[Black Wolf]

Updated to version 1.1:

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Now includes the 23 cell girder and a resized (to standard 44m) umbilical, along with the 10m single cells and the 90 degree benders. Also includes fixed mapping on the docking pad to work better with texture replacement, additional dockpoints on the cargo platfomr at a standard spacing to integrate with the 5 cell girder (didn't get around to taking off the tabs - I like them on the model as a standalone too much). Everything else is pretty much the same I think - oh, the readme's a liitle different, a few more tips.

This will be the last "Drydock" type release. Release 2 will be more about adding on installation modules, though I will include at least some capability for angled girders in the next release.

[sigtau]

Oh.

I should get into FS modding now, just so I can use this.

[Black Wolf]

So I've gotten onto doing some hab modules, but they're... I'm not convinced I'm going in the right direction. They're just meant as base units, for stuff to be added on to, but they may well change to something completely different before I'm happy.

[EDIT]I should explain the system I've come down on. That module there is 118m wide, 64m tall and 64m long - this corresponds with the girders (5 cell plus 2 10m cubes = 64m, 11 cell +20m = 118m), and you can see how they fit flush against the sides. This particular piece is an end bit - there is an equivalent 64x64x118 without the bevelled cap bit, so they can be strung together in chains. I'm planning at least 3 or 4 similar end bits to add some diversity, plus there'll be further doodads which can be attached - larger scale than the plates, docking rings and whatnot you can see in that picture. Hopefully these larger scale doodads and the multiple cap pieces will add a reasonable level of detail, but it's important to understand that a kit like this is never going to create models on par with something like the Asteria for detail without putting hundred and hundreds of parts together, which obviousy isn't viable.

[EDIT2]Added another pic - I'm rstarting to have fun with this stuff

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Nohiki]

It's the modularity that counts, in fact i think that less details actually makes sense, as it is designed to be built quickly :-)

[Black Wolf]

Stole the missile turrets off the Canberra. Also got a couple of bigger doodads made, got some plans for them, should have something a little more freespace-installationish as of tomorrow or tuesday (Need some texs), assuming no work related time hassles.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[JGZinv]

Idea: Some kind of rail mounted repair robot or skiff that fixes the girders / platforms.

[Trivial Psychic]

Problem:  Anything on a rail will require lateral movement, and right now the engine doesn't support submodel translation.  I could perhaps foresee a fixed robotic arm but I don't think that you could mount a dockpoint to a moving submodel, so it would be decorative rather than functional.

[z64555]

Problem:  Anything on a rail will require lateral movement, and right now the engine doesn't support submodel translation.  I could perhaps foresee a fixed robotic arm but I don't think that you could mount a dockpoint to a moving submodel, so it would be decorative rather than functional.

What about a "craft" exclusive to AI that jumps from dockwpoint to dockpoint?

[Nuke]

id just say use a tug ship, which would dock to the parts, and can manuver them into place. you could actually show an installation being made in game and i think it would be pretty awesome.

[z64555]

id just say use a tug ship, which would dock to the parts, and can manuver them into place. you could actually show an installation being made in game and i think it would be pretty awesome.

Even better

[Trivial Psychic]

id just say use a tug ship, which would dock to the parts, and can maneuver them into place. you could actually show an installation being made in game and i think it would be pretty awesome.

There is a problem with that, as they will only be able to place the components, rather than actually docking them.  The only way I could foresee this done, would be to give the component itself an AI class and limited movement.  Then when the docked construction pod moves the component close to the dockpoint, the pod shuts down its control and the AI in the component is activated and with the pod in tow, moves its other dockpoint to dock to its intended destination dockpoint on the target structure.

[Nuke]

id just say use a tug ship, which would dock to the parts, and can maneuver them into place. you could actually show an installation being made in game and i think it would be pretty awesome.

There is a problem with that, as they will only be able to place the components, rather than actually docking them.  The only way I could foresee this done, would be to give the component itself an AI class and limited movement.  Then when the docked construction pod moves the component close to the dockpoint, the pod shuts down its control and the AI in the component is activated and with the pod in tow, moves its other dockpoint to dock to its intended destination dockpoint on the target structure.

im sure with some mod magic it could be made to work.

