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[0.25] Orbit Manipulator Series (Updated March 12 2014)

HoneyFox

By HoneyFox
in KSP1 Mod Releases

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AndreyATGB

AndreyATGB

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This is pretty damn awesome dare I say. I got an encounter with the Mun at 10km, and by the time I got to the periapsis it was actually 40km and I needed half the dV to circularize. It's so unpredictable, if N-body is gonna be a thing, we need to be able to see the future, KSP's current encounter system doesn't work at all. It is pretty fascinating though, see how every time I go on the Kerbin side, my periapsis drops.

I finished some testing in RSS and the FPS doesn't drop at all for me even at 600000x timewarp. Lagrangian points don't seem to work, I managed to get 1 500 000km away from Earth and the Sun was on the opposite side (0 relative inclination) but my vessel still pulled ahead and even got sucked into Earth with a periapsis of -4000km. The effects seem a little exaggerated, I'm having a hard time imagining a real Moon orbiter will crash in the surface in under a day from a 30km circular orbit.

Edited by AndreyATGB
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HoneyFox

HoneyFox

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This is pretty damn awesome dare I say. I got an encounter with the Mun at 10km, and by the time I got to the periapsis it was actually 40km and I needed half the dV to circularize. It's so unpredictable, if N-body is gonna be a thing, we need to be able to see the future, KSP's current encounter system doesn't work at all. It is pretty fascinating though, see how every time I go on the Kerbin side, my periapsis drops.

I finished some testing in RSS and the FPS doesn't drop at all for me even at 600000x timewarp. Lagrangian points don't seem to work, I managed to get 1 500 000km away from Earth and the Sun was on the opposite side (0 relative inclination) but my vessel still pulled ahead and even got sucked into Earth with a periapsis of -4000km. The effects seem a little exaggerated, I'm having a hard time imagining a real Moon orbiter will crash in the surface in under a day from a 30km circular orbit.

For the L1/L2 point, they should partially work if you can put your vessel at that location as well as give your vessel the proper speed (with that speed, your vessel orbit should have the Ap at the orbit's opposite side if you are outside of earth or have the Pe at the orbit's opposite side if you are inside of earth).

BTW is 1500000km still in Earth's SOI? If it is, the current implementation has some error that might change L1/L2 location a bit.

Edited by HoneyFox
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AndreyATGB

AndreyATGB

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For the L1/L2 point, they should partially work if you can put your vessel at that location as well as give your vessel the proper speed (with that speed, your vessel orbit should have the Ap at the orbit's opposite side if you are outside of earth or have the Pe at the orbit's opposite side if you are inside of earth).

BTW is 1500000km still in Earth's SOI? If it is, the current implementation has some error that might change L1/L2 location a bit.

No, the SOI ends at around 800k or so. Only thing I did was get a smaller orbit with the same eccentricity and argument of periapsis as Earth and wait until it's right under it then reactivate N-body.

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HoneyFox

HoneyFox

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How about the opposite of orbital decay, where we can operate our ion engines while we're actually away from the craft. (not warpable engines.... just be focused elsewhere while a probe makes its ion burn)

Sounds interesting but might be hard to implement...

I don't know how to acquire a vessel's parts when it's not loaded (i.e. not within 2.25km~2.5km range of the active vessel), thus not being able to judge what (and how many) warpable engines exist. I guess that RemoteTech2 should have encountered similar issue too, I need to check how RT2 solved this.

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z26

z26

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The warp engine feature seems to work quite reliably, which is awesome since ion engines running in timewarp is something I've wanted since a really long time :D

A small nitpick: it would be cool if there was an option for the slider not to reset itself when you exit timewarp, so that one does not need to constantly pull the slider back up if timewarping in/out often (to adjust one's direction)

Also, a button that set all the warpable engines' sliders to max/off in a single click might be useful, especially for vessels with a lot of thrusters.

Edited by z26
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8749236

8749236

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I suggest make the engine on warp a separate plugin or just a lib where other people can just download it and use it..

Instead of maintenance all of the config file by your self...

As for the orbital decay... it is not obvious and also very pointless (sorry)... Unless you make the vessel start decaying even higher than 69.9km.... Which then everything goes even MORE frustrating..

Imagine you just came back from your interstellar mission to Jool, and you noticed ALL of your vessel crashed into Kerbin due to orbital decay...

And glad we don't have that...

Although I'd like to say good work, but what is the point of this feature?

*** Add ***

Suggest acquire thrust information for ion engine in warp through the throttle instead of bars...

Or catch throttle input while in warp.. since KSP don't need it in warp anyway...

Edited by 8749236
Add thinkings...
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HoneyFox

HoneyFox

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The warp engine feature seems to work quite reliably, which is awesome since ion engines running in timewarp is something I've wanted since a really long time :D

A small nitpick: it would be cool if there was an option for the slider not to reset itself when you exit timewarp, so that one does not need to constantly pull the slider back up if timewarping in/out often (to adjust one's direction)

Also, a button that set all the warpable engines' sliders to max/off in a single click might be useful, especially for vessels with a lot of thrusters.

