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Hey everyone! Following my work and a lot of studying on CubeSats recently, I figured I would go ahead and make a small mod to include the little buggers in KSP. This mod is based on the real-life CubeSat standard. It utilizes MechJeb, but can be enjoyed without it installed. There are two sizes - tiny and small. Each size contains its own battery supply, SAS level, and antenna. However, neither sizes include reaction-wheels or any form of attitude control. The inside of the chassis for each ³Sat can be stacked (like stacking reaction wheels and fuel) or surface-attached (like attaching batteries or instruments inside.) Those that have tried my "PEST" mod and used the Dawn-style probe body will be familiar with the idea. Oh, and the name is pronounced "CubeSat" because... the "³" is the symbol for "cubed" and I'm not that clever. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Recommended mods: MechJeb TweakScale Download: SpaceDock

Tutorial: Setting Up EVE Cube Maps In this tutorial we will be looking at how to take advantage of EVE's Cube Map system to layer up to 4 textures onto a single cube map to reduce file size within mod distributions. This method will be outlining the process of taking 4 Equirectangular Cloud Maps, converting them to a single image by putting them into the Red, Green, Blue and Alpha channels, converting it to a Cube Map and setting it up for use in-game with EVE. ***Please Note: All the images below are clickable thumbnails to 1080p images*** ---- 1. Source your Cloud Map (or whatever you want to use) images from wherever. Google Images, NASA, your own creations etc. and ensure that they are all sized correctly in an Equirectangular format; as what has always previously been used in EVE & KSP i.e. Width = 2 x Height. You can use up to 4 image maps at this stage. Below, I have shown a 8192px x 4096px cloud map that has a transparent background. 2. Your images will need to be converted to Greyscale, flat images where the light portions will be the clouds and the dark portions of your image will be the transparent parts in game on your cloud layer i.e. the opacity of the pixel scales with brightness. Therefore, at this stage just edit your cloud map to have a black background with your cloud map layer over the top. 3. Do this for all 4 of your textures and save them as .bmp. For ease of use, I'd recommend naming them something simple like red.bmp, green.bmp, blue.bmp and alpha.bmp or 1.bmp, 2.bmp etc. 4. Open your Equirectangular to Cube Map conversion software, I recommend CubeTheSphere or Hugin (I will be using CubeTheSphere in this tutorial), and load in and convert your images to Cube Maps. In CubeTheSphere open your Equirectangular .bmp image and then select the individual cube face image size to be 2048px x 2048px under the Options toolbar. This will result in the output Cube Map to roughly equate to the same resolution as the 8k Equirectangular image. 5. Extract all the faces of the Cube Map to give you your 6 individual images being the Front, Back, Left, Right, Top and Bottom sides of the map. Do this for all of your 4 cloud maps. This may take some time as your computer is rendering out the images for each face of the cube. Be patient. 6. Now you need to rename the faces to correlate with EVE's naming conventions. In EVE the following sides of the Cube are given as X Positive, X Negative, Y Positive, Y Negative, Z Positive and Z Negative. Seeing as we will finally be outputting the textures for KSP in .dds format, we will need to name the sides of the faces upside down as .dds flips the image vertically when saving. For ease of use, use the following guide to help you rename the files: Xp : Right Xn : Left Yp : Bottom Yn : Top Zp : Front Zn : Back So you should end up with something like the following list of files for each of your cloud maps: redXp.bmp (Right Image) redXn.bmp (Left Image) redYp.bmp (Bottom Image) redYn.bmp (Top Image) redZp.bmp (Front Image) redZn.bmp (Back Image) 7. Once you have your cube maps for all your 4 cloud map textures, go back into Photoshop and load the first 3 X-Positive face images. i.e. redXp.bmp, greenXp.bmp & blueXp.bmp 8. Convert each of the images to Greyscale. Confirm to 'Discard' when asked. 9. Ensure that each of the images is flattened. 10. Navigate to the Channels panel and select the 'Merge Channels' button from the drop down menu. 11. The Merge Channels menu should pop up where you can select the RGB option from the drop down menu, select the 'RGB' option and 3 channels and click 'OK'. 12. In the next menu select the appropriate image for each of the corresponding colour channels. Click 'OK' to merge the images into one image. 13. As a result you will end up with something similar to what is shown below. By toggling the visibility of each of the colour channels you can see you individual textures appear on their separated colour channels. 14. To add the 4th cloud map, cube map face texture to the image, we will be putting it into the Alpha Channel. To do this, in the Channels panel click 'Create New Channel' to add another channel to the image. This will by default apply a solid black mask to this channel which will act as the alpha channel. 