Project Lodestone-Class Cislunar Cruiser

[Frogisis]

OK, so here's my second addon after making a cartoon UFO to test out the whole process. The Lodestone-class Cruiser, a Gas-Core NTR ship, designed to make trips around the Earth area, to the Moon and various Lagrange colonies (I'm making an O'Neill Colony once this is done), and then back again, although here I'm testing it out on a one-way trip to Mars:

I'm writing a .dll this time, and I've got a compiler all set up (I'm an artist, not a programmer, but I checked out a tutorial online and now I can write a C++ program a few steps past the "Hello world!" stage). I first made it as a spacecraft3.dll ship, but I thought I'd give my own .dll a shot, and I can get it to fly in the sim, working fine, but there are a few missing pieces that keep it from being all it could be:

- I want to add a second fuel tank for the RCS. I copied code from the Delta Glider and checked out the API manual, but no matter what I try it doesn't work. There's still only the one tank in Orbiter.

- I want to add the thruster animations I defined in the .ini file, but I can't make heads or tails of how to do that in the C++ code.

- I made a mesh for cargo containers to latch onto those two side spars you can see in this image, but I am totally at a loss for how to attach those in a way that's clear and manageble from within the simulation.

Here's the .cpp file for anyone who wants to take a look at it and tell me what I'm doing wrong: Lodestone code.

In any case, this is supposed to by a conception of the ultimate Fission Powered Ship - I did all the math and the dV is right (17.5 kps) for a ship of its size and propellant ratio. It's got 1g of acceleration and the RCS is a little more powerful than it'd probably be in real life, but just to make it more playable. It's supposed to be a kind of Super ShuttleA, and I hope you'll enjoy it.

 

[tl8]

Have you seen the surveyor tutorial on orbiter wiki. It will run through everything that you will need, also look the API guide and reference for more detail.

 

[Urwumpe]

What is wrong is your expectation. Orbiter does always only display one propellant resource in it's generic displays, you need to write your own HUD code if you want to show more than the default propellant resource.

 

[T.Neo]

Orbiter does always only display one propellant resource in it's generic displays, you need to write your own HUD code if you want to show more than the default propellant resource.

Or you make a custom panel or VC...

I find the one propellant resource display irritating. I have to bring up Fuel MFD to check my RCS fuel sometimes...

 

[Frogisis]

Thanks for the replies; The problem is, though, that I can't even get the second fuel tank to show up in the scenario editor, it still only says "tank 1 of 1" when I look at the propellant window. I knew it wouldn't show up on the HUD (The DG's doesn't, after all) but even putting two full tanks in the scenario file has no effect; the RCS is still using the main tank.

I have actually seen the Surveyor tutorial and tried copy/pasting that code into this .cpp file, but it still didn't give me more than one fuel tank. Right now I'm just changing parameters at random and seeing what happens - I'm seriously at a loss. It's probably something stupid like a missing semicolon or something 10 lines away, but damned if I can find it...