Bonus Eventus

Yes I'm aware of all of that. I haven't finished the part yet. I just wanted to get it in the game early to test some things out. Fortunately the outer two rings of engines will be built into the part. In reality it' will be eight engines. 7 with gimbal in the center. EDIT: you know I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just combine them all. If I add a skirt, much like the Merlin’s on the falcon 9 octaweb, I could cut down on the polygons, and use bone animation instead of constraints for gimbaling. The part would act like the old behemoth engine. EDIT: Bone animation successful. Now for the tricky bit of managing 42 radially placed fx transforms...sheesh

No date yet. Still have work to do... one more tank cap to texture. Only partially modeled the decouplers. Need to model the S6 fairing. Add smokescreen configs to the engines. Finish the adapters. Texture the S6 engine mount. And a few other things.

Any plans for part variant integration?

It’s amazing how much value PBR adds to texture quality. I’ve started to work nondestructively in photoshop so I can more easily export pbr textures when the time comes. This should be part of the stock game. Considering how much effort was put into adapting Squad legacy shaders, as well as a planned part update, you’d think they would have just went with the standard shader model.

Size 3 tank.

Size 4 and Size 6 tanks with gray color scheme.

This should be stickied, at least until the modder's notes are out.

The new tanks will all have switchable textures. At least 3 options. Had to redo the textures unfortunately to fit them all into the same atlas. It came out good though! EDIT: Thought I would explain a couple of things about the process to create the new version of the tanks. 1) The initial problem I ran into was that I have many tanks in many different sizes, which won’t fit easily in a single texture sheet. Sizes are 1.25, 1.875, 2.5, 3.75, 5, and 7.5 meters. Heights for the tanks include, 1.25 ,3.75 ,7.5 ,and 15 meters. Diffuse textures weren’t too bad. The real problem was normal maps with 4 way symmetry. The normals for modular textures have to be made with flat geometry ( imagine high res geometry for a floor tile normal map). I was making quarter tile then mirroring the polygons vertically and horizontally for a larger tile. If the normal map had vertical grooves, smoothing would get very confused when the verts were merged. If the verts aren’t merged, then you will get light leaks. 2) For the external feed lines, it’s nice to have some occlusion shadows. This means unique versions of some tiles/panels. So, even less UC texture space. SOLUTION: The solution was counter intuitive. I made a quick experiment, modeling all of the panels like I would for a high res model for a unique normal map, just without the sub d bevels. I started with the largest tank. The tri count for the tank walls without end caps came to just under 6k. That’s about the polly budget for a typical engine in KSP. Surprisingly enough, not too bad. I still used normal maps for some extra details, but only in areas where merging mirrored polys together was unnecessary. There was one caveat though. Vertex smoothing became discontinuous. Panels looked too faceted and not quite round enough. I could have just upped the poly count, but instead I used a neat trick. I created a separate cylinder the same size as the tank and then transferred it’s vertex map to the problem polygons on the tank. It looked amazing. Then I got ambitious. it would be nice if the rcs ports were real geometry too. Only problem there is it creates five way intersections when you cut holes into quads, which makes strange smoothing issues Here I transferred the vertex map too—result was perfect smoothing. This technique would work great for command pods that have to have their surfaces cut up for windows. I think that’s what Squad probably did for the rcs ports on the new capsule. Sometimes the most straight foreword dumb method is the best method.

After mulling it over a bit, I think this is a good idea. Because of the scale of the mod, I've been prone to chip away at different aspects quite randomly. This will give the development some much needed structure. So, here's the plan: The beta release will roll out in blocks. Block 1 - Launch Hardware (Single resource tanks, Bipropellant fuel tanks, first/second stage M1 engines, decouplers, engine adapters, and size 4/6 fairings) Block 2 - Couplers (radial decouplers and docking ports) Block 3 - Trusses Block 4 - DA 42 Command Pod Block 5 - Truss Adapters Block 6 - Powerplant (solar panels and small fusion reactor) Block 7 - SAS and RCS Block 8 - Electrical (fuel cells, capacitors, and lights) Block 9 - Radiators Block 10 - Deep Space Engines (ion thrusters and fusion engine) Block 11 - Storage (rocket part containers, food containers, cargo bays, KIS containers) Block 12 - Manufacturing Module Block 13 - Docking Bays Block 14 - Habs Block 15 - Centrifuges

