nyrath
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Posts posted by nyrath
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New Version 0.16 available
at the first post.
Only difference is the animation of the dropping bomb.
WARNING: this means the explosion happens 0.16 seconds after hitting the Z or spacebar, instead of immediately.
I had a couple of designs where the vessel was held in the air by launch supports. Previously the spacebar would release the supports and the throttle would make the first bomb immediately loft the vessel. But now, if the vessel is held too low, it might drop and hit the launch pad before the first bomb goes off.
Having said that, in most cases you can just launch the blasted thing with no launch supports, pusher plate sitting flat on the launch pad.
Due to the extra animation (bomb drop), the pusher plate animation will be swifter. The entire sequence has to fit into 0.8 second.
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I copied and hacked up the large NTR from KSPX to match the specs for the DUMBO NTR (it was the most powerful one on the Atomic Rockets drive table that also weighed 5 tons), and got some pretty sick results
Well, the original NERVA solid core NTR had a pathetic thrust of 49 kN. The stock KSP LV-N atomic rocket motor has a thrust of 60 kN. The Dumbo NTR was estimated to have a thrust of a whopping 3,500 kN, which is ginormous compared to the stock NTR. It would have the same atmosphereCurve specific impulse, that more or less depends upon what you are using for propellant. I didn't do the math for Agarax's ship, but it looks reasonable.
What the finished product will look like:Oh, my. That is a freaking NEXUS booster, with gas core nuclear thermal rockets. And they didn't say anything about "closed-cycle" either (translation: you get twice the specific impulse compared to a closed-cycle gas core, at the cost of having glowing radioactive death spraying from the exhaust nozzle).
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=700
That monster can boost 1,500 metric tons into orbit with one trip. You are probably looking at a thrust of 3,500 kN to 5,000 kN, depending upon the specific impulse (Isp goes down as thrust goes up). It does have a chemical first stage which is a small mercy.
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An ion flying out of the exhaust of an ion drive into the vacuum of space is not going to find any electrons to unionize themselves. This means that the spacecraft will become more and more negatively charged. Eventually it will be so charged that the ion exhaust will be bent around until it strikes the ship and/or the ion accelerator cannot counteract the attraction of the ship so they refuse to leave the ion drive exhaust port.
This is why ion drives have cathodes emitting electrons. This neutralizes the beam and prevents the ship from becoming charged.
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You had chemical engines able to send humans to Mars 50 years ago as well. The issue with doing it isn't ISP, thrust, radioactivity, any of those. It's money. No bucks, no buck rogers.why do you want bigger rockets? for send people to Mars and to do what? to pick some rocks and plant a flag? We aren't kerbals, I would much rather see money go to unmanned craft that can do the same science than a manned one at a fraction of the cost.
m4V the quote Kryten alluded to is more commonly: No Buck Rogers, No Bucks. Meaning taxpayers are far more enthusiastic giving money to NASA for manned space flight as opposed to some unmanned space probe. Translation: yes, you get more science bang for your buck with robot probes as opposed to manned missions, but that is bitter consolation if you cannot get any taxpayer funding for your robot probe.
Werner von Braun, Carl Sagan & Gerard O'Neill
http://theforvm.org/diary/bill-white/werner-von-braun-carl-sagan-gerard-oneill
In a paradigm Tumlinson dreamed up, the space world fractures into three groups: Saganites, O’Neillians and von Braunians.
Saganites, named for astronomer Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996), are the philosophers and voyeurs of the cosmos, intent on low-impact exploration that promotes a sense of wonder. They consider the universe an extension of Earth, and want space explorers to be politically correct pacifists and environmentalists.
O’Neillians take their name from Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill (1927 - 1992), who imagined city-size colonies in space contained on vast, rotating platforms (think of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its spinning rings and artificial gravity). Getting people out of here en masse was the thingâ€â€not to kiss Earth good-bye in the rearview mirror, but to give it a chance, by consuming extraterrestrial rather than terrestrial resources. (An O’Neillian motto, riding a bumper sticker of his day, read: “Save Earth: Develop Space.â€Â)
Von Braunians are, strictly speaking, the old guard, named for the V-2 and Saturn rocket-meister Wernher von Braun (1912 - 1977). Von Braunians advocate a centralized approach: large expensive projects like the ones NASA undertakes, projects that ordinary people can be proud of but not participate in.
