Universal Storage II [1.3.1 and 1.4.5 - 1.7.0]

[StevieC]

I notice many of the Universal Storage versions of Dmagic's Orbital Science parts are intangible in the VAB after being placed, and thus impossible to move or adjust once placed

[Derb]

3 hours ago, StevieC said:

I notice many of the Universal Storage versions of Dmagic's Orbital Science parts are intangible in the VAB after being placed, and thus impossible to move or adjust once placed

Put the original Universal Storage in your gamedata folder along with Universal Storage 2. Dmagic is not updated for US2 yet, and references parts from the original. The wedges will still fit more or less with some minor adjusting.

[Wyzard]

This looks great!  I like the new height-adjustable features, and the addition of fairing parts so that the wedges don't need to have pieces of fairing built-in.

One thing I've always found a little odd about US is the presence of Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Water tanks, since nothing else in my game uses those resources.  When I saw Oxygen and Water tanks, my first thought was that they must be TAC-LS parts showing up by mistake even though I use USI-LS, but after seeing the Elektron and fuel cells, I'm guessing that these three resource tanks are just meant as a form of energy storage.  Is that correct?  (Also, the description for the Hydrogen tank says it's stored cyrogenically, but it's different from the LqdHydrogen resource that Nertea's mods use as a fuel.)

BTW, a few small bugs that I noticed:

• The Elektron's part description lists "water" (all lowercase) rather than "Water" as an input.  This prevents it from working, since a Water tank doesn't meet its input needs.
• The 2.5m Attitude Control Decoupler has holes in its mesh, on the upper surface near the ribbon cable.
• In the 2.5m fairing, between the primary and secondary bay doors, there are some things that look like bolts (some with yellow tubes attached) that are missing their "inside" faces.  There's also some Z-fighting on two of the support posts when the primary doors are open.

Edited August 10, 2018 by Wyzard

[Daishi]

4 hours ago, Wyzard said:

This looks great!  I like the new height-adjustable features, and the addition of fairing parts so that the wedges don't need to have pieces of fairing built-in.

One thing I've always found a little odd about US is the presence of Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Water tanks, since nothing else in my game uses those resources.  When I saw Oxygen and Water tanks, my first thought was that they must be TAC-LS parts showing up by mistake even though I use USI-LS, but after seeing the Elektron and fuel cells, I'm guessing that these three resource tanks are just meant as a form of energy storage.  Is that correct?  (Also, the description for the Hydrogen tank says it's stored cyrogenically, but it's different from the LqdHydrogen resource that Nertea's mods use as a fuel.)

BTW, a few small bugs that I noticed:

• The Elektron's part description lists "water" (all lowercase) rather than "Water" as an input.  This prevents it from working, since a Water tank doesn't meet its input needs.
• The 2.5m Attitude Control Decoupler has holes in its mesh, on the upper surface near the ribbon cable.
• In the 2.5m fairing, between the primary and secondary bay doors, there are some things that look like bolts (some with yellow tubes attached) that are missing their "inside" faces.  There's also some Z-fighting on two of the support posts when the primary doors are open.

Thanks!  

Yeah, back with the first version we really liked the idea of fuel cells, and thought it was more accurate and within the scope of the mod to have them use the correct resources. At this time stock fuel cells didn't exist, so we had to use external plugins to get the generator working. There was a hitch with floating point errors if we directly used LqdHydrogen, because the minuscule amounts needed for the correct EC output would round down to 0, and the game would choke (you can't run a dense cryogenic liquid through a fuel cell anyway, it needs to be an expanded gas). For simplicity sake (so it also played nicely with TAC, ECLSS, etc) we just went with basic hydrogen and oxygen, stored in a part that contained it cryogenically (hence the large capacity) with it's capacity in expanded gas liters that the fuel cell would feed from.  

Good spotting on those bugs, i'll add em to my list.

Edited August 10, 2018 by Daishi

[eberkain]

im an idiot

Edited August 10, 2018 by eberkain

[StevieC]

Now all we need is a processor that can convert oxygen to oxidizer so that we can replenish both propellants onboard.

[greenrolf]

Very cool project!

[Wyzard]

13 hours ago, Daishi said:

Yeah, back with the first version we really liked the idea of fuel cells, and thought it was more accurate and within the scope of the mod to have them use the correct resources. At this time stock fuel cells didn't exist, so we had to use external plugins to get the generator working. There was a hitch with floating point errors if we directly used LqdHydrogen, because the minuscule amounts needed for the correct EC output would round down to 0, and the game would choke (you can't run a dense cryogenic liquid through a fuel cell anyway, it needs to be an expanded gas). For simplicity sake (so it also played nicely with TAC, ECLSS, etc) we just went with basic hydrogen and oxygen, stored in a part that contained it cryogenically (hence the large capacity) with it's capacity in expanded gas liters that the fuel cell would feed from.

Makes sense.  I'm sort of on the fence about whether to use these parts, or patch them out with MM.  On the one hand, it's weird to have those resources that look like life support and fuel but aren't; on the other hand, it's a very efficient form of energy storage.  (An Elektron and fuel cell, plus 1 unit each of water/hydrogen/oxygen tanks, holds about 10 times as much EC per unit volume compared to the battery wedges, for about 40% the EC per unit mass.)

BTW, I really like the actual life-support storage parts — putting small recyclers inside a fairing is much nicer than the USI-LS surface-mount ones, and the Supplies tanks are a good middle ground between USI-LS' tiny surface-mount ones and its big 2.5m cylindrical ones that hold much more than I need.

