Part Alignment By Specific amount

[Angelus2141]

Hi All,

         Long time player first time poster (wow a radio reference). Im having a bit of trouble. I want to create a specific shape out of fuel tanks. But it must be a certain size for the vessel to look proportioned. So i found that Rocomax jumbo 64 fuel tank is 6m in height and im working with Rocomax x-200 which is half that so 3m in height. for what I want each tank need to be angled from the last tank by 37 degrees and thats whats causing the issues. So i looked around and found a mod called Part Angle Display which I thought would solve all my problems but it seems not so much. 

I click the first fuel tank so its the root part and dont change any alignments on it. Then I add the second fuel tank on top. Now in the mod ive tried changing increment increase/decrease in various ways but it doesnt actually change the angle at all it says it does but when I click on the part with rotate tool and manually change to roughly what I need the its totally different. This only seems to be an issue with fuels tanks and the attachment nodes as when I add wings to the sides of the tank (radially that is) I am able to change but the increment stated in the mod and attach radially at that angle. So it seems to work radially but not on the nodes.

But I cant attach radially as the shape I want is circular-ish plus like i say i want the fuel tanks on top of each other. Does anyone know how to over come this in the mod or if there are any other mods that can help me do what I want. Otherwise Im going to have to change each tank individually and only roughly get the right angle rather than exactly and I really need the exact angle.

 

Thanks

[Jetski]

If you are trying to make something like a ring station, I place girders in 6 way symmetry first around a central core.  Then place your tanks on the end of the girder. Smoother look if you stack 2. Then use the stock rotation tool on one, all will rotate together (Try and you will see what I mean).  Repeat on the second tank for a smoother curve. Struts for strength at the ends to reduce wobble. Tweak between the 2 tanks (unclick the snap to fit circle) until it looks right. Save as a sub assembly if you want it sideways or multiple rings. Profit!

 

Edit: a more concise answer is that putting bends in central core is buggy and hard, easier to make bend around outside in symmetry mode, then rotate as needed.

Edited March 17, 2016 by Jetski

[Tex]

Thread moved to Gameplay Questions due to gameplay question.

 

Also, welcome aboard, Angelus!

[Padishar]

It is unfortunate that Part Angle Display doesn't do what you want but it works by using an existing feature of the editor code to handle all the rotation and, when it was originally written, the editor code didn't allow node attachment at anything but the "correct" orientation.  To be fair, it does say the following (emphasis added) in the first sentence of the mod's forum thread:

Quote

This is a simple KSP plugin that allows you to surface attach parts at accurate angles.

In 0.90, when the rotate gizmo was added, it became possible to rotate a node-attached part but detaching the part and reattaching it loses the rotation (and various other things can also confuse it) and the gizmo code wasn't exposed for modders to easily access it.  I have experimented with doing the part rotation myself rather than letting the editor do it but it requires a lot of work to make it behave sensibly and I haven't found the time (or, if truth be told, the inclination) to finish it off.

Hopefully, I will get some time to work on it during the upcoming public 1.1 beta phase so I can fix it for the new version and fix some of the issues it has but this will probably not include being able to rotate attached parts except possibly that I may enable the rotation hotkeys in the stock rotate gizmo mode if I can work out a simple way to do it.

It is also not possible to create a complete ring of node-attached parts because the vessel is a tree structure that can not contain loops (except for special cases like struts and fuel lines which are surface attached and contain a special reference to the part the other end connects to).

Edited March 17, 2016 by Padishar