[1.12.x] The Maritime Pack v0.1.19

[Krakatoa]

19 minutes ago, Fengist said:

Mech Jeb, you don't even need to see how to fly.  Though it ends up having all the fun.

 

Well, that may or may not be a hovercraft and whether it'll be fun to fly will depend on whether I can get it to fly at all.  There's at least one other hovercraft mod out there and there is a mod with hovering engines.  However I believe both of those rely on essentially invisible wheels.  I'm going to attempt to go wayyyy back in time to the early days of KSP and pull a Romfarer.  He had a mod once called Lazors or some such.  You could put these little things under your ship and they'd shoot out a beam and, your ship would hover.

I've got a pretty good idea of how they worked and I'm pretty certain I can duplicate that effect.  The question is, can I duplicate that and keep the hover distance in a very narrow range while this thing is travelling over land or water.

The basic theory is that there will be a non-engine engine (the round horizontal things in the screenshot).  They'll have a fixed thrust and will always generate max power.  They won't be connected to the throttle but you'll need to turn them on to generate the air for the cushion sections.  Each of the cushion sections (there's 4 in the screenshot) will have... well... think of it as a pair of air vents that force air downward.  As long as there's enough power from the lifting engine to cover all of the cushion sections and lift the mass, hopefully it'll float.

One other plan is to have the skirt collapse when the lifting engine shuts down.  This should make it easy enough for Kerbals to get on and off.  It hopefully will float with about 1m clearance.  When the lifting engines shut down there should be about 1/4 meter between the ground and the hard edges

And another plan is to have each cushion section to be independent.  As in, they'll each have a full skirt. Hopefully, you could have a front cushion, then attach some stock fuel tank to it, then a rear section with an engine and, it would still lift.

And plans are to make both Air/LF and an Atmosphere/Electric engines so that you wouldn't be limited to Kerbin.

How you get this monstrosity to another planet is up to you though.

Again, this is all theory at the moment.  I know a buddy of mine has been playing around with a 'shield' that pushes just about anything away from a ship.  That same method should.. I say should... work for this.

 

I don't use the mod, so I can't speak to how it works, but I know Kerbal Foundries has repulsors in the pack that work as hover devices, and they show it traveling over water in the picture.

[Fengist]

7 hours ago, Krakatoa said:

I don't use the mod, so I can't speak to how it works, but I know Kerbal Foundries has repulsors in the pack that work as hover devices, and they show it traveling over water in the picture.

Ya those were the ones I was thinking of. I thot they were actually wheels. @SpannerMonkey(smce) has the other hovercraft though it's more of an LCAC. And I think his uses wheels. I may be wrong on both counts.

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

1 hour ago, Fengist said:

 has the other hovercraft though it's more of an LCAC. And I think his uses wheels.

Hi, no wheels on our hovercraft visible or invisible.  The hover function is provided by the magic of Raycast ,  using  a number of named and oriented transforms.

Spoiler

 

[Fengist]

54 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

Hi, no wheels on our hovercraft visible or invisible.  The hover function is provided by the magic of Raycast ,  using  a number of named and oriented transforms.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Yep, exactly how I planned on solving the problem.  Mine will hopefully be a more civilian oriented one. Did you use actual engines or did you just apply force?

Edited June 14, 2017 by Fengist

[Rainbowd4sh]

12 hours ago, Fengist said:

Mech Jeb, you don't even need to see how to fly.  Though it ends up having all the fun.

 

Well, that may or may not be a hovercraft and whether it'll be fun to fly will depend on whether I can get it to fly at all.  There's at least one other hovercraft mod out there and there is a mod with hovering engines.  However I believe both of those rely on essentially invisible wheels.  I'm going to attempt to go wayyyy back in time to the early days of KSP and pull a Romfarer.  He had a mod once called Lazors or some such.  You could put these little things under your ship and they'd shoot out a beam and, your ship would hover.

I've got a pretty good idea of how they worked and I'm pretty certain I can duplicate that effect.  The question is, can I duplicate that and keep the hover distance in a very narrow range while this thing is travelling over land or water.

The basic theory is that there will be a non-engine engine (the round horizontal things in the screenshot).  They'll have a fixed thrust and will always generate max power.  They won't be connected to the throttle but you'll need to turn them on to generate the air for the cushion sections.  Each of the cushion sections (there's 4 in the screenshot) will have... well... think of it as a pair of air vents that force air downward.  As long as there's enough power from the lifting engine to cover all of the cushion sections and lift the mass, hopefully it'll float.

