Kurld

So as to atone, here is some gratuitous post-mission spam from STS-92:

Just install every mod on earth and then you're covered Seriously though, I feel this. One thing I'd love in KSP2 is some kind of in-game "warehouse" where you can go and get, for example, that one engine or the little greebley doo-dad you want from a part-pack and it will let you download and that one part and anything it absolutely depends on. And then you can use it without having to restart your game. For a game built around a modding community (everybody knows it's not the other way around, right?) this should be a first-class feature. </soapbox> </thread derailment>

Yeah the RMM SSMES seemed pretty weak when I switched to 2.5x scale. I think I tweaked the thrust in them a bit myself aside from scaling them down. I fool around with stuff so much I can't remember what all I've done, lol.

Rationale for this combo? I use the big orange tank from reDirect and the boosters from Photon Corp. The SSMEs are from RMM, but I had to get into the config and scale them down to make them look correct. I can't remember why I decided to use these and not the Rainstorm from reDirect. Maybe the FX looked better or something subjective. The ORANGES stuff looks really nice but I thought I'd give it a minute to breathe before trying it out.

It's funny, sometimes I think, hmmm maybe one day I'll try to solve this or that part and then a few days later turns out @benjee10 has already done it. Nice work, as always!

OK, cool I was just wondering if there was something else I was missing that would lead to transforms flopping around or other bad behavior. I am doing the adjustments to angles in degrees and then setting them back to quarternions after I'm done, which is what I think you're saying here. I was able to tweak the part I was messing with the way I wanted so maybe I've forgotten less of Blender than I thought. Thanks for your help!

That's fine; I understand your reasoning, for sure. I'll make it work, I'm sure. Good to know about rescaleFactor, though the way I tried to sort it was changing scale in the model node. Is that essentially the same thing? One thing I noticed is that the node2 on the boom did not move at all, so that approach won't work, anyway.

vs: Part of it is perspective being a little different and the fact that the picture of the real truss has the big mounting bracket, but I think you can see the boom is too long. It certainly doesn't fit into the shuttle bay without clipping really bad.

I'll get one up here in a bit. The dish is probably closer to being correct than 0.9. The boom hangs out way longer than it should when it is in "travel" position.

@benjee10 I wasn't sure whether to post this here or habtech2 thread, but I started working on STS-92 (Z1 truss) and noticed the SGANT boom and dish were kind of huge, especially when I tried to put the thing in the orbiter's payload bay. I'm using the beta parts as of last week sometime, I think, so if this is old news, forgive me. FWIW, I updated my config so that the dish is scaled to 0.9 in the model node, and the boom is scaled to 0.8. This makes it more or less resemble a photo I found of the thing being prepared for orbit at the SSPF (see https://g.co/arts/GCs5uoz8HfBwq9CF7).

Are you talking about the base between the rocket and the spacecraft? I'd imagine that would not be too much extra work, BUT I've barely thought about this beyond the point of thinking it might be something I'd like to tackle at some point. The main "real world" part of the way this thing works that I see maybe being a problem is that during an abort-escape the fairing splits along the plane of the bottom of the descent module, while in a normal "jettison the shroud" scenario it does the usual clamshell thing after the tower part has already left 45 seconds ago. I'm not sure I can imagine how to accomodate both scenarios unless there is some mechanism in the game to dynamically show and hide different parts of a mesh during flight and then you're probably back into writing a plugin DLL. It's been about six years since I wrote PEBKAC and I don't know what's possible.

Sounds like a lot of trouble and possibly you letting the majick smoke out of your Xbox drive. Why not just play the game on PC and cast it to your TV or something? I'm 90% sure all the data you'd be interested in is encrypted, besides.

The only way I've gotten the arm to be remotely useful is to figure out the "end pose" for each step and then program the transitions into the KAL-1000 controller and then let it move about as fast as it does in real life, which is barely at all... Figuring out the angles to get the arm to line up became a lot easier once I realized I needed to try to keep things at 30 and 45 and 60 and 90 degree angles as much as possible. If I can manage to get it close, like the end effector is lined up and within 10 cm of touching down on the PDGF I'll put up the essential bits of what I'm trying to hook up into a distant orbit around the sun; Like way out past the last planet.. this is to minimize the effect of rotational motion. Then I loosen the torque on all the motors to 0 or 1% and fiddle with the coupling forces to try and get stuff to "connect itself" as they will often kind of settle into "more comfortable" positions all by themselves. Then I tweak the values in the KAL controller with the new ones and try it again.. Usually after 2 or 3 (or 17) iterations and I can get the arm dead on the money so that when things connect and disconnect the station does not become Kraken food. When I'm happy that the motions are going to be relatively stable and will actually work to connect things, I'll send up a mission "for real." IRL, most of the station got assembled by the Canadarm 2 and that robot that slides back and forth along the truss. I guess I'm hoping Benjee10 gets us some more robot toys to play with in HabTech2 because otherwise, I'll be back to using tugs to build out most of it. As far as landing: I'm slowly homing in on deorbiting and arriving where I need to be to get to the KSC. I take notes and try to adjust. Last time I really just barely missed it. I might have actually been able to do a big bank and land like they do in real life, but I have barely any seat time landing the thing so I chickened out and decided just to coast on down and land and because I have that part of it down pretty well. I probably just need to spend a day or two reloading from a save in orbit and doing it over and over until I get it down.

All this was managed by parts from the SmartParts mod: a couple of timers and an altitude trigger. After I hit the ABORT button, I didn't have to touch anything except F1 to take screenshots. If I get more time to spend on this, I'll try to model a proper shroud and maybe work out a way to manage the various escape motors more like it works in real life. I wrote a plugin to manage all the multiple rocket engines for the Mercury/Apollo spacecrafts in the PEBKAC and BDB mods, but I think I will probably try to do it as a kOS script this time.

