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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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Cheers dude.

Was getting so many "Wheels not work :(" posts from people putting them upside down, I hadn't even thought of turning the marker off completely! They do, or should, disappear when you move out of the editor. I've no idea how to make a global config yet - I'll look into it.

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You can config bash one up pretty easily, actually. Grab the APU config, slap the engine and apu controller module on whatever part you want. You'll have to know a game object name inside it to give as the thrust transform (not that it matters for thrust, but the module will need it), but I think that's about it. You can add resources and change what the engine runs on too. I can do a config for my rover body if you need a few pointers, or did you have something specific in mind?

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I want to make a dropship from Dust 514. These ships are neutrally buoyant; you steer with these controls:

thrust +normal (up through the axis of your ship)
thrust -normal (down through the axis of your ship)
pitch
roll
yaw

Your antigrav repulsors look like a great place to start.

I will check out the source code in your zip; but I would really love a github repo to follow and fork!

-NJ

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I found a slight issue that may be with the repulsors:

if my hovercraft ever gets tilted, no feasible amount of rcs and reaction control can make it level again - even if the ground is(I know the repulsors follow the ground)

https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/tilt.jpg?_subject_uid=298802250&w=AACWa-JpiWnT2zq4P7JskufOvhSpZqiCf8eGrjtBI5R0ig

the output log(even though you probably won't need it for this one)

They can be a little quirky if mounted off axis. Thanks for the log, but could you post a screen grab of your craft please?

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I found a slight issue that may be with the repulsors:

if my hovercraft ever gets tilted, no feasible amount of rcs and reaction control can make it level again - even if the ground is(I know the repulsors follow the ground)

https://dl-web.dropbox.com/get/tilt.jpg?_subject_uid=298802250&w=AACWa-JpiWnT2zq4P7JskufOvhSpZqiCf8eGrjtBI5R0ig

the output log(even though you probably won't need it for this one)

I've also found that once you get flipped over, you can't flip back.

Please if you are reading this Please add magnetic wheels, spiked wheels, and magnetic tank treads

Theres not a whole lot of magnetic things that such things would be used on. You'd be limited to what you build and possibly the KSC buildings.

Spiked wheels sound cool just for the coolness factor, even if they're not entirely pratical.

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I suppose it could be a similar effect as what you get with the old Hooligan Labs Squid. It basically acted like a magnetic wheel that would keep the wheel on the surface it was planted on or rolled onto. Speed up as much as you like, go over that hill, you'll never catch air... ever. Apparently it also worked for landing small craft on bodies with little to no gravity, or even attaching landing gear to the surface of another ship.

I'd think a spiked wheel/track strip would be similar except that it would basically add more friction against slippage, such as when trying to halt your motion against gravity when the surface you are touching rests at an extreme angle. Magnetic ones would all you to maintain friction and relative-downward pressure on a surface at vertical or inverted angles (within reasonable limits between craft weight and gravity factor).

On the other hand, these types of wheel systems would not allow the craft to maintain or even attain any usable level of velocity. Think of it as trying to run a marathon with magnetic boots on which require a complete attachment with the surface, then take a second or so to disengage, recharge the capacitors, and re-energize the magnetic surfaces before reattaching to the next surface. You'll be running along at a whopping .02496843 steps per second or, in simpler terms, burning rubber for a snail on speed. A baby could crawl at a faster rate if it was carrying a 12 ton diaper. Don't think about that one too much, or you'll disturb yourself.

Still... a system like that, which could be activated when needed, could be useful.

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I found a slight issue that may be with the repulsors:

if my hovercraft ever gets tilted, no feasible amount of rcs and reaction control can make it level again - even if the ground is(I know the repulsors follow the ground)[snip]

You are running out of electric charge. Whatever you use to produce it isn't good enough to keep that mass of your ship at your desired height.

If I recall right, the higher you are on a repulsor the more power hungry it is. The heavier the ship, the hungrier it will get.

You are reaching an equilibrium between produced power and achievable height but not all the repulsor are reaching this equilibrium at the same height. One is probably dipping under (reducing the EC cost) while the rest is sticking at the desired height (or at least, at the same height with each other). Place an APU somewhere (along with some liquid fuel) and see where this gets you? Otherwise, slap some more radioactive shafts things (I never remember the names of the damn things) of some more solar panels.

