[1.0.x; Part, Plugin] parameciumkid's Jump Drive 0.6 (compatibility update)

[problemecium]

PARA-SCI JUMP DRIVE [WIP]

(Better name STILL in the works)

So, jump drives. The whole idea of warp and teleporting mods. We've all gone down the same train of thought by now and obviously the terms "OP" and "cheat" have shown up in there, so I'm not gonna pretend I'm not wading through that territory.

BUT! This isn't a complete game-breaking hack, nor was it ever meant to be. As I've played KSP, I've found that setting up colonies is a tedious job. Not only do I have to launch the base (and if it's on another planet, do the whole transfer window dance and wait 6 months while my poor Kerbals twiddle their thumbs), I have to expand and maintain it, which means running a series of missions, every single one of which will have to do the aforementioned transfer window dance. In summary, the stock game doesn't provide much incentive for setting up permanent outposts.

I could of course download a bunch of mods and mine for resources and build stuff, etc. etc. on the base, but in general I don't like changing the game mechanics too much via mods. I don't use a lot of mods myself, and the ones I do have are relatively minor.

Man this introduction is getting long. ANYWAY. I made a jump drive, but the unique feature of this thing is that to jump anywhere you have to have already been there and left something for the drive to target. With this plugin, there should be an incentive to set up outposts and a way to semi-easily get stuff out to them, e.g. more Kerbals, fuel, replacement rovers for the ones you crashed, etc.

DOWNLOAD (WITH SOURCE) (I haven't set up Curse yet)

Installation should be the same as with any other mod.

Instructions:

First, make sure there is a jump beacon somewhere in space:

- Launch a ship that includes a jump beacon part, e.g. the G-02 Cynotsosural Field Generator. Note that it will require a very large amount of electric charge!

- Once in a stable orbit, right-click the beacon and select "Activate" to activate the beacon.

The Jump Drive is activated via an action group or a context menu in flight.

After clicking "Activate", select a target from the list of beacons that appears, and the drive will start to charge.

When it has reached a full jump charge, it will teleport your ship to a location near the target vessel.

Before the jump completes, you can cancel it at any time using the "Cancel" button in the part's context menu.

Known issues which are not bugs but features:

- The jump charge generates a "space-time fluctuation" that increases the apparent mass of the ship to several thousand tons prior to jumping.

- Since Kerbals have not invented the technology to transport electrical power through hyperspace, the ship will finish its jump with very little electric charge left. Please make sure you are prepared for this.

- The space-time fluctuation generated by the jump drive is also fairly violent and will rip fragile parts like extended solar panels clean off the ship, so make sure to fold them away before jumping!

- Target vessels must have an ACTIVE jump beacon in order to appear in the list; make sure you click "activate" on the jump beacon part after you launch each jump target.

- It is no longer possible to slowly charge up the jump drive using solar panels; if the necessary charge is not present on the ship, or perhaps a powerful generator such as a mod-supplied nuclear reactor, the jump will fail.

The mod still being in development, this thread is for feedback and suggestions! Tell me what you guys think. As far as I know there aren't any other up-to-date jump drives out (unless you count HyperEdit), but let me know if anyone else is working on something like this.

Planned future features include surface-based receiving pads and an "advanced" beacon ring that can precisely position incoming ships where they can be easily docked (good for wrangling asteroids).

Screenshots:

 

Edited April 23, 2017 by problemecium
Updated download link and album only!

[Tery215]

Good mod! I hope the more features come quickly.

Edited January 23, 2014 by Tery215
incorrect data

[Termaul]

I like were this is going . Would love to see some warp gates. Some cool ideas would be to give the warp drive a cool down so you couldnt just spam it , Failed jumps could make end you up some were random in the SOL!

[ThirdHorseman]

Interesting idea. I offer a suggestion: put in a minimum jump distance. This way, you still need to get to Mun/Minmus the old fashioned way, but you can jump to other planets easier. This makes it useful for interplanetary travel, but it can't be spammed for intrasystem travel...

Just a thought...

[problemecium]

There actually is kind of a cooldown - the jump drive currently consumes about 10,000 units of electric charge, and unless your ship has solar panels and RTGs out the wazoo it'll take a while to regenerate that. And failed jumps... well if I fixed all the bugs they shouldn't happen, but the ones that occurred while I was debugging did do that. In fact they not only messed with the active ship but with any other ships nearby - hence the safety warning in the part description. Due to KSP's vessel loading / unloading mechanics, it literally has destroyed nearby ships up to 200 meters away. One time it actually jumped by itself and left the rest of the ship behind xP

[Helix935]

how about looking into this

the Mass Relay

[Mekan1k]

I like it! Any other requirements for the jump? Such as being in orbit?

Oh, and you might want to decrease the Jump-Charge time.

EDIT: Do you know if this works with Kagrathea's Planet mod?

Yeah- it isn't working for me. At all. Any idea what mods could interfere with this thing?

Edited January 23, 2014 by Mekan1k

[problemecium]

[Accidental duplicate]

Edited January 23, 2014 by parameciumkid
accidental duplicate

[problemecium]

Did it work for you without the planet mod? Do you happen to have a fresh install you could try with it?

As far as I can tell, if this is indeed having trouble coexisting with Planet Factory it's because PF messes with the way KSP stores the list of planets somehow, and for some reason that messes with the part of my code that's supposed to determine what the targets are orbiting. Lemme know if it works alone, and in the meantime I'll see if there's any other issues.

[1of6Billion]

me likes!

put it on the end of the tech tree please

[aeTIos]

I like it, IMO it's not severely OP, maybe just a little but that's nice

[Mekan1k]

Did it work for you without the planet mod? Do you happen to have a fresh install you could try with it?

