[1.3.1 <= KSP <= 1.12.5] Impossible Innovations under Lisias' Management - 0.8.10.0 - 2023-1021

[Lisias]

As from 2018-0606 and under @jandcando agreement, I'm the New Management(TM) for Impossible Innovations. From now on, it's all my fault. 

In a Hurry:

• Releases:
  • on GitHub
  • on SpaceDock
  • on CurseForge
• Old thread: on Forum.
• Project
  • Yes, it works with KSP 1.10.0 (with Making History and Breaking Ground)  
  • Current Release:  0.8.10.0
    • Install Instructions.
    • Announce.
  • Source: on GitHub
  • ChangeLog: here.
  • TODO list

Introduction:

Impossible Innovations is a parts pack for KSP that adds some late-game parts based on fusion. Eternal Working In Progress. Here's the rundown:

The Add'On adds several engine types that run off of deuterium.

There is also a powerful RCS system driven by tritium. The reaction wheels also use tritium.

Other all-around useful parts are added like the dead weight, different strut varieties, better parachutes, etc.

Part Information:

Spoiler

• Aerodynamics
  • Ionized wing: Wings that can alter the properties of the air flow beneath them, making the air press on the wing from the bottom. This process consumes electricity. If the wing has no source of electricity, it will quit producing amazing amounts of lift.
• Control
  • TDRCS Block: A tritium-driven RCS block. Uses tritium instead of mono-propellant, and is much stronger.
  • TDRCS Linear: A linear version of a normal TDRCS thruster that can only fire in one direction.
  • Strong Reaction Wheel: Uses tritium instead of electricity to produce massive amounts of torque.
• Engines
  • Fusion Engines: Fusion engines run on deuterium and are very efficient. There are 3 type to choose from.
  • CL-20 Boosters: A solid fuel booster that runs on China Lake 20, a propellant that doesn't emit any smoke, is 20% stronger than normal solid fuel, and is a little more efficient. Boosters come in all shapes and sizes.
• Fuel Tanks
  • Deuterium Tanks: These tanks hold deuterium, the fuel used by fusion engines.
  • Tritium Tanks: These tanks hold tritium, the fuel used by TDRCS thrusters and also reaction wheels that use tritium.
• Command
  • Manned Pod: This command pod can hold 4 kerbals and has a very weak RTG built in. The reaction wheels inside operate using tritium.
  • Probe Cores: There are 2 probe cores: a flat rescalable one and and a cubic one. All use tritium for torque.
• Structural Parts
  • Struts: There are 2 added struts: A basic aluminum strut and a high-tier iridium strut. The aluminum strut is lighter than the standard strut and it can extend twice as far. It is slightly weaker, though. The iridium strut can only extend half the distance of a normal strut, and it is heavier. This strut is very strong.
  • Dead Weights: We also give a lead weight. The volume of the weight can be changed via TweakScale, and there is a "Lead" resource that is tweakable and adds the correct amount of weight per liter of Lead.
  • Poofing Part: This part can be made to instantly disappear on command, sort of a like a super-clean decoupler. It has a safety feature to prevent "accidents".
• Utilities
  • Battery Packs and Banks: Both inline and radial radioactive rechargeable batteries are added. They have very high electric capacity, but tend to be heavy and fragile.
  • Advanced Solar Panel: This small solar panel is surprisingly heavy for its size, as it is packed with sun-collecting technology. No sun-tracking abilities.
  • Advanced Parachutes: These parachutes use advanced fibers in their material. They are quite forceful when deploying at high speeds, but they will slow your craft down so long as they remain attached.
  • Hydrogen Intake: This intake will slowly collect hydrogen from the atmosphere, and also in space. The thinner the air, the slower it collects.
  • Hydrogen Tank: This tank will store collected hydrogen.
  • Hydrogen Isotope Converter: A machine to convert hydrogen into either deuterium or tritium using electricity. You can also convert deuterium and tritium back into hydrogen and gain electricity, but you won't get all your hydrogen back.

A little bit of useful info on how Impossible Innovations alters the tech tree:

Impossible Innovations uses ModuleManager to place additional nodes to the tech tree. So if other Add'Ons do likewise, the possibility exists that there may be overlapping nodes, but no functionality would be lost. There is some basic integration with the Community Tech Tree, so don't worry about compatibility issues there.

