nyrath
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Posts posted by nyrath
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The rescue craft.
Its got enough fuel to go anywhere.
I even made the Rescue craft re-attachable with the aid of the New docking-port sr. Just realised that if i un-dock the rescue craft, trying to use the orion drive could get messy. Oh well, plenty of fuel for a return trip form the ship itself, dont need to send a rescue ship for the rescue ship.
Could you make two attachment nodes. one node attaches to the central column of the feed tube and the secoond node that stacks. That could fix one problem, might crate some more along the way.
Yes, that rescue craft can probably reach anybody in the entire Kerbal system.
Ummmm, I'm confused about the nodes you want. Where do you want them?
The engine that everybody has now is equipped with one node stack-top, at the top of the center spine.
The new engine (that I have not released yet until I get it working) has seven node stack-top points: one on top of the center spine, and six on the top of the engine for the magazine stacks.
The trouble with the magazine nodes is that they are inside the engine's collider (as seen here). I had to edit the magazine's part.cfg file to make them allow collision in order to let them use those stack nodes.
If those are the extra nodes you want, I'll have to figure out how to edit the engine's collider so it does not overlap the stacking area. Not much of a problem, but it will have to take its place in the bug list and wait its turn.
If you want to experiment, you can of course edit the USAFOrionEngine part.cfg yourself and add extra stack nodes yourself.
Made a craft with just a cockpit, ASAS, and the four science instruments and a Telemachus link on a structural fuselage. The g-force over time graph is particularly amusing. Pictured: Initial ascent, gravity turn and briefly coasting while I re-orient, and raising apoaposis. Not pictured is the circularization, because the graph got too horizontally scrunched together.The Velocity-over-time one's pretty interesting, too. Pictured: Vertical ascent, coasting to apoapsis, "circularization," and drifting around for a little while.
Yow! Look at that g-force over time graph! Looks like a seismometer's chart of an earthquake. Great graphs!
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I think he meant just use the color on the Radiation symbol, like you already have, and DROP the text completely. put the Kiloton information in the Description of the part in the VAB.
Yes, I can do that. Have to be careful to make the blue different enough from the green so they are not confused. The kiloton description is already in the VAB catalog.
Phooey. I tried using the 400,000 kN bombs. Since each magazine had a mass of 180 tons, first it was just too heavy for the support struts to hold it, fell down go boom.
Added more struts. Blasted thing shook itself apart, with the magazines dancing like titanic poker chips. I initiated a launch and it just blew into smithereens.
So I tried the 80,000 kN bombs, with a cockpit - large advanced SAS - engine stack. I guess the coupling with the SAS is a little weak. One bomb and the cockpit shot off the end of the rocket like a champagne cork. But one bomb had tossed everything halfway to orbit. Deprived of the cockpit, the engine will no longer accept Z key commands. So both cockpit and engine just plummeted to earth.
Next I tried just a cockpit-engine with no SAS. Cockpit stayed on, but of course the rocket quickly started to tumble. By only firing when the plate was aimed at Kerbal, I managed to get almost to orbital altitude before the bombs ran out (currently my code is only smart enough to suck bombs from one magazine, only 60 bombs).
I'll have to try using an SAS tied down with lots of struts...
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I took a couple of snapshots of my Dres Rescue Craft, You can see them here.
Looks like good progress. Making them color coded on an "order of intensity" could be better than writing on them.
Wow! That a real rescue craft! Look at that monster.
I tried writing on the magazines with color coded text, but it wound up looking a little too psychedelic 1960's Yellow Submarine, and less military. I've already gotten a lot of flak because the textures on the rest of the Orion are not enough like the textures on the stock Kerbal parts. Of course I include information in the extra file of the mod to allow one to change the textures.
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Well, here are the magazines. Maybe the writing on them is a bit too garish and large...
Listed on the side is the bomb yield and megaNewtons of thrust of each of the nuclear pulse units contained therein.
