Cargo Transportation Solutions (WIP)

[RoverDude]

FYI very pleased with these - I'm using them now for my MKS walkthrough tests

[Talisar]

Glad you like it! I've been watching MKS with interest, I'm planning on including it on my next save.

Progress on the updated textures and masses is going slowly. Too much RL going on.

[Green Skull]

Too much RL going on.

Same here mate. Working hard IRL will get on with your stuff soon

[KBluey]

This is a brilliant mod....solves so many problems I've been having! Thank you.

[Shukinen]

i really enjoy that mod, i tried making a cargo ship with jettisonnable carbo to shorten the lenght of the cargo until i send another cargo compartment, but then i came across a little isue, using the docking port from the mod, i can come in close contact and they smoosh together but they wont lock to make it a single ship, any1 know how i could solve this?

[Talisar]

This is a brilliant mod....solves so many problems I've been having! Thank you.

Glad you're finding it useful!

i really enjoy that mod, i tried making a cargo ship with jettisonnable carbo to shorten the lenght of the cargo until i send another cargo compartment, but then i came across a little isue, using the docking port from the mod, i can come in close contact and they smoosh together but they wont lock to make it a single ship, any1 know how i could solve this?

Hmm, I've done pretty much the same thing as you are describing without running into this problem. Basically I made a tug, and I've launched different cargo sections up and docked them for transport. I'll play around with it some more and see if I can replicate the problem you are having. The first thing that comes to mind is to suggest that you turn off SAS right before the two parts dock if you haven't been. I've seen similar behavior to what you describe when SAS is fighting to maintain orientation while fighting the docking ports' magnetics.

I'll also post an "update update" while I'm at it. Still working on getting decent textures done, but I haven't been happy with anything yet and I still have less time than normal to dedicate to it. It's coming though

[Shukinen]

i suppose some pic could help a bit, maybe i did set them in a wrong way because i dont see why it wont connect

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ey7jvrevzjokou8/AABNzfb1_jLyIAbnKGdTgaBYa

[Talisar]

Hmm, I made a ship similar to the ones in your pic and ran into the same issue. I'm not sure what has changed since I initially made these, as they were working fine before, but I'll see what I can figure out.

[Shukinen]

all right, thx

[Talisar]

For the time being I've rolled back the model to the docking ring to the previous (working) version. Apparently I broke something when I simplified the collider, but I was able to use the older version with no problems, so this shouldn't break any craft (It did make some of the docking rings on already-launched craft non-functional, but they were that already ). I'll revisit the collider simplification, but this should get things working until I do. Main post is updated, and HERE is a download link.

Sorry about the issues with it, and thanks for pointing them out to me!

Edited May 15, 2014 by Talisar

[marce]

I had a question and you had the perfect answer, thank you so much for this mod (and your tanks as well)!

One addition: could you please make the cargo bay and fairings shielded?

Edited May 17, 2014 by marce

[K3-Chris]

Sweet parts, not sure how much work it would be to add but it would cut down on parts in editor and make it easier to use; tweakables for length, width, PP style, would be really nice, though obviously I have no clue if that's 10mins of work or a week, the cargo bays might be tricky to make procedurally long what with the teeth and whatnot not just being scaling, needs to increase in count etc.

[Talisar]

I had a question and you had the perfect answer, thank you so much for this mod (and your tanks as well)!

One addition: could you please make the cargo bay and fairings shielded?

Glad you like it! I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that FAR would determine if shielding is appropriate based on keywords such as "cargo" and "fairing" in the part names, so I thought that would happen automatically. I'll look into what I have to do to make this happen.

Sweet parts, not sure how much work it would be to add but it would cut down on parts in editor and make it easier to use; tweakables for length, width, PP style, would be really nice, though obviously I have no clue if that's 10mins of work or a week, the cargo bays might be tricky to make procedurally long what with the teeth and whatnot not just being scaling, needs to increase in count etc.

