[WIP][1.8.x] SSTULabs - Low Part Count Solutions (Orbiters, Landers, Lifters) - Dev Thread [11-18-18]

[tater]

I listened to a panel at an air force space meeting (youtube video) where Aerojet Rocketdyne and BO were both on the panel. The meeting was last week, I think, very recent. The RD-180 issue was specifically addressed. The AR guy said that they would be testing the AR-1 in a year or two at some level, and that they, like BO, didn't have a full-sized engine yet... the BO guy (not Bezos) interrupted, and pointed out that they have a full-size BE-4 in a test stand, right now, and they would be firing it in the next few weeks. I think that this is BO's contract to lose, frankly.

[Calvin_Maclure]

7 minutes ago, tater said:

I listened to a panel at an air force space meeting (youtube video) where Aerojet Rocketdyne and BO were both on the panel. The meeting was last week, I think, very recent. The RD-180 issue was specifically addressed. The AR guy said that they would be testing the AR-1 in a year or two at some level, and that they, like BO, didn't have a full-sized engine yet... the BO guy (not Bezos) interrupted, and pointed out that they have a full-size BE-4 in a test stand, right now, and they would be firing it in the next few weeks. I think that this is BO's contract to lose, frankly.

lol what?! Do you have that link?? The AR guy must've have felt pretty embarrassed... 

[blowfish]

AR-1 is looking more and more like a pork project without a purpose.  I am even skeptical of their claim that it would be a drop-in replacement for the RD-180 (or at the very least the rocket's payload capability would be significantly reduced since it's a lower performance engine).

[Temeter]

Never heard of the AR 1, seems to be like a concept that was originally offered as an SLS LFB?

Spoiler

 

 

Much smaller, though, 560kn vs the 4.150kn of the RD180. Needs a lot of upscaling, I wonder if they'll manage to keep the efficiency that high (although SL Isp is still 10 points lower).

 

Would be interesting to see, but I find it hard to believe that US' developed engines suddenly beat the 170-successors (US kerolex was always kinda weak and set aside). Maybe in price, but then again, this is old school rocketry industry, who generally don't do cheap. Seems a bit like a backup plan in case Blue Origin can't deliver. Mind, it's still a bit of a startup.

Edited April 12, 2017 by Temeter

[blowfish]

@Temeter 559.1 lbf = 2487 kN.  Two of them would have more thrust than the RD-180, but not a lot more (Aerojet Rocketdyne's plan to replace the RD-180; they also proposed an LFB for SLS with 3 pairs per booster).

Edited April 12, 2017 by blowfish

[Temeter]

28 minutes ago, blowfish said:

@Temeter 559.1 lbf = 248.7 kN.  Two of them would have more thrust than the RD-180, but not a lot more (Aerojet Rocketdyne's plan to replace the RD-180; they also proposed an LFB for SLS with 3 pairs per booster).

Oh, my mistake, confused the measurements. This way it actually fits the bill in terms of thrust. Btw, did you make a mistake with the comma? An RD 180 has 4.15mn thrust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180

Edited April 12, 2017 by Temeter

[blowfish]

1 minute ago, Temeter said:

Oh, my mistake, confused the measurements. Btw, did you make a mistake with the comma? An RD 180 has 4.15mn thrust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180

Yep, put a decimal point when I shouldn't have.  Fixed.

[Temeter]

Also had to find out lbf directly translates to pound force. Darn, those americans and their weird british systems not even the UK uses anymore. xD

Higher thrust makes the engine more interesting. Still a weird stopgap, not as a efficient as the 180, nor as groundbreaking as the BE-4 wants to be.

Edited April 12, 2017 by Temeter

[Shadowmage]

Slowly working through the back-log of stuff I've got WIP, finished off the geometry of the LMDE:

Mostly unwrapped already; few new meshes to unwrap, but nothing major (mostly piping, and those are easy).  Going to combine the LMDE and LMAE onto a single texture I think, likely a 256x or 512x.

Think I have the updated geometry finished for the MFT-D tanks (and soyuz nose-adapters).  Debating on if I want to keep the mounting plane straight or angled.  Neither is technically 'correct' as on the real R-7, the engines themselves are offset inside of the mounts; whereas I have modeled the mounts as being straight.  Hoping to finish up the textures on these throughout the week/weekend.

[Jimbodiah]

@regex  Make a Jupiter III   [click here]

[chaoseclipse01]

I seem to be having a small issue with the ISS inline Solar Panel (ST-GEN-DSP-ISS). I also have Kopernicus and Kerbol Star System installed as well.

For whatever reason, the solar panel absolutely refuses to align with Kerbol. I tried switching to different control points on my stations and none of them are working. The only place I can guess the panels are aligning to is The All, which is where my Radiators all want to seem to align to as well, and it's slightly annoying. It doesn't affect Electrical Generation however, I'm still getting the 132 EC/s I should be getting...but my station looks funny with 6 of these panels all rotated to where their tips are facing the sun as supposed to facing their broad-sides to the sun lol.

 

I figured I'd post this here first rather than go straight to GitHub, maybe I missed a fix for this issue, or that this is a known issue.

[Relitto]

this is probably a bad question, but why does sstu remove all the stock parts? is there a way i can use sstu with stock parts?

[ComatoseJedi]

4 minutes ago, Relitto said:

this is probably a bad question, but why does sstu remove all the stock parts? is there a way i can use sstu with stock parts?

There is an SSTU Optional folder has a .cfg to removes the stock elements that this mod replaces. You can either remove the .cfg file that removes the stock parts or remove the entire SSTU Optional folder.  

