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[1.0.4] Maritime Pack - 0.1.4


Fengist

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Nobody has commented in a while............

Sorry about that. I've taken a few days off from modding to kinda clear the brain a bit. And thank you VERY much for the donation. Hopefully, if everyone likes the next pack well enough, a new hard drive will be on the horizon. To answer your previous question about what that donation gets you...

Though I've taken a small break, rest assured, the next pack is still being actively developed and even though I haven't been painting pixels, the ideas just won't leave my head. Here's a preview of what's to come.

For some reason, sketchfab doesn't like flags. The sides of the cargo bridge have the window lighting texture overlaying where the flag should be.

One the the first things you'll notice is the new texture. I've finally gotten it applied to the RoRo and the Helo stern. The RoRo will need a bit of touchup on the Plimsoll line. I tried to copy it from another texture and it looks pretty bad. I'll redo it so it has it's own.

Next you'll notice the engines changed on the Helo Stern. That's because the hard mounted engines have been removed. Those are two new surface mount engines. I figured it was about time, since basic testing seems to be complete, that you decided how much power and thrust your ships needed, not me. With those engines, the powered clipper stern will vanish and no longer be in the pack. You will have the rounded stern though to mount engines to. Both the rounded and the helo stern will lose their fuel tanks. If you want to keep the look of the pack, you'll need to use the Clipper hull LF.

With this change comes a major problem, a brick wall that seems to be insurmountable with stock physics. I had been reading in another thread that attempts to exceed 125m/s on water ended rather abruptly. I can safely say I have found the same problem. With the new engines you'll be able to go as fast as you want. Though I'm leaving crash tolerances where they are, reaching 125m/s won't be a problem. Exceeding it will. Every time I've hit exactly 125m/s, things have promptly ripped off the hull bringing me back under 125m/s.

And I can fully understand why this hard limit exists. For those of us still on the imperial system, 125m/s=279.617mph. The current record for water speed on our planet is 141.9 m/s (317 mph). Many of those attempting to break water speed records have lost their lives when the boats utterly disintegrated.

So, with the next pack, you will be able to reach that hard limit. Doing so will have it's consequences.

Another minor change is a rework of the RoRo animation. I've reduce the angle on the ramp. It won't lower quite as far as before. Since most beach landings will be at an up angle the ramp will still sit at or below the surface, just not as far.

So, the status is: Only one hull piece still needs to have the new texture applied, the Foc'sle Bow. There's still one part for the paddlewheeler that needs to be completed, a promenade that will attach to any of the lower deck sections and give it a 'rounded' appearance and provide a smooth transition from the walkways to the clipper decks. Right now, it's a straight drop for the Kerbals to walk over. While they do it, it just doesn't look right. I still need to determine how the new steam system is going to finally function and that's just a matter of editing cfg files. Once those things are complete a check of all parts to make sure they do what I intend, that their textures aren't too large and applying any changes needed to fix things should finish up the next release.

Hopefully, I say hopefully, in the next week all of this should be done.

One of the other things that's slowing me down is Windows 10. I upgraded from Win 7 32 bit to Win 10 32 bit. One of the consequences of that is reduced ram available for apps. I had my Win 7 set up to allow 3 gigs of ram for apps. Win 10 32 bit promptly reset that to 2 gigs and damned if I can remember how to put it back. I get maybe 5 or 6 launches with KSP before it crashes. I've installed Win 10 64 bit on an old 75gb IDE drive but now I need to get all my apps installed and working with it.

So, after that is taken care of and the next pack releases, then I begin work on a tweakscale config file.

That's the status.

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Is it compatible with better buyoancy?

AFAIK yes.

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http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/443954483439294815/FDE4081CD69A420F7A6534AB6A149A7B2C95279E/

The slowest drive-by in history. 400 tons of pure FREEDOM!

I love this mod... it's easily moddable and easy to use. The hull parts here are 2x the normal size and work well for cruisers/battleships/carriers and possibly cargo ships too.

The only problem I have is that the BDArmory guns are too heavy for the ships and usually capsize them... but I solved that by placing many bitts on the bottom hull of the ships. Add a few blisters after that and the ships are A-OK.

Looking forward to future updates! :D

The things you guys come up with just amaze me. Glad to see my parts are being used creatively.

