SciTek Industries Parts development

[gl0ryh0und]

EDIT: I want to revive this idea, but I need help. An artist with strong texture skills/modelling and someone who could perhaps mentor me some with the more complicated Unity stuff. Any takers please feel free to inbox me.

Hi all,

UPDATE: Sept 10 2013

through extensive testing and trying to come up with a way to improve stability I've found that the ships have a really difficult time maintaining stable attachment node inside my meshes. Especially tanks, anything with substantial mass. I love the whole concept, but at this point I'm stuck at how to get tankage and modules with masses greater than the superstructure to be stable. They tend to want to break away from their attachment nodes, strutting helps but it takes so many it defeats the purpose. If someone would like to take a try at it, PM me and I'd be happy to supply what work I've done so far.

I'm developing some parts for large scale space based ships, I'm going for a sci-fi looking theme. I know that is not what a lot of hardcore players want, my parts are somewhat unrealistic but I want to include them into the game in such a way as to add to it instead of ruin it or unbalance things.

So Far I have modeled and built an engine, added Deuterium as a fuel.

I've got an engine that uses ElectricCharge as a fuel along with the Deuterium and it works.

The engine is designed to work only in space, any attempt to use in atmosphere simply dumps your fuel, although I'd like a way for it to shutoff automatically. If a coder would like to write a small plugin to accomplish that it would be great.

I'm also working on a Superstructure parts pack of large ship structural parts that allow attachments not just outside, but inside as well.

Ultimately the goal is provide parts for very large ships upwards to 1000+tonnes and engines to drive them.

Obviously they would have to be assembled in space.

I would be interested in feedback, anyone interested in such a parts pack?

Current Parts List

2x12m Capital Core Super Structure Kit

6x12m Capital Core Super Structure Kit

2x12m Capital Core Super Structure Kit (Open sides) or Bays

2x12m Capital Core Bulkhead

2x12m Capital Core Engine mount assembly x2 large mounts for the 4M Fusion engine

4M C-01 Fusion Drive for Capital class ships

Planned Parts List

6x12m Capital Core Super Structure kit (Open top/bottom) or Large drop bays

2x12m Capital Core Super Structure Crew Quarters

Adaptable Tanks for LFO, Kethane, Deuterium, Antimatter

4x12m Capital Core Fusion Reactor - Burns Deuterium

Large Plasma thruster system

More to come.

Edited December 16, 2013 by gl0ryh0und
Parts list added

[JeBuSBrian]

Can I suggest that you make those larger trusses align with LLL / THSS? There's a certain commonality of shape there.

[gl0ryh0und]

Yes they are common, and I could build adapters to match but I would leave those to last. Initially I just want to get my parts fitting right and mature the textures.

That Superstructure is just a place holder for experimenting at the moment. My plans are going to be for 3.75meter scale parts and up.

[dizzysaurus]

Yeah, seconding the LLL / THSS compatibility.

If'n y'all are interested, here's what I've done with LLL / THSS (no pictures yet, sorry)

1) Copied the LLL nuclear engine and created a LH-only burning gas-core nuclear engine. Increased the specific impulse to 3000 in line with the wiki article on nuclear thermal engines. (much, much lower ISP in atmosphere, these engines aren't intended for atmo use)

2) Copied the large THSS fuel tank and edited it to create one that holds only LH.

Hooking those two together gives you a very high delta-v craft for use in interplanetary missions. I'm not going to "release" these mods since they're just part copies/edits.

[gl0ryh0und]

I use THSS regularly, but the LLL I'm not familiar with I'll have to check it out.

The Fusion engine I made has similar specifications.. 4500 ISP but also eats your power reserves.. adding to design requirements. At full thrust of 2000 it can eat up the largest battery charge in seconds. So there will be reactor parts in my future as well, generating power at the cost of Deuterium and generating Neutrons.. not sure how to accomplish that yet I'd like a 'kill zone' around the reactor or to do shielding but alas again I am no coder of plugins and if I went down that road this game might get done before me.

Oh and just an FYI, I've done a lot of testing with OP edits and the ship size, fuels and requirements most useful ships come in at around 8 - 14 K DeltaV It was possible to build ships with 60+K Dv but it was basically a flying tank with a probe body and some solar.

