Kickasskyle

May 16, 2015

As Winston said, we've fixed pretty much most of the issues. Now I've got to get 3 hours sleep before I go get a plane and go on holiday for a week, Winston will be watching so if anything goes horrifically wrong he'll be around. For the FAR users who want to use the old fairings, they're in the extras folder.

There were quite a few tweaks to the thermal stuff as well, such as making decouplers hardly conductive to stop mass loads of heat transferring between stages etc. Feedback is always appreciated.

Finally, big thanks to Nathan Kell for making the plugin that allowed us to make emissives work again.

Here's the relevant changelog:

Updated to 2.7

- 1.02 compatibility update.

- Rebalanced ISPs to account for new aerodynamics.

- Rebalanced and changed thermal properties to account for the new system.

- Converted the majority of textures to .dds producing an overall ram saving of about 25%.

- Updated engines with the latest FX modules.

- Fixed node issues brought on by v1.0 update.

- Old FAR compatible fairings moved to extras folder.

- New procedural fairings added until a better alternative is utilised.

- Parts in defunct research nodes have been moved to the next best alternative.

- Subassemblies split into legacy (for old FAR compatible fairings) and default (for the new default procedural fairings).

- Misc Minor bugfixes.

May 13, 2015

I think I've come up with a cheeki way to mitigate the horrible texture warpage on the inner faces. The top faces are a total loss though, because squad. So tomorrow I'll see what I can come up with for texturing the stuff.

Turns out I'm running into some problems with unresolvable seams. The worst problem is probably the fact that I can't match the colour palettes at all, for some reason the p.fairing textures come out ridiculously darker, even a a 100% white texture will come out looking grey due to what I'd assume are lighting issues. Then there's also no specular map support, and I can't figure a way of changing the glossiness, if it's even an option.

If you're interested in reviving the old fixed multipart fairings, it might be possible to modify the payload fairing module from old FAR for this purpose. All the machinery for detecting occlusion is there, and ferram4 seems to be generally permissive with people asking to use his code.

I wouldn't mind giving it a shot, but we're not the most plug-in oriented mod so I honestly wouldn't know where to start.

May 12, 2015

I think I've come up with a cheeki way to mitigate the horrible texture warpage on the inner faces. The top faces are a total loss though, because squad. So tomorrow I'll see what I can come up with for texturing the stuff.

May 12, 2015

Take a look at what Frizznak did with the FASA fairings. They still separate potato chip style but they don't look bad.

Like I said, I'd play around with it. It's just stock fairing module has problems with issues like texture warping all over (note the strip of super squashed texture)

.

May 12, 2015

I'm going to keep them around for that reason. I'll probably bump them into the extras folder.

It surprised me that squads execution of procedural fairings turned out to be worse than original community made one. But regardless I'm going to have a mess around with the stock fairing system and see if I can do anything meaningful with it. It probably wont look that pretty, considering the massive abhorrent texture tile shredding that I noticed during use.

The ideal fairing system (for me) is pretty much going to be what Sumghai is planning to do anyway, procedural fairings that limit you to reasonable proportions.

May 7, 2015

Hey, Kickasskyle, just for your awareness:
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/119873-PSA-to-Part-Mod-Authors-Please-Distribute-Textures-as-DDS-if-Possible

I was aware of the change and was going to mess about with it.

April 27, 2015

I'm going to take a look at all the balance things once my exams end, but until then you'll have to sit tight. Should be around the 12th or so next month.

