Make a hangar that works like a gate to some bugger space.

[allista]

That's just the idea for now. See:
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/88933-0-24-2-Hangar-v1-1-1-1?p=1401296&viewfull=1#post1401296

[allista]

Some thoughts:

• to use it with ships I need a module to mark parts that are capable of storing ships (e.g. cargo bays of other mods, etc.)
• to use it with an asteroid I need another part that will attach to the asteroid and mine it, making it hull inside and a lot lighter, spawning smaller asteroids in the process. Otherwise it will be totally unrealistic. There should be huge energy consumption and the process should be slow. A lot of work, but the idea is great.
  • for that I also need to rework the tech limit calculations, allowing min-max definitions of a part to override the common ones, because huge docking ports will be needed to connect the Gateway with the Miner part.

[AccidentalDisassembly]

In the first case, where a module would be needed to figure out which parts of a ship could store other ships, would it be possible to use a system like AGX, where clicking on parts in the SPH/VAB creates a list - then calculate the volume of that list and add it to the hangar? That might work. The only downside I could see is that a person could click all parts on a ship to add a very large volume.

Another option would be simply to calculate an arbitrary value for the larger ship and base it on the ship's mass to volume ratio: very high mass for its volume (e.g. close to the mass per unit volume of LF/OX)? Probably full of fuel, can't hold a lot of hangar space. Low mass for its volume? Probably mostly hollow, can hold some crafts. That way the design of the ship does make a difference, but the calculation is automatic. This would allow for a lot of design freedom too: you could have the entrance to the hangar on the side of the ship, whereas the option below would basically necessitate front or rear.

On the other hand, it might also be interesting (and maybe easier? don't code, don't know...) to do the following:

1. Create a part with the same cross section as existing hangar mouths.
2. Allow that part to have tweakable length.
3. When that part is stack attached to the rear of the hangar, it increases the hangar's volume. Maintains realism: you actually have to put a big-volume part on the ship to get more in the hangar.
4. Also allow radial attachment to expand hangar size, but it would have to be radially attached to the hangar mouth itself, or to an extension stack-mounted to it.

In the asteroid example you gave, the mechanic of mining out the asteroid sounds about right: something that takes a long time and requires a lot of juice. But it'd be really interesting to drag an asteroid somewhere and make it into an orbital base of sorts!

Hope that's vaguely helpful.

[allista]

Well, I don't really like the idea of the automatic calculation, because it's very much unrealistic and, most of all, breaks the KSP module paradigm. Indeed, if you have a light fuselage part it is only logical it should have the ability to store vessels (which is easily achieved with a dedicated model inserted using MM); but if we use automatic calculation as you described, the user receives the ability to attach, say, a huge fuel tank to a ship, empty it via tweakables and use it as a hangar space, which is almost alright, except that the fuel tank cannot have the machinery needed to store, vessels, refuel vessels and allow crew in or out. And that's the simplest case. I can easily imagine the design where the ship does not have big parts at all and still have low density; in that case allowing to store ships in it would actually imply their disassembly.

So I'm inclined to stick to the second design; except the radial attachment part, because I don't see how you can transfer a ship through the wall of the receiving hangar =)

[allista]

Still I'm working on radial-to-stack adapters which will effectively allow you to implement radial designs.

[AccidentalDisassembly]

That's certainly true, but the existing hangar part also asks for suspension of disbelief and implies disassembly - I mean, the entire craft disappears, and you can fit multiple crafts inside that relatively small box. If you want to go further, using volume at all to calculate available space in a hangar is also not realistic: really, you would have to calculate the surface area of one side of the interior of the part, or all sides in zero gravity, and use the footprint dimension of the craft to figure out how many could fit sitting on that surface. So suspension of disbelief is basically a requirement unless you really want to go crazy with that kind of thing.

Really, NO part actually "has the machinery" except for in the imagination of the person using it, unless you make a dedicated part with visible stuff in it and/or add more parts onto that. I think that's fine too, personally, and I would most definitely use it. Some fuel tanks don't look like fuel tanks, either, if they don't have tanks in them - like the new B9 HX parts. They CAN have tanks in them, but otherwise they're just big blocks. They would make sense (theoretically) for a hangar when most of their inside isn't dedicated to fuel - but you can't see the inside anyway. Since we're talking about the imagination, you can make an equal counterargument that, yes, a hollowed-out fuel tank lacks the machinery, but the hangar mouth part IS the machinery, ostensibly extending back into the fuel tank (or it installs the machinery therein when it's attached).

Seems more fun and versatile (maybe easier too...) just to make a part that can't be TOTALLY unrealistic, but also lets a user build something really neat and useful and creative.

Re: big ship made of small parts, overall low density - yes, it could then store ships in it, but in order to do so, it would have to have a hangar stuck on it of the appropriate size for the ships it wants to store. This would be equivalent to the setup right now, just with more volume added. At the very least, that ship with small parts would have to have one part on it - the hangar - wide, tall, and long enough to fit the ship that's docking there.

Is it possible to calculate the volumes of individual parts on the ship, and make sure at least one part is bigger than or as big as the hangar itself?

Here's some more random possibilities - just throwing ideas out. Don't know what's workable and what's not.

1. Make the calculation of usable volume ignore things with certain resources in them (fuels etc). PROBLEM: even some hollow parts can have tanks with ModulaFuels and whatnot.
2. Make dedicated hangar parts (and entrances) in many sizes and orientations that add to hangar volume or are hangars themselves, so that people can build ships in different ways.
3. Make a part that attaches to other parts, converting the part(s) it attaches to for use with the hangar system, adding volume (maybe stripping out fuel tanks or whatever too). No idea how that would work with multiple hangars, maybe add to them all equally? But this could be attached to small parts, too.

Deleted 4, it was dumb.

1. Only make the part a hangar is attached to count for volume - still a suspension of disbelief problem if attached to hollow parts, really, would make no visual sense in some configurations. However, then a ship with small parts wouldn't get much volume benefit. That might work.
2. Hangar parts as they are now gain a configurable option so the user can (depending on their taste for realism) decide to give them lots more volume and imagine them as gateways to the bigger ship/asteroid/whatever. Problem: can make infinite hangars really easily.

Also, the radial attach I was thinking of would make more sense if you first attached a hangar extension, THEN radially attached something to that extension. Very true that it wouldn't make any sense if it were sitting on top of the hangar instead...

[allista]

Wow! =^_^=

As I wrote in the forum thread, I do exactly this. The volume calculation is made just for reference, and the real decision whether to store another ship into a hangar is made depending on the geometries of the new ship and already stored ships by the comprehensive packing algorithm.

Well, playing games is all about imagination, but we could help players to imagine things or we could make it more difficult. I try as hard as I can to maintain realism while fighting hardware limitations with this mod. So again, I agree that some parts may be used as hangar spaces, even some with fuel tanks within, but not in general. So it still seems more fair to me to add this capabilities only to particular, selected parts. There are many players who don't like it when a mod makes the game too easy.

As I see it, I need to implement something akin to the Connected Living Space, so that parts that have HangarSpace module and are connected through a continuous string of nodes to a Gateway Hangar are constituting its SET of storage spaceS. I mean, I don't want to have some abstract big space through all the ship; instead each HangarSpace extension part will be a space of its own. If you add a small extension, then it could be used only to store some small drones, and if you add a huge one, you could store anything that fits into the Gateway. This allows easy integration of other mods and much more freedom in ship's construction than now, while maintaining enough control over this for other modders.
I also think that hangars that exist now are not suitable to be the gateways. They don't have internal doors. So there's a need to made custom models for the gateways too.

[allista]

Done.