In a nutshell: Saganites say, Look but don’t touch; O’Neillians, Do it yourself; von Braunians, We’ll do it for you.
Saganites are about indulging our sense of awe. They believe all space races we can imagine now are just tune-ups for the real eventâ€â€which will happen when we discover, through SETI, or planet-hunting interferometry probes, evidence of probable intelligent life. Saganites would like to see humanity develop international space treaties, to view space as a common resource.
O’Neillians are about free enterprise, manifest destiny and everyone’s right to a piece of the private-entry-to-LEO pie. They believe space is fair game for development.
Von Braunians are about national prestigeâ€â€NASA’s very reason for being, and surely the biggest single driver of space-faring to date. When Kennedy announced Americans would be first to the Moon, when Nixon signed off on the space shuttle program, when Reagan OK’d the space stationâ€â€they were all serving up old Wernher, wrapped in Old Glory.
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Yes, NovaSilisko gave me his old code. I used it as a skeleton for developing my mod's plug-in. However, I had to change so many things that very little of it is left.
The plug-in contains all the mechanics for the Orion: moving the pusher plate, applying the impulse from each bomb blast to the vessel, that sort of thing.
Using my plug-in, and the notes in the readme file, anybody who can create 3D models could make their very own Orion parts, and link them to my plug-in with the part.cfg file.
NovaSilisko was in the process of doing that, making his own marvelous Orion parts. Naturally he was running into trouble, since the mod's author (me) was a rank novice at KSP, C#, Unity3D, and Kerbal mods in general (still am, actually). After making us all salivate by showing us his ultra-sexy Orion, NovaSilisko went on vacation, where he undoubtedly has better things to do than fix the Orion mod.
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Can a mod be any more Kerbal than this? Love it.
A great way to experiment with technologies we'll probably never see. Also a great way to get those high part count ships to orbit. Here is the experimental Ion Flair Mk I, I forget the total part count but with over 450 Ion engines you can imagine the rest.
The Ion Flair series is so environmentally friendly and earns so many environmental credits that an atomic lift stage is not so much justified as it is mandated.
Great Galloping Delta Vee!!! Look at the size of that monster!
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In that case, the main thing I have too look out for is too fine a granularity. For example, the Orion had 2MN magazines and 3.5MN magazines (for historical authenticity reasons). As it turned out, nobody was really using the 2MN magazines (with a couple of notable exceptions), so they were wasted parts just clogging up memory (blasted textures were 3 megs apiece).
So I have to choose my atomic engines such that they have thrust and specific impulse sufficiently distinct from each other.
I am tempted to make the nuclear lightbulb more cinematic. In the real design one cannot actually see the lightbulb through the engine bell, but I think it would be much more visually interesting to be able to see it glowing in all its radioactive fury.
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Nyrath: This is an awesome mod. I've been an Atomic Rockets fan for a while and it's fun to finally take ol' Boom-Boom out for a test drive.
Minor Suggestion: Orion-Class RCS thrusters. Even if you only load up with the smallest of the magazine selections, the ship turns like a beached whale even with the Kilowatt Rocketry RCS packs. Could you add some souped up RCS thrusters to the pack to allow a more nimble turn rate?
Major Suggestion: I'd love to see this turn from just an Orion Mod to an Atomic Rockets mod. An NSWR or gaseous core coaxial NTR could drag the Kerbals straight into the future of the 1950s. Taking the Polaris to Duna and back on a single stage would be pretty awesome.
Thank you for your kind words.
Hmmm, I'll have to look into super jumbo RCS. Which will probably need super jumbo monopropellant tanks.
