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allista

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  1. allista
    I'm sorry, but the wiki is somewhat out of date I've removed many things, the concentrator being among them, when I was reviving/upgrading the Hangar to work with KSP-1.2+. Currently, since the Ore is a stock resource and the stock asteroid drills mine it as is directly from asteroids, the Hangar's Asteroid Drill does the same: you get the Ore right away, without the step of enriching it from the ground rock.
  2. allista
    Once again I need your opinion/advices I'm currently developing the requested boiloff/active-cooling system. I've tried to just use the one from the CryoTanks, but soon understood that I want something more physically realistic (as usual). So I've added some simplified thermodynamics: like in the ModuleCoreHeat, the part is "divided" into the part per se and the "Core", i.e. the mass of the resource surrounded by insulation, which limits heat transfer between the two. This allows to have, say, a tank with the H2 at 20K attached to a probe core that should operate above -20C, or to a water tank. This also lowers the boiloff rate that, otherwise, is over the roof, as without insulation the whole ship is actually cooled. This works perfectly, responding to external temperature changes and part heating; even the catching-up (after some time spent with some other craft) does not causes any trouble. The active cooling is more difficult. The cooler watches at the temperature of the resource, and if it's above a threshold, pumps the excess energy to the part's skin, using some EC to do the work (I've modelled it as a non-ideal cooling Cranet cycle). So it eats EC and heats the part. But many other factors affect part's temperature, and the ship may have different generators to produce EC, often at expense of some other resources. Thus, to do the catching-up, I need to implement some kind of a hack, e.g. to first measure the actual EC/temperature change rates during normal operation, then apply them during a catch-up. This works when there's only one active cooler in the ship, and no other mod try to do the same thing. Another option is to not touch anything except the resource temperature (which is internal to this mod). This will produce a non-realistic discontinuity of operation, but at least it will be in tune with the basic KSP. So, how would you feel about an active cooling system that cools the resource, but does not heat the ship up or consume electric charge while the ship is unloaded (e.g. you're at KSC, or working with other ships far away)? As for the figures, I've tried to tune the insulation so that the boiloff rate is about that of the CryoTank's 0.05% per hour. The energy consumption of the cooling system is currently 3/5 times lower (about 3 EC/s to cool the Jumbo of LqdHydrogen), but it is also heavier than CryoTanks, so I guess it's ok.
  3. allista
    Wow, what a beauty! Yes, Stop/Anchor (and any other autopilot) use the Collision Prevention System (CPS). It doesn't matter if you're using hover or just vertical velocity control. But, in "advanced" pane you have the CPS switch that toggles the collision avoidance. Thanks, I'll look into it!
  4. allista
    Not so. You just don't need the animator module and AnimatorID field in the Hangar's configuration. Then the "gates" will be always in the opened state.
  5. allista
    No, KSPIE fuels (except liquid hydrogen) are not yet supported, but as @NeuroticGamer mentioned, adding this support is simple and straightforward, so you can do it faster than I probably will. See at the patches that are already included in the mod. Also, TCA does not require Configurable Containers at all. It depends only on AT_Utils,
  6. allista
    Ah, now I understand! Unfortunately, this bad behaviour is expected: the dropdown list was made by some David Tregoning a while ago; it uses a hack to prevent click-throughs when it is opened. That same hack prevents the proper use of scrolling. I've tried to think something up, but couldn't solve it. If it's a big issue in your game I'll just switch from dropdown list to a plane scrollview embedded in the main window.
  7. allista
    Hm... the main download site is (and will be as long as it exists) the SpaceDock. I've updated GitHub releases last time because SpaceDock was having temporary troubles.
  8. allista
    How come?! Have I missed your bugreport somewhere? I never knew there was such problem. And never encountered it...
  9. allista
    I don't know what mod this icon belongs to. If there's no TCA icon in any of the toolbars, TCA is not installed properly, because even when TCA is inactive the "TCA MAN" icon should always be visible in all scenes. So you're probably missing the AT_Utils. Try to download and reinstall the mod from SpaceDock: http://spacedock.info/mod/198/Throttle Controlled Avionics/download/3.2.3 If that won't help, I will need to see the logs to know what's happening. If I'm not mistaken, in the OP video the landing was performed on an island on Kerbin. So if you have enough fuel and control authority, TCA should land you within 100m of the target, whether it is on Mun, Duna or Kerbin. If you're trying to land a standard rocket lander (no RCS, single engine, parachutes) TCA will do its best, but in that case safety goes first, so don't expect too much accuracy. And I should emphasize, that in the course of several last versions the Deorbit Autopilot was greatly improved (as was the game itself, by the way ). So I strongly recommend you to upgrade at last. I never tested it with DR, but the solution to this would be simply to land from low orbit (as it's supposed to be done anyway). In that case you wouldn't have much vertical velocity upon deorbiting, and the deorbit burn itself will kill much of the horizontal velocity. In my tests TCA flies (and lands) with FAR pretty well; the same landing as shown in this video was performed with FAR many times with the same result. That's because TCA relies more on real-time adaptation than on pre-calculated solutions.
