Project Plants

[dumbo2007]

What we really need are mining machines like this

 

[Carmen A]

 

[dumbo2007]

Ah yes the giant killing machines !

 

[Carmen A]

Ok - for vchamp's and fans' input;

Should I create terrain for known industrial areas and major aerospace industrial hubs?

If vchamp wants to do basic industries I can do that too - mining of rare exotic materials in remote areas, use XR5s for VTOL and bulk transport to processing hubs. I can make cargo pods for these raw materials and also refined products like metallic ingots, for further transfer to factories.

We can use the real world as inspiration, using existing airports or creating our own in remote areas.

 

[vchamp]

I wouldn't mind someone to make a good config file with thought-out locations of plants in different parts of the world. Also each plant base should have at least a couple of buildings and recognizable areas for loading/unloading. This is the primary goal. Surface tiles and good custom models of buildings (and battlemechs ) could be a nice bonus though.

 

[Carmen A]

Ok, so we have a go for Earth Aerospace industrial research.

I'll take over the initial location propagation and surface tiling, followed by location of transshipment bases. For added challenge we may want to create a "hub and spoke" system where smaller air transports, rail, and sealift assets move raw materials to a XR5-capable spaceport for mass haulage to a processing facility which may then send material out into space for final assembly. Priority will be given to existing spaceports such as SRC in Indonesia, Jarvis, Overton Island and WIN whose main purpose is to receive and send material to/from space as well as exchange resources suborbitally between themselves.

For short range hauling, DG-EX is capable of using existing, real world runways. Same goes for XR2 and DG-IV. As for slower modes of transportation (subsonic air freighters, ships, land transport, etc), this is not within the scope of Orbiter gameplay and can be simply roleplayed by positioning of static objects.

This might be more realistic and economically sound than flying in XR5s to every single factory or resource base location (we know how destructive those hover thrusters are). Furthermore STOVL mode on those spaceplanes require a lot of fuel and reduce the effective payload significantly. Whereas the DG-EX's much more efficient aerospike engines can cruise faster than any conventional aircraft today at a very high efficiency.

 

[vchamp]

My attempt of storages and intake/output locations representation:

As you can see, I added one storage building and two marks for fuel and oxygen placement. I suggest to use texture elements with different colors to distinguish between different types of products. On this screenshots the frames have different colors.

There is a small problem with unloaded vessels positioning. They appear obliquely located for some reason, not in even rows.

The current version, which includes depots implementation: View attachment 11-03-02.zip. It will overwrite standart Base.cfg and Canaveral.cfg.

 

[Carmen A]

So far so good. What would happen if we used XR5 containers for the cargo? (More realistic for bulk transport purposes).

Container farm

 

[vchamp]

I doubt that it is possible to load [ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=4657"]this container[/ame] from my module. Unfortunately UCGO SDK doesn't provide means for that. Good idea anyway.

Maybe we can use mkr marker files for intake area indication. I'm going to try this, because I don't like to change existing config files.

There is a repository for the project at bitbucket now: https://bitbucket.org/vchamp/plants.

 

[Carmen A]

First research project is Japanese aerospace industry. Why Japan?

I like Mitsubishi

Second, I have a grand, evil idea to create a new Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' spaceport on reclaimed land

 

[vchamp]

Time for a little update. The current state of the project is quite stable, so I am releasing the first version. It can be found here: https://bitbucket.org/vchamp/plants/downloads. Recently I added the remaining time indicator, the text field to specify a custom vessel name, surface markers for intake/output locations and added simple base objects to Brazoria County fuel producing facility (on screenshots). I also decided not to include modified standard files in release. Instead the the text from the files like Base.add.Plants.txt should be included to corresponding config files (Base.cfg in this case).

As the next step, I'm going to create orbital facilities. Unfortunately it seems that I am left alone in this project, so I have to work on bases creation too.