[1.0.2] NovaPunch 2.09. - May 6th - 1.0 Compatibility Update

[Hyratel]

what can we say beyond "NovaPunch ROCKS"?

[toastar]

So Awesome, Can't wait for the final package.

Just a note, I also ran into the parachute problem. It worked as advertised when I fired it in the upper atmo like planned. The issue I had was when I came in to fast in a bailout scenario it just ripped right off.

[Tiberion]

Okay, been playtesting for a couple of hours and caught a few bugs and such, but I think I am done now.

Gonna pack it up after dinner and release it. Will post the changelog with it.

[Tiberion]

Okay, pack is uploading, ETA 15 minutes

Here's the changelog:

NovaPunch Changelog 1.3a

Updated to 0.16 parts scales

- most tanks, engines and parts were left as-is

- added parts to fill "new" gaps

--New 5m tanks, decouplers, engine plates SAS and RCS tanks

--Moved Matriarch (Omnibertha) to 5m size and power

- Made "Odin" capsule the standard 2.5m size and crewed with 3 people

- Scaled up the matching fairing set to match

- Left the small mercury-style capsule at stock size and crewed it with 1 person

- Made the "Thor" LEM Bigger to hold 2 Kerbals

- SPS-10, M-50 and Large Bertha moved up a size in scale

Added hatches and ladders to all capsules and lander parts

- Transitions from one ladder to another can be tricky, try tapping the wasd keys to free a stuck kerbal.

Updated all tank and engine performance values to match the new stock scale.

- Engines now include Isp values for 1 atmosphere and vacuum, and have been arranged so some are good as launcher, and others on orbit.

- The NERVA is now high mass, extremly high Isp and medium thrust

- The Aerospike is slightly heavier than most engines, but has above average Isp across all pressure ranges

- Medium and Large bertha are also represented as having aerospike qualities

Lots of minor tweaks and fixes

- Unified stackable RCS tanks to use the same model.

- Changed all SAS modules to use the old "1.75" SAS module from Sundaypunch.

- Added 2 matching ASAS modules with blue textures (1.25m & 2.5m sizes)

Added Parts:

- Larger stackable parachute that converts back to 0.5m accessory size

- 5m large and small tank, RCS fuel, SAS module, engine adatper (takes 5x M-50 engines Saturn V style)

- 5m interstage shrouds, decouplers and stage adapters

- 2.5m "pancake" decouper & 3m stack decoupler

Probably lots I forgot

[maxpanic]

Yesterday, 23:57

Gonna pack it up after dinner and release it. Will post the changelog with it.

That's one hell of a dinner you're having.

EDIT: And as I wrote that, you posted. Nice timing.

[Tiberion]

Heh yeah it took a while; had some last minute renames on parts I missed, and the changelog took a long time edit up to readability. And I forgot to build some ships. Whoops.

Anyway, here's the link: http://www./download.php?l9162s76a3u9spj (Yep, mediafire now...)

Keep is mind it IS an alpha release. Lots of changes so I expect to hear about some broken things, or changes that had weird effects.

As far as known issues:

I didn't change all of the folder names or convert all of the measures to the new standard in all of the text fields, so things will read as "1m" "2m" and so on. They'll get updated later

The ladders and hatches on the landers are rough first attempts, I am sure there will be alignment issues I didn't see. If you get stuck going down a ladder, try hitting the various directional keys (or wasd) and the kerbal will snap to the new ladder usually. Worse case, you can usually fall of and still be able to make the climb upward

Anyway, let me know what you think. New part sizes, new engine Isps and power, etc.

I removed the Odin link, its included in the main pack with more tweaks. Be sure to uninstall ALL old NP_ parts before installing this, as always.

[MinerEdgar]

im going wait till wesday to get this just so i would be up all night

[Alphablanch]

few things ive noticed so far:

1)Impact tolerances are too high. I had a rocket spin out of control, slam into the ground and nothing happened

2)No 5M fairings. I don't know if you are planning to implement them but it seems kind of silly to not have them.

Everything else seems just fine.

Edited September 5, 2012 by Alphablanch

[willow]

Sweet man

Thanks for your hard work!

