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[0.25] RasterPropMonitor - putting the A in your IVA (v0.18.3) [8 Oct]

Mihara

By Mihara
in KSP1 Mod Releases

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Boamere

Boamere

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Another silly question, if install scan sat I'm guessing it will show up on the screen? and also what is IR on the screens? One final question , Therealcrow how did you get the target management screen up? (sorry about all the questions I'm' new to this mod and it all seems very cool :) )

Also I might be getting all this stuff confused simply because the screens I'm using don't have that function (from the ALCOR capsule)

tP9C23L.png

Edited by Boamere
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Mihara

Mihara

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Another silly question, if install scan sat I'm guessing it will show up on the screen?

Only if the monitor is configured for it. ALCOR 0.6 by default is not, look in it's thread for the config patch alexustas posted before leaving for vacation.

and also what is IR on the screens?

A spot reserved for InfernalRobotics control menu, which Sirkut is hoping to eventually make. Currently does nothing.

how did you get the target management screen up?

ALCOR 0.6 was released before the target management screen was available, so it isn't configured to display it either.

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Boamere

Boamere

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Only if the monitor is configured for it. ALCOR 0.6 by default is not, look in it's thread for the config patch alexustas posted before leaving for vacation.

A spot reserved for InfernalRobotics control menu, which Sirkut is hoping to eventually make. Currently does nothing.

ALCOR 0.6 was released before the target management screen was available, so it isn't configured to display it either.

Thanks for the help!

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MOARdV

MOARdV

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Just showing off. :) This is a gutted and remade stock indicator panel in which, all 12 lamps actually mean something, instead of the usual 4.

Awesome. I *so* need one of those. Or a couple, actually. The ALCOR tablo indicators are cool, but they're too big for my main command pod. Can it do bi-color or tri-color lamps yet? :)

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Mihara

Mihara

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Awesome. I *so* need one of those. Or a couple, actually. The ALCOR tablo indicators are cool, but they're too big for my main command pod. Can it do bi-color or tri-color lamps yet? :)

It can lerp smoothly between two colors, and I suppose if you can ensure the same lamp triggers won't coincide, you can have each trigger use any color you like. :)

Check the dev build package.

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mushroomman

mushroomman

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Unlike my earlier problems, I'm now getting this thing were only the cameras work! I can't seem to cycle through them either. None of the buttons do anything except the docking and external camera buttons. And half of the time it just opens with the weird grey screen and I can't do anything. I'll try to fiddle around and find the problem but I have no real idea.

Edit- upon further inspection it seems that in the mk1-2 pod the screens show it's bumpmap but if you zoom in closer it switches to the EVA suit bumpmap. Weird. Mind you, this isn't the only pod where it doesn't work.

Edited by mushroomman
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Mihara

Mihara

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Unlike my earlier problems, I'm now getting this thing were only the cameras work! I can't seem to cycle through them either. None of the buttons do anything except the docking and external camera buttons. And half of the time it just opens with the weird grey screen and I can't do anything. I'll try to fiddle around and find the problem but I have no real idea.

Check for duplicate copies of RasterPropMonitor.dll. Make sure that only one copy is present, the one in JSI/RasterPropMonitor/Plugins

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Mihara

Mihara

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What do A/D, MECO and CONT mean?

A/D - ascent/descent, lights up red if you're going down and green if you're going up.

MECO - main engine cut off, lights up when the engine is off.

CONT - Contact light. Lights up when the lowest point of your ship (i.e. the landing gear) is 1.676m off the ground, which is what the length of Apollo LM's ground probes was. Once it lights up, you're supposed to shut the engine off and fall, in theory. :)

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beita

beita

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Awesome mod.

Would it be possible to add a few variables to make mission planning a bit easier?

Looking for variables for fuel mass for the various types, the returned value is in fuel "units" and would need to have operations performed on them to be displayed as kg/tons. Would also love to see a deltav for current active engines, staging would be optional for that. Alternatively, a variable to display total burn time left for each fuel type would work as well.

Is it possible to do any operations on the variables you can draw, ie: $&$REALISP*9.81 or something similar? Looked through the documentation but nothing was said on the topic, so I'm assuming that it can't be done.

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MOARdV

MOARdV

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Would it be possible to add a few variables to make mission planning a bit easier?

Looking for variables for fuel mass for the various types, the returned value is in fuel "units" and would need to have operations performed on them to be displayed as kg/tons. Would also love to see a deltav for current active engines, staging would be optional for that. Alternatively, a variable to display total burn time left for each fuel type would work as well.

Is it possible to do any operations on the variables you can draw, ie: $&$REALISP*9.81 or something similar? Looked through the documentation but nothing was said on the topic, so I'm assuming that it can't be done.

I'm working on implementing some of the Protractor functionality in RPM (phase angle, ejection angle). I might be able to pick up some of these parameters, too, if Mihara doesn't get to them.

