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

[Montieth]

Airships were anchored to blocks of concrete or tiedowns in the soil. A bar sticking out of the ground would look correct. Nautical anchors work with a lateral pull. The horns are designed to catch as its pulled. An airship will have a vertical pull that a ship does not have. Ships are able to raise anchor because they're pulling the anchor upwards.

A large heavy tower/mast with the anchor on the nose would be the best way to anchor your airship. Bud one in the VAB and move it away from the launch pad on

large wheels then retract the wheels.

[Hooligan Labs]

...A large heavy tower/mast with the anchor on the nose would be the best way to anchor your airship. Bud one in the VAB and move it away from the launch pad on

large wheels then retract the wheels.

Well, airships right now only go between well civilized locations. Airships to other planets don't have that luxury! Hence the need for anchors.

[Montieth]

Airships carry ballast. In theory if you wanted to anchor to an unimproved site, you'd drop a few men down to set screw in ground anchors and then moor with those. Setting a weight as an anchor point is odd because you're going to have to carry that weight around.

Any ground abhor you set will need to resist vertical movement. A screw in anchor point would make the most sense to me and would be small an light to carry.

[Montieth]

Oh, there were airship journeys to te arctic by Explorers. Umberto Nobile is one of them and flew to the north pole as well as transmuted the north pole from Europe to North America.

Setting a a cluster of screw in anchors in ice would be trivial.

[Scotius]

Screws? Ballast? Seriously? Just drop a pointy, solid piece of metal shaped like a harpoon from several meters - if it can penetrate the soil deep enough, it will hold your airship long enough to properly tether it down. Use more than one if needed. To pull them up install spring mechanism which will retract blades back to the shaft. Like a harpoon guns used by whale murderers

[Montieth]

Scotius, what level of force do you think the harpoon will be exerting. Also, ballast is a key component to airships and modulating the lift that the lifting bags exert. The craft uses fuel and a neutral or slightly negative buoyancy is what one wants close to the ground. Too much lift and you risk going out of control, exceeding pressure height and venting your lifting gas. Then when you come back down you'll be over weight. Look at the details on the US Navy's Airships. They went to great lengths to setup a ballast release system as well as condensers to retain some of the water from engine exhaust and to use that as ballast. This reduced the amount of lift gas venting necessary to maintain boyancy in a controllable range.

As to anchors, correctly speaking, you need a weight of earth or material upon that anchor to act as enough ballast for such an object. A few inches of harpoon barb would be poor at best and would rip out.

NAS Lakehurst has multiple tie down points of steel eye hooks embedded in concrete cast into the ground. There were also very substantial anchor points for the high-mast plus other equipment.

Naval Anchors work as I said laterally. They can act due to weight, but the forces on the ship are laterally and not as much vertically. If a ship is anchored and very close it it's anchor it will pull it's anchor up and drag under the force of currents. Anchors work basically like a plow and dig in that way. There are differences in types for types of sea bottom and amounts of weight vs shape for various levels of function.

http://www.christinedemerchant.com/anchor_styles.html

Edited April 29, 2013 by Montieth

[Hooligan Labs]

You may want to actually try using my mod to land on a planet before making too many assumptions.

[sproginator]

You guys are debating nautical physics in a space game......

[andysim212]

Kerbal space program baby!! welcome to the most fun sandbox since minecraft!

[Hooligan Labs]

You guys are debating nautical physics in a space game......

Kerbal space program baby!! welcome to the most fun sandbox since minecraft!

Exactly!!!

[Montieth]

You guys are debating nautical physics in a space game......

Which has both ship mods and airship mods....

And hey, it's an AeroSpace Game...

[Tw1]

If I leave the old parts in when I down load this, Will they still appear in game? I have some on craft That I'd rather not loose.

Maybe it's time to learn save file editing...

Also, I have an idea but I need you guys' ability to create magnetism.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/showthread.php/26134-Magnetic-boots-for-the-Kerbals

Might you be able to help?

Edited April 30, 2013 by Tw1

[Kif]

Awesome mod! All the mechanics are very fluid and work great. I am however encountering a problem when using detachable ports. I have a Kethane mining rover on the Mun and your mod has allowed me to easily refuel aircraft for further exploration or to make a safe return to Kerbal. The rover has an assortment of detachable ports for aircraft without permanent ones. Whenever I attached the probe, the craft either explodes or gets flung to Minmus......I've tried putting the ports on different parts of the craft and extending the winch prior to connection, but no joy. I don't have this issue with ports installed in the hanger from the start. Has anyone found a work around for this?

[KospY]

Kerbal space program baby!! welcome to the most fun sandbox since minecraft!

Exactly!!!

+1

I don't see the point about "KSP is a space game", so no naval ships, no airship, no cars, etc... This is a pretty restricted view of a space game

It's indeed focused on space travel, but also a lot on landing on others planets. So it's possible to "land" on an ocean planet (boat), a gaz planet (airship) or a solid planet (rover).

This is the 3 states of matter, that can be found all across the universe (I believe )

Edited April 30, 2013 by KospY

[Scotius]

Hey! Who knows - maybe in full game we will have to build our own sea ship for recovery of splashed down capsules?

