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Reliant with Gimbal
Have you ever thought to yourself: self, I wish I could combine the higher thrust and sea-level Isp of the Reliant engine with the gimballed control of the Swivel engine?
Well, if you have, this is the solution for your problem! I have successfully installed a gimbal on the reliant engine to combine the powers of both in one engine!
What do you mean just use a Vector instead
? This is art!
Details
- Type: SPH
- Class: lifter
- Part Count: 40
- Pure Stock
Intro to Collide Tech
More seriously, this is the first practical* example of collide tech that I have produced. Collide tech uses pure stock mechanics to include limited ranges of motion in craft. The main tools here are the Same Vessel Interaction option, Rigid Attachment, and the bendable nature of separator and docking port joints. By forcing parts to collide and bend, you can create oversized control surfaces, gimballing engines, and maybe even swing wings that are all a single craft.
Inside the Gimbal
The image to the left shows a cross-section of the mechanism. The outlines show the collision boxes of the relavent parts.
Top to bottom:
yellow, small blue: these stop the thrust of the engine from compressing the engine into the fuel tank.
Elevons (blue) + I-beams: these are the bread and butter of the mechanism. The elevons act on the I-beam to rotate the engine around, responding to flight controls.
small blue, center: these are the docking ports which make up the ‘hinge’. It is six junior ports stacked end-to-end to form a flexible hinge.
Words of advice to anyone looking to explore Collide Tech further:
* I highly recommend the Collide-o-scope mod. It’s used to create the above screenshot, and is a godsend for anyone messing around with stock mechanics of any kind.
* Make sure that none of the parts which have Same Vessel Interaction enabled are overlapping.
* Some parts don’t allow you to enable SVI from the editor - but you can activate it from action groups. You can bind that to stage so that it works without an additional button press on startup.
Have fun tinkering! As far as I can tell, this is a wide-open field for exploration, so I’m excited to see where it will go
