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


swamp_ig

Would you prefer decouplers to:  

118 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you prefer decouplers to:

    • Closely as possible follow stock behaviour
      15
    • Have a sensible relation between size, decoupler force, and mass
      153


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So, I've been having a bit of trouble with the procedural heat shields.

Currently, the procedural heat shields are limited to a single shape and weight, and are unrealistically heavy. A 3.75m heat shield weighs 4.2 tons, as much as an entire empty Dragon spacecraft, whereas the Apollo heat shield only weighed 850 kg. Reducing the amount of ablative is currently a workaround, but this is imprecise and the balance seems a bit off compared to real-world ablatives. For example, when I removed ablative from a 3.75m shield to reduce its total mass to 1 ton and performed a ballistic reentry from 400 km LEO with a 0 km periapse, with a pre-entry spacecraft mass of 9 tons, all of the shield's ablative was expended, (although it did not burn up). I would like to be able to adjust the amount and effectiveness of the ablative material to approximate different real-world materials and requirements (e.g. reinforced carbon-carbon shield for ballistic entry on Jupiter vs. multi-use PICA-X shield for lifting entry from LEO).

I would also like to be able to change the shape and length of heat shields just like with the tanks and nose cones. The current fixed "pill" shape doesn't fit smoothly with many parts. Real-world heat shields typically use either spherical sections or sphere-cones, neither of which are currently possible with Procedural Heat Shields. For that matter, an adjustable top diameter as used in procedural tanks and structural elements would allow biconic heat shields and other more complex sections. Making the heat shields hollow, with an adjustable position for the "internal" node, would also help a lot, although I'm guessing it would require changing the plugin's code.

I'm guessing some of these features would have to be implemented in future updates to Procedural Parts, but for the time being are there any changes that could be made to the config files to allow some of them?

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Yep, sorry, not a project I plan to take on right now. Also, PP is set up for stock, anyway, so don't expect realism.

That said, ferram and I *are* finally rewriting DRE, so you'll get real-world performance if you stat your heat shields correctly.

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So, I've been in talks with the Creator of KW Rocketry and he has given me permission to release a KW Texture Pack for Procedural Parts.

But by all means you can give it a shot.

(Via PM)

Without Further Ado Here are all the textures availible. Please Note some tanks will look better than others at certain scales, this is a product of the texture conversion process and there's nothing I can do about it.

fOVd3wR.png

And for those of you wanting to get your hands on this pack Here's the Download!

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I'm not sure if this is a PP bug and it strikes me that this might have happened before, so you may know the answer to this, but if you could help, that would be wonderful. Anyway, here goes.

I built a Skylon-inspired spaceplane for testing in RSS, both in a clean build install (exactly like the instructions say) and a previous one where I was more liberal in interpreting the instructions. In both of them, this bug happened:

tMroUuE.png

As you can see, the front part disappears inside one of the other parts, leaving no way for me to get it out. It's happened on the end as well, which you can just see. The attachement node on the front of the other part that the first goes into also disappears, so I think it gets moved or something.

I don't know what exactly causes it, but some things that are correlating include when the spaceplane gets over a certain length in the SPH, or it might be to do with crashes, since it only pops up once the games crashed a few times.

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I have done 7 SAS modules for Procedural Parts.

These including torque wheels, MechJeb2, SAS and small batteries.

Torque is ranging from 5 to 500, (5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500), with TweakableEverything you get a range from 0 - 1000.

Every modules has an unique minimum size depending on the torque wheels, but can be scaled up to fit your rocket.

Techtree is not included right now. Tell me what you think!

Download

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I have done 7 SAS modules for Procedural Parts.

These including torque wheels, MechJeb2, SAS and small batteries.

Torque is ranging from 5 to 500, (5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500), with TweakableEverything you get a range from 0 - 1000.

Every modules has an unique minimum size depending on the torque wheels, but can be scaled up to fit your rocket.

Techtree is not included right now. Tell me what you think!

Download

Interesting idea. Will have to check it out.

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I don't know if this has been requested before, but I think spherical tanks would be very useful. Also cubes. And nosecone tanks?

--EDIT--

I just discovered on my own that you can make spherical tanks using the fillet cylinder.

Edited by jandcando
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I don't know if this has been requested before, but I think spherical tanks would be very useful. Also cubes. And nosecone tanks?

--EDIT--

I just discovered on my own that you can make spherical tanks using the fillet cylinder.

Nosecone tanks are also a thing. Just set the shape to the style of cone you want and set top size to 0 and bottom to whatever you need.

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Nosecone tanks are also a thing. Just set the shape to the style of cone you want and set top size to 0 and bottom to whatever you need.

Yes, but those are very pointy nosecones :) Just wondering, does FAR recognize them as cones?

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FAR doesn't recognize nosecones as special nosecones.

They're just parts. They're not special. They never were.

The lower drag is a function of shape, not some special "isNoseConeGiveMagicalLowerDrag" flag.

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FAR doesn't recognize nosecones as special nosecones.

They're just parts. They're not special. They never were.

The lower drag is a function of shape, not some special "isNoseConeGiveMagicalLowerDrag" flag.

No, I was asking if FAR knew that they are the shape that they are. Like they aren't cylinders with an open face anymore.

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Yes, but those are very pointy nosecones :) Just wondering, does FAR recognize them as cones?

You can adjust the height to make them less pointy, I use the smooth cone if I need a fuel cap like that.

Also, I would assume FAR knows that they are conical in shape and therefore adjusts drag accordingly.

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@jandcando: Apologies. Allow me to adjust that:

Procedural meshes are just meshes. They're not special. They never were.

FAR will detect the shape of the mesh. It does not care how it got that way, or its history, only what its current shape is.

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Is it okay to use this mod as a dependency for my own work?

I'm currently working on a plugin which adds buoyancy to procedural parts to build Airships, baloons and stuff like that. Like the Airship mod from hooligan labs but...procedural. :D I think yor license allows it but I thougt it whould be a good idea to ask for permission before publishing.

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It is possible that it's really Procedural Parts that's causing the crash, but you should try updating several of your mods. From memory, Infernal Robotics has been updated four times since your version, and StillBetterThanSpyware hasn't been updated for 0.24.2. Both of those outdated mods could conflict with the latest Procedural Parts or TweakScale.

Also, the latest versions of any mods still hosted on the forums (such as FAR) should no longer include ModStatistics, so if you replace (not merge) all of your mods with updated versions, you should no longer have ModStatistics. Alternatively, you could follow the instructions on how to remove and/or disable it. Those instructions are available in this thread or in the ModStatistic thread.

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Odd, I downloaded all of them today, I'll try removing those two

It's scansat that's triggering ksp crashing due to the battery, this stuff is starting to give me a headache.

Edited by Crimor
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