CobaltWolf

SEP was officially discontinued yesterday.

Yeah, I said something in the thread, but to clarify: I didn't know WHAT this announcement was going to be. I had mentioned discontinuing SEP to some people, and several of them assured me not to worry and that it wouldn't be missed. I wasn't sure what they meant, but now I know - and WOW! This looks awesome! Edit: @SQUAD it's early to say, but this surface science stuff - will it be possible for modders to add new experiments that use the same system? And, to be sure, would that be allowed even (since it's a DLC)? Obviously it would need to have the DLC as a dependency I figure so probably not a problem?

Thank you everyone for the kind words. And as for this question... ... everyone should check the announcements board if they haven't. If anyone is still wondering, I had talked about ending SEP with some close friends last week, and a couple of them assured me not to worry, but did not elaborate more. It seems that this is even better than I could have hoped for.

Finally got around to making the first set of alt textures for the core - Titan 3C. I'm not sure how many alternate textures we'll have, but there will be more than a few... Current: GLV 3C Proposed: White and black (aka 'stockalike', since the lower part of the GLV tank is already white/black stripes, this will have the 3A's stripe pattern) Late Titan 3 (that sort of yellow-goldish-brass? tinted color) 23G (all gray, no white accents, extra brown accents) Because of the atlasing, this means that more than just the tanks are getting variants - the interstage and gemini decouplers also will have a variant for each of these sheets, as well as the shroud on the LR-91-AJ5 (the AJ11 is on a separate sheet and idk how many variants I'm doing for that one yet). A small detail that some might enjoy, but because of the split in the first stage tankage, it will be possible to recreate the color scheme of the handful of Titan 3s that flew with a gold-ish fuel tank and gray oxidizer tank.

So, I suppose there's no easy way to say this, so I just will... but SEP v2.7 (released this past January) will be the last update for SEP, for a number of reasons: I checked when I found out about the legacy KAS stuff breaking, I believe I've lost the source files for the parts in the several years since they were originally made, so they would have to get remade from scratch. I already wanted to remake the parts for this mod from scratch before I added anything else, but the parts aren't that enjoyable for me to make. In general, working on SEP quickly stopped being enjoyable following the initial release, because making and testing these parts is miserable and time consuming. (Testing a fix for SEP can take hours rather than minutes) I actively make a much bigger (if less popular) mod, which takes up pretty much all my free time and focus. Some things I had planned for SEP (an expansion on hand tools for enhanced soil and rock samples) seem outside the scope of possibility in the current implementation of KSP. There are a number of breaking bugs, such as wonkiness with terrain colliders and some quirks of KIS/KAS, that have persisted through the lifetime of the mod and can't be fixed. DMagic generally feels the same way as myself on these points. Albert, the author of the original MSEP, does not play KSP anymore and has been in contact with me only once in the last two years. tl;dr SEP is not an enjoyable way for me to spend my free time. I'm sorry for not being more active on this thread over the last ~three years. I understand the deafening silence, especially in the face of mod breaking bugs, especially when the bugs are the kind that are within my control, is not fair to our users. It took me a while to get up the nerve to say this, but the changes to KAS and the amount of effort that would be required to make the mod work properly with them, is more effort than I'm willing to put into keeping this mod around. With all that said, I'm glad that people seem to generally have enjoyed using SEP over the years. Perhaps my longest standing issue with KSP has always been a lack of interesting stuff to do once you build rockets and get to your destination. Though it doesn't approach stuff like Pathfinder or USI, I'm glad to have done a small part with making the surface more interesting. For the time being, if there is a combination of legacy patches that keep the mod working, I suggest you all keep using that - if there are community fixes, that's great, but me and DMagic would prefer that SEP does not get adopted. And, if you're sad about this mod passing into the ether, don't worry... -CW

I had big plans for improving the Blue Streak / Europa and making a bunch of new variants related to them, especially alt-history stuff. Blue Streak and it's derivatives (real or not) is one of my favorite rockets, it basically combines the best parts of Titan (strong enough structure for boosters) and Atlas (partial balloon tank for efficiency, kerolox instead of hypergols) into one LV core. Unfortunately, I just don't have time to devote to fleshing it out with how long my to-do list for BDB is (I have literally years of content planned for that mod and I have consistently felt behind schedule on it since I started working on it). I'd like to come back to it some time, but for now the Blue Streak and Europa parts are on indefinite hiatus.

Thanks to some trick UV work, the Transtage will have texture switching. I'm thinking of making an extra pack of optional textures so the main release doesn't get too bloated. Here's an example I whipped up today.

Personally I am interested in the smaller pieces - all the experiment packages and stuff like that which have been mounted to the ISS (sometimes temporarily) over the years.

There will be a texture switch. The outer skin is on a separate 256 texture sheet. No, the Transtage is too complex to make a separate version. Thanks, I know the RCS (which is separate, everyone, don't worry) and everything are correct relative to each other but when I did that part I was only looking at exterior photos. Not getting rid of the stripes on the fairing base. It's some of the only consistent design language in the game The bumps will be fine I think. I am probably going to get rid of the triangles they're fugly.

I assume from the response you found the shroud option? (If not, place the engine like you would normally and use the right click menu in the VAB to switch to the 2.5m with Pipe shroud variant)

Hmm, like, it's not showing up in the tech tree? (If so does it not show up in sandbox?) The new version is shown without the shroud in the VAB list. Do you have all the dependencies? It uses B9 part switch extensively and I don't know if not having that would break it.

Echoing a pro-B9 stance since it also gives you a lot more capability as a mod author especially with some of the new features being rolled out. With competitors like Firespitter dying B9PS is becoming ubiquitous like MM is, so I don't think it's all that big of a deal to include as a dependency. It's not like @blowfish is about to pick up and walk away from KSP any time soon. But, if not, I say the second option - just have them as a mesh variant, with no provision for switching the fuel amounts. The difference in performance is nominal, and you don't have to go through the headache of which Soyuz is the "correct" one for balance purposes.

Yep you should be able to. Make sure to give the parts different internal names at the top of the cfg, so the game knows they are separate.

Sorry for the delay - woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. While that means I won't have as much time as I wanted, we can still definitely get some stuff done over on Twitch

Wanted to do a little bump / reminder that there's going to be another Titan dev stream tomorrow (essentially ending a 2-week real life induced hiatus) starting at around 9 AM Eastern time. We'll see how much more we can get done.

Some new parts I modeled while away from my main PC, looking for thoughts... 1.875m generic fairing base, how do y'all like it? Very WIP 1.875m generic decoupler... Really not sure what else to do with it. Titan 3/4 Avionics Truss Core... uh... thing. Not the most useful KSP part, but necessary for getting the later Titans to be the right length. It will have beefy SAS and that middle area will be hollow. The real avionics truss, for reference

I think proportionally its correct though because the first stage represents the wider Algol 2 from the later Scouts

Oooh! I will have to reread that later, I'm running out the door now. But first, a small thing...

Very nice! I didn't realize the extent of the issues

How is it the Titan family of all things has the fewest number of variants out of these sheets so far?

Great to finally see this revealed! Looks incredible dude.

If you add 1.5m then Kosmos should be 1.5m so we can balance it closer to IRL just sayin