[1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (September 6)

[lordcirth]

20 minutes ago, Creedix said:

Thank you Lordcirth !

That's good news for me, I will reactivate the parts and make a copy of the files just in case !

@Nertea for what it's worth, I really do like the aesthetics of those tanks ! makes for sleeks designs If you ever decide to remove them from you mods, please consider including them in a Legacy, un-maintained mod ?

Have you tried the monoprop tanks in Restock / Restock+? They are very nice.

[Nertea]

1 hour ago, Creedix said:

Thank you Lordcirth !

That's good news for me, I will reactivate the parts and make a copy of the files just in case !

@Nertea for what it's worth, I really do like the aesthetics of those tanks ! makes for sleeks designs If you ever decide to remove them from you mods, please consider including them in a Legacy, un-maintained mod ?

 This link will provide you with more context. I will remove them permanently before the end of the year so you should probably extract them from the mod before that point. 

[Nertea]

I'm working on a new feature that is part of Dynamic Battery Storage. One of the thing that DBS does as part of its process is track electric charge using modules. I thought - why not do something with that? This framework could be used to, for example, create a planning tool for players to use in the VAB to ensure you've got enough power for your mission.

...one major refactor later...

So it's close to done. Enter the new Near Future Systems Manager, which is going to be available both in the editor and in flight. It tries to predict the vessel's power consumption and generation to tell you if you have enough power. It'll also tell you how long it takes to charge/discharge batteries which can be useful.

You can drill down into the generation/consumption headers to see what's eating power by category, and turn things on and off as you want to examine power consumption under various scenarios.

Engines, transmitters, etc, if they use EC they will be added to the manager and simulated.

There's also a solar simulator, you can switch your point of reference for different planets so you can predict the power given by solar panels in different scenarios.

But wait - there's more! The manager has a thermal mode for inspecting core heat, which is I think a somewhat frequently requested feature.

Just like the electrical mode, you can drill down to see what's heating you up and cooling down, but really you just want that number to not be red:

 

The flight mode is still in the works, but the VAB is pretty good now. In flight, you'll have no simulation options, but everything will be directly sampled from the modules so will be accurate instead of simulated.

 

 

[Brigadier]

1 minute ago, Nertea said:

So it's close to done. Enter the new Near Future Systems Manager, which is going to be available both in the editor and in flight. It tries to predict the vessel's power consumption and generation to tell you if you have enough power. It'll also tell you how long it takes to charge/discharge batteries which can be useful.

Cool.  An NF integrated replacement for AmpYear. Looking forward to it.  Thanks.

[budda]

nice

[zer0Kerbal]

20 hours ago, Nertea said:

... But wait - there's more! The manager has a thermal mode for inspecting core heat, which is I think a somewhat frequently requested feature. ...

Most delicious!

 

Will the thermal part be able to simulate different environments? (Mun/Duna/Eve/etc)?

Looking forward to this!

 

Another question: will this be packaged as part of Dynamic Battery Storage or standalone?

[FellipeC]

Wow 

[Streetwind]

6 hours ago, zer0Kerbal said:

Will the thermal part be able to simulate different environments? (Mun/Duna/Eve/etc)?

From the way the screenshot looks, the plugin deals with core heat. Which is different from normal heat in KSP. Core heat rejection on radiators works independent of ambient temperature and will not add actual heat to the ship. Core heat is used whenever there is a part that realistically needs to be very hot to operate on the inside, such as ISRU or a reactor, but it would be inconvenient to actually have the outside of the part be that hot because it would cook the ship it is on.

[zer0Kerbal]

8 hours ago, Streetwind said:

From the way the screenshot looks, the plugin deals with core heat. Which is different from normal heat in KSP. Core heat rejection on radiators works independent of ambient temperature and will not add actual heat to the ship. Core heat is used whenever there is a part that realistically needs to be very hot to operate on the inside, such as ISRU or a reactor, but it would be inconvenient to actually have the outside of the part be that hot because it would cook the ship it is on.

great explanation, thank you.

...But Val likes to fry eggs on the reactor!

Edited June 2, 2019 by zer0Kerbal

[KSPanier]

I have that glitch, where a phantom light appears on each solar panel, also illuminating its surroundings.

Did anyone else encounter this, or does know, how to get rid of it?

