benjee10

Hey Shryq! Looks good! Great to finally be able to play with the Ranger! A few points: as mentioned before, the ship naturally torques up, so the reaction wheels could do with beefing up a bit. The RCS is also imbalanced; I think the front set could do with less power. Also, the craft as a whole is too big - I think I've scaled down the Endurance and Lander a little to make the ends of the connector tubes standard 1.25m. The Ranger needs to be about 0.8 of the size it currently is - this should be fixable with rescaleFactor but there's a bug with that where if your root part has rescaleFactor =/= 1 then it will change scale when reverting flight, so you may need to rescale just the main body in Unity. It means the stock port won't fit perfectly but the current size makes the Endurance and Lander look tiny haha! Still, great to see it in game! Good job! IVA looks really cool too! Lander torque is set to 100 with an electric charge rate of 50. We'll use stock ports for now and decide whether or not to make custom ones later. At the moment I don't see any reason too other than for looks.

Hey Ramix09, unfortunately I've already handed in the two versions. Great work though! Here's the other version:

I could be totally wrong but wasn't the reason they needed the Saturn V to get off Earth but not the other planets because of the tidal forces of Gargantua? They never go into orbit around Miller's planet, so is it possible that the black hole's tidal gravity literally pulled them out of the planet's gravity well after they got high enough? Same with Endurance easily escaping Mann's planet. Would the tidal forces of a supermassive black hole be enough to have that kind of effect? Still, yeah, the radiation is the biggest plothole but it's one you kind of have to overlook because otherwise there'd be no movie. Whatever the case it was nice to see proper scientific ideas being presented in a major movie in a reasonably accurate way and a depiction of spaceflight that at least felt plausible even if under closer scrutiny it comes apart a bit. Films like Interstellar and Gravity are what we need to get people interested in spaceflight again even if they don't strictly play by the rules.

Latest update is up. It's basically just tweaks to what already exists to make it a bit more balanced and usable.

Just changing the windows slightly like that has greatly helped I think. Looks very Gemini now! Visibility looks good too. Will you be making the service module too? The Gemini spacecraft has always been my favourite of the capsules, has that retro vibe as well as looking somewhat more futuristic than Mercury or Apollo did. (also the fact that you knew about the Interstellar mod made me squee a little inside. Stay awesome Beale, stay awesome)

Yeah I've noticed some issues with the fuselage crash tolerance. I'll look into it and work that out for next release! Glad to know it works well with FAR as well!

I'm a long-time lurker of this thread (I love these parts so much - KSP feels so empty without them) but I thought I'd chip in on the Gemini pod: I love the colour and the texturing, but I think to get it looking more definitely Gemini-looking you should increase the size of the windows quite a bit. I know how annoying that is to do when you've already modeled and textured everything but at the moment the proportions are the only thing stopping it from screaming 'Gemini!' as soon as you see it. Still, fantastic. I'm in awe of your texturing skills and the sheer rate you work at!

I originally had it set up like that with the engines separate, but the trouble with this is that as the fuel drains from the fuselage the centre of mass slips backwards and makes VTOL impossible. I'm currently focusing on making everything work with stock but I'll bundle some DRE configs with the next update and maybe that'll help fix the problem. Or failing that just increase the maxtemp value so it won't overheat.

Nice job! There's plenty of free video editing software out there, especially if you just want to put some music over it. Even Blender has a video editing function. You should take a look, would be great to see it with the music! Awesome. I look forward to it & take your time, IRL stuff always comes first! Update with new Lander configs and a deadly reentry patch will probably come Friday as I'm busy tonight and tomorrow.

The Rangers will be ready when Shryq has time to work on them. I don't have any control over that. I would make a cinematic but the computer I play KSP on isn't really powerful enough to run it on high quality and screen capture at the same time. Much as I'd love to I don't think a cinematic will happen, at least from me. If anyone else wants to then that'd be brilliant though.

Thanks! I'm experimenting with bumping up the isp to make it Eve-orbit capable without being totally overpowered. Current setting has it reaching orbit on about a quarter of a tank - which nice as it is basically removes the need for the endurance mothership entirely as it can go literally anywhere it wants from Kerbin's surface. There is such thing as too overpowered haha! Also, because I'm an idiot I stuck the ladders on the lander stock craft on upside down - will fix shortly.