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I'm loving the idea behind this pack, however I'm having a couple of small issues. I have this mod installed via CKAN so assumed everything would run smoothly. For some reason the "bitts" arent in game, and I can't access any right click menus on parts for condensing water etc in order to make the bitts and blisters work. Any idea's what could be causing this? From what I can see, I don't have any mods installed that could conflict with it, but I'm not 100%,

On another note, will this become tweakscale compatible as I'd love to be able to scale the part sizes to build bigger ships!

I haven't looked at the CKAN pack. I can tell you this though, it was pulled directly from KerbalStuff. CKAN periodically checks KerbalStuff and adds it's listings to their pack. So if it works on KerbalStuff, it should also work via CKAN. If right click menus aren't showing up then (I hate to do this because every IT guy will say this) it's not the fault of Maritime Pack. The right clicks are hard coded into KSP. The only right click menus that aren't fully hard coded are the engines which include items from Firespitter. If the Bitts aren't included then that's not a Maritime release or your copy of KSP is not finding them. Make sure they're in the GameData directory. If they are, check the log file and see if you can find why they're not loading.

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Is it possible to make submarines in this mod?

A few pages back I discussed the issues with subs. While it's not off the table, it's teetering on the edge.

Edited by Fengist
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Just got to realizing that many of you may be questioning my sanity, mixing paddlewheel boats with aircraft... Well, I thot I'd offer you definitive proof that I'm not the first to come up with this hair brained idea. The amazingly daft and infinitely creative U.S. government apparently beat me to this wild punch.

I present the SS Greater Buffalo, a paddlewheel Great Lakes passenger steamer before... and after it's transformation into the USS Sable. Yes, a paddlewheel aircraft carrier. And to prove that they really meant to do that and this wasn't just some stupid engineering glitch, they made a second one, the USS Wolverine.

To quote wikipedia "Together, Sable and Wolverine trained 17,820 pilots in 116,000 carrier landings. Of these, 51,000 landings were on Sable alone. One of the pilots qualified on Sable was a 20-year-old Lieutenant, junior grade, future president George H. W. Bush. Both the USS Sable and the USS Wolverine hold the distinction of being the only fresh water, coal-driven, side paddle-wheel aircraft carriers used by the United States Navy."

So, there is your proof. Both the US government and I, have completely lost our minds... not that that's a bad thing.

094608118.jpg

1280px-USS_Sable_%28IX-81%29.jpg

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Just got to realizing that many of you may be questioning my sanity, mixing paddlewheel boats with aircraft... Well, I thot I'd offer you definitive proof that I'm not the first to come up with this hair brained idea. The amazingly daft and infinitely creative U.S. government apparently beat me to this wild punch.

I present the SS Greater Buffalo, a paddlewheel Great Lakes passenger steamer before... and after it's transformation into the USS Sable. Yes, a paddlewheel aircraft carrier. And to prove that they really meant to do that and this wasn't just some stupid engineering glitch, they made a second one, the USS Wolverine.

To quote wikipedia "Together, Sable and Wolverine trained 17,820 pilots in 116,000 carrier landings. Of these, 51,000 landings were on Sable alone. One of the pilots qualified on Sable was a 20-year-old Lieutenant, junior grade, future president George H. W. Bush. Both the USS Sable and the USS Wolverine hold the distinction of being the only fresh water, coal-driven, side paddle-wheel aircraft carriers used by the United States Navy."

So, there is your proof. Both the US government and I, have completely lost our minds... not that that's a bad thing.

http://www.navsource.org/archives/09/46/094608118.jpg

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/USS_Sable_%28IX-81%29.jpg/1280px-USS_Sable_%28IX-81%29.jpg

Except that it looks like the paddlewheels were removed during the retrofit, so they are former paddlewheel ships rather than combo. Unless the paddles are internal or something.

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yes, you wouldn't want to expose your main source of propulsion :P

They kept the paddles and as a matter of fact, there was no armor or armament at all on those ships. They didn't need it since their training consisted of sailing about a mile off of the Chicago harbor, launching, landing and returning. They were completely fresh water. Some called them the Corn Belt Fleet. Their sole purpose was to get crew and pilots their carrier qualifications without tying up one of the big CVA's.

According to wiki, their biggest problem was they couldn't generate enough speed to get wind over the deck on calm days so they had to wait for windy days.