One other plan is to have the skirt collapse when the lifting engine shuts down.  This should make it easy enough for Kerbals to get on and off.  It hopefully will float with about 1m clearance.  When the lifting engines shut down there should be about 1/4 meter between the ground and the hard edges

And another plan is to have each cushion section to be independent.  As in, they'll each have a full skirt. Hopefully, you could have a front cushion, then attach some stock fuel tank to it, then a rear section with an engine and, it would still lift.

And plans are to make both Air/LF and an Atmosphere/Electric engines so that you wouldn't be limited to Kerbin.

How you get this monstrosity to another planet is up to you though.

Again, this is all theory at the moment.  I know a buddy of mine has been playing around with a 'shield' that pushes just about anything away from a ship.  That same method should.. I say should... work for this.

 

I am just thinking in physical terms, wouldn't it float like an air ship would? Both use air to levetate, just one flies and one hovers. I don't know how airship mods like hooligan labs or heisenberg does it, but may be a possibility if it were the same system, just a lot weaker so it barely hovers. 

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

1 hour ago, Fengist said:

Did you use actual engines or did you just apply force?

Hi, It's all force from raycast, there are no vertical lift engines , also as a nice touch the hover is tied to the skirt animation, so at rest the skirt is deflated and craft is sitting on the ground, and hovering, skirt is expanded and craft can hover anywhere from barely, which makes it very realistic to handle on land, a little less hover gives the skirt drag and gives the craft some lateral grip . to half a meter or so depending on mass. On the water, it's very  like a real one, except you don't have to climb out of your own hole before you can get a move on.

[Fengist]

35 minutes ago, SpannerMonkey(smce) said:

Hi, It's all force from raycast, there are no vertical lift engines , also as a nice touch the hover is tied to the skirt animation, so at rest the skirt is deflated and craft is sitting on the ground, and hovering, skirt is expanded and craft can hover anywhere from barely, which makes it very realistic to handle on land, a little less hover gives the skirt drag and gives the craft some lateral grip . to half a meter or so depending on mass. On the water, it's very  like a real one, except you don't have to climb out of your own hole before you can get a move on.

Ya thanks. Applied force was the plan as well as an animated skirt.

Going to have a couple different lift engines to handle more or less mass.  Don't think I'll add in any ground drag, I'll just make the skirt sections drag a little more than normal. Thanks spanner.

46 minutes ago, Rainbowd4sh said:

I am just thinking in physical terms, wouldn't it float like an air ship would? Both use air to levetate, just one flies and one hovers. I don't know how airship mods like hooligan labs or heisenberg does it, but may be a possibility if it were the same system, just a lot weaker so it barely hovers. 

Well the system will be similar but a lot stronger and with less margin of error. An airship can tilt 90 degrees and still fly.  You tilt a hover 90 degrees and you just made a plow.

Plus an airship in RL depends on being lighter than air. A hovercraft depends on increased air pressure inside the skirt.  But for ksp both effects are created using the same Unity function of applying or removing a downward force.

Edited June 14, 2017 by Fengist

[adsii1970]

 

2 hours ago, Fengist said:

Yep, exactly how I planned on solving the problem.  Mine will hopefully be a more civilian oriented one. Did you use actual engines or did you just apply force?

Woo hoo! A @Fengist hovercraft! Now this is going to be awesome!

[Fengist]

1 minute ago, adsii1970 said:

 

Woo hoo! A @Fengist hovercraft! Now this is going to be awesome!

I knew you would be excited. 

And like my other stuff it will be completely modular so you can put it together the way you want.

[adsii1970]

And you know I love seeing how far I can push your mods...(can anyone say a hovercraft that carries helicopters!) as well as the mods of others. I've thought about getting into modding myself, but a little afraid of the whole 3D art thing... If I can ever overcome that, I think I would do fine.

[Fengist]

3 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

And you know I love seeing how far I can push your mods...(can anyone say a hovercraft that carries helicopters!) as well as the mods of others. I've thought about getting into modding myself, but a little afraid of the whole 3D art thing... If I can ever overcome that, I think I would do fine.

Well I hadn't Thot of a landing pad. I'll see what I can do.  As for the modelling, that's the easy part.  There should be a link to @Beale 's tutorial in my op. Just follow that then make something simple that you want. My first part was a 90 degree elbow.