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Besides, your Orion can be easily accelerated to more than 40.000 m/s. I think the weight of the engine, bombs and bomb storage should be increased, it will have a bigger impact than price (until we have a career mode at least). I have a very small payload (5t?) but still...
Oh, that's easy. The weight of the bombs and bomb storage is as per the original USAF Orion study. But the engine should be 91 tons. You can try changing that yourself, in the USAFOrionEngine folder, make a copy of the part.cfg file. Then edit the part.cfg file, changing the line mass = 2 into mass = 91 or whatever value works best.
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DONE!
36m28s to Mun and back - and still 16% nukes left!
It could be much faster than that but I wanted to set the periapsis low and have some time to take pics and set the nodes.
Conclusion: once you go Orion, you never go back. What's the point of any other engines when you have THIS?
Yes, in other words it breaks the game.
Blasted thing is a Torchship.I will have to set the cost of these items pretty high, even though currently that has no effect.
Your mission and screencaps are awesome, though.
The thing is, we could have this in real life, if we could find a way to deal with the radiation and that pesky nuclear test-ban treaty. Yes the radiation is a problem, but this thing could send a manned mission to Saturn.
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Also, for those of you who wondering: Yes, it's possible to have radially-mounted stages. You just need to finagle things a bit in the VAB...and probably use the Editor Tools mod to get it all to fit. Works fine, though!
Great Galloping Galaxies!! That's terrifying!
If you ever had a burning need to put an intact city block into orbit, Hremsfield has you covered.
Sweet with magazine stacks i can now attach RCS or 3m SAS modules. Im assuming that with the addition of magazines the "ammo" count goes up?Yes, ammo count goes up. Currently that does not work, but it will soon.
Each magazine has 60 nukes. I'm also going to have magazines for 1 kiloton/2,000 kiloNewton, 1kt/3,500kN, and 5kt/80,000kN bombs. Naturally the individual bomb mass goes up with the size, as does the total mass of the magazine. I will also add a 15kt/400,000kN magazine if I can ever find accurate figures on the bomb mass.
The idea is to allow the user to customize the magazine array to fit the mission, instead of being stuck with the monolithic package you have now.
Right now I wrestling with how to handle it if some person adds magazines of different sizes, and if somebody pushing the limit adds multiple Orion engines. Probably needs an entire pop up GUI window.
So.. Any progress on figuring out how to slave the animation and firing to the throttle?It's on my big list of things to do in Bugzilla.
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I finally got the blasted separate magazine parts to stack!
What was the problem? The collider.
As you can see in the above picture, the automatic collider created by Unity 3D totally overlaps the volume the magazines were supposed to stack in. I fixed it by editing the magazine part.cfg file:
// attachment rules: stack, srfAttach, allowStack, allowSrfAttach, allowCollision
attachRules = 1,0,1,1,1
so the magazine would ignore the engine's collider.
and yes, if you turn on the "center of mass" display in the VAB, if you add magazines asymmetrically you will see the CoM ball move off-center.
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Nyrath,
Ok, I found more details about the 'one bomb at docking'.
It has to do with "engin activation", not throttle. When you dock to a ship, and have Mechjeb, that happens to still have "AutoStage" turned on, MJ will 'Re-Activete' the engines of the mother ship. normally this is a non-issue, since the throttle is at 0. however, for your engine..... one bomb.
So, since this isn't exactly a problem with your mod, it is really an issue with the combination of MJ and your mod. I will rebuild my station and attach the Orion engin LAST. and also make DAMN sure I have unchecked MJ's "Auto stage" button before I do.
Also, it would be helpfull if your Engine had the 'activate/dectivate" toggles.
Gotcha! I'm glad you found out what was causing it.
I'll look into activate/deactivate toggles.
Attention Sbowyer28!
Clean your private inbox. I cannot send you any messages until you do.
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I'm pretty sure anyone on-board there will be pretty much reduced to human paste due to massive g-forces each explosion, unless some safety support is installed...
Well, that was a major concern. The designs had not one, not two, but three stages of shock absorbers in order to smooth out the acceleration to something the human body can survive. And over-designed acceleration couches.