[Good_Apollo]

If I'm not mistaken there appears to be a few missing satellite parts like the dishes and antennae. No big deal as I grabbed them from other sources.

[mrenigma03]

Your fuel tank weights are also a little off. The 3m long tank has a dry weight of 10, versus 8.8 for the dry 5m long tank.

[Shuttle]

Thank you very much for the update ! I've played for a couple of minutes and here is what seemed strange to me, all images click to enlarge:

1. [Page 3] "3 to 5 meter adapter structure" looks weird when connected to any of 5m fuel tanks:

A piece of the adapter goes through tank, compare it with another decoupler:

2. [Page 3] "3 to 5 meter adapter structure" has a typo in title: "3 to 5 meter adatper structure"

3. [Page 3 bottom right corner], "3 metre to 5X1 metre adapter shroud" - it is 5m adapter, not 3m

4. When I try to connect [Page 3] Bearcat 5x Launch Engine to the [page 3] FL-R1000 fuel tank, a piece of engine goes through tank:

[Capt'n Skunky]

Tib, you should be able to update the thread title by going to the first post and editing it using the Advanced Editor. (Click Edit Post then the Go Advanced button)

If ya still can't, I can update the title for ya.

Cheers!

Capt'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager

[Nori]

The Aerospike in your pack weights more than the vanilla one and has lower ISP.

Most of your parts have crazy high breaking torque/force, is that intentional? I understand it being on things like fairings but I find it a bit immersion breaking to have it on all the engines and most of the parts. My experience is that 200 for engines is usually plenty, while still having a small chance of breaking. Just food for thought.

I personally think the NERVA should have higher ISP (at least in vacuum). The reason being, it is 6x as heavy as the aerospike, while having half the thrust and just slightly over twice the fuel efficiency. Not bad, but if I put something on a ship that weights 12x as much for the same thrust, it should be very fuel efficient. Maybe it could have a ISP of 1200? Just a thought, I obviously can tweak it how I want. Also, maybe a 1.75m, 2m, 3m and 5m versions?

The Radial Liquid Boosters are rather lackluster. They have lowish ISP, higher weight and very low thrust. I suppose they should have a disadvantage being sidemounted. But still.

The SAS-2 vernier pod, is it supposed to have a dryMass while not storing fuel? Not sure how it should work so just asking.

Edited September 5, 2012 by Nori

[CaptRobau]

Just tried it out. A bit too unbalanced and buggy for me. Command pods explode on contact with the landing pad, even the smallest solid-fuel booster can nearly get into space and that same booster bounces back up when making hitting the ground at hundreds km/s.

[Tiberion]

Okay.. so...

I made up a shiny spreadsheet with all the new tank weights and and fuel levels.

And never entered them in the configs. I just cloned the tanks and made the 5meter ones, and got distracted I guess. I thought they were done ages ago.

Fixed those. Also fixed Shuttle's issues

I was wondering about that, thanks Capn

Nori: The stock aerospike has been overtuned and I think it is is getting a nerf. I asked around a good bit and aerospikes tend to be heavier than normal bell rockets and just average Isp; its just that the average Isp is average in both the pressure of atmosphere and in vacuum, so it has a very specific use. If it proves to be useless, I am not opposed to tweaking it, but I don't think the stock one is a good example.

The NERVA numbers are definitely just a wild stab for testing. I'd be interested in other opinions. I was pondering bumping its vacuum Isp up higher. is the mass in a good place? I don't plan on making a copy for each size, though I could see one for the next size up if people are interested in it.

I honestly did not thoroughly test the radial engines, I think that is the original values from the spreadsheet I started from. I'll do some testing to make sure they aren't dead weight; More feedback would be welcome.

Not sure where the drymass value came from on the vernier; it's been a few different part types since it was made, so it could be a leftover that never got removed.

breakingForce/Torque: Those were bumped up to clamp down on part wobble; it was bad enough that rockets were snapping in half. Since we just kicked rocket sizes up a notch I wasn't going to mess with them too much until I knew things would fly at all. I'll probably adjust them down in a future update, but just building ships yesterday showed me that its still pretty easy to build a design that will fail in a spectacular manner.

