Gravity Rings! (discussion about new part in orbital colonies)

[Presto200]

I as well as many others in the KSP2 community am extremely excited for the Colonies update coming sometime in the coming months. With the  sneak peak for orbital colonies post made today (link below), I wanted to point out the different gravity rings and suggest that the dev team considers making them procedural  for different size spaceships/stations. 

 

The image below was released with the heating VFX dev chat made before the For Science! update, notice how it is different from the one in the recent leaks for orbital colonies. I wonder if this was a change in design or if this is a whole other part, I'm speculating that the 1st image below is some sort of special resource storage/refinery that would need to feel effects similar to gravity for some reason. I say this because there are no visible windows where as the gravity rings in the 2nd photo has many windows. This also makes me curious about the box-y rotating modules because they seem to have windows and rotate too (this is more obvious in the video from the sneak peak post). Seeing windows there makes me wonder if those are also for kerbals. This seemed odd to me because at the different levels there will be different effects of the artificial gravity due to being at a different radius from the center of the craft it is rotating around. 

 

I would also like to suggest that the gravity rings become procedural parts similar to the wings and the radiators(not in the game yet). I hope they make them procedural mostly for ascetics in case I want an extra large or a mini space station, I would like to choose the size of the rings I put on it. This would also play a certain role in the physical aspects of the game. Procedural wings in the game act differently based on the way you design them, the procedural radiators are planned to manage heat differently based on the way you build them as well. Spinning parts will introduce torque into the game, If I want a balanced craft I will need to have an equal amount of mass going at the same speed with the same radius in opposite directions. If these parts were procedural we could have fun problem solving our own crazy designs for these colonies/motherships. I would also suggest if these parts became procedural, that the rings spun to create 1g  of artificial gravity no matter the radius (Or you could override it to make the kerbals legs extra strong  )

 

Anyways I feel hyped for rotating parts and wanted to open a thread for this discussion. I'm very excited for what is to come  in colonies (and in the smaller bug fixes in between).

 

1:

 

 

2:

 

Sneak Peak Post:

 

 

P.S. from what we've seen so far I'm pretty sure there is only one size for the gravity rings but its just a wish for now until we get more information

[stephensmat]

16 minutes ago, Presto200 said:

P.S. from what we've seen so far I'm pretty sure there is only one size for the gravity rings but its just a wish for now until we get more information

 

Even if it is, I have no doubt the community will come up with a thousand and one ways to use the moving parts provided for a variety of creative/artistic/improvised things. And that's not even counting the modders once a 'moving part' get included in the game code.

[Darta01]

To make a part procedural, its characteristics and appareance need to be easy to compute. Wings are parallelogram with a few equations to set their lift and drag ratio. I'm guessing radiators will be similar (I wonder why we don't have procedural tanks...). Gravity rings however have a very complex look, I'm not sure it would be possible to make them procedural. And if the devs want to render the interior (which they did for every parts containing kerbals), it means the interior would also be procedural, which is a pain to compute.

 

[Lowi_Sace]

I would like them to also have a gameplay aspect. I want a reason to include them on my vessels and colonies. One way to do that is by having a kerbal fitness level which slowly decreases when they spend a long time in low/zero G. Having a ring on your craft/station would limit/prevent a kerbals fitness to go down. Fitness could effect stuff like walking speed, Jumping height and ability to climb ladders. Made a graph how this could be effecting kerbals.

Bigger rings would mean more space and higher gravity which would help players to keep there kerbals fitter for the mission.
 

[Presto200]

7 hours ago, Darta01 said:

To make a part procedural, its characteristics and appareance need to be easy to compute. Wings are parallelogram with a few equations to set their lift and drag ratio. I'm guessing radiators will be similar (I wonder why we don't have procedural tanks...). Gravity rings however have a very complex look, I'm not sure it would be possible to make them procedural. And if the devs want to render the interior (which they did for every parts containing kerbals), it means the interior would also be procedural, which is a pain to compute.

Maybe it would be slightly hard to compute but I don't think it would be terribly worse than wings. It would take the user's requested radius for the ring, then they figure based on the size how many structural beams and struts would be needed, this is just a design decision they can make on how many structural parts to put in between, then they can find where the structural components should attach to the center by dividing the circumference of the circle by the amount of structural components to get equal spacing. It would also have much less inputs as wings in the game which have wing span, wing angle, root length, root thickness, tip length, tip thickness, tip angle, ect. Procedural gravity rings would only have 4 things at most being radius, thickness (which probably wouldn't be implemented), structural beams (which also could be just an automatic decision of the game), and speed(which again could be an automatic thing). From there the only complicated thing to calculate would be how it all effects drag. I don't think it would be extremely hard to calculate especially for a modern computer/game.

4 hours ago, Lowi_Sace said:

I would like them to also have a gameplay aspect. I want a reason to include them on my vessels and colonies. One way to do that is by having a kerbal fitness level which slowly decreases when they spend a long time in low/zero G. Having a ring on your craft/station would limit/prevent a kerbals fitness to go down. Fitness could effect stuff like walking speed, Jumping height and ability to climb ladders. Made a graph how this could be effecting kerbals.

Bigger rings would mean more space and higher gravity which would help players to keep there kerbals fitter for the mission.
 

This would be an interesting idea, maybe they can make an "extra realistic" or "ultra-realistic" version of the game including life support, this would be interesting to be added with that. And if they decide not to then a modder could use the part to do something with this idea.

[magnemoe]

9 hours ago, Darta01 said:

To make a part procedural, its characteristics and appareance need to be easy to compute. Wings are parallelogram with a few equations to set their lift and drag ratio. I'm guessing radiators will be similar (I wonder why we don't have procedural tanks...). Gravity rings however have a very complex look, I'm not sure it would be possible to make them procedural. And if the devs want to render the interior (which they did for every parts containing kerbals), it means the interior would also be procedural, which is a pain to compute.

 

Agree, now the large ring looks a lot like this rotating habitate in KSP 1 stockalike station parts mod. 

Except this is build in space so no reason to retract and a full ring has more volume and is more accessible. 

An internal shot from the mod rotating hab. 

I know it will be many rotating habitates, we see two here and the large interstellar one had multiple of an smaller inflatable one. We also has the first image here who I assume is a step above the inflatable if they has not been dropped. But they might be relevant for long interplanetary missions if you can inflate in space. 

The center rotating beam is interesting. Here gravity will change with floor while constant in a ring.