Edited August 8, 2013 by gl0ryh0und
clarification

[JeBuSBrian]

Yes they are common, and I could build adapters to match but I would leave those to last. Initially I just want to get my parts fitting right and mature the textures.

That Superstructure is just a place holder for experimenting at the moment. My plans are going to be for 3.75meter scale parts and up.

What I mean is, why bother having to make more adapters? If that's the basic shape you want, simply aligning them with LLL or THSS from the start would save you the effort.

@dizzysaurus, This isn't the place to discuss that. Go to the LLL / THSS threads.

[dizzysaurus]

Take a look at the Deep Space Mission pack, it has a reactor part that drives its ion engine part.

[gl0ryh0und]

Because of the scale... observe

[JeBuSBrian]

Wow, okay. The scale was certainly a lot bigger than I expected. This going to be like... 15m wide? Maybe even 20m judging by that? That's a whole other ballpark.

[gl0ryh0und]

indeed and I have, i've looked at a number of other setups too. but mainly I wanted to add a component to the reactor that could make it deadly to kerbals, I may just end of simulating shielding by adding tonnes of weight to the reactor.

[dizzysaurus]

very cool stuff

[dizzysaurus]

@dizzysaurus, This isn't the place to discuss that. Go to the LLL / THSS threads.

Apologies, I let my enthusiasm get the better of me all too often.

[gl0ryh0und]

Wow, okay. The scale was certainly a lot bigger than I expected. This going to be like... 15m wide? Maybe even 20m judging by that? That's a whole other ballpark.

Indeed, and the fact that the superstructure has an actually working hollow collision mesh. you will be able to build internal docking areas, cavernous sections.. add in stock parts inside the superstructure, tanks, crew quarters, command capsules.. This section is 2M long, and I'm going to make a 6M section. I'll build some tanks to go in them, but the point will be to allow you to add stock tanks or your own inside the structure. Obviously something of this scale would need to be labor instensive and require assembly in space. I think the whole thing is about 12M wide.

[gl0ryh0und]

So I've been doing some testing of my concept with my first couple parts and I've noticed the following:

Okay so one major problem I'm running into is it can be tricky to place some items into the superstructure, also I thought I would share how I got the 'hollow' collision mesh.. well it turns out that if you build a bunch of primitives in the your modelling application but export them as a single object, Unity and KSP won't object to having a collision mesh that isn't forced convex. The only limiting factor I've notice so far is that each primitive in the collision mesh can't clip into each other and each object must be convex itself, not following those two simple rules will result in game breaking lag/crashing. Weird things happen when the parts break, the object as a whole has no problem working with the individual collision object, but if you say run your ship into the ground at 400m/s the pieces come apart and get tangled and clip into one another, KSP doesn't seem to care, I didn't notice any lag and I added 60 structural parts that I built into one ship and didn't notice any real performance hit, despite the fact that each structural member had 10 collision meshes, I had suspected that the additional collision meshes might put quite a hit on the physics, but to my surprise it didn't seem to affect it at all.

Another surprising side effect is that because of the size and the wide foot print of the engine, I've been able to build asymmetrical ships, with off center configurations. Not a ridiculous amount, but say a few tonnes one way or the other on a ship weighing in at 300 tonnes. Makes for some interesting design possibilities.

Edited August 9, 2013 by gl0ryh0und
clarification

[gl0ryh0und]

I've added an open sided structural member and tried some practical application to see how it worked and stability with parts.

80Tonnes, 171 parts, quite heavy on the parts but I was just throwing stuff at it.

The collision mesh needs some work, as you can see I have connections hanging in thin air, this was because I was using large rectangular slabs for the collision mesh. On the next revision it will more resemble the actual visual model.

[gl0ryh0und]

New Parts

Engine mount assembly

Reworked SS parts. - Vastly improved collision models

SS bulkhead

Edited August 10, 2013 by gl0ryh0und
spelling

[gl0ryh0und]

I want to bring this mod out of moth balls. I'm thinking there might be life in it if I can leverage the KerbalJointReinforcement to make it work. Which means that mod might be needed to make this work.