AdmiralTigerclaw

I scale things to fit. Though in the last few airports I've been scaling the base plates to scale 3. EDIT: Also, of the three filler triangles, you actually need to use all three. Filler A is a regular equilateral triangle. Filler B1 and B2 are right triangles that have their sides flipped. So if you're bracing one side with B1, the opposing side needs to be B2. EDIT2: I'm taking my stuff over here...

I meant I update with a new link, and kill the old file, so the old link is a dead husk. Thought that's good to know. I forgot they got all upset about that stuff. I've been running ad-blocker so long, I forget that garbage popups exist.

The base mod is just Eskandare's bases. My airport work is a separate download hiding as a mediafire link on one of the pages, though every time I update them, the link is invalidated. If you wait for a little later tonight, I'm going to put up another temporary link with the new airport installed.

I haven't seen anything that lends itself to a water spawn YET. I'm using runways shrunken down to as small as they'll go to act as spawn points on open tarmac. The closest thing to what you're asking for is L-OUIS Tropical Floatplane stop. But that spawn is up on the tarmac. However, you can roll down into the water and then launch from there. Anyway, I just finished the last of my International Airports. Now I'm waiting on XKJMK from BottleRocketeer.

I'm working on a lot of airports (back-skim the thread. Half the pages at this point I think are filled with my updates.) and BottleRocketeer has poked the Kerbinside GAP thread about it while poking me. And I put in my two cents and plans.

Since Bottle Rocketeer tagged me, here's my battle plan: And to show it's not just a pipe dream... My Data Chart as I update it. And one of the airports- Actually, edit. Here's the album. https://imgur.com/a/feNu1Uq EDIT: IF I were the one setting up the planning, I'd be creating Charters that look more like real air contracts. Some of the rules I suggest. 1: Start with three primary air charter sizes. 0-10 passengers between local airports. 10 - 30 for regionals. 30 - 100 for internationals. 2: A charter can go to any airport of matching size class or higher. Locals can go to and from ALL airports. Regionals can go to regionals and international, but cannot fit locals. Internationals can only go between themselves and the spaceports. (Don't bother with spaceport contracts beyond intl transfers.) With ten international airports, at least 20 regionals, and a large number of locals, there will be a LOT of options for routes. If I go on strictly doubling the numbers with every size down, I'm looking at a minimum of 70 individual airports across the planet. Something else to consider so long as I'm thinking about it, is creating contracts that involve chains of flights. In example, I fly a route between two airports, drop off the kerbals, pick up new ones, and fly elsewhere. I'm making these airports with the intent to spawn, taxi to the runway, take off, fly to the destination, taxi, refuel, taxi out again, and fly to another destination. All without having to leave the flight scene. I want to absolutely encourage turnarounds. So a category of contract for those kind of multi-step flights would be neat. Also, with all these airports, it might also be fun to have another category of flight contract, 'rush' flights. A very well paying one to five passenger contract that is geared to get a kerbal from a pickup point to a destination as fast as possible. Works like a typical flight, but with a timer that starts the moment you're wheels-up off the runway (Not before. Don't want the player to feel they have to jump into the flight the moment they accept the contract). And I can give you the numbers you need to start figuring out what would be reasonable rush times. At airliner speed, between mach 0.75 and mach 0.83, an antipode (exact opposite side of a planetary sphere) flight on Kerbin is approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes. That's wheels up to wheels down. You can even use this to create contracts with restrictions, such as 'Passenger is afraid of going supersonic. Do not exceed mach 1'. Which would encourage players to create aircraft that can straddle high-subsonic. But ALSO encourage the players to make their flights as efficient as possible. Because honestly, you can lose a LOOOOOT of time overshooting or undershooting an aircraft descent. (And I would assume NOT pulling an aerobatics maneuver to make the Blue Angels proud would be academic if you don't want Vanderbuilt Kerman's caviar lunch spewed all over the carpet.)

'Gras' Color .45 / .45 / .45 / -0.22 Far as I can tell, it's RGB and some kind of Texture selection effect. For the tiny 1700 C runway I've been using as a spawn location, I've been making it a bright yellow with .5 / .5 / 0 / -10 EDIT: Okay, I've almost got the last of my international airports completed. Just need to do the screencaps, tweak the files, and prep the folder.