Yes, I had been toying with the idea of more ferocious atomic rockets. Nuclear lightbulb, gas core, all that. And a NSWR if I want to go full-Jebidiah on my mod-making. Again my main concern is breaking the game. With those monsters, who wants to play around with piddling chemical rockets?
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Oh i thought the magazine parts would actually become one.
Alas, they become separate parts linked by ConfigurableJoints. But as far as the physics engine is concerned, they are still separate parts.
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I thought the Small magazines would actually fuse to solve the wobble problem?
I do not think they are talking about the wobble problem. It is my understanding that in KSP the frame rate will rapidly degrade if the part-count of the ship becomes too high.
Yes, maybe you could have just two larger magazines.The first one with small, medium and large nukes in it.
The second one with extra large, enormous and humongous.
They could also carry more of each type of nuke. Each magazine would still weight more, but you reduce the part numbers in the VAB and on the rocket.
The good news is that with KSP 0.20 it is now easy to make multiple parts that share the same model and/or textures. I did a quick test, just by changing the part.cfg file a bit I made two multi-magazines appear in the VAB catalog.
The bad news is that making one magazine part containing multiple nuke types will be tricky. Currently the magazine and the magazine handler code assumes only one nuke type per magazine.
Increasing the number of nukes in a multi-magazine is doable, but I have to be careful. Increasing the mass of a part but not increasing the volume has the effect of increasing the part's density. And for whatever reason the KSP physics engine does not handle dense parts very well, the physics break and strange things happen.
I'll have to experiment.
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I've got to ask though, is there a possibility that the many different magazines will get their own version of the multimagazine?
The thing is all the little magazines quickly turn into hundreds of parts (at least for me, since, well, I build cruisers with the thing.)
and my computer doesn't like it when ksp tries to load more than around 300 parts.
I'll see what I can do. I think it is possible to make multi-part part.cfg files. The main issues are
[1] not having to re-use the texture for each multi-magazine, since the blasted texture file is 3 megabytes! KSP's ram usage is tight enough as it is
[2] clogging up the VAB catalog
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Not to much please.No! NOOOOOOO!!!
Please don't.
The nays have it.
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Idle thought: should I make it so if the throttle is in the red zone, the pusher plate will tend to overheat and explode?
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Ooh that looks nice. Did you change the pusher plate animation at all? It looks faster and less smooth than I remember it being.
Yes, I had to.
In the engine part.cfg file are values for detonationDelay. In the two engines I supply, the shortest delay is 0.8 seconds between bomb detonations.
This means that the animation has to take no longer than 0.8 seconds.
Before, the only thing the animation had to do in 0.8 seconds is make the pusher plate move up and down. Now it has to animate the bomb drop AND the pusher plate movement in 0.8 seconds. So the pusher plate animation is faster and less smooth.
In order to simplify the code, I have the 0.8 seconds divided into five equal sections: bomb drop, plate from neutral to full up, plate from full up to neutral, plate from neutral to full down, plate from full down to neutral. I might have to try and make the bomb drop section shorter. Of course that will make the bomb drop less smooth.
Now all you need is a better explosion animation.The only way I know to make an explosion is by calling FXMonger.Explode(). I'm open to a better animation, but the documentation is sparse. Understandably so, the Dev's priority is making the game work and implementing features, documentation is secondary.
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I'm still trying to make resources work.
In the meantime, my only successes are silly stuff like animating tiny bombs dropping. Why does everything take so long?
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...you must spread some reputation around before giving it to Tommygun again...
These images are classics!
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As we speak, NASA is working on these 'warp drives' which, according to them, could accelerate anything with mass to the speed of light. Not just the speed of light though, they also claim that they can accelerate anything with or without mass to 10x the speed of light! How is this possible?
No, that is the entire point. Relativity makes it impossible to accelerate anything with a rest mass to the speed of light. So the warp drive does not accelerate the ship to the speed of light.
Instead it accelerates a bubble of space to a speed faster than light. The ship is stationary inside the bubble, as far as relativity is concerned. And nothing in relativity says you cannot accelerate a patch of space faster than lightspeed.
