Save out craft files

[Mickey-b]

Save craft files for 3d printing 

from the game its self so there is no need to try and load them in blender.

and save them out.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

I vaguely remember official support for this via shapeways at one point. I don't remember whether you can still do that.

[qzgy]

There was support I think not from shapeways, but from a company called Eucl3d or so. Pretty sure it shut down some time ago.

If you ask me this seems like a very niche feature that wouldn't be super useful......

[sumghai]

Speaking as both a KSP modder and someone who has industry experience making 3D printed parts for engineering/commercial purposes, I can't say I'm fond of the idea.

The main problem is that the part models in the game (both stock and mod) are inherently unsuitable for 3D printing as-is. This is because when game developers make 3D models, they optimize their meshes by deleting hidden faces that players are never expected to see, resulting in models with lots of unclosed meshes and other physically-impossible geometry. When you import these models directly into typical 3D printing slicer software, you end up with lots of geometry errors that would either make the model impossible to print, or come out looking funny.

As tempting as it is for someone to yell out "then fix all the models so that they can be 3D printed!", this means telling SQUAD / TakeTwo devs (as well as every single part mod dev) to spend significant amounts of time reworking all their parts, potentially impacting in-game performance just to satisfy a small subset of the community's desire for 3D prints of their ships. In fact, Eucl3d ended their collaboration with Kerbal Space Program and went out of business because they couldn't justify the cost of reprocessing all the game models for 3D printing into something that was actually affordable for most users.

ASIDE: There's one fairly successful and cost-effective example of 3D printing personalized game models, and that is the collaboration between GamePrint and Cryptic Studios for player starship models from Star Trek Online. In this case, they worked closely with CBS (who owns the Star Trek IP) and limited the number of ships and customization option available to customers/players, and so didn't have to do as much model fixing/optimizing for printing. In contrast, the near-unlimited permutation of part combinations in a typical KSP craft makes this much less technically and financially feasible.

 

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

18 hours ago, qzgy said:

There was support I think not from shapeways, but from a company called Eucl3d or so. Pretty sure it shut down some time ago.

If you ask me this seems like a very niche feature that wouldn't be super useful......

Yep, I misremembered it.

Shapeways did 3D printed Kerbal figurines though: