CobaltWolf

Not very legoable, I'm afraid. The parts will be split up but that's mostly to ensure there isn't too much going on with any one part. The problem I quickly ran into with the X-15 is that the cross section changes along the entire length of the craft, so it wasn't something I could make compatible with other bulkhead profiles. However I hope that I'm able to add enough variation that it's still fun to mess around with!

Launching it will be up to the user, I'm sure you all will come up with some weird ideas and make me uncomfortable.

Yes, you will be able to fly the flown configurations plus a couple more treats.

No, sorry. Once you start seeing screenshots of stuff in game, we'll be close. Both part sets have a lot more left to do than it might seem.

Yeah, BDB was never meant to add new functionality to the game - I'm an artist, not a coder, so we've only been able to take advantage of functionality that's in the stock game or comes from one of our few dependencies. The science experiments can't even be broken out into their own mod. Most of them use texture sheets which also contain all the other textures for the associated probes/crafts. You'd still need massive textures for parts that are only using small portions of them. Not happening, sorry. The last thing I want to spend my free time doing is repackaging and reuploading and other busywork. I enjoy making stuff, what people do with it after I release it into the wild is up to them.

I don't think we've added stuff to the Science folder since... back before BDB was a dedicated historical rocketry mod

It's uh... well, when I was working on the Redstone, around the same time I saw some close up pictures of a Long March 1 rocket? And I really wanted to make an engine like it. Of course, having 4x the power of the normal Redstone was too much, so I just scaled it down to something reasonable for LVs of that diameter. It's an entirely made up part I came up with one evening. I had typed up a reply to this, then went back to the previous page and lost what I'd typed. But the part quoted by @Razgriz1is correct. You can go into Gamedata/Bluedog_DB/Parts/ and delete things there on a folder-by-folder basis. The "ProbesExpansion" folder can also be pruned by subfolder. You can even delete late-game stuff, like Apollo and Saturn, at the beginning of a save and then add it back in later.

I honestly have no idea. We inherited it from the PEBKAC mod back in 2016 or so and I've never really understood what it does.

I did get an alpha for the Mariner 8/9 parts up a few weeks ago. Apart from that, nothing much - we have all been on an unplanned hiatus until me and Zorg started picking things up again recently.

I feel much better about not wanting to make Balls Eight then. From what I've read, the definitive plan would have been to use Saturn 1.

Wait what? It spawns you in the air at speed?

At this rate, it sounds like I will be making multiple swappable experiments for the 3 different locations (payload bay aft of the cockpit, the wing pods, and aft of the dorsal vertical stabilizer). Goo would be good, even better would be a micro materials bay - very in line with what the X-15 actually researched. What RP-1 experiments are you talking about? Anything that would be worth adding directly to BDB for the X-15? No, 2AS attached the solids to the booster skirt - it's one of the only "structural" parts of the whole rocket. It's specifically the main colliders on the balloon tank sections. By the way, @Zorg, were you planning on continuing that setup with the new parts?

On that note... I do have some plans for giving it useful, maybe even unique, science abilities. X-15 flew a number of different experiment payloads. I was lucky enough to find good source images for some, though I'd like more info on them.

Since you've all been good...

Yes, it's intentional. It's actually a tag that you can apply to colliders in Unity that prevents radial attachment, regardless of the attach rules for the part. I discovered it around the time of the last Atlas revamp. It felt like it was an opportunity to introduce some interesting decision making for the player - in terms of 1.875m "workhorse" rockets, you had two options. You could go for maximum single-stick performance with the balloon tank Atlas, but if you needed something more than that, you'd have to move to the less efficient Titan, which allowed for multiple cores and thus scaled more at the higher performance end.

It's not even a sustainer engine, it's just... the lower half of a booster bell? Thanks for letting us know! I'll try and take a look at that soon.

Think of it as a teaser, if you will...

If we're playing that card, I can't imagine requiring that sort of lift capacity in KSP1. KSP2, on the other hand... Also, on that note:

My point was mostly in reference to, if we ever did do said probes, it would be years in the future and the conversation would likely be very different. More broadly, I (and I can only speak for myself, not the other team members, though they seem to mostly agree) decided a long time ago to try and limit the scope of BDB to Apollo-era craft and things directly derived from them, ie, not shuttle or modern era. Yes, I am aware there are plenty of exceptions to that rule in the mod already. That's partially to try and keep our to-do lists manageable (it gets depressing when you have a ton of things you want to do, but making things always takes way longer than you think), and also to leave room for other modders that want to carve out their own niche. My personal feelings haven't changed on that matter. As for CurseForge, I honestly don't even know what that is. It was added after my time.

If we ever did, they would likely not be for KSP1. But we'll see.

They are maintained on the RO side. I don't know what the status is re: configs for all of BDB. I know that the models are used in ROEngines, ROCapsules, etc.

Yep, just a toggle on the part. The blanketed version (similar to Viking) doesn't really work outside of historical builds, so the blanket-less version will have to serve in that capacity. I have not forgotten about Viking, but no news to report still.