[Horizon]

These are looking very promising.  I want to offer some suggestions if I may?  I actually am a USCG licensed Captain and have been to many a dry-dock and regular maintenance dock in my work. 

1)  This is not a "Dry-Dock."  Dry-docking is when a ship is taken out of the water completely and placed on land.  This allows work on the underside of the hull and also allows for complicated inspections to take place that will keep the vessel registered, like some of you must get emissions tests on cars, ships and boats who are for hire or inspected as training/military/commercial must undergo regular, rigorous inspection by either the military or USCG inspectors.  This happens once a year, with major inspections due every 5 which include running drills and simulations with the crew for the inspectors to pass off crew as being proficient enough to run the vessel.

The equivalent of a dry-dock for a ship would be an entirely enclosed, gravity-enhanced facility that is climate controlled and that would ground the ship by hard, semi-permanent attach points to the inside of the facility. 

Instead, you would consider this a "hard-dock."  Or just a regular dock, in general, as most all docks for ships have even rudimentary ability to be service facilities.

2)  You need more connections and the girders need to be closer to the ship.  The girderrs I've seen in your Screens look too far away from the hull to allow a human team of engineers or welders to benefit from them being there.  I imagine that most any worker would be suited in an exo-suite of some kind, and thus the only purpose of the girders in deep space would be to allow heavier equipment to be handy, as well as tethering the workers to the station for safety.  Also it could be used to help brace and position difficult repair jobs and equipment.  You would constantly have traffic on and off the ship. 

3)  You also need a support center.  Girders around a ship with just a small dock at another end with no structure to support materials, housing, utilities such as fuel and gas, and auxilliary machinery that the ship may need is pointless.  If the ship were going to do repairs on it's own self without going to a very lively, stocked and supported facility, it would just do them in it's own little piece of space without bothering about the girders.  The crew would tether to the ship, and repairs would be made sufficient enough to make the nearest hard-dock. 

4)  If you want to include some sort of scaffolding support, ie - heavy damage to the ship requires the crew to build scaffolding on to the exterior in order to repair the ship to make minimal way, the scaffolding would be small and localized, and physically attached to the ship.  A Fenris cruiser, I doubt, would have the spare cargo room to hold girders the length and scale of what you screened.  The scaffolding they would have would be for when it was only absolutely necessary, or when there would be long portions of time away from any hard dock facility where repairs to exterior mechanics could take place.  If you've never been aboard any commercial or military ship, they are equipped with scaffolding and maintenance supplies.  Some even have cranes mounted in stowed positions that can be spot welded into place should the need arise.  However in doing so, they give up a very big majority of stowage space and typically those that have such equipment haul cargo and do scientific missions.  Warships have very little space for large scaffolding or repair equipment, relying on support ships for this.  The turrets, crew quarters, life support and engine systems take up more room than can be spared, and most quarters aboard are tight, sparse.  The BattleStar Galactica series was a bad example of interior ship design.  They showed large hallways, spacious quarters and many vacant, unused rooms.   A true warship has no space for heavy repair machinery that does not have some dual purpose for war.   Everything on a ship has a dual purpose.  Right down to the seats.  No wasted space.

I really like where you want to go with the idea of manipulative scaffolding.  Don't get lost in the "cool" factor though.  Keep it realistic and functional. 

[General Battuta]

Well that was an excellent post.

[Nuke]

i for one dont thing using the naval terminology to describe spacecraft and the support thereof, unless used in a metaphorical sense, is a very good idea. i kinda dont think it would be practical to have an atmospheric enclosed space station large enough to accommodate a ship any larger than a cruiser (in the freespace sense of the word). i would imagine that anything corvette or smaller could be constructed on a moon or asteroid with low gravity and preferably some atmosphere. even if it is not breathable, if the pressure and temperature is appropriate, workers could operate in less constricting gear than a full space suit, such as a breathing mask of sorts. one big thing astronauts always mention is that doing work in a space suit is like working with a beach ball between your arms, and it would be cheaper in manpower, cost and time to use arrays of one shot boost motors to get into space. of course with freespace theres always the possibility of using an intra system subspace jump to orbit.

