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

[TachyonGMZ]

Will I be able to use smurff alongside it without affecting other parts? Jimbodiahs patch lets me get into orbit with a periaps of -64 (so nearly not completely) using the 3 part rocket I used to compare the smurff and stock in the first place so too unbalanced.

 

[Jimbodiah]

How is that "too unbalanced"? You need to post more info because everyone is stabbing in the dark at this.

Edited January 4, 2018 by Jimbodiah

[TachyonGMZ]

I apologise I also had smurff installed alongside it. I have tried it again and it is great. Stock Ion probe gets 30000+ delta V but i'm not complaining. It works great.

Edited January 4, 2018 by TachyonGMZ
Tested second time

[Jimbodiah]

Yeah, that's going to compound and be OP. You should need around 10.000dV in RSS to get to LEO and do a suicide burn to re-enter.

The patch is meant to run on it's own so you don't need RO/SMURFF.  I tended to play stock and SSRSS only at the time, so made a simple patch for the few times I playes RSS as I did not want the full RO suite. After that it just stuck when I started to play only RSS, as it works just fine for my gameplay.

[RedParadize]

Is it possible to set change the max deployedAngle on the SC-GEN-IPA?

 

[Shadowmage]

29 minutes ago, RedParadize said:

Is it possible to set change the max deployedAngle on the SC-GEN-IPA?

 

Through the GUI while in he editor.  You can select from 0-120 degrees.  Past that? Nope.

//how far should the panels be rotated for the 'deployed' animation
        [KSPField(guiActiveEditor = true, guiActive = true, guiName = "Deploy Limit", isPersistant = true),
         UI_FloatEdit(suppressEditorShipModified = true, minValue = 0, maxValue = 120, incrementLarge = 30, incrementSmall = 5, incrementSlide = 0.1f, sigFigs = 1, unit = "deg")]
        public float deployedRotation = 60f;

(why?  I'm having a hard time seeing any standard use of a petal adapter that would need >120 degrees of deployment rotation; most would be fine with as low as 30/60 degrees)

[RedParadize]

1 minute ago, Shadowmage said:

Through the GUI while in he editor.  You can select from 0-120 degrees.  Past that? Nope.

(why?  I'm having a hard time seeing any standard use of a petal adapter that would need >120 degrees of deployment rotation; most would be fine with as low as 30/60 degrees)

Its because I am always outside of standard use:

Imagine how beautiful it would look like if the petal were almost parallel to the tank. (obviously I will have to change the inside color of the panel)

[Kaa253]

12 hours ago, RedParadize said:

Its because I am always outside of standard use:

Confirmed! I have no idea what I am looking at.

[Jimbodiah]

Red, why use a pedal here at all ?

[Nightside]

5 hours ago, Kaa253 said:

Confirmed! I have no idea what I am looking at.

Cool looking space thing.

 

3 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

Red, why use a pedal here at all ?

See above - also maybe for reentry?

[Shadowmage]

Huh... never would have thought...  I knew the number was big... but this is something else...

MFT-A, only partially setup -- 7,735,944 model mesh combinations.  Not all of the adapters are setup in the part yet, so that number will grow even further (in a non-linear fashion; one new adapter might add 10,000 more valid combinations).  With no duplicates.  The 'combinations' file to list them all is ~190mb of text, with one combo per line.  I actually had to adjust the combo-finding program to write things out to stream as it worked rather than cache+write when done as it was running out of memory somewhere around the ~5M entries range (now it runs steady state at around 15mb ram; previously it easily ate up multiple GB).

And that number is only taking into account the actual model/mesh variants -- not including diameter selection, texture sets, recoloring, or vertical scaling.

I think I can easily hit the 10M mark for that part before it is done.  Most other 'modular' parts won't come close to that number of possibilities, but they will all offer 'lots of configuration'.

[NateDaBeast]

Does this mod feature the Mars Base Camp?

 

If not, could we possibly see it in the future?

[JohnMcLane]

23 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

It should be relatively simple to write a patch that adjusts the SSTU fuel tanks to have more 'realistic' mass fractions, but there are a few other considerations when other mods are also used.

