[0.23.5] Spherical and Toroidal Tank Pack (Updated 05/02/14) (New download link)

[Rayder]

Ah, that does indeed seem to be the case. It's not like it's gamebreaking anyway. Now it's just a bug with KAS slowing me down now...

[oniontrain]

I really like the new idea too. I use the crap out of these for all kinds of stuff. The only problem I had with the radial tanks was that adding one plus the mount usually resulted in LESS Delta-V so they really weren't worth using. The half tank with built in base is probably the way to go for those, I can't think of a better way to do it, I mostly used the half tanks as adapters with some bonus fuel.

[Railgunner2160]

Personally I rather like the idea of being able to choose the mounts for the half-sphere tanks, It still only means making 1 tank model for each size, then we can attach whatever of the mounts your already making to determine what size of parts we wish to use...

If your idea doesn't wobble too much then I think this would cut down on the required parts correct??

[Talisar]

Personally I rather like the idea of being able to choose the mounts for the half-sphere tanks, It still only means making 1 tank model for each size, then we can attach whatever of the mounts your already making to determine what size of parts we wish to use...

If your idea doesn't wobble too much then I think this would cut down on the required parts correct??

Oh, I intend for you to be able to choose the connection mounts for the half-spheres. The part I was talking about being built in was the "bottom" of the tank, where it is widest. Just thinking of making some kind of visual structure for that point. If I just chop the sphere in half and leave it like that, it won't look very convincing.

[Talisar]

Just wanted to pop in and say that the current version of this pack appears to be working just fine with the most recent experimental version of MFT (v4_pre8, which you can get from the MFT thread HERE). The only major issue is that if you build a ship and change the fuel types using the actiongroup menu, then save it. When you next load the ship, the original fuels will show up on the Tweakables menu with values of NaN/0.00. You can get rid of this by opening the actiongroup menu and removing all/readding the desired fuel types to the tank. After I get home from work today I'll put together updated configs and push out my update, and the combination of those and a MM patch should fix that issue.

Big thanks to NathanKell and taniwha for the hard work getting this up and running again!

[Stone Blue]

Quote Originally Posted by Kokanee

Also your half sphere tanks are perfect for building fuel depots, please don't get rid of them.

I'll find some way to make them work. Probably a separate tank model that has an attached base so it doesn't just look like the bottom half is simply chopped off.

What about maybe just making ONE, separate part, like a round framework, maybe one ring that mates against with the flat side of the tank, with some short "legs" coming off it at 90°, with some smaller "struts" supporting them at 45°?... Just make one for each size tank... I'm thinking something like the open, interstage couplers on some of BobCats Soviet rockets...??

Hmmm... maybe make a short legged one, to set the half-tanks on top of, and a longer legged one for full tanks...??....OR, if the legs were long enough, you could attach it to the "equator" of the full tanks, so the tank sits down inside it, and use the SAME base for the half-tanks to sit "on top of"...??

Hmmm...Maybe even incorporate a docking port, or even a couple different sized ones, or a maybe even a single, one-size-fits-all-universal docking port (I recently saw a post of someone combining a Sr, regular, and Jr port into one part..??), onto the framework so vehicles could pull up perpendicular to the tank base, dock, and refuel or offload directly from the tank?

Have maybe 6 or 8 attachment nodes around the outside of the base, so you could also attach trusses that attach to neighboring tanks?...or obviously for other uses and things to attach to..??

OR, how about making some "plumbing" parts, like the stock fuel lines, that can be stretched between tanks, or from different TYPES of tanks (ie LOX, O2, Mono, LF, etc..), to one single "port", "valve", "faucet" or docking port, so a vehicle with multiple fuel usage/capacity could dock once, and fill or offload from/to several near-by tanks all at once?....

Of course, i'm thinking all this would be GREAT mainly for ground bases....

Edited December 22, 2013 by Stone Blue

[Patupi]

This is something I've been playing with. With the current design, if I try one of the mounts on a larger diameter tank, then the center connection hovers above the tank. I can change that connection to a cylinder that is long enough to just clip into the smaller tanks if used on them, but it doesn't look as nice. I may be able to come up with something as I play around with the design though.