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It's SLIGHLT overpowered, which kinda ruins the drama of space travel. I run some tests:
I'm starting from low Kerbin Orbit, c.5-6t of payload, target - Eve.
Crew pod broke off but I still have 271 bombs left and guess what?
Kerbin-Eve in 47 hours!
With additional bombs I can easily increase payload and reduce time travel, although 0.001c is quite impressive.
With Orions you can get to Eeloo and back in few weeks! And without this Hohmann transfer nonsense or planet alignement.
You know what we need guys? BIG 5-1 adapter: you put 5 Orion engines, on top of them 5 bomb tanks, than adapter and some 100-200t of payload. Voila, you have your ISS above Bop in few days
Well, that is the entire point about Orion drive. It is insanely powerful. But what do you expect from a rocket driven by freaking atom bombs?
And this model only uses 1 kiloton bombs. There was another study about an Orion that used 15 kiloton bombs.
That one could deliver 1,300 tons of payload (not kilograms, tons). To the the Saturnian moon Enceladus. And back.
I do have the stats for a weaker 1 kiloton nuclear propulsion unit, it only has 2,000 kN instead of 3,500 kN.
Yikes, I made a mistake in the part.cfg file. I have
bombImpulse = 3500.0
bombMass = 0.079
It should be either
bombImpulse = 3500.0
bombMass = 0.141
or
bombImpulse = 2000.0
bombMass = 0.079
I'll fix that in the next release. By that time hopefully I'll have individual magazines, so I can offer a selection of magazines with different sized bombs
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When even I dock to a ship that has this engine one of the bombs is launched. this is really messing with my orbit, as I am sure you can imagin. is there any way to prevent (or to recode) the engine so that when it is 'activated', or 'staged to' so that is doesn't launch one bomb?It didn't launched a bomb when i docked to it.
Sigh, another conditional bug.
Thanks for the testing, Canopus! Remember the movie The Right Stuff? That's you, with nukes.
And the same goes for czokletmuss, Leonov, and the others in this thread.
Fyrem, again, a craft file of the ship which exhibited the problem would be nice. Were you using KSP 0.20, 0.19 or other? Any mods?
Orion Z key vs Throttle
What if I made two engines, one that responded to Z key, the other for throttle?
I will have to see if there is any way to toggle from one control to the other, there does not seem to be an obvious way.
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So, I had a curious event happen today. I had an orion interplanetary stage deliver a lander to the Mun, then detached a lander, landed, and returned.
I got to within about 1 km and almost matched orbits, but ran out of fuel and RCS on the lander. So, 1km away, I use ] to switch focus to the Orion drive vessel.
The orion drive and other orion parts disappeared, and all of the other parts (12 of the largest "grey" stock fuel tanks, a hitchhiker compartment+ASAS+RCS tank, some RCS thrusters) go flying in wildly different directions - not any explosion, just that the very wide central component they had been attached to suddenly vanished, and they were at different heights above the Mun so were on divergent orbits.
Any attempts to save the game failed, and using ] to scroll through the options, there was one completely invisible part; I'm guessing that was the drive and magazine, and somehow the graphics (and collision meshes) for them vanished. That's why everything else came apart like that, I think.
@nyrath i just docked my lander back on the Orion mothership without the reported explosion issue.Hrrmph. That's annoying. But good to know it is not universal.
Khyron42, could I please have a copy of the craft file of the ship this happened to? Were you using KSP 0.20 or 0.19 or other? What mods were you using?
When even I dock to a ship that has this engine one of the bombs is launched. this is really messing with my orbit, as I am sure you can imagin. is there any way to prevent (or to recode) the engine so that when it is 'activated', or 'staged to' so that is doesn't launch one bomb?Canopus, when you docked your lander, did the Orion mothership detonate a bomb?
Thanks for testing this out.
