[1.3.x] CONTARES 1.8.9 closed

[hraban]

'Schmankerl' from workbench

[hraban]

Moving test for Многоцелевой лабораторный модуль - МЛМ, englisch Multipurpose Laboratory Module solar-panel.

 

[Nightside]

Thanks for the new release @hraban! It looks great. What do you mean that this is the last release of Contares? What are your future plans?

[hraban]

32 minutes ago, Nightside said:

Thanks for the new release @hraban! It looks great. What do you mean that this is the last release of Contares? What are your future plans?

In the future, Contares will be offered in a core mod and various addons. The core mod is given all the components which are used several times in the addons. This includes IVA's, MM patches, future plugins, universally used parts such as stack and radial decoupler, docking nodes, antennas and control modules.

How the addons are built is not quite sure yet.

The structure could be as follows:

- all spaceplanes in an addon
- all satellite bus systems and scientific experiments, provided that they are not assigned to any of the nations listed below
- all products associated with European and Japanese space travel
- all products associated with American space travel
- all products associated with Indian space travel
- all products associated with Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian space travel (this addon is still separated into two parts if necessary)
- all products associated with Chinese space travel
and so on

Support is welcome

[hraban]

More finetuning on texture and specular color but looks and works fine.

[RaiderMan]

nicely done. very nice.

[hraban]

Solar Panels for older Space Stations like DOS-6 and, without suntracking, for TKS.

[Damon]

On 15-9-2017 at 5:14 PM, hraban said:

New and vintage tweakable satellite BUS systems. Thank you to BDB and Coatl for the nice and helpfull created science experiments!

KERBUS1000 for IridiumNEXT satellite

DT-001 BUS for small and medium optical instruments

Vintage style BBBP-001

Hi, I'm somewhat new to this mod, and may have missed it somewhere, but have you released these already or still in the making? Thanks!

[hraban]

2 hours ago, damonvv said:

Hi, I'm somewhat new to this mod, and may have missed it somewhere, but have you released these already or still in the making? Thanks!

All shown BUS-Systems you can found in PODS.  DT-001 Bus for Telescope, BBBP-002 and BBBP-001 Bus for older soviet-style systems, KERBUS-1000 for Iridium NEXT. Small Atachments in Communication and Science. Many shown science Parts are from Coatl and BDB.

Edited October 19, 2017 by hraban

[Kablob]

On 10/16/2017 at 12:14 PM, hraban said:

In the future, Contares will be offered in a core mod and various addons. The core mod is given all the components which are used several times in the addons. This includes IVA's, MM patches, future plugins, universally used parts such as stack and radial decoupler, docking nodes, antennas and control modules.

How the addons are built is not quite sure yet.

The structure could be as follows:

- all spaceplanes in an addon
- all satellite bus systems and scientific experiments, provided that they are not assigned to any of the nations listed below
- all products associated with European and Japanese space travel
- all products associated with American space travel
- all products associated with Indian space travel
- all products associated with Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian space travel (this addon is still separated into two parts if necessary)
- all products associated with Chinese space travel
and so on

Support is welcome

That sounds fantastic--I love the spaceplanes from this mod but my game can't really handle the entire mod along with the others that I use, so I'd be super interested in stand-alone packages.

[hraban]

1 minute ago, Kablob said:

That sounds fantastic--I love the spaceplanes from this mod but my game can't really handle the entire mod along with the others that I use, so I'd be super interested in stand-alone packages.

This will take a while. In the meantime, you can remove directories from the parts folder with components that are not desired.

[Ithirahad]

Any chance we'll be getting an RSS-RO config for this once RSS-RO updates to 1.3.1?

...Also, X-37C?

Edited October 19, 2017 by Ithirahad

[hraban]

48 minutes ago, Ithirahad said:

Any chance we'll be getting an RSS-RO config for this once RSS-RO updates to 1.3.1?

...Also, X-37C?

You want configurations for RSS and RO? Then make yourself at work to create such!
I am happy to publish configurations and MM patches for various Mod-supports.
However, I would recommend you in this case a lot of time and sense of responsibility, because the maintenance and continuation would not be carried out by me.

If and when there will be more spaceplanes is currently in the stars. The X-37c could hit the same fate as Venture Star and Skylon whose investigations so far rather unpleasant.

[vossiewulf]

I am building this monster to single-lift a science space station into Gael orbit, and one thing I really like about Contares is all of the spaceplaces, so of course I used a spaceplane to provide quick Gael access.

However, having some problems flying the Dreamcrusher that I chose for this mission. I'm using KSP 1.30 and the previous Contares release and Ferram for 1.30. First test after test staging at about mach 2 and 10k meters, it tumbled backward uncontrollably until it hit its terminal velocity, where I was just barely able to control it with full nose down.

Going back to the VAB to check the Cg/CoL and this is what I see, a CG well aft of the CoL with its normal loadout and that is going to fly like I experienced. And if I put on the SSTU probe core and small monoprop engine you see below it, the Cg moves even farther aft and the problem gets worse.

So am I doing something wrong, or does the Dreamcrusher have a problem?

[vossiewulf]

Well one answer is the VAB lies about these things, I saw the same pattern with other Contares spaceplanes so I went to the SPH and here we see the Cg/CoL relationship is perfect. If so, then still not sure why it was so unstable in flight for me, I had SAS on - does this require RCS to be on to be controllable? I believe I had RCS off, I rarely use that unless I'm in or near orbit.

[hraban]

6 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

Well one answer is the VAB lies about these things, I saw the same pattern with other Contares spaceplanes so I went to the SPH and here we see the Cg/CoL relationship is perfect. If so, then still not sure why it was so unstable in flight for me, I had SAS on - does this require RCS to be on to be controllable? I believe I had RCS off, I rarely use that unless I'm in or near orbit.

The problem of instability results in the use of FAR. FAR still does not get clear with one-part lifting objects, unless they move ballistically. On the other hand, I am unsure if the mod RetractableLifitingSurface, which is mandatory for Dreamcrusher, is compatible with FAR.

In the use of contares one-part spaceplanes, the use of FAR should be omitted.

An old, always recurring theme.

Edited October 21, 2017 by hraban

[hraban]

More for older 'soviet style' space station projects and a big version of MLM / NEM solar panel.

 

[vossiewulf]

On 10/21/2017 at 12:57 AM, hraban said:

The problem of instability results in the use of FAR. FAR still does not get clear with one-part lifting objects, unless they move ballistically. On the other hand, I am unsure if the mod RetractableLifitingSurface, which is mandatory for Dreamcrusher, is compatible with FAR.

In the use of contares one-part spaceplanes, the use of FAR should be omitted.

An old, always recurring theme.

(sorry, thought I had posted this last week, but found it still in the buffer)

Thanks, I was able to test it again and unlike the first two times, this flew about as fine as you can expect in a craft that has no parts very far from the Cg- it's going to be twitchy on the controls no matter what. The test was when my giant booster above went out of control (huge "sail" area of aerodynamic fairing + I forgot to turn off the Dreamcrusher's control surfaces for the launch) and it got torn into 3 zillion pieces, my pilot decoupled his Dreamcrusher and fired up the monoprop engine and landed right on the centerline at KSC.

And then I reverted the flight because 6 scientists had been blown up with the rest of the rocket.

I wasn't aware that RetractableLiftingSurface was required, I'll look for that. And go check the OP to see if I missed anything else.

---------- now moving on to today's post -------------

Also, are there craft files for Contares? I'm not seeing them. However I very much appreciate the manual, that must have been considerable work to put together.

Finally, I have several of these planetary probes that use a bunch of Contares parts. All of them are doing this, where two panels are tracking the sun correctly and the last one is 90 degrees off. It's not critical as two provide plenty of power, but I'd like to know why that third one is doing that so it doesn't happen when it's the only panel

 

 

 

[hraban]

54 minutes ago, vossiewulf said:

(sorry, thought I had posted this last week, but found it still in the buffer)

Thanks, I was able to test it again and unlike the first two times, this flew about as fine as you can expect in a craft that has no parts very far from the Cg- it's going to be twitchy on the controls no matter what. The test was when my giant booster above went out of control (huge "sail" area of aerodynamic fairing + I forgot to turn off the Dreamcrusher's control surfaces for the launch) and it got torn into 3 zillion pieces, my pilot decoupled his Dreamcrusher and fired up the monoprop engine and landed right on the centerline at KSC.

And then I reverted the flight because 6 scientists had been blown up with the rest of the rocket.

I wasn't aware that RetractableLiftingSurface was required, I'll look for that. And go check the OP to see if I missed anything else.

---------- now moving on to today's post -------------

Also, are there craft files for Contares? I'm not seeing them. However I very much appreciate the manual, that must have been considerable work to put together.

Finally, I have several of these planetary probes that use a bunch of Contares parts. All of them are doing this, where two panels are tracking the sun correctly and the last one is 90 degrees off. It's not critical as two provide plenty of power, but I'd like to know why that third one is doing that so it doesn't happen when it's the only panel

(snip)

The craft files can be found in the main directory of the delivery (.zip) file and can be copied to the safe game directory you want.

The manual did some work and will be completely redesigned for future addons.

I have no answer regarding the incorrectly positioned solar panel and can only shake my head in astonishment.

[vossiewulf]

1 hour ago, hraban said:

The craft files can be found in the main directory of the delivery (.zip) file and can be copied to the safe game directory you want.

The manual did some work and will be completely redesigned for future addons.

I have no answer regarding the incorrectly positioned solar panel and can only shake my head in astonishment.

Thanks for the quick answer. I should have thought to look in the downloaded zip, duh.

The manual is already nice, any improvements are going to make it that much more useful. One request I have if you are improving the manual is delta V charts, one each for the light/med/heavy launchers, with each one carrying a standard mass - 2t for light, 10t for medium, 25t for heavy, (just making those numbers up, you would know what is correct) from a 1g launch location. That would help me understand how they relate to each other in terms of lift capability and would really help me find the right one for my current mission payload.

And if you can do that, please include that delta V number on each of the launcher pages, that would prevent switching back and forth from individual launcher pages to the chart

Just suggestions, I'm already happy with what I have now.

Would you like a copy of the craft file that is acting weird? FYI I retracted and extended those panels again and those two went back to exactly 90 degrees off.

Actually that sounds like a framework level bug, I assume you just set a boolean to enable tracking and a tracking speed parameter and from your point of view all six of those panel instances are identical. So probably nothing anyone can do, the lack of Squad interest in previous bug reports means I probably wouldn't bother trying.

Edited October 29, 2017 by vossiewulf

[hraban]

21 minutes ago, vossiewulf said:

Thanks for the quick answer. I should have thought to look in the downloaded zip, duh.

The manual is already nice, any improvements are going to make it that much more useful. One request I have if you are improving the manual is delta V charts, one each for the light/med/heavy launchers, with each one carrying a standard mass - 2t for light, 10t for medium, 25t for heavy, (just making those numbers up, you would know what is correct) from a 1g launch location. That would help me understand how they relate to each other in terms of lift capability and would really help me find the right one for my current mission payload.

And if you can do that, please include that delta V number on each of the launcher pages, that would prevent switching back and forth from individual launcher pages to the chart

Just suggestions, I'm already happy with what I have now.

Would you like a copy of the craft file that is acting weird?

The idea with the payloads of different initial orbits and delta-v tables is a good idea but goes beyond my time capabilities.

Basically, the Contares launchers are based on the payload data e.g. on the page http://www.b14643.de/ were published. Where 1t real payload equals 1t in the game. Based on the published information of the launchers, there are two characteristics for each orbital trajectory in relation to a Stock Kerbal system:

Kerbalstationary Transfer Orbit KTO = AP 2884 km to PE 200 km.
Low Kerbal Orbit LKO with AP / PE Circular between 130 and 160 km.
Kerbol Synchron Orbits KSO are too different for a basic recommendation to be made.

The craft files can be one or the other which does not work anymore. Unfortunately I did not manage to update craft files before the update.

[vossiewulf]

6 minutes ago, hraban said:

The idea with the payloads of different initial orbits and delta-v tables is a good idea but goes beyond my time capabilities.

Thanks for the explanations.

If you could generate the data in tabular format, I'll make you some nice charts, if you'd really like to have charts. I'm qualified   

Also please see my edit above, I'm not expecting you can do anything about the weird solar panel behavior.

[hraban]

Almost all components for BYOSSM (Build Your Own Space Station Module) are completed. Work on the IVA is progressing.

 

As a byproduct a module command center with large windows has arisen which can also be used as a landing capsule. The module holds up to 4 Kerbals. Similarities with the much larger pod from 'Near Future Spacecraft' are purely coincidental.

 

A design of an early spaceship concept. Similarities to the design of British Aerospace are intended.

[hraban]

@Tyko

Please remove the Pictures in quotes. Thank you

[Jhorriga]

I want more craft files for things like pinbol, Hermes, Cst-100, and x-37B