Making plugins, that's a whole different ball game.

Edited June 14, 2017 by Fengist

[Rainbowd4sh]

4 hours ago, Fengist said:

Ya thanks. Applied force was the plan as well as an animated skirt.

Going to have a couple different lift engines to handle more or less mass.  Don't think I'll add in any ground drag, I'll just make the skirt sections drag a little more than normal. Thanks spanner.

Well the system will be similar but a lot stronger and with less margin of error. An airship can tilt 90 degrees and still fly.  You tilt a hover 90 degrees and you just made a plow.

Plus an airship in RL depends on being lighter than air. A hovercraft depends on increased air pressure inside the skirt.  But for ksp both effects are created using the same Unity function of applying or removing a downward force.

Ah that makes sense. Thanks for explaining. 

[Fengist]

Experiments:  Code and part tests.

2 parts for the hovercraft, the square skirt section and the lifting engine.  All of these have 4 lifting sections.  I put the MP bridge on it to give you an idea of scale.  The engines are a pair of pulse jets from the 1869 pack.  The first three are flat land and water speed tests.  And yes, that does say 328m/s hovering less than a meter off the water (thanks to @zitronen for that chunk of code).  The last image is something I hoped would work, the ability to insert any part in between the skirt sections.

And before you start drooling, there's still a lot of code work to do.  It does work but it's pretty bouncy.  I need to refine and dampen the lifting part of the code.  And I need to get some at least partially decent textures on the parts.

Anyway, that's the status so far.

Edited June 17, 2017 by Fengist

[Fengist]

Updated the OP with a link to Maritime Pack on KerbalX.  Some really... interesting ship designs there.  Feel free to upload yours and share.

I haven't been home in over a week so I haven't had the opportunity to work on the hovercraft.  The code is... progressing.  Unity has a unique way of adding force to vessels and hitting that sweet spot where it actually hovers instead of launching into orbit is a bit tricky.

 

[RandyRawgust]

Tugboat parts still around?

[Fengist]

On 7/8/2017 at 4:44 PM, RandyRawgust said:

Tugboat parts still around?

Should be in the latest version.  Are they not?

[Turbofreak88884444]

XD i remember the onlder version of this mod and i took 2 nuclear engines and put them on a plane and flew it to the mun and back XD

[Fengist]

6 hours ago, Turbofreak88884444 said:

XD i remember the onlder version of this mod and i took 2 nuclear engines and put them on a plane and flew it to the mun and back XD

You mean a boat?  I don't have planes in this mod.

[Turbofreak88884444]

13 hours ago, Fengist said:

You mean a boat?  I don't have planes in this mod.

 yes i was refering your boat mod that was created in 0.21 version of Kerbal space program

[Fengist]

Ok, I just updated the second post in this thread which is reserved for training videos.  I just found a video made last month by Scott Manley and I can only describe it as: Things you're not supposed to do with a submarine.  If there's one thing KSP teaches us it's no matter how much you INTEND for something to be used a certain way, somebody will find a way to... well... have fun with it.

[adsii1970]

19 minutes ago, Fengist said:

Ok, I just updated the second post in this thread which is reserved for training videos.  I just found a video made last month by Scott Manley and I can only describe it as: Things you're not supposed to do with a submarine.  If there's one thing KSP teaches us it's no matter how much you INTEND for something to be used a certain way, somebody will find a way to... well... have fun with it.

hehehe.... what do you mean we cannot use those parts like that! You know we always never read the instructions!

[PDelta41]

Hi all. I've finally got my CTT integration branch mod up. This will create naval tech nodes, and place Fengist's parts in them. 

https://spacedock.info/mod/1283/Community Tech Tree Naval Branch

[Fengist]

On 7/23/2017 at 5:55 PM, PDelta41 said:

Hi all. I've finally got my CTT integration branch mod up. This will create naval tech nodes, and place Fengist's parts in them. 

https://spacedock.info/mod/1283/Community Tech Tree Naval Branch

Are you modifying any of the .cfg files?

 

[TheRagingIrishman]

2 hours ago, Fengist said:

Are you modifying any of the .cfg files?

just checked, it changes the TechRequired field (using mm patches)

[PDelta41]

It doesn't redistribute any of your code, or parts. It just creates a CTT branch and nodes for them. Everything it touches, it does through module manager. 
Its only utility is in career mode, in sandbox, the changes aren't even accessible.