Real problems with Orion aside...This mod is awesome, if a little tricky to control. For landing and more fine work, a bunch of radial liquid engines (I had 12) with a pair of action group keys that lets you switch them off and on is good for fine tuning orbits etc., just match as close to the speed you want with charges then flickj the OMS engines on and off to fine tune it. Steering the sucker needs a lot of SAS torque or just a ton of RCS fuel and thrusters.
I actually like that it's disconnected from the throttle controls as it makes it easier to control and give you the option for fine control via conventional engines above.
This is great. I've tried to explain Orion to so many people and they simply cannot get their heads around it. A video of this thing in action is just what's needed. They can see, graphically how the ide of the pusher plate and the charges works to propel the vehicle using Newtonian physics.
Didn't Freeman Dyson do a calculation that a typical launch of Orion would risk killing an average of 0.11 people per launch or something crazy? It was surprisingly low, I do know.
OK, I'm not sure if I can rig the Orion so you can toggle between Z-key mode and Throttle mode. One or the other.
Everybody vote on which you'd like.
MDBenson, your radial engines sound awesome. Did you make any screen caps?
You need tons of torque because the blasted bomb magazine module is almost 50 tons. And in the future that may go up, if I can get the individual magazine option to work. The rack will hold up to 3,600 bombs, for a total mass of 295 tons.
I'm glad the Orion mod is educational, since the educational nature of KSP is what originally made me an enthusiastic fan. Orion = action and reaction in one easy lesson.
IIRC Freeman's calculation was based on the increase in background radiation and rising cancer risk with a few Orion launches. As it turns out, the fallout problem can be mitigated by using an armor-steel launch pad covered in graphite dust.
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If you don't mind the fallout.True,that is a disadvantage.
Not if you are a Kerbal. They appear to be immune to radiation.
Actually the fallout is not a problem if the launch pad is a huge sheet of metal covered in graphite.
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I copied the radial decoupler and added the Rockomax stack decoupler's decoupling module to it so it had both. If the stack module activated, there's a puff of smoke but no decoupling. If the radial module activated, it behaved like a radial decoupler. If both, it behaved like a radial decoupler. I was thinking that the ejection force could be applied at an angle, rather than perpindicular/parallel to the rest of the construction. I'm not sure if this would actually help or not. Detachment arrows would be needed, so this is probably more trouble than it's worth. Did a quick "sketch" anyways...I am not an artist.
Oh, now I see! That's not a bad sketch at all!
I was resisting putting the framework with the magazines, since the framework scaffolding pattern only repeats over several magazine-heights. If I can get the stacks working, I can avoid that.
I assume you were activating the two different modules by commenting out sections of the part.cfg file? Pardon my newbie-ness, but what is a detachment arrow?
I'm such a newbie at this. I have the new engine, with the spine incorporated into the engine. In the part.cfg file I put seven node_stack_top nodes, one on the top of the spine, and six where the bottoms of the magazine colums will rest. On a single magazine disc I place one stack top node and one stack bottom node, and set attachRules = 1,0,1,1,0. I can place one magazine on each of the six spots on the engine. But I cannot place a second magazine on top of an existing magazine. I tried attachRules = 1,1,1,1,0, but makes the magazine try to stick to the outer skin of the engine. I'll figure it out.
Being off-CoM isn't an absolute end-of-the-world...but it was still pretty inconvenient, especially without RCS. And most people probably wouldn't want to time accel to stop rotation. Of course, that was with about a third of the total mass being offset, but hey.I'll assign that bug a lower priority in Bugzilla.
I'd have to play around with different values to be able to answer that, because I don't know, either.On the topic of .cfg values, I'm a bit surprised the engine is as light as it is. I know you'd reduced it from 91 tons for thrust/weight reasons; perhaps something heavier is called for? I'm saying this as someone who hasn't actually done heavy lifting with the ultimate heavy lifter, but something that large and that dense probably shouldn't be that light.
Well, the problem is the original USAF Orion had a thrust to weight ratio of about 0.5. I fudged the engine mass to make it capable of lift-off, but obviously I fudged it a bit much.
