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[1.0.x] [V1.9f] Kerbal Foundries wheels, anti-grav repulsors and tracks


lo-fi

What to work on next?  

1,282 members have voted

  1. 1. What to work on next?

    • More wheels
      123
    • More tracks
      453
    • Rover bodies
      241
    • Landing gear
      137
    • Landing legs
      108
    • Something completely different
      193


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Good point about the exhaust damage!

Using the rapier as a base is not possible, sadly. A 'Feature' of ModuleAlternator is that it latches onto the first engine module it finds in the part. As the rapier uses two, MA will only work for one mode or the other. I've had a workaround suggested to convert intake air into oxidiser when available, which seems promising, I just need a little time to implement :)

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Agreed, that giant platform thing is a giant monstrous... thing. I don't blame you for not wanting to tackle that. Still, it would be so seriously awesome to see that thing fully figured out, then strap something stupidly top-heavy to it and cruise Kerbin at nosebleed speeds. It'd be so kerbal.

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Thx lo-fi that new version you gave me fixed the orientation loss on the deployed crane. Will watch the behaviour in the next days, but it seems stable for now.

Im putting up a short showcase on Youtube right now Gaalidas, youll see that the crane is pretty sturdy ;)

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Ah, superb news, Haifi! The updated code is in Alpha 1.5, so you can dispense with the temporary plugin I gave you earlier. Thanks for bringing it up, that's another bug whacked and something useful learned.

That's a pretty cool machine! Does it have a specific purpose, or was it 'just because'? I'm so pleased my plugin is robust enough to deal with something as complex as that, it's really good to know :) Edit: I just saw the title, all makes sense now!

I do have an idea for that mobile launch platform, though I've no idea how to implement it yet... There was a plugin for changing the spawn point kicking about, it was for the battleship stuff I believe. Might have to have a peek at how they do that. One of the biggest issues with the heavy crawler for the mobile pad is the skinning of the track mesh to the links is nowhere near finished. It's what takes the longest when modelling tracks, and it's not easy to get it 'just so'. That and I'll have to partially re-write my plugin :/ One day, maybe! Might be a mid-winter job.

Edited by lo-fi
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Well there IS a working model for the mole tracks, its from the first RBI release... Its just not very responsive because the old tracks.dll has issues. Its the predecessor of the thing they were planning.

lYg8JPu.jpg

Its meant for heavy payloads, slow in every means but sturdy. There are 3 - 2.5m nodes on top and 2 - 1.25m nodes each at the back and front side...

SNjo has a spawn modification part in Firespitter, you put a small box on your craft in VAB or SPH and can spawn on some preset locations like the Beach and so on. Also you can save new coordinate sets if you have that box on another craft and you move it, lets say to the southpole, save the coordinates with the box and you can spawn your next vehicle in the spot.

Edited by Haifi
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I'll have the individual track units of that size out shortly running my plugin ;) I have them working, just tweaking now. I need to work out some texturing stuff with the bump and transparency too.

Thanks for the tip on FS.

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I'll have the individual track units of that size out shortly running my plugin ;) I have them working, just tweaking now. I need to work out some texturing stuff with the bump and transparency too.

Thanks for the tip on FS.

Yay, that sounds awesome :)

Then well just need a fitting rover body that weighs 30 tons+ to keep the CoM low enough :P . You eventually need to set a higher suspension and dampening rate for these heavy duty tracks.

And youre welcome

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I can bung the body from that model out as a part so you can recreate the original by bunging two track units on? Might stick some EC storage in it along with a couple of extra stack nodes. I'll change the tweakable range for the suspension, it's no big deal :)

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I've got the fbx for the mole tracks, but thanks. I'm lacking an fbx for the two smaller ones, though. I might have to try the .mu importer, but that means opening blender, and it always gives me the rage!

Cheers :) I always liked the tracks, its nice to give them a new lease of life.

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Ah I see. Sorry my fault. Yeah I just recently started fiddling with blender because I wanted to make some better models for a deprecated / abandoned mod, BUT it just hammers you with possibilities to no end ^^. I like to think I get the hang of it :P

When you try to learn something whith such high complexity autodidactically, you have to live with a setback now and then.

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I use the Kerabal town plugin and That allows you to spawn new locations, there is another mod that allows you to launch from the OLd KSP location. um its is called *goes to look* Ah found it it is called kerbal side located at here there is also a link there to kerbaltown mod.

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Alpha 1.6 up. Added large mole tracks, texture for oval inverting tracks updated. I've messaged ElectronicFox to see if I can get the models for the smaller tracks. I had a go at the .mu import, it doesn't work for those .mu versions.

Thanks Damaske, I'll have a look at that too.

Anyway, that's three sets of tracks working and released, though I desperately need to texture mine properly. I'll talk to Spanner about rover bodies, see if I can talk him into releasing some of his :)

Edited by lo-fi
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Am i the only one that still uses the original RBI tracks in .24.2? they work fine for me with a 60m/s torgue curve!:cool:

@lo-fi

Is it ok to both use your plugin and the original tracks.dll at the same time? i haven't noticed any bugs yet myself, just curious.

