[Minimum KSP: 1.12.2] Heisenberg - Airships Part Pack

[Lisias]

13 minutes ago, Angel-125 said:

@Lisias Congrats on getting your airship airborne!

Better! Getting airborne in just one piece (and not scattered over the skies!)

However, this is just a fraction of she. The other 4 hulls are still work in progress! =D

But at least, I know what to do now. This is getting interesting!

Edited May 9, 2018 by Lisias
better phrasing.

[adsii1970]

25 minutes ago, Angel-125 said:

@Lisias Congrats on getting your airship airborne!

More like an air city... That thing is huge!

[Lisias]

Well... Another hard nut to crack - preferably, without loosing some teeth :-)

I planned and built this huge vessel with real life engineering concerns in mind (not that I know too much  - I'm just a smart ass that likes engineering). But... Kerbal physics can have some resemblance with real-life physics, but... That's it! Just some resemblance! =D

First things first: since not all parts of the vessel have the same buoyancy, you can end up with some variation of the two extremes below:

Two common "fixes" for this problem are using i-beams and struts, as follows:

Since my vessel has a very long hangar in the center, the model that it follows are the top one: light extremes, heavy belly. And since I decided to add some more functionalities, more buoyancy will be needed, but I wisely decided that the vessel is long enough :-) so I decided to expand it laterally - what would eliminate the need for a I-Beam and struts  - what would seriously impair my airstrip and/or my landing capabilities!

So, the top view of my vessel is something like this:

What would solve the problem: I added buoyancy to the center of mass, so the vessel is now almost equilibrate. Autostruts to the Root part (that is also the CoM) would solve the slightly heavier belly (autostruts to the CoM would cause KrakenWobbling when docking vessels!)

However.... KSP doesn't works like that. :-)

Buoyancy appears to be implemented as merely subtracting weight from the CoM. So the parts itself doesn't have a Buoyancy exactly, but a "weight inverting factor". And since all parts have a weight, what I did accomplish was a huge vessel that follows the "belly light" model, with the extremes pending down due the force of Gravity! #facePalm

If I try that stunt again, and add yet more buoyancy in a third hull (each side), what I would accomplish would be a even heavier nose and tail due adding mass to CoM that is "inverted" by the sum of the "buoyancy factor" of the parts. Exactly the opposite from what happens in reality. =D

So... Now I have to cook a way to strut my vessel nevertheless my "clever" design. Worst, now I have more functionalities the would be impaired by such strutting. =D =D

Yes, I foreseeing a very interesting Weekend. =P

[Lisias]

I needed a rest, found this, so I did this:

[Lisias]

Another issue for "hints while strutting" series: do not strut into the flight deck! It can't take the load without being strutted itself into something else, what is a problem due the way it snaps into its place. :-) 

Seriously. Save yourselves some pain while strutting. This kind of thing is harsh to detect. =P

Edited May 16, 2018 by Lisias
fixing image. better phrasing

[StevieC]

so can anyone confirm whether the Hooligan Labs airship mod works in 1.4.3?

[Saberdo]

hi kerbonauts. i have a little problem. only the rear part of my airship generates uplift. the front always goes down. what do i wrong?

[One Random Kerbal]

I didn't know whether to put this here, tweakscale, or aircraft carrier accessories, bur how do i make the arresting wires small enough to fit on an airship? I think i need to make a .cfg file, but how do I make it, what do i put in it, and where do i put it?

[Lisias]

On 5/14/2018 at 12:27 PM, StevieC said:

so can anyone confirm whether the Hooligan Labs airship mod works in 1.4.3?

Yes, without issues.

@Angel-125 , I have a feature request. :-)

How about a Bison fairing that opens a cargo ramp, more or less as this:

This would made my life considerably easier while building cargo sections for my little monster pet!

[Lisias]

On 5/16/2018 at 9:13 AM, Saberdo said:

hi kerbonauts. i have a little problem. only the rear part of my airship generates uplift. the front always goes down. what do i wrong?

Where is the Center of Mass of your airship?

[Otto Neumann]

Hi people, I do have a question; I keep installing the latest version of the mod by extracting the files into the gamedata folder, and there's no way to load a saved game, nor beginning a new one, without having Ksp.exe crashing.

Do you have any ideas?

[One Random Kerbal]

On 5/16/2018 at 7:13 AM, Saberdo said:

hi kerbonauts. i have a little problem. only the rear part of my airship generates uplift. the front always goes down. what do i wrong?

Try putting the gondola in the middle of the airship instead of the front, along with other heavy items such as a hangar, and try to spread the amount of lift equally on the front and back of your airship. Remember that airships are going to need symmetry or they will tip over.

[Lisias]

10 hours ago, Otto Neumann said:

Hi people, I do have a question; I keep installing the latest version of the mod by extracting the files into the gamedata folder, and there's no way to load a saved game, nor beginning a new one, without having Ksp.exe crashing.

Do you have any ideas?

You exceeded some memory limits - usually, Unity doesn't know when to stop "eating" VRAM from your GPU, and then KSP goes kaput when the VRAM blow up.

