CobaltWolf

I'm looking into it, I have the document the post is based on, just haven't looked at it too much. It will probably just be "loosely inspired" tbh.

Yeah, I remember reading that in 2017 or so and being really impressed with the illustrations. I usually try and work from actual documents. I can try and see about tracking down the sources DSFP used. The more I look the more I realize how may parts FLEM would need. To be clear, it isn't something I'm currently planning on doing. I am a bit interested though. EDIT: Looks like the main paper is on AIAA, if anyone can grab it for me... https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.1966-36 Got it, didn't have anything useful

Yeah, I never even committed to making FLEM. I think after I finish the Helios revamp I'd like to try working on the orbital half of the Viking missions to see if that helps move those things along. I also don't know if there's any primary sources available for FLEM, which is something I strive to find before working on things anymore. I actually do 3D work professionally, though you'd be surprised how little overlap there is between my real job and KSP. I certainly don't get to hand paint textures for my "professional" career. Mostly just buying car assets off Turbosquid and ramming them together like a toddler, haha. Does that include the 4.25m "straight" walled SLA? Or just the expanded ones. Correct, the best way is usually to delete the Bluedog_DB folder from your GameData and replace it with a fresh one. If you know what you're doing, you can try replacing smaller chunks of the mod, but it could easily lead to problems.

Ha, you make it sound so easy. I forgot part of it landed, that's definitely a lot more complicated than I thought.

What do you mean all IVAs don't work? Most of the ones in the mod are the black "void" placeholder IVA. If you have Kerbal portraits in the lower right of your HUD, the IVAs aren't broken.

The official update is I have not heard anything since the announcement was made, which in retrospect was premature. I'd like to at least get the files from Akron to finish them but his IRL is very crazy. FLEM would be cool to have some day, I think we only have the S-IVB Venus Flyby design for that sort of thing at the moment right? I think the idea with the Gemini version is, even if the 'garage' isn't pressurized, at least you don't have to worry about the astronauts floating away...

This is really sad, but I don't actually spend enough time in game to have real answers for this. But I did think of one thing - aren't a lot of the experiments mentioned meant to be reset by a Kerbal on EVA? Is it possible the data was being collected without the experiment being reset? Or is it just the [X] Science issue? In other news, I have enough to share for my current project: Reworking the Helios probes. I was never really happy with the quality of these parts - they were some of the last probe parts made before the big revamp that redid most of the other probes (Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, etc) to a much higher standard. So, I decided to give it some love. I must say, including the damper cables for the magnetometer arms REALLY improves the vibe of this probe.

I'm not sure what you mean, which experiments are you talking about? I'm sure it will jog my aging memory. True, but I think there's a big difference between early 60s planning and the mid 60s planning for follow-ons to actual built hardware. There's certainly no mention of monotank S-1 that I've seen in those studies. I'm not sure if BellaTU is updated, that would be my best guess.

It used an F-1A, which was a substantial improvement that existed IRL. If we'd built any more Saturn Vs, they would have used it.

Chiming in here with some thoughts. The Eyes Turned Skyward Saturn 1C is a fairly unrealistic design. I could make several arguments as to why, but there's one big one - nothing like it was ever studied IRL. No monotank S-1, no single F-1, etc. So in terms of plausibility it's more or less off the table. Something that comes up a lot is, as great as ETS is, it wasn't researched and written to the same standard as later space alt histories. The Saturn 1C is the result of the combination of switching to an orbital rather than lunar program, along with the authors' desire to keep the F-1 in production. The Saturn 1B INTs were looked into, such as the ones with UA-120 boosters, but no matter what you still wind up having to keep producing the S-1B stage. The INT Saturns weren't just meant to fill the gap in payload capability - they were also meant to reduce to total number of production lines needed for various stages. Since the S-1B was only used for the Saturn 1B, it was primed on the chopping block. Which leads on to @DaveyJ576's INT-20. From my understanding, the INT-20 was considered the favored design, since it essentially consisted of two Saturn V stages that would have to be in production anyways (assuming you want to continue the lunar program). As Davey pointed out, the biggest issue is changing the LUT - though, I think even in your explanation you downplay the difficulties and costs associated with said work. (Ground infrastructure is EXPENSIVE!). INT-20 also offers the possibility of being combined with the S-1D first stage, greatly increasing the capabilities; in such a scenario, the S-1D would also become the first stage of future production runs of the Saturn V. Flying in that configuration, the skirt would be fixed to the stage resulting in a 1-2% decrease in payload due to the more complex (and without separation, redundant) structural design of the S-1D engine skirt. I can't remember if that assumed a stretch on the first stage. That would again require some expensive ground infrastructure work, but on some level you need to assume that money is forthcoming if you want to have cool toys.

Oh, those are gaseous oxygen (GOX). No, I don't know why they needed so much.

How so? Do you mean I increased the total space without increasing the default fill? Neither was I when I started BDB

If you're standing in front of the ladder, facing back towards the LM, the MESA should be on the left side. It's wrong in both sets of blufor's screenshots (Love ya tho!) The LM Taxi is basically just a modified (2-stage) LM. I don't know if I'd even say it was uprated - the modifications mostly revolve around making sure it can survive at least one lunar night and still reliably get the crew back to orbit. Something to remember is there's no single LM Taxi, Shelter, etc. I have a bunch of different docs and made something of a pastiche of my favorite elements from each. Most LM Taxis still assumed a 2-member crew (and only one would do surface EVAs at a time! Sounds scary), but I gave it 3 capacity since I wanted people to be able to take full advantage of the larger habs.