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You can make them work...Somewhat... Its just that they are either way too fast or unresponsive. I've got some of them working by tinkering with the values in the torquecurve and for the smaller ones adding rolling resistance additionally. But your plugin is way more reliable. So if I have the alternative im going to use your tracks.

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I can bung the body from that model out as a part so you can recreate the original by bunging two track units on? Might stick some EC storage in it along with a couple of extra stack nodes. I'll change the tweakable range for the suspension, it's no big deal :)

I don't know why, but your overuse of the word "bung" hit a funny bone in me this morning.

Well there IS a working model for the mole tracks, its from the first RBI release... Its just not very responsive because the old tracks.dll has issues. Its the predecessor of the thing they were planning. Its meant for heavy payloads, slow in every means but sturdy. There are 3 - 2.5m nodes on top and 2 - 1.25m nodes each at the back and front side...

Yeah, I liked the idea behind that thing but the nodes were hard to work with for me, and the thing was a bit hard to place. You pull it out of the toolbox and the positioning relative to the mouse was horrid. I then had to struggle with it because there was no easy way to surface attach stuff to it (I didn't have the editor extensions stuff back then which would have made it easy) and there was no easy way to adapt the two front nodes into one centered node (I was so new to KSP back then that I was still trying to connect one part to two individual nodes... which, as we all know, doesn't work.)

SNjo has a spawn modification part in Firespitter, you put a small box on your craft in VAB or SPH and can spawn on some preset locations like the Beach and so on. Also you can save new coordinate sets if you have that box on another craft and you move it, lets say to the southpole, save the coordinates with the box and you can spawn your next vehicle in the spot.

Yeah, so that thing is really rather cool, especially when kerbtown insists on NOT using any of the toolbar plugins and instead just renders this huge button in the VAB for you to choose a spawn location, and then insists on spawning you under the ground after placing you in the intended spot. Okay, so that's a rather isolated situation I had, but it was annoying. The firespitter version was interesting, except for the fact that when trying to launch a water-craft I discovered what it was actually doing. It was first spawning you at the standard location, then it was moving you to the new location by, for lack of a better word... bumping you... in the general direction on your destination and then smacking you to make you stop. I'm sure it was more technical than that, but the effect was that it was a rather violent procedure. The visual aspect of this was that all the parts of my craft were temporarily turned to their natural orientation and, upon reaching the destination, the parts were re-orienting themselves based on their strength with the nodes they were attached to. It was like it was reassembling itself on the spot. Even worse, when my craft came to a halt it was not on the water, but actually a few meters above it and... get this... it was facing nose down into the water. I lost a lot of crafts that day until I finally gave up and either rolled my craft to the water manually, or used something like hyper-edit to produce a much more reliable effect.

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No issue there at all, they won't interfere with each other. Did you do some config bashing on the originals?

I've only edited the torque curves, made them much faster and brightened the textures. There's still the rare bug where they don't move on launch but turning on/off the brakes fixes it every time.

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Ah ha. Thanks, Gaalidas, saves me a ton of work recreating that particular Kerbal massacre before coming to the same conclusion.. And who doesn't love a good bung, as sit were ;)

Interesting about the old tracks. I could never figure quite what happened in the weird buggy moments, which is a part of the reason I gave up and wrote my own. Very glad it's proving reliable so far! I was shocked when I re-rigged the oval tracks, exported and fired up KSP thinking 'this'll be a laugh', then found they worked perfectly first time. I had to have a celebratory beer :D

I'm currently working on a rover body the likes of which KSP has never seen: Air intakes, engine attachment points, nice flat surfaces for wheel/repulsor/track attachment, cargo bay and service hatches with animated doors, built in APU. It has the lot! Stock-ish look to suit the MK2 cockpit, so 1.25m initially and 2.5m will follow. The aim is a rigid, robust chassis to mount different parts in depending what you want to do with it, rather than making a body out of rocket parts with little tolerance for the crashy-crashy-boom-boom, rough and tumble nature of rovers.

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That's another thing that really bothers me about making rovers in KSP. In life, one may drive an off-road vehicle which may, possibly, roll over and get mashed up a bunch. BUT, it still runs. Why? Because it's just a dent. A stupid dent! In KSP, however, that dent causes the entire thing to explode, fall apart, and become completely non-functional. So, I add more structural elements to it which should, in theory, allow it to survive rolling on the wrong end with the wheels doing a sky-dance and what happens? The damn panel falls off and my craft blows up. There's no winning here! We either stay wheels-fixed-to-ground or we go BOOM! So yeah, little peeve of mine.

Somehow, this nice mod conflicts with heldiver's recent KSOS package #4 (rovers). Your wheels disappear when both mods are installed.

How very odd... I haven't launched with both of those installed yet, but I will be shortly. My only guess is that it's some sort of conflict in an MM patch, or a memory issue. It's not like the plugins themselves are conflicting, since a lack of a particular module loading properly only results in a malfunctioning part, not a completely removed part.

Edited by Gaalidas
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Ah, that's not actually particular to KSOS, it happens if you use stock wheels on the same craft as mine. I have zero idea why it happens. Could you post output_logs please?

EDIT: I've got it, it's to do with the damaged wheel stuff. Fix won't be hard. Kept meaning to look at that as ecat brought it up a while back and I completely forgot.

Edited by lo-fi
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