Jump to content

[1.2] Procedural Fairings 3.20 (November 8)


e-dog

Recommended Posts

It looks okay to me since its only about x2 heavier, mostly in line with other KSP (stock) stuff. If you want it more realistic for RSS or something, you can adjust the specificMass parameter. The four numbers are the coefficients for cube of size, square of size, linear size, and constant respectively.

Personally, I don't consider interstage bases and thrust plates to be "real parts", but rather workarounds around game-specific problems, and as such, their weight should be close to zero, regardless of their diameter. I mean, in real life there is no limit to the amount of "nodes" on the bottom of the tank, so you can attach as many engines there as you can fit. A part that let's you do what you should be able to do anyway should not add 6 tonnes to the weight of your vehicle.

And yes, I need this for RSS purposes. I'll try adjusting specificMass, thanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you want to get rid of thrust plate, mod engines to have surface attachment. AIES does that for some of its engines.

Interstages are real world structural parts though, I don't see why they should be massless.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sure they are, but they usually don't have separate "bases", they are just walls connecting the bottom of one tank to the top of another. The mass calculation for walls is fine, I'd even be okay with them being heavier than they currently are. It's the huge mass of the bases (which are pretty much a "workaround" non-part) that result in weird masses for completed PF interstages. As an illustration: a h=3, r=5 interstage is almost THREE TIMES heavier than a h=5, r=3 interstage, despite having the exact same surface area (3x5 is exactly 3.608t, 5x3 is 9.642t, both have 95.25 square meters of surface area).

I do use AIES, but the ability to do the same with any engine makes your part immensely useful. I never said anything should be massless, I'm just saying that the mass of workaround structural parts should be insignificant, like say under 2 tonnes. As it currently stands, a 10 meter thrust plate (10 m is a pretty standard first-stage diameter for large rockets in RSS) weighs over 6 tonnes, which is way too much to just brush off.

Edited by Hattivat
Link to comment
Share on other sites

That'd be decouplers with shroud when I'll finally make them.

Low mass inline parts for heavy rockets have issues with physics simulation though, because of imperfect joints and high-frequency oscillations caused by high mass ratio of connected parts which are not properly captured with high time step of realtime physics.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Low mass inline parts for heavy rockets have issues with physics simulation though, because of imperfect joints and high-frequency oscillations caused by high mass ratio of connected parts which are not properly captured with high time step of realtime physics.

I see. That's a pretty important restriction, I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the explanation. I'll experiment with specificMass, and if I get some interesting results, I'll report them here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Requests -

1. How hard would it be to offer the option to enable/disable built in decouplers to the bases?

2. Is it possible to reduce the height of the bases by 50%?

If you take the height / thickness of the base then stick a decoupler on top of that you are adding like a meter to the ship. If you use two bases to create side fairings it's even worse. This is the reason I prefer kosmos fairings. but what I would really like is to see decouplers and reduced thickness of the bases in the PF mod itself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
Just as a suggestion for 0.24 you could have the cost be a function of the weight to save on coding.

Based on comments in the KAS thread, Squad didn't allow that to be possible. The cost has to be fixed with the part.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One caveat about 0.24: you will get a compatibility error if you have the toolbar mod (or any mod that includes it) installed. The fix for this is easy, or at least it was in my case: go download the alpha zip file from the KSPAPIExtensions GitHub and extract the DLL, and overwrite the one that exists in ProceduralFairings. That should do the trick.

BIG RED WARNING EDIT SINCE I SEEM TO HAVE ANGERED NK: don't do this unless you're willing to deal with any idiosyncrasies it might introduce. I am a professional software developer who is skilled with debugging and understanding issues with software. I, for one, am willing to accept the inherent risk with swapping out the DLLs. If you cannot say the same thing with 100% certainty, then please just wait for an official update. That is all.

Edited by Paragon
Link to comment
Share on other sites

And you might have broken PF, since as I said in that very post giving the link that download is for developers only. Do not go changing a plugin's KAE; it's compiled against that, and any change to KAE will probably break it in invisible ways.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Uh-oh. Decoupler bug?

Decouplers doesn't work as intended in x64 version - basically there is no decoupling force, which means that fairings won't fly away when separated. This bug was in x64 hack for 0.23.5, and it seems that Squad didn't squashed it (Or, in case it's a Unity bug, they simply couldn't do nothing about it).

Moving from decoupler to a small separatron rocket means that this bug will be circumvented. AIES fairings use this method.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It should work, but KSPAPIExtensions will complain about the KSP version. I'll update it when there'll be new KAE dll released.

As for the costs, there's no way to make them procedural for now. I asked Squad to add support for it when it was in experimentals (and before too), but here we are.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And you might have broken PF, since as I said in that very post giving the link that download is for developers only. Do not go changing a plugin's KAE; it's compiled against that, and any change to KAE will probably break it in invisible ways.

Hehe, Nathan, you weren't kidding! On a lark, I just tried your recent alpha with ProcParts and got some bizarre results. It was fun for me seeing the outcome, as nothing was lost. FWIW, ProcParts makes three mods in my list that are not playing nice with 24 -- ProcParts, ProcFairings, and RealChutes.

@e-dog, I don't know what others are experiencing, but I'm not seeing the size adjustment sliders in the right-click boxes. There seems to be enough room in the "gap" for three items, but I don't recall what the other two were. The extra radius slider is visible, though.

Edited by BARCLONE
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Decouplers doesn't work as intended in x64 version - basically there is no decoupling force, which means that fairings won't fly away when separated.

Ah, that explains it. I had to shake a capsule off my craft in orbit lol. They decoupled but didn't go anywhere so just kind of wiggled them loose.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...