Any chance of adding monopropellant as an option for the center cores (as an alternative to crew tube or LFO tanks)?  I often use Nertea's LH2 engines so LFO tankage isn't always useful, but that center core would be a great place to keep a vessel's maneuvering fuel (rather than, again, tiny surface-mount tanks or a huge inline one).

[Daishi]

6 hours ago, Wyzard said:

Makes sense.  I'm sort of on the fence about whether to use these parts, or patch them out with MM.  On the one hand, it's weird to have those resources that look like life support and fuel but aren't; on the other hand, it's a very efficient form of energy storage.  (An Elektron and fuel cell, plus 1 unit each of water/hydrogen/oxygen tanks, holds about 10 times as much EC per unit volume compared to the battery wedges, for about 40% the EC per unit mass.)

BTW, I really like the actual life-support storage parts — putting small recyclers inside a fairing is much nicer than the USI-LS surface-mount ones, and the Supplies tanks are a good middle ground between USI-LS' tiny surface-mount ones and its big 2.5m cylindrical ones that hold much more than I need.

Any chance of adding monopropellant as an option for the center cores (as an alternative to crew tube or LFO tanks)?  I often use Nertea's LH2 engines so LFO tankage isn't always useful, but that center core would be a great place to keep a vessel's maneuvering fuel (rather than, again, tiny surface-mount tanks or a huge inline one).

Adding a mono option is on the cards, i'm just looking into how i can introduce that change without breaking current parts. 

[Paul Kingtiger]

For more information on each part, you can check out the part catalog at kingtiger.online/usvii

Edited August 11, 2018 by Paul Kingtiger

[Paul Kingtiger]

Updated both versions of the mod with a couple of fixes.

Direct Download links

Universal Storage II 1.4.5.3 for KSP 1.4.x

Universal Storage II 1.3.1.3 for KSP 1.3.1

 

[Bombaatu]

FYI, I found an error on http://www.kingtiger.online/uvsii/other_mods/

The description for the Surface Mountable Inventory Container is the same as for the Guidance Computer:

Quote

 

A top of the line, 2MHz digital computer. Can be used with Kerbal Oberating System (kOS) or MechJeb to automate flight plans.

 

[Wyzard]

8 minutes ago, Bombaatu said:

FYI, I found an error on http://www.kingtiger.online/uvsii/other_mods/

Also, the "size configurations" section for many of the wedges says "The Battery available in four height configurations."  Missing "is", and wrong part name (well, except for the actual battery part).

The water tank on the "payload" page has that, and all the resource containers on the Kerbalism/Snacks/TAC-LS/USI-LS pages.

[Bombaatu]

Is there any chance you'll be making a cylindrical 1.875m fairing? I love the tapered Gemini fairing, but sometimes you just wanna build 1.875m stuff.

[evileye.x]

OMG, this mod looks so sexy...

[Paul Kingtiger]

33 minutes ago, Bombaatu said:

Is there any chance you'll be making a cylindrical 1.875m fairing? I love the tapered Gemini fairing, but sometimes you just wanna build 1.875m stuff.

I believe it is on the to-do list.

Thanks for the feedback on the website, I have fixed those issues.

[Derb]

36 minutes ago, Bombaatu said:

Is there any chance you'll be making a cylindrical 1.875m fairing? I love the tapered Gemini fairing, but sometimes you just wanna build 1.875m stuff.

Daishi confirmed they are currently working on it.

[Daishi]

12 hours ago, Bombaatu said:

Is there any chance you'll be making a cylindrical 1.875m fairing? I love the tapered Gemini fairing, but sometimes you just wanna build 1.875m stuff.

Ya, it's coming

[r1chardj0n3s]

Finally installed manually (no sight of it on CKAN). Wow. Y'all have done amazing work with this release!

[DStaal]

22 hours ago, Bombaatu said:

Is there any chance you'll be making a cylindrical 1.875m fairing? I love the tapered Gemini fairing, but sometimes you just wanna build 1.875m stuff.

In the meantime, the Interstage Service Compartment from MOLE is an almost perfect fit:

(Some of the wedges clip a bit with the doors closed - notably the fuel wedge.)

[hab136]

Wow.  Amazing work!  I loved the first Universal Storage, and can't wait to try out this one.

Also I'm very happy you're supporting 1.3.1!  I'll upgrade to 1.4 eventually...

[priles]

Currently it seem like none of the science experiments are currently working. Are they all through Dmagic? 

[Obsidianpick9999]

Is there a chance of you adding support for the near future RTG decay patch to the RTG wedge?

It would also be nice to be able to use Interstellar Fuel Switch or RealFuels to change the fuel in some of the wedge tanks for things like Xenon based probes.

Really like the mod so far though, and it makes things look great.

Edited August 16, 2018 by Obsidianpick9999

[scottadges]

As I mentioned, I pretty much immediately started incorporating US2 parts into my career game. 

Here are some screencaps of the completed craft:

Kerbin Science Station Mk3 (Upgraded Hab and Supplies using US2)

I had a Space Station contract to expand my smallish science station to support 14 kerbals, so the upgrade module (on right with bays open) includes food, water, batteries, solid waste capacity, carbon dioxide pods, and nitrogen. Plus some fancy new generators, recyclers, and two 800L KIS modules in the secondary bays for future KAS/KIS construction storage.

Mun Orbiter Vehicle (US2 Bay and Supplies) with Lander (US2 Supplies without Bay)

I loved the look of US2 supply components as part of the Lander without a service bay. As well as, using this for supplies and materials for the Orbiter. This vehicle made the Mun transfer, orbited for about 40 days while the lander completed Mun science contracts, then everybody went back to LKO for final return to Kerbin (underway now).

Edited August 16, 2018 by scottadges

[frencrs]

OH MY SWEET JESUS CHRIST MONKEY BALLS