Some Pictures:

Here.

Known Issues:

Working on it. Please be patient, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to break something soon.

Credits:

Contributions From:

• JandCandO (for creating this Add'On at first place!)
• Dungchunker (For creating the amazing blue models you see)
• Baconator900 (For previous efforts as one-man testing team)
• Lando (For creating Part Generator)

And future new features/bugs/mishaps from yours truly.

Legal Stuff:

Spoiler

Impossible Innovations is licensed as follows:

• Source Code and TweakScale Patches:
  • SKL 1.0.
  • GPL 2.0.
  • And you are allowed to choose the License that better suit your needs.
• Models, Textures, Art & Configs:
  • CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

 

 

Edited October 22, 2023 by Lisias
V 0.8.10.0 is on the Wild! All your Distribution Channels are belong to us!

[kenwud]

yay

[jandcando]

You have my blessing, Lisias. I know you'll do great things with this mod. Be nice to the new management, everyone!

[DeltaDizzy]

@Lisias I would just love it if there were some pictures to look at.

[Gargamel]

On 6/6/2018 at 8:12 PM, DeltaDizzy said:

@Lisias I would just love it if there were some pictures to look at.

And a banner... all classic mods need a banner!

Glad to see you take this one over Lisias!

[Lisias]

On 6/6/2018 at 9:12 PM, DeltaDizzy said:

@Lisias I would just love it if there were some pictures to look at.

Work in Progress.

5 hours ago, Gargamel said:

And a banner... all classic mods need a banner!

CLOSED/FIXED !  

[Lisias]

HI. That's the idea: I was doing some research on Hydrogen-2 and Hydrogen-3 (Deuterium and Tritium) in order to cook something to make the Engines work in a sensible way on II.

Then I found something about Cold Fusion,  or Muon Catalyzed Fusion. There's mainly two useful reactions: (d-mu-t)+ and (d-mu-d)+. In a nutshell, catalyzing two Deuteriums with a Muon produces less energy per Muon than when using Deuterium and Tritium,  but it's not radioactive. 

So the Tritium consumers should consume Deuterium also, and would kill any near Kerbal when active as the Nuclear Engines do.

The source of Muons is a Monte Carlo Generator for generating Muons for the fusion, and this thing works on Electricity. Huge amounts of Electricity. I need to add this as a new Part to II. 

The SciFi excuse, I mean, solution for this work is a magical discovery that eliminates the problem of the alpha-sticking, so each Muon would be indefinitely useful for catalyzation, making the Cold Fusion net positive. 

In order to simplify things, I think it's a good idea to ditch the internal resource definitions for Deuterium and Tritium and use the Community Resources Pack's (and so, CRP would be a hard dependency). 

My main problem at the moment is to calculate a viable and plausible ISP for the (d-mu-t)+ and (d-mu-d)+ engines. And the cost in E for the Muon Generator.

POST_EDIT: on a second thought, I don't need a new Part for the Monte Carlo Generator. The rocket engines are such generators themselves! It only happens they have the expansion chamber embedded.

Edited June 14, 2018 by Lisias
New insight

[Lisias]

Hi.

Finally, after "a few days" (I didn't mentioned which planet's days!), Release 0.8.8.2 ready to be downloaded. See the OP for the download links.

I did my best with the time I had to release a (somewhat) working add-on. There're a lot to do yet, but at least we can play with it on 1.4 now!  

Unfortunately, older crafts will choke with this new release due the Resource Renaming. I wondering if a migration tool would be of use? It's not that hard - it's the time to do it my problem.  

Anyway - have fun!

Change Log:

• New Parts!
• Renamed resources to avoid conflicts with CRP.
• New Filters.
• New Distribution sites
  • CurseForge
• Some bad decisions reverted. Sorry, my bad.

Edited October 10, 2018 by Lisias
tyops. tyops, tyops everywhere!

[baconator900]

Hello, I wanted to thank you for deciding to continue this project for my friend Jand, this was one of my favorite projects and mods for KSP, and I'm glad that it's being continued. It's been a while since I played KSP, but if you need some more help with the testing feel free to let me know.