Edited by Fengist
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Also i made for myself some one piece floats in Wings3D, but they don't mirror properly as one is always upside down. And while i actually now recall reading about this, it means i have to split the model up and give each part an attachment node :(

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I voted for something different. I would like to see grey boat parts so i can build a more militaristic ship t go with BD armory. I would also like a central hull section with a 5 by 5 meter hole to put cruise missiles for A vertical launch system

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I voted for something different. I would like to see grey boat parts so i can build a more militaristic ship t go with BD armory. I would also like a central hull section with a 5 by 5 meter hole to put cruise missiles for A vertical launch system

While battleship grey might be doable in the future a 5x5 hole might be a problem with the clipper hull. It's length is exactly 5 meters. One thing to keep in mind, adding grey texture means more memory usage. Whether you actually use a part or a texture or not, it's loaded into ram. Rather than use Firespitters texture swapping, I can only see it being doable as a separate pack.

Edited by Fengist
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Problem: I want to build a base on lathe, naturally it will be at the equator. However, the only source of MetalOre I can find is at the poles.... So I load up two 5M Kontainers between your pieces. (strangely, the joints on your stuff don't seem to be holding). I have the kontainers at maybe 1/5 capacity, and I have 15 of your bouyancy thingies under it. The main hull is a standard 1:8, beam:length, three masts, I have the outriggers too. At its current load, the deck is barely 2mm above the waterline... I wanted the best fiziks I could get so I have better Bouyancy and Ferram installed. also: IT NEEDS A KEEL!!!! K E E L !!!! Otherwise steering the damn thing is hopeless. =P

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Problem: I want to build a base on lathe, naturally it will be at the equator. However, the only source of MetalOre I can find is at the poles.... So I load up two 5M Kontainers between your pieces. (strangely, the joints on your stuff don't seem to be holding). I have the kontainers at maybe 1/5 capacity, and I have 15 of your bouyancy thingies under it. The main hull is a standard 1:8, beam:length, three masts, I have the outriggers too. At its current load, the deck is barely 2mm above the waterline... I wanted the best fiziks I could get so I have better Bouyancy and Ferram installed. also: IT NEEDS A KEEL!!!! K E E L !!!! Otherwise steering the damn thing is hopeless. =P

Steering boats always has and will be an issue with ksp, as the devs never intended us to use it as anything more than a splashy landing pad. Unfortunately while BB fixes some stuff it is mainly orientated towards making water NOT the most destructive force in the Kerbal Universe. And while it would be possible to make a keel shaped wing, if you rolled your ship on it's side, your ship would fly because of the amount of "Lift" required to make it hold a heading. Also you are carrying a lot of weight for a fairly small amount of boat as both those containers weigh about 13 tons, not to mention any other resources you are carrying and equipment. Just keep in mind that the game was never designed with proper water PHYSICS in mind.

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ok just wanted to say the carriers as they are, are too small... my custom K-14s can't land on the carriers and they're VTOLs. the carriers are just too small :/ tweakscale is a good starting point.

other than that i can't say anything bad about this.

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'hey again, I'm using AV-t1 winglets as my keels, and the ship performs quite satisfactorally... Here's the picture: 4Mn00z3.png

I've sailed over 250 km, and parked it in a harbor with a narrow entrance. The thing only went 23km under fuel, after that I had to cheat. =|

Edited by AlonzoTG
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Problem: I want to build a base on lathe, naturally it will be at the equator. However, the only source of MetalOre I can find is at the poles.... So I load up two 5M Kontainers between your pieces. (strangely, the joints on your stuff don't seem to be holding). I have the kontainers at maybe 1/5 capacity, and I have 15 of your bouyancy thingies under it. The main hull is a standard 1:8, beam:length, three masts, I have the outriggers too. At its current load, the deck is barely 2mm above the waterline... I wanted the best fiziks I could get so I have better Bouyancy and Ferram installed. also: IT NEEDS A KEEL!!!! K E E L !!!! Otherwise steering the damn thing is hopeless. =P

Try using the rudder in the parts pack. I have no problem steering even the largest ships with one or two rudders on the bottom. That and when the next pack comes out the engines will be surface mounts so you can add action group settings to manually reverse them. It will allow the boats to essentially spin in place with one thrusting forward, the other reverse.

