CobaltWolf

KSP parts should be 24 sided

Been busy the last 48 hours or so, planning and then executing a dash down to DC for an afternoon. I took a lot of blurry pictures. But, here are pics of Thor-Delta, the LM, and Apollo (CobaltWolf for scale)

The issue is that a proper PBR workflow requires two separate specular components, while the blinnphongs that are currently used in KSP only have a texture map for one. More info here. Now, with that in mind, I have a love/hate relationship with TU, which more has to do with my own personal frustrations with my art. One the one hand, if I were to see my parts PBR'd, I'd want them to be perfect! But, I do not have time to create the new/improved maps to extract the most benefit from TU. Which leaves poor @Electrocutor struggling with the maps currently in the textures - and, as he noted before, the quality of the BDB parts varies widely, because it represents 2 1/2 years of shifting art styles and improving skills. As I said, this is more to do with me being an artist that looks on their projects and only sees the problems that I wish I had time to solve - if users desire to have TU configs for BDB, I absolutely want them to have access. @Electrocutor I thought you had made at least a boilerplate config set for BDB? I know that @HooHungLow has also been experimenting with TU configs. If you feel that it is best to have them be kept with BDB, then I am certainly interested in hosting them on my Github as I do with many other compatibility patches. That has the added benefit of other contributors being able to build on the work without your input. Does TU accept proper PBR maps? I know that some parts - thinking in particular of the Apollo since that is the 'flagship' of the mod, and also would benefit most substantially from TU due to its material - could stand to have true PBR maps made for them. Again, particularly the Apollo because it has reflective metal and windows in a single mesh, so controlling the different materials needs to be done through texture (the hatch window is only textured so I can't just separate the mesh)

Careful though... Mark Wade is very much a 'the grass is greener' type writer. Remember the North American design wound up being much heavier and more complicated than was originally proposed. The problem with 'What Ifs', especially in aerospace, is the legacy they leave consists entirely of marketing documents trying to sell the idea in the first place.

idk wandering around

(it's not)

god now I can't unsee it

Ye

Delta K is already redone, Delta II (with the 3 GEMs) is a very-near-feature task (I plan on making it part of the next release, but this release is also shaping up to have a 6 month dev cycle... again...). Thor/Delta... not really. Like, yeah, those parts aren't aging well but they're far from the worst parts in the mod right now so I'm not losing sleep over them. Yet. Just all the other stuff

Yes and yes. I'd recommend Editor Extensions once the parts are out - the paired mounting points (the side with the pipe and avionics raceway, as opposed to the empty side with 3 SRBs) are at 20 degree increments rather than the standard 15 degree increments that the editor defaults to using.

I actually very quickly experimented with it and couldn't get an effect I liked. In any case, that would be pretty excessive on RAM since the Atlas V is using a 4K texture (that includes the tank, engine shrouds, srbs, interstages...)

Was it this one?

Flips notes Alright let's see... yeah the SRBs are getting done. 2.5m>1.875m interstage is getting redone. A new 2.5m>3.125m combo interstage adapter/fairing base (god I hope it works...) is getting added. The extended Centaur tanks that are in the mod (also by @PickledTripod, as it happens) are getting their textures redone and they will be available in white and orange foam. Yeah, probably not going to happen. Not because I don't want to, trust me I do (which means this doesn't really exclude it just suddenly appearing here on the thread one day as a screenshot) it's just a matter of prioritizing time. And, at the end of the day, the current SM works and isn't atrociously ugly.

Yeah there's also gonna be a new Atlas V or something...

No way to do that without LH2.

I vote for handling it the same way BDB does so that any complaints are shared between mods

Eh... Oooh, Hoo's is real nice... Is the SaturnMB.cfg still on the GitHub? It should be removed, there are actual models (not MM configs) for those parts now.

Wow I bet @damonvv would be really interested in this!

As previously mentioned, Atlas V dev stream starting in a couple of minutes.

As @benjee10 alluded to there are already a number of 3.125m parts in BDB and they are being expanded into a fully fleshed out bulkhead profile part set based on the Titan-Barbarian proposals. I know @Superpenguin160's Vulcan revamp will also be 3.125m.

RD-180 courtesy of the awesome @PickledTripod, shroud done by me. Atlas V revamp development stream tomorrow afternoon.

Anything re: my RCS question?

For gameplay reasons I decided not to make the swinging truss. Typically I launch with it docked to the top node, and then once it's in orbit I undock > redock.

That's more what I was wondering. I know that sometimes when I import into Unity I'll see things like the X rotation of my thrustTransforms is like 89.99whatever instead of 90 and thought I was lucky to have noticed it by clicking the wrong thing in the outliner. Still, always nice to have easy/simple fixes to issues. Also, I haven't seen any official response on the subject of the RCS effects being borked? What was the reason for the change, and does it mean that we should be switching to ModuleRCSFX? If so, I've gotten a number of issue reports of people returning to crafts in orbit (which used RCSFX and not RCS) and having the thruster fx firing in all directions without producing torque. I'm a bit worried because at the time the fix was to switch the affected parts back to ModuleRCS.

What floating points? Wouldn't the X/Z (X/Y in Blender if I remember?) just have to be set to '0' for the engines to have proper thrust? I agree with @Poodmund, I'm curious if there is some sort of existing issue that could be affecting my engines and these two stock engines are just particularly affected.