I will consider adding "Kill Throttle" and "Full Throttle" buttons for convenience. The resetting-throttle-when-exiting-time-warp is an intended design but I will add an option to disable it (especially after the "Kill Throttle" button is introduced).

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HoneyFox

HoneyFox

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I suggest make the engine on warp a separate plugin or just a lib where other people can just download it and use it..

Instead of maintenance all of the config file by your self...

As for the orbital decay... it is not obvious and also very pointless (sorry)... Unless you make the vessel start decaying even higher than 69.9km.... Which then everything goes even MORE frustrating..

Imagine you just came back from your interstellar mission to Jool, and you noticed ALL of your vessel crashed into Kerbin due to orbital decay...

And glad we don't have that...

Although I'd like to say good work, but what is the point of this feature?

*** Add ***

Suggest acquire thrust information for ion engine in warp through the throttle instead of bars...

Or catch throttle input while in warp.. since KSP don't need it in warp anyway...

The point is to destroy those debris that should have re-entried.

In stock game those vessels/debris having Pe at about 30km will keep orbiting if you don't get close to them/control them directly. For a launcher that push the payload into a sub-orbit with Pe close to the upper boundary of atmosphere(like 50km for stock KSP or 80km for RSS), this feature will help to clean the launcher debris after several orbits.

As for controlling the thrust via throttle, I guess it's not possible to catch the input because KSP doesn't need it in warp and actually it doesn't allow you to operate throttle as well... Of course I can catch the keyboard input directly ("X"/"Ctrl"/"Shift" keys) or perhaps joystick's throttle axis as well, but that takes quite some effort to implement. I would perhaps, provide an overall throttle slider-bar in the GUI for overall thrust control, what do you think?

Edited by HoneyFox
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z26

z26

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I will consider adding "Kill Throttle" and "Full Throttle" buttons for convenience. The resetting-throttle-when-exiting-time-warp is an intended design but I will add an option to disable it (especially after the "Kill Throttle" button is introduced).

Cool! I've just made a 2 hour 5000dv test burn without it being too tedious. The next time I hear someone saying ion engines are useless, I'll redirect them here :D

Oh and if you need any suggestions for the interface I'm there.

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HoneyFox

HoneyFox

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That's what I was thinking, yeah. They may just set it once on enter rails, rather than keep setting it, in which case if you *un* set it, then throttle control can occur.

I'v tried disabling the TimeWarpLock but the throttle control still doesn't work.

EDIT: Looks like the reason is something related to RemoteTech's flight control state hooks...

Edited by HoneyFox
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Romby

Romby

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Really like your mod. Hate having to design every rocket in a way that drops the boosters with a PE under 25 km. So will 100 % use this mod in next game.

2 things to add. Would it be possible to add a toggle for Nbody to the settings, so we have an option to turn it completly off? Another idea could you add AtmosphereDecay height to settings? So people can change the height they prefer.

Edited by Romby
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HoneyFox

HoneyFox

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Really like your mod. Hate having to design every rocket in a way that drops the boosters with a PE under 25 km. So will 100 % use this mod in next game.

2 things to add. Would it be possible to add a toggle for Nbody to the settings, so we have an option to turn it completly off? Another idea could you add AtmosphereDecay height to settings? So people can change the height they prefer.

The toggle already exists. If you use the Toolbar plugin there will be several buttons for this plugin and one of them is the "NBody" on/off switch. Otherwise, use the hotkey mentioned in OP instead.

For atmosphere decay height setting, shouldn't be too hard for values lower than actual atmosphere height since it's just an additional condition check. But for thermosphere/exosphere range that are higher than KSP's atmosphere height (>70km in stock KSP or >104km in RSS), I need to check if I can still get the correct air density value (because the drag force is affected by air density).

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HoneyFox

HoneyFox

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:D happy to tell everyone that this works well in ARM. I've just finished an asteroid capture mission with combined propulsion system including ion thrusters and conventional engines. It works good and I can save a lot of liquid fuel for later use. (e.g. fast retro-burn at Pe)
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mdosogne

mdosogne

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I remember the first time I sent an ion-powered probe to Jool - spending over an hour at 4x physics warp... can't wait to try this mod!. Time-warping ion drives should be part of stock, instead of the .23.5 tweak.

I'm also glad to see the orbital decay; I've been manually deleting debris with PE < 60KM for a long time now, and finding it tedious. I understand it would wreak havoc on many player's stations and satellites, but would you consider an option to extend the orbital decay into the exosphere?

Since you're already calculating orbital decays, consider a "station keeping" option which auto-drains RCS to counteract the drag… (and maybe an alarm when RCS is running out; another reason to refuel my stations periodically :)

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