[0.21.1] KAS v0.4.3 - Struts, pipes, part storage, containers, merged winches & more

[bs1110101]

Just had this idea. Could your EVA system, for picking up the different hooks, be re-purposed to allow the Kermans to place parachutes, RCS thrusters, Etc, during EVA? Would love to be able to do this.

Bobcat did that first with solar panels on mir

[Faulcan]

I am having a problem with getting this mod to work. I am only new to KSP, so I hope I am doing things right.

I merged all of the folders in the mod with KSP, the game loads fine and I can see and install the mod parts. That is all I can do though. I have no context menu or any operational use of the parts. They are just decorative to me.

Anyone know how to fix this please?

[KospY]

New update (0.2.2) :

- Fixed grappling-hook which became buggy after a save/load

- Fixed slowness caused by the GUI. (thanks to a.g.)

- Fixed retract after using eject

- Removed hook grab context menu for hook stored in the hook bay

- Removed "Unplug and grab" action on plugged mountable connector port

- Restricted winch to connector only to avoid non supported configuration

- Checking connector if upside down

- Added an attach orientation parameter for the evagrab module

Edited April 28, 2013 by KospY

[Faulcan]

I am new to KSP and I am having no luck with this mod. I can attach the parts to my craft, but when I try to fly it, nothing works. I don't get a context menu or anything.

Could there be something I am missing?

-Sorry for the duplicate post.

Edited April 28, 2013 by Faulcan

[winn75]

I am new to KSP and I am having no luck with this mod. I can attach the parts to my craft, but when I try to fly it, nothing works. I don't get a context menu or anything.

Could there be something I am missing?

-Sorry for the duplicate post.

Could you post a screenshot with a right clic on the part? Maybe it could help us to understand where the problem come from.

Meanwhile, here are few points that could fix the problem:

-Do you have the last version of the game?

-Kospy just updated the mod (v2.2). Maybe it will fix the issue.

-Did you fully read the documentation? Maybe you've missed something in it.

-Did you copy all the files in your KSP folder? (part, source and Plugin).

Sorry, those are very basic things. I don't want to seem condescending, I'm just trying to help

[Hooligan Labs]

KospY, it's awesome you got your update out! It really is an evolution of the design.

However, could you bring back some of the old parts?

The grappling hook is great for stopping an airship on a dime, but not so great if you are coming in from orbit! Then the airship has a high surface velocity. When the grapple sticks the airship swings down and smashes into the earth with explosive force...

It would also be nice to have the old parts for radial connections and such back. It's not necessary, but my old Airship to Other Planets are no longer compatible.

[andysim212]

working brilliantly now, gonna be using this system on my future bases. works 100% of the time after reloading (F9) now too!

Thanks!

[heikkik]

@winn75 you don't actually need to copy "source" folder to KSP_win

[Payload]

New update (0.2.2) :

- Fixed grappling-hook which became buggy after a save/load

- Fixed slowness caused by the GUI. (thanks to a.g.)

- Fixed retract after using eject

- Removed hook grab context menu for hook stored in the hook bay

- Removed "Unplug and grab" action on plugged mountable connector port

- Restricted winch to connector only to avoid non supported configuration

- Checking connector if upside down

- Added an attach orientation parameter for the evagrab module

Awesome man. That GUI was really the only thing that was bugging me as I had learned all of the other quirks. This mod is prime time now. Flawless functionality. I haven't even had it destroy any of my ships since the prior update. That is really saying something considering the bone stock docking ports can still sometimes cause a random destruction event. This makes my Kethane operations a whole lot easier and faster.

[ahappydude]

New update (0.2.2) :

"snip*

Thanks for those bugfixes and that gui stuff And -"Added an attach orientation parameter for the evagrab module" will come real handy!

[winn75]

Could you bring back some of the old parts?

It would also be nice to have the old parts for radial connections and such back. It's not necessary, but my old Airship to Other Planets are no longer compatible.

You mean the airship anchor? We replaced it by the grappling hook which have a more "tech" design than the old "potatoe bag" (for now the model is a placeholder but i'm working on a new one).

Also we wanted all the hook to fit in the hook bay. Maybe an improvment of the grappling hook would be better? (with a "disable attachment" option).

About the winches:

Sorry but the old designs won't be used anymore. As you now have to add the "connector" part to any attachement design, the old "winch>hook" or "winch>part" attachment order will not work.

Same is for the old winches part attachment node which won't take notice of the new connector.

But I'm glad you're talking about them because i wanted to give some explaination :

On the last version of the mod, we had a 1m stack winch vertical and a 1m radial winch.

For 2.0, Kospy asked me to make new model for a 0.5 stack winch vertical and a 0.5 stack winch horizontal.

If we count all the possible variation we could have :

-1m stack winch Horizontal/ Vertical + radial winch.

-0,5 stack winch Horizontal/ Vertical + radial winch.