I've wanted math operations for a few things, too. That gets a bit messy, but I'll let Mihara answer that definitively.

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kiwiak

kiwiak

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A/D - ascent/descent, lights up red if you're going down and green if you're going up.

MECO - main engine cut off, lights up when the engine is off.

CONT - Contact light. Lights up when the lowest point of your ship (i.e. the landing gear) is 1.676m off the ground, which is what the length of Apollo LM's ground probes was. Once it lights up, you're supposed to shut the engine off and fall, in theory. :)

Will you make actual gear with contact probes?

Anyway - awesome. Will we have this in alcor too? Are you working on some other capsules?

If i can suggest something, some one man capsule with larger window woudl be cool.

Edited by kiwiak
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Mihara

Mihara

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Will you make actual gear with contact probes?

No. I don't make models. :)

Would also love to see a deltav for current active engines, staging would be optional for that. Alternatively, a variable to display total burn time left for each fuel type would work as well.

That should be a FAQ, really. Then again, people never read those, so that would not stop this question from being asked. :)

The dV/burn time problem appears deceptively simple, because it's just a formula that takes ISP and fuel. But as soon as you add any staging or a fuel lines into it, it becomes an iterative nightmare -- it is never entirely clear just what should dV/burn time computations be based on. The actual code that computes your dV in MechJeb totals up to about 30kb worth of code that does nothing except that, in a separate thread (!) that it periodically polls to ask if it's done yet (!). I don't relish the idea of borrowing such amounts of code and then having to support something I barely, if at all, understand -- sometimes bugs are found in it, and sometimes, like with the 0.23 update, Squad breaks it. So these are two commonly requested variables that I will not add directly. If anyone is up to cleanly excising the code that does it out of MechJeb and supporting it in perpetuity I will add it, but I seriously don't want to do it myself.

I am investigating a different approach to the problem which is based on extending the computing module with plugins just like the display module is extended. That would permit me to directly request that variable from MechJeb if MechJeb is available, which would be a decent middle ground.

Is it possible to do any operations on the variables you can draw, ie: $&$REALISP*9.81 or something similar? Looked through the documentation but nothing was said on the topic, so I'm assuming that it can't be done.

It cannot currently be done. This is another thing I'm very hesitant to add, though for a very different reason.

I've spent much of my life fighting programming languages that evolve in this manner. First you ask for a mathematical expression, then you ask for a conditional, voila, you have a Turing Tarpit. That 'TSC' example this article gives is very telling because that is exactly how these horrible things get born, and the RPM page definition language is already dangerously close. The correct policy for doing things like that would be adopting a real programming language to extend the system instead, or directly bumping up the number of variables -- i.e. REALISP*9.81 is trivial to add as a new variable, (what should it be called, by the way?) and so is mass of a resource in kilograms, so that could simply be done.

I am not at all sure how to deal with the problem eventually, because I agree the need for some operations on variables does exist. The naive approach of making the computing module actually apply mathematical operations to variable names it gets is easy to make, but there is serious danger it is going to be completely monstrous by the time everything anyone wants is added to it.

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beita

beita

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I read through most of the first 10 pages of the thread, then from 26 to the end. Didn't see the "dV Question" heh. Figured it had already been asked but oh well.

Figured it is not easily done, but thought I would ask. Your solution of importing the variables from other plugins would work perfectly from an end user perspective.

An interesting quirk that would be nice to have some variables to avoid is that the wet mass of a craft considers the masses of all resources, not only propellants. This includes ablative shielding for heatshields. Needless to say, 1000kg of ablative material isn't the same as 1000kg of liquid fuel/oxidizer and throws your calculations off a wee bit. So, perhaps a variable that sums the total mass of all propellants on a craft? A bit messy in that you would have to identify which resources are propellants and which are not, but it would be helpful.

There are dozens of other cool and nifty variables I could ask for, but I am sure you have other things you would like to finish :)

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Mihara

Mihara

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I read through most of the first 10 pages of the thread, then from 26 to the end. Didn't see the "dV Question" heh. Figured it had already been asked but oh well.

Russian forum users ask it all the time. :)

An interesting quirk that would be nice to have some variables to avoid is that the wet mass of a craft considers the masses of all resources, not only propellants. This includes ablative shielding for heatshields. Needless to say, 1000kg of ablative material isn't the same as 1000kg of liquid fuel/oxidizer and throws your calculations off a wee bit. So, perhaps a variable that sums the total mass of all propellants on a craft? A bit messy in that you would have to identify which resources are propellants and which are not, but it would be helpful.

That would be trivial if it were easy to know what is a propellant and what isn't. Unfortunately, you can define an engine that uses ablative material as a propellant, however silly it would be, KSP won't stop you. Also, is monopropellant to be counted as a propellant for the purpose of calculating propellant mass or not? Because there are popular engines which run on monopropellant.

I think the solution to this one is asking the engines what they consume and only counting as propellant things that engines present on the vessel will actually burn. I'll see what I can do.

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