Can I make small FPV drones and a hoops course in space?

[tsmspace]

I want to simulate a small 16 thruster drone that would be flown around a small hoops course in zero gravity. It would be similar to the SPHERES project from some years ago. 

Basically, you would be able to make courses and then sit and practice flying around them with your drone as pictured. 

 

Is there any way to do this in Kerbal?? It would be a lot like normal quadcopter FPV, but use thrusters etc.

[The Aziz]

Why not? Something small should be lightweight enough to make it work on RCS thrusters, so just slap few of them around the fuel tank and learn how to operate it. The hoops course however, unless they're all attached to one vessel, there's no way to do it I don't think, because everything would sooner or later drift away.

[swjr-swis]

8 hours ago, tsmspace said:

I want to simulate a small 16 thruster drone that would be flown around a small hoops course in zero gravity. It would be similar to the SPHERES project from some years ago. 

Basically, you would be able to make courses and then sit and practice flying around them with your drone as pictured. 

Is there any way to do this in Kerbal?? It would be a lot like normal quadcopter FPV, but use thrusters etc.

I don't see why not.

1.  Start a new save, go into the tracking Station, and wait for an asteroid to spawn.
2. Cheat (Alt-F12) the asteroid to an orbit at the very edge of the solar system, where its orbital velocity essentially becomes zero.
3. Build your course as one craft. You can keep the part nr. down by using hollow parts (3.25m or 5m decouplers come to mind), but this will put a limit to the size of your drone.
4. Add a Jr docking port to the course craft as a place to add the drone later in a standard starting position. Save the course craft.
5. Build your drone and save it. Make sure to build the drone so it can be attached to the course - add a docking port or simply leave one node open on the root part.
6. Load the course again, and now load the drone but with 'Merge'.
7. Attach drone to the starting point of the course.
8. Launch the craft, and then cheat it to 'rendezvous' (Alt-F12 again) at a safe distance from the previously placed asteroid.
9. Stage to release drone from course starting point.
10. Race on.

Or even simpler: use the same cheat menu to set gravity to zero, then you only need to build course and craft, spawn at the SPH, and run the race right there. You really should use a new save for this, as zero gravity will mess with any other craft in your system at the time.

EDIT: I should've mentioned that you will likely need to either edit the game's settings file to allow much bigger offset limits, so you can pull the hoops apart from each other, or use a mod like editor extensions to remove those limits entirely.

Edited December 30, 2021 by swjr-swis
offset

[chadgaskerman]

Even better you could create such a course without the use of an asteroid using the mk3, mk2, structural tubes and decouplers, with maybe a few flags or markers for each checkpoint and make a time trial out of it. 

[Axelord FTW]

Either use an asteroid with stuff docked on it to work as hoops, or maybe use Gilly for your course. The very uneven terrain, and low gravity actually makes it harder to navigate in a timely manner. Using launchclamps to secure hoops all around the planetoid would probably be the best choice. I recently had a contract for some feature scanning and I basically made a scaled-up version of that idea (a 6-axis RCS driven drone). You could totally create a track and share it, turning it into a challenge of sorts. Using Kerbal Konstructs to create a starting point (i.e. a launchsite) on Gilly might help in creating a consistent starting/end point too.

You could even make a sub-challenge about using the least amount of fuel to complete the track instead of ranking by time. Without cheats, the absolute lowest amount of parts needed would be three: one probe core, one monoprop tank, and one 5-prong RCS thruster. EC capacity, and better linear control would up the part count a bit but you're still looking at a very lightweight and small craft. The more practical design would be: one probe core, two solar panels, one monoprop tank, and two five-prong RCS thrusters (or four if you want perfect attitude control). This assumes there's enough sunlight, and enough relays nearby to get probe control.

Heck, I'll make one, just give me a few.

EDIT: Here you go:

 

Edited December 31, 2021 by Axelord FTW

[tsmspace]

to all::: I will reply to some of you independently, but for now am just going to try and follow some of the instructions. Honestly I don't play them game,, just tried a few times, so i will need to see how well I figure all of this out. It sounds perfect, though.

[tsmspace]

6 hours ago, Axelord FTW said:

Either use an asteroid with stuff docked on it to work as hoops, or maybe use Gilly for your course. The very uneven terrain, and low gravity actually makes it harder to navigate in a timely manner. Using launchclamps to secure hoops all around the planetoid would probably be the best choice. I r

well,, your version went roughly 80 billion times closer than my version. I mean,, I did manage to get some sort of thing going on there,,, if you can imagine giving a six year old a shopping list and the keys. 

 

anyway, I don't know even a little bit how to play kerbal space program,, I just want to do my one thing. I basically know enough that if I keep on trying to figure things out, I should get it eventually. It will be much easier to make a sort of FPV simulator situation this way then trying to learn unreal engine from the beginning,, which is a popular suggestion. (but I mean if I can't figure out kerbal I don't think I will figure out unreal engine). And then kerbal is like an a-list production, whereas I would be stuck on every little issue just to get some cheeseball thing up and running. There's already lots of games that are somewhat close.... 

[Axelord FTW]

Well the first step would be to learn KSP as a whole before you get into the minutia of... whatever exactly is your endgoal.