There's no remedy other than delete some mods. Start with the visual enhancements ones, as Scatterer and the ones with new (and big) Textures.

Another thing that crashes KSP is running out of Heap/Static memory. But this usually happens while loading KSP. The remedy is the same - deleting mods. This time, the memory eater ones - what can only be detected by runtime check - what you cannot do due the crashing. What I do on these occasions is to move everything but the Squad folder to somewhere else, and then moving back a few ones at a time and firing up KSP. Start with the most important ones for you, so when the thing crashes, the remaining would be less important and, so, less painful to lose.

Edited May 21, 2018 by Lisias

[Lisias]

Well... More Quick&Dirty tricks from Lisias.. :-)

I have good and bad news. The bad news are here =D, the good news follows.

I finally managed to stabilize the central hull of my ship! None of the gondolas (lateral or ventral) are bouncing anymore! I still have to use "Unbreakable Joints" on launching, but after that you can deactivate the cheat. The ship accelerates and moves without spaghetification! =D

I managed to do not use autostruts to Root on everything:

• Keel (Ship's Spine) is simulated by Autotrut all the HL Dirigible Sections, the Hangar Sections, the Nose and the Tail into the Root - and the Root is the central Hangar Section, exactly at the middle of the Vessel. The Rigid Attachment was also set to On.
  • This make the "main  hull" behave as it were constructed around a Spine.
• All the Elevators and Flight Decks does not use Autostruts neither Rigid Attachment.
• All the Gondolas Sections are Autostruted to the GrandParent, and without Rigid Attachment. They were created separately, with the Root Part on the "local" Center of Mass and then merged into the Main Hull craft file.
  • So they're not "magically welded" into the Root part.
  • And so they must be "attached" to the "Spine" somehow
• All gondola's connecting trusses (used on the lateral gondolas) are autotrutted to Root and Rigid Attachment to On 
  • Also simulating attachment to the "Spine"
• I also found a Part configuration that "promoted" wobbling. Avoiding this configuration made wonders to the vessel.

I will detail these things in the next post, as this one has already too much pictures (it appears to have a limit on the pictures you can post on a single post).

[Lisias]

On the KrakenWobbling Summoning Part Configuration

I found that not all parts "glue" to the Dirigible Sections with equal "stickiness". In special, the HL-10 Gyro Ring doesn't hold well when an very heavy part is attached to it on one side, and the thrust is "felt" from another. The solution is to put the heavy parts on both sides as the pictures show:

Figure 1: The Wobbling Summoner

Observe that on this configuration, the HL-10 is attached to the main hull, followed by a "Super Lithium Battery" teakscaled to 10M, what renders 160Tons of mass. Attached to the Battery there's the Tail Cone (or the Nose Cone).

This configuration will make the vessel wobbles terribly no matter how you autostrutted the parts, or how many struts you shove on them - 160Tons appears to be simply to much. The wobbling is so severe that 1/3 of the Battery insiders are visible from the Main Bridge while flying, so severe is the displacement.

Figure 2: The solution:

Note that on this configuration, the heavy part (the battery) is attached to the main hull, then the HL-10, and then the Tail Cone (where the engines are).

The same must be done on the Nose Cone: you attach the Battery into the Dirigible Section, then you attach the HL-10, then the Nose Cone - doing otherwise will summon the KrakenWobbling.

I didn't tested attaching the HL-10 on the inner Sections as there's a huge hangar on my vessel, and the HL-10 would block it.

So... Yeah. This is what was preventing me to get rid of the "autotrut everthing to Root" stunt. My previous design kind of worked - what was happening is the HL-10 problem, that made the main hull wobble so terribly that the gondolas attachments were collapsing! Even with struts (that were collapsing themselves!).

 

Attaching Gondolas

Well, with the 'Keel" working, I could attach the gondolas successfully into the Hull without "autotruting" then to Root or Heaviest (what I consider cheating).

I accomplished that by building the gondolas "on the ground", unattached, and then autostrutted every one of them to the GrandParent (without rigid attachment). This made the gondola pieces firmly tightened to each other - exactly as we would built them on real life. The Root Part of this "subassembly" is the "local" CoM.

However, since KSP craft's data structure is a tree, the subassembly will attach to the main hull in only one place - and then the extremes would be "spaghetified", with the extremes hanging. Since the gondola's mass is almost negligible compared to the main hull, the main hull doesn't wobbles, but the gondolas start to move as worms being fried! =D

Of course, autostrutting everything into Root would solve the issue - on the cheating way, what I don't want to do. The stock EAS-4 Connector is not strong enough, so I had to add a pornographic amount of struts to keep the thing in place. This was raising the part count, what would make me have to cut out something nice after. So I gone for shopping, and found Impossible Innovations (link to unofficial package, recompiled to 1.4.x), that added "Iridium Struts" to the game.

They worked fine as I wished! Or almost, as the gondolas were bouncing when the vessel moves attitude. =/

Well... That made me think: on "real life", we do not attach struts to the "skin" of the attached parts. We strut things into the "spine" itself! So... I autostruted the strut to the Root! :-) This is not cheating IMHO, as the strut is simulating the bolts that tie the appendices to the vessel's main spine. 

