[0.22] Extraplanetary Launchpads Legacy Thread

[betony1]

I have scanned and used version 3.0 with the fixes, the augur did not work, I then put in version 3.1.....or so i thought, then i noticed that it was a bit above the ground. Once I put the augur into the ground, it worked flawlessly. Unlike Kethane, the augur needs to start in the ground!! I searched through and could have sworn i read most of the comments, and nobody described how it worked! I spent hours trying to play with it, and swearing it fell off as soon as it hit the ground...I was wrong!

*****Tip*****

put the Augur INTO the ground!

[SyberSmoke]

I have scanned and used version 3.0 with the fixes, the augur did not work, I then put in version 3.1.....or so i thought, then i noticed that it was a bit above the ground. Once I put the augur into the ground, it worked flawlessly. Unlike Kethane, the augur needs to start in the ground!! I searched through and could have sworn i read most of the comments, and nobody described how it worked! I spent hours trying to play with it, and swearing it fell off as soon as it hit the ground...I was wrong!

*****Tip*****

put the Augur INTO the ground!

I like to have the auger on an Adjustable rail that way I can launch with it high, and having it descend after I touch down using the rail just looks cool. :-) Plus I can use the reail to adjust JUST in case I miss the placement. Infernal Robotics is an excellent pack.

[Tw1]

-snip-

You raise some very interesting ideas, but not sure we need more intermediate steps, IMHO. Depends on how cool the ore sorter looks

[carsenere]

I'm having this issue where upon reaching ~6000m above kerbin, any launchpad part, be it from this mod or the spherical launchpads one, apparently decides it is somewhere several kilometers from the rest of the ship (struts don't break though). the camera freaks out, I see struts extending seemingly to the surface, and the entire craft starts careening out of control until it finally crashes into the ground... any ideas?

I am having a similar problem:

Once I pass 6km altitude the camera starts moving backwards in jumps of about 1km, the ship also oscillates slightly. I manage to make orbit but I am unable to focus on my craft due to my camera being centred so far away, it also thinks my ship is under slight acceleration making my projected orbit oscillate and meaning i cant quicksave or timewarp.

anyone got any ideas or a fix?

p.s. only mods i have downloaded are kethane (worked fine used alone) and the KAS mod besides this one.

[SyberSmoke]

You raise some very interesting ideas, but not sure we need more intermediate steps, IMHO. Depends on how cool the ore sorter looks

True an intermediate step may not be the best path. But I am personally a stickler for consistency, not really OCD, just I like it so my suspension of disbelief is not harmed in the process.

As for the models...Oh they could look very cool with just a sectional design and rotation along the long axis of the model. Oh and texturing, clean texturing. There is always a balance between reality and game play that must be kept in mind. May be that intermediate step, while not necessary, would be useful to increase inefficiency.

So with out processing the ore before smelting, the efficiency of the smelter is reduced significantly. But you can still mine and process ore. Adding the Ore Processor to grind, pulverize, separate and sort the ore reduces the load on the Furnace and as such increases efficiency because you do not need to remove as much waste.

There are many way s you can go about making it fun and look good with out resorting to filler. :-)

[guardian259]

thats an awsome idea i never thought of using the KAS as a connector before!

[Ratzap]

I've spent 3 days putting together a launcher base on Duna. The main problem I see with the current LP/ore system is you spend so much time on logistics of getting parts to make storage so you can send enough parts to make bigger storage and so on in a cycle until you can finally build something worthwhile. A decent heavy lifter costs a vast amount of parts to build, ore mining is very very slow - the electric drain I can live with but 10 per second per drill is terrible. Even on high time warp it takes an age to fill up and process.

I started out with a launchpad and a KAS hub (ship with a kerbal in and 8 winches round the bottom plus 4 movable plugs). I got a ship landed and plugged in with part hex cans which serves as fuel storage and built 4 rovers to cover kethane mining, ore mining, smelting and workshop. I have 1 free KAS connector now (after plugging in a big blob of rocket part storage) for a kethane refinery to complete the base's self sufficiency. Two of the rovers are so heavy when full that the tires burst and cannot be fixed Metal is the big problem there. Part count is also now so high that it takes 25 seconds to load when I switch to it (I have a beefy i7 machine) and the lag is pretty bad. Which kind of defeats the purpose since it's hard to launch and fly around in a slide show.