[tsmspace]

2 hours ago, Axelord FTW said:

Well the first step would be to learn KSP as a whole before you get into the minutia of... whatever exactly is your endgoal.

well,, if you must know. I built an arduino 4 joystick controller. The reasons I did this include that i have some space games that are like,, shooters and such, and I was flying FPV drones, and wanted to drive a spaceship with a controller and imagine it's a space robot. ,, so actually the end goal is exactly my first goal, to make an FPV course and go fly around it with a bottle and some thrusters just like the SPHERES robot (I imagine astrobee to be heavy). I have some other games that do allow some sort of thus simulation. I have starmade, for example, which I can sort of do this. Also, there's Lunar Flight, which is quite different, but does offer some degree of such activity. Also, there's Orbital Racer, which is exactly right,,,,, except,,,, it's not a small drone, it's a huge spaceship that a rider sits in, and the game physics are according to that idea. But,, if you rode in a quadcopter (like a flying car), it's not going to be as agile and capable as the tiny drones that people race with. Likewise, I can only imagine that if you tried to race the dragon capsule using rcs thrusters, even scaled up a bit,, it would be a much slower paced activity (heart pumping nonetheless) then if you had just a little drone, which I somehow am convinced would be able to race around pretty much like starmade. I will post a video. ,,, ok I will post 3.  ,,, so,, my first picture, but with Lunar Flight sort of fuel limitations (SPHERES had about 30 seconds of actual thrust,, so you would need to thrust just right, and float to your goals, and then you should be able to get about a minute or two of time to manuever around a small course) ,,,, 

 

I mean actually my end goal is to get the real life drone and race it, but ,,,, that would require ,,, well,,, that would be a "lofty" goal is the joke. 

Edited December 31, 2021 by tsmspace

[tsmspace]

Ok,,, for any interested,, I've managed to fly around the spaceport after hacking gravity. This means that I've figured out how to make a balanced craft with the smallest mass parts in my unmodded game. It also means I'm all configured with controls (specifically SENSITIVITY FOR ROTATION) ... OMG. barely touch joystick, rotate 9 billion. Hold joystick 9 billion, barely translate. But, I've found a nice set of thrusters that are nice and balanced, and give me enough acceleration to monkey around and basically look exactly right. (just the smallest monopropellant tank that is a fuselage part, the smallest nav computer, 4 smallest 4 nozzle angled rcs thrusters in the x, and 4 2 way orthoganal in the plus, and the smallest battery. 

 

Now, it doesn't look like theres a way to achieve FPV. I can fly from behind the craft, ,but is in my view. I need a camera. It's quite fun, and remarkably stable. At first i was like this will never work, how am I supposed to balance the thrust,, but once I figured out some of the toggles in the build menu I got a nice even balanced responsive and controllable machine WITHOUT any sas. sas is of course much easier, but does seem a bit more hungry for propellent. 

 

step 2 seems harder. I don't know how I will go about building courses ,, it would be cool if I could place racing gates straight out of velocidrone all over the spaceport. (dream scenario). Like,, if I could have my little craft, or something just like it, but all of the course editor features in velocidrone, that would be the pinnacle. 

[Axelord FTW]

There are mods that add fixed cameras-as-parts, though that's something I've never really cared about so I can't really help much.

[tsmspace]

I saw that but since I don't know anything about mods, I didn't go through that part yet. what I DID figure out, is how to "play my game". So, I can basically build a course out of parts, it looks pretty cool, with motors and wings all over randomly, and then I can launch it from the airfield, set position near the launchpad, hack gravity as low as it goes, and then launch my craft and go fly around the course. For some reason I wasn't able to get my course to stay out when launched from the launchpad, although other drones that landed elsewhere would, so I guess I must still be doing something wrong somewhere,, but ideally I would be able to make a world with several courses all set up and then make longer courses out of them . but, I also like the small course format, which is what I imagine to be realistically feasible for someone to actually try right now. (in real life,, like, using something roughly the size of SPHERES). 

 

So,, I will figure out camera mods and then it might be much easier,, third person view is not terrible though when locked, but is a little confusing at times still. It's really quite fun! I will post a video eventually, but not yet. Also, I don't know how the game works, but it appears to me as though loading in the course is actually not particularly efficient for the computer,,, I get a not responding flash, and then my graphics are breaking up a bit. maybe there's a way to crank them down a notch, but it looks pretty low, it just seems that the entities all being individual parts are a lot of processes compared to normal graphics with textures instead of all kinds of mass and aerodynamic surface and position and vector data. (so, by the time I load in a course, it's quite a few parts). 

[swjr-swis]

13 hours ago, tsmspace said:

Now, it doesn't look like theres a way to achieve FPV. I can fly from behind the craft, ,but is in my view. I need a camera.

• Right-click on an appropriate part of the drone, preferably one along the center line and as far to the nose as possible.
• Select 'Aim camera', and zoom in extremely close. Then switch camera to 'locked'.
• If you picked the right part, you'll have little to nothing obstructing your view, and it'll be just like you're flying in FPV.

 

 

[tsmspace]

I'll try this out right now. 

 

 

to the rest,, here's my video showing that I got some success. 

 

 

[tsmspace]

23 hours ago, swjr-swis said:

• Right-click on an appropriate part of the drone, preferably one along the center line and as far to the nose as possible.
• Select 'Aim camera', and zoom in extremely close. Then switch camera to 'locked'.
• If you picked the right part, you'll have little to nothing obstructing your view, and it'll be just like you're flying in FPV.

 

 

Well,, i tried it, and technically it did refocus the camera,, , but,,, just in this case I still couldn't see. i put some struts out the front, and ended up getting a pretty good view,,, but it made my craft like 3 times longer,,, so a bit of a fail still. I'm using the smallest parts I can, so I can't zoom in to the very front, it only zooms to a close view of that part. I did, however,, get a fairly useful view by zooming in to the thruster on the very TOP of the craft,, which blocked a lot of the screen but did give me a good view of what I could see, one that was pilotable now that I know what the craft can fit through. it's hard to fly locked 3rd person because of the same reason it's hard to fly inverted if you're not used to it,,, when you go left, and your camera is at the front of what's rotating,, then your view all goes one direction,, but if you are rotating around something out in front of you,, then part of what you see goes the opposite,, so depending on where your eyes are scanning at a given moment, you will think you are going backward.