-2m winches?

It means 6 to 9 different winches which all have the same purpose and work the same way (the only difference would be the cable lenght and the mass of the part). IMO, this is way too much.

To prevent editor spamming by adding too many parts, I suggested Kospy to limit their number to a minimum by merging some of them.

So for instance, 0,5 stack winch vertical and 0,5 winch radial can be the same part: If i add a "try square" shape as a fixation on the design, you would be able to attach it both on top and side).

What do think of the idea?

[winn75]

@winn75 you don't actually need to copy "source" folder to KSP_win

Ho ok, I didn't know that. What is it used for?

[MaHuJa]

For one, the source folder is used for compliance. To post plugins here and on the spaceport, you need to also include the sources. It's also useful for those who want to learn how it works behind the scenes, and someone could potentially look at the sources and find how to fix a bug. Potentially continue the project where kospy left off if he disappears, but that depends a bit on license and stuff.

[Lego8_bit]

ok i found a bug in the GUI aparently when u have 2 or more vertical or horizontal motors with either grappling hooks or magnets when ever you try to extend one magnet the gui will dissappier in to the top left coner can u please fix that immedatly.

[andysim212]

jsut had a blast messing around with this mod and towing stuff around with an airship I just built. if you are carfull you can hook 1 airship up to another and tow it around! hehe!

[MonaBabii]

Hello!

First of all, amazing work on the mod 'been having so much fun creating crane trucks to try and fix and build rovers and what not, preparing for bigger projects outside Kerbin. The entire mod is great, and works almost flawlessly as well

That said, I do have a question: The 'Stack Connector Port (0.5m)' part... I assume this part is not meant to be placed in hook bays, or even be dropped at all? When I undock it from the winch it simply goes through the floor, and when I put it in a hook-bay I cannot retrieve it. Again I imagine it's simply not meant to be used as the other parts but if so, the question would be 'Why?' The reason I figured it could go in a hook bay is because it fits perfectly in them, so I'm a little confused.

Thanks tons for the mod, your time and effort 10/10.

[Stealth2668]

New update (0.2.2) :

- Fixed slowness caused by the GUI. (thanks to a.g.)

Ya what caused this slow down? It was annoying

Also, how do we update a mod? Re-download it and replace old files?

Edited April 29, 2013 by Stealth2668

[razgriz86er]

would you believe this actually worked?

step 1: assemble giant KAS construction vehicle

step 2: park KAS rover under vehicle created in step 1

step 3: pick up rover and drive a plane underneath

step 4: pull levers like a kerbal until they dock

step 5: fly the docked monstrosity over to the island base and deploy parachutes.

step 6: ???

step 7: profit

[hoojiwana]

I built a similar monstrosity back before there were rover wheels in order to load a probe rocket to a plane. It had to "walk" on and off the huge step that was on the edge of the runway multiple times to do it. Unfortunately I didn't take any screenshots of it, but I did make this thing tonight. For clearing the dirt runway of the inevitable bits of debris that get strewn across it in my awful attempts at landing. There was a bit of an odd bug with the magnet, after I attached the plug to it when it was in the hook-holder on the side, whenever I grabbed it with the Kerbal my entire rover jolted around like crazy. Usually that ended up popping wheels, or even shaking the whole thing to pieces. I did manage to safely get it off eventually by facing the Kerbal away from the hookbay though.

[Scotius]

You were lucky hojiwana - when i encountered similiar bug i was in orbit, and my EVA'ing Kerbal was catapulted towards Mun (along with a piece of his ship) . Today i encountered another bug - this time on my orbital tug, during orbital junk removal mission. I used vertical winch/grapple combo placed on the nose of 1-man capsule. After ejecting the grapple it apparently shot INSIDE - towards the capsule. Only 1 meter of the cable uncoiled, and grapple was not visible outside of the ship. I released the cable, retracted it, and grapple appeared again on the nose, but the cable was still not retracted. So i clicked the release option again...and bad things happened Winch and grapple were torn off, and fell towards the Kerbin as another pieces of debris, and my ship started dropping like a stone straight down - at least in map mode, because in main screen everything was frozen. No change in altitude or speed. I could use staging, and decoupled parts fell down normally - but my capsule remained frozen in space, totally unresponsive. I couldn't even end the flight. Luckily Quickload worked, and returned me to launch pad. Weeeeirrddd...and kinda scary. I love this mod and possibilities it gives, but i'm afraid to use it

[hoojiwana]

I've actually had something similar happen when I was trying the grappling hook out. I ejected one from a rover towards a fuel tank sat on the launch pad, there was an explosion and nothing connected, and things bugged out. I couldn't move the camera, and my rover magically floated straight backwards away from where the fuel tank was, with no control what-so-ever.

That was in the version before the latest though, and I've not tried it out since updating.

