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

[Eggman360]

Great mod! I spent about 2 hours last night building on this mod and making procedural tanks for ores, metals and rocket parts (extra-planetary launch pads), for kethane and even some of the resources from interstellar and tonight (UK time) will be working on the TAC life-support resource tanks, 30m^3 of waste tanks anybody? Lol

What I'm doing is taking the size of current storage tanks used by the other mods in question and making the procedural tanks match up with those, so the kethane tanks made with my tweaks should match the same storage per volume as the kethane storage tanks from the kethane mod, so if you have the original kethane tank and a procedural one of the same size the amount of storage should be the same.

This is of course a balance thing, but I'm assuming that the other mod makers tried to balance their mods with tank size and volume, if not I'll work on an average.

My point is (after all this rambling) would people be interested if I could ask to get these extra procedural resource tanks I've made to be included with this mod as add-ons? (As add ons because of course everyone won't have all the other mods)

Just to clarify these tanks are separate items (as in if you'd look to the left in the parts catalogue in the VAB for instance you'd see separate items for the different resources, as I haven't made them so you can cycle through what they carry in the right click GUI, this is to keep my modification as modular as possible...plus it's a lot easier for me lol

Edited April 4, 2014 by Eggman360

[EatVacuum]

I know it's moot for most people now but would you consider making the tank cost proportional to the length of the tank? Some of us play with mods like Kerbal economy so we are spending to build our rockets. And it would give PP a headstart when full campaign mode arrives. Stretchy SRBs was great as it let me chop dozens of parts and save RAM but the tanks are too expensive when you just want a short one. Thanks a heap though either way, I love all the procedural addons.

[ThorBeorn]

I have a request. How about a stretchy tank shaped like the four surrounding tanks of the first stage of the Soyuz rocket? We got them in two different sizes only from KW Rocketry. Stretchies would be cool! I wish I had them in my Realism Overhaul career.

Also, thanks for a great mod.

[Guest]

You can create them already. Just use a conical tank, then a short, straight one, and an engine under it. It'll be a bit angled, but it should work.

[ThorBeorn]

Dragon01 you're right. But it would look so much prettier with the top off center like the real deal. This part could also be used for aircraft fuselages I guess.

[curiousepic]

Dragon01 you're right. But it would look so much prettier with the top off center like the real deal. This part could also be used for aircraft fuselages I guess.

Yes, I previously requested this an "offset" feature like this previously, for replicating the Skylon, and swamp_ig indicated it would definitively be possible and considered for a update soon, though I haven't seen anything about it recently.

[Guest]

I also requested it, for Energia and Proton-style designs, as well as for a number of other applications. I hope this will eventually be made.

[Azimech]

You can emulate the design using a few thin, long structural tubes attached to the core, so it will fill the gap between core and booster. It looks pretty good.

[AndreyATGB]

That's impressive work. What engines are you using and how did you clip them in the tanks so only the nozzles are visible?

[ThorBeorn]

Azimech: That's a nice result. Though I stick with my opinion that a stretchy version would be more optimal.

[Azimech]

That's impressive work. What engines are you using and how did you clip them in the tanks so only the nozzles are visible?

Stick 4 engines with radial adapters under a tank, stick another tank underneath the first and adjust size to your liking. At the bottom I fit a structural element in cone shape, top diameter the size of the tank, bottom diameter zero, height 125 (don't go lower than that or a bug appears) . The engines are standard LVT-30 for the boosters and LVT-45 for the central stage.

Azimech: That's a nice result. Though I stick with my opinion that a stretchy version would be more optimal.

Agreed, decreases part count.

[Azimech]

Great mod! I spent about 2 hours last night building on this mod and making procedural tanks for ores, metals and rocket parts (extra-planetary launch pads), for kethane and even some of the resources from interstellar and tonight (UK time) will be working on the TAC life-support resource tanks, 30m^3 of waste tanks anybody? Lol

What I'm doing is taking the size of current storage tanks used by the other mods in question and making the procedural tanks match up with those, so the kethane tanks made with my tweaks should match the same storage per volume as the kethane storage tanks from the kethane mod, so if you have the original kethane tank and a procedural one of the same size the amount of storage should be the same.

This is of course a balance thing, but I'm assuming that the other mod makers tried to balance their mods with tank size and volume, if not I'll work on an average.