[Lisias]

17 hours ago, baconator900 said:

 It's been a while since I played KSP, but if you need some more help with the testing feel free to let me know.

Thank you!  :-)

i'm glad you offered help. Currently, I have a issue with the resource naming. By some reason, the new names I choose works but are rendered chopped on the screen.

Do you want to try some new names on the resources to see what happens? 

[baconator900]

1 hour ago, Lisias said:

Thank you!  :-)

i'm glad you offered help. Currently, I have a issue with the resource naming. By some reason, the new names I choose works but are rendered chopped on the screen.

Do you want to try some new names on the resources to see what happens? 

I'll be glad to help any way I can, would you prefer we talk somewhere else so that we can talk a bit easier with each other? I don''t use the KSP forums much so it wouldn't let me message you.

[Lisias]

Your Attention, please.

The TweakScale embedded with the latest Impossible Innovation release will complain about being used on KSP 1.6 . You can safely ignore the warning, TweakScale is working fine on KSP 1.6.

A (minor) release will have TweakScale "fixed" to be less complainer.  

[Lisias]

Impossible Innovations V0.8.8.4 is on the wild!

Quote

• 2019-0111: 0.8.8.4 (Lisias) for KSP >= 1.4
  • Certified for use on KSP 1.5.x and 1.6.x series
  • Added an option to turn off the II Category Filter on the Advanced Menu
    • Useful if you want to use Community Category Filter.
  • Added bulkheadProfiles setting to parts missing it.
  • Updated embedded dependencies to the latest.

The most important changes are the dependencies being updated to the latests (so no more issues on KSP 1.6.0) and the ability to disable the specialized menu item for II on the Advanced Menu on VAB/SPH.

Download on the OP.

Cheers!

Edited January 11, 2019 by Lisias
Borked on the 0.8.8.3. New Issue. :)

[mindseyemodels]

I had to edit this whole comment as I thought this mod updated and removed a part that I use but I realized that it was a totally diferent mod that I stupidly uninstalled

 

Edited April 27, 2019 by mindseyemodels

[Lisias]

Impossible Innovations is working with KSP 1.7.1 + Making History + Breaking Ground. 

No new defects detected - but the old ones still apply.

Edited June 10, 2019 by Lisias
kinda of typo...

[Lisias]

ANNOUNCE: Impossible Innovations V0.8.8.5 is on the wild!

Quote

• 2019-0709: 0.8.8.5 (Lisias) for KSP >= 1.4
  • Avoiding runtime problems on TweakScale
  • Certified for use on KSP 1.7.x

Nothing really important, just a small fix on the filesystem to prevent problems with another Add'Ons (as TweakScale).

And the thing is (still) working fine on KSP 1.7.3

Download on the OP.

Cheers!

[Lisias]

ANNOUNCE

Impossible Innovations V0.8.8.6 is on the wild!

---

• 2019-0728: 0.8.8.6 (Lisias) for KSP >= 1.3.1
  • Using KSPe.Util.Image facilities
    • update to the most recent KSPAPIExtensions (2.1.0.15 at the present moment). 
  • Dependencies are not more embedded. We are sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s unfeasible to keep various downloads to the same version when only the dependencies are KSP version locked.
    • See INSTALL.md for detailed instructions.
  • Avoiding runtime problems on TweakScale
  • Certified for use from KSP 1.3.1 to KSP 1.7.3

---

Now Impossible Innovations works from KSP 1.3.1 to the latest. Using the same package, no changes.

On the other hand, the dependencies are not being packed together anymore - there’s no point on making the Add'On multi KSP just to be forced to distribute multiple packages due Add'On restrictions. Most of the time, the Add'Ons are utterly outdated at the moment of the download anyway.

Download on the OP.

Cheers!

Edited September 7, 2019 by Lisias
ugh =P

[kenwud]

does this work with current version or how can i update it?

 

nvm i see it does thank u

Edited June 11, 2020 by kenwud

[Monniasza]

I suggest you to reference used models instead of cloning them - it would save a lot of space.

