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Real Airplanes -- Piston engines with AJE (and more) [Update 3/27/15]

Genius Evil

By Genius Evil
in KSP1 Mod Development

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Genius Evil

Genius Evil

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This mod is intended to add parts for making realistic planes with FAR and AJE. Contains realistic piston engines, rocketplane engines, and miscellaneous aircraft parts.

Realistic Piston Engines.

Advanced Jet Engines (AJE) currently uses rescaled Firespitter models to represent its piston engines. The Firespitter engines are nice models, but they aren't exactly realistic. These models, however, are:

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Features

  • Tweakable textures & cowl styles.
  • Animated cowl flaps.
  • Accurately represents all 28 piston engines in AJE -- down to the number of cylinders.
  • Only takes up ~5MB on disk.
  • Textures are reused as Procedural Part and Procedural Wing textures.
  • Constructs engines from many rescaled simpler models (prop blades, spinner, cylinder, cowl, etc.) to minimize memory footprint by reusing models; also means new engines are simple to add.

Miscellaneous Airplane Parts.

kTqmjJ1h.png

Realistic rocketplane engines --

  • HWK 109-509 (A1, A2, and B1 variants), which powered the ME-163
  • XLR-11 (5 and 13 variants), which powered the Bell X-1
  • XLR-99, which powered the X-15 (Current model is a placeholder)
  • Spectre, British design intended for the SR.53

WIP P-51 style bubble cockpit. Cannot currently EVA or IVA.

Download here.

Installation instructions in zip and on download page.

Note: Requires Firespitter.dll and AJE. (Get them here and here)

Realfuels is recommended, but not essential.

Future Plans

  • Normal maps for procedural fuel tank textures -- rivets, seams & greebles. Done!
  • Ditto for procedural wings.
  • Procedural fuselages with the PwingManipulator module. This might not work; I haven't looked into it yet. Not currently possible.
  • Surface mountable cockpits. In progress!
  • Landing gear.
  • Greebles -- exhaust ports, antennas, etc.
  • Jet and rocket engine models. Partially done!

Changelog

[LIST]
[*]v0.14 -- Added black and white colors, added rocket engines (Walter HWK, XLR11, XLR99, Spectre), added WIP p-51 bubble cockpit. Engine Fuel type now automatically configured for RealFuels if it is installed.
[*]v0.13 -- Fixed drag issue with inline engines;
         Added normal maps for procedural parts;
         Changed folder structure.
[*]v0.12 -- added configs to scale engines to stock part sizes
[*]v0.11 -- added configs for use without RealFuels
[*]v0.1 -- Initial release
[/LIST]

Models by Genius Evil.

Realistic engine configs by Nathankell & Camlost.

Uses textures by nli2work (Prop disk) and Snjo (Metal texture).

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Edited by Genius Evil
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DaMichel

DaMichel

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Observations:

* Apparently makes my plane yaw unstable. Tried to launch with Separatrons and 0 Throttle. Still veers off to the side. Not enough rudder authority to compensate. Works fine if i just remove the prop although the missing mass makes the plane pitch unstable.

* Tried a few engines. And i got flame out message on some of them. Possibly this happens after Revert to Runway.

* Engines with fuselage cover are just slightly too large to match stock parts.

Tested with current FAR dev version and AJE 2.0.2.

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bs1110101

bs1110101

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This looks wonderful, how can i use it without AJE or with AJE but not RealFuels?

Edit: Saw RealFuels not being a dependency anymore, downloaded it, not working at all, none of the effects of it are showing up at all, no idea why.

Edit 2: Something went totally wrong, textures not loading, mass glitchyness, no idea why, fortunately, that was a copy of my ksp install, and now is being deleted. I'd like to be more help tracking down the bugs, but it was just not working in the slightest bit, nothing from AJE or this mod was showing up at all.

Edited by bs1110101
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Monkthespy

Monkthespy

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Observations:

* Apparently makes my plane yaw unstable. Tried to launch with Separatrons and 0 Throttle. Still veers off to the side. Not enough rudder authority to compensate. Works fine if i just remove the prop although the missing mass makes the plane pitch unstable.

* Tried a few engines. And i got flame out message on some of them. Possibly this happens after Revert to Runway.

* Engines with fuselage cover are just slightly too large to match stock parts.

Tested with current FAR dev version and AJE 2.0.2.

Pretty sure the yawing is intended, props have a good bit of torque to them, and its why in real life you have to apply rudder constantly on stuff like take off. If you already know this, I guess you mean its waaay too much.

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Genius Evil

Genius Evil

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Damichael --

I haven't noticed any yaw instability when testing them on my planes. Is the propeller disk touching the ground? It has a rotating collider. Which engine are you using? I haven't tested every single one of them; one may have a thrustTransform pointing the wrong direction.

I believe the flame-outs are an AJE issue. Do they occur when you start the engine at 0% throttle?

The engines are scaled to be the size of their real-life counterparts. They are intended to be used with procedural parts. If you want to make them fit stock parts, you can set the rescaleFactors to 0.625.

bs1110101 --

Those bugs occur because the engines are set to use AvGas, a Realfuels resource. I had them happen when I was testing the engines on an install without RealFuels. I can upload a set of configs set for LiquidFuel; it should only take a few seconds. You can use those with AJE and not RealFuels, but if you want to use them without either you will have to manually set the engine thrusts. I would recommend something like 0.03-0.05kN times the engine horsepower rating if you're not using FAR.

Wow! I didn't think this would be so popular. I was expecting maybe one comment! Thanks everyone.

I will try to post progress updates every day or so. I'm going to take a look at making a Pwing-based fuselage later today and tomorrow.

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camlost

camlost

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Maybe consider publishing on KerbalStuff, I think a lot of players read it instead of forum. Also post links for dependencies. Cheers.

Edit: The KAX.cfg and FS.cfg are old, and why are they included?

Edited by camlost
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Genius Evil

Genius Evil

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Good ideas camlost, I'll do that.

I started working on the mod before 0.90 came out, and never updated the install it was on. I checked to make sure it worked with 0.90, but didn't look into the new AJE folder. The cfgs are included to overwrite the existing ones and remove the duplicate engines that would be created by them. The engines previously in those cfgs are in the Parts/Props folder.

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bs1110101

bs1110101

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I can upload a set of configs set for LiquidFuel; it should only take a few seconds..

Great, i'm going to start using AJE, i like realism, though RealFuels bugs me because of all the faffing about with configs, and i didn't know AJE stopped having RealFuels as a dependency.

Also, why only radial engines so far? Are inline engines waiting for a better heat system? I'd like something like that a lot, even if it was just like interstellar's, but separate and with a bit of solar heating.

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bs1110101

bs1110101

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I've finally got this mod working (dx11 and AJE not working together), the problem now being that all the engines seem to be around 20% too big. I'd think this was intentional, but they all seem to be the same size, and not want to fit any of the cockpits.

Oa83qf2.png

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Genius Evil

Genius Evil

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That is intentional. The engines are scaled to the sizes of their real-life counterparts. They are intended to be used with Procedural Parts. If you want to use them with stock parts, you can set the rescaleFactor on the engines you want to 0.625. I may release a version scaled for that size, since several people want it.

EDIT: Rescaled configs released.

Edited by Genius Evil
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Beetlecat

Beetlecat

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That is intentional. The engines are scaled to the sizes of their real-life counterparts. They are intended to be used with Procedural Parts. If you want to use them with stock parts, you can set the rescaleFactor on the engines you want to 0.625. I may release a version scaled for that size, since several people want it.

EDIT: Rescaled configs released.

This are all quite lovely! Now I just have to decide if this, KAX, and Retro-Future are too much to have all at once. ;)

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spike52656

spike52656

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Beautiful. I was waiting for something like this.

I also have a question: all of the engines are set to only have 5 thrust. Is this normal? Am I forgetting something?

EDIT: Nevermind, I am being an idiot as usual, I forgot to install FAR.

Edited by spike52656
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advice_dawgg

advice_dawgg

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I never really understood why you would want to build "boring" prop planes, as I used to go strait for the biggest meanest high powered cutting edge jet engine to make craft.

I've found it to be alot of fun getting it right and flying the old war bird prop planes. This pack makes them alot more ascetically pleasing to boot.

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DisarmingBaton5

DisarmingBaton5

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That's beautiful.

Inline engines are in the mod. They are currently only represented by propellers though -- no fancy tweakable cowls yet.

If/When fancy tweakable cowls are released, how tweakable/fancy will they be? Will they be a selection of shapes, or one shape with variable length, or something else?

Edit: Also, how are you changing the paint?

Edit2: Nevermind, I was being an idiot and didn't have Firespitter.dll installed :P

Edited by DisarmingBaton5
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Genius Evil

Genius Evil

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Hey, I'm back! Sorry for not posting anything sooner.

Progress update: I got a bit burnt out from pushing to get the mod done over winter break. That + start of new semester meant that not much got done in January.

The drag issue with the inline engines is nearing resolution. It turns out that having more than two meshes in the same space completely breaks FAR drag modelling (?!). Now that I actually know what the issue is, I have a couple of ways to fix it. Going through and fixing this in all the inline engines may take some time -- hopefully not too long though.

I also started working on normal maps for procedural fuel tanks. The maps might be released at the same time as the drag fixes.

@DisarmingBaton5

I'm not sure exactly how inline cowls will work. They will probably have a choice of cowl shape, and a choice of air scoop shape. The inline cowl will probably be a separate part from the engine, since sometimes an inline engine needs to go on a cylindrical body.

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