TAC Fuel Balancer-DISCONTINUED

[WedgeJAntilles]

The placing issue is that part.cfg is missing "scale = 1" so it is not scaled correctly anymore, as the default value of "scale" has changed.

I assumed this was the issue, but I couldn't verify it until I got home from work.

Anyway, I've gone ahead and updated this plugin for 0.20; you can get it here: http://file2web.com/download.php?file=192(0.20)TAC_Fuel_Balancer_1.1.2.zip

I fixed the part and moved everything to the 0.20 directory structure.

[John FX]

I must say this is one of my most used mods. I like to launch an empty last stage on a slightly overpowered lower stage and then transfer the fuel in orbit, dump the inefficient stage and carry on.

[Frostiken]

Is the mod creator still around? Would be nice to get an update that:

A) Decouples functionality from a specific part. In particular, if you add the TACFuelBalancer module to another part, it won't work right. I'd like to make a single part that functions as an 'avionics brainbox', combining several mods into one. Unfortunately I have to keep the big ugly black box around to use the fuel balancer. In fact, it would be best to do away with the part requirement altogether. This fuel balancing should be a default configuration of all crafts. Go to an 'alarm clock' / 'manifest' method of an icon on the top of the screen that you can click to bring up the balancer.

2) Updated UI for the fuel balancer. Smaller and more similar to the MechJeb 2 and the debug UI screens.

Thanks. This mod is fantastic otherwise.

[Gaius]

A) Decouples functionality from a specific part. In particular, if you add the TACFuelBalancer module to another part, it won't work right.

Not true. As I mentioned above, I add:

MODULE
{
	name = TacFuelBalancer
}

...to all my command pods. Works perfectly.

[Frostiken]

When I did that all I got was the fuel balancer window with nothing in it.

[TaranisElsu]

Is the mod creator still around?

I'm still around, and I'm working on an update. Adding several requested features in addition to updating it for 0.20. I apologize because it is taking longer than anticipated.

It works under 0.20, especially if you leave it in the legacy folders. The only thing that I had to do was add "scale = 1" to the part.cfg.

Edited May 26, 2013 by TaranisElsu

[willow]

Hey, I don't think your fuel balancer needs a part, could you make it work like the crew manager and alarm clock with a small icon on the top left that allows access to the balancer?

[Chebalu]

It would be very useful that Willow suggested!

[Gaiabladegold]

Hey, I don't think your fuel balancer needs a part, could you make it work like the crew manager and alarm clock with a small icon on the top left that allows access to the balancer?

Seconded here. ^^

[Specialist290]

Adding another vote for that suggestion. Partless integration would be very awesome indeed.

[Itsdavyjones]

Part less integration would be amazing.

[TaranisElsu]

Hey, I don't think your fuel balancer needs a part ...

It would be very useful that Willow suggested!

Seconded here. ^^

Adding another vote for that suggestion. Partless integration would be very awesome indeed.

Part less integration would be amazing.

Well, the people have spoken. Part-less functionality will be coming soon.

[willow]

Awesome Taranis, your mod is already much more userfriendly than the KSP in built fuel management options especially when many small tanks are involved! However I do have a few ideas. Since the previous one was so successful I'll just throw out the other ones, you decide on which are jewels and which are garbage.

With loads of tanks the mod is at it's best yet at the same time the gui gets confusing and big. So I'm thinking along lines of reducing the clutter.

* A smaller font would already do wonders in reducing the size of the window.

* I think most of the time fuel and oxygen should be treated the same way, having them in separate groups only doubles the on screen confusion.

* You could think about a super on/off switch which serves to activate/deactivate the whole mod whilst keeping all the settings intact. (This could be reflected in the on screen icon)

A completely different approach to setting up the balancer (which might prove to be way too much work): How about a system where every tank gets either a "+" an "=" or a "-". Fuel gets divided first over the + tanks then the remainder gets divided over the = tanks and the remainder of that over the - tanks. You might want to add an "ignore option" which is the same as your lock right now and means the tank is ignored in the calculations. (Default would be = so when you activate the balancer via that single click default all tanks and all fuel types get balanced)

In combination with this fuel tanks could get a right click menu option to either completely fill or completely empty the tank (Setting to + or -).

