[1.1] BDArmory v0.11.0.1 (+compatibility, fixes) - Apr 23

[Spooglecraft]

Now that we have cruise missiles, would some kind of torpedo be feasible for us weird guys with battleships?

I made myself a torpedo launcher upscaling the hidden Vulcan and making it a cannon, but a missile should be modifiable in a way to work like a torpedo, as long as it survives the water.

[riceiq999]

It's not a part's crash tolerance that decides how resistant it is to BDArmory weapons, it's the heat tolerance.

From what i know so far when a part has been hit with a BDArmory bullet or shell, it's heat increases. So increase the heat tolerance of the parts you are using. I know this mainly because when a part is destroyed by a BDArmory weapon. The F3 log reports the destruction as an "overheat"

You should also reduce the power of the guns as Spoogle said. Especially the large cannons. It's really not that fun to see my Tank Destroyers flinging my SuperMegaHeavy Tank Destroyer across the map with their 105mm guns.

You might be right on the part that heat tolerance determines when the part explode. There is a maxTemp setting for parts in configs but I haven't been experimenting with it.

On the other hand though after some testing I found crash tolerance does matter, specifically for how much of a temperature rise each bullet can inflict. In panzer1b's heat damage model readme he said "At point blank vs 80 impact tolerance 20mm vulcan will do 123 damage per shot with 11286 damage per second" and "at point blank vs 50 impact tolerance 20mm vulcan will do 197 damage per shot with 18058 damage per second". During my testing I found that if you increase a panel's crash tolerance to 100 then the simple chaingun can no longer destroy it at 400 meters while the Vulcan also has a harder time destroying it at that range (I used a smaller damage multiplier for the test). This also explains why a chaingun can one-shot B9 HX parts because they have such a low crash tolerance = 20 that each bullet raises the temperature by a lot.

Another thing I have been doing is modify the B9 procedural wing part to change their impact tolerance from 15 to 100 and they can function as armors. They are super versatile because you can shape them and put them in corners and cover triangular/trapezoid areas, and their mass also scales (and they look cooler/spacier than the structural panels ).

For now I just need to tweak the cannon part. What shell power and radius settings have you found to be better? I'm thinking of trying reducing the radius so that shells don't destroy whatever is behind the armor, but again I'm not too sure how the explosive power works.

[BahamutoD]

You might be right on the part that heat tolerance determines when the part explode. There is a maxTemp setting for parts in configs but I haven't been experimenting with it.

On the other hand though after some testing I found crash tolerance does matter, specifically for how much of a temperature rise each bullet can inflict. In panzer1b's heat damage model readme he said "At point blank vs 80 impact tolerance 20mm vulcan will do 123 damage per shot with 11286 damage per second" and "at point blank vs 50 impact tolerance 20mm vulcan will do 197 damage per shot with 18058 damage per second". During my testing I found that if you increase a panel's crash tolerance to 100 then the simple chaingun can no longer destroy it at 400 meters while the Vulcan also has a harder time destroying it at that range (I used a smaller damage multiplier for the test). This also explains why a chaingun can one-shot B9 HX parts because they have such a low crash tolerance = 20 that each bullet raises the temperature by a lot.

Another thing I have been doing is modify the B9 procedural wing part to change their impact tolerance from 15 to 100 and they can function as armors. They are super versatile because you can shape them and put them in corners and cover triangular/trapezoid areas, and their mass also scales (and they look cooler/spacier than the structural panels ).

For now I just need to tweak the cannon part. What shell power and radius settings have you found to be better? I'm thinking of trying reducing the radius so that shells don't destroy whatever is behind the armor, but again I'm not too sure how the explosive power works.

For explosions, a piece of armor (or any part) would block the 'rays' that damage parts, but objects behind it would still experience a reduced amount of force.

[CrayzeeMonkey]

For explosions, a piece of armor (or any part) would block the 'rays' that damage parts, but objects behind it would still experience a reduced amount of force.