What other buildings assets do you have on hand? I would love to have a few more options to make some tweaks to the current airport set (Using the same statics over and over gets monotonous). Honestly, I've love to recycle the helipads from the old Kerbinside assets. Especially the platform. But I don't know what would be safe to drag in, and if it would be allowed. I also kind of want to invest into the integration of Supply and Demand. Having certain mid-field bases that produce a raw good unit that needs to be moved around seems fun. I need to poke that thread...

I don't know what Eskandare's planning. But I was considering making some polar research bases. But I would be making them without runways, because polar bases don't HAVE runways. (Not exactly trivial to get the logistics needed to prepare and establish a huge strip of steel-reinforced concrete in what is effectively the most remote place in the world on a sheet of ice). I was thinking of just plopping a terrain decal down, and then a few buildings, and some lights. Make it really look like a remote ice base that you need a ruggedized aircraft to get access to, like a C-130. But again, I want to know what @Eskandare has planned for additional assets before committing to poking those. I'm assuming he has some good stuff, but I want to be certain... If he'd just answer me. (Doesn't even need to be pictures or anything, just a quick list.) Also, what do you guys think about a test base? This is an airport like the others, but I'm thinking of putting it on one of the islands south of the desert. Unlike my airports, it'll have runway starts for getting right to takeoff tests, like KSC. However, the start point for the runways will overlap and I'll have three of them in a star pattern. No lights, no ILS, no extra Taxiways. @Vonnmillard Hey, I can't give you craft files that would do you any good with all my mods, but do you want a set of pictures of some of my vehicles so you can figure out how to make them with what you have? I can make an album of the 747 to show you some of the more critical details. Especially the slotted flaps. I made actual WORKING slotted flaps with infernal robotics, B9 Procedural Wings, and of course, FAR for the physics.

Snap a picture, I'm not understanding what's going on.

I'm afraid that's undoable. I have too many mods (120+), several of them with custom-input tweaks made to them, and several of them old as dirt. To 'give you' my 747 to try would pretty much require me to upload my entire gamedata folder just so I don't miss anything I may have messed with that went into the Sky Queen. I'm not uploading a 3.6 gig folder.

Hey, can you PM me what you're planning for models/statics? EDIT: Here's the latest upload for KSRAirports: http://www.mediafire.com/file/29t63kh9nvzec24/KSRAirports.rar/file I should also mention, I'm not playing with version numbers right now. So as I make and put one up on mediafire, the old version gets deleted, and old links die.

To make it simple, Unity's engine places things in a cubic grid in the scene. Kerbin, is a sphere, and we use the global coordinate system when dealing with it. Kerbal Konstructs has some math magics that allows us to place things by latitude and longitude, and converts it into the proper cubic coordinates. (I remember when KK first came out. The static placement system didn't have a converter yet, so you had to run the math for coordinates, and then use a relative position system that you centered on a core static to place things in a base. I decided never to touch it.) However, the conversion system is subject to positional error the more it has to utilize decimal chains. Computers can't take decimal chains to infinity because it has to store them in a memory address that is only so large. So there comes a point where the decimal MUST be cut short. If the next number after the cut point would be anything other than zero, you lose that precision equal to the size of that value. The leftover dividing error is a floating point error (There's a lot more to this, but I'm trimming it down to understand the core problem). Now, why is this important? Keep in mind something about latitude and longitude. If you look at a sphere, latitude lines are evenly spaced, but longitude lines converge on the poles. As the longitude lines converge, the distance between them decreases. Thus, in example: Where 10 degrees between longitude lines might be 10 km at the equator, at 30 deg. Latitude that might be 6 km, and at 60 deg. latitude, that might be 3 km. To keep the precision when moving an object back and forth along a longitudinal axis, you have to be able to use smaller and smaller increments to represent the coordinate change. Thus, the formula doing the conversion from the lat/lon coordinates has to account for the fact that high latitude positions have less distance between longitude values. Therefor, what would be only a meter of longitudinal precision at the equator, must come down to a fraction of a meter at or near the poles, and may in fact 'approach zero' (It cannot actually become zero in the computer, you run into maybe messing with Divide By Zero... Which is just infinity, and that's a useless value here). That means it needs more decimal places to be happy. BUT! Because we have to 'truncate' the decimal at some point, you will hit a brick wall trying to enforce 0.000000000001 meter precision when the memory address for the number can only hold half that many decimal places. This manifests as such: On the equator, when I hit the 'move this thing west by 1 meter per click' button, it'll move west 1 meter. If I'm working at say, 62 degrees latitude, hitting the 'move this thing west by 1 meter per click' button will move it west by 0.734007241 meters, and south 0.52348796 meters. This results in a lot of very slow, annoying stair-stepping as you move and align the statics. So what this means for a polar base, is that placing statics is a very slow and time consuming process. I haven't seen how bad the mis-jumps are myself, but what I've seen at a 60 degree latitude makes me think that you might as well be playing darts when you're near 90 latitude. And north, south, it doesn't matter. That may actually even be the reason why both polar bases in Kerbinside 'Classic' were never AT the poles. The closer you get, the more ugly the error becomes until it really is like throwing darts.

