krystar

yea creating that dependecy on KAS isn't ideal for sure. what if the spacedock part has to be placed attached to a docking port part. and the spacebuilt part also has to be docking port part. then when you launch into space, u could find an empty spacedock docking port on the targeted dock and the attach on the two matching docking ports. the only question then is to make sure that the rotational configuration on the port allows the newly constructed vessel to exist without collision.

i have a dream of a shipyard where new ships are spawned at 100-500m. then a lander module with an attached KAS tow line undocks from the space station and RCS's over to the new ship and attaches the umbilical and starts pumping in fuel. if new ship don't have a docking ring or a fuel port, how are u gonna pump gas in ? heh

well u can do that already with docking ports. which is what they do IRL but i imagine yer thinking about doing in-space welding you should look into the KAS mod. there's a Part that you can detach from current vessel and attach onto target vessel using EVA mode. i'm looking at the source code now and he's doing some ray cast hit collision between cursor and target vessel. the actual attaching is done by part.Couple(targetVessel's part)

i think there was originally a suggestion either in this or another orbital shipyard thread that ships should be launched dry w/o fuel. so should probably calculate dry mass of tanks.

yea fryem that's the workaround for now heh. if we really wanted to super accurate, we'd calc the vessel mass minus all the stability enhancers. evilC, i added in case BuildMode.Build a foreach(p in vessel.parts)to do vessel.parts.Remove(p) for stability enh...but it seems like it just removed the part while on the launchpad and doesn't jump it into orbit. any idea why? how did you code it up?

i was thinking of changing mass to a object property and moving the determinemass to onAwake or onStart. it only needs to execute once since mass shouldn't change. wasn't sure what exactly those methods tie into on the unityengine. i know we've always said that spacebuilt vessels shouldn't have the stability enhancers..but i think we need to code in an option to strip the stability enhancer parts off of the vessel so to allow designing vessels that cannot hold together under 1g, but are fine in 0g. that's at least half of the reason why you would build a ship in an orbital shipyard instead of a terrestial one.

oh btw, OC_Warehouse is incorrectly categorized "Propulsion" instead of "Control" where everything else is

great mod. can i make a suggestion. instead of just a one way street, let's have both a construction and parts salvage. i always end up with extra lift engines and fuel tanks once i'm in orbit. how about the spacedock identifier part can also have an action to dismantle target ship if close enough. either a total dismantlment (with like say only 80% recoverable part weight) or if possible, you could take the ship model info, end its flight, save it into VAB for editing, then relaunch to space dock in its original position. if you want to be overly ambitious, seperate the propellant types vs actual hardware. but yea...2x 25ton parts module is a bitch to orbit.