Of course the USAF was using 3,500 kN bombs, if I can get the magazines working I can offer a selection of 2,000 kN, 3,500 kN, 80,000 kN, and 400,000 kN. I'm sure the latter can handle a 91 ton engine with no trouble at all.
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When even I dock to a ship that has this engine one of the bombs is launched. this is really messing with my orbit, as I am sure you can imagin. is there any way to prevent (or to recode) the engine so that when it is 'activated', or 'staged to' so that is doesn't launch one bomb?
Yikes! I didn't know it did that. It is easy to stop that, but I'm worried about lift-off. If you have your rocket held clear of the launch pad by stabilizers, you'll have to be quick to hit the spacebar then immediately hit the Z key. Otherwise the ship will fall to the ground and blow up.
I'll look into this.
Come to think of it, why doesn't this happen with all the engines in the game?
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Going to use this to move a fully loaded Orbital Constrction werehouse from LKO to Jool orbit... thats 1000t of mass just in spare part cargo.
May I juggest a larger side connection node between the tank and the Engine? such a small node is very .. fragile.
Heh, go for it.
For what it is worth, the connecting node has some outrageous values for breaking force, breaking torque, linear strength and angular strength.
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The new model is looking really good! I actually did a playtest with just the Orion and found it completely adequate as an SSTO platform, only problem, as several people have mentioned thus far, was that it wasn't very good at precise orbital maneuvers. So I slapped on a few Fatman NERVA engines, kind of like what mushroomman did, and it DID seem to do the trick. Of course, I'm eagerly awaiting a version that works with the throttle controls, but for now this seems like an effective workaround solution.
Also, I thought I'd include some artistic references for anyone with the skill (not me, sadly) and the interest to come up with different Orion-type designs.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/artgallery.php#WilliamBlack
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/artgallery.php#id--Rhys_Taylor
I'm glad it works for you!
And of course I know about those pictures since that is my website.
I'm hoping that I can get the plugin to the point where other people can use it as is. All the customizable variables are exposed in the part.cfg file. The main thing will be for somebody to make an Orion engine with Blender or something, and note how far the pusher plate moves.
Which reminds me that I should make the bomb supply mechanism so it can be easily adapted to other Orion designs.
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So, the thought I had was to add the decoupler module to the magazines, so when they're done they can just eject themselves, probably at an oblique angle so columns and radial attachment both would work.
*blink* *blink*
Enable both column and radial attachment? I did not think that was possible.
And what happens if you have a stack of magazines, then decide to eject the one on the bottom? I'd think that if they were using column attachment, the entire stack would be ejected. And if it was using radial attachment, the unsupported magazines would hang there until the acceleration stress tore them away. But I do not know what would actually happen.
The method used by the original USAF Orion was complicated and I am not going to try and duplicate it. The feed intakes on the engine ate bombs from the magazine at the bottom. When the bottom magazine was empty, it was ejected, and the entire stack would move down on rails until the new bottom-most magazine was seated in place.
I did have the bomb import ports and magazine ejection pistons modeled in the 3D model, you can see them at the bottom of the magazine array. I removed them for this new version because I was afraid they would be encased in the collider for the engine, and prevent the magazines from being attached.
I'm not sure I can visualize the oblique ejection angle that will accommodate both column and radial attachment. Can you make a quick sketch?
As you've already got the model as part of a larger model, you could open up the magazine .blend file, do a save-as, and then delete stuff that isn't the central stack. It...doesn't actually bode well for structural stability, to have the spine be made of segments one magazine tall, but it allows for easily changing the ship's size if someone wanted a smaller or (God help us) larger amount of nukes. Would the word be payload, or is that reserved for what you're bringing along? Huzzah for words with multiple meanings :VActually not increasing the payload, instead increasing the propellant fraction (i.e., the mass ratio).
I had thought of doing the spine in sections, but that both compromises the structural stability and increases the part count (which has a direct impact on the frames per second). The current spine allows for 60 magazine or 3,600 nukes. Canopus managed to go from Kerbal orbit to Duna with only 250 nukes. I'm not saying you'll never need more, but you have to make trade-offs.
