Project Base Improvement Project: (Updated 4/1/11)

Izack said:
Um, friction? Touching down on a long runway could save a few litres of propellant, eh?
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Which would then promptly be wasted on taxiing (or dragging) the vessel back to BB, and fixing the canyon you ploughed through the regolith.
 
And then there's the problem of cooling the brakes themselves: brakes on cars, airplanes and I believe the Orbiter also rely on air cooling the brakes during and after the use.
 
Fabri91 said:
And then there's the problem of cooling the brakes themselves: brakes on cars, airplanes and I believe the Orbiter also rely on air cooling the brakes during and after the use.
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And the frozen vacuum of space wouldn't be enough?

In all honesty, there's a lot of sensible science against the idea, I just think it would look cool.
 
wehaveaproblem said:
In all honesty, there's a lot of sensible science against the idea, I just think it would look cool.
Click to expand...

If you're in some kind of dense'ish atmosphere it does look cool. In vacum it just looks daft.
Kinda like a Humvee on low profile tires. It only looks cool if you have no idea what off-road vehicles are for. Would a sports car on caterpillar tracks look cool?
 
C3PO said:
If you're in some kind of dense'ish atmosphere it does look cool. In vacum it just looks daft.
Kinda like a Humvee on low profile tires. It only looks cool if you have no idea what off-road vehicles are for. Would a sports car on caterpillar tracks look cool?
Click to expand...
no it wouldn't... but a humvee on low-profiles would :rofl:

This is one of those times when cool over-rides practicality.. like sunglasses inside...

I think in reality all I'd want to see would be stretched lpads.
 
wehaveaproblem said:
... but a humvee on low-profiles would :rofl:

This is one of those times when cool over-rides practicality.. like sunglasses inside...
Click to expand...

No it doesn't. Taking a car that's useless for on-road and making it useless off-road too is just daft.
And so is wearing sunglasses indoors. :)
 
C3PO said:
If you're descending under power from orbital speed, the last 150-200 m/s don't cost that much fuel. I suspect that the extra mass of the wheels is going to cost more fuel.
Click to expand...

But if your space-craft already has wheels (as many orbiter craft do) you're not sacrificing anything.

Jarvitä said:
Which would then promptly be wasted on taxiing (or dragging) the vessel back to BB, and fixing the canyon you ploughed through the regolith.
Click to expand...

Yes, but that work can be done by ground based tugs who don't need to haul thier mass into orbit. Likewise I'm pretty sure the landing zone will be paved. :thumbup:

To be clear...

I am not advocating run-on landings as a standard for lunar arrival. My primary reason behind including a "runway" is the simple size and akwardness of certain popular vessels in relation to the standard landing pads. Namely Dansteph's Arrow, and to a lesser degree the XR5 Vanguard and Firefly Jumbo.

---------- Post added at 08:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:40 PM ----------



Seeing as how the Orbiter default (80m) tower presented a potential navigation hazard to approaching craft it has been replaced by a smaller (IMHO more practical set up). As you can see, work has also begun on the outlying Habitation/Work areas.

I've been working on simplifying the geometry to get the most physical detail out of the fewest vertices. As it stands the custom meshes (Launch berms, Tower, and Hab-domes) all whiegh in at less than 40 polygons a-piece, which should help those with lower-end computers.

Now I just need to learn UV Mapping.
 
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LPAD2.jpg

Code: 
LPAD2A
 POS 600 0 -300
[U][B][I]SCALE 5[/I][/B][/U]
 TEX Lpad02a
 NAV 132.80
END

I can make it bigger! :cheers:
 
Well if you're going to cheat... :rolleyes:

In all seriousness though, the idea in my head is more "stretched landing pad using runway textures" than "proper runway".
 
Ok I need assistance:

I'm trying to UVmap a texture for my Hab domes. The image is 512x512 and is designed as a 1/4 circle that will be mirriored 4 times (planar projection) as in the LPad2a default texture.

The problem is that all I get in orbiter is a flat black object. I can make texture work using "OWNMATERIAL" but I want to use the TEX tag so I can take advantage of the "_n" parameter of nightlights.

If someone could point me towards a good UV mapping program or tutorial it would be much appreciated.
 
As you know, I'm not particularly wise to the TEX functionality, and I use a built in UV mapper with my 3d prog. But I believe a lot of people use UVMapper for their uv mapping. That might help you.
 
