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[WIP] Cacteye Telescope v0.1 (2/1/14) - Modular, EVA-serviceable orbital telescope

Rubber Ducky

By Rubber Ducky
in KSP1 Mod Development

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Rubber Ducky

Rubber Ducky

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Are there any kind of Star Ops experiment? Can we gain science by just looking at the stars?

There's some experiments that will just run as long as the telescope is in orbit and activated (doesn't matter where it's pointed). IMO KSP's default star map is quite uninteresting and painfully low res (even without the telescope!). Maybe I'll look into making a custom skybox with Universe Replacer to be used with the telescope, but that'd have to be in a future update - I don't want to add any more major features at this point.

For Christmas, can you give us all a download?

Keep in mind that I'm only showing off the totally finished stuff; there's still a ton of bugfixing and most of the parts have no models and are only half-functional. It's still too rough at this point. Don't worry, though, because outside of some family stuff that's come up I mostly have the entire next week to work on this. Hopefully should be done not too long after that.

Why is transmission 90% if we're expected to keep these in orbit? Kerbals recovering the data every service mission?

I kind of arbitrarily set the transmission rate to 0.9 just for now. I've been thinking about just changing all of them to 100% for release; it all depends on how final testing goes with career mode.

Thanks everyone for all your comments! Morale is still very high here.

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Pigbear

Pigbear

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There's some experiments that will just run as long as the telescope is in orbit and activated (doesn't matter where it's pointed). IMO KSP's default star map is quite uninteresting and painfully low res (even without the telescope!). Maybe I'll look into making a custom skybox with Universe Replacer to be used with the telescope, but that'd have to be in a future update - I don't want to add any more major features at this point.

Keep in mind that I'm only showing off the totally finished stuff; there's still a ton of bugfixing and most of the parts have no models and are only half-functional. It's still too rough at this point. Don't worry, though, because outside of some family stuff that's come up I mostly have the entire next week to work on this. Hopefully should be done not too long after that.

I kind of arbitrarily set the transmission rate to 0.9 just for now. I've been thinking about just changing all of them to 100% for release; it all depends on how final testing goes with career mode.

Thanks everyone for all your comments! Morale is still very high here.

maybe with a research station you could improve said data to make it a 1.

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Carlbergh

Carlbergh

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If you make it so that it is neccesary to service the camera by a kerbal every once in a while I don't see why you should have the transmitted sience a 1. Of course depending on where you've placed the telescope it's going to be more or less accessible or more or less tideous to service it.Maybe even lower the transmitted sience to make it worth while service the telescope?

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axelman

axelman

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IMO KSP's default star map is quite uninteresting and painfully low res (even without the telescope!). Maybe I'll look into making a custom skybox with Universe Replacer to be used with the telescope, but that'd have to be in a future update - I don't want to add any more major features at this point.

The grey background is indeed not very inviting... Why is that ? It's the same with the Tarsier Telescope... If a simple black background is possible, with UR or not, that would be much nicer !

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miracmert

miracmert

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The grey background is indeed not very inviting... Why is that ? It's the same with the Tarsier Telescope... If a simple black background is possible, with UR or not, that would be much nicer !

It's not about the telescope. It's because of the default skybox in KSP. It's pretty low-detailed that's why it shows gray when you zoom in. I recommend Texture Replacer with dark sparkly skybox which is way more realistic.

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Rubber Ducky

Rubber Ducky

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Quick update:

BkDfTIf.png?1

Experiments are mostly modeled, but they still need a TON of work. Not functional at all at this point, and there's still some critical bugs to work out. I'll show these off a bit more when they are all finished and I'm ready to move on to the solar panels.

Also, in the interest of speeding up development, I've decided to delay solar telescopes until a later update. I'll focus primarily on the basic telescope for the first release.

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Rubber Ducky

Rubber Ducky

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Science experiments are now almost entirely finished. Basically just need to do some further testing and write out experiment result dialogues for a couple of them. Here's the mid-tech experiments, mounted in various ways around the service bay:

VHYea5y.jpg?1

I've been working on the solar panels for the past few days. It took a ton of troubleshooting, but I finally got it working:

v7XANd1.jpg?1

For further challenge on my end, I decided to design the solar panels so that they roll out - like the first and second generations of Hubble's solar array.

Here's a video of the solar panels deploying:

http://youtu.be/zeJDXgQvPL4

This solar array is easily the most complex part I've made so far, so I'm really quite proud of them.

Anyway, next up is going back to the plugin side and making the parts actually require electric charge when activated and such, and integrating with blizzy78's Toolbar plugin (if I can actually figure it out; I'm pretty bad with GUI still).

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1of6Billion

1of6Billion

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This all looks amazing. I am really looking forward to the release!

I have two suggestions I would like to make, not hindered by any coding or modelling skills off my self:

Would you consider to display a feed of the SOHO observatory when using the solar telescope? I assume the current Kerbol does not have many interesting features..

Can you also make a few structural parts to make planet based observatories?

My 2ct....

Edited by 1of6Billion
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tygoo7

tygoo7

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OOOHH!!

Question: Will you be packaging a version with a simplified version of KAS for just your stuff for those of us who do not currently use KAS? (It's too many parts that I don't use often enough to make worth it)

You could just download KAS and remove the parts from it for just the plugin :)

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