Sucking bombs from the most empty magazine...well, it has to figure out which magazine to draw the first blast from. Would something like the way liquid fuel/oxizider flows now be close to what you're looking for? Obviously there's need to be something else, because nukes are a discrete unit, unlike liters/whatever. So, it would have to draw one from one side, and then one from the opposite, etc whenever launchBomb() is called.ohboy, I didn't even think about that. Bad idea to keep sucking from one magazine until it is empty.
One magazine has a mass of 4.92 tons (4.74 tons for the 60 bombs, 0.18 for the empty magazine). Using up one magazine then ejecting it will move the ship's center of gravity by almost 5 tons. That's got to hurt the ship's stability.
Will have to try and absorb equally from the top 6 magazines.
Ooh! On that note, I attempted re-entry around Kerbin, and the entire rocket flipped forwards from a pretty high altitude. This is good for keeping it stable on ascent, but bad for landing on worlds with atmospheres, so the drag values might need to be looked at.
Both the engine and the magazine array have
dragModelType = default
maximum_drag = 0.2
minimum_drag = 0.2
angularDrag = 2
because those were the values in the part.cfg file I cribbed from, and I didn't know what reasonable values were. Suggestions?
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When i first came across the idea of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, I thought it would be perfect for Kerbal space program.
While using this for my latest endevor to the Kosmos i saw just how "Kerbal" this is. It opens up so many doors for posibilities on future missions.
I have nothing but praise for your endeavour into the making of this mod and wish you luck in its fufillment.
A quick question, Why is the fireing of the Projectile depended/bound on/to the Z Key?
Could there be a way to Adjust the timing at which the craft launches the projectile by using the throttle function?
Yes, that is on my list of things to do, but it is not top priority right now. It will have to be done because the Z key does not work with time warp. Though that is probably not much of a problem, blasted ship accelerates so fast.
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I'm making a new engine model, with the frame on top, and individual bomb magazines.
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I can't get more than one pulse. What am I doing wrong?
When you hit the space-bar, it automatically sets off one nuke.
As Canopus stated, as long as you press and hold down the Z key, nukes will be detonated at one second intervals.
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Make that three votes for accuracy. Also, I've made an album of launching just a cockpit-and-ASAS and talking through it here; feel free to use it however you want, nyrath.
...
In case I'm coming off as preachy (I'm not trying to, but it's early in the morning here), I'm not trying to say how you should or shouldn't make your mod, but you've got my brain going coming up with ideas on how this could work, so I want to share them.
Thanks for the images! And you are not being preachy, I need this sort of input. My trouble is that while I do know a lot about Orion drives, I am a novice at KSP. I was unsure about how the existing staging system works.
The existing decoupling/staging systems work perfectly for ejecting spent magazines, if they're externally or stack mounted. If your heart was set on drum magazines, though, then yeah that's more difficult.Ummmm, I'm confused. How is the drum magazine different from an externally or stack mounted magazine? The internal details of the magazine do not matter. The only important thing is how many bombs are left inside. What I was fretting about is how the user can figure out which magazines are empty, and how to decouple just them. The baseline USAF Orion design has 60 magazines, in six stacks of ten high.
The main thing is to give the user the ability to adjust the number of magazines to match the mission. Those things are massive. And there are different sizes of nuclear bombs, the more massive, the more kiloNewtons they put out. I could easily make magazines for each bomb size. All you have to do is clone the part, rename it, and do a couple of edits in the part.cfg file.
You can do none of this if you are stuck with a huge monolithic magazine array, as I have currently.