15. Open up the 4th appropriate cube map face in Photoshop (in this examples case the alphaXp.bmp), convert it to Greyscale as before and select all the image and cut/copy it. 16. In the Channels panel with the new Alpha channel selected as the Active Channel, paste the image into this channel. You should see it appear similarly to what is shown below when only the Alpha channel is toggled visible. 17. At this stage, toggle the RGB channels on and the Alpha channel off and save the resulting texture as a DXT5 .dds texture. I have shown my nVidia dds configs below during the saving process. When saving the .dds texture, make sure to name them '******Xp.dds' for ease of use later i.e. cloudsXp.dds 18. Repeat steps 7 through 17 another 5 times for each side of the Cube Map and you should end up with 6 .dds textures with your 4 cloud maps appearing on the 4 separate channels named: ********Xp.dds ********Xn.dds ********Yp.dds ********Yn.dds ********Zp.dds ********Zn.dds These are the final textures that will be used in-game. Copy them to your Textures directory inside your mod directory. 19. EVE requires a separate config to know how to handle cube maps. This file can be located anywhere in your mod directory but must be named 'textures.cfg. I always recommend the use of the EVE GUI to edit the configs as no syntax or parameter errors can be made but for this demonstration I will be listing the config structure below as I assume the knowledge and familiarity with EVE's GUI. The Textures config can be found in the TextureConfig panel in the GUI. In this config, you will be required to list the following information: Cube Map = True and paths to each of the cube map faces. i.e. EVE_TEXTURE_CONFIG { OBJECT { name = Mod/Textures/imageName isCubeMap = True texXn = Mod/Textures/imageNameXn texYn = Mod/Textures/imageNameYn texZn = Mod/Textures/imageNameZn texXp = Mod/Textures/imageNameXp texYp = Mod/Textures/imageNameYp texZp = Mod/Textures/imageNameZp } } 20. Once EVE knows to recognise the 6 images as a Cube Map, you can navigate to your Celestial Body's Cloud Manager in the CloudManager Panel in the GUI and add a cloud layer. You can name this layer whatever you wish and input your specific settings for altitude, speed etc. 21. Toggle the MainTex option and input the path to your texture; this will be as specified in the Texture Config section i.e. Mod/Textures/imageName 22. Change the RGBA setting by default to AlphaCubeMap. If done correctly up until this stage, the image path should be displaying as white text. 23. Scroll down the GUI and toggle the 'layer2D' option so that it renders the cloud texture as a graphic in ScaledSpace/PQS. 24. At this stage you can hit Save and Apply and EVE should now render, by default, the cloud map you specified to be in the Alpha channel of your Cube Map. If following my instructions above with regards to the alignment of the cube faces using CubeTheSphere it should be aligned correctly. If using other software or this is not the case, you may need to play around with the sides of which your textures are appearing on the Cube Map. 25. To change the rendering of the cloud map to that of the Red, Green or Blue channels, cycle through the 'alphaMask' option to switch between your 4 cloud map textures. 26. At this stage you should be finished and able to choose between 4 different cloud maps by using only 6 cube map textures. Hooray! From here you can go back into your cloud layers and edit the parameters of them to how you wish to configure your EVE Cloud Layer to appear. ---- For reference, if you were to use 4 separate 8k DXT5 .dds textures for the 4 cloud maps, the resultant total file size would be 170MB. By combining these 4 maps into a single 2k DXT5 .dds Cube Map the resultant total file size is only 24MB... more than a 700% saving! Imgur Album of the above Tutorial Images for your reference: A big thank you and shout out to @rbray89 for making all of this possible with EVE and the continous support that he has given when we badger him with questions. EVE Forum link: I hope that you found this helpful and will be an aid in your endeavour to create better and more efficient visual packs for EVE. If you have any queries, feel free to ask by pinging me with an @Poodmund tag in this thread.

Re-Engineering how you build Space Stations! I had the idea that space station can be Long, round or even circular but I haven't seen a cubical space station. So I have tasked myself to see if a cubical space station will work will it be stable? can you actually build it? and Who ate all the snacks? If this works I may see if we can add to it to find out how large we can build it

I just ordered 3 cubes, a 2x2x2 stickerless speedcube, a 3x3x3 concave stickerless cube. and a regular stickerless 3x3x3(NewIsland). Anyone else play with Cubes or Cuboids? if so what cubes do ya got? (as there are several thousand diferent types of cuboids/cubes out there.) So if you don't you're probably wondering what the heck i just said, basically like this: A 2x2x2 stickerless speecube is a rubiks cube, but instead of being 3 squares by 3 squares, it's 2 by 2. and it turns REALLY fast. a Concave cube is a cube that caves inward towards the middle... here lemme grab a video on a concave cube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAsS_O56aSo there ye go. And a 3x3x3 stickerless cube is a rubiks cube just without stickers. the one i got is also a speedcube. (solving cubes in under 10 seconds is actually possible.)