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

[passinglurker]

I believe snjo made a patch or something that you apply to the .24 update to make it work with .25 reading the last few pages of the firespitter thread ought to give you the information you need

[Kenobi McCormick]

Or, you know update the mod only to find out it's still geared towards the last version of KSP and still reports incompatibilities.

Ignore the whiny little popups. If the mod works as-is it works. In 0.24 I ran with several mods whining that they were out of date and supposedly incompatible, yet they worked flawlessly. The popup isn't accurate, and honestly, should be ignored in favor of actually testing the mod for bugs and glitches. It loves throwing false alarms up.

[Gaalidas]

Ignore the whiny little popups. If the mod works as-is it works. In 0.24 I ran with several mods whining that they were out of date and supposedly incompatible, yet they worked flawlessly. The popup isn't accurate, and honestly, should be ignored in favor of actually testing the mod for bugs and glitches. It loves throwing false alarms up.

That's why, when someone put up a mod a while back that disabled that little popup, I grabbed that little bugger immediately. I can easily track my own mod versions and compatibility issues without KSP bugging me every time I launch it.

[Madrias]

Could you link me to that, Gaalidas?

[lo-fi]

Why don't you just recompile it without the version checker?

I'm sat looking at a UV template I've just rendered out. Man, I hate texturing :/

[praise the suuun]

is this the place to ask for help with the old caterpillar mod? im just covering related threads to get attention and find a solution with placing the treads in the SPH. full details about the problem are here.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/100790-question-about-the-old-caterpillar-tread-mod?p=1553599#post1553599

[lo-fi]

Hello

Kind of. I can't claim to have taken over the old mod - what I've done is use the RBI models, made some new ones and written a new plugin. So I can't really claim to be doing support for the old mod, other than having taken some cues from the RBI plugin and revived the models. I've taken a different approach with the mole tracks, and split them into separate units having ditched the body as my plugin doesn't support multiple tracks in one part.

However, I know that the attach problem you're talking about is an old one. I suspect the node vector is set incorrectly, so try reversing its direction. This might help you out quite a lot: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97126-0-25-CIT-NodeHelper-v1-0-2-17-10-2014

[loler43214]

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/35147-Caterpillar-Tracks-NOW-OPEN-SOURCE-ALL-FILES-OPEN-TO-PUBLIC/page27

Would you do these if you can for next update.

[lo-fi]

I don't have the model files for that I'm afraid, and my version wouldn't be dual tracks on a body as my plugin doesn't support that. ElectronicFox is active around here again though, so if we ask him nicely we might be able to get hold of the model files and I'll publish as separate tracks units and body.

[Gaalidas]

That would be nuts. In a good way too.

[loler43214]

I don't have the model files for that I'm afraid, and my version wouldn't be dual tracks on a body as my plugin doesn't support that. ElectronicFox is active around here again though, so if we ask him nicely we might be able to get hold of the model files and I'll publish as separate tracks units and body.

His tracks are all ready public source files. But I bet coding must be a pain just to work.

[lo-fi]

Some stuff; not everything got bundled up into the downloads when it was open sourced. I like the design, though - I'll see if I can get hold of EF, or recreate if I get time.

The plugin was, and is challenging, but in the best way possible

[sober667]

I love your stuf aspacjaly bigest ones only think that can handle my huge power station (bigest weels from stock cant only Huge Tracks can)

and its look beatifull ( i needed to use 6 of them i can add pictures later)

and repulsors are gratest landing gear ever just before deploing traditional (becouse is realy hard to stop within it but u can even use ONE of normal weels to stop and it works)

[BarniK]

Is there any way to increase height of the repulsors? I just built a huge VTOL only to realize its maximum height is 8 meters

[AccidentalDisassembly]

Is there any way to increase height of the repulsors? I just built a huge VTOL only to realize its maximum height is 8 meters

Wondering that myself, and also wondering if the answer wouldn't come when the TweakScale stuff gets sorted out - would seem to be a good way to address that. Possibly.

[BarniK]

I want to launch that thing really bad!

[Gaalidas]

Not only is the maximum height 8 meters at the moment, I discovered that really heavy stuff tend to limit that height even further. 8m for something like that monstrosity might end up looking more like 8 in. Also, might not want to launch it stabilized at such a great height. Otherwise, no matter what happens with those repulsors, that thing is going to fall quite the distance before getting into repulsor range.

There is good news however, that maximum height value can be tweaked (if you're a code-diver like me) and I doubt it would be much trouble opening that variable up to the configuration layer. It might already be available, I'm unsure what needs to be done to make that happen. I may have to do some code digging after I finish my SQL homework. If I survive my SQL homework that is.

Note: the repulsors never really had a problem with TweakScale, except that nothing other than the model size and node placement was ever actually scaled.

[LitaAlto]

Hey, you might like to know that fellow Forum member Jatwaa threw down a racing challenge, using the anti-grav pods.

Here's my entry.