All in all the mod has promise but it needs a lot of balancing work yet to make it less tedious, less storage hassle (and that guys idea of making smelting a 2 part process will not help there at all) and lower part counts. If it was possible to make buildings and place them once it would be fabulous - So much wasted part count on wheels, rockets etc for things I will never move. Base building tools are badly needed in KSP.

[taniwha]

Ratzap: Yes, I forgot to tweak the rates when I did the densities (however, 10t/s is a tad fast, maybe 1-2t/s).

[CoriW]

Hello, so I've just installed this mod and I've noticed something that I'm not sure if it's intended or not... No matter where I take the launch pad it requires no resources to build any ships.

First I just deployed the pad on the launch pad at KSC, and when it let me build a ship without the required resources I just assumed it was because of my close proximity to KSC, however after that I took one to Minmus only to discover that the same issue was present there as well, and I could build a ship without the required resources.

EDIT: The above has been solved, in the "launchpad2" part.cfg file there was "debug = true", to fix it I just changed it to "debug = false"

Another thing I've noticed is how exactly are you supposed to connect parts to the launch pad in order to supply it with power or store more rocket parts, etc? Due to the unfolding animation anything you place on it in the VAB will usually either end up inside the unfolded launch pad or floating mid air above it.

Other than those two things I've also noticed that when the launch pad is unfolded you can actually see under the model's mesh in some places which is a little bit immersion breaking.

So that's my feedback so far, I'll keep playing around with it and will let you know if anything else comes up.

EDIT: Another thing I've noticed is that the launch pad can apparently hold 2 crew, however there seems to be no way to actually get them out of it? Along with that, they also don't show up in the bottom right corner, I almost lost Jeb.

Edited August 22, 2013 by CoriW

[Ratzap]

Immersion breaking? Hehe but sending an entire launchpad that magically weighs 14 tonnes on it's own to another planet is totally acceptable?

w/e - anyway, your problem with connection = KAS, kerbal attachment system. You need a lot of mods to get everything going and you're going to need patience because you'll be scraping/repeating a lot till you work it all out.

[Ratzap]

Ratzap: Yes, I forgot to tweak the rates when I did the densities (however, 10t/s is a tad fast, maybe 1-2t/s).

The part is 24/s electric and 0.1L/s so I was getting the 10t/s at about 6 arrows fast forward. The heavy kethane drill is 5L/s and the same energy draw - 50 times faster. So yeah, bumping the drill to 2 or 3L/s would still be slower but not horrifically so.

I know this is all new and rather complex but I wish more people using it would actually playtest it rather than leave it on debug, launch a few rockets and go weeee. Without proper playtesting to balance/tune the mod it's going to be pretty useless.

I finished off my Duna station with 2 hypered in parts. I was sick of sending parts to build storage to fit enough parts to build bigger part storage in order to.. and so on. Some of my large launcher/payloads are almost 250,000 rocket parts even something tiny with like 3 parts to it is 400. The whole base weighs 2947 tonnes, 90%+ is parts/metal/ore storage.

[taniwha]

Raztap: the reason I've been fairly quiet lately is because I've been playing^h^h^h-testing. So far, I've managed to collect 11.6875t of ore (two large hexcans) after driving ~500km to get it (nearest deposit to KSC: got rather unlucky this save). I'm currently on the way back (about 20%). I'll be able to get 7.25t of parts out of that: just enough to build a small smelter with an auger and a KAS connector). Anyway, it was kind of fun dropping 54 flags (one every 10km (5km for the first few)) to mark my way home

24u/s EC might actually be a touch high: that's 24MW by my reckoning^[1], but then one tiny little solar panel can produce 0.75MW? Dunno about Kerbin, but Earth gets about 1.1kW/m² of sunlight). Anyway, not too onerous: 2 gigantors or 3 medium hexcan RTGs are more than enough.

