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

[Ph34rb0t]

Yessss! Oh yes! Oh god, yes! Thanks!

[RedAV8R]

I'm not precisely sure which package this is from but I have this part called "thrust plate Multi-Adapter" which is a procedural thrust plate. It's still broken. the UI for manipulating it's parameters is still shot and I think the nodes are out of place. I have this experimental 2,500 ton launcher that needs it for 4-5 KW Titan T1's. -- the launcher uses an 8.75m tank. =P Only trouble is that it is so immense that by the time you start actually building the payload you are already about 20 stories above the roof of the VAB. =\

That part is found in the Procedural Fairings mod. It's not broken. Not if you have the actual 0.25 update (v3.10) that came out yesterday.

[Hodo]

So glad this was updated. Again a part count saver right here.

[jnokomis]

The procedural life support tank has odd ratios of food:oxygen:water since TAC LS was updated. Any chance on getting these changed so they balance out again?

[NathanKell]

I included a pull that I thought did that. I'll recheck.

[lajoswinkler]

This is great news, I will download it immediately.

- So far, it works great. Well done.

Edited October 14, 2014 by lajoswinkler

[Noio]

I'm confused by the relationship of the procedural heat shields to the ones that come with DRE. I'm hoping somebody can help calibrate me:

I notice that the procedural shields, by default, have much less ablative than the DRE 'stock' shields of the same diameter, and that the amount of ablative doesn't scale linearly - that is to say, that the ratio of

(PP ablative)/(DRE 'stock' ablative)

isn't constant across the gamut of part sizes.

I can twiddle multipliers in the configs to get the two kinds of shield to match for a given part size, but because of the non-linear relationship, all part sizes other than my 'tuned' one end up way out of whack.

So I find myself wondering: what's the intended balance here? Are the legacy DRE parts too beefy? Are the PP parts too wimpy? Am I witnessing a move towards a rebalance, but confused by old data?

(Given my track record, I'm voting for 'confused')

Can anybody offer insight on the intended balance between DRE and PP heatshields?

Thanks!

[[email protected]]

I'm confused by the relationship of the procedural heat shields to the ones that come with DRE. I'm hoping somebody can help calibrate me:

I notice that the procedural shields, by default, have much less ablative than the DRE 'stock' shields of the same diameter, and that the amount of ablative doesn't scale linearly - that is to say, that the ratio of

(PP ablative)/(DRE 'stock' ablative)

isn't constant across the gamut of part sizes.

I can twiddle multipliers in the configs to get the two kinds of shield to match for a given part size, but because of the non-linear relationship, all part sizes other than my 'tuned' one end up way out of whack.

So I find myself wondering: what's the intended balance here? Are the legacy DRE parts too beefy? Are the PP parts too wimpy? Am I witnessing a move towards a rebalance, but confused by old data?

(Given my track record, I'm voting for 'confused')

Can anybody offer insight on the intended balance between DRE and PP heatshields?

Thanks!

I've noticed this too, I'm leaning towards the old DRE parts being too beefy. I think I may have burned through about half a shield in my most aggressive returns (like almost straight down from the mun). Returns from even Jool and Eeloo ate less than half a heatshield. Turned "deadly reentry" into 'Add an extra part!".

[Camacha]

I love these parts. With a little creativity they are highly versatile. I was wondering though - is there a way of removing the node from the top of a tank? That would allow us to use one as a FAR nose cone, since FAR sees unused nodes as drag causing entities. That's not what you ideally want on the top of your rocket

[jrandom]

I love these parts. With a little creativity they are highly versatile. I was wondering though - is there a way of removing the node from the top of a tank? That would allow us to use one as a FAR nose cone, since FAR sees unused nodes as drag causing entities. That's not what you ideally want on the top of your rocket

There's a procedural nosecone part that doesn't have a top node.

[OtherBarry]

Just Dispelling some rumours here. When we made our procedural heatshields, we put a lot of time into getting it to look right and work as close as possible to the DRE's standard heatshields. This took quite a bit of work from me on testing the two in many an environment (Yay HyperEdit), and much more work on the coding side form Swawp_ig and NathanKell.

At the time they were made, to fit the best within scaling laws, they should have similar ablative amounts to the normal heatshields, when made to the same size (that's visual size, not claimed diameter size) and have as similar statistics as possible. Obviously this means that when you scale them to any other value, you'll end up with some odd effects, although they should still function relatively well. However, with many updates to both mods since, this may have changed.

Once RealHeat is released, more work will be put into making procedural heatshields work as perfectly as they should.

[OtherBarry]

I was wondering though - is there a way of removing the node from the top of a tank?

