TiktaalikDreaming

There's one or two gauges that suit the theme, but in reality, even the older style dials in ASET are from much newer craft than this would have been. So I think I'm caving in and making props. I'm going to re-do the numbers and positions on this, but first cut of a basic airspeed indicator

From a very quick trial run, this seems to work very nicely. Good work

OK, better ASET based IVA. I caved in and used the NASA style resource gauges. I would have preferred olde style round gauges. But at least it's functional. The other option would be to do my own props, but I just want to get a basic functional IVA for the moment, and move on to some landing skids. Looking at the cockpits for WWII era Messerschmidts, there's virtually no text, just gauges, and no colour. So you needed to know before hand which dial showed what. I guess that's OK if you already need to know, it's pretty harsh on kerbal players though.

And now an IVA using ASET props. Although I need to switch out the speedo. There's times I guess when you need a velocity indicator (esp in a space game) with increments of 1kmps, but probably should have checked that before sticking it on the dash of a WWII era rocket plane. That's the view doing a ramjet powered cruise at around MACH 4, no discernible shift in the speedo clearly designed for orbitable work. I think I'll go look for something called an air-speed-indicator. No-one should be doing 100kmps in atmo.

Cockpit unit added. It pretty much all still fits on one extra 2k texture for all the A-4 "bonus" items. I'm probably happier about that than I should be. I blame the Nexus. Jeb's test flight of the new IVA mask, and returning my A-4b wings from experimental attach nodes unfortunately happened at the wrong time/angle for good photography. I returned the A-4b wings to non-experimental so I could pack a dev release via github, https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/releases/tag/0.19.200621 The IVA is still fairly basic. It's the basic space, plus a seat and a dash panel with some basic gauges. I can't say the digital speedo is totally in character for the part, but it's the only speed indicator in the base squad props. I will add a secondary dash to show IFF the game has something else, once I decide which mod adds the most suitable bits.

Jeb finally fits in, Even if his compass is upside down, Current git commit has the cockpit, but the A-4b wing is part way towards having itself rotated and the attach node is extremely wonky.

New variant;

Camo pattern done. The surface attach wings aren't able to always be matched up with the fuselage camo pattern obviously. But broadly they fit. In fact, the A-9 wings don't exactly match, as the two sides of the main tank aren't the same. It really doesn't seem to make much difference in game though. An extra line along a seam between parts is just more camo pattern Also, I noticed I forgot a bit of yellow on the ramjet.

I've added a specular layer, keeping it fairly basic for now, and a second colour variant, cheap old green. I basically had to add the green to get the painted areas all mapped out to do the specular. And I had to do the specular because the non-shiny canopy was annoying me. Still testing with my Asterisk Wing "space fighter", A-4b-6-9 hybrid. To Do list based on things so far. IVA - at least the basic shape, a chair, kerbal transform, etc - except I seem to have broken my PartTools in Unity and can't spawn an IVA or prop. Edgewear and general grunge - to match other A-4 parts Emissive for window toggled with light Fix wing controls, the wings need rotating to have the controls along the axis, meaning attack node needs shifting and rotating. <- started, trying to remember trig from decades ago Do that camo pattern. That's gonna be a bit of a pig to have it all match up. <- done

Eventually. Some of those are a bit embarrassing, with seams showing clearly etc. And a lot of textures could be switched out for a 1 pixel green spot. It's like I made the 3d models and never got around to texturing them or something

The long delayed A-4b+ cockpit has started being redone. Or as I like to think of it, the self cremation unit. I tried to organise it like a WWII German fighter cockpit, but between giant kerbal heads and the fact that there's very little space up top there, it consistently looked stupid. There's just not enough length, so the canopy ends up looking like a cartoon plane. By sinking the kerbal further back and deeper into the part, and just accepting that visibility will be fairly bad, this semi space age looking thing emerged. The IVA will emerge as well, and I have a version of it, but the walls joining the canopy hatch and the rest is fairly awful at the moment. All parts with IVAs take a bit longer to get into game. But it should be too long to get a basic version up and running to replace the old cockpit

I still have a bit of work to do, normals for the A9 body wing, and specular, plus the paint variants, but I now have the three wing variants looking OK at first glance; A-4B A-6 A-9

And adding some colour to the ramjet,

Basic work done for the A-4b wing, and the A-6 wing now as well. I had lost the unity set-up for all the wings and the ramjet, so there was a bit of trying to get nodes right and so on. The 3 wing types, and the ramjet all fit on one 2k texture. I very much doubt the cockpit will fit on as well, doubly so with an IVA. I'm going to ditch my attempt to make a combined cockpit and landing wheel, as it was a disaster. But I do want to have a bit of bonus liquid fuel (or kerosene iff real fuels is installed) on the cockpit part, so when using that, the ramjet has something to work with. Next up is dumping UV maps out and starting a bump map. Here's a (less crazy than I thought it would be) craft using the A-9 wings, the A-4b wings and the A-6 wings, with a ramjet. https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/releases/tag/0.19.200610

Nodes are now rearranged so things fit without doing silly things; Mostly re-unwrapped. I'll be unwrapping the other wing parts and so on before any real texturing starts though, to make sure they're arranged on the texture atlas nicely. https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/releases/tag/0.19.3 for anyone following along at home

I remember now. After I did the A-4, I did the A-2,3,5. Then I turned my attention to doing a combined A-4b cockpit with landing wheel. I'm still not sure that's a good idea in KSP with how wheels work, and it gave me no end of grief. And I got sidetracked with my Nexus revamp. I've re-opened my A6-9 files and adjusted some things. Will be progressing the revamp on those. Starting with the annoyingly awkward to place ramjet. Which is now matched (in blender) to the correct stack node, re-UV mapped, and test AO baked (I do that to check a bunch of things). Some slight mesh improvements happened. The base shroud piece was just removed and replaced with a new copy from the A-4 revamp. I fixed the mesh up around the weirder curves. The internals are no longer floating. Looks like I can probably get all the A4b-A6-A9 extras on one 2k texture as well. A fair way from in game yet, but progress.

