CobaltWolf

I wouldn't install it to play with an existing career. Just sandbox for stuff you don't care if you lose.

Funnily enough, the Atlas V was the first "realistic" set of parts I added. The impetus being, my father works at L3Harris in their radio communications division, and helped work on the MUOS satellite radio system. That's also where the BDB Atlas V gets it's name. In terms of them fitting in the mod, Atlas V and Delta IV feel appropriate in that they're the end of the line for the development heritage covered by BDB. Vulcan feels too much like a fresh build rocket without the same legacy attached. I realize that it has as much in common with Atlas V as Atlas V or Delta IV do with their predecessors, but... One of the things on my mind has been doing some touch up work on Titan. The models are all fine, but there are some aspects of the textures that I think could be improved. Those parts sit in a middle area, where they're better than a lot of what came before, but didn't benefit from all the lessons I learned while doing them. When the Titan revamp finished, I went straight to work on the 'Early Rockets Revamp' which included Thor, Redstone, Agena, etc and those parts all came out wayyyy better since I was able to apply some new lessons and learned from mistakes with previous part sets. So as you said, the Titan parts weren't designed with the "butt-engine-interstage" philosophy, nor were they designed for making length variants in the way later parts were. I'm not sure how much can be done for either, but some amount of cleanup wouldn't go amiss. We started using B9PS partway through that development cycle as well, so a lot of the switches were last minute additions. But yeah, Titan is on my radar as something worth spending some time on. I'm not even comfortable giving a general guesstimate. Once we reach a good stopping point with the current WIP part sets like Atlas and X-15, we'll start having an idea.

'Slipper' tanks are now available. They provide another small boost to fuel, and are integrated into the mesh switch for the fuselage. So now you have both historical lengths, with and without slipper tanks. @Rodger and myself are still making improvements to the SERJ, both on the art side and for in game capability. Let us know if you've flown it and what you think! EDIT: See below - SERJ accelerating under Rocket-Augmented mode. Look at the little glowing circles of the annular rocket engine inside the engine! And now when it's running in low-power jet mode (aka superfan mode), the effects are limited mostly to heat. The flames and mach diamonds are now contained to the higher end of the power range, which represents running on full ejector ramjet cycle.

Challenger is S-IVB diameter lol. And I believe the other modules are a mix of 2.5m (4m IRL) and 3.125m (5m IRL).

If you replace the fuel tanks with a cargo bay where does the fuel go? In all seriousness, I understand the appeal of an “X-15 Shuttle”. But it’s so far outside the capabilities of the real thing. It couldn’t even stand up to a short duration Mach 4.5 run without being coated in ablator. It doesn’t have as much Delta V as you think, and even the SERJ engine would be overly reliant on the limited oxidizer to provide the thrust. Capability-wise, it gets compared to a Mercury with wings, but even that’s generous. So there’s very limited attitude control, let alone translating RCS. And X-15 is small - I think it comes in at under 0.9375m in game, so there isn’t much you can even fit inside it. So orbital X-15 by itself is a pipe dream, let alone doing anything useful. There is the small payload bay behind the cockpit, but that’s really just for science payloads. I realize that I’ve effectively made an in-game dead end, but if you really want then make up a successor that uses the hypothetical X-15 tech advancements to create something at a useful scale.

Thanks to Rodger's Waterfall-fu, we now have gorgeous plumes on the SERJ engine. This thing is an absolute blast to fly - I easily hit Mach 5 in level flight, though you have to be careful about your altitude. The Delta Wing variant needed some love too - I already nearly forgot I'd added these! There is already a custom tank type that changes the Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer ratio, for more flight time in air breathing mode. I am also working on these proposed "slipper" tanks that go on top of the side tunnels, on either side of the dorsal fin. They will also include supplementary aviation fuel.

Nyet

Preliminary Waterfall FX for the SERJ engine. Already looking much much better! A pity, that's actually a good idea Sadly we have to prioritize and make calls about scope, at least for a given work-cycle. This guy gets it! So cool that we can actually build ETS Freedom now!

It's beautiful, isn't it?

Gorgeous parts!

Those are from 2017, Pappy...

@Zorg or @Invaderchaos any thoughts? I was never happy with the truss interstage, though I might be able to redo it in the style of the one I made for Saturn Centaur. As for the fairing base, what do you mean @Entr8899? I specifically built the Centaur (Centaur D, at least) with the fairing base accounted for in the length/construction. I don't know, I don't think I even finished that part enough to place it. Very. Here's some WIP shots of the X-15-SERJ. You'll note we were having some heating issues in air breathing mode. Textures are still unfinished for the engine and the intake. This engine is going to be pretty complex to sort out and make work properly/accurately, so I'd hold off on messing around with it for now. The visual effects also need a lot of work, but I think once we have proper Waterfall configs for it, it will be a very visually unique engine with the double-plug-nozzle and rocket/jet modes.

I caught them. I caught all the fish.

suh

They shouldn't still be in game... their textures aren't (shouldn't) even be in the mod anymore. Gonna have to summon @Pappystein on this one, but I'm pretty sure that's actually the "advanced" Big G, the one that would share little to no hardware with the Gemini or the "min mod" Big G. But I'm sure he can expand on that. In other news, I'm out fishin. See you all in June.

It's incredible how none of those parts are in the mod anymore

I think I need to toss out my SERJ model and redo it... I finally found some cross sections, and this thing is way weirder than I thought...

Probably not? Honestly I really cheaped out on the XLR-11 and didn't model anything besides the nozzle tips. That's pretty much it. I wasn't going to do much based on that one illustration, at least not the bottom craft. I've tried adapting the cockpit to dual-seat but it came out rather poorly. I'm open to giving it a whack again. I will be out of town all next week though. lol ur good. Speaking of the SERJ intake... I don't think I'll be able to get it all working in game before I leave, but we can dream!

No, though I appreciate the boldness of asking for it in the next update and not just "in the future". As I said before, paint variants won't come until I'm 100% finished with a texture sheet, otherwise I'd be trying to make changes on multiple versions at once... Not even joking, I will specifically not work on it now just because you said this. Modified ventral fin and dummy scramjet for X-15A-2. These are some of the last historical parts for the X-15. The only parts left after that are the science experiments for the little cargo bay, and then the ahistorical SERJ parts.

I thought a Delta II core on it's own didn't even have positive TWR..?

That's... weird. That's what it looks like when I export broken normal maps from Unity, but I've never seen it go away when you zoom in. Almost like it's caching the broken mipmaps or something... but I don't think you'd have mipmaps for a .png texture?

That looks great!! The drawings I've seen show a modification to the spine of the XB-70 so that the X-15 rests in a bit of a 'cradle'. I don't think that's easily doable without dedicated parts though. To be fair, I didn't expect the X-15 to take up an entire season and counting...