[0.90WIP] Procedural Parts - Parts the way you want 'em 0.9.21, Dec 19

[OtherBarry]

I have been running stretchsrb, realfuels , jacks eng configs. will it be straight forward to me to switch over the PP????

Not yet unfortunately, I'd stick with StretchySRB v9 until there is proper RealFuels integration, which should (hopefully, swamp_ig is doing quite a bit at the moment) be next update. Currently RealFuels thinks a 5x5m tank has the same amount of fuel as the the stock Oscar-B tank. I switched about two weeks ago and haven't been able to play with any of my realism stuff since , although it did give me a reason to do another stock career mode runthrough.

[OtherBarry]

Also, is procedural parts going to start supporting StretchySRB's new 'utilization' feature? Would be great for hyper-realistic rockets.

[swamp_ig]

Real Fuels is working - in my developer version

I will need to update RealFuels a little bit for it to work to my satisfaction, but it's pretty good at the moment. That was part of the side-track

Edited March 24, 2014 by swamp_ig

[OtherBarry]

Ah. The ol' developer version trick . Glad to see RealFuels is almost ready.

Will procedural trusses be in the next update too, or are they further down the line?

Edited March 24, 2014 by OtherBarry

[Wadusher0]

Are there any plans to add procedural toroidal tanks to this in the near future?

[Azimech]

I like to see where this is going. Could very well be the ultimate end for asparagus staging. I made this monstrosity as some sort of personal tech demo, using only Mansails. Couldn't be bothered to use Procedural Fairings on this one. Mods used in this construction: B9 strut, Procedural Parts. Other important mods: KJR, FAR.

Edited March 25, 2014 by Azimech

[swamp_ig]

I like to see where this is going. Could very well be the ultimate end for asparagus staging. I made this monstrosity as some sort of personal tech demo, using only Mansails. Couldn't be bothered to use Procedural Fairings on this one. Mods used in this construction: B9 strut, Procedural Parts. Other important mods: KJR, FAR.

Totally Cool

[John FX]

I can totally understand why the people who currently build with stock parts resist any new stock parts, especially procedural ones. It means that most people could build a stage that is 5m wide and has 30,000 fuel without having to have an advanced degree in strut placement, clipping, or owning a monster PC...

Then the `good` craft would be decided by the look and flight characteristics instead of `is it stock?` and the skill would be in that area instead of how well someone copes with a reduced part set...

I fully support procedural parts and wish you luck in the future.

[swamp_ig]

I can totally understand why the people who currently build with stock parts resist any new stock parts, especially procedural ones. It means that most people could build a stage that is 5m wide and has 30,000 fuel without having to have an advanced degree in strut placement, clipping, or owning a monster PC...

Of course, but what this mod gives you is tech level control over what sizes are available. Essentially you only get small variations of the stock parts at the same level of tech.

[John FX]

Of course, but what this mod gives you is tech level control over what sizes are available. Essentially you only get small variations of the stock parts at the same level of tech.

And that is exactly how it should be. I mean for sandbox it will change things.

[Camacha]

Why would those limits be necessary? I do not think there it much of a problem in real life building a huge tank. Sure, it will be a big task, but the forces are all well understood.

I would rather be challenged with real challenges

[OtherBarry]

Why would those limits be necessary? I do not think there it much of a problem in real life building a huge tank. Sure, it will be a big task, but the forces are all well understood.

I would rather be challenged with real challenges

You are sort of correct there. IRL tanks are sort of limited in size, in that the larger the tank, the less of its total volume is fuel, which increases wet mass, decreasing efficiency. This is an important factor in building rockets, as it essentially gives you the maximum volume of a tank before its more efficient to add another stage. That seems to be incorrect. See NathanKell's post below.

That being said, currently this mod does its best to stick to the stock way of implementing, such that more science = bigger fuel tanks. I assume it will stay that way, although hopefully there will be an equivalent to the 'utilisation' feature of the latest stretchy tanks, to help in realism.

Edited March 30, 2014 by OtherBarry

[Azimech]

I have three requests:

Procedural hollow units, a bit like Nothke's 6s parts.

