CobaltWolf

(just woke up)

Yeah the amount is fine! I don't remember how many stock has but it's prolly just one.

Doesn't necessarily need to be that simple. For example, I liked the bit about Minmus throwing snowballs. I mean don't make them too scientific, talking about the chemical composition and stuff. I would also say to remember a) this instrument would mostly belong on probes, so the characters probably aren't interacting with it - that's what crew reports are for. So things like referencing Jeb doesn't really work, especially because we don't know whether Jeb is there, or even alive, depending on the player. The detector is meant to give an idea of the number / frequency of impacts. So around Dres, where there are a lot of asteroids, there would probably be a lot of impacts.

Oh wow I like them! The only problem is Kerbal sciencedefs are in second person ('You look at the thermometer', 'You inspect the goo'). Do you want to change that or would you like me? Don't worry too much about spelling/grammar I don't mind editing it. EDIT: Also know that it doesn't know the composition of the debris. So we wouldn't know that, say, the debris from Duna is ferrous.

I don't think it's so much trading thrust for isp as it is trading thrust for weight and thus delta V. Once you're out of the worst of the atmosphere the need for TWR diminishes so you drop the extra engines. I don't think there's any real reason to do it much differently than, say, FASA. Asides from the obvious sizing differences. I had some success with making the bell of the main engine 1.25m and making the boosters .625m, for a rocket that's 2.5m at the bottom. Perhaps. I'm not really sure how to animate the geiger counter. I'm looking into DMagic's animation plugin since it allows experiments that only go one way, as well as experiments that consume resources... like film. I'll just PM you my email address.

I guess just make them 'Kerbal', which is a mix of funny and serious, leaning towards funny. In the current release there is a sciencedefs files that includes the Micrometeoroid experiment. You can open that up in notepad to see how it works. EDIT: Aight, two things. So: Atlas is indeed happening, but it is a long way off. As in, it got appended to the end of my priority list. Don't expect it soon. Top priority is still in redoing / polishing the parts currently in the pack. The needle animates. Continuing my efforts to avoid 'boxes full of science', this one is a cylinder!

I use Maya 2016 since I'm an animation nerd.

I encourage you to start learning how to mod! But to be perfectly honest I have enough difficulty keeping track of my own efforts. Frankly I'd rather not coordinate more people. I hope to see what you come up with!

Just gonna post this again since it immediately got smacked off the front page. So if anyone can help with the animations, that'd be awesome. Update is proceeding as planned: Working on the science and antenna parts.

Very cool!

Couldn't figure out how to record a gif so... uh, here. Yes, Venom's Mass Spectrometer is on the craft. No, I have not written an experiment for it. No, it is not animated yet. For something complicated like that I might need DMagic's animation plugin. I'd have to see what I can do. The Vega balloon probes are really cool and I'd like to do something like that at some point.

I've been banging my head against my desk for the last hour or so trying to figure this out. I have a science experiment that has an animation for an event occurring, blinking the lights, and returns to it's normal state. Is there some way to prevent it form reversing the light pattern when it is reset? Thanks!

I'll worry about one thing at a time. The experiments don't even have sciencedefs for the vanilla system. (At the first kopernicus defs I'd write would probably be New Horizons as I usually play with that). Sciencedefs are fun but I'm not very good at writing flavortext. EDIT: @Venom can you send an FBX instead?

Maybe old Atlas... put it in the tech level between the 1.25m rockets and the 2.5m. Maybe do it as a 1.875m rocket..? 2.5m always struck me as being too big for it. I'll look into it. Mass Spectrometer is in game but needs science defs. Up next - geiger counter! That should round out the early science parts... I think. Maybe. I'm not really worried about having too many; I'd rather try and represent some of the breadth of scientific instrumentation and leave it to the player to adjust their science return value. Besides, if I put enough in you won't be able to put all the parts on a single probe like in stock haha.

Yes. The science parts are getting looked at this update; their cfgs were just quickly implemented for the first release and haven't been touched since.