[Nertea]

On 6/1/2019 at 6:32 PM, zer0Kerbal said:

Will the thermal part be able to simulate different environments? (Mun/Duna/Eve/etc)?

No, as mentioned environmental 'part' heat is not included in this, because it sucks. 

On 6/1/2019 at 6:32 PM, zer0Kerbal said:

Another question: will this be packaged as part of Dynamic Battery Storage or standalone?

It's effectively a very advanced debug window for DBS, so it will not be standalone or distributed by itself. 

[zer0Kerbal]

56 minutes ago, Nertea said:

... because it sucks. 

It's effectively a very advanced debug window for DBS, so it will not be standalone or distributed by itself. 

this really made me laugh, and cry because it's true.

Exactly what I thought, and expected. Now I know where to look in the NearFuture.

Thank you for the reply.

[Some_stranger]

Hi, I just wanted to say I've really enjoyed this mod and what it has to offer.  The quality is top notch and the modular struts are my favorite.

Cheers.

[Rayder]

Not sure if it's been reported yet, but... I've noticed a bug with the Octo-Girders when switching the configuration. When I'm switching between tanks, the pop-out shows tanks being added on, but not removed.

That is, when I switch to a LF tank, it puts that resource in. Then when I switch to the oxidiser tank, the LF tank remains and now it has both. THEN when I switch to the LFO tank it adds in two new LF and O tanks. The part will just keep accumulating tanks every time I switch the part.

The curious thing is, it seems to only be cosmetic. When I unclick the part and re-click it, the part shows the correct tanks. The mass display on the bottom-right seems to display correctly, for the selected tank.

So I guess it's a relatively minor bug, but it's there nonetheless.

KSP v1.7.1-2539
NFT Construction v1.1.1 (with B9PartSwitch and MM v4.0.2)

No other mods installed.

[juanml82]

3 hours ago, Rayder said:

Not sure if it's been reported yet, but... I've noticed a bug with the Octo-Girders when switching the configuration. When I'm switching between tanks, the pop-out shows tanks being added on, but not removed.

That is, when I switch to a LF tank, it puts that resource in. Then when I switch to the oxidiser tank, the LF tank remains and now it has both. THEN when I switch to the LFO tank it adds in two new LF and O tanks. The part will just keep accumulating tanks every time I switch the part.

The curious thing is, it seems to only be cosmetic. When I unclick the part and re-click it, the part shows the correct tanks. The mass display on the bottom-right seems to display correctly, for the selected tank.

So I guess it's a relatively minor bug, but it's there nonetheless.

KSP v1.7.1-2539
NFT Construction v1.1.1 (with B9PartSwitch and MM v4.0.2)

No other mods installed.

This is an issue with Interstellar fuel switch, it has been reported in that thread

[Jognt]

1 hour ago, juanml82 said:

This is an issue with Interstellar fuel switch, it has been reported in that thread

Nope. It’s a bug introduced in stock. Probably due to PAW changes. 

Note that the person you’re responding to doesn’t have IFS installed  

[Nertea]

The new version of B9 Part Switch (2.8.0) will resolve these issues. 

[Infinity_XT]

@Nertea Why were the NF Propulsion Ion clusters deprecated again? Can I get them back for 1.7?

[Catto]

Im using this for 1.7, And it says "b9partswitch fatal error." How do i fix this?

[TBenz]

On 5/28/2019 at 9:55 AM, Nertea said:

I have made them very conservative in terms of what roll angle they can dock with. If someone wants to test more convenient values, you can try editing 

captureMinRollDot = 0.99999

In the config file for the docking port. Discover a pleasant, more user friendly value that keeps things working nicely in terms of angle and I'll revise the next version with that value. 

I've been having some difficulty with the octo-girder octagonal docking connector myself. After playing with the config for a bit, and doing some extensive ingame testing, I've come to the conclusion that the issue stems from the positioning of the attachment nodes and the collider dimensions. 