larger ships would best be constructed in space due to shear magnitude. though i can imagine the construction being somewhat modular fashion, with sections being built at a large installation or planet side, lifted to space, and moved to the "hard-dock" for final installation. pressure seals would be welded first, and if the segments are air tight for the most part, portable life support equipment could be brought in and the workers could finish welding the internal structure without suits.

maintenance would be an entirely different issue than it is with sea vessels. primary concern with those is corrosion, because salt water chews metal something fierce, ships must always be cleaned and painted to protect the hull. in space this would mostly be a non issue. you might have issues with radiation damage or other as of yet unidentified issues with space hulls, but external maintenance would mostly revolve around patching up damage and repairing external equipment. spot welding small scale scaffolding directly to the hull on a temporary basis would definitely be a common practice. of course id figure a primary reasoning for girders would be a place to attach and support large multipurpose robot arms like the ones on the space shuttle or the iss, which would provide footholds for workers and move heavy ship parts, as well as for mooring purposes.

from a modding standpoint i would definitely want to see robotic arms used, they could probably be scripted to a degree to be able to pull off inverse kinematics. so the fredder would be able to call functions to make the endpoints of these arms go pretty much anywhere. there is definitely a large number of possibilities. furthermore the kit could be used to make pretty much anything, so were not limited to shipyards and "hard-docks".

[Black Wolf]

These are looking very promising.  I want to offer some suggestions if I may?  I actually am a USCG licensed Captain and have been to many a dry-dock and regular maintenance dock in my work. 

1)  This is not a "Dry-Dock."  Dry-docking is when a ship is taken out of the water completely and placed on land.  This allows work on the underside of the hull and also allows for complicated inspections to take place that will keep the vessel registered, like some of you must get emissions tests on cars, ships and boats who are for hire or inspected as training/military/commercial must undergo regular, rigorous inspection by either the military or USCG inspectors.  This happens once a year, with major inspections due every 5 which include running drills and simulations with the crew for the inspectors to pass off crew as being proficient enough to run the vessel.

The equivalent of a dry-dock for a ship would be an entirely enclosed, gravity-enhanced facility that is climate controlled and that would ground the ship by hard, semi-permanent attach points to the inside of the facility. 

Instead, you would consider this a "hard-dock."  Or just a regular dock, in general, as most all docks for ships have even rudimentary ability to be service facilities.

2)  You need more connections and the girders need to be closer to the ship.  The girderrs I've seen in your Screens look too far away from the hull to allow a human team of engineers or welders to benefit from them being there.  I imagine that most any worker would be suited in an exo-suite of some kind, and thus the only purpose of the girders in deep space would be to allow heavier equipment to be handy, as well as tethering the workers to the station for safety.  Also it could be used to help brace and position difficult repair jobs and equipment.  You would constantly have traffic on and off the ship. 

3)  You also need a support center.  Girders around a ship with just a small dock at another end with no structure to support materials, housing, utilities such as fuel and gas, and auxilliary machinery that the ship may need is pointless.  If the ship were going to do repairs on it's own self without going to a very lively, stocked and supported facility, it would just do them in it's own little piece of space without bothering about the girders.  The crew would tether to the ship, and repairs would be made sufficient enough to make the nearest hard-dock. 

4)  If you want to include some sort of scaffolding support, ie - heavy damage to the ship requires the crew to build scaffolding on to the exterior in order to repair the ship to make minimal way, the scaffolding would be small and localized, and physically attached to the ship.  A Fenris cruiser, I doubt, would have the spare cargo room to hold girders the length and scale of what you screened.  The scaffolding they would have would be for when it was only absolutely necessary, or when there would be long portions of time away from any hard dock facility where repairs to exterior mechanics could take place.  If you've never been aboard any commercial or military ship, they are equipped with scaffolding and maintenance supplies.  Some even have cranes mounted in stowed positions that can be spot welded into place should the need arise.  However in doing so, they give up a very big majority of stowage space and typically those that have such equipment haul cargo and do scientific missions.  Warships have very little space for large scaffolding or repair equipment, relying on support ships for this.  The turrets, crew quarters, life support and engine systems take up more room than can be spared, and most quarters aboard are tight, sparse.  The BattleStar Galactica series was a bad example of interior ship design.  They showed large hallways, spacious quarters and many vacant, unused rooms.   A true warship has no space for heavy repair machinery that does not have some dual purpose for war.   Everything on a ship has a dual purpose.  Right down to the seats.  No wasted space.