January 8, 2015

I was not happy with a lot of the KW engines in KSP v0.90 especially the 2.5M and larger engines. Thus I decided to do some tweaks to be more in line with stock KSP "balance". I've done my best to give each engine a role, or place, in the engine "hierarchy".
I wrote the config as a module manager patch. Therefore, if you decide you don't like the changes you can easily delete the patch and have "stock" KW engines.
I am open to opinions on these changes. I tried my best not to make any 1 engine the "best", though some engines are definitely better at certain things (such as the Griffon "series" engines being excellent launch engines).
Release v1.0
// Changed the Vesta VR-1 to be a lighter LV-T45 with less thrust
- thrust increased from 90 to 100
- ASL ISP reduced from 350 to 320
- Vac ISP reduced from 400 to 370
// Changed the Wildcat V to be a heavier LV-T30 with more thrust
- thrust increased from 230 to 260
- ASL ISP reduced from 325 to 320
// Changed the Vesta VR-9D to be a lighter "Skipper" with less thrust
- weight reduced from 5T to 2.5T
- thrust reduced from 600 to 540
// Changed the Maverick V to be a lighter "Mainsail" with less thrust
- weight reduced from 6T to 4T
- thrust reduced from 1400 to 1000
- ASL ISP increased from 285 to 320
- Vac ISP increased from 335 to 360
// Changed the Griffon G8D to be a launch pad lifter engine (A 2.5M reversed-role KR-2L)
- thrust increased from 1900 to 2000
- ASL ISP increased from 280 to 400
- Vac ISP reduced from 325 to 260
// Changed the Wildcat XR to be a heavier KR-2L with more thrust
- thrust increased from 1400 to 3800
- ASL ISP increased from 275 to 280
- Vac ISP increased from 370 to 380
// Changed the Titan T1 to be a heavier KS-25x4 with more thrust
//(also note Titan T1 is slightly less efficient due to massive gimbal)
- thrust increased from 3600 to 4600
- ASL ISP increased from 270 to 300
- Vac ISP increased from 325 to 340
// Changed the Griffon XX to be a launch pad lifter engine (A 3.5M version of the G8D)
- thrust increased from 5000 to 5900
- ASL ISP increased from 265 to 400
- Vac ISP reduced from 310 to 260
// Changed the Titan V to be a 5M variant of the Titan T1
- thrust increased from 5800 to 7300
- ASL ISP increased from 260 to 290
- Vac ISP increased from 335 to 340
// Changed the Griffon Century to be a launch pad lifter engine (A 5M version of the G8D)
- thrust decreased from 11000 to 10000
- ASL ISP increased from 257 to 400
- Vac ISP reduced from 300 to 260
Download the file here on dropbox

Funnily enough I do actually have a set of stock "balance" numbers hidden in the dark depths of a forbidden excel spreadsheet tab.

Did you use any performance metrics for the engines when you came up with your numbers or did you just use straight edit the stats?

Sorry for the sparse replies all around guys and gals. I'm still knee deep in various levels of work and pretty much have been over the entirety of the Christmas holiday.

Although I'm fairly sure I'll get a nice chunk of free time in a couple of weeks, so I'll use that to take a look over some things that have been needing to be touched.

December 14, 2014

And on that note, your textures will get really messed up if you try to convert by hand - .dds flips the texture on load for some reason, so you have to flip the texture during conversion too. The plugin that Olympic1 linked will do that automatically.

Has anyone benchmarked and determined the rough gains you get by using .dds in ksp with the previously mentioned loaders?

If it's reasonable I might think about converting all the textures on my end and doing some release magic when I get some time (dissertations and coursework up the yazoo n all that).

November 27, 2014

Some things I've been meaning to ask K&W for a while but have just been reminded about:
1, why use a negative ejection force on the fairings? Is it due to the way they're assembled?
2, what's with the extra node in the fairing bases? One decouple node on top, one attach node on the bottom and one just slightly above the bottom for... reasons.

1. Yeah, if you reversed it they'd collapse inwards, we could probably fix it to be "positive" if we dicked around. But "if it ain't broke" and all that.

2. It's just there for the sake of squeezing out as much height as possible if you have a relatively \ / conical 'rear end' to your fairing load.

November 24, 2014

KickAssKyle, Thankyou for the great mod! I have been using KW in every install I have had of KSP for close to 2 years!
I must say that I miss the 3.75m orange tank, like the one I used in for the main body of the craft in this pic:
I would really like a copy of that texture so that I could use it as a procedural tank texture only for my own personal use. I still have a .23.5 install on my PC with the KW 2.5.6B installed that has that part. However I did not see a .png or a .tga file that I could open that looked anything like that tank in that Gamedate/KWRocketry/Parts/Fuel/KW3mtankL4ALT folder. Would you be so kind as to either make that texture available to download or to help me figure out how to extract the texture from the old install?

http://puu.sh/d40Lb/c358723ac6.rar

The specular maps are contained within the alpha channel of the main texture. I can't remember how procedural handles textures though.