I understand (based on past conversations) why this is an issue for you and I'm certainly sympathetic, but this is also not something up for debate since it's a personal choice by myself and the other devs. In any case, the first several years of BDB2 would be taken up by porting over the existing assets anyways, so there wouldn't be anything new to try and port back anyways.

No plans to continue BDB1 once we start BDB2. Time unfortunately moves forward - I'm thinking in terms of the long game of what will be possible 5 years from now. But KSP2 is obviously in a bad place right now. Nothing to do but be patient.

Correct, we haven't started any work on it. We don't even have enough specifications to start converting the art assets.

Ooh, I have some notes! LM Shelter should be using the Truck descent stage Extra batteries should be placed on both the front/rear. The LM deployable radiator should go on the black rectangular feature on the back left quadrant. The single deployable RTG should go on the bottom left of the back right quadrant, not the front. There's also the quad surface-mount RTGs, which I liked better for the LM Shelter, but we're already at the point where this is a pastiche of different proposals. Incidentally, that means the MESA can go in its original position. Ha, to be fair, usually that's because they're asking about C-8 and not the broader Nova family. So I'll answer this one. In terms of the Nova rockets, I think it's probably a lot more work than you realize. That's a lot of new tanks, adapters, decouplers, fairing bases, interstages, engine mounts, etc etc etc... doing it any sort of justice would be as much work as the Saturn parts themselves, and that's without the plethora of photos and documents I had to work from for the Saturn parts. So it's a lot of work with not a lot to go on - and I'll be honest, I'm not particularly good at creating things whole-cloth. I will say that the Nova parts do feel more appropriate in KSP2, but to be clear we have absolutely no plans to do them.

Oh, if you're talking the A and B series Saturns, yeah we don't have those and have no plans to add them. They'd be... surprisingly difficult to make, unless I textured them very generically (ex, not including the unique Titan stage details in the B-1). They're definitely "wow that would be cool someday" parts but there's definitely no plans for them. I think I'd try and do dedicated C-3 and C-4 parts before I did any of the A/B stages - I could see C-4 stages, with a diameter between the S-IVB and S-1C, being useful to have. And yes, sadly Astronautix is not what I would consider a reliable source. It's cool, and there's definitely a lot of Soviet stuff that I haven't seen elsewhere. However, the author definitely will do things like making assumptions without denoting them as such, there's a lot of 'placeholder' technical stats that are incorrect, etc. These days we work almost entirely off of primary sources. (Please note that documents being in that folder does not mean there are plans to add it) Hard to say right now. The team certainly isn't done with the mod, not by a long shot, but KSP2 puts a wrench in things. I don't think there's a lot of motivation to continue adding more parts, knowing it's creating more work for bringing things over to the eventual BDB2. I actually have no idea how to disable it now that we use SystemHeat. My 2c on the matter - cryogenic fuel gives you a lot more performance, and in gameplay terms I like how it is balanced by the boiloff. That means your primary use case for hydrogen will be launch vehicles with short loiter times, and then occasionally using them with radiators for longer term voyages which really only work past a certain scale. If you're launching stuff like Centaur, radiators shouldn't be needed - just don't expect it to be able to do a lunar insertion after days of coasting. That's what the (lower performance) storable fuel stages are for. Isn't Saturn 500F the facilities test article? The S-IVF was for making Comet HLLV, but it's also useful for anyone wanting to have a constant diameter LV / needs a wider payload fairing than the S-IVB can provide.

When it's a ton of B9 errors like that, it's usually some sort of installation issue. I'd remove BDB + its dependencies and reinstall them. If you're still getting the issues, I think it might be a mod conflict (your install seemed pretty packed)

There's a ton of errors in there, what issues are you having from BDB?

Good thing I was scrolling the thread, I missed this when you posted (Sorry I've been so absent everyone!) I'm not sure of a better way to get the heights. Taking the difference between the nodes works for most things. You could try using the .mu importer to bring the few you aren't sure about into Blender? For scaling the Saturn... well, there was a big discussion about it between myself, some users, and other mod authors who had a vested interest in compatibility. My understanding was that we'd reached consensus on 4.25m as a compromise. I was later informed that I should have made them 4.125m, but I was much too far along to change it, especially given the relatively minor scaling issue compared to the overall scale of the parts. Typically what we do for rockets is figure out the diameter scale and work from there. If I decide something is going to be, say, 1.5m, then I'll find a good orthographic image, scale it so it matches a 1.5m cylinder, and go from there. In rockets where the stages are multiple diameters, you can already imagine the issues this can cause. Usually there are some compromises along the way, with the end goal being to match the overall proportions while still keeping to established diameters. So there are definitely instances where, say, a stage is slightly overscaled in diameter, but the height is still "correct" compared to the first stage's scaling, for example. Which is all to say, there's never going to be a perfect number you can multiply everything by and achieve 'real scale'. There's too many compromises and executive decisions. Generally the scaling is correct, parts that are 1.25m and below (in KSP scale) tend to have more issues. A lot of the 0.625m and 0.9375m rocketry parts are overscaled, and that's partially so they can fit payloads in their fairings.

Rest assured that the Powers That Be have also taken notice

Sorry about the relative quiet here everyone, IRL has been pretty crazy. My car finally got written off after being rear ended two weeks ago, among other things. Here's some more work on the M55 solid - a toggleable skirt, and a dedicated matching nose cone. Will hopefully have them in game some time this weekend.

Oh, I think those are old old parts that aren't in the mod anymore? I haven't updated the Github (or the forum OP) in years...

Sorry for the delay in finishing up this set of parts, I'd rather have had them finished by now. IRL has been hectic lately (Nothing that isn't being handled!). Anyways, I'm not sure if I shared what I have so far here, so here's a peek. The proportions are a bit whack but there isn't much I can do while keeping diameters.