[BarniK]

Not only is the maximum height 8 meters at the moment, I discovered that really heavy stuff tend to limit that height even further. 8m for something like that monstrosity might end up looking more like 8 in. Also, might not want to launch it stabilized at such a great height. Otherwise, no matter what happens with those repulsors, that thing is going to fall quite the distance before getting into repulsor range.

There is good news however, that maximum height value can be tweaked (if you're a code-diver like me) and I doubt it would be much trouble opening that variable up to the configuration layer. It might already be available, I'm unsure what needs to be done to make that happen. I may have to do some code digging after I finish my SQL homework. If I survive my SQL homework that is.

Note: the repulsors never really had a problem with TweakScale, except that nothing other than the model size and node placement was ever actually scaled.

That pic is just an idea of what I wanted to do at first. Also I checked the part.cfg, didn't find any height settings, and that concludes my knowledge of KSP modding unfortunately

[Gaalidas]

Yeah, I have yet to look at lo-fi's code to see if a simply addition of that parameter into the cfg would work. I'll get on that.. uhh.. eventually. I hope.

[Axelord FTW]

Hey, you might like to know that fellow Forum member Jatwaa threw down a racing challenge, using the anti-grav pods.

Here's my entry.

Ah, thanks for the heads-up.

[lo-fi]

Is there any way to increase height of the repulsors? I just built a huge VTOL only to realize its maximum height is 8 meters

Wondering that myself, and also wondering if the answer wouldn't come when the TweakScale stuff gets sorted out - would seem to be a good way to address that. Possibly.

Sorry, not with the way the plugin is configured at the moment. In any case, increasing height too far beyond that with repulsors gets.... weird, and I don't think it's going to get you what you want for a VTOL. They're just abused wheel colliders, don't forget, so everything balances from the point of contact with the ground. You can angle them, or course, but weird stuff tends to happen with really wide fields, which is why I sort of left it at 8m. That being said, I'm happy to leave the repulsor test module live in the plugin for next release, which allows 64m, so you can config bash and play about to your hearts content with the 1.8 version.

Hey, you might like to know that fellow Forum member Jatwaa threw down a racing challenge, using the anti-grav pods.

Here's my entry.

Thank you, I'll be keeping an eye on this

And generally, apologies for my hiatus. Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated I do have some good news, though! xEvilReeperx has sent me some code to test which will hopefully sort out the editor icon size, so the tracks will no longer appear with blank icons

[Gaalidas]

I've tweaked my copy of the plugin to allow a bit more flexibility in the repulsor height to see if I can squeeze some more height out of it without side effects. I'll let you know if it works.

[AccidentalDisassembly]

Sorry, not with the way the plugin is configured at the moment. In any case, increasing height too far beyond that with repulsors gets.... weird, and I don't think it's going to get you what you want for a VTOL. They're just abused wheel colliders, don't forget, so everything balances from the point of contact with the ground. You can angle them, or course, but weird stuff tends to happen with really wide fields, which is why I sort of left it at 8m. That being said, I'm happy to leave the repulsor test module live in the plugin for next release, which allows 64m, so you can config bash and play about to your hearts content with the 1.8 version.

And generally, apologies for my hiatus. Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated I do have some good news, though! xEvilReeperx has sent me some code to test which will hopefully sort out the editor icon size, so the tracks will no longer appear with blank icons

The 8m limit could be worked around if tweakscaling the repulsors just made them carry more weight (and have an amount of springiness that works for really heavy things), probably. The issue I have with them currently is that I can't set the strength high enough for ludicrously large crafts (~ 35,000 to 50,000 tons), so either I put 923859835938 repulsors (even with their strength tweaked to the max) or wait for the TweakScale goodness to arrive =)

My usual disclaimer: no clue how any of this works, so I'm just going to throw out some verbiage and see what happens. If the issue is the edge of the wheel colliders being more than 8 meters from the base they're attached to (presumably), could there be an invisible, collision-less base (imagine an invisible landing gear leg, or really just an invisible, non-colliding cube, or something) that gets added between the wheel and the visible repulsor when its scale is increased? As if the repulsor part itself were actually much bigger than it looks, while the wheel collider is still only 8m from the edge of the invisible bits now added to the visible part?

Does any of that even make any sense?

Looking forward to the next release.

[lo-fi]

Hehe! That's a whole lot of repulsors

What happens when you have repulsors at silly heights isn't really to do with them themselves, but how the vessel isn't really suspended in the air, it's supported from the contact point of the WC with the ground. So once you get hovering >>> than vessel length, you tend to run into major stability issues, and things get rather counter-intuitive. You can move stuff around in the part, but then you get a hard limit on how close to the ground you can get, and if you turn them off the WC clips through the ground and will never make contact again unless you have another way of getting the craft lifted to clip back above the ground collider. They certainly won't ever make a a VTOL you can fly around at 5,000 feet I'm afraid - it would need a totally different mechanic for that, and, well: wings

Gaalidas, you'll find that the RepulsorTest module has 64m height. It ought to be a slightly old copy of the normal class that I was going to delete, but changed for something Madrias was playing with.

Strength, I can do something about, I'll modify the ranges for next release if people are finding they need more.

Just tested the icon size fix, which is working perfectly!