Hey Shadowmage, i want to try something similiar. Not quite sure what to change?

For example:

SSTU-SC-TANK-MFT-A

.......

CONTAINER
    {
        name = Main Tank
        percent = 100
        tankageVolume = 0.15
        tankageMass = 0.15
......

i would write a patch to change tankagemass to reduce the mass of the fuel slightly ?!

[tater]

38 minutes ago, NateDaBeast said:

Does this mod feature the Mars Base Camp?

 

If not, could we possibly see it in the future?

Not specifically, the idea is that the parts have literally millions of possible combinations that allow making most anything.

 

 

Note that the LockMart lander is from another mod.

Edited January 5, 2018 by tater

[Shadowmage]

12 minutes ago, JohnMcLane said:

Hey Shadowmage, i want to try something similiar. Not quite sure what to change?

For example:

SSTU-SC-TANK-MFT-A

.......

CONTAINER
    {
        name = Main Tank
        percent = 100
        tankageVolume = 0.15
        tankageMass = 0.15
......

i would write a patch to change tankagemass to reduce the mass of the fuel slightly ?!

You can't reduce the mass of the resources.  Physics being physics and all.  (well, technically you can, but that is outside of the scope of SSTU)

You can reduce the mass of the dry/empty fuel tank.  (tankageMass = 0.15)  Setting this to zero will result in a dry-tank mass of zero (which will actually break KSP), so recommend a small value like 0.01 rather than simply '0'.

You can reduce how much of the raw tank volume tank is 'lost' to tankage/structure/insulation (tankageVolume = 0.15).  This will give more fuel for any given tank, but it will also increase the mass of the part from the added fuel.  You can safely set this value to 0.

[Jimbodiah]

2 hours ago, NateDaBeast said:

Does this mod feature the Mars Base Camp?

If not, could we possibly see it in the future?

You can build most of it with sstu. For the round panels, check out Near Future solar which now also has the large round versions for this build.

[Nightside]

1 hour ago, JohnMcLane said:

Hey Shadowmage, i want to try something similiar. Not quite sure what to change?

For example:

SSTU-SC-TANK-MFT-A

.......

CONTAINER
    {
        name = Main Tank
        percent = 100
        tankageVolume = 0.15
        tankageMass = 0.15
......

i would write a patch to change tankagemass to reduce the mass of the fuel slightly ?!

 

Look back a page or two, I posted a MM patch to reduce mass of using realistic values borrowed from KerbasAdAstra's work in SMURFF, there is a lot of good info in the OP.

 

[chrisl]

I know that engines can be resized using "engineScale" within the "SSTUModularEngineCluster" module.  But is there any way to resize space stations (presumably inside "SSTUModularStationCore" module)?  I'd like to use the DOS and COS space station parts in my RO game to recreate Mir and ISS.  I've been trying to resize some of the parts myself but so far my changes don't have the desired effect.

[RedParadize]

9 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

Red, why use a pedal here at all ?

Basically, it allow me to do a two stage to orbit without discarding anything valuable. In this case, the petal protect the pod, solar panels, legs and experiment. All of it is brought back, main engine included. Since all the weight is at the bottom and that most of the stuff do not generate parasitic drag, the re-entry and landing is safe and pin-point accurate.

I had been playing with up side down rocket for quite a while. If you want the equipment to be accessible from the ground its really nice. with a extra tank staked on top and solid booster on its side you can lift it from Kerbin to low orbit. It can land and take off from the moon on its own and do the same from Duna with a just the top jetissonable tank. These top tank eject upward and down and are replaceable from orbit. So if you carry few extra top tank you can plan a mission with multiple landing without carrying too much weight.

[Nightside]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

I know that engines can be resized using "engineScale" within the "SSTUModularEngineCluster" module.  But is there any way to resize space stations (presumably inside "SSTUModularStationCore" module)?  I'd like to use the DOS and COS space station parts in my RO game to recreate Mir and ISS.  I've been trying to resize some of the parts myself but so far my changes don't have the desired effect.

