[1.0.4] Endurance (from Interstellar) [DISCONTINUED]

[xxhansonmaxx]

here is the lazarus pod in game

http://i.imgur.com/WpaPqbN.png

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1x26y7skzjp4uaj/AABIdEjyl5rdidR-VmmFvMJwa?dl=0 (Really buggy, I have no clue how the config attachment points and unity work lol) - includes a flag made by sevgonlernassau on reddit!

here are the source files if u would like to implement it better

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a6noneu4ii8q3mw/lazayeahyeah.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q6g8drdm8g9jrkq/lazaruslander.blend?dl=0

[L4rg3Singularity]

here is the lazarus pod in game

http://i.imgur.com/saBOB1d.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/WpaPqbN.png

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1x26y7skzjp4uaj/AABIdEjyl5rdidR-VmmFvMJwa?dl=0 (Really buggy, I have no clue how the config attachment points and unity work lol) - includes a flag made by sevgonlernassau on reddit!

here are the source files if u would like to implement it better

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a6noneu4ii8q3mw/lazayeahyeah.png?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q6g8drdm8g9jrkq/lazaruslander.blend?dl=0

Ermahgerd

[Shryq]

Really buggy, I have no clue how the config attachment points and unity work lol

I'd suggest learning how to do it. Really satisfying to get something working right. Even addicting I might say.

Easiest way I've found to make attach nodes, you make a empty in blender, point the Z direction where ever you want your node to point, give it a name. And then put this in the code (take out the < and > as well as the description):

NODE
{
name = <completely irrelevant except for some complex part modules>
transform = <The name of the empty in UNITY, doesn't matter what it was in blender, as long as it matches unity>
size = <determines the radius of the node snap in the VAB, and also the visual circle.>
method = FIXED_JOINT //don't change that
}

Make as many as you need, just copy that exact same format for ever node.

This is what the ranger body looks like in unity, mostly a bunch of empties (also called transforms):

http://i.imgur.com/8uzENHv.png

Does it need legs or anything else? If you wanna learn I'd be happy to help.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Shryq

[Gaalidas]

Alright, this is really weird. I don't usually have these kinds of issues, honest. So, the ranger looks great... but something not right on my end. the main hull is scaled a bit smaller than the rest of the parts, and the attach nodes are floating in the air like they think the hull is still some other size. On top of that, most the parts are still scaled to match the nodes, except for a few specific parts. For instance, the middle part of the wings seems to fit in precisely the right spot, but the side wings float ahead of the spot they would normally sit. Finally, the craft file seems to contain invalid parts. This is really not a normal occurrence for me.

[xxhansonmaxx]

i dont think it has legs, in the movie it just sits there

thanks for the help!

[L4rg3Singularity]

Is the ranger/lander compatible with FAR? I want to try airbraking like in the film.

[Shryq]

Alright, this is really weird. I don't usually have these kinds of issues, honest. So, the ranger looks great... but something not right on my end. the main hull is scaled a bit smaller than the rest of the parts, and the attach nodes are floating in the air like they think the hull is still some other size. On top of that, most the parts are still scaled to match the nodes, except for a few specific parts. For instance, the middle part of the wings seems to fit in precisely the right spot, but the side wings float ahead of the spot they would normally sit. Finally, the craft file seems to contain invalid parts. This is really not a normal occurrence for me.

Did you load the Ranger from the stock craft file? If so I may have forgotten to update that when I scaled the Ranger down the last time. If you're building it from individual parts check the log and let me know.

Is the ranger/lander compatible with FAR? I want to try airbraking like in the film.

Not currently. There's a bunch of weird .... I have to do to get it working. I decided It would probably just be easier to wait until I got the new model and nose control surface working, that would gives us a better aero profile, a control surface (duh) and hopefully It doesn't fly quite so much like a brick. The thing is a body-lift craft, so I wanna see if I can get that working to some effect before I start messing with turning parts into wings that aren't really supposed to be wings.

Judging by the shape of the cowling over the nose, I looks like it would pivot about 3 degrees upwards, so then I assume 3 degrees downwards. On such a large control surface that should give a good amount of control, especially in FAR, where most of my control surfaces are limited to 5 degrees, and they're much smaller.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Shryq
I accidentaly a word.

[L4rg3Singularity]

Did you load the Ranger from the stock craft file? If so I may have forgotten to update that when I scaled the Ranger down the last time. If you're building it from individual parts check the log and let me know.

Not currently. There's a bunch of weird .... I have to do to get it working. I decided It would probably just be easier to wait until I got the new model and nose control surface working, that would gives us a better aero profile, a control surface (duh) and hopefully It doesn't fly quite so much like a brick. The thing is a body-lift craft, so I wanna see if I can get that working to some effect before I start messing with turning parts into wings that aren't really supposed to be wings.

http://i.imgur.com/wBEF1AS.png

Judging by the shape of the cowling over the nose, I looks like it would pivot about 3 degrees upwards, so then I assume 3 degrees downwards. On such a large control surface that should give a good amount of control, especially in FAR, when most of control surfaces are limited to 5 degrees, and they're much smaller.

We need air intakes at the end of the wings. The feedback modules at the end of the wing use the hydrogen in the atmosphere to fuel mono propellent, which fuels the vtol engines. Cool huh?

Edited February 19, 2015 by L4rg3Singularity

[Shryq]

We need air intakes at the end of the wings. Which you use to fuel mono propellent as those feedback modules use the hydrogen in the atmosphere to fuel mono propellent, which fuels the vtol engines. Cool huh?

That's... Totally doable, and very cool. Did you get that from the movie or just an idea you had?

And are you saying restock monoprop, or just use air to power the Vtol and RCS in the atmosphere?

[L4rg3Singularity]

That's from the movie, when Cooper attempts to do an airbrake in millers planet. And using the air to power the vtol and the rcs.

- - - Updated - - -

"Should I disable the feedback?"

-Case

"No, I need to fuel the air"

-Cooper

Edited February 19, 2015 by L4rg3Singularity

[billbobjebkirk]

"Should I disable the feedback?"

-Case

"No, I need to fuel the air"

-Cooper

He said "feel the air". Still a good concept though.

EDIT: as in, feel what the Ranger was doing via the control feedback CASE was asking if he should disable.

Edited February 19, 2015 by billbobjebkirk

[Shryq]

Ah. Now that you say that I totally remember. I assumed it meant like feedback into the stick/pedals right?

I'm a tad disappointed XD That was such a cool idea.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Shryq

[L4rg3Singularity]

Ah. Now that you say that I totally remember. I assumed it meant like feedback into the stick/pedals right?

I'm a tad disappointed XD That was such a cool idea.

Man! That sucked D:

But we have to make that a sandbox mode only part!

[xxhansonmaxx]

Yes! I made it flyable! I'm planning to make this into a science lab, add RCS and fix the airlock

[L4rg3Singularity]

There's a docking port on the bottom btw. You can see it in action during the detach scene

[Shryq]

Man! That sucked D:

But we have to make that a sandbox mode only part!

Actually check this out, snippet from the interstellar wiki:

"The Ranger utilizes twin linear aerospike, hybrid plasma engines, capable of achieving high thrust while maintaining very high fuel efficiency. Aerospike rocket engine exhaust is immediately ionized into plasma and magnetically accelerated to very high velocities, vastly increasing fuel efficiency. This enables the Ranger to achieve orbit, accelerate to escape velocity, and travel to other planets, requiring little to no rocket staging. If available, local atmospheric oxygen is collected and burned during atmospheric flight, saving its on board oxidizer for very high altitudes and orbital maneuvering."

So you may have been onto something. Cool. We could have the chemical engines using Lf/Ox/electric, and the plasma just using lf+electric. Then it could generate and store Ox from the atmosphere. Retaining the stupid levels of efficiency, but giving a challenge to achieve that? Also what do the engines look llike when they're on the planet?

There's a docking port on the bottom btw. You can see it in action during the detach scene

"the forward section is a cockpit that sports four crew seats, two benches for four additional passengers, four hibernation tanks, and supplies. The aft compartment functions as an airlock. Inside the airlock are two ports (one aft, one down) that can dock with other spacecraft."

Yup. I can rather easily make a docking port for the bottom. The only thing is I don't know how exactly it works. I can take some artistic liberty, but if anyone knows better than that half second we see it in the movie, speak now or forever hold your peace D:

Edited February 19, 2015 by Shryq

[L4rg3Singularity]

Actually check this out, snippet from the interstellar wiki:

"The Ranger utilizes twin linear aerospike, hybrid plasma engines, capable of achieving high thrust while maintaining very high fuel efficiency. Aerospike rocket engine exhaust is immediately ionized into plasma and magnetically accelerated to very high velocities, vastly increasing fuel efficiency. This enables the Ranger to achieve orbit, accelerate to escape velocity, and travel to other planets, requiring little to no rocket staging. If available, local atmospheric oxygen is collected and burned during atmospheric flight, saving its on board oxidizer for very high altitudes and orbital maneuvering."

So you may have been onto something. Cool. We could have the chemical engines using Lf/Ox/electric, and the plasma just using lf+electric. Then it could generate and store Ox from the atmosphere. Retaining the stupid levels of efficiency, but giving a challenge to achieve that? Also what do the engines look llike when they're on the planet?

We could collect oxygen using the intake which adds more oxygen to the TAC life support mod.

[Gaalidas]

Did you load the Ranger from the stock craft file? If so I may have forgotten to update that when I scaled the Ranger down the last time. If you're building it from individual parts check the log and let me know.

that craft file keeps telling me it has found invalid parts and cannot be loaded. I think I discovered my problem with that part though. So, what I was doing is just starting a new craft and grabbing the body part as my base part. the nodes are floating out of place, and the other parts appear to be unmatched in scale. It's like it's being rescaled after all the nodes are created.

I'm not done experimenting with this thing though. There could be a bad interaction with the replacement from a "mesh" parameter to the "MODEL" node I had to do in order to set up texture sharing between the parts. I can't afford to have anything loading the same large texture for multiple parts like that if I want KSP to run smoothly.

[benjee10]

There is a known issue with the "MODEL" module which causes scaling bugs like that if the rescale factor is not 1. Firstly it scales the model wrong on loading, and secondly it will then rescale the model again upon reverting or quick loading. The only way I found of fixing it was to manually rescale in Unity.

[Mekan1k]

We need air intakes at the end of the wings. The feedback modules at the end of the wing use the hydrogen in the atmosphere to fuel mono propellent, which fuels the vtol engines. Cool huh?

Thing is, the odd-shaped protrusion underneath the vehicle (y'all know the one I'm talking about) is perfect for a subsonic air intake or flat-bottom super-hypersonic air scoop.

[Gaalidas]

There is a known issue with the "MODEL" module which causes scaling bugs like that if the rescale factor is not 1. Firstly it scales the model wrong on loading, and secondly it will then rescale the model again upon reverting or quick loading. The only way I found of fixing it was to manually rescale in Unity.

In which case the config must be altered to not do any extra scaling if it's already scaled in the first place. I know there are ways to fix the scaling issue when using "MODEL" nodes. I believe it involves making use of the scale parameter inside the node, which calls for three dimensions of scale. I'm looking around my damedata directory for examples now.

I've seen a few cases where "scale" is removed from the part level, and instead defined inside the "MODEL" node to redefine the scale of the part, while leaving rescaleFactor at 1. That might be the ticket.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Gaalidas

[benjee10]

You'll still run into issues because the scale factor is 0.7 instead of 1, which'll mess up the scaling of the root part upon reverting the flight. Without rescaling inside Unity I don't think there's much you can do about it.

[Gaalidas]

That's just the thing. Why should I need to fix this in the first place? I went looking for examples of a working way to deal with the issue and you'll never guess where I found it. That's right, it's here in the Endurance folder:

name = commandEndurance
module = Part
author = benjee10

MODEL
{
    model = Endurance/Parts/ENDURANCE/commandEndurance
    scale = 1, 1, 1
}
rescaleFactor = 0.9

Notice the rescale factor is not 1, and yet so far no complaints about it resizing itself when reverting. My point with all this is that if the other two crafts of this mod are all sharing textures in a rather efficient manner, and the ranger has to load a separate large texture that is exactly the same for each part, then there's something that needs to be addressed. I'm trying to make it work in the meantime for my local copy, but in the end the developers of this mod need to decide if they're going to use an efficient way of handling models and textures or not, and not have a whole third of their project bogging the user's system down with redundant textures when the rest is more optimized. And before you say it, yes I know the endurance itself has a separate texture for each part... I can excuse that because it's such a large and awesome craft, and at least the texture isn't exactly the same for each part.

My hope is that I'm not coming off as the rear end of a donkey here. I'm just speaking up for the voiceless masses that don't have the experience with modifying configs or texture formats for performance reasons.

[benjee10]

The rescale bug doesn't manifest itself in the Endurance because in the stock craft the root part is not the ring itself but the docking port on the front (or at least it should be - I rebuilt the stock craft for the latest release and can't remember whether or not I used the root tool on it)

I think Shryq is looking to optimize the Ranger for the next update - I know he said he was working on getting all the RCS blocks being just one part with the main body, so that's three parts down, and I'm sure it would easy to make the landing legs share their textures. I totally appreciate what you're saying but keep in mind that Shryq and I are effectively working separately (i.e. he has all the Blender and Unity files for the Ranger and I do not) and are making this mod in our free time - it's difficult to optimize everything and I remember it took me a long time to work out all the ins and outs of the RescaleFactor system to ensure everything shared textures properly. Once you get something working it's pretty disheartening to then optimize it and then load up the parts in KSP and all the scales be wrong and the nodes in the wrong places.

Re the shovel nose control surface, I can't actually see any reference to this in the movie. If you do implement it I'd suggest only giving it a few degrees of pitch - such a large surface moving about rapidly would look silly IMO.

[Gaalidas]

yeah, well, I'm out of ideas here. I tried adding the "scale = 1, 1, 1" in the node, commenting out the scale parameter outside of the node, and leaving rescaleFactor alone, and all I got was what I had in the first place. I'm done trying to figure this out now. I'm just not too sure what the real problem here is. There are countless mods out there that can use mesh or model parameters interchangeably without issue either way, and which use all sorts of scaling values. This ranger body is a real bugger. We'll just leave it in the designer's hands then... and hope for a miracle.

Edited February 19, 2015 by Gaalidas