The current rate of 0.1u/s (2.75kg/s) is waaaay too slow, even if the auger is using only 24kW. Unless I am mistaken, 24kW should be able to lift 1t 2.4m every second. With 24MW, that ore should be swarming in. I think ~1t/s should be reasonable (36.36u/s). I'd be happy to make it a nice round 40u/s even.

While I think the rate and power probably still need some tweaking, the smelter input/output ratios are carefully calculated (I documented it in the cfg file). I plan on adding CO in/CO₂ out to the smelter once I've done some more research^[2].

tl;dr So, yes, indeed: EL still needs a lot of balancing work. That is part of the purpose of my current play-testing (another part is rescuing Jeb from Laythe:)).

[1] The ion engine produces 500N of thrust with an exhaust velocity of 41202m/s (4200s Isp). The power to produce the thrust is P=1/2m_ev_e² = 1/2 F v_e = 1/2 * 400 * 41202 = 1050000W (10.5MW). Actual power consumption of the ion engine is about 14.5u/s, which works out nicely for ~70% efficiency.

[2] Smelting iron produces more tons of CO₂ than it does Fe! Mind you, it consumes the same number of Moles of CO as it produces CO₂, so with a CO₂ splitter (producing CO + O₂), it's actually not so bad: recycling ftw .

[edit]PS: awesome base. I love the pile of spherical tanks

[Ratzap]

[edit]PS: awesome base. I love the pile of spherical tanks

I use Kordo's RTG pack, the XXL on a few things does the job for normal drain and when I have drills on I flick the keth generators on.

That tank pile was hypered in and even then it took a few tries. Hyper edit lowers things to the ground at 1.1m/s, sounds slow but as soon as one edge touches down it lets gravity take over. So one corner touches and the whole thing drops under gravity the rest of the way - all the RTGs fall off and struts snap. So I finally found a use for the shock absorbing legs a guy posted They actually withstood that 178 tonne pile bouncing down on them. They broke off as it filled up though, 300,000 rocket parts are heavy as hell.

That smelter rover on the left got so heavy as it filled with metal that the tires exploded and the probe controller fell off...

[CoriW]

Immersion breaking? Hehe but sending an entire launchpad that magically weighs 14 tonnes on it's own to another planet is totally acceptable?

w/e - anyway, your problem with connection = KAS, kerbal attachment system. You need a lot of mods to get everything going and you're going to need patience because you'll be scraping/repeating a lot till you work it all out.

Yeah well, I only commented on the mesh because on some earlier page (no idea which page) somebody said the mesh was immersion breaking, so I figured I'd throw that in there as a bit of constructive criticism. I'm only trying to help and don't intend to offend anybody. (Apologies if it came across that way, for the record the model is actually pretty good, I quite like it.)

EDIT: Sending a 14 tonne launch pad to another planet surprisingly doesn't actually feel all that immersion breaking to me, considering that I've had landers that weigh much more than that.

As for KAS, it's on the list of mods that I typically use, however am not currently using because it's still [0.20] and I've heard there are a few bugs with it currently, I just wasn't sure if there is a way to hook up to the Launch Pad without KAS?

...I know this is all new and rather complex but I wish more people using it would actually playtest it rather than leave it on debug, launch a few rockets and go weeee. Without proper playtesting to balance/tune the mod it's going to be pretty useless.

I finished off my Duna station with 2 hypered in parts. I was sick of sending parts to build storage to fit enough parts to build bigger part storage in order to.. and so on. Some of my large launcher/payloads are almost 250,000 rocket parts even something tiny with like 3 parts to it is 400. The whole base weighs 2947 tonnes, 90%+ is parts/metal/ore storage...

Well, hopefully I can do some of that playtesting, when I first installed the mod I thought it was a bug that I could launch ships without the required resources, first thing I did when I found out it was debug mode was turned debug mode off. However since I like to play through my 'missions' and whatnot at a relatively slow pace, I wouldn't expect me to get a chance to playtest it for awhile until I actually get a base up and running, we'll see what happens.

Anyways, really awesome base you have there, I like it.

