[WIP] (1.9.1 - 1.12+) TrekDrive - a Star Trek-like Warp Drive by ShadowWorks v0.99.1w NX-Class (10/08/2021)

[Puggonaut]

10 hours ago, TheShadow1138 said:

Thank you.  I hope that it all turns out great in the end as well.

NX Update:  I have the Engineering Pylons modeled, not completely though, still need to do a cutout and some geometry for the first stage plasma accelerator and a couple of other things, but for the most part the hard part is done.  I'm not that great with more organic shapes so these were the part I was dreading on this model.  But, I think that they turned out pretty good.

Dorsal:

Ventral:

Looking great . 

[TheShadow1138]

We inch closer...  The engineering section is more-or-less complete from a geometry standpoint.

First Stage Plasma Accelerators, grooves, and the rest of the engineering section.

Aft view showing sensor pack, airlock, and the main impulse engines.

Now...on to the pylons and nacelles!

[Spaceman.Spiff]

1 minute ago, TheShadow1138 said:

We inch closer...  The engineering section is more-or-less complete from a geometry standpoint.

First Stage Plasma Accelerators, grooves, and the rest of the engineering section.

Aft view showing sensor pack, airlock, and the main impulse engines.

Now...on to the pylons and nacelles!

Oh boy! Unwrapping this is gonna be a nightmare!

 

[TheShadow1138]

1 hour ago, Spaceman.Spiff said:

Oh boy! Unwrapping this is gonna be a nightmare!

 

You are, unfortunately, very correct.  I hope I can do this model justice when it comes time to texture it out.

[Tanner Rawlings]

So maybe I'm (I most certainly am) doing something wrong here, I seem to explode leaving warp, is this just because my Kraken deflector shields are not activating?

(RIP 3 Kerbals so far....)  7.....

Update: I had Part G-Limit enabled, so that was the issue

Edited May 7, 2021 by Tanner Rawlings
Update

[TheShadow1138]

21 hours ago, Tanner Rawlings said:

So maybe I'm (I most certainly am) doing something wrong here, I seem to explode leaving warp, is this just because my Kraken deflector shields are not activating?

(RIP 3 Kerbals so far....)  7.....

Update: I had Part G-Limit enabled, so that was the issue

Glad you figured out what was going on, though RIP your kerbals.  I'll have to see if there is a way for me to keep this from happening, though I'm not sure right off.

[PalowPower]

The NX-01 is one of my favorite ships in the whole ST universe.

How about adding a Waterfall Patch to the engines. would look nice. And since Waterfall has a distortion effect, it's perfect for a warp drive

[TheShadow1138]

6 hours ago, PalowPower said:

The NX-01 is one of my favorite ships in the whole ST universe.

How about adding a Waterfall Patch to the engines. would look nice. And since Waterfall has a distortion effect, it's perfect for a warp drive

I hadn't thought about using Waterfall's new distortion feature for the warp drive.  I'll definitely have to see if I can get a good effect with it, and if so it will be included.  The Phoenix actually already has Waterfall effects, they're not the greatest right now, but they're there.

I really like the NX-01 as well, though my favorite Enterprise is the Sovereign class Enterprise-E.  Have a look at the newly geometry complete (unless I realize I forgot something) NX class starship:

It really has turned out really well, much better than I had originally thought.  Now will come the long/tedious process of unwrapping and texturing.

Edited May 13, 2021 by TheShadow1138

[PalowPower]

12 hours ago, TheShadow1138 said:

I hadn't thought about using Waterfall's new distortion feature for the warp drive.  I'll definitely have to see if I can get a good effect with it, and if so it will be included.  The Phoenix actually already has Waterfall effects, they're not the greatest right now, but they're there.

I really like the NX-01 as well, though my favorite Enterprise is the Sovereign class Enterprise-E.  Have a look at the newly geometry complete (unless I realize I forgot something) NX class starship:

It really has turned out really well, much better than I had originally thought.  Now will come the long/tedious process of unwrapping and texturing.

The Model looks impressive! Unwrapping is harder than a demon in GD for this model lol 

Edited May 13, 2021 by PalowPower

[Minmus Taster]

5 minutes ago, PalowPower said:

The Model looks impressive! Unwrapping is hell for this model lol 

I don't think you can say h**l here

[TheShadow1138]

1 hour ago, PalowPower said:

The Model looks impressive! Unwrapping is hell for this model lol 

Thanks!  I'm hoping that the symmetry will be a big help in the unwrapping department.  I can unwrap an object that is duplicated and/or mirrored, then delete the mirrored object, and replace it by duplicating the newly unwrapped object and mirroring the geometry.  That way, unwrapping one object is the same as unwrapping two.  Also, any object that is exactly duplicated, i can unwrap all of them at once.  Hopefully that at least helps the process move faster.  I probably should have been unwrapping as I completed objects, but got so caught up in how good it was looking.