You should still be able to get the kerbals out by clicking EVA on their portraits. I'm looking into the hatch unclickable bug! No idea why it's happening. Glad you guys like the Lander! Any feedback on balance/resource levels etc etc?

The trouble with that would be that the ring wouldn't be a complete circle. Because of the way the KSP node system works there would always be one part of the ring that wouldn't connect properly and you'd lose structural integrity and it'd be basically un-flyable. This is the only way to go as far as I can work out.

LANDER DOWNLOAD IS UP! Also added craft files into the .zip. They have action groups set up etc. etc. Once we get to a stable beta release with everything implemented parts wise, I'll start adding MM configs for stuff like that cryo freeze mod!

I took some artistic license with the visualisation of the stars. Plus we don't know what dwarf planets are present there; the only planet shown is the gas giant, the grey one is meant to be a dwarf and the atmospheric world is a moon of the gas giant.

It was actually based on Gamma Cephei, which is about 46 light years away (so utterly impractical for interstellar travel) because that had the kind of planetary system I needed. Plus everything seems to go for Alpha Centauri and I wanted to be a bit different but still be real place haha! I've done an alternative edit of the film which should be uploaded soon which is an artier version, but I'm submitting both versions for my final piece and saying one is more of a cinematic version and the other to be something projected in a gallery for example. Thanks for all your feedback everyone, you've been a great help!

Thanks! Working on a rescale now. I'll release them when the engine effects are done, so either tonight or tomorrow most likely! Also, just tested out, the torque on the Lander and Endurance combined are insane enough that you can pull off orbital maneuvers using the Lander main engines when it's docked horizontally to the bottom of the ring, just like in the movie. Also had a thought that could explain why the craft seem to have such insane delta-v: all of the planets we see them visit are deep in Gargantua's gravity well, so much so that on Miller's planet tidal gravity was enough to pull up waves thousands of meters high. This means that any craft leaving the surface would be getting an assist from Gargantua; fly up high enough and it just plucks you out of the planet's gravity. This also explains how Endurance was able to escape Mann's planet so easily, and why the Ranger needed a Saturn V to get off Earth and yet was an SSTO on other worlds. Obviously we can't model that in stock KSP, so I'll keep the delta-v as ridiculous as they appear. And thanks Nertea, huge fan of your mods, Near Future Technologies is a staple of my career saves now!

They're pretty easy to dock with manually to be honest. Anything within the ring will be tricky to dock on autopilot. I'll try it out with the Ranger mockups and see how much clearance there is. Thanks that'd be great!

xxhansonmaxx is handling the IVA modelling. You can see some of his stuff on previous pages! Not sure about the scale. Too large or too small for the ring?

The lander is currently 5 parts excluding RCS and docking ports, and RCS will eventually be integrated. I had to make the body and makn engines one part to combat COM issues when using the VTOL engines. Unfortunately due to the specific nature of the vehicles there aren't many parts which can be used for other things, but the vehicles themselves can be used for multiple purposes. You could use the lander to hoist space station parts into orbit for example.

Thanks everyone! There's two black marks on the rim of engine mount/fuel tank which should be covered up when the engine is rotated correctly. Coming next update: Still need to work on colliders as they're preventing docking using the port on the underside at the moment. Otherwise it flies well. The rangers in the background are just placeholders and entirely non-functional just to get a sense of what scale everything needs to be.

The ranger is more complex since it has moving parts which need to be animated and has to have the aerodynamics balanced, so that will come later when Shryq has time. EDIT: Updated to 0.1.4. Added main engines and hopefully fixed the docking port disappearing bug. Download in the OP.

Adding RCS is something I'm looking into but for the moment it isn't top of the list of features since the reaction wheels should be enough to hold the ship steady. Caullerd, I'll look into that! In the meantime SAS should probably be kept on pretty much all the time.

Hmm. That's weird. I'll look into it. Not really done any long-duration tests with it yet. I suspect it may be something to do with the colliders I used on the ring which are going to be redone with the next version anyway. Thanks for pointing it out!

0.1.3 released! Added science unit and hatches to all habitable pods. No more trapped kerbals! Next update should add engines.