[0.22] Extraplanetary Launchpads Legacy Thread

[skykooler]

In v3, does the Kethane scanner still detect ore?

Yes. I don't have a way to change that; but Majiir has warned that in a future release of Kethane the Kethane detector will detect Kethane only and not other resources.

The metal and ore bins are missing textures on the top and bottom.

No, they're not, I did give them textures, which work fine in Unity; but the top and bottom aren't showing up in KSP. I'm not sure why; it's not a normals issue. If you want nice-looking rockets, continue using the Hexcans for now.

[aron123]

THanks for the update works great!!

one question is it only me or does the launch pad have a weird node that sticks out to on side. is this for something

[sproginator]

Works like a charm, expect for filling up pods with kerbals xD

[skykooler]

Works like a charm, expect for filling up pods with kerbals xD

It's not supposed to do that anymore, with the new crew mechanic; you'll have to send kerbal shuttles to your launchpads.

[KhaosCorp]

Yes. I don't have a way to change that; but Majiir has warned that in a future release of Kethane the Kethane detector will detect Kethane only and not other resources.

No, they're not, I did give them textures, which work fine in Unity; but the top and bottom aren't showing up in KSP. I'm not sure why; it's not a normals issue. If you want nice-looking rockets, continue using the Hexcans for now.

Hehe, lots of stuff that works in Unity does not work in KSP....mostly with no obvious reason why not lol.

Glad to see you got the unity not writing issue solved though =)

[sproginator]

It's not supposed to do that anymore, with the new crew mechanic; you'll have to send kerbal shuttles to your launchpads.

Aww, Is there no way to get it to do it for you if you are in debug mode? :/

[skykooler]

Aww, Is there no way to get it to do it for you if you are in debug mode? :/

Debug mode is mainly so you don't need other mods for resources etc. You can transport kerbals completely stock.

[sproginator]

Yeah, kinda difficult if on other planets lol

[Kimberly]

Debug mode is mainly so you don't need other mods for resources etc. You can transport kerbals completely stock.

It may be a bit much to ask, but how about allowing auto-filling of the ship if there are sufficient kerbals attached to the launchpad? With those specific kerbals being moved to the ship, of course. It would be really neat.

[Mihara]

[Pardon me, wrong thread.]

Edited August 9, 2013 by Mihara

[th3shameless]

any ways to make the stock kethane drills mine ore? i've tried myself but the resuts are glitchy and non functional

[mimblgrimpf]

Hey there, question

In your screenshots you launch little rockets without any rocketpart hexcans attached to the launchpad........ how? I just want to know if there's something wrong that i need 242 Rocketparts just for the Ion powered space probe. I planned to launch my bigger space vehicles (+600 parts) from Mimmus but it requires like 500 large hexcans just to store the parts (btw i'm using the spherical launchpads because of the size but it shows me the same numbers with every pad). Is it just me or does it just not like me?^^

[Van Disaster]

Best idea is to copy the drill cfg and replace any functional references to kethane with the ones from the augur. I've used the large Kethane drill like that, it works fine.

[urablahblah]

Has anyone else noticed that Rocketparts are now only .0025 T/u? This is great and all, but now the hex cans basically hold enough for a toothpick, much less any decently sized ship. I'm guessing the cans should just hold a significant amount more now. Like the large should be like 85,000 to be equivalent to what it was before. Somebody check my math, that sounds nutso to me.

EDIT: Upon further analysis, this is indeed the case. The resource definition says "parts are very fluffy, 0.5t/m^3." Awesome, if I wanted my parts to float, I think this would be a good density (water is 2.2t/m^3).

Now we need bigger tanks, because I need about 35 large hex cans for a medium-sized ship.

Edited August 9, 2013 by urablahblah

[taniwha]

urablahblah: the low density is very very deliberate. What you need to do is use much bigger cans. I've modded my hexcans to have a "huge" size (rescaleFactor = 4 (2x Larg)), with 8x the mass and capacity of the large hexcan. It will hold 4.25t of parts.

May I suggest modifying the large spherical tank to hold parts? Set the amount to 38400 (just ad LF and O amounts to get the appropriate value): that will hold 96t of parts: enough for most rockets. A medium modded to hold 4800u of parts will hold 12t, and two can be built from one huge hexcan of parts. You'll then be able to store enough to build a large tank.

Bootstrap, baby, bootstrap!

Also, I strongly advise not freighting parts, but rather freighting metal as it is the most dense. Convert metal to parts on-site. A large spherical tank holding metal might spontaneously explode: 1497.6t.

Here is my config for a huge RocketParts hexcan (just drop it into the EL Parts/HexCanRocketParts as Huge.cfg):

PART
{
        // --- general parameters ---
        name = HexCanRocketPartsHuge
        module = Part
        author = Greys + evilC

        // --- asset parameters ---
        mesh = model.mu
        // texture = hexcan.png
        scale = 1
        rescaleFactor = 4
        specPower = 0.3
        rimFalloff = 3
        alphaCutoff = 0

        // --- general parameters ---
        node_attach =           0.0, 0.0, -0.2,   0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 2
        node_stack_top_01=      0.0, 0.0,  0.166, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1
        node_stack_top =        0.0, 0.75, 0.0,   0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1
        node_stack_bottom = 0.0,-0.75, 0.0,   0.0,-1.0, 0.0, 1

        attachRules = 1,1,1,1,1

        // --- editor parameters ---
        cost = 200
        category = Utility
        subcategory = 0
        title = HexCan-RocketParts-Huge
        manufacturer = PanSpace Manufacturing Inc. Ltd. LLC. Co.
        //                              small= 0.75m, normal= 1.5m large= 3m
        description = A 6m long resource canister containing RocketParts 