My point is (after all this rambling) would people be interested if I could ask to get these extra procedural resource tanks I've made to be included with this mod as add-ons? (As add ons because of course everyone won't have all the other mods)

Just to clarify these tanks are separate items (as in if you'd look to the left in the parts catalogue in the VAB for instance you'd see separate items for the different resources, as I haven't made them so you can cycle through what they carry in the right click GUI, this is to keep my modification as modular as possible...plus it's a lot easier for me lol

Very interesting! I dislike the shape and textures of different tanks when I decide to build something with an omni-stretchie texture.

[Eggman360]

Very interesting! I dislike the shape and textures of different tanks when I decide to build something with an omni-stretchie texture.

Thanks It's good to see I haven't done this bit of work and no-one else wants it haha.

Once I built a mathematical model to follow to work out how much resources should be volume (note not based on density values in the Mod\Parts\Resources folders, as it turns out either mod makers don't really alter these form liquid fuel values or they actually don't mean anything, either way I have a custom pseudo "density value" that I work with.

What I mean is that if you take a vanilla Xenon tank (with a diameter of 0.625m and a height of 0.5m) it will hold 700.0 units of Xenon...

If you take the procedural Xenon tank I've knocked together and make it by the same dimensions, it will have 700.0 units of xenon...

The procedural parts mod as it is does this with liquid fuel and oxidiser but just a tad over to be honest, yet I've noticed that the standard procedural RCS tanks hold 35% more RCS than they should to when compared to vanilla RCS tanks.

I figure that if its balanced with the other mods (as in the one the resources belong to) in respect to how heavy the tanks are and such procedural parts are all positive, with no disadvantages (feel free to correct me) and one thing I am NOT doing is making it so resources are all available on the Launchpad, for example I HAVE made scalable tanks for both tritium and helium-3 individually from Interstellar, but I've made it so that the resourses cannot be simply added when in the VAB/SPH, is it overpowered or cheat-y to have a 200m^3 Helium-3 tanks? no...because it starts empty and you'll still have to fill it lol. (For those of you who don't use Interstellar you use nuclear reactors to make tritium and that naturally overtime turns into Helium-3...but it takes weeks of in-game time, an overly simple decription of the process but trust me, its a fantastic mod)

(Just note that the other resources that are available from the VAB/SPH as "standard" can of course be filled during construction as their original mod counterparts can such as Xenon, liquid fuel/oxidiser (with an "s" because I'm English lol) etc. I know that kethane tanks for example can't be filled in the VAB/SPH so the one I've cobbled together can't be either.)

Edited April 5, 2014 by Eggman360

[jsimmons]

Today I sat down to try out the 0.8.1 version of this mod. I have to say it is quite a improvement. Realfuels works nicely

with it. I see even a nice GUI interface to access RF with tweakables. Only problem now is lauching a test rocket resulte

d in really terrible wobbling and this is with kerbal reinforcement. I mean really bad as you can see here http://www.infradead.org/~jsimmons/badwobbel.png

[orcman]

Had a thought about another structural part that might be easy to add.

A "hub" - basically a structural cylinder that has stack attachment points radially around it's girth.

Extra parameters would be:

- an "end offset" = distance from base/top (0 to length)

- a "spoke count" = how many radial points (0 to inf)

- a "ring count" = how many ring layers or spokes along the remainder of length (spaced at ((length- 2(offset))/ring count) intervals)

[Eggman360]

Had a thought about another structural part that might be easy to add.

A "hub" - basically a structural cylinder that has stack attachment points radially around it's girth.

Extra parameters would be:

- an "end offset" = distance from base/top (0 to length)

- a "spoke count" = how many radial points (0 to inf)

- a "ring count" = how many ring layers or spokes along the remainder of length (spaced at ((length- 2(offset))/ring count) intervals)

The spoke thing would be interesting, basically the same as if you have a central cylinder and the spokes were just like protruding trusses?

As far as spoke count would go I'm pretty sure KSP is limited in symmetry to 6 (or 8 or something, I cant remember) by default, sure you could add one full symmetry set and then another but I'm pretty sure the core game will limit the spoke count to 6 (or 8, I feel silly that I don't know this :/ lol)

Edited April 6, 2014 by Eggman360

[Eggman360]

Today I sat down to try out the 0.8.1 version of this mod. I have to say it is quite a improvement. Realfuels works nicely

with it. I see even a nice GUI interface to access RF with tweakables. Only problem now is lauching a test rocket resulte

d in really terrible wobbling and this is with kerbal reinforcement. I mean really bad as you can see here http://www.infradead.org/~jsimmons/badwobbel.png

I'm pretty sure that the 0.23.5 ARM update includes kerbal reinforcement, maybe adding that mod will negatively affect how your ships handle, I know that when I use too many 2.5m SAS modular the front end of my ship will oscillate like its in a mosh pit.