As jrandom said, use the procedural nosecones when applicable, as they have no top node. Theoretically all the weird shapes in procedural parts should play well with FAR, but I believe that was broken in a recent update. If you want to use fuel tank nose cones, then the mod would need to be reconfigured to have no attach nodes on parts with 0 diameter. Maybe make a request on the github issues page, which should increase the chance of it being in a future update.

[Camacha]

It is me or do connections between procedural parts and other parts tend to slide around sometimes? I installed KJR because I realized I forget, but it still seems to be the case sometimes.

There's a procedural nosecone part that doesn't have a top node.

Excellent! I guess I overlooked that one.

[jnokomis]

I tweaked my TankLifeSupport.cfg file to get all of the ratios to line back up again for TAC LifeSupport. All resources line up pretty nicely into the 12,000 kerbal-day range.

The file in question lives in [...]/GameData/ProceduralParts/Parts/ZOtherMods/TankLifeSupport.cfg

https://www.dropbox.com/s/iavf18djvs98gy1/TankLifeSupport.cfg?dl=0

If anyone would be willing to double check the new entries (and my math) that would be awesome. I didn't touch the dryDensity numbers, I figured those were fine.

Time to sleep.

[Northstar1989]

Hey swamp_ig,

It's been a while since I actually managed to play through a Career or Science save up to the highest tech levels, thanks to real life and my love of discussing sstuff on the forums. The last time I actually managed to do so, I was running StretchyTanks rather than ProceduralParts...

So, I was wondering- is it actually still possible to build a mammoth fuel tank large enough to, say, stick a cluster of 8 Mainsails (or better yet, the SLS-tyle upper stage engines) under and launch it?

I'm aware that since fuel tanks are pressure vessels, there are limits to their absolute volume in real life. But hey, this is KSP, and besides, the limits are on the absolute volume of each individual tank, and are almost completely unrelated to shape, as it turns out (fuel tank mass actually has no relation to shape in real life- the mass necessary to hold a certain volume, ignoring extra mass for structural stability, actually scales more or less 100% linearly with volume, regardless of shape, in reality... This is because fuel tanks are pressure vessels- so shapes with more surface area can have proportionally thinner walls...)

So there's no reason to think I couldn't build a fuel tank 25 meters wide and only 5 meters tall, for instance... Any limits on tank size in ProceduralParts *should* realistically be connected with tank volume (and increase with tech level) rather than tank dimensions, for realism...

But besides that, a single "fuel tank" part could also just as well be envisioned as a number of smaller fuel tanks withing a single aerodynamic shell- an important distinction over using multiple smaller tanks for FAR, and one requiring far fewer struts and lower part-count... (Procedural Fairings could, in theory, be used to construct such an aerodynamic shell around smaller tanks instead- but the fairings/fuselage cost algorithm doesn't currently scale well for such gigantic applications, and quickly becomes disproportionately high...)

So, anyways, the question is this- IS IT POSSIBLE? Will I be able to build the massive, giga-huge fuel tanks of my dreams once I unlock the final tech nodes (such as Experimental Rocketry)- or will I forever be limited to fuel tanks roughly in the 5 meter range and below? (Keep in mind that many rockets with diameters exceeding 10 meters- the size of Saturn V- have been proposed in real life, and would have been perfectly feasible...)

Regards,

Northstar

P.S. The reason for my desire for huge rockets is actually, though this may sound strange, cost-savings. I am hoping to build enormous rockets to launch fuel extremely cost-effectively to LKO, as larger rockets require proportionately fewer guidance systems and have superior ballistic coefficients which cause them to experience relatively less atmospheric drag for their payload capacities. Also, if I can convince NathanKell to actually fix the boil-off equations for RealFuels so they are proportional to tank surface area rather than tank volume, like in real life, then the gargantuan orbital fuel depots this will allow me to support should also experience proportionally less losses to boil-off, again precisely like in real life- where bigger fuel tanks have relatively less boil-off due to their superior ratios of surface-area-to-volume, via the Square-Cube Law...

Edited October 17, 2014 by Northstar1989

[OtherBarry]

Hey

(...)

So, anyways, the question is this- IS IT POSSIBLE?

(...)

Regards,

Northstar

Myself and NathanKell were having a discussion about this earlier. Realistically, there shouldn't really be any limits on tank size, for many of the reasons you mentioned. With the new advent of procedural costs, once they are properly balanced, I think it would be a good idea to completely get rid of the tech limitations, or at least severely reduce them. What do you think? Also, what does everyone else think?

To answer your question more directly, you'll unlock infinite part sizes once you unlock the "Meta Materials" tech node. For an in depth view of the tech limitations, look at the cfg files for the different parts. they're well documented there.

[NathanKell]

And for further context, swamp_ig is basically done with KSP, so despite the OP being his I'm, with OtherBarry's help, the maintainer...