[KospY]

Awesome mod! All the mechanics are very fluid and work great. I am however encountering a problem when using detachable ports. I have a Kethane mining rover on the Mun and your mod has allowed me to easily refuel aircraft for further exploration or to make a safe return to Kerbal. The rover has an assortment of detachable ports for aircraft without permanent ones. Whenever I attached the probe, the craft either explodes or gets flung to Minmus......I've tried putting the ports on different parts of the craft and extending the winch prior to connection, but no joy. I don't have this issue with ports installed in the hanger from the start. Has anyone found a work around for this?

Generally speaking, as KAS is always in BETA state, make sure to save before attaching anything for now. I don't want to be the cause of the death of a lot of poor kerbal

About your trouble, can you send me your save game ? It can help me a lot to understand the problem. You can also post what you get in the debug log at the connection (press alt+F2 to show it)

[Kif]

Generally speaking, as KAS is always in BETA state, make sure to save before attaching anything for now. I don't want to be the cause of the death of a lot of poor kerbal

About your trouble, can you send me your save game ? It can help me a lot to understand the problem. You can also post what you get in the debug log at the connection (press alt+F2 to show it)

Thanks for the prompt reply KospY. I get the following right after connection in the debug console:

[Log]: [04:23:09]: Structural failure on linkage between KE�X130 External Drilling Unit and Rockomax X200-8 Fuel Tank.

[Log]: [MMI.K Miner 01]: Orbit started

Then followed by a whole lot of explosions and general destruction. I should mention that making a connection in 'undocked' mode works flawlessly. I have PM'd you both my quicksave and persistent.sfs (not sure which one you needed). I will do some more investigating and let you know if I find anything else that may help.

[KospY]

Interesting discussion about the Anchor...

If we add a new one, I think It will be more like a shorter or retractable boat anchor (to store it in the hook bay) than the previous burlap sack.

I will certainly create a new hook module for it, for increasing it's drag value when it touch the ground to simulate the traction effect (as suggested by hooligan before).

However, I need to discuss with Winn75 about this. I don't know yet if we will add a new dedicated part or if we will upgrade the current grapple.

Reducing part count is great, but what the point of a hook bay and the exchangeable hooks if the we start to merge them ?

I personally like to have multiple hooks, as it force the player to think of it's ship design and purpose. It also add some usefulness to eva.

Merging grapple and anchor are also questionable, what will be the design of this ? I don't even know if that kind of thing exist.

Some feedback on this will be appreciated

Edited April 30, 2013 by KospY

[Weatherman159]

I think there's a place for a unique anchor part. It's not like KAS adds tons of parts, there's no need to merge part functions to reduce the count.

[Hooligan Labs]

There is absolutely a need for a grapple (screw, etc), especially since the KSP dev team said they will introduce wind within the next few patches.

I would suggest that any "anchor" functionality would not be merged with the existing grapple part. It is light, strong, and does exactly what it should. That is the modular, Kerbal way.

We just need an anchor that will slow us down without slapping us in the ground! Airships have almost zero drag at low speeds and need to be able to apply friction with the ground or they will drift almost forever.

The anchor from before could use a visual update but the functionality was otherwise great. It could be possible to experiment with other friction values in an attempt to provide the same slowing ability with less weight (stuff like http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/PhysicMaterial-staticFriction.html) but I don't want to slow KAS development for this specific purpose.

[magnemoe]

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?

This reminds me of my problems with the previous version. I had an winch with an junior docking port. An ant rover with another port. On kerbin I was able to park the rover, lower winch and dock then retract and lock the winch.

On Minmus with low gravity and no atmosphere the rover started to swing wildly, this turned into rotation as I retracted. Trying to lock winch brake the junior docking clamp connection. As the ant rover with wheels retracted ignored collision this worked, with wheels out the lander was destroyed. Issue was worse on bodies with low gravity and no atmosphere. It worked nice on Laythe. On Duna it stabilized over time. On Mun this took an day or something.

[a.g.]

If that rover was using the bobcat plugin, that is probably because in order to make rovers more stable and avoid all the complaints about difficulty of steering it applies artificial gravity of 1 kerbin g to the rover when wheels are deployed.

[andysim212]

wind is coming? awsome!!!!!!

[magnemoe]

If that rover was using the bobcat plugin, that is probably because in order to make rovers more stable and avoid all the complaints about difficulty of steering it applies artificial gravity of 1 kerbin g to the rover when wheels are deployed.

Thanks, however I was able to get serious airtime on Gilly however it might be that the gravity worked like ground effect and went away then airborne. Will try with stock rovers and see if work better they will be lighter to.

[Montieth]

http://www.goodyearblimp.com/cfmx/web/blimp/history/faq.cfm

How is the ship anchored when it's on the ground?

At the very tip of the blimp's nose is a steel ball much like an automobile trailer hitch. This ball locks onto a cup at the top of the portable mooring mast, which is taken along and set up wherever the ship is operating. The blimp is anchored to the earth only at this one point, so it is always free to rotate 360 degrees around the mast as the wind changes. This arrangement has held the blimp in hurricane-force winds on more than one occasion. The blimp will always point itself into the wind, like a weather vane.

See also -

Airship Ground Handling