It's got plenty of umph now: The chute is kind of puny. I have it tuned for 25m/s, but it seemed to be moving a bit faster than that. Luckily, the retros fire and slow it down enough to get Jeb to his pancake breakfast. I don't know how fast these things move in real life, but hitting the solid ground at any speed is probably not much fun.

BLAST OFF! Wait! WHAT?!! I changed the angle on the tower thrustTransform from ~ 5 degrees off centerline to about .3 of a degree to keep it from flipping all over the place. It has more solid fuel which helps with the CoM and the grid fins work very well to keep it oriented prograde. The burn is probably a little long compared to what the tower motor provides in real life. I have no data, but suspect that the tower probably burns just long and hard enough to yank it off and away from the rocket. I think I've seen in pictures there are some smaller nozzles/motors that same cluster yaw/pitch it out of the way. The majority of the tower (the part below the rings) is presumeably where all the propellant is stored for the 4 nozzles that are down around the base, and I think these provide the vast majority of thrust. Enough to pull the real MS-10 quite far from the exploding rocket. I just added some small seperatron-type things there to help move things along as you will see in a later shot. Crusing along.. sure is quiet... 15 seconds after abort (I don't have a figure for real life) the LES carries the shroud and the orbital capsule away from the descent capsule. A few seconds later, a lot of stuff happens. Well two things.

Well since I can't seem to post a vid here are some screen captures. Here Jeb sits waiting for somebody to light the candles.

I may be conflating it with what I read about Orion a while back. I've got something rudimentary working but I can't seem to upload the video of it to imgur for some reason. Is there some size or time limit?

No. Though that can be annoying as well. There is a way to turn that off in windows under accessibility settings, if I remember right. What I'm talking about when you're playing the game and at some point your keyboard stops working to respond to directional or other commands. You can generally hit ALT+F12 and there is a menu under there where you can "clear all input locks" and restore it to working again. There is some kind of bitmask displayed there that is totally not helpful for letting you know why your keyboard stopped working. If you're hovering over the debug window itself, it will tell you that the debug window has locked your keyboard. This is to keep your console input from registering as WASD or whatever in the game. But it can happen at random times for no reason I can see. I'll try to grab a screenshot later.

So if I'm on Blender 2.83 it should work still? I installed all this morning and started messing around again after 4 years. When I import an engine mu and export it straight back (no changes to anything), it seems like it rotates the thrust transforms 90 degrees. Did I understand incorrectly that it would do the Y-up/Z-up translation automagically? Basically I'm trying to revise a mu so that the thrust transformed is aligned properly for the intended use. I think my workflow will be: Import .mu adjust errant thrustTransform object rotation so that it points where I want* select the root empty Export .mu file Which axis should be pointing in the direction of thrust? Y or Z? I think I can make the adjustments to the transform in eulers and then switch it back to quaternions? Is there anything else I need to do?

@deak That's essentially what I have working now. I didn't realize PF was still a thing (I last played much in 2016) since most people seem to include parts that leverage the stock way of building them. I found the KRE yesterday. The thrust transform on the tower is problematic (way too far off the Y axis compared to the expected CoM for the Soyuz underneath it). This makes pad aborts problematic because the escaping vehicle never gains enough altitude to deploy chutes in time. I'm fairly ignorant of the technical details about the LES in real-world (burn times, mass and TWR for various components, wet/dry CoM, etc). It looks like it might have some kind of active thrust vectoring to help steer the thing away from the LV and into a certain trajectory. The shroud is a separate animal. I'm not having much luck coming up with any documentation (in English, anyway). Making mods really gets in the way of actually playing the game, but I could not resist the challenge and loaded up Blender again this morning to see if I might tweak the thrust transform to be less heavy-handed.

@Jim123 That video was freaking awesome! Love the tribute stuff all over Columbia. I realize now I need to go ahead and install MLP. Your station looks really cool and I dig the amount of thought you put into it. Did you build it all in space? I started a "KSS" build and got as far as STS-102 before deciding to start over in a 2.5x rescale. So far I'm only back up to having docked Progress M1-3. But I did Unity/Zarya with the shuttle and kerboarm this time, so that felt rewarding. What do you use for the plume on the SRBs? Mine still look really vanilla. (I use the ones from Proton Corp.) Also: nice landing! So far I can barely manage to arrive within 100km of the KSC. Maybe it won't take me 200 flights to get good at it. I will give one piece of unsolicited advice: I loved the video, up until it started panning around the station, at which point I nearly hurled. Too much movement, too chaotic, too fast. I'm on the sensitive end of such things, so take that feedback with a grain of salt, or in my case, some pepto. Without some way to cue the viewer as to which way the camera is going to turn next, the pace around 4:00 is about as much movement as you should ever want/need. Also, when you're whipping around so fast like that, there's not enough time to really see (absorb) what you're trying to show off. The "closer" you are, the more you need to slow down. My opinion. I'm not trained in anything, so again, take it with some salt, I'm just sensitive to this kind of thing. The video was really cool and I appreciate your taking time to create and share it.

Is there some way to speed up the fins extending?

And why does it always seem to happen when the $#!^ hits the fan?

If it's like most stuff on Xbox, it won't work. The game files (everything really) about the Xbox file system is pretty much locked away and inaccessible. The fact that many of the best mods also include plugin code that needs to execute on the CPU would be another big hurdle, possibly insurmountable even beyond technical reasons (licensing, liability). Our best hope would be that someday M$ lets us stream from our PCs to our consoles, but I bet pigs will fly before that happens.