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Umm, how old is the version of the Orion engine your using??? I've tried Orion Versions 0.14 and 0.15, they keep saying I'm missing a USAFOrionmag1kt2mn part.....
The NR280 is from the Nucleonics ltd. stockalike pack(NOT included in the Fatman pack), and the CL.Large.TripleFueltank From the KSPX or kerbal stock part expansion mod.....
Other than the USAFOrionmag1kt2mn I'm not missing any of the parts you listed.....
USAFOrionmag1kt2mn was removed from Orion 0.14. (the 2MN magazine is practically the same as the 3.5MN magazine, and the blasted texture file is 3 megs)
You can find it in version 0.13 here:
http://ubuntuone.com/44qIfp6I86yoWzHtAwNW1b
sorry for the trouble
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I ran into a bug last night trying to return to Eve. Any time I activated Mech Jeb's (2.0.8 i think) landing autopilot from orbit, it disabled the Orion. As in shut it off and clicking on it no longer brought up the menu to turn on and off various magazines. It would remain disabled until I shut off MechJeb and switched to the space center or another craft, and then back.
Trying to think what was different about this ship:
(1) Maybe this is the first time I've done something so insane as to try and land it from orbit with MechJeb? I know I've tried using MechJeb for final landing before with the Orion, with often hilarious/tragic results. Just a touch more thrust before we land *boom* . . . anyway that didn't shut down the Orion.
(2) This is the first ship where I've used the action groups with Orion, an action group to shut off all magazine types.
(3) That ship had an unnecessarily huge part count -- I was just throwing things together to see what worked. It did get to Eve, but very slowly with the game crashing once.
That's about it . . . if I get time later (a big if as to when that might happen) I'll try it on more basic ships and see if I can narrow it down.
Thanks for the report, let me know the results of your narrowing. Sorry you are having trouble.
Now, did MechJeb ever work with Orion? One of my major bugs is that since Orion does not use a resource, it is invisible to MechJeb and others. The delta V appears as zero. I'm still trying to figure out how to spoof MechJeb.
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If anyone would like the .craft file for my Science fiction-ish Orion ship, there's a download and used mods list over here.
Thanks!
Is there a download link for the .craft file?
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and Markarian421 turned in this tour de force:
https://plus.google.com/101042352076384750112/posts/QNNZP3Rys4Q
Landing on Eve was routine.
Lifting off was anything but.
Eve's dense atmosphere prevented the nose from pointing skyward. The ship almost flipped over and augured in. He had to panic start the liquid fuel engines and fight to get the nose up.
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I did one to Eve, that was fun. Got a few screenshots of that lying about somewhere.
I'm running out of superlatives! That was wonderful! And yes, the re-entry shaders do look quite nice.
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I've been building some Science fiction-ish ships lately, and I decided to take a crack at a "more reasonable" Orion drive spacecraft in that same style.
I haven't named it as of yet, and don't really plan to use it for anything, it's a slideshow even just sitting in space.
I has 3 6m long hangars for landers or spaceplanes with Large docking ports at either end, anything I loaded into them would come with some sort of sub docking gantry,
It also carries six greenhouse modules, to ease supply burden and to give its sixteen kerbals a relaxing green space to float in while not on duty.
Yow! That is one serious spacecraft. Lookit all the hangar bays. I like it!
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Were 8000 tons not enough?
Yes, as I said "there has been a bit of that". Your have done more than your fair share of pushing the envelope, others should see what they can do in the realm of heavy lift.
Orion aka "Ol' Boom-boom"
in KSP1 Mod Development
Posted
That is a truly amazing vessel! I am most impressed!
Ah, you mean dock the bomb tender to the big ship and pump the bombs from one to the other? Yes, I am still trying to figure out how to do that, I want it as well. Trouble is that bombs are not quite like resources, and the documentation is sketchy. But that does have a high priority.
Oh, dear. I'm sure the explosion blinded most of the Kerbals on the hemisphere facing the vessel.