-edit- No, that wouldn't work either, because the stack node would have to be in a different place for each size of tank. I could maybe do the same clipping idea with the ring as well to make it work, but it'll probably look odd. I'll try it out and see though.

They also work well as radial connections, which is another point on the positive side for that particular design choice.

This is definitely something to consider as well. My initial feeling was that the increased versatility would more than make up for a relatively minor increase in part count... But then again, if you are using a bunch of the tanks, the part count increase quickly becomes non-minor. Hmmm...

I also don't see an easy way to do half-spheres that would look believable with this style. The man reason I made them was so that you could stack two different types of tank into one sphere, but that's not really necessary since I started adding the MFS functionality. I hesitate to get rid of them though, as they seem to get pretty heavy use in the pics I've seen of peoples' builds. Maybe just a "base" that could be added to the bottom? (thus increasing the part count again, grrr)

How about one ring with an oversized dome with a radius large enough that it works with any size tank, then instead of a ring outside that use struts. These struts can be a sharp enough angle (or curved) so they intersect with the tank frame and on the large tanks would be partially inside them. Should work with all tank sizes. Hang on, I'll do a rough sketch of what I mean and post it up.

EDIT: OK, here is a rough sketch of what I mean:

Doh. Just realized I didn't put the actual tank fuel connection in the middle of the connector. Well, just imagine a pipe off the top of the dome

Edited December 22, 2013 by Patupi

[landeTLS]

So, while I've been waiting, I've been playing around with alternate designs for the spherical tanks...

Snip

That is a 2.5m diameter tank (current medium size) with 1.25 and 0.625m mounts. What I'm thinking is splitting these up in much the same way that I did the toroidal tanks, where you place the tank and mounts separately. This would allow more choice in what is used. Also, it would mean just 1 tank for each size, and 2 (or 3, depending on demand) choices of mounts for each size. It also allows for having different sized mounts on the same tank (for example a 2.5m mount on the bottom for an engine and a 1.25m mount on top for a 1-kerbal capsule). My major concern with this will be the joint strength. If it's too wobbly, it'll be useless.

Anyhow, nothing for sure yet, just playing around. Anyone have thoughts on the design?

Love the idea of using the mounts to reduce the amounts of tanks. I really like the new designs. May i suggest applying stocklike details/distressing and perhaps normalmaps on the final design of the spheres so they look a little less plain. I could even have a go at it myself if you want. Tho im mostly experienced in 2d renderings(havent done much of any 3d texture work).

[Patupi]

Query, in all the spherical and conical structures (stock as well as modded) items connected radially to the surface flip between two slightly off angle orientations. I'm guessing this is due to the collision mesh being made of triangles rather than rectangles (or rather two side by side triangles that are aligned in parallel) and the slight angle differences tilt the planar connection. Is it possible to adjust the mesh to get rid of this, or is it implicit in the way connections are done in Unity?

[Talisar]

What about maybe just making ONE, separate part, like a round framework, maybe one ring that mates against with the flat side of the tank, with some short "legs" coming off it at 90°, with some smaller "struts" supporting them at 45°?... Just make one for each size tank... I'm thinking something like the open, interstage couplers on some of BobCats Soviet rockets...??

Ok, now I'm pretty sure you're stalking me I feel special.

This is pretty much exactly what I'm thinking of. A "structural" piece that would have good geometry upon which to add other parts (such as legs, storage container, KAS equipment, etc...). If designed right, it could also act as a mount for large constructions, such as if you want to mount a small half-tank (base size of 2.5m) on top of a 2.5m cylindrical tank.

How about one ring with an oversized dome with a radius large enough that it works with any size tank, then instead of a ring outside that use struts. These struts can be a sharp enough angle (or curved) so they intersect with the tank frame and on the large tanks would be partially inside them. Should work with all tank sizes. Hang on, I'll do a rough sketch of what I mean and post it up.

-snip-

Interesting concept there. That's pretty much the same procedure that I used made the struts for my toroidal tanks work (in a more Euclidian fashion ) I like having the structural ring for their base, but if I made it part of the tank instead of the mount I could possibly ensure an intersection on any sized tank if I used the right strut curvature. I'll play with it and see how it works.

Thanks for the feedback guys, keep it coming!