Stuff in the KW folder is generally finally exported as .mbm though, which is why you find anything, you can convert it but without some superPNG tweaking it'd look half transparent.

October 16, 2014

Bug report. InstantPowerResponseConfigs breaks things. It has wrong scale values, like
-scale = 1, 1, 1
+scale = 0.8, 0.8, 0.8
Look at that difference file: http://pastebin.com/MpLnqsYL, it even affects gimbals and jettison forces.

I'm assuming you're not using version "v2.6d2". I redid the IPR config files after forgetting to commit them on the previous release. The majority of the engines should now be at scale 1,1,1 sans a few outliers.

I have a small request. Could the KW winglets get FAR config data? It'd not be a big task, but would be really great for FAR users, who'd then be able to use Bearcat Century winglets.

I'll be honest, I'm not the best person to do this. I Haven't dabbled enough with the cfg workings of FAR to know how to works, but I'm sure someone else in this thread has an idea. Right, guys?

October 15, 2014

Should i wait downloading the mod, reading about some problems?

v2.6d2 should be coming very soon, it fixes the issues with the instant power response configs and the launch clamp sounds.

If you don't use either of those, it shouldn't be an issue.

October 14, 2014

for some reason i;am still geting scaling issues on some engines with this update anyone else? did a clean install and it;s still a no go i'am i missing something?

I just thought about it now, and I may have accidentally overlooked changing the scaling on the instant power response configs, I'll look into it when I get back home later. But I think that might be it.

October 14, 2014

V2.6d has been released!

see OP for DL's.

This version mainly fixes the scale issues and changes some of the entry costs, but there are also a few other minor fixes that I've applied.

I decided to delay implementing any soundscape changes and contracts stuff because it needed more testing than I was able to put in. I'll probably wrap them all up in their own mini update to be put out in the near future.

A word on entry costs. I came up with (what I thought was) a nice little pricing solution for engines/solids, the jist of it is the entry cost is that it's the combination of the 'tech level (1-9)' and the cost of the part itself (when available). I thought that was a good way of incorporating both the start up costs associated with producing & getting stuff setup initially and sort of a visible tech progression.

Some of the bigger engines get a bit pricey to unlock, but what's career mode without goals and things to aim for.

A counter to those prices is that fact that fuel part unlocks are half the cost of the actual part mainly because you wouldn't be paying for the inclusive fuel in your entry costs! At least that's how I see it.

Anyway we'll see how that goes down, have fun I'm off to bed.

October 13, 2014

So,

I've gone through and fixed all the scale issues with KW Rocketry for the latest fix. I've got a few other things I need to before release.

But the main thing that I see holding it up is the 'economy check', I haven't had enough time to search the forums but does anyone know if anyone's got a list of any price changes .24 -> .25?

It looks like it'll be end of tomorrow that I'll try and get release up for, I've got some stuff to do when I get home tomorrow but I should be able to put in the last few bits and release it. Hopefully.

I gotta shoot off to sleep.

October 8, 2014

Hey guys.

Sorry for the slow uptake guys, I've been spending the last few days bedridden due to a blasted cold so I didn't see release or the problems it brought along and Winston was also on holiday so we have been caught off guard.

I can't give you a solid deadline for when the fixes will be out as I've just now gotten visibility of this, but I'd hope for sometime late this weekend. I'll add in a bunch of other fixes that have been looming around and some other small things that are about.

Hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to zip through the scales and check on the pricing/research amounts.(he says)

So it's coming, one way or the other.

September 24, 2014

When I used the KW SC3 - RCS 3.75 monopropellent fuel tank, it was replaced with image of another tank named SC-3 RCS.
I carried out a quick test which replicated the problem as shown in screen shots below.

Looks like you didn't delete the previous version before installing the new one, as those thinner RCS tanks don't exist in the latest version.

September 8, 2014

Not sure if this has been reported already or not, but the cost of the ST-25 2.5m side tank is inconsistent with other fuel tank costs. For other tanks in both stock and KW the cost of the fuel ends up being 23% of the total cost of the tank. For the ST-25 the fuel costs is 51.6% of the total cost (i.e. the "dry cost" is abnormally low). This results in said tank costing less than a Rockomax X200-32 despite holding substantially more fuel. To match the cost ratio of other tanks its total cost should be 12,960.

