! bang. BANG!!!
And I finally got the controls working so you can just have the desired magazines on-line. If you have them all off-line, it is the same as deactivating the engine.
In the first image, there are three different types of bombs loaded. I've turn them all off except for the totally outrageous 400,000 kN Armageddon bomb. In the second image, this is what it looks like after you've set off 10 of those monsters. Note the altitude, note the fact this is about 10 seconds after lift-off.