Orion aka "Ol' Boom-boom"

[Canopus]

I would prefer to keep it realistic with the small magazines.

[Sbowyer28]

I would prefer to keep it realistic with the small magazines.

Don't anger Knova, he was making an Orion plugin before he joined the team, he knows what he's talking about.

[Canopus]

Don't anger Knova, he was making an Orion plugin before he joined the team, he knows what he's talking about.

I'm not angering him i was just giving my opinion on the subject.

[Fyrem]

sometimes, 'real' has to give way to 'functional'

(personally, once this is finished, I may re-scale a copy down to be more of a 5m part, instead of 10m. but that is just for my use)

[Canopus]

sometimes, 'real' has to give way to 'functional'

(personally, once this is finished, I may re-scale a copy down to be more of a 5m part, instead of 10m. but that is just for my use)

The thing is that the one with the individual magazines worked perfectly before the last update.

[NovaSilisko]

[XilentDude]

Oh.. That looks really nice !

[Mekan1k]

That... Looks... Ideal. Seriously- that looks really good!

[NovaSilisko]

Is it possible yet to jettison empty bomb containers? It doesn't seem to work on my design, though it could be a problem with the docking nodes themselves.

[nyrath]

Are the folders formatted properly for .20?

I don't really want to remove these parts from my partsfolder every time there is an update

Arrgh. I formatted it for 0.20, and now it doesn't work. The items appear in the VAB inventory, you can add them to your vessel, but the Orion engine no longer adds an icon to the staging display, and it will not take off the launch pad. I'm working on it.

I'm curious that you had to put on so many magazines to get the same jumping-bean failure I've been getting. I wouldn't have thought that would be machine dependent, but I can't think of anything else between our two installs that would be different. And for me (at least in v9) even two layers of any types of magazines (except the least massive) caused a failure.

Yes, as a programmer I know that is a very bad sign. If it is machine dependent, it becomes several orders of magnitude harder to root out the bug.

I had a thought. I see that you're dynamically calculating the mass of the magazines as bomb count is decremented. Any chance you could just assign the mass to the engine rather than the magazines? This might throw off the center of mass a bit, but it would allow you to keep the overall mass of the craft appropriate, and allow the mass to scale properly when adding/removing magazines.

That is a very insightful and interesting suggestion. I'm certainly going to try that. I certainly sounds like it would avoid the small dense object problem.

Might be better just to depart from reality a little and have fewer, but larger, magazines. Small, heavy objects hate existing.

I will certainly try to optimize in that direction. KSP has made it quite clear it does not like such objects at all.

The thing is that the one with the individual magazines worked perfectly before the last update.

Please, until I get all of this sorted out, you'd be better off reverting to the version that works for you. If you no longer have the zip file PM me and I'll get it to you.

Oh lordy, that's sweet! A Kerbalized Orion!

Is it possible yet to jettison empty bomb containers? It doesn't seem to work on my design, though it could be a problem with the docking nodes themselves.

Alas, jettisoning empty cannisters has not yet been implemented. It had a lower priority because it does not actually interfere with performing a mission.

Is it not possible to add a decopuler module to the magazine part.cfg file?

Currently the Orion engine is magic. As long as a magazine is part of a vessel, the engine can magically find it and suck nuclear bombs at will.

[NovaSilisko]

Seems my docking ports were the issue, so false alarm!

[hoojiwana]

Arrgh. I formatted it for 0.20, and now it doesn't work. The items appear in the VAB inventory, you can add them to your vessel, but the Orion engine no longer adds an icon to the staging display, and it will not take off the launch pad. I'm working on it.

I converted v8 to 0.20.2 and it worked just fine apart from those bugs that you've fixed now. All I did was add PART {} around the part CFGs and then stuck the Parts and Plugins folder into one called nyrath which I then dropped into GameData. Admittedly that was a few plugin versions ago, and I've not tried it with the most recent one.

[NovaSilisko]

RE: .20 issues, I formatted my parts with the new system and it works fine...

Edited June 6, 2013 by NovaSilisko

[nyrath]

OK, false alarm.

Problem was due to programmer stupidity.

Everybody, you might want to check the USAFOrion3Engine part.cfg file.

Make sure it contains

linearStrength = 2200
angularStrength = 2200

NOT

linearStrength = 2200

}

angularStrength = 2200

0.20 version working fine now that I removed that dastardly "}" character. I have no idea how it got in there.

[NovaSilisko]

I recalled a lessed known feature of .20...

Using the FlagDecal module, you can put your current mission flag onto a part.

MODULE
{
    name = FlagDecal
    textureQuadName = flags
}

[hoojiwana]

What is textureQuadName? A transform defined in Unity?