Edited May 13, 2021 by TheShadow1138

[PalowPower]

1 hour ago, Minmus Taster said:

I don't think you can say h**l here

Is h*ll really a swear word?

[Minmus Taster]

6 minutes ago, PalowPower said:

Is h*ll really a swear word?

Yes

[PalowPower]

21 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

Yes

sry, didn't knew that

[Tanner Rawlings]

So after rescuing a stranded warp test pilot, i found the rescue ship could no longer enter warp for some reason.

It would not enter "ready" status, despite the warp core being on, and the coils being charged.

Any ideas? Am I doing something wrong? Or did I just find an edge-case bug?

Attached image:

Spoiler

 

[TheShadow1138]

22 hours ago, Tanner Rawlings said:

So after rescuing a stranded warp test pilot, i found the rescue ship could no longer enter warp for some reason.

It would not enter "ready" status, despite the warp core being on, and the coils being charged.

Any ideas? Am I doing something wrong? Or did I just find an edge-case bug?

Attached image:

  Hide contents

 

I assume that you are clicking the "Check Ready Status" button before trying to engage the drive.  If you haven't, you need to click that first as that checks to make sure that the coils are charged and the warp core is active.  it's a manual thing, it doesn't check automatically.

I also notice that your nacelles aren't lit up, which is part of the charge process.  I want to make sure I'm understanding the situation completely.  You warped to a location where another warp vessel was stranded, switched vessels to allow EVA the stranded pilot and transfer them to the rescue warp ship.  The nacelle lights may be because of a coding error on my part, as could the inability to go to warp again.  I'm not sure why it wouldn't let you go to warp after switching away and back to the vessel, it wasn't something I tested, at least I don't remember testing it.  Hopefully, clicking the "Check Ready Status" button is the issue.  Let me know if that does fix the issue, if not I'll see if I can reproduce it on my end and see if I can figure out what's going on.

Update:  I have successfully reproduced this and found exactly what you found.  There must be something with my code that is causing this, that is that the "Check Ready Status" doesn't work when you switch from one vessel to another.  I'll have to see if I can figure it out and get back to you.

Edited May 17, 2021 by TheShadow1138

[Tanner Rawlings]

2 hours ago, TheShadow1138 said:

Update:  I have successfully reproduced this and found exactly what you found.  There must be something with my code that is causing this, that is that the "Check Ready Status" doesn't work when you switch from one vessel to another.  I'll have to see if I can figure it out and get back to you.

Yes, I was clicking the charge coils, noticing nothing was changing, then hitting "Check Status" several times

I am willing to bet that it might be that if one ship is "activated" it causes issues when both ships enter loading range of each-other, are the statuses a global value or somehow behaving like one? I also noticed that when my stranded ship lost a nacelle, I couldn't even get the remaining one to charge. I don't know if that information Helps

Edit: It wouldn't help if somehow one could discharge the coils then re-charge them right? (also side note, noticed that in the UI it says "Chgarged")

Edited May 17, 2021 by Tanner Rawlings

[TheShadow1138]

3 hours ago, Tanner Rawlings said:

Yes, I was clicking the charge coils, noticing nothing was changing, then hitting "Check Status" several times

I am willing to bet that it might be that if one ship is "activated" it causes issues when both ships enter loading range of each-other, are the statuses a global value or somehow behaving like one? I also noticed that when my stranded ship lost a nacelle, I couldn't even get the remaining one to charge. I don't know if that information Helps

They are KSPFields and are set to be persistent.  I've added overrides for OnLoad and have at the very least corrected the nacelle glow issue, but it has yet to fully resolve the inability to re-engage the drive.  Clicking "Check Ready Status" appears to do nothing.  The "Check Ready Status" is set up as a KSPEvent.  I'm setting up Debug logs to see if I can trace where it's failing.  It does check to see if there are other active drives, but it only checks the active vessel, so I don't think it would "see" an active drive on another nearby vessel.

Update: v0.7.5w Hotfix

This hotfix corrects an issue that was discovered by @Tanner Rawlings in which you would be unable to engage the warp drive after switching craft, or even on reloading a save.  This would also remove the glow from the nacelles, which was minor, but aesthetically not pleasing.  It turned out that I needed to include "OnLoad" functions to correct this, but now it works!

Upon switching away from your warp ship, and switching back, the warp drive will be inactive and in the "Not Ready" state.  The warp core will remain active if it was active previously, and the warp coils will remain in their state.  There was simply an issue with the warp drive being able to see that everything was in the correct state, which is now fixed.  Simply click the "Check Ready Status" button in the PAW and then you will be able to engage the warp drive as expected.  Thanks again to @Tanner Rawlings.

NOTE:  If you have an in-progress flight with a TrekDrive warp ship where the warp coils are already charged, you will need to do the following before loading your save in order for the fix to work properly with in-progress flights.