[Relitto]

2 minutes ago, ComatoseJedi said:

There is an SSTU Optional folder has a .cfg to removes the stock elements that this mod replaces. You can either remove the .cfg file that removes the stock parts or remove the entire SSTU Optional folder.  

thanks for the help!

[tater]

1 hour ago, Relitto said:

this is probably a bad question, but why does sstu remove all the stock parts? is there a way i can use sstu with stock parts?

After you use it a while, you'll forget how ugly the stock parts are. This prevents you from accidentally picking one, then throwing up a little.  

[Relitto]

5 minutes ago, tater said:

After you use it a while, you'll forget how ugly the stock parts are. This prevents you from accidentally picking one, then throwing up a little.  

i want stock parts so i can use my old crafts with sstu, instead of losing them because it says i dont have the required parts.

[tater]

I start a new save with new mods, so that hasn't happened to me, but yeah, that's a legit concern, I suppose  .

[Shadowmage]

22 hours ago, chaoseclipse01 said:

I seem to be having a small issue with the ISS inline Solar Panel (ST-GEN-DSP-ISS). I also have Kopernicus and Kerbol Star System installed as well.

For whatever reason, the solar panel absolutely refuses to align with Kerbol. I tried switching to different control points on my stations and none of them are working. The only place I can guess the panels are aligning to is The All, which is where my Radiators all want to seem to align to as well, and it's slightly annoying. It doesn't affect Electrical Generation however, I'm still getting the 132 EC/s I should be getting...but my station looks funny with 6 of these panels all rotated to where their tips are facing the sun as supposed to facing their broad-sides to the sun lol.

 

I figured I'd post this here first rather than go straight to GitHub, maybe I missed a fix for this issue, or that this is a known issue.

That would appear to be a Kopernicus problem, with the way they re-parent, re-order, and re-arrange the CelestialBodies.  Stock code (and stock-compatible code) expects CelestialBody[0] to always be the Sun (kerbol).  Kopernicus-enabled mods often re-arrange the CelestialBody array/list to put a black hole/other star at the center of the world.  Thus all radiators/solar panels align to whatever the new replacement body is (in your case, 'The All', whatever that is).

Essentially the solution to this needs to come through stock code.  There needs to be a way to specify the current 'main solar body' so that solar panels can look at it, and radiators can look away from it.  Until such a time as this is fixed in stock code there is little that I can do to properly solve the situation (there are some hacky workarounds, but I prefer to not use hacky stuff if at all possible, and even these work-arounds would not fix the problem in setups with multiple stars).

[ComatoseJedi]

18 minutes ago, Shadowmage said:

That would appear to be a Kopernicus problem

This is correct. I play on Half RSS and I noticed a good discrepancy between stock and the Half RSS system EC generation with the panels. Then I realized that "Hey, this is half of 93 million miles away than from the stock distance". Oh... now that makes sense.  

[Shadowmage]

2 hours ago, ComatoseJedi said:

This is correct. I play on Half RSS and I noticed a good discrepancy between stock and the Half RSS system EC generation with the panels. Then I realized that "Hey, this is half of 93 million miles away than from the stock distance". Oh... now that makes sense.  

Your particular problem is actually solvable -- there is a distance-setting in PhysicsGlobals that determines the effective solar power at various ranges.

float distMult = (float)(vessel.solarFlux / PhysicsGlobals.SolarLuminosityAtHome);

Now, the 'PhysicsGlobals.SolarLuminosityAtHome' is the value that I'm referring to, and it should be configurable through the stock config files, or possibly through Kopernicus (not really familiar with that one to know).  I'm not sure what the default values are for the stock system, or what the adjusted values should be for any given scale, but taking a peek at the existing configs should probably make it a bit clearer.

[ComatoseJedi]

14 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

Your particular problem is actually solvable

You know, that sounds like it would work wonders and you're awesome beyond a huge exploding brofist celebration, but I will stick to keeping it simple. If it's not generating enough EC, add more solar arrays. Eventually, I will get tired of doing so and add a reactor. Problem solved. But, it's generating enough EC to keep me happy.  And this is not your problem, because you are not building this mod for other solar system creations. You are building for stock. It's up to the creator of other systems to adjust your mod to their system. Which brings something to light when I used the SSTU Shuttle parts, the IVA is way back into the cargo bay. It may be my fault since I use an ASET driven IVA. But, it couldn't be that since you had configured the IVA to point to the one you made for your 7 Kerbal IVA. Just throwing that out there, in case you didn't know.  

[tater]

need any LR-87 images? Barely on topic, but took my son and his buddy to Atomic Museum today, and a Titan II is laying around.

Edited July 2, 2017 by tater

[organikarocks]

Whenever I place a part onto a node, it seems to bug out and doesn't place the object.  Any fix?

[blowfish]

45 minutes ago, organikarocks said:

Whenever I place a part onto a node, it seems to bug out and doesn't place the object.  Any fix?

Something is likely throwing an exception, but impossible to tell what just based on that (as is usually the case).  Please find and upload your log.  Instructions on how to do that are in the first link in my signature.  The log typically reveals the issue immediately.

[organikarocks]

3 hours ago, blowfish said:

Something is likely throwing an exception, but impossible to tell what just based on that (as is usually the case).  Please find and upload your log.  Instructions on how to do that are in the first link in my signature.  The log typically reveals the issue immediately.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s39m4sly5l2ondy/output_log.txt?dl=0