Aircraft generally only use one parallel set of runways at a time as wind conditions favor (Land into the wind as much as possible). So you don't actually have much of a collision problem with taxiing planes crossing runways that aren't the 'Active'. And I've been sticking with Intl. Airports having a max runway length of 3200 meters (Scale 1.3). You can get a 300 ton 747-esque vehicle off the ground in that distance just fine. (Remember, Kerbal's scaled down, and so are the parts.) As for the ILS. After messing with the KK ILS setup, I discovered that multiple landing guidance systems in the same area don't like to play nice, so I decided to stick with what I call 'The Most likely'. In that manner, I choose my ILS based on which approach will have the largest runway, least obstructions, and likely be the most favorable wind conditions. For coastal airports, that usually means the approach coming in off the water has been the one I've been picking. However, that may also end up being the opposite direction, as a good sea breeze would mean the aircraft should take off going out to sea, and land heading out to sea. As for lights, ASLF-2. Match the scale of the runway, or they'll look awkward. And the Precision Approach path indicator I scaled to size 3 so it can be seen further out (they pixelate and can't be seen when too small). For the Localizer Antenna bar, you'll be happy to know that the antennae on that look like triangles should point AWAY from the runway. The ILS slope systems face the same way, but also have an L and R letter hiding on their frame. If you're looking at the runway on approach, these should be pointing out at you and those positions are relative to that camera position looking in If you don't want to worry about figuring them out, just place them and I'll do cleanup when you send me what you've done.

Here's a chart-shaped progress report on airports as a whole. The red tag is the airport Bottle Rocketeer is working on. Don't know his progress. But now I'm down to just poking out where my region E international airport is going to be. Then I move on to smaller regionals.

90 degrees latitude is the north pole.

PM me the coordinates where you plan to put that new base as soon as you can. I've got a local airport planned for a spot near the crater, but I need to make sure I don't set it right on top of your new one.

I didn't take a picture of Bifrost to make a fancy postcard image with, but I took one of tonight's work: Welcome to BottomsUp International. I wanted to put it up on that hill to the left at first. The plateau-like spot is begging for an airfield with a view. Unfortunately, the airport is too large. So I'll see about poking at putting something nifty there later. I'm hoping, at some point, someone will do some contract packs similar to Kerbinside GAP. It'll be awesome.

Okay, so I've got a Bifrost International almost completed, but I want some input from you guys on stuff for the future. 1: Airports already open, or closed? From one perspective, it is a game progress feature to open the airports as you go along. But from a realism standpoint, the space program isn't going to own all these airports. I'm open to opinions on this matter. I could even say the airports can be open, but not the two spaceports. 2: @Eskandare I never got an answer as to whether or not you'd like your bases included in my base information chart. If the bases are intended to be hidden, this information chart gives their locations away without remorse. 3: Further, I'm going to need to figure out how you'd like to integrate it with KSR officially. Would you like to include it in the package at the end of work? Or separate? It's your assets, but I've been putting a huge amount of time into this. EDIT: And now I have some... creatively used assets to create something... Just play this in the background. I'd like it to be functional, but I'm not sure which would be better. Having it using the KK working kerbals, or having you actually purchase a supply to fly back to base with.