1.  Open your "persistent.sfs" file for the save in a text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, etc...)
2.  Find "Chgarged" and replace with "Charged".
3.  Save your "persistent.sfs", and load up your save.

There was a typo that labeled the warp coils as "Chgarged", and the OnLoad function specifically looks for the correct spelling, and so will not automatically fix any in-progress flights where the warp coils are already charged.

Edited May 17, 2021 by TheShadow1138

[TheShadow1138]

20 hours ago, Tanner Rawlings said:

Edit: It wouldn't help if somehow one could discharge the coils then re-charge them right? (also side note, noticed that in the UI it says "Chgarged")

Actually, I think the ability to discharge the coils would have allowed one to fix the issue.  What was ultimately happening, I believe, is that the boolean that marks the coil as charged was not persistent, so when the part was loading after switching the boolean was getting reset to the default value of "false" while the chargeStatus variable stayed set to "Charged", which then prevent you from charging the coil, and prevented the "Check Ready Status" from working because it saw the coils as not charged (the aforementioned boolean variable).  It probably could be a littler neater (one variable instead of two), and I'll go through once I'm closer to v1.0 and see what cleaning up I can do to the code.

I have been thinking about adding a discharge option for the coils, especially if you want to do a full shutdown with the NX, or any larger ship that may come along in the future, so that may be in the next version of the plugin.

[TheShadow1138]

Quick NX Update:  There isn't any real visual progress to be had, though uniting a few polygons yielded a quite pleasing result on the large engineering pylons.

The UV unwrapping is progressing.  I have unwrapped the following:  Warp Nacelles, the entire Engineering Section (Engineering pylons/Deuterium tanks), the Warp Field Governor and wing connecting the Engineering Pylons, and both the primary and secondary Impulse Engines.

The remaining unwrapping, as far as final parts goes, is the Saucer Section, the Bridge, and the Navigational Deflector.  Once the unwrapping is completed, I will move on to texturing this beast, and hope that I can do justice to this beautiful model.

[kerbalk]

Wow, this looks exactly like what im looking for! Great work. Any chance it can be found on CKAN soon for people like me who can't install properly?

 

[TheShadow1138]

14 hours ago, kerbalk said:

Wow, this looks exactly like what im looking for! Great work. Any chance it can be found on CKAN soon for people like me who can't install properly?

 

Thanks!  It might be on CKAN, I'm not sure.  You're free to check and let me know if it is or not.  I just went into the Spacedock page and checked the "Add to CKAN" option and saved the change.  So, it should be on CKAN, but I'm not sure how long it will take for this change to take effect.  Just keep checking CKAN and hopefully it will show up some time today or tomorrow.

Stay tuned, Ive nearly finished the UV unwrap of the NX, just have the Saucer section to do before I begin the texturing process.

Edited May 22, 2021 by TheShadow1138

[TheShadow1138]

NX Progress;  I have completed the UV unwrap!!!  I did make a couple of geometry updates to the saucer while I was at it.  One of the first changes was to the saucer RCS pods.  I am going to use textures mainly for the RCS thrusters otherwise there would be even more geometry than there already is, and there is quite a bit.  The pods I originally modeled did not have the bezel in the vertical section of the pod, so I added that bezel/ramp to the vertical portion of the pods:

Old RCS Pods:

New RCS Pods:

While working on the UV unwrap I found a nice collection of high resolution images of the NX-01, including some renders from Doug Drexler's old Drex Files blog that gave me a much better view of the aft portion of the saucer, so I took the opportunity to update that geometry as well.  The update here is relatively small, I expanded the block on which the observation dome sits, and using a boolean to create the recess for the docking port

The final update was also the result of realizing that a texture wasn't going to cut it.  The Deuterium filling ports on the top of the saucer, between the bridge and the engineering pylons, have a rectangular protrusion that I was going to accomplish with a normal map.  The reality of the situation, as I was unwrapping this portion of the saucer became clear, I would not be able to prepare the UV map to easily use a normal map as planned.  So, I simply added a new piece of geometry, relatively simple by comparison to some of the ship.

That's it for this update.  I can now begin the texturing process so that it hopefully begins to look even more like the NX-01.

[TheShadow1138]

NX Texture Progress:  I have begun with the saucer section because of the number of visible separate panels and the "Aztec" patterning.  I have a good portion of the dorsal saucer panels done at this point, and I think it looks pretty decent.  There are panels over the cargo doors that will be replaced with the more accurate markings once all of the panels are done.

[theJesuit]

9 minutes ago, TheShadow1138 said:

NX Texture Progress:  I have begun with the saucer section because of the number of visible separate panels and the "Aztec" patterning.  I have a good portion of the dorsal saucer panels done at this point, and I think it looks pretty decent.  There are panels over the cargo doors that will be replaced with the more accurate markings once all of the panels are done.

Looks so good.  Will you put the decals on it or will we be able to name the ship for ourselves?