Good Apollo: Those payload items are ancient; They don't really serve a purpose other than give you something to carry into space, they aren't developed into real parts like the satellite mods out there (not really in the scope of this mod, honestly.) I just sort of leave them for posterity's sake.

Alphablanch: 5 meter fairings seem silly to me. That is a huge stack size and I don't think an all-5m rocket with a payload is a feasable thing. Could you imagine a rocket with the base of the SaturnV all the way up with a massive payload bay? It would hold a decent sized house. There are too many structure parts already; maybe once they add subcategories I'll think about it.

So that is a good number of fixes already. I'm gonna wait a while for more reports to come in before I update though, since nothing is horribly broken. I wouldn't get attached to the current engine balance as it may need another pass with the new fuel/mass values. If you're curious or want to test them, the values are in the spoiler below:

[TABLE]

<tbody>[TR]

[TD]Tank Name[/TD]

[TD] Fuel [/TD]

[TD] Wet Weight[/TD]

[TD] Dry Weight[/TD]

[/TR]

</tbody>[/TABLE]

[TABLE]

<tbody>[TR]

[TD]1m HH77[/TD]

[TD]600[/TD]

[TD]3.375[/TD]

[TD]0.375[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]1m S100[/TD]

[TD]1200[/TD]

[TD]6.75[/TD]

[TD]0.75[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]1m R25 (&yawmaster)[/TD]

[TD]165[/TD]

[TD]0.93[/TD]

[TD]0.15[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]1.75m HH78ab[/TD]

[TD]1500[/TD]

[TD]8.5[/TD]

[TD]0.85[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]1.75m HH78a[/TD]

[TD]3000[/TD]

[TD]17[/TD]

[TD]1.7[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]1.75m HH78L[/TD]

[TD]6000[/TD]

[TD]34[/TD]

[TD]3.4[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]Big Lander Tank[/TD]

[TD]1200[/TD]

[TD]8.5[/TD]

[TD]0.9[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]2m S500[/TD]

[TD]2133[/TD]

[TD]12[/TD]

[TD]1.2[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]2m S2000[/TD]

[TD]4266[/TD]

[TD]24[/TD]

[TD]2.4[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]3m R1000[/TD]

[TD]6255[/TD]

[TD]35[/TD]

[TD]3.5[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]3m T3000[/TD]

[TD]9480[/TD]

[TD]53[/TD]

[TD]5.3[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[TD]

[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]5m TD5001[/TD]

[TD]10425[/TD]

[TD]58[/TD]

[TD]5.8[/TD]

[/TR]

[TR]

[TD]5m TD5002[/TD]

[TD]15800[/TD]

[TD]88[/TD]

[TD]8.8[/TD]

[/TR]

</tbody>[/TABLE]

[Tiberion]

Just tried it out. A bit too unbalanced and buggy for me. Command pods explode on contact with the landing pad, even the smallest solid-fuel booster can nearly get into space and that same booster bounces back up when making hitting the ground at hundreds km/s.

Um, I landed all 3 of the pods under parachute descent multiple times; the 3man pod even had the extra odin hardware for extra weight. Going to need screenshots of what you're trying to do.

The smallest solid fuel booster? The mini 0.5m one? There is no way its getting you to space. And the longest ANY of the boosters burn is 70 seconds, which does not get anything reasonable to space. If you're putting a SRB on a pod and launching, it, that's just silly, and there's nothing I can do to balance that and still keep them useful as actual launcher items (the stock SRBs are next to useless since they burn for such short periods of time) If you can tell which SRBs are not exploding when crashing, I can tweak that.

Also, I said it was a freaking alpha version of a release that touched almost every part in the game in one way or another. If you weren't expecting bugs, you should have been.

[Zaran]

Your premade Odin Launcher is rather wonky, as in, the strap-on boosters are not centred and the two fins are not centred properly either. (The fins also cause wobble that causes the boosters to blow up sometimes as their engines collide with the main stage tank!)

[SyrusDrake]

Oh thank heavens, it's back! I'm so glad.

I literally can't build rockets using anything but NovaPunch

Just as a heads up, I noticed that the Mesh-files for the 2.5 m fairings are still called 1_25mfairingWall.dae or whatever. They still have 1_25 in the name. I'd love to use the 1.25 panels from version 1.2 for single-man rockets but they conflict with the new fairings. I can change that myself, I'm just pointing it out so you could maybe fix it in the final release of 1.3.