Today I made Cape Hook Global (X-KCHG). It's on the southern land hook just south of where Kerbin City sits. I saw the approach lights that approximate KC INTL's airport location and kept well across the bay to satisfy that potential issue. I already have the top-down stored for @MaxPeck.

I'm not going to post a craft file. I'm so custom-modified I couldn't rightly list everything that goes into what I have, and I'm using KSP 1.2.2. But I can point you at a list of things to look up. For the wings, I use B9 Procedural wings. There are two types of procedural wings floating around the KSP mods, but you need to specifically find the B9 variant. Regular procedural wings have no real interface. I also support the wings using FAR. Next, I use procedural parts for all cylinder, cone, and smooth cone shapes. In the L-16s above, that's the engine cowling that extends back into the tail booms, and the shaft for the outrigger float pontoons. Utilizing Real Fuels along side Proc. Parts can make me use them as fuel tanks. I'm not sure if the wings need real fuels as well, but they have wing tank functionality that is extremely useful and dynamic with their size. I'm not entirely sure of which mod the surface tail extender comes with, but that's what I made the tail booms themselves out of. (I flipped them around and turned them upside down so their flat surface was facing up.) The STE has a size and aspect tweak that allows me to make it fat and long, or fat and short, or even tiny, which makes it perfect as a wing end-cap. But you'll definitely want Kerbal Aircraft Expansion, and Airplane Plus. For wheels and gear, check Kerbal Foundries. For engines, check into AJE or Advanced Jet Engine. That'll get you things like accurate turboprops and jet behavior. Remember to do a version check for everything you grab and pull it from the githubs instead of spacedock. For cockpits and cargo bays/ramps... uh... Phantom Works. Check anything that comments on SSTO or mk whatever parts extras. Not sure which mod gave it to me, but the antennae on the cockpit are called kommutronski. I use them for aircraft antennae since they're swept. There used to be a mod back in the day that was one part, and it was the 'shark fin' antenna. But that's been buried a long time. I miss it.

Okay: So, instructions. Follow these, and it will flow into your becoming your answer. 0: Get into the flight scene and put yourself near where you want to deploy the terrain decal. You MUST be in the flight scene. 1: Open Kerbal Konstructs. 2: Select the Terrain Decals tab. The Decal tab shows you a list of active decals on Kerbin, not a list of available decals. An actual list, of every decal created for other bases. If you note the names, it's all of @Eskandare 's bases. Do not mess with these decals in any way, move on to instruction 3. 3: In the lower left corner of the KK window, you'll see a button for creating a new decal. Click it. Immediately, the decal editor will pop up. At the top of the decal editor, it will be named something along the lines of KK_terraindecal_blablablah. Rename the decal at once so you don't forget later. I suggest naming it KK_JMKinternational or something along those lines so that it has a unique name that goes with the airport. The file that gets created later will go into the same folder as the statics. 4: Next, in the flight scene itself, you will see a NSEW designator pop up centered on your craft. It's a visual marker as to how wide your decal is, where it's centered, and how high the top of it is. 5: In the editor, you will see a radius value. It's in meters, and it's RADIUS, not diameter. So a radius of 1000 will create a decal that's 2 km across. Your visual marker will reflect these changes immediately by having the lines become longer. But it won't rotate if you change its heading. Not that changing that setting really matters. 6: In the editor, you will see the standard options for moving the decal marker around N, E, S, and W. Adjust those until the center of the decal is where you want it to form. You also have absolute height modifiers, get those more or less in line with the local terrain if you want it to look as natural as possible. It is entirely possible to create a plateau if you so desire. Recall: the Loui's "Volcano". TWO WARNINGS: a: The decal marker does not drag the camera along with it. You'll have to play musical camera to keep in position, but precision won't be a problem at this point. b: Don't have your aircraft in the same place as the decal when you save and render the decal. It'll instantly wreck your vehicle, even with anti-destruction cheats turned on. That'll force some awkward adjustments to fix it. 7: Near the bottom of the editor, you will see a dropdown button called height map. There are a dozen or so options that create a general surface shape for the decal. Some of them are flat, some of them are not a good idea to use for an airport. You may switch between them all you want until you find what you like. Right below the dropdown is a field for smoothing the decal into the terrain. Default is a value of something like 0.125. The higher this value becomes, the more 'natural' the decal blends into the terrain, but at the expense of making the flat area on the top of the decal into gentle slope, making it harder to level the airport on it. The lower the value becomes, the more SHARP the edge of the decal becomes. A value of zero, thus, creates perfect cliffs. 8: Color map is only useful in special occaisions, ignore it. It has a smooth field as well, equally ignorable. Again, used on the Loui's "Volcano". 9: A few radio buttons at the bottom are also available. Cullback looks like it takes portions of terrain along the edge, and chops their shapes into the decal, making it possible to create a terrain decal that has a ragged cliff edge the follows a ridge line. Experiment at your own leisure. I'm not exactly sure what the other two are actually doing, but I have them on, and I don't see anything of concern. 10: When you are done setting the parameters you want, the 'save and apply changes' button is what you want to press. The game will freeze up while it does its thing, and then the altered terrain will pop into existence. Again, make sure the aircraft you are using for the scene is outside the range of the decal, or the decal will just pop into existence on top of it and murderize it. ALSO, altering the decal, or creating a decal, will mess up any statics you are working on, forcing you to realign them. This is mainly because the statics try to auto-level with the terrain, and that includes the terrain decals. Convenient, but also annoying if it's not perfect. 11: When you have the decal the way you want, DO NOT attempt to edit any statics right away. Instead, return to the space center, and then go to the tracking station and re-start flying your vehicle. I don't know why, but once you actively play with the decals (at least in my version of KK), attempting to edit or spawn statics doesn't play nice. The statics editor doesn't want to appear, and things act stupid. Changing scenes and coming back fixes that.