[Talisar]

Love the idea of using the mounts to reduce the amounts of tanks. I really like the new designs. May i suggest applying stocklike details/distressing and perhaps normalmaps on the final design of the spheres so they look a little less plain. I could even have a go at it myself if you want. Tho im mostly experienced in 2d renderings(havent done much of any 3d texture work).

That's the plan. I'm going to work on much better texturing that I have in the past, and I also plan to include normal maps this time (if I can get them to work correctly. I had issues before ). But my texturing skills have improved quite a bit since v1 (I hope) so I expect I can do better this time around. My goal is to aim for a very stockalike look to these.

Query, in all the spherical and conical structures (stock as well as modded) items connected radially to the surface flip between two slightly off angle orientations. I'm guessing this is due to the collision mesh being made of triangles rather than rectangles (or rather two side by side triangles that are aligned in parallel) and the slight angle differences tilt the planar connection. Is it possible to adjust the mesh to get rid of this, or is it implicit in the way connections are done in Unity?

This is due to the part you are attaching orienting itself to the normals of the faces of the collision mesh. The collision mesh is not nearly as smooth as the rendered mesh, in order to keep the tanks from crashing peoples computers. Even with the simplified mesh, there are a LOT of polys involved in making a spherical tank compared to a cylindrical one. For example, the maximum number of faces Unity will allow in a single collision mesh is 255, so the current large spherical tank actually uses 5 separate meshes to make it work. I could smooth it out by adding more faces to allow a smoother progression over the surface, but I'm afraid it would negatively affect performance.

Funny story here too, it took me forever to figure out that I had to rotate the final model by 5.625 degrees in order to present a flat face in the 4 cardinal directions so radially attached parts would sit flat there

Edited December 22, 2013 by Talisar

[FaceDeer]

I've used the smaller half-spheres as "endcaps" on cylindrical tanks and other standard-sized cylindrical parts before, it looks awesome when I do that. The larger half-spheres have made for neat-looking "domes" as part of base-building activities on other worlds, I've used Extraplanetary Launchpads to make them from local materials and then used a rover with a KAS winch to drag them off the launchpad to wherever they're supposed to go.

Speaking of which, what would you say to the notion of a variant of the large spherical and half-spherical tanks that hold Kerbals? Sort of an ultra-mega-sized Hitchhiker. Extraplanetary Launchpads has made me start thinking big and it'd be nice to be able to populate my ridiculously large stations and bases with similarly ridiculous numbers of Kerbals. I wouldn't care about an IVA or anything fancy like that, just slap some portholes on the texture and I'd be happy.

I love your plan for separating the mount and tank models, adds a lot of customizability. If you go with that another nice thing to consider would be angled radial mounts. Here's a fairly common pattern I use when making use of these large tanks as part of a ship. As you can see, with stock parts this looks a bit ragged and for these Mainsails I had to trick the clipping-detection code slightly to make it work.

[Talisar]

Speaking of which, what would you say to the notion of a variant of the large spherical and half-spherical tanks that hold Kerbals? Sort of an ultra-mega-sized Hitchhiker. Extraplanetary Launchpads has made me start thinking big and it'd be nice to be able to populate my ridiculously large stations and bases with similarly ridiculous numbers of Kerbals. I wouldn't care about an IVA or anything fancy like that, just slap some portholes on the texture and I'd be happy.

I worked on something like that earlier, but never got it to release quality. It's definitely an option for the future though. Here's a pic (It's from about 35 pages back, so I'm not surprised you didn't see it . The top half-sphere is a command pod and the bottom is a half-spherical LFO tank.

I love your plan for separating the mount and tank models, adds a lot of customizability. If you go with that another nice thing to consider would be angled radial mounts. Here's a fairly common pattern I use when making use of these large tanks as part of a ship. As you can see, with stock parts this looks a bit ragged and for these Mainsails I had to trick the clipping-detection code slightly to make it work.

Something along the lines of these?

[Patupi]

This is due to the part you are attaching orienting itself to the normals of the faces of the collision mesh. The collision mesh is not nearly as smooth as the rendered mesh, in order to keep the tanks from crashing peoples computers. Even with the simplified mesh, there are a LOT of polys involved in making a spherical tank compared to a cylindrical one. For example, the maximum number of faces Unity will allow in a single collision mesh is 255, so the current large spherical tank actually uses 5 separate meshes to make it work. I could smooth it out by adding more faces to allow a smoother progression over the surface, but I'm afraid it would negatively affect performance.

