Vintage Rockets

[riocrokite]

I'm working on a vintage rockets mod. Why another rockets mod you might ask?

Several reasons:

- exploring dead end concepts of rocketry that include exotic fuels, hybrid rockets, tank clustering, big dumb boosters, square tanks and couple of others weird ideas
- introducing more complication into building and operating rockets that is of a different flavor than RO/RP-0/RSS stuff
- I want to concentrate on chemical rocket propulsion only, mostly because I find using LV-Ns or near future engines a little bit too easy and then there are plenty of super cool mods for that , other reason would be to introduce sensible and limited isru operations later on
- my main goal would be to supply different paths for early-mid career so yah science tree overhaul is pretty much guaranteed
- for now I'm focusing on 1st stage SL engines and tanks
- just to answer in advance any questions about interoperability with another mods - I think it will be very limited. This means incompatibility with most stock parts, CTT, CRP and other parts pack (different mounting points) so yah this would be pretty much a closed mod

No images yet since I'm at 2d drawings stage, so just a historical engine for now:)

 

Edited March 2, 2016 by riocrokite

[VenomousRequiem]

I can't wait to see what you get out of this! Good luck.

[riocrokite]

thx VenomousRequiem ;

an  early test of openable engine fairings/interstages so a player could see and interact with parts attached inside; each color = different part:

an engine's not mine, using tweaked Ven's part for now

Edited March 8, 2016 by riocrokite

[riocrokite]

some more fiddling, this time with squarish tanks;

Edited March 10, 2016 by riocrokite

[Kartoffelkuchen]

This looks interesting!

[Hellbrand]

is MFS still going to be supported? or are we out of luck in that respect?

 

 

[riocrokite]

17 hours ago, Kartoffelkuchen said:

This looks interesting!

thanks

6 hours ago, Hellbrand said:

is MFS still going to be supported? or are we out of luck in that respect?

 

 

yah, I'll maintain working version, however its dependencies will need to be updated for 1.1 for it to work.

[Joco223]

@riocrokite Those engines look really nice. Keep it up

[MrMeeb]

The models look stunning!

[riocrokite]

thx,

did some work on conceptualizing tank shapes, for now I have a plan that player starts with 0.625m cylinder tank and then can spend sci on different paths - cheap but inefficient OTRAG style 0.625m clusters, standard progression for bigger cylinders, or go for clusters that need less sci but have downsides (they weigh more), I haven't figured out 'surrounding' tank shapes a'la Saturn 1b or Proton, might include that here later.

 

 

green numbers - preliminary sci cost for upgrade.

[riocrokite]

just an update; will be inactive for about 2 next weeks (Easter holidays), so far I've spent more time on 2d drawings trying to reconcile piping and cable ducts for different tank and pressurarnt combinations

[riocrokite]

I think I'll start with otrag style parts and release them first as a separate mod and then integrate it into my full vintage rockets mod.

Otrag here means more generally 'cheap common module rocket' or 'billigrakete' concepts. In other words I'll be using some elements from concepts like Otrag, Exoge, Armadillo's stig, Interorbital's Neptune and SWORDS.

Edited April 11, 2016 by riocrokite

[riocrokite]

right, so I stumbled onto an other OTRAG mod for KSP by hraban (similar stuff to what I've planned) so yah

anyway just letting you know guys that I'm still working on this stuff, mostly conceptual work how to get a nice functionality without writing a custom plugin. The biggest problem lies with the haromonizing piping between different variants of tanks so the rocket looks consistent. It gets quite complicated when you factor in cluster and square tanks and then clustered engines. It's kind of hard to do it so I might end up with trying to create a plug-in after all

 

[riocrokite]

trying to create very rough models for different tanks and engines to test compatibility and planned functionality. good news is that new code allows for nice soyuz style one axis only verniers working in stock

Edited May 24, 2016 by riocrokite

[Astrofox]

Yes for OTRAG inspired parts!

Man, we could use the Sounding Rockets mod, but for there to be a dedicated OTRAG mod would be amazing!

I do hope to see this in the future!

[riocrokite]

Just letting you know I'll be off for 2 weeks,

when I'm back to I'm going to work on on MFS again since I've stumbled into design issues here that I cannot resolve in a satisfying to me way (yet). I guess I'll be hopping between dev of MFS and VR in the future.

[riocrokite]

another one week trip ahead;

I'm dropping here sneak peak at my first test plugin (\o/) that kerbalizes thrust combustion instability. One can choose between random/sine/sine+random oscillations affecting thrustTransoformations on a given engine. In real life most of big engines including SRBs are suffering from this syndrome (at a rate of about 15 Hz) and I believe this was the biggest reason for Ares I being cancelled and why Russians never developed big SRBs and opted instead for multinozzle engines and LF boosters. In real life you normally can't see the effects of it from the distance however you can see how whole construction is shaking as a result of srb combustion instability at 0:45 onwards:

Kerbalized version: sine oscillation + minimal randomness on stock KSLV SRBs (without flight inputs so one can see what impact it has on a direction of flight):

 

 

Edited June 24, 2016 by riocrokite

[Nightside]

Wow, this looks really cool! I'm eager to try it out.