I'm not finding then, I'm making them. Terrain Decals. They're one of the tabs in Kerbal Konstructs. You add a new one, set the radius to a little over half of what you need for a runway length, move it where you want, set its height, and set the height map to one of the available options. The terrain decal creates a custom terrain map (or 'decal') that overwrites the terrain it's on. Though, after you place it and get what you want, you need to pop back to the space center and then back again. KK doesn't like to work right after editing it. The 'Volcano' in the Loui's picture is also a terrain decal. I've been naming the terrain decals coder-friendly names of the airport complexes. Like KK_badlands, or KK_cottonmouth, and storing them in the folder the airport statics go in. To be fair, before I stumbled into them poking at the KK editor, I wasn't going to launch into this project. But the moment I started going 'what does this even do?', and saw it create a flat terrain feature of arbitrary size, I grinned and realized where those flat areas the other bases had came from. Kojave Sands, for example, is sitting on an absolutely huge decal.

Cool, I'll poke at it. Meantime, my note of the day is I'm starting on Mystic Lake International. EDIT: Fastest I've put an INTL airport together. I tried something different this time, and just upsized the Observatory Base to size three, instead of trying to put a dozen of them together like puzzle pieces. Saved me a LOT of work. I need to get in and tweak the runways and taxiways a little more before I'm done with this one, though. You can see the foreground of runway 16 at the taxiway has a height problem. I just can't get them angled so that both ends are smooth with the runway, AND cross each other without one doing a fair impression of a highway overpass. Anyway, this one's angled base on my best guess for where updrafts will draw the winds. During the day, daytime heating will be causing an onshore breeze (shore is behind the camera in the image). However, the valley between the mountains out to the horizon to the left will draw air in that direction. Meanwhile, Mystic Lake (background, mid right), will act as a thermal dampener, ensuring that the surface winds prefer going towards the valley instead of straight inland. Thus, Runway 10 is the primary. Runway 16 in the foreground, faces directly to the lake and directly across the land mass to the ocean. In the event of direct wind patterns from the ocean straight to the lake, or back the other way, this covers that alternate direction.

I'll have to poke at that, then. Right now I use Pilot Assistant as my autopilot, with NavUtils, Kerbal Konstructs' navigation aid, and Waypoint Manager as my nav aids. Does Kramax come backwards compatible for KSP1.2.2? I can't go any further forward without breaking a mod stack the size of Texas. EDIT: Also, I keep reading Kramax as "Crawmerax".