Implementing nukes as a resource...looking through OrionPusherPlate.cs, I see where in launchBomb() you decrement the number of nukes left; if I'm not mistaken, this works for doubles, floats, etc as well as integers. I know it does for C++, but I haven't used C# to know there. I'm going to go ahead and see if I can jerry-rig something, probably using the smaller RCS tank as a model. This'll be...Interesting, because I don't have a C# compiler and don't exactly know how to compile a .dll, but hey, hopefully it'll be easy. If not, I'll send you screenshots anyways of what I was trying to do to see if it gets your lightbulb going. I can't test the engine, because the only thing I could do without a compiler is make a very-high-thrust and high-specific-impulse rocket that operates identically to a liquid-fueled engine but uses nukes.When I was making the package, I downloaded the free version of Unity 3D to make the models. I later found out that it comes with the Monodevelop IDE for C#, altered so it works with Unity. Apparently it has the C# compiler as well, at least I did not have to download anything else in order to compile. I used the instructions here to set it up
http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Plugins
Okay, took some screenshots of what I'm trying to say, and put them in another album here. If the current engine becomes an actual engine, it can search for magazines above it like liquid engines do now. I think the best option would be implementing both methods, which requires "only" (says the guy not actually making anything) making a stack base above the engine, and making a magazines model. This will allow users to make their own ships look as realistic as they want, but won't prevent an actual realistic ship from being madeThat is excellent!
Currently, my magazine array includes a central core and some framework stiff in between the magazine stacks. That could be moved to the engine model, as long as the collider had holes allowing the stacking of magazines.
I've actually already got a magazine model, I just stretched it into the size of a 10 stack for the current model (to keep the polygon count low).
When you say "make a stack base", you mean placing attachment points on the top of the engine part, not creating an entirely new part, correct?
It would be nice if I could incorporate a decoupler into the magazine, to keep the part count down. And incorporate automatic fuel lines, also to keep the part count down. I was toying with the idea of making the engine magically find all the atomic magazines in the vessel, automatically suck bombs from the most empty magazine until it was dry, and automatically somehow ejecting the spent magazine. Probably a bad idea, but I wasn't sure if KSP could handle 60 decouplers with individual controls.
As for the issue of the throttle not doing anything, the throttle only applies to actual liquid engines. Project Orion was obviously neither solid nor liquid fuel, but (oddly enough) seems to behave as a combination of the two. You control how many pulses there are, and you control when they happen, but you don't control how powerful they are. Theoretically in-game, you could scale the bombs' yields to the throttle, but Orion is about riding the shockwave of a nuclear blast, not about finely regulating your orbit.When the USAF Orion was designed, variable-yield nuclear devices were not common. Instead they would throttle the thrust by altering the bombs-per-second detonation rate. In the part.cfg file I have it set up to do 1 bomb per second, so the kiloNewtons per bomb is equal to the ship's thrust. If it is 2 bombs per second then thrust is x2 kN/bomb, if 1 bomb every 2 seconds it is x1/2 kN/bomb.
In practice though, people in this thread and other places tend to mount auxiliary propulsion systems for fine control. Like atomic engines.
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So, I had a curious event happen today. I had an orion interplanetary stage deliver a lander to the Mun, then detached a lander, landed, and returned.
I got to within about 1 km and almost matched orbits, but ran out of fuel and RCS on the lander. So, 1km away, I use ] to switch focus to the Orion drive vessel.
The orion drive and other orion parts disappeared, and all of the other parts (12 of the largest "grey" stock fuel tanks, a hitchhiker compartment+ASAS+RCS tank, some RCS thrusters) go flying in wildly different directions - not any explosion, just that the very wide central component they had been attached to suddenly vanished, and they were at different heights above the Mun so were on divergent orbits.
Any attempts to save the game failed, and using ] to scroll through the options, there was one completely invisible part; I'm guessing that was the drive and magazine, and somehow the graphics (and collision meshes) for them vanished. That's why everything else came apart like that, I think.
Yikes! That sounds like a serious problem. And it seems to be linked to having a lander.
Would it be possible to get a copy of your craft file, to see if I can reproduce the problem?
Canopus, have you tried using a lander with the Orion yet?
Blasted thing is a 
Orion aka "Ol' Boom-boom"
in KSP1 Mod Development
Posted
No need to apologize for your GIMP skills, you made the diagram quite clear. Thanks!
I will look into it, but I fear that Canopus is correct.
What I will also do is take a peek at the Quantum Struts mod and see how they do it.