[1.0.2] B9 Aerospace | Procedural Parts 0.40 | Updated 09.06.15

[camlost]

Tested with the same craft as above, indeed the bug's fixed. Don't know how to thank you now. XD

[DaMichel]

Yeah this is great to read. Seriously. Great work!

But with the new version i have a little problem. The center of mass moves in the opposite direction of sweep. So backward swept wings put the mass way forward. I'm actually not sure if this has been an issue before or if it occured with 0.15.

One more thing: DumpInteractionData dumps something like WP | ID -1392246 | T: 139.0 | DumpInteractionData | FAR module not found, report failed.

But FAR is clearly working fine and the wing part got the FAR module with the correct geometric data AFAIK.

[bac9]

Yeah this is great to read. Seriously. Great work!

But with the new version i have a little problem. The center of mass moves in the opposite direction of sweep. So backward swept wings put the mass way forward. I'm actually not sure if this has been an issue before or if it occured with 0.15.

One more thing: DumpInteractionData dumps something like WP | ID -1392246 | T: 139.0 | DumpInteractionData | FAR module not found, report failed.

But FAR is clearly working fine and the wing part got the FAR module with the correct geometric data AFAIK.

I'll look into CoM issue, thanks. As about the report, at the moment it only works on procedural wings, not control surfaces.

[Rayder]

The center of mass moves in the opposite direction of sweep. So backward swept wings put the mass way forward. I'm actually not sure if this has been an issue before or if it occured with 0.15.

I was able to observe this as well. Sweeping the wings right back pushed the Center of Mass slightly forward.

[DanBMan]

Is these a way to get the wings to reflect cost based off of their size? I think procedural fairings does something like this, although I looked in the .cfg file and could not find anything to suggest such. I was thinking someting like cost = mass (tonnes) * 1000. So a 2T wing would be 2000, whereas a .1 ton wing would be 100. Currently I just have a flat price of 2500 which I think is fair for wings but if anybody could figure out how to implement a scaled cost like it does for mass? (at least I am assuming mass scales with size). Great mod though, I just deleted most of the B9 wings (except the winglets with built in flaps, I love how they look!) and SPP wings as well, kept a few stock wings for nostalgia purposes though.

[bac9]

Version 0.16

https://bitbucket.org/bac9/b9_aerospace_plugins/downloads

• Wings support thickness of up to one meter from now on
  
• Removed leading and trailing edge multiplier property from wings
  
• Added leading edge root/tip width and trailing edge root/tip width properties, all four of them can be adjusted from zero to one meter, allowing you to set up vertically elongated edge cross sections, horizontally elongated edge cross sections and cross sections proportional to arbitrary wing thickness values alike.
  
• Added collapsable categories parenting logical property groups (dimensions, materials, edges and so on) to the tweakable menu, making the selection and adjustment of numerous properties more manageable
  
• All tweakable properties are no longer initially open in the context menu, being hidden under categories
  
• Replaced all edge models with new ones, improving cross section polycounts and adding hard material edge that looks better under arbitrary thickness and edge width combinations resulting in stretching
  
• Reordered edge models: first type is circular, second type is biconvex (between sharp and circular in shape), third one is triangular, which makes a bit more sense (progression from smooth to sharp shapes instead of random order)
  
• Reordered and renamed some properties for convenience
  
• Added flat fill support (fifth material type) to edges
  
• Improved aerodynamic value calculation for wings, edges now properly contribute to the behaviour
  
• Improved aerodynamic value calculation for control surfaces, trailing edge widths are now taken into account, along with contributions of offset properties to taper ratio
  
• Internal fixes and refactoring in geometry handling, setup sequence and field updates
  
• Top and bottom surfaces of control surfaces and wings are collapsed into one mesh with a slight benefit to performance (separate material selection still available, shader based switching makes use of one mesh a non-issue)
  
• Slight improvements to text in alternative UI

Note:

This update can potentially make the crafts made with previous version of the mod unstable, due to changes in aerodynamic value calculations for FAR. Specifically, with wing and control surface edges now taken into account, you might see unexpected increase in lift from your wings, which has potential of, for example, shifting your center of lift a bit forward. Nothing catastrophic and nothing that can't be fixed with a bit of tweaking (using, for example, four new edge shape properties), but I figured you should know.

Edited January 16, 2015 by bac9

[kofeyh]

• Wings support thickness of up to one meter from now on
  
• Removed leading and trailing edge multiplier property from wings
  
• Added leading edge root/tip width and trailing edge root/tip width properties, all four of them can be adjusted from zero to one meter, allowing you to set up vertically elongated edge cross sections, horizontally elongated edge cross sections and cross sections proportional to arbitrary wing thickness values alike.
  

Fantastic, started a Buran build yesterday, and these were the features I missed the most; not having a thicker wing root potential. Buran is 5.5m wide, thus the wings disappeared a bit and I lamented not having a thicker chord. You seem to have solved that conundrum.

At present the maximum dimension (width of root/ tip) is 16 meters. Is this likely to be the limit going forward, or are you considering increasing potential span?

Right now there is (considerable) lag when modifying properties, but I prefer that to constant OOM crashing, editor takes a bit to get used to, but I think it's probably the least offensive option you could have chosen, given what appears to be a moderate degree of memory leak in the current release of KSP and Unity version used.

Edited January 16, 2015 by kofeyh

[bac9]

At present the maximum dimension (width of root/ tip) is 16 meters. Is this likely to be the limit going forward, or are you considering increasing potential span?

The current limits are likely to stay in place. The precision of tweakable sliders is limited: at any given increment step you can only push the range so far before the players lose any option of reliably hitting particular values (for example, 0.00-8.00 range with 0.25 increment makes is impossible to hit values like 0.50) because there are only so many pixels to click. I somewhat offset this with layered tweakables for the parameters with the biggest value sets (like semispan), but still, I will never introduce ranges like 0-64 meters or increments like 0.01, because they will impair some precise designs and selections rather than broaden the options. Another reason for limiting range is stuff like wing flex you should not entirely sidestep - I don't think it's fair to drop one 60m wing piece and call it a day, avoiding all potential challenges.

Right now there is (considerable) lag when modifying properties, but I prefer that to constant OOM crashing, editor takes a bit to get used to, but I think it's probably the least offensive option you could have chosen, given what appears to be a moderate degree of memory leak in the current release of KSP and Unity version used.

I'm not getting any lag, so that's interesting. There is an unavoidable delay before the movement of your mouse takes effect (the distance passed by your mouse must accumulate to at least the integer value of 1 in order to move a given parameter by one increment step - otherwise you it would've been possible to scroll through entire range of values in one tiny swipe, which is unusable), but I never encountered real slowdowns. What hardware, mods and part counts are you dealing with?

[kofeyh]

The current limits are likely to stay in place. The precision of tweakable sliders is limited: at any given increment step you can only push the range so far before the players lose any option of reliably hitting particular values (for example, 0.00-8.00 range with 0.25 increment makes is impossible to hit values like 0.50) because there are only so many pixels to click.

Good point.

I'm not getting any lag, so that's interesting.

Interesting is one way to put it; low part count (dozens, not hundreds) and I had quite bad lag, stutter until I selected another part. Moving the camera created multi-second delays as the view refreshed. I also had to wait several seconds, stretching out to 15 seconds at times, when attempting to select another part in the part list before it would release the editor.

As soon as the editor released it was fine. It felt like the part was updating every tick until I reset focus on something else. So it's highly plausible something else is interacting/ updating whilst editor is active; I am not sure, however that there are many other mods that would interact with the parts, beyond FAR.

I can attempt a process-of-elimination by shifting mods out in sequence to narrow cause, if of benefit.

Mod list here:

http://pastebin.com/jM85zSzj

[silentdeth]

This looks fantastic, I can't wait for a stable version to use in my Let's Play.

[Horus]

@silentdeth: it's already quite stable. bac9 done a lot of work so it become stable

[TeddyDD]

This mod is brilliant! I'm going to delete all stock wings when this will be released as stable final version

[fordskydog]

Holy bajeebus! I love you! I can't wait to use this mod. It is beautiful and so accommodating. Wow.

[*Aqua*]

There's a problem if you use DRE. Somehow it halves heat tolerance to 850°C rendering the wings useless for space planes.

There should be a MM script like this one:

@PART[B9_Aero_Wing_Procedural_Type?]:NEEDS[DeadlyReentry]
{
    @maxTemp *= 2
}

(I didn't test that.)

[RainDreamer]

There's a problem if you use DRE. Somehow it halves heat tolerance to 850°C rendering the wings useless for space planes.

There should be a MM script like this one:

@PART[B9_Aero_Wing_Procedural_Type?]:NEEDS[DeadlyReentry]
{
    @maxTemp *= 2
}

(I didn't test that.)

Was there a DRE-compatible version released? I was pretty sure that this haven't got a DRE-compatible updated yet, so I would expected things would burn up on re-entry, especially since they are without heat shields.

[*Aqua*]

One reason more to add DRE support.

I looked at the wing cfgs of the B9 mod how bac9 added heat shields to wings and I came up with this script:

[@PART[B9_Aero_Wing_Procedural_TypeA]:FOR[B9_Aerospace]:NEEDS[DeadlyReentry] {
    @maxTemp = 1700
    MODULE {
        name = ModuleHeatShield
        direction = 0, 0, 0
        reflective = 0.25
    }
}
[@PART[B9_Aero_Wing_Procedural_TypeB]:FOR[B9_Aerospace]:NEEDS[DeadlyReentry] {
    @maxTemp = 1700
    MODULE {
        name = ModuleHeatShield
        direction = 0, 0, 0
        reflective = 0.25
    }
}
[@PART[B9_Aero_Wing_Procedural_TypeC]:FOR[B9_Aerospace]:NEEDS[DeadlyReentry] {
    @maxTemp = 1700
    MODULE {
        name = ModuleHeatShield
        direction = 0, 0, 0
        reflective = 0.25
    }
}

Credits go to bac9. I just copied what he wrote.

[RainDreamer]

Does direction = 0,0,0 means a 360 degre heatshield coverage? O-o

Pretty sure bac9 is looking for a way to avoid it.

[*Aqua*]

According to the code of DRE direction magnitude of 0 indicates 360° coverage. But I'm not sure what direction exactly represents. Does it indicate from which direction the heat shield works best (= lowest heat, most ablation)?

It would be cool if the material you've choosen have an impact on heat tolerance. But I'm not sure if it could be easily done.

[bac9]

Single-vector config currently used by DRE makes it impossible to accurately represent shielding of separately configured top, bottom, leading and trailing sides of the wing. Ideally we need a way to define shielding per 6 major directions or to define an array of vectors and shielding multipliers of arbitrary length, but there is nothing like that supported in DRE at the moment. I'll have to postpone it's support for now.

[*Aqua*]

DRE only calculates heat dissipation if a heat shield faces the shock front (which is ahead in the direction of the flight path). It is also aware of angled heat shields and let's them dissipate less heat. Upside down heat shields won't dissipate any heat. And the most important part: It will act on every heat shield you put into a part. So there could be multiple ones.

You'll only need to add a ModuleHeatShield for every side. The direction property tells DRE how it is orientated.

[bac9]

DRE only calculates heat dissipation if a heat shield faces the shock front (which is ahead in the direction of the flight path). It is also aware of angled heat shields and let's them dissipate less heat. Upside down heat shields won't dissipate any heat. And the most important part: It will act on every heat shield you put into a part. So there could be multiple ones.

You'll only need to add a ModuleHeatShield for every side. The direction property tells DRE how it is orientated.

From what I remember, temperature is added once per every module so multiple modules have a chance of overheating the part much faster unless heat is added just from the dot product between shock front vector and config vector, with no additional sources capable of overlapping. I'll check it out again though.

Edited January 18, 2015 by bac9

[AngelLestat]

one question, maybe off topic..

How I remove all the stock wings and aero parts from the game?

I already delete all models and parts in gamedata/squad/aero with one part exception (tail)

But when I enter in the game all those parts are still there. And I can use them..

First I thought that maybe FAR mod was causing this, but I dont see any model file there.

I use many others mods but I still can not find what is causing this.

How do you do it?

I just want to use procedural wings.. that is one of the main reasons dont you?

Edited January 18, 2015 by AngelLestat

[fordskydog]

Do the numbers in the sliders correspond to any units? like are they meters? Always thought some kind of scaling tool with units would be nice. Since the game is in meters...

[bac9]

Do the numbers in the sliders correspond to any units? like are they meters? Always thought some kind of scaling tool with units would be nice. Since the game is in meters...

Everything is in meters.

[blowfish]

one question, maybe off topic..

How I remove all the stock wings and aero parts from the game?

I already delete all models and parts in gamedata/squad/aero with one part exception (tail)

But when I enter in the game all those parts are still there. And I can use them..

First I thought that maybe FAR mod was causing this, but I dont see any model file there.

I use many others mods but I still can not find what is causing this.

How do you do it?

I just want to use procedural wings.. that is one of the main reasons dont you?

More are in actually in Squad/SPP/Wings (or something like that)