[WIP] Bogan Aerospace

[Oblate Prince]

This is the beginnings of a 'harder' sort of spaceplane mod designed to play nicely with rescaled systems and the more realistic art styles of BDB, Tantares, and KNES (hopefully). Don't expect any wacky magical airbreathing engines here.  I'm very new to Unity and don't have very much free time.  Expect models and textures to come well before any in-game parts (unless somebody holds my hand through the process).   Expect various part mod dependencies/synergies throughout the development process. The goal is to make spaceplanes for the rocket crowd.  Some fudging on tank mass may be required; I don't expect or intend to make this mod compatible with stock spaceplane parts.  

 

Roadmap: 

1. ROO (Reusable Orbit Option): an ~2.5m set of spaceplane parts based on concept art for the Boeing XS1.  The ROO is designed to function as marginal SSTO, transporting about 1.5 tons to LKO in JNSQ (target DV ~5200 m/s but subject to player input) using methalox engines.  It is better suited to carrying a  dedicated 1.5m upper stage on a suborbital trajectory 

Batch 1: [Expected soft dependencies: BDB, Provenance Aerospace]

• 2m tank
• 4m tank
• 6m tank
• long 2.5 > .625 nose
• short 2.5 > .625 nose
• Engine plate
• ROO > 2.5m adapter
• ROO drone core
• ROO delta wing
• ROO stabilizer

 

Batch 2:

• ROO wing flaps
• 2m cargo bay
• 4m cargo bay
• 6m cargo bay
• 1.875m cargo bay crew module/airlock
• 1.875m cargo bay command module
• 1.875 >1.25m cargo bay module adapter
• ROO methalox engine (targeting half a BE-4 engine)
• ROO kerolox engine (target TBD, subject to player input)
• Joey upper stage tank S
• Joey upper stage tank L
• Joey engine
• Joey fairing base/avionics package

2. TO BE DETERMINED

 

And now, pictures

https://imgur.com/jC3tcTX

https://imgur.com/cVfjn6J

https://imgur.com/b0Necm7

Edited October 8, 2020 by Oblate Prince

[Oblate Prince]

Blocked out the silhouette for the hull and scaled up to accommodate a slightly bigger cargo bay.  Looks like most of the work is going to be in textures, at least for now. I'm not really seeing the need for greeblies on a hypersonic hull (but if anyone has better XS-1 reference images than the ones that show up on google that may change yet).  A normal map will probably work just fine.

Expect a flat surface-attachable wing mount with nodes to attach the wings without messing with surface attach.  That's roughed out here.

I'm dreading the prospect of doing landing gear.  Any thoughts on the best dependency to use would be appreciated. Or I might just retexture and rescale the stock gear.  Animated cargo bays are going to be hard enough for me as it is. 

 

https://imgur.com/OMqJuK5

https://imgur.com/tgamYMT

 

[Oblate Prince]

Texture work begins:  

I'm not entirely sure about the HSRI tiles (and welcome peoples' inputs).  Most images of the XS-1 show carbon-grey heat shielding.  On the other hand, I'm quite taken with the texture. 

[Clamp-o-Tron]

This looks incredible! I'd love to help, but am awful at modeling/texturing. I could help out with .cfg files and patches, maybe?

[Oblate Prince]

5 hours ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

This looks incredible! I'd love to help, but am awful at modeling/texturing. I could help out with .cfg files and patches, maybe?

Yes! Any help is appreciated.  But I'm certainly not ready to put stuff in the game at this stage.  

I need help with configs, playtesting, and balance.  Also Unity. 

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This is the carbon TPS.  It has the great virtues of being really easy to apply to curved objects and not taking up much space on a texture sheet.  I'm still undecided between this and the HSRI tiles.  The latter is more attractive but less versatile (and also annoying).