With stock docking ports the docking nodes seem to be essentially flush with the surface of the collider, and so when the stock docking ports are properly centered and the colliders are physically touching, the docking nodes are aligned just about perfectly. The octagonal docking ports, on the other hand, have docking nodes that seem to be a fair distance away from the collider. This results in the parts not actually making physical contact when the docking nodes are aligned. That becomes a problem because, from what I can tell, the docking ports need to be moving very slowly relative to eachother for docking to occur. The magnetic docking attractor can get the docking ports moving quite quickly, and the game seems to rely on the physical collision of docking ports to slow them down to a proper docking speed. But that doesn't happen at the right position with the octogonal docking ports. So instead of being physically stopped by the collider and properly docking, the docking nodes speed past eachother and the colliders make contact with the nodes misaligned. Then the magnetic docking force ends up pulling the docking ports apart, as it's trying to bring the overshot nodes back into alignment, and the docking ports bounce apart. This happens back and forth in an oscillation that can last a significantly long time, if not forever, without any outside intervention.

If that doesn't make any dang sense, I put together a diagram illustrating what I was observing:

Spoiler

As well as some pictures illustrating the differences between docking node distance and collider distance ingame:

Spoiler

Docking node distance - This is the distance that the parts need to be in to properly dock:

Collider Distance - This is how close the parts can come before the game registers them as physically colliding. (Yes they aren't properly aligned in this picture, but I was trying to keep them from docking, and just wanted to illustrate how close they can come before colliding).

Stock, medium sized docking ports, on the other hand, have little to no difference between docking and colliding.

Docked:

Undocked but colliding:

 

I also tested the other stock and octo-girder docking ports. They all exhibited the same characteristics as the stock medium sized docking ports, the distance at which they dock is virtually identical to the distance at which they collide. I didn't experience any issues in getting them to properly dock.

I don't really know how to fix this alignment issue myself, unfortunately, I'm not familiar with node manipulation, and I certainly don't know how to fix the physical colliders for parts. I attempted to change the position of node_stack_top in the CFG file, and while I could tell that it was changing where the attachment node was in the editor, it didn't seem to have any effect on the distance at which the docking occurred.  A quick fix solution I managed to put together is to decrease the attractive force between the docking ports. Adding:

acquireForce = 0.05

to the ModuleDockingMode module made the attraction force small enough that the docking ports pull together, and drift apart more slowly, and are more likely to actually be going slow enough for docking to engage. It still doesn't guarantee that things will go right, it may be necessary to further decrease the relative velocity of the two docking ports using a well timed burst from the RCS. And it has the obvious downside of not providing nearly as powerful of a docking assistance magnet as most other docking ports do. 

A proper fix for this will either have to come from you, @Nertea, or someone else familiar enough with modifying docking nodes or part colliders. Wish I could be of more help here. Also, I hope that this rather lengthy post is actually helpful, and not just an annoying waste of time.

 

Edit: Also, if it would be useful, I can open up an issue on the Near Future Construction github. I probably should have gone there first, but I'm still not fully used to using github and it didn't really occur to me that it would be the proper place for something like this until after I posted. 

Edited June 17, 2019 by TBenz

[Catto]

"NOTHING HERE"

Edited June 17, 2019 by siklidkid

[DStaal]

I just wanted to thank @TBenz for their analysis.  That exactly correlates to what I was seeing, and adds a *lot* of detail.

[Nertea]

On 6/16/2019 at 6:06 PM, TBenz said:

Edit: Also, if it would be useful, I can open up an issue on the Near Future Construction github. I probably should have gone there first, but I'm still not fully used to using github and it didn't really occur to me that it would be the proper place for something like this until after I posted. 

Yes, please link to this post from an issue on GitHub or it will get lost - and thanks!

 

On 6/16/2019 at 3:46 PM, siklidkid said:

Im using this for 1.7, And it says "b9partswitch fatal error." How do i fix this?

If you want to use an outdated version, just live with the error, it doesn't mean anything.

On 6/13/2019 at 1:56 PM, Infinity_XT said:

@Nertea Why were the NF Propulsion Ion clusters deprecated again? Can I get them back for 1.7?

They were deprecated literally years ago, the models were awful and the paradigm of the mod changed. You can get them back by dredging them up from an old version somewhere, but I won't be providing support with that. 

[Catto]

But i can't change the variants of the parts.

Like for the crossway from stockalike station parts, Without b9 part switch i can't change the number of points.

[DStaal]

19 minutes ago, siklidkid said:

But i can't change the variants of the parts.

Like for the crossway from stockalike station parts, Without b9 part switch i can't change the number of points.

I'm having no issues in 1.7.2.  I'm not sure if there's a backwards-incompatable change in b9 part switch, but if there is the best first check would be to find an older version of b9 partswitch.