I've been playing around with orbiter for approximately 6 years now. I've done so quietly, not really getting involved in the community, but constantly reading up on it, and learning, tweaking my skills. I've reached the point now where I can take the space shuttle into orbit with a realistic payload, and fly a relatively realistic mission. One of the things that has helped me massively is the people who have developed all the great MFDs out there (I'm an addon junkie, I admit it). Lately, I've really been enjoying Ummu and UCGO, but have noticed there's not a lot of options for space station construction using ummu. I'd really like to *build* a ummu compatible space station, give it consumables missions, really have some fun with it. So here's my idea, and why I'm weighing in.
It occurred to me that since I have a significant amount of programming experience, I probably could make a module without too much difficulty (new API learning curve not withstanding) to allow individual ships to be docked, converted to attached, and allow ummus to be "shared" between them, using some parent vessel to house the ummus. Attaching would mean that the craft would have a more predictable superstructure behavior, allowing one vessel to be the "controller" vessel which maintains current mass and cg for the station. So after about 2 hours of perusing the sdk docs, I have come up with the following concept for fully ucgo/ummu compatible station modules (laugh if you must, but I haven't found it, and I'd like to have it to play with, and maybe OFSS4 can use it?)
Design concepts:
This is obviously just a thought, and I might be biting off more than I can chew. I'm not really a god modeller, so if I could find someone to make the various model meshes, that'd be extremely appreciated. I do believe I can write the code on this without too much trouble. I've considered making addons a couple of times before, but always the thought of having to write code for in atmosphere operations has turned me away. This however would be something that I could make with my limited understanding of physics (center of gravity and moments of force are just within what I understand).
Looking for any comments, suggestions, or modelling help!
It occurred to me that since I have a significant amount of programming experience, I probably could make a module without too much difficulty (new API learning curve not withstanding) to allow individual ships to be docked, converted to attached, and allow ummus to be "shared" between them, using some parent vessel to house the ummus. Attaching would mean that the craft would have a more predictable superstructure behavior, allowing one vessel to be the "controller" vessel which maintains current mass and cg for the station. So after about 2 hours of perusing the sdk docs, I have come up with the following concept for fully ucgo/ummu compatible station modules (laugh if you must, but I haven't found it, and I'd like to have it to play with, and maybe OFSS4 can use it?)
Design concepts:
- All modules would share a common class. This class would have different capabilities depending on if the module is a control module or a support module.
- Limit of one "control" module per station.
- Support modules can provide resources
- Electricity
- Heat
- Water
- Fuel
- Torque (think gyros for attitude control)
- Support modules can consume resources
- Radiators would consume Heat, most modules would consume electricity, habitat modules would consume water
- Astronauts who are eva'd into the station through any docking port would immediately move to a habitat module (each of which would have a specific astronaut capacity).
- Active UMMU docking ports would be able to poll connected modules for astronauts to eva, and provide these to the user, evaing such an astronaut would first move that astronaut to the appropriate module and then eva them through ummu.
- all modules except the control module would have all thrusters disabled on docking, the control module having the only thruster control (using cg calculations to trigger thrusters/gyros on support modules in reaction to dummy thrusters).
- When a module connects to another module already attached to the station, the module already on the station would create a parent attach point at the docking location, the connecting module would create a child attach point at that same location, the two would be connected, and docking bays deleted. This would result in the modules being attached rather than docked, allowing orbiter to only have to run the physics calculations on the structure once (framerate and stable orbit friendly, as well as "deorbit" friendly).
- When a non-module connects to a module, the station will take it's mass into account on it's calculations for attitude control, center of gravity will usually still be within the station.
This is obviously just a thought, and I might be biting off more than I can chew. I'm not really a god modeller, so if I could find someone to make the various model meshes, that'd be extremely appreciated. I do believe I can write the code on this without too much trouble. I've considered making addons a couple of times before, but always the thought of having to write code for in atmosphere operations has turned me away. This however would be something that I could make with my limited understanding of physics (center of gravity and moments of force are just within what I understand).
Looking for any comments, suggestions, or modelling help!
