[1.1.2]NSS/OctoSat-SOAR S3-A300 (Modular Satellites, Reusable launchers)[0.72- 11Jun16]

[Angstinator]

It seems to have updated rather recently - but unfortunately, the update appears to have led to incompatibilities.

Some parts of 0.60 seem not to have transfered well to 0.65, which is in danger of costing me my Jool probe.

Requesting 0.60 download link.

[Nookos]

On 1/3/2016 at 0:30 AM, Delta_8930 said:

That might require a plugin in order to increase lift, slightly increase drag, and deploy separately from the air brakes.

It might indeed. But I don't have those kind of skills. I have a few ideas I want to try before though, so not all hope is lost.

On 5/3/2016 at 1:19 PM, Treble Sketch said:

I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but your mod is on CKAN. And that it was still linking Kerbal Stuff downloads.

So I changed it now to SpaceDock downloads. (At current typing, still changing it. Just notifying you)

Thanks a lot for doing that.

On 5/3/2016 at 6:15 PM, Deimos Rast said:

this looks mighty fine sir, mighty fine indeed. I'll be downloading it right quick; can never have enough probes.

and I like the airplane as well, even though I have bad luck with the things (runway is all crooked in my game, I swear!)

hehe sounds like your runway needs an upgrade.

2 hours ago, Angstinator said:

It seems to have updated rather recently - but unfortunately, the update appears to have led to incompatibilities.

Some parts of 0.60 seem not to have transfered well to 0.65, which is in danger of costing me my Jool probe.

Requesting 0.60 download link.

Indeed some parts were renamed in 0.65. Sorry about that but it is to be expected with a mod in development. 0.6 is still downloadable on spacedock ( changelog tab). Or if you want to keep the update I'd suggest recreating the missing probe and hyperediting it where it was. That is how I do it.

[tempes156]

Great looking MOD. I dug thru replies and didn't find anything, but all I want is the satellite...the A300 and anything that supports it I just don't want to add. Exactly what folders are required for the OctoSat to function properly?

[Nookos]

9 hours ago, tempes156 said:

Great looking MOD. I dug thru replies and didn't find anything, but all I want is the satellite...the A300 and anything that supports it I just don't want to add. Exactly what folders are required for the OctoSat to function properly?

You need to remove the Airbus folder for the A300 and S3 folder for the spaceplane. The rest needs to stay.

[tempes156]

Thanks Nookos.

Edited March 13, 2016 by tempes156
spelling

[Jimbodiah]

Great addition!!!!

Just a question of all parts could be contained in one folder? This would keep the gamedata folder more organised (excluding dependencies ofcourse).

[Stone Blue]

13 minutes ago, Jimbodiah said:

Great addition!!!!

Just a question of all parts could be contained in one folder? This would keep the gamedata folder more organised (excluding dependencies ofcourse).

Hmmm... It IS included all in one folder... Even more so than normal, since everything here seems to be in the /Parts folder, with no individual /Parts/<each parts' own folder>, like normal, i dont know how you could GET any more limited to everything in one folder?

Edited March 15, 2016 by Stone Blue

[Jimbodiah]

there is one for the soar, one for the A300 and one for the Octosat. I tried moving them into one directory ("octosat" but then they do not show up (paths probably defined in the cfgs).

Also the soar does not want to be stable when re-entering and coasting down, it only tumbles if you do anything but point nose down. Do I need FAR or something? If I pull up just a little it will flip around and start tumbling.

Edited March 15, 2016 by Jimbodiah

[Nookos]

11 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

there is one for the soar, one for the A300 and one for the Octosat. I tried moving them into one directory ("octosat" but then they do not show up (paths probably defined in the cfgs).

Also the soar does not want to be stable when re-entering and coasting down, it only tumbles if you do anything but point nose down. Do I need FAR or something? If I pull up just a little it will flip around and start tumbling.

Regarding everything in one folder, it is possible but then a bit less obvious for people like tempes156 who want to keep just the satellite system. Or people who want just the plane, or else.. That is why I keep it organised by manufacturer. 

When you tried to put them all in one folder it didn't work because of the model path in the cfg files. You would have to edit all the moved ones. With all this said, I never thought someone would be bothered by having it organised by manufacturer. I'll give it some thought for the next update.

I didn't work on FAR configuration yet. And SOAR is not supposed to be going through serious reentry. It's a suborbital vehicle. So I haven't tested it in those conditions. In real life the concept is supposed to fly to 80kms and back down, so on kerbin I set it up to go between 55-60kms, release the third stage and back down smoothly. It only has control surfaces at the back so it needs to be dealt with very gently. To fix your problem you could put canards at the front too but it is not necessary.

