[1.12.x] Stock Waterfall Effects (SWE) - A Waterfall config set for realistic rocket exhaust plumes for the stock engines

[Knight of St John]

On 12/17/2021 at 10:55 PM, QAM00 said:

 

Is it just me or does the vector/mammoth plume not look as good? Performance improvements are great but I think the purple/red/orange is a little too bright compared to how faint it was on the rs-25 in real life and the plumes from before. And also when going up through the astrosphere when the plume expands I feel like the exhaust is too bright and doesn't move as much as before. One thing I do like though is the little puff that comes out when you "start" the engine.

Here are 2 pics showing what I though wasn't the best looking about 10km up

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2685217599

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2685217514

the previous RS25 plume definitely looked a lot worse (and less realistic) than this one. trust me. the current plume is indeed brighter than the real life RS25, and that is because i thought it looks nicer if you actually see something coming out of the engine. :-)

about the speed of the plume: yes i've noticed this issue. i'll fix it when i have the time to do so.

I dissagree about those pictures. I feel like they look great. not particularly realistic for the RS25 though, that is correct. but if you want 100% realism, you would barely see anything at that height.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Knight of St John

[QAM00]

On 12/22/2021 at 7:06 AM, Knight of St John said:

the previous RS25 plume definitely looked a lot worse (and less realistic) than this one. trust me. the current plume is indeed brighter than the real life RS25, and that is because i thought it looks nicer if you actually see something coming out of the engine. :-)

about the speed of the plume: yes i've noticed this issue. i'll fix it when i have the time to do so.

I dissagree about those pictures. I feel like they look great. not particularly realistic for the RS25 though, that is correct. but if you want 100% realism, you would barely see anything at that height.

Thanks!

[AtomicTech]

I have noticed that sometimes the Vector's plume sometimes disappears in flight, usually around 40,000 km.

On 12/22/2021 at 6:06 AM, Knight of St John said:

the previous RS25 plume definitely looked a lot worse (and less realistic) than this one. trust me. the current plume is indeed brighter than the real life RS25, and that is because i thought it looks nicer if you actually see something coming out of the engine. :-)

about the speed of the plume: yes i've noticed this issue. i'll fix it when i have the time to do so.

I dissagree about those pictures. I feel like they look great. not particularly realistic for the RS25 though, that is correct. but if you want 100% realism, you would barely see anything at that height.

I do love the plume though. It's my favorite!

[Knight of St John]

12 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

I have noticed that sometimes the Vector's plume sometimes disappears in flight, usually around 40,000 km.

I do love the plume though. It's my favorite!

Yes I know about this.

On 12/10/2021 at 8:22 PM, Knight of St John said:

I also noticed that the new spectra seems kinda bugged though.
try to install scatterer version 0772 instead of the newest scatterer. I believe that might fix your issues.

 

[AtomicTech]

9 hours ago, Knight of St John said:

I also noticed that the new spectra seems kinda bugged though.
try to install scatterer version 0772 instead of the newest scatterer. I believe that might fix your issues.

But I don't have scatterer?

Would installing it fix it?

[Knight of St John]

16 hours ago, AtomicTech said:

But I don't have scatterer?

interesting... could you share your GameData folder?
and do you mean 40 km or 40 000 km?

[AtomicTech]

5 hours ago, Knight of St John said:

interesting... could you share your GameData folder?
and do you mean 40 km or 40 000 km?

I'll send it this weekend!

I mean 40 km or 40,000 meters

[AtomicTech]

I've been using the Cheetah recently for my SLS Replica,

Spoiler

and I felt like the Cheetah's plume didn't quite match (It being some sort of Hydrolox instead of a Hypergol). So, I wanted to ask if, using B9 Part Switch, you could make a variant of the Cheetah's plume that looked like Hypergol engine, closer to the Titan II Upper Stage Engine that it's an analouge for.

Spoiler

 

Edited January 12, 2022 by AtomicTech

[Knight of St John]

On 1/12/2022 at 10:23 PM, AtomicTech said:

and I felt like the Cheetah's plume didn't quite match (It being some sort of Hydrolox instead of a Hypergol).

Well, I could do that, but I could do a lot of things :-)
As stated on the main page of this thread, when designing a plume, I choose to model its propellant according to the engine performance. the cheetah is a very high-isp engine, and so it's hydrolox in this mod.
If you're really anxious about this, you could mod it yourself. use the vector config file as an example, and use the stock-aerozine50-upper template as an upper stage hypergolic plume.