There's one other situation I don't have a clear solution for. When sending refuelling missions I often want to keep a tiny bit of fuel left in a tank or ship for the deorbit burn. Right now that means timing a hit on the "lock" button which of course is inaccurate and leaves different amounts of fuel and oxidizer in my ship. Or I do a complicated act where I use a tiny tank on the station to siphon off a bit of fuel for the deorbit burn. This situation is so specific adding gui features for it would only make things more confusing. I don't see an easy fix while at the same time keeping your gui user friendly. The timed click on "ignore" would already work better if fuel and oxidizer were thrown together as one resource.

Anyway, thanks for building the fuel balancer. It's one of those mods I keep installing.

[John FX]

Well, the people have spoken. Part-less functionality will be coming soon.

Can I vote for partless also, sometimes it`s hard to find a small black box on a large craft in the dark, hehe. I also second the option (if possible) to simply click on an existing tank and have a menu option to open the balancer to give functionality to existing craft launched without a balancer.

I`ll just repeat what has probably been said a few times and say that this mod is one I could not play without and still get as much fun out of the game. Just to be able to launch empty tanks on my lander stage that use the last bit of fuel left in the launcher stage (saving launch fuel) is strangely satisfying.

Keep up the good work.

A couple of suggestions. One is to save a small settings file for each craft so when you return to it the fuel settings are kept A la Mechjeb 2 Often I switch ships, come back, start a burn and wonder why my fuel runs out so fast. Also, as has been said, optionally treat oxi and liquid as one fuel to reduce clutter. Maybe each tank could have a menu for "In,Out,Global EQ,Lock" so you just click each tank and set what it does with an option to just balancethem all?

[Mihara]

* I think most of the time fuel and oxygen should be treated the same way, having them in separate groups only doubles the on screen confusion.

Spaceplanes with jets make it necessary to treat them separately.

It would be nice to have a toggle of some kind, though, as a large station can make it a pain to manage them separately...

[Talisar]

What I would like is some way to maintain separate designations for docked ships. For example, I'd like some way for the fuel balancer to know which cluster of docked parts is my "Station" and which parts are individual "Ships". That way I could bring up the station and the tanker I wanted to transfer resources between without having to figure out which tanks were on the tug docked next to it. I currently get around this sometimes by using different types of tanks on each ship, but I have certain parts that I tend to use a lot and it leads to confusion when I have 14 of the same RCS tank and I'm trying to find the blue glow on the correct one that I'm trying to transfer fuel into.

[willow]

Spaceplanes with jets make it necessary to treat them separately.

They don't have oxygen in those tanks do they? What if you were to treat tanks who have both oxygen and fuel as one type, tanks with merely fuel as another type. Technically speaking you might want to transfer fuel from a fuel/oxygen tank into a pure fuel tank. But apart from that being bad design (leftover oxygen) it's also a corner case that can still be solved with the standard vanilla ksp fuel management option.

Or maybe there's a better option? Don't hold back! I was just spewing ideas. No reason to believe they're the best ones.

[Mihara]

They don't have oxygen in those tanks do they? What if you were to treat tanks who have both oxygen and fuel as one type, tanks with merely fuel as another type. Technically speaking you might want to transfer fuel from a fuel/oxygen tank into a pure fuel tank. But apart from that being bad design (leftover oxygen) it's also a corner case that can still be solved with the standard vanilla ksp fuel management option.

Generally, when you're flying an SSTO spaceplane, a) you need an extra quantity of LF without the accompanying quantity of oxidizer to run your jets, but the rest is the normal LF/Oxidizer mixture -- and when you're back, you end up burning the remainder of LF to land even though you might still have oxidizer left over you want to keep the fuel in all the extra nooks and crannies balanced so that your center of mass doesn't shift forward or back, as that affects your flying at the critical moments (when you're relying on the lift of your wings). This is one of those things that makes SSTO spaceplanes annoying both to design and fly.

