[Plugin, 0.14.1] Wormholes - alphav1

[The_Duck]

Black holes with gravity that you can launch into orbit, and which can be connected by wormholes to allow instant transportation across any distance!

Download link below this post. Note: this project is 'alpha' because it is quite rough and rather likely to crash. Don\'t download it right now if you want a finished product.

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First, the bad news. A few days ago, some lab technicians at Anatid Robotics accidentally created several thousand 5-meter wide black holes that they barely managed to contain before they plunged into Kerbin and consumed the planet.

Next, the good news: working without sleep, the same technicians managed to set up some force fields that allow the black holes to be attached to rockets and launched into space, where we won\'t have to worry about them destroying us all:

Finally, the payoff: the black holes can be connected together to allow essentially instantaneous transportation along a wormhole network. Put up two black holes and we have a superluminal highway between any two points in space.

This is a dangerous business. While the black holes are completely safe while attached to the ship, they become lethal as soon as the confining force fields are released. They have powerful gravity at close distances, and anything entering a black hole will be destroyed unless it carries a properly programmed Wormhole Interface device, which can manipulate spacetime to create the temporary wormholes used for transportation.

Actually using a wormhole transportation network requires rendezvous with an orbiting wormhole (or bringing one up with you). Rendezvous is made somewhat easier, however, by the black hole\'s gravitational attraction. This will be dramatically clear when you make a close approach to a hole, but it\'s enough so that it can pull you in from several hundred meters if you reduce your relative velocity. It\'s even possible to get into a tight orbit around a black hole (or, probably, to get several black holes to orbit each other).

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Details: This currently consists of two parts and an associated plugin. One part is a 5-meter black hole, or wormhole mouth. You should attach this to a rocket via a decoupler, launch it into some orbit, and then decouple it. Once you decouple it it will start to act like a black hole, complete with gravity and death for those who enter it. The other part makes black holes safe: a Wormhole Interface. Attach this to your rocket and you will get a GUI window that allows you to set a destination wormhole mouth. With this set, you can pass unharmed into any other black hole and emerge at your destination. Because a black sphere strained my 3D modeling skills to the limit, the wormhole interface currently uses the stock ASAS model.

Note: Your ship will be destroyed if you do any of the following:

-fall into a black hole without a wormhole interface

-fall into a black hole with a wormhole interface without a destination selected

-fall into the same black hole selected as the destination on your wormhole interface

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Suggestion for how to start with this: send up one crew with a black hole on a suicide mission. Just get the black hole into some orbit. Then decouple it; the crew will fall in and die but you\'ll have one wormhole up. Then send up another crew with a wormhole interface and a second black hole, and before you decouple the black hole, program the interface with the other black hole as its destination. When you decouple the second black hole, your ship will dive into it and emerge at the other one; when you emerge, you may have to thrust away a bit to avoid being sucked back in and dying. Now you can shuttle between these two holes at will, and put up more destination holes at your leisure.

I\'ve been liking RinComp as an aid for rendezvousing with black holes.

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This project is currently pretty rough. It might crash or break in bad ways. But it works to an extent and I\'m eager to have people try it.

The current code for this is crude and my 3D modeling skills are nonexistent, so if anyone wants to help out with this project I would be more than happy to share it!

To install, unzip Wormholes_alpha.zip in your main KSP directory. Wormholes_alpha_source.zip is the code for those interested.

Mediafire links since the attachments seem corrupted:

Plugin zip: http://www./download.php?q4mts83qyew3648

Source zip: http://www./download.php?8hdyzb5ztc8mp4v

[ddavis425]

are you a wizard

[FourTee2]

No suicide mission needed, use the Mechjeb unmanned pod!

[Nomad]

With some mesh tweaking we could make mass releys =P

[Steve5451]

Can I safely park one on Kerbin and one on the mun?

[The_Duck]

Unfortunately they currently won\'t work in atmosphere; the teleportation mechanism relies on switching away from the active vessel and the game doesn\'t allow that if you\'re in atmosphere. Actually trying this breaks the plugin currently; I guess I should just make it destroy the ship if you try.

It might be possible to have a usable wormhole on the surface of the Mun, though I haven\'t tried.

[Tiberion]

Unfortunately they currently won\'t work in atmosphere; the teleportation mechanism relies on switching away from the active vessel and the game doesn\'t allow that if you\'re in atmosphere. Actually trying this breaks the plugin currently; I guess I should just make it destroy the ship if you try.

It might be possible to have a usable wormhole on the surface of the Mun, though I haven\'t tried.

Just gonna throw this out there;

You can swap vessels if on the pad.

[Misterspork]

OH how good a decision it was for Harv to add that plugin compatibility.

[Blinkin]

Holy ergjknwebfuiervbghwcbner vdb23uqwyjfuhvnbtui ihrjwef! ???

Did anyone expected this when HarvesteR released the plugin maker?

My god, this is mind blowing.

[Caesar15]

Next thing you know they ll be making cities in orbit!

[Emilio]

Hell yes ! Will download tomorrow (it\'s 9:20 pm in France).

Silly question : can a black hole eat another black hole ???

How did you managed to add gravity to them ? Gonna add the same to jellycube\'s asteroid

Challenge : put a damaged ship into a black hole orbit, then rescue it...

[OmegaX123]

Mass Effect: Kerbal Edition. Someone needs to get on that re-meshing project. With OP\'s permission, of course. If I had skill, a program to work with, and OP\'s permission, I\'d be all over it.

EDIT: Hey, got a bit of an issue here. I built a ship (a HUGE mother of a ship) to take up a pair of wormholes to create a network (stage 1->wormhole 1->stage2->wormhole 2->stage final). It crashed when I tried to launch. Is this a bug, a problem with carrying more than 1 wormhole on the same ship, or something unrelated?

[Barrayar]

Hi

Here are my first alphatest-results for you:

1) I had problems with a rocket on which the wormhole is staged in the middle

- if I decouple the last stage it\'s getting sucked in the wormhole and is crashing all the stages above it

(incl. stages above the hole) - then the flight ends but the wormhole is also destroyed in the process...

2) With the Wormhole at the top, I find it hard to balance \'litte\' ships - which can be compensated by building them big - but when I\'m in the \'right\' orbit where I want the hole to be and decoupling my second-last-stage it\'s going Rambo(similar to 1) ) and the ship is destroyed(as expected), but the parts remain and spam my orbits with a huge load of debris (I hoped everything\'s going to be sucked in the wormhole - but seems to stay in orbit).

Besides these little problems - I like this plugin a lot!

Thank you for it!

(Although I never got 2 holes up in orbit to test the wormhole-jumping - either collapsed holes through [1)] or to much debris in the orbit [2)] - so that I restart ;P )

[SmiteZero]

Hahaha. Madness.

[PWNDEZ]

Let e preface what I am about to say by mentioning I am on .14.0 since stupid ESET does NOT let me patch (I\'ve excepted pretty much every .ece, including the ones in pather_data and still no dice), so that might be why, but I am having issues wit working these quantum singularities...

I tried to get some wormholes in orbit and they aren\'t appearing as wormholes. I decouple them and I\'ve even TOUCHED them afterwards and nothing crazy happens. I double checked and the parts are all there (duh... how else would I get it ON a ship =P) and I know for sure I have the DLL in the right folder since I\'ve already had other plugins work no problem AND the wormhole interface computer has a GUI window...

I have an interface AND a wormhole (attached to a decoupler like it should be) on the same ship... is that a problem? I\'m also using mechJeb, some assorted NP and TD mods just to get it to orbit...

On the launchpad

Decoupled, not having any problems being close to it (I see no gravitational attraction...)

As you can see, I am inside it and there is NO problem touching it.

Second attempt with the ship is still no good...

Also note I terminated one of the attempts by ramming the wormhole and both the wormhole and the ship exploded, so there IS a collider present... I already have maybe 2 or three in orbit (plus a million pieces of debris from me ramming things at each other in the process to see if I can get anything to get sucked in...) and you can see the interface not recognizing any.

This makes me very sadface.

[The_Duck]

Thanks guys for trying this out!

1) I had problems with a rocket on which the wormhole is staged in the middle

- if I decouple the last stage it\'s getting sucked in the wormhole and is crashing all the stages above it

(incl. stages above the hole) - then the flight ends but the wormhole is also destroyed in the process...

2) With the Wormhole at the top, I find it hard to balance \'litte\' ships - which can be compensated by building them big - but when I\'m in the \'right\' orbit where I want the hole to be and decoupling my second-last-stage it\'s going Rambo(similar to 1) ) and the ship is destroyed(as expected), but the parts remain and spam my orbits with a huge load of debris (I hoped everything\'s going to be sucked in the wormhole - but seems to stay in orbit).

I think these might be helped by giving the wormhole a substantial velocity away from the ship when you first decouple it, so it doesn\'t immediately wreck everything. Maybe its gravity can also wait a little while to turn on. I\'ll try to implement something like this. I think also I didn\'t intend for black holes to have gravity until you decouple them; I\'ll try to fix that.

Having an interface and a wormhole on the same ship is fine. Also, the black holes only have gravity when the active ship is within a few kilometers of them (they are on rails and don\'t run any code), so they unfortunately they won\'t clean up debris if left to themselves.

Let e preface what I am about to say by mentioning I am on .14.0 since stupid ESET does NOT let me patch (I\'ve excepted pretty much every .ece, including the ones in pather_data and still no dice), so that might be why, but I am having issues wit working these quantum singularities...

I tried to get some wormholes in orbit and they aren\'t appearing as wormholes. I decouple them and I\'ve even TOUCHED them afterwards and nothing crazy happens. I double checked and the parts are all there (duh... how else would I get it ON a ship =P) and I know for sure I have the DLL in the right folder since I\'ve already had other plugins work no problem AND the wormhole interface computer has a GUI window...

0.14 might be the problem; I haven\'t tested at all on it. Clearly the wormhole parts aren\'t recognizing when they decouple, or they are and the code that is supposed to run then isn\'t working. If you want you can try deploying one again, and if it doesn\'t work, close the game and then post here the output_log.txt file from the KSP_Data folder; that might have useful information in it.

Silly question : can a black hole eat another black hole ???

How did you managed to add gravity to them ? Gonna add the same to jellycube\'s asteroid

I think currently the black holes will destroy each other, but of course they should really coalesce into a bigger hole.

The gravity is simulated by a few lines of plugin code; maybe it would be a good idea to incorporate those lines into a mini-plugin that could be used to give any sort of object gravity.

[Misterspork]

So far, no significant bugs on my side. Just thought I\'d give you he relief that not everyone is experiencing these bugs.

[N3X15]

[mod] You're missing some stuff we need in your subject to determine whether your plugin is up-to-date or not. Please read http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8088.0. [/mod]

(Specifically version of KSP and your plugin, plus [PLUGIN] tag.)

[marko dash]

what happens when two SOIs collide? could you use gravity and a small SOI on a part for docking?

like i said in the magnetic coupler thread

would it be possible to add gravity to a part? if you could to that within a small radius and use a strut or something to hold it clear of your own ships reference point could you use it to hold other ships, or if possible just other identical parts?

[Blinkin]

Let e preface what I am about to say by mentioning I am on .14.0 since stupid ESET does NOT let me patch (I\'ve excepted pretty much every .ece, including the ones in pather_data and still no dice), so that might be why, but I am having issues wit working these quantum singularities...

I have this issue too and I wondered why ESET didn\'t logged anything about it.

Reason: it\'s isn\'t ESET.

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/forum/index.php?topic=8845.0

[Lazurkri]

This still being worked on or....?

[The_Duck]

Not at the moment, no. I\'ve split off the only part of it that was in halfway decent shape as the part gravity plugin.

[Lazurkri]

Damn, I was hoping to set up a Wormhole in a easy-to-reach orbit above the KSP and set up another above the Mun, and funnel supplies in to a spacedock, using that orbital construction plugin.

Or set up one 5KM away from the KSP on the ground and do much the same thing, only with ground vehicles; be....interesting for the Kerbals in the buggy when they come out above the Mun, but, meh, they\'ve been through worse.

[Willbl3pic]

The black holes won\'t appear in the part pallete.

[TheRoland]

I was going to take a look at updating this (since there\'s better rails mechanisms now) but can\'t seem to open the zip or sources; windows says they\'re invalid. Any help?