        // --- general parameters ---
        mass = 0.6
        //drymass = 0.15
        dragModelType = default
        maximum_drag = 0.2
        minimum_drag = 0.3
        angularDrag = 2
        crashTolerance = 12
        breakingForce = 400
        breakingTorque = 400
        maxTemp = 2900

        // --- resource parameters ---
        // 2x the container size = 8x the volume
        RESOURCE
        {
         name = RocketParts
         amount = 0.0
         maxAmount = 1700
        }
}

Edited August 10, 2013 by taniwha

[SkyHook]

Yea, you forgot to reverse your normals on your metal and ore bins. Quick reimport with proper normals should fix it

[Railgunner2160]

I seem to be having a problem with the mod, it refuses to spawn a ship correctly. I can spawn one but it ends up sideways attached to the fuel tanks and the game says no ships in range......

[urablahblah]

urablahblah: the low density is very very deliberate. What you need to do is use much bigger cans. I've modded my hexcans to have a "huge" size (rescaleFactor = 4 (2x Larg)), with 8x the mass and capacity of the large hexcan. It will hold 4.25t of parts.

May I suggest modifying the large spherical tank to hold parts? Set the amount to 38400 (just ad LF and O amounts to get the appropriate value): that will hold 96t of parts: enough for most rockets. A medium modded to hold 4800u of parts will hold 12t, and two can be built from one huge hexcan of parts. You'll then be able to store enough to build a large tank.

Bootstrap, baby, bootstrap!

Also, I strongly advise not freighting parts, but rather freighting metal as it is the most dense. Convert metal to parts on-site. A large spherical tank holding metal might spontaneously explode: 1497.6t.

Here is my config for a huge RocketParts hexcan (just drop it into the EL Parts/HexCanRocketParts as Huge.cfg):

Aha, I wish you hadn't spent the time playing with the config, because I just got done editing mine! I made one for every spherical fuel tank and every EPL resource. However I calculated the volume of the tanks by the weight of the fuel (which, iirc, is 5tons/m^3). So the large tank holds 38.4 m^3, so 7680 units at 200 units per m^3 (as per resource density definitions). That works out to a little less than 20 tons rocket parts per large tank, which I can live with. If anyone wants my config files I can upload them.

[Fyrem]

not letting me download.... are you updating it?

edit : nevermind, I finally got it.

Edited August 10, 2013 by Fyrem

[taniwha]

urablahblah: well, here is a set of configs for the sphereical tanks (all 5 sizes, all 3 resources): http://taniwha.org/~bill/el-sphere.zip. Just unzip in in your GameData directory. It's based on the same assumptions I used for balancing the fuel in the spherical tanks (200u/m^3) and the EPL resource.

[hubbazoot]

So, I just went to see what it'd take to bootstrap a base... The plugin is saying 6593 rocket parts for a pretty basic drill and a ore->metal conversion unit. Is this right? That number feels REALLY high. It'd be nice to have some parts more designed to bootstrap. The small landing pad is nice, but more scalability (kinda using kethane as an example) would be nice to give us some option for scaling up our operations.

[taniwha]

hubbazoot: well, you do need 400 rocket parts / ton of hull. This is why I suggest shipping metal rather than parts. And yeah, the new pad is a tad short on parts storage (wasn't updated for the new densities).

[hubbazoot]

Yeah, I was saying it'd be nice to have some smaller converters, as well. It'd be nice to have a low production base we could use as a bootstrapper. Maybe the base unit isn't terribly powerful in and of itself, but it still has enough production that you could make a medium from a small, and then make a large from a medium.

[Zeroignite]

I buffed the density of Rocketparts.

Question though, is it possible to spawn ships which include rocketparts containers? When I try from the build menu, ships fail to load.

Also, on ships I do spawn, they now end up totally off the sides of the HL Launchpad.

[taniwha]

hubbazoot: sorry, I was a bit rushed (chasing bugs). I agree some smaller units would be nice for bootstrapping. Even if just a smaller workshop and "pad". Then you ship workshop, pad and metal to your destination, and start building.

Zeroignite: in the current version, building ships with rocket parts storage may be iffy, but it does work in the dev version on github (though skykooler had some issues I can't reproduce ).

As for buffing the density of rocket parts: while I did make it so you can have any non-zero density you want, I really don't recommend making the density higher than 0.5, which in itself may be too high still. The density of the Jumbo-64 is 0.1t/m³ (1/5 of rocket parts). Even a mainsail is around 0.35t/m³. My 0.5t/m³ assumes you have to build a mainsail from sub-parts. Really, you shouldn't be able to store rocket parts in anything smaller than a very large crate, and even then, that will get you a smallish rocket.

Yes, the density changes are a pretty harsh change to what you're used to, but the previous density was so bogus it wasn't funny: 200t/m³ is just not feasable. The densest known substance this side of neutronium (4x10¹⁴t/m³) is osmium (22.6t/m³). If you think KSP is "just a game", then play it: meet the challenge, find ways to work around the low density. The old densities were, IMHO, just plain broken. I had the parts density at 6t/m³ during my play in 0.20.2, but even that was just too high and too easy. There was no challenge (other than getting 40t of parts into orbit).

This change was about 1) making containers hold a sane mass of ore/metal/parts, 2) bringing logistics into the game.