  10. allista
    Configurable Containers v2.3.1 for KSP 1.2.1 (2016.11.13) ChangeLog:
  11. allista
    Hangar v3.1.0 for KSP 1.2.1 (2016.11.13) ChangeLog:
  12. allista
    TCA v3.3.0 for KSP 1.2.1 (2016.11.13) ChangeLog:
  13. allista
    You can disable T-SAS by clicking on the currently active T-SAS mode button. Unless the "Auto" mode is on, in which case some autopilot is using T-SAS, and you need to disable all autopilots running. TCA autopilots cannot use stock SAS.
  14. allista
    There's the stock MODULE for this -- ModuleFuelJettison. It does not require any configuration and adds the abovementioned right-click action to the part menu. So there's no need to reimplement it in CContainers; and the decision about adding it to a particular tank I'll leave to the part/patch makers (Squad, for instance, decided to omit it from fuel tanks).
  15. allista
    Yep, that too is fixed in dev branch. I'm very sorry I'm still not able to publish. Too much work right now
  16. allista
    Yea, I know the figures. The difference is, those tanks have no cooling systems, they were not meant to live longer than few tens of minutes from liftoff. When I implement the boiloff I could make two cryogenic tank types: long-term with cooling and short term that will hold on sheer heat capacity of the fuel mass. Yet again, I don't know what's best here. So I'll stick to Cryotanks for now...
  17. allista
    TANKTYPE:NEEDS[TacLifeSupport|USILifeSupport] //arb { name = Food UsefulVolumeRatio = 0.95 //cargo needs additional fixation and compartmetalization TankCostPerSurface = 2 //pressurized AddMassPerVolume = 0.003 PossibleResources = } @TANKTYPE[Food]:NEEDS[TacLifeSupport] { @PossibleResources ^= :$: Food 0.8;: } @TANKTYPE[Food]:NEEDS[USILifeSupport] { @PossibleResources ^= :$: Supplies 0.8;: } @TANKTYPE[Food]:NEEDS[KolonyTools] { @PossibleResources ^= :$: ColonySupplies 0.8;: } Needs to be like this.
  18. allista
    Thank you for the advices! When I first began to develop this controller I did made a sandbox. But then things got too complicated: in some cases what worked in the sandbox did not in the game, so I needed to make it more and more complex to mirror KSP's inner working. In the end I figured I don't want to spend so much time for reimplementing KSP code in python, especially when each game update could break it. So now I'm somewhere in-between: I gather statistics in-game, plot it, feed into several models and try to figure out what causes yet another excitation (the main problem with this controller). The idea of gain scheduling, though it seems harder to implement, is very appealing. To be honest, if not for your post, I, for the lack of knowledge, would've started to fit a simple neural network there; either to tune PID, or instead of the PID itself And cascading is also a thing to consider... Thanks! I will of course watch from the beginning; if my university taught me anything, it's the value of systematic learning.
  19. allista
    Well, this dry mass comes from here (arrow): TANKTYPE:NEEDS[WarpPlugin|KolonyTools|NearFuturePropulsion|CryoEngines|zzz_CryoTanks|FFT] { name = Cryogenic UsefulVolumeRatio = 0.9 TankCostPerSurface = 500 AddMassPerVolume = 0.85 <= PossibleResources = } I honestly thought that cryogenic tanks should be heavier than high-pressure gas ones (active cooling, passive cooling, all that stuff), and they have 0.74 t/m3 of additional mass as calculated from stock parts. The stock parts themselves and more or less all the mods are unbalanced; between them and with mother Nature The only thing I can say here: let's role-play and say that the CryoTank is so high-tech and specialized that it manages to be so light, while the equipment provided by CContainers to convert a generic volume to cryostorage is heavy. D'you have any better ideas? Thanks! Fixed.
  20. allista
    It's not actually tweakscaled, it's from stock parts; this was just a way to describe it visually.
  21. allista
    Super! So, the basic problem is this: attitude error (for pitch, roll and yaw) => PID (one for each dimension) => control input (pitch, roll, yaw) Static PID parameters will, of course, work for only a limited set of vessels (if not for a single one), so dynamic adjustment is needed to adapt to arbitrary moments of inertia, available torque and engine types (instantaneous thrust change, or some hysteresis). Another issue is that the target attitude may continuously change, providing a degree of unpredictability of the attitude error. Currently, by trial and error I have concocted an attenuation algorithm that manages quite well (judging by TCA's performance), but it's pure alchemy! More than a dozen manually tuned numeric coefficients to strap together all the parameters of different scale and dimensionality. But. It all fails in (at least) one particular case: big, bad, heavy VTOL on large jets. Remember the Mk2-based small jet VTOL drone that I use in many of the videos (including the last one)? Imagine tweakscaling it 2-3 times. So, numerically, all should work: it has ~same angular acceleration around the axes, same response times of the engines. But where the small one flies flawlessly, this thing goes into self-excitation, producing ever-increasing oscillations resulting in overflipping. I'm beating meself against this for three days now and can't figure out what the hell happens. I understand that for any real help you'll need particulars, but I thought an overview would also help.
  22. allista
    Sure, I'll cook something up Meanwhile, does someone have an expertise in control theory? I have a problem with dynamic PID tuning for attitude control
  23. allista
    Yes, it should be possible using the Follow Path macro with the For or While loop macro.
  24. allista
    What's the problem with CKAN?
  25. allista
    But they all have LFO counterparts which do have tank managers in them.
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