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[1.2.2] Netherdyne Mass Driver Mod- Version 1.3.2 is now LIVE!


Northstar1989

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A little practical experience might be helpful, no offense...

Still, the source code is freely available (it's linked on the front post). You're free to take a look at it and try and make heads or tails of it if you can. My understanding of programming is, to say the least, minimal. :(

Still hoping AaronLS will be willing to help work on this project, though... I assume you'd be fine working with him if he does join up?

Regards,

Northstar

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A little practical experience might be helpful, no offense...

Still, the source code is freely available (it's linked on the front post). You're free to take a look at it and try and make heads or tails of it if you can. My understanding of programming is, to say the least, minimal. :(

Still hoping AaronLS will be willing to help work on this project, though... I assume you'd be fine working with him if he does join up?

Regards,

Northstar

Totes. =D

What would you like me to work on first?

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Totes. =D

What would you like me to work on first?

See what you understand of the source-code, and I'm sure ideas will present themselves from there. Right now I'd mostly just like you to familiarize yourself with the code and the intricacies of how it works...

Regards,

Northstar

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  • 7 months later...
  • 2 months later...
On Saturday, May 14, 2016 at 11:15 PM, Zombienoms said:

So this sounds cool. Any chance of it coming to 1.1?

I think it already works in 1.1, I just haven't had opportunity to test it.  Give it a try and see!  If not, I'd love somebody with a bit of programming experience giving me a hand updating it for 1.1 !   :)

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@FreeThinker Awesome!  I'll give it a try sometime when I need a longer break from medical school applications...

You should probably give the mod a try yourself.  Mass drivers are pretty cool and have some sweet uses in setting up a long-term ISRU infrastructure on airless planets or moons.  For best results, I suggest after confirming that the mass driver works on the ground on Kerbin sending up a bunch of RocketParts to the Mun or Minmus in Extraplanetary Launchpads and building a giant mass-driver there right on the ground...

The easiest such Mass Driver to construct would simply be vertically-oriented and held up with launch-clamps (which you can build off-planet with Extraplanetary Launchpads) that the test-rockets wheeled beneath from the side (ideally, you'd build a sort of tractor-trailer with Kerbal Attachment System to get it there) to position for launch.  But if you can build a horizontal mass-driver and come up with a reliable system to position cargo at the loading-end, you can build some very long mass-drivers that provide most of the impulse to get cargo to a low Munar/Minmus orbit... (with a vertical setup, you have to settle either for a shorter and less powerful mass driver, or for launching to a suborbital trajectory with a high Apoapsis and *then* circularizing, which is a less fuel-efficient way to reach high orbits than heading to a low orbit and then raising it...)

 

Regards,

Northstar

Edited by Northstar1989
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  • 3 months later...
On Fri Oct 28 2016 at 2:52 PM, dunebugmi said:

Has anybody tried this in KSP 1.2?  Does it still work?  

I think I tried it in 1.0 and it still worked, but maybe needed some changes to the attachment point vectors.

FreeThinker released a recompile for 1.1.3 for me, but we need one for 1.2.x

https://spacedock.info/mod/890/Netherdyne Mass Driver Mod

If you go prod him for me (I asked him about it a while ago, and never heard back from him) he might be convinced to do a 1.2.x recompile.  Sadly I don't have the skills to do a recompile myself- the limits of my skills are doing research on real world science and things like part config editing to try and match it...

Alternatively, if you have the skills, you're free to take the version from that link and recompile for 1.2.x

 

Regards,

Northstar

Edited by Northstar1989
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7 hours ago, Northstar1989 said:

Great!  Thanks FreeThinker!

Playing with this build now, and it no longer seems to work as advertised - for a start the colliders are not donut shaped so nothing can pass through the middle.

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21 minutes ago, illectro said:

Playing with this build now, and it no longer seems to work as advertised - for a start the colliders are not donut shaped so nothing can pass through the middle.

How are you trying to pass through the center?  Are you using the Mass Driver's context menu to activate it and accelerate a *seperated* craft through?

Colliders don't normally change between updates, so I would be surprised if they were really the issue...  Will test myself to try and determine the source of the problem...

 

Regards,

Northstar

 

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@Northstar1989 Perhaps he was expecting the functionality created by @AaronLS version, which appears technically superior

On 9-8-2015 at 0:39 AM, AaronLS said:

Hey Svm, thanks for the encouragement. Hopefully this will live up to your expectations. It's pretty rough around the edges as I've been involved in other things and haven't had time to work on this. I've made a short video on its operation since its quite different. Pretty much rewrote all of the code.

I created a ring that acts as a magnetic docking port. It will pull a nearby vessel, and when the vessel intersects it will become "docked". It's a little bit unrealistic in the way it operates currently. The previous version was a little bit risky as you'd get your vessel in position but it'd just be floating there and you'd quickly have to fire the magnets before it floated out of alignment. This solves that problem by allowing you to lock your vessel in place, and the Magnetic Ring Controller allows you to automate the process of decoupling and firing the magnets.

If I can find time to add some polish to this and get it up to production quality, I'll probably start a new thread for it since I can't edit the root of this one.

The main thing I'm not happy about is the docking ring will not apply torque to align the vessel. Some of the math regarding rotation is new to me and haven't had time to get up to speed. Looks like things have evolved beyond just being simple matrix math since I haven't done 3D in several years. I also want to making the docking ring more intelligent, and have it auto-reduce power as the vessel gets closer, to nullify the violent oscillations and hard docking.

Video:

Download from GitHub: https://github.com/AaronLS/KerbalMagnetMod/releases/tag/v00.01-alpha

 
 

I only updated the version that was reference on the OP

Edited by FreeThinker
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This keeps on appearing in the debug console. I use KSP 1.1.3.

[Exception]: TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'Vector3d' from assembly 'Assembly-CSharp, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null'.

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4 hours ago, illectro said:

This is how it behaves for me - no objects want to enter the core, even when I have no other mods installed.

I didn't watch the livestream, but did you try placing the projectile below the ring? The edited video only shows you placing it on top.

Edited by rspeed
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53 minutes ago, FreeThinker said:

seems Scot Manly was so kind to test the mod and teach us something in the process (unfortunately he used KSP 1.1.3)

 

Nah I tried it on 1.1.3 at the start of the stream because my pre-stream testing on 1.2.2 looked broken, but you'll see I switched to 1.2.2 when I showed that the mod behaviour was the same.

28 minutes ago, rspeed said:

I didn't watch the livestream, but did you try placing the projectile below the ring? The edited video only shows you placing it on top.

Not on the livestream but if the projectile is below the ring it smashes into the ring when fired.

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1 minute ago, illectro said:

Not on the livestream but if the projectile is below the ring it smashes into the ring when fired.

Yeah, I'm looking into this now. I imported the .mu into Blender to take a look at the collider and I think I found the problem. It appears that no colliders were created manually, so Unity defaulted to creating duplicate meshes as colliders. That's a problem for the three rings, since they're concave, and colliders in KSP have to be convex. I'm guessing that results in their colliders essentially being discs, which would explain exactly what you're seeing. I'm gonna do a bit of tweaking and give it a proper collider to see what happens.

As for why this would suddenly break, my only guess is that KSP used to ignore concave colliders, and at some point it started "fixing" them.

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