[0.22] B9 Aerospace Pack / R4.0c / New pods, IVAs, engines, fuselages & structures

[Kass]

Cool looking new parts b9, I got one request for new parts, fuel and LFO versions of the S2 6m model, there is fusilage and crew but not fuel/lfo while there is fuel/lfo of the mk2 5m part, a bit weird.

Hmm true, but it is easy enough to make your own. Go into the B9 folder into the parts section and into the Cockpit_S2_Body folder ( I think).

In it is the .cfg file for the Structural_6m part. All you need to do is a right click copy, right click paste on that in that folder. then open the .cfg in notepad or something like that. You need to add fuel to the name so it is something like B9_Cockpit_S2_Body_6m_Fuel to avoid conflicts and just paste in a fuel module with the amount you think based upon it's size:

  RESOURCE
    {
        name = LiquidFuel
        amount = 4800
        maxAmount = 4800
    }

If you are using modular fuels by NathanKell, then you will need to go into the .cfg of that and just add this new named piece plus the amount of fuel the that parts holds to make sure you can change the fuel type to whatever you wish modular fuel style.

Piece of cake really.

[Murph]

Since I seem to have opened a can of worms on the wish for super-heavy gear, I just want to clarify what my wish is. With the current HDG gear, there's a significant tendency for the gear to shimmy/wobble sideways, causing a loss of directional stability on takeoff roll, on huge and heavy planes. That's even with the gear strutted onto its surrounding parts, and plenty of parallel individual wheel units sharing a common wheel axis to spread the load. So, the wish is for either beefed up HDG or a super-heavy variant which solves or improves that sideways wobble/shimmy/instability. The cosmetic appearance doesn't matter all that much (not to say looking awesome is unimportant, it's just not the primary issue here), it's the practical function that I'm really looking for.

[madnessinmysoul]

Bac, I'm sure you're incredibly busy and probably in the process of working on the 0.23 release of this, but is there anything you'd like to tease for future additions to this pack?

[Guest]

Read the previous page, would you? Yes, both of you. This had been answered, and Bac9 showcased some awesome pics.

[Hector_919]

Since I seem to have opened a can of worms on the wish for super-heavy gear, I just want to clarify what my wish is. With the current HDG gear, there's a significant tendency for the gear to shimmy/wobble sideways, causing a loss of directional stability on takeoff roll, on huge and heavy planes. That's even with the gear strutted onto its surrounding parts, and plenty of parallel individual wheel units sharing a common wheel axis to spread the load. So, the wish is for either beefed up HDG or a super-heavy variant which solves or improves that sideways wobble/shimmy/instability. The cosmetic appearance doesn't matter all that much (not to say looking awesome is unimportant, it's just not the primary issue here), it's the practical function that I'm really looking for.

I noticed and posted this problem earlier, and somebody recommended using the Kerbal joint Reinforcement Mod which worked perfectly and also helped me reduce the number of struts needed drastically, I can only recommend it for you to try it out.

If you don't feel like installing an entire additional mod just to solve one problem: It seemed to me that this "gear-wobbling" occures mostly on S2 Parts. Simply putting a 1.25m Fuel tank between gears and the S2 part solved the problem (to a certain degree) for me while also allowing for more clearance (making landing easier) and fuel capacity.

Also look for the gears that are the last ones to leave the runway - at a point during takeoff they carry nearly all the weight of your plane. this axis needs the most wheels.

If your plane leaves the runway very late or only at high speeds, try moving the aforementioned axis forward - this way it is closer to the centre of mass and the pitch elevatorsonly need to turn your plane, but not lift it that much. this way the rear pitch elevators also don't push your rear gears to the ground that much, as well as decreasing the descent speed of your pnaes' nose at landings, making it more unlikely to rip of your cockpit when the front wheels smash into the ground.

If the gear-free area on the rear end of your construction leads to you losing the tail during landing (or you fear it will), add another gear axis behind and above the "big landing/takeoff" axis in a way that it will touch the ground during takeoff/landings with a steep angle and keep your tail away from the ground, but allow a vertical angle at that the wings start lifting the plane during takeoff.