Well, for length I'm not sure, but I plan to include integration with the Tweakscale plugin on the next update. In the meantime, you can download it and add the following MM patch to apply it to the current parts:

@PART[TALMediumCargo*]
{
    MODULE
    {
        name = TweakScale
        type = stack
        defaultScale = 2.5
    }
}

@PART[TALLargeCargo*]
{
    MODULE
    {
        name = TweakScale
        type = stack
        defaultScale = 3.75
    }
}

[marce]

Glad you like it! I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that FAR would determine if shielding is appropriate based on keywords such as "cargo" and "fairing" in the part names, so I thought that would happen automatically. I'll look into what I have to do to make this happen.

I think you are right. Today I looked at what FAR does myself and yes, it should work automatically.

Surprise, surprise: after I updated some mods it now shows that the parts are shielded. So the problem was somewhere in my installation and you are totally in the green, sorry for the false positive!

[Talisar]

Hey, that means I've helped you twice by doing absolutely nothing! I like this trend!

[marce]

Hey, that means I've helped you twice by doing absolutely nothing! I like this trend!

Well, unfortunately that's unacceptable.

Mod creators have to suffer from annoying and incompetent users demanding everything and the kitchen sink, that's their reward for making awesome stuff.

So to get things straight again: I have a hard time connecting the payload with the mounting points. I tried both directions (1. attach your frame to payload; 2. attach payload to frame) and neither works out satisfying.

My current "solution" is to add additional connection parts (from Goodspeed parts) to the mounting point and then the payload to them = more parts and not nice. The following image shows a dummy payload attached to a Goodspeed con part attached to the frame on the left and a dummy payload directly attached to the frame on the right.

Don't know if there's something you can do about it. Maybe changing the position of the attachment point or something like that. Or it's just me again doing something stupid and not knowing about an editor trick like pressing Shift+W+O+R+K which would help...

[Captain Sierra]

Well, unfortunately that's unacceptable.

Mod creators have to suffer from annoying and incompetent users demanding everything and the kitchen sink, that's their reward for making awesome stuff.

So to get things straight again: I have a hard time connecting the payload with the mounting points. I tried both directions (1. attach your frame to payload; 2. attach payload to frame) and neither works out satisfying.

My current "solution" is to add additional connection parts (from Goodspeed parts) to the mounting point and then the payload to them = more parts and not nice. The following image shows a dummy payload attached to a Goodspeed con part attached to the frame on the left and a dummy payload directly attached to the frame on the right.

http://i.imgur.com/mIeTxGz.jpg?1

Don't know if there's something you can do about it. Maybe changing the position of the attachment point or something like that. Or it's just me again doing something stupid and not knowing about an editor trick like pressing Shift+W+O+R+K which would help...

This is a problem with surface attach. The part you are attaching has it and so does the frame. We can't take SA off the frame because then you couldn't mount RCS on it, which kinda matters. Alternatively, you could use EditorExtensions, which will allow you to disable surface attachment on the part you are holding and attach it painlessly.

EDIT: here's where you can find it: http://bit.ly/1p9J3ym

[marce]

Funny, I'm already using Editor Extensions and I also tried to disable SA globally or for only one of the parts. However, then they move through each other and I can't connect them at all.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong here? Thanks!

[Kiwa]

Not sure if it helps you, but I found with EE it is often a question of activating/disabling the various snapping options, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways, to get a good attachment. Angle snap in particular did cause unexpected results a few times.

[marce]

I only wanted to note that it's working fine with TweakScale for me (related to base size), maybe you can look at this mod to also make the length tweakable and reduce your part count without losses (as you have planned anyway if i remember correctly).

[Starwaster]

Well, unfortunately that's unacceptable.

Mod creators have to suffer from annoying and incompetent users demanding everything and the kitchen sink, that's their reward for making awesome stuff.

So to get things straight again: I have a hard time connecting the payload with the mounting points. I tried both directions (1. attach your frame to payload; 2. attach payload to frame) and neither works out satisfying.

My current "solution" is to add additional connection parts (from Goodspeed parts) to the mounting point and then the payload to them = more parts and not nice. The following image shows a dummy payload attached to a Goodspeed con part attached to the frame on the left and a dummy payload directly attached to the frame on the right.

http://i.imgur.com/mIeTxGz.jpg?1

Don't know if there's something you can do about it. Maybe changing the position of the attachment point or something like that. Or it's just me again doing something stupid and not knowing about an editor trick like pressing Shift+W+O+R+K which would help...