I really like where you want to go with the idea of manipulative scaffolding.  Don't get lost in the "cool" factor though.  Keep it realistic and functional. 

Wow, Battuta's right, that's a good post. Unfortunately, I think you're kinda missing the core purpose behind this project.

I don't want to dismiss your obvious experience or expertise, but you have to remember what's being made here. Initially, it was a set of girders, made solely as a storytelling prop - "This mission is set in a shipyard. You can tell it's a shipyard because there are all these ships sitting in girders everywhere" or "This ship is being repaired after that beating it took two missions ago. You can tell it's being repaired because it's surrounded by girders". It wasn't meant to be a realistic projection of repairs performed in space any more than the Orion is a realistic projection of what human stellar-warfare will look like in the 24th century. It's designed to work ingame and evoke a feeling, not to be technically accurate.

Also, don't forget this is now not just a set of girders for making drydocks - it's designed to be put towards making all sorts of modular stuff. Solatar has already shown some cool things that can be done with it other than just putting girders around ships. Getting everything closer to the hull means making all the pieces smaller, which decreases the viability of that modularity (there's a certain size below which stuff just isn't worth making, given the scale of FS). It also introduces technical issues, such as increasing the number of objects required to completely enclose a ship, which is already getting quite high and potentially problematic.

Also, there is some provision for support type gear - those platforms fit a bunch of cargo containers on them, for example, and you can see a few posts up that I'm working on hab modules that'll eventually make this much more of a modular outpost type pack in addition to just docks. Cranes and stuff make sense, but I'm not sure how good they'd be without better animation code, and I'm certain I'm not a skilled enough POFfer to do justice to any code that might come along.

Lastly, just FYI none of this stuff is meant to live on the Fenris - it's meant to be set up in a shipyard somewhere, and the Fenris comes into it under its own steam (or under tug,  I suppose). Obviously, it's far too bulky to all fit on the ship.

That aside, I'll grant you the definition of drydock doesn't really apply here. It's a drydock in the sense that the Ganymede is a drydock - of course, it's never called a drydock anywhere in the player-accessible fluff (It's called a "Repair and Resupply" facility IIRC), but it has the drydock ship flag, and calling it GTI (i.e. Galactic Terran Installation) goes against the definition of installation given in the Arcadia tech room, IMO. So while the terminology may not be strictly correct (Spacedock or Stardock is probably better), it's kinda-sorta-behindthescenes-quasi-canon, so I'm happy enough with it.



As I said above, I don't want to come across as though I'm belittling your experience or your opinions. I just think that we're maybe looking at this project from two very different perspectives, and unfortunately practicality for FREDders and rule of cool have to be given priority over realism in a game like FS2.

[MatthTheGeek]

Yeah, seriously, realism ?...
In FreeSpace ?...

...wut

Rule Of Cool ftw.

[Nuke]

i think you can have geometry 5 levels deep. with hull and taking up one with 4 other segments attached, and pivoting joints. point of ik is to calculate the angles of a system of joints to position the end point at, or as close to as possible, any arbitrary vector that is possible for the system to reach.  this would definitely need to be scripted, at least to prototype the algorithms used. of course ik may be overkill, it might just suffice to animate it with the existing animation system.

[peterv]

Keep analyzing this people 
It can be very usefull for future mods based on Black Wolfs excellent work.

[BengalTiger]

I have a strange feeling that with power suits and robots working in vacuum won't be nearly as hard as it is today.

Compare a car without power steering to one with power steering. You could rotate the wheel with 1 finger on a stationary vehicle with PS, and without you need at least 1 whole hand to do anything.

The same will apply to power space suits vs regular space suits.