I see what I did when I input the cost, if you go in the part file you'll notice that entryCost is what the actual cost should be. I'll change it for the next release. Cheers.

Dear Kyle and Winston
Can we have shroud functionality on the interstage size adapters, so that they split in half as well as decouple? That'd be REALLY really useful and swell in so many ways. I'll buy you cookies

I'll knock up a prototype and see how it rolls, I have a feeling it would cause problems if for some reason someone had them in parallel with another set of stacks.

August 23, 2014

Is there a fairing only download? I love the fairings and I'd like them in my space program.

Download and install the whole thing. Go into the parts folder, delete everything except 'FairingBases' and 'Fairings'. There don't seem to be texture dependencies outside of those folders.

I was writing a reply and he beat me to it, the only thing you'd be missing of things somewhat 'related' to fairings would be the 3m petal adapter and the adapter shroud decouplers.

Kyle, Winston
since you are planing next update, may I suggest to add some additional tuning to engine sound volume levels.
Using this, you need to throttle to almost one third to hear any sound
...

I honestly didn't know what the exact arguments were in the sound/effects system, but now that I look at it with what you've said it does seem pretty obvious. We'll no doubt have another look at them before the next version, so we'll see how that goes. Cheers by the way.

August 22, 2014

Kyle, Winston -
Test craft that suffers from the engine fuel flow / flame out problem. It looks like the engine is connected to the shroud, not the fuel tank. Oddly the engine doesn't decouple with the shroud.

I loaded up your craft file and it didn't fire first time, then I took off the shroud and put it back on it the same place and it worked fine.

I missed the good ol days when I could use KW, with the recent patches to kerbal I have been unable to install KW without getting this stupid line 49 unity crash, I have been in denial about the fact its KW causing it, however, when I delete KW and run a steam integrity check the game runs great... Reinstall kw and it does the same thing.. both on my computer and my wifes, this is with 64 bit Win 8, I7 16gig ram, 2 high end dedicated graphics cards. So I'm going to assume its most likely due to trying to run 64 bit with KW, havnt tried to see if i can recreate the error with 32. (sigh) I need my KW

I did a bit of poking around and you don't seem to be the only person experiencing this error regardless of mods installed, so I'd imagine it might have something to do with 64bit. Trying on 32bit might be a good idea.

