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Everything posted by automcdonough

  1. check out some of the land speeders. the airplane wheels won't pop on overspeed.
  2. not much, i'll set it then usually staring at the navball/instruments.
  3. I have a two-shot for ya. 1. My "isplore" rover. It's a few versions old but still king for full-speed + low-grav baja action. link in my sig to the thread for it and craft file. 2. A sort of minimalistic science ship for 1 pilot that I call "Solo". It carries 1 of everything except the big lab, nuke for efficient travel and a little VTOL engine for easy landing. It's very well balanced, center of mass being in the fuel tank so it won't go front/back heavy as fuel is used. I had originally tried to SSTO it but decided I would rather have it be good at space and return trips and I'll use a launcher. Shown here with ridiculous launcher: The business end. 5700 d/v optionally eject the tanks if things get tight on the return trip. 1350 d/v here and all science on board.
  4. it's because of max speed rating of wheels. if you break the ruggedized ones going less than 60, try more wheels or less weight.
  5. aw yeah that is tricky. a CNC costs a lot more than a nice set of drills! I've made gears by hand before, they were good enough for the low-speed application I made them for. Printed them 1:1 on a sticker and laid it flat on the metal then got to work with a saw and files. It sounds tedious (and it was) but like most of the things I've made by hand, took way less time than trying to get a 3D printer to do it right. (and in that case I wanted metal..)
  6. you should check out the aviation lights, they have flash/strobe modes and lots of colors. good for blinky applications. This seems more like a floodlight kinda thing..
  7. so.. I have an idea/request. Something I've wanted since ISA came out several versions ago with the GPS part.. I would like a direction finder for getting to anomalies. Something that, as you're driving around looking for it, uses the map data you've collected to help you zone in on the location. This could perhaps be any waypoint that you click on the map to set, it _somehow_ conveys which direction you have to go to get to that point. It could be a point on the nav/compass. It could be a window with some obscure homing beacon blip like out of the first two aliens movies. It could show on the screen as if approaching a flag. A separate compass. I'm not picky about it, don't relaly care just want the functionality. It doesn't have to be 100% precise, just some basic guidance. It could be a separate GPS type part, but you do already have one that serves only to display map. In lieu of this, perhaps a way to zoom in on the big map and see where you are compared to the map blip?
  8. my rovers i saved as subassemblies.. It was built from the top docking port down with intent to use as a subassembly. science/util version shown doesn't have docking port up top i just decouple it when i get there.
  9. isplore, science utility version! flying squirrel! too heavy to do anything in particular very well! Still looks neato.
  10. Anyone get some use out of this?? science utility version! started with the isplore5 (stock link still works). Mods you see are MJ, KAS, inline light, and there's an aviation tail light too.
  11. I wanted a biome explorer. Something that can do a long distance hop to a point then do some driving around, and not be awful at it. 1st attempt "Explorer" A successful spaceplane which could VTOL up and away and use orbit altitudes to drop in anywhere. At 22t it proved a bit too heavy to do any reasonable sort of offroading, and actually flying in VTOL mode was a bit of a nightmare. 2nd attempt "Armadillo": A similar concept which uses the little rockomax thrusters for VTOL. It's about half the weight at 13t, drives better but still seems to be hard on the wheels. 3rd attempt "Squirrel": I pretty much set the science setup on the frame for my isplore rover (see sig). To slim it down I bailed on all VTOL and orbiting capability, it's got 1 turbojet and that's it. I also didn't want to deal with landing gear, so enough lift to take off at 60m/s was in order. This got the weight down to a little over 5t. It drives great.. Did some offroading at the north pole in search of an anomaly (didn't find it). looks almost like a hurricane back there clouds on the pole, beautiful Driving up a mountain or steep hill then gliding off is an AWESOME way to get around. Good trip!
  12. For those asking about this, check out the KSP Interstellar mod. Most of the parts are in there. The ring shaped part is a warp drive.
  13. Our sats currently do use earth's magnetic field to move and align themselves, much like a compass. It does not require much power at all, but the field is very weak. it's like using an ion engine.. practically unmeasurably small force is exerted over a long period of time to accomplish movement. Ramping up the coil power doesn't help, once you max out the force you can push off the planet's field with the rest is just wasted power. Also other planets have inconsistent or totaly missing magnetic fields, so it's really not a good solution for exploratory sats.
  14. good idea with the ebay. some tinkering around getting some of these patched into that servo board might be a nice shortcut. and they are the real deal.
  15. this method would require a way to calibrate itself though. perhaps a mark on the ball that it homes to. The more I think about this, the more I can see the merits of staying on your current path. do you have any intention of marking the prograde/retrograde on it? This seems like a difficult idea. maybe a light screen in front of the ball? aim laser pointers at the face of it? mechanical crosshairs? I'm not trying to derail your effort here, but I think if it were me I would consider 2 options: 1. Just use a dedicated LCD screen buried in there. perhaps even with a globe face + mini projector setup. I don't consider it a cop-out, modern and future craft are not likely to use heavy mechanical things for this. Plus marking targets, prograde, etc is cake. 2. use the normal avionics, the compass orientation would be a separate gauge next to it. This is a little bit of a copout but could make displaying additional information such as prograde much easier. what's the main purpose here?
  16. It occurred to me that instead of 3 wheels acting as casters it could be 3 simple rollers with 1 motor each. Kind of like how a mousewheel works, but there needs to be 3 for rotation as well. The trick is the ball itself has to be hard enough to slide on the roller when it's going perpendicular to it's rolling direction. edit: no looks like 2 and a turntable..
  17. i think you are taking the wrong approach on this, and that it can be mechanically less complicated. consider a globe sitting on 3 caster wheels. yes the wheels themselves would all need 2 motors, but they would all be stationary in the base.
  18. lol, no it's because the blink timer circuit is not connected on them. Each light is a self contained unit, the pilot only turns on the power. So one might blink 3% faster than the other just because of part tolerances in the timer circuits, they don't have any sync.
  19. yeah i just used presets so all 4 in the example would be the same. you're setting the intensity of each color, like a tv pixel. so if you want yellow add red+green, the closer all 3 colors are the closer the light will be to white. set all 3 to 20% and it'll be white dimmed to 20%..
  20. quad lights too bright? set all 4 to dim: seems to work fine for me.