The description of how you got to your problem is not what I'd expect but the symptom I've seen before. If I am wrong, well... anyone got a better idea?

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Uh, I thought you didn't need fuel for those APU things?

Anyhow, the hovercraft that I posted a pic of earlier worked well when covered in those solar panels and an APU for each repulsor AND the hover fan going at the same time.

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You can config bash one up pretty easily, actually. Grab the APU config, slap the engine and apu controller module on whatever part you want. You'll have to know a game object name inside it to give as the thrust transform (not that it matters for thrust, but the module will need it), but I think that's about it. You can add resources and change what the engine runs on too. I can do a config for my rover body if you need a few pointers, or did you have something specific in mind?

I was thinking something that could look good as the lower chassis of a tank. Was an idea I had while playing around with BD Armory a while back.

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Yep, you need fuel for the APU. Not a lot, mind, they're very efficient.

I've never seen those engines before either, they're really nice.

Spiked wheels? Maybe, if the mood takes me. Magnetics are a no, I'm afraid. Too much messing, and as Gaalidas points out, too easy to create phantom forces that mess with orbits, landings etc.

I kinda have an idea, Madrias... Will get back to you.

Btw, anyone hunt down a better, softer turbine sound for the APU? As a guide to what I'm looking for, the sound the drive makes at the start of Interstellar would be perfect.

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I can't figure out how to quote from my phone, but the propeller pods as discussed earlier are from karbonite, it comes with regular fuel driven ones as well as karbonite powered ones. Their pretty fantastic especially for these hovercrafts as they have reversible thrust.

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Yep, you need fuel for the APU. Not a lot, mind, they're very efficient.

I've never seen those engines before either, they're really nice.

Spiked wheels? Maybe, if the mood takes me. Magnetics are a no, I'm afraid. Too much messing, and as Gaalidas points out, too easy to create phantom forces that mess with orbits, landings etc.

Right, phantom forces and stuff... yeah... actually, I don't think I had those in mind when typing out my recent posts, but you make a good point there. I can still see the usefulness in something that attaches to a surface and doesn't let go. I might have to go have a look at those old mods now that I know more about what I'm looking at when diving into plugin code and see what makes that stuff tick. Having landing gear which could magnetically attach to a parent craft without needing to dock could be extremely useful, and could be the answer for any sort of non-docking tie-downs.

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Big, big problem with attached but undocked is the on rails system. Doesn't seem to matter what you do, if the two vessels are, indeed, separate "vessels", then in the eyes on KSP, they have different trajectories, and there is naff all you can do about it. I've posted a thread in the plugin dev forum asking for info, but nothing is forthcoming. I think this one is intractable, as it would require messing with the most fundamental parts of KSP, so it's the docked way, or the highway. I did try disabling the flight integrator, which is hilarious, as it makes the world move around the active vessel at anything over 800m/s, very interesting things happen...

There are two ways to do magnets: with joints, or with forces. adding a force against another part will be hard, as unity applies forces simply to a gameobject, not from one to another like a joint. Joints are not practical for wheels, as we need them to move. So magnetic wheels, you might as well forget about - they just won't work. Spiked wheels? Yeah, but you're only going to end up with another TR-2L, and nobody wants that, do they? The fundamental problem is that we expect to drive too fast in low gravity. Realistic speeds are just deathly boring in a game :/ As a visual thing, hey why not, though!

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Remind me again, which wheel is that? Is that the one that caused the program lead to shout "WHY???" and then fall over dead, or am I thinking of something else? Anyway, if it produces the effect we want, with (maybe?) a toggle to deploy the spikes and, at the same time, impose some realism by lowering the maximum speed/torque/whatever-else-you-would-call-it, then maybe we do want another one of those. The question now is not whether we want it or not, it's "how completely psychotic are we, and do we want it badly enough?" For the answer to the first question, you'd need a picture of me after waking up from a mid-day power nap. I don't see the problem, but my mother just about looses her mind upon seeing it. You'd think I'd adopted an "Einstein hairstyle on acid" or something.

I hear you on the magnetic thing, but I'm not one to give up on something until I've already swallowed my leg (adaptation of mouth-in-foot). So... I've already gone and grabbed the source for the SQUID system, updated the code**, successfully recompiled and will start fiddling around with it. It uses forces, so in testing I should be able to identify if KSP, in its current state of simulated gravity and force and all that, will react badly to this sort of thing. I gotta know what really happens before I leave it alone. especially considering all the time I spent working with SQUID before discovering your wheel project (literally by accident) and got hooked.