Well apparently Venom is working on a Centaur now. I have a lot of stuff in progress. Next update is probably going to include some more new science that me and Venom have been working on, and refreshes of the antenna and explorer parts. After that I would like to finish up the parts that were in the WIP gallery a few pages back. After that I'm unsure. Probably working on more small stuff. I'd like to make some probe cores, mayyyyybe a couple dishes if people aren't sick of remotetech parts. There will probably be another rocket in there but I'm not sure what. Probably something related to Thor. It would be very cool! I'll have to look into animating textures, I'm not entirely sure how to do it. I do like animated science!

(Is that what that is?) I'm glad you like them! They're not in game quite yet but they should be soon.

What makes it better then? If it plays exactly the same? Just having less detailed texture maps?

Yeah sure, I'll PM you. Thanks; like I said, I don't plan on using it. I just thought it might be helpful to see how I would go about doing it. (Emailing would also mean we're not bumping the post every 10 minutes haha)

I figured since it was on that page I linked. I think the stripes will add to it a lot. What are you trying to mirror? I don't use Wings 3D but these seem helpful. I took a 15 minute break to play with the shape. It's not too bad but it's a bit odd. I made a trapezoid, split it into four quadrants. Extrude the upper two inwards, flatten the sides. Extrude up to make the electronics bin. Extrude the two other blocks from their own quadrant. Put in the cylinders, then do the NURBS extrusion for the wires like I talked about in on of the posts above. It's sitting around ~700 polys right now. I could probably cut it down to something like 500 if I cleaned up the geometry from the edge loops and merged together some of the straighter parts of the wires. One thing I notice is that you want to make the base a bit taller than you would expect, so that if the model gets put on a rounded part, the bottom edges aren't as easily visible. (I'm not going to use this model but I figured it might be helpful to see how I would do the geometry)

My Explorer parts are sized to .125m to be compatible with WAC parts. :3

For the ring around the fat cylinder, if it's going to be that subtle, I'd say just save the polys and let it be made in the texture. EDIT: I like this picture where the base plate is trapezoid shape and on the narrower part there is a box full of electronics. I don't think we have many instruments with a trapezoidal base, no? EDIT2: Why no I'm not avoiding rigging still. BUT I FOUND THIS! THAT THING IS SO CUTE!

Yeah it looks great! I have some feedback here but for the most part they're curiosity and not any issue. The part is supposed to be about the size of the stock science instruments, correct? I think it would look cool if you made a loop cut on the main body at the two green lines, extruded up where you have that little cube, and move the top edges inward to form a rectangle. But looking at it again I think I prefer the smaller one that just chills there. It seems like Maya may have better tools for making the wires you want. When you're done modeling you can just send me an obj and an image of where you want the wires and I can put them in. Thank you! Yeah, I generally find the older stuff a lot more interesting. Especially the periods when we were still figuring out how everything works. Now, for example, most probes look very same-y with all the gold foil and such. And there are more than enough mods that aim to recreate things like the SLS. I made an Atlas V because the only one I know of, OMSK, is somewhat dead and I didn't care for the textures. But that's probably the only modern part I'll make unless another catches my eye. I think my current plan is still just to implement the cameras as normal experiments and worry about making them compatible with hullcam or something later. I have very little interest in programming which means creating a bespoke plugin is very much outside the scope of this project. Thanks! I definitely feel wayyy better about including it now. I just looked into it. I made a little piece of debris that is invisible until the animation starts. It starts very far away from the detector and comes in very fast, striking it. Unfortunately it is very hard to make out so probably isn't worth it. Maybe I can look into spawning sparks using one of the stock effects? Like the one that appears when an engine flames out?

Well if you insist, I guess I have to I used Wings a couple times for unwrapping my early KSP models before I got a better UV mapping plugin for Maya. I never used the modeling toolkit. For the wires on the MM detector I drew a CV curve in Maya and extruded a nurbs circle along it. I set it to extrude as polygons with the settings as low as I could go and have it look acceptable. That's how I did it. Otherwise, I guess you'd just have to start at one end and extrude the edges over and over. (note to self: look up what a mass spectrometer is)

Yes I think I'll probably be referring to it in the future. I don't think I need much help at the moment but I appreciate it. Modeling, coding, texturing all get better with practice. I say go ahead and try, if you wind up with something cool you could release it yourself :3