However it is still an early wip. The rudders need to be reworked and split in half to be used as airbrakes, plus it needs some more tweaking regarding control surfaces and lift surfaces so it might handle a bit better in the release version.

[Jimbodiah]

Re folders: Not a big deal either way. I tend to run 15-20 mods and add/remove them depending on which save I play, so having mods contained in one folder makes life easier. The manufacturer tabs are actually very cool to keep the parts together (saves skipping through tons of parts to find what I need), not many modders use these.

Gotcha on the soar. I actually send it into orbit and release a satellite, kind of like a mini shuttle.  So it's user error on my part   Was it meant to return or is it just a disposable 2nd stage? I love that you have the entire setup now, really cool!!!

Edited March 16, 2016 by Jimbodiah

[Nookos]

2 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

Re folders: Not a big deal either way. I tend to run 15-20 mods and add/remove them depending on which save I play, so having mods contained in one folder makes life easier. The manufacturer tabs are actually very cool to keep the parts together (saves skipping through tons of parts to find what I need), not many modders use these.

Gotcha on the soar. I actually send it into orbit and release a satellite, kind of like a mini shuttle.  So it's user error on my part   Was it meant to return or is it just a disposable 2nd stage? I love that you have the entire setup now, really cool!!!

Good job on putting it into orbit  The A300 and SOAR are meant to be recovered ( I don t know if StageRecovery works for them and I should check but FMRS does) I m glad you re enjoying it and I ll make sure to finalize them as soon as I have time for it. Once the airbrakes are functional reentry will be easier.

[Jimbodiah]

Is there a way to patch the science parts to show up for contracts? The first post links to a MM patch, but the link points back to the same message.

[Nookos]

6 hours ago, Jimbodiah said:

Is there a way to patch the science parts to show up for contracts? The first post links to a MM patch, but the link points back to the same message.

The MM patch is in the archive at the root alongside the explanation. It's not optimal yet, make sure to read the explanation before as it replaces stock parts for contracts. 

[731destroyer]

No Ckan No Fun

[Jimbodiah]

@Nookos Found the patch and it works, thanks!!!

I've been using octosat for all the satellite contracts and it is a blast to use! Right now I am building some drop probes for the planets/moons and wondered if it would be an idea to make a ring that fits to the bottom and has 3 or 4 very simple landing legs on it so we can land the satellite, and also a parachute module perhaps?

[CobaltWolf]

21 hours ago, 731destroyer said:

No Ckan No Fun

Holy crap I think some of my G+T came out my nose...

[Avalon304]

So I dont know whats caused it... but the liquid fuel engine core (I believe I used the Magnus engine, the one that uses LF and OX) for the OctoSat no longer has a deploy animation... the engine still works (as far as I can tell) but the engine nozzle doesnt extend out of its casing like it did before.

Edited March 21, 2016 by Avalon304

[Nookos]

On 19/3/2016 at 11:22 PM, Jimbodiah said:

@Nookos Found the patch and it works, thanks!!!

I've been using octosat for all the satellite contracts and it is a blast to use! Right now I am building some drop probes for the planets/moons and wondered if it would be an idea to make a ring that fits to the bottom and has 3 or 4 very simple landing legs on it so we can land the satellite, and also a parachute module perhaps?

Yes, a landing module is on my road map. As well as a heatshield and parachute ( or at least a node somewhere to stick a stock one. Right now the smallest landing legs fit quite nicely.

1 hour ago, Avalon304 said:

So I dont know whats caused it... but the liquid fuel engine core (I believe I used the Magnus engine, the one that uses LF and OX) for the OctoSat no longer has a deploy animation... the engine still works (as far as I can tell) but the engine nozzle doesnt extend out of its casing like it did before.

If it is only the Magnus engine, it is very strange indeed. Only scenario I can think of right now is if the BahaSP plugin got deleted. But that would mean that none of the engines would deploy anymore. Maybe you should try to reinstall the whole pack. And if that doesn't work you might have another plugin that is not compatible with BahaSP. But again that would be strange if only Magnus doesn't deploy and the others do.

[Marsu69]

Hi there.

I have discovered your mod today and it's awesome ! I love sat mod and yours is really cool.

The M900 is trully amazing and I can't wait to see the SCANsat integration. Any idea of ETA ?

Thanks

[Nookos]

23 hours ago, Marsu69 said:

Hi there.

I have discovered your mod today and it's awesome ! I love sat mod and yours is really cool.

The M900 is trully amazing and I can't wait to see the SCANsat integration. Any idea of ETA ?