Edited August 23, 2013 by CoriW

[Vertibirdo]

As for KAS, it's on the list of mods that I typically use, however am not currently using because it's still [0.20] and I've heard there are a few bugs with it currently, I just wasn't sure if there is a way to hook up to the Launch Pad without KAS?

The only bug i have encountered with KAS is the problem with dismountable connector (Sometimes they send stuff flying and exploding). Everything else is totally fine.

[CoriW]

The only bug i have encountered with KAS is the problem with dismountable connector (Sometimes they send stuff flying and exploding). Everything else is totally fine.

Actually, this was posted by the maker of KAS yesterday.

...what I reported so far on 0.21 is :

- Attaching a part in space are not possible sometimes as pointer is always yellow (I have some idea of what is the cause, but I need to confirm this)

- Keyboard control give input to all winches that are physicaly loaded instead of only the one active (to do)

- Alone parts attached on the ground can disapear after a save/load (already fixed on the next version)

- Rover can't turn after been docked with a connector is certain configuration (waiting completion of my new winch module to see if it will fix the problem)

- Floating cable seem to be reported (waiting completion of my new winch module to see if it will fix the problem)

- Grabbed part disapear after entering a pod (already fixed on the next version)

- Sounds can be heared from kilometers (already fixed on the next version)

- Part dropped in space do not resume the correct velocity (to do)

Although this is sort of off topic in this thread so that'll be all I say about it here.

[Ratzap]

Something else odd that I saw just now. I have a rather simple lander/probe build launching from Duna, when I go to build it it says Jet Fuel XXXX/XXXXX. The design has no jet fuel in it and the base has none either but it still builds no problem (not in debug mode).

[zgrillo2004]

Is there a possibility of making a new model for a ore scanner for small probes and spacecraft?

[skykooler]

Is there a possibility of making a new model for a ore scanner for small probes and spacecraft?

What don't you like about the current small scanner?

[SyberSmoke]

What don't you like about the current small scanner?

It looks like an over sized circuit board that was blown up to epic proportions and is disproportionately large to other science devices in the game. I mean how does a two pin connector, some wires, five Capacitors, and a Transformer (? The big copper wire thing), and a single chip detect ore. It sounds harsh, but given the size of say the Graviolie Detector, this item is a little out of proportion and does not make allot of sense to use.

I do hope that they are working on some new models or may be make the detector part of a new object that fits better.

Edited August 24, 2013 by SyberSmoke

[skykooler]

It looks like an over sized circuit board that was blown up to epic proportions and is disproportionately large to other science devices in the game. I mean how does a two pin connector, some wires, five Capacitors, and a Transformer (? The big copper wire thing), and a single chip detect ore. It sounds harsh, but given the size of say the Graviolie Detector, this item is a little out of proportion and does not make allot of sense to use.

I do hope that they are working on some new models or may be make the detector part of a new object that fits better.

Hmm, I compared it to a Kerbal and it looks like you're right, the model is about 5 times larger than it's supposed to be. I'll scale it down properly.

It's roughly modeled after this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Floating_core_fluxgate_inclinometer_compass_autonnic.jpg

Edited August 24, 2013 by skykooler

[AtilaElari]

And you can just make an ore scanner out of kethane dedector by changing a single line in .cfg file, so you'll have the kethane model for ore detection. (I think)

[AtilaElari]

I do not have KSP installed now and I don't want to put this time-killer back unless I can do what I want with it, so I'll just ask you guys.

Can the launchpad in new versions build crafts while NOT landed? I know it could not in older ones. And if it can't because it's intended, can you please tell me what I need to change in .cfg file for it to work in-flight? I have an idea for air base in Jool that would use baloons to float and modified HOME AirMiner to get rocket parts from intake air. But, naturaly, it won't work if launchpad won't be able to build things in air.

[taniwha]

I made an ore scanner out of the stock comms dish

[Zeroignite]

I made an ore scanner out of the stock comms dish

...now why didn't I think of that.

My solution to the wacky models was to stick them on the "inside" of a structural girder with 2x symmetry, facing each other, so the backside of the cicuitboard is the only thing visible.

EDIT: Think it'd break existing ships if I changed the rescalefactor on the magnetometers?

Edited August 24, 2013 by Zeroignite