Question about explosions ( I swear, it's not about weapons)

[Neomatt]

Hi,

I've just started making a small plug-in/part to remove space debris (basically, a TNT bomb, Wile E. Coyote/ACME style, which triggers 5 seconds after being decoupled).

My issue is not making the part (it's mostly done, except some CFG issues, but I can deal with that later), it's "how to explode the discarded stage with the bomb on it".

If I just explode the pack, nothing explodes around it.

If I decide to explode the pack and its parent, only those two are exploding (and projecting fuel tanks upward. Fun, but not what I expected).

I finally tried what would have been the "best way": explode each and every part of the discarded stage (I used some sort of parent/children algorithm to get them all).

It works fine for 2 tanks, an engine and a decoupler, buuuuuuut KSP crashes if I use it on my 36-tanks, 9-engines, 48-struts stage (since then, I removed the struts from the list; still crashes though) .

It also creates deadlocks and the likes, and that's just a dirty, wrong way to make it happen.

Now that I've thought a bit more about it, I'd think the best way to do this would be some sort of "now let's blow this thing and go home": a big, huge explosion, and other parts destroyed without exploding (this way, KSP just removes them and doesn't search to make a "fractal" explosion).

So here are my questions:

- is there a "good" way to explode a vessel completely? I think most of the issues are due to the "sum" of explosions I make by blowing each part.

- is it preferable to do a "massive" explosion and part.onPartDestroy() than just part.explode()?

- in the case it's preferable, what is a good "max" value for explosionPotential (not crashing, not lagging, still scares Jeb even if he's 2km away), and can it be set dynamically to a part via the API? (I made an "explosion.dll" already, so it's more of a "how can I set this")

It would be best for it to go from something like 0.5 for a TNT pack alone to <maxValue> if you have more than 5 or 6 explosive parts.

Anyway, if you have any ideas, please let me know.

[Neomatt]

Okay, a bit more trial-and-error yesterday, and here's what I got:

- I can retrieve/set the explosionPotential of a part by... calling part.explosionPotential. Dunno why I was expecting something else. I also saw some other variables like blastForce and the like; any idea what those are? (smells like moar testing)

- destroying parts instead of exploding them is HARD. After many fails, I decided to set a part explosionPotential to 0 and explode it. However, that brings back the "old" issue if the explosion is too complex, with deadlocks and the like.

- I tried to use Vessel.destroy(vessel), but it was a lost cause, didn't work. Shame, it would have been perfect.

Also, this is more linked to my code, but if I think deadlocks are caused by the fact there is more than one TNT pack on a vessel (one is enough, but I know people will put 10 or 20 ) and they're trying to delete the same part at the same time.

I may have to rethink how the destruction occurs (shared static list between TNT packs? One "master" pack that destroys the vessel, while the others just explode?)

edit: well, it's done now.

What I did:

- Vessel.Die() kills the whole vessel without any fuss. It's perfect for my needs.

- before that, each pack knows the "main" pack (first one in vessel.parts). The others are destroyed with the vessel, but their explosionPotential is added to the main one; this way, only one big explosion, much less (or no) deadlocks, and the vessel is destroyed.

- the maxValue is set at 100, but since I didn't see a difference with 10, it's not very useful. Maybe I'll remove it.

Edited August 8, 2012 by Neomatt