Procedural Airships development thread

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

Procedural Airships

A ProceduralParts Expansion

FUTURE PLANS

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This is the Procedural Airships development thread. Ongoing development will be discussed here. If you are looking for the newest version or support, please visit the release thread.

Edited November 12, 2014 by RadarManFromTheMoon
future plans

[passinglurker]

how are you generating lift? hooligan labs or your own plugin?

[marce]

how are you generating lift? hooligan labs or your own plugin?

From a quick look at the source: it's implemented in this mod. He may have started with HoologanLabs, though (don't know).

Looks very promising! I was never a big fan of the HooliganLabs models, but airships are cool. And I have seen FAR handling which is always good

Only one request: please make them deflateable

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

how are you generating lift? hooligan labs or your own plugin?

It's from my own dll. It is similar to hooligan labs approach but uses two types of liftig gas (Combustrogen and Liftium) as a resource instead of just providing a certain amount of buoyancy. Im planning to make Combustrogen verty vulnerable to high temperatures. But it's not implemented yet. To generate more lift you would have to dump water from ballast tanks. (or reduce your vessels weight any other way). You can also dump lifting gas to reduce weight.

Edited August 20, 2014 by RadarManFromTheMoon

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

From a quick look at the source: it's implemented in this mod. He may have started with HoologanLabs, though (don't know).

Looks very promising! I was never a big fan of the HooliganLabs models, but airships are cool. And I have seen FAR handling which is always good

Only one request: please make them deflateable

Maybe. Will see if its possible to change the procedural shapes while flying.

ps. FAR support is planned but does not work yet. We will have to wait until the next FAR release to get correct air density values from FAR.

Edited August 20, 2014 by RadarManFromTheMoon

[Guest]

Would that be possible to implement airship-style altitude control? The real Zeppelins had bladders inside their envelopes which could be filled with air, increasing the pressure of the lifting gas and decreasing it's volume, thus reducing lift.

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

Would that be possible to implement airship-style altitude control? The real Zeppelins had bladders inside their envelopes which could be filled with air, increasing the pressure of the lifting gas and decreasing it's volume, thus reducing lift.

I will do a little research, but sounds sensible to me.

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

Okay, it seems that airships have those bladders called ballots which are used to adjust pitch and to compensate gas expansion at higher altitudes. I'm not sure if they are really suitable for altitude control since too much pressure could stress the hull too much, leading to spontaneous envolpe popping. But those stuff will definitely get implemented.

[SpannerMonkey(smce)]

Liftium love it much s......ing,( what oh gosh golly jolly bad show i was censored! we'll change that to grinning) great idea btw missed drifting around

[Gaalidas]

Just thought of an excellent way to reduce craft weight. Simply toss an expendable kerbal out the back.

[passinglurker]

could just take the hot air balloon approach. burn fuel to heat up the balloon to go up and leave it alone and let it cool off to go down at an ever accelerating speed

[BigFatStupidHead]

More Zeppelins is cool. I approve.

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

Liftium love it much s......ing,( what oh gosh golly jolly bad show i was censored! we'll change that to grinning) great idea btw missed drifting around

Glad you like it

Just thought of an excellent way to reduce craft weight. Simply toss an expendable kerbal out the back.

Hehe. Unfortunately kerbals are weightless for some esoteric reasons.

could just take the hot air balloon approach. burn fuel to heat up the balloon to go up and leave it alone and let it cool off to go down at an ever accelerating speed

Thats actually a cool idea. Like:

*Create a special heat-resistant envelope.

*Point a little engine towards it to heat it up.

*clear pressure. (maybe with some kind of an automatic valve)

*Profit

Edited August 21, 2014 by RadarManFromTheMoon

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

new experimental release!

I will write more when I have more time but in short:

-Envelopes now have ballonets. Ballonets are inflatable balloons inside envelopes. By inflating a ballonet, it is possible to decrease the envelopes effective volume. Decreased volume means less lift. Deflating the ballonets increases lift again.

-Envelope pressure is now taken into account, pressure damage is not implemented yet though. Also: stacked envelopes are connected now. Gas will flow from high pressurized envelopes to low pressurized envelopes. (this does only work for stacked enveolpes. Not for radially attached ones)

-Lifting gas temperature is fixed at 20°C. This is intended to lower complexity for testing.

-I've changed the buoyancy multiplcator from 5 to 2. This means envelopes create twice as much lift than they whould realistically do. You can change this to whatever value you want just edit "airships.cfg".

-release breaks saved crafts from 0.1.0.0

NOTE: This is only for testing and feedback. It is not really playable yet. It is, for example, possible to fly envelopes which contain a vacuum which is not really realistic.

Edited August 26, 2014 by RadarManFromTheMoon
oh I forgot....

[AKSkinnyMan]

Any news? Had lift in 0.1.0.0 but not in 0.2.0.0?

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

Any news? Had lift in 0.1.0.0 but not in 0.2.0.0?

There should be lift.

Check the following:

-Your Vessel may be too heavy. Check your net. buoyancy in the tweakables. if it is greater than 0 it should generate some lift. (there seem to be a bug that shows slightly more buoyancy in the editor than there really is in flight. I will fix this with the next release)

-Vessels built with version 0.1 will most probably won't work with 0.2. You will have to rebuild them. Sorry for that, but thats the nature of an early alpha pre-release.

-Try to deflate the ballonet to increase lift.

-I changed a value in the config so that envelopes create less lift than in 0.1. If you don't like it this way open airships.cfg and change "buoyancyMultiplicator = 3.0" to "buoyancyMultiplicator = 5.0". 5.0 was the setting in version 0.1 but you can set it to any value you want. 1.0 is real world buoyancy, while 5.0 means 5 times more lift.