If you can keep your cursor from actually touching the truss part you can keep surface attachment from kicking in. In particular you want it to not be touching at the point that the two stack nodes make contact. It's very tricky sometimes but it should be doable given that the truss has so much empty space to aim for. Just reorient your camera until you can find an angle that lets you do it.

[marce]

I found a somehow reliable way: I'm now making the truss root, add a radial connector and a docking port, attach the payload and switch the root part back again.

[Olympic1]

Can you place this on GitHub

[Vladthemad]

If you can keep your cursor from actually touching the truss part you can keep surface attachment from kicking in. In particular you want it to not be touching at the point that the two stack nodes make contact. It's very tricky sometimes but it should be doable given that the truss has so much empty space to aim for. Just reorient your camera until you can find an angle that lets you do it.

Can you show a pic of this working for you? I am able to get it work with the smaller one, but like marce I'm not able to get it to work with the larger TCS Arched Cargo Frame V2. Strangely, it seems to have to do with orientation of that particular node. If you use a part that doesn't allow radial attachment, like the Rockomax HubMax Multi-Point Connector or a stack decoupler, you can't get it to attach properly but it will attach. It seems as if the node is turned 90 degrees to what it should be. If you place both sizes of the TCS Arched Cargo Frame V2 and then attempt to attach a stack decoupler to that node, you'll see that on the smaller frame you can get it to orientate correctly, but on the larger it will only place if the stack decoupler is rotated at a 90 degree angle from what is intended. As it works properly with one and not with the other, this would seem to be an oversight somewhere in the configs...but I have yet to find it

EDIT: I figured it out. There's an error in the configs. I was already combing through them when I wrote the above. After comparing the configs for the smaller and larger peice, I saw that in the nodes there was a difference besides size. If you go into the TALLargeCargoFrameArchMount.cfg, scroll down to the node definitions...

node_stack_center = 0.00, 0.00, -2.00, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 2

needs to be....

node_stack_center = 0.00, 0.00, -2.00, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 2

After changing it as stated, I was able to get parts to attach in the proper orientation. But if you remove those stickers and fix it yourself, your warrenties are null and void

Edited July 3, 2014 by Vladthemad

[Starwaster]

Can you show a pic of this working for you? I am able to get it work with the smaller one, but like marce I'm not able to get it to work with the larger TCS Arched Cargo Frame V2. Strangely, it seems to have to do with orientation of that particular node. If you use a part that doesn't allow radial attachment, like the Rockomax HubMax Multi-Point Connector or a stack decoupler, you can't get it to attach properly but it will attach. It seems as if the node is turned 90 degrees to what it should be. If you place both sizes of the TCS Arched Cargo Frame V2 and then attempt to attach a stack decoupler to that node, you'll see that on the smaller frame you can get it to orientate correctly, but on the larger it will only place if the stack decoupler is rotated at a 90 degree angle from what is intended. As it works properly with one and not with the other, this would seem to be an oversight somewhere in the configs...but I have yet to find it

EDIT: I figured it out. There's an error in the configs. I was already combing through them when I wrote the above. After comparing the configs for the smaller and larger peice, I saw that in the nodes there was a difference besides size. If you go into the TALLargeCargoFrameArchMount.cfg, scroll down to the node definitions...

node_stack_center = 0.00, 0.00, -2.00, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 2

needs to be....

node_stack_center = 0.00, 0.00, -2.00, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 2

After changing it as stated, I was able to get parts to attach in the proper orientation. But if you remove those stickers and fix it yourself, your warrenties are null and void

Can't right now; don't have it installed on this computer.

I'll see if can do that later.

But if it helps, basically you'd orient your camera view so that when you bring the part into contact, your mouse cursor will be between truss beams. You might have to tweak camera view a few time. Might also work if you're doing it from the outside but looking out the open side. If the mouse cursor touches something right before you get there, reposition camera and try again.

Edited July 3, 2014 by Starwaster