[NovaSilisko]

Yes. Note that the flag is stretched to a square, so the UV just has to cover the mesh completely as if you were texturing it with a regular square texture.

[Markarian421]

I tried v 0.11 -- so far no self destructs on the pad. But if I load it up with 3.5MN magazines it can't get off the pad -- it initially slowly rises, then sinks almost as if its mass is increasing.

One curious thing I've noticed, I'm not sure if it's 0.20.2 or this mod -- in the VAB if I disconnect a part I sometimes can't reattach it. Or let go of it. I have to start a new craft or load one or sometimes kill the process to escape. I have only encountered it when I have a craft with an Orion engine, and it happens most often with the Orion engine part.

[Markarian421]

Never mind -- next craft I tried to make, using only one level of the 80NM magazines, spontaneously exploded on the pad. (As soon as physics kicks in, before I hit launch.)

[Lumaro]

I recalled a lessed known feature of .20...

Using the FlagDecal module, you can put your current mission flag onto a part.

MODULE
{
    name = FlagDecal
    textureQuadName = flags
}

Maybe someone should spread this information to some of the modders. If they don't know about it already, that is.

[nyrath]

I tried v 0.11 -- so far no self destructs on the pad. But if I load it up with 3.5MN magazines it can't get off the pad -- it initially slowly rises, then sinks almost as if its mass is increasing.

That's pretty weird! I'm wondering if this is a processor problem. Due to the fact that I'm paranoid about people adding or removing magazines during a mission, when the engine requests a bomb from the MagazineManager, the manager does a re-inventory of the magazines. This might stress a CPU with lower specs than the computer I'm testing on. I'll look into optimizing the MagazineManager.

Never mind -- next craft I tried to make, using only one level of the 80NM magazines, spontaneously exploded on the pad. *(As soon as physics kicks in, before I hit launch.)

But the MagazineManager has nothing to do with dancing magazine problem. Still working on that.

One curious thing I've noticed, I'm not sure if it's 0.20.2 or this mod -- in the VAB if I disconnect a part I sometimes can't reattach it. Or let go of it. I have to start a new craft or load one or sometimes kill the process to escape. I have only encountered it when I have a craft with an Orion engine, and it happens most often with the Orion engine part.

That happens occasionally to me. Only seems to happen with the Orion engine with the column on top, not with the flat-top engine. One accidentally disconnects the engine, engine turns red, the six magazine attachment points show as green spheres but the attachment point on the top does not appear, cannot let go or re-attach engine. It's on my list of bugs.

[Splode]

That's a really well known bug (where you can't let go of a part) with the ksp build menu. I haven't seen it in 0.20, but I'm sure it is still kicking around. Nothing to do with your mod, nyrath.

[Markarian421]

That's pretty weird! I'm wondering if this is a processor problem. Due to the fact that I'm paranoid about people adding or removing magazines during a mission, when the engine requests a bomb from the MagazineManager, the manager does a re-inventory of the magazines. This might stress a CPU with lower specs than the computer I'm testing on. I'll look into optimizing the MagazineManager.

It's not the newest machine but it's not terribly slow:

Mac Pro Mid 2010

Processor 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon

Memory 12 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC

Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB

[Anglave]

That's pretty weird! I'm wondering if this is a processor problem. Due to the fact that I'm paranoid about people adding or removing magazines during a mission, when the engine requests a bomb from the MagazineManager, the manager does a re-inventory of the magazines. This might stress a CPU with lower specs than the computer I'm testing on. I'll look into optimizing the MagazineManager.

This machine (work) is a Latitude E5520 (5.9 WEI). Intel i5-2520M (Integrated HD Graphics 3000) @ 2.5GHz, 8GB RAM running Win7 64-bit.

My game machine (home) is an Intel i5-2500K quad core @ 3.3GHz, 8GB RAM and a Radeon HD 5770 also running Win7 64-bit.

Not the bleeding edge, but a quite serviceable gaming rig. Both have the jumping bean issue.

It occurs to me that both Markarian and I are using Radon graphics cards in our gaming machines, and I seem to recall that KSP uses Ageia PhysX, which is baked in to the newer NVidia cards. I'm not 100% sure this is correct, but what manner of video card / PhysX implementation are you running, nyrath?

Update: After some more Googlin', it appears that although Unity3 does use PhysX, it doesn't support GPU offloading of the PhysX stuff. So quite possibly this is a wrong guess on my part.

Edited June 6, 2013 by Anglave

[Fyrem]

Anglave,

After some more Googlin', it appears that although Unity3 does use PhysX, it doesn't support GPU offloading of the PhysX stuff. So quite possibly this is a wrong guess on my part.

While you are correct, KSP now (since 0.18 or 0.19) uses Unity 4.

Still I believe that GPU offloading of PhysX is still not supported by Unity4.