I suspect the big issue is the weird mix of editions. 0.19.2 has a mostly updated configuration for ro, but still has the issue with unmatched parts, for the ramjet and the A-9 swept wing. I don't know if the wing is easily adjustable, but the ranker, being only placed once, can be shifted easily enough. I think one of the last things I fixed up were some ro things.

Yeah, that's where I was going to go if I had the time. I've just never had that time, and to be honest, it was the interaction with KSP's api that baffled me the most. For the record, "my" Orion mod was basically an updated parts mod on top of Nyrath's Orion mod which was actually the work of a bunch of people. Nyrath being the Winchell Chung who runs the Atomic Rockets web site with all this nice info http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.php#boomboom The only stuff I really did with the plugin was fix a reference after it changed once, and ad some tweaking to account for atmo. I can code math, even in C#.

Neither of these have been redone for the revamp yet, so I'm not even sure it'll function in modern RO, or link to the right node placement anymore. scale should also be set to 1.0, but I can't make any promises it'll function (a bit like the real thing I guess). The A-10 fairing gaps are for wings and the cool looking non-functional swept wing thing the A-9 had. Also, if there's a staging issue and you decouple without droping the fairings, and everything is perfectly linear (ha) it'll let the fins through. The old RO patch file is here; https://github.com/TiktaalikDreaming/WernhersOldStuff/blob/a01113396bba10414784e0afaa747a315835103d/configs/RealismOverhaulWernhers.cfg Again, where things are supposed to match revamped parts things might have changed a bit, and it was last tested in RO maybe 3 years ago. RO warning: LOX+Ethanol with low TWR engines and general horribleness means you end up staging early. Lots of drag slamming you back into the earlier stage. And ruining your propellant flow. Expletive tonnes of ullage or hot staging are needed.

The NASA grade pulse units were around 141kg, I don't have exact dimensions for them. The USAF grade units were either 79 or 86kg depending on what you read, and 33cm round by 61cm long (density of ~1.65kg/L). I suspect we know those dimensions because they had to share that much at least when working with Coca-Cola Vending machine designers with the feeding mechanism. As the NASA units were derivative and later than that collaboration, we just know the mass. The NASA units were (according to the George Dyson book) missing some of the super secret tweaks to reduce the nuclear device size, so they pick up a bit of mass and probably size from that. Pulse units for the different craft varied, which is damned inconvenient for a mod. The big early Orions used NPUs of around 1.15tonnes each. 640kg is somewhere between what would be used on a 20m Orion and a 4000tonne (I think the 86foot?) Orion. It's pretty damned big for a scaled down 5m Orion. Which brings us to dial-a-yield. This is a great improvement over the old Orion mod. There's no sign in the documents that I've found to support them, BUT they needed different yields, and the people involved would certainly have been aware of the capability. As far as I know, there's only really a couple of ways of doing it on purely fission devices, but both are likely to be available on units where size is critical, as they're both about varying neutron flux "artificially" which is needed to shrink the primary fission system. Critically for the mod, it makes it much easier to use. We can argue all day about whether they would risk the added complexity or if the added neutron flux from the capability is a good idea in a crewed craft full of enriched fissionable material. But Kerbals don't care. It aids boom boom. I've just started going through some of the code. I tried and failed several times to get up to speed to rewrite the old Orion mod, but with zilch experience in C# I struggled a bit. And the final disabling of extending part rather than partmodule basically killed my chances of fixing it. It looks like the plate movement is based on an animation. Excellent And the primary and secondary suspension move properly. That makes me inordinately happy.

It took a rather absurd amount of research to get it to where it is now. I think the most recent main change was realising the LH2 pumps should be on the safe side of the shadow shield. It's been mutating and getting more detailed for years now.

The suspension system that was intended by the project orion would have spread the impulse out over most of the time between pulses, with the forces felt by the upper craft never dropping below 0 during normal operation. This was due to a combination of the sophisticated suspension and the pusher plate system accounting for a significant fraction of the vessel mass. That of course works against you when either shutting down or if there's a misfire, and suddenly there's an oscillating few hundred tonnes of craft linked to you. That's when the real vomiting would start. In normal operation, even at minimum mass/max acceleration they were talking peaking at 4G (meaning +4G->-4G->+4G etc when shutting down) with normal operation peaking at around 2G, with averages only 1.2ish. Awesome work friend. I love that it took me several reads through to notice the image above isn't the original, and it was the "in collaboration with Sean's Cannery" that wormed it's way into my skull with the hint.

OK, tank thing is pretty much done now, so there's a new version on spacedock. I also updated the blueprintish type images on the first post to reflect the current state of a whole 3 parts.

The technical questions you talk about all had solutions from the work done by project Orion. It's not like they didn't realise having a nuke go off under you could cause some issues. The unsolved problem is that it really annoys the neighbours, and the one outstanding unknown technical issue is whether spalling would kill the pusher plate or not. The experienced G forces on top of the suspension system would fluctuate, but we're talking a very survivable (if not super comfortable) wave pattern that varies a bit from about half a G to a bit under 2 G (when the vehicle is fully loaded, maybe 4-ish at min mass). The bigger loads are if you get a misfire, and during start-up and shut-down.

First one in game. Not finished by any stretch of the imagination, but my Internet was deceased for a day, and between complaining to my ISP then my ISP's wholesaler, I had time to do a bit more work on it. I'm basically still working on getting the bump maps right before moving on to finishing the rest of the textures.