What do you mean by force? If you're talking about actual force it's quite useless because the affected parts are connected to the actual vessel. When i make my tanks do battle with each other, when one tank shoots another tank in a really heavily armored spot, instead of the shell just bouncing off, the targeted tank just flies off and usually gets destroyed by surface impact. Probably 60% of my vehicle kills have been from surface impacts due to the shells launching them in the air. I have a suggestion, how about a HEAT shell that sends damaging rays only in front of it (And like a real HEAT shell, it's superheated copper penetrator (the damaging ray) loses it's penetrating power as distance increases.), and it focuses on destroying parts rather than pushing them away.

I've also been making a radial part for BDArmory and it has some symmetry problems. In both radial and mirror mode and with 2x symmetry my part, instead of both parts facing the same direction, both parts face the opposite direction Here is a picture.. Since you've made radial parts with BDArmory, do you know how to fix this? Is it a problem with the game or my part?

What shell power and radius settings have you found to be better? I'm thinking of trying reducing the radius so that shells don't destroy whatever is behind the armor, but again I'm not too sure how the explosive power works.

I'm not sure, in my 0.90 build i've never bothered to edit the .cfgs yet. In my .25 copy i modified the shells, but it caused some weird system-side problems that's probably only unique to my system. I say to reduce the radius enough so that it doesn't go farther than the width of armor that you have. You should also experiment with the configs if you have time. You can make a dedicated KSP copy for playing with the configs so that your KSP should load faster and therefore find the perfect combination faster.

Edited April 11, 2015 by CrayzeeMonkey

[riceiq999]

Does countermeasure work against guns like goalkeeper (on guard mode) as well?

[Hellbrand]

Hey we totally need a way for kerbals to re-arm a craft with bombs and such after a sortie! was wondering if you could do something combining KIS and BD armory to create a system for us to resupply a crafts armaments without having to recover it or to swap out armaments.

[King_komodo93]

Hey we totally need a way for kerbals to re-arm a craft with bombs and such after a sortie! was wondering if you could do something combining KIS and BD armory to create a system for us to resupply a crafts armaments without having to recover it or to swap out armaments.

Someone did write a KAS script before (and it should be linked in the OP iirc) not sure how it works with KIS but it did allow you to carry bombs/missile/ammo.

[CrayzeeMonkey]

Does countermeasure work against guns like goalkeeper (on guard mode) as well?

Sadly, no. However there is this interesting way to distract the guns. You could place weapon managers on small and fast missiles (Not the BDArmory missiles! I mean the missiles out of stock parts) that you can decouple and launch. Set all the weapon managers to a team and launch them toward the attacker. The attacker should target the weapon managers on these small missiles and you can fire away at the target.

Even simpler, you could just carry LOTS of Hellfires by being clever with the Procedural Hardpoint part and fire the hellfires in rapid succession. This especially works against the YAL Laser.

Have a nice day!

[BoomShroom]

Hey we totally need a way for kerbals to re-arm a craft with bombs and such after a sortie! was wondering if you could do something combining KIS and BD armory to create a system for us to resupply a crafts armaments without having to recover it or to swap out armaments.

KIS can be used for this, but Baha would have to do something to allow changing the various settings (decouple speed/direction, deployment altitude, or even the turn limits on lost turrets) in flight. KIS works on everything, you just need large enough boxes to hold it all.

[Hellbrand]

This is true but it still seems like an excellent idea... considering how just to resupply you need to recover crafts most of the time. it can be kind of annoying when you send a strike mission halfway around the globe and you need to head back to the KSC just to resupply on bombs and such. when you could just send your bomber to a forward airbase and resupply there! ((all in all it does seem like it would be plenty useful yes?))(Just like have an ammo cache at the island airbase?)