[Knight of St John]

new release: 0.6.3

• new plume for the NERV engine
  instead of the pink hydrogen plasma, the NERV now has a realistic heated hydrogen exhaust plume. red in atmosphere because of hydrogen-atmospheric oxygen reaction, and blue heat-radiation in vacuum. Cherenkov radiation is also visible now, coming out of the engine throat.
• improved realism of the vacuum expanded plumes for the Vector, Mammoth (both hydrolox & methalox), Rapier & RCS.
• improved plume selector flavor text for the Vector & Mammoth (@AtomicTech)

Edited January 17, 2022 by Knight of St John

[AtomicTech]

On 1/17/2022 at 11:05 AM, Knight of St John said:

new release: 0.6.3

• new plume for the NERV engine
  instead of the pink hydrogen plasma, the NERV now has a realistic heated hydrogen exhaust plume. red in atmosphere because of hydrogen-atmospheric oxygen reaction, and blue heat-radiation in vacuum. Cherenkov radiation is also visible now, coming out of the engine throat.
• improved realism of the vacuum expanded plumes for the Vector, Mammoth (both hydrolox & methalox), Rapier & RCS.
• improved plume selector flavor text for the Vector & Mammoth (@AtomicTech)

Congrats!

On 1/15/2022 at 5:17 AM, Knight of St John said:

Well, I could do that, but I could do a lot of things :-)
As stated on the main page of this thread, when designing a plume, I choose to model its propellant according to the engine performance. the cheetah is a very high-isp engine, and so it's hydrolox in this mod.
If you're really anxious about this, you could mod it yourself. use the vector config file as an example, and use the stock-aerozine50-upper template as an upper stage hypergolic plume.

So a mod for a mod. 

Sounds very Kerbal, I LIKE IT!

[Knight of St John]

On 1/18/2022 at 9:58 PM, AtomicTech said:

Congrats!

So a mod for a mod. 

Sounds very Kerbal, I LIKE IT!

yep, you could just use modulemanager for this. I believe if you put :AFTER[StockWaterfallEffects] you should be able to modify any of my configs with your own "mod".

[AtomicTech]

@Knight of St John, here's the SpaceDock Page!

https://spacedock.info/mod/2957/Stock Waterfall Effects

[Knight of St John]

1 hour ago, AtomicTech said:

@Knight of St John, here's the SpaceDock Page!

https://spacedock.info/mod/2957/Stock Waterfall Effects

thanks. Added it as secondary download option to the main post.

[FlyingPotato_131]

plumes for rapier (cc mode), vector and lvn engines show through parts, other engines seem to work fine (linux native version)

[AtomicTech]

24 minutes ago, FlyingPotato_131 said:

plumes for rapier (cc mode), vector and lvn engines show through parts, other engines seem to work fine (linux native version)

Welcome to the Forums!

To address your bug report, if you were to post a .log file and send some screenshots, it would go a long way in helping to fix the issue at hand!

[FlyingPotato_131]

here's ksp.log (ig that's what you're asking)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pzqgnsl7fci30nc/KSP.log?dl=0

here's a screenshot

https://photos.app.goo.gl/PPtcEg3q5UXsX9B57

can get more if needed

[Knight of St John]

23 hours ago, FlyingPotato_131 said:

plumes for rapier (cc mode), vector and lvn engines show through parts, other engines seem to work fine (linux native version)

it seems on windows this doesn't happen.
this is gonna require quite a bit of digging on my end. so dont expect a fix immediatly.

also: this is technically a waterfall bug. not StockWaterfallEffects.
but you reached the right person.

Edited January 22, 2022 by Knight of St John

[FlyingPotato_131]

23 hours ago, Knight of St John said:

it seems on windows this doesn't happen.
this is gonna require quite a bit of digging on my end. so dont expect a fix immediatly.

also: this is technically a waterfall bug. not StockWaterfallEffects.
but you reached the right person.

thanks man!

[lajoswinkler]

On 12/10/2021 at 1:18 PM, Knight of St John said:

I fixed this, and also the bug where the small linear RCS doesn't make sound.

Also, I've made new RCS plumes. they are now much more accurate to real life rcs jets in vacuum:

I haven't logged on in a while so I haven't seen this. This is really excellent work. Well done, man!

 

By the way, I was looking at GitHub's page on this mod and it says:

new plume for the NERV engine
instead of the pink hydrogen plasma, the NERV now has a realistic heated hydrogen exhaust plume. red in atmosphere because of hydrogen-atmospheric oxygen reaction, and blue heat-radiation in vacuum. Cherenkov radiation is also visible now, coming out of the engine throat.

I am not sure about the blue heat radiation so I won't comment on that (yet), but in regards to Cherenkov radiation, why do you think it would be visible? Cherenkov glow appears in dense dielectrical materials such as water. I don't even think there would be ion glow like when there's a strong alpha particle flux impacting air (for example glow of air above the surface of substances such as radium or actinium).

Edited January 24, 2022 by lajoswinkler

[Knight of St John]

2 hours ago, lajoswinkler said:

I haven't logged on in a while so I haven't seen this. This is really excellent work. Well done, man!

 

By the way, I was looking at GitHub's page on this mod and it says:

new plume for the NERV engine
instead of the pink hydrogen plasma, the NERV now has a realistic heated hydrogen exhaust plume. red in atmosphere because of hydrogen-atmospheric oxygen reaction, and blue heat-radiation in vacuum. Cherenkov radiation is also visible now, coming out of the engine throat.