August 18, 2014

I have a lot of mods for sure:
ModuleManager v2.2.0.0
aaa_Toolbar v1.0.0.0
ActiveStruts v1.0.0.0
ActiveTextureManagement v1.0.0.0
AdaptiveDockingNode v1.5.5311.28823
AviationLights v0.0.0.0
BDAnimationModules v0.0.0.0
Chatterer v0.5.9.4
ChopIt v2.0.1.0
CLSInterfaces v1.0.0.0
ConnectedLivingSpace v1.0.8.0
CrewManifest v0.5.8.0
DifferentialThrust v1.0.0.0
DeadlyReentry v5.1.5319.31493
DebRefund v1.0.12.31180
AGExt v1.0.0.0
EditorExtensions v1.3.5313.1464
FerramAerospaceResearch v0.14.1.1
ferramGraph v1.3.0.0
JsonFx v2.0.1209.2800
FinePrint v1.0.0.0
Firespitter v7.0.5320.35444
Pump v0.0.0.0
InfinitechTACGreenhouseLights v1.0.0.0
MechJeb2 v2.3.0.0
RasterPropMonitor v0.17.0.0
MechJebRPM v0.17.0.0
KAS v1.0.5325.39758
KerbalJointReinforcement v2.4.3.0
HyperEdit v1.2.4.1
MapShowNavBall v1.1.5254.4435
InfernalRobotics v0.18.4.0
KSPAPIExtensions v1.7.0.0
Scale_Redist v1.0.0.0
MechJebFARExt v1.0.0.0
NBody v1.0.0.0
FinalFrontier v1.0.0.0
OpenResourceSystem_1_1_0 v1.1.0.0
PartAngleDisplay v0.2.4.1
ProceduralFairings v0.0.0.0
ProceduralParts v0.9.18.0
QuantumStrutsContinued v1.0.1.30222
SCANsat v1.0.6.0
ScienceAlert v1.7.0.0
SelectRoot v0.0.0.0
SmokeScreen v0.9.0.0
StripSymmetry v1.3.0.0
SwitchVessel v0.0.0.0
MiniAVC v1.0.2.1
TacFuelBalancer v2.4.0.0
TacLifeSupport v0.9.0.0
ModuleDB v1.0.5338.38984
ToadicusTools v0.0.0.0
KerbalAlarmClock v2.7.8.2
KSPAlternateResourcePanel v2.5.1.0
TweakableAnimateGeneric v1.2.5338.38982
TweakableDecouplers v1.4.5338.38980
TweakableDockingNode v1.1.5338.38979
TweakableEngineFairings v1.0.5338.38983
TweakableEVA v1.4.5338.38983
TweakableGimbals v1.3.5338.38981
TweakableIntakes v1.4.5338.38984
TweakableLadders v1.2.5338.38981
TweakableRCS v1.3.5338.38982
TweakableReactionWheels v1.2.5338.38981
TweakableSolarPanels v1.2.5338.38980
TweakableStaging v1.4.5338.38979
Scale v1.41.0.0
Karbonite v1.0.0.0
KolonyTools v0.16.0.0
USITools v1.0.0.0
AirbagTools v1.0.0.0
WheelSounds v0.4.0.0
bounce v1.0.0.0
Shrouds are working for Stock & NovaPunch engines and I don't see any errors. Therefore I suspected a faulty KW install on my side at first.
However, once I removed everything except KW the shrouds appeared, so yes there is a conflict. Do you see anything suspicous? Otherwise I'll do the ususl "add one mod and test" dance
EDIT: got it! It was my own foolishness of course... I had an old tweak lying around which fixed KW & TweakScale. Looks like it's not required anymore, but it messed up with the shroud models...

Well I'm glad you managed to fix it, hopefully your efforts will help anyone else that comes across a similar problem.

August 17, 2014

Thanks for your reply, yes it is.

Do you have any other mods or plugins installed that could interact with the shroud functionality?

August 14, 2014

Still haven't seen a solution to this. For now, I'm just using a Procedural Fairings interstage to shroud the engine, which works well

I cannot replicate this, as much as I've tried. As I result I can't even really try and fix it without commiting something that will bust how it functions for other people. Because I can't replicate it, I'm inclined to believe something else is clashing and causing it. If you have any ideas, shoot.

Tested with the wildcat engine on the third stage of a heavy lifter. It will fire fine on the ground with the lower stages still attached, but when the lower stages are dumped in orbit the engine flames out even though it's directly attached to a full tank.

Does the issue occur with just KW tanks? Seeing as you've said it happens with both stock and KW engines.

Don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet or not, but struts are not surface mountable to some of the SRBs in this pack, or they don't work correctly anyways. Any chance you can address this?

Which SRBs specifically? I can't recall ever having had this problem.

August 6, 2014

This is what I tried the other night - connecting the top of the petal adapter to the bottom of the SM engine which auto generates the fairing. The problem I have is that the auto generated fairing won't disappear. Whether I use the decouple command on the petal adapter or try to manually "jettison" the fairing before decoupling, the fairing stays in place. So when I open the petal fairing the auto generated fairing remains fixed in place, attached to nothing. I can clip right through it so I can still turn the SM around and extract my lander, but it looks pretty silly.

The majority of the engines now have a cloned top node for this very reason, you can place shrouds/etc on them without triggering the automatic shroud. This was the design intent for the petal adapter.

Is it just me or is the 'Griffon Century' over powered, with the largest tank it makes it pretty easy to get a orange tank or even more into space.

Bigger rockets enabling you to lift heavier cargo into orbit isn't anything I wouldn't expect, if that weren't the case I'd question what their use.

Generally speaking the way we've setup the balance for KW rocketry at the moment relies on the thrust to weight ratio of the engines increasing relative to their size/role. To counter this they have a drop off in their ISP.

If you wanted to point at overpowered engines, the stock KR-2L actually has a higher thrust/weight ratio than the griffon century and a higher ISP to boot. But stocks in my opinion, dubious balance direction is a subject for another day.

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