Edited April 12, 2015 by Hellbrand

[LORDPrometheus]

so i was dointg the math to see how to scale a nuclear armed AGM 86 and found out something kinda funny

40

using the Mk82 we can see its RL equivalent has a yield of 429.1188MJ (raw explosive and thermal power of an 87kg Tritonal warhead) since this bomb has an ingame blast radius of 40m and a blast power of 25unidentified units we can see that 1 BDarmory blast radius is equivalent to 10.72MJ and 1 Blast power is equivalent to 17.164MJ. the official blast radius of a Mk82 bomb is 60m absolute lethality and injuries up to 200m. this tells us that the game's bombs are scaled to be 33% smaller than their RL equivalents as far as blast radius is concerned and with no other yield to work with from the game due to ambiguous units i'll roll with this.

therefore 1Kt of TNT in game is 2761440MJ not the RL 4184000MJ

so a 1kt explosion in game would be represented by a blast radius of 257597m and a blast power of 160885.57 units

this in the end does not help me due to limits on physics distances so i basically said meh its kerbal and set the radius to 1000m for a 5kt (lowest W80 yield) AGM-86D and put the blast power at 120 for no reason in particular

Edited April 12, 2015 by LORDPrometheus

[BahamutoD]

so i was dointg the math to see how to scale a nuclear armed AGM 86 and found out something kinda funny

40

using the Mk82 we can see its RL equivalent has a yield of 429.1188MJ (raw explosive and thermal power of an 87kg Tritonal warhead) since this bomb has an ingame blast radius of 40m and a blast power of 25unidentified units we can see that 1 BDarmory blast radius is equivalent to 10.72MJ and 1 Blast power is equivalent to 17.164MJ. the official blast radius of a Mk82 bomb is 60m absolute lethality and injuries up to 200m. this tells us that the game's bombs are scaled to be 33% smaller than their RL equivalents as far as blast radius is concerned and with no other yield to work with from the game due to ambiguous units i'll roll with this.

therefore 1Kt of TNT in game is 2761440MJ not the RL 4184000MJ

so a 1kt explosion in game would be represented by a blast radius of 257597m and a blast power of 160885.57 units

this in the end does not help me due to limits on physics distances so i basically said meh its kerbal and set the radius to 1000m for a 5kt (lowest W80 yield) AGM-86D and put the blast power at 120 for no reason in particular

I'm glad you did the math on that.

Edit: I believe the units of the blast power is kilonewton-seconds (impulse).

Edit2: According to unity, it is mass*distance/time http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ForceMode.Impulse.html

Edited April 12, 2015 by BahamutoD

[JewelShisen]

Hey Baha is there any chance of getting the Cruise Missiles set so that they won't launch from inside a closed cargo bay?

[teepee2345]

i have a question concerning the Cruise Missiles. do they follow the contours of the terrain or do they just fly to their targets in a straight-ish line?

[JewelShisen]

i have a question concerning the Cruise Missiles. do they follow the contours of the terrain or do they just fly to their targets in a straight-ish line?

They follow the terrain though out over water I am not so sure about how they behave.

[eeveelution]

They follow the terrain though out over water I am not so sure about how they behave.

I guess it's just a raycast downwards and a bit forwards, so it should detect the water, or anything in fact as long as it has a collider (which I believe water has, but I might be wrong and it might be just a physics change at the 0m altitude or something).

[BahamutoD]

Water has no collider, but if it detects terrain that has negative altitude, it knows there's water there.

JewelShisen, extending the bomb clearance detection to missiles is on my todo-list.

[JewelShisen]

Water has no collider, but if it detects terrain that has negative altitude, it knows there's water there.

JewelShisen, extending the bomb clearance detection to missiles is on my todo-list.

Ah cool! And thanks for the update Baha!

[Bluejay0013]

I sure hope the Seismic Charge comes out on the next update:wink:, or maybe soon a M1 Abrams tank body that would be sweet:D. It would just have to be the body, don't care about tracks I can get those with Kerbal Foundries.

[KnightOwl]

I feel like I don't need to ask for much since pretty much everything I need, you've already thought of. But I agree with the others, KAS support would be amazing. It feels strange to build some beautifully designed fighter only to scrap it after one mission because you exhausted your payload. Especially since I'm fighting on Duna's surface right now.

