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Quadcopter/Extra Small Probe Parts. FIRST RELEASE AVAILABLE (fixed now...I think)


electronicfox

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Blue aliens? How disgusting. Why can't alien life be a healthy green like the rest of us? I'll bet it's because they deny themselves that healthy dose of radiation that a kerbal gets from licking the RTGs. If they licked more RTGs, they'd be much nicer to look at.

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I need it more than I need oxygen.

10/10 I'm setting this to be the first tab that opens when I open my browser, so I know when it's released.

I'll be doing some balancing of these parts this afternoon after I get some work done (gotta make them monies), with any luck, a beta release will be out tonight.

this is not a guaruntee

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Very close to the first beta release now. The sizes I originally made these parts in were still too big for what I envisioned, so rather than having a 0.5m core, it is now 0.25m (and the engine mounts are now 0.125m).

A couple issues I have come across. KSP is not good with tiny parts. The VAB and SPH do not zoom in far enough to make things easy (a separate drone/rover construction building would be excellent for this), and connection nodes tend to cover the entire part when building. These seem like plugin-only fixes though.

The second issue is the colliders on my landing legs dont like to work properly. Originally I had capsule colliders and box colliders around the mesh, they worked fine until I rescaled to the smaller size, now they dont like me at all. For now I have one convex collider over the model, which works to an extent (the legs still sink into the ground a bit, and anything under/inside the legs cannot be selected/right-clicked). If anyone has a workaround for this I'm all ears.

Everything else works nicely, and if I can get these issues fixed I will release the first beta tonight.

Jeb likes his new toy.

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Were you inspired by South Park? lol

By the way, it's looking awesome! It could be interesting to have HullCamera integration (or similar), if you haven't already thought of that.

I dont really watch South Park, not my brand of humour.

Nah I just thought that KSP's probe parts dont match up to modern probe tech. Its still quite large and bulky and awkward if you just want to make a little probe vehicle to do some recon and such.

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It will definitely find a place on all my rovers just for the ability to find out what is on the other side of "that ridge".

Which makes me wonder how well the small docking port will fit on this (if at all). That would definitely be necessary for this sort of usage.

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Which makes me wonder how well the small docking port will fit on this (if at all). That would definitely be necessary for this sort of usage.

The small docking port is too big for the core parts of this mod. For now I have rescaled the smallest port, but I'll be making a new one later (as well as decouplers and such).

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Ok the ship is ready, now all that's needed is the USV (un-manned space vehicle)bE2R9th.png?1

On the hullcam question, does anyone know of a plug-in that allows for wireless video sending? It would be truly seismic if it were possible to have a camera on the quad which feeds to an RPM monitor in the cockpit of the mother craft.

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Ok the ship is ready, now all that's needed is the USV (un-manned space vehicle)a>

On the hullcam question, does anyone know of a plug-in that allows for wireless video sending? It would be truly seismic if it were possible to have a camera on the quad which feeds to an RPM monitor in the cockpit of the mother craft.

Unfortunately, the probe wont fit in that cargobay in (what I assume from your picture) such an orientation. However, these slightly different slimmer designs will work.

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Or you could just not use the shielding for the propellers...that'd work too.

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Unfortunately, the probe wont fit in that cargobay in (what I assume from your picture) such an orientation. However, these slightly different slimmer designs will work.

I take back everything I said about making the arm structures one part. Those designs/the versatility are cool enough that I would rather be given those options than save on part count :D

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A couple issues I have come across. KSP is not good with tiny parts. The VAB and SPH do not zoom in far enough to make things easy (a separate drone/rover construction building would be excellent for this), and connection nodes tend to cover the entire part when building. These seem like plugin-only fixes though.

I wouldn't mind having the original scale parts available for larger drones as well as the tiny ones. It's becoming a little too small for my taste, and the constructional issues would be a serious pain.

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you use Kerba Joint Reinforcement? I'm asking because I had made tiny parts before, ~0.3m diameter, but there was a lot of sliding with the stack nodes.

No joint reinforcement used at all. There doesnt seem to be any kind of sliding or wobbling issues for me with these parts.

---edit

Actually, the landing legs sometimes slide a little when landing at certain angles. Only a minor movement though.

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I like it. It looks as all the models are sharing one texture properly (Thank you!) But I see that the diffuse texture is in there duplicated twice (arm1 and propeller) any reason behind this? The propeller one doesn't appear to be used.

Also, are you still considering making a version that merges more pieces together to reduce the part count?

Developer curiosity: Did you make the texture from a rendered Ambient Occlusion map?

Edited by akron
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It won't load past "TinyEgine" for some reason, it always stops there.

Is this with the 0.5m version, or 0.25m?

Also, do you have FireSpitter installed? It seems to get stuck on parts when the game tries loading something that isnt there.

Edited by electronicfox
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I like it. It looks as all the models are sharing one texture properly (Thank you!) But I see that the diffuse texture is in there duplicated twice (arm1 and propeller) any reason behind this? The propeller one doesn't appear to be used.

Also, are you still considering making a version that merges more pieces together to reduce the part count?

Developer curiosity: Did you make the texture from a rendered Ambient Occlusion map?

The parts are indeed sharing one texture (2 technically, diffuse and normal), aside from the propeller which uses an additional texture for the blurred blades. You are correct about the duplicated textures. Seems I forgot to put the dummy textures with the propellers.

I am still gonna create the version with a reduced part-count later down the road.

I did use an AO map as a base for the diffuse.

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