Funny story here too, it took me forever to figure out that I had to rotate the final model by 5.625 degrees in order to present a flat face in the 4 cardinal directions so radially attached parts would sit flat there

OK, but when I was modelling (a long time ago now!) I often redesigned the basic model spheres and cylinders to minimize this. It doesn't take extra polys, just aligning the ones you have. It's just matching triangles, and their vertices, to follow each other and keep adjacent surface normals coincident. For cones I usually ended up taking a cylinder, rotating the vertices half the angle from the subdivisions (ie if there were 32 subdivisions around the cylinder, rotate 5.625 degrees), then shrink the top to make the cone. Though that depends on how the standard cylinders you're working with are constructed. Might work with the standard ones without rotation if their built right and just shift things a little. Occasionally I had to take every other vertex and scale it from the center of the cylinder to match by hand.

With spheres I usually ended up making them from cylinders and scaling and shifting the stacks till they made a sphere. I did all this mainly to get smoothing groups looking right when part of a cylinder/sphere was one smooth group and part another. But it should work for normals too.

[Talisar]

OK, but when I was modelling (a long time ago now!) I often redesigned the basic model spheres and cylinders to minimize this. It doesn't take extra polys, just aligning the ones you have. It's just matching triangles, and their vertices, to follow each other and keep adjacent surface normals coincident. For cones I usually ended up taking a cylinder, rotating the vertices half the angle from the subdivisions (ie if there were 32 subdivisions around the cylinder, rotate 5.625 degrees), then shrink the top to make the cone. Though that depends on how the standard cylinders you're working with are constructed. Might work with the standard ones without rotation if their built right and just shift things a little. Occasionally I had to take every other vertex and scale it from the center of the cylinder to match by hand.

With spheres I usually ended up making them from cylinders and scaling and shifting the stacks till they made a sphere. I did all this mainly to get smoothing groups looking right when part of a cylinder/sphere was one smooth group and part another. But it should work for normals too.

Hmm, I have been focusing on the face normals, but I never played with the vertex normals (even though I should have thought of it). Thanks for the explanation on that. I will experiment and see if I can make an improvement there. I'm by no means a pro, but I'm learning

[Patupi]

Heh, me either, and I haven't played much with modelling for an age. I was never any good at textures, but I got fairly good at low poly stuff. However that was maybe ten years ago. I used to do modding for Homeworld and a few others, but haven't done much of late.

EDIT: Oh, and love that dome command pod. There are a few things where I needed large Kerbal storage to minimize parts count on personnel transport. How many can that thing hold? Is it comparable to the Hitchhiker in mass/kerbal stored?

Edited December 22, 2013 by Patupi

[FaceDeer]

Eep, how embarrassing. I haven't been paying as much attention to the structural components that come with the spherical tanks, I forgot that those were bundled with them.

That habitat dome is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of, it looks awesome. What wasn't releaseable about it? The only thing that looks a bit "off" to me is the brightness of the blue in the windows, might be a good idea to darken those a bit and crank up their specular reflectivity to make them look glassier. I'd love to plunk a few of those down around any major bases I've got groundside.

[Talisar]

Oh, and love that dome command pod. There are a few things where I needed large Kerbal storage to minimize parts count on personnel transport. How many can that thing hold? Is it comparable to the Hitchhiker in mass/kerbal stored?

It's far bigger than it looks in that picture. That's one of the largest spheres (7.5m diameter), so you could easily fit 4-5 of the hitchhiker modules inside it and probably have space to spare. To give you a sense of scale, that hatch on the front is about the same height as a kerbal. My design was for it to actually be 2 levels inside with the top being CCC and the bottom level being crew and storage space. It could easily hold a dozen Kerbals comfortably, I'd think.

Eep, how embarrassing. I haven't been paying as much attention to the structural components that come with the spherical tanks, I forgot that those were bundled with them.

That habitat dome is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of, it looks awesome. What wasn't releaseable about it? The only thing that looks a bit "off" to me is the brightness of the blue in the windows, might be a good idea to darken those a bit and crank up their specular reflectivity to make them look glassier. I'd love to plunk a few of those down around any major bases I've got groundside.