-I've yet to see a fusion engine setup that didn't call for huge radiators. -Most fusion engines I've seen produce low thrust at sub 100 KN. ISP in the 5000s though, but still kind of a bummer for moving around 100+ ton ships in KSP. Also, not very extensible. Can't cluster magnetic engine nozzles (like you pointed out). -If I drop the fusion reactor what do I replace it with—an equally bulky fission reactor or a million solar arrays? Those ion engines consume gigawatts of power. -The fusion reactor I had in mind uses magnetic targeted fusion, by way of compressing plasma surrounded in a vortex of molten lead with a spherical array of pistons. Can't understand how this sort of reactor could be used for direct thrust. Maybe open gas core cycle? Use a heat exchanger to heat up propellant?

I think this version is the winner. I'm still not happy with the fusion reactor adapter (I think it needs more trusses), but I really like the engine shrouds. Reactor has a 4M diameter and a length of 12M.

Not a bad suggestion. I'll think about it.

Latest version of the engine cluster design. Still have to model the terminals for all those power lines, and also the liquid fuel lines. I may add gas tanks too. So far I'm really liking this iteration. P.S. I couldn't resist adding 2 more for 12 total, that way the electrical requirement to run all ion engines at full power will be 1.21 gigawatts.

I used the docking bays to show the scale of the engine clusters. I plan to add a few adapters that will help the engine cluster and fusion reactor integrate with different bulkhead types.

Finished modeling the docking bay adapter.

Yes, however there's a lot of different ways to create the plasma, like high powered lasers, or microwave emitter that would eliminate the electrode all together. The electrodes right now can't handle 1 MW let alone 100 so I'm assuming an electrodeless thruster. Edit: Some more info on hall effect thrusters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall-effect_thruster They can run on Argon, Krypton, Bismuth and iodine as well.

NASA demonstrated last year that ion drives can operate at 100KW of input power and generate 5.4N of thrust. At 84KW of power, VASIMR has produced 3.8N of thrust. So, they're actually pretty comparable. All ion engines are plasma engines since plasma consists of ions. Both the VASIMR and NASA's high power X series of thrusters are trying to get the engines to operate at much higher power (MW) which will equate to much higher thrust. Unfortunately the engines made so far can't operate at near MW power without their components melting XD https://futurism.com/nasas-new-ion-thruster-breaks-records-could-take-humans-to-mars/ P.S. I'm assuming that power to thrust will scale at a 1/1 ratio for now, so 100 MW would equal 5.4KN of thrust. I'm going to increase that thrust by 10x for better playability, even though it's stretching the realism a bit. Each ion engine will now output 50KN of thrust at 100 MW of input power.

Thrust frame attachment section Edit: Added protective doors. Still needs work Edit: Not sure about this, I may try a totally different approach next. Something with trusses.

Woa, can't believe I missed this. Great job @Nertea and team!

Doing some variations, considering what @FreeThinker was pointing out. EDIT: Another Variation Edit: Third variation Edit: Fourth variation I'm justifying the extra bulk as capacitor banks. Edit: Fifth variation So far I think I like the fourth one the most.

Hmmm... I assumed you could use some kind of shielding like a superconductor or solenoid to isolate the fields... So, what you're saying is that the fields of the magnetic nozzles would overlap? Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that, I was mostly thinking about the ICH.

Optimized the geometry, added detail to the back coupler, and shortened the length some.

Front and back view of the VASIMR engine enclosure. The squareness of the sides implies modularity. Now to design the thrust frame (not plate after all) and add small details.

Yeah, 5 nozzle vasimr. It will be operating at 100 MW. I plan to develope a MTF (Magnetized Targeted Fusion) reactor that can output 1 GW a second. The engine enclosure has a diameter of 1.25m. It’s designed to be attached to a thrust plate which will help order the engines into 5x2 array. The thrust plate will seamlessly integrate with the MTF, and provides a mount point for specialized radiators. Each array will output 500 KN of thrust at an isp of 3300 KM/S (subject to change, this is highly theoretical at the moment).