Kerbal SUBNAUTIC Program · Docking with a MASSIVE underwater CITY

[kurgut]

My first ever underwater docking, and in IVA view !

 

Recently I discovered the beautiful Buffalo 2 mod by @Angelo Kerman, with a neatly made MAS IVA. I fired this up, along with sunkworks (by him too : ) ) and went underwater, with parallax scatters, and oh boy I was thrilled. That's the start... The end is me making an absolutly gigantic underwater city, modifying the submarine IVA to add even more cool screens and props, and voilà ^^ Rabbit hole again haha

You can find the video at the bottom of this post, as the modlist : ) 

Just sharing some bits of the process, since it was... interesting hehe :

I first made the city, it was more than 800 parts when completed, of course using tweakscale like hell, to make the parts huge.  
Then I welded it (with Ubio welding mod), that brought the part count to less than 40. But it still lags a lot, I guess because that's a huge texture model to render, and + there's a lot of lights...
Image in the VAB, and on the runway, to show the size comparison with KSC :

Spoiler

Then sunking that thing starts to get funny... Since the center of mass of a welded part is placed at the center of the geometry... haha, So of course ore tanks won't do, not weighty enough. I tried a trick using utiliy weight mod, then with hyperedit, in flight, increased the "tons" (it's a resource in this mod), but it did break the attachement point each time, and resulted in a beautiful and thrilling R.U.D.  
I tried using the ballasts from sunkworks, but they weren't enough too.
And finally, the simplest idea came to edit this goddam craft file... I increased the mass of the city to some thousands of kilo tons. Increased the crash resistance to 1000 m/s, and voilà ! It sank in 5 seconds, and hit the seabed at 100 m/s  
The city is at ~500 m depth. I changed parallax scatter settings so they look nice with the city, and also scatterer ocean settings, so it's less dark at this depth.
Then I embarked on the submarine, first I used the SEA 64 to level the craft (wasn't intuitive at first, but afterwards really stable and worked very well ! Great mod  ).
Then I moved around with the engine, and the underwater RCS for translation and thus docking too.
Sadly I couldn't make any quicksave/load, since the ballasts got reset, and made my craft go up to the surface instantly, so I had to do the whole mission in one save (btw in the video, this is my first docking attempt: ) 

Spoiler

That's it, the rest can be seen in the video, let me know If you've any questions !

And enjoy ! (best watched with headphones)

After an expedition to gather some kelp to make kelp pies, and taking some scientific measurements, the Echo-3 exploration submarine returns to the capital underwater city of the Kerbin oceans, Nereia.
Also, apparently, the tastier kerbin kelps are found deep, near the sea bed.
But ancient Kerbal tales also speak about a giant specie, that would be responsible for so many ship sunkings, and thus was at some point adored by some kerbal cultures as a divinity... :
The Krakiatan.

(from the Great Kerbal Book of Mythology, he's supposed to be the great uncle of the Kraken himself)
Hope's it's gonna be allright !

 

Important mods used :

Spoiler

Sunkworks (great submarine parts and ballast mechanics)
Bufallo 2 (with custom made IVA, with a lot of assets from user Vulkan)
MAS, ASET and RPM
FreeIva
Through the eyes of a Kerbal
Ubio Welding (to weld the city from 800+ parts to less than 40....)

Tweakscale
Station Parts Expansion Redux
Planetary Domes (domes and glass tunnels)
KSPIE (some reactor parts only for decoration)
Ven's new parts (one station part used for the central tower)
TUFX : essential to make the interiors look less dull, with some slight AO, depth of field, and here motion blur helped me mask the fact that I didn't have much fps haha
Parallax
Other usual visual enhancement mods
+ minor bits and bobs

Also this gives idea for better underwater stuff I guess (at least If I was a planet modder)... Just sharing most of the things that passed by my head when exploring the depths :
more types of scatters, thus more underwater(water) biomes.
The load distance and behavior of the seagrass and others gets clunky when increased, so sadly it's only small range around the craft (still ~400m).
Have different variant of scatterer underwater tint, not global, so they can be set per biome, and thus have normal color for shores, maybe some green_ish for "algae-like" biome, purple/deep-blue for some forest mushroooms (yeah subnautica^^), etc.
Have a better terrain height map (idk if some planet pack has one for underwater ? if so I'd be glad to know! : ) ), so the sea bed is more interesting to explore (canyons, craters, wave like formations, mountains, underwater volcanos (possible with EVE integration ? like geysers for instance? ),...)
But yeah it's really small niche in the player base, so I guess those will remain dreams haha... or in KSP 2 ? ^^

Cheers
(Also would anyone like to make a Leviathan  (Krakiatan sorry) and peeper mod ?  )

Edited August 7, 2023 by kurgut

[kurgut]

Also, I'd be curious to see if anyone recognise the music the pops at 4:27 ? Just after entering physics range with Nereia...

 

[Lisias]

On 8/7/2023 at 9:51 AM, kurgut said:

Also, I'd be curious to see if anyone recognise the music the pops at 4:27 ? Just after entering physics range with Nereia...

 

Swimming to Otoh Gunga, from the Star Wars Phantom Menace OST.

(it's on the video credits, by the way!!! )

[Angelo Kerman]

This looks great! I love the breakdown of how you made the city and sank it. I’m curious to know why SunkWorks ballast didn’t help; I designed the plugin to drop part buoyancy to zero when there is no IntakeLqg, so in theory it should have worked. With 40 parts you might have needed more ballast tanks but it’s been awhile since I looked at the code.

for the save and load, the ballast not being saved sounds like a bug. I’ll look into it.

Thanks again, I too wish there was more to do underwater despite the game being about space programs…

[kurgut]

21 hours ago, Angelo Kerman said:

I’m curious to know why SunkWorks ballast didn’t help; I designed the plugin to drop part buoyancy to zero when there is no IntakeLqg, so in theory it should have worked.

Interesting ! Yeah the city was sinking mostly, but the problem was that It didn't fall straight (since remember, that whole thing is mostly one giant single part^^), and also some parts of the city aren't welded like the docking section : with more effort it might have worked I think, but in the end, editing the safe file was easier and much faster, with the big benefit to not add more parts to this contraption which was already happily tanking my framerate haha.

21 hours ago, Angelo Kerman said:

for the save and load, the ballast not being saved sounds like a bug. I’ll look into it.

Sweet, thank you!  

21 hours ago, Angelo Kerman said:

Thanks again, I too wish there was more to do underwater despite the game being about space programs…

Thanks to you! Yeah... can't disagree with that < 3
(btw just stumbled upon this KK addon, I think I'll have some fun with that when I have some time... adds moving leviathan, cave system, rock boulders, mushroom forest, didn't try it yet but sounds fun)
CountryDoggo's Random KK Bits on SpaceDock

Cheers!