Thank you for your great work, I really need NovaPunch and I'm glad that it's back and better than ever.

[Capt'n Skunky]

You can safely delete files in the \mesh\ folders. The game will rebuild them when it starts.

Tiberion, can you add [0.16] to the front of your thread? I'm trying to encourage all modders to put the min version their latest release is compatible with at the beginning of the title to assist people in getting mods for the right version of their game.

Cheers!

Capt'n Skunky

KSP Community Manager

Edited September 5, 2012 by Capt'n Skunky

[Tiberion]

I would not doubt that some of those craft files are a bit sketchy. Building ships @ 3:30AM after wrestling with ladder colliders in Unity all day is Less Than Optimal

Syrus: I left those named the same to not break compatibility. It seemed like a good idea when I did it, but upon reflection is completely useless. Already renamed in the part configs.

The DAE file names are irrelevant, they could all be named bob.dae since each has its own folder. They actually still ARE 1.25m sized in the DAEs too, since the scaling is done in the config.

Capn: done, sir (and holy crap I miss the 'new reply' notifications when making a new post )

[Nibb31]

I agree with you about the aerospike. It is a very specific engine that only makes sense on an SSTO spacecraft.

I would put the Isp of the Nerva to 0 in atmosphere. See it as a security valve to prevent it from making Kerbin uninhabitable after one launch. Something insane like 1000 in vacuum sounds good, which is balanced by its huge mass (it is supposed to include a nuclear reactor, so 5 to 10 tons doesn't seem outrageous). The size is fine. It should be used as an upper stage only, so there is no reason for it to be used on 3m tanks.

Some of the other engines need rebalancing. I tend to find that there is a plethora of crazy insanely powerful engines and not much choice in the small and medium thrust engines. Some of those large engines could be turned into 300, 400 or 500 thrust engines.

Edited September 5, 2012 by Nibb31

[Kreuzung]

Also, for the case someone needs more NERVAs it whould suffice to put them all on an adapter plate, right? Back in .14, I made several rockets made with medium tanks and a lot of efficient engines originally designed for upper stages. Only for small payloads, but easier to fly and often SSTO.

I'm sure people will build ships that need the high Isp of the NERVA but far more thrust, but making a new part for that shouldn't be necessary.

[zYnthethicz]

Those 5m tanks and engines etc. are ... godsend. Thanks tiberion!

[Nori]

I agree with you about the aerospike. It is a very specific engine that only makes sense on an SSTO spacecraft.

I would put the Isp of the Nerva to 0 in atmosphere. See it as a security valve to prevent it from making Kerbin uninhabitable after one launch. Something insane like 1000 in vacuum sounds good, which is balanced by its huge mass (it is supposed to include a nuclear reactor, so 5 to 10 tons doesn't seem outrageous). The size is fine. It should be used as an upper stage only, so there is no reason for it to be used on 3m tanks.

Some of the other engines need rebalancing. I tend to find that there is a plethora of crazy insanely powerful engines and not much choice in the small and medium thrust engines. Some of those large engines could be turned into 300, 400 or 500 thrust engines.

Yeah wasn't sure about the Aerospike as I had heard it would be toned down a bit, so maybe it is fine. However, should it's values be changed a bit just to differentiate it from the stock one? Maybe it could be a lighter lower thrust version?

As for the NERVA, I don't know if you can make a ISP of 0. But in any case, I would say lower it, but not to 0, more like 200. No sane person would use it to boost into orbit then. In space I would argue for 1200 like I said before. That would balance out the weight, which is at a good point. One could argue for higher thrust though, maybe 200. There is a distinct lack of reasonably high thrust high vacISP engines as a final stage. Also I disagree about not having a larger version. I don't know about some people, but I frequently put massive ships into space (or at least try) and so a high ISP high thrust, high weight large engine sounds great to me. So I would like a 2m version. Don't really need the other sizes I guess.

I agree we could use some more medium/small thrust engines. There is a lot of options in the 900+ range and the 300- range, but not much in the 400-800 or the sub 100.