That was just a very rough first shot at it, and I felt it was far too unpolished. It was mostly an exercise for me to figure out how to handle airlocks, ladders, animations, and lighting. At the time I had those mostly figured out is when I started the revamp of the spherical and toroidal tanks in order to share textures and reduce the part counts, so it kind of got put on the back burner. I also needed to take some time and improve my texturing skills a bit (that particular texture looked like concrete). It's something I can definitely go back to though, and I think that this design scheme that is developing for new tanks would carry over well to hab/command modules too.

[Patupi]

Cool, nice for heavy a people mover. But I was meaning how heavy it was per kerbal it holds. IE the ratio of mass to kerbals. Is it roughly the same as the hitchhiker in that? Just... I guess, three times as heavy if it holds three times as much?

EDIT: Basically I would like something that would save on part count but not be OP compared to the hitchhiker

[oniontrain]

I've gotten normal maps working in game before, feel free to PM me and I might be able to help on that end. I started work on a rover yard type thing with Kerbtown but haven't gotten the time to finish it, but I've gotten most of the texture stuff figured out.

[Talisar]

Cool, nice for heavy a people mover. But I was meaning how heavy it was per kerbal it holds. IE the ratio of mass to kerbals. Is it roughly the same as the hitchhiker in that? Just... I guess, three times as heavy if it holds three times as much?

EDIT: Basically I would like something that would save on part count but not be OP compared to the hitchhiker

Ahh, I see what you mean. I never got as far as figuring that much out, I was mostly just figuring out the technical bits of the modelling. I do try to balance my parts against stock as much as possible though, so it would likely fall somewhere between the hitchhiker and a command pod as far as the mass ratios are concerned. Once I get that far, I'll probably be posting here asking for input (as well as asking taniwha for help keeping me honest with the math )

I've gotten normal maps working in game before, feel free to PM me and I might be able to help on that end. I started work on a rover yard type thing with Kerbtown but haven't gotten the time to finish it, but I've gotten most of the texture stuff figured out.

I appreciate the offer! I was able to get them to work in-game (somewhat), my main issue is getting them made. I model in 3ds max, and I can burn the normal map from the high poly model just fine (and when I did a render using them in 3ds max they looked great), but when I tried to use the nvidia plugin in photoshop to convert them to be useable by unity they got kind of washed out. So I'm pretty sure that my problem is in the conversion settings rather than making the map in the first place. I'm certain it's just a matter of buckling down and learning how to do it correctly. I'll definitely give you a PM once I get to that point again and have some examples to show you though, maybe you can spot what I'm doing wrong.

[FaceDeer]

That was just a very rough first shot at it, and I felt it was far too unpolished. It was mostly an exercise for me to figure out how to handle airlocks, ladders, animations, and lighting. At the time I had those mostly figured out is when I started the revamp of the spherical and toroidal tanks in order to share textures and reduce the part counts, so it kind of got put on the back burner. I also needed to take some time and improve my texturing skills a bit (that particular texture looked like concrete). It's something I can definitely go back to though, and I think that this design scheme that is developing for new tanks would carry over well to hab/command modules too.

Given that my intent is to manufacture these things on location from local resources, a texture that looks like concrete is actually ideal.

[Talisar]

Here's kind of what I'm thinking for a base for the half tanks:

[Talisar]

Given that my intent is to manufacture these things on location from local resources, a texture that looks like concrete is actually ideal.

Lol, well I intend on making these with multiple textures to choose from, in the same way that you can change the color of the bands on the current set. I'll try to include a concrete texture for you when I start making them

[Stone Blue]

Here's kind of what I'm thinking for a base for the half tanks:

http://imageshack.us/a/img21/3221/ip79.jpg

I was thinking more the other way...dome just like it is, but framework same as your bottom piece, but with legs extending down from that, AWAY from the dome...so there is room to put docking ports on or between the legs...

Excuse my kindergarten artwork...lol

Round circle would be where you could put attachment nodes, optimally for a docking port for rovers...lol

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0D_PFGuuyqocWNBOEV6cGQwajQ/edit?usp=sharing

Edited December 23, 2013 by Stone Blue