As far as I can tell, if this is indeed having trouble coexisting with Planet Factory it's because PF messes with the way KSP stores the list of planets somehow, and for some reason that messes with the part of my code that's supposed to determine what the targets are orbiting. Lemme know if it works alone, and in the meantime I'll see if there's any other issues.

It is not working with any of my mods. And yes, I tried it without planetfactory, and it did not work in the absence of said mod.

Modlist:

Yeah- I know it's alot of mods. But there are only a few plugins.

Firespitter

Exurgent Engineering

Mechjeb

Planetfactory

KineTech animation

Tweakable everything

Nazari's Hotparticles

Romfarer

Extraplanatary Launchpads

WetCrewTanks

Nearfuture

Modulemanager

CrewManifest

Toolbar

But I cannot think of any one specific plugin that would effect it to prevent it's working...

[The Right Trousers]

This won't be useful in established games until the jump drive only targets specific jump targets. When I activated the drive, I got a list of targets that went off the bottom of my screen.

Bug report: The first time I clicked on the propulsion tab (I know it's not in there), I thought my computer froze. It was nearly unresponsive for about a minute. When I clicked onto the page under utilites that contains the jump drive, it took about 15 seconds to bring up the page. You have a resource problem somewhere. Ubuntu 64-bit, if it helps.

Idea: It might be good to limit the drive to out-of-atmosphere use.

Idea: It would be cool if the drive maintained the *relative shape and inclination* of the ship's orbit. I could set up the exact orbit I wanted for Eve (which takes a lot of dv) before jumping there from Minmus (which is easy). I'm not sure what to do about degenerate orbits like on grounded ships - maybe just hyperbolic with no velocity (i.e. dropping them) would be good. Then players could build bases by setting up a geosync satellite and jumping to it from the launchpad.

[problemecium]

Hmmm.... a lot of bugs I didn't see coming.

Honestly I don't think the resource problem is my fault. Usually long loading times are the result of having a lot of parts in the list. I do have a mesh collider on the module, rather than the "standard" cylinder, but it's very low-poly to begin with.

It is on the end of the tech tree. I actually put it in one of the "secret" empty nodes, the same node that SCANSat uses actually, so it can't be unlocked until after you've unlocked uh, giant solar panels I think. In any case, by the time you're ready for this in Career mode, you've probably already got bases all over the place so I'm really just saving you the tedium of repetitive maintenance missions.

And I have another hypothesis on the "not working at all" issue - I actually did encounter this, in a form, and was never able to fully fix it. The drive will not activate on the launch pad or before the first stage has fired. In fact, I recommend only using it in orbit as due to "space-time fluctuations and advanced quantum pseudodynamics" (a whim on my part) the mass of the ship increases to several thousand tons during the spool-up phase. Thus if you're sitting on the pad and the jump drive isn't on the bottom of the ship it will crush everything below it. So launch the rocket and get some altitude and then it should work as advertised.

[TJBombard]

After extensive mod testing due to having a bug where my drive wouldn't spin up in any fashion I discovered that it's not compatible with Kethane, RasterPropMoniter or module manager. However, I stopped testing after this due to the drive not working even after I uninstalled these mods.

[problemecium]

Hmmm, very interesting. And you did make sure you'd staged the rocket and left the pad? And did the menus work, or did nothing happen at all?

[TJBombard]

Staged the rocket, was in orbit. Menus worked fine, hit activate and it seemed to activate but no jump charge built up, just sat idle. I had 40,000 electric charge in batteries on board with loads of solar panels to eliminate that from being an issue. I even used Hyperedit (worked fine with it to start) to fill the resources to sort of "jump start" it so to speak. Jump Charge filled to max but ship still sat idle

EDIT: I don't understand why it suddenly wouldn't work. I basically had to install a fresh vanilla game to make it work again. It seems to get along with HyperEdit alright but perhaps that makes it wonky after a while.

I haven't the slightest clue about modding so bear with me: could it not get along with mods such as Kethane due to them altering some aspect of the planet such as adding a mining resource/grid overlay?

Also, I've quoted an above post with a list of plugins that I use as well as them since we are both getting the same issue to possibly narrow it down:

Mechjeb

Romfarer

Modulemanager

CrewManifest

Toolbar

Edited January 25, 2014 by TJBombard
Added information

[problemecium]

Hmmmmm.... unlikely. It sounds like I have a problem with the targeting function. I'll look it over again and do some tests if I have time in the next couple days.

[The Destroyer]

This sounds very good. I suggest you partner with Frizzank and the Mass relay, so you need to have a powerful warp-gate too.

[problemecium]

Update bump (new model!)

[JonoRig]

I remember there use to be a mod like this in 0.17, which was one of my favourite early mods, though i over used it i feel. In that you had to have a receiver already in orbit, and to use the jump drive you had to be in flight, and i think you had to be between 25,000 and 75,000 metres to the target, or something similar; along with the high electricity requirement. I would def be interested in seeing a new one for the current versions, but feel it would be better if it could only target a specific custom part, rather then any craft; as well as a min/max range, and maybe some other pre-requisites (be in orbit, or at least out of atmo?)

[problemecium]

That's the plan, I just have to slog through scripting all of that.

[Pleborian]

jump drives eh? im slowly but surely creating a mod that will utilize this technology nicely

for those unaware, this is a WIP of the machine from the film contact. using this jumpdrive it could actually make the thing work like it does in the movie

[TJBombard]

I don't know what you changed with this release but I'm happy to report a 100% jump success rate thus far. This is my new favorite mod

Edited January 30, 2014 by TJBombard
Fixing typos

[problemecium]

xD I didn't change any of the code at all (as far as I know)... glad it worked though ^^

Maybe there had been an error in ZIP compression before...