Thanks

Hi! Thanks for the positive feedback.

I'm unable to give an ETA on this. My free time and motivation are very unstable. Since december I barely touched the project. However I had some time yesterday and worked on the side dish. So I'm sorry I can't give you an estimate for completion, however the mod is not forgotten. It would be great if I can get it ready for the 1.1 release and when the dependencies are updated. But even those two have no ETA.

 

Regarding the side dish progress, the idea was to make galileo's high gain antenna ( the one that failed). But the limitation with shaders + the weird behavior of alphas in ksp, made it a semi failure. It will stay like this for now but hopefully 1.1 will bring some new shaders that allow alpha, specular and normal map all at once. And the translucent shader is either useless or I don't understand it. Anyway this is how it looks right now:

[Marsu69]

So beautiful ! Love it ;-)

[CobaltWolf]

5 hours ago, Nookos said:

Regarding the side dish progress, the idea was to make galileo's high gain antenna ( the one that failed). But the limitation with shaders + the weird behavior of alphas in ksp, made it a semi failure. It will stay like this for now but hopefully 1.1 will bring some new shaders that allow alpha, specular and normal map all at once. And the translucent shader is either useless or I don't understand it. Anyway this is how it looks right now:

Is that not intended behavior? It looks correct to me.

[DMagic]

Making transparent mesh textures for large parts like that is really tricky.

For one, there seems to be a large difference in the final outcome based on which format the texture is in. I seem to get OK results using nVidia's DDS Photoshop plugin, but I imagine other converters might have problems (I know, for instance, that the PS plugin works fine for small icon DDS textures, but others don't work at all).

Then you can run into problems with mipmaps and visible transitions between the different levels, which are especially noticeable with transparent textures. The lower quality mipmaps can sometimes end up with very jagged looking transparent sections, somewhat like you see at the top of the dish.

You can try not using mipmaps at all, but the results are usually worse, with lots of artifacts like you see at the bottom of that dish, where detail is replaced by flickering bands.

For me, the best option was to auto-generate mipmaps with PS's DDS plugin, then re-load the full file, with mipmaps, and manually edit the lower quality sections. It can be a pain, and I have no idea of what options are available if you aren't using PS.

And then, like @Nookos mentioned, there aren't many options for transparent shaders, I think there is just one for cutoff transparency, so you can't have any normal maps or specularity.

[Nookos]

48 minutes ago, CobaltWolf said:

Is that not intended behavior? It looks correct to me.

I intended to use specular as well and have cleaner alpha. The screenshot is from cutoff bumped shader, bad png alpha and without the specular map the normal map is pretty much useless. For some reason the clean mbm alpha I used on the survey scanner didn't work and my png isn't clean anymore like on the scanner. No idea why this time it didn't work.  And the translucent shader is just not translucent at all.. there is no option in that shader so I can't be doing it wrong. It just doesn't do anything.

33 minutes ago, DMagic said:

Making transparent mesh textures for large parts like that is really tricky.

For one, there seems to be a large difference in the final outcome based on which format the texture is in. I seem to get OK results using nVidia's DDS Photoshop plugin, but I imagine other converters might have problems (I know, for instance, that the PS plugin works fine for small icon DDS textures, but others don't work at all).

Then you can run into problems with mipmaps and visible transitions between the different levels, which are especially noticeable with transparent textures. The lower quality mipmaps can sometimes end up with very jagged looking transparent sections, somewhat like you see at the top of the dish.

You can try not using mipmaps at all, but the results are usually worse, with lots of artifacts like you see at the bottom of that dish, where detail is replaced by flickering bands.

For me, the best option was to auto-generate mipmaps with PS's DDS plugin, then re-load the full file, with mipmaps, and manually edit the lower quality sections. It can be a pain, and I have no idea of what options are available if you aren't using PS.

And then, like @Nookos mentioned, there aren't many options for transparent shaders, I think there is just one for cutoff transparency, so you can't have any normal maps or specularity.

Thanks for the input. I ll try a bit more the DDS's settings ( mipmaps). I haven't made any test with those yet. When I did the survey scanner mbm turned out to be the cleanest but heaviest. These were the results of my tests: ( I think I made a mistake with png not interlaced ( it was still mbm.. so png is not that clean)

Indeed the shader is cutoff bumped. I believe there is transparent specular available too. But none using all channels ( diffuse, specular, normal) Fingers crossed for 1.1 part tools.

 

Edited March 29, 2016 by Nookos

[Goldobsidian]

Disreguard my previous statement >.> A friend knew what the issue was and worked me though it. all cool now.

Edited March 31, 2016 by Goldobsidian