[Northstar1989]

Myself and NathanKell were having a discussion about this earlier. Realistically, there shouldn't really be any limits on tank size, for many of the reasons you mentioned. With the new advent of procedural costs, once they are properly balanced, I think it would be a good idea to completely get rid of the tech limitations, or at least severely reduce them. What do you think? Also, what does everyone else think?

To answer your question more directly, you'll unlock infinite part sizes once you unlock the "Meta Materials" tech node. For an in depth view of the tech limitations, look at the cfg files for the different parts. they're well documented there.

I think the tech restrictions serve good purpose (although they need to be relaxed a little IMHO- at some points the largest ProceduralParts tanks I could make were *smaller* than available stock/ KW Rocketry tanks...)

However, regarding the tech unlock at Meta Materials- are the tank sizes truly infinite? Or do they cap out at some modest value like 7 or 8 meters? That is what I was trying to figure out before... (also, if I install a mod that enlarges the VAB, could I build them to some insane size like 20 meters, if I had enough Funds?)

@NathanKell

Also, if you're running ProceduralParts, then this is all the more reason to fix the boil-off equation in RealFuels. Look at the post I made there: boil-off should probably increase at a lot LESS than the 2/3 power of tank volume. The 1/3 or 1/2 power seems about right, though actual real-world mathematical models can be found in this NASA article I'm going to try and read through:

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20080013162.pdf

Regards,

Northstar

Edited October 18, 2014 by Northstar1989

[OtherBarry]

By infinite I do mean truly infinite. I use them for RSS, and have no issue building rockets so large that the launch clamps hang several metres off the side of the launchpad. There are a few limitations on the lower end of the spectrum though. I don't think you can go below 0.01m radius or height, so no 2 dimensional objects unfortunately.

[NathanKell]

The max diameter and max length are set to float.Infinity

That I'm doing PP doesn't have relation to boiloff per se, because as I answered there, a single part may have many tanks inside it and thus you shouldn't base (RF "sub" tank) surface area on the part's surface area. Consider a proc part service module with some LOX and LH2 for a fuel cell, some NTO/AZ50 in highly pressurized tanks, some NTO/MMH in membrane tanks, some Helium for tank pressurization, and some batteries (ElectricCharge). No way the LH2 boiloff rate should be based on the entire SM's surface area.

[RussianIvan]

Why can not I increase the size of more than?

[GiantTank]

I have not been able to play ksp recently (too slow) and had to delete all mods, but if it has not been added, can you add this;

A way to type in values for height and width. For us players who derp around in sandbox with aircraft carrier sized rockets. It takes a while to make a 200 meter by 50 meter fuel tank.

[NathanKell]

RussianIvan: In career mode, there are limits to maximum (and minimum) diameter, and to height, and to volume.

GiantTank: Sorry, not likely.

[Northstar1989]

The max diameter and max length are set to float.Infinity

Awesome.

That I'm doing PP doesn't have relation to boiloff per se, because as I answered there, a single part may have many tanks inside it and thus you shouldn't base (RF "sub" tank) surface area on the part's surface area. Consider a proc part service module with some LOX and LH2 for a fuel cell, some NTO/AZ50 in highly pressurized tanks, some NTO/MMH in membrane tanks, some Helium for tank pressurization, and some batteries (ElectricCharge). No way the LH2 boiloff rate should be based on the entire SM's surface area.

Ahhh, but you *could* set the boil-off rate to be related to the tank volume for the particular resources that experience boil-off, i.e. based on a simple 4/9 power relationship between tank volume and boil-off rate (as I stated before, the Square-Cube law gets factored in TWICE when determining rate of boil-off: once to determine the rate of Heat Leakage driving the boil-off, and once to determine the amount of Surface Area through which the liquid could leak) no knowledge of total part size and shape necessary (although technically tank shape does affect boil-off, boil-off rate is still affected to the 4/9th power by volume compared to a smaller tank with the same shape...)

Regards,

Northstar

[Northstar1989]

RussianIvan: In career mode, there are limits to maximum (and minimum) diameter, and to height, and to volume.

GiantTank: Sorry, not likely.

But didn't you just say that with MetaMaterials the tank size-limits become infinite??!

Also, while we're discussing ProceduralParts, there needs to be the ability to store KSP-Interstellar LdqWater in ProceduralParts tanks even w/o RealFuels installed. Although this is something that is MUCH more useful with RealFuels installed as well (as it allows players to, realistically, circumvent boil-off while storing Hydrogen and Oxygen in water form), it still has its uses in KSP-Interstellar+ProceduralParts WITHOUT RealFuels installed...

Once again, I have no idea how to go about playing with ProceduralParts to add this integration functionality. And I don't know if Dreadicon would be interested in this, since his efforts mostly center around getting RealFuels to work. But perhaps somebody else reading this (or yourself NathanKell) would like to work on fixing this?

Regards,

Northstar