Hlynkacg said:
The problem is that all I get in orbiter is a flat black object. I can make texture work using "OWNMATERIAL" but I want to use the TEX tag so I can take advantage of the "_n" parameter of nightlights.
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Can you post a few first lines from the mesh file (including a few lines of vertices from the first group), or a few lines from the definition of a mesh group which is black?
 
Dude, I like the new control tower for Brighton Beach. Pretty cool looking. I'm glad you clarified your elongated landing pad for large ships. There is a lengthy thread here on the forum where a guy argued with some of the best minds here as to why a 4 Km long runway on the moon is practical. Funny reading sometimes.

Anyway, regarding textures... I've tried my hand at UVMapper, paired with Anim8tor. It seems to work for me, but there are probably better ways than mine. Or, as they say, more than one way to skin a cat.

note - No animals were harmed during the typing of this post.

Here's the thread I was thinking of.
http://www.orbiter-forum.com/showthread.php?t=8154&highlight=lunar+runway
 
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The interest of a short landing strip on the Moon, for a vessel like the Deltaglider, is that it would allow some Z-axis horizontal velocity on landing, that can be killed with brakes.

The big flaw is meteroids ; a Deltaglider is not a rover and you need a perfect flat surface (like regolith-concrete) when landed and still rolling... :P

A vertical landing pad doesn't need to be in perfect state, small meteroids impacts aren't a big matter. Even simpler, you can lay metal plates to quickly make a pad, and change plates damaged by meteroids/messy landings.
 
My secret moon lair is CATOBAR equipped.

Runways make sense for spaceplanes, since they eliminate the need for hover jets at the cost of more complicated control software. I'm guessing it'd be brakes+RCS to stop though.

With hover jets arriving over a long paved strip is has an edge in debris and ATC even if you never touchdown. Less worry about plumes of regolith and it's simpler to direct pilots from the end of the strip to the pad. In particular it makes it much easier for the tower to visualize the ground situation and not direct inbound traffic over landed craft, parked vehicles, etc. Also an oblique runway greatly reduces the chances of crashing onto your base at high velocities.

Of course that assumes low-angle approaches. High angles make a lot more sense in terms of debris and aborts. How much would hover jets benefit from ground effect?
 
orb said:
Can you post a few first lines from the mesh file (including a few lines of vertices from the first group), or a few lines from the definition of a mesh group which is black?
Click to expand...

I'd like to but I'm not sure how to go about doing it. This is my first foray into 3D rendering and "mesh group group definition" may as well be greek to me. :shrug: I've only made it this far thanks to AR81's excellent tutorials and some prior experiance with CAD. I am using Anim8or and UV Mapper Classic (as per AR81's tutorial) adjusting the facets in UV mapper by splitting them from the main group then rotating them till they overlap the appropriate segments of the texture.

To clarify, when I load the mesh using "Ownmaterial" it comes out looking right. When I try to use "Tex" the whole thing comes out black. I suspect that it has something to due with the tranfer of UV maps to/from Anim8tor but I don't know enough to know what I'm doing wrong.


N_Molson said:
A vertical landing pad doesn't need to be in perfect state, small meteroids impacts aren't a big matter. Even simpler, you can lay metal plates to quickly make a pad, and change plates damaged by meteroids/messy landings.
Click to expand...

That is an excelent point, a Lunar/Martian "Airfield" would have a lot in common with military "Dirt-Fields". That really should've occurred to me earlier. :facepalm:

Looks like I'll be putting a shipment of [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsden_Matting"]PSP[/ame]on the next XR5 out.
 
Hlynkacg said:
I'd like to but I'm not sure how to go about doing it.
Click to expand...
Mesh files are just a text files. You can open them with for example Windows Notepad and copy/paste here into [code][/code] tags. For example, this is what it should look like, but of course with numbers instead:
Code: 
MATERIAL <m>
TEXTURE <t>
GEOM <v> <f>
<x1> <y1> <z1> <nx1> <ny1> <nz1> <u1> <v1>
<x2> <y2> <z2> <nx2> <ny2> <nz2> <u2> <v2>
<x3> <y3> <z3> <nx3> <ny3> <nz3> <u3> <v3>
<x4> <y4> <z4> <nx4> <ny4> <nz4> <u4> <v4>
 
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