**It was crazy. There wasn't even a namespace or anything, and SharpDevelop found all sorts of redundant code in there. I couldn't let it go until I'd made it beautiful again.

On another note, if you do get the on-rails thing settled with the hitch, then a miniature hitch with a very small amount of "wiggle room" on the connection could definitely work for a non-KAS style tie-down.

- - - Updated - - -

Big, big problem with attached but undocked is the on rails system. Doesn't seem to matter what you do, if the two vessels are, indeed, separate "vessels", then in the eyes on KSP, they have different trajectories, and there is naff all you can do about it. I've posted a thread in the plugin dev forum asking for info, but nothing is forthcoming. I think this one is intractable, as it would require messing with the most fundamental parts of KSP, so it's the docked way, or the highway. I did try disabling the flight integrator, which is hilarious, as it makes the world move around the active vessel at anything over 800m/s, very interesting things happen...

I would love it if you would share more about those... um... interesting things...

So, along the lines of those on-rails vessels and such, I still remember a plugin that was able to get around that... somehow... I think. I'm going to do a little research. I may know absolutely nothing about what it is you're asking the rest of the forum-gurus, but I have looked at and tested out billions (sorta) of mods for this space simulator we all love (and hate at the same time, usually) and while I don't have any sort of super-accurate memory, I do remember all sorts of strange things that I read in mod change-logs. I'll let you know if I find anything useful. Now that I've discovered ILSpy, I'm finding all sorts of cool stuff hidden away in the DLL files we get with some of the older mods from before source was so easily distributable and/or required.

UPDATE: ah-HA! I found it. The mod was called "Burn Together!" and it allowed a lead vessel to command surrounding vessels to copy its movements, thus creating a formation-flying effect. I always wishes you could also force the vessels to try and maintain a specific formation relative to the heading of the lead craft so you could have a flying-V setup, but that would bloat the code to over twice what it is now I'm sure, since you'd have to account for the relative distance, speed, and vector of movement between every vessel and every other vessel in the formation, and get them all to move at different speed and angles to maintain the formation. Though, now that I type all that out, I have to wonder if an adaptation of the KF wheel calculations could have proved useful in such an endeavor. Oh well, we'll probably never find out. The last release for this mod was back during KSP 23.5. Back to the matter at hand though...

The important parts of the change-log are these:


alpha v5.1:
[B]-timewarp lock occurs only if followers are within 0.1m/s of leader[/B]
-fixed loss of followers during high timewarp

alpha v5:
-added some rudimentary rover support
[B]-ships lock in position during timewarp[/B]

So, I gather that the author found a way to lock two or more crafts, which are separated by longer distances than we are even trying to achieve, in the same relative spot during high time accelerations (which I would assume also includes the odd things that happen when exiting high time acceleration modes). I shall investigate further.

Edited by Gaalidas
I'm so awesome.
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It's the nice looking medium size one that breaks all the time, digs into the terrain and has more grip than fluff to Velcro. An evil contraption. I can't comment on the hair.

Send the Squid code over, it'll be interesting.

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You mean the mod that was mentioned in one of the source files as the main inspiration for writing it? Nope, never head of it...

Honestly, that development line for the critter crawler was going so well, I was rather sad when it just... died out...

- - - Updated - - -

It's the nice looking medium size one that breaks all the time, digs into the terrain and has more grip than fluff to Velcro. An evil contraption. I can't comment on the hair.

Send the Squid code over, it'll be interesting.

I'll put it up to my dropbox when I get a chance to give it a test. Gotta see if it actually works at all still.

I'm drawing a blank of that wheel, so I'll just take your word for it. I never had much luck with stock wheels, so until KF came around I just didn't build rovers... ever...

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You mean the mod that was mentioned in one of the source files as the main inspiration for writing it? Nope, never head of it...

Honestly, that development line for the critter crawler was going so well, I was rather sad when it just... died out...

BahumotoD is working on their own game now I believe, maybe Lo-Fi could ping them about rolling it in with KF here if it would otherwise be abandoned?

[Edit] If I could otherwise make a request, Lo-Fi could please include the version/release in the thread title that would be fantastic, thanks!

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