Which is why for spaceplanes, the fuel balancer actually works exactly as needed, as it balances fuel components separately and reduces the shifts of center of mass.

Where that becomes annoying is when you always use LF/Oxidizer mixture, and have a lot of tanks, like on a space station, in a big tanker, in a lander with engines on shoulder mounted tanks, etc, where you would want to treat LF and Oxidizer as the same entity since you always have them in the same proportion. The best way to deal with it would be to have a per-ship toggle of that behaviour.

[willow]

I understand Mihara, those are two very distinct use cases. (I suck at spaceplanes so I tend not to build them) What do you think of 3 types? Fuel. Oxygen and Fuel/Oxygen. Where the first two will also show tanks that contain both types. And the latter one won't show tanks that only contain one of the two. That should satisfy both use cases?

[Frostiken]

The fuel balancer part has one advantage - I shrunk it down, and now I'm using it as an 'avionics brainbox', sporting Chatterer, Protractor, Mechjeb 2, Fuel Balancer, and Engineer.

[Mihara]

I understand Mihara, those are two very distinct use cases. (I suck at spaceplanes so I tend not to build them) What do you think of 3 types? Fuel. Oxygen and Fuel/Oxygen. Where the first two will also show tanks that contain both types. And the latter one won't show tanks that only contain one of the two. That should satisfy both use cases?

It would sort of work, but how is that structurally different from a toggle, I don't really see, the coding effort looks to me about the same.

[willow]

It would sort of work, but how is that structurally different from a toggle, I don't really see, the coding effort looks to me about the same.

You're right that's pretty much the same. Sorry, my brain got stuck on one idea.

[TaranisElsu]

I'm still working out how to handle liquid fuel and oxidizer together, but I am thinking along the lines of having sections for LF, Ox, and LF/Ox. That way, you can manage LF and Ox separately, or together under LF/Ox. I am not sure how to handle the case where you want to manage LF/Ox together, but they are out of sync -- i.e. some tanks do not have the right ratio of LF to Ox.

What I would like is some way to maintain separate designations for docked ships.

I am looking into it. I do not know how hard it will be.

Maybe each tank could have a menu for "In,Out,Global EQ,Lock" so you just click each tank and set what it does with an option to just balance them all?

I am also looking into adding my module to all fuel tanks so that you can right click a part and toggle one of the modes (in/out/balance/etc).

[willow]

I'm still working out how to handle liquid fuel and oxidizer together, but I am thinking along the lines of having sections for LF, Ox, and LF/Ox. That way, you can manage LF and Ox separately, or together under LF/Ox. I am not sure how to handle the case where you want to manage LF/Ox together, but they are out of sync -- i.e. some tanks do not have the right ratio of LF to Ox.

Would it work if you'd just "shortcircuit" your gui so that a click on a lf/ox button behind the screens would be treated as a click on both lf and ox? That way your changes can stay restricted to the gui, and you can save yourself changes in the rest of the code! That could work don't you think?

[John FX]

What I would like is some way to maintain separate designations for docked ships. For example, I'd like some way for the fuel balancer to know which cluster of docked parts is my "Station" and which parts are individual "Ships". That way I could bring up the station and the tanker I wanted to transfer resources between without having to figure out which tanks were on the tug docked next to it. I currently get around this sometimes by using different types of tanks on each ship, but I have certain parts that I tend to use a lot and it leads to confusion when I have 14 of the same RCS tank and I'm trying to find the blue glow on the correct one that I'm trying to transfer fuel into.

It would be nice to have two way highlighting. Currently you can highlight a part by clicking on it`s name in balancer but it would be good to click on a part on your ship and have it highlighted in fuel balancer to set fuel for that tank as well.