This patch should resize all parts with SSTUModularStationCore to a realistic proportion (1.6x).

Note: it is only tested in ksp 1.3.x, Not sure if it will work in older versions of sstu/ksp.

//Resize SSTU station cores
@PART[*]:HAS[@MODULE[SSTUModularStationCore]]:NEEDS[SSTU]
{
    @MODULE[SSTUModularStationCore]
    {
        @topDiameter *= 1.6 
        @coreDiameter *= 1.6  
        @bottomDiameter *= 1.6 
        @CORE[*]
            {
                @volume *= 1.6 
                @volume *= 1.6 
                @mass *= 1.6
            }
    @SOLAR,*
    {
        @POSITION,0
        {
            @position[*] *= 1.6
            //rotation = 0, 180, 0
            &scale = 1, 1, 1
            @scale[*] *= 1.6
        }
        @POSITION,1
        {
            @position[*] *= 1.6
            //rotation = 0, 0, 0
            &scale = 1, 1, 1
            @scale[*] *= 1.6
        }
    }    
}

This is from my Transmogrifier patches. There is some of this stuff is on my Github, but the SSTU is  WIP so I'm not sure if what is on there is current, might be helpful though. feel free to follow up on the thread in my sig if you have any questions about getting this to work.

[RedParadize]

@Shadowmage The radial booster decoupler generate way too much drag, it is particularly true and annoying when scaled down to 0.625 as it will inevitably make the booster crash into the rocket.

I think that since they are mostly conformal it would not hurt to set the dragModelType = none. That or reducing maximum_drag, minimum_drag and angularDrag to 0

Edited January 6, 2018 by RedParadize
Because I am so bad at english

[JohnMcLane]

12 hours ago, Shadowmage said:

You can't reduce the mass of the resources.  Physics being physics and all.  (well, technically you can, but that is outside of the scope of SSTU)

You can reduce the mass of the dry/empty fuel tank.  (tankageMass = 0.15)  Setting this to zero will result in a dry-tank mass of zero (which will actually break KSP), so recommend a small value like 0.01 rather than simply '0'.

You can reduce how much of the raw tank volume tank is 'lost' to tankage/structure/insulation (tankageVolume = 0.15).  This will give more fuel for any given tank, but it will also increase the mass of the part from the added fuel.  You can safely set this value to 0.

 

10 hours ago, Nightside said:

 

Look back a page or two, I posted a MM patch to reduce mass of using realistic values borrowed from KerbasAdAstra's work in SMURFF, there is a lot of good info in the OP.

 

Thanks both of you! The patch works well for me and i know which values i have to tweak to make adjustments.

[Kaa253]

9 hours ago, RedParadize said:

I had been playing with up side down rocket for quite a while.

I did eventually work out what I was looking at, thanks for the explanation. It seems like a pretty cool and clever design. I might need to try building my own variant on the theme.

[Mike`]

8 hours ago, RedParadize said:

@Shadowmage The radial booster decoupler generate way too much drag, it is particularly true and annoying when scaled down to 0.625 as it will inevitably make the booster crash into the rocket.

Can confirm i had this problem as well. Having thought about it later, maybe i should have reduced the thrust of the booster a bit to have a longer runtime/decouple in less dense atmosphere.

What i ended up doing was increase the thrust of the radial decoupler separator-boosters somewhat with a patch, so it was able to push the boosters away and the nose of the booster outwards. To do that you also might need to turn down the thrust-level of the lower separator-booster and spread them out so they are at the end of the booster.

[Jiraiyah]

@Shadowmage

Sir can i ask for a second version for one of your parts?

This one has a side without docking port, can you make another version side by side this that has ALL sides with docking port? also something that may worth looking into it? rover dude has a docking port that lets you destroy it after docking to fuse two parts and reduce not only part count but at the same time will stabilize the station or what ever more. can something like that be added to this mod too? maybe a module manager patch IF we have rover dude's system to add the needed stuff into your mod?

Edited January 7, 2018 by Jiraiyah