- Do you have FAR installed? FAR support is planned but not properly implemented yet. So that may lead to problems too.

If all that doesn't help please send me your log files (KSP.log and output_log.txt). There might be a bug somewhere.

The infos in the tweakable menu may be a bit overwhelming now. Most of it is for debug puposes and will be invisible (or optional) later. I will make a little tutorial soon, but maybe not until I release version 0.3.

Edited August 26, 2014 by RadarManFromTheMoon

[Gaalidas]

Kerbals have no weight you say? Then how do they still fall to the ground when you punt them into the stratosphere? Gravity needs a little help from the weight of the object y'know.

We just need a way to load "Kerbals" as a resource, it would be like stuffing a bunch of passengers into a spare room in the hull and tossing them out one at a time to decrease the weight of the craft. Sorta like tossing a defiant child out the car when the fuel gauge gets too low.

I mean... NO, that would be VERY BAD. Children are not a resource... they just consume resources. Whew, that was a close one. Almost got nailed by the ethics board.

Y'know... Kethane had a little tool for recycling kerbals into liquid bio-matter which could then be refined into kethane... just something to think about...

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

Kerbals have no weight you say? Then how do they still fall to the ground when you punt them into the stratosphere? Gravity needs a little help from the weight of the object y'know.

We just need a way to load "Kerbals" as a resource, it would be like stuffing a bunch of passengers into a spare room in the hull and tossing them out one at a time to decrease the weight of the craft. Sorta like tossing a defiant child out the car when the fuel gauge gets too low.

I mean... NO, that would be VERY BAD. Children are not a resource... they just consume resources. Whew, that was a close one. Almost got nailed by the ethics board.

Y'know... Kethane had a little tool for recycling kerbals into liquid bio-matter which could then be refined into kethane... just something to think about...

Hehe. I apologise. Kerbals are of course not weightless. But as soon as you load them into a pod: POOF! Their mass magically disappears and does not add to the pods mass as you would expect it to do. (At least I think so. They maybe changed that and I haven't noticed.) Must be some kind of space super-diet. =)

I may consider your idea for a later release, but for now I am happy to announce that I'm making good progress. So version 0.3 release is near and will hopefully contain all features planned for version 1.0. So from there on its only balancing and bugfixing. I will also write a little tutorial because, as it turns out, building and flying airships is a bit more complcated than I expected.

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

new experimental version: 0.3

changelog:

-Feature: envelopes containing combustrogen will explode when exposed to high temperatures

-Feature: envelopes will explode when their gas pressure exceeds the tolerance

-Feature: Lifting gas venting

-Fixed Bug: mass values now correct

[Hattivat]

Great idea, subscribing to see how it develops

[JewelShisen]

Interesting idea. May I ask what got you to start this mod?

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

Interesting idea. May I ask what got you to start this mod?

Well. Hooligan labs played a particular role in my decision. Please don't get me wrong, HL is great but it has it's limits. Most of the time I was strapping some huge envelope parts together and the result was not that aerodynamical. So I thought doing it the procedural way would help a lot to build really "airship-like" looking designs and to reduce part count by the way. I was using proceural Parts for a while and on closer look it turned out to be perfect for integration with other mods so I decided to make it a dependency rather that developing a shape generator from scratch.

[JewelShisen]

Well. Hooligan labs played a particular role in my decision. Please don't get me wrong, HL is great but it has it's limits. Most of the time I was strapping some huge envelope parts together and the result was not that aerodynamical. So I thought doing it the procedural way would help a lot to build really "airship-like" looking designs and to reduce part count by the way. I was using proceural Parts for a while and on closer look it turned out to be perfect for integration with other mods so I decided to make it a dependency rather that developing a shape generator from scratch.

That's cool and I totally understand. It's part of why I am working on a remake of the HL parts to something more trimmed down and nicer to look at.

I had considered making them procedural, and may still make them TweakScale using, but couldn't think of a good way to correctly scale the volume and lifting force.

Edited September 1, 2014 by JewelShisen

[RadarManFromTheMoon]

That's cool and I totally understand. It's part of why I am working on a remake of the HL parts to something more trimmed down and nicer to look at.

I had considered making them procedural, and may still make them TweakScale using, but couldn't think of a good way to correctly scale the volume and lifting force.

Thats the good thing with swamp_igs ProceduralParts. It gives you the desired shape and calculates the volume by the way. No dealing with that unless you want to add a new type of shape.

Just checked out your experimental parts from the curseforge. Really like the hub part. It's a good addition.

For the tweakScale: Haven't worked with it so far but I think my approach whould be to feed your dll with some assumptions about the overall shape of the part via the cfg and then use that to calculate the volumes. The Envelopes for example seem to be elliptic so you could just scale the major and minor axis and the length to calculate the parts volume from it. I'm totally shooting in the dark here, you maybe tried something similar and found it impractical, but it could be a starting point. It certainly gets much more complicated with more complex shapes though.

[JewelShisen]

Thats the good thing with swamp_igs ProceduralParts. It gives you the desired shape and calculates the volume by the way. No dealing with that unless you want to add a new type of shape.

Just checked out your experimental parts from the curseforge. Really like the hub part. It's a good addition.

For the tweakScale: Haven't worked with it so far but I think my approach whould be to feed your dll with some assumptions about the overall shape of the part via the cfg and then use that to calculate the volumes. The Envelopes for example seem to be elliptic so you could just scale the major and minor axis and the length to calculate the parts volume from it. I'm totally shooting in the dark here, you maybe tried something similar and found it impractical, but it could be a starting point. It certainly gets much more complicated with more complex shapes though.

And that is the issue. Parts like the Hub and Cap get a more complicated and deployable ones are right out because of the animations.