Some more orbit to orbit weaponry would be sweet as well but that's me being selfish again. Anyway keep up the amazing work. BDArmory For 1.0!

[sumghai]

Having read numerous posts requesting KAS support, I'd like to play Devil's advocate, and suggest that BahamutoD put this suggestion aside temporarily.

This is because KAS will soon have some of its functionality transferred over to KIS, and until we're 100% certain what specific features would be removed from /retained in KAS, it's a bit premature to ask for compatibility.

By the way:

My understanding is that BahamutoD is considering an overhaul on the ammo storage system, and one of my original suggestions was the idea of a "universal" ammo container that would essentially work like Modular Fuel Tanks for ammunition (i.e. mix and match different quantities of different types of ammo).

The main advantages of this are:

- Reducing Part List bloat (i.e. fewer or no more specialty ammo boxes)

- Support for ammunition subtypes (e.g. currently we have the generic CannonShells, but the proposal would allow the system to easily support CannonShell_HE, CannonShell_AP and CannonShell_Incendiary)

A question for everyone

Should the universal ammunition container be a unique part (surface attached boxes or direct integration into turrets), or should it be integrated into the Weapons Manager itself?

Unique universal storage containers

+ Better control over ammo store part placement allows CoM/CoL/CoT balancing for vessels

+ Better control over ammo store part placement allows more interesting playstyles (e.g. shoot the ammo box!) or redundancy (as long as one ammo box remains, the vessel won't be defenseless

- Part list bloat in VAB/SPH editor

- Adding extra parts to vessels may contribute to physics lag

Weapon Manager as universal ammo store

+ Fewer items in VAB/SPH editor part list

+ Fewer parts required to arm a vessel

- Requires tricky positioning of Weapon Manager since it is now also an ammo storage compartment with mass

- Destroying the Weapon Manager on an enemy vessel completely disarms it and ends the engagement too quickly (less fun)

[BoomShroom]

*snip*

Definitely the first choice. I quite like the lack of magic wormhole ammo crates as well as being able to place the ammo in positions similar to the real deal when I'm making replicas.

[LORDPrometheus]

i think the ammo boxes should come in three sizes and use the same system the configurable fuel tanks from many mods use

no for the weapon manager thing but integrating it into all cockpits would be smart

[tetryds]

@sumghai:

While I like reducing part count, I don't really like the idea of universal storage containers as of one single that does it all.

The current ammo boxes are very low poly, and that does not really impact the framerate much (from my base building tests, the ammo boxes themselves used negligible resources).

And having ammo on the weapons manager is very weird, to say the least.

If anything, having one type of box for every type of ammo will prevent you from simply having all kinds of guns and all kinds of ammo at once (be it lag or weight or whatever).

I would thus, rather that we continue having one ammo box for every ammunition caliber, and have tweakables on these boxes to choose the ammo type.

The box size and weight would vary depending on the caliber and also on the type of ammo it has.

To switch between ammo types, simply use an action group set to "next ammo type" or "next ammo box".

Pros:

-Much more versatile ammo management, reloading your boxes is simpler.

-Different designs will suit certain calibers better.

-Allows for multiple ammo types on a single vessel.

Cons:

-Higher part count

By the way, where does this universal ammo storage idea come from? I don't really like it.

In real life you can't have a box for every possible type of ammo while also having it to feed every possible type of gun.

And you cannot fit so much ammo inside of a device the size of a big potato chips bag, haha.

Edited April 14, 2015 by tetryds

[sumghai]

The universal ammunition stores would be available in a small range of sizes and form factors, each with total capacity/weight limits, much like Modular Fuel Tanks - rest assured that you won't be cramming hundreds of CannonShells in a matchbox anytime soon.

My argument against one unique ammo box per calibre (even with tweakable types) is that of expandability - there are only so many coloured stripes to choose from for distinguishing all current and possible calibre types before you run out.

Also, I'm actually not that fond of ammo storage within the Weapons Manager itself, but I wanted to bring it up specifically to show how bad taking the idea to the extreme would be.