Since some gondolas are huge, I had to use bolts in strategic places. I choose to "bolt" the Bison Stabilizer Legs, so all the other parts are held into place by the Leg's part. And since the Leg's part is bolted into the "Spine", we have a somewhat real life solution kerbalized, I mean, hammered into the game. =D

This stunt fulfilled my requirements: made the thing sturdy, but not impossibly studier. The main structure can be abused and will twist due the abuse, as a real life ship would. As follows.

 

Proof of the Concept: Abusing the Ship.

Few things ruthlessly destroy our most beautifully designed crafts as much as... the Time Warp. So, I timewarped to 4X to see how she handles, and she bent due the thrust!

Also note that the Gondolas are being pushed out from the Hull by the stress, but they are not wobbling (I should had made a video...). I wonder how she will behave when the secondary hulls are attached...

After deactivating the time warp, I had to turn off the engines and to activate SAS. The ship "waved" (not wobbled) for some time, and then came back to be a straight, sturdy platform! interestingly, having two reaction wheels (one in each extreme of the vessel) helped (instead of making things worse as is documented in many tutorials). When turning the reaction wheels off, the waving easing was slower.

Also note on this last picture the "bolting points" where the "Iridium Struts" are holding the gondolas attached to the Keel, instead of magically "glueing" everything as it was casted from a solid.

This next picture was taken 2 seconds after the last. Observe how the gondolas had came back to their position instead of wobbling around.

If I stress her enough, something will probably break - as it would in the real life. I need to do some more tests to confirm it.

By moving aggressively the control surfaces on high speeds (she reaches ~55 m/s at this configuration), the hull "waves" similarly. Using SAS alleviates the twisting a bit, but not completely.

Edited May 21, 2018 by Lisias

[Otto Neumann]

19 hours ago, Lisias said:

You exceeded some memory limits - usually, Unity doesn't know when to stop "eating" VRAM from your GPU, and then KSP goes kaput when the VRAM blow up.

There's no remedy other than delete some mods. Start with the visual enhancements ones, as Scatterer and the ones with new (and big) Textures.

Another thing that crashes KSP is running out of Heap/Static memory. But this usually happens while loading KSP. The remedy is the same - deleting mods. This time, the memory eater ones - what can only be detected by runtime check - what you cannot do due the crashing. What I do on these occasions is to move everything but the Squad folder to somewhere else, and then moving back a few ones at a time and firing up KSP. Start with the most important ones for you, so when the thing crashes, the remaining would be less important and, so, less painful to lose.

my mods are KAS/KIS, mechjeb, Reentry particle effect, TAC life support and kerbal planetary base system, right now TAC is uninstalled due to the same problem, I will delete reentry particle effect and give it a try! *edit* It worked, I can start a game, however, my airship refuses to lift, even without a significant load; I guess that it will take some time

 

Edited May 21, 2018 by Otto Neumann

[Lisias]

23 hours ago, Otto Neumann said:

 my airship refuses to lift, even without a significant load; I guess that it will take some time

You need Hooligan Labs Airship.

[Otto Neumann]

22 hours ago, Lisias said:

You need Hooligan Labs Airship.

Hmmm it doesn't seems to have been updated in a while, I'll install it right now

[The Minmus Derp]

Maybe a sorta crane that can grab stuff without wheels. 

@Angel-125

[Lisias]

26 minutes ago, The Minmus Derp said:

Maybe a sorta crane that can grab stuff without wheels. 

@Angel-125

Give Konstruction a peek.

[Angelo Kerman]

Heisenberg comes with a construction crane already...

@Lisias @The Minmus Derp

Edited May 24, 2018 by Angel-125

[The Minmus Derp]

I’m making a big Laythe base and this mod will be essential to it. In other words, the entire base is attached to a multihull airship. @Angel-125

[Lisias]

3 hours ago, The Minmus Derp said:

I’m making a big Laythe base and this mod will be essential to it. In other words, the entire base is attached to a multihull airship. @Angel-125

/me too! =D

Bleh, there goes my "surprise" - this AddOn is so good that everybody had the same idea. =D What just demonstrates the well defined concept and implementation, @Angel-125! Congrats!

 

In time... I have "yet another" feature request. (please advise if I'm annoying).

I think it would be a good idea to have Hangar Decks and Fligh Decks with the same size of the HL-10M Dirigible Section. This would make easier symmetrical designs on multi-hull vessels with different functionalities. As a example, on the picture below I had to put two Cargo Lifts in sequence, as I need this hull to be the same size the other and I only have HL-10L sized Hangar Decks to be used on the other side.

A HL-10M Flight Deck would also allow me to put flight decks over Cargo Lift without stunts like what I used over mines.

Edited May 24, 2018 by Lisias

[The Minmus Derp]

Yeah.

[Lisias]

So, yeah. I'm managing to make the triple-hull design to be stable. Some more work to do, as more floaters I have in the airship, harder is to stabilize the gondolas! :-)

Baby steps. Whale baby steps. =D

More interesting pictures here: 

In time, the last update from WBI Tools solved some glitches for me.

Edited June 6, 2018 by Lisias