[Lisias]

On 7/19/2020 at 6:34 AM, Monniasza said:

I suggest you to reference used models instead of cloning them - it would save a lot of space.

Probably, but it also couple them to the current KSP version, and if the part gets deprecated, I would need to update the Add'On - what's not exactly a unsolvable problem, as far as I know the deprecated assets are still being distributed on a folder called zDeprecated (and so someone can try to load them when needed). However, there's no such support yet, and this Add'On is distributing the current assets for ages - I would need to check all the textures against the current meshes to see if anything changed. [Suggestion accepted. Work in Progress]

In a way or another, the at least some meshes are in need to be reworked due some vertices being displaced outside the collision mesh, what on recent KSP triggers what I call "The Jumping Jack Effect" (something to do with animations, FS's gears suffer from this too). Once this fine Add'On gets on the top of my backlog I will consider your suggestion.

Edited July 21, 2020 by Lisias
Suggestion Accepted.

[Monniasza]

On 7/19/2020 at 12:29 PM, Lisias said:

Probably, but it also couple them to the current KSP version, and if the part gets deprecated, I would need to update the Add'On - what's not exactly a unsolvable problem, as far as I know the deprecated assets are still being distributed on a folder called zDeprecated (and so someone can try to load them when needed). However, there's no such support yet, and this Add'On is distributing the current assets for ages - I would need to check all the textures against the current meshes to see if anything changed.

In a way or another, the at least some meshes are in need to be reworked due some vertices being displaced outside the collision mesh, what on recent KSP triggers what I call "The Jumping Jack Effect" (something to do with animations, FS's gears suffer from this too). Once this fine Add'On gets on the top of my backlog I will consider your suggestion.

You can remodel every part, using small PNG textures and low poly models (like I did in SSTO Project).

 

[Lisias]

12 hours ago, Monniasza said:

You can remodel every part, using small PNG textures and low poly models (like I did in SSTO Project).

Yep, probably the best solution.

On a second thought, however, perhaps I should give your first advice more attention? Thanks for the heads up!

-- POST EDIT -- 

You are right. Way less space used, way smaller download package. I need to nail down some details (some assets are moving on the file system on new KSP versions), but I think I though on something that will allow me to keep II compatible with multiple KSP versions nevertheless...

Edited July 22, 2020 by Lisias
post edit

[Monniasza]

On 7/21/2020 at 11:18 PM, Lisias said:

Yep, probably the best solution.

On a second thought, however, perhaps I should give your first advice more attention? Thanks for the heads up!

-- POST EDIT -- 

You are right. Way less space used, way smaller download package. I need to nail down some details (some assets are moving on the file system on new KSP versions), but I think I though on something that will allow me to keep II compatible with multiple KSP versions nevertheless...

Did you remodel anything?

[Lisias]

1 hour ago, Monniasza said:

Did you remodel anything?

Baby steps.   I run out of time for modding this month! (yeah, real life...)

I got rid of the redundant textures and meshes and started to use the ones from the KSP's instalment, taking advantage of a new feature of KSPe (KSP version conditional patching! yeah!).

The next step is to optimize the textures that remained, as they have no equivalent on KSP and they are now the bigger space guzzlers. 

With the textures under control (and converted to DDS), the models will be refactored. I'm pretty sure there're duplicated vertices everywhere - I will do this by last because I want to resurrect an old tool of mine from my times on Orbiter (a lint tool for meshes). But as I said above, my time for modding this month is more than exhausted, this will have to wait a bit.

[Monniasza]

14 hours ago, Lisias said:

Baby steps.   I run out of time for modding this month! (yeah, real life...)

I got rid of the redundant textures and meshes and started to use the ones from the KSP's instalment, taking advantage of a new feature of KSPe (KSP version conditional patching! yeah!).

The next step is to optimize the textures that remained, as they have no equivalent on KSP and they are now the bigger space guzzlers. 

With the textures under control (and converted to DDS), the models will be refactored. I'm pretty sure there're duplicated vertices everywhere - I will do this by last because I want to resurrect an old tool of mine from my times on Orbiter (a lint tool for meshes). But as I said above, my time for modding this month is more than exhausted, this will have to wait a bit.

You can offer two texture packs (half resolution and full resolution).