Procedural rectangular hollow units, for anyone who wants to build the Galactica 1978. Just imagine the landing strip in the side pods ;-)

Procedural oval tanks. Great for SSTO building and other sci-fi stuff.

And my compliments for the team and all previous developers. This really boosts KSP to a whole new level.

For fun and some experimenting I disabled Deadly Reentry, and teleported a 50m x 100m fuel tank to an orbit of 40 km. Mass was in the millions. Anyway, it hit the water with a speed of more than 1 km/s, didn't break and sank to the bottom of the ocean. It's still there. I wonder when it will start to rust. Bob was displeased with the waste of resources. Bill said he won't filter plankton from that part of the ocean for a while. Jeb was disappointed because he expected a huge explosion.

Just shows how well strength scales with size, which is great. Unrealistic size = unrealistic result.

[Voidryder]

...Unlike the decouplers when you go to implement the SASTweaker class please don't limit the possible shapes. The SASTweaker class would be the base class for probes and command pods...

First, this mod is so helpful. Thank you for creating it.

I did do a thread search before posting my question, but didn't find any direct mention about command pods except for the post quoted. So I am wondering if it will be possible to create procedural command pods in various shapes and sizes at some point?

I did try to do a cfg edit (personal use only) to the structural stretchy to create CM's, but was only able to create crew modules. Obviously no IVA or built-in hatch and unfortunately I had no luck in getting the other MODULE's that make up a Command Module to work.

So any ideas or any possibility?

P.S. Not expecting that IVA's or hatches would be possible.

Thanks again for a great mod.

Edited March 29, 2014 by Voidryder
clarification

[NathanKell]

You are sort of correct there. IRL tanks are sort of limited in size, in that the larger the tank, the less of its total volume is fuel, which increases wet mass, decreasing efficiency. This is an important factor in building rockets, as it essentially gives you the maximum volume of a tank before its more efficient to add another stage.

(emph. added)

Wait, what? Why would that be? My understanding was that pressure vessels scale linearly in mass with the volume of propellant they contain, and that the utilization scales pretty much normally. Also if you mean decreasing efficiency, I think you mean increasing *dry* mass...

What *does* have a big impact on utilization is the aspect ratio of the stage: short, fat stages have much lower utilization than tall, skinny stages because of the domes of the capsule tank-shaped pressure vessels.

[OtherBarry]

(emph. added)

Wait, what? Why would that be? My understanding was that pressure vessels scale linearly in mass with the volume of propellant they contain, and that the utilization scales pretty much normally. Also if you mean decreasing efficiency, I think you mean increasing *dry* mass...

What *does* have a big impact on utilization is the aspect ratio of the stage: short, fat stages have much lower utilization than tall, skinny stages because of the domes of the capsule tank-shaped pressure vessels.

Ah, that post was based on rather limited research that I'd picked up while trying to recreate realistic rockets. I'm sure you know a lot more than I do about this. My main thought was that once your tank got larger than say first stage Saturn V tanks, surely you would need more support than just tank walls in order to prevent the whole thing from falling apart, or imploding.

Also, after rereading the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, it turns out I may have misinterpreted the reason for staged rockets, its actually for two reasons, firstly, that when a stage gets large enough, there is more dry mass than having a smaller tank and smaller engines in a new stage. Secondly, because thrust required for liftoff can cause g-force problems when its pushing a practically empty tank.

Edited March 30, 2014 by OtherBarry

[Motokid600]

I take it procedural decouplers are in the plan? If so.. is it possible to be able to toggle a fairing and raise/lower its height? .. Maybe even angle?

[OtherBarry]

I take it procedural decouplers are in the plan? If so.. is it possible to be able to toggle a fairing and raise/lower its height? .. Maybe even angle?

Procedural decouplers are already in the latest release. By fairing do you mean engine shroud or payload fairing?

Assuming you mean engine shroud, you can do this using a procedural interstage adapter from the procedural fairings mod.

[Motokid600]

Procedural decouplers are already in the latest release. By fairing do you mean engine shroud or payload fairing?

Assuming you mean engine shroud, you can do this using a procedural interstage adapter from the procedural fairings mod.

Engine shrouds. Yea I've been using the interstage adapter, but If such functionality was built into a set of pre-sized decouplers it'd save ALOT of build time. Procedural engine shrouds if you will.

[BSR]

Sorry wrong thread.

Awesome Mod nonetheless.

Keep it up!

Edited March 30, 2014 by BSR

[Uberdude9001]

I have three requests:

Procedural hollow units, a bit like Nothke's 6s parts.

Procedural rectangular hollow units, for anyone who wants to build the Galactica 1978. Just imagine the landing strip in the side pods ;-)

Procedural oval tanks. Great for SSTO building and other sci-fi stuff.

And my compliments for the team and all previous developers. This really boosts KSP to a whole new level.

For fun and some experimenting I disabled Deadly Reentry, and teleported a 50m x 100m fuel tank to an orbit of 40 km. Mass was in the millions. Anyway, it hit the water with a speed of more than 1 km/s, didn't break and sank to the bottom of the ocean. It's still there. I wonder when it will start to rust. Bob was displeased with the waste of resources. Bill said he won't filter plankton from that part of the ocean for a while. Jeb was disappointed because he expected a huge explosion.

Just shows how well strength scales with size, which is great. Unrealistic size = unrealistic result.

OP already said there would be no hollow shapes. Oval tanks already exist, just use two bezier cones.

I'd like to see different decoupler shapes/skins. The current ones don't look good when combined with the tanks.

[MDBenson]

I have been using this for a week now and build half a dozen rockets with it and I gotta say you've done an awesome job. I love the use of tweakables for the sizing and the way you've added the various levels of granularity to the sizing. The variety of shapes also makes it easier to attach various sizes and shapes of engines, pods, fairings etc.

I've had some issues with stuff not attaching in the right place after reloading a .craft file or moving to the launch pad, might be related to other issue (below).

Also sometimes when I edit a part the tweakables have no visible effect. Saving and reloading results in the shapes being what I edited them to, and the tweakables work okay, but then the attachment nodes are messed up when you reload.

Great work so far, though. I've been having a lot of fun

[Motokid600]

Is it possible to tweak the interstage adapter so that engines can thrust through it? Also.. would it be possible to make the physical model of the adapter invisible? This way all you see is just the fairing.. And as far as adjusting it goes.. its there, but... Just invisible lol. All you'd see is the nodes and that's all I need.

[Guest]

I'm not sure if this has been addressed yet, or if anyone has even experienced the issue:

There is a procedural structural part in the middle of the centrifuges and three procedural fuel tanks ahead of the nuke engine. The Crew Pod ship above and to the left has a single procedural tank, but it does not "revert".

This happens when two craft with stretchy tanks load into 2.25km range. It's benign; the tanks revert once you dock them together and go back to the space center, or after one leaves and you reload the other from the space center. It only happens to the non-active ship. It might have something to do with interaction with another mod, I have quite a few installed on this particular install and I continually see the following error spam when the issue is happening:

Ignore collision failed. Both colliders need to be activated when calling this IgnoreCollision

(Filename:  Line: 1316)

Ignore collision failed. Both colliders need to be activated when calling this IgnoreCollision

(Filename:  Line: 1316)

Ignore collision failed. Both colliders need to be activated when calling this IgnoreCollision

(Filename:  Line: 1316)

This is about the only error that even makes sense in the list. Here is a link to my output_log.txt file, if you want to take a look at it. Search for the first instance of "Dorigh Kerman" for when the Crew Pod rendezvous flight starts. The other ship is called "Eeloo Hab Core", I think. Searching for "Eeloo" should find it.

Also, I'm still using 0.6 but I'll be upgrading to the latest tonight. Unfortunately I don't have time for another rendezvous to test this. I'll give it a try tomorrow and report back.

Thanks for your work on this mod, great stuff!

[John FX]

Is it possible to tweak the interstage adapter so that engines can thrust through it? Also.. would it be possible to make the physical model of the adapter invisible? This way all you see is just the fairing.. And as far as adjusting it goes.. its there, but... Just invisible lol. All you'd see is the nodes and that's all I need.

I imagine you mean something like this.