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Good work! Maybe Tweakscale integration? I'd love to make aircraft carriers big enough to land large planes without increasing the part count...
ok just wanted to say the carriers as they are, are too small... my custom K-14s can't land on the carriers and they're VTOLs. the carriers are just too small :/ tweakscale is a good starting point.

other than that i can't say anything bad about this.

Yep, tweakscale is on the list right after I get the next release finished. The other option I'm working on is a catamaran adapter. Like many of the other parts, it'll snap onto the deck of the clipper and allow a second hull to be attached beside it.

Let me explain the difficulties I'm facing with this 'larger' boats plan.

  • Tweakscale will allow for larger boats, yes. But as these parts are scaled up, they begin to look less and less realistic.
  • Adding tweakscale support means the pack becomes dependent on yet another mod, something I'm desperately trying to avoid.
  • The more dependent the pack is on outside mods, the more memory it consumes and, not everyone will want to install these other mods.
  • If I choose to make larger hulls, this creates a need for a lot of new parts, which adds to the pack size.
  • The more parts I add, the more memory the textures consume.
  • Hull parts are now becoming some of the larger textures due to the fact many people want better textures.
  • Better textures = more memory consumption.

So, no matter which method I choose, it's going to be either more memory consumption or less realistic.

From the R&D department

With that though in mind, here's a pic from the R&D department.

CatamaranTest.jpg

This is a test of a catamaran adapter (the ugly blue thing). Like the CVE parts, it snaps onto the top of the clipper hull. It then allows a second hull to be attached in parallel.

The benefit of this method:

Relatively low part count. A new class of double wide ships and a CVL can both be created with only 6-7 new parts, most of them very low polygon count.

The downside:

There will be multiple connection nodes along the Y and Z axis. Since KSP only allows for connections to one of these nodes, creating ships that bend in the middle or wrong places will be a problem.

I hope this gives you guys an idea of some of the challenges I'm trying to sort out with the 'bigger ships' plan.

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Fengist, I have a minor request. No coding, no textures, no models, only on the forum.

Can you please edit the OP to include a link to the Tweakscale configs that someone posted a while back?

I can do that. I started a FAQ on the OP with a link to Jatwaa's tweakscale config file.

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In the beginning, I considered this option... a different hull for different fuels/cargo and even test designed a few. Here's the problem. This pack is destined to get big. If I keep adding parts and textures you may end up with a pack so large, you can't add planes and spacecraft. With that, I decided the best option to was to allow the surface attachment of other tanks and give them a fuel crossfeed. Essentially, you can take any fuel tank from most any mod or stock and surface attach them to the hull and then transfer fuel around.

While I do like the thought of dedicated cargo hulls, I'm trying to keep this pack so you don't have to delete your other mods in order to use it. For now, I have no immediate plans to add in dedicated cargo hulls.

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Hey Fengist, whats happening man? Been a bit quiet here of late, so it would be nice to hear from you ;):P

The reports of my death were highly exaggerated. Sorry, RL has intervened once again. IRL, I drive a school bus (yea, it's hard for me to believe too) and with the impending start of school, preparations have begun and thus, my time is temporarily limited. But it should free up a good bit more in the next week or so. Yes, another delay but rest assured, development continues. The only part that remains unfinished for the texture update is the Foc'sle and it's mostly done, just need to tweak the texture a bit. After that, a bit of testing and packaging and I hope like hell I can get this release out. I really want you guys to play with this paddlewheeler. IMHO it's pretty neat, but I'm biased.

Another big slowdown was switching over to 64bit Windows 10. Since my Win 7 was 32 bit, I'm having to reinstall every single program I use and that's quite laborious.

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http://i.imgur.com/LnP9043.png

I made a US-style submarine from WWII after I saw the USS Cobia at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum. Sadly It cannot submerge. I need a bigger compressed water tank. A conning tower part would be cool too.

USS Cobia:

http://www.wisconsinmaritime.org/typo3temp/pics/46a4f86ee8.jpg

I started a FAQ on the OP with a link to the question of submarines.

Edited by Fengist
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I discovered that even the most top heavy craft can be stable if you put a large steel plate radially on the bottom, like a keel, and then put a bunch of bitts on it. It will pull the boat upright, even if it's tipped over. It works better than putting the bitts on the deck, since that makes it want to flip. The bitts and keel don't explode, since they're below the water line.

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