I hope this helps

Hector

PS: the gear wobbling issue on S2 parts still needs to be adressed, bac9

[K3-Chris]

Hmm true, but it is easy enough to make your own.

I'm well aware I could do that, but it wouldn't have the right texture.

[bac9]

Wooow. Those parts look awesome! Love some more big parts. Any chance to impliment more S2(the shuttle cockpit) type textures on these and the rest of the more nice but unfinished looking parts(s27/mk2 etc.)?

If you mean adding thermal protection plating and other stuff to those big parts, nope, won't happen. They aren't meant to be used for atmospheric craft at all.

Btw those 3.75m tanks? Will we be getting 3.75m b9 engines and components?

No, there is KW Rocketry for that, zero need to make another mod filling the same niche.

With the current HDG gear, there's a significant tendency for the gear to shimmy/wobble sideways, causing a loss of directional stability on takeoff roll, on huge and heavy planes. That's even with the gear strutted onto its surrounding parts, and plenty of parallel individual wheel units sharing a common wheel axis to spread the load. So, the wish is for either beefed up HDG or a super-heavy variant which solves or improves that sideways wobble/shimmy/instability.

This is largely a physics issue and not something that can be solved on the side of a part model or a config, so I can't really help here.

[landeTLS]

If you mean adding thermal protection plating and other stuff to those big parts, nope, won't happen. They aren't meant to be used for atmospheric craft at all.

I was thinking more like details like distressing and such. Some of the parts look kindof plain with just a single shade for each color. I just used the s2 as an example because all the details on it looks just awesome.

No, there is KW Rocketry for that, zero need to make another mod filling the same niche.

O thats ok. I dont use kw so i wouldnt know.

Keep up the good work. Cant wait to test out the new version when its ready.

[bac9]

I was thinking more like details like distressing and such. Some of the parts look kindof plain with just a single shade for each color. I just used the s2 as an example because all the details on it looks just awesome.

I'll look into it, but sometimes it's better to use as little unique detail as possible if you'll have dozens of parts showing the same area of the texture next to each other. One part with a cool burnt edge looks nice, ten parts with the same repeated edge aren't. By the way, every single part in this ~50-part addition is using just one texture atlas, so it would be a very lightweight update.

[Murph]

This is largely a physics issue and not something that can be solved on the side of a part model or a config, so I can't really help here.

Ahh well. Thanks for the response, and thinking about it, it's much appreciated.

I guess I'm just stuck with camera gymnastics to hide lots of gear reinforcement struts.

[landeTLS]

I'll look into it, but sometimes it's better to use as little unique detail as possible if you'll have dozens of parts showing the same area of the texture next to each other. One part with a cool burnt edge looks nice, ten parts with the same repeated edge aren't. By the way, every single part in this ~50-part addition is using just one texture atlas, so it would be a very lightweight update.

Thats good. btw I was thinking of doing a distressing overlay for the mk2 cockpit one of these days. If you want i can upload it for you when i get around to it to look at. If you like it could perhaps do the whole mk2 range if i can figure out how to get around that detail duplication issue if they use the same texture meshes that is(havent looked). I could perhaps use mostly symmetrical stuff so it wont look wierd with stacked parts. I dont have a lot of experience in 3d texturing as my background is in 2d renderings (product pictures etc.) But id love to give it a go.

Edited December 23, 2013 by landeTLS

[BubbaWilkins]

And what's the point in that when it will be exactly as stable as every single wheel I have already added?

Aesthetics for one. But it appears from looking at the screenshots of your vtol that you have already started working along these lines. Those 4 wheel landing gears look good.

[Sajuk]

Thoes are not 4 wheel landing gears, thoes are just 2 of the 2 wheelers turned towards each other

[Firov]

Aesthetics for one. But it appears from looking at the screenshots of your vtol that you have already started working along these lines. Those 4 wheel landing gears look good.

Those "4 wheel landing gears" you see are really nothing more than the current heavy dual landing gear duplicated and placed back to back. I do that with some of my heavier SSTO's. So it's not actually new gear.

On the plus side, now that you know that, you can immediately use this technique on your craft to get quad-wheel landing gear carriages. Sort of.

Edit - On another note, Bac9, have you considered making an "HL Fuselage Front Adapter" that can serve as a crew tank for maybe 3 or 4 Kerbals as a sort of extended cockpit? I was thinking something like that would be great for space shuttles, since so many space shuttles are based around your HL fuselage anyway and it would allow us to conveniently carry roughly the same number of personnel as the actual space shuttle.

Just in case I got the name of the part wrong, it's the adapter right behind the cockpit in this picture.

Edited December 23, 2013 by Firov

[Hodo]

Those "4 wheel landing gears" you see are really nothing more than the current heavy dual landing gear duplicated and placed back to back. I do that with some of my heavier SSTO's. So it's not actually new gear.

On the plus side, now that you know that, you can immediately use this technique on your craft to get quad-wheel landing gear carriages. Sort of.

Edit - On another note, Bac9, have you considered making an "HL Fuselage Front Adapter" that can serve as a crew tank for maybe 3 or 4 Kerbals as a sort of extended cockpit? I was thinking something like that would be great for space shuttles, since so many space shuttles are based around your HL fuselage anyway and it would allow us to conveniently carry roughly the same number of personnel as the actual space shuttle.

Just in case I got the name of the part wrong, it's the adapter right behind the cockpit in this picture.

http://cloud-4.steampowered.com/ugc/505823265163557859/EB354797411F7911D0387D4D42FF4C391072E73F/768x432.resizedimage

First I would like to say, great looking shuttle.

Next I agree about the part, I know the MkIV parts, that add the wide cargobay for the big 3.75m wide cargo bay adapter in the B9 pack, has this exact part you are talking about. But it does not mate up at all to that cockpit. Which is really kind of depressing. And the MkIV cockpit is pretty horrid to use, it just is offset so much nothing looks good with it.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

*Munches on popcorn and watches the fireworks.*

I'm over here pretty much waiting on KW and B9 to finish myself. Lots of interesting talk about wheels and those new parts look like they took a page out of LLL's playbook.

Then took that page, slapped it on a copy machine, and hit the 'Blow Up to 200%' button. Not sure if 'staple' option was selected as well but I digress. They look nice and sci-fi.

The biggest bother I've had with B9 parts is getting proper gear alignment on some of the angled undersides. A few radial 'undercarriage adapter' parts would make a simple, and sweet addition to the collection being sported here. See here for what I mean. The 'bulges' house the gear rather than stapling them to the hull itself. I could see two benefits from them.

1: You could attach the gear without worrying about the gear housing interfering with the insides of cargo bays. (I encountered this with the stand alone Mk IV parts. The upper portion of the gear bays extended up through the floor of the Mk IV cargo bays.)

2: If the gear are mounted to a Gear Adapter, and you need to move the gear around CoM, you can move the entire set just by grabbing the gear adapter.

Though, maybe some of the new parts can double for that. Depends on the shape. I know I ended up doing that when I was building a C-130esque design a month ago. Used Firespitter fuel tanks and tail sections for their rounded features and managed to get them to attach after an hour fighting with them. Mounted the gear to those, and had myself a K-130 parachute probe dropper.

The pain was finding Point of Rotation for the aircraft. Odd how center mass isn't when it comes to gear and the point of rotation.

[British_Rover]

Random question.

If I am not using FAR does it matter what which of the B9 intakes I use for a large cargo carrying SSTO? I can't seem to notice a difference between any of them right now.

I will probably start using FAR once B9 is updated for .23 but as of right now I am not still.

[bac9]

The biggest bother I've had with B9 parts is getting proper gear alignment on some of the angled undersides. A few radial 'undercarriage adapter' parts would make a simple, and sweet addition to the collection being sported here. See here for what I mean. The 'bulges' house the gear rather than stapling them to the hull itself. I could see two benefits from them.

1: You could attach the gear without worrying about the gear housing interfering with the insides of cargo bays. (I encountered this with the stand alone Mk IV parts. The upper portion of the gear bays extended up through the floor of the Mk IV cargo bays.)

2: If the gear are mounted to a Gear Adapter, and you need to move the gear around CoM, you can move the entire set just by grabbing the gear adapter.

Though, maybe some of the new parts can double for that. Depends on the shape. I know I ended up doing that when I was building a C-130esque design a month ago. Used Firespitter fuel tanks and tail sections for their rounded features and managed to get them to attach after an hour fighting with them. Mounted the gear to those, and had myself a K-130 parachute probe dropper.

The pain was finding Point of Rotation for the aircraft. Odd how center mass isn't when it comes to gear and the point of rotation.

There is no point in adding parts like those as they will only provide vertical gear attachment from one fixed angle around the hull (not to mention it's not the best idea to add extremely specialized decorative parts). It's entirely possible to make nice looking "bulges" with 1.25m cylinders and existing endpieces, which I did on Strugatsky sample craft, I think. It's also impossible to make a "bulge" part with integrated wheels at the moment: as KSP has no proper mirroring, so only way to make that work is using two separate manually mirrored part types (in which case you won't even be able to perfectly align the wheels).

Random question.

If I am not using FAR does it matter what which of the B9 intakes I use for a large cargo carrying SSTO? I can't seem to notice a difference between any of them right now.

I will probably start using FAR once B9 is updated for .23 but as of right now I am not still.

SABRE intake is facing roughly seven degrees down from your direction, which makes it better for high-altitude gliding where you can't ever stay level if flying aligned with your velocity vector. Other than that, nope, stock SSTO is all about intake air numbers.

Edited December 23, 2013 by bac9

[Eskandare]

As I wait for B9's update (He's busy with that, other things he's doing for Squad, and his personal life), meanwhile I've decided experiment with conventional KW engines to put stuff into space.

72 tons is not too bad. I'll have to try and rebuild my 3 orange tank monster.

[enki]

This is largely a physics issue and not something that can be solved on the side of a part model or a config, so I can't really help here.

Wouldn't reducing the sideways 'grabbiness' of the wheels help? In the same way RoveMax Model 1 wheels will slide vs. teh TR-2L Ruggedized wheels will grab and cause rovers to do stupid things?

[dtobi]

I got a message from careo today. He fixed exsurgent engineer and recompiled the dll for .23. You can download the DLL from the link below. This should fix all problems with the sabre and the turbojets.

Here is what he wrote:

I've fixed the slight breakage in the code for 0.23 and pushed the updated source to https://github.com/careo/ExsurgentEngineering , and checked in the DLL to go with it for good measure https://github.com/careo/ExsurgentEn...ngineering.dll .

[likke_A_boss]

I got a message from careo today. He fixed exsurgent engineer and recompiled the dll for .23. You can download the DLL from the link below. This should fix all problems with the sabre and the turbojets.

Here is what he wrote:

I've fixed the slight breakage in the code for 0.23 and pushed the updated source to https://github.com/careo/ExsurgentEngineering , and checked in the DLL to go with it for good measure https://github.com/careo/ExsurgentEn...ngineering.dll .

Link is broken. Sounds great though

[Deathsoul097]

Wow! Bac, that looks AMAZING! I am going to create some cool stuff with this! (AKA: Giant space battleships and super-carriers)

[Grease1991]

I'm pretty sure that this is somewhere on the forum but if you could add/make a S2 Wide rear ramp piece, that would be beyond amazing.

I feel like i should say that by far this is one of the best mods for KSP I have used, as far as the range, quality, and overall awesomeness of the parts its rivaled by very few.

Can't wait to see all the new parts i didn't know i needed.

[NathanKell]

https://github.com/careo/ExsurgentEngineering/raw/master/ExsurgentEngineering/obj/Release/ExsurgentEngineering.dll

Fixed link.