I am not sure about the blue heat radiation so I won't comment on that (yet), but in regards to Cherenkov radiation, why do you think it would be visible? Cherenkov glow appears in dense dielectrical materials such as water. I don't even think there would be ion glow like when there's a strong alpha particle flux impacting air (for example glow of air above the surface of substances such as radium or actinium).

well, I'm just guessing. since hydrogen-oxygen engines in space are also blue-white (because of the high temperature) and they run hydrogen rich, I'm just assuming that's what very hot hydrogen looks like.
and yes I am aware that the cherenkov radiation is exaggerated, but it does make the engine look at least 80% cooler.
this way it's actually distinguishable from regular reaction engines and you get that nuclear feeling.

one thing is for sure: it's way more accurate than the pink hydrogen plasma plume from before. you dont actually create plasma with a NERVA engine.

Edited January 24, 2022 by Knight of St John

[AtomicTech]

Just now, Knight of St John said:

least 80% cooler

Only 80%?

[lajoswinkler]

1 hour ago, Knight of St John said:

well, I'm just guessing. since hydrogen-oxygen engines in space are also blue-white (because of the high temperature) and they run hydrogen rich, I'm just assuming that's what very hot hydrogen looks like.
and yes I am aware that the cherenkov radiation is exaggerated, but it does make the engine look at least 80% cooler.
this way it's actually distinguishable from regular reaction engines and you get that nuclear feeling.

one thing is for sure: it's way more accurate than the pink hydrogen plasma plume from before. you dont actually create plasma with a NERVA engine.

That bluish light from hydrogen and oxygen reacting in chemical engines is made by the excited species releasing photons. I don't know the exact details which ones are present because it depends on several factors, but it is certainly the chemical reaction that is giving off light and other invisible radiation like UV and IR, in addition to black body emissions of dense gases. Ionized hydroxyl ions come to mind.

On the other hand, hydrogen heated to little over 2000 °C, which is the running temperature of NERVA engine, is not plasma just like you said. There are also no chemical reactions going on in the exhaust so the only photon emission is of a hot, dense gas. At 2550 K (NRX A6 had exhaust temperature of 2285 °C), this corresponds to situation as displayed in this graph. (link to simulator)

Basically orange plume at the exhaust throat. Not shiny, either. In vacuum of space it would probably be a short, wide, dim, orange plume probably dying off in the engine bell itself. Yes, pink is out of the question, but so is blue.

One thing to note is that the blackbody radiation of the engine itself should overpower the glow of the exhaust after short time that it has been turned on. There would be yellow-orange glow coming through the nozzle because the insides would be basically an atomic furnace. Anyone could see it but couldn't live for long to tell the tale.

Edited January 24, 2022 by lajoswinkler

[Knight of St John]

On 1/24/2022 at 4:34 PM, lajoswinkler said:

That bluish light from hydrogen and oxygen reacting in chemical engines is made by the excited species releasing photons. I don't know the exact details which ones are present because it depends on several factors, but it is certainly the chemical reaction that is giving off light and other invisible radiation like UV and IR, in addition to black body emissions of dense gases. Ionized hydroxyl ions come to mind.

On the other hand, hydrogen heated to little over 2000 °C, which is the running temperature of NERVA engine, is not plasma just like you said. There are also no chemical reactions going on in the exhaust so the only photon emission is of a hot, dense gas. At 2550 K (NRX A6 had exhaust temperature of 2285 °C), this corresponds to situation as displayed in this graph. (link to simulator)

Basically orange plume at the exhaust throat. Not shiny, either. In vacuum of space it would probably be a short, wide, dim, orange plume probably dying off in the engine bell itself. Yes, pink is out of the question, but so is blue.

One thing to note is that the blackbody radiation of the engine itself should overpower the glow of the exhaust after short time that it has been turned on. There would be yellow-orange glow coming through the nozzle because the insides would be basically an atomic furnace. Anyone could see it but couldn't live for long to tell the tale.

ah it's great to have people be this invested in ksp graphics. makes me happy I made this mod :-)
well, your arguments are irrefutable. I guess next update I'll make the plume orange. As you said, it'd probably be quite dim compared to the engine bell glow, but I don't like having invisible plumes, so just as with the cherenkov radiation, I think I'll exaggerate the exhaust glow so it is actually visible. Thanks for your feedback.

[AtomicTech]

Just now, Knight of St John said:

ah it's great to have people be this invested in ksp graphics. makes me happy I made this mod :-)
well, your arguments are irrefutable. I guess next update I'll make the plume orange. As you said, it'd probably be quite dim compared to the engine bell glow, but I don't like having invisible plumes, so just as with the cherenkov radiation, I think I'll exaggerate the exhaust glow so it is actually visible. Thanks for your feedback.

Ooh!

Perhaps you could use B9 to make two plumes?

Then I can write some savory flavor text!