[Faulcan]

Could you post a screenshot with a right clic on the part? Maybe it could help us to understand where the problem come from.

Meanwhile, here are few points that could fix the problem:

-Do you have the last version of the game?

-Kospy just updated the mod (v2.2). Maybe it will fix the issue.

-Did you fully read the documentation? Maybe you've missed something in it.

-Did you copy all the files in your KSP folder? (part, source and Plugin).

Sorry, those are very basic things. I don't want to seem condescending, I'm just trying to help

I was right-clicking during both of those screenshots. Absolutely nothing.

Thanks for the advice, any help is appreciated.

-As far as I know I have the latest version : 0.19.1

-I saw the updated mod and tried it with a clean install of KSP. No change.

-I have re-read all of the documentation and I can't see anything I missed before.

-First time I just extracted the whole mod into KSP and merged the folders. I retried by copying each one into the correct folder. Neither way made any difference.

Might be something funny with my computer. Wish I had another computer to try this on, seems to be working for everyone else.

Thanks for all the help.

[Mihara]

Thank you for an amazing method to make KSP even more frustrating than it already was. This should be a stock feature!

The particular way it frustrated me was that I tried to recreate the scene in one of the demo pictures wherein a lander winches a rover up. I've been looking for a method to deliver a rover I could pick up and move elsewhere since dropping a new one every time I move to some other exploration spot turned out to be tiresome. So I built a lander with two winched up DEMV Ant rovers.

It worked fine in the space center, but it turned out that the force of winching is insufficient to produce a lock if the lander is on a 30% or so incline, so it keeps dangling. Unfortunately, on the Mun, the ground is never quite flat enough, and in the physics system, the pendulum motion of the rover that produces never, ever stops. Eventually after many a tense minute I was able to catch it quickly enough to get it to lock...

...but part of the rover got stuck inside a fuel tank and when I folded the landing legs, the whole lander suddenly disintegrated.

The next version holds the rover by a docking port instead and uses two winches to pull it up until the docking port sucks it in -- at least, this promises to avoid the problem because I can control the angle and rely on the docking port's magic to correct what I can't, but I guess I'll see if I have a spectacular disintegration again soon.

I understand it might not be practical to limit the pendulum motion (probably impossible without getting at the engine itself), but could there possibly be a method to force the parts to align when the cable is pulled in almost fully and the connector is just caught on the edge of the model, kinda like the docking ports suck each other in?

Also, as far as I've been able to determine, switching to docking mode if the cable is under strain is likely to immediately launch the objects into each other at great speeds, usually with disastrous consequences. Is it possible to have the winch check for that and prevent this from happening?

Edited April 29, 2013 by Mihara

[Hooligan Labs]

You mean the airship anchor? We replaced it by the grappling hook which have a more "tech" design than the old "potatoe bag" (for now the model is a placeholder but i'm working on a new one).

Also we wanted all the hook to fit in the hook bay. Maybe an improvment of the grappling hook would be better? (with a "disable attachment" option).

Yeah, the potato bag was funny but there was no way to explain a dragging a one ton burlap sack across a rough surface at 100 m/s.

We just need something exceedingly tough that will provide a lot of traction without gluing the vehicle to the spot. It is amazingly hard to find a picture of a real airship anchor, it seems they are usually just moored to a tower (like the Empire State Building) or caught by hand (which looks pretty hilarious). There are a great number of modern boat anchor designs, however, which would look great when flattened out so they could be stowed:

Given our mascot, I would vote for Union or KLIP.

jsut had a blast messing around with this mod and towing stuff around with an airship I just built. if you are carfull you can hook 1 airship up to another and tow it around! hehe!

Nice~!

would you believe this actually worked?

step 1: assemble giant KAS construction vehicle

...

I think off-site construction should be a part of KSP!

I understand it might not be practical to limit the pendulum motion (probably impossible without getting at the engine itself), but could there possibly be a method to force the parts to align when the cable is pulled in almost fully and the connector is just caught on the edge of the model, kinda like the docking ports suck each other in?

I looked this up and it is a real issue that modern winches have to deal with. I'm no expect, but it appears that "swing arms" dampen unwanted pendulum motion. The new KAS winch definitely has a shape that could do that. Actually animating it would be out of scope, but codewise might not be difficult.

First, let me say that it's crazy that the entire KAS system seems to have been done without a single call to FixedUpdate.

Perhaps it would be possible to force a rigidbody.drag onto the connector? Thus, even when there isn't an atmosphere the swinging motion would be reduced. If not some work with torque and velocity/position cross products would need to be done.

As for smoothly bringing the connector back into its mounting, before the spring joint is converted to a fixed joint there could be a slow combination of RotateTowards (parent rotation) and RotateAround(connector around winch) to allow for non-violent alignment.

.... But really, I just need the anchor back.

[udk_lethal_d0se]

Really nice looking Mod, great documentation too. Keep up the good work.