EDIT:

Yeah here is a blog post with a message from ferram4 saying its part of stock KSP, look about 3-4 posts down from the top.

www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/21y9oi/arm_and_mods_whats_broken/

Edited April 6, 2014 by Eggman360

[Starwaster]

I'm pretty sure that the 0.23.5 ARM update includes kerbal reinforcement, maybe adding that mod will negatively affect how your ships handle, I know that when I use too many 2.5m SAS modular the front end of my ship will oscillate like its in a mosh pit.

EDIT:

Yeah here is a blog post with a message from ferram4 saying its part of stock KSP, look about 3-4 posts down from the top.

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/21y9oi/arm_and_mods_whats_broken/"

Your link is broken. (not sure why; looks sound but I had to manually correct it in the address bar after clicking it)

[swamp_ig]

I know it's moot for most people now but would you consider making the tank cost proportional to the length of the tank? Some of us play with mods like Kerbal economy so we are spending to build our rockets. And it would give PP a headstart when full campaign mode arrives. Stretchy SRBs was great as it let me chop dozens of parts and save RAM but the tanks are too expensive when you just want a short one. Thanks a heap though either way, I love all the procedural addons.

Probably better proportional to the volume or dry mass (which amounts to the same thing). You could argue surface area too (which you could also do for mass, but in stock it's more more proportional to volume so I made it that way).

The only issue is - when do you incur the cost with the economy mods, is it on launching? Because if it's on buying the part that is going to have obvious issues .

If you would like to give me reasonable constants of proportionality, I'd be more than happy to put this into the next release. The first step would be to have a look at this spreadsheet: https://github.com/Swamp-Ig/ProceduralParts/blob/master/Source/StockParts.xlsx and fill in a column for cost for all the parts. If you're keen raise an issue: https://github.com/Swamp-Ig/ProceduralParts/issues and give me the numbers.

[Eggman360]

Hmm, strange, in hindsight I didn't actually test the link xD lol

Thanks, I'll get it sorted

Edited April 6, 2014 by Eggman360

[Eggman360]

Your link is broken. (not sure why; looks sound but I had to manually correct it in the address bar after clicking it)

EDIT:

Fixed

[swamp_ig]

Today I sat down to try out the 0.8.1 version of this mod. I have to say it is quite a improvement. Realfuels works nicely

with it. I see even a nice GUI interface to access RF with tweakables. Only problem now is lauching a test rocket resulte

d in really terrible wobbling and this is with kerbal reinforcement. I mean really bad as you can see here http://www.infradead.org/~jsimmons/badwobbel.png

Looks like joints are changed in the new version, will take a look at this and see what the go is.

[Eggman360]

Probably better proportional to the volume or dry mass (which amounts to the same thing). You could argue surface area too (which you could also do for mass, but in stock it's more more proportional to volume so I made it that way).

The only issue is - when do you incur the cost with the economy mods, is it on launching? Because if it's on buying the part that is going to have obvious issues .

If you would like to give me reasonable constants of proportionality, I'd be more than happy to put this into the next release. The first step would be to have a look at this spreadsheet: https://github.com/Swamp-Ig/ProceduralParts/blob/master/Source/StockParts.xlsx and fill in a column for cost for all the parts. If you're keen raise an issue: https://github.com/Swamp-Ig/ProceduralParts/issues and give me the numbers.

When I played with the mission controller mod I thought it charged you according to amount of resources on board too, so if that is the case I figure this works as it is?

If your referring to the cost of the actual tank included that's being kind of picky, I mean I understand that a 20m cylinder isn't free, but if we're talking in the 10's or hundreds of thousands when we talk about the cost of putting something into space then the cost of the actual metal empty tank is relatively pretty negligible...

[ANWRocketMan]

I'm pretty sure that the 0.23.5 ARM update includes kerbal reinforcement, maybe adding that mod will negatively affect how your ships handle, I know that when I use too many 2.5m SAS modular the front end of my ship will oscillate like its in a mosh pit.

EDIT:

Yeah here is a blog post with a message from ferram4 saying its part of stock KSP, look about 3-4 posts down from the top.

www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/21y9oi/arm_and_mods_whats_broken/

It's not actually *PART* of 0.23.5. But the new ARM update has its own strengthening added as a result of Unity updates that made it possible. KJR has it's original strengthening features disabled in light of this. As such, it's not a conflict.

[colmo]

I'd like to suggest the ability to have offset, either variable, or just with one perpendicular side. This way bezier curved and conical parts, for example, could be used to make Soyuz-style first stage boosters. I'm sure there are many other possibilities too.