Legless buildings

[Jaeleth]

 

Advanced building 101

I recently found a problem, and I would like to know if there's someone else out there with the same problem.

I am building colonies at every world. Some are older and are, therefore, bigger. They have been built in career mode, so they are made up of a mix of attached blocks through docking ports, on the surface. One of them, my minmus fuel factory, has grown in size quite a bit, the latest addition was a nice landing pad, placed quite far from the main building, via a long pipe which was assembled, in place, in 3 sections. What happens is that, since terrain is not level and there is yet to be done a mod that allows for buldozzers or terrain levelling, the landing pad, when I warp time, clips the terrain mesh a little.

this is enough, however, to make parts of the landing pad exploding and jumping into the air.

the reason why I adopted the "no legs" building process is that it is easier to standardize equipment, since, independently of local gravity the port height for each block remains the same, unlike when we use legs. Besides... It looks better... Knowing if port height matches is, as you can see, of paramount importance before sending base components to be assembled millions of miles away, and if I have to design this for each scenario, instead of using default design for all, it's a pain in the ass...

but.... The no legs approach is giving me this problem... What do you suggest? Using legs will prevent this on larger ground bases? Is it worth the pain? Anyone knows when bulldozer mod will be available? Maybe making smaller bases (in terms of area)? How have you overcome this problem, if you ever encountered it? I can think on a number of alternatives, Imwould be interested in knowing thenless painfull ones  eheh

Edited December 22, 2015 by Jaeleth

[Temstar]

You can still achieve level docking port with legs if you lock the leg's suspension before final deployment, or at least that's what I'm been told.

Paging @Rune, he would be the expert at this.

[Jaeleth]

Ah, so, locking suspension before landing? Maybe, not as easy as legless but... it makes sense. I'll try that.

I'll mix that with a modular all purpose base foundation that I am designing.

it would be great that squad would allow us to tweak suspension height once in place. Actually, is there a mod for that? For individually setting the height for each shock absorber? It would be easier than develop the mod for buldozzing.

[Rune]

1 hour ago, Temstar said:

You can still achieve level docking port with legs if you lock the leg's suspension before final deployment, or at least that's what I'm been told.

Paging @Rune, he would be the expert at this.

I gotta learn how to do that... Anyhow, yeah, locking the legs is a good way to control the sag of landed structures, but you can't really get 100% rid of the slight jumps when you load stuff, especially when it loads as you come in with another ship. Some pretty violent jumps can occur, as you say, so legs to cushion the impacts are pretty much a must. Which is kind of why I have stopped building stuff connected to my bases with KAS, the connections were blowing up whenever I landed something nearby...

All I can tell you is, plan for that sag. By raising a select number of legs, you can tilt whole bases so their docking ports are higher or lower, and it always helps to have some method of raising the docking element. For example, my base assembly rover has a pretty powerful monoprop VTOL system: I built it so it has the right height with the wheels completely unloaded, so if I am coming a bit low because the module I am carrying is a heavy one, I can turn on the engines and raise the suspension a bit so I can still dock.

Having connecting corridors that can take a bit of the misalignment out helps immensely, too, like these:

 

Rune. Mostly, test everything to death on kerbin, then on Mun.

Edited December 22, 2015 by Rune

[Stoney3K]

17 minutes ago, Rune said:

I gotta learn how to do that... Anyhow, yeah, locking the legs is a good way to control the sag of landed structures, but you can't really get 100% rid of the slight jumps when you load stuff, especially when it loads as you come in with another ship. Some pretty violent jumps can occur, as you say, so legs to cushion the impacts are pretty much a must. Which is kind of why I have stopped building stuff connected to my bases with KAS, the connections were blowing up whenever I landed something nearby...

Have you tried anchoring your structures to the floor with KAS winches and harpoons? If you have a set of winches restricting the structure from jumping off the floor, and the landing leg suspension locked, in my experience the buildings will stay firmly attached to the floor.

Don't try to retract the winches though, they're powerful enough to pull your structure INTO the floor.

[Snark]

Of course, if you're using KAS anyway, you can use KAS connector pipes instead of docking ports and the problem of assembling a base is HUGELY simplified.

That still leaves the jumping-building problem, though. I really wish they could fix that, though presumably it has to do with Unity's collision detection, so I'm not sure how much leeway they have to tweak the behavior. Will be interesting to see whether the 1.1 update makes any difference there, since it's a major version upgrade to Unity.

Neat idea about the winches, though, I'll have to try it!

[Rune]

 

1 hour ago, Snark said:

Of course, if you're using KAS anyway, you can use KAS connector pipes instead of docking ports and the problem of assembling a base is HUGELY simplified.

That still leaves the jumping-building problem, though. I really wish they could fix that, though presumably it has to do with Unity's collision detection, so I'm not sure how much leeway they have to tweak the behavior. Will be interesting to see whether the 1.1 update makes any difference there, since it's a major version upgrade to Unity.

Neat idea about the winches, though, I'll have to try it!

See, the problem I have is actually with KAS pipes and supports. When the base is loaded upon landing something close to it, the jump makes all the KAS connections jump enough that they break, disconnecting everything and meaning I have to go into EVA to reconnect all the greenhouses and such. The docking port connections, OTOH, are wobbly enough to resist undamaged, not to mention they load perfectly aligned and not with some position errors like KAS pipes.

2 hours ago, Stoney3K said:

Have you tried anchoring your structures to the floor with KAS winches and harpoons? If you have a set of winches restricting the structure from jumping off the floor, and the landing leg suspension locked, in my experience the buildings will stay firmly attached to the floor.

Don't try to retract the winches though, they're powerful enough to pull your structure INTO the floor.

...which is why I don't think that'll work, my bases have almost no issues with this. Other than a few "fancy" docking tricks involved (like smashing the port together to make a corridor oscillate up and down until it connects, for example), the problem I have is with the stuff I lay about them using KAS.

 

Rune. Turns out the stock way is the reliable way!

[Snark]

 

3 hours ago, Rune said:

See, the problem I have is actually with KAS pipes and supports. When the base is loaded upon landing something close to it, the jump makes all the KAS connections jump enough that they break, disconnecting everything and meaning I have to go into EVA to reconnect all the greenhouses and such. The docking port connections, OTOH, are wobbly enough to resist undamaged, not to mention they load perfectly aligned and not with some position errors like KAS pipes.

Yah, that can happen. But I've found that if I put the buildings on legs, the problem generally goes away.  The main thing is to make sure that no part of the building is touching the ground except the legs; then it does fine.

Yes, I know the OP's original question was "how to do legless buildings," but I gather that the reason for that was that the legs make docking port connections harder.  If you're using KAS pipes, then the exact alignment doesn't matter, so there's really no problem with legs.

Resting on wheels works, too.

[LordKael]

I